PARLIAMENTARY ITEMS.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1468, 30 October 1878, Page 3

PARLIAMENTARY ITEMS.

By Teleoraph. [from the correspondent op the press.] •special wires. The following report was presented to the House to-day:—"The Public Petitions'Committee report on the petition of Messrs Holt and M'Carthy. The petitioners state that they carry on the business of Press Telegraph Agents, and they pray that they may have equal rights and facilities for using the telegraph thtoughout the colony as are granted to any other persons carrying on the same businoss as themselves. I am directed to report that the Committee is of opinion that with reference to the Press or Press Agencies, no monopoly should be granted, and that all newspapers, whether evening < r morning papers, and Press Agencies in the colony should be placed with regard to the telegraph on an equal footing, and therefore recommends the prayer of the petition, embodied in section 3, to the favorable consideration of the House. (Signed) Thomas Kelly, Chairman." THE NATIVE VOTE. Nothing further has transpired as to the intentions of the Government with reference to the oispute between the two Houses on the question of the dual Native vote. The r port has been placed on the Order Paper immediately be.'ow the Maori It*presentation Act of Taiaroa, and the Government evidently intend to take the debate on both these together. Ihe probability is that the Electoral Bill will be altogether withdrawn. THE WAIAPU NATIVES. Mr Sheehm this afternoon, announced that the Native disturbance at Waiapu was all over. The armies of eine and ten warriors respectively having concluded an armistice. "THE PRINCESS ALICE DISASTER. ~ ["Spectator."] There was nothing, or very little, of human perversity in the catastrophe which destroyed the Princess Alice, a Thames pleasure steamer, on Tuesday; but with that exception, the tragedy included almost every element of horror. Its victims were multitudinous, as England counts multitudes j they were in a majority women and children, as helpless in presence of this particular danger as babies in arms, yet as conscious of it as the most experienced men ; the destruction was sudden, yet not sudden enough to exclude for the destroyed an agony of terror ; there was a chance for each, yet a chance of the faintest sort; there was darkness, which always adds to dread ; and there was for survivors often the last extremity of mental suffering. In this last respect, indeed, the tragedy stands among accidental tragedies separate and pre-eminent. We cannot re member a case in which the special horror that attends devastating epidemics like the plague or cholera, the horror of " extermination," of losing all that are dear at one blow, of standing in a" moment alone on earth, was ever added in such measure to the customary horrors of shipwreck. The Princess Alice was full not only of holiday-makers—in itself a circumstance of pain, because the revulsion from joyous content to imminent dread of death must have been so rapid and so terrible—but of holiday-making families, of whole households, of groups of relatives, kinsfolk, or friends, out of which, in repeated instances, only ono unhappy survivor escaped, to find himself alone. Men had taken out their wives, mothers, children—even the babies — and sweethearts, to enjoy the sail in the fine, calm weather. One man lost his wife and eight children; another, his wife and four children; another, hia mother, wife, sister, and children; another his sweetheart, torn from, his shoulders, as he swam on, bearing her; another, thrsa sisters; another, three young children ; another, his mother and aunt. A man lost" all, hie friends," and probably uses the word in it s Scotch sense, as an equivalent for relatives. A governess lost all her oharges, six young girls, of Q.ueen'e College, and was saved herself. A girl of eighteen loet father and mother, and went temporarily mad ; and in two cases at least it is believed that a child . i of four has lost everybody belonging to. him, and is conscious of that, said ijhat only. In one strangely pathetic ca3e, a man swam ashore tearing, as he thought, hie wife, only to discover on landing that he had saved a stranger. It wag for the passengers by this boat aa it is when a pestilence strikes a town; there was death for the victims, and there is for the survivors no visible life leffc # no affection, no protection, »o property, nothing but ono terrible, burning sense of: want of all. This is the special horror of the catastrophe, which was a bad one in itself, as heart rending to hear of, as any wreck at sea, with this aggravation |or the sufferers, that they had, 'neither warning nor preparation, not eVen that fatigue and lona of vitally which sometimes diminish the final pain of shipwreck} hut were hurled from a position oj gareieaa ease out into the deep warer, to endure those two minutes of fighting, struggling, choking dread which precede drowning, and make up the true terror of that mode of death. To be drowned, in "the Thames, on a calm autumn' evening, in sight oi the shore, yet helpless, on a pleasure party —it h the saddest of fates ; and it tell on Tuesday on hundreds at onoe, on entire families out in search of a day's ease, on scores upon scores of wives and girls and children and little babies, killed before even they knew that danger was cpon them. There was the grinding which struck none of tho inexperienced as serious, the rush up tho deck rising momently into the air, the fall forward into the river, usually from a great height, the struggle, and then death.

