The Press.
London, England, 1857-10-24 00:00:00

THE PRESS, OCTOBER 24; 1857.

adds his Lordship, "the danger is imminent, the remedy is obvious."
And he goes on to recommend that the scale of living at such institu-
tions should be as low as is consistent with " decency, health, and
rational comfort." If they do not exceed this, he thinks the honest
labourer will have no reason to envy them. Now, no doubt the agri-
cultural poor of this country are much better off at present than they
were some years ago. We can easily believe that in certain
favoured districts where wages aro at a maximum, and landlords
philanthropic, certain families may by constant industry and good
conduct have attained a level somewhat above mere "decency, health,
and comfort." But we are sure that the average industrious peasant in
an average locality but rarely succeeds in rising above this level,
and that there is besides a very large proportion of honest poverty
which novel. succeeds in rising up to it. The one class would be
driven to reflect that after a career of vice and crime the young offender
was still no worse off than his own child ; and the other would have
the painful conviction thrust upon it that he was much better. In addi-
tion to this, the inmates of a reformatory cannot be kept there doing
nothing. If they cannot work, they must be taught. Here at once is
a practical advantage afforded to them, which the labourers can
appreciate better than any others. We fear, therefore, that Lord
STANLEY'S anticipations on this head will not be so easily fulfilled. We
do not in the least degree shrink upon that account from the further
extension of reformatories. That the poor should envy them is a
necessary evil, but not one to deter us from the work of their establish-
ment. We must trust to the good sense of the people to smooth this
difficulty away. But we hold it to be impossible to establish refor-
matories which shall not present various favourable points of contrast
with the dwellings of the " honest labourer."

It will be remembered that• in the last week of the session Mr.
ADDERI.EY put certain questions to Mr. LARODCHERE with respect to
the German Legion having upon their arrival at the Cape been put
upon full pay, and whether they were to be kept permanently upon
that footing. Mr. LABOUCHERE, in the course of his explanation, endea-
voured to show that these Germans were embodied by Sir GEORGE
GREY on account of the Indian outbreak. Now, we venture to
believe that these men, after having been petted and pampered
in England for• two years, were sent out last year as colo-'
nists, military colonists it is true, but still as colonists,
some months before the mutiny broke out in India, yet almost
immediately upon their arrival they were embodied and put upon full
pay, and we believe are at this moment doing garrison duty. Now the
point is, upon what authority and for what reason did Sir GEORGE
GREY call out and put on full pay these men, whose extent of service
was limited to the colonisation and defence of the frontier, upon the
system of military colonies propounded by Sir GEORGE CATHCART ? If
Sir GEORGE GREY required more than eleven regiments to garrison the
Cape, surely we could have spared him ten months since an additional
regiment or two from home. There is some mystery connected with
this embodiment, for the plea of the Indian revolt will never do. We
shall be glad to see it cleared up next session.

The Waterloo- bridge mystery remains a mystery still. Thousands of
persons have examined the clothes, and inspected the bones, and no
one man, not even Superintendent DURKIN, or Sir GEORGE GREY, is a bit
wiser than his brother. The many dramatic incidents pictured by our
contemporaries on a theory of assassination, based upon grounds pecu-
liarly their own, are fast fading from the public view. The affair is
very generally felt to be either a hoax or a political assassina-
tion. If the former, the gentlemen who have " supped " the town
" full of horrors " for a fortnight have, in all probability, long
since left the country, or, if in London, they continue to
pursue their studies unsuspected. On the other hand, if political
motives only have actuated the assassins, with the escape of Foseurst
fresh in our memory, we have no hopes of the success of the police.
The colony of refugees settled in London is altogether too close a
family borough for even a keen detective to penetrate. It is quite an
imperium in imperio, and altogether excessively disagreeable, unsafe,
and not sufficiently under the grasp of the law. Now
and then some curious circumstances, such as the Foschini
affair, force themselves upon public notice. It was only a few
days before the discovery of the mutilated corpse on Waterloo-bridge,
that a gentleman of German type, walking close to the Regent's-
park, was observed to fall down flat on his back. He seemed to have
been struck suddenly dead. After some delay and crowding, the man
was picked up, put, into a cab, and taken to the nearest hospital.
On coming to his senses, he spoke in French, and stated that
he had been robbed in Norton-street of his watch and twenty
sovereigns. But at the house particularised, when the police
visited it, all knowledge of the Frenchman in question was
positively denied. Then another statement was made to the effect
that the robbery took place at the other side of the river Thames, and
either mental incoherence or downright prevarication was visible.
When asked who his friends were, the first name mentioned was that
of a noted French political refugee, now (or lately) residing in London,
and it was not far from the refugee's house that the person was picked
up. The matter was properly brought under the notice of the
police, and the detectives were engaged upon the whole affair up to
the middle of last week. For ohvious reasons, in the aspect
of the case, we suppress the mention of names. There were some
highly curious features in it deserving the strictest attention ; but