SAN FRANCISCO MAIL NEWS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 210, 13 April 1877, Page 15

SAN FRANCISCO MAIL NEWS.

(From our Exchanges)

The Emperor of Brazil, on the 14th February, visited the Pope. He expressed the hope that the Pope would, in accordance with the Brazilian Government, assist in removing all ecclesiastical difficulties in Brazil. The Pope replied that the Church was rather accustomed to smooth than create obstacles. He hoped to be able to restore religious harmony, which had always been the glory of Brazil. The interview appears to have been marked by extreme cordiality. The Emperor showed much emotion, and threw himself at the feet of the Pope. The Empress was also present, and was received with great kindness by the Holy Father. The county of Waterford has won a great victory for the good cause. The candidate who represented denominational education, Home Rule, tenant-right, and amnesty has defeated the English Whig by the splendid majority of nearly 1300. The number for Delahi'nty was nearly 1900, while the alien candidate could not muster 600. The defeated candidate of course threatens to petition against the return on the ground of priestly intimidation. If there was any intimidation at all it was on the part of the landlords, whose agents crowded the polling-places, thinking that (notwithstanding the ballot) they might frighten the tenant class. Now that the people of Waterford have done their duty to the good cause, it is to be hoped Mr. Delahunty will not fail to do his. The patriotic Father Lavelle (says a correspondent of the Connaught Telegraph) bos not been unmindful of those of our race ■whose blood has been shed for fatherland. On Sunday, the 19th December, he announced the approaching anniversary of the martyrs to Irish liberty, and in accordance therewith had reverentially prepared for the solemn occasion. On that most sad-recur-ring day — the 23rd — the parochial church of "Cunga na Glora" was in full mourning. The Mass was offered in particular for the souls of Allen, Larkin, O'Brien, and Barrett, and generally for all the suffering departed whose main object was faith and fatherland. Father Lavelle, with his usual warmth on such occasions, spoke at Borne length on the pure and unselfish motives of those brave men who nobly fought for Ireland's cause, and whose last breath was an invocation to the God of justice to bless their native land. Tears flowed freely from the large congregation, and from the manifest emotion of the reverend preacher the instructive lecture was deep in its effect. May God lengthen the day sof such a priest to inspire us on the path to freedom. A rumor was prevalent at Mullingar that a severe shock of earthquake occurred on the Ist ult., in the neighborhood of BalUngall. On enquiry it appears that during the heavy storm of wind and rain which passed over this district on the Saturday night previous, an underground rumbling noise, accompanied with a tremulous motion of the earth, was noticed by several persons in the neighbourhood of Knockdrew, Ballingall and Culleen, No damage was done. Mr. Luke Owen Pipe, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, has written an elaborate and learned work upon the " History of Crime in England," which has been recently published in London. In this book there is much to be admired. Its author urges that crime in England was the consequence of the Teutonic conquest of that country ; before the conquest property was safe, roads were good, tastes were fine, houses were full furnished, and life was secure. With the conquest all this was swept away before a spirit of violence and fraud which has not yet ceased to have its influence. In regard to the influence of education upon crime Mr. Pipe dissents from the popular opinion that universal education is altogether wholesome. The system of compulsory education, he says, is practically a step in the direction of Commissions. He says, in effect, when the State takes into its hands the education of children, it places the parent in a position in which he may with justice say, " You Jiave deprived me of my right to educate my child, and you must therefore take the consequences, and find him a means of living when he has been educated by you." Government reports show the appalling total of 65,000 men, women and children killed or mutilated in their daily work in mines, railways and factories during the years 1873-4-5. England slaughters more per thousand — by at least double— of her mining labourers than either Belgium or Prussia ; and the vast majority of the accidents of all kinds are, according to the best evidence, preventible. Here is a true national calamity certainly, but still more a national disgrace. An uneasy feeling pervades the mind that all our classifications and reports have not yet touched the most fertile cause or causes of these industrial horrors, and until this has been done legislation, which has already attempted to grapple with them, would seem to be futile. Our own belief is Sfeat gross and wilful carelessness is one of the most constant factors in the work of death, and that a few cases of manslaughter well pressed home and severely punished would go far to abate the death-rate. In the case of the late fatal accident on