The Sun.
London, England, 1868-12-17 00:00:00

EPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Tunes again attacks the constitutional formula
which requires that members of the Government should
seek re-election after accepting office. It doubts whether
the system of re-electing members of Parliament who
have taken Ministerial office was ever put to an ordeal, on
the whole, so trying as this ; and the result is awkward,
since the system is one of those time-honoured national
institutions which it is almost impossible to defend, at
least on its own merits. How on its own practical merits
any sort of decent defence can be made out for it, we fail
to see. Even its most ardent admirers appear to admit that
in the present position of English politics it is little more
than ornamental, or, if in any way useful, only so as a con-
spicuous monument of a constitutional principle so
important that it should be allowed to run no risk of being
overlooked. But they add that under certain conceivable
circumstances—such, for instance, as the accession to the
British Throne of an able but wrong-headed king—it
might still, with a host of similar contrivances, subserve
the purpose for which it was originally devised, to protect
the people from the too powerful prerogative of the Crown.
Thus—to put a case which, however extreme, does well
nlugh for illustration—if Mr. Gladstone were a dangerous
Minister whom the Queen ought not to have appointed,
Greenwich might now stand between the people and the
Throne, and reject him. But surely Parliament would be
quite capable of keeping the Premier's despotic tendencies
in order without the assistance of Greenwich, and ought
to reflect the general feeling of the country decidely better
than any single constituency? Besides, although it is con-
venient for the argument, it is scarcely fair to assume
that, in any difference of opinion between them,
Greenwich must necessarily be tight and the
Crown wrong. The reverse might happen, and
a Premier approved by the great majority of the
people, as well as by the Crown, might be unseated, and
for a time kept out of his own proper place in the House
of Commons by one small constituency. It is absurd to
suppose that, with the close intercourse now kept up
between members and their constituencies, Parliament
would not reflect the popular feeling better than any one
constituency. Subservience, not absolutism, is in these
days the besetting danger of Parliaments.
The accident to a goods train on the Brighton Railway
suggests to the Daily News some remarks on the carriage
of oils. A North-Western truck, laden with petroleum or
some inflammable oil, bad been passed on to the Brighton
line to be sent to France. The precaution had been taken
to put the barrels in a covered van, or box truck, but as
the train stood at a siding in the darkness, a watchful
guard detected a leakage from the truck, and went lamp
in hand to ascertain its cause. As he stepped into the
vehicle the vapour caught fire, and in an instant he
was enveloped in a sheet of flame which filled the
interior. A fellow-guard helped him out, but he
has since died of his burns, and it is only too probable
that his gallant rescuer may not recover from the injuries
he received. It is impossible to say that anybody was to
blame for this calamity; but its accidental nature suggests
whether explosive and combustible oils ought to be carried
by railway at all. They can hardly have special trains to
themselves, and they will always be sources of danger to
any trains by which they are sent, and to the whole traffic
of the line. But why need they go by rail at all ? The
country is covered with a network of canals which still
carry some of the heavy traffic. Would it he a severe
hardship if the carriage of explosive oils were limited to
them? It makes all the difference in the danger that the
one class of traffic is by fire and the other by water ; and
the slower movement of water carriage would only
render it needful that orders should be given a day or two
earlier.

The Times considers Mr. Reverdy Johnson's speech at
the Fishmonger's banquet as decisive in the matt, r of the
Alabama difficulty. The telegraphic abstract of the
President's Message informed us that there were some
points in the proposed arrangement from which the United
States Government withheld their assent, soil we desired
to be further informed whether these points were of
primary or of subordinate importance. If the main
principles of a treaty are agreed upon, there can be no doubt
the two Governments will be able to adjust matters of detail.
We are glad, therefore, to find that Mr. Johnson renews,
in the most unqualified terms, the encouraging assurances
he had previously expressed. The fear that there exists
.any insuperable impediment to a settlement is, he declares,
" all a delusion." " There is not," he says," the most remote
possibility that the friendship between the two countries
will not be fixed upon a firm and endurable basis." He
repeats that "there is not the most distant expectation"
of a failure ; and he hopes no one will endeavour by
a report to the contrary to depress the English or American
funds. In the face of these statements there ought no
longqr to be any doubt of the successful result of the
negotiations. Mr. Johnson has, of course, been in
communication withhis Government, and is fully acquainted
with their views. He knows also the point beyond which
we are not prepared to go ; and when he asserts so
positively that there is not the in st remote possibility
of disagreement, we are bound to regard the question as
virtually settled.

