DE OMNIBUS REBUS.

Globe, Volume V, Issue 558, 1 April 1876, Page 3

DE OMNIBUS REBUS.

In England, the richest country in the world, the Prime Minister receives £SOOO ner annum ; in Turkey, the Grand Vizier draws £30,000 a year,'while the civil list and the salaries of all the high officials are are vastly more than those of the Queen and Ministers of Great Britain. Mr T. Brassey, the member for Hastings, who is on a cruise in his yacht, the Sunbeam, has sent home for publication a series of letters relating to bis voyage. Dating from Constantinople, he writes, relative to the Government of Turkey “ The authorised civil list of the Sultan is about £1,200,000 a year. All along the shores of the Bosphorus vast palaces and elaborate kiosks occur in succession, at a distance little more than a mile apart. Some of these buildings arc furnished in the most costly style. The daily dinner of the Sultan—he al ways dines alone —consists of ninety-four dishes ; and ton other meals are prepared in case it should be his fancy to partake of them. He has eight hundred wives, attended and guarded by three hundred and fifty eunuchs. For this enormous household forty thousand oxen are yearly slaughtered ; and the purveyors are required to furnish daily two hundred sheep, one hundred lambs or goats, ten calves, two hundred hens, two hundred pairs of pigeons, and fifty green geese. Between the profligate luxury of the establishment of the sovereign and the miserable poverty of too many of his subjects, jects, the contrast is truly melancholy. The incomes of the principal Ministers of State are such as would grievously shock the

radical reformers of our country. The salary of the Grand Vizier is £30,000 ; of the Minister of Finance, £11,000; and so in proportion for the other principal Ministers.” The London correspondent of a contemporary says :—“ If some accounts that reach m from India are to be relied upon, howerer, no matter how loyally His Royal Highness may be received by the natives, his own fellow-countrymen, the official personages charged with his personal safety, will have cause to congratulate themselves when they have seen him oil to England safe and sound. The precautions for hia security are something extraordinary ; the fate that bcfel Lord Mayo at the hands of a fauat’c being always before their eyes. Two British officers, lam assured, sit up—not sleep—in the room in which the Prince reposes ; and when he is camping out a whole company is stationed all night round his ten f , He seems, in fact, to be like some beautiful service of egg shell china, which its fashionable owner is proud to possess and exhibit to her guests, but is still better pleased when the occasion for its use has passed, and it is packed up in wool in its box again. For my part, in common with most Englishmen, I should ba genuinely grieved should ‘ anything happen to him,’ as the evasive phase runs, and has run from the old Greek times, to avoid speaking of pale death. But I wear my Royalty with a difference from Lord Wharncliffe, who, in speaking of the diminution of crime at Sheffield, ascribes it to the moral impression produced by the visit of the Prince of Wales to that town. Nothing in the way of forced connection has been read equal to this, since the answer (in the * Rejected Addresses’) to ' Who fills the butcher's shops with large blue flies V wrs expected to be ‘ The Corsican usurper.’ ” Two cases of personation at elections were appointed, siys the West Coast Times, to be tried at the District Court in Westport. The first—against Baptiste Perou, for having personated one Morris Perou—failed for want of proof of a certified copy of the electoral roll. A copy of the roll signed by the returning officer was put in, but that was held to be insufficient, and by the direction of the court the jury acquitted the prisoner, who was discharged, after an admonition from the Bench, In consequence of the objection taken and sustained, the case against Patrick Foley was not proceeded with. Messrs Haselden and Fisher were solicitors for the defence of Perou. At a complimentary picnic given to the Mayor of Ashfield, Mr Parkes, being called upon to respond to the toast of “ The Parliament,” amused his auditors by a speech, of which the following is a report:—“ He said that as it appeared they wished him to say something, he would tell them what in his judgment Parliament was like. He was one of those strange creatures who had a fond A love for the lower animals. He liked dogs and cats, and bears, native bears, and opossums, and he had a kind of love for a snake. (Laughter.] Very well, if he had nothing else to do but to gratify his own taste, he should try to collect together specimens of all these creatures. But his means and the labors that were cast upon him did not allow him to gratify his taste, and the nearest approach he got to that gratification was in the Legislative Assembly. In the Legislative Assembly he often indulged in physiological studies, and in his taste for for natural history, and he could always find there a type for an old Jack possum—[laughter]—and for a native bear, and for a wombat, and for a black snake—[laughter—and he was never at a loss for types for rats. [Laughter.] It was the most curious menagerie he ever saw. [Laughter.] He excepted Mr Moses. [Laughter.] Or if he were to cite him as a representative of any animal in animated nature he should consider him as a bird of paradise. [Great laughter.] He could assure them that if they had any taste whatever for the study of animal nature, they could hot derive greater instruction or amuse themselves better than watch the proceedings of that extraordinary collection of bipeds found in the Legislative Assembly. [Laughter.] Their excellent friend (Mr Sutherland), who was looking so earnestly, he would consider as represented by an Australian lion, or a Scotch lion — t certainly not an African lion. [Laughter.] But whatever might be the peculiar features of Mr Sutherland or Mr Moses, the Assembly, as a whole, could not be better typified than as representing the lower animals of this country. He hip d they would not imagine that he was passing anything like an unfavorable criticism upon these gentlemen, because in his experience he met so many who would be shamed altogether by the correct behaviour of a good dog, His experience told him that there were a great number of dogs even in Ashfield that stood considerably higher than some members of the genus homo. [Great laughter ] But, joking apart, he considered the electors of this country did contrive to send into the Legislature the most contradictory characters. They had men returned by the same body of electors the most opposite in feeling, the most defiant of each other in their arguments and their general character. But a sense of the obligation under which they lay, and of the account which they must one day or other render to their fellowcolonists, had the effect of grinding them do wn into a groove of common intelligence.’ A letter from Amsterdam in the Cologne Gazette says that political affairs in Holland during the past year have, as has been the case for many years past, not been very satisfactory. A few important bills have been passed, but the situation generally has become rather worse than better. The Ministry, taken from the smallest party in the Chamber and the country, maintains itself in office by a skilful management of minorities, and is thereby enabled to protect itself against the opposition of the Liberal majority, which by its factious spirit and its shameless personal attacks has lost much of its moral influence. The Dutch Liberals can hardly expect to come into power so long as they have neither leaders nor a united policy, and their views are daily becoming more and mure divergent. Their disunion affords a pretext to the other parties for assarting that they support M. Heemskerk in order to prevent the country from falling into a state of anarchy. Meanwhile the clericals continue to agitate; the Calvinists by means of “revivals,” while the Ultramontanes have formed a party of their own in the House, called the “ Catholic ” party. In the press a bitter conflict rages between the orthodox clergy and the Liberal theologians, the latter of whom adhere as rigidly to their dogmas as their adversaries. While these dissensions are going on, political progress is at a standstill, and popular discontent increases, especially as the Government does not make up for its inactivity at home by a successful policy abroad.