rattintial.

According to Mr. Disraeli, there is a legion of agricultural societies in the county of Buckingham—" they exist in all parts of the shire." One of these local societies held a show on Tuesday, at Chesham. At the dinner, Mr. Cavendish M.P. occupied the chair; surrounded by Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Mechi, Lord Curzon, and a host of farmers. The speech- making was generally unimportant, except on one point : Mr. Disraeli had been asked to state his opinion on the great bucolic question of agri- cultural statistics, and he did so-

" I believe that the Minister of no country in the world has a better means of ascertaining the produce of the country than the Minister of England. Remember, there is no parish in England in which the acreage is not known, and even the cultivation. That information exists in the Commuta- tion of Tithe Acts, the awards under Enclosure Acts, and the maps of paro- chial assessments. I give no opinion that it is not necessary to obtain wider information; but when it is maintained in this country, that we are absolutely in the dark, it will not be considered by you either irrelevant or impertinent, if I, as your Member, remind you of the existence of these remarkable means for the purpose of obtaining information on the agri- cultural produce of the country. It may be said that there should be more accurate means. Suppose von had inspectors, and they furnished an estimate, is there a man here who does not feel that nothing could be more deceptive than the return, for instance, founded on the calculations of the last harvest ? The only deduction I draw is, that we can only obtain gene- ral results to guide legislation, and that there exists in this country the means of obtaining such results which are not open to the Minister of any other country in the world. I do not say this to encourage a blind and bi- goted opposition to any measure which may be passed on this subject. I only say that we are living in an age of statistical impostdre ; and that many returns in reference to agriculture are made by men who are not acquainted with rural life. We have a great basis, and on that we may build ; but let us not encourage the cry—which is the cry of ignorance—that in this country the Minister has no means by which he can obtain a general esti- mate of the agriculture of England. That, gentlemen, is not the case. We have the means, and we can improve them. I trust we will ; but we cannot improve them without that support which cannot and which should not be obtained unless the body from whom we ask it is treated with that deference and that courtesy which are necessary, and which they deserve."

Mr. Packe presided over the dinner of the Loughborough Agricultural Association, yesterday week, and made a semi-political speech to the farmers. What is the reason, he asked, why we have not more foreign produce brought into this country ?—Because property in France is so greatly divided. There are 13,000,000 proprietors in France, of whom 8,000,000 are "on the parish," as we should say. The English farmers have no cause to complain ; but when it is known that from 1849 to 1852 France supplied more corn to this country than America and Russia put together, it would be felt that if there were in France farmers as intelli- gent as those of Leicestershire, they would be able to produce to such an extent that "it would be next to impossible but that we must be com- pelled to retrace our steps" in Free-trade. On agricultural statistics, Mr. Packe gave it as his opinion that the object of getting these statistics was to benefit the great corn-dealers. What the farmers want to know is, how much corn is coming from abroad. He believed the Government is heartily sick of the whole matter, and that no further attempt will be made to pass a bill on the subject.

The annual dinner of the Hereford Agricultural Society, at Hereford, on Saturday, brought together two of the Members of the County, Cap- tain If anbury and Mr. Booker Blakemore, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who thus revisited the old scene of many a well-fought election-contest. Although the rejected of the county, as he came among them in the character of a Minister of the Crown, Sir George Lewis's presence was welcome and especially acknowledged ; and he replied by a manly reference to his own defeat, and the passing away of all resentment on both aides.

Sir Stafford Northcote met his constituents at Dudley on Tuesday, and explained to them the course he had taken in Parliament, and his views —not very decided—on the current topics of the day. He discredited the policy of the Government with regard to the affairs of Naples, but pronounced no decided opinion in the absence of evidence. He had a word to say in favour of competitive examinations for the Civil Service ; he hinted at the probability of an educational rate—a. hint met by cries of " No, no !"—and he ventured to express his opinion, that if the middle and upper classes would cooperate on the subject of the education of the poor, all the benefits we could hope to derive from an educational rate would follow. His views on party politics were negative and unde- termined— He thought the duty of the Conservative party was to rely on their prin- ciples until they saw that something really dear to them was attacked, which he conceived at present was not the case ; and that it was not necessary they should be continually active. That was a negative kind of Conservatism, which perhaps might not be satisfactory to some.

