NEWS OF THE WEEK.

THE Sultan either has or has not agreed to an extension of the armistice. It is affirmed that he has, but it is also affirmed that a difficulty has arisen as to the terms of the armistice as regards ships which will involve its nullification. We think the armistice is signed, because the Turkish Foreign Minister on Thursday discussed terms of peace with the Ambassadors for three hours, and they agreed to study the questions of Thessaly, of the indemnity, and of the Capitu- lations from the historic point of view. There is not a symptom, however, that the Pashas dream of surrendering Thessaly, and many reasons, stated elsewhere, for believing that they intend to keep it at all hazards. They believe that the German Emperor is willing they should, and are inclined to bid defiance to Russian pressure. They are strengthening themselves in Thessaly, and the old report that they would accept the Greek Fleet as security for the indemnity has been again revived in a serious form, Germany, and perhaps Austria, being inclined to consider this Fleet a mere burden on Greek finance. It seems to be allowed on all hands that the nego- tiations will be protracted, and that, while they go on, Thessaly, recently a most contented and quiet province, will be ruined for a generation. A large section of its people have fled, and its cattle will be used up by the Turks for food and transport. The distress of the Thessalians naturally increases the anxiety of the Greek Government for peace, and they now declare that they are unreservedly in the hands of the Powers.

The condition of Crete is deplorable. Mr. Balfour on Thurs- day declared pessimistic fears about the island to be un- warranted, but there exists in it no effective government whatever. The Mahommedans make raids on the insurgents, the insurgents make reprisals, and then the squadrons open fire lest the insurgents should win. The responsible Governor, Mr. Balfour explains, is the Turkish Vali, and the Pashas at Constantinople are demanding that the " autonomous " Governor-General should be appointed by the Sultan, while Berlin wishes the Powers to use Turkish troops in " pacify- ing the island. It is even reported with many details that the Turks offer to exchange Crete for Thessaly, and propose to locate all Cretan Mussulmans in that province, and ex- patriate all Thessalian malcontents to Crete. It is not probable that even the Imperial Powers will consent to this arrangement, but its discussion in Constantinople, which seems to be certain, sufficiently indicates the tone there prevalent. A curious rumour comes from Constantinople which may , deserve much more attention than it has yet received. It is said that the fighting tribes of Arabs behind Tunis and Algeria are immensely moved by the Sultan's victories, and that many of their Chiefs are arriving in the capital and beseeching Abd-ul-Hamid to turn out the French. They receive much encouragement from the Islamic party, and even the Sultan is inclined as Khalif to give them some fair words. This is a real and a serious danger for the French Government. The tribes cannot drive it out of Africa, but they can make Tunis unsafe, and compel the French to in- crease their garrison there by many thousands of men. The Senoussi Dervishes are formidable fighters, with immense in- fluence among both Arabs and negroes. The French Treasury will not like the expense, while the peasantry will be irritated by the despatch of their children to the detested Africa. M. Hanotaux, therefore, will eagerly support Great Britain and Russia in putting a check upon the Sultan. It is not supposed that the German Emperor desires Tunis.

The desire of the great Colonies for closer connection with the Empire appears to increase. The Canadians openly avow it, and their new preferential tariff is in actual opera- tion, while the Cape Parliament agreed on June 2nd to propose to pay a contribution towards the Imperial Navy. Similar feelings are expressed in Australia, and Mr. Seddon, Premier of New Zealand, also avows them, adding, however, that the Colonies wish for more influence over the foreign policy of Great Britain. There in the long run will be the crucial difficulty of Imperial Federation. People here welcome every sign of Colonial friendship, but they will not willingly surrender their own perfect independence of action. They will, we fancy, for the present at all events, prefer to bear the whole expense of Imperial defence, even though it tends to increase to an unprecedented height. The present situation in Europe, which is no doubt unusual in that we are apparently left without an ally, will not last for ever.

Yesterday week the Parnellites availed themselves of the vote in Supply of £19,087 for harbours under the Board of Trade, to protest against Ireland's having to pay so undue a. proportion of the vote. First Mr. Clancy, then Mr. John Redmond, then Mr. W. Redmond, and then Mr. Field asserted, in defiance of the Chairman of Committees, that they had a constitutional right to open up on this vote the whole question of the financial relations of England and Ireland. Mr. J. W. Lowther (the Chairman) pointed out the absurdity of raising so large and abstract a question on one item of account, but first the leader of the Parnellite party and then three of his followers in succession refused to defer to his ruling, and were suspended by the vote of the House. As we have pointed out in another column, we suspect that this was partly the consequence of the remorse felt by the Parnellites at having received Mr. Balfour's overtures on the previous Friday with so good a grace. The Irish party have a conscience which regards amenity to English statesmen as a grievous political sin.

