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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 13, 18 July 1884, Page 7

The Boston police haftre lately been instructed in surgery so far as to enable them to act in cases of emergency while waiting for a doctor. This is an excellent step, as is also the intention* of the Commissiontrs to have the police trained in athletic 3, and particularly in scientific boxing. The police are the physical arm of the law ; but the oaly arm they know how to use is the bludgeon or revolver. Tne first thing a policeman should be taught is how to conduct himself in a street fight or a row of any kind. It is not necessary or right that he nhould at once endanger the lives of the people by using his " billy "or pisto'. Teach policemen how to meet a ruffian with a solid fist, and thoy will rarely draw a deadly weapon. Every great city ought to have a police gymnasium. Boston has done well in beginning a system of '• emergency " teaching; and it is well to remember that a police emergency is as likely to be the need of safely knocking a man down as of binding up his wound. -~Pilol. Dr. Armand Despres is one of the physicians of the Hospital de la Charite, of Paris. Dr. Despres is a Freethinker and Republican, but he manfully replies to certain calumnies uttered by M. Quentiu, Superintendant of Public Assistance. The only charge made against the religious, whom the French Atheists are trying to drive out of the hospitals, is the one that they proselytize the patients on their sick beds. Dr. Despres admits this ; but he regards it a 9 an amiable weakness, without which the religious serving in the hospitals would be alone in the world the ideal of perfection 1 Dr. Despres asserts, after a keen glance at the abuses of the " lnicized " hospital*, that the hospitals served by the Sisters cost only one-half of those in which paid attendants are employed. Dr. Despres informs M. Quentiu that to " make a man like him, it required only a vacant place and the friendship of Gambetta," while the writer and his associates in the hospital earned their position by thirty or forty years ' devotion to the unfortunate. In conclusion, Dr. Despres accuses the Government of having inaugurated a species of odious despotism, and adds significantly : "If we lose the Republic, if it takes us a century to regain it, you will have been the cause of it." When Republicans recoil from Republican tyranny, it looks as if the ea4 of the despotism of " liberty" were coming.— N. T, Freemm,.