the Midland line the jury found that it was in great part owing to the negligence of Pepper, the driver, who was one of the killed. That verdict was a step in the right direction. According to the Hungarian papers, the illness of the Grand Duke Nicholas originated with an attempt to shoot himself. He is said to be seriously, though not mortally, wounded. The Countess Novikoff, the Eussian lady whom wiseacres have credited with a special mission from the St. Petersburg Foreign Office to the Russophile party in England, still remains the occupant of her pleasant suite of rooms in Symond's Hotel — the same rooms, by the way, in which were quietly matured the details of the Alfonso restoration expedition. Here it was where two years ago the young Sandhurst cadet, " The Colonel" Senor Mery de la Val and others busied themselves over cipher telegrams and tough problems of ways and means. Madame Novikoff receives an extraordinary inedly of visitors— Mr. Gladstone bowing himself out as Mr. Kinglake bows himself in, Turcophile dropping into the chain

vacated by Uussophile. Madame Novikoff is the sister of the gallant and ill-fated Colonel Kireeff, who was the first Russian to fall in the late Servian war, and whose tragic end Mr. Kinglake has described with so much detail in his preface to the just published sixth edition of his " Crimean War." Mr. Kinglake says the Turks could not be persuaded to surrender poor Kireeff's body. From what I have heard, they had good reason in their own interest as claiming to make war decently for this declinature. — World. We cut the following brief summary from the columns of the New York Sun: A distinguished and popular Boman Catholic preacher died recently in Germany, whose life had features of peculiar and dramatic interest. Johann Emanuel Veith was the son of Jewish parents, who were very faithful in the observance of their religion, and who had him thoroughly instructed in rabbinical literature. Being sent to Vienna to study medicine, he made sufficient progress to perform successfully a very difficult and dangerous surgical operation upon his father. After a time, however, his attention was diverted, to religious topics, and he became a convert to Roman Catholicism, and began to study for the priesthood. When his parents, for whom he seems to have had a strong i affection, heaxd of his conversion, they mourned for him as though j he were dead, sitting for seven days on the floor and reciting the prayers for the departed, and his mother wept until she became blind and died. The young preacher, however, labored with great fervor and eloquence at the task he had assumed, and became very popular. He never again saw the Jewish friends and associates of his youth, and when, after years, impelled by irresistible yearning, he went one day to the village where his father resided, and sent a message to him to ask leave to see him, the only reply the old and broken man returned was that he had no son. His only child was long dead. But Johann Emanuel Veith bore goodwill to the Jews all through his life, and helped and defended them against many persecutions and unjust accusations; at the same time he toiled faithfully to the end in the advocacy of what he considered the true religion. The Fost observes that the increasing difficulties of the internal situation in Germany have, even at an earlier stage of their development, led to the hazarding of suppositions which are irresistibly recalled to mind by the events of to-day. The spectacle of 123 Socialist candidatures at the elections for the Imperial Parliament of regenerated Germany within six years of its regeneration is, it must be confessed, an extraordinary one, nor need we be entirely surprised if the thought that foreign policy is a less perilous arena than domestic Parliamentarism should rise frequently across the anxious mind of the German Chancellor. Parliamentarism has brought scant success to the German Chancellor. He is more accustomed to seek solutions by the sword. What if the drama being played at Constantinople should give him the opportunity of rousing the inaDhood of Germany to a nobler struggle than that of obscure demagogues and levelling agitators. A Parisian writer, in criticising the refusal of Germany to participate in the coming French Exposition, declares that he has found out the true reason According to him, the intending exhibitors of Alsace and Lorraine, who are the most industrious people in the empire, refused to figure under the German flag, preferring to enter individually. The ugly look such an occurrence would wear decided the authorities to hold aloof. The usual yearly summary of the weekly returns of births and deaths in Dublin, for the year 1876, shows that there were 9,006 Irish births registered in Dublin during the year 1876 ; this was at a ratio of 29 per 1000 of the population. The birth rate for the same period was in London 36 per 1000, Glasgow 38, Edinburgh 33. The low birth-rate in Dublin shows a want of general prosperity, with its usual result of discouraging marriages, 8097 deaths were registered in Dublin during the year 1876, being at the rate of 25.7 of the population. I hear strange rumours of overtures from the English Liberals to the Irish members. The terrible truth seems at last