NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE brightness of the Coronation festivities at Moscow was entirely marred on Saturday by an accident so destructive of human life that it resembles rather the accident in the amphitheatre at Fidenm recorded by Tacitus than any calamity of our time. The Czar had ordered that six hundred thousand cups of enamelled iron, six hundred thousand handkerchiefs with the Em- peror's portrait, and six hundred thousand sausages should be distributed among the vast crowds which attended the ceremony. The memorials are greatly valued, and on the night of Friday week half-a-million persons bivouacked on the Khodinsky plain to be in time for the distribution. On the following morning the crowd, tired with waiting, began to rush towards the booths in which the cups were known to be stored; the attendants, alarmed, began to fling them out, a scramble occurred, and became a stampede down a declivity in front of the booths. Hundreds fell, the vast crowd still pressed on, and in a short time three thousand six hundred men and women had perished, most of them by dis- embowelling. The police and soldiers removed the dead, and the Czar ordered £80 to be given to each bereaved family, but for the rest the accident was treated as if an epidemic had broken out. The festivities and banquets went on as before, and though the bereaved mourned with the Slav exuberance of grief, their comrades who were not bereaved hailed the Czar with their accustomed noisy but genuine enthusiasm. No one was to blame except for stupidity in selecting a single centre for the distribution, and the appa- rent heartlessness was due in part to stolidity, in part to an Asiatic resignation. The Czar, it is said, at first ordered all display of joyousness to cease, but was warned that such an order would enormously exaggerate the effect of the ominous incident throughout the Empire.
