The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1869-06-19 00:00:00

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BY OCR OWN OCSILESPONDENT.

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ft% remarks under this head are to be regarded as the et-
doltva.An of independent opinion, le•nn the pen of &gentleman
•wirom WEI have the greatest gm:Mince, but for which we
4tdritheleas do not hold ourselves gesponsiblej

The two great public topics of the day—the Irish
Church Pill, in the House of Lords, and the disturb-
ances im Paris—are matters on which you will doubt-
less gisse ample information, but I am precluded from
commenting on those simply because they vary with
tire hour. May the result of the politiabecclesiastical
battle, ard of the political agitation be for the benefit
.of Britain and her once natural enemy, France. If
present difficulties are arranged, we shall ere long per-
haps be paying more attention to the movements of
the Viceroy of Egypt than to anything else in the
metropolis. He is to be received at Buckingham
Palace in a say that is fitting to his state and dignity,
while the City of London, in its corporate character,
and several members of the aristocracy individually,
sal help to entertain his Highness.
The Middlesex grand jury have done a sensible thing
in protesting against an absurd institution, all things
considered—the grand jury system. They complain of
the "serious inconvenience and manifest inutility of
perpetuating the practice of empanelling a grand jury
when it is known that there will be no case brought
before them, or any business to be transacted." They
aright have gone farther, and protested against the
grand jury system altogeth,r. No doubt there are
some slight advantages connected with it, but they are
more than counterbalanced by the disadvantages and
the inju.stice to a body of professional men and trades-
men, who arc called away from their business for no
good whatever. The Lord Chief Justice himself says
that grand juries are often merely sworn in and dis-
charged. But when the grand jury actually does any
so-called business, it is in 99 cases out of 100 little
better than a farce, and the real business has to be
done afterwards. Trial by jury is, of course, a fine
institution, but the preliminary fussy examination
whether a man shall or shall not be tried when he has
already been committed for trial is but a solemn farce.
We have not heard much about tramways in Lon-
don lately, but their advocates have not been idle, and
have been pushing their bill through Parliament.
Read a second time in the Lords, it may now be con-
sidered safe, and ere long we may expect to find tram-
ways laid down and street cars running to and fro, as
in New York. It will he a boon to London to have
these new iron ways. There will be greater speed, no
jolting, less dust, less labour for the horses, loss dif-
ficulty in driving, more comfort in ruling, and many
other advantages; all of which makes one wonder
that we have been so long without street tramways.
Will any one have the courage to propose to adopt
those tramways to the velocipede? It may seem like
a joke, but the question is worth a second thought.
Rather a funny thing has been lone by our Lord
Mayor and Sheriffs. The present Archbishop of
Canterbury while he was Bishop of London devoted
himself assiduously to the laborious work of his large
diocese and did much to improve its condition. Our
gratitude to him is therefore reasonable enough, and a
testimonial to him might have been considered a
natural mode of expressing that gratitude. But it is
rather droll that when we feel grateful to one man we
should present a testimonial to another. But this is
what the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs have done on our be-
half. They met at the gallery of Mr. Graves, in Pall-
Mall, "to present to the Bishop of London a portrait
of Dr. Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury, to be placed
in Fulham Palace, in recognition of his services to the
diocese of London as its bishop. The Lord Mayor read
an address to the Bishop of London, who replied in
appropriate terms." No doubt of it; but his lordship
must have been rather puzzled at first to find the ale
propriate terms. Possibly Dr. Jackson may have taken
the present as a gentle hint that he should follow in the
footsteps of his predecessor. The gift was, however,
so far appropriate that it is to remain a kind of epis-
copal heirloom at Fulham Palace in testimony of the
worth of one of its most popular occupants.
The emigration movement keeps up, and some two
Cr three thousand persons per week leave our shores
for the colonies and the States. The Government
deserve great praise for the way in which they are
assisting unemployed dockyard-men to emigrate to
Canada. At the latter end of this month a splendid
screw steamer, the Nugent, of 4,400 horse power, is to
sail for Quebec with some Chatham dockyard artisans
and labourers and their families. It is sad to see how
our working men have to go like this, but it is by far
the lesser evil of the two. This emigration movement
is decidedly having a beneficial effect in lessening the
pressure on our labour market.
The commercial panic of May, 1866, which produced
effects, which continue even to our own day in a modi-
fied form, has, among other results, stopped the letting
of many of those magnificent offices and chambers
which have been built during the last few years in the
City, but the value of ground in the metropolis seems
as great as ever. The Merchant Taylors' School has
bad to pay 1:00,000 for 5j acres of ground which be-
longed to the Charterhouse, and a freehold residence in
Cavendishorquare bas just been sold for £20,800, which
is double what the Earl of Wicklow paid for it twenty-
five years ago. Numberless facts of the same cha-
racter, on a smaller scale, could be mentioned. And
yet there are now suburbs of London which are evi-
dently being overbuilt.
Years ago it used to be a very common remark that
England is not a musical nation, but few would venture
to say that now. True we may not have the State.
supported musical academies, convert:Moires, and insti.
tides of the Continent, and we still send our aspirants
to study music in Florence, Leipsic, Vienna, and
Paris; but then how liberal we are to foreign artists,
who all come, or wish to come to London and other of
our great towns to exchange their notes for our gold.
Nowhere is music more heartily supported than in
London, and June is specially the month for con-
certs. We have at present concerts innumerable. At
the Crystal Palace there are "popular operatic after-
noons" and grand summer concerts; we have bazaars
and feles which are not complete without bands of
music ; the band of the Commissionairea plays every
evening in St. James's Park ; we have music-halls,
public gardens, and assembly rooms, which would be
nothing without music; we have continual concerts at
our literary institutions, where nothing pays so well as
music ; we have grand oratorio concerts at Exeter
Hall and St. James's hail; we have our Philhar-
monic Society, Musical Union, and numberless
other musical societies; and then we have, last, not
least, our fashionable morning concerts. It is de '
ritmeur for our "upper ten" to go to a few of
these concerts during the season, and they like it
all the better perhaps because the prices are high
—for instance, sofa stalls, one guinea; side sofa stalls,
15a. ; stalls, 10e. ; balcony, he. And it is consider, d
the thing to admire long and complicated instrumental
pieces. The exquisices who repose lazily on their sofa
stalls do not applaud—that would be sir trop---but they
are supposed to be drinking in with delight the sweet
strains of the grand sonata in A minor, Op. 164; and
when they smile and chat and rearrange their flowing
drapery when the sonata is over, of course they don't
feel glad that it is over, but it is only in pleasant
preparation for the quartet in D major, Op. 44, No. L
which into follow. Add to all this the musical societies,
the singing classes, and the musical entertainments all
ever the country, and the piano in every "respectable"
house, and then perhaps it will be freely admitted that,
whatever we might once have been, we are now a musi-
cal nation.