On Tuesday last the South African Committee—Mr. Labonchere and Mr. Blake alone opposing this course— . decided that they would not make a special Report as to Mr. Hawksley's refusal to produce the telegrams, but would merely report the fact in the interim Report on the Raid which they intend to issue. The last of the evidence was taken on Tuesday and on Friday last, too late. however, for any comments by us. Counsel were heard on beaalf of Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Beit. As we have pointed out elsewhere, this of course means that Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Hawksley have beaten the Committee, and that the telegrams will not now be produced. Altogether the proceedings of the Com-

mittee have been most unfortunate. They have been baffled at every turn by those interested in keeping the true and full story of the Raid in the background, and it has only been by the occasional blundering of a witness either weary or else grown contemptuous by familiarity with the Committee, that any facts of importance have leaked oat. It is difficult now to believe that the Committee ever meant business. If they had been in deadly earnest—and nothing but deadly earnest would have been of any use—they would never have allowed Mr. Rhodes to return to South Africa. The fact that be was not re-examined after the Committee had heard the rest of the evidence is a proof of how little anxious the Committee were to push matters to extremities. The blame for the fiasco must not, however, be placed only on the shoulders of the Government. The fact that Sir William Harcourt, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and Mr. Buxton assented to the final breakdown of the proceed- ings makes the responsibility of the Opposition every bit as great as that of the Government. It now remains to be seen whether the Committee will allow the inquiry into the administration of the Chartered Company to be as factitious and irrelevant as that into the Raid.

On Tuesday Mr. Chamberlain was examined by the Com- mittee, and made a very frank and obviously sincere statement as to the position of the Colonial Office. Mr. Chamberlain was sure that if Mr. Fairfield had known anything about the plan for the Raid be would have communicated it. Mr. Fairfield was absolutely truthful and absolutely honourable. He was, however, very deaf, and, like most deaf people, was sensitive, and did not like to have a sentence repeated. Hence a misapprehension might have arisen as to things said to him. Asked whether he would object to the Hawksley telegrams being produced, Mr. Chamberlain replied, " I am really quite indifferent." Asked whether he had any objection to asking Mr. Rhodes to produce the telegrams, he replied, " Not the least." One telegram he should very much like to see published. It dealt with the transfer of the Protectorate, and gave a complete answer to the suspicions as to the Colonial Office. There occurred the words, " I dare not mention the reason,"—i.e., that the real reason the transfer was required, was to have a " jumping-off place" for the Raid.

In the House of Lords on Friday week Lord Stanhope moved an address to the Crown praying her Majesty to take such measures as were necessary to preserve in the country " such pictures, prints, books, manuscripts, works of art, and scientific collections not yielding income as are of national, scientific, or historic interest." He argued that steps ought to he taken without delay to determine the manner in which Clause 20 of the Finance Act of last year should be ad- ministered. The clause was intended to prevent art collections being broken up in order to pay duty, but the speaker declared that it was being harshly interpreted. He proposed to have a consultative Committee to decide as to what collections came within the clause. The debate that followed was marked by moderation and good sense, Lord Kelvin expressing anxiety as to the protection of scientific collections and apparatus from taxation. Ultimately Lord Cross read a Treasury minute on the way in which the clause was to be interpreted, which was admitted to be fairly satisfactory. The Treasury, however, will not deal with collections as a whole, but only with individual works of art. That seems to us unfair, and may still cause the break-up of collections which it is to the public interest to preserve whole. What, however, is chiefly wanted is a Department sympathetic in the direction of preserving our art treasures. If the spirit is sympathetic the words will be found wide enough.

We have done the Royal Niger Company, unconsciously, an injustice. It appears that Lord Salisbury's statement about the complaints from the town of Brass as to the interference with native trade were not directed against the Company, but against the British Government, which is directly responsible for affairs in Brass. The Niger Company, though under its present management it is much the best of the Chartered Companies, keeps up a degree of secrecy as to its methods of governing which it will, with its vastly enlarged territories, find it difficult to maintain. We entirely admit the ignorance of the democracy. but still it is responsible for all whom it governs, directly or indirectly, and it ought to be kept thoroughly well informed. We do not see- any evidence that when territories are well administered the people will show any undue diiiposition to interfere. Their pre- sent inclination, in fact, is to interfere rather too little, and except when theii 'attention is called by some well managed or badly managed little war, to let the affairs of the dark dependencies slide. We do not want daily telegrams from West Africa, but a yearly Report by an independent in- spector is, we think, needed to enable the democracy to be sure that it is discharging its duty well.

