NEWS OF THE WEEK.

acceptance of office by Mr. Gladstone is the event of the week. He is appointed Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary in the Ionian Islands, for the purpose, it is intimated,, of investi- gating and composing the differences which have existed so long between the indigenous, Government and the representative of the British Crown. Mr. Gladstone will go to Corfu, and begin his work at once, without superseding the Lord High Commis- ,ioner in ordinary. It is implied that Mr. Gladstone has been induced to accept this temporary employment by the opportu- nities which it may offer of studying some portions of his great Homeric subject in situ. It is by no means impossible that Hellenic affections may have inclined the expounder of the im- mortal bard to accept the office ; but it will be more generally supposed that the cogent motive was Mr. Gladstone's well under- stood desire to obtain public employment suited _to his station ; and should he really apply himself to the duties which he has undertaken, he must have very little -leisure for the exploration of obscurities in the text of Homer, or the classic, geography of Ionia.

For nothing can be worse than the state of the country which Mr. Gladstone is the High Commissioner Extraordinary for settling. There is internal disease and external irritation. The people of the Islands have never taken to the protector set over them by the European settlement. For a long series of years they have been imbued with Panhellenic aspirations instilled into them unquestionably for yet broader Pansciavonian purposes ; and so insolent have feelings of the kind become, that the As- sembly has rung with hostile diatribes against the Lord 'High Commissioner, against the British Sovereign, and against the English in general. The very Senate and Representative Cham- ber have become incorporated scandals with which the repre- sentative of the Queen could scarcely hold intercourse ; and al- though there has for a time been some slight abatement of this ugly fever, the disease has now become complicated by many foreign irritants. The state of Turkey has again aroused the hopes, and, what is worse, the intrigues of the most intriguing and degraded race upon the face of the earth—those mongrel successors to a classic name, the " Greeks." The intrigues of Athens extend to Corfu; the manoeuvres of Russia tell upon Ionia; and the people of the Islands are stirred against their Government de facto by every conceivable combination of extra- vagant hopes, vulgar prejudice, and the speculative_prospects of spoils in case of a rupture. Such is the nature of the difficulty which Mr. Gladstone has accepted office to investigate and over- come.

The prospects of peace are becoming rather complicated by the complications in that empire which professes to be identified.with Peace. The French Government has evidently overshot itself in more than one of the actions to which it has been recently com- mitted. The prosemition of the Count de Montalembert was a course as hazardous as it was needless. So long as the Count remained simply a highminded commentator on affairs in general

[WITH MONTHLY SITITLEXENT.] —a sort of amateur statesman removed from the scene of active life,—something like what we might call a high Churchman of impracticable politics,—he was a curiosity whose removal by chance the Emperor and his friends might not have disliked, but who exercised comparatively little influence. Far less powerful was the Count pouring forth his eulogies in praise of England through the pages of the Cu/Avow/ant than the same man ar- raigned before a public court, after the example of public trial in the Orsini Case ; defending himself without any such antece- dents as those of the Italian assassin, but with all the associa- tions of an amiable character, a cultivated understanding, a po- lished bearing, a chivalrous spirit, and a noble name. The whole good feeling of France is likely to rally round a mania such a position ; and the Government which attempts to strike him has placed itself relatively in the position of the insurgent against order, and the violator of public respect.

Nor is the case of Portugal against France closed, morally. The Charles-ct-Georges has been towed out of harbour in French custody ; the order has issued for the liberation of Captain Rouxel ; but the clear account given by the Mario do Governo renders the outrageous conduct of France the more marked. Manifestly our own Government is ashamed of its ally. A story was current, last week, that Lord Malmesbury had interfered, and had even sent the Channel fleet towards Lisbon, but in such • a manner as to defeat his own intervention. A- semi-official

• contradiction.has been given to this account. It is implied, that

the case was rendered difficult by the presence of the French Foreign Office agent on board the Charles-et-Georges, which im- parted to the vessel a sort of official character ; and, moreover, Portugal had not invited interference. The fact appears to be that the weaker Government was left without defence, our own not seeing the right course clear before it ; but obviously Lord Malmesbury is as ashamed as Lord Palmerston could possibly be of the manner in which the French Emperor has defied alike law, policy, and decency.

