The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1878-07-27 00:00:00

Throne, they have important duties to perform.

• The clearing away of the Eastern Question once
more will be felt as a great relief, not only by Parlia-
ment, but by all classes of the body politic. For
three long years we have been thinking and talking of
little besides Russia and Turkey, Bulgaria and
- Roumelia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and
Servia. British interests abroad have been over-
shadowing British interests at home. Many a
domestic social problem has had to go unsolved
because Parliament could not at one and the same
time deal with home questions and with foreign
policy. While trade has languished and incomes
have been diminished, the public burthens have
[..r.',5.110 increased, and local taxation has also been materi-
,• ally augmented. The hardships borne by our own
people have been unheard of whilst the public
mind has been filled with speculations respect-
ing the future of the south-eastern populations.
We shall now, it is hoped, be enabled to attend in
some degree to our own affairs, and to much that has
been left undone which now presses for Parliamentary
attention.

Another burst of tropical heat has sensibly depleted
the number of the Upper Ten Thousand who, with a
residence in London, can at any time get away from

4 the great wilderness of bricks and mortar. With a
temperature quite on an average as high as that of
wig India, the ordinary duties of life almost cease to be
tolerable, and people become sensibly aware that most
'English houses are built only for winter. The streets
are suddenly found to be too broad and too exposed to
the sun's rays, and narrow bye-ways are sought as
• affbrding a protection from the burning rays which are
- •
poured down upon the crowded town. The general
run of a Bombay summer is 95 degrees in the shade,
while in London the thermometer has marked 96.
And there is all this difference that whereas in India
, people dress, diet themselves, and have their houses
constructed the better that they may endure the
- fierce heat which periodically visits them, in Eng-
land it finds us totally unprepared. The steaming
joint and the hot vegetables are placed upon the
table as usual; a man is bound to go about with the
- regulation collar and the tightly-fitting necktie; and
. the walls of his house are fixed and irremovable. The
P - Lord Chancellor and the Sr esker of the House
of Commons swelter under their heavy wigs,

and amid the folds of their official robes, just as

though an arctic temperature had settled down
• ' upon the capital. The torture which some people in
England undergo, when suddenly and unexpectedly
called upon to face the equatorial heat, which ever

, and anon bursts upon them, is excruciating; but
habit must not be broken through; the collar and the
' necktie must be worn; and as to a man appearing in
• • the streets without a coat, the bare idea of the thing
would make his friends shudder. And so comfort is
,
-sacrificed to conventionality, and the Conservative

~•;fer. . owstome of tho peut.de—ubing tho word in ita non.
3'. itrb,political and social senses—are not interfered with by
' the rise or the fall of the thermometer.

Westminster Hall is an excellent reflex of the politi-
cal and legal life of London. On one side of it is the
members' entrance to the House of Commone, and on
the other stand the Law Courts. Many an aspiring
politician has wistfully gazed upon the archway upon
jolty* the south side of the building, leading into the People's
kr* as Chamber, wondering whether it will ever be their pri.
4304 vilege to have the entree into an assembly which has
numbered amongst its members some of the most dis-
tinguished names in English history. Some of them
have been struck into stone, and their statues
stand in Parliament-square, on the other side
of the way. Canning, Palmerston, Derby, Peel
—there they are, looking down upon the ever-
shifting crowd constantly flowing past the walls
of the Legislative Palace in which their political lives
. were spent. On the north side of the hall, where
4- is., eminent judges sit for the administration of justice,
I. there are memories of Coke and of Mansfield, of

Ellenborough and Tenterden. In the full tide of the
1.1%; session and of term there are few busier places than
-, Westminster Hall, but when Parliament is up and
4.1,4 Wit
the Long Vacation is running out its slow length,
▪ there are few spots more suggestive of solitude. The
▪ Long Vacation begins on the 10th of August, and the
prorogation will take place within a few days of that
date. Long enough indeed the vacation is for many of
those who have to live by the law, for it is not until the
24th of October that the courts are re-opened, and the
legal machinery of the country is once more in full
motion.

