The Sun.
London, England, 1855-06-04 00:00:00

AN ORDER IN BASTARDY MADE UPON
A ROMAN CATHOLIC CLERGYMAN.

The magistrates of Stockton were engaged some time
on Saturday in hearing the application of Miss Jane
Jones, for an order on the Rev. Richard Singleton, the
Roman Catholic priest of the district, to contribute to
the support of her illegitimate child.
Mr. Stevenson said he appeared for the complainant,
who was a single woman. About a year and a half ago she
had occasion to reside in the neighbourhood, in the
family of a person named Eyre, when she became ac-
quainted with the defendant. Being a stranger, and
not feeling comfortable in the family, she confided her
grievances to the defendant, who, in consequence, asked
her to go and take up her residence at his house. De-
fendant was understood to be a single man. Whilst
Miss Jones resided at his heuse, she dined •at his table,
along with himself alone, and usually after dinner they
left the dining-room together, under circumstances, as
he (Mr. Stevenson) would prove, which discreet people
would perhaps not approve of. Mr. Singleton usually
left the dining-room with his arm about Miss Jones's
waist, and led her into an adjoining room, where they
had a dessert. At night they slept in rooms contiguous
to each other. As to what took place upstairs he could
not, by other witnesses, corroborate Miss Jones's
evidence, but he would confirm her statement of what
took place down stairs, which could lead to nothing
less than that connection in consequence of which the
child was born. The defendant accompanied Miss Jones
to Leeds. The facts he (Mr. Stevenson) was in a posi-
tion to prove were, that in the house of defendant crimi-
nal intercourse took place between him and the
2com-
plainant • before leaving she told defendant that she was
enciente by him ;
that she was deliver
which the defendant was the father ; and that she was
ed of a child of
without means to support it.
The complainant and other witnesses; then gave evi-
dence.
No one appearing for the defence, the magistrates re-
tired for a few minutes, when the Mayor announced that
they were of opinion that Mr. Singleton was the father
of the child, and made an order on him for the payment
of 2s. 6d. per week, with 10s. for the midwife, and the
usual costs.

The sum for which Messrs. Jackson, Bean, and Gow,
of London, have contracted for the construction of
Jarrow Docks near Newcastle, is stated to be
358,0001. Thera were 14 tenders in all, two of which
were even below' the above figures, but there was only
a diff,:renee of 7.0001 not of seven of the tenders. The
ground is already staked out at Jarrow, as well as the
branch railway for the trunk line to Brockley Whine,
so that this undertaking will be forwarded
ut-
most despatch, with the ut-

will be in your recollection that when our
forces originally left this country for Gallipoli (during
the March of 1854) there remained behind them a reserve
of 10,000 under Sir George Cathcart. It will be remem-
bered, moreover, that a very little time elapsed before
those 10,000 men followed their compatriots to Varna ;
and that, within a quarter of a year front the landing of
the allied armies in the Crimea, the heroic leader of
what bad once been our Reserve fell pierced through the
heart by a bullet under the deadly volleys of the Russian
rifles during the glorious struggle of the sth of Novem-
ber at Inkerman. It cannot he forgotten either, how
for a long time afterwards, during that frightful winter
of 1854-5, while our noble fellows before Sebastopol were
dying daily in platoons, struck down wholesale not by
the sword, or the minis-ball, or the bayonet, but by disease
and atrophy—while they were perishing, rank and file,
nearly 1,500 within the fortnight, in the slough of the
camp and the quagmire of the trenches, as afterwards
on board the pest-ships at Balaklava, or, later on, in
the lazar-houses at Scutari—at home the authorities were
beating up for recruits in every town and village, with
fife and drum, in a sort of wild desperation. We all
know with what indifferent success, We all bear in
mind with what disastrous precipitation, with what
lamentable want of forethought, with what culpable Nck
of common sense, and, let me venture to add, too, of
common humanity. Scarcely one unfortunate varlet
was refused, however much of a stripling or of a scare-
crow. The standards both of age and height were gra.
dually diminished, and, as those standards were diminished,
the bounty, by an inverse proportion, was increased. Every
body seemed to be looked upon as eligible. The new shil-
ling was thrust into the first horny palm that was offered.
