Adam Sedgwick, M.A., Woodwardian Professor of and fishermen lose their nets. The wire was successGeology in the University of Cambridge. fully plunged to the bottom, however, safe equally from ships' anchors, sailors' nets, or monsters of the deep. The remainder of the route was safely and slowly traversed, and the Goliah reached the French coast about eight o'clock in the evening. In half-an-hour the wire had been carried ashore and run up the face of the cliff, and messages had been carried from end to end of the wire. A few days afterwards it was discovered that the wire had been cut asunder among the rocks at Cape Grisnez, the leaden tube in which it was enclosed having been too soft to protect it from injury. The communication between the coasts has been consequently suspended till means of greater security are adopted. The Society of Arts has issued a notice, intimating that, as the Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in 1851 has rendered it superfluous for the Society to pursue its ordinary course by the offer of its usual prizes, the Council are of opinion that it will be most useful for them to encourage the production of philosophical treatises on the various departments of the Exhibition, which shall set forth the peculiar advantages to be derived from each to the arts, manufactures, and commerce of the country. They, therefore, offer the Society's large medal and 251. for the best, and the The operation of Throwing down a portion of the small medal and 10/7. for the second best, several trea-Cliff near Seaford by an explosion of gunpowder, was tises on the objects exhibited in the section of raw successfully performed on the 19th. Its object was to materials and produce, the section of machinery, the project a part of the cliff, above 200 feet high, upon the section of manufactures, and the section of the fine arts. beach, so as to constitute a groin for the protection of Each treatise must occupy, and not exceed, 80 vessels. Several immense charges, containing many pages of the size of the Bridgewater Treatises, and must be thousand pounds of powder, were deposited under the delivered on or before the 30th of June, 1851. The cliffs, and ignited by voltaic batteries. There was no Society will also award its large medal and 25 guineas very loud report; the rumbling noise was probably not for the best general treatise upon the Exhibition, treated heard a mile off, and was perhaps caused by the splitting commercially, politically, and statistically; and small of the cliff and fall of the fragments. There seemed to medals for the best treatises on any special objects or be no smoke, but there was a tremendous shower of class of objects exhibited. The treatises for which re- dust. Those who were in boats a little way out felt a wards are given are to be the property of the Society; slight shock. It was much stronger on the top of the and if deemed suitable for publication, should the council cliff. Persons standing there felt staggered by the sec fit, they will cause the same to be printed and pub-shaking of the ground, and one of the batteries was lished, and will award to the author the net amount of any profits which may arise from the publication after the payment of the expenses. thrown down by it. In Seaford, too, three quarters of a mile off, glasses upon the table were shaken, and one chimney fell. At Newhaven, a distance of three miles, the shock was sensibly felt. The effect of the explosion was stupendous. The chalky cliff cracked along a whole mass of the precipice seemed to crumble into pieces frontage of more than a hundred feet; and then the and fall into the sea. The dislodged mass formed a bank about three hundred feet broad and nearly three hundred long towards the sea, and about a hundred feet high. the ground and property requisite for the construction The government have completed the purchase of all of the New Harbour of Holyhead; and the whole of the works will now be pushed forward with the utmost expedition, nearly 1500 men being constantly engaged in the various operations. The engineers are proceeding rapidly with the extension of the sea-walls at the Northern breakwater, and are also proceeding with the erection of the stages. Many thousands of cubic feet of stone are now ready for the commencement and erection of the immense sea-wall, and fresh supplies are daily obtained from the lofty heights that overhang the harbour, where extensive quarrying operations are carried on. The material thus obtained is thrown down into the breakwater, in masses from ten to fifty feet in thickness. The estimated coast of this new harbour, which will give 316 acres of sea-room, is 700,0007. Canal Locks have been Superseded by the introduction of an inclined plane, on which the boats can be drawn up to the proper level by means