NOTES OF THE MONTH.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 278, 3 May 1875, Page 3

NOTES OF THE MONTH.

(From tlie Spectator.) The latest telegram from Spain, dated Tafalla, February 4th, announces that General Moriones has entered Pampeluna, and that the Boyal army is now within six miles of Estella, where the Oarlist forces, much thinned apparently by desertions, have been concentrated. If the Carlists resist the place must be carried by assault, and the carnage must be fearful, but there is an expectation in Spain that the pretender will make one more effort. He has been offered an amnesty for his army, and the rank of Infante of Spain, with a pension of £50,000 a year for himself; and the Pope, to make retreat easier, has advised him to give up his expedition, as the Church is safe, but he may not choose to accept any overtures. If his decision is to resist, he should either win or die in Estella, in the midst of his followers, but Kings rarely take that kind of resolution. Alfonso is with the army, and appears to have been under fire, and does not appear to have run away or wished to do so, which inspires his soldiers vefy much. As yet, fortune has been with him to a marvellous extent, and he seems to have at least one quality immovable firmness very useful to a Sovereign. The pressure placed upon him to retire to Madrid has been most severe, but he has remained, to the great improvement of his reputation, and to the great worry of speculators in Spanish stock, who fancy that with all his good luck he may be shot. There has not been a KiDg killed in action since Gustavus Adolphus. A private telegram has been received in London which seems to prove that the object of the recent intrigues in Pekin was to confirm Prince Kuug and his colleagues in power. The Emperor having died " of small* pox," much power would have fallen to his widow, who accordingly " committed suicide," A child of three was then acknowledged Emperor, and the " Empress mother"—that is, the mother of Toungchi—who was nominally reigning from 1860 to 1872, has been replaced in the regency, and will exercise her powers doubtless as before. In fact, Prince Kung triumphs all along the line. We shall see his real drift by and bye, and meanwhile we must demur to one statement of the Times. That journal says the Chinese army only exists on paper. We hope it may prove so when we are next driven to invade, but the Chinese Mohammedans of the West have found that army a real entity, so real that they are all dead. The St. Petersburg correspondent of the Times describes a serious secession to the Greek Church which has occurred at Sedletz, in Poland, a town of 300,000 inhabitants. Of these, 100,000 were " Catholics of the Oriental rite," a body acknowledging the Pope, but whose priests are allowed by a special dispensation to marry. Of late, Borne has shown a disposition to abolish these special "rites," and an Encyclical of 13th May, 1874, caused so much irritation that half the " Qniates" of Sedletz applied to the Emperor for admission into the Greek Church. After some delay, caused apparently by unwillingness to embitter further the quarrel with the Catholics of Poland, permission was given, and on 24th January, 1875, 50,000 persons, including twenty-six priests, were admitted into the Greek Church. It is considered that the whole body of " Uniates" will ultimately adopt this course, and it is noted that the parish priests, though they never begin the movement, always follow their congregations. Hungary seems to have obtained a respite. So extravagant has been her recent expenditure, that the revenue this year will be short of the outlay by £2,500,000. and the Minister of Finance proprsed an income-tax of 4 per cent, or 9£d in the pound. What with this proposal, some scandal about money, and many personal enmities, the Ministry has lost support, till it has been difficu' t to secure a majority, and as the Opposition is divided, whispers were heard of suspending the Constitution. The leader of the Left, however, Herr Tiszde, has announced that hie party accept cordially the dual Empire, and it is believed, therefore, that the Ministry will give place to a coalition, or will receive support enough to carry its financial Bills. Hungary is rich enough in " resources," but has to encounter the usual difficulty of States which, with a partly civilised population, establish a civilised administration. She finds it, as Naples finds it, and Greece, and Austria, much more costly than a despotism. Mr Bright's attack at Birmingham on the principle of the Parliamentary representation of labor by working men has called forth a letter of remonstrance to him from the secretary of the Labor Bepresentation League, Mr Henry Broadhurst, to which he has replied with a curtuess that amounts to a snub. " I do not feel," he says, "that I have anything to add to, or to take from, what I said in my recent speech at Birmingham, and the subject is one which cannot well be treated by correspondence." The truth is, Mr Bright has evidently something of a prejudice against working-class members of Parliament. He is quite right in saying that it would be a wretched principle to lay down that a great class can only be represented by members of that class. That would tend to break up society into horizontal strata of a most dangerous kind. But it is also true—and this is what Mr Bright will ignore—that it is very far from desirable that Parliament should go without the aid of members of any one of the larger classes, and it must go without the aid of working men, who are too poor and too hardly pressed to enter into political life without special assistance, unless something like a Labor Bepresentation League helps to introduce a few such into the House of Commons Mr Bright's jealousies and prejudices are all those of the class to which he himself belongs, though early in life he mastered successfully one or two of them. The clergymen of the Established Church will hardly be pleased if they succeed in making it a common practice for the people of England to bury their dead without any religious service, yet that is the tendency of the obstinacy with which a few of them seem to resist the duty of burying persons whose lives they cond<mn,—aconriemnaiioti, by the way, which falls much oflener on the working-classes, of whose true moral sins and moral temptations they know comparatively little, than on the middle-classes, whose sins and temptations they know better. The Bev Mr Coley, vicar of Cowley, in the suburbs of Oxford, has just kept the body of a man named Merrett unburied for twelve days after his death ; and when at last he allowed another clergyman to officiate for him in the burial service, he would not open the church, and ordered that the service should be performed wholly in the churchyard. The result was two separate