The Duke of Northumberland has built a Sailors' Home at North Shields at his own expense, and furnished it, and is now temporarily paying the officers ; while a public subscription has been raised to endow the building. The Duke has given between 80001. and 90001. ; the sub- scription has raised 30001.

"The basement story is occupied as a shipping-office, sailors' money- order-office, and saving-bank, the two latter established by the Board of Trade. There , are also in the same range a large kitchen for cooking din- ners for 150 seamen, baths, and an extensive laundry, fitted up in a supe- rior manner. The other stories of the building contain large dining-rooms, smoking-rooms, a long room for meetings, a reading-room, a hospital for the sick, a navigation-school, a large warehouse for storing seamen's ef- fects, and dormitories for 160 men." On Tuesday, the anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, this institu- tion was publicly opened. North and South Shields kept holiday ; the Mayors from the neighbouring towns on the Tyne, the shipowners, the seamen and fishermen, met the Duke as he entered North Shields, and escorted him to the Home, where he addressed them. In the afternoon there was a dinner, at which the Duke presided, supported by Mr. Ing- ham, Mr. Headlarn, Mr. Lindsay, Mr. H. G. Liddell, Sir Walter Rid- dell, Mr. Hugh Taylor, and other persons conspicuous in the district.

A lecture by the Earl of Albemarle on Benefit Societies, at Dias yesterday week, has attracted some attention. The propositions Lord Albemarle insisted on were, that benefit societies should only be esta- blished for the purpose of giving aid in cases of sickness and death ; and that other means should be taken to make provision for old age. The means he suggested were the purchase' of annuities. He recommended his hearers to work their clubs for a limited period, say from year to year, instead of attempting to spread the advantages held out over such long periods.

The United Kingdom Alliance, the British champion of the Maine Liquor Law, held two meetings at Manchester on Wednesday; Sir Walter Trevelyan in the chair. The speakers, delegates from different parts of the country, seemed extremely well pleased with the progress of their movement; and several resolutions intended to advance it were adopted. The Alliance are not in want of the sinews of war. The re- ceipts of last year amounted to 9517/. ; the expenses to 8516/. ; balance in hand 10011. A subscription was begun on the spot with 14001.

At the second meeting, Sir George Strickland took the chair; and, together with the subsequent speakers, Sir Walter Trevelyan, Mr. Pope, and Mr. Lawrence Heyworth, argued lengthily in favour of the "sup- pression of the liquor-traffic " by act of Parliament. Mr. Heyworth ventured on a prediction—" I think I can prophesy that the Maine Law will be carried."

At the large meeting in Birmingham, briefly mentioned in our post- script last week, to assist a society established for the purpose of extend- ing a helping hand to prisoners at the moment they leave gaol, some in- formation was given hi the speeches of Mr. M. D. Hill and Sir John Pakington. Mr. Hill stated his own experience.

" It is probably known to many present, that during the seventeen years of my Recordership, I have adopted a plan which I derived from the worthy and excellent Magistrates at the Warwickshire Sessions,—namely, that when there is reason to believe that a young person at the bar is not utterly depraved ; that he is there for his first, or nearly his first offence • that there are those allied to him by ties of blood or of friendship (oftentimes his em- ployers) who would take him and give him a home and an asylum,—I have practised the lesson I learnt, and delivered up such young persons to those who have offered to restore them to their families and afford them an oppor- tunity of reformation. And I must be allowed to say, and I do it with gratitude, that the benevolent persons to whom I refer,. the friends who received the youth just stamped with felony, were in a majority of instances the very persons who were the sufferers by the offence of which the young criminal had been convicted. How often has it occurred to me to find the prosecutor, with tears in his eyes, beg and entreat that the young prisoner might be given up to him for a further trial ; and when the Court has yielded to that entreaty, there has been a burst of gratitude and thanks for being allowed to take upon himself so anxious a responsibility, as that of receiving into the bosom of his family a convicted felon. I have felt, as you must be sure I should feel, that the thanks and gratitude ought to pass from me to the benefactor, and not from the benefactor to me. In the course of my seventeen years' Recordership, many prisoners have been so dealt with. I have kept an exact register, and the individuals whose names have been entered therein have been visited for the purpose of ascertaining the fruits of the lenity shown to them : 483 persons have been so disposed of at the Birmingham Sessions. A watchful eye has been kept upon the entire num- ber, and the result has been, that they have not been able to detect that more than 78 out of 483 have appeared again at the bar of any court."

