The Sun.
London, England, 1868-12-12 00:00:00

LONDON, SATURDAY, DEC. 12, 1868.

Several days a o we gave a duplicated list of the
late and of the present Administration, so far as the
latter had then advanced towards completion. The
Government offices are now so nearly all of them
filled in, that it seems desirable here to repeat the
much more lengthened catalogue, or rather cata-
logues— the list, that is, of the recent and the list of
the existing Administration. Here, to begin with,

are—

THE CABINET MINISTERS.
F irst Lord of the Treasury,
Mr. GLADSTONE

Lord Chancellor.
Lord HATHERLEY

President of the Council.

Earl DE GREY and RIPON. Duke of MARLBOROUGH.
Lord Privy Seal.

Earl of KIMBERLEY. ...... EMI of MALMESBEIRY.
Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Mr. ROBERT LowE.

Secretary for the Home Department.

Mr. AUSTIN BRUCE. Mr. GATHORNE HARDY.

Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

Earl of CLARENDON. Lord STANLEY.

Secretary for the Colonies.

Earl GRANVILLE.
Secretary of War.

Mr. EDWARD CARDWELL... Sir JOHN PAKJNGTON.
Secretary for India.

Duke of ARGYLL.
Secretary for Ireland.

Mr. C. FORTESCUE.

First Lord of the Admiralty.

Mr. CHILDERS.
President of the Board of Trade.
Mr. JOHN BRIGHT. ... Duke of RICHMOND.

Postmaster-General.
Marquis of lIARTINGTON.... Duke of MONTROSE.

Poor Law Board.

Mr. J. G. GOSCIIEN The Earl of DEVON.
Pointing out here once more the one distinctive dif-
ference between the last and the present Cabinet, ob-
servable in the fact that the Postmaster-General has a
seat in the present and had not a seat in the last one—
the fifteenth seat i i the latter having been awarded
instead to an administrator who is on the contrary
endowed with no seat in the present Cabinet, namely,
the Chief Commissioner of Public Works, or Woods
and Forests as he used to be called a few years back
—we may now add the two following high extra-
Cabinet appointments, recent and present
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
Lord D UFFE RIN Colonel TAYLOR.
Chief Commissioner of Parks and Palaces.

Mr. AUSTIN LAITARD Lord JOHN MANNERS.

The subjoined, again, are the principal Household
appointments in attendance upon the SOVEREIGN :

Lord Steward.

Earl of BESSBOROUGII Earl of TANKERVILLE.
Lord Chamberlain.

Viscount SYDNEY Earl of BRADFORD.
Master of the Horse.

Marquis of AILESBURY Duke of BEAUFORT.

Mistress of the Robes.
Duchess of ARGYLL Duchess of WELLINGTON.
Master of the Buckhounds.
Earl of CORK.
Only of less importance than the Heads of Depart-
ments themselves, are the Under Secretaries, who are
thus distributed :

Home Under Secretary.

Mr KNATCHBULL-HUGESSEN. Sir JAMES FERGUSSON.

Indian Under Secretary.

Mr. GRANT DUFF Lord album

Foreign Affairs Under Secretary.
Mr. OTWAY.

Colonial Under Secretary.
Mr. WILLIAM MONSELL.... Mr. ADDERLEY.

War Under Secretary.
Lord NoRTHBROOK
Then come those exceedingly important officials, the—
Joint Secretaries of the Treasury.
Mr. GEORGE GLYN
Mr. AYRTON Mr. SCLATER-BOOTH.
While, added to the Second or—
Janior Lord of the Treasury.

Mr. ADAM Sir G. MONTGOMERY.
there has been created now, what there has not been
hitherto—a Third Lord of the Treasury, who
is Mr. STANSFELD. Ailing the President of the
Board of Trade, there is, now under the Right Hon.
JOHN BRIGHT, as there was previously under the Earl
of DEVON, the
Vice-President of the Board of Trade.
Mr. LEFEVRE .
Another high official, whose name ought especially to
be particularised, is the—

Vice-President of the Council.
Mr. WILLIAM FORSTER Lord ROBERT MONTAGU.
The legal appointments, again, were and are the
following :

Attorney-General.

Sir ROBERT COLLIER

Solicitor-General.

Mr. JOHN COLERIDGE
Lord-Advocate for Scotland.

Mr. MONCREIFF Mr. GORDON.

Attorney-General for Ireland.
Mr. SULLIVAN Dr. BALL.

Solicitor- General for Ireland.

