The Sun.
London, England, 1869-01-06 00:00:00

1111 t: SUN, LONDON, WEDNSDAY EVENING, JANUARY 6, 1869.

MONDAY MORNING AT BOW STREET.

xtegular passers-by of certain London thoroughfares—
the lawyers, merchants, Government officials, and mis-
cellaneous workers whose business carries them down
particular streets during the few minutes preceding
ten a.m.—become acquainted with a queer procession
which meets them punctually each morning at that
hour. Men, women, and boys—frowsy, draggletailed,
and forlorn ; or flaunting, brazen, and with a tar-
nished smartness—walk in single file, each by the
side of a policeman ; and looking in the aggregate like an
academy of vice and crime and folly taking its formal
" constitutional" between school hours. They are the
night charges being conveyed from the police cells in
which they have been confined since the day or night
before to the police court, where the sitting magistrate will
dispose of them according to law. It would be invidious
to point out Bow-street as pre-eminent for the discipline
and order which it shares with some other of the metro-
politan headquarters. But it is safe to say that the
morning procession there is among the most characteristic
of all. The proximity of Covent-garden and
Drury-lane, the guilt-gardens of Endell-street, the foul
tribntaries of the streets between Long-acre and Seven
Dials, all help to tincture it ; and the moment at which it
crosses the road and passes from the station to the court
gives the bystander or pedestrian a glimpse into some of
the worst phases of metropolitan life. The charges were
few last Monday. Christmas and Boxing-day, and the
drunkenness, violence, and indolence which followed
them, had, in the opinion of the inspector, some-
what exhausted the capabilities of the district. " They'd
most of them spent their money, and couldn't get
drunk in consequence," expressed a fact and a
deduction which were verified by the morning's proceed-
ings• These were infinitely dull. The amiable gentle.
men who discharge the duties of metropolitan magistrates
go through an amount of tedium and vilely uninterest-
ing drudgery which can only be comprehended by those
who have made our police-courts a study upon off-days,
and when no case of special interest was anti-
cipated. The constable who states his name and
number, and relates his evidence as if he were
repeating a lesson got by rote, or reading from a
school book ; the defendant who equivocates, or
pleads utter ignorance, or is sorry for being in such a
position, but was overtaken, as he may say, and has never
been drunk before, were both represented. These are
general types ; but there were special ones as well. The
man who, like the workhouse inmate in Mr. Dickens's
essay, insisted that he was a Freemason, and wished to
put in his greasy and well-thumbed parchment certifi-
cate of membership as evidence that he could not
by any possibility have been drunk ; the valiant
greengrocer from Clare Market, who heard a noise
on Sunday morning, and left his bed to disturb a burglar
in the act of packing up portable property, and to subse-
quently chase him into the street and capture him near
the Strand, adding deprecatingly, as he told his story,
that be would have had him earlier if he had
had anything on but his shirt ;" and the ruffian
who, with four companions, knocked a peaceful
workman down, bruising and kicking him out of
sheer wantonness, were all figures slightly out of
the common run. But the people representing the
general public who stood in the body of the court
to laugh admiringly when the "only in my shirt" story
was told, and to be peremptorily snubbed by usher and
officers, ought to have been in the dock, unless physiog-
nomy is a delusion. Some of the friends and relations of
those tried, others mere idlers, fascinated by the Lucretian
notion of seeing others in trouble while safe themselves,
they recalled street outrages, public executions, and the
ragged fringe which hangs about our racecourses. The
men and women who come into the dock one by
one, most of them with the sawdust of their cell
clinging to their clothes, and all bearing traces of
the night's confinement, seemed of a positively higher
order than the miserable on-lookers, who represented the
people of England watching the administration of Eng-
land's laws. So with those lounging about the rooms and
corridors outside. Wrists made for handcuffs, lowering
faces one longed to crown with a prison cap, and uneasy
shambling figures which rubbed uneasily against wall or
chair while chatting with the policemen—made up the
bulk. A decent-looking brewer's drayman, with his decent
wife, both in a high state of nervous anxiety, whose
appearance suggested some mishap connected with driving
athwart crowded crossings, and a woman with an infant,
who was bathed in tears, were the only unofficial people
to whom the word "humanised" could be applied ; and
the stranger to whom last Monday was his first morning
at Bow-street probably left the court uncertain whether
to be impressed most with the sordid pettiness of its pro-
fligacy and offences or the apparently unredeemed bru-
tality of the offenders and their friends.—Daily Netts.

THE GALE.

--

The severe south-westerly gales which have swept over
the coast of Kent during the last few days have been
fruitful of disaster. On Saturday night signal guns
were heard from the North Sand Head Lightship. The
lifeboat Bradford promptly put to sea, attended by the
steamtug Aid, and on reaching the Goodwins they found
a large ship, which had grounded but had got off, and
was out of danger before the arrival of assistance. On
Sunday, about eight o'clock, the gale had increased to
great violence, sudden gusts of wind frequently sweeping
upon the coast with terrific force. Signals of distress were
heard proceeding from the Gull Lightship, and a vessel was
descried on the Goodwins. The alarm was quickly given,
and the lifeboat again put off to render aid to the unfortu-
nate vessel. The tide was ebbing fast, and the sea was
very rough. On reaching the sands, the crew of the life-
boat found that the distressed vessel was a French schooner,
named the Gaspard, Rousel master, of and from St. Malo
for London, with a cargo of oats. The vessel was too
deeply imbedded in the sand to be rcecued from her peri-
lous position. The lifeboat was run ashore on the
Goodwins in order to reach the vessel. When boarded only
one man, the master, was found. He stated that while he
had left the deck to go down into the cabin, the boat con-
taining the crew, four in number, had put off from the
vessel, leaving him behind either by accident or design,
and they had not since been seen or heard of. After taking
the master from the wreck, the crew of the lifeboat had
a long and arduous task to extricate their boat from the
sands. After persistent efforts for between two and three
hours, however, they succeeded, and once more put to
sea on their return to the harbour, which they reached
about half-past twelve noon, and were warmly cheered on
landing by the crowds who thronged the beach and the
pier-head.

