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degraded, or rather exalted, through the exercise of such miserable privileges. But would it not be altogether more convenient to have the reporters locked up in one of the clerks' rooms, where they could be provided with victuals and drink, have the awards duly supplied to them, and receive instructions as to what they should say? It will be seen from what we quote elsewhere that one or two of the sporting journals have protested against the insult to which they were subjected; while others seem only too happy to lick up the dirt and to write of the good order, and good fun, and so forth. As to "order," there is, or was, little or none, from the arrangement of the bewildering cocknified catalogue up to the admirable plan upon which a man could pass in his own unsound horse as a sound one.

As lovers of the horse from our youth upwards, we protest against the base uses to which he is turned at Islington; and on behalf of an independent journal, we are proud to say that we receive no favours from the managers of the Islington Horse Show. At the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, on Saturday evening, we heard noblemen and officers of long service speak to the character of the English Press, and to the services which it rendered alike to the senator and soldier. Officers dwelt on their reminiscences of the pleasant days they had spent in the tented field with "our own correspondents," as of "privileges" readily granted and ably exercised. At the Islington Horse Show the Press receives no privilege beyond a negative insult, of being ordered into a cockloft, where a proper discharge of its duty is rendered impossible. And yet we are told still of "the able management," of the people grinning and grimacing in the ring, as seen from afar off. The Mark-Lane Express, of June 7th.

THE DAY AFTER THE FAIR.

ENGRAVED BY E. HACKER, FROM A PAINTING BY E. CORBet.

Hie! Hie! Hie! Let him go! Send him along! Give him his head! Hie! Hie! Hie !-is the cry, as job-job go those armed heels against poor old Hackabout's sides, although he is at full stretch and as free as over-taxed bridled liberty can be. "Tis “the Day after the Fair," but there is no rest for poor Hackabout, who has seen as many ups and downs by the look of his knees as his fair namesake, the heroine of one of Hogarth's well-known series. He is as game as a pebble, but much too fast to last, and, like many of our over-taxed racing stock, has fallen into the hands of the lowest of dealers; while in fair-play to the fallen we give the letter of a friend (who has seen some fair-days in his time) upon the late decision of the Jockey Club:

With the greatest respect for men of station-when they act like men-I must say that I have read with disappointment the selfish, timid, or thoughtless verdict against the humane and manly proposition of Sir Joseph Hawley for not allowing two-year-olds to run earlier than July. As a man who has seen some races and taken part in nearly all our sports and pastimes, I think there is not one of the present nor of the past so void of any good, so brutal and unfeeling, as

The Day after the Fair

the racing of two-year-old colts and fillies as carried on at the present day-the forcing to a feigned maturity the immature, and training and goading to over-exertion these over-grown babies; until shattered in constitution, broken in heart, crippled and tortured by the veterinarian, they are condemned before they have half reached their prime to linger out a miserable, degraded, and often almost-useless existence. And all this cruelty is practised not for sport, but merely to supply the cry of fresh dice, to feed the insatiable mania for gambling that is ruining the country. I have witnessed bull and badger baiting, dog, cock, and prize fighting; and I have seen them all, as I hope to see this far greater evil of twoyear-old racing, put down by the law. But I do not remember any meeting of bull or badger baiters, dog, cock, or prize fighters being convened to decide whether they should be or not be stopped, and I cannot for the life of me see why the BAITERS of two-year-old colts and fillies should be more favoured.-Yours, &c., J. J. J.

THE WEALTH IN EQUINE RESOURCES POSSESSED BY FRANCE IN HER ALGERIAN PROVINCES.

BY R. P.

