NOTES OF THE MONTH.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 183, 9 January 1875, Page 3

NOTES OF THE MONTH.

•'"'"' (From the Spectator.) > The Directors of the Midland Railway, who were the first to carry third-class passengers by all trains, have found that experiment partially successful; The increase in the receipts from third-class passengers has been very great, they having risen from in 1870, to £983,356 in 1873. On the other hand, the second class receipts have fallen from £336,051, in 1871, to £189,436 in 1873, and there has been considerable increase in the cost of "haulage." The directors have therefore determined to abolish the second class, to reduce the firstclass charge to l£-d a mile, and to discontinue return-tickets. There is every probability, that the experiment will succeed financially, but a certainty that it will greatly diminish the comfort of first-class passengers. It is believed that the other great Railway Companies which must follow suit, will not try the same experiment, but will retain three classes reducing the price of the second. They hope thus, without incommoding first-class traffic, ,to fill the second class carriages; in fact, to tempt part of the third-class passengers to pay a higher fare, Jt remains to be seen which is the better plan, but the latter is the more comfortable one. The Arnim scandal has presented no new feature this week. The Count remains in custody, but on the report of two physicians has been removed from prison to a maison de sdnti, where he can have more exercise. The Berlin Tribunal affirms, through its president, that it is not under the influence of the

Foreign Office, and semi-official correspondents allege that the only cause of quarrel between Prince Biemirck and Count Arnim was the adhesion of rli»* latter ro the Lcp-iti-mist party in France, which the Prince considers dangerous. It is rumored that amongst tho letters retained is one with notes by Prince Bismarck most disrespectful to the Emperor; that one contains a sharp rebuke to Count Arnim for writing private letters to his master, and that one reveals future objects of policy; but there is no proof whatever of the truth of any one of these stories. All that seems clear is, that Prince Bismarck is very much out of temper, and that the political air in Berlin is much disturbed in consequence. Mr Otway, ex-M.P. for Chatham, made a speech at Chatham which showed that if the Conservatives of Chatham had given their votes to him instead of to Admiral Elliot, they would not have found themselves very much misrepresented in Parliament. Mr Otway thought the country had not suffered much by the change of Government, and that the new Government would remain in a very long time, unless some effective steps were taken to reorganise the Liberal party. But he did not regret the prospect, aud only seemed to think that Lord Derby and<Lord Carnarvon were not quite up to the mark of the statesmen, Lord Granville and Lord Kimberley, whom they succeeded. He sup ported the Public Worship Act, apparently thinking, like a recent meeting, that [God has been good to us in giving us at last such a Proteßtant Prime Minister as Mr Disraeli. In short, Mr Otway sees no real difference, except one on the whole for the better, between this Government and the last, and was disposed to praise Chatham for not returning himself. We suspect that would be the state of mind of a great many Liberals who were rejected at the general election, if all were as candid as Mr Otway, and you cannot give* a better reason why they were rejected. If there be a Conservativelyinclined Liberal and a Conservative, who„ equally wish for the sort of things For which the electors also-wiwfrrttnrTatter are clearly right to vote for the Conservative. They get equally well represented, and they also get one who will not have pressure put upon mm to make him the supporter of new things. The Bishop of Lincoln, as we have more than once had occasion to observe, is a man the roots of whose ethics and theology appear to cling with the utmost tenacity to the stratum of the conventional. Not long ago he intimated that the practice of burning the bodies of the dead would, if adopted, in some inscrutable way, be utterly fatal to the Christian faith ; more recently, he dilated on the sin of giving the title of " Rev " to Wesleyan preachers and others without regular Episcopal "orders;" and last week he solemnly rebuked one of his own clergymen for being the owner of a mare, " Apology," which was the winner of the Oaks and the St Leger. But it appears that the aged clergyman in question, the Rev John King, is not only the vicar, but the squire of Ashbyj a large landowner, and as such a breeder and admirer of horses. He is not a betting-man, and his near neighbour, Mr Henry Chaplin, who is also the owner of racehorses, is actually one of the Bishop of Lincoln's lay-consultees, chosen by Bishop Wordsworth himself, in conformity with one of his decisions at the Diocesan Synod. Now either it is sinful for a rich laymanjas well as for a rich clergyman to own a racehorse, or it is sinful for neither ; and then the most that can be said against Mr King is that, in running a racehorse, he is not very careful of the external proprieties of a clergyman's position. It will never do to raise all this cry against a sacerdotal caste and yet make clergymen feel that there is one morality for them and another for the laity. Our own feeling is, that a clergyman ought to be even more profoundly devoted to his profession than average laymen, because it is hardly one to be idly chosen; and that such a clergyman would not be apt to burden himself with any exciting occupation running into questionable spheres, and as a matter of fact, though not of necessity, tending to foster a brood of parasitic vices. (One would certainly like to know how Mr King employed the great winnings his horse gained for him.) Undoubtedly there are.a good many clerical occupations almost as liable to abuse as that of breeding and owning a racehorse; and as regards Bishop Wordsworth's pompous rebuke, we cannot recognise it as having any deeper source than a habit of mind which makes a prim and Tigid, but not very potent, religion of rather shallow social conventions.