of a stationary steam-engine. This new process was put to the test on the 24th of August, at the Blackhill Locks, on the Forth and Clyde Canal. The result was most satisfactory; three boats having been drawn up in less than five minutes, while to have made them pass through the locks would have taken half an hour. The Submarine Electric Telegraph between the English and French coasts, was successfully laid down on the 28th of August. The points chosen were Shakspeare's Cliff at Dover and the opposite chalk headland of Cape Grisnez on the French coast midway between Calais and Boulogne. The operations were conducted from the Goliah steamboat. Between the paddle-wheels in the centre of the vessel, was a gigantic drum or wheel, nearly fifteen feet long and seven feet in diameter, weighing seven tons, and fixed on a strong framework. Upon it was coiled up in close convolutions about thirty miles of telegraphic wire, encased in a covering of gutta percha. The connexion of the thirty miles of wire enclosed in gutta percha was made good to three hundred yards of the same wire enclosed in a leaden tube, to protect it from being chafed by the shingle on the beach and in the shallow water. The Goliah then steamed forward at the rate of about three or four miles an hour, in a direct line to Cape Grisnez. The great drum was put Mr. Hind, the astronomer, has given an account of in corresponding motion, and from it the wire was paid the discovery of a New Planet, made by him on the off over a roller at the stern of the vessel. At every two-evening of the 13th. It is in the constellation Pegasus, hundred-and-twentieth yard (one-sixteenth of a mile), the square leaden clumps, weighing some twenty pounds, were rivetted to the wire to sink it well to the bottom, and to assist in embedding it in the submarine soil. The depth of the water varies between one hundred and one hundred and eighty feet; but at certain points there are ridges and valleys which made the sinking of the wire one of careful management. Between two of these ridges, well known to sailors, and called by the French the Colbart and the Varne, is a steep valley surrounded by shifting sands, many miles in length, parallel to the shores; and in these sands, as with the voracious Goodwins, ships encounter danger from losing their anchors, and appears like a star of the ninth magnitude, with a COMMERCIAL RECORD. BANKRUPTS. From the Gazette of August 30. ROBERT BARKER and HENRY DAVEY, Bicester, Oxfordshire, drapers.-WILLIAM JEFFERSON, Hull, painter.-ROBERT M'DOWALL, Worthing, Sussex, draper.WILLIAM MILLER and ALEXANDER MILLER, Liverpool, and Bootle, Lancashire, wine merchants.-CHARLES PORTER, Bocking, Essex, grocer.-VIRGIL JAMES POWELL, King's Place, Commercial Road East, tobacco manufacturer.-ROBERT SMITH, Liverpool, tavern keeper.-JOHN SNOWBALL, Gateshead, Durham, builder.-SAMUEL WILSON, Wolverhampton, grocer. September 3. ALFRED CRANSTON, Wimborne Minster Dorsetshire, cabinet maker.-STEPHEN CHARLES LAKEMAN, St. Mildred's Court, City, commission agent.-GEORGE NORTON, Cadford Saint Mary, Wiltshire, plumber.-JAMES PRIESTLEY, Radcliffe, Lancashire, cotton spinner. September 6. THOMAS BRADLEY, Ranelagh Road, Pimlico, lard retiner. GEORGE FRIEND, Kidderminster, bookseller.JOHN STORK, Hull, wine and spirit merchant.-WILLIAM THOMAS, Southrop, Gloucestershire, baker.-WILLIAM WARD, Liverpool, victualler. September 10. JOSEPH BROWN, Gravesend, grocer.-JOSEPH CHARLES BYRNE, Pall Mall East, and Sun Court, Cornhill, emigration agent.-JOHN DAWSON, Northfleet, Kent; Mitrecourt Chambers, Temple; and Clement's-lane, Lombard-street City, shipowner.-RICHARD GADSDEN, Boughton Mill, Northamptonshire, miller.-JOHN HALL, Brighton, victualler.-ISAAC JESSUP, Kingsdown, Kent, farmer.-DANIEL RADFORD and GAD SOUTHALL, Gracechurch-street, City, coal merchants.SUMMERLAND STANIFORD, Plymouth, innkeeper. September 13. THOMAS BOOKER, sen. and THOMAS BOOKER, jun. Mark-lane, City, merchants.-CHARLES CUTHBERT, Kennington-cross, corn-dealer.-JAMES HUSSEY, Poole, linen-draper.WILLIAM JEFFERSON, Hull, painter.-GEORGE KETCHER, Asheldham, Essex, innkeeper.-JAMES TOOVEY, Watford, Hertfordshire, innkeeper.-ROBERT WESTLEY, Greenwich, bootmaker. September 17. JAMES BENSLEY LARKE, Norwich, draper.ELIAS MARCUs, Vincent-street, Limehouse, and Stepney, builder. -JOHN SAVILL, St. Neot's, Huntingdonshire, draper.-EDWARD PALFREY SIMMONDS, Highgate, Warwickshire, commercial traveller. ABRAHAM SOLOMONS, Basinghall-street, City, merchant. -JOSEPH TURNER, Eastbourne, Sussex, grocer. September 20. JAMES ATKINSON, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, victualler.-JAMES BENNETT, Hayhill, Berkeley-square, builder. HENRY WARD FARRER, Old Fish-street, City, wine-merchant.SAMUEL FRANCE, Bradford, Yorkshire, grocer.-BENJAMIN HOPKINSON BATES, Liverpool, merchant.