The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1876-10-10 00:00:00

TIA DORSET COUNTY EXPRESS AND AGRICULTURAI, GAZETTE, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1873.

Valet (Dahl &gm.

TUESDAY. Oman 10. NM

NOTES OF THE WEEK.

From a party point of view, the position
taken by the Government in shrinking the
difficulties of the Eastern Question, is most
sagacious. If peace is maintained, all the
credit will be given to the firmness of their
attitude. If Rusin& persists in going to war it
is open for them to say that such a calamity
would never have happened but for the un-
governed language of Mr. Gladstone.

, open
would

The accounts of that unfortunate speculation
the Hour have been made public, and it appears
that upwards of £70,000 was sunk in the vain
attempt to float it. This ill success has had a
deterrent effect, for—though we have had one
or two new weeklies—no one has dared to start
a new daily.

Of late the public mind has been much
exercised touching the sale of poisons. The
Pharmacy Act undoubtedly gives us a certain
amount of protection, but of course it does
not and cannot enable us to trace to the hands
of a poisoner illegitimate possession of a deadly
drug if he happen to be a doctor, a chemist, or
a photographer, or, indeed, anybody in whose
business chemical agents arc daily employed,
and who has, therefore the means of privately
procuring or making them. But it would seem
that the Pharmacy Act fails in a still more
important way to prevent poisonous materials
from being wrongfully used. We are not going
to discuss whether an old-fashioned and little
known drug like laurel water, for example, is
a poison deadly enough to render its un-
restricted sale a matter of suspicion, though
it is described by the old school of physicians
as a convenient sedative vehicle in which to
administer any nauseating poison, such as tartar
emetic, which, if taken in a large dose would
be promptly ejected by the stomach. Confining
our attention to less obscure drugs, we are
somewhat struck with the strangeness of a fact
which the Lancet briz4olight, that opium
bought
can be at any druggists shop with the
utmost ease. " Its sale,' we are told, "is
practically unrestricted." If a man wants to
buy it he needs no introduction to the druggist.
The seller of the poison need make no entry et
the purchase—all he is bound to do by the law
is to mark the bottle " poison " and hays
printed or written on the label his name and
address. Now we begin to understand why so
many cases of suicide are returned as being due
to opium-poisoning. With the exception of
phosphorous which can always be got from the
ends of lucifer matches, there is no deadly drug
that can be bought with more freedom from
inquisitive suspicion or more apparent facility.
Morecver, there is no pleasanter way of shuffling
off this mortal coil than by taking "an over-
dose" of opium. Of course, in its most
common form—laudanum—it requires a pretty
large dose to make its use fatal, and many
people drink it as a stimulant, just as others
take brandy or beer. But any change in the
Pharmacy Act which prevented the sale of this
deadly drug, save on the same terms as those
in accordance with which arsenic is vended,
would, at the most, embarrass no innocent
person save the habitual opium-eater. Why
should his interest be any longer allowed to stand
in the way of our making the traffic in this bane
subject to the same restrictions as are dealings
in all other poisons I

The ward-room officers of H.M.S. Sultan are
beginning to find that the honour of serving
under a Royal Duke in a crack ironclad is a
somewhat costly luxury. A great part of their
time is spent in harbour, and wherever they go
they are expected to exercise a liberal hospi-
tality. To such an extent this has been carried
that even the patience of the ward-room has
given way, and strenuous representations have
been made at the Admiralty. As a matter of
of course the officials there do not recognise the
liability of the Crown, but a "contribution" to
the mess-funds has been promised, sufficient in
amount to save the officers from the unpleasant
discovery which would probably have awaited
them at the end of their cruise, that their
caterer's bills had swallowed up all the pay due
to them. So much for Royalty playing at
sailors!

Why does every Englishman who visits the
United States think it necessary to extol that
country at tho expense of his own, They all do;
and even Professor Huxley has fallen into the
unpatriotic blunder. We see by the Chicago
papers that he haa been addressing the
American counterpart of the Brandt Associa-
tion ; and that, in order to flatter his
hosts, ho was good enough to enure them
that American liberality in the endowment of
science and in affording provision for the wants
and comforts of the poor made him ashamed for
his fellow-countrymen's meanness. After all,
however, it can hardly be said that Englishmen
have much to blush for in this matter. If the
question is one of the endowment of science Sir
Joseph Whitworth's gift of 2250,000—a million
and a quarter of dollars—may safely be com-
pared with anything that has been done in the
;Mates. Or take the magnificent endowments
recently raised in Manchester, the Grammar
School and the Owens College; the gift of Mr.
Mark Firth to Sheffield • the two parks given to
the town of Birmingham by • lady of the place,
or Sir Josiah Mason's splendid charities in the
*me town. The list might be extended in-
definitely; but those half-dozen instances of
British liberality are sufficient to prove that the
Professor's reproach was wholly undeserved.