The Express.
London, England, 1847-04-10 00:00:00

c- he prOSlii•

MAILS.
The weal India mails, excluding Rime for Menko, Honduras, sad
Ile liannush, will be made op on the morning of the 17th April.
The mail* for Vign, Oporto, Lisbon, Madeira, emits, sad utbreitar,
wig be mule no ea the morning of the 17th April.
Tbs overland mails for Gibraltar, Malin, Orem*, the lonian
Rim*, Achy Ceylen, India, !loan-Kong, and China, ma Southampton,
will M made up on the morning of the 20'b April.
The crrerland elowd via Marwillee, to the Mediterranean,
Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, India, Hoag Kam, trx., will be made up on the
evening of the 24th April.
The mails for New Smith Wales, Van Diernen's Land, and New
Zealand will be mule up on the evening of the au:h April.
The mails for Hellish North America, Rennie* and the United
&Mee, will be made up On the evening of the 3rd May.
The mails for the Brmils, the River Plate, Moots Video, remain-
boy% Rallis, Ma :rim, and Buenos Area, will be made op en the
evening of the 4th May.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON-BRIDGE.
Tan ati —llfranlap, 43 an. past S ; A/Wawa, 30 man. past 9.
To-aloasow—Monwast, 11 lain. past 10; Marasco, 31 mos past 10.

