NEWS OF THE WEEK.
riliE tidings of the week are naturally bloody, preter- naturally blood-thirsty. In two great victories in Vir- ginia, and in the bombardment of New Orleans, of which we have now received the full details, much blood was naturally spilt. But it is in England and Ireland that we hear most of the thirst for blood, and we regret to say of its gratifica- tion. The Confederates, indeed, seem to have left behind them at York Town infernal machines of a kind similar to those by which our courageous Sheffield operatives have again this week proved that they prefer to punish their social enemies. But, on the whole, the civil strife in America has been singularly free from the meaner phases of revenge. In Ireland two atrocious murders have been committed in open day, and in. the presence of women, one, an agrarian murder in Limerick by, it is said, a hired assassin, and one of personal vindictiveness near Belfast, by a cousin of the murdered man, in the presence of a lady guest. In Eng- land we have not been behindhand. In Manchester a strange murder of revenge was artistically set, by the mur- derer and his wife, in a little circlet of three infanticides of despairing pride ; and in London a mother has poisoned her two children and ineffectually attempted to destroy her- self.
Parliament has roughly reminded the present Cabinet of its mortality by a.dmunstering a severe check to what we may term its testhetic expenditure. On Monday night Mr. Disraeli delivered an elaborate lecture on Lord Palmerston's financial extravagance, general heedlessness, and irreverent banter which the present age, he obscurely intimated, would denominate " chaff ; " to which Lord Palmerston replied by scattering a good deal of that loose husk of satire over Mr. Disraeli's own head. The Opposition leader's general lecture in finance, however, was not to go without its application. Later in the evening the Chancellor of the Exchequer moved the second reading of the British Museum Bill, the object of which was to remove the natural history collection, under its present director, Professor Owen, to an independent habita- tion at South Kensington, where it was to have covered five acres of ground. The whom t sum required was 680,000/. The Government chose to assume the necessity of obtaining flVe'acres somewhere at once for the purpose, as their point of departure, and then conclusively showed that it could not be managed more cheaply than in the way proposed. The Ifouse, however, was not sure about the necessity for five acres at all, was still less inclined to concede that they must all be on the ground floor, instead of being half raised to a second story, and was entirely convinced that the moment for-this testhetic purpose was mal-apropos. The vitality of Lancashire operatives is, after all, of more account than the osteology of dead whales, and the House put the Govern- ment in a minority by a vote of 163 to 71. So the nation is to keep its skeletons in the closet for another year at least.
Where the politicians left the controversy, the naturalists took it up. Professor Huxley wrote to the Times to con- gratulate Parliament on its wisdom, and to assert—somewhat dogmatically,—that two acres of conveniently lighted room are ample for Professor Owen's purpose. Professor Owen replied, with a certain precision and calm of manner curiously contrasted with the jubilant tone of his younger rival, that there are two acres already, and that many of the most im- portant specimens are thrust ignominiously into cellars. He calls on the shade of Baron Cuvier who penetrated by lamp- light into the secrets of the "great whale-bone whale" in the vaultsof the Museum in 1816, and on Sir Emerson Tennent, who seeks there for the Elephant of Ceylon, but seeks for it in vain,—for where shall the Ceylon elephant find stabling in the present Museum 2—to attest his necessities. " I would not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion," is Professor Owen's comment on the Leviathan as it was job's, for "lie is the chief of the ways of God." But dark cellarage is all he can gain for his big protégés in the present year at least, and looking at his wasted speci- mens the osteologist groans within himself. The scientific sepulchre must keep its bones for the present. The day of prosperity, 680,0001., and a five acre collection, may yet come.
A similar question of economy was next raised in the. House about the works at Alderney. On Friday-week the vote for Alderney Harbour, as a harbour of refuge, was carried only by a majority of eight, Mr. Disraeli voting against it. On Thursday the contest was renewed with a less narrow majority. Mr. Ayrton moved, as an amendment on the vote of supply, the appointment of a select committee to inquire into the amount for which the harbour and forti- fication of Alderney can be completed, and Lord Palmerston, with some asperity, explained that a great part of the works were completed, that it would be more than a waste of the work already done, not to carry out the plan, and that the occupation of Alderney would be essential in time of war in order to help Portland to "watch operations in the channel." Satisfied with the great victory of Monday over the departed whales and elephants, the House gave Lord, Palmerston a majority of 174 to 118.
The Confederate retreat from York-town, the Federal. victory of Williamsburg, in which a small body of Northern troops had to stand fire for hours after their ammunition was exhausted, in a pouring rain, and defend themselves with the bayonet against a much larger body, till their muddy comrades came up to win the victory,—and the battle opposite West Point, in which the Northern gene- rals Franklin and Sedgwick defeated General Lee, have cleared the great wedge of Virginia, lying beneath the York and James river, of Southern troops, and the fall of Richmond seems an imminent event. Still more brilliant, however, was the exploit of the large wooden flotilla in the Mississippi, where successful operations against the forts, steam rams, and iron gun-boats of the Confederates, settle the question at all events as to the partial utility of a wooden fleet, even when opposed to iron-plated antagonists. The Southern statement that the course of the Mississippi be- tween Memphis and New Orleans is one long chain of cotton bonfires was circulated apparently quite too soon for the fact to have been ascertained, even if it be true. Our infant contemporary, The Index,—the English advocate of the South,—regards this statement, we observe, as the one happy augury amidst the recent constellation of defeats.