Holiday routes are now being busily marked out,
and the termini of the railways witness many a crowd
anxious to be off on their annual period of recreation.
The imagination has gone forth in search of cool
places, and finds many that are sufficiently shady and
Pleasant. At times it is carried to the rugged outline
of the western coast, where the giant waves of the
Atlantic roll in with all their force, and the white
foam is borne clean over the perpendicular cliffs
which are perpetually standing fathoms deep in ever-
heaving water. Then there are the mountain
chalets of Switzerland, where the sharp air of
the glaciers has a renovating influence upon both
mind and body. Or his fancy may dwell upon
the scenery of that famous river which the Germans
call the sacred Rhine, upon the beauties of the Italian
lakes, or the quiet which reigns upon the fjords of
Norway. An increasing number appear to be coming
to the conviction that wildness and grandeur, solitude
and beauty can also be found within the limits of our
own islands. How many of us have explored the far-
off Hebrides, or have listened to the thundering
surges of the ocean as they beat upon the shores of
Connaught? But to come nearer, those who wish for
quietude and loveliness of scenery combined have
only to run down to Cumberland, whose lakes suggest
many an association of Southey and Wordsworth;
while to the angler or the oarsman there are secluded
nooks upon the reaches of the Thames, where the
river is a narrow stream clear as crystal, with none of
those contaminations which are poured into it during
its Passage through many a mile of the largest city in
the world.
The people of Berlin, having witnessed the close of
the Congress, are now in the midst of an electioneering
excitement, consequent upon the summoning of the
new German Parliament. We know in our own
experience something of what this is like, and all over
Germany vigorous preparations are being made for the ,
contest. Whilst speaking of the Prussian capital
which, compared with the importance of the empire it
represents, is disproportionately smau, it
may be
mentioned that the " Kaiserhof," 41,
leading hotel
in the city, founded by a joint-stock company,
gained a considerable profit by the Congress. Lord
Beaconsfield and the staff of the special Embassy,
who inhabited nearly the whole suite of the
front rooms on the first floor, paid altogether
about 40,000 Marks-22,000, or about £152 per day.
Including the officials and servants, about fifty
persons had to be accommodated, and 63 rooms in
. the Xaiserhof were thus occupied. The apartments
allotted to the two plenipotentiaries are described as
lyster,.., having been really magnificent, and the table Wali
always furnished with the delicacies of the season.
The acquisition of Cyprus has not lost any of its
!, interest, and this is attested by the way in which in
- • one way or another, the subject is repeatedly referred
toils both Houses of Parliament. One question, almost
more than any other, has commanded especial attention
from a people which nearly half a century ago abolished
Slavery throughout the British Dominions, and that is
the existence of slavery in the new possession. It seems,
however, that it is a terra which admits of a wide

interpretation. The lot of the Turkish slave is not,
and never has been, like that of the negro who
belonged to Anierican planters, or the serf who
twenty years ago was the property of a Russian
boyard The law bids a Mussulman call his slaves
his children; Mohammed was explicit in enjoining
kind treatment to them; and the Koran is so
minute in its prescriptions respecting the treat-
ment of slaves as to regulate even the number
of blows which a master may inflict as a correc-
tion. The very word slave has an ugly sound
in English ears, but that it did not have always
the same meaning as that which we attach to
it, seems clear from what St. Paul wrote in his
epistle to Philemon, whom the Apostle does not
censure for having a slave, but in pleading for
Onesimus he simply begs that the runaway may be
received back as a free servant. Still, it is not difficult
to see that even in a qualified form, the existence of
slavery in Cyprus will be distasteful to the people of
this country, and that no long time will elapse before
it will be swept away. The flag which has "braved
a thousand years the battle and the breeze,"
would be untrue to its glorious traditions, to the
struggles of our ancestors in the cause of freedom,
to the splendid history behind it, and to the brilliant
future which we all believe even now lies before
it, if its folds were flung out over a land in which man
was held in bondage to his fellow-man. Long ago
Lord Mansfield laid it down that no man who breathed
the free air of England could be a slave, and its people
will take care that wherever the British flag floats
under the light of Heaven, it shall wave over a soil
cousecrated to the undying principle of human liberty.