Dr Ferrier, the professor of forensic medicine at King's College, in his address the other day at the opening of the session, made a rather eccentric remark on the strong objection entertained by many—by us amongst the number—to the practice of painful vivisection and other painful pathological expements in the interests.of science. He said:— "There had been some danger that the progress of scientific medicine should be discouraged by the outory of a certain class against what they called the inhumanity and cruelty of physiological investigators. . . . But he strongly objected to the conduct of those who, professing to have such delicate sensibilities, pryed into what waß not written for them, merely for the purpose of misrepresenting and vilifying in the public prints those who might be actuated by as high principles of humanity as themselves." Now, if Dr Ferrier really knows of the existence of any such persons as these, he is quite right in condemning them. But we know a good many of the opponents of vivisection, and never came across one liable to Dr FerrieVs censure. It is not of the distress caused to our own sensibilities that we complain, and we trust that we have never misrepresented the motives of those of whose conduct we complain. But how are we to protect the poor victims without making ourselves acquainted with the facts of their sufferings? If Dr Ferrier would show us any way in which the dumb victims could escape the torture as easily as we couM escape the knowledge of it he would never hear of our complaints again. But to entreat us not to trouble ourselves about their pangs, is not to the point. Dr Ferrier would do better to urge his own side of the case—the force of which we recognise, though we think it greatly inferior to that of ours—and not make himself almost ridiculous by inventing freely a class of opponents who are simply the wildest chimseras ever generated by his prolific brain.

Begent's Park had a narrow escape from a danger supplementary to that of the explosion of a fortnight ago, of which it little dreamed. The reptiles, including a large number of dangerous snakes, West-African pythons, twenty feet in length and eighteen inches in circumference, rattlesnakes, puffadders, Vipers, and crocodiles, were confined

in cages shut in by great squares of glass, and if these had been broken, they would all have escaped, and escaped in a hungry condition—for Friday is their feeding-day—and they were all ready for a meal. Imagine the consternation which a raid on North-West London by a hundred hungry snakes and fifty other dangerous reptiles,—creatures not only not amenable to the police, but indifferent to the last resort of injured Englishmen, an indignant letter to the Times, — would have produced! But, fortunately, the seed of the serpent had no such renewed chance against us; while some of the glass of the Aviary was broken, and a few rare birds were liberated, all the glass of the reptile cages held fast. The Bishop of Manchester has almost as much good sense and courage as all the rest of the Episcopal Bench put together. He hardly ever opens his mouth without saying something that wants saying, and yet he opens it very often. He made an admirable speech yesterday week on secondary education, when distributing the London prizes awarded after the Oxford local examinations. He insisted on the necessity for offering a general inspection to all Secondary echools, and hoped that a result of such inspection would be that parents would refuse to send their children to any school uot in possession of a certificate of competency. He ridiculed the passion for learning only that which is immediately useful and available, and pointed out that the best methods of learning are often learnt in studies by no means immediately useful or available—for instance, in this examination all the boys most successful in modern languages had been taught Latin and Greek. He gave an admirable definition of a perfectly-educated as distinguished from a perfectly-instructed person :—" When a man went out into the world, knowing when he did know a thing, knowing when he did not know a thing, and knowing how knowledge was to be acquired, he called him a perfectly educated man." it will hardly reccommend itself to Manchester quite as cordially as to its Bishop. Our great cities are full of well "instructed" men ; but of " perfectly educated " men they count, unfortunately, very few. Mr Robeson, Secretary of the United States' Navy, made a speech to a great Republican meeting held at Paterson on the 10th instant, in which he said that neither the Administration nor its Chief would depart from the traditions of the country. President Grant had no idea of allowing himself to be put forward for a third term of office, and regarded the discussion of such a [question as unworthy of notice. As an American Minister is responsible to the President alone, this must be taken to mean that the President, for the present, at all events, has no idea of a third term. The autumn elections are going, on the whole, against the Republicans, who have lost Indiana and Ohio and nine seats already, and with them the power of passing a law by a two-thirds'majoiity. This event greatly strengthens the hands of the President, who can now, for example, veto the Civil Rights' Bill, if he pleases. He will no longer want the Negro vote.

Mr Goschen addressed the Liberals of Bath, in a long, but not very exciting speech. He said the Tory Government had plenty of work cut out for them next Session in Sanitary Bills, Judicature Bills, Land Transfer Bills, and Bills on Local Taxation, and he hoped on such measures the Liberals would assist them, that is, provided .the highest authorities should digest and understand their own Bills, —a fair hit at Mr Disraeli and his Endowed School's Bill. The Liberal party would object, with all its might, to the introduction of any measure restoring Army Purchase in any form or degree—even, as we understand, the purchase of exchanges—and would resist it successfully. The Tories might also deal with the Universities on the Report of the Commission on University Finance, but somehow they dislike reforming Universities. It was difficult to foresee what original thing the Government could attempt; but they should not forget the speech made by the Premier at Glasgow, when he said, " Do not mumble the dry hones of Liberal political economy." Liberal political economy was the best defence we had against Communists, and far less subversive than Conservative administration would be without it. Perhaps the best thing Mr Goschen said was that he went to Bath because he had promised to jjo there, but he could not help longing for the interesting topics the next two months " would" supply. The power of prophecy just now would be worth anything to statesmen, as to editors.