Mr. Sergeant BARRY Mr. ORMSBY.
The two grandest appointments of all in the sister
Island, being and having been—
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland,
Earl SPENCER
Lord Chancellor of Ireland,
Mr. Justice O'HAGAN Mr. BREWSTER.

Examining carefully the names of those who have
thus been selected by Mr. GLADSTONE to fill the offices
of dignity or of responsibility under his Government,
we are still of opinion that the names themselves are
not in reason to be objected to, tha tthey are names,
in fact, everything considered, which have been
by him admirably well selected—our only regret
being, to the last, that in this instance several of the
more important on the list of the offices of State
should not have been more judiciously distributed.
Mr. BRIGHT we would far rather have seen Secretary
of State for India than President of the Board of
Trade. In Mr. LOWE we should have preferred to
recognise, instead of our pressnt Chancellor of the
Exchequer, our future Minister of Education, giving
to him to that end the Vice-Presidency of the Coun-
cil, instead of to Mr. W. E. FORSTER, for whom
might more reasonably have been found a seat in the
Cabinet, as Secretary of State for the Colo-
nies. Lord GRANVILLE, instead of being placed
over that department would have far better
filled the port of President of the Council than
the Earl DE GREY and RIPON, who is in no respect
whatever that we can see qualified for it. As for the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, it would have been far
more suitable for Mr. CHILDEP.S than the First Lord-
ship of the Admiralty : while the selection of a Home
Secretary without any seat whatever in the House of
Commons, in the person of Mr. BRUCE, seems to us
not only inadvisable but incomprehensible. More
than anything else, however, as a source of lasting
regret to us in the construction of the new Cabinet,
is the selection by Mr. GLADSTONE of Sir WILLIAM
PAGE WOOD, or rather, as he is now, Baron HATHER-
LEY, as the new Lord High Chancellor instead of
Sir ALEXANDER COCKBURN, the Lord Chief Justice
of England, who, as a brilliant debater, as a profound
lawyer, and as man of unquestionable genius, would
have been in all those respects a worthy successor of
one of the most gifted men who has ever taken his
seat upon the Woolsack.

IT is very rarely that men have an opportunity of
returning to political life after sixteen years' seclusion
from it. Sixteen years constitute a large portion of the
period during which men are fit for political achieve-
ments, and the chances are that a man who absentshim-
self from the arena during that time never returns
to it. The new LORD CHANCELLOR is more happy.
Having spent this period in the judicial calm of Lin-
coln's Inn, he now returns to the stormy contests of
Westminster. He finds that all the measures which
he advocated when he was there before have been
carried. Men called him a Republican then, because
he proposed the measure which the " Constitutional"
party have carried—household suffrage. It was while
the same party were in office that the corn laws and
church rates were abolished, and that Jews were
admitted into Parliament. What lugubrious vati-
cinations these measures excited when Mr. PAGE
WOOD was M.P. for Oxford city; how groundless
those vaticinations are admitted to be even by the
political opponents of Lord Chancellor HATIIERLEY.
It is not the agriculturists who have been destroyed,
but those bad feelings which set one class against
another ; it is not commerce which has been
extinguished, but those fetters by which it was
hampered; it is not religion which has been swept
away, but those hard and fast lines by which the
members of one faith were separated from another;.
and now, by way of finish, the working class have
been admitted within the pale of the Constitution,
and it is not the Constitution which has been broken
down, but only Hyde-park railings.
So much the new LORD CHANCELLOR finds has
been done during the half a generation that he has
been absent from Parliament. But he would be the
last man to affirm that nothing remained to
do. Retrospect was natural enough in his
position, but if he had been contented with retro-
spect he would not have joined the Ministry whose
great fault in the eyes of its opponents is that it
will be dangerously active. The great question of
religious_ equality is the first that will have to be
settled. Education, law reform, pauperism, the
licensing system will follow, and each of these ques-
tions involves work of which a septuagenarian, as
Lord HATIIERLEY very soon will be, cannot
hope to see the completion. They would
occupy us for many a year to come if
we had nothing but domestic affairs to manage.
Unfortunately, there is an outer world with which
we are bound to have relations, and that world just
now is in a very " parlous " state. Lord STANLEY,
the heaven-born Foreign Minister who was supposed
to have set everything to rights, has handed the uni-
verse over to his successor in a most unsatisfactory
condition. We were told only a few days
ago, on the high authority of this Minister

THE SUN, LONDON, SATURDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 12, IE6B.