He had a severe word to say upon one form of temptation which tries alike the criminal and the honest man- " You have no doubt been exposed to temptations of which the noble lords and right honourable gentlemen present know nothing. You have tri- umphed over those temptations, and you will bear me out when I say, that among the most fearful and irresistible by which you were beset were the 1500 public-houses, the 308 taverns, the 321 gin-shops, the 871 beer-houses —the authorized temptations offered by the Legislature to crime. I speak in the presence of Members of both Houses of Parliament., and I affirm that these 1500 dens, which these great men suffer to be opened, lest, as it were, the criminal who perseveres in his reformation should retire to some quarter of the town to be out of reach of temptation, are the main sources of crime in this country. There is scarcely a street that does not contain one or other of these plague-spots. 'Whatever door is shut against the criminal, the door of the public-house is always open ; whatever may be his guilt, so long as he has the smallest of her Majesty's coins in his pocket, that door will not be closed against him."

Mr. Stuart Wortley, Recorder of London, added another item of expe- rience— " This society cannot deal with the hardened offender or the habitual thief ; they must be left to other reformatories : but its efforts must be directed to that unfortunate class who are led into temptation by the weakness of hu- man nature. Take, for example, the girl who, at the age when vanity is uppermost in her thoughts, is tempted to commit crime for the possession of some trifling ornament. She is one of the unfortunate class to which I re- fer. Or, again, an apprentice, who from his youth received a scanty remu- neration, and is tempted by the handling of a little money. He is sent to prison, and at the expiration of his imprisonment sent adrift without the slightest assistance. How many of these poor creatures have no homes, or, if they have any have bad relations who corrupt them ? At one of the largest establishments near London—I mean the Brixton House of Correc- tion—the officers stated that they could manage well enough those who have no friends—by friends he meant relatives—but those who had any, and were visited by them, were constantly corrupted by them." Sir John Pakington told what had been done in the same direction elsewhere— A society for kindred purposes exists in Worcestershire. "From a re- port presented at the annual meeting of that society, it appears that, since its establishment in 1840, 228 prisoners have been relieved ; of whom 11 have been recommitted to prison, and there is reason to believe that the re- maining 217 have reformed their habits and turned from their evil courses. It is gratifying to know for a certainty, that many of that number have be- come useful and valuable members of society. The society is modest ; but for sixteen years it has been struggling on almost the only one of its kind in England ; for in this, as in other matters, we-have been lagging behind the rest of the world. The 'United States have done much ; France has done much ; Prussia has done much ; and even Italy, upon whom, in our in- sular pride, we are accustomed to look down in contempt, has set us an ex- ample which we are at last willing to follow. In Gloucester a similar as- sociation has been established, and, as in Worcestershire the exertions of its promoters have been attended with the success which I hope will attend the institution now formed in Birmingham."

At the opening of the Birmingham Quarter-Sessions on Saturday, Mr. the Recorder delivered an elaborate address to the Grand Jury, em- bodying an account of the labours of the Transportation Committee, with which we have already made our readers familiar. Mr. Hill congra- tulated his hearers on the present aspect of the Reformatory question, so different from what it assumed twelve months ago, when the country was in a state of alarm in consequence of the alleged working of the Ticket-of-leave Act; and he ascribed the change in public opinion to the labours, report, and recommendations of the House of Commons Committee.

The Standard makes the public acquainted, from its peculiar point of -view, with the facts of a fresh ease of Puseyite innovation. According to this statement, the Reverend Mr. Cameron of Hurst in Berkshire, some time since "attempted innovations in the service of the Church" ; but yielding to public opinion he relapsed into quiet. About a year ago, he obtained a faculty for repairing the church, which, it is represented, had a few years before been repaired and embellished at a cost of 10001. Mr. Cameron proceeded, and when the church was reopened in December 1855, the parishioners saw, to their horror, that he had introduced into the chancel " darkened windows, a surpliced choir, a lectern, a highly- painted screen, gaudy altar-cloth and curtain, and other semblances of Popish ritual." The consequence was, that the greater portion of the congregation—all, in fact, except the poor, who have an interest in the bread charity dispensed every Sunday by the clergyman—deserted the church. The Bishop of Oxford, it is said, has been unsuccessfully ap- pealed to by the parishioners, who by a public vote have expressed their disapprobation of the conduct of their pastor.