The Press.
London, England, 1858-08-07 00:00:00

between the Premier and Mr. DALY was most amusing, and elicited much
happy retort on the part of the Minister.
Upon the superior claims of his native town Mr. DALY affirmed that
all classes were agreed, and expressed the confidence of all classes that the
enterprize was a national one.
Lord DERRY. That, of course, is a commercial speculation. The
Rev. Mr. DALY admitted that it might be called so, but remarked, never!
passenger trade,
theless, that in the enterprize, though commercial, the country took a
general interest. All that was wanted to carry out the Galpwasa:rt,
schemes was merely a grant of public money. Passengers, freight, a
dividend of ten per cent., trade, general prosperity would all ensue upon
the receipt of public money. Rem, da, modo, rem.
Lord DERBY conceded to the advocate the probability of a
but had doubts on other points. There was freight, for instance. Besides,
could not a Company which paid a dividend of ten per cent. give any
security for the use of so large a sum as 152,0001. The humour of the
dialogue calcinated at this point, the Rev. Mr. DALY rnakinz a reply
national " entirely." "If the Government," he said, " will accept my own
personal security, there will not be the least difficulty in giving it"--a pro-
position which produced general laughter, in which Lord DERBY heartily
joined. We, too, join. However readily disposed to shorten the passage
to America, we should not like to accept Mr. DALY'S personal security for
all the commercial advantages which his enthusiasm prompts him to hope
would result from the bestowal of a Government grant ; nor do we think
that the Galway Steam Company, which proposes to pay ten per cent., has
established a greater claim to public money than the Oriental Company, or
the Glasgow Company, or the Hull Steam Company, or a hundred other
Associations which would doubtless send up deputations, and consume a
Prime Minister's time, if a grant to Galway were established as a
precedent.

The Honourable Member fbr Oldham has lately been spouting e
" Publicola" to his admiring constituents. It is really grievous to see a
man of any intellectual calibre stooping to the arts which Mr. Fox stoops
to, or guilty of the ignorance of which Mr. Fox is guilty. "In his young
" days," says Mr. Fox, " France gave the watchword of Liberty' to the
nations, and was the apostle of liberty, equality, and fraternity to all
" countries. Now she was the enemy of freedom and equality, and had
" little fraternity with anything noble that existed in Europe. Then she
" struggled for her independence against all Europe in arms ; now she up-
" held despotism wherever it existed, and trampled out the sparks of the-
" dom wherever she could set her foot." It is really time we heard the
last of this kind of twaddle. The idea of Revolutionary France being
really the apostle of liberty ! It is, in fact, the Revolution of 1788 that is
the legitimate parent of the despotism of 1858. But even Mr. Fox, who
professes to instruct so many of his fellow-countrymen, has yet to learn
that in the large communities of modern times liberty is only to be main-
tained through the agency of a constitution, and can never be purchased
by the destruction of it. In another portion of his speech Mr. Fox errs
most eFrefiously. The "people" of this country did not pass the Roman
Catholic Emancipation Bill. Nothing is better known than that the majo-
rity of the nation were opposed to it. And here, therefore, is an admirable
refutation of Mr. Fox out of his own mouth, and a proof that it is from
their governors, and not from the people themselves, that his own
kind of measures are to be expected. We are sorry to see an old man still
so enslaved to puerile prejudices. Having nothing to gain from either
party, Mr. Fox might just as well make a virtue of necessity and become
impartial ; as it is, no one can read such an address as that delivered last
Wednesday without a mingled feeling of contempt and pity.

It is considerably more than a year since we called the attention of
our readers to the iniquities of Whitecross-street Prison. We are happy
to observe that the new Governor, Captain Blocs, has already addressed
himself to the removal of one most serious grievance to which the helpless
debtor is subjected. The class of low solicitors who hang about the
purlieus of debtors' prisons and insolvent and bankruptcy courts are a
pestilent and abominable race. They have been favourably described by
Mr. DicaENs in his character of Solomon Fell, the confidential friend of
the Lord Chancellor; and few people, perhaps, except the unlucky expert:
of Whitecross-street and the Queen's Bench have any definite idea of their
actual mode of conducting business. Captain Hicxs's report, however, has
now done much to make public their systematic style of fleecing—and we
hope it may act as a caution to the friends and relatives of prisoners
not to supply them with money for legal expenses without previous inquiry.
But the real truth is that our whole law relating to debtor and creditor
demands careful revision. If imprisonment for debt be continued, the
sponging-house is an institution that ought at once to be extinguished.
The nefarious profits of these establishments are a scandal to the age; and
whatever the loss to fast novelists and " screaming" farce-writers, such
places should at once be declared illegal. It would almost seem as if it
had been a matter of careful contrivance that as soon as a man was arrested
for debt, he should at once by a multiplex system of extortion be pre-
vented from ever getting free. The officer's fees, the sponging-house
tariff, the prison solicitor, &c., speedily eat up a great deal more than
many a debtor is confined for. The money painfully scraped together to
satisfy his creditor is swallowed up by the harpies that surround him; and
with the hope of a discharge skilfully dangled before his eyes, the dupe
continues his exertions till his last resources are exhausted, and beggary
and misery await him. Such is the end of many an unfortunate debtor,
who, but for our iniquitous system, might have returned to society an
honest citizen, and have lived and died respected.
Despite of sinister auguries, and the real obstacles interposed by
stormy weather, the Atlantic telegraph cable has been succes.shilly
At six o'clock on Thursday morning the Agamemnon anchored in Doulas
Bay, off Valentia, bringing her end of the coil, whose other extremity—as
the "all-right" signals kept pleasantly informing her curious crew—