LONDON, SATURDAY, APRIL 10.
ONCE introduced to the house, the fate of Lord
MORPETH'S Bill for improving the Health of Towns
will lie in the hands of the public. It will depend
on the pressure from without whether it passes in a
mutilated form, stripped of its moat necessary powers,
and robbed of its moat valuable machinery, or be-
comes law as the large and complete measure which
now emanates from the Woods and Forests.
Above all other classes, the poor have the greatest
interest in such a bill. It is framed with an express
view to their comfort and advantage, in the first in-
stance. To secure these, private and local interests
may appear to be disregarded or postponed, to a
degree unusual in English legislation. But it is not
to be concluded that these interests, properly under-
stood, will suffer from the measure. The commis-
sioner may be also a town councillor : the share-
holder in a gas or water company is, at the same
time, a contributor to the rates. If the
former find himself superseded in his place
at the existing board, he may acquire in-
creased, importance and a wider field for his ener-
gies as a member of the corporation. If the latter
has to'complain that his profits are limited to six per
cent., he will find himself more than compensated by
reductions in his poor and police rates. His pocket
will be assailed by less frequent drains in the shape
ef contributions to local charities, his comfort en-
hanced by the removal of the sad sights and sadder
effects of immorality, filth, and suffering.
The philanthropist who does not require, as his
condition of supporting a measure, that it can be
proved advantageous to him in point of hard cash,
will need no other inducement to act strenuously for
this bill than the increase of health, comfort, and
decency which it will bring within reach of the lower
class.
In fact, we can anticipate little opposition to the
act unless from the numerous and partial boards of
local jurisdiction which it will supersede and consoli-
date. The most intelligent members of these, how-
ever, must see that they can serve their town more
effectually in the mode of action which the bill pre-
scribes, than under the present system.
Now, each department has its authority, or authori-
ties; conflicting among themselves where more than
one exist for the same thing, and with each other
where each has its own apparatus. Paving commis-
sioners are arrayed against their brethren of the
sewerage ; the above-ground operations of the one
clash with the subterraneous workings of the other;
gas leaks into water-pipes, and water corrupts the
gasman's plumber work ; street levels are planned
without reference to sewers, and houses jotted down
without regard to the symmetry of streets.
The bill places all these concerns under one and
the same control—that of the corporation. It con-
templates not the destruction of existing functions, '
but their consolidation, in order that each
may be carried on with reference to the
others. With each an harmonious machinery, we
shall never again see, as we may see now-a-days,
sewers which cannot rid themselves of their contents
for want of outfall, and whole districts, whose want of
sewerage and drainage makes them perpetual forcing-
halms of fever, from which the grim guest distri-
butes the seeds of corruption and death even to the
richer and more favoured abodes lying round about.
We shall not have different localities in the same
town in which the per oentage of mortality differs as
much within an area of two miles, as in the most and
least healthy parts of the empire. Nor must we mea-
sure oar gain by the deaths alone which sanitory re-
gulation will prevent. Dr. PLATFAIR calculates 28
cases of unnecessary sickness for every unnecessary
death. And who can reckon all the cast, and demo-
ralisation, and misery, implied in the wasting sickness
of a labouring man ?
But the interests of towns ander this bill, besides
the advantage of consolidated jurisdiction and unity
of operation, will be further secured by the opera-
tion of the inspecting Board of Health and Public
Works. The plane of the local surveyor, and the
precautions of the local health officer, will be super-
vised, confirmed, improved, and corrected, where neces-
sary, by men the most eminent for engineering and
medial science. Nothing will be left to hap-hazard,
nor even to the ordinary chances of miscalculation.
There will be a sifting process from the surveyor to
the common council • from them to the general
inspecting officer; from him, again, to the central
board. We shall have local activity, originating,
planning, and executing, with the advantage of aid
and guidance from the soundest and most extensive
knowledge that can be made available.
At first eight the bill may appear to confer too
much initiatory power on the Commissioners of Health
and Public Works. But every such measure must
provide especially for the cases in which local
wisdom and eaergy are wanting. Its powers, to be
operative, must be calculated to overcome the dead-
weight of sloth, selfishness, and ignorance. Where
there are men on the spot to plan and to execute the
initiatory work of the inspectors, the commissioners
will be a sinecure. Of course they. must first satisfy
themselves that there are those in the place able
and willing to do what is to be done. They
will, even is these cases, give their advice and
aid. But local energy, where there is local
energy, will be the originating, no less than
the executive power. We have only to think
what some of the worst districts in England would
be if it were left to their inhabitants to begin the
work of sanitory reform. Manchester, and Liverpool,
and Glasgow, have scientific doctors, and benevolent
manufacturers to undo the doings of selfish and blind
years. But many of our rural parishes are studded
with noisome hamlets and fever-stricken villages
where there is neither resident knowledge nor resi-
dent activity to effect what must be effected before
we can substitute decency for brutishness, comfort for
filth, and health for disease. Any sanitory measure
without powers to meet such cases would be maimed
and worthless. In short, we believe that, so far from
superseding local activity, this bill will supersede
local inactivity.
It will not check a thought or paralyse a band
that is now at work for the material improvement of
the empire. Who have most earnestly advised its
introduction? Who have principally suggested its
provisions ? The very men who are now most active
for sanitory reform, and whom those who oppose
such a measure contend it would reduce to cyphers.
Is it likely that Dr. SOUTHWOOD SMITH would be
struggling and striving for an act to impair the
activity of sanitory reformers in London, or that
Dr. DUNCAN would be fighting heart and soul to
annihilate his fellow-workers in the same cause in
Liv ? We should not be surprised to find those
who depr sate the bill, as destroying local activity,
the most inactive characters in their several neigh-
bonrhooda The men who have never stirred a finger
In such improvements will be loudest in exclaiming,
" This measure ties oar hands'."
But besides all the sanitary advantages of the
measure, there is an extra-sanitory effect which we
may anticipate from the novel powers bestowed in it
on the corporations. In their present state it is
political partisanship which generally determines the

composition of our municipal bodies. But once
assign to these local bodies duties so important as the
paving, lighting, cleansing, ventilating, sewering, and
draining of their respective towns, and a class of
persons
od will at once take their place at the council
who now hold aloof from it. The man of
science and the man of humanity will be anxious to
have a voice in matters bearing so closely on the
pursuits of each and the good of all.
- •

There will be a new field of operation opened, into
which neither sectarianism nor partisanship can de-
cently intrude. Party feeling is visibly weakened in
parliamentary warfare. 'Phis measure would do much
to propagate through the country the improved feel-
ing which has mule whig and tory almost empty
shibboleths in the capital.

When we set against all these advantages the one
counterweight of narrowly comprehended private in-
terest, we can hardly doubt of the result. But to se-
cure the victory will require as much activity from
the friends of the measure as is likely to be shown by
its opponents. The pettier the interest, the more
active. A cur is a much noisier animal than a New-
foundland dog. Governments are impressible bodies.
They must be guided by public opinion, and
can only learn what that opinion is by
what reaches them from without. Let the
friends of sanitory reform—in other words, all that is
wise, and foresighted, and humane in England—make
their feelings, their hopes, and, if necessary, their
demands, known to the government in every consti-
tutional way. Once let the ministry which has
brought in this bill feel that it may count upon the
support of the community, and it can then afford to
disregard that small section of it whose erroneous
notions of their interests, whose fears, and whose pre-
judices, will doubtless urge them to a clamorous, and
therefore formidable, opposition.