The Standard thinks the correspondence between Mr.
Coniugsby, on behalf of the working men of London, and
Mr. Reverdy Johnson is an episode at once painful and
ludicrous in the contemporary history of our relations with
America. Among the various insults to which the

American ambassador has been subjected, while in this
country upon a mission of peace, from the Radical party
and their organs, perhaps the most flagrant as well as
ingenious one is this last—to ask Mr. Reverdy Johnson
to dinner, and then to put him off upon the ground
that he is not popular among his own countrymen. The
exquisite bad taste, paltriness of spirit, and effrontery of
this proceeding are quite in keeping with the more
deliberate attempts which have been made by the Radical
press in England to discredit Mr. Reverdy Johnson, and
to bring his mission into contempt. First to ask a man
to dinner, and then to tell him he is not good enough
company, is as bad a compliment in the abstract as any-
one can pay his neighbour. To treat a stranger so
in a foreign country is a refinement of snobbishness.
But the so-called working men of London have managed
to surpass even this almost impossible feat of shabbiness.
They asked Mr. Reverdy Johnson to dinner, being a
visitor charged with the representation of the United
States in England, and after deliberate consideration of
all the circumstances, including a careful scrutiny of Mr.
Reverdy Johnson's personal character, they tell him, in
almost as many words, that he must not come to their
dinner because certain of his acts are not agreeable to the
majority of his countrymen at home.

The Herald says that Mr. Johnson and the working
classes of England are not alienated one from another. It
was a clique which invited him ; it was a coterie which
rescinded the'invitation. We beg the American Minister
not to misjudge this incident. It denotes nothing, except
that the peculiar conceits of certain insignificant cabals
generally result in confusion. We wonder where the
balance of loss lies—with the diplomatist who has lost his

dinner, or with the gentlemen who have thus bonnetted
their opportunity of self-display?

The Telegraph rather roughly disposes of the pretensions
of Greece. The plain truth is, that the Hellenic Kingdom
has not been such an acquisition to the modern comity of
nations as to induce other Powers, for its sake, to acquiesce
in a glaring outrage on international usages. A nation
may be judged, not by what it has done, but by what it
is expected to do ;" such has been the standard applied to
modern Greece, and she has fallen far below the ideal.
Looking back to the high hopes that were formed on the
morrow of Navaho°, and comparing the Greeks
of 1829 with those of to-day, it is impossible to
disguise the fact that if independent Greece is not an
actual failure, she has at least grievously disappointed
expectation. The last forty years have done much in the
lives of nations. Within that period more than one
continental kingdom has sprung into buoyant life ;
Italy has revived from the sleep of centuries ; and the
scattered members of the Teutonic family are uniting
into one. But for Greece there has been no resurrec-
tion. Greece was " living Greece no more" in the days
of Byron, and she is dead still—dead to the tradi-
tions of an imperishable past, to the glorious
incentives supplied by a living and advancing
Present to the sense of national honour, to the promptings
of a noble ambition. She contributes nothing to the
artistic or industrial resources of modern civilisation ; she
appears as utterly lost to all sense of the beautiful, the
true, and the elevating, as she was when the heavy flail of
Ottoman tyranny beat crouching peasants to the dust, and
the fishermen of Hydra were driven to man the Turkish
galleys in more than one deadly struggle against the flags
of Christendom.

