The Express.
London, England, 1848-11-03 00:00:00

PROVINCIAL.

TUE MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS have been boxy
in all puts of the country electing town councillors in place
of those who retire by rotation.—At larazrool. the
strutiny into Mr. Shand's election has ended in his
rival, 11r. Langedalc, being declared duly elected,
end thus no anti•rater has been retuned. —At
. _

SOUTHAMPTON the election excited but little interest. In
one word, the return was made by a single vote. There was
a gain of four seats on the liberal side.—At HASTINGS the
contest terminated in the return of three liberals and three
caries. There was no gain on either aide.—At CHESTER six
coneerratives have been returned to four liberals—At
GLOUCIIITIL Mr. T. Mason and Mr. O. 8. Wintle were re-
elected for east ward; Mr. Pearce and Mr. Clifie for west
ward; Mr. C. Washbourne and Mr. R. Leader were re-
elected fee month ward.—At NV ante the election urmsated
in the return al four conservativw—At Witecearria three

conservative, and three liberals wen returned.—At SALO-
SUET a Tall severe °outset took place. ID St. Thomas's ward
two conservatives and two liberals were returned ; in St.
Martin's ward, two ocowerratives and one liberal ; in St.
Edmund's ward, two consenrativei and one libsral.—At
LICHTUILD the contest terminated in the return of three

conservatives for the north ward, and throe liberals for the
south ward. —At WARWICK the liberals have succeeded in
returning the whole six town councillors of their party.—At
HEWDLEY a very warm contest took place. The conserva-
tives returned • majority of their party in the proportioss of
three to one liberal.—At KING'S LYNN also the conserva-
tives have triumphed, five conservatives being returned to
one liberal.—At HUNTINGDON the three conservatives and
one liberal who went out by rotation were reuleeted with-
out a mutat. —At CARLISLE also the election passed off
without a conteet.—At KOORISTRI the election was 00R-
*Mad with more than ousel vigour. Five conservatives and
ens liberal west out, and the return was in the mane propor-
dm, but with diminished majorities in favour of the con-
senstive candidates, eepthially is St. Margaret's ward,
where their strength is greatest.—At CANTRIBURY the re-
sult leaves the po ioal parties is mach the same pathos as
for the put year.

KENT.

ALLEGED DEPALC.ATIONB BY THE CHIEF CLERK
or a Bwixoe Baxx.—At Margate, on Tuesday, Mr. J. C.
Bennett, late chief clerk of the Margate Savings-bank, wu
examined on several charges of baring appropriated the
funds of the bank to kis own use. It is stated that the ex
tent of his defakations amount to near 1,5001. After they
had been detected, it was found that the accused had fled to
Amerka • he, however, recently returned to England, and
was apprehended. An adjournment of the investigation wee
granted, in order to collect the necessary evidence in support
of new charges which are intended to be preferred against
the accused. Bail was accepted.

Mtrapaa.—ln the case -of JohniVhitefurd, charged
with the murder of his wife under the circumstances detailed
in the Express of Tuesday bit, the verdict of the coro-
ner's inquest, which sat.. on Baturday, was wilful murder,
and the prisoner, who appeared in a very low and ds pressed
I state, was convoyed to the county gaol.

A LADY PoniOXlM—Considerable excitement has
existed in Ramp and its neighbourhood since Tuesday last,
in cousquense of the death of a lady of rank, the wife of
Sergio= Smith, Ent., of Jersayn's-hoase near Ronny,
and granddaughter of the first Lord Duane., by poison.
It appears that Mrs. Smith, for some slight illness, obtained
a prescription from her Southampton phydoisa, and sent to
a Ramsey ellen= to have it made up. • porn= of the pre.
soription as it was ordered was 3 grams of maltase, which is
the enemas of the willow bark. It was that the
dismiss was la the habit of keeping his saliciae and
strychnine side by side in saws particular part of his
shop. The latter medicine is well known se a dearly
poison, being the active principle of nun tali= When
and as a medicine than is never more than the aixtee.ith
part of a grain given In a don. The prescription wu made
zaion:e dusk of the evening, and moot =fortunately the
from thel"ksairinMwe hogruttlr c=un from 112.
"Ilaia.tasace wasiuumdfrightinl4.
The unfortunate lady expired on Tuesday in about twenty
minutes alter taking the prescription, and endiutd the must
intolerable agonies. The description given by . Mrs.

