MISCELANEOUS.

Grey River Argus, Volume XIV, Issue 1750, 14 March 1874, Page 4

MISCELANEOUS.

The ratepayers of Edinburgh as a whole, and more especially the Sabbatarians and teetotallers among them, have been somewhat exercised of late by the discovery that their town Council had been feasting on Sunday at the expense of the city. A lynx-eyed gentleman named Hope, at a meeting of the Council, discovered that two items, amounting together to Ll4 4s, were being smuggled through with suspicious haste. The reason of thip haste was apparent when it was found that the little bills were " for wine for Sunday luncheons." Further enquiry disclosed the fact that the luncheons al which the wine was drunk took place on the days on which the Town Councillors made their annual visitations of the city churches. The facts place tho Councillors in anything but a creditable position. Either the exertion of attending church was so great and unusual to them that they required to take something to sustain them during the arduous day's work, or they were simply doing on these particular occasions at the expense of the city what they would on either Sabbaths have done at their own expense. Yet these gentlemen would no doubt severely punish any publican who sold drink on Sundays to any " common "person, and would recoil with horror from a proposition to open the reading-room of the Philosophical Institution on Sundays. In amusing contrast to this conduct of the Edinburgh Town Councillors stands a decision arrived at by them nearly contemporaneously with their Sabbath fuddling. They proposed to celebrate their joy at the marriage of the Duke of Edinburgh by illuminations and a bonfire on the top of Arthur's Seat. Referring to the latter, the Lord Provost said that the fire was not to be fed with coal, but with old wood saturated with tar, "as they did not like burning coal at the present time." This conscientious scruple to put the ratepayers to the additional cost that would be incurred by burning coal instead of "old wood" come with ludicrous inconsistency from the men who had been guzzling on Sunday at the public expense. A better instance of Pharisaism we have not come across for a long time. The expression " railway slaughter" has been looked upon for the most part as an exaggeration indulged in by sensationloving newspaper writers. It is now shown to be only too accurate. A committee of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce has been investigating the suhject of railway accidents, and its report is abolutely startling. After giving the statistics for 1872, the report says : — " Keeping in view the frightful casualties of the present year, there can be no question that more deaths have resulted from railway accidents in the United Kingdom in the last two years than were killed in action of British soldiers during the two years of the Crimean war" — i.e., 2755. This is a heavy indictment, and unfortunately the figures adduced fully sustain it. If this state of things continues, there will be some chance of the Pall Mall Gazette's remark, that travelling by railway would come to be regarded as a proof of lunacy, being verified. The winter assizes in England show that even " good times " are not always free from epidemics of crime. At Liverpool there was a heavy calendar, including no les3 than six cases of stabbing, while at Chelmsford, the Judge (Mr Baron Pigot), stated in his charge to the Grand Jury, that the calendar included "nearly every possible crime." It is to be noticed that all the stabing cases at Liverpool had their origin in drink, and may therefore have actually been due in the first instance to the " good time 3 " aforesaid. A discovery that will interest philologists has recently been made, and reported to the Philological Society. Hitherto the Etruscan inscriptions discovered have been undecipherable, and the language to which they belonged, unknown. By the discovery, in a tomb, of some dice, bearing words on their faces, it has been assertained that the Etruscan language was Altaic, and following on this, the Etruscan mythology is proved i>o be essentially the same as that of a Finnish epic. Thus it may literally be said that the grave has disclosed the fact that the Etrurians came from the centre of Asia. London dressmakers and milliners, although nominally protected by law, like their' Punedin sisters, are very much worse off than thjß latter. The Inspector of Factories, Mr Baker, reports that many complaints have reached him of " intolerable overwork" among milliners, but although some of these have personally told him of infringements of the law, not one has been bold enough to put the law in motion, from fear of being afterwards regarded as a marked person and refused employment. It seems that in the height of the .season the gjrls are at work for 14 hours a day, including an hour and a half for meals ; and it is no' .exteiuiatjpn of this slave-driving ,to .say that in'th^e .duljl Reason the girls only ?sr,or]k for seven ,or v eight , hours daily. The girls think jfe fcour3' .a . day ought to be the outside limit of theii' ' work, and most people will consider their ' desire a very moderate one. The part of their case, however, which has most intrest for- Jtfew Zealand people is that the law is being syatppatically violated by the employers with impunity. This is the more instructive from the fact — whiph we learn from an official report just issued— that it is found practicable to enforce the law where children are concerned, the convictions for breaches of the Factories AoU numbering about 800 annually.