riots, and on Wednesday last a breakingopen of the church door, the crowd insisting that.tha.coffiasho.uld.be -taken as usual-into the church. Clergymen who feel this kind of obstinate objection to doing their duty as the servants of the State, do more than any one else to stimulate religious as well as political disloyalty towards their Church. The appointment of Mr Field, Q.C., to the Bench,—he takes the place of Mr Justice Keating, resigned,—was one which we had ventured to anticipate a year ago; and it does credit to the Tory Government that they have selected so able a man, for no party reason,—Mr Field is, we believe, a Liberal, so far as he is a politician at all,—indeed simply for his attainments and capacity. However, it is a difficult question whether, considering the new Judicature Act and the necessity of fusing Law and Equitv, two or three more Equity lawyers are ,"not needed, before the addition of a single fresh Common lawyer to the Bench. The new Court will certainly be far more deficient for the purposes of Equity than for the purposes of Common Law. And no one knows this better than Lord Cairns. We may here notice the extraordinary line taken by the Pall Mall. It holds that the proper justification of a law punishing cruelty to animals is solely that the " wanton" illtreatment of animals—(the word " wanton," by the way, was advisedly struck out of the old Act on this subject, as if to imply that there may be cruelty without wantonness), — brutalises men, and renders them at least likely to be guilty of crimes of violence against their own kind; whereas the objects of the Vivisectionists, and the beneficial results of their investigations, ought to protect them against all this kind of danger. But if it be true that there is no intrinsic good at all in tenderness and consideration for the lower animals themselves —which is what the whole article implies—but only a disadvantage in cultivating a mood of mind which may not improbably infect our temper towards our own kind—if it is not for the sake of the lower creatures, but for man's sake only, that we should shrink from the voluntary infliction of pain, then the torture of an animal directly for the pleasure of man—say, of the goose for the preparation of the pate de foie gras —should be quite as justifiable as torture for the relief of human pain. If sympathy with the lower creatures has no claim on us for its own sake, the infliction of pain on them for the purpose of extracting a human pleasure, must be quite as justifiable, and as free from all brutalising effect, as the infliction of pain on them for the sake of mitigating a human pain. The position will not hold water for a moment. The object of punishing cruelty to animals is to inspire sympathy with all sensitive creatures, for their own sakes, and this object is as much imperilled by the habit of deliberately inflicting on them torture in the ultimate hope of diminishing human suffering, &-:■ by the same habit indulged in the ultimate hope of promoting human enjoyments. Of course the result of Mr Forster's letter was thai the meeting at the Reform Club came off without discussion, and simply ratified the foregone conclusion to select the Marquis of Hartington. It was not a very numerous meeting, and included only about 150 members of the party. Mr Whitbiead proposed and Mr Fawcett seconded a vote of very warm thanks to Mr Gladstone foi his past services, Mr Fawcett dwelling on the qualities which distinguished him above all his political contemporaries, " his great earnestness, his great devotion to principle, his administrative knowledge, his financial skill, and his unsparing industry,"—qualities not, we fear, very likely to be soon again at the service of the Liberal party. Then Mr Charles Villiers moved, and Mr S. Morley, who admitted that he had desired to have Mr Forster for his leader, seconded, the offer of the leadership to the Marquis ot Hartington, and Mr Bright having put it to the meeting, it was carried unanimously. Acknowledgments on his brother's behalf were made by Lord Frederick Cavendish, and the business of the meeting was done. Mr Bright, however, as chairman, in acknowledging the vote of thanks given to him, took occasion to express his " entire and hearty concurrence" in the judgment to which the meeting had just come. He made light of the family connection between Lord Hartington and Lord Granville, intimating his entire approval of the plan of keeping on the present occasion the heads of the party within the limits of a small Whig clique, and saying in defence of it what is not very much to the purpose, that England is not yet prepared to follow the Italian Republics in their policy of insisting that any noble who served them should first disconnect himself from the noble class to which he belonged—a remark which has a very good application to the choice of Lord Granville as leader, but not the least to the choice of a second leader in the Commons, whose only prominent recommendation is his connection with the same class; Mr Bright went on to »ay that Lord Granville's Liberalism his never been narrow in its type, which is true enough, indeed it has been wide—at all events, for one whose associations have been ■o strictly aristocratic. And then Mr Bright wonnd up with a compliment to Lord Hartington's " health and hard-headedness." In fact, the great Radical posed in his Tory attitude, which is not the least remarkable aspect of his character. The Tribune of the people prefers hard-headed nobles to equally hard-headed but larger-minded middle-class statesmen. There is a strong bourgeois element in Mr Bright. The Times has published a letter by Mr Forster to Mr Adam, the Liberal " Whip," in which he withdrew his name from the place claimed for it by a very great number of independent Liberals, as that of the best future leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons. After ex ressing, what everybody knew, his " anxious desire" throughout " not to be ma ea cause of disunion in the party," Mr Forster writes, " It now, however, appears to me clear that I should not receive th t general support without which I ought not to attempt to fulfil the duties of this most difficult, though honorable post; and therefore, though I must not be supposed to anticipate that the choke of the majority of the meeting would fall on me, I feel it my duty to state that, iven thould it chance to do po, I could not uudertake the task." We are quite sure that this decision of Mr Foster's was dictated by the highest and most honorable principle, and that it was the decision of a very sagacious as well as resolute man ; but we are not at all sure that it was not unduly diffident. The majority was, we believe, certainly for Mr Forster. The irreconcilables of the Left Wing were certainly not numerous, and hardly included any name of importance but Mr Richard's, w o is not exactly a host in himself. The irreconcilables of the Right Wing would rather bare itrengtfaened his popitioa ttwi other-