The Prince Regent of Prussia has accepted the resignation of the Ministers who served his brother, and has appointed a new Cabinet under the -residency of Prince Hohenzollern Sigmarin- gen, the son of a quondam Sovereign House who has now de- scended to be a working statesman, and is reputed to represent the moderate Liberal party. The better known Rothman-Holweg is also in the Cabinet, whose Members appear to bear the same repute for honest liberality. There was a time when 'the Baron von Manteuffel was regarded as a Liberal perhaps more pro- nounced than those who have succeeded him in office ; but he 'entered into the business of state as a profession, executed the wishes of his client, the Crown, and had long since become's mere representative of bureaucracy, which is strongly influenced in -Prussia by the personal wishes of the King for the time being. The present tendency undoubtedly seems towards a more genuine and national action, in a Liberal sense.

It is true that the circular just issued from the Ministry of the Interior for the guidance of the police hardly admits of this con- struction, if we are to regard it as uttered in round English ; -but it was not published in English : it was in German—a very different language. The purport of the circular was to tell the Police, that they might give electors information, and even ad- vice, with regard to the choice of candidates for the Chamber of Deputies, but that they must not positively interfere to restrain the views and actions of the electors ; and it is that latter part which marks the sincerity and practical tendency of the new regime. With ni,it would be a circular inciting the Police to interfere—an outrage upon the Constitution ; in Prussia the inter- ference is a matter of course, but there is the Constitutional innovation of ordering the Police to interfere less. 44— --- We now have for the first time something like a complete account of Lord Elgin's mission to Japan, and of its results. The whole story is more like a chapter from The New Atlantis than the record of a business proceeding. Lord Elgin went to Japan pre- ceded by the terror of his name acquired in China ; he found the way opened for him by rivals,—by the vigour of Commodore Perry in breaking down the barriers of exclitsion ; by the adroit- ness and good fellowship of Consul Harris who assisted the Bri- tish to attain what he had already got for the Americans ; and by the reports which Prince Pontiatine the Russian Plenipotenti- ary had brought of Lord Elgin's tremendous success in China. And thus, although the Japanese so far observed their traditions, in form, as to deprecate his entrance, they have allowed him to enter, permitted him to see the wonders of Jeddo, and conceded a treaty. This treaty opens three ports, with three more in pros- pect and two great cities ; permits the entrance of a British Min- ister ; and establishes a general tariff of 50 per cent ad valorem, including all charges and dues, with the lower claim of 5 per cent on cotton and woollen goods and some other articles. The Japanese appear to be prosperous, simple-minded, intelligent, and kindly. They have taken to the Yankees, to mechanical improvements like the steam-engine and the railway, and to their new British acquaintance ; with liberal views on the subject of commerce, as if they had all along been sharing European " pro- gress."

An annual ceremony in the neighbourhood of Hongkong seems to be becoming the quittance of the English tenure. A great piratical establishment existed near ; the Admiral sent out a few ships and gunboats to clear away the wasp's nest ; and ad- mirably did the British officers and men perform the work. Within a week, with very limited means, they captured and de- stroyed a fort, a hundred and thirty vessels, and five hundred and sixty-three guns. The Emperor of China never could keep the rascals under ; and England is exercising the fullest right of might by employing it for the common good.

While Cardinal Wiseman has been delivering his " impressions of Ireland and the Irish " to a fashionable audience at the Han- over Square Rooms, the Protestants of Southampton have been echoing the denunciations of St. James's Hall against the Angli- can confessional ; but it is the Cardinal who is most true to po- licy. His account of Ireland suddenly rising to prosperity, is flattering at once to English notions and to Irish feelings ; and his assertion that the prosperity results in the building of more churches is at once a flattery for the Romanists both of England and Ireland, and a practical hint for them to emulate each other in bringing their tribute.

