PENRITH HERALD and EAST CUMBERLAND and WESTMORLAND NEWS. NO. 438-Sixth Week in Quarter Registered for Transmission Abroad. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1874. PRICE 1D. TOWN TALK. By Our Special Correspondent. Our readers will understand that we do not hold ourselves responsible for our able Correspondent's opinions. The election, and nothing but the election fills up the conversation everywhere, although there never was one at which both parties were so hard up for a cry. MR. DISRAELI's Tadpole and Taper, who, thirty years ago, tried our "Young Queen and Old Institutions" would now scarcely venture on our "Old Queen and New Institutions." As for the addresses, except where some advanced Liberal cries out for a clean shave - a forcible application of a political mowing machine - to all existing institutions, there is very little difference, and the wealthy Conservative and wealthy Liberal both play the same tune with very slight variations. As to the London papers, the Times supports and patronises the Ministers; the Daily News is working hard to heal the breach with the Nonconformists it has done so much to create; and the Telegraph, as usual, in Yankee phrase, goes blind for GLADSTONE. The Saturday Review, like the Pall Mall Gazette, shows impartial contempt for both parties; while the Spectator, for the present, pardons the Ministers for not going to war with Germany for the sake of France, and upholds the finance of MR. GLADSTONE, who the Saturday Review and Pall Mall so heartily despise. Before these lines are printed, the majority of the elections will be decided. There can be no doubt that the Liberal majority, if not extinguished, will be largely cut into, and that the Conservatives, undivided by any important difference, will present a numerous and compact body, only wanting a younger leader than MR. DISRAELI with his eloquence, or the tact and temper of the EARL OF DERBY in the House of Commons. The friend at whose house I am writing this letter, ten miles from a post town, has retired from a contest in a borough of medium population, where he was returned at the last general election triumphantly at the top of the poll, simply on his pledge to support MR. GLADSTONE, beating a local Conservative of great and deserved influence. On this occasion his course was settled by a series of deputations from parties who had previously supported him, as a matter of course First came the licensed victuallers to extract a pledge; next the Good Templars, the Permissive Bill advocates, and other teetotallers on the other side. The Liberation Society, requiring the Disestablishment of the Church, and the Nonconformists, who would be satisfied with the repeal of clause 25 of the Education Act, were followed by a compact body of Secularists, who insisted on School Boards being everywhere established, universal compulsion, and purely secular education. The Peace Society, with some highly-respectable Quakers at their head, wanted all international disputes referred to arbitration, including that with KING KOFFEE of Coomassie, if there was time. The working men came up in a body, and insisted that no trades unionists should be punished for breach of contract, picketing, rattening, or otherwise carrying out the rules of trades unions. There were also individual constituents, representing their four or five votes each, who required respectively that endowed charities should not be interfered with; that the pay of civil servants and postmen should be raised. A retired Common Councilman of the City of London, who commanded five votes, bargained that reform of the London Corporation should be opposed, and that Christ's Hospital, in which he had educated one son and hoped to educate another, should not be interfered with. These were all old friends and supporters. Of course all the parsons, all relations of military officers, and all the officials of charitable and school endowments were against him; so, after sleeping on the result of these interviews, and finding that he was between fire and water, and not inclined to go to Parliament, bound hand and foot, he retired to private life, a disappointed man; withdrew his subscriptions from all the local institutions for the lease of a house in London, in the hands of an agent for sale, and told his daughters that they must give up the idea of being invited this season, or ever, to the Buckingham Palace balls. There are a good many in the same hole as my friend, who have not had the sense to retire before being kicked out. No one seems to have noticed that the malt tax grievance, which has done such good service for years at agricultural dinners, has entirely disappeared from the addresses of county members; nor do we hear any more of MR. DISRAELI's "Sanitas sanitatum*omnia sanitas." But, however the elections turn out, everything will go on much as usual. No past Act will be repealed, and rotten endowments and corporations will be in as much danger under the EARL OF DERBY as under LORD ABERDARE. The licensed victuallers will be disappointed, although the great names of ALLSEPP and BASS are returned without opposition for a division of Staffordshire. P.P. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~