wise. To have had Mr Lowe and Sir William Harcourt attacking their leader from below the gangway, andfrdm a Conservative point of view, would rather have increased than decreased Mr Forster's power over the bulk of the party. We cannot but regret, too, that circumstances should have seemed to give a victory to the small and narrow political section which vowed vengeance against Mr Forster for his education policy, and which will now carry away the very erroneous belief that it can at pleasure override the wishes of the majority of the party, and make any leader impossible whom it chooses to denounce. Sectional conspiracies of this kind should be crushed as soon as they are discovered.

An old Northumbrian, whoselife had been spent among his native hills, overheard the talk of some people about their recent visit to Newcastle, when he exclamied, 'Ay ! aw was nobbut yence at Newcastle —an aw spat black for a week efter !' Considerable interest was excited in town, says the Grey JRiver Argus of Monday, when the rumour got abroad that good gold had been struck on Messrs Kilgour and Perotti's land near the town, and that a prospecting area had been applied for and granted by the Warden. On inquiry we found that this was quite correct, and the prospecting area had been taken up by Kilgour and party, more as a precaution, as the discovery was on their own freehold land. The prospects which were washed out on Saturday ran from 3grs to Jdwt to the dish, taken from the banks of a small creek; but there are numerous similar looking creeks in the neighbourhood. The prospect of sdwt to the dish was lodged with the Warden on Saturday, and is a fine sample of scaly gold. So far the ground is very limited; but should the lead run into the terrace, as it is expected to do, it may prove a very valuable discovery Yesterday a number of citizens went fossicking round the district with extemporised tin dishes, and several succeeded in raising a very good prospect. The Darmstadt Military Gazette publishes an article on the new arms being furnished to the German artillery and infantry. The writer 6ays that in the summer of 1870, before the war broke out, arrangements were made for issuing the converted needle gun to the troops; but that, as there was no tima to carry them out, the army had to go to the field with their old rifles. Immediately after peace was concluded, the infantry were at once armed with the converted rifle, and soon became thoroughly familiarised with its use. Meanwhile the new infantry rifle of the model of 1871, in introducing which the firm of Mauser, the gunmakers of Oberndorf, rendered such important services, was adopted by the German War Office, and a new armament of the troops was energetically proceeded with. About the end ef June, 1873, new regulations were provisionally introduced for the management of the new rifle, and were subsequently approved by the Emperor. In December, 1873, the Guards' corps was armed with the new rifle, and it is now being issued to the corps d'armee in the provinces, though on a different principle from that adopted in previous issues. Formerly a corps d'armee was provided with arms according to its strength when on a war footing before the arming of the other corps was proceeded with; while in the present instance the new rifle is being issued for the various corps according to their peace establishment. Eight corps d'armee —the Guards, the 2nd, 3rd, Bth, 10th, 11th, Uth, and 15th corpsforming nearly one-half of the entire army—have already been supplied with the new rifle, and the remaining half will also be provided with it in the shortest possible time. One-third of the rifles will be manufactured in the Prussian factories at Dantzic, Erfurt, and Spandau, and two-thirds in Austrian and English factories. The number required for the whole German infantry is 1,737,000, including 841,000 as a reserve. In the field artillery 391 batteries and 177 ammunition columns have to be provided with the new guns, All the barrels, with some of the carriages, &c,are being constructed in the factory of Messrs Krupp.