London, February 16. The farce of Mr. Sidney Herbert’s 
re-election as Member of Parliament for the southern division of 
Wiltshire took place yesterday in Salisbury Town Hall.* Even 
among the English counties Wilts is notorious for a concentration 
of land-ownership which has turned the whole area into the 
property of fewer than a dozen families. With the exception of 
some districts in Northern Scotland, the land has nowhere been so 
thoroughly “cleared” of inhabitants, nor the system of modern 
agriculture applied so consistently. Except when family feuds 
happen to break out among its few landlords, Wilts never sees an 
electoral campaign. 

No rival candidate had been put up against Sidney Herbert. 
The High Sheriff,” who presided over the election, therefore 
declared him re-elected by all the forms of law at the very 
beginning of the meeting. Sidney Herbert then rose and 
addressed a number of very worn-out platitudes to his tenants and 
vassals. Meanwhile there had gradually gathered in the Town Hall 
an audience of townspeople who were not entitled to vote but 
whom the English Constitution fobs off with the privilege of 
boring the candidates at the hustings.© Scarcely had Sidney 
Herbert sat down than a barrage of questions volleyed about his 
venerable head. “What about the green coffee-beans served to our 
soldiers?”’, “Where is our army?”, “What did The Times say of 

you yesterday?”,’? “Why did you spare Odessa?”, “Does your 
uncle, the Russian Prince Vorontsov, own palaces in Odessa?”, 
etc. Naturally not the slightest notice was taken of these 
unparliamentary questioners. On the contrary, Sidney Herbert 
availed himself of the first lull to propose a vote of thanks to the 
Sheriff for his “impartial” conduct of the “proceedings”. This was 
accepted amidst applause from the parliamentary audience, and 
hissing and groaning from the unparliamentary. There then 
followed a second volley of ejaculatory questions: ‘““Who starved 
our soldiers? Let him go to war himself! etc.”” No more result than 
before. The Sheriff then declared the play, which had lasted little 
more than half an hour, to be over, and the curtain fell. 

The first measures of the re-constituted ministry were by no 
means received with approval. As Lord Panmure, the new 
Secretary for War, is an invalid, the main burden of his 
administration falls to the Under-Secretary for War. The appoint- 
ment of Frederick Peel, the younger son of the late Peel, to this 
important post arouses all the more displeasure since Frederick 
Peel is a notorious mediocrity. Despite his youth, he is the living 
incarnation of routine. Other men become bureaucrats. He came 
into the world as one. Frederick Peel owes his post to the 
influence of the Peelites. It was therefore necessary to balance the 
scales with a Whig in the other pan. Sir Francis Baring has 
therefore been appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. 
He was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Melbourne’s Whig 
administration and at that time bore the well-deserved nickname 
of “Mr. Deficit”. The most recent army appointments all remain 
true to the system of gerontocracy. Thus the octogenarian Lord 
Seaton has been appointed to the command of the army in 
Ireland. Lord Rokeby, old, gout-ridden, and deaf, has been 
dispatched to the Crimea as commander of the Brigade of Guards. 
Command of the Second Division there—formerly under Sir de 
Lacy Evans—has fallen to General Simpson, who is no Samson but 
on the contrary occupied a fitting retirement-post as veteran 
Lieutenant-Governor of Portsmouth. General Somerset, already a 
Brigadier in 1811, has been sent to India as commanding General. 
Finally Admiral Boxer, “that anarch old”, as The Times calls him,’ 
who threw the whole transport service into utter confusion in 
Constantinople, has now been ordered to Balaklava to put that 
harbour into “proper order”. 

“We fear,” says The Times, “we must look elsewhere for Ministerial vigour. [...] 
It is vain for us to appeal to those who do these things against such cruel and 
wanton squandering of the best resources of the nation. Were they not infatuated 
by a long course of power, which only shifted from one portion of their own [...] 
class to another, they would scarcely have chosen this moment at least for the 
exhibition of such wanton and short-sighted selfishness. The instinct of self-preserva- 
tion would have taught them better, but we solemnly ask the people of Eng- 
land whether they will suffer their countrymen to be thus sacrificed at the shrine of 
cruel apathy or helpless incapacity.” The Times threatens: “It is not a Government, 
nor is it even a House of Commons. It is the British Constitution that is under 
trial.” 

The latest news from India is important because it describes the 
deplorable state of business in Calcutta and Bombay. In the 
manufacturing districts the crisis is slowly but surely advancing. 
The owners of spinning-mills of fine yarn in Manchester decided 
at a meeting held the day before yesterday only to open their 
factories four days a week from February 26 and in the meantime 
to call on the manufacturers in the surrounding area to follow 
their example. In the factories in Blackburn, Preston and Bolton 
notice has already been given to the workers that there will 
henceforth only be “short time”. The fact that in the past year 
many manufacturers have tried to force the markets by circum- 
venting the commission-houses and taking their export business 
into their own hands means that bankruptcies will be all the 
larger in number and in size. The Manchester Guardian. admitted 
last Wednesday’ that there was overproduction not only of 
manufactured goods but also of factories.