The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1866-12-11 00:00:00

NOTES OF THE WEEK.

I.—His Mlinnusaf COMB BACK, OR
has I•e not? Is the Pontiff going to leave
Rome, or stay? Such are the nuts the French
Emperor will have to crack this Christmas—
and nobody believes he can. As for the
Mexican Emperor-of-an-hour, his appoint-
ment "in the Mediterranean" with his medical
friends, in the second week in December, and
their implicit acquiesence therein, can only
remind us of the famous colloquy betwixt the
inebriated gentleman and the obsequious
waiter in Punch: INEBRIATED GENTLEMAN :
" Waiter !" Warm: " Yesair." 1. G. :
"Meet me in the willow glen, waiter." W.:
"Willow glen, sir, yessir." Accordingly the
France of Friday evening publishes as
"reliable" this telegraphic news, via New
York:—MaMmilianto his consort's physicians
—" Meet me in the second fortnight in
December, in the Mediterannean ; no more
letters to be sent to Mexico." By the way,
we wonder whether La Bronco can tell what
that telegram coat? We saw it lately men-
tioned that the dispatch recently sent through
the Atlantic Cable by the Emperor of the
French to General Castelnau in Mexico cost
' £l,BBO. But the Emperor of the French
very much resembles the father of a friend of
ours who happens to be a Quaker, and once
insisted upon correcting the press from a
considerable distance, through the medium
of the electric telegraph; when the reply to
a remonstrance was, "Sir, if there should be
two ways of doing a thing, and my father can
find out which is dearest, he will use the
dearest." If, however, the French Emperor
has money to throw away, we can hardly
suppose the Mexican Emperor has; we can
only hope, therefore, that the above sum
included the answer back, prepaid, and that
Maximilian benefitted by his Imperial
friend's disbursement, for really these Trans-
Atlantic messages would seem to be so
terribly overcharged that the cable is once
more lost to us as soon as found; and the
American press we perceive has at length
struck against its extortion, although they
alone have hitherto used it for purposes of
publicity. With reference to the Pope,
'there has been a meeting in St. James's Hall
to revive the payment of Peter's pence for
his Holiness's support; but as the Times
points out, the revenue of £l,OOO a-year from
that source is ridiculously inadequate to the
occasion.

IL—As RINDISPUT takes various forms
in various countries, and is yet identified in
all, it is unfortunate for the London Reform
Demonstration that it should have cropped
out at the same moment when, as Pus sug-
gesta in this week's cartoon, "there was a
smell of something smouldering somewhere,"
namely, Fenianism. Heaven send, however,
that the latter movement may pass, and pass
away as suietly as the former; that its 200,000
may dwindle down to an eighth of the
threatened number; and that, like Mr.
Leicester, Stephens, Meany, and all the rein,
deaf Kickham included, may do more by their
preposterous violence to intimidate and
detach their own adherents, than such a com-
parative handful of" the trades" of London
as marced into Beaufort park, could possibly
do to overawe the three millions who inhabit
London. The marshalling of "the trades" by
the way is not original. In other days it was
"the apprentice boys" of London• who
managed all the riots; and Dickens, in his
" Barnaby Budge," now running as a four-
act drama at the Royal Princess's Theatre,
ought probably to be blamed for reminding
Mr. Potter and his friends at the Beekioe
office of Lord George Gordon and his lads!
That the trade with which the press stands
more immediately connected, declined to turn
out on this occasion, is highly creditable to
the most intelligent of all the trades of
London, not excepting the glass-blowers, of
whose pre-eminence Mr. Leicester, as one of
them, appeared to vaunt. The compositors
refused to join in the Trades' demonstration
in favour of Reform because their society
was established for trade purposes only, and,
whatever might be their individual leanings,
they objected to it. machinery being em-
ployed for political purposes. This, at all
events, is honest, for those who can call to
mind the old Reform demonstrations of 1882
cannot but remember that the use or abuse
of this sort of machinery necessitated at one
time the suppression of the Trades' Unions
altogether. Later in the day, too, on the
revival of these bodies, chiefly in the shape
of benefit societies, a form under which they
are received into the direct patronage of the
State, it was judged prudent for the great
Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, during the
agitation of the anti-Corn Law League, to
declare that neither members of des'
Unions, nor the sons (we must suppose) of
Rebecca and her daughters, were admissable
to their lodges. So much was this declara-
tion appreciated that nothing ever imparted
a greater impulse to Oddfellowship ; and yet
in the programme of the procession to Beau-
fort House we find set dovrnseveral Oddfellows'
and uther such lodges. How is this? Has the
rule alluded to been repealed? Or is it Jeri
for an essentially secret society, employing
signs and passvrords, to suffer its lodges to
in public and political processions in
Ingland ?
It is not so in Ireland. But we
have no desire to pursue the parallel, rather
wishing to point out the contrast betwixt the
Fenian Brotherhood and the orderly Reform
Demonstration of London.
IIL —Tama BONI POUrti which demand
Doti°, in the Dorchester County Court cess of
Dunn a ffyfe, of which a contemporary, who, if
all tales be true, is really the party most interested
In Si. affair, has given a one-sided report,
omitting all that tells against himself, and
introducing another pretended "proprietor"
whom name, as suck, was never Minticesd
throughout Si. *mem about to be called when the