and of Mr. JOIINSON, that the difficulties between the
Governments of London and Washington had been
overcome; whereas the PRESIDENT of the UNITED
STATES now tells us that he hopes some arrangement
may hereafter be presented to Congress which may
lead to a settlement—a very different thing, espe-
cially as it is assumed at the same time that we have
admitted a condition which we have always
refused to admit. Then there is the Eastern
Question, which Lord STANLEY appears to have
discovered for the first time three weeks ago when
he addressed his constituents at King's Lynn, and
which is now in such a tangle that ships of war are
sailing and armies on the point of marching ; and it
will require all the energies of all the Foreign
Ministers in Europe, to say nothing of Lord
CLARENDON, to postpone an outbreak. The new
tenant of the Foreign Office will find numerous
other matters to engage his attention. Spain,
having got over its first stage of revolution
with unexampled quickness, has now entered
upon the second stage the stage of civil war.
Prussia and France are still looking at each other
with vizors barred and lances in rest. Italy is still
bent upon getting possession of Rome. And then
there is the China dispute, which seems to be
growing more serious every day. Lord STANLEY has
left his successor a good many worlds to conquer.
We only hope that the House of Commons will not
be compelled to-take part in the conquests more than
it can possibly help. It has abundance of other more
fitting and more urgent work to do.

THE BE-ELECTIONS,

THE story of the poisoners of Marseilles,which has
been told in our Paris correspondence, presents some
features of exceptional horror. It is not, indeed,
comparable, either in the magnitude of the results or
the subtlety of the means employed, to some historical
cases of wholesale slaughter. It bears no resemblance
to the famous Roman conspiracy for the poisoning
of husbands which resulted in the execution of
some 170 ladies. It becomes insignificant by the
side of the history of the aqua tofana, a
liquid clear as water, five or six drops of which
would cause death, which was employed by a woman
without discovery for above half a century, and
which is supposed to have caused the death of six
hundred persons. Murder by poisoning, both as a
rude expedient and as an occult act, as an ordinary
instrument of revenge and as a scientific means of
causing death by a process so slow as to xesemble
disease, has been sufficiently common in all ages to
furnish more remarkable examples than these
husband murders at Marseilles. But no instance of
the kind has occurred of late years. Some
recents trials in England—the PALMER, MADELEINE
SMITH, and PRITCHARD cases—have been remarkable
enough to justify the intense excitement caused by
them ; but this is, perhaps, the first instance of death
being bought and sold as an ordinary commodity,
and of victims being disposed of at so much per
head. No such revelations of ignorance, superstition,
and rice have been disclosed at a modern trial. The
history is one of descent to the last extreme of
depravity ; and, unfortunately, it is in some measure
a testimony to the uncertainty of justice against this
mode of slow and secret murder. It is little likely
that these crimes would have been discovered
but for an accident. The victims had been
killed in safety, and some of them had been
buried for some time ; but the imprudence of one of
the guilty women gave a clue to a labyrinth of
crime which was penetrated at length, not by the
police, but by a private individual. Even when
three murders had been disclosed, and seven persons
arrested, the President of the Court expressed the
belief that justice was .still in arrear, and that the
crimes revealed were but a few of the whole number
committed.

The following is a complete list of offices the acceptance
of which will involve the issue of new writs :—First liord
of the Treasury, Secretary of State for War, Chancellor
of the Exchequer, First Lord- of the Admiralty, President
of the Board of Trade, President of the Poor-law Board,
Chief Secretary for Ireland, Attorney and Solicitor-
General for England, Attorney and Solicitor-
General for Ireland, Solicitor-General for Scotland,
Vice-President of the Council for Education, the
English, Scotch, and Irish Lords of the Treasury, the
Chief Commissioner of Works, the Treasurer, the Con.
troller, and the Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal House.
hold, the Lords of the Admiralty, the Judge-Advocate.
General, and the Groom in Waiting to her Majesty.
The whole of these offices have not yet been appro.
priated, but, as a consequence of those which have
been filled, the following constituencies will be
called upon to ratify the appointments :—Green.
wich, which returned Mr. Gladstone ; Oxford,
City, Mr. Cardwell; Lo-Idon University, 11fi • Lowe;
Pontefrac*;, Mr. Childers; Birmingham, M.. Bright;
City of London, Mr. Goschen ; Louth County, Mr.
Chichester Fortescue; Plymouth, Sir Robert. Collier;
Exeter, Mr. Coleridge ; Bradford, Mr. W. E.
Forster ; Halifax, Mr. Stansfeld ; Southwark, Mr.
Layard. Had the Home Secretary and the
Postmaster - General possessed seats in the House
of Commons, they must have vacated them on being
appointed to office ; but seats for Mr. Bruce and Lord
ETartington have yet to be found. Under ordinary circum.
stances, the Lord-Advocate of Scotland would also have
been obliged to seek re-election on his appointment ; but
in the present case there is no necessity for doing so,
inasmuch as Mr. Moncreiff was nominated to his post
before he had been declared elected for the Universities of
Glasgow and Aberdeen. None of the parliamentary
under secretaries have to be re-elected. The secretaries to
the various departments—Treasury, Admiralty, Board of
Trade, and Poor-law Board—enjoy a similar immunity.