A societycalling itself the London Dialectical Society
has had some extraordinary gatherings here. Mast of
the persons present appear to have been believers in
spiritualism, and they have made statements which
bay be characterised as very hard nuts for non-believers
to crack. I will just pick out a few of the most start-
ing of these. One speaker said that he had seen a
young lady raised from the floor notwithstanding the
efforts of two stout men to hold her down, and this and
other phenomena he ascribed to "intelligent, non- I
material, but substantial beings." How anything non-
material can be substantial, or how anything non-
material can exercise force opposed to "the efforts of
two stout men," was not explained. A Mr. Eyre said
be had seen a piano playing when no one was near it
that a medium told him where to find a baptisms
register which he had vainly sought for three months ;
and that "ho had spoken on subjects which he "knew
nothing about," (a rather awkward ansonincement.)
A London city merchant sail lie had experienced
"muscular, manual, and pedal contractions, and had
found hiuiself speaking a language he did not under-
stand." Another gentleman exhibited a crystal ball,
a little larger than a duck's ego, and said that in this
ball he had seen representations of events which were
occurring in distant parts of the world at that par-
ticular time. Such statements as these are certainly
remarkable, a hether spiritualism be true or untrue,
and they are drawing renewed attention to the subject.
Whether velocipedes' will ever come into vogue as
ordinary locomotive vehicles is rather doubtful, but
their use, for amusement and pleasure, is increasing,
Along suburban roads may now often be seen the
velocipedest, distancing omnibuses and keeping up
tolerably well with cabs, though the smart butcher's
boy with his fast-trotting pony easily passes the bi-
cycle. Many large establishments are now selling
velocipedes almost as fast as they can be made, and
their practising grounds have become quite a feature
of London, while the velocipede races at the Csystal
Palace and the Agricultural Hall have excited a good
deal of interest. The three-wheeler is now voted very
slow, while a four-wheeler compared to a bicycle is as