LATEST ENGLISH INTELLIGENCE.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 83, 7 October 1843, Page 331

LATEST ENGLISH INTELLIGENCE.

The intelligence from England, though speaking of partial improvement in particular branches of trade, is on the whole gloomy and distressing in the extreme. The promised advantages of conservative legislation have proved hollow and worthless, and a steady progression has gone on from bad to worse. The present may be emphatically termed the " distress of the country," for on no former occasion, we believe, did it ever extend itself so widely. The following extract, taken from a report of " the condition of the labourers of Dorsetshire/ may be taken as a melancholy specimen — " Throughout all that district [Wimborne] the wages of labourers average about 7s. a week. If garden and potato ground, where these exist, are taken into account, the average income of an ablebodied labourer in full employment is Bs. a week. In a family of four or five children there is either one or two of them employed for two or three months of the year ; but in as many families it happens that the father loses time, by wet weather or sickness, to as great an amount as the children's income. Formerly, the mother of a family and her female children could add a few shillings a week to the income by making shirt-buttons ; but, of late years, and especially at the present time, this kind of manufacture is not in demand. At present, a mother and two female children, the latter from nine to twelve years of age, can earn at buttonmaking from tenpence to fourteenpence a week, working from daylight in the morning to dark at night. To these long hours they task themselves whenever they can get a market for their work ; but they and many others complain that they have not the privilege of being thus employed, as there was not a sufficient demand."

The manner in which town and country distress acts and reacts on each other is well shown by the relieving officer of the Poole Union — " His account of their distress, of the unqualified poverty of the entire rural population, was most appalling. The stagnation of trade in Poole had thrown outwards the country people, or prevented them from coming in as usual. They could buy no clothes, and few of the necessaries of life, as sold by shopkeepers ; consequently, shoemakers, tailors, grocers, shipmasters, and all others, required no apprentices. The youngsters were at home starving like their parents, and the poor-rates were continually on the increase. In many of the cottages, there was almost no furniture;. in someof them absolutely none. The people, he toM me, were driven by sheer hunger to thieve." An English country town, at the present time, differs widely from what we have ourselves seen, and often read described. The town spoken of is Poole — " Between six and seven thousand inhabitants, with empty houses for the accommodation of many more. Warehouses and workshops shut up, the unopened doors and shutters worn with weather, not with work. A spacious quay, with water frontage deep and ample, and capable of being amplified to any extent. Ships of various tonnage, barques, brigs, schooners, smacks, sloops, and fishing boats laid up for want of trade ; the seamen idly lounging about, save those belonging to the only vessel that had a cargo on board, and they wefe raising from the hold and selling by retail half a ton of coals to a farmer, who, with his cart, was on the quay. The farmer had three or four bundles of straw for sale, and sought to have a customer in the landlady of the inn, close by, who said she could not afford to buy them at his price, and he said he would have his beer and bread and cheese in the house, if she bought the straw ; if she did not he must sell it somewhere else, and get his beer somewhere else, or take it home and go without beer, that he must, " for them be ticklish times."

Our next extracts are from the Examiner newspaper — '« Distress of the Country. — Two documents which bear frightful evidence to the increase of pauperism have been published. The first is a communication from Mr. Samuel Sandars, of Hemel Hempstead, addressed to the overseers of Uxbridge, in which he states that out of 1,000 houses no fewer than 400 are on the "excused" list on account of pauperism. We are not aware that there is anything peculiar in the circumstances of Hemel Hempstead. We fear that its condition may be taken as a sample of that of the kingdom. The second document is an address from the auditors of the Arnica le Society, Southwark Arms, Tooley Street ; from which it appears that, from the difficulties of the times, their accounts, which at the commencement of former years showed a great balance, exhibited at the commencement of the present year a sad reverse : — " At the commencement of the year (1842)," say these auditors, " the funds amounted to the sum of £1,162 ss. 4sd. t which sum was considered sufficient for our purpose, until shear-day arrived. After drawing that conclusion, we found (as time rolled on) it was an error — that our funds were fast sinking, and ultimately became exhausted ; and but for the timely loan of £200 from our respected treasurer, who charged no interest on that sum, our position would have been a perilous one*" Many friendly societies throughout the country are, we fear, in the same situation ! "

" Fjeveb in th« Metropolis. — Much low fever of a typhoid character at present prevails in the metropolis, which is said to have been introduced by the poor agricultural and mechanical labourers who crowd up to London in search of employment, and arrive in a state bordering on starvation. It proves fatal to the extent of 25 percent, and ia not ' confined to those with whom it originated. Active measures are about to be taken to check its contagious extension, by the appropriation of more ample means of relieving the poor sufferers. The total number of deaths in the metropolis for the week ending last Saturday, as made up by the Registrar-General, is 1,040, exceeding the weekly average of the last five years by 137. The class of diseases which gives the great increase is that of the lungs and other organs of respiration, the' number of which for the week is 365, and die weekly average of which for the last five years was 267."

