The Cannock Chase Examiner. — 1874-07-04 (Cannock, Staffordshire, England)

THE EXAMINER  SATURDAY, JULY 4, 1874.  NEWS OF THE WEEK.  • The Emperor of Russia has banished the Grand Duke Nicholas for life to the Caucasus, and taken from him the Cross of St. George awarded for services in the Ehivan campaign. The declaration of the poll for Galway borough was made on Tuesday. Mr. Ward, the Home Rule candidate, was elected by a majority of 438 over Mr. Monahan, his Liberal opponent. The Welsh Eisteddfod was commenced on Tues. day, at Coeppoeth, near Wrexham; Sir Watkin Williams Wynn presiding. The favourite vocalist Miss Edith Wynne is one of the principal singers. On Tuesday, five men were suffocated by foul air while descending a shaft at the East London Railway works, at Wapping, and were taken out dead. At a cloth mill, at Dewsbury, one man was killed, and three others were fatally injured, through the breaking of a steam hoist. A Norfolk oorrespondent of the Morning Post states that at seven o'clock on the morning of the 31st instant—the longest day—he took off a sheet of ice one-eighth of an inch thick, and that the potatoes in his district were on that morning widely injured and partially destroyed. A Frenchman named De Groof ascended from Cremorne Gardens, on Monday evening, with Mr Simmons, the aeronaut, to zest a flying machine of which the former is the inventor. After being I released from the car, M. De Groof and his , machine beat the balloon in a race by two fields' length, and descended safely.  An English narrative by two conspicuous memhers of the Paris Commune, who succeeded in escaping, with M. Rochefort, from New Caledonia, has been published in the Times. All the political prisoners, it appears, are not at the Peninsula Dims, the Isle of Pines, at Nouraea, or in the mines. Three hundred among them, bearing a harder lot still, have been condemned to hard labour, and are at the "Bagne," or galleys, mingled with the vilest of miscreants. What are the motives which have dictated those terrible aggravations it would he difficult to say. When a man arrives at the " Hague " he loses his individuality ; he is shaved, dressed in a special uniform, chained up by the leg, known by a number, and put to the hardest labour. He becomes a machine, but a machine which feels and suffers. The convict is the Thing of his overseer or ' "ganger." This one " thee " and "thous" him, outrages him, knocks him about, without the slave's having anything to say. Dare he show his pain, or his anger, by even a single gesture, ' by a word, a shot from a revolver levels him stiff to the ground, and the ganger bas not to answer to any one for this murder. The life of the convict is summed up in two words—work, suffering. Up by daybreak, he passes his days in the Government dockyards, occupied, under a scorching sun, in the most laborious of work. His salary is nought, or so slender as not even to be enough to procure him tobacco; his food filthy and scanty. At night he sleeps on a camp bedstead with nineteen other unfortunate ones like himself, riot a moment of solitude and of self-communing, or of respite. Sunday is set apart for washing, and Catholic offices, compulsory to him, whatever may be his faith. He can write but one letter per month, and receive but one reply; both are opened, and can only treat of questions of health. He is classed in one of the four categories of condemned, according to the marks he receives from his overseers. The first exists, as may be said, only in name; the semnd, very limited, is composed of convicts who can be authorised to leave the Hague in order to serve as slaves to the governor and to the high and low bureaucricy; the third is the most numerous; the fourth the hardest. There are in New Caledonia about 7.000 convicts distributed among the central Bag-ne of the island of Non the camps dispersed all over the The convict is subjected to the most tortures. imaginable. The "cat" is  applied twic.a week, and as for the ~. it is not unknown to the poor wretches, adding:—" We have often seen convicts wor) on the Peninsula Ducos who had lost one or _ .