[JULY. COMMERCIAL RECORD. BANKRUPTS. From the Gazette of June 28,-JOSEPH BOYCOT, Kidderminster, draper.-GEORGE HOLMES and HENRY HOLMES, Derby, ironmongers.-WILLIAM JONES, Bristol, stationer.-JOSEPH MOORE, Hanover Street, Islington, victualler.-MOSES WRANGLE, Boston, Lincolnshire, cabinet-maker. July 2-JOHN BULL, South-Audley Street, ship-owner.JAMES CORBETT, Llantillio Pertholey, Monmouthshire.THOMAS EDWARDS, Newport, Monmouthshire, ironfounder.-SAMUEL LAVINGTON, Devizes, grocer.-JOSEPH LOMAS, Manchester, warehouseman.--THOMAS LUCKES, Exeter, provision dealer.-CLEMENT NUTTALL, Bacup, Lancashire, innkeeper. -WILLIAM RIDLER, Cowlersley, Yorkshire, contractor for public works. EDWARD BEVAN THOMAS, Leominster, wine-merchant. July 5.-JOSEPH BOYCOT, Kidderminster, draper.-THOMAS BROADBENT, Halifax, Yorkshire, draper.-SARAH DAY, Coventry, ribbon manufacturer.-GEORGE FULLER, Poultry, City, auctioneer-JOSEPH NASH and THOMAS NEALE, Reigate and Dorking, Surrey, bankers.-ROBERT HARDMAN PARKINSON, Manchester, warehouseman.-JOHN RYAN, Mark-lane, City, and Manor-lane, Bermondsey, manufacturing chemist.-JAMES THOMPSON, Manchester, cement and gunpowder-dealer. July 9.-NEVILLE BROWN, Hounslow heath, licensed victualler. -THOMAS DALTON, Coventry, silk-dyer.-GEORGE WILLIAM LAIR, Landport, Hampshire, auctioneer.-JOHN BUDGE SPARKE, Torquay, Devonshire, hatter.--JOHN TAYLOR, jun., Littleworth, Gloucestershire, licensed victualler.-JOHN WALLACE, Carlisle, grocer. WILLIAM GEORGE DENNETT WALLIS, Grove-pl., Lissongrove, bill-broker. July 12.-WILLIAM CLARIDGE, Bromley St. Leonard, Middlesex, butcher.-CHARLES GARLICK, Charterhouse-sq., Manchester, warehouseman.-JAMES HENRY GILL, Plumber's-row, City-rd., grocer.-JOHN JONES, Brynmawr, Breconshire, coal merchant.GEORGE WILLIAM LAW, Landport, Hants, auctioneer.-THOMAS ROLLASON, and WILLIAM BURMAN, Birmingham, glass and china dealers.-BURROWES WILCOCKS ARTHUR SLEIGH, Bedford-st., Strand, and Thurlow-sq., Brompton, newspaper proprietor.SAMUEL WILKES, Birmingham, clock-dial maker.-Joshua WOODWARD, Loxley, Yorkshire, paper manufacturer. July 16.-EDWARD ROBSON ARTHUR, North Shields, shipowner.-GEORGE COLSTON BAYLIS, Cardiff, dealer in flour.FRANCIS BLANCHARD and WILLIAM PASSMORE, Leeds, tailors.THOMAS DALTON and THOMAS EDWARDS, Birmingham, ironfounders.-HENRY HART DAVIS, Battersea, Surrey, builder.WILLIAM DAYMENT, Christian-st., St. George's in the East, tailor.-GEORGE KNIGHT, Worthing, Sussex.-SAMUEL NICHOLSON, York, trader.-JOHN VANDERSLUYSE SCANTLEBURY, Conduit-st. East, Paddington, carpenter.-JOHN SCORAH, Pontefract, Yorkshire, seed-merchant.-JOHN SHARROCK, Toxteth Park, Lancashire, licensed-victualler.-JOHN WELCH, Ashby-de-la Zouch, Leicestershire, draper,-SAMUEL WILKES, Birmingham, clock-dial-maker.-THOMAS WILLIAMS, Trowbridge, Wilts, auctioneer.-WILLIAM MINTER WOOD, Dover, hosier. July 19.-TIMOTHY BOURNE BOURNE, Liverpool, cotton-broker. -THOMAS DYSON, Hardinge-terrace, Newington, railway-contractor.-GILBERT FINLAY GIRDWOOD, Maida-hill, chemist.GEORGE SHEPHEARD, Modbury, Devonshire, linen-draper. July 23. ROBERT DAY BUST, Reading, Berkshire, auctioneer. -WILLIAM WARD EVANS, Ludlow, Shropshire, butcher.EDWARD FOSTER, Chesterton, Cambridgeshire, agricultural machinist.-RALPH HAMMOND, Macclesfield, inn-keeper.-WILLIAM HASLAM, Hertford, chemist. -JOHN HAYWARD, Hisland, Shropshire, scrivener.-EDWARD ROUND and WILLIAM ROUND, Tipton, Staffordshire, timber-merchants. -RALPH NUTTALL, Macclesfield, silk manufacturer. July 26. THOMAS BINCKES, Brunswick-place, Blackheath, dealer in Berlin wools.-CHARLES BUNYARD, Mark-lane, City, seedsman.-ROBERT FAIRLEY, Sunderland, chemist.-GEORGE GARRARD, Saxmundham, Suffolk, ironmonger.-DIRK HORATIO HALEY, Lodge-road, Birmingham,, ironfounder. - WILLIAM RAYNHAM, Ladbrooke-road, Notting-hill, builder. BANKRUPTCIES ANNULLED. THE STOCK AND SHARE MARKETS. PROVISIONS-LATEST WHOLESALE PRICES. Bacon, per cwt.-Waterford, Beef, per 8 lbs., mid. to prime, 28. to 28. 10d. 12s. per 12 lbs.; Carlow, 1st, Cheese, per cwt.-American, 348. to 43s.; Dutch (Gouda), Hams, per cwt.-American, Essex Shaws, 65s. to 80s.; GROCERY-LATEST WHOLESALE PRICES. July 16. WILLIAM BRANSCOMBE, Blandford, Dorsetshire, com- Cocoa, per cwt.-Trinidad, 35s. City, July 27. Rice, per cwt., Bengal white, 98. to 128.; Java, 11s. to 12s. 6d. Sago, per cwt., Pearl, 19s. to 24s. 51s. 6d. good Jamaica, Tea, per lb. (duty 2s. 1d.), ord. Congou, 10d.; Souchong, com. to fine, 11d. to 2s. 8d.; ord. to fine Hyson, 1s. 2d. to 38. 