NOTES OF THE MONTH.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 272, 26 April 1875, Page 4

NOTES OF THE MONTH.

([From the Spectator .) The scheme for tunnelling the Channel has got thus far, that two companies—one French and one English—have agreed to try an experiment on each side. They have the necessary concessions and the needful capital, and are going to bore in earnest. When they have bored, the world will be in a position to judge of their prospects, and not till then. They hope to bore through chalk, to keep a chalk wall fifty yards thick over their heads, and to find no very serious “fault;” and if their hopes are justified they may make the tunnel, and have no tasks remaining except to secure the needful air, the necessary passengers, and a profit. The seventh annual Congress of the Trades’ Onions was opened in Liverpool on Monday, the 18th of January. The delegates denounced the judges’ interpretation of the law of conspiracy in very strong terms, and would, perhaps, have accepted a proposal to prosecute the masters who combined for the lock-out in South Wales, in order to try the law, but for the determined resistence of Mr Macdonald, Mr Burt, and Mr Halliday, who argued that such a measure, besides being impolitic, would be unjust, as they ought not to use a law against which they were protesting. The resolve not to prosecute was found to be nearly unanimous, and Mr Odger, who had made the proposal, withdrew it. The prizes for the best essays on Trades Unions were distributed, and the second one (£2O) fell to Mr John Wilson, grinder, of Sheffield, a determined opponent of unionism. He had, however, defended unions probably to prove that he understood that side of the question. The delegates were very angry, and some of them hissed, but they agreed, in a spirit of justice we are glad to recognise, that Mr Wilson was entitled to his prize.

It is stated—we do not know whether authoritatively or not—that Lord Lyttelton’s Bill for an increase of the Episcopate, will receive the support of the Government. Some of the dioceses, particularly Exeter and London, are utterly overgrown, hut we hope if any increase is made, it will be on the principle of making bishoprics conterminous with counties. Of course, that cannot be quite universal, but excepting in Wales and one or two English counties, one county is enough for one man, There is no need to pay them all alike, or give them all cathedrals, but the principle should be countybishoprics. The opportunity should be taken, too, to abolish that shameful conge d'clire, to vest the appointments directly in the Crown, and to allow the removal of a Bishop on address from both Houses. If the Bishop of Manchester could but multiply himself by twenty, the National Church would be in no sort of danger. He is always Liberal, always manly, and always sensible. In delivering the prizes in connection with the school of the Liverpool Council of Education, he said he had long arrived at the conclusion that without a uniform, equitable, but at the same time effective, system of compulsion, the education of the country would never be what we have a right to expect. “ Rather than maintain a Church of England school as denominational in a state of languor and inefficiency, he, as a clergyman bothered out of his life to get up subscriptions and to have school sermons—begging and begging for the upholding of the school— would ask the School Board to take it for secular purposes. The Act allowed him his own terms, and he would certainly preserve his school as a place of religious education.” No doubt ; and Dr Fraser, moreover, would manage this without the unfairness which has characterised Ibid operation iu the bands of some

astute church managers, who have given their religious lessons in such close proximity to the School Board*s secular teaching,as to give rise to the impression among the parents that the School Board is responsible for it, and that it is part of the regular school course. But Dr Fraser looks at school Boards as if they were friends not enemies. If the clergy would but follow his example, the famous “religious difficulty” would soon disappear. A contemporary, quoted by the Times, has taken up its parable for hotel life as against domestic life, on the ground that both the cost and the petty responsibilities of a house of your own are so far less distinctly measurable, and consist of so many and such complicated elements, over which you have no clear control, while at an hotel you know exactly what your expenses are, and are relieved of all the responsibilities of domestic superintendence. All this, no doubt, is perfectly true so far as it goes. The incidental expenses of a house, on which no one ever calculates, are always a fresh surprise ; and the difficulty of getting good servants, and of managing them even when you have got them, is daily increasing, and likely to increase. But to substitute hotel for domestic life is a remedy vastly worse than the evil for which it is prescribed. A family which grows up in an hotel is hardly a family in the English sense at all; it is only an unusually permanent element of a changing crowd. As the large cities in the United States show, the moral dangers of such a life are peculiar and great, and there are no moral advantages to set against them. Besides, to turn a rapid river of perpetual novelty through your home is to make novelty itself vapid, by making you a stranger to yourself and to your own people. The life of families in an hotel is something of a parasitic life ; they are living on a foreign organism, and are quite sure to assimilate many of the qualities of that organism for which they have no liking or respect. Some gardener has recently found out that he can make all sorts of gourds of different orders and species grow together in a hybrid mass by a little grafting. That is a type of the family life of hotels.