'Tue Pall Matt Budget received by the last English mail (dated July 3rd) contained a striking article headed, "The Great Police Strike: 'Looking backward' on what might be." Such apprehensions of the anarchy andi disorder that would overwhelm London in the event of a general strike of the police must have been present in the minds of most of the London journalists, as they wrote in the second week of July on the abortive strike in one division of the Force.
Newspapers of nearly all shades of political opinion join in almost unmeasured condempation of the strikers; not merely of the rioters, for whom of course there is nothing to be said, but of the police for striking at all. The advice given them is of the usual worthless kind: "You are very well off, much better off than men of the same class in other walks of life; you are very well paid, your work is not too hard and you get a pension, and it is very ungrateful of you to strike." These writers forget that the employed form their own ideas of their advantages, and do not look at them in the same light as their employers. The following extract from the Times gives the general view of the London press on the matter The strike, about which so much sentiment is set in motion by those who advocate it, would, as a matter of fact, be for the most vulgar of motives—more wages and better pecuniary prospects. But what are the wages and what are the prospects of the Metropolitan Police? We give the figures in another column; and they tell a very curious story. They afford a comparison of the wages and th pensions of the much-enduring policeman th those of the soldier and sailor; and of the wages of the policeman with those of the labourer, who has no pension, poor fellow but the' workhouse. The public at large expects after all this excitement to find that the pay-table will reveal a real grievance. What are the facts? Taking the pay and the pensions separately, we find that the average pay of the London policeman is £74 a year; of the soldier, £48; of the ' A.B." Sailor, £48; and of the highest unskilled "and lowest skilled labourer (in London) £67 odd. We find that the after 21 years' s the soldier, £19 15s. and of the civil serval is stated that the usual time at which constables retire is after 22 years' service, and at that time a constable's pension exceeds a civil servant's by 28 per cent., a soldier's by $2 per cent, a sailor's by 89 per cent., a "petty officer' (naval) by 17 per cent.; while, as we have said, had the constable remained in the ranks of ordinary labour he would have got no pension at all. It cannot be urged that th policeman's life—though the comic opera say: that it is not a happy one"—is harder than the sotdier's or the sailor's, that it is more distasteful than the one or' more dangerous than the other. It is, indeed, in many' ways to be preferred to either.
It is obvious that there must be another side to the question, and that men in such goud case as the metropolitan police would hot strike without some reason. The fact that the postmen were striking too—and the discontent in the Post Office was by no means confined to the letter-carriers—naturally led people to ask what the true inwardness of the dissatisfaction was, and the Pall Mall gives the following explanation, in reading which it has to be remembered that the Pall Mall is only too glad to yet a chance to discredit the Government, individually as well as collectively At bottom, no doubt, the discontent in the Police-force and the Post Office is part of the eneral movement for better conditions and labour world. "But both the policemen and higher wages which has infected the whole
the postmen are, reasonable, patient, and orderly men; and a special cause must be sought, to explain the fact that they are now on the brink of strike and insubordination. That cause is simply the folly of their official superiors in not allowing free vent to the men's complaints. 'The police were agitating, legally and constitutionally, for better pay and more convenient shifts. That their agitation was not primd facie unreasonable, was proved by the ex-Commissioner's covert' sympathy with it. The resignation of Mr. Monro created some passing excitement, and there was u danger for the moment of violent_measures. But the new Commissioner devised a safety-valve in the Police Petition to be ad-Gressed through him to the Home Secretary, and the movement had resumed its moderate and peaceable course. What has sudanly set up a criss i simply the ill-advised atter of hasty subordinates to interfere with the right of petition, The Home Secretary made a Nery great mistake (to soy nothing of the fib) in shielding the Divisional Inspector who tore up the sheet containing signatures to the tition at Hunter-street. Sir Edward Braslford made a very great mistake in listening to the tell-tales who reported the cireul: of a petition by Constable Beevers, Kither the policemen have the right of petitioning, or they have not. If not, Sir Edward should have pat his foot down at once. If they have, then the right should be left intact. To tell them that they may petition, and then to punish them for collecting signatures is just one of those foolish and vexatious half-mea. sures which invariably instigate disorder. The origin of the trouble in the Post Oflice is the same. There also the original grievances on the score of pay have been overlaid by grievances on the score of the right to secure redress; and what the postmen now demand first of all is "the right of meeting " and the reinstatement of those who have been suspended for asserting that right, The cause of the crisis in each service is thus the same, It is pleasant to learn that the International Conference at Brussels on the prevention of the African Slave Trade has ended its labours very satisfactorily. The Powers concerned have drawn up what amounts to a second Declaration of the Rights of Man, They will spread civilisation in the interior of Africa, establishing fortified stations as refuges and. posts of observation; they will introduce domestic animals so as to extinguish cannibalism they will jointly establish a code of penalties for the crime of slave-dealing; the sale of fire-arms and of spirits is to be almost entirely interdicted, and where the use of spirits has already established itself, it will be regulated by the imposition of 'a high license. The great difficulty hitherto im the way of stopping the ron-herve trades was the refusal of the French to allow Arab dhows flying the tricolour to be searched but on this point France has decided to justify her great traditions, and has ceded measures of supervision ro effective that the technical right of search may safely be allowed to fall into the background."
Thus the Pall Mull, which contains besides two excellent portraits of Stanley and his bride, and a very clever one of Mr. E. A. Waterlow, A.R.A, There are two zvod caricatures of the First Lord of the treasury, some ghastly sketches of the Gouffé murder, and some very pretty drawings of Metehet Court.
the following extract from the St. James's ives a condensed idea ofthe position taken Mr. Blaine as to American rights in Behring Sea A summary has been published in New York of the correspondence between the British and United States Governments regarding the Behring Sea fishery questi Which it is expected will shortly be distribu ed to Congress. In January last Mr. Blaine sent a Note to the British Government, point ing out the ancient. recognised claims of Russia to the exclusive right. to the benefits of the fur seal fishery and the acquisition of those rights and benefits in the eastern portion of the Behring Sea by the United States under treaty. Mr. Blaine, in a later despateh, declined Sir Julian Pauncefote's suggestion that the matter should be settled by an inter: ational convention, Lord Salisbury, in sumed by the United States, and stated that lengthy despatch, impeached the position as-
the controversy between Russia and the States in 1822 had an obvious reference to Behring Sea. To this Mr. Blaine answered in forcible and outspoken terms, reiterating the right of America to ox: clude Catiadian sealing from Behring Se He repudiated the argument put forward by the British Forei; fice, that in 1822 the United States held the same position towards Russia as that now occupied by Great Britain towards the United States. What Russia then claimed was the right to treat the Pacific asa mare clausun between the Asiatic and American coasts southward to the fifty-first degree of latitude, and all Mr. Adams then resisted was the attempt to treat a large area distinctively known as a great ocean as a
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.