PRUSSIA.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 36, 3 January 1874, Page 9

PRUSSIA.

Thb forthcoming elections in Prussia are giving the ruling party a vast amount of uneasiness. Not that they are afraid of losing the majority by means of which they were able to pass all those laws for the oppression of Catholicity during the last sassion of the House of Representatives, for in a population of which nearly seventy per cent, are Protestant, the Catholics can never expect to gain a numerical preponderance. What Bismarck's friends do apprehend is that the number of their opponents in the next Parliament will be so much increased as to render it impossible for them to meet with any chance of success in passing additional coercive measures against the obnoxious priests. All the papnrs of the 'National Liberal ' school are full of appeals ad miseriocordiam, begging of the electors not to stay away from the polling booths, and thereby enable their opponents to gain the day ; but the disposition of the "Liberals" all over the country is fearfully lukewarm, and the indifference with wh:ch these appeals meet very generally elicits the following cry of distress from the leading organ of the party, the Kolnisshie Zeitung ; " The general apathy with which the forthcoming elections to the Prussian Landtag meet in the various encampments of the Liberal party, is givm? us considerable uneasiness about the result. Whilst our own friends exhibit an astouudi lg am >v it of callousness, the Ultramontane agitators have been at work for many weeks, both in public and private— in public so-called Catholic meetings, and in private conventicles of their own— and they are trying their utmost to take the wind out of our sails." This is precisely the sort of thing the 'TJniversu' advised the German Catholics to do as far back as six months ago. They hire tarried a little, but now seem to act up to the advice of carrying on an electoral agitation from one end of the country to the other, and tho crawn fears of their opponents foreshadow a signal victory for the Catholic cause in the elections.— The ' Universe.'