OUR readers are aware, from the communications
of our Edinburgh correspondent, that a very
went, and not very scrupulous, agitation is in pro-
gress, north of the Tweed, to defeat the LORD ADVO-
CATE'S Registration and Marriage Bills.
A perusal of the bills themselves—carefully pre-
wed abstracts of which are given in another column
of this day's publication—will be found inadequate to
suggest any explanation of the clamour that has been
raised against them. The Registration Bill is simply
what it purports to be: a measure for conferring upon
Scotland (what it has been sadly in want of) such
a record of birth', deaths, and marriages, as may
subserve the purposes of the political arithmetician
and the statesman, and (what is of much more im-
portance) diminish the number and complexity of a
numerous class of law suits, together with the uncer-
tainty respecting property and status, and the unprofit-
able expense which they entail upon society. The mar-
riage bill contemplates a restriction on the facilities
for contracting those irregular marriages, which cer-
tainly have not rendered Scotland more moral, and
which have destroyed the happiness of many respect-
able and even distinguished English families.
The registration bill supplies a machinery simple,
yet efficient, for recording all births, deaths, and
marriages, that take place in Scotland, and imposes
penalties, to afford a guarantee that this ma-
chinery shall not be slovenly worked. It is
unnecessary to expatiate on the importance of
this machinery, as ancillary to the census taken
at the close of every ten years, for the purposes
of statistical inquiry. Uncontrovertible though the
value of the materials supplied for this purpose
by the registry will be, its tendency to diminish
or simplify litigations arising out of disputed in-
testate successions is in our estimation much
greater. Many of our Scotch readers have had pain-
ful experience of the procrastinated vexation and
pecuniary loss, which may arise from the difficulty of
proving satisfactorily that one person is dead or alive,
that another was born in or out of wedlock,
or that of two persons one stands in a nearer
grade of relationship to the deceased than another.
And any of our northern friends who may not hare
had opportunities of profiting by the lessons of
experience in this branch of knowledge may convince
themselves, by turning to the pages of Morrison's
Dictionary of Decisions," and the Faculty's, or
Shaw and Dunlop's Reports, of the extent to
which the annual litigation of their country is in-
creased by the occurrence of such dubious questions.
A simple, comprehensive, and efficient system of re-
gistration is the best—the only means of diminishing
the amount of precarious personal and proprietary
rights, of abridging the labour of the courts, and of
saving the money of clients. Such a system the
LORD ADVOCATE'S bill offers, and such a system
Scotland has never hitherto possessed. Registers of
births, deaths, and marriages, kept by the subordinate
officers of an ecclesiastical establishment from which
fully one half of the community arc in a state
of open and avowed dissent, must, of necessity, be very
imperfect. They must be imperfect from the inability
of the registrars to command the necessary informa-
tion, and from the reluctance to give it. Besides, the
official upon whom this important trust devolves has,
in too many cases, been glaringly incompetent.
The marriage bill takes advantage of the other
measure to impose a restraint on the license of the
Scotch marriage law without encroaching on its
liberty. Marriage, in the eye of the law of Scotland,
is a civil relation, in which two parties stand towards
each other in virtue of a consensual contract. So-
lemn espousals in facie ecelesife are one means of
proving that a marriage is contracted ; but the law of
Scotland admits of other modes of proof. If the par-
ties declare themselves man and wife before compe-
tent witnesses, the marriage is held to exist; the
testimony of the persons who heard the declaration
establishes its existence. Nay more, when one or
both of the parties is dead—a written declaration on
the part of the man that the woman was his wife, the
testimony of neighbours that they. were " repuied "
man and wife, and other corroborative circumstances,
have been received in courts of law as sufficient to
prove the existence of a marriage.
In the view taken by the Scotch law of the
nature of marriage no change is made by the
LORD ADVOCATE'S bill: that measure will merely
save the law courts from the painful and degrad-
ing necessity of receiving a great deal of gossip-
ing and suspicious testimony. The oath of a
drunken blackguard, who makes money
.by being the
hired witness of declarations of marriages by run-
aways from across the border, will no longer be suffi-
cient to establish a marriage. The half-crtilotis, half-
mercenary testimony of chandler, laundress, and lodg-
ing-keeper, will be equally unavailing. All who by
their mutual consent to become husband and wife
to each other have in the eye of the law of Scotland
become husband and wife, and who for any reason,
trivial or substantial (the fear of the cuttie-stool it
may be), are reluctant to invoke the church to become
witness of the fact, may accomplish their end by. in-
voking the registrar. The liberty of Scotch marriage
is nowise curtailed ; but the facilities of getting up sham
marriages, or contracting inconsiderate marriages,
afforded by the present loose state of the law, are done
away with.
As we have hinted, therefore, it is not in the bills
themselves that we are to look for the grounds of oppo-
sition to them. The ostensible reasonsof the hostile agi-
tators may be counted on one's fingers. The bills are
said to be calculated to promote clandestine and irregu-
larly contracted marriages; to be a blow levelled by
an enemy at the vested rights of the established
church; to be degrading to medical gentlemen, by
the penalties which in certain contingencies they
impose upon them; and to be unjust to parish school-
masters, who are declared incapable of holding the
office of registrar.
Only one of these allegations deserves a moment's
consideration. As for the pariah schoolmasters, if
their exclusion be deemed a hardship, let the clause
enacting it be struck out, as it may be without affect-
ing the principle of the bill. Only, if the parish
schoolmaster is to take upon him the office of regis-
trar, it may not be unadviaable to pass an act empower-
ing the heads of families in any parish to dismiss
their schoolmaster, if, while pursuing other
avocations, he neglects his scholastic duties. A cor-
respondent of the Scotsman illustrates the hardship
of this clause, by stating that a schoolmaster in the
neighbourhood of Edinburgh already holds the offices
of session clerk and inspector of the poor, and that
if the bill passes without the clause, he will stand a
fair chance of being appointed registrar. If so, it is dif-
fficult to conceive what time this Caleb Quotem of Lib-
berton will have remaining to teach in. The vested
right which the church claims in the management of
registrations is a vested right in an abuse ; the church
has failed to provide a sufficient registry, and there-
fore the state has a right to employ other instru-
ments. Besides, is it consistent with justice, that a
free kirkman, burgher, quaker, or anabaptiat, may not

