Austria just now seems to have fallen upon very bad times. Prague for the second, time in the last three years is under martial law and Vienna bids fair soon to follow suit. - For parallel scenes to those lately enacted in the Reichsrath where, during the past few days, furniture has been broken and legs of tables and chairs, portions of chandeliers and such minor articles as ink bottles and rulers, flung gaily at offending or non-offending members' heads, we have to go back to the days of the French Revolution, and some of the papers say that for violent behaviour the proceedings of the past week leave the days of the Revolution far behind. The Vienna correspondent, of the Daily Telegraph seems to think ho has found a solution of the whole trouble and that itis bad champagne. Quite recently in Vienna there have been two law-suits, In one case two gentlemen were accused in the Leopoldstadt quarter of Vienna of fabricating and selling noxious champagne with a French trade mark, at two florins bottle. Chemical analysis proved this sparkling wine to consist of 89 per cent of water and a certain amount of salicyl, a drug extensively used as a cure for rheumatism but in no way connected with the juice of the grape. An expert declared the beverage injurious to health and affirmed that it did not contain one drop of wine. The other case was still worse Tt was a case of theft, in which the value of the wine stolen cropped up. It turned out that it was manufactured in the prosecutor's cellar, and was composed exclusively of tartaric acid, soda water, and sugar, the cost of production being exactly three-half pence a bottle, but it was sold as champagne for a very different sum. Tt is suggested that this is the drink that was indulged in by those Austrian legislators who have been creating such a disturbance lately, and I should think there may be something in it, as neither salicyl nor tartaric acid commend themselves as a fitting beverage for those who have to decide weighty matters of State.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.