The narrative of one murder is really the history
of the others. One of the women, named VILLE, 41
years of age, was married to a linendraper in good
circumstances. The two lived comfortably : the
husband entrusted everything to his wife, who
had the absolute command of the household
purse. Excess of liberty at length proved
a bane. She fell into evil courses, and after a very
dissolute life for some years, formed an attachment
for a mason named MARINO. Her infatuation
became so boundless that she neglected her business
for her paramour, and squandered her money upon
him. Wishing to know whether her attachment was
reciprocated, she consulted a fortune-teller, named
FANNY LAMBERT. It is here that the tragic part
of the story begins. Fortune-tellers gave her the
information she sought. But little by little—in what
manner does not transpire—the idea of poisoning
M. VILLE was conceived, and at length attempted.
The process of murder was begun in February
and lasted until May, the husband suffering
horrible torments the whole of the time. Arsenic
and belladonna were given alternately, so as to change
and confuse the symptoms ; on one occasion, when
suspicion was excited, the process was suspended ; but
it was resumed, and at length the linendraper was
despatched by continued doses of arsenic. Neither the
fortune-teller northe wifewas the moving spirit of this
tragedy. A herbalist of the name of JOYE,
a swindler, wizard, fortune-teller, and finally pro-
fessional poisoner, supplied the drugs, and at the
last directed their use. The fortune-teller wus
merely a subordinate in a business of murder
which was carried on after a regular system.
Superstition and ignorance induced many women of
the lower orders of Marseilles to apply td the fortune-
teller for necromantic aid generally against
troublesome husbands, or on behalf of obstreperous
lovers. They were supplied with charms against
every kind of mischance, and prophecies of every
description of event. When the supernatural failed,
the terribly real was brought into requisition. After
the cabalistic element had proved useless, the
fortune-teller would suggest the expediency of
the herbalist's white powder. Some of the mis-
guided women eagerly embraced the proposal
to murder their husbands in order that they
might marry other men. Some of them hesitated;
but not one to whom the offer was made refused it,
or the crimes would have been disclosed sooner. In
but one case was there the slightest excuse
for the murder, and in this instance the
husband was drunken and idle. The other
women seem to have had exceptionally good
partners. The evil deeds were carried on and con-
secrated by the aid of the supernatural.
The Paris journals might well express the wish, as
they served up this story to their readers, that com-
pulsory education was the law of France. It would
be very hazardous, after our PALMER and
PRITCHARD experiences, to affirm that instruc-
tion would have prevented these crimes ; but the
trial revealed an extremity of moral blindness and
superstition which must have been no small aid to
the arch-fiend JOVE. The women seemed utterly
unconscious of the magnitude of their offence : their
distress arose only from the fact that it had been
discovered. They laboured under the .impression
that they purchased murder just as they purchased
sorcery—only that the former was higher-priced
and more effectual. They bought their commodity
according to their means. The woman VILLE said
she paid £l6O for the four months' slow poisoning ;
whilst another victim cost only £2O. It is beyond
doubt that the trial did not disclose the whole
extent of the trade. Joyit and the fortune-teller
incriminated each other in court. The herbalist
charged the fortune-teller with disposing of numbers
of people during the last visitation of the
cholera, when they disappeared without sus-
picion. The fortune-teller retorted that JOYS
would have poisoned all Marseilles had he been granted
ten years more liberty. Such depravity almost
defies comment. It would not, however, be well to
attempt to conceal the danger of these practices.
There may not be many JOYES in existence,
but the example of CATHERINE WILSON shews
that the species is not confined to this one
example. To some extent the public is at the mercy
of its own morals. This long series of murders was
only terminated by the imprudence of the fortune-
teller. She threw out a hint to the wife
of MARTINO ; the latter made inquiries, and after
a difficult and intricate search found out part of the
truth. The whole truth will never be known. The
moral of the story is, that justice, though a great
agency in the protection of mankind, is not infallible,
nor the only means by which crime can be detected
or averted.