The Atherstone, Nuneaton, and Warwickshire Times. — 1883-06-09 (Atherstone, Warwickshire, England)

BROMLEY DAVENPORT, M.P., AS A  PROPHET.  Writing in the Nineteenth Century on "Fox Hunting," Mr. W. Bromley Davenport. Conservative member for North Warwickshire, brings his article to a close with the following melancholy prognostications : " Who shall pierce the veil of the future I, As with the individual so I think it 18 with nations. They, too, when they grow old should preserve,or at least not too remorselessly extinguish, their follies. I fear lest in grasping at the shadow of national perfection we only Wain the reality of a saturnalia of prigs—apotheosis of claptrap. Legislation has performed such queer antics lately that the angels must be beginning to weep. And ugly visions sometimes haunt me of a time coming, which shall be a good time to no man, at least to no Englishman, when an impossible standard of pseudo-philanthrophy and humanitarian morality shall be attempted ; when the butcher shall lie down with the lamb, the alderman with the turtle, and the oyster shall not be eaten without amethesties ; when nature itself shall be under the eye of the police, and detectives watch the stoat's pursuit of the rabbit and keep guard over spiders' webs ; when all property (and not in land alone, my advanced friend !) save that of hardware magnates,who have made a monopoly and called it peace, shall be confiscated as an 'unearned increment' to the State; when we have by legislative enactment Vrbidden the prevention and sanctioned the admission of loathsome diseases, and antifoxhunting ma 3 be as loud a cry as anti-vaccination; when there is a Parliament on College Green: when the 'languishing nobleman' of Dartmoor is free, and repossessed of his broad acres,which in his case alone, because they so clearly belong to someone else, shall escape confiscation ; when, as a final climax to our national madness, we have employed science to dig a hole under the sea, and, by connecting us with the Continent, deprive us of the grand advantage which nature has given IP, and which has conferred on us centuries of envied stability, while thrones were rocking and constitutions sinking all around us ; when, had] tx already passed laws not only to prohibit our children being educated with the knowledge and fear of God before their eyes, but even to forbid His very name to be mentioned in our schools, we deliberat.dy and scornfully abandon our ancient reliaion and admit proclaimed infidelity and public blasphemy to the sanction, recognition, and approval of Parliament—then indeed we need not wonder if we lose not only our national sports, but our national existence ; and if Divine Providence, giving practical effect to the old quotation— Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat— allows England. after passing through the phases of insanity which she has already begun to display, to be blotted out from the nations of the world."  A Cabinet Council was held on Saturday, in Downing-street, all the Ministers being present ex cept Earl Spencer. The Marquis of Ripon has been elected a member of the National Liberal Club, in accordance with his own wishes communicated from India.  The Observer says that the Government, having had five weeks' Supply voted, will now devote all the available time to making progress with bills. The Corrupt Practices and the Agricultural Holdings Bills will be pushed forward. On Saturday morning the wife of Philip Davenport, blacksmith, of Bollington, near Macclesfield, was arrested on the charge of murdering her three children, aged respectively eight, six, and four years, by drowning them in the canal.