-WILLIAM HUNTLEY, Hartstreet, Covent-garden, licensed victualler.-RICHARD WILSON JEWISON and EDWARD ATKINSON, Charlotte-terrace, New Cut, Lambeth, linendrapers.-WILLIAM PIKE, Reading, Berkshire, tobacconist.-FREDERIC VINES and THOMAS KITELEE, Greenwich, millers.-GEORGE WALKER, Philpot-lane, City, merchant. September 24. MARY BAKEWELL, Manchester, size manufacturer.-RICHARD BATTERSEY and JAMES TELFORD, Liverpool, iron-founders.-JOHN JOWETT and THOMAS JOWETT, Coventry, grocers.-WILLIAM LUPTON LOWE, Salford, Lancashire, victualler.-CHARLES RICHMOND POTTINGER, Hardwick-place, Commercial-road east, wine and spirit merchant.-WILLIAM RICHARDS, Devonport, printer.-JOSEPH SEELIE, Freeschoolstreet, Horsleydown, rectifier.-JAMES TAYLOR, Rochdale, cotton spinner. BANKRUPTCIES ANNULLED. Sept. 10.-HENRY ASHBEE, Kingscote, Gloucestershire, innkeeper. Sept. 20.-WILLIAM ASH, Henry-street, Hampstead-road, plumber. THE STOCK AND SHARE MARKETS. City, Sept. 27. During the early part of the month the business in the English Stock Market was moderately active, but for the last fortnight very little has been done either for speculation or investment, and prices have remained almost stationary. Our last review left Consols at 96 to 1, from which price there was little variation till the 8th inst., when they became rather weaker, and declined to 96. Since then the market has been steadier, and the price is quoted this day 964 to . The transfer books of the Reduced 3 per Cents, and the 31 per Cents, and two or three other stocks, are shut for the dividend: they will re-open on the 18th Oct. PROVISIONS-LATEST WHOLESALE PRICES. Bacon,per cwt.-Waterford, 46s. | to 58s.; Belfast, 48s. to 50s. Beef, per 8 lbs., mid. to prime, 28. to 2s. 10d. Butter, per cwt., Cork, 1st, 80s. to 818.; Carlow, 1st, 768. to Cheese, per cwt., new Cheshire, 428. to 678.; new Wiltshire GROCERY-LATEST lon, 528.; mid. to good plan- Rice, per cwt.-Bengal white, Eggs, English, 6s. 6d. to 7s. 6d. per 100. Hams, per cwt.-Limerick, 648. Essex Regents, 50s. to 70s. WHOLESALE PRICES. to 51s. 6d.; brown to good Tea, per lb. (duty 2s. 1d),—Ord. Congou, 114d.; Souchong, com. to fine, 11d. to 2s. 8d.; ord. to fine Hyson, 1s. 2d. to 3s. 6d.; Imperial, 18. 3d. to 2s. 8d. 248. Candles, per 12 lbs. 4s. 6d to 5s.; Coals, per ton, Wallsend, 15s. 9d. to 16s. 9d. In the Railway Share Market this has been a month of great excitement and fluctuation. Extensive purchases have been made and the prices of nearly all the chief stocks have experienced a very considerable rise, which, notwithstanding a Pale Seal, per ton, 382. temporary re-action, is well maintained; the tone of the market Sperm, 831, to 841. to-day being firm, and prices still looking up. Cod, 351. OILS. Olive, Gallipoli, 431. Published at the Office, No. 6, Wellington Street North, Strand; and Printed by BRADBURY & EVANS, Whitefriars, London. Monthly Supplement to "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," Conducted by CHARLES DICKENS. THE incidents of the past month are fraught with warning to writers of history. There has been so alarming a succession of events at once strange and humiliating, and the recurrence of crime and disaster has been so revolting and incessant, that, to a statist who should merely aim at effect in the portraiture of a period, and think it fair to seize any fact, however extreme or exceptional, wherewith to form general conclusions, we might seem to have suddenly retrograded from Queen Victoria, Lord John Russell, and Doctor Sumner, to Dick Turpin, Jerry Abershaw, and the Pope. Were it possible to imagine M. Ledru Rollin, for example, inspired for the occasion by a regard to the rights of conscience and property, one might fancy him describing, for a second edition of his Décadence de l'Angleterre, the condition of English society, and its results during October 1850, somewhat in the following strain. "It became at this period perfectly evident that the restraints of order and law, as well as the obligations of conscience, had lost their power over the ill-disposed. With irrepressible and insolent defiance Robbery and Murder stalked through the land. Houses were entered in the metropolis at mid-day, their inmates left half-strangled, and property of singular value carried off without hindrance. Men were waylaid in the public thoroughfares, struck into insensibility, and plundered of all they possessed. Jewellers' shops were stripped in the Strand. In broad day, in Adam Street, Adelphi, a government messenger was stopped and rifled. Highway robbery was committed in St. Paul's churchyard. Infernal machines were delivered by hand in Bermondsey. Houses were entered in the Regent's Park, and only saved from plunder by the timely and gallant resistance of the men and women servants. The counties in closest vicinity with the metropolis