be born, or marry, or die, without paying toll to the
church, as by law established, under the name of a
registration fee? The ease of the medical gentlemen
is quite on a par with the cases of the schoolmasters
and established clergy. If the penalties are not
required to compel them to do their duty, they will
be a mere name ; if they are, they ought to be im-
posed. Parsons, dominies, and doctors, may pair off
with a class who have a deeper stake in the rejec-
tion of the bills than any of them, but who have
kept a modest silence on the occasion—the amiable
and accomplished makers of runaway marriages at
Graitney and Coldstream.
The only argument against these hills that has
even an external appearance of weight, the allega-
tion that they will promote clandestine and irregular
marriages, is refuted by their tenor. More form and
regularity will be required to establish the existence
of a marriage than at present. More time will be
given to the young and heedless to reflect upon the
nature and consequences of the step they are taking.
So far from enabling profligates to deceive innocent
girls by sham marriages more easily than at present,
the LORD ADVOCATE'S bills will render such rascally
tricks more difficult. At present, a girl has a vague
idea that any two witnesses, or that " marriage
lines" may prove her marriage. She may therefore
trust to evidence which a villain may bribe off or
destroy. But under the provisions of the LORD ADVO-
CATE'S bill she will be aware that unless the ceremony
has been performed by a clergyman, or the contract
duly registered, no marriage will be held to exist, and
she will be on her guard. Many a tottering virtue
that would yield on the chance of regaining its
ground, by being perhaps able to prove a mar-
riage, will be fortified by the increased risk. And
there is one gross abuse to which these acts will put
an end : the getting up of false evidence after a man's
death to make bastards appear legitimate, and defraud
the lawful heir. Under the existing loose system,
such a thing may be done, and has been done. Even
where the attempt has ultimately failed, as far as the
clients are concerned, a rascally pettifogger has some-
times made his gains out of the litigation.

