NEWS OF THE WEEK.
CHOLERA, Hungary, and the Bermondsey murder, are the subjects of the week. At home, cholera is left in almost uninterrupted pos- session of the field, not because its increase is so very striking, but because other subjects cast up just now, in this dull and stagnant season, are small. And the alarm has received an impulse from the report that a solemn fast is + 3 be officially appointed. A contem- porary applauds the idea, and asserts that the fast in 1832 had a manifest effect in checking the malady, which showed a marked decrease onethe following day. But the malady was at its maxi- mum in the following month, April, and it afterwards recurred twice in the same year. There is danger of provoking irreverent notions by tampering in this way with great phrenomena that are beyond human cognizance. If a decrease on the day after the fast is to be proof that the ceremonial was efficacious, a marked and continued increase would by the same reason- ing suggest, the converse. But in fact, suck calculations are wholly unworthy of the exalted subject in contemplation. It is the very trick of ignorance, in this instance copied by a culti- vated intelligence, to assume that the vast operations of na- ture 'are etil: on the contearyi-the- tendency of all science is to reconcile the mind to a larger faith, by showing that the opera- tions of nature which seem injurious in the limited view of merely human interests, are most beneficent. If incidentally some par- tial injury visits the small section of the living universe which constitutes the human family, the species is gifted with intelli- gence to redress the balance. The same power that decrees the vast disturbances of electricity permits to man the arts of life, the use of science, and the civilized appliances for counteracting the inequalities of climate and seasons. We now know enough to be- lieve, that the immense operations in the atmosphere, of which cholera is a trivial incident, are as widely beneficent as any into which we have penetrated; that it would be silly and wicked to petition for the arrest of those movements ; but that by taking the proper measures to counteract the partially injurious effects, chiefly apparent in the defective parts of our own artificial abodes, we are piously obeying the same beneficent laws which are ever producing health out of danger, life out of death, eternity out of change.
The fast we may have ; usage and precedent, however obsolete, are unrepealed : and it will not be merely fruitless—the classes born to toil will have an additional holyday.
In other domestic matters the public seems to have been en- gaged in no very profitable activities. The hop-growers meet to petition for postponement of the tax due in 1848, in order to give them time for obtaining its repeal—they ask the taxgatherer to "call again tomorrow," that they may find out a mode of not paying him! Moreover, they continue this movement while the Treasury has denied the prayer to the hop-growers assembled at Hastings. Freehold-land societies are becoming active, and promise to get up a brisk trade in Parliamentary votes ; only, we fear, to find out that it will not make much difference to the proceedings of the Legislature, and that the chief profit will fall to the lawyers. And Britons keep on coming. forward to resolve on the subject of Hungary ; 'a mechanically-promoted agitation, to which the last advices from that ill-used country impart an aspect at once melancholy and ludicrous. ' - •
