ITEMS BY THE MAIL.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5632, 18 April 1879, Page 3

ITEMS BY THE MAIL.

(From the Spectator.)

Mr. Bright, in a letter on the American protective tariff written to Mr. Cyrus Field, puts the case against protection with almost extravagant force. “It is strange,” he says, “ that a people who put down slavery at an immense sacrifice, are not able to suppress monopoly, which is but a milder form of the same evil. Under slavery, a man was seized and his labor stolen from him, and the profit of it enjoyed by his master and owner. Under protection, the man is apparently free, but he is deiued the right to exchange the produceof his labor except with his countrymen, who offer him much less than the foreigner would give. Someportion of his labor is thus confiscated.” Yes, but by popular consent, whereas no one ever maintained that slavery was enforced l by popular consent. According to that argument, every mistaken law which diminishes the produce of labor,—as doubtless -a number of our enactments still do,— is -but a mitigated slavery. This seems to us, we confess, to confound completely , distinct things. If Birmingham, by its municipal council, puts on a bad rate, unquestionably its citizens confiscate for themselves a portion of their own labor ; but if they do it of thsir own accord there is no more slavery in the matter than there is when, under the same circumstances, they decide against such a rate. A monopoly established by popular ignorance is the blunder of free men. Slavery, established, as it always is, by force, is the sin of tyrannical men ; and there is but little chance of shortening the reign of the former by trying' 1 to blacken it artificially'with the deeper guilt of the latter. ' , '

\ Lord Cairns introduced his Bankruptcy Bill on Monday, in an excellent descriptive speech, in which he told the Lords that the plan of leaving creditors to look after their debts had failed; that liquidations by arrangement or composition had risen from 3051 in 1870 to 8566 in 1877, while in 75 percent, of the cases the dividend declared was under ss. iri the pound. In only nine cases were the creditors paid in full.- Liquidation, moreover, had become a trade ; trustees canvassed for the appointment, and absorbed, as a rule, above 30 per cent, of tho assets, while delaying settlements in order to obtain interest on the balances in their hands. The total loss to' the community was not under eighteen millions a year, most of which ultimately fell upon consumers who were charged prices to compensate traders for bad debts. ■He proposed, therefore, to appoint a now Judge of the Bankruptcy Court who would specially watch over bankruptcy, to order all balances to be paid into Court, to refuse certificates where the dividend is under ss. in the £, to limit the profits of liquidators by a maximum, and to make certain improvements of detail, the effect of which will be to enable the Judge in Bankruptcy to prevent collusion between part of the creditors, the debtor, and the liquidators. The Bill is a great improvement, though we doubt, from a long study of these efforts, whether any Bill will work. Why not refuse a certificate to any debtor paying less- than 12s. in the £, unless the Judge, on a general review of the facts, declares the debtor’s case a special one. The Lancet has the following :—“ Mr. Secretary Cross has encouraged the hope that nothing so imbecile as an adoption of the heathen practice of burning the dead will- be tolerated in England. The perils of such a •procedure are manifest, and have been’sufficiently exposed. Nothing could 1 possibly-be easier than to destroy the traces of poisoning, and, indeed, of death from violence in every form, if cremation were allowed by the law of the land. It is passing strange how the danger of even permitting the recourse came to be overlooked.- Obviously, 1 not only would the presence of poison be imdisooverable, but the traces of internal injury and many methods of 1 murder would be lost, If the body of the dead person were destroyed by fire. Crime would ,be rampant if the means of hiding it for ever were thus placed at the disposal of - e vil-doers. It is hot*eaay. to discover how this project came to be seriously entertained or discussed. The Hon. Francis Scott and those who joined him in the recent protest against the establishment Of a Cremation-pyre-near Woking—the thin end of the wedge—have done good service to the public, and deserve better thanks than they have yet re'ceived.” - :