The bunch of party-coloured ribbons fluttered in the cap
of every fresh tatterdemalion. Each recruiting ser-
geant, met by hazard, in any rural district in any county
of broad England, had at his heels an awkward squad
not a jot less promising in appearance than the rapscal-
lions marched through Coventry six centuries back under
the banners of Sir John Falstaff. The sequel of all this
was only precisely what might have been anticipated.
Hastily collected together, hurriedly drilled, carried off
in ship-loads and disembarked pell-mell, in a Crimean
January and February, the poor fellows—boys most of
them—died off faster than the old soldiers—scarcely
reached the camp before they fell sick, hardly became
accustomed to their regimentals before they had to be
rolled up in their blankets and stowed away by pitsfull
in the burying-ground.
Further exertions had to be made at home to
compensate for the still extending deficiency. The
number of our troops had so fearful dwindled away
before Sebastopol, that something was felt to be
essential in the way of extraordinary efforts with a •
view to the restoration of our army to its original
magnitude. Well, we all know what was done under
(hose very alarming circumstances. The militia was
embodied—but how carelessly, partially, and therefore
altogether ineffectually ! Additional recruits - were
gathered together—this time, however, older and younger
than ordinary, weaker and shorter, with still increased
bounties, and no longer from the bluff, hardy race of
our hedgers and ditchers, th Tro of of the agricul-
tural districts, but from '• ly population
of cur manufacturing towns, pale-fa rtisans, rather
than the ruddy and freckled followers the plough, the
sturdy wielders of the flail and the billhook. Neverthe-
less, somehow or other, the requisite numbers were ulti-
mately made up, the British army before Sebastopol was
once more swelled to its old proportions. Thirty thou-
sand men or thereabouts were again under arms, under
the command of Lord Raglan. Considerable good hav-
ing meantime been effected in the manner of their treat-
ment and general organisation—thanks to the exposures
made by the Press and to the scrutiny entered upon
under the auspices of Mr. Roebuck's Committee. In-
somuoint'nat—at last—the brave General Canrobert was
enabled, in the spring of 1855 (not during the spring
of 1854, remember ! but during that of 1855), to
announce the satisfactory state of our forces iu a gene-
rous despatch transmitted with the good news to the
French Imperial Government. So fir, therefore, so '
good. Again our army numbers some thirty thousand.
At last it is brought to something like a rational state
of organisation. But—after we have declared thus much
—what shall we say about the RESERVE ?
Recollect the original Reserve of 10,000 men went away
before our forces had left Varna to disembark on the
beach of Kalatnita Bay—they were swallowed up in the
sanitary disasters of the ensuing winter, just as completely
as their glorious old general had been swallowed up
in the flame and smoke of that great battle of the
sth of November. And subsequently, as already re-
marked, all the raw recruits that could be co'lected to-
gether—now from the purlieus of the farm-yard, now
from the precincts of the manufactory—were conveyed
from our shores as quickly as possible, by shipload after
shipload, three thousand miles away, on the other side
,if the Euxine and of the Mediterranean. Nay, other
transport ships are still following those which have
already borne regiment after regiment from Southampton
to Balaklava. Consequently, there are but indifferent
prospects of a Reserve being collected, to be retained at
borne until the fitting occasion for its departure—a
Reserve adequate for the existing emergency. Yet
never, sir, I venture \to say boldly, has there been more
reason for a considerable Reserve of this kind since the
memorable date (the 28th of; March, 1854), when the
London Gazette announced that the war with Russia had
actually commenced ? For, what are the circumstances
just now ? Have not the Vienna Conferences, whatever
Lord John may say to the contrary, failed—failed to-
tally and egregiously ? Has it not been at length un-
willingly admitted even by our Prime Minister (a states-
man I at one time little thought to be, as he has now
proved himself to be, no loss squeezable than the Whigs
of old), has not Lord Paltherston (thanks mediately
to the Press, and immediately to Mr. Disraeli's motion),
spoken out, at last, plainly enough, avowing that it
