Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1879.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 631, 20 February 1879, Page 2

Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1879.

There is no period which has beet recorded during the present century, ■when England suffered what she is now suffering. "Wars, and gigantic commercial failures, bringing ruin upon tens of thousands of once happy homes and households. Famine, climatic severity ; men on strike, men, women and families starving ; men out of employment, and able ; men discharged in crowds because employers cannot find profitable employment for them ; disorder, confusion and dire distress everywhere, ramifying to the most remote corners of the earth. "Seldom," says the World, "has a twelvemonth closed amid denser or more general gloom than that which surrounds the last days of 1878. Always more or less of a mockery, the customary greetings of this season are more empty and unreal than ever. The Cimmerian darkness of the physical atmosphere extends over our entire social, commercial and political system. Of late years Christmas has become the signal for an accumulation of sinister events ; the associations of the festival have^ increased in melancholy inapprppriatehess, and to-day this tendency is witnessed in a more intensified degree than we have yet known. The death of the Princess Alice has cast a shadow over every household in the kingdom. The Afghan War has struck the note of an equally jarring discord; and our first successes against Shere AH are followed by the intimation that an ultimatum has been sent to a warrior-chief in South Africa, and that before long we may expect the hind of the Zulus to be the scene of a campaign more desperate

and dangerous than we are carrying on against the Afghans. The prevailing industrial distress has reached the dimensions of a national infliction, and the sequel of commercial paralysis is found in a succession o*f financial catastrophes. Nothing like the pi-e- 1 sent wretchedness, and the want of confidence in trade which begets wretchedness, has been known in the memory of this generation. It is confined to no one class of the population ; clerks suffer as grievously as mechanics, atid the agricultural labourer has less cause of complaint than the country curate. As yet we are only on the threshold of trouble. There is not a bank nor a mercantile house in Great. Britain whiqh,. the protracted crisis will not try severely ; and there must be some, if not many, which are destined to collapse beneath the strain. The position of labour and capital, employed and employer, is equally bad. The market of the former is overstocked \ the enterprise of the latter is fettered by considerations which it needs more than common courage to face. • It is j the reaction after years , of unex- j ampled prosperity that is now being felt. For the first time in our modern industrial history we have to compete against nations eauipped as well as ourselves, with all the appliances of commercial and material success ; and the struggle finds us alarmed and unprepared." Another Home journal, reviewing the events of the year, refers to the many gigantic failures which have occurred already amounting to four hundred million sterling and of which, it is feared, is" only the forerunner of many more to follow. On March the 24th, writes the Home News, "The series of marine casualties, which have been a melancholy feature in the histoiy of the year, began with the foundering of the Eurydice off the Isle of Wight, with a loss of 330 lives, followed on the 31st of the next month by the foundering of the German ironclad, Grosser Kurfurst. Both of these calamities have since been eclipsed by the sinking of the Princess Alice in the River Thames after the collision with the Bywell Castle, involving a loss of 700 lives, and it is now only three weeks that a similar disaster befel the Pommerania. '• The industrial riots in Blackburn, Preston, and elsewhere in the Lancashire cptton districts, were preceeded by some serious disturbances among Scotch miners near Slamannan, and had their sequel in storms and tempests more severe in their consequences than the burning of Colonel Jackson's house. Indeed, the atmospheric phenomena of the year have been throughout remarkable. Great storms have been successively advertised bo arrive from Ameiica, and have duly arrived as per advertisement. We have experienced the very extremes both of heat and of cold. We have had the heaviest thunderstorms known for years, the heaviest falls of snow, the thickest ice, and the biggest hailstones. As the air above has been troubled, so, too, have the subterranean depths of the earth beneath been the scene of deplorable disasters. At Bolton and Wigan and elsewhere there have been colliery explosions. At Birmingham and at Bradford there have been great conflagrations. The cycle of financial failures has been completed by the failure of the West of Kngland and City of Glasgow Banks- The distress which now prevails from one end of England to the other is as severe as the climate itself has been. In the I extreme north the railroads have been j impassable from heavy snowdrifts ; in ! the south 'traffic has been either stopped or checked in our streets and thoroughfares. Meanwhile, commercial failures have become a stereotyped feature in the columns of the daily newspapers. Mills and factories are closing more rapidly even than jointstock banks. In Lancashire the suffering exceeds now the suffering in the year of the cotton famine — 1864. i Want and misery are confined to no one class of our population. Clerks and skilled artisans are as much in need of work and food as agricultural labourers." Such is the picture of unhappy England at the present juncture, and it is lamentable to read that public journals of a certain class are glorifying the downfall of so many houses, and gloating over the fact of England's distress. It has been said that the darkest hour of all the day is the hour before the dawn. Let us fervently pray this is so with England, and that the people of a great country may live to free themselves from the evils by which they are at present surrounded.