to have dawned on the Marquis of Hartington that without his Irish followers he is powerless, and the Liberal party is powerless. He may not care much, but there are forces behind him which he cannot control, and which he must acknowledge. It is now urged by prominent and independent English Liberals that a time has arrived for at least discussing the basis of a union with the Home Rule party. Thanks to faithful Waterford for enforcing the great lesson. — London Correspondent. Mr. F. O'Donnell, vice-president of the Home Eule Confederation, writing to the Times under date February 6, says :— "May I hope that your courtesy will allow me to state in reference to your leader on the Home Rule Party Conference in the Times of to-day, that not sixteen but thirty-two members of Parliament attended the Conference? Secondly, that the "emissaries" of the Irish nation to present the Centennial address to America were not both absent bewailing their disappointment on the banks of the Potomac ? One of them, Mr. Parnell, was at the Conference, and the other, Mr. O'Connor Power, has the pleasure of being able to send home the assurance that the Irish address declined by the President is to be received by the Congress in special session, and duly framed and deposited in the Capitol instead of the White House." Those who have read De Quincey's works will have been very sorry to hear from Dr. Charles Mackay in his " Forty Years' Recollections " that in his later days the greatest of English writers sank so low as to ask friends in the street for sixpences to bay opium. Dr. Mackay further alludes to an undischarged debt between the essayist and himself. So far as we can judge, Dr. Mackay meant no unkindness in raking up these old stories — memoir writers never do ; but they prefer effect to sympathy and their book to family feeling. We are not surprised to find a letter from De Quincey's two daughters — one married, the other not — 'denying in a very categorical fashion the allegations of Dr. Mackay. They convict him of error in matters of fact, and undoubtedly it is much to the point that a man who says he was an intimate friend of De Quincey's was never heard of by his daughters. The ladies admit ia the,

frankest way that De Quincey's akill in money matters was nil, and that his method of getting things without money led to his paying much more than he owed in the end. This present writer ventures to state here that he sought to borrow ss, and presented a £50 note of the Bank of England as security ! In certain conditions of brain *xeat man knew no better ; and this failing accounts quite for stories that may be told concerning what the vulgar* call nging." The letter of the ladies seems to us to upset all allegations against De Quincey's honour and decency ; but that he was deplorably weak and imprudent after the opium had diseased his mind we fear there is no ground for doubting — Freeman. The EvssJci ilir, a leading journal of St. Petersburg, says: — " England may well boast that she is ready for war, for she does not require much time to mobilize her insignificant military force and to send her fleet to sea. Sweden and Denmark may also say, ■with equally good reason, that they are ready for war; but the question is whether England is able to enter into a successful conflict with Russia for the achievement of a fixed political object. England is powerful on the sea, but she is hopelessly weak on the Continent We may leave the sea to the English, and in the meanwhile we can quietly destroy the Turks on land, or allow them to escape in English ships. We can raise an insurrection in India from Persia and Khokand, and we can describe England's maritime trade by the help of a few cruisers, while the English ironclads -will endeavor in vain to approach the harbours of the Black and Baltic Seas, so strongly protected by torpedoes. Our railway communications would make a successful landing of English troops on Russian territory as impracticable as one of Russian troops on English territory. In a word, England is harmless to us so long as she has no Continental allies ; and she will not find any, for the Napoleonic regime in Franco has fallen, and no other European State is disposed to follow its disastrous example. The great powers of the Continent must attach far greater importance to the maintenance of their mutual relations than to the alliance of a commercial nation, which being separated, from them by the sea, holds aloof from the system of Continental politics. The busiest man in Russia is Prince Gortschakoff. He rises at 6 a.m., reads letters until eight; his secretary reads or analyzes to him the more important articles of intelligence in the daily paper* of Europe; he lunches at noon, walks an hour, receives visits from one to four, answers letters from four to eight, dines and spends the evening at the Empress of Germany's cottage. The most interesting portion of Prince Gortschakoff's correspondence is the letters he gets from ladies. He begs every Russian lady about to quit St. Peters-, burg to write him frequently and tell him everything she sees and hears. In this way he is kept familiar with all the public, private, and secret history of Europe. The old fellow evidently knows where to look for news. It is not