The Sun.
London, England, 1869-10-13 00:00:00

MERIT OF TUB PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Times observes that the public has been supping full
with horrors lately. On Thursday, Co 23rd of September,
there was the frightful Hounslow wife murder, in the near
neighhourhood of this Whitton crime. On Saturday, the
25th, there was the Bolton murder by a father-in-law,
followed by the murderer's suicide ; and on the Sunday
after the Little Suffolk-street murder of the murderer's
mistress. All these were attended by circumstances of
peculiar atrocity. On the following Friday, the Ist of
October, occurred the firework explosion at Bayswater,
resulting in the destruction of seven persons. On the 4th
of October there was the double murder and attempted
suicide at Wood-green. Last Sunday four lives were lost
by a fire at Newington ; on the same day steam took
its quota of seven victims on the Midland Railway;
and now the neighbourhood of Hounslow comes in with a
second murder and a suicide to complete the dreary list
which Hounslow inaugurated. This is a crowded cata-
logue of violent deaths for eighteen days. It might almost
seem that violent deaths were catching, like scarlet fever.
The chief uncertainty, in fact, is how the infection works.
Is it in the air we breathe, or does it require actual con-
tact to communicate itself ? Can it be taken in a mild
form, like tho smallpox? If so, sensational modern litera-
ture may perform functions in letters very different from
those usually assigned it. Or does this anticipation of the
malady, as gaol chaplains declare, only bring it—after
the manner rather of inoculation than of vaccination—in
all its terrors on those who would never naturally have
caught it? If we could find out any law by which crime,
or the gross negligence which is from a social point of view
the same thing, suddenly bursts out in unexpected quar-
ters, we should be far on the way to discovering a preven-
tive. Crime and gross negligence, even of the most appa-
rently irregular and casual sort, doubtless do arise from
marshy centres which might be drained ; even when they
have got abroad, they might very possibly be stamped out.
But, if so, in the presence of a list of unprofessional out-
rages on law and the good order by which British subjects
have a right to die peaceably in their beds, society ought
to feel more acutely than ever an obligation to consider
the subject as a whole and scientifically, with a view to a
remedy.

Tho Telegraph thinks that desperate poaching affrays
could hardly occur at a time more inauspicious than the
present for the zealous advocates of excessive game preser-
vation. The current of hostility against the Game Laws,
which has set in more strongly every year with the reviving
independence and habits of combination among the tenant
farmers, has received a great impulse since the reform that
has widened the base of our electoral system, and propor-
tionally reduced the overshadowing influence of territorial
landlordism. The farmers are quite aware that mere
prescription will now do nothing for game preserving,
and that, unless the practice can be proved to
be beneficial, it will receive no mercy from
Legislature which, for almost the first time, faithfully re-
flects public opinion in considering such questions on broad
grounds of general utility. It is hardly possible to look at
a report of any meeting among the local Chambers of
Agriculture without seeing that the farmers are unwearied
in their hostility to the Game Laws, and that, if their in-
fluence shall prevail, the law will be amended in a sense
widely different from that adopted in Sir Baldwin Leigh-
ton's famous measure. The point to bo considered is,
whether, granting all that the farmers demand, real
sport will be any the loser. If every tenant had full
licence by law, and independently of his landlord's
caprice, to shoot all game trespassing on his fields,
there would be fewer rabbits, hares, and pheasants, no
doubt; but it is absurd to suppose that they would be
extirpated, or sport be seriously diminished. The deter-
mined agitation which leading agriculturists, backed by
active associations, have commenced against the Game
Laws, has, then, an object in view as feasible as it is bene-
ficial. That object must be approved by economists as con-
ducive to the general wealth and can hardly be con-
demned by any statesman who desires to see crime dimi-
nished, and who, while resolved to punish the criminal,
will also aim at removing the fountain and origin of the
evil.

