The Express.
London, England, 1846-10-28 00:00:00

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LONDON, WEDNESDAY, OCT. 28.

DARKER and darker every day grows the cloud
that lowers over Ireland. Premature as the alarm
was said to be, there is already a fearful amount of
misery for which the foresight came too late. Famine
will not wait, while the machinery for its mitigation
is being fitted and put into action. The preliminary
arrangements for help are in progress ; the ultimate
ravages of want and disease are, with multitudes, in
progress also. Deaths from utter destitution are be-
ginning to multiply, appalling first-fruits of a fatal
harvest. Typhus is taking possession of crowded
hospitals and poor-houses, making those forlorn'
asylums for relief and remedy only the portals of the
grave. Cetaeombe are not so gloomy, nor the battle-
field so terrible, as the aspect of Ireland at this mo-
ment. It presents a scene to strike with awe the
I most unthinking. And yet the deepest impression is
not made by the sufferings of the passing time, but by
the portentous indications they afford that "worse
remains behind."

In tbs various articles of Irish intelligence which
so often ocxnq oar columns, it may be seen how
widely the panic spreads through society. Landlords
are rushing forward to proclaim what large per cent-
ages of their rents they are ready to forego. Priests
and clergymen of all churches are assailing heaven
with incessant prayers. Those who address the public
at meetings, or through the press, vie with each other
in lashing the inevitable slowness of the operations
for relief. Convoys of corn for exportation are inter-
cepted, and provision stores are storm( d. Some are
furious, and others stand aghast, like passengers in a
foundering ship. It is hard work even for the most
intelligent and collected, to apply themselves steadily
to the imperative duties of the time, and do the best
that can be done in the struggle with impending
calamity.

At such a time, people will not suffer quietly, and
be helped thankfully. Parishes and baronies are
loud with their competitive statistics of starvation.
Their demands on the public parse are unbounded.
They utterly forget that it is not the purse of
Fortunatus ; that nothing can come out of the
Treasury but what has first gone into it, and been
drawn, in large measure, from toiling multitudes not
many removes from their own condition. The mil-
lions they calculate so fluently, and demand so
fiercely, would be " blood, sweat, and tear-wrung
millions." The wretehedest catch up this head-
long claim. They are impatient of the rea-
sonable requirement of labour for their food.
Heated with the hunger-fever, work seems to
them a needless interposition between their wants
and the bounty of relief. They strike for higher
wages, when the lowest might well be deemed a
heaven above their deep abyss of misery. They refuse
task•work, as if equality of want were an all-suffi-
cient title to equality of supply. Bands of them tra-
verse the country ; foraging parties in advance of the
fearfullest sf invasions. They beg with bludgeons.
The robber and amain are abroad. Some cry
for meal, and others for muskets. Power is com-
pelled by the disorder to grow churlish in its
charity ; to surround with bayonets the bread it
will distribute; and sometimes to fire on those whom
it desires to reed. We mean this for no cata-
logue of crimes; no articles of impeachment. It is a
portion of the trouble and the trial that are come upon
us. It is the frantic raving of national disease. It
must be repressed; but it should also be com-
miserated. We must look on it firmly and
calmly. Such symptoms naturally attend the master
mischief. They are the throes and convulsions of a
famine-stricken people. Oar business is to heal.
Every step of success will witness their abatement.
Nor let us presume that we shall pass through the
winter and spring merely as spectators of Irish
misery. The rock on which we overlook that flood
is not so high as to place us above the pelting of the
storm. The pressure on the poor has begun at home.
Prices hold on their regular march in the Corn Mar-
ket from week to week. There is no pause ; so
retrograding. The duty is down to its legal lowest,
and still the price advances. People call for opening
the ports, and they must be opened; but the
remission will avail us little. The popular demand
for a short-time Factory Bill is yet ringing
in our ears ; short time ie enforced by a mock-
ing Necessity, making a curse of the granted
prayer. One mill after another in the North is
striking hours off the day, or days out of the week, in
its operations. Untiring steam begins to take its grim
repose ; but hunger is rapacious while steam is
resting. Speculation stays its hand, and counts its
outlay, and curtails its expenditure. If some Irish
will not, many English cannot, toil at task-work.
Everywhere, diminution of food just precedes, or
instantly follows, diminution of employment. Trades-
men and manufacturers confine their purchases, their

production, or their stock, within the narrowest limits.
They lie on their oars, and wait. The labouring
chums cannot wait. Want cannot afford to be pru-
dentiaL We have called this a time of trial. It is
eminently so; a time of moral trial for the English
character. We are within the circle of the storm
that bursts on Ireland, and have to care for both
countries; we have to show how a peril may be sur-
mounted more formidable than all precedent dangers,
whether from the madness of faction, the encroach-
ments of prerogative, or the menacing front of hostile
armies.