Smith's lady's maid of the eircular effect of the
p.,ison on the frame, and the sufferings of her mitoreee,
was of the most terrble descriptien. The on fur: undo lady
was a very beautiful woman about 35 years of age, and was
the mother of five children. A coroner'• inquest was held on
the body on Wednesday, and was adjourned till today
(Friday), in order to give Mr. Randall, an eminent Snathr
anipton analytic chemist, an opportunity of analysing tina
coated' of the stomach. It appears that the chemist, when
he accidentally saw from the position of the salicine and
strychnine bottles that he mast have us d the lath r, wet
horror-stricken, and immediately pronounced that Mrs.
Smith most have been poisoned.

LITERATURE.
The Observance of Sunday considered sea respect to
Public Health and Morals and to the Relations of
the Panay and the City. By P. J. PROUDHON.
The atheists of the last century confined their phi-
losophy to the investigation of physical causes and
effects, and left the explanation of moral and spiritual
' phenomena unattempted. Baron d'Holnach, the
sailor of that really remarkable treatise t falsely
ascribed to :11irabeato, the " Systeme de la Nature,"
ousted a creative God from the place assigned to him
in the doctrines of every religion on the earth, and
establishing a something called Nature in His place,
fancied he had sufficiently accounted for ti e present
constitution of the material world. People were
alarmed at first, but when it was found that the book
and the atheistical system might be made to approxi-
mate very closely to orthodoxy, by simply writing
the word 004 instead of the word Nature, in

the same manner as loyal subjects are • ac-
customed in their prayer-books to erase the
name of the defunct king, and substitute that of
this successor, the alar.m sabsided. In the meantime,
. .

the great moral and spititnal world was left un-
touched, as affording no proper field for the philooo-
- investigatiocs ; it was looked upon as an un-
manageable jumble of incidents, no one or aeries of
which oould, by any possibility, ever aspire to the
dignity of a cause. There was evidently a screw
loose in its constitution. It performed vagaries quite
unworthy of an orderly explainable world, and was
Hooked upon, therefore, with a great deal of distrust
and no little contempt. The whole mass of religious,
and political, and moral repletion', and customs, and
traditions, was considered so thoroughly heteroge-
neous, it bore upon its face such evident marks of a
chaos, that it was not considered worthy to bo inves-
tigated in the scientific laboratories. Its antecedents
were as unintelligible as its future was unimagin-
able. It bore the same relation to the material

world, where everytbirg seemed so orderly and
intelligible, as comets, in the Astronomy of the day, to
the well-conducted planets of the solar system; while
the latter bodies kept their time, and displayed their
phenomena, with a puootnality and a regularity
which were the admiration of all calculators. the latter
went whirring about space subject apparently to no
law, but that of their own caprice.
But comets, it is found, are explainable. 'Very
great steps have been made in these latter times to-
wards including the motions of these erratic bodies
under one general law. And there arose a screwing
conviction that Mind and Soul are underthe dominion
of laws no less potent than those which regulate ina-
nimate nature. " Here is a purr of fortune, sir, or of
fortune's cat," was shrewdly suspected to be a very
unphiloeophical formula. The wind of atheism shifted.
It was conceded that there was an immense deal of
philosophy in religion, only religious moo had
never been able to find it oat. It was
reserved for the modern school of at%eista
to discover the divinity latent in all the divine
symbols which religionists blindly worshipped.
It was reserved for those who had no God at all to in-
struct the believers in a God—in the true meaning of
the object of their woreip—and to point out the foot-
steps of the Godhead where none else lied presumed
to look for them. The last school of philosophy in
Germany—the Hegelians der Linken—have come
forward with their formula: Ilomn homini dew ("Man
is the god to man," or, "It is man who makes his
own god"), and, subjecting all the divice ordinances
to their omnipotent 'menses of analysis and syn-
thesis, have proved the divinity of these ordinances,
by showing how nearly they approximate in prin-
ciple to what they—the Hegeliane of " the left"—
should have established themselves.

Proudhon is not an Hegelian " of the left;" nor
can he be said to belong to any school of philosophers
under the sun, except the Proudhonions. Most truly
may he say of himself:
Nullins addierns jurare in verbs rregietri
Quo me minion molt tempest," deferor heves.

