General News.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 243, 15 July 1876, Page 17

General News.

During the prayers at the evening service at All Saints Church, Sandhurst, recently, the congregation were surprised by the rev. incumbent coming to a dead stop of some seconds' duration twice or thrice. At the close of the prayers the rev. gentleman expressed his regret that some persons present should so far forget themselves and the place they were in as to be guilty of most unseemly behavior, intimating his intention on a recurrence of the offence to request the verger to remove the offenders from the church. Whoever the persons referred to were, they must have felt very uncomfortable under the rev. pastor's severe admonition. The well-known episode in which the Duke of Wellington and a laborer took part, has just been re-enacted in "Victoria by Sir George Bowen and a groom. The horses attached to his Excellency's carriage, after doing wonders on the boggy plains of the Wimmera, gave unmistakeable signs of being exhausted. It was imperative that. Sir George should reach his journey's end quickly, and an application was made for the use of some horses belonging to the omnipresent Cobb and Co. " Have you got an order from Mr. Cameron?" asked the groom in charge. " No, but the horses are wanted for.the Governor, and =-." "Can't help it; my orders is riot to let 'em go without

an order, and they musn't go till you get one." " But I tell you they are wanted for the Governor," said the applicant. " I don't care if they're for the Queen ; I've got orders to go by, and you'll have to get an order." No order was forthcoming and no horses could be had, his Excellency enjoying the joke as much as anyone, and highly commending the fidelity of the groom, and the high state of discipline to which the great coaching firm had managed to bring its staff of officers. A curious fact in connection with Protection in Victoria has come under notice. In Tasmania an iron smelting company has been established with Victorian capital, is managed by a Victorian board of directors, and Victorian shareholders receive the benefit of its success. But Victoria is also the market into which the pig iron is taken, and upon the pig iron a protective duty is levied, so that ,under the specious guise of protection to native industry, a heavy impost is placed upon Victorian capital. The absurdity of the tax is aptly illustrated by the incident, but the operation of protection on any article Avould be found to be equally pernicious, if people would look a little beneath the surface.

The Government of Tasmania recently corresponded with all the Australian Governments and the New Zealand Government, asking each to spare an engineer to form a board in Tasmania to report on the manner in which an English company had carried out its contract to construct a railway in that colony. An engineer proceeded from each colony except New Zealand, and the report of the engineers has been published. It is to the effect that the general conditions of the contract, as far as the construction and maintenance of the line are concerned, had not been complied with, and that the speed stated in the timetables at which the express trains were to run, viz., 23 mil s an hour, is, in the present condition of the permanent way, dangerous. A late English paper reports that the annual number of wrecks upon the British coast for the last five years has reached an average of five per day, and yet, high as this average is, it is not higher than might have been expected when compared with the enormous amount of shipping—upwards of a hundred millions of tonnage—which enters inwards and clears outwards from the ports of England each year, and when we take into account the intricate and difficult navigation by which many of these ports are approached. A careful study of the wreck charts of the last twenty years shows that these wrecks are very unequally distributed round the island, and, for the most part, they reoccur with surprising regularity on the same spots year after year. A rather amusing incident has been related to a Melbourne contemporary respecting a fright received by a member of a certain card party, not a hundred miles from Sandhurst, quite recently. The games played during the evening were many, and of an exciting nature, requiring in the case of the person we refer to the frequent use of stimulants, which in their turn caused him, at a late hour of the night, to suddenly fall asleep. His slumber was not observed until it came to his turn to play. It struck some of the wags at the table that the opportunity was a good one for a joke, and accordingly lights were extinguished, and they spoke as if playing, shuffling the cards, &c, at the same time rousing the slumberer. When he awoke he yawned, asked where he was, and hearing his friends all speaking, and apparently continuing the game, jumped up in a fearful state of frenzy, and in a deeply agitated voice announced that he was blind —suddenly struck blind. He continued to pour forth his lariientations until he was stopped by uproarious shouts of laughter from all sides, as one of his friends struck a light and lit the lamp, showing how he had been hoaxed. A recent investigation has brought to light in England a state of things as regards criminal statistics which has shown that in a great number of cases the causes of crimes are to be attributed to the overcrowding of families in houses, or, as they might perhaps be more correctly termed, "hovels." In a pamphlet which has lately been issued the executive committee of the Howard Institution assert that amongst other incentives to intemperance is the extreme privations to which certain sections of the poorer classes of the people are subjected, and to all apj>earances practice substantiates their assumption. Special reference is made to the town of Liverpool, where the density of the population is affirmed to be double that of London. 150,000 persons, it is said, reside in single rooms, of which no less a number than 15,000 are cellars, often filthy, dark, and ill-drained. The official returns of the Glasgow health officer, which, by the way, refer back for a period of some years, give evidence that whereas in the healthy part of the city the mortality per annum is as 40 to 1000, in the overcrowded portion the mortality is 70 to the 1000 ; this is reckoning the population at 300,000. "How much crime," it is remarked, " in addition to death has been produced by this state of things is known only to the Omniscient Oae." A few years' ago the death rate of Glasgow's worst districts was 100 per 1000. "By great improvements in sanitary inspection and opening up crowded spots the whole death rate of the city has been reduced nearly 1000 per annum, and the cases of crime and disorder from 11,000 in 1867 to 8000 in 1873. Speaking at the meeting at Shoreditch lately the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is President of the Church of England Temperance Society, congratulated the association on its project of having a conference between its members and the brewers, distillers, and licensed victuallers of East London. " He was afraid," he said, " that at times some harm had been done by the way in which all persons engaged in those branches of trade had been spoken of at some of the meetings held in favor of temperance. It was his" fortune to know personally some of the most estimable and religious men in the United Kingdom who were engaged in thai

