The San Francisco call., 1896-03-29


final tussle. II they fail something more
than the fate of the Ministry is not un-
likely to be pitched into the melting pot
In other words, there will be dead set to
drive Faure from the Elysee as well.
What effect BertheIot's retirement will
have on the possible crisis it is difficult to
guess. So long as England played the
game of French reconciliation, he seemed
to be the ideal foreign Minister, but the
emergency of England's sudden shifting
found him lacking in diplomatic expe-
rience and calm, and the French polltl-
clans seeing that he was, after all, only an
amateur began humping on him. SO
Bourgeois had been compelled to throw
him overheard.
The Germans have been having their
fill lately of quarter-century celebrations.
and have yawned percepnbly over some of
them, but none fell to the same level of
public contempt as the twenty-tifth ami
versary of the first session of the Reicns-
tag. 1t was only after a prodigions amount
of correspondence and bargaining that
majority of the mem bers could be induced
to meet one another at a formal banquet,
and the only toasts that they agreed to
allow were to the Emperor and to Bis
marck, who may hardly be said to typty
the triumph of the parliamentary idea OF
popular interest in the event.
There was not the slightest sign, and the
press comment on the thing was almost
universally disdainful. Eugene Richter,
in the Freisinnige Zeitung, says that after
twenty-five years OF the Reichstag Ger
many is more split and divided by fac
tions, jealousy and hatreds than it was be-
fore the empire was founded, and nobody
contradlcts him.
Bismarck's specific ailments are not
more active than usual. but his general
strength is failing. and his eighty-first
birthday, Wednesday, will be kept very
quietly. Only torchlight march of the
Ham burg Society is to be permitted in
side the Friedrichsruhe grounds this year,
all the other organized pilgrimages being
warned off.
The vast crowds which gathered in the
streets of Constantinople this week to
watch the arrival of Prince Ferdinand of
Bulgaria and his subsequent public move
ments have surprised everybody who
knows Stamboul. They are said to have
far exceeded anything in any ones recol-
lection.
No one suggests satisfactory theory of
its special meaning, but the fact itself i'm
pressed the Imagination. The Sultan has
paid extraordinary honor to his visitor,
who will return TO Sofia with a recognized
dynastic position, and apparently with a
Ru sso-Turkish mandate to 60 ahead and
make of himself the biggest man in the
Balkans. 1t is said that IN Stamboul the
Turks pointed him out to one another as a
prince who some day would be ruling
them and hearing the Greek mass in st.
Sofia. That Ferdinand would cut the Sui
tan's throat as readily as STAN buloff' 8
need not be doubted, and that his ambi-
tions reach to the Bosphorus may be
taken for granted, but be he ever so able
and audacious, Russia is more capable and
merciless still and when she has used him
to her needs she Will break him like reed.
II the medical faculty were recognized
enemies of the human race there could
hardly be louder expression of general
| Joy than is called forth by the jury's ver-
dict yesterday of $50, 900 damages against
the eminent and fashionable DR.. Playfair
for using knowledge obtained by profess
sional examination TO discredit and i'm
poverish the poor lady who is his wife s
sister-in-law and had an allowance from
his wifes family. The development of
the case during the week excited all Eng
land, and it is hard to say whether the
revelations of treacherous meanness inside
the Playfair family or the spectacle of
some OF the most famous physicians in
London coming up one by one supporting
10 -Foir 1rh 2 nd
dlsgusted the enraged public. The dam
| ages are by far the heaviest on record for
| SANDER, but the jury arrived at the sum
| by capitallzing at 81 per cent the allow
ance of $1,000 which DR.. Playfair's perfidy
robbed Mrs. Kitson of, and it Is hard to
see how an appeal can upset that. 1t
| should be added that the verdict is every
where taken as meaning not only that DR..
| Playfair's ethics are abominabl BILE, but that
his professional diagnosis which i'm puted
dishonor to tie plaintiff is no good.
| l suspect that if human motives could
| be laid bare 1t would be discovered that
there is prevalent here just now popular
anger against doctors in general, directly
| due to the arbitrary muzzling laws and
the consequent wholesale slaughter of dogs
which we owe to panic about rabies
stirred up by the medical press. Within
the past three months nearly $4,000 dogs
have been asphyxiated and cremated al
the dogs home in Battersea alone, and
similar butchery is going on all over the
country. AS Englishmen love dogs rather
more than they do their own children-oI
at least are more solicitous about their
diet and comfort-this harrying of pets
amounts to a national grievance, and nat
urally the blame for it is put on the doc
tors, who, it is said, spread entirely fabu.
| lous reports of hydrophobia for their own
| benefit. Indeed, half of the people in
| England seem to be coming around to the
| beliefthat there IS no such disease at all.
Speaking of dogs, an ex-Cabinet Minis
! ter, who knows the Queen very well, told
me the other day that she takes the keen
| est interest in this Battersea dogs home
| and in similar institutions, and that she is
especially vehement in antagonism to
vivisection. OF his own knowledge, he
said, whenever an anti-vivisection society
seemed to be tagging in its public propa-
| ganda, its noble chairman got personal
letter from the Queen stirring it up to