True it is that he shows indubitable signs in his
writings of having visited as "hospee" the very large
and fertile shores of German philosophy. We might
point as a proof of this to the essay which forms the
subject of our remarks, which is an amplification of
certain texts from the " Sendung Mosta" of Schiller,
which latter tractate, by the way, scams to have in-
spired Mr. Carlyle with many of the ideas in his
sketch of Mehemet, and Miss Martineau with the
ideas, and remarks into the bargain, for her notices of
Moses and the children of Israel in her last work.
Bat SI. Proudhon makes every subject his own by an
originality and a vigour of treatment which have no pa-
rallel in the writings of any of his brother philosophers.
We beg our readers not to belt ve that there is
nothing in his writings more striking or more worthy
of a philosophical antagonist than the few sophisms
which were disposed of in M. Thiere's brilliant orato-
rical display. To thew who are engaged in the inves-
tigation of the causes which are now shaking the con-
tinent of Europe to its centre, and who coosder that
the study of the works of men whose writings have
influenced the makers of revolutions, is a ne
e
part of their labours, the deep earnestness witheala
NI. Proudhon sets himself to work to establish or to
demolish a theory, the masculine eneruy of his style,
the triumphant march of his logic when he has met
with an enemy whom he can conquer, are ohjt chi of
an admiration at once painful and intense. The
man whose reckless atheism has disgusted Victor
Cousin and allreligious men, whose levelling
doctrines on property have roused the indignation
of M. Thief' and all the respecters of the right of
property, is the most terrible opponent that has yet
appeared of materialism and communism. It is not,
however, in these labours that we have now to regard
him. Many indeed of his peculiar doctrines are occa-
sionally brought forward, but the intent of the arga-
meat, which is very well kept in view through the
whole of the treatise before ns, is to vindicate the in-
stitution of the Sabbath.
The attempt coming from M. Proudhon, the vio-
knee of whose atheism occasionally in his other tree-
' tises exceeds all bounds, will appear remarkable to
most of our readers. They will be surprised ia addi-
tion to this to hear that M. Proadton exhausts all the

powers of his eloquence in praising the decalogue, and
the prophet its promulgator :
" What a magnificent symbol!" he exclaims, "what
philosopher, what legislator, except this, ht.' ever established
such categories, has been able to fill them up ?" " Show
me a single precept, a single obligation, not reducible to this
standard, and without examination I am entitled to declare
by anticipadon that this obligation, this precept, is out of the
conscience, and therefore arbitrary, unjust, iminoral."
They will be surprised to hear that the author
lament. the degradation of the Sabbath which fol-
lowed the return of the Jews from Cheldea, that he
speaks as a priest an I a poet a -ruld speak of the pro-
fanation of the Christian Sunday ;tat he mentions
in terms of fervent gratitude the good deeds of tie
Christian councils which promulgated inch inflexible
decrees on the observation of the Sunday; that he
looks forward with prophetical hope to the future
identity of p litics and religion—the wish of our own
Arnold ; sad finally that he declares :
F.r myself, I plate my confidence in nothing now under
the sun. My faith is fixed on ideas as old as the human
race. All the elements of order and happiness exist still,
preserved in imperishable traditions; the task that re,t,ains is
to discover their synthesis, their mettle: of application, and
development.
All this is remarkable enough, and is explainable
only by bearing in mind the substance of our pre-
ceding remarks on the method of the modern atheisti-
cal philosopher.. Religion and religions phenomena
are not now dismissed with sneers, as unwerhy of in-
vestigation; on the contrary, large sequences of reli-
gious causes and effect. are treated as if they were
as worthy of attention as similar sequences of mat. rial
causes and effects. Their presence is a great fact,
and a law moat be found to explain it.
Bacon (M. PromOhon observe') has been called tie restorer
of the sciences, because he substituted (pt....ovation and expo-
, rience for syllogism in physieal researches. Maier ohile•
gopher', following his example, smut that philosophy should
be a collection, subject to a matood, of observance and
d ern
"fT.lhei n:t.Yl there
t h How
thoughtmia also
there
which eextizistulisa a e 'intai
r usht iui oc alt
is 4 ftarul thedthe
hollowinganr
discourse.
' He then casts a rapid glance at modern French so-
; ciety, and finds that ail political right is founded on
the principle of property bleed upon the Roman law