The visit of the Archbishop of York and his kindly courtesy appear greatly to have impressed the ecclesiastical authorities in Russia. They are sending over the Archbishop of Finland, not only to attend the Jubilee ceremonials, but to be present at the meetings of the Pan-Anglican Synod, which will be held in Lambeth. This is intended as a great exhibition of friendli- ness, and will, we hope, be so regarded by all Churchmen in this country. The two Churches are as yet divided by too many fissures for anything like union in the technical sense, but there is no reason whatever why there should not be amity between them. There is already, as we pointed out on April 24th, a singular absence of inherited prejudice, the English predisposition being to regard the Orthodox Church as very nearly Protestant. The Russian Bishop will probably be surprised to find how widely the Anglican Church has spread, and how little in the Colonies it minds being dis- established, while the English Bishops may discover that the Russian Church is not quite so " dead" as it is the custom in this country to believe. Certainly it retains a very strong hold upon the minds of its votaries, who, moreover, recognise a strong tie of brotherhood with all members of their own faith, in whatever country or under whatever regime they may be living.

The verdict in the trial of Herr von Tausch, chief of the Berlin political police, was to arrive too late for our issue. It was expected to be one of acquittal, it being evident from the demeanour of the Court and of the Public Prosecutor that the Government doubted the expediency of the whole inquiry. Herr von Tausch, who, it appears, spied upon the Emperor as well as everybody else, evidently knows a great deal, which he avoids stating. It is now stated that Baron von Marschall, the Prussian Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the mover of the prosecution, has received two months' leave of absence, and it is expected that he will not be con- tinued in office. As the Emperor-King is his own Foreign Secretary this does not matter greatly; but German Liberals complain that changes are too rapid, that even Ministers do not understand the Imperial policy, and that solid men will be reluctant to take office. The whole affair is one of those which indicate the existence of bitter personal and political struggles round the Imperial throne.

The Spanish Premier, Senor Canovas, has resigned, and it is supposed that his rival, Senor Sagasta, will be sent for, and that the Cortes will be dissolved. This event is impor- tant, because the Conservative and Liberal parties differ violently as to the policy to be pursued in Cuba, Senor Sagasta being willing to grant a real autonomy, which Senor Canovas has steadily refused. Both parties, however, desire to retain an absolute control of the finances of Cuba, to which the insurgents say they will not submit. Marshal Campos has been sent for by the Queen to give advice on the military situation, and will, it is supposed, once more accept the post of Governor-General in the island. There is great doubt as to the feeling of the Spanish people, who, on the one band, are most unwilling to surrender the island, and on the other, are excessively irritated by the enormous waste of conscript life. Recently they even rose in tumult to prevent the despatch of farther reinforcements. They will probably elect a Sagasta Parliament, but the difficulty of dealing with the island finances will be very great. The Spaniards mean to make Cuba pay the expenses of the war, and for the next few years she cannot do it.

The Bishop of London (Dr. Creighton) gave an interesting address on " Reading" at Sion College yesterday week, after distributing the certificates won in the London Diocesan Church Reading Union. He declared that one of the reasons why people choose their books so badly now is that the demo- cratic spirit has got hold of them, and brought them to think that "one man's opinion is as good as another's." So far as that means that no man is to be preferred simply because he belongs to any particular social grade, it may be true; but it is certainly not true that the man who takes great pains to form his opinions is no more to be trusted than the man who takes little pains. In reality nothing is more important than to gain the power of distinguishing between trustworthy authors and untrustworthy. The modern eagerness for short books really means the eagerness to get a little knowledge at very little cost. Yet no man's judgment is worth much who has not read books on very different sides of the same question. The great time devoted to newspapers and scrappy collections of odds and ends of learning is fatal to true study, and nothing could prove more clearly how very indifferent modern study is, than the magazine articles on theology, which are full of ignorance, and yet express dogmatic opinions without the knowledge required to form opinions. Then the Bishop went on to speak of those foolish objections to dogmatic theology of which we have said enough in another column. Dr. Creighton himself never expresses opinions on subjects of which he is igno- rant, and in that respect is one of the best teachers of our day.

Mr. Dillon in Thursday night's discussion on the Whitsun- tide adjournment again raised the subject of the release of the dynamiters, whom he termed political prisoners, and quoted President Kruger's excuse for refusing to release the Johannesburg prisoners on the ground that we keep political prisoners in confinement who have now been detained for twelve or thirteen years, his reference being to the Irish dynamiters. To this Mr. Balfour replied that the Government do not regard dynamiters as political prisoners, since their crime is one that endangers a number of innocent lives, and therefore cannot be regarded as directed against political enemies; nor did he believe that if President Kruger under- stood our reasons for denying the political character of their crime he would identify it with that of the Johannesburg prisoners. We are not quite sure of that, for President Kruger is not very scrupulous in arguments of this kind. But at all events the Government is entirely right in denying that the Fenians of thirty years ago ought in any way to be confounded with dynamiters who endanger lives that are in no sense those of political foes.