would be altogether absurd to count any longer upon
the possibility of a pacific settlement as the result of
iurther negotiations ? Added to all which, have we not
a double and very material guarantee for the extension
of the great struggle now carried on between the Allies
and the Autocrat—in two rather noteworthy incidents—
in the extension of our operations in the Crimea, as
indicated by the late successful expedition to
Kertch, and yet further, if that be possible, by
the increased manifestation of a warlike policy
by the French Imperial Government Napoleon
111. could hardly indeed have proclaimed the reso-
lute character of his determination to withstand the
daring ambition of the Czar to the very utmost, his
Imperial Majesty could scarcely have proclaimed this
more clearly, more boldly, more unmistakeably than he
has done of late—by the publication, for example, of the
Polish address in the Moniteur—by the sudden removal
of M.• Drouyn de l'Huys from the direction .of the
Foreign Department so soon as that statesman had
shown himself to have been infected by Austrian influ-
ences—above all by the nomination of General Pelissier
as the Commander-in-Chief of the 80,000 French troops
now encamped before the earthworks of Sebastopol. It is
obvious, consequently, from all this, that the war must
perfofce be persisted in with redoubled energy, in order
to bring it as speedily as possible to some satisfactory
termination. It is equally manifest that, this being the
case, and no further hopes remaining of a pacific arrange-
ment through diplomacy, even according to the reluctant
but explicit acknowledgment of my Lord Palmerston—
it
is no less manifest that the more energetic prosecution
of the contest must, sooner or later, result in yet further
destruction of life among our heroic soldiery. Where-
for the adbumulation and organisation of a fit-
ting Reserve has become more than ever a neces-
sity This Reserve, too, must be no mere sham
Reserve no hastily collected jumble of raw-recruits,
drilled no further than the goose-step, armed with no-
thing better than old Brown Bess, and then marched off
to the railway station, to be embarked on the transport
vessel, and ultimately tumbled on shore in the Crimea,
to be herded to the front, mere food for the cannon
balls, and for hardships for which there have been made
no sort of preparation. The Reserve must, on the con-
trary, be a real Reserve—an army in miniature. Let
Aldershott be, as it is proposed to be, the scene of its
organisation. But, in the name of right reason
and common sense, let the recruits for this Reserve
be drawn from some other sources than those to whioh
the enhanced bounty has already extended its allure-
ments. If our agricultural districts are to a certain ex-
tent exhausted, it by no means follows that the only re-
source then left is that discernable in the squalid and un-
healthy haunts of our manufacturing population. Why
by rigidly adopting this alternative, we have arrived at
such a stage of depreciation already that the Com-
mander-in-Chief has himself avowed, from his place
in the House of Lords, that the recruiting-ser-
jeants have for some time past been collecting
together, not as hitherto, bone and sinew, but—mere
gristle ! That is the declaration, nay the very phrase,
of Lord Hardinge. It is time, therefore, I cannot but
think, Sir, that we should bestir ourselves, that we should
eagerly and seriously look about us for the discovery of
some more eligible quarter from which our recruits may
hereafter be derived—so that the country may have some
fair prospect of finding a proper Reserve assembled be-
fore much longer on the Aldershott Encampment.
uadvapnr
A suggestion to this end I would consequently now
soldiersg uin e , i f
abroad, adopted,
lumns, to public consideration. A suggestion which I
amonly
a ourselves
beneficial
a t
to oursan
pry
neotiost t
home.-tending at once to the substantial improvement
of our army in the East, and to t'a.e yet further consoli-
dation of the fraternal ties binding together, more and
more closely, the integral parts o f the United Kingdom.
The direction to which my proposition points, is, briefly
then, to the opposite side of St. George's Channel. Is
there not, I would ask, discoYera btu in the sister island,
a noble Reserve already made to band in as at, body
of men as we have in the three kingdoms mean
the gallant and stalwart band of t' ho Inns Constabulary in
?
Recollect—that body already alb 1- •
in perfect organism,