The Standard declares that Mr. Gladstone's friends in
Ireland are becoming daily more clamorous. They have
long ago abandoned the pretence of limiting their demands
by any regard to law, public justice, or the common inte-
rest. Having had one concession made to them for which
they never asked, in satisfaction of a romantic grievance,
nothing can be more natural than that the Fenians should
proceed to demand a formal recognition of their cause
itself, and to accompany that demand with threats of open
vengeance. This is the true meaning of the Dublin demon-
stration, which is but the legitimate product and sequel of the
Ministerial policy. We are no longer entreated to i;Ardon
esor laws. There* ia
no word of pardon, no hint of misguidance, at the more
recent of the Fenian gatherings. At the same time, it is
necessary to say that the demand, which is foolish, im-
pudent, and insulting when made on the British nation, is
not so monstrous or unnatural when urged against the
Gladstone Government. Fenianism, while it has no claims
whatever against England, has some right to ,eppeal to the
English Administration. It is this Administrii, which
is mainly responsible for the hopes which )have
been excited in Fenian bosoms. It is this Admineitn2-
tion, which found Fenianism a miserable and all but
extinct secret conspiracy, which has raised it to
life, and given it the power, the dignity, and the
proportions of a quasi-national movement. It was Mr.
Gladstone who released some Fenian prisoners, and who
may reasonably, therefore, be asked to release them all. It
is Mr. Gladstone who has encouraged Mr. G. H. Moore and
"The People of Ireland" to hope that what may not be given
in justice or in mercy may still be extorted by bullying
words and threats of violence. If Fenianism has become a
formidable danger, it is only because Mr. Gladstone has
paltered with it and abased himself before it. And to deal
with it now is naturally much more difficult than it would
have been had the Government from the first retained a
consistent attitude towards it.
The winter is drawing near, says the Daily New.', and
we have read with some interest of some experiments
which have been made on a large scale in Germany on a
method of heating railway carriages by steam. We in
Loinion are familiar with gaslight in railway carriages.
Why should we not have steam-pipes to heat them ? In
the first-class carriages we can generally in cold weather
get a tin containing hot water for the feet; but this is a
luxury forbidden, we believe, to second and third-class
passengers, and even first-class passengers have at
times had to tip the porters before they could
obtain the boon. The experiments to which we
refer have been made on the Brunswick :Railway,
on the Prussian Eastern, on the Hanoverian, and
on the Lower Silesian. The Hanoverian Government
Railway, for example, runs daily two mail trains with
steam heating between Cologne and Berlin. The steam
comes from a tubular boiler in the luggage car. In the
Brunswick Railway it comes directly from the locomotive.
In either case the temperature of the carriages is raised
from twenty to thirty degrees Farenheit. Is it too much
to hope that our engineers will one day allow us this
comfort? The winters on the Continent are coverer than
with us, just as also the Continental summer is warmer
than our Insular one. Still wo can he cold enough in
England, and we do not think that railway managers would
lose much in their returns—probably they would gain a
good deal—if they would make travelling in the winter
time less of a penance than it is for persons in delicate
health, and less of a risk to all.
The Star remarks that fox-hunting is so generally ex-
tolled as a manly pastime, that people who would shudder
with horror at far less cruelty to a domestic animal, or
who would, at a pinch, send a contribution to the society
which usefully devotes itself to the repression of this
species of inhumanity, have persuaded themselves that a
sport so popular and pursued with so much eagerness is
somehow or other worthy to be regarded with a
kind of admiration. Mr. Freeman is ,Toot so oblivious
to the subtle influence of custom in hiding from
a man the real quality and nature of his owil acts as to
impute to the fox-hunter a naturally cruel or sanguinary
disposition. What ho contends is, that the act itself is
bad ; that indulgence in it must more or less harden the
heart ; that, at all events, the fox-hunter would be a better
man if he were not a fox-hunter; and that, as respects
its influence on the judicial character of the squire-
archy, "next to a Jamaica court-martial, no mockery
of justice can be conceived greater than that of
a game-preserving squire sitting to convict a
poacher on the evidence of a gamekeeper." Fox-
hunting, he shows, is ono of the last relics of pastimes
which, from the days of the Roman emperors, have con-
verted human or brute suffering into a means of affording
pleasure to heartless and unfeeling men. It is in the
direct lino of succession with the barbarous practices in
which our forefathers indulged; and, like those practices,
it will one day disappear under the enlightened influence
of a growing, although yet terribly imperfect,
The Herald comment on the two inquests held on the
same day, and on the same number of persons. In the one
case, the jury had to inquire into the causes of the deaths
which ensued from the firework calamity at Bayswater
In the other they had to perform the same
duty with respect to the victims of Saturday's casualty
at Long Eaton. The one inquiry virtually, and the
other actually, ended in a verdict of accidental
death, by which somewhat loose and very convenient
expression we understand not exactly that the misadven-
tures were unavoidable, but that they occurred under such
circumstances that it would be rather hard and very unfair
to impute blame on account of them to any one in par-
ticular. The result is that fourteen persons have lost their
.
lives, and a great deal of suffering has been causeld tc
survivorl, but that, after using the best existinge
failedal
machinery provided for that pin-pose we h
to solve the mystery in one instance, a and to fix
sdpeoends
fi buirini tiys
hi na
int the
to e
xl;
nh
ge
t
p
fir lc . 13T
h3Cs NC' odni oae
Long Eaton is a much more simple affair.
On foggy
awshsitcahrtwedasontlyo
five minutes
ianuhteeasve xrceug
etxria)irne s
sw,
run at its usual rate, and which could only help running
heavy special
before a
I into the other by good luck and good management
As it happened, the management was n.either bate]
nor worse than usual, but the "luck" upon- which the
authorities relied deserted them at a critical momt..nt. A
luggage train got in the way, and blocked the line wheo the
" excursion " was duo. The latter went on with slackened
speed, and the mail, which had started only five minute,
after it, ran into it with all the force of a powerful engine
drawing a light train at the rate of forty miler
an hour, on a foggy night, upon a railway whose
directorate has hitherto declined to adopt the block sys-
tem of signalling. Under such conditions it is no wonder
that travelling by rail was somewhat unsafe. The collision
on the Midland line might be "accidental" in the sense
that no one had wilfully caused it, but it certainly was not
accidental if we take proper notic9 of, tkc fa_lu ty aztepe
i2akibutoci to it. '--