With the judicious and generous arrangements of
the Government, we believe the public feeling to be
entirely in accordance. Nor should occasions be
neglected for the expression of approval and confi-
dence. They are due, and valuable, while the un-
reasoning hubbub of reproach is so often raised.
The single thing to be done is the throwing down of
whatever barrier remains to the free ingress of food
into Great Britain and Ireland, in whatever vessels
it may come, and from whatever countries. On this
we confidently reckon. It will leave no demurring,
no drawback, no flaw in the identity of feeling between
the Government and the People. It argues well, too, for
the sound judgment of the nation, that the old and
superficial resource of subscription, though sometimes
suggested, has found little concurrence. Its superfi-
ciality is seen ; and its utter inadequacy. The public
understand that the aid they desire to bestow, must
be rendered by mightier agencies than almsgiving.
The silence on this matter is not the neglect of in-
difference, but the strong purpose of intense sympathy.
And while in churches, both Protestant and Catholic,
the inscrutable workings of Providence are adored in
this dark dispensation, we cannot but think we per-
ceive an unwonted solemnity of thought in the mode

in which it is generally regarded by the different
classes of society. The national mind is at once more
humble yet more energetic ; it has no touch of des-
pondency, yet none of boastfulness. For nations, as
for individuals, there is a moral training in calamity.
And we would fain hope that this England, whose
" ancient prerogative " it was to " teach the nations
how to live," may come out of the fiery trial more
pure and resplendent, with every noble quality of
national character developed, matured, and elevated.

SIR ANDREW AGNEW " bath iteration :" in the case
of so saintly a person, the adjective used by FALSTAFF
iS obviously inapplicable. Ever since the opening of the

WAN*tmd Glasgow Railway, Sir AXDRZW and
his oaadjakes have made an annual attempt to stop
the Sunday trains on that railway ; and annually they
have been outvoted. The proxies of the English share-
holders have mainly swelled the majorities oa these
occasions. Al our readers are aware, the English
shareholders in this concern have recently crossed
the border in person, attacked the directors in
their city of Glasgow, overthrown the old dynasty,
and installed themselves on the vacant throne.
In their triumph we entirely sympathised. The
management of the railway, both in finan-
cial respects and in the matter of carriage,
had been so wretched, that it obviously could
not fall into worse hands, and might possibly
fall into better. But the first step of the new di-
rectors has not been such as to inspire confidence in
them. In opposition to repeated decisions of general
meetings of shareholders, they have intimated that
they, the directors, are about to stop the Sunday
trains. They, the very persons who, as shareholders,
exercised their legitimate authority to keep the trains
running, are now, as directors, going to exceed their
delegated powers and stop them.

The natural inference from this sudden change
of opinion is, that the outvoting of the directors
(and their consequent resignation) has been owing
leas to the shareholders' conviction of their
mismanagement, than to an unworthy intrigue by
which Sir ANDREW AGNEW and his saints lent their
aid to place the new dircctors is office, provided
that, when there, they would act in defiance of all
their former professions of principle. The new
directors may rest assured that they cannot by each
means promote the interests of the railway. By this
time they must be aware that a section of the ousted
party have a most lawyer-like propensity to struggle,,
for the re-acquisition of office, by all sorts of legal
quibbles. The step they are about to take will lend
these men a handle for multiplying and perpetuating
sectional divisions among the shareholders, and for
combining party votes regardless of principle. 'The
intestine disseosions thus created will not facilitete
the profitable management of the railway.
Again : the new directors are mistaken if
they imagine the measure they contemplate
will be generally approved of in Scotland.
Mr. RIPPEN spoke the sense of a mejority of
Scotehmen when he bluntly declared (fluttering
the Agnewites in their dovecote) that "'there was
little fanaticism now, but abundance of hypocrisy had
taken its place." The new directors have been warned
by Mr. M'Neill of the great inconvenience they will
entail upon the public by discontinuing the Sunday
trains. The railway has displaced all other means of
communication between Edinburgh 'and Glasgow :
the Sunday trains being stopped on that day, the son
will be precluded from hastening to his father's death-
bed ; the physician from visiting hit distant patients ;
pious dissenters in secluded localities, from repairing
to the churches of their recpectlve creeds in towns.
There is an ineffable voluntary forgetfulness on the
part of these Agnewites. They allow the mail on
Sundays to be carried twice in either direction,
but not passengers. Is them less sin in conveying
letters than human beings? 1)o the engine-drivers,
stokers, and others employed, less incur the sin of
Sabbath breach when there are only letters, than
when there are passengers? Have Sir ANDREW
and his friends any more right to expose these few
unfortunates to the wrath they profess to believe
awaits them, thaws greater number?