When bad seasons, drought, locusts, and earthquake have visited any of the French-Algerian possessions, as also during the more recent fearful famine which in 1868 swept away a considerable number of the Arab population, and drove some even in the towns to acts of violence and despair, singularly oblivious that of late years, with that impartiality with which Providence metes to all countries and nations alike their climatic blessings or afflictions, whole provinces of our own much older conquest in India, to say nothing of a still older conquest nearer home, had not been exempted from some of those fearful scourges, English journalistic politicians, in that spirit for which they had long obtained a traditional repute, have made themselves conspicuous, upon the occurrence of such mournful visitations in the North African possessions of our neighbours, by regarding them in the charitable light of a gratulatory evidence that our Gallic friends, after thirty-eight years' conquest, have found their beautiful Algerine colony a burden rather than a success.

Wholly at a loss to discover the relation between such incidental climatic influences or natural phenomena, and the political circumstances and future prospects of failure which the writer so ingeniously deduced from them for the French colony, we are led to conclude that our teachers in the important art of logic have very unexpectedly restricted the number of sources from which evidence is to be derived, by limiting them to four only. For a fifth and more fruitful source, at least, is, in the present day even, as obvious as ever among English writers, and may be defined as the evidence of inextinguishable prejudice, founded on deductions from old-established, invidious premises, and deep-rooted doctrines of national jealousy.

From the chronological date therein assigned, also, to the achieve

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ment of the conquest of Algeria, it was very evident that the writer erroneously computed that conquest from the final capture of Algiers, after the three-years' siege of the Casbah, 1830, to 1868; whereas the conquest of the Algerian Regency (the Mauretania Cæsariensis of the Roman Empire) was not considered by the French themselves as effected till 1853, after the final overthrow and captivity of Abd-elKader. Hence the period wherein colonizatian, in the bucolic and export-trading sense of the term, could be effected, under favour of a peaceful occupation of the soil, had been, in fact, but very shortscarcely over fifteen years-from 1853 to 1868-and after twentythree years of a fiercely-contested struggle.

It did not seem to have suggested itself to the expositor of this augury of the failure of our Gallic neighbours in a speedy remunerative utilisation of their African conquest that, in cases of territorial acquisition, where there is no parity of circumstances, of time and opportunity, no just comparison can be instituted between the facilities for colonization; and that those which presented themselves during twenty-three years of war to the knife, in Algeria, were of a very different kind from those that have presented themselves to the settlement of the artisans, farmers, graziers, victuallers, and squatters, who emigrated from this country, of their own will and at their own cost, upon the coasts of Australia or New Zealand.

Previous, therefore, to entering upon that portion of our subject which constitutes both the purpose and the title of this paper, in the interest of those of our readers who are accessible to the evidence of facts more reliable than any adumbrated ad libitum by augurial deductions, we submit to them some statistical information from official sources in relation to the agricultural and commercial development of the Algerian colony which, under the very adverse political circumstances we have shown, is singularly illustrative that the, view taken by the journalist had a strong family-likeness to those so-called "publicopinion views" which a clever political essayist used to designate "the Bermondsey policy," and shows how thoroughly he impersonated one of the chief characteristics of that class of politicians-to wit, a total ignorance of all foregone and known information on the subject.

In the spring of 1855-anterior, therefore, by thirteen years to the augury he pronounced in 1868 on the burdensome character of the Algerian colony to its conquerors-the Administration of the Algerian Customs published a tabular report of the commerce of the colony in 1854, of which the following resumé appeared in the April (1855) number of the Annales de la Colonization Algérienne :

"As regards the movement in the ports and navigation, the increase of shipping has been 3,507, measuring 315,517 tons. The commerce in cereals alone has given employment to 7,500 vessels, of a total tonnage of 222,810 tons. After having provided for her local consumption, excepting as to a small quantity of flour-sorts destined for special purposes of luxury, or withheld through insufficiency of the means of grinding in Africa-the colony has been enabled to export to France and foreign countries 1,600,000 hectolitres of grain of all kinds, and upwards of 60,000 quintals of flour and biscuits, the greater part of which were sent to the army in the East, to which destination also 100,000 quintals of hay and straw were expedited.

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