The anti-confessionalists spoil their cause by exaggeration and exclusiveness. If they are to be believed, the confession is " the fashion,"—the very idea most calculated to extend it. While they can never expect much sympathy from the working classes, who view these questions with indifference, the openly disavow three great parties in the state,—the Tories, the Whigs, and the Times ! And while the agitators of Southamp- ton proclaim that their movement is, and is to be, exclusively middle class, an unhappy Vestryman of Marylebone goes to the district police office, and by the tenour of his complaint makes known the painful fact that even in the singularly enlightened and singularly middle class Marylebone, the middle class cannot construe the laws that govern the family or those that govern the land The movement is managed as if its very authors re- solved that it shall be " no go."

The Reform movement has been represented by some minor gatherings. Mr. Midi, with much apparent success, has won the support of the Banbury folk to the London Reformers' scheme of Reform identical with Mr. Bright's. At Lincoln, the local Association, headed by a local manufacturer, has given its ad- hesion to the same project. At Edinburgh, the Liberals in public meeting assembled deviated to other affairs. Mr. Cowan des- canted on " three atrocious crimes" of the day,—the Sepoy mutiny, the commercial frauds, and the attempt on the Emperor of the French ; and Mr. Black was for contrasting the Palmerston and Tory Ministries, while cries of " six and half a dozen " re- buked that attempt to bespeak a party feeling.

The first meeting of the Railway Companies Association may be considered to have established an important body—a sort of Joint Committee, representing such railway companies as have joined the Association. The professed object is to carry out the railway administration of the country on the principle of har- mony, instead of one of hostile and conflicting competition ; and there can be no doubt that if the professions of the Association be realized, with an enlightened comprehension of public inte- rests, a bringing together of practical men, and a cultivating of free discussion, the Association may be most valuable, not only to the individual interests of the companies, with their share- holders, but to the public at large. It looks rather as if the railway companies were inclined to adopt and carry out the main principle of that Bill which Lord Dalhousie laid before Parliament, but which Parliament and the Executive had not the energy to shape into a law.

The Duke of Cambridge has issued a general order on

affair which is likely to have a large effect upon the Arm A. young officer of the 47th Regiment had paid an unbidden 1,qt to an acquaintance in a militia regiment, and upset his room and had afterwards figured at an hotel in a state of intoxictiti4, The Court-martial before which he was called found the charge proven, but struck out of it the words " conduct unbecoming the character of an officer and a gentleman." The Commander-in. chief does not visit the young culprit, who is thus " let down), with any severer punishment than that pronounced by the Court. martial ; but he reads the Court a lesson on the lax execution of its duties, and improves the lesson for the edification of other courts-martial. Orders to prohibit practical joking had been issued by Lord Hardinge, the late Commander-in-chief; to disobey those orders is unbecoming an officer ; to visit a man's room unbidden, and damage his furniture, is unbecoming a gen- tleman; and in future courts-martial are to avoid the " erre. neous opinions " displayed by the late Court-martial in its esti- mate of what is becoming an officer and a gentleman. The min. take undoubtedly derived strength, if not its origin, from the system of purchase. Young men buying themselves into the Army imagined they had " a right " to be there ; poorer men who had entered by other means were regarded as inferiors ; and the independent purchasers believed themselves to possess a privilege of regulating and selecting the society of the mess-room. The imperfect state of the laws indeed prevented them from expelling an officer if not suited to their taste ; so they invented the prac- tice of worrying him out of the regiment. If gentlemen in- dulged the practice actively when young, when they grew older they retained the erroneous opinions, cultivated in the school, and the Court-martial winked at the custom *oh was actively kept up by the juniors. In the late instance, the Court convicted it- self of conniving at a mutinous disregard of the Horse Guards' general orders ; but the reprimand administered by the Duke can scarcely be treated with the same indifference.