ENGLISH MAIL NEWS.

Grey River Argus, Volume XII, Issue 1052, 9 December 1871, Page 2

ENGLISH MAIL NEWS.

The Irish potato. crop "scare" is reported to have collapsed. Scores of families in Cornwall are migrating to Lancashire. Mr John Stewart Mill is suffering seriously from consumption. The Emperor Napoleon has been estatehunting in Devonshire. -. - ■ Thirty-two violent deaths occurred in London recently in a single* week.* According'to Mr Spiirgeon, a bazaar is " one of the moat legitimate, and certainly one of the happiest, modes of obtaining money for a good cause." The Fraserburgh fishermen have caught more herrings this year than in any previous one. In fact, several nets have been lost through being overweighted with fish. It is stated to be the intention. of the authorities, m consequence of Sir Hope Grant's reporp on Jhg Jast Easter Monday review, to abolish all vohmteer field as? tillery. At Ling, in Upper Austria, an " Education Congress" was lately held, at which 2000 male and female teachers met to discuss the subject of religious and secular education. Mr M'GregQr has been navigating tbe. Zuyder Zee in his r ßob Roy canoe. f { ln a fortnight spent among the Dutch," he says, "I have seen- not one beggar, or blind man, or idiot, or shoeless or drunk person."

At Kidderminister, Mr J, B. Edge, a volunteer, firing at a 500 yards range, made §25 points in IQO consecutive shots. He wagered that he would score an average of centres, and won with 25 to the good. ' ' Republican Clubs now exist ir Birminghara ? Lejces.ter, Manchester, Newcastle, Dundee, Glasgow, and other large towns, tn London, a paper entitled the Bepublicmv, has been started as the official organ of the movement, At Listqwel, ]£erry, a panic was caused by a rumar that all the children in the National School were, by order of the Government, to be branded with the letters V.R. The parents, in frantic haste, rushed to the school and hurried their children away. Two vessels of the Swedish navy have fetched from Greenland three aerolites, the largest of which wbighs nearly 30 tons, and which are to be closely examined. They were floated 25 miles on floats brought from Sweden for the purpose. " Confessions" are heard regularly at nine o'clock nightly at St. Alban's, Holbdtn, London. The "confessionals" are somewhat novel4rbanners qf violet stuftj, fixed in position in the leffi side aisle, on one side of which is a chair for the " priest," and on the other a kneeler for his "penitent." Borings are being made, with a view to the construction' of a tunnel under the Clyde at Glasgow. The railway servants in Scotland are agitating for the reduction of the hours of labor to ten daily. A barge laden 'with petroleum took fire on the Thames lately, but burned out without doing damage. The Bank of Ireland, Dublin, was robbed of L4OOO through a clerk leaving his desk for a few minutes. M. Thiers has decided that.the statue of Napoleon I. shall be replaced on the Vendome Column. The Guicowar of Baroda has had built for himself a carriage "^consisting largely of gold and silver." Tourists have this season visited the North of Scotland in greater numbers than in almost any former year. The foundation stone of a Seamen's Orphan institution, to Gosft LgO^OOO. has been laid at Liverpool. ~ T The health of the Princess Christian has not improved during her slay on the Continent, as was hoped. The Mayor of Bolton suggests the reyiyal of the stocks in that town as a fitting punishment for drunkards.. I It is said that the Duke of Edinburgh is about to undergo a course of instruction in steam at Portsmouth. An edict h«is gone forth in Constantinople, forbidding the use of donkeys as beasts of burden in the streets. At "Oxford three ladies were hurt by the fall of an elm branch, weighing two tons, in New College gardensl Three hundred policemen were appointed to "protect" the 30,000 troops engaged in the Hampshire Campaign. A conference, to consider the reform, of the House of Lords, is to be held at Birmingham on November 28th. The entire Russian array has been armed with an improved needle-gun, named, after the manufacturer, iheKrincK pattern. ' * " ! ■ Only a third of the potato crop in Scot-