were over-run with thieves of the most daring kind. County magistrates went to bed with six-barrelled revolving pistols under their pillows. Bagshot was once more a solitude; and grass grew again on the old Bath road, as in the days when it made smooth trotting for the hoofs of highwaymen's horses. "All the incidents just mentioned, and all those to be now narrated, occurred within the brief space of three weeks of the distressing period referred to. In the parsonage house of Frimley, a small village within half an hour's ride of the metropolis, a venerable clergyman was murdered in his bed by burglars detected at their midnight practices. In the same county eighteen houses had been similarly entered and robbed, and their inmates treated with violence, in less than the same number of preceding weeks; and in the neighbouring county of West Kent, ten parsonages had been plundered in less than the same number of preceding months. But the fate of the rector of Frimley seemed suddenly to let loose, simultaneously, over all the counties of England, a spirit of outrage without parallel for concentration and intensity. The Times devoted column after column to burglaries in the provinces. Durham and Devonshire, Lancashire and Bedford, Bucks and Staffordshire, figured in a single list served up at a morning's breakfast-table. The objects of ruffianly attack embraced prizes as various as the government mail-carts and the meanest huckster's shops; and so flushed were the rogues with their daring success, that they even broke into the Governor's house in the gaol at Worcester, and carried off the plate under the very noses of warders and turnkeys. Nothing was too high, and nothing too low, for the designs of this desperate banditti; nor could their cruelty, when unresisted, be equalled but by their cowardice when resolutely met. A girl of fourteen, armed with a brace of pistols, put some half dozen thieves to flight at Abbotskerswell, in Devon; 'O don't! for God's sake, don't shoot me!' was the supplication of a cringing thief to the butler in the Regent's Park, to which that gallant domestic responded by 'firing at his head; a youth at Northampton sprang from bed in his shirt upon a burglar armed to the teeth, and pinned him to the earth till assistance came; and one spirited old maid proved too much for a couple of tall ruffians at Swindon in Gloucestershire. But these cases were unhappily rare; for the destruction of life at this lamentable period seemed to have been sought quite as eagerly as the abstraction of property. "In Birmingham a gold and silver beater was struck and maimed with murderous weapons until supposed to be dead. At Bath the landlord of a tavern, and his wife, were murderously mutilated with a razor. At another hotel in Kendal, an aged dissenting minister was horribly wounded and half suffocated in his bed. A labouring man in Oxfordshire savagely murdered his wife. At a farmer's house in Laugharne two murders were committed within a few days of each other. In another part of South Wales an elderly lady was poisoned for the chance of an inheritance. At a small town in Lincolnshire a ferocious old drunkard, of seventy-three, stabbed to death a youth who would have prevented his murdering his aged partner. At Haverfordwest an old woman was found murdered in a ditch. A murdered infant was picked up in one of the most populous of the London squares; and, in Essex, a poor seduced girl and her unborn infant were mercilessly strangled. 'He has fair hair,' said the reporter of the leading journal of England, describing the seducer and supposed murderer, in the last-mentioned case, 'a brilliant florid complexion, small delicate features, regular in their contour, and a general cast of countenance very expressive of mildness and rustic innocence !' Such was the fashion at this deplorable juncture of speaking of persons charged with the most detestable crimes. "It cannot of course be thought surprising that the whereabouts of the Police should have become matter 2 of anxious question, while unchecked and uninhibited violence thus raged throughout the kingdom. The cost of guardianship being not less than 17,000l. a year in the county of all others the least effectually guarded, such a question became extremely natural; but, alas! the discovery was soon made, that the paid conservators of order and decency, at this distressing period, had not been able to escape its general demoralisation. Concurrently with the acts just recorded, a series of acts of criminal outrage upon the public peace were proved against its very custodians themselves. While the unhappy goldbeater of Birmingham was under the furious bludgeons of his assailants, two 'experienced officers,' a sub-inspector and a sergeant, were proved to have stood within sight and hearing of the outrage, and, in