The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-11-27 00:00:00

Oat iou torresponbent.

[We deem it right to state that we do not at all times
identify ourselves with our Correspondent's opinions.]

If you ever glance over the list of Ministers attending
a Cabinet Council, you will see that the names are invari-
ably given in due order, and according to the importance
of the office filled. First, of course, is the Premier,
next the Lord Chancellor, as the keeper of the Queen's
conscience, thirdly the Lord President of the Privy Coun-
cil, ard fourthly the Lord Privy Seal. Then the Secre-
taries of State begin, and it will be notfd that the
Secretary for the Home Department always leads the
way. The Home Secretary is the virtual ruler of
thirty millions_ of people, and besides, time was when
there was only one of these high functionaries in
existence. He managed everything foreign as well as
domestic. Then a Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairi was created; next one for the Colonies, who
also looked after the War Office. During the Crimean
• t • struggle, however this dual system broke down, and a
fourth Secretary of State—that for War—was called
into existence. Eighteen years ago a fifth was added
—one for India. This then is the order of the Secre-
te' taries of State—Home, Foreign, Colonies, War, India.
Then come the Chancellor of the Ex,chequer, the
First Lord of the Admiralty, and the gostmaster-
General. There are only twelve in the present Cabinet,

while Mr. Gladstone had fifteen, the number being
regulated by the will of the Prime Minister and the
weight and influence of those whom he selects as his
1 colleagues.

Years may come, and years may go; but the tides
flow on for ever! We are so accustomed to their rise

and fall, and they perform their parts with so much
, regularity, that it is only when they suddenly and un-
expectedly rise to an extraordinary height we are
brought acquainted with the forces by which they are
ruled, and we see the importance of a proper observ-
ance of the laws of Nature. Homer was the earliest
author who speaks of the tides, and Julius Cassar wrote
of them in his fourth book of the Gallic war well nigh
2,000 years ago. They were then attributed to the
action of the moon, and this theory was con-
• firmed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1683. The sun, though
i more remotely, has an influence upon our tides, and
when in conjunction with the moon, very often serious
displacements of our waters follow. A short time ago
an enormous tidal wave swept three thousand miles
over the surface of the mighty Pacific. Fortunately
there were no populated cities of the size of London in
its way, and the submerging of a few little islands was
the only baneful result of the phenomenon. But when
it is seen how much damage can be inflicted by a more
than ordinarily high tide in the Thames, it is obvious
at a glance how depenctnt is even our very existence
upon our entire freedom from such convulsions as that
in the Pacific of which I have spoken. Some as-
tronomers maintain that in the course of countless ages
yet to come the acticn of the tidal wave will ultimately
stop the rotation of the earth upon its axis, and that
while that part of our orb which is turned towards the
sun will rejoice in eternal light, the other side will be
condemned to perpetual darkness. This process they
say, is going on at the rate of a second in every twelve
weeks, four seconds and a quarter every year, a couple
of minutes every generation, six minutes in a century,
an hour in a thouand years. That is not a very rapid
rate, it is true; and so far as ourselves and our imme-
diate descendants are concerned, we need be under no
apprehension on this soore. Time alone can show
whether the theory be a correct one. But there is
little doubt that the influence Of the earth upon the
tidal wave of the moon has had this effect. The same
aide of that luminary is always turned towards us, and
day and night do not alternate there. The moon
moves round the earth every month, but she does not
turn upon her axis once a day as the earth does, and
as we hope we shall long continue to do. We shine
with an everlasting light upon one half of the moon;
we leave the part turned away from us in endless un-
relieved night. It is pretty well established that the
useful little orb is uninhabited, cr the conditions of
life there would be rather peculiar. And if astronomers
are right and the time should ever come when the
earth always turns the same side towards the sun, they
say that the people then upon its surface will have
been prepared for the change and acclimatised to it.
To our present limited vision either alternative would
seem a hard one.
North v. South! Not, dear reader, the well-known
cricket match between the representatives of those
two cardinal points which attracts so much
attention when played at Kennington Oval, but those
parts of London which are so named from their division
by the river. The waterside residents of the south
complain bitterly that the magnificent Thames Em-
bankment on the northern shore, by confining the
waters upon that side, throws them over on the southern
bank with irresistible velocity; hence the overflow, the
misery, and the distress upon two occasions within
tweptymoralls. In the recent inundation the Middle.
sex side of the stream escaped without injury ; the
opposite shore was strewn with devastation for miles.
The people on the north, rejoicing in their safety, tell
their less fortunate neighbours over the water to em-
bank their own side of the river; but this is more
easily said than done. The splendid granite wall from
Blackfriars to Westminster cost two millions sterling;
still, as the damage by the late floods in Lambeth and
Southwark is estimated at just one half that amount,
there is no doubt that the money for a southern embank-
ment would be well expended. At all events, some-
thing will have to be done. It would be a reproach to
the engineering skill of the age to leave one half of a
great city liable to be invaded by every high tide. We
cannot control the winds and the waves, but we ought
to do our best to neutralise their destructive effects.
Amongst the learned societies whica have just com.
menced their winter session is the Royal Geographical,
and at its next meeting on the 29th instant a discussion
will take place on Mr. Henry Stanley's recent discov-
ries in Africa. The president, Sir Henry Rawlinson,
is famous as an explorer of the ruins of ancient
Babylon so often mentioned in the Old Testament.
Sir Henry has told us that this city was at one time
the most magnificent in the world. Thehasagiog gardens
are described as having been of a square form, and in
terraces one above another until they rose as high as
the walls of the city, the ascent being from terrace to
terrace by steps. The whole pile was sustained by vast
arches, and on the top were flat stones closely cemented
together with plaster of bitumen. This was covered
over with sheets of lead, upon which lay the mould ot
the garden, where there were large trees, shrubs, and
flowers, with various sorts of vegetables. These
gardens were about four English acres in extent, and
were disposed in the form of an amphitheatre. Yet
the walls of Babylon, massive as they were, and its
hundred gates of brass, did not prevent the place from
being conquered and destroyed. London has often
been called the moaern Babylon, but the comparison
is not a just one. London is truly the seat of a mighty
empire, but it does not make war upon its neighbours,
and carry captive its enemies to treat them as slaves.
The Thames and the Euphrates are widely-different
streams. "By the waters of Babylon we sat down
and wept is not applicable to our own river. We
have no King Belshazzar to treat with contempt the
sacred vessels of silver and of gold; no mysterious hand-
writing on the walla of our palaces to tell us that the
kingdom is divided, and that we have been weighed
in the balances and found wanting. And although
Macaulay has presented us with a graphic but fanciful
picture of the New Zealander sketching the deserted
ruins of St. Paul's from one of the broken and ruined
arches of Loudon Bridge, we have every confidence
that many a summer-day shall yet light up the golden
cross of the cathedral before mart and senate, street
and square, are turned into an abomination of desola-
tion and before the cormorant and the bittern shall be
the only representative of the wilderness which once
%larked the homes of the teeming myriads of a vast
population.

