The Pall Mall Gazette from London, Greater London, England • 10

June io, 1873. PALL MALL GAZETTE. -h-riAos tn hp rnnnted in china bowls and nrcA SIONAL NOTES. and the custom of breaking it in manifestation of excessive grief is mentioned in tne "Arabian Nights," and Consul West has been told of an instance of a member of an old Cairaean family having still 150 large china bowls of hereditary descent ranged on shelves round his room. A letter from Bern in the French papers says a circular has been addressed by the Prussian Government to its representatives at foreign Courts, and to the presidents of provinces and other Government agents, instructing them as to the language to be used reaard to the establishment of the new Government France.

The Prussian despatch begins by acknowledging M. Thiers' efforts to ensure payment of the war indemnity, and the loyalty of his attitude towards Germany. It then gives expression to the hope, in view of Marshal MacMahon's declarations, of continuing on good terms with the new President of the Republic. The Government agents are specially asked to say that at Berlin there is every desire to strengthen the Conservative tendencies of the new French Government in opposition to the schemes of Socialism. They are also directed to express the con viction of the Prussian Government, that the change of rulers in trance will have no influence on the attitude of the members of the various religious communions of the Empire.

As Germany has no desire to meddle with French domestic affairs so long as they do not compromise the payment of the indemnity and the liberation of the territory, there is no reason why there should be any disquietude felt in the Empire with reference to France. The document concludes by pointing out that the character of Marshal MacMahon and the Conservative principles with which he is animated are a guarantee to all of the maintenance of friendly relations with the new French Government. which there has been suf tter controv erg nominai liability to JTL'lSto 1 topercd by allowing thereto SrVe tLfowntbstitute on their own terms, subject, of course, to the engage their own ff Th dsnt xeformers, represented by apS Sn brog haS denounced this plan so earnestly that it stands cSnedS opinion; but, on the other hand, no Government fn the free little kingdom has the power to enforce actual service he mnk on the Sto-do classes. The idea of the Cabinet obviously to endeavour to accommodate the conflicting views of the two sections, and for this end they propose that personal substitution ha be abolished, the State undertaking to give the needful bounties to he volunteers who fill the places of those who choose to pay or exemp ioii According to the proposed bill, the price to be paid for such exemption is to be fixed by decree each year, three months at least before the annual drawing. The obvious objection to the scheme is that it approaches very closely to that introduced, for somewhat similar reasons, into the French army during the atter years of the Second Empire, when it ended in the necessities of the military administration causing the Government to retain the penalties paid its coffers without earning out its original intention of providing the substitutes.

The other chief change proposed is to extend the time of actual service in the ranks from about two years, as at present, to two and a half. A letter addressed to the Times, under the signature of Spinsters, contains a new complaint against the lax and culpable inaccuracy in the assessment of income tax by which a naturally irritating impost is rendered almost intolerable. The writers, who are "spinsters deriving a. smalt pension ofioo a year, their sole income, from the Bombay Civil nana, for which their father paid by subscription during his life," state that their pension was for many years overtaxed 30. a year, without the fact being discovered.

On its being brought to their notice application was made for the restitution of the overcharge, when they were informed by the authorities at Somerset House that only three years' excess could be recovered. Of course, all preceding excess had been appropriated by the Government, and there was a heavy expense incurred by the writers in the recovery of the three years' excess. The strangest part of the matter, however, is, they add, that the overcharge still continues, and has to be recovered by the following process Printed forms have to be obtained from Somerset House, and certificates from our agents that the claim for overcharge is correct These papers are sent to the district surveyor, when other papers specifying whether our parents are dead, whether the income is for maintenance or education, vested interest or contingent, are received, and all these sets have to be returned to Somerset House, when, after considerable delay, the overcharge is returned." All this argues a vexatiously defective system but after the flood of complaints which poured into the newspapers last year on the subject of unjustifiable overcharges, we cannot say that any new revelation surprises us. The worst of the matter is that official apologists for the present mode of assessment seem to think it quite a sufficient excuse for overcharging the honest taxpayer that the dishonest taxpayer is given to undercharging himself. It is, however, a somewhat barbarous method of adjusting matters to add 10 or 20 per cent, indiscriminately to the assessment of some incomes in order to recoup the supposed losses on others which are wilfully understated.