6d. Imperial, 1s. 2d. to 2s. 6d. The English Stock Market has been very quiet during the month, but the tone has been very firm, and an improvement of nearly one per cent. has been established. Our last monthly review left Consols at 96 to ex. div.; from this point they moved steadily upwards till the 5th inst., when the price touched 97; but a few days after, the unsettled aspect of the question pending between Denmark and the Duchies began to exercise Candles, per 12 lbs. 4s. 6d. to 5s. | Coals, per ton, 133. to 16s. 6d. an influence on the market, causing some degree of flatness. Prices have since rallied, however, and Consols are now quoted 963 to . Sperm, 84l. to 851. The Railway Share Market has not been so steady this month, the prices of all descriptions having receded, to a greater or less | Cod, 351. OILS. Palm. 281. to 291. Published at the Office, No.16, Wellington Street North, Strand; and Printed by BRADBURY & EVANS, Whitefriars, London. Monthly Supplement to "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," Conducted by CHARLES DICKENS. MR. SHANDY held all kinds of swearing to be bad, and would have been confirmed in this opinion if he had lived to hear the debates on Baron Rothschild's claim to sit in the House of Commons. Scriptural precept never received holier warrant than in the wisdom of the inspired injunction, Swear not at all. If swearing does not tend to utter indifference in the matter of oaths, it certainly tends to distinctions between what is sworn and what is unsworn, very fatal to the sanctions of truth in half the affairs of life. Nothing can be necessary to truth in the witness-box, or at the table of the House of Commons, which elsewhere is not necessary to it; or the observance of which in the one case, does not to a certain extent damage its nonobservance in the other; nor is there any argument producible for oaths which is not directly drawn from their own effects upon society, or which would not yield to the higher and better influence of an enactment restoring solemnity to truth on all occasions, and excusing its laxity in none. In this respect the case of a Member of Parliament is the same as that of a common witness; and the distinctions attempted to be taken in the debate, between oaths of verity and oaths promissory, were properly scouted. The Jew is excluded from the legislature for his respect to an oath, by men who sit there in very right of their indifference to one; just as the law shuts out of the witness-box a man whose scruples are honest, and listens to him whose conscience is accommodating. Rabelais contains few greater absurdities than these swearing debates will be to the readers of another century. Here it suffices to mention that the greater part of them turned upon the question of whether any words of an oath could be omitted as immaterial, at the swearer's discretion; that the first of the two principal divisions affirmed Baron Rothschild's seat as not full, the second declaring it to be not empty; and that they left the matter, on the whole, somewhat worse than they found it. The Session was afterwards brought to a close with a great deal of hard work, making up as usual for wasted time; but failing to overtake some important Irish bills, and one very important English one. The Savings' Bank Bill never reached its second reading; and the compromise of ten shillings in the pound offered to the Cuffe Street depositors, will be but a sorry satisfaction to many other bodies of the most important class of men in any country, poor, honest, industrious, frugal, saving men, whose danger from dishonest actuaries and irresponsible trustees ought much earlier to have been the care of a government which can have no safer or more reliable support. Nor will it be inappropriate to add, while on the subject of savings, that, manifold as Lord Brougham's subjects of scandal have been during the last month, he has discovered the greatest scandal of all in the fact that the savings from the Queen's Civil List are kept by herself, and not paid into the public treasury; which would be just as reasonable as that his own savings, out of his pension of five thousand a year, secured in like manner by statute, should go to the removal of public nuisances, or in alleviation of the expenditure on lunacy. The Queen, admitting that no more than what was just was settled upon her at her accession (which Lord Brougham at least must admit, since at that time he anticipated nothing less than a royal insolvency as the result of the arrangement), has been honourably careful in pecuniary matters; and, out of her own income of sixty thousand a year, and the balance of three hundred and twentyfive thousand on the other five departments of the Civil List, has managed, during the past year, to show an unexpected surplus of thirty-eight thousand pounds; whereupon Lord Brougham rushes off into the city to tell his old Whig friends the fishmongers, who used to cheer him when he denounced the profligacy and tyranny of the Court thirty years ago, that they have lost all spirit because they don't cheer him when he does the same thing now; and rushes back to the House of Lords to fall foul of his old Whig friends there, for having basked in Court smiles till they have no relish for popular abuse; and finally accuses both Houses of Parliament of an absolute prostration of the understanding, when such a thing as even the word Prince happens to be mentioned in the country. But all this, thrown out in intervals of abuse of newspaper editors, and other oddities of a similar kind, seem to pass for nothing that may not easily be pardoned to the extravagant and erring spirit which all are glad to remember so capable of better things. Her Majesty's appearance on the prorogation day showed certainly no sign of temper ruffled by anything unpleasing. She entered with her usual dignified ease, greeted Lords and Commons with her accustomed grace, and, as she occupied the throne, so picturesquely arranged her person and robes of state as to give an admirable "sitting" to Mr. Gibson the sculptor, who had been placed for that purpose exactly opposite royalty, and whose plain black coat seemed oddly out of place in a scene glittering with diamonds and gold lace, epaulettes and plumes. And so the speech was read, in tones that no peer of Parliament can make so audible or clear in that gorgeous chamber; and Lords and Commons were sent packing to their private affairs. Thus Parliament is up (to express it in other words, one might say the Sea-Serpent has reappeared in the newspapers), and everyone, heartily sick of the subject, is prepared to listen to all kinds of abuse of it, for which there is no lack of providers. But Lord Lyndhurst, who used to spend all the session in obstructing what the Whigs wanted to do, and then abuse them at the end of it for doing nothing, has had no worthy successor in his ingenious art; and there is now as much dullness in finding fault with the thing as in the thing itself. The premier's plea had best be admitted, therefore, that the House of Commons has really been very busy for the last six months, and has done a better stroke of work than any other legislative assembly going. But granting this; conceding also Mr. Bright's illustration, that the two hundred really working members have worked harder during the summer than any equal number of manual labourers in any parish of the land; and not questioning in any manner the return obtained by Sir Benjamin Hall, making it manifest that a thousand and fifty-two hours have been consumed in a hundred and fifty-three sittings, on an average of ten hours and a half every day for four days of the week, and that at least a hundred and eleven bills have been passed into law, out of the two hundred carried through a first reading; still the question is to be settled of the value of the work done, and this unhappily is quite independent of the number of bills enacted or the hours consumed. The vice of too much legislation is the unavoidable result of careless legislation. That bills "No. 1," "No. 2," and "No. 3," should indicate the blunders of a session discovered in time for remedy, would import little; but it matters much more that each successive session should supply a supplement of correction to the blunders of its predecessor so large, that the statute book is loaded past the limit of endurance, the efficacy of every kind of legislation obstructed, and the future administration of our laws rendered more and more confused. Judged, however, simply by its predecessors, the session has been of average utility. The Woods and Forests are still mismanaged, the Window Tax unrepealed, the Jew disqualified, needless Oaths insisted upon, Savings Banks unprotected, the Law of Settlement unsettled, Railway Audits mismanaged, the English