The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-08-27 00:00:00

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE SESSION.

Referring to the passinrinto law of the Irish Land
Bill, the Daily News of Tuesday said :—" The great
work of the session was finally accomplished yester-
day. The Land Law Bill received the Royal assent.
The session, then, has accomplished what we may
regard as its one serious purpose. It was a session of
hard and weary, and sometimes bitter, struggle. It
will be memorable in history as the session which passed
the Land Bill, and which, we trust, did thereby much
to establish prosperity in Ireland and peace be-
tween England and Ireland. It will also be remem-
bered in history as the session which listened to the last
speech of Lord Beaconsfield, and to the funeral
oration pronounced over Lord Beaconsfield by
his great rival. It was in many ways truly a sessio
mirabilis. It began a month before the usual time,
and went on to nearly a month beyond the usual time.
It was a single Act session, for we do not care to
count the Peace Preservation Acts as amongst its
achievements. They may have been its necessities,
but they will hardly be reckoned amongst its triumphs.
In any case the overplus of time given to this session
beyond that of the ordinary session would have exactly
accounted for the passing of the Peace Preservation
Acts. If, therefore, we come to compare its work
with the work of an ordinary session, we are fairly
entitled to say that the Land Law Act was its one
achievement. Never certainly was there in the
history of our country a session so monotonously oc-
cupied with one single subjeci,. The condition of Ire-
land was virtually the only question in debate from
first to last.

It is a curious fact, well worthy of notice, that im-
mediately after the third reading of the Land Law
Bill in the House of Commons, just when the House,
which had been discussing an Irish question through
many successive months, believed itself released from
such a subject for a time, it so happened that in the
rotation of business the next topic for discussion was a
motion on the subject of the Irish fisheries put on the
paper long before. So the House passed trom Irish
land to Irish waters, from the necessity of securing
the Irish tenant in his holding to the expediency of
encouraging the Irish fisherman in his craft. What
with the Coercion Bill and the Land Law Bill and the
Irish fisheries and the arrests of Irish prisoners, the
session has hardly had a moment's breathing time for
any question that was not purely Irish."

LOCKING THE DOORS OF RAILWAY
CARRIAGES.
The locking of the doors of railway carriages is one
of the mysteries of railway management, (remarks
the Pall Mall Gazette.) No passenger has ever been
able to divine why such infinite pains are taken to lock
him in. The only result of the process is that if there
is an accident he is a prisoner with a chance of being
killed. If, on the contrary, his train arrive safely at
his destination, he is still a prisoner, who has
to wait till he is liberated, making meanwhile
spasmodic signals to attract some friendly porter
for the purpose, unless, having grown wise by
experience, he carries a key himself, and is able
triumphantly to emerge. Some people imagine
that a regulation of the Board of Trade obliges this
extraordinary precaution. No such regulation, how-
ever, exists. On the contrary, the greatest diversity
of practice prevails on the subject. One company
locks its carriage doors on the main line only, another
on the branch and main lines both, a third on single
lines only, a fourth does not lock its carriage doors at
all. And the extraordinary thing is that the com-
panies that entirely neglect the custom find no disad-
vantage whatsoever in doing so. On the contrary, their
porters are able to attend to other matters during
the time when they would have been locking and
unlocking doors. The following are the railway com-
panies who do not lock their doors on either side of
their trains :—ln Scotland: The Glasgow and South
Western, Great Northern of Scotland, Highland,
and North British. In England: Great Eastern,
London, Chatham, and Dover, and North Eastern.