Sir Charles Trevelyan writes to us as follows In your Census of Casuals" last Friday you called attention to two remarkable facts: First, that in winter, when employment is comparatively scarce and distress the greatest, vagrancy is at a minimum and, secondly, that "the summer increase of 187 1 was largely, and that of 1872 wholly, due to the metropolis and the adjacent counties." The first half ot this problem admits of a simple explanation. Have you never seen the seagulls pursuing a shoal of herrings, or the kites and vultures hovering over a camp In like manner the migration of human birds of prey is determined by that on which they feed. When those who have money and no brains leave their comfortable winter quarters in the country, those who have brains and no money gather to receive them town When the London season is over and the watering-places fill, the beggars swarm to the Isle of Wight, Bri ghton, and other places of popular resort. Then comes another hibernation, and another spring gathering, and so on. The other half of the problem is explained by the Committee on Vagrancy and Mendicity appointed by the Charity Organization Society London and other large centres of population are the great depots the vagrancy and mendicity of these islands, into which vagrants and mendicants from every part of the United Kingdom are absorbed, and from which they reissue.

The vagraney and mendicity of the metropolis and other large cities are attracted and developed by the profuse and indiscriminate relief to vagrants and mendicants. In the especially, it is found that night refuges and free dormitories, to which all comers are admitted with hardly any check, public soup-kitchens, innumerable doles of bread, groceries, coal, and a vast system of recognized mendicity by which crossing-sweepers, sellers of matches and other articles, street singers, subsist upon alms under pretence of service, are among the means by which a large vagrant and mendicant population are enabled to live in London without regular or productive labour. London is the paradise of idlers. If there had been a deliberate intention of enabling the largest possible number of people to live without working, it could not have been better arranged. The doles at the doors of convents, which pauperized the pre-Reformation era, were a trifle compared with the gratuitous distribution of food at the missions in various parts of London.

The lapsed, demoralized multitude which dragged down heathen Rome has been reproduced on a much larger scale in Christian London. So it must always be when the great law of our nature that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow is suspended. In these days it is impossible to tell what questions may be asked of candidates for public appointments by the Civil Service Commissioaers, and as the Suez Canal is a likely subject for examiners to use for purposes of torture, a few scraps taken from an interesting report by Consul George West on the Trade and Commerce of the Port of Suez for 1872, lately issued, may be valuable to candidates. It appears that it is a popular error to imagine that the ancient name of Suez was Kulzum. The site of the Kulsum of the Arabs is an irregular mound of earth about seventy feet high, nearly conterminous with the northern extremity of the town of Suez.

Suez from its commencement seems to have stood apart from Kulzum, and probably took its place about ad. 1349. The exact word in Arabic is Suweis, a diminutive form of Sus, a worm, and the name of towns in Morocco, Tunis, and Persia. A local version of the origin of the name of Suweiz (Suez) is that a Sheik from Sus, in Morocco, on his return from his pilgrimage to Mecca, from illness, or perhaps poverty, took up his abode among some fishermen, who had formed on the sea-shore, about 100 yards to the west of the present Suez Hotel, a small hamlet to themselves for the more easy pursuit of their vocation. This Sheik, having acquired credit for sanctity, became known as Es-Susi, the Susian, and the hamlet after him as Es-Sus, and afterwards as Es-Suweis, the name which the town into which the hamlet grew also retained.

The Sheik's tomb is still shown and venerated as that of an early father of the place, which must mean nearly 600 years ago. It is also worth mentioning that during the rule of the Fatimite Sultans of Egypt, of Salah-ed-deen and the successors of his family, the Turkish and Circassian Marmuks (a.d. 969-1517), Kulzum, and then Suez must have been emporia of costly trade, since the princes of those houses and their dependants were all great patrons of Indian and China fabrics and so much was the porcelain of China in vogue in Egypt and Syria that every house of respectability was not only furnished with it for use, but also for ornament, and it since became the 2162 It appears that one, at least, of the German Governments anticipated by some years the recent legislation of the Diet against the Jesuits and other Ultramontane orders. The Church law of Baden, dating from October, i860, positively forbids the introduction into the Grand Duchy of any religious order, or the establishment of any religious house, without the previous assent of the Government The provisions of this Act have been recently applied to a large institution near Freiburg which has hitherto evaded them by keeping the name under which it was originally founded of an industrial school, but which a recent Government inquiry proved to be completely under the management of unlicensed priests of the society known as the Brotherhood of the Precious Blood. A decree recently signed fixed the 1st of July as the final date for the dispersal of those employed in the establishment, who numbered, with thtfir pupils, 164 persons in all) and the brotherhood is further prohibited from exercising the functions of teaching anywhere within the Gran'3 Duchy, as belonging to the category included in the recent imperial legislation.

The Committee on Justice of the Council of States? held their final deliberation on the subject on the 13th instant, when the sentence of banishment under the law of 1872 was ordered to be applied to the Redemptorists and Lazarists, as well as to the smaller societiesi.