Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 June 1875 — An English Growl. [ARTICLE]

An English Growl.

The Americans have been celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the battleof Lexington. It was not a very big battle, but it was undeniably a very important one; and it would be absurd to grudge them any satisfaction which they may derive from firing the usual salvoes of congratulatory orations, poems and festivities. It is melancholy to think, however, that we are probably entering upon a round of such celebrations. Next year will, of course, see the biggest of all possible celebrations of the inevitable Fourth of July. We pity the unfortunate orators who are perhaps even now cudgeling their brains for something new to say upon an event which has already been the pretext for an unparalleled quantity of nonsense; but we admit that the performance is inevitable. * * * The Americans are going to make all manner of fine speeches about the great days of 1776. Why should not we have something to say upon the subject? Let us have a dinner of herbs and water instead of turtle soup and champagne. Let the Lord Mayor and the Prime Minister and the popular speakers of the day walk in prqcession through the streets, appafeled in their shabbiest clothes, aud drink in solemn silence to the memory of I a departed empire. And let a speaker arise, not to pour out floods of gushing sentiment and declare that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, but in lugubrious and depressed spirits endeavor to provoke tears rather than bursts of repeated applause. Let him think upon the shortsightedness which lost a great empire, or upon the folly which, if the empire had to dissolve, caused the dissolution to be attended with a bitterness that has not yet died out. Let him dwell upon the stupidity which threw away British armies upon hopeless enterprises, the want of unity which paralyzed all our plans and the’stupidity of a Parliament which ridiculed Bui.ke and Chatham, and believed in the wisdom of North. Let him point out that we have no right to shift the blame off our own shoulders upon those of poor George HI., inasmuch as the people were quite as stupid as their rulers. And then let him ask whether we are so much better now; whether we have the true spirit for rilling a great empire: whether Parliament is more given to action and less to talk; whether our military efficiency has improved in proportion to its costliness, and Whether, if our ancestors had a Wilkes to represent them, we have not a Kenealy. —London Saturday Review.

—A Pans sheet says there are 462 Ger man journals published in the United States, and all of them are in the secret pay of Bis. Let it he hoped a time will come when he will be in their pay, and then the world will run all the smoother, in the meantime this tyrant, who salaries the press with a greasy hand, keeps up, moreover, five organs in Australia and one at the Cape of Good Hope for the benefit of Africa and China. —Cincinnati Commercial. —To make Venetian stew, take one tablespoonful each of chopped onion, parsley, flour and Parmesan cheese, p little salt, pepper and ground mace, spread between same thin slices of veal; leave tor some hoars, then stew in rich broth, with a good piece of batter. —Michael Lahy, a no-armed graduate of the Pittsfield, Mass., High-School, has been appointed by the Selectmen to take the census of persons in town between the ages of five and fifteen years. He writes a “ good hand" with the pencil in his mouth. —The late Gen. Shirss, U. S. A, was a physical curiosity, in that he never developed any teem. *