Paris is to have ts tuiderground railway, so
well has the plan of subterranean • locomotion
answered with us. It will be connected with the
western station at St. Lazare, reached by the New-
haven and Dieppe route, and with the northern ter-
minus, accessible by way of Dover and Calais. Not
that the traffic in the streets of Paris is anything, like
what it is in London; but our neighbours are anxious
to show what their engineers can do; and their under-
ground line will, tc a great extent, supersede the
circular railway which now rung round the city, and
is too far removed from the centre of the capital to be
much used. Vi=itors to Paris never fail to be impressed
with the singular contrast which it presents to London
in one essential particular. In London the heart of
the town is dingy, murkey, and anything but beau-
tiful; it is only when you get some distance into the
suburbs that there is anything pretty to be seen.
Paris, on the other hand, concentrates all its beauty
upon the city itself, and its outskirts are about the
dreariest places to be imagined. In another respect
there is a great difference between the two capitals.
The public buildings of London are all upon one bank
of the river. The Houses of Parliament, the Tower,
the National Gallery, the British Museum, the
General Post Office, the Guildhall, and all the rest of
them, are all on the northern side, and overshadowed
by the stately dome of St. Paul's look proudly across
on the less favoured denizens of the Surrey shore.
With the exception of St. Thomas's Hospital, the
south of London can point to no public building of
importance in their mild. This is not the case in
Paris. The Tuileries is on one side of the Seine, and
the Corps Legislatif on the other. The Madeleine
and the Louvre are north; the Hotel de Ville and
Palace of Justice south; the Ministry of Finance on
one side and the Hospital of the Invalides, with its
gilded dome upon the other. Yet another distinction
between the two cities in which Paris shows to ad-