Franchise not extended, the Stamp Acts little better than they were, Ceylon still a mystery, the Ionians unredressed, Chancery not reformed, Smithfield not abolished, and the people unprovided with Education; though the new Duke of Cambridge has been provided with twelve thousand a year, and the young Prince of Wales has got five thousand pounds for stables nine years before he wants them. But these are not worse than the average no-doings and misdoings of a session; whereas there is unusual merit in the Extramural Interments Bill, in the Bill for Australian Self-government, in the principle of the yet imperfect Bill for extending County Court Jurisdiction, in the intention of the somewhat crippled Bill for a reconstruction of the Ecclesiastical Commission, in the Bill for correction of scandalous Church Abuses in Manchester, in the Brick Duties, Charitable Trusts, and Mercantile Marine Bills, in the discomfiture of the Sabbatarians as to Sunday trading and Sunday letters, in the greater facilities given for the establishment of popular Museums and Libraries, and in the issue of the Royal Commission for taking evidence as to the state of the Universities. The failures of the session most to be deplored are in the still hapless direction of Ireland. The Bill for the Elective Franchise has indeed been passed, by the exact compromise anticipated in our last Narrative, but so far maimed in a very vital member; and though six desperate attempts in the Lords to strengthen the land against the peasant, in so many bills introduced by Irish landlords, have been defeated in the lower house, yet not the least advance to a better system has been made in the all-important direction of landlord and tenant; while the working of the Encumbered Estates Bill is still hampered by the delay of the Security for Advances Bill, and the power and authority of the Lord Lieutenant has received a serious check in the premature disturbance and unsettlement of the question of the Irish Viceroyalty. Nor while these mistakes of Parliament are recounted, does any set-off appear in the condition of the country itself, or in the policy of agitation there. There seems no apprehension of a less than average harvest; but the most dreadful evictions continue, as well as the savage murders they occasion; and though it is impossible to doubt the importance of a movement which enlists the resolute Presbyterian of the north in a co-operative league with the ardent Catholic of the south, it is to be said of what has hitherto transpired of the Dublin conference on the subject of Tenant Right, that a series of more manifestly impracticable propositions could hardly have been looked for out of Bedlam. Nor is this the only Irish conference from which evil is just now to be apprehended. A Catholic Synod is assembled (while we write) in the Tipperary market-town of Thurles, not simply for the purpose of reviving gorgeous Catholic ceremonies unwitnessed in these islands for centuries, but with the more grave intention of restoring stricter monastic observances, of reimposing canonical practices and saints'day observances, of forbidding marriages between Protestant and Catholic, of separating the two persuasions in burial and fast as well as in festival and marriage, and finally of pouring out the vials of Papal wrath on the Government colleges lately built and endowed in the hope of educating Catholic and Protestant together. Let not the reader smile as he reads this, and dismiss it as an amusing piece of insolence. A glance at what the last month has elsewhere brought forth will not be inappropriate here, and will enable him the better to understand what is now proceeding in Ireland. In truth, by far the most remarkable feature of the time, and that which, sooner or later, will lead to the most decisive results, is the unblushing revival, abroad and at home, of the most insolent claims of the Roman Catholic Church. While political parties on the continent have been tearing each other to pieces, dominant priests have been quietly repiecing pretensions shattered even centuries ago; and now that the laymen are exhausted with their struggle, the churchmen are carrying off the spoils. The Jesuits have again got admission to the schools in France; the Prussian priests, not long ago, had the insolence to refuse the oath to the constitution; advantage has been taken of the helplessness of Austria to obtain such safe guarantee for popish