HER MAJESTY.

BALMORAL CASTLE, Oct. 11.

The Queen, with their Royal Highnesses
Princess Louise, Prince Leopold, and Princess
Beatrice, with the Ladies and Gentlemen in
waiting, attended Divine service in the parish
church, Crathie.

LATEST INTELL IGENCS

(REUTER'S TELEGRAMS.)

AMERICA.
(Per French Atlantic Cable.)

NEW YORE:, Oct. 12.
The llamburg and American steamship Silesia
arrived here at 8 p.m. yesterday.
The Cunard Royal Mail steamer Russia also ar-
rived here yesterday at 10 p.m.

COMMERCIAL INTELLIGENCE.

CLOSING PRICES.

Gold closed at 1301 ; the highest quotation dur-
ing the day was 130/ ; the lowest, 130.
Sterling Exchange on London lO9/.
5-20 U. S. Bonds, 1882 l2Ol.
cc " 1885 1194.
4t " 1867 llBl.
10-40 if
Illinois 1321.
Erie
Cotton—Mid. upland 26lc.
Petroleum—Standard White 32P.
Flour, extra state, $5.70c. to $6.30c. Corn, al
mixed, sl.lc.

According to Mr. Adam Moffatt's report the
receipts of cotton for the last four days have been
36,000 bales, against 33,000 last week; shipments
to England, 7,ooo:bales, against 5,000 ; to France,
1,000 bales, against 2,000,; and to the Continent,
1,000 bales, against 1,000. Market quiet, and
easier. M.-Upland, 10 15-16, cost and freight per
steamer.

RUSSIA.

ST. PETERSBURG, Oct. 12.

The Ameer of Bokhara has applied to Russia for
assistance against Shere Ali, accompanying the
request by the payment of a tribute. lie has also
despatched his son with an Embassy to the Czar
in order to secure his succession to the throne
through the protection of Russia.

VICTORIA.

MELBOURNE, Sept. 12.

. _
A Parliamentary crisis has arisen here, and a
vote of want of confidence in the Government 16
pending, in consequence of their having nominated
Mr. Ralto (who is not a member of Parliament) to
the post of Commissioner of Customs. The SUP'
porters of the Ministry are indignant at this ar
poiutment.
The Legislative Assembly have resolved to abo•
lish the State Aid Grant in five years, diminishing
the amount by £lO,OOO in each year.
Mr.Tawlner, the founder of the colony, is dead'
Kenealey and the other pardoned Fenians have
been expelled the zolony under the Criminals It"
flux Prevention Act.
Trade is extremely dull.

SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
ADELAIDE, Sept. 9•
A telegraph line is about to be laid to the north
West coast.