trade. In that particular neighborhood he supposed that every clergyman living within the region of Spitalfields knew what works of charity and beneficence and Christian kindness had been done by persons engaged in the trade. Therefore it seemed to him only right and proper that they should hold, as was proposed, a meeting with those persons, and talk with them, as Christian men with Christian men, as to the way in which they could co-operate in this important movement.' If all the leaders of what is called the temperance movement were as charitable as the Primate here showed himself to be, and were endowed with wisdom equal to their charity, they would be able to do much better work than they have hitherto done. Their language and temper are generally very different. —London Licensed Victualler's Gazette.

The Sydney Morning Herald of a late date says: —"Let New Zealand accept the Bay of Islands as the port of call, let the necessity for detention at all other places be reduced to a minimum, let every steamer which the company puts on the line be equal to theZealandia, and let there be the same consideration for the comfort of the passengers which those who made the last voyage gratefully acknowledge, and there can be no ground for doubt thatthe Pacific service will become thoroughly efficient in less time than the P. and O. Company did, and win its way in a few years to a foremost place among the great lines of steamers that conduct the world's traffic, and have already paid Australia the compliment of acknowledging that her commerce is worthy of their competition.

At the recent meeting of the French Socie'te' des Agriculteurs, one of the questions discussed was the expediency of protecting small birds from indiscriminate slaughter, and a resolution asking the Government to legislate on the subject was eventually passed. This society exercises great influence upon all legislation of an agricultural character, for among its members are many politicians of all parties, and the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, whoever he may be, is, as a rule, glad to have the opinions of so many practical farmers as a guide. The present Minister may or may not carry out the recommendations with respect to small birds ; but whatever course he may take, it is significant of the society's influence that the Minister of Public Instruction has already issued a circular to the schoolmasters, requesting them to impress upon their pupils the usefulness of small birds, and the loss which their destruction causes to agriculture. The damage done by insects in France is estimated to be not less than £12,000,000 per annum, and the total gets larger every year, as the bird-popu-lation decreases. In the Haute-Marne, a fifth of the beetroot crop is generally destroyed, which represents a loss of nearly £2 an acre. In the Eure-et-L'oir, three-fourths of the colza crop are often devoursd, at a loss of £8 an acre. In the meanwhile, the destruction of the insect-eating birds continue apace, and in the Champagne district robins are annually killed by the thousand, to be sold and eaten as larks. If the schoolmasters, by impressing these and similar facts upon their scholars, can prevent them from pillaging nests and setting bricktraps for the small birds, the ministerial circular will have done some good ; but unless by means of a close season or some other legislative enactment, sparrows and finches are to be protected from the guns of French " chasseurs," they must not be expected to increase and multiply.

The Melbourne correspondent of the Bendigo Independent writes under date Saturday, 10th inst. :—ln the absence of any topics of interest I will tell you a little story. There was in the clear atmosphere of a religious country town a certain vicar, blessed as clergymen sometimes are with a love of good liquor and an accommodating wine merchant, who sent in his quarterly accounts regularly for a space of about two years. Considering, at length, that quarterly accounts should sometimes be a subject matter for consideration, a polite note was addressed to our clerical friend, suggesting that a remittance would be desirable, to which a courteous reply was sent expressing the hope that the wine merchant would not deprive the sender of the pleasure of receiving the quarterly effusion which gave so much pleasure to the writer and his family. Waxing demonstrative at this, the wine merchant returned an intimation that unless settlement was made within a specified period,- the Bishop who presided over that portion of her Majesty's dominions in which the correspondent resided should be informed of the circumstances. Hereupon the old Adam broke forth in the man of piety, who rejoined, in politely forcible terms, that his creditor could do as he pleased, and that he did not "care ad for his Bishop." The reply was duly framed and glazed by the vendor of fluids, who proceeded to "have the law" of his cool-visaged debtor. On the inquiry our clergyman pleaded that he was not in the habit of paying wine bills until such times as it was convenient for him to do so, and that he could not distinctly recollect the alleged blasphemy of his Bishop, as to the best of his knowledge he had not sworn. *' since he was an undergraduate at Cambridge !" The naive frankness of the admission did not, however, absolve him from paying his chalked up score, a verdict being duly recorded.