domination as the right to punish priests, to impose ecclesiastical deprivations, to receive the dictates of the Pope, and to compel the observance of Catholic saints' days, independently of the civil power; and a quarrel now rages in Piedmont wherein the whole question is stirred to its foundations. In that kingdom, till within a few months, exclusive clerical jurisdictions existed, irresponsible of the civil tribunals; but one of the first acts of the new king, and his new representative chamber, was to abolish this injustice, and make all Piedmontese without exception subject to the regular law. Upon this the Archbishop of Turin, Cardinal Franzoni, refused obedience; was imprisoned for fourteen days; and since his release has vented denunciations against the civil power from every Sardinian pulpit, in the shape of appeals to Austria, and invocations of Rome. In the midst of these the minister Santa Rosa, most obnoxious for his support of civil rights against ecclesiastical privilege, was seized the other day with mortal illness; when Franzoni forbad the clergy of his parish to administer the dying rites without previous confession of penitence for his acts as a minister, and Santa Rosa, declaring with his dying breath that he knew how to reconcile his duty to his country with his duty to his God, died unshriven; whereupon, by the same interdict of Franzoni, the rites of burial were refused, and then the people, suddenly awaking to the monstrous tyranny, rose in a mass against the recusant convent, compelled one priest to perform the burial offices, drove out the rest, and made the show of popular wrath so formidable that Monsignor Franzoni was next day under escort to a distant fortress, and his too obedient monks under sentence of banishment from Turin. Then came, at that very instant, the answers of Austria and Rome to Monsignor's original appeal; Austria demanding prompt banishment of a moderate newspaper editor opposed to Franzoni, and Rome declaring broadly that no Catholic state has a right to alter its domestic institutions, so far as education or worship is concerned, without previous assent from the Holy See! In other words, this is precisely the claim now set up by Irish Franzonis against what they call Peel's Godless Colleges; and it is the claim which will have to be conclusively settled before the world is much older. That all civil restrictions must be vexatious to a church which ere this has placed kingdoms under interdict, absolved peoples from their allegiance, and hurled kings from their thrones, is, of course, quite manifest; and it is deserving of remark that under whatever form the demands of this church are advanced, they are always substantially the same. What is now rehearsing in the Vatican at Rome, is also under rehearsal in the village of Thurles, in Ireland; and what Catholicism can, in the one case, openly impose as a right, she is taking as effectual means, in the other, of secretly obtaining as a favour. She has tyrannised over the world; she has been the tool of tyrants, when herself without strength for the vile office; and now, allowing no other worship than her own within the walls of the city where she sits supreme, she is clamouring everywhere else for freedom from all restrictions as opposed to the spirit of the age. But the most liberal statesmen will have to awaken to the truth that the rights of such a church are incompatible with the equal rights of every other; that her organisation is such as to give her instant predominance, where equal privileges are accorded; that even in such apparently trivial concessions as the titular dignities and dresses of her priests, a mistake has been committed; and that the xistence of an assumption now prevailing, that every Catholic in Ireland must submit to this Thurles Episcopal Synod, radiant though it be in mitres dazzling with precious stones, in copes of embroidered crimson, in soutanes of purple, in crosses, croziers, and robes of gold, is a defiance to the Settlement of these realms in 1688 too impudent to be tolerated much longer. It is clear, at the same time, that the colleges raised at so much cost and capable of such inappreciable blessings, will have to sink meanwhile under the very weakness of their supporters, unless means be found to strengthen the independent lay element in the Roman Catholic population of Ireland. The mere approach of the Synod armed with powers against the