land is expected to be realised this year, and in many districts much less. r The Liverpool School Board find themselves called upon to provide school accommodation for 25,000 children. In a crowded Highland inn lately, a noble lord was obliged to sleep upon a dining table, and two M.P.'s underneath During the year ending on the 30th June last, the Glasgow. (Corporation) Gasworks yielded a profit of L 68,203 45.4 d. The French ironclad, Normandie, has been broken up, her framework being rotten, though she was only ten years old. A Bplendid monument to the memory of the French soldiers who fell at Metz is to be erected there. Seven hundred girls are employed in the cartridge factory at Woolwich Arsenal, and their number will shortly be largely increased. ■^ For attempting to throw hia wife and infant child out of a window, a man in London Was sentenced to a month's .imprisonment. The Morning Post says the King of Wurtemberg is about to make Prince Teck (husband of Princess Mary of Cambridge), a duke. The centenary of the birth of Mungo Park, the African traveller, was celebrated at Selkirk on September 10th, by a public dinner. ". ; At the Surrey sessions, a solicitor, named Harvey, was sentenced to si* months' imprisonment, for indecently assaulting two young girls. Near Malton, a Mr Lamb swallowed a wasp while taking a "drink. The insect stung his throat, and he died before medical aid could be obtained. The death of Aali Pasha, the Grand Vizier, who for ten years has governed Turkey with success, is expected ; daily. He was a firm strong man who held obstinately to the idea tint it would be better for the Empire to j erish as a whole tiian to perish of incessant eOneesaipns. He therefore re-conquered. Crete, beat down the disaffected Arabians, threatened the Principalities, and twice by most decided and daring action arrested the career of the Viceroy of Egypt. He was,\itls Said, the son of ahumal.o?. porter in » little Turkish town, and was rather proud of his origin, which in Mussulman idea was as high as that of anybody else not a descendant of Mohammed or of the House of Othman. He appears to have sue» ceeded least in the financial department, but nobody could succeed in that Court, and surrounded by the most corrupt subordinates known in the world. There was, however, either superstitution op want of cr.ui-age in his steady refusal to face the grand difficultyof the Turkish Treasury, the exempiion of the vacouf or religious lands from taxation. A discussion is going on as to the propriety of applying the rule which limits the tenure of certain Staff appointments to five years, to offices like the superintendence of the- great Government fac-r tones at Eltham arid Woolwich, Tne rule, of course, improves the service by giving everybody his chance of the good things going ; but it sometimes injures the factories, by taking away exceptionally competent men, and replacing them with jmen who may have all to learn.. It is quite possible to exaggerate thig injury, however, the permanent officials keeping the factories going all right, and we should prefer the Indian compromise to any radical change. A merely good officer goes when his term has expired, but when an officer is exceptionably good, the Government holds itself at liberty tp give him a short extension, fenewajjfe every year, as areward. ' ' : '•" '"'-''. ' l The Dublin Nationalists are trying to lay down the astoundingprinciple, of which they themselves, with the national instinct for militarism, are half ashainecl, thatsediti.qn jn a civilian and sedition in a soldigi are morally one and the game thine, might just as well say that refusal to obey orders in a workshop and refusal in a regiment are morally one and the same thing. They are not, as the nationalists; will be the first to admit, if ever they get an army of their own. Whatever, may be the case in a conscript army, the soldier in an army like ours voluntarily surrenders some of his rights as a oitken, his right, for. example, of kickmg his superiors without beiilg killed, voluntarily passes under the yoke of a code which makes of revolt the very highest offence. He, therefore, in revolting, is guilty .of two crimes instead of one, breaks his, pledged word as well as his obligations. Moreover, the right of a nation, to keep itself existing is a moral right as distinct as the-" tight df 'self-defence ii'aVinfividual, and no nation- Which tolerates mutiny in its army, no nation which hesitates to inflict death for military disobedience, can long continue to exist. The Nationalists do net advance their cause by arguments wbicb, if pushed to their conclusions, would subvert society. The Pall Mall Gazette says :— " Some uew particulars, stated .to bp '-derived, from the ' best spurce,? are published m the Cologne Gazette relative to the Gastejn meeting of the Emperors of Germany and. Austria. The origin of the -meeting, says the writer, is to be traced to Count Beust's statement in the delegation that the interests of Germany and Austria are identical, now that the rivalry between the monarchs of the two countries for the hegemony in Germany has ceased. This declaration produced so good an impression at the Court of Berlin that the Emperor William at once concluded there was no further obstacle to his making use of the waters pf Gastein. A communication this effect was accordingly sent to Vienna, and it was answered by ,a warm nvitatioH froai the Hofbiirg. After the two Sovereigns had cordially saluted eaoE other, Prince Bismarck also felt a desire to restore his health at the Gastein waters, and Count Beast showed that he was ready to postpone his departure from Gastein for a few days in order to have a talk" with Prince Bismarck. Thprpsujf «. was not a treaty, but what is more valuable than any written document— a conviction on the part of both statesmen that not a single question exists on the field of European politics in which 'the interests and views of the two states are not entirely concurrent, $he writer adds that this community of views and interW^ ia also < completely shared by Italy that tho policy of Germany is now backod •by 90,000,000 of people.'' As toAmS? Germany, though having no idea of inter' fenng in her internal aftairs, is, at the Bame time, 'desirous that Austria should ' be strong, as it must be for Germany's own interestthat 1 the shjte ffhjch *.-&£ natural ally in all questions should have Hie necessary powerto support her > » The correspondent of the Pati Mall

\. Gazette atSt Petersburg says:— "There > seems to be something wrong about the .relations between the Russian Court and that of Berlin. First, the proposed .meeting of the two Emperors at Ems did not take place ; and now it see 1 ins settled that the Emperor William will not come to St Petersburg for the autumn manoeuvres, though his arrival was looked forward to as a certainty. There is unusual bustle, too, in military quarters. On his return from Norway the Czarewitch went straight to the camp without calling at the palace ; the .military- manoeuvres have already begun, and will be more expensive and prolonged than was at first intended. But the most evident sign of a coolness towards Prussia is the re-appearance of antiPrussian articles in the Russian Press. Last December, as I wrote to you at the time, the chief censor announced . to the editors of all the Russian newspapers that it was the will of the Czar that all attacks on Prussia in the press thonld cease. Tfie order was faithfully obeyed, and even some journals which had formerly been declared adversaries of Prussia, went so far as to publish articles setting forth the advantages of a RusaoPrussian alliance. Directly the Czar returned from his German tour all this was changed. The Goloss, which is known to be inspired by General Milutyn, the Minister of War, openly declares that the policy of Prussia is dangerous to the very existence of the Russian Empire. ' The events of the last ten years,' it says, * prove chat during the whole of that time Prussia has had one leading principle of action, that of securing an ally before a war, and breaking the alliance as soon as it is victorious. In 1862 she entered into an eternal alliance with Austria against Denmark, and in 1866 she concluded a similar alliance with Italy against Austria. In 1870 she made mends with Russia, and now that she has gained a victory which she owes almost entirely to Russia's conservative policy, she is endeavoring to form an alliance wij;h Austria against us Will not Europe at length understand the dangers which proceed from such a policy ? Is it not time to form a league of mutual security against such machinations?"'