The murder at Manchester,. detailed in another column, contains very strange dements of horror. The prisoner Taylor, who concerted with his wife the destruction of his three Children, before his awn act of revenge wasperpetrated, seems to have regarded his participation with her in the guilt of this premeditated act as almost a luxury of confiden- tial sympathy. In the court, the perfect and tender under- standing between them, their common exultation in what they had done, excited general notice. There was a craving for artistic effect in the way in which the children's corpses were laid out in white dresses, with the separate little in- scriptions pinned on each. But that the sense of mutual sympathy in so horrible a deed should have given a terrible delight to the perpetrators, shutting them out from the rest of the world by their community in guilt only to bring them closer to each other, is a subtlety in the history of crime which only one great imaginative writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, has ever dared to describe minutely. The ghastly glory which murder sheds round such a passion, as depicted in his last tale, "Transformation," will be recalled to most minds by the demeanour of Mr. and Mrs. Taylor.
The Times has given conspicuous insertion to a letter com- plaining that honest people, who wish to say their prayers as a society on the Sunday, should be compelled to accept also, as a condition sine pa non, individual suggestions on spiritual subjects from the officiating clergyman or mi- nister. The complaint has profoundly touched the general heart, and the voice of long pent-up bitterness bubbles up with pathetic earnestness in a little host of encouraging letters. One protest alone appears. " Clericus" thinks the fault lies with the length of the liturgy, not with the clergy- man. In dissenting chapels, he says, weariness with the sermon is unknown. Alas, no ! Experience positively asserts that there, too, the burden is often intolerable, nay, that a worse risk is incurred. For there, it has been known that the elastic sermon may penetrate everywhere, like a subtle gas, defying even the form of supplication itself to keep out the most prosy and opinionative argumentation.
Sermons in the United States seem to aim at a more ex- citing ideal. In a recent sermon Parson Brownlow is said to have told his flock that he would have them "fight the Confederates till hell froze and then fight them on the ice ;" while even the Rev. H. Ward Beecher indulges in. images needlessly irritant to the nervous system, for example, "This is God's saw-yard. He is sawing out timber ; and you are that timber. To-day he is ripping you with the saw. To-morrow he is smoothing you with a plane. The next day he is rub- bing up the surface with some kind of a rasp. He plies you with hammer, and nails, and screws, and bolts,-and all sorts of instruments." We should not sleep under such preachers, but we should do nothing half so good.
The treaty concluded between her Majesty and the United States of America for the suppression of the slave trade is now published. It is exceedingly satisfactory. It gives both nations a mutual right of search within 200 miles of the coast of Africa, and south of the 32 deg. parallel, and again within thirty leagues from the coast of Cuba. It estab- lishes three mixed courts of adjudication, containing an equal number of English and American. adjudicators—one in Sierra Leone—one at the Cape--and one at New York. These courts are to pass sentence on the eases submitted to them ; and a vessel of either nation suspected on good ground by a commander of the other nation of being engaged in the slave trade is to be taken to one of these mixed courts for adjudication. The whole arrangements seem really adapted to the end in view, and we may now hope to see an end put to the Cuba Slave trade. Were this the only result of the republican administration in the United States it would be a great one.
The King of Prussia pursues his vacillating course— breaking off relations with Hesse Camel for being too auto- cratic, and forbidding his own subjects to be too free. The Chambers were not opened in person by the King, and the address delivered was meant to be at once a reprimand and a condescension. It was a somewhat sulky attempt to deprecate further contest. The military estimates, he says, have been reduced for the present. Nothing more is wanted of the member* tbanjust to vote the necessary supplies, and. then go their way. The delegates heard in silence, though without ill-humour. When asked by their President to begin the session by three cheers for the King, they fell into the routine eulogium without relu.etance—the more so that they hope to extort some concession from him which may make the cheer better deserved. The contest can scarcely be long deferred.
Mr. Laing's financial exposition is very much more favour- able than from the confused telegram received last week any one had imagined. It is certain that during the past year a large reduction, of nearly 5,000,000/. sterling, has been effected in the expenditure, of which about 3,000,000/. is owing to savings in the army expenses. The whole military expenditure is now less than 13,000,0001., while in 1869-60 it was near 21,000,0001. Mr. Laing has, he thinks, at last established an equilibrium between expenditure and revenue —thinks as yet, rather than knows, because even now he has not received the actual accounts for the last two months of the year just expired. He estimates a surplus of 1,428,623/. for 1862-3, and disposes of all but 78,800/. of it by the remission of taxation—a step which will seem to maw' premature.
