The Press. — London, England, 1857-10-24 00:00:00

THE PRESS, OCTOBER 24; 1857. adds his Lordship, "the danger is imminent, the remedy is obvious." And he goes on to recommend that the scale of living at such institu tions should be as low as is consistent with " decency, health, and rational comfort." If they do not exceed this, he thinks the honest labourer will have no reason to envy them. Now, no doubt the agri cultural poor of this country are much better off at present than they were some years ago. We can easily believe that in certain favoured districts where wages aro at a maximum, and landlords philanthropic, certain families may by constant industry and good conduct have attained a level somewhat above mere " decency, health, and comfort." But we are sure that the average industrious peasant in an average locality but rarely succeeds in rising above this level, and that there is besides a very large proportion of honest poverty which novel. succeeds in rising up to it. The one class would be driven to reflect that after a career of vice and crime the young offender was still no worse off than his own child ; and the other would have the painful conviction thrust upon it that he was much better. In addi tion to this, the inmates of a reformatory cannot be kept there doing nothing. If they cannot work, they must be taught. Here at once is a practical advantage afforded to them, which the labourers can appreciate better than any others. We fear, therefore, that Lord STANLEY'S anticipations on this head will not be so easily fulfilled. We do not in the least degree shrink upon that account from the further extension of reformatories. That the poor should envy them is a necessary evil, but not one to deter us from the work of their establish ment. We must trust to the good sense of the people to smooth this difficulty away. But we hold it to be impossible to establish refor matories which shall not present various favourable points of contrast with the dwellings of the " honest labourer." It will be remembered that• in the last week of the session Mr. ADDERI.EY put certain questions to Mr. LARODCHERE with respect to the German Legion having upon their arrival at the Cape been put upon full pay, and whether they were to be kept permanently upon that footing. Mr. LABOUCHERE, in the course of his explanation, endea voured to show that these Germans were embodied by Sir GEORGE GREY on account of the Indian outbreak. Now, we venture to believe that these men, after having been petted and pampered in England for• two years, were sent out last year as colo-' nists, military colonists it is true, but still as colonists, some months before the mutiny broke out in India, yet almost immediately upon their arrival they were embodied and put upon full pay, and we believe are at this moment doing garrison duty. Now the point is, upon what authority and for what reason did Sir GEORGE GREY call out and put on full pay these men, whose extent of service was limited to the colonisation and defence of the frontier, upon the system of military colonies propounded by Sir GEORGE CATHCART ? If Sir GEORGE GREY required more than eleven regiments to garrison the Cape, surely we could have spared him ten months since an additional regiment or two from home. There is some mystery connected with this embodiment, for the plea of the Indian revolt will never do. We shall be glad to see it cleared up next session. The Waterloo- bridge mystery remains a mystery still. Thousands of persons have examined the clothes, and inspected the bones, and no one man, not even Superintendent DURKIN, or Sir GEORGE GREY, is a bit wiser than his brother. The many dramatic incidents pictured by our contemporaries on a theory of assassination, based upon grounds pecu liarly their own, are fast fading from the public view. The affair is very generally felt to be either a hoax or a political assassina tion. If the former, the gentlemen who have " supped " the town " full of horrors " for a fortnight have, in all probability, long since left the country, or, if in London, they continue to pursue their studies unsuspected. On the other hand, if political motives only have actuated the assassins, with the escape of Foseurst fresh in our memory, we have no hopes of the success of the police. The colony of refugees settled in London is altogether too close a family borough for even a keen detective to penetrate. It is quite an imperium in imperio, and altogether excessively disagreeable, unsafe, and not sufficiently under the grasp of the law. Now and then some curious circumstances, such as the Foschini affair, force themselves upon public notice. It was only a few days before the discovery of the mutilated corpse on Waterloo-bridge, that a gentleman of German type, walking close to the Regent's park, was observed to fall down flat on his back. He seemed to have been struck suddenly dead. After some delay and crowding, the man was picked up, put, into a cab, and taken to the nearest hospital. On coming to his senses, he spoke in French, and stated that he had been robbed in Norton-street of his watch and twenty sovereigns. But at the house particularised, when the police visited it, all knowledge of the Frenchman in question was positively denied. Then another statement was made to the effect that the robbery took place at the other side of the river Thames, and either mental incoherence or downright prevarication was visible. When asked who his friends were, the first name mentioned was that of a noted French political refugee, now (or lately) residing in London, and it was not far from the refugee's house that the person was picked up. The matter was properly brought under the notice of the police, and the detectives were engaged upon the whole affair up to the middle of last week. For ohvious reasons, in the aspect of the case, we suppress the mention of names. There were some highly curious features in it deserving the strictest attention ; but 103P' we have not the slightest belief that the