This sacrifice of a minimum quantity of souls, in
order to comply with the conditions on which they
hold their privileges, reminds one of fairy practice,
as recorded in the ballad of Young Tamlane—
" For aye, at every twalmonth's end,
They pay the keno to hell."
It would be no more than Christian charity were
Sir ANDREW and his friends to ensure safety to the
souls of the stokers, by taking the perilous service
upon themselves which is to bring gain to them.

Reports continued to reach Paris on Sunday and
Monday of the details of the disasters attending the
inundations, but brought nothing of importance in
addition to those particulars which have been given
in our correspondence of the last few days. The
waters are gradually subsiding. Subscriptions are
everywhere opened for the relief of the sufferers, and
cabinet councils were held under the presidency of
the King on Saturday and Sunday, at St. Cloud, for
the consideration of such measures as might be most
conducive to the relief of the unfortunate population.
The Minister of the Interior had already visited the
seat of the disasters, and had directed the most urgent
measures, and ordered pecuniary assistance.

The conflict between the Paris journalists of the
Conservative party on the one hand, and the various
sections of the Opposition on the other, continues to
be carried on in a tone of extraordinary virulence.
England and the English alliance, the Spanish mar-
riages, the general tendencies of the Guizot Ministry
to support absolutism everywhere in Europe ; to court
the favour of despotic powers and alienate liberal
alliances; to repress and discountenance popular
movements in other states, and extenuate and defend
the oppressors of absolute governments and reaction-
ary cusps treat, constitute the staple of the charges
against the ministerial party, and are the elements of
the conflict

The intelligence which has been received from
Switzerland removes all doubt of a movement at
Beale [defiler to that which has taken place at Geneva.
On the evening of the 20th the leaders of the radical
party assembled at an inn about half a league from
the city, to concert means to overturn the existing
government, and to insure the triumph of their prin-
ciples. Reports state that the result of their discus-
sion was to overturn the existing government, to
reduce the members of the lesser council from seven-
teen to ten, giving each an annual salary of 200/.1 to
extend electoral rights ; to dissolve the defensive
alliance of the seven cantons ; and to oppose the
establishment of the Jesuits in Switzerland. The
Conservatives also held a meeting at the 11401 des
Troia Rois, but they,seemed completely disorganised
and paralysed. Letters from the frontiers of Switzer-
land, dated the 22nd; mention that the canton of
Basle was in full revolt; that the pavement of the
streets had been torn up, that the great council had
resigned, and that Basle-ville and Basle-campagne
would be formed into a single canton. At Berne,
tranquillity continued to the date of the latest accounts.
(21st). • The concentration of the French troops on
the Swiss frontier had attracted the attention of the

authorities. The governments of the Cantons of Geneva
and Vaud were making military preparations that
of Berne only waited the orders of the Vorort. Mean-
while the farther disbanding of troops was deferred ;
there were under arms there two battalions of infan-
try, each 1200 strong ; three companies of cara-
bineers ; three squadrons of cavalry • and two bat-
teries of artillery : in all above 3000 men, who had
been reviewed on the 21st by the director of military
affairs, Colonel Ochseubein. Independently of the
questions arising out of the Gcncvcse revolution, it
was evident that an extraordinary meeting of the
Diet must soon be held in consequence.

Letters from Zurich have been received to the
23rd inst. The silence observed by the Chargé
d'Affaires of Switzerland at Paris and Vienna, appears
to have satisfied the public there that neither France
nor Austria contemplate an intervention. M. do
Tschann regarded as unimportant the advance of the
French troops on the frontier, and no information was
given by M. Esainger of the reported movements of
the Austrian troops or the military demonstrations on
the French frontier.

Our Madrid dencc of the 19th, with the
journals of that city, Gave arrived; the mails of the
20th and 21st were, however, still due, and had not
been received at Paris when our correspondent there
closed his despatches.

PARIS, Oct. 24.

The Parisian press is very much occupied with
commentaries on the position of M. Guizot and the attitude
which the northern courts have assumed with ',lard to
France, in the diplomatic difficulty raised by the marriage of
the Duke de Montpensier. The ministry is represented as
on the eve of being dissolved, and France under the ban of
Europe. Without inquiring into what may ultimately mine,
it appears desirable to me to state the facts as they really are.
The northern courts have pronounced neither for England
nor France, but have observed a close neutrality. M• de
Metternich, who has spoken in his quality of diplomatic