reply to entreaties from the daughter of the victim, to have refused interference with what might be merely, for what they knew, an act of highly proper chastisement! In the same week, in the centre of English civilisation, three very gross and wicked offences were proved against members of the metropolitan force; and one of its superior officers was charged with manslaughter by a coroner's jury, for having beaten and maltreated to death an industrious inoffensive artisan. But the general disorganisation of society exhibited appearances even more alarming. It was not simply to the lower servants of the law, but to its highest administrators, even to its makers and judges, that the scandal of this unhappy time extended. An Ex-Lord-High-Chancellor of England was fined for unlawful practices with fishing-nets; and a Nobleman in the most exalted rank of the peerage assaulted, without provocation, two wayfaring young collegians whom he encountered by chance (and without his trowsers) in what the law of the land had declared to be a public pathway, but which he insanely imagined he had as much right to shut up, as to lock up his own nether garments. "Nay, not even here did the marks of universal degradation cease. What had heretofore been considered the most stubborn bulwark of English independence was now discovered to have been equally undermined. A hope prevailed that the daring spirit of burglary would have found some check in the difficulty of disposing of the property and plate which were its spoils; but a man of the highest respectability in the City, a bullion broker of forty years' standing in Barbican, a man who had amassed enormous wealth without forfeiting the respect of his fellow citizens, was suddenly discovered in close correspondence with gangs of provincial burglars, who had thus found safe and unsuspected market for their villainous trade. Nor were encouragements to misdoing in any degree less wanting, either from those who administered what was called justice, or from those in whose behalf it was administered. While magistrates failed properly to discriminate the grades of guilt in criminals, society as little perceived the danger of misplaced sympathy with crime itself. Charitable people with money to bestow, lavished it on those who had yielded to temptation and made poverty the excuse for theft; while the patient and long suffering class whom temptation had found firm, were left to perish on all sides around them. In Staffordshire a labouring man was as heavily punished for setting snares. and beating with a dog, as one of the highway tramps for an act of thieving, as well as beating of a very different order; and, by a bench of Squire Westerns in Westmoreland, the value of a dissenting minister's life seemed to be judged pretty nearly on a par with the worth of a brass pan. "In short, but for the unquestionable authenticity of the records preserved of this extraordinary crisis in the British history, the relation of it would be utterly incredible. Whether the scene be the heart of the metropolitan city, or the wilds of an Irish county, the inquirer is shocked and disgusted alike by the same absence of all the signs or fruits of civilisation. Children and grown men were dying of absolute starvation in the public roads of the County of Clare, at the very time when crossing-sweepers of Baker Street were leaving large fortunes behind them. St. Luke's in England was filled with people capable of the most rational enjoyments, whose innocent and pleasant recreations the journals duly chronicled; while a parcel of hotheaded Presbyterians and hair-brained Roman Catholics were left free to agitate Ireland for the restoration of her prosperous days, by bawling for the annihilation of every holder of property. The art of Mutuality, or the Means of Trading Without Capital, was at the same time regularly taught in both countries by societies invented for the express purpose of plunder; and four City of London firms with very sounding titles appear to have carried on the invention with moderate success in 'a single apartment in a sort of public house' in St. Martin's Court. All over the counties of England, concurrently with these events, arose the flames of incendiary fires; and even claims the most monstrous were set up to a sort of vested interest in the profits of calamity. A band of fishermen on the Norfolk coast asserted their right to a beneficial tithe of every wreck upon their shore, by going off in their boats like so many savages of the Pacific, and committing desperate assault on a steamer hired by the owners of the wreck for its rescue. Other as intemperate wretches drank themselves to death from the spoils of a shipwreck washed on the coast of Liverpool; and at the same wreck, on that same full-frequented hospitable coast, even the