The Continental news is not striking ; only a kind
of stir, as though there were something important behind. The French Ministers are kept in perpetual hot water, as if to remind them that in the midst of life they are in death. The Chambers make sport of measures to check railway speculation— now prohibiting, now refusing to prohibit ; set at nought the Ministerial intentions in the details of the tariff; get up rumours of formidable opposition which come to nothing, and only mock with needless terrors the laborious preparations to conquer into which Ministers are entrapped. In short, Ministers rule in the departments, but have no mastery over the naughty Peers and Deputies. The cat has lost its fangs, and the mice play before its face.
'Switzerland is still under the fit of revolution. The Free Corps, the most licentious of fanatics, are preparing to carry on Ilbe Jesuit controversy—the Maynooth question of Helvetia— with powder and ball ; regardless of the Foreign Powers that stand by and watch this technical breach of the constitution, in order, when the breach is practicable, to step in and subdue the Republic with a war of partition disguised in diplomacy.
Spain labours under some access of the insurrectionary fever ; whether of the Esparterist, Republican, or Carlist kind, is scarcely certain. Queen Christina is Said to wish that her daughter Isa- bella the Second should marry her young relative the Neapolitan Count Trapani. This Carlist stir may be an attempt to frighten the Queen-mother into favouring the Prince of the Asturias, Don Carlos's son-; or it may be some manoeuvre devised by the in- triguer herself; or it may be mere wantonness of anarchy. It does not much matter which, for Spain suffers alike in any case. he dull girl seems destined to wed some dull boy ; and her nuptial-feast will be the signal for new outrages by the disap- pointed intriguers who speculate in the rejected boy, whichever he may be.
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