EUROPEAN ITEMS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 1170, 17 November 1871, Page 3

EUROPEAN ITEMS.

♦ {From fhe Speriarfor.) Lord Derby has been to Manchester to invite support for next year's International Exhibition at South Kensington, and of course they got him to make a speech there on commerce and peace, which he did, when he was even rather more ostentatiously sensible than usual. He maintained that though it was perfectly true that the hopes founded on commerce for preserving peace had been illusory, ifc was no less true that the great rival spirit to the military spirit is that of trade and that in the absence of absorbing military traditions such as the Continent is still overrun with, the spirit of commerce really does do a great deal to hold in check otherwise very dangerous passions. He held, for instance, that tho dislike for war which had shown itself as between England and America, in spite of what were regarded as great provocations on both sides, was in a large measure due to the fixed conviction of both countries that we could not go to war without striking a deadly blow at our prosperity. All that is very true, — Lord Derby does always contrive to be so vexatiously accurate, — but how does it show wbat he called the plain and simple rule of foreign policy, " to leave other people alone, in the confidence that if you do so they will leave you alone," to be anything more thau a capital empirical rule, holding good only so long as no higher consideration compels you to interfere to prevent a gross injustice? It is a very good rule not. to meddle with quarrels in the street ; but it is a rule which, if you observed it always, would make you skulk sometimes in a way for which you would never forgive yourself. Lord Derby echoes Mr Gladstone so exactly, that it would seem the statesmen on both sides have a tacit agreement to ignore, in theory at least, all the foreign duties of England. "We have all talked of the Alabama claims and the Treaty of "Washington till we are tired of the subject, yet we sometimes doubt whether one person in a hundred knows either what the claims are or what the treaty contains. We hear ifc, for instance, constantly asserted thafc the Recorder of London is going to "Washington to help in settling the Alabama claims The fact is that he is the English member of a court of three persons who are finally to determine, not what are popularly called the " Alabama claims," but all claims arising out of acts committed during the war in America, " not being claims growing out of the acts of vessels referred to in Article 1 " of the Treaty of Washington. That is, Mr Russell Gurney and his colleagues are to deal with all claims except those claims which he is supposed by most persons to have undertaken to settle. We wonder, by the way, whether a writer in the Times, who a week or two back heaped eulogies on all concerned with the settlement of the Alabama claims, knew that a mass of matters to be arranged under the Treaty has nothing to do with these claims whatever. The Newcastle masters deny our facts as to the foreign immigrants whom they have brought in in the place of the recalcitrant engineers and it would appear that they have had a good deal more success, and have more chance of an ultimate victory, than we represented last week. They assert, and we are assured by an impartial authority on the spot, who has absolutely no interest in the struggle, that these representations seem to be correct, — that by the help of home and foreign recruits the Newcastle masters have now 3116 hands at work, or half as many as before the strike, and that of the few who went back to the Continent, some have even again returned to England. Whether the facts be favourable or unfavourable to the Nine Hourß' Movement, the facts should at least be known ; but when Sir W. G. Armstrong writes to lhe Times as if the masters had a moral claim on tbe sympathy of the public, he assumes what nothing in his letter goes to support, and what if the facts stated in Mr Cox's letter, printed elsewhere, be accurate, — for which we need not say we do not vouch, — we should be strongly inclined to deny. Masters who reply cavalierly by lawyers' letters to the demands of ' their men, refuse peraonal discussion,

and acfc as nearly as they can like despotic governments against revolutionary bodies, can hardly expect their moral claim on the sympathy of the public to be conceded. Yet we suspect the men would have done well to accept the fifty-seven-hour compromise at length reluctantly offered by the masters on the 3rd of August, for the present. Ib was a concession of twofifths of the demand, and would have led probably sooner or later, had Sunderland and other placeß continued to concede the whole, to the rest. As it is, the prospect is doubtful. The Railway market has had a sensation this week. The North- Western has effected a junction, — for working purposes, — has made what is called a " common purse," with the Lancashire and Yorkshire. In other words, though there is to be no identity in the dividends declared, aud so forth, tbe working expenses are to be thrown together, a proportionate allowance made to each lino for its expenses, and, what affects the public most, the rivalry and competition between them are to cease. As the capital of the London and North- Western is £56,543,000, and of the Lancashire and Yorkshire, £23,921,000, or the aggregate capital £80,765,000, the operation is oue of the most important which has ever been chronicled in railway history. The aggregate mileage of the two lines is something like 2000 miles, and as they transact about a fifth part of the whole railway business of the United Kingdom, it will be the biggest undertaking of the kind in the world. This is a great step towards a siugle centre of management for our complicated railway system, — the greatest reform of that nature that could well be conceived. Bishop Wilberforce and Archbishop Thomson have both been conductiug Presbyterian services at Glengarry, in the Established Kirk of Scotland, this, autumn, and the performances of the latter, who preached and conducted the service there on Sunday, Sept. 10, are celebrated in a letter to the Daily Telegraph by a vigilant observer, who evidently held it to be obligatory on him to subordinate his duties as a Christian to his duties as a correspondent. He records how Dr Thomson began in the orthodox fashion, with " Let us begin the worship of God by singing to his praise the hundredth psalm ; " how he substituted for the " unpremeditated " prayer of the Scotch clergy one compiled from the English Liturgy by the simpleexpedient of pntting "Deliver us" before instead of after the catalogue of sins and evils from which deliverance is prayed ; but how even here, "his Grace vigorously tried to repeat the words without looking at the book, but was now and again forced to cast furtive glances at tlmVprinted page ;" and how he concluded the service by uttering a prayer of his own composition, but " tried to conceal the fact that he was forced to aid his memory by occasional glances at the paper." The correspondent himself makes no effort to conceal the fact that he must have been closely watching the most reverend prelate through his fingers. The letter concludes with a friendly assurance to the Archbishop that if he would join the Kirk he would probably rise to the highest places in her ministry. We are not quite so sure of that. Is his Grace hard-headed enough for the Macdonells and the Macdougalls, who would dissect his logic over their whisky-and-water ? You can hardly transplant, even in imagination, the oil and wine of a Wilberforce, or the milk and honey of a Thomson, to the " stern and wild soil" ofthe Scotch Kirk. There is something repugnant in the very idea. No ; they shall pot leave us even for high promotion in the Kirk.