The Express. — 1867-12-14 (London, England)

THE WEEKLY PRESS.  The Saturday Review believes it to be a truth that catholicism is gaining strength in France. The priests tight for the ten.porel power as for • symbol of their authority, and an object which they have agreed to think absolutely indispensable to their church, and the recent vote of the church ought to be set down clearly as a clerical victory. But it was not only a clerical victory. It was also meant as an assertion of a particular line of secular policy. If the present storm blows over, the action of France may possibly not be quite so decided as the Chamber has now resolved it shall be ; but, for the immediate future, it is difficult to exaggerate the gravity of the situation in which France has placed Italy and herself by the triumph of H. Thies. After years of energetic foreign action Napoleon has succeeded in restoring the isolation which be bated and feared so much. Het has made Germany and Italy feel that he Is hostile to their development. He has exasperated Russia by touching, without settling, the Polish question. He has alienated America, frightened Belgium, and deserted Denmark. His ministers pretend to have won over Austria ; but Austria seems very unlikely now to commit herself to any anti-German enterprise. - . . .  The Examiner complains that neither in legislation or in administration has Ireland the benefit of constitutional government. No man has depicted in more telling terms than the present Chancellor of the Exchequer the painful exigencies of the " Irish question ;" and no man knows better than he how worse than vain it is to hope for peace, prosperity, or contentment while that question remains unsolved. Yet not an effort or a proposal worthy of the name is made in parliament by the existing Ministry to mitigate the social and sectarian injustice which has driven so large a portion of an oppressed community mad. As for the executive, it is helpless, save only to chase and cage a few of the political lunatics here and there ; but as for general measures of cure, Lord Aberoorn and his advisers do not appear to have so much a• thought of them. We read in the Spectators—Frederick Raker, the attorney's clerk who cut up a little girl at Alton, has been sentenced to death, and the day of his execution bar been fixed. No one doubts his guilt, or that his guilt deserves the highest penalty, but serious doubts are entertained of his sanity. He was always esteemed peculiar, and so strong was his tendency to suicide, that he wee watched on one occasion by a policeman through a long walk. His father years ago bad an attack of acute mania, with homicidal tendencies, and another relative is now in an asylum for the came reason. Then the act itself, in its motiveless atrocity, is not that of a sane man, and the entry of the murder in the prisoner's own diary can be explained on no theory except that of insanity. It is urged, on the other hand, that his fellow-clerks saw no insanity in him, and that he knows right from wrong; but the doubt in the cane seems too strong to justify execution. Until our whole theory of punishment is changed, we cannot hang the mad without unsettling all the principles of the public mind. We might as well hang a man for a murder in his sleep, or for tumbling off a roof on to a puler-by. There m►y be danger to society without moral responsibility, but there cannot be guilt.  The Royal Botanic Society announces, amongst its arrangements for 1868, an exhibition of spring flowers, to continue during one week, from March 21st to March 28th ; an American exhibition, to continue from June Ist to June 13th ; and three miscellaneous exhibitions of plants, flowers, and fruit, to be held respectively on May 27th and 28th, June 17th and 18th, and July lit and 2nd. There will also be lectures at the gardens on the following Fridays :—May 15th, 22nd, 29th ; June sth, 12th, 19th, 26th ; July 3rd.  An Italian journal states that a number of the citizens of Spoleto (in the former territory of the Holy See) have sent the subjoined telegraphic despatch to M. Jules Favre :—" The volunteers and citizens of Spoleto, assembled at a fraternal banquet, send to you a heartfelt greeting—to you, the intrepid and magnanimous defender of Italy, as well as to your friends in the Legislative Body, and to Liberal Frame."