gallantest, best paid, and till then most unfailing service of humanity was abandoned, and hapless creatures clinging to the sinking shrouds saw their last hope perish within sight of its fulfilment, by the cowardly retreat of the Liverpool life-boat before an ordinarily-tempestuous sea. Even to scamen of the higher rank the panic of the time extended; and the commander of a steamer in the English channel, after running his ship on its most formidable reef of rocks with a sacrifice of eleven lives, in a calm sunny day, was the first to desert the ship he had imperilled for the supposed shelter of a boat, which he swamped by suddenly leaping into it in search of despicable safety. "Do these read like the records of a civilised land? Yet not even here are we permitted to close our reiteration of barbarous events in the same single month of the eighteen hundred and fiftieth year of the Christian dispensation. In this so-called Christian period, a man in a fair way of trade had to answer the indictment of his parish for refusing to support his aged mother; and a lodging-house keeper in Kent Street did not hesitate to dispossess himself of a half-dying tenant, in arrear of rent, by dragging him naked out of his sick bed, bastinadoing him down the stairs with a heavy bludgeon, and thrusting him without covering into the public streets, bleeding and insensible. 'Gruel indeed! what next?' asked the wife of a master-tailor in Whitechapel who was working and starving his apprentice to death, when the lad drooped at length under his labour of near eighteen hours a day, and required other nourishment than tea and dripping.' Then, of course, very speedily, the What next? came, and the poor creature welcomed it with the affecting cry of 'Oh God has heard my prayer!' Even children from six to ten years had caught the infection of hardness and guilt, and were as resolute and insolent in the docks of the police courts as the most veteran offenders. Nor this alone with children bred to neglect and shame. Thirty-three boys, well born and carefully nurtured, had to be suddenly removed from one of the most important schools of discipline in the kingdom, with their characters indelibly blackened. The most appalling stories were also told in the police offices, of public lodging-houses crammed with both sexes in streets behind one of the greatest London thoroughfares, where ninety creatures were wont to pass the night in a house without proper accommodation for nine, and where the rooms overflowed with night-soil. Nor, as if to prove even such horrors capable of aggravation, was there wanting the contrast of scandalous waste beside these pictures of destitute misery. Two or three days after refusing to let a vote be passed for occasional loan of a book from the city library to a studiously-inclined member of corporation, the common councillors of the city of London voted five hundred and twenty-seven thousand pounds for the continued support of the abominations of a cattle market in the heart of their crowded streets! "What, meanwhile, was the spiritual condition of the country thus overburdened with folly and crime? We may obtain, perhaps, some approximative notion of it by taking the prison commitments of an important county for the twelve months immediately preceding. They exhibit eight hundred and thirty souls inade amenable during that time to such laws as prevailed. One-third of these had never attended a place of any kind in which a form of divine worship of any description prevailed. Nearly one-half had never learned to read. Seven hundred and fifty forlorn wretches among the number were found able to repeat the Lord's Prayer, but nearly four hundred of them possessed not the slightest notion of its meaning. Six hundred and twenty-two could repeat the Apostles' Creed, but of these more than one-sixth had no knowledge of the nature, the works, or even the name of Christ. No one, at the same time, could feel the least surprise at this, who knew how the spiritual teachers of the day passed their time, and the subjects in which alone they took interest. They had long abandoned every effort to enlighten the rational beliefs or inculcate the practical duties, for eager discussion of such questions as whether sermons should be delivered in a surplice, or candles lighted at the communion-table; and at what period of the rite of baptism the babe was saved from sin's eternal penalties; and whether Church could act independently of State, and if State had power to sit in judgment on Church? And while the garrison thus quarrelled and disputed, lo! the enemy were thundering at the gates. "The state of England in the nineteenth century had retrograded, in a word, to that of Britain at the close of the sixth century. Of the latter period the chroniclers record that the clergy seldom troubled