The Weekly Gazette for Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hartlepool and Cleveland District. — 1879-05-24 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

OOO.  GOSSIP. ' (From the Referee.) Two things at present are bad for the British Constitution—the weather and the Government. The weather, which used to be arrangel by the Archbishop of Canterbury, is now one of the principal exports of the United States, and for quality is about the sort of thing one would expect from the laud of wooden nutmegs. The Government is sent, not from America, but from a country many degrees hotter, the general descriptions of wbich may be fairly d. scribed as fla ing accounts." Now, the couetitutiou that the weather attacks can be fortified and guarded, because there is no humbug about the enemy. The cold north-easter comes up to you like a man, roars out its vindictive intentions in your face, and sets about you in an honest if slightly objec. ionable manner. But the Constitation•which the Government attacks is more difficulty to shield. Personal government and underhand legislatiou stab in the dark, smile while they give the murderous till mit, and glide away from your revengful grip like the poisonous reptiles of the tropics. Wine: than that even— an ordinary reptile does not soap its tail to avoid capture; these reptiles do. If the British Constitution is to remain whole and sound while the present aovernment is on the hunt for prey, it must be looked after by men up to every mean and dirty trick in the reptile repository. That it is so looked after I firmly believe. While we have such statesmen as Gladstone and Br:ght. and Lowe; while we have a Liberal Press towering above its Tory rivals alike in learn:ng, ability, information, and power; while we have a population blessed with strong common sense and a religious love for the freedom their fathers won aftei many a hard-fought field, I don't think we need trouble ourselves about the British Constitution and the prerogative of the Crown. Mr Dillwyn's motion is useful as giving a mild hint to political area-sneaks that the policeman has his eye on them, but it is of no serious importance,und might well have been dispensed with.  If her gracious Majesty—who, spite of her whimsical partiality for foreigners and antipathy to the English, is at lwart on EngHAlwoman chooses to give certificates of =arseter to worthless underlings, to compliment blundering commanders on their incompetence, or to send a telegram to India crossed thrice and with four postcripts, let her. It can do no real harm if it does no good. Such letters and such telegrams are about on a par with the cheques for a thousand drawn by stage fathers and presented to stage sous. They are not worth the psper they are wlitten on.  What can it matter what the Queen says er writes? If the country withdraws its confidence, and Humpty Dumpty Frere or Humpty Dumpty Chelmsford has a great fall, all the Queen's letters and all the Queen's telegrams can't put Humpty Dumpty up again. They amuse her, and they don't hurt us. Her Majesty has retired for years from the active discharge of her queenly duties. She keeps no court; she attends no public festivals; she scarcely visits the metropolis at all; she travels about mysteriously veiled and hidden jealously from the vulgar eye, and passes the time in hiding the world from her youthful daughter. Under such circumstances she must amuse herself somehow. TLat this amusement should take the innocent form of scribbling to Viceroys and Generals,and bestowing honours and titles on a political mountebank, is a matter for congratulation and not for Parliamentary ('ensure.  To hear some folks talk one would thick I we were gcing to have a" Reign of Terror"— Parliament abolished, Gladstone knouted, and the Referee seized by Colonel Henderson. Bosh! In two years from this the Beaconsfield burlesque will be over, the clowning comedians of the Cabinet will have danced their last breakdown and cracked their last feeble joke, and the stage, swept and purified, will be handed over to Reason and Liberalism once more. And then we shall laugh heartily at the foolish craze that set some of us crying out about "the royal prerogative." Ditlwyn, my dear, you'd had pork sausages for supper and read "Charles I." in bed the night before you put that motion on paper.