Lord Kelvin has a fend with the older geologists for insist- ing on such a vast number of years as they demand for the geological changes through which the earth has passed. Lord Kelvin is quite sure that this globe cannot have been habitable by living creatures for more than thirty millions of years, which he evidently considers a very moderate age for the duration of life on the globe. Considering how very minute a proportion of that vast period can be included within the range of anything like historical or traditional records, and how impossible it seems to look forward to anything like such a period in the future, we can hardly think that Lord Kelvin is a minimiser. His reason for beating down the duration of life on the earth to this short period of between twenty and thirty millions of years appears to be that, judging by the properties of rocks and by underground temperatures, the earth could hardly have been solidified sooner than thirty millions of years ago. And according to the latest geological calculations the time needed for the formation of all the later strata between the first Cambrian rocks and those of the present order of things, would be about seventeen millions of years. Lord Kelvin, therefore, inclines to regard our earth as a com- paratively infant world, aged not more than about a score, or at most a score and a half, of millions of years.

On Monday Cuthbert Patrick Evans, a lad of sixteen years of age, one of the prefects at Haileybury College, committed suicide by placing his neck on the metals of the Great Eastern Railway near Ware, leaving two letters behind him, one of them addressed to Canon Lyttelton, the head of Raileybury College, in which he declared that the cause of his death was the constant insults which were showered upon him by three other boys whom he named, who caricatured him, shut him out of the study, and spoke of him insultingly to the other boys, till he could bear his life no longer. As he

was to be another year at Haileybury, the prospect of this sort of persecution for so long a period was too much for him. He seems to have been a quiet boy and in outward appearance at least of a happy disposition, but very sensitive, and unable to bear either the odium of reporting to the Head-Master what he suffered, or the indignities which his schoolfellows inflicted on him. Canon Lyttelton reported that, in fact, what he had suffered was a long course of teasing, but it would seem to have been unmerciful teasing. In all pro- bability.the most accomplished teasers are quite unaware of the immense amount of suffering which they can and do inflict, and it would be a good thing if the consequences of such teasing were made known in all public schools,—of course without any mention of the names of the operators. Boys never wish to commit murder ; but they are quite ignorant of the agony which their apparently commonplace instrument of torture, if applied day after day and week after week, can produce on the nervous system of a sensitive lad.

The Times' correspondent in St. Petersburg publishes some curious information as to the property of the Russian Imperial family. It is one of the richest in the world. Apart altogether from the Civil List, which usually amounts to £1,500,000 a year, but which may of course be increased by Imperial order, the house of Romanoff owns twenty-one million acres in different parts of Russia, which, nnder a system laid down in the reign of the Emperor Paul, are managed by a special bureau called that of the Imperial Appanages, which is controlled by a Minister, who reports to the Emperor alone, and takes no orders from the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Appanages now enjoys a revenue of more than 22,000,000, out of which forty-six Grand Dukes and Duchesses are supported, at an average cost in all of £500,000, or say £11,000 a year per Prince or Princess. The remaining income is suffered to accumulate in order to meet the constantly increasing number of members of the Imperial family, who are by no means always satisfied with their dotations. The sums, though large, are not derived from taxation, and are probably less than those enjoyed by the Hapsburgs, who are as a corporation immense landowners, not to mention the great fortunes of two or three branches of the family, or than those of the house of Othman. The revenue of the Hohenzollerns exceeds a million, and that of the house of Savoy is more than 2600,0 00 a year, the British house being, among the greater Sovereign houses, by far the poorest. Fifty years hence the question of appanages will be a serious embarrassment to the dynasties, and will probably lead to a great relaxation of the Royal marriage laws. Then the American heiresses, who by that time will possess half South America, will indeed have a chance.

The Compensation for Accidents Bill, which Las been before the House of Commons during the whole of the past week, will have passed through Committee before these pages are in our readers' hands, the plan being not to adjourn the House for the Whitsuntide Recess till the Bill is through Committee. The House, and as we think rightly, refused on Thursday to make the children of men killed by accident mean illegitimate as well as legitimate children, though the peculiarity of English law, under which subse- quent marriage fails to make previously born children legitimate, may no doubt produce very hard cases. The most important amendment of the week was Mr. Chamber- lain's own, under which either employer or workman may, after twelve months, apply to have a weekly payment commuted to a lump sum (to be settled by arbitration) not exceeding six years' purchase. On the whole, the Bill has achieved the rare success of gaining ground under discussion. Mr. Chamberlain's conduct of the measure—it was only natural, considering his practical experience of industrial life, that the matter should be largely left in his hands—has on all sides been admitted to have been admirable. It has been both spirited and tactful, the two essential qualities for defending a measure in Committee. Mr. Chamberlain's heart is in the Bill, and yet he has not regarded it as a sacred object which no profane band must dare to touch. He has been very liberal in the matter of concession and compromise.

Bank Rate, 2 per cent.

New Consols (21) were on Friday, 113.