themselves much with preaching the faith either to the ignorant Britons or the heathen Saxons, whereupon Pope Gregory the Great was moved by divine inspiration to undertake the conversion of the island by sending over more worthy preachers; and over there came accordingly a monk, subsequently bishop and archbishop, and invested with plenary power over twelve other bishoprics, into which this kingdom was then and there divided by order of his Holiness. After a lapse of twelve centuries and a half, exactly the same thing now occurred; but, unhappily for this offending and miserable people, what in its origin was an effort of retrieval, in its renewal was but the penalty of sin. The intervening centuries counted backward, to depth after depth of degradation; and in more than equal proportion to the blessings of Christianity which Gregory the Great diffused by a movement of divine inspiration, were the scandals of Popery which Pius the Little inflicted by means of Doctor Nicolas Wiseman. No sooner had the new Cardinal Archbishop arrived within the precincts of his Archiepiscopal diocese, than a compact band of infuriated Westminster doctors of the faith about to be displaced, including one archdeacon, five canons, and an infinite number of rectors, vicars, subdeans, precentors, minor canons, professors of divinity, incumbents, and curates, rose en masse under the leadership of the Reverend William Sewell, and Cetera desunt. So might the history of our time be written, with not a word of falsehood in the facts, and with not a word of truth in the inferences. For let the reader take breath, and continue of good heart. The final sentence against Old England still waits to be pronounced. We have not yet become the serfs of an Italian priest, nor yet are we obliged to beg our daily bread from the barbarous Russian. The cheerful arithmetic of our Household Words Lord Granby rejects as distasteful; but to deplore and bemoan a system which is fast ruining the country solely by relieving its pressure of taxation, is an innocent comfort which no one need grudge to that extremely self-sufficient young nobleman. Even Lord Stanley begins to have hopes of us; and to admit that "the agricultural interest" and "the good of the community" may be separable things. It is true that certain elderly authorities which warn us of a plague as the first fruit of next year's Exhibition, also tell us that Free Trade is responsible for all the murders and burglaries. But, on the other hand, the worthy Mr. Recorder Hill discovers an origin for them less far a-field, and has set a number of intelligent writers on an eager discussion of their remedy. Thus already evil turns to good; and it will be safe to predict that, of the crime whose alarming frequency during the past month struck every one with so much terror, what remains a few months hence will be but the wholesome example of its detection and punishment. For it is not that such depravity in far greater excess has not heretofore existed, but that it has never been seen in such startling contrast to the amendment and better progress of all things else never tracked with so much vigour, never laid bare with such terrible distinctness. Not to leave undone but to keep unknown, has been of burglars in past days, as of the Venetian ladies in Iago's time, the best virtue; but it is a virtue which cannot co-exist with true and honest Civilisation. Her office is the painful but essential one of compromising no unpleasant reality in favour of a less unpleasant seeming. It is the necessary purification of the Woolwich Academy, which makes its present shame be seen; as it is from the vigilant watchfulness of men no longer tolerant of the least abuse of authority, that the exceptional defects of our system of Police are no longer able to conceal themselves. And infinitely greater and more beneficent are the duties and labours of Civilisation which still wait to be discharged. She has to attend to the neglected and remember the forgotten. She has to direct misplaced sympathy into better channels. She has to connect the enjoyments of wealth and success with the higher sources of content and virtue. In one sense it may be no extravagant charge to attribute to the more rapid means of accumulating wealth increased temptations and facilities for crime. Upon intellectual cultivation depends the worth of material prosperity; and this before every other is the consideration which should occupy the thoughts of all men at present. Religion must be made a practical and intelligible truth; the poor must be taught as well as fed; and to a sound system of Universal Education we must look for our only effective antidote to crime and bigotry. We require no other weapon against the Pope and his Cardinal Archbishop, but most assuredly this weapon will be needed. |