The horror of the catastrophe is, we think, increased by the spontaneity, so to speak, which is a marked feature in it. There must, of course, be rigid incuu'v, but we do not see, after the reading of all evidence, that anybody was to blame, unless it bo the Board of Trade, for allowing guch a rule of the road in a crowded water-street like the Thames. The old ride was that a steamer going down should go by one hank, and Bteamev going up by she otherj but the new rule—made we presume, for sufficient renson—allows crossing and pissing, according to a riithar complicated code of signals by lights. The Princess Alice, thereforo, crossed just as the Bvwell Cnstlo was passing, and after a moment's " dodging," such as happens when two passengers meet in the Strand, the By well Castle's strcl prow touched the side oi the Princess Alice, which was crvjsutci in by the tap like a bandbox. lid precaution short of suspending ni>;.hfc ' traffic, would altogether auch accidents, for neither vessel was going uracil foster than a man's walk, and you cannot decree that two vessels colliding shall be of equal height and \?eig&t, while if they are very unequal, one will go down. Much has been said of the faloon steamer's overcrowded state, but overcrowding had.

nothing to do with her destruction; and much also of her weakness, but how can that be helped ? The Princess Alice was strong enough for anything she had to do. We cannot build river pleasure-boats with a view to their surviving smart taps from steel colliers, and under any other form of danger she was just as able to get along as a stronger boat, which, moreover, would only have been forced down bodily. A contrivance which would keep such a vessel afloat even when full of water is perhaps possible, and is highly to be desired : but none such has been used yet, and no blame attaches to any one for tin. want of it. As to the usual talk about the absence of boats, and the " evident mismanagement somewhere," because bo many wore drowned in so narrow a river, it is talk merely. Boats are of no use when a ship is cloven open, for they can neither be lowered nor filled; nor if they could, would they carry a sixth part of the passengers. If the boats could be lowered in one second, it would take many minutes to fill two, and bring others up to the ladders, already full of swarming, panicstricken crowd. The narrowness of the river is no help, except to swimmers. A nonswimmer, man or woman, cannot advance a yard in deep water, and would be drowned in a ditch thirty feet wide —a catastrophe which has occurred in the Lea often enough. As to rescue from without, everybody in the neighborhood, including the captain of the Bywell Castle, did what they could, and some few, mostly swimmers, were saved; but for all the women and children, and most of the men, human aid except for swimmers, was hopeless. There was no time. Not one in ten of the women and children, dragged down as they were by their clothes, ever drew breath after the first plunge, while for men who cannot swim the interval of chance never roaches three full minutes. Unless men of exceptional nerve, they have not an idea how to keep afloat, throwing up their arms instinctively as if to clutch—the writer once saw eighty human beings drowned in a river in lees than two minutes a movement which takes them down; and once under the water, the struggle does not last a hundred and fifty seconds. Once out of the ship or boat, all is over for non-swimmers ; and it is to keep them in, not to rescue them when out, that attention should be directed. We greatly fear that when all hcs been done that can be done, thevo will still be horrors, and even dramatic horrors. A percentage of those who go afloat will be drowned, and modern civilisation, by encouraging men to travel in huge groups, by trainfuls instead of coaohfuls, and steamerfuls instead of boatfuls, insures that the percentage Bhall be made up in huge calamities appalling to the imagination. The world was not made by Socialists, nor is the safety of its masses one of its apparent ends. Every one is sentenced, and most will die in pain. Man is bound to do what he can, but when he has done it, he will have to acknowledge tuat catastrophes still enter into the scheme of God's mysterious providence for him. If Dr. Richardson's Hygeia had been built iu Hungary, it would on Thursday last have been destroyed, like any odorous and unsanitary southern village. In the midst of a terrific storm, a waterspout, containing probably thousands of tons, burst directly over Miskolez, and blasted away its thousand houses as instantaneously and finally as if it had been a thousand-ton shell,—nor would all the wit of man exhaustedo on making Miskolez safe have modified one jot. There are and will be catastrophes in which the lesson is not effort, or foresight, or precaution, but endurance, and of such, we fear, is the lamentable fate of the Princess Alice.