STEAMERS are fast losing their character for
security, and are unfortunately found to fail precisely
in those positions, in which the use of them might be
expected to redace all chance of danger to a mini-
mum. Coasting along a lee-shore, which in tempes-
tuous weather was ever an awful risk for
the sailing-vessel, seemed as nothing to the
steamer, until repeated wrecks of large steamers
off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and the still
more frequent disasters of the powerful West India
steamers, have come to reverse all calculations, and
seem to restore to canvas the superiority which it
once ceded to steam. _ .

Yet, when we come to examine into the cause ofeach
disaster, we are struck by the complet. similitude, in all
cases. The rate of speed, the direction ran, is always
miscalculated. The log is always in perfect order,
but the vessel and the log never agree. The force of
currents, or of some wayward power, unfelt to the
same degree, and unappreciated by sailing-vessels,
drifts the steamer sut of her course, and she bumps
ashore off Cape Finisterre or the Alacranes, finding
herself between half and a whole degree out of her
course. _ . .

There really ought to be courts of inquiry into
such acsidents, befalling all vessels, whether com-
mercial or military. This need not be with a view to
vindictiveness or punishment, though they at times
would not be misplaced, but for the sake of scientific
and general information. The loss of steamers has
been attributed to the greater hardihood and risk
incurred by making short cuts through passages
which sailing-vessels would not attempt; and
many other causes have been assigned. But such
inquiries ought not to be left to the chance
curiosity or inquiry of the individual. Some
better rules and organisation are required for our
merchant service, both to test the competency of
officers, to whom the lives and property of so many
are committed, and to improve and extend nau-
tical science, especially in a time when a new ele-
ment pertaining especially to science, has been intro-
duced
as a motive force. .

Comment would be thrown away upon the melan-
choly disaster of the Tweed, nor could any touch
heighten the painful and vivid description of the
Passenger who has sent home an account of it.
The conduct of the Spanish captain, BERNARDINO
CAMP, and his mate, ought not, however, to be
allowed to pass into oblivion without some mark of
national gratitude. What the French would do in
such a case we need not say : and we trust that
England will not limit her gratitude and sense of
such generous courage to a paragraph.

FRANCE.—HAvaE, APRIL B.—The
gives an account of the wreck of a French brig, the St.
Pierre, bound from Lisbon to St. Pierre, Miquelon, and the
loss of 18 men of the crew. The brig was laden with salt,
and on the 19th of March, having been twelve days at sea,
she shipped a heavy sea, and shortly after sunk, carrying
down with her 18 out of 20 men forming the crew. *The
two survivors, Lepelletier and Duchet, remained sixty hours
clinging to the spars left by the wreck; they were picked up
on the 20th of March by the Swedish brig Experiment, the
captain of whom (Carina) landed them safely, on the 30th
ult., at Dover, where they were left in charge of the French
consular agent.
GERMANY.—BERLIN, APRIL 2.—The official
organ of the government has just published a royal decree,
declaring that ships of war belonging to foreign nations, in
the ports of which Prussian vessels of a similar description
are not subjected to harbour and navigation dues, shall enjoy
the same privilege in Prussian porta. With respect to pilot
dues, the sum to be paid is fixed at one thaler for every sta-
tion, and for each foot of the depth to which the ship's keel
is sunk.

BAVARTA.—MUNICH, APRIL 3.—Fresh changes
are about to take place in our diplomatic Corp.. Count
Leufft-Pilsach is, we understand, to become ambassador at
Naples instead of Prince von Schwartzenberg, and Mr. von
Gist is designated as the person likely to succeed Count
Leufft-Pilaaeh at Frankfort.—Cologne Gazette.
DENMARK.— KIEL, MARCH 28. Authentic
news from Copenhagen informs us that the council of state
have come to the determination of going earnestly to work
to settle the entangled question of Schleswig-Holstein, is a
manner satisfactory to the prejudices of the people. The
four aasemblies of the states and the legislative assembly
(A:thing) of Iceland, will be extraordinarily convocated in
their usual places of meeting in a few days. Seven dele-
gates will be sent from them to Copenhagen, to give their
sanction to the proposed measures. It is said to be under-
stood that the peculiar political circumstances of Holstein
especially deserve attention, but that, on the contrary,
Schleswig is to continue to remain a dependency of Den-
mark.—Nuremberg Correspondent.