Morning journal and courier., 1881-10-07
Price Four Gents.
ated in 1724 and resumed the crown the

cated in 1724 and resumed the crown the 1 same year. Don Alfonso, however, is as fond of au- thority as his mother, and it is Q ludicrous mistake to suppose he has ever received or 1 ders from Paris since he quilted that city to 1 ascend the throne of his ancestors It was on
 a December day, one of the first in the year 1874, that Gen. Martinez Campos proclaimed him King in Valencia. He was evidently | taken by surprise when knelt to, and hardly l expected to have his hand kissed. ''Sire' was as yet unfamiliar sound to his ears But he soon recovered himself and talked like Sixth Form Etonian who is member | of "Pop'' and reads the Tunes. He did not ! fail to make the trite remark that Spain was one of the oldest constitutional countries in
 the world. At the moment the great news | was brought him he was reading Macaulay's l Essay on Give in the original. Close beside
 him was treatise, just laid aside, on fortif- l cations. Since that day he has had scant I leisure for books, but has profited immense 1 ly by the practical instruction in political l science which he has now received during the better part of seven years.
 Talk to Don Alfonso on the condition of | his kingdom and you will get from him the | refined expression of all that political philos- 1 ophy has to say about the subject, and you will be saddened by the reflection that that all Is very little. The crowned descendant of Louis XIV. and Charles V. is a man of cul- ture, ands what is better, of heart. Joseph Smith was an illiterate impostor. But Joseph Smith founded Mormonism, which, with all its faults, IS an evangel of york; sobriety and prayer. King Alfonso will found noth- ing; too happy It he can transmit an unbro- ken sceptre to his successor. He is smtten, like most sovereigns of our day, with intellect ual impotence; the fire which might have blazed in him smothered by the heaps of coal. The moral is certainly not that ed ucation is bad for King, but that the right sort is required. Old Frederick William knew what he was about when he positively interdicted his son the study of Latin. He understood that the youth of princes, and of other mortals, is short and that there is no time for the acquisition of all knowledge, however desirable such possession might be. Had Alfonso been taught nothing but to speak fuently, to act promptly, and to
 handle an army in the field or regiment in
 the streets, he might have proved the despair
 of parliamentary wire-pullers and paper
 constitution makers, out he might also have
 pulled Spain clean out of her slough of de-
 spondency and bankruptcy. On the other
 hand he might equally have proved an un-
 manageable despot. You cannot make Q
 good King to order, though you can certain
 ly mar one. Perhaps Alfonso is best as he
 is. If unable to achieve great things, he
 can do no serious mischief even if he would.
 and by sitting the throne prevents a
 worse from filling it. Not hero king, but
 at all events gentleman king.
 The Landsltp i'm Switzerland.
 The Geneva correspondent of the London
 Ttmes sends the following account of the re- cent catastrophe at Elm by which between one hundred and fifty and two hundred lives
 were lost:
 s'Next to the rain the chief cause of the terrible catastrophe which has overwhelmed Elm is said to be injudicious quarrying for slate, whereby the mountain was in part un- dernined and so rendered unsafe. Some AI, C1xvw oEl were observed, and the cantonal forest mas ter Herr Seei warned the proprietors of the quarries that they were carrying on their ex- cavations beyond the bounds of safety. The work went on without interruption until last Thursday, when the premonitions of disaster became so alarming that all the men were withdrawn from the quarries yet no one seems to have thought the village was in dan, ger until Sunday afternoon, when, as the people were coming from church, quantity of stones rolling from the Ischingel crushed several houses in Unterthal nearest the foot of the Alps. Ten minutes later came the great catastrophe; thunderous noise rent the air, black dust-cloud overspread the val ley and all was still In those two or three seconds Unterthal had disappeared, and with it were buried nearly every one of the un- fortunates who a few minutes previously were worshipping in the village church. Scarcely any, in fact, who on the first alarm crossed the Sernft, either out of curiosity or fear to lend helping hand to those whose houses had been struck, escaped and they include nearly all the manhood of the village The proprietor Of the Elm Hotel was thrown by the concussion of air from the iron bridge over the Sernft into the stream and drowned His brother, who had reached the Unterthal side, crushed beneath fragment of rock In one house there christening party of fifteen persons, mostly kinsfolk, all of whom, save the child's father, were killed at one stroke he was bereft of family rela- tivesyand estate. His house is gone, and his fields are buried under the wreck of the mountain. From the first, rescue, though energetically attempted, was seen to be hopeless; rocks and earth piled over Unterthal to height of 50 feet, and the area covered by the debris is computed at from six to eight square miles, The statement that two or three of the victims had been taken from the ruins alive has not been con- frmed, and the dead are mutilated beyond the possibility of recognition. It adds another pangto the grief of the bereaved to know that even if their dead should be found they will be unable to claim them.
 ttA correspondent of the Ne1Ge Zu1Tc1ter Zeitung, who visited Elm on Tuesday, des- cribes the scene as weird, wild and melan- choly beyond the power of words to express. Above the rolling clouds which hung about the skirts of the mountains rose the white summit of the Plattenberg Every few min utes great fragment of rock thundered down the side of the Tshingler Alp. Where Unterthal had been was mass of stones and earth as high the church steeple. great part of the village on the other side of the stream was under water, and the Sernft, forced from it's bed was vainly dashing itself against the Instructions that barred it's way. Through driving rain men were carrying shapeless bodies and laying them in the church, one of the few buildings which have escaped destruction. weeping woman search ing among the ruins for some vestige of her lost little ones and an old man, whose wife, children and grandchildren had all perished together, was wandering about needless of everything, praying that the rocks might crush him also. But except these two the villagers, fearing another earthslip, had hed''