without importance, in the present crisis of affairs in Turkey, to remember that the Catholic Church, rartly as the Latin Church and partly as the United Greek, is alone to be found in every I part of the vast Ottoman Empire. The Greek schismatics are far more numerous, but they are confined to certain provinces, in which they form the vast mnjority of Christians. But in every part of the Turkish Empire in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Catholic Church is carrying on her divine work of Christian civilisation ; she possesses no fewer than sixty-six bishoprics and aiehbishoprics and eleven apostolic vicariates, with a Catholic population amounting to about 1,000,000. In European Turkey there are ten bishoprics and two archbishoprics, with a Catholic population estimated, on a very moderate calculation, at between 260,000 and 300,000. Constantinople is the seat of the Catholic patriarchate. In Bulgaria, Wallachia, Moldavia, Servia, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia, and Herzegovina there are eight bishoprics and five apostolic vicariates. Wendell Phillips, in a recent lecture on education, thus declares his dissatisfaction with the present training of young girls : "In the city a child is kept constantly in school from the age of seven to fifteen, and taught botany, history, and that class of knowledge. Seven out of ten are to make their own living, and there are very few of those who Btrive for a livelihood, who do not come back to their parents utterly incompetent to do one single act of any kind worthy of a morsel of bread. This is what they call education. , Four-fifths of the girls you present to society cannot read a passage or write a letter intelligibly, and all those valuable years have been wasted in acquiring a mere superficial education." A Massachusetts fishing schooner was obliged to return to port recently on account of a singular misfortune. The vessel was at anchor, and it seems that by some means a whale got the end of the cable nearest the anchor twisted round his tail, and in his efforts to free himself became securely entangled. The crew had no itt&pation of the trouble till the vessel was suddenly towed through the water at the rate of ten or fifteen miles an hour for

several miles. The whale lifted himself entirely out of the water several times, and at length broke the cable and freed himself. About 140 fathoms of cable were lost. Had the monster had the use of his tail he would probably have done serious damage to the vessel. Old fishermen who have frequented the Banks all their lives say they never heard of such an occurrence. The Irish nationalists, owners of the barque Catalpa, that rescued the political prisoners from Western Australia, have disposed of the vessel in a generous and highly creditable way. A New Bedford paper makes the announcement that Mr. John Devoy, of New York, and Mr. Reynolds, of New Haven, Conn., in whose name the Catalpa was entered, visited that city lately, and presented the vessel as she stood, with her whaling inventory, to the three men who best deserved her, namely, John E. Richardson, the agent, George S. Anthony, the brave captain, and Henry C. Hathaway, the Chief of Police whose fidelity and sagacity had much to do with the success of the rescue. Messrs. Devoy and Reynolds also settled with the crew on most liberal terms, the details of which, and the whole statistics of the enterprise, will soon be published. This is the proper ending for an affair that was well managed from the beginning, and reflects credit on all I concerned. Says the Cork Examiner of January 6 : — " The floods and gales throughout Ireland have abated. The damage done to property ia immense. The city tramcars to the watering places had to cease running, the lines being covered with four or five feet of water. Large coping stones were hurled from the sea walls and lodged in the middle of the tram lines at Clontarf . A criminal hoax has been perpetrated upon the officers and crew of the Goshawk gunboat, stationed at Queens town. A false tele* gram, purporting to come from the Admiralty, was received at the Admiral's office, Queenstown, ordering the. Goshawk, with her full strength of men on board, and carrying the utmost possible quantity of coal, to proceed instantly to Gibraltar. The Goshawk proceeded as far as Vigo, in dangerous weather, before the hoax was discovered. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, in a Mandement prescribing prayers for the Chambers, says : — " I doubt not that the concourse of the faithful will again this year testify the sentiments of faith and religion which, whatever may be asserted, remain those of the French nation. May these acts of national piety be a kind of public protest against the torrent of impiety of which we are daily the afflicted witnesses ! May this homage rendered to God turn away the chastisements which the unmentioned outrages offered to the Holy Church and to religion itself may call upon a country ! Lastly, may depositaries of power of all grades be imbued with this grand truth — that a nation which ceases to respect itself by exposing the most sacred things to scorn, runs the risk of losing the esteem of other people, and places itself on the brink of irremediable ruin ! "