NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE week has been, in its way, not uneventful. Chicago, the great capital of Illinois, has been burnt nearly to the ground, by a fire which occurred on Sunday night, from the spilling of a lamp in a cowshed. There have been also bad fires on the prairies in Wisconsin, where several villages have been burnt, and, it is said, five hundred lives lost. The Canadian town of Windsor, opposite Detroit, has been nearly burnt to the ground. A Fenian raid has been made on Canada, near Pembina, but it was stopped by United States' troops, and General. O'Neil was again taken prisoner. The Newcastle Strike has terminated with a virtual* victory for the men, almost immediately after Sir W. G. Arm- strong had explained, on behalf of the masters, the unanswerable economical reasons why they could yield nothing. The French elections for the Coneeils-Gadraux have confirmed the impres- sion that the French peasantry, while they take but a languid interest in politics, accept the existing Government, and prefer that, so long as it is tolerably quiet, to any prospect of change. Count Benedetti, the ex-Emperor's late ambassador at Berlin (and at Ems), has put forth his defence of himself and his feeble apology for his Imperial master. Mr. Baxter, the Secre- tary to the Admiralty, 110.51 made an imprudent speech to his con- stituents, expressing his satisfaction and almost exultation in the humiliation of France, and, contrary to constitutional usage, throwing on the permanent subordinates of his department all the responsibility for his own answers in Parliament in relation to the unseaworthy and shipwrecked Megsera. And last, not least, we have had revealed to us the heads of a scheme—described and criticized in another column—for an alliance between the Tory aristocracy and the working-men on the general basis of the socialistic principles developed nearly thirty years ago by the leader of Opposition in 44 Coningsby " and " Sybil."