Reform questions are the subject of many notices of
motion that have already been made in Parliament. It is
now indisputable, says the Post, that the abolition of
composition has been attended, as it was always said
it would he, by great inconvenience both to rate-
collectors and ratepayers, and by enormous hardship
to the latter. 'The fine, however, which has been paid
for the vote by the poorer tenants this general election
will hardly be endured till the next, and Mr. H. B.
Hieridan's proposed bill to repeal the obnoxious clause
of the Reform Act, although it will no doubt be met
with cOnshlerable oppo.:iti‘.o. will in all proCability be
passed at an early period of the session. At any rate,
of the advisability of reaoring the power of making
compositions there can be no doubt, whatever may
be the opinion as to the policy of carrying with it the prac-
tkal further extendon of the franchise which .Air. Sheridan
Mr. Vernon Harcourt's motion for a committee
to inquire into the Reg.ist, ation Act probably points to the
sane subject, and that, too, will certainly produce some
animated debate, which will, however, require all Mr.
larcourt's own clearness of statement to make the subject
ii.tAigible or palateable to the uninitiated. All these
motions indicate a set determination to bring the Reform
Act once more into question ; and when the inevitablepro-
prosals for the Ballot and the remodelling of the distribu-
tion of members are supplivd the whole case against it will
be completed.

MURDER.

AO,

On Tuesday night a revolting murder was committed
Istar Ackhurst Hall, three miles from Wigan. Mr.
William Houghton (the farm bailiff) and hie wife, who
ived about two hundred yards from the hail, had left
their own house, in which there were five children, for about
►n hour. On their return home, at a distance of thirty or
:arty yards from the door, they saw a white object, which
was at first mistaken for a duck, but which on closer in-
spection was found to be the dead body of their eldest child,
girl of 12. She was covered with blood and dreadfully in-
'med. The parents rushed forward to the house, calling for
die second daughter, Catherine, aged 9, but for a short
;ime she could not be found. She was at last heard calling
timidly from behind a hedge, " Is that you, mother? " The
:hild was at once taken to the house. She said that a short
:ime after her father and mother had gone out a man,
-tether taller than her father, and apparently a collier,
appeared at the door and asked if William Houghton
ived there. Her eldest sister said that he did, but he
was then down at the Hall ; and no sooner had she
•eplied than, raising a heavy hammer, he struck her
I violent blow on the forehead. She ran round the
ritchen, and he put sued her, striking her with the
hammer, which cut her dreadfully. She ran out by
;be open door, and tried to escape to the Hall, but the
man went after her and her screams ceased, she, no doubt,
being killed by another blow from the hammer. The man
then returned to the house, where the younger sister had
remained in great terror. He struck her on the back of
the head with the hammer, and then dealt her several
plows on the shoulders, but he did not stun her. He then
..00k her by the throat, and, after squeezing it tightly,
;brew her over into the pasture-field, where she lay, bruised
end terrified, not daring to move until she heard her
mother's voice. An infant lay unharmed in a cradle
II the kitchen, and upstirs two children (boys)
were in bed, but had heard nothing of what occurred.
An examination of the house shewed that the murderer,
after thus disposing of the children, had put his hammer
m the dresser, on which its form was marked with blood,
end had then passed into the parlour, where he had ran-
' tacked the drawers. The only article of value he ob-
i;aimed was a silver watch which had been left in a small
:asket, and from which he had detached the riband that
served as a guard. The money kept in the house was up-
stairs, and evidently he had not been there, for the drawers
lad not been disturbed. Information was at once sent
o the Pemberton Police-station, and Superintendent
Ellison was promptly on the spot. Mr, Huet, surgeon,
)f.Upholland, was also in attendance, and dressed the
wounds which the younger girl had received. She gave a
description of the man, which was at once circulated
through the whole district. On Wednesday morning, as
soon as the day broke, an active search was commenced
for the hammer, and one was found in a wheat-field about
150 yards from the house. A number of long hairs were
sticking to the iron, and when the weapon was shewn to
the surviving girl, she at once said it was that with which
she and her sister were struck. Mr. Parkinson, the
anderlooker of a colliery close by, recognised the hammer
is one he left at the smithy at half-past five on Tuesday
night. A reward of £5O has been offered for the app.
pension of the murderer.