education of the people, has been already signalised by a cowardly submission of the authorities to whom that charge is entrusted. The professor of modern languages in the College at Cork having published a book on Christian Civilisation in no respect connected with his teaching, and this book (a very innocent one, a sort of supplement to Guizot, embodying the religious eclecticism of that statesman, very reverent in its tone, and containing even a formal protest against all teaching founded on infidelity) having been denounced by the bigots of the Roman Catholic press as deliberately adverse to religion, and dangerous to the faith and morals of the Roman Catholic pupils, M. de Vericour has been suspended by the Board without a hearing, and a recommendation for his dismissal forwarded to Lord Clarendon. Lord Clarendon, it is to be hoped, will know how to deal with it. Returning to England, matters involving doubt and difficulty are not left behind. A dispute between employers and employed which has the effect of throwing one of the greatest lines of railway communication into a dangerous, if not impassable state, concerns the public too nearly not to excite much public anxiety; and, without affecting to pronounce decisively on the differences which have led to the resignation of nearly two hundred drivers and firemen on the Eastern Counties Railway, it seems manifest that the men, whose efficiency in their special duties is admitted both by the superintendent at issue with them (who had been in office three weeks) and the superintendent he replaced (who had been in office four years), cannot be held justly responsible for the general want of discipline which the system of the new superintendent seems to have been meant to correct, and which could hardly, after existing unchecked for so many years, be checked without unreasonable harshness in as many weeks. Too much was suddenly imposed upon the men, who in turn as quickly demanded too much; and since mutual concession can alone conclude such a dispute with fairness, it will become the Company to remember that for any ill effects resulting from laxity of discipline they are themselves directly responsible, in the first degree. In connection with such strikes, by the bye, a statement worthy of mention appeared the other day in a report on the Mining Districts, to the effect that the famous strike of the colliers six years ago involved a loss to the owners of two hundred thousand pounds, and to the pitmen of three hundred thousand pounds in wages alone. Another report, out of the many lately presented to both Houses, will justify mention here, for its sensible rebuke to certain wild and selfish Protectionist schemes of which a good deal was heard some months ago, in connection with the alleged pressure of "local taxation." The Lords' Committee on parochial assessments have reported that the present system is susceptible of material improvement; but that, in their judgment, stock in trade should still be exempted from the rate, and the general maintenance of the poor should not be provided for out of the consolidated fund; nor do they feel justified in recommending any general system of union rating, or any plan for the assessment of personal property in aid of real property. In other words, they don't think Mr. Disraeli a conjurer, or take flight with Mr. Christopher into the cloudy regions of farmer's finance; but content themselves with a few practical, intelligent, and desirable suggestions for improving the present irregular assessments, for repealing certain awkward technicalities, and for reducing the inordinate amounts at which railways are assessed. This is a great slap in the face to the Protectionists; who have in other respects also suffered sorely of late, and were fain to let the session expire without a sign. They cannot even hope that a bad harvest should make opportunity for them now; for though prospects in this respect have unfortunately clouded during the last three weeks, and a somewhat poor average of corn is to be feared, yet no unhealthy tampering with the markets is observable, nor is the winter contemplated with any painful anxiety. The repeal of the laws limiting our supply of food to this island has effectually cured us of such fears and dangers; and John Bull now not only knows to what extent he has a reliance against unavoidable chances of the seasons, but with what reasonable arguments he can abate the