police will ever be able satis factorily to explain whether this man was drugged and robbed, or whether an attempt had been made to poison him. A more terrible mystery envelopes the Waterloo rags and bones. How best to insure the safety of railroad travelling is a question that is rapidly assuming very serious dimensions. When the alarming character of railway casualties is confronted with the simplicity aud ease with which they might be prevented, we are forced into reflec tions of a highly unpalatable kind. The question is no less than this, how to render persons who possess an inevitable monopoly of traffic amenable to public opinion. We might transfer the management of rail ways from private companies to Government; but this, we fear, would be only out of the frying-pan into the tit-e. It is a very little while ago that we were told how any private company of merchants would be ashamed to conduct their affairs so foolishly as the Government of the day; and nothing has occurred of late years to convince us that a Minister of the Crown is likely to be a better man of business, or a more disin terested individual, than a railway director. To what quarter, then, must we look for relief ? We confess ourselves puzzled. Competition is out of the question. The turnpike road as much so. And the only loophole of escape from this hazardous monopoly appears to lie in the prosecution of a company by Govern ment as often as an accident involving loss of life or limb occurs upon their line. The expense of doing so would doubtless be heavy, but the public would gladly bear it did the system offer any real security against the frequency of these terrible catastrophes. If a good round fine were inflicted whenever it could be clearly shown that the acci dent was the result of negligence of any sort or kind whatever, even though it could not be directly traceable to any individual, we do think that perhaps railway companies might in time find out that the publics safety and their own profits were more closely connected than they appear to believe at present. The present position of our Money Market attracts considerable attention not only in this country, but, as a consequence, throughout Europe. The severe pressure of the last three weeks has been greatly aggravated, if not entirely caused, by the disastrous intelligence from America ; and in proportion to the estimate formed of the amount of mischief likely to accrue to us from that quarter, does the tendency to alarm arise or subside. It is by no means easy to discover how the crisis reported from the United States should permanently increase the stringency of our Money Market. The apprehensions created here on the first receipt of the tidings of the supension of several banks and numerous firms in America—apprehensions almost amounting to a panic—must probably be attributed to the re collections of the disasters caused in our mercantile com munity by former American crises, more especially that of 1837, and by a vague dread of a repetition of similar results at this period. The most immediate fear was that of the shipment of large quantities of specie from this country for the purpose of being invested in the purchase of bills at the favourable exchanges quoted from New York. It appears, however, highly probable that the depression in the value of bills on England may have been occasioned as much by a certain want of confidence in the intrinsic value of the paper offered for sale as by any absolute absence of demand for remittances to this country, and hence we may assume that an exchange operation by means of specie shipped from home, based upon the late quotations from New York, would be too uncer tain to be largely entered into. For our own part, we do not believe the effects of the present American crisis on our mercantile commu nity will be similar to those experienced in 1837. Prior to the crisis of that year, English banking firms were tempted, by the apparent rapidity with which fortunes were to be gained in America, to grant to the mercantile community in that country almost unlimited facilities in the shape of credits upon no other security than that of their undertaking to remit. These credits were made use of to a large extent by American houses for the purpose of enabling them to speculate in tempting securities ; and when a crisis more severe than the present supervened, the Americans were naturally unable to pay their debts, and their failure was followed by the total ruin of the houses in this country which had thus foolishly lent their credit to enable their American friends to speculate There seems little reason to believe that the credit lately granted to the Americans by this country has been for any purpose but that of conducting the ordinary operations of commerce—such, for instance, as the purchase of commodities for the supply of the wants of the people of the States; and the undoubted prosperity of the bulk of the inhabitants of that country, coupled with the general rise in the price of most articles, must have tended to render such transactions profitable to those en gaged in them, and consequently to increase their ability to pay the amounts due to this country. There does not, therefore, appear to be any ground for fearing extensive disaster even amongst the houses more especially engaged in the American trade, although many may doubtless be severely inconvenienced. It may also be noticed that, although English capital or credit has not been advanced to enable Americans to hold their own securities, very considerable amounts must of late years have been transmitted for investment in the same for account of English capitalists. Many of the English holders will doubtless have been induced by the discredit cast upon their invest ments to give orders to have their money realised and sent home, and the amount due to this country will thereby he increased; whilst the loss arising from the sale at the depreciated value *ill be borne in quarters little likely to affect the Money Market.