To-day Ministers have gone down to Osborne to receive formally from Her Majesty the Queen's Speech; and on Tuesday ~atliament will be opened. Ministers have toa very limited extent taken the public into their confidence on the subject of the programme of the Session 5 but on Satur-lay Mr. Balfour crushed the hopes of the churchmen by announcing that the promised Education Bill would not give aid from the rates to the voluntary schools. The announcement has vreated such an imsession upon the Bishop of Chester that has addressed and published a letter to Cardinal Vaughan in which he virtually proposes a union of the Roman Catholic and Anglican forces to smash the Government unless it gives way, and to treat with the Liberal leaders, And the strange things is that Cardinal Vaughan has actually returned quite a sympathetic answer to. the suggestion. The correspondence has, however, only been regarded with amusement as a further evidence of the hopelessly unpractical nature of the ecclesiastical mind. It is precisely because not only the Liberal-Unionists but even the more liberal-minded of Conservatives recognised that schools could not be allowed to dip into the local rates without submitting to local public control that the Government abandoned the idea of rate aid; and the notion of the extreme clerical party coming to terms with the Radicals, whose object is to nationalist all the schools and take the education of the children out of the hands of the parsons, is too ridiculous for words, As for the other great question with which Parliament will have to concern itself during the early days of the Session—the alleged over-taxation of Treland—the excitement on that question has already to a large extent died down. A good many of the Irish Unionists who threw themselves ''bald-headed " into the agitation have already seen their mistake. As a peg on which to hang anew the demand for Home Rule there may be some substance in the agitation; but from the Unionists' point of view there is none at all; and the Unionists are pagiening see that by supporting the agitation they have been playing into the Home Rulers' hands.
BY-ELECTIONS, A by-election has just taken place in the Cleveland Division of Yorkshire, and there are two more now hanging over us—one in Forfarshire, where the Conservatives think they have a chance of adding a couple to their huge majority, and the other in, Essex, where they have a safe seat. In the Cleveland Division, which has long been a preserve of the great Quaker family of the Peases, Mr. A. E. Pease, who
retained the seat for the Radicals by a very is now shooting big "game in Avice, largely increased majority, though he was absent from the fight and—his opponent was © local'man who, has twice before contested the constituency. Up to 1892 Mr. A. E. Pease divided with Sir Frank Lockwood the representation of: York City. He has a father," brother, and a cousin in the Commons (the cousin being a Uni ist) and he replaces another cousin in the seat which he has just gained. So the Peases are well represented in Parliament.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.