In Yorkshire, early on Sunday morning a S.W. gale, at
times blowing with the violence of a hurricane, with very
heavy rains, set in, and continued until about nine a.m.,
when the weather moderated, and ultimately became quite
summer-like. The effect was magical. On Saturday the
whole country was deeply covered with snow, but at noon
on Sunday not a trace of snow was to be found. So
rapid a thaw was, of course, expected to cause floods,
and on Monday all the Yorkshire rivers were, for the
fourth time in as many weeks, over their banks, and a
very large tract of country is flooded, roads and houses in
some places being inundated. A narrow escape occurred
at Newsham Bridge on Monday, when a man on horse-
back, in fording the flood water, got off the road into deep
water, and had great difficulty in regaining it. Various
works and mills near rivers are flooded and stopped..

A contemporary cataloguing a series of disasters
which attended the keeping of New Year's Day in various
parts of the country, says that in Glasgow, a tailor, excited
by drink, threw himself out of a window three stories in
height, and was killed ; and a woman cracked another's
skull in a by-road known as " the Havannah." The same
night an Irish Yankee, drunk and riotous, murdered a
police inspector in Greenock while the officer was taking*
him into custody.

THE MURDER OF MR. DARCY M‘GEE.---The
Court of Queen's Bench has refused to grant a new trial
to Whelan, convicted of the murder of Darcy 3/Mee.
Chief Justice Richards and Judge Wilson sustained the
verdict of the Ottawa jury, while Judge Morrison dis-
sented. The prisoner was remanded. He will appeal
against the ruling of the court to the Court of Errors and
Appeals.

LEICESTER RAMS FOR PRUSSIA.—SOITIO months
ago Mr. Robert Metcalfe, of Malton, was commissioned by
one of the largest landowners in Prussia to send out two
Leicester rams for the first season. These sheep did so
well that Mr. Metcalfe has received a similar order. He
has again selected two rams from the well-known Barton
flock (Mr. John Burton). The sheep are this time the
descendants of the famous Sir 'Patton, which won thirty.
six first premiums.

MISCHIEVOUS FREAKS OF SERVANT GIRLS.—
On Saturday two servant girls were charged on suspicion,
before the Merthyr .Tydvil magistrates, with being con,
cerned in a series of acts of wilful damage in the house
of their master, Mr. Davis, the proprietor of the Crown
Inn. On Tuesday morning a bedroom was discovered to
be on fire, and the flames were not extinguished until
considerable damage had been done. The same evening
another fire broke out in another bedroom with the same
results. A watch was set, but during the night the wine
cellar was entered, and the taps of four spirit-casks
turned on, by which liquor of the value of £5O was wasted.
On Thursday morning, about half an hour after the
detectives left the house, two upstair bedrooms were die.
covered to be on fire, and another was lit close to a
wooden partition. The evidence against the girls WAS not
cons*nd iaciont, and both won discharged.

MISCELLANEOUS NEWS.

SIP. CHARLES TREVELYAN ON THE EASTERN
QUESTION.

Sir Charles Trevelyan has been attempting to rind
a solution of the much-vexed Eastern question. He
asks what is to become of the Eastern Empire which
was conquered 500 years ago by the Turks, and
observes that a similar question has been solved in
England, France, Spain, and Italy by the absorption
of the conquering minority into the conquered
majority. In the Eastern Empire this solution has
not been possible, because the conquerors were not
only Turks, but Mahomedans, and their absorption into
a Christian population could not take place. A possible
solution was the absorption of the Eastern Empire
into Russia ; but at this point Europe interposed.
Constantinople occupies an imperial position, and its
possessor can exercise a wide influence. Russia could not
be allowed to re-establish in Europe an empire of the
Cxsars more dangerous and enduring than that of
the First Napoleon. The third and actual solution of
the question is the internal disintegration of the
Eastern Empire, and its recombination in new auto-
nomies. This was begun in the last generation by
the war of independence, but by a cruel kindness
Greece was only half reconstituted. Even Metter -
nich, her consistent enemy, admitted that the new
State should either be larger or should not exist at
all. Two successive dynasties have been powerless to
restrain the national sympathy for their countrymen
and companions in arms left under Turkish rule. ID
point of fact, it is not Turkey, but England herself which
is menacing Greece. Hobart Pasha's fleet is composed
of ships built, armed, and equipped in England,
commanded by officers and petty officers of the
British navy, and paid for by British money. Strip
off this thin disguise, and the utter helplessness of
Turkey will appear. If we merely assume a neutral
position, and enforce the Foreign Enlistment Act
against both parties, the whole thing will collapse,
and return into the hands of the Congress, to be
settled at their discretion. Greece has a right to
demand that the question shall be settled. If by war,
then let all foreign assistance be withdrawn, and let
them fairly fight it out. If by mediation, the settle-
ment must be based on the real justice of the case.
If the progress of the next twenty years at all keeps
pace with the growth since the Crimean war, there
will be no difficulty in determining at a future date
how the central State of the new Eastern Confede-
ration is to be constituted.

TA inrrea*e met cerraunty or cannmon, ana to maKe
public security additionally sure. Mr. Tallack con-
cludes by urging the importance of making every
effort to secure the end in view, and declares that
the friends of abolition should use their influence
with their parliamentary representatives to support
the object they have at heart.