NOTES OF THE MONTH.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 214, 15 February 1875, Page 4

NOTES OF THE MONTH.

(From the Spectator,') Mr Rodwell, Q.C., M.P. for Cambridgeshire, and in a very special sense the repre. sentative of the tenant farmers of tni county, has been making a somewhat embarrassed endeavour to reconcile himself and his constituents to the education law, in spite of the frankly expressed dislike of it which he and they evidently feel. In a speech at Ixworth he remarked that the hopes of those who had been sanguine enough to expect a great diminution of crime from the spread of education had not been verified by the results, for—so he stated—in the manufacturing districts where the Education Act had been carried out most completely, the magistrates were constantly lamenting the extent of crime. A lawyer should know better than to give such silly evidence as that. Mr Rodwell might just as well remark that in towns people are always lamenting the badness and deficiency of the gaslight, and argue thereon that the progress of science has not had the effect that might have been expected in extending the arrangements for lighting our towns. Besides, the Education Act has been in force for exactly three years, and does Mr Rodwell suppose that those who were children three years ago would in any case have already furnished a very large force of recruits to the ranks of convicted criminals ? However, the tenant-farmers hate the Education Act and the Agricultural Children’s Act, and approve the Government for lowering the standard in the workhouses, so Mr Rodwell is obliged to talk a little nonsense ; and as he goes on to recommend giving the Act fair-play, and to point out that educated children will earn enough when they are older to make up for the earnings which they lose by attending school, we suppose he may be forgiven for his little effort to cast suspicion on the Education policy. Mr Reed (M.P. for Pembroke District), the former Naval adviser of the Admiralty in relation to Naval construction, has addressed his constituents at Tenby in a curious speech, of which this sentence from it may be taken as the motto . —“ His vote fon the county franchise] has been put forward among them as a proof and example of extreme Radicalism on his part. He was not very anxious to repudiate this designation but he ventured to say that his view's on this subject were pretty closely identical with those of the leading members of the present Conservative Government, including Mr Disraeli and Lord Derby ; and that it was only the Tories of the hour, and not the Conservatives of the near future, who viewed the county ratepaying franchise as a goal of Radicalism. It was much more likely to prove a milestone of Conservative legislation.” Mr Reed went on to say that he had voted for household franchise in the counties, and hoped some day to see it pass; but for the present, he would not promise to vote for it again, for “ in politics timeliness was a great element.” In fact, Air Reed’s speech was Liberal in the abstract, and Conservative in the concrete, and may be said to be timely in the sense of serving the time. The part of his speech on the Church was also curious. He appeared to condemn the Public Worship Regulation Act chiefly for giving the remedy against infractions of the Rubrics only to ‘‘declared members of the Church of England.” He thought this a new test inconsistent with a National Church. It looks rather as if Mr Reed wishes to gain the support both of those who disliked the Bill for diminishing the comprehension of the Church, and of those w’ho disliked it for not giving enough opening for complaint and litigation.—for not allowing Dissenters to complain of the illegalities of the clergy. It was a speech to gather in votes from all parties. Mr G. H. Davis, the Secretary of the Religious Tract Society, seems to think himself very ill-used by the Press in its remarks on the piracy of Miss Maury’s book, “ The Memoirs of a Huguenot Family.” Mr Davis states that the book has been known for forty years ; that it has been published in England for twenty years without objection, and that he was totally unaware that the American edition bore Miss Maury’s name on the title-page. He adds, that when American publishers reproduce English books “ they act within their rights,” and he does not call them pirates. Well, we do. We are quite willing to believe that Air Davis and his committee alike acted in ignorance, and with no intention of wronging any individual, but still they knew perfectly

well that the book was not theirs, and the fact that it was American gave them no rights to it whatever. The principle they appear to defend —we do not suppose that they will really defend it—is bad enough in a publisher, but worse in the mouth of a Society professing a religions object. They might just as well maintain that if a clerk stole their books they would have a moral right to steal his watch, a proposition which we presume they would repudiate with anger. The American does not lose his rights because Congress is not honest enough to admit the rights of Englishmen. The Academy contains a paragraph on the question as to the reality of spontaneous combustion, recently discussed at the Societe de Chirurgie de Paris, which concludes thus —“ Again, after injection made into the veins of animals, as of dogs, it was found impossible to effect their combustion.” Does this mean that the veins of living dogs were injected by the Paris doctors with great quantities of alcohol —itself, we believe, a process of genuine torture—and that then, while still living, the effort was made to set them on fire, to try whether they were inflammable! We fear, from the known indifference of the French vivisectors to the sufferings they inflict, that that is exactly what it means, though we hope it may not be so. And we greatly fear that English science is rapidly becoming more and more indifferent to such cruelties, solong as they offer theslightest hope of theminutest pathological discovery. We can of course distinguish between the motive of the cabman who, the other day, roasted a rat alive, and the pathologist who tries to set a living dog on fire—supposing that was what wasdone—buttheman who woulddothe latter from an almost empty scientific curiosity as to the possibility of spontaneous combustion, would justly be regarded by the perpetrator of the former wickedness, as setting him a very good example of utter indifference to the agony he inflicted. We wish that our English contemporaries—especially when of so high calibre as the Academy —would not retail such experiments without a word of condemnation. The scientific idea seems to be that a grain of possible knowledge is cheaply bought by any number of agonising animal martyrdoms. It is stated, but we hope not truly, that one of the staff of the British Museum, a member of the Printed Book Department, Mr Warren, when attacked some time ago by an illness which pointed to the bad ventilation of the room in which he was employed, took his physician, at that physician’s own request, into the room where he worked; and that on reporting to his superior this gentleman’s opinion that the air of the room was quite unfit to live in, he only got a reprimandfrom his chief for introducing a medical man without express leave to do so. The story goes on to say that the evil was not remedied and that Mr Warren’s death, which has now occurred, is probably partly due to the unwholesomeness of the room in which he was compelled to work. If the story be not true, the chief librarian should at once expose its falsehood, if it is true, there must be something very wrong about the government of the Library Department, and what is wrong ought at once to be set right. Nothing is more grotesque than the fancy some Biblical students have for identifying modern nations with the “ lost Ten Tribes of Israel.” Mr Edward Hine seems to have tried to persuade the people of Woolwich last Tuesday that the English represent these lost Ten Tribes—a proposition which he appears to have supported by arguments even odder than the conclusion, such as phrases in our Prayer Book, and features in the structure of English Churches. It is a harmless form of superstition, this, to revel in the illusion that we may be descended from Reuben, or Dan, or more appropriately perhaps, Issacher, the “ strong ass crouching between two burdens”—but for people to regard it, as they certainly do, as an elevating and pious sort of exercise, to find excuses for connecting their history, by imaginary links, with that of the Bible, is as strange a caprice of idolatry as Mr Disraeli’s fancy that the mountains of Arabia in some sense exhale inspiration. After all we say against Ritualism, the love of touching sacred things with one organ or another is always breaking out, even in the bitterest anti-Ritual-ists.