NEWS OF TITE WEEK.
THE Cabinet has undergone a small internal spasm of a curious, but hardly important, kind. Mr. Chichester Fortescue has re- signed the Irish Secretaryship, and accepted Mr. Bright's vacant place as President of the Board of Trade, for reasons which are somewhat obscure. He exchanges £4,000 a year for £2,000 a year,—a matter of no great consequence to him, perhaps,—a post of first-class official importance for one of the least important in the Cabinet, which can hardly be indifferent to him,—and finally, one of all the official details of which he was fully master, for one which must lead him into a very unfamiliar, if not an entirely alien, world. Further, the Marquis of Hartington has abandoned St. Martin's-le-Grand for Dublin, where we hope he will ad- minister the affairs of Ireland in a more liberal spirit than he has sometimes betrayed in his Irish speeches,—that, for example, on the Irish Land Bill, which excited so much migiving in the autumn before last. And beyond this the Cabinet is unchanged, the office of Postmaster-General being no longer connected with a seat in the Cabinet, and the number of Cabinet officers being reduced again to its normal number,—fifteen. What the Cabinet gains by this change it is not easy to see, beyond the apprenticing afresh of two ministers who had learnt to do their old work fairly. Mr. Cardwell's reign at the War Office seems not likely to be disturbed by any event short of invasien or revolution.
