A Hundred Years Ago
THE SPECTATOR, SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1829.
THE CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT.
There has been no period of our history in which the intended measures of the Cabinet have been more studiously kept secret than at the present moment ; and, consequently, at no time were the rumours of projected innovations to be received with greater caution. Among these rumours no one has been more positively insisted on, nor repeated in more various quarters, than that which states a determination to modify, in some way not precisely explained, the present Ecclesiastical Establishment in the ensuing session of Parliament.
WIFE-MURDER.
. .
Abraham Reed, a wild-looking man about thirty years of age, was tried at the Bridgewater Assizes for. oisoning his wife ; to which, it is believed, he was instigated not so much by mere dislike, as by the desire to possess himself, of a sum of money for her burial, to which the death of the unfortunate woman entitled him as a member Of a benefit club at North Molton. The poison (arsenic) was adminis- tered in cream ' • it had been expelled from the stomach of the victim by vomiting ; but there remained ample and clear evidence of the crime, and the sordid murderer was doomed to suffer death and dissection.
PRIZE-FIGHTING.
At the Ilford Petty Sessions, on licensing-day, the Chairman very properly admonished publicans of the impropriety of harbouring prize-fighters.
The persons guilty in the first instance are not the publicans, who merely supply the means to the end ; but the noble lords, and patrician patrons of the ring, who encourage the barbarism, and are the authors of the demand for prize-fighters. The training to which the publicans are party, is not the temptation to fighting, or the cause of throwing ruffians into the ring. The rewards, the sanction, all the motives of the mischief, are referable to the sporting men ; and on them, not on the mere caterers, shall fall the full.measure of the merited shame. We believe this vile taste has declined ; but the slang merenften were responsible for its encouragement, and are yet main causes of its surviving to its present extent, amidst the spread of the humanities.
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