Meanwhile the war and the opportunity it has afforded to dishonest and unpatriotic financiers has gone far to precipitate a revolution in Italy, and has raised the price of bread in this country to a figure which must bring some amount of privat tion and suffering upon thousands of poor people. The only gainers in this country are the farmers, who are getting better rices for their wheat than they have en able to procure for a quarter of a century past. With regard to the Italian risings it is very difficult to obtain reliable information in consequence of the rigid censorship of telegrams exercised by the Italian authorities; but there seems to be very little doubt that the rise in the price of bread is merely the occasion seized by the leaders of a revolutionary movement which has been in process of organisation for a considerable time past.
To-day the result of the polling at a by-election in South Norfolk has been declared. Mr. Soames, the Liberal candidate has succeeded in turning a Unionist majority of 836 into a Liberal majority of 1,330, and thus winning a seat from the government. In West Staffordshire on Tuesday the Unionist candidate managed to retain the seat vacated by the' death of' Mr. Hamar Bass, but with a majority some 1,700 less than that secured by the late member in 1892, the year of the Liberal victories. 'These results are significant enough' of the feeling which has come over the country but more significant still is a letter which has been addressed: by Mr. Finch-Hatton to Viscount Newark, his successor in the representation of the Newark division of Nottinghamshire. Mr. Finch-Hatton gave no reason publicly for this retirement at the time when he resigned'a few weeks ago; he waited until his successor had been elected without opposition, and until the other pending by-elections in South Norfolk and West Staffordshire had; been fought. Then he published a letter in which, six weeks ago, he poured forth the vials of his wrath on the Government of which he was until recently a supporter. He declares that Lord Salisbury and his colleagues had betrayed the agriculturists to, whom they. had promised relief, by doing nothing for, them except pass a measure which in many cases increased the evil which it was intended to diminish, that they.had flung justice and the property of the landlords into the insatiable maw of Irish disloyalty by their Irish Land Act, that they had in their Workmen's. Compensation, Act passed measure which could only be described as punitive legislation deliberately aimed at capitalists.as a class finally that their foreign policy "may.rank with the most effete and pusillanimous era of Radical administration." It is a pretty, steep denunciation to come from a Conservative; and what makes it far more serious is that the Times, while deprecating some of Mr. Finch-Hatton's criticisms of the Home policy of the Government, endorses to the full his severe judgment of the action of the Government in regard to'China, The Government have undoubsedly a troublous time before them. The results of the London County Council elections have knocked on the head their principal measure of the. session—that for the creation of a number of petty London mayoralties and corporations,—and it appears that apart from the Local Government Bill for Ireland, which is passing through Committee pretty smoothly, there will not be much of a legislative record to show this year.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.