Thinking men of all shades of politics ate earnestly inquiring for a remedy. And the ale which first presents itself is the repeal c&WJi, Corn Laws, and the extension of the piiricljall;

of freedom of trade. The Anti-Corn- Law League has thus been forced into existence, and very opportunely appears a book written by one of the most profound thinkers of the age, Mr. T. Carlyle, in which, with a giant's might, the wickedness of the present system is laid bare. Our newspapers shall furnish us with a couple of extracts : —

" The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of the tree itself. Old ? Yes, it is too old. Many a weary winter has it swung and creaked there, and gnawed and fretted, with its dead wood, the organic substance and still living fibre of this good tree ; many a long summer has its ugly naked brown defaced the fair green umbrage ; every day it has done mischief, and that only : off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more ; let the Conservatism that would preserve tut it away. Did no wood forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous ; is as a dead ironspike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance ; — nay, is far worse; for in every windstorm (' commercial crisis ' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as your dead iron spike would ! If I were the Conservative Party of England (which is another bold figure of speech) I would not for a hundred thousand pounds an hour allow those Corn Laws to continue ! Potosi and Golcondaput together would not purchase my assent to them. Do you count what treasuries of bitter indignation they are laying up for you in every just English heart ? Do you know what questions, not as to Corn prices and Sliding Scales alone, they are forcing every reflective Englishman to ask himself? Questions insoluble, or hitherto unsolved ; deeper than any of our Logic-plummets hitherto will sound: questions deep enough, — which it were better that we did not name even in thought 1 You are forcing us to think of them, to begin uttering them. The utterance of them is begun ; and where will it be ended, think you ? When two millions of one's brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five millions, as is insolently said, ' rejoice in potatoes,' there are various things that must be begun, let them end where they can."

" Corn Laws. — What looks maddest, miserablest in these mad and miserable Corn Laws is independent altogether of their ' effect on wages/ their effect on 'increase of trade,' or any other such effect : it is the continual maddening proof they protrude into the faces of all men, that our Governing Class, called by God and Nature and the inflexible laww Fact, either to do something towards governing, or to die, and be abolished, — have not -yet learned even to sit still, and do no mischief! For no Anti-Corn-Law League yet asks more of them than this ; — Nature and Fact, very imperatively, asking so much more of them. fttti-Cqrn-Law League asks not, Do something ; but/Cease your destructive misdoing, Do ye nothing ! ". , An additional embarrassment to the Ministry is the return of Mr. Ellis from the Brazils, without being able to negotiate a commercial treaty with that country. The Brazilians absolutely refuse to enter into a new treaty with Britain, unless their coffee and sugar is allowed to enter her ports on the same terms as the productions of her colonies ; and thus, at this critical moment, England is in danger of losing one of her best and most important customers.

Next to the distress of the country, and its proposed remedies, the subject which most 'engrosses the public mind is Sir James Graham's Factory Education Bill. This bill seeks to reenact the principles of the Test and Corporation Acts. Not only must the master of all schools be a churchman, but it is contrived that the committee for their management shall invariably have a majority of the same persuasion. The whole measure is of the most bungling description, and its effect will be to tax dissenters to educate children in the principles of the Church. The following extract from a London paper is a happy description — " Bishops and rectors were to be propitiated by new powers over the education of the coyfctry. Puseyites, by a due regard to the fasts and festivals of the Church, — which it was hoped the rising generation of Dissenters would be passively taught to reverence. Evangelical divines and rectors, by giving them the selection of books, — • a selection of books ' being confided to the ' clerical trustee alone.' The Dissenters, by being graciously permitted to withdraw their children when they pleased from clerical control. And lastly, the High Tory party, it was hoped, would favour a scheme by which the Privy Council was invested with the prerogative of Parliament to tax the people, but without responsibility or appeal, for the purposes of education, — the conduct, discipline, and management of which was placed wholly in the hands of the Established Church ! In fact, Sir James Graham's system is the Prussian system of taxation, without either its impartiality or its liberality." We regret to see that another of the West India steamers has been lost. The Solway struck on a sunken rock off Corunna, and almost immediately went down. Twenty lives were lost, including that of the captain. The remainder of the crew and passengers reached the shore in boats. The shock of an earthquake was severely felt early in April throughout the north of England and Ireland. The Laureateship. — Our readers will, we think, be gratified to learn that her Majesty offered the office made vacant by the death of bis friend Southey to Wordsworth. Mr. Wordsworth has gratefully declined the proffered honour, on account of -his age. The day after to-morrow will be his birthday, and it will be the seventy-third. His declining to accept the office it as reasonable and becoming, on account of his advanced age, at was the offer of it on account of his exalted merit Mr. Wordsworth attended the funeral of his friend Southey, and is in good health for hit time of life. — Morning Post. We may state that Mr. Wordsworth, in consequence of communications from Sir Robert Peel and the Lord Chamberlain, has accepted the appointment of Poet Laureate. — Standard. There are at present in the East and West India, London, and St. Katherine docks, upwards of 200 vessels ready to be sent to sea, unemployed, and for which freights cannot be obtained.