pressure of importunate creditors. Others of his family, it is to be regretted, get into the Bankruptcy Court with apparently less ability to get out of it; and a report appearing not many days since excited not a little apprehension, from points of startling resemblance to the head of the family himself. The name was also John Bull; and Mr. Bull appeared in the Bankruptcy Court, not very creditably we regret to say. He was said to have a vast number of sharking relations; and having been accused of playing into their hands too much, his certificate is adjourned. He tried to throw all his misfortunes on the fact that a certain firm “had had a sort of millstone or national debt fixed round his neck for a very long period," but his statements as to this did not seem to obtain unlimited credence; and the counsel against him, charging him with unaccountable and improper delays during the last two years, pointedly remarked that "the year 1848 would certainly have been the proper time for Mr. Bull to have come to that court." This very i 2 obstinacy, however, may yet be the means of redeeming Mr. B.; for certainly the old rival of his family, M. Jean Crapaud of Paris, who went much too easily into bankruptcy that year, would have come off better by holding up his head a little longer. So Mr. Bull is not yet to be despaired of; and such other social illustrations of the condition of his friends and connections in various parts of the country as other law cases of the month supply, must not be too exclusively interpreted to the general disadvantage of his family. They are often only isolated cases; though it is right not the less to fix attention on the special injury involved, and demanding special redress. Thus in Scotland, or under the interpretation of Scotch law by our highest English tribunal, it would appear that a man who gets possession of his wife as part of a pecuniary transaction with her father, may afterwards count upon the law's co-operation in sordidly completing what has been thus sordidly begun. The law will suffer him, without a reason assigned against the unhappy wife, to cease holding intercourse of any kind with her, three months after the marriage; will countenance his refusing to speak or sit with her, living in the same house; will view with the utmost unconcern, his treating her with the extremes of insolence and contempt before her servants; will sanction his cruel interdict against her either receiving visits, or paying them; and will allow him, in temporary absences from home, even to leave her without necessary means of existence;-and then, when this wretched woman, whose "good and kind disposition" her tormenter freely confesses, no longer able to bear the burden of a life of such unutterable misery, returns to her father's house and implores for separation and alimony, which the Scotch judges pronounce her entitled to, the English Law from its higher seat proclaims, that, inasmuch as direct personal violence is not alleged, and adultery has not been committed, the wife has no remedy whatever, nor even a title to the costs of her application; and somewhat jocosely the law adds, through the mouth of its exponent Lord Brougham, that "it might as well be said the husband ought to pay for any other luxury which his wife, after separation, might think proper to indulge in, as well as the luxury of a lawsuit." Their lordships present laughed, and it is to be hoped that poor Mrs. Patterson may derive some little comfort from the joke. Nor is it perhaps less desirable that, in the other cases of the month throwing light upon the marriage laws, a joke should if possible be made of them, seeing that they certainly fail of any graver sources of satisfaction. There is the case of a woman who had married again after her first husband had many years deserted her, prosecuted by her worthless second husband to rid himself of the children she had borne him, dragged from her bed to the dock, exciting the sympathies of every one in court, and getting off with seven days' imprisonment. There is another case of a moustachioed fine gentleman who squandered the fortune of a young wife and left her penniless, to marry another fortune with a middle-aged lady attached to it, and who had not the additional good fortune to excite any sympathy; but who nevertheless escaped transportation (perhaps because of his moustachios), and is sent to Bridewell for twelve months. There is a young Donald Macdonald of one of the islands of the Hebrides, who carries off his young Jessie by main force from her own bed-room, in spite of an obstinate father who had provided and set his heart on a quite other son-in-law, notwithstanding a meddlesome uncle who darted out of sleep and stood shivering in his nightclothes at the youth's Lochinvar-like audacity, and in defiance of a lidless-eyed dragon of an aunt keeping guard in the very bed of the maiden; who is nevertheless triumphantly acquitted even of an attempt at wrong doing, and carried home in a popular triumph. There is a simple German who tries as hard to get free from a young wife as the Highlander to get fastened to one, but though he has a case that should have entitled him to easy redress, the magistrate can only refer him to the Consistorial Court with a polite hope that he has the means to go there, and so send him mystified away. Meanwhile a somewhat similar case, the sexes only being reversed, had been taken in charge by Lord Brougham before the House of Lords; and, for the first time in that assembly, an incompleted marriage has been dissolved on the petition of the wife, and proof that the husband had contracted a second marriage abroad; which certainly seems the strangest contrast possible, in point of "luxury" as of every thing else, to the result in the unhappy case of Patterson. But let us not conclude these notices of legal history without approval of the legal judgment delivered a few days afterwards in Norris and Cottle, also by Lord Brougham, and conclusively settling a question which has cost more in anxious litigation than any other in modern time, that of the non-liability of provisional committee-men. At last a plan of sewage is about to be tried on a tolerably extensive scale, and at a cost of a quarter of a million sterling. Up to the point of what is to be done with the sewage when collected and drawn off, there secms little reason to question the feasibility or efficacy of this plan; but the doubtful point is an all-important one, for the notion of discharging the sewage at Woolwich must have been formed in ignorance of the tide. A dead dog launched at Woolwich would never get to sea. A fallacy is founded on the fact that the ebb-tide at any given spot runs more than six hours; but things carried down by the ebb, meet the flood so as to bring it within the six hours; and things floated up by the flood will have a tide of more than six hours, seven or even eight with an easterly wind. This is a danger which will have to be guarded against when the scheme is so far completed. With indication of a danger of another kind, as imminent to the comforts and lives of her Majesty's lieges, our month's summary may becompleted. The wreck of an iron steamer full of holiday makers off Southport, on her way to the Menai and Tubular bridges, has created little sensation because only two lives were lost; but it was something not far short of a miracle that more than fifty lives were not sacrificed; and the case is another flagrant example of the outrageous neglect of the surveyors of steamboats, which the result of the coroner's inquest at Preston makes it the more necessary not to overlook. At that singular inquiry no one seems to have been examined that was not in some way responsible for the mischief done; while, on the other hand, not a subpoena was sent to a single passenger; and of the many who attended to give evidence voluntarily, the worshipful "crowner" declined to examine one. It has nevertheless since transpired that the steamer was manifestly unseaworthy, that her pilot was not a licensed one, that there was no register or certificate of her having been duly inspected, that she had no life-boat, only one life-buoy instead of two, only one punt instead of four punts and boats, that her only pump was out of order, and that all her fittings were crazy and rotten! The comfortable set-off is the two lives lost instead of fifty; the accident not being "graced with decent horror" to make inquiry interesting, or worth while. In like manner, about three weeks before, an old steamer plying on the River Tamar exploded at Devonport, just as she was getting up her steam to convey an entire dissenting congregation on a day's excursion to the Morwell Rocks; and, because the dissenters did not go into the air with the boilers, the affair passed off without excitement. Only out-of-the-way people (who don't wait |