THE MAGAZINES ON THE WAR.

A min of war must be, on the whole, a trying time for the editors of magazines, more especially those • filled with literature intended to be ephemeral. They must be so put to it for padding. They do not pretend to give news—we wish they did, believing that the first grave magazine which will give us a succinct, fairly-

written history of Europe for the previous month, with full dates, documents, &c., will make a fortune—and they cannot very well fill their columns as the weeklies do, with essays on the War, often as full of news—to their readers—as the columns of the dailies. Seriously, the Magazines are wrong from the selling point of view in not giving more history. Their conductors are too able, and do not realize either the entire and hopeless inability of the average Briton to remember the news of a month, when conveyed in snippety, contradictory, badly-translated, untruthful little tele- grams, or the interest he feels in recovering his memory by reference to an account which he can find without searching a file of news- papers. A file of newspapers. Will somebody just write an article about that ? Has anybody outside a newspaper office got. a file ? Is there anybody, except an editor or sub-editor, who,. having a file, say of a penny paper, ever succeeded in finding any- thing in it which he wanted, more particularly if he was abso- lutely certain it was there ; or in forgetting the exact column in which it ought to be, but is not ; or, in keeping himself at the ende of a long and entirely fruitless search from " spuffiing " with rage? (N.B.—Spuffiing is not English, but it is very good Suffolk, and a beautiful word). If there is any such person, let him,.

if male, and under fifty, take courage, for he will get on in life, and make money, and never have heart disease, and suc- ceed generally, and will not need the histories we are recommend- ing. The Essays do not supply their place, though they are often very good. " W. R. G.'s," for example, in the Contemporary,.

is a "leader" of the very best kind, not impartial and not ex:- haustive, but still a most noteworthy statement of the case as. against France. He is particularly severe on the French for thinking France " a diamond among stones," a nation with an in- herent, indestructible superiority, and quite forgets that England.

thinks herself the iron among the metals, while Germany de- scribes herself as the wheat-flour among foods. Every nation, in fact, believe in its own inherent value, and is, as a rule, the better and the nobler for so believing. If the diamond were con- scious, its effort would be to flash, and the duty of diamonds is.

flashing.

Very good, too, is Mr. Harrison's essay on 64 Bismarkism " in

the Fortnightly. We have commented on it elsewhere, and need here only remark that for a statement of the case against Ger- many in a lyrical way by a man with a capacity for good, honest, temporary hating—the sort of hating that is Christian, because- the enjoyment it produces is so great that you love your enemies.

because they afford it—we can recommend that paper. So we- can M. de Laveleye's in the same magazine, though it is scarcely as strong as we expected. Its underlying thought, that the ultimate struggle in France will be between the anti-religious and; supernaturalist parties, is, we believe, true ; but we cannot admit- so fully that the anti-religious party is sure to lack both morals.

and force of character. Morals in the Christian sense it would lack, of course ; but it would invent a morality of its own, which,. as in the case of many English, German, and Jewish atheists, might be of ascetic grandeur ; and as to force, it certainly was not that which Frederick of Prussia, who was, from M. de- Laveleye's point of view, a consistent and determined atheist, was. found to lack. We expect the anti-religious party, when in full swing will discover great energy, and perhaps some pagan virtues,.

and will be beaten mainly by the want of sympathy between its. thought and the intuitional or self-derived thought of the good. among mankind. The second idea, that the proprietors of France, who are the people, are simply silly in their dread of socialism,. which is more impossible in France than elsewhere, and should.

face the Red Spectre, is very striking ; but we cannot get over the notion that they are conscious of a weakness somewhere which we

do not see. Are they perchance not proprietors, but, as Napoleon III. used to say, bailiffs for mortgagees? M. de Laveleye's horror of repeated change in the form of Government is a little English, inasmuch as such change is not necessarily more frightful than the vast changes in the depositaries of power so repeatedly made in England as in 1832, when the form of the Constitution was allowed to remain ; but the whole paper is of interest, and is full of para- graphs like this, of illustrations taken at first hand :—

" Who does not know the immense sacrifices that Germany has made for the advancement and diffusion of knowledge ; spending, for instance, twenty thousand pounds sterling at Bonn in a chemical laboratory, forty thousand at Heidelberg in a physical laboratory ? Little Wiirtem- berg devoted more money to superior instruction than big France. A. thing unheard of, France made the very fees of the university students a source of revenue. She gave without counting it more than a conple of millions of pounds sterling (between fifty and sixty million francs) for the new Opera, and she refused forty thousand pounds for school buildings. Last year on the deck of the steamer which was conveying us to the inauguration of the Suez Canal, M. Durny, the one man of

merit who ever served under the Imperial Government, told we the tale of his griefs in the Ministry of Public Instruction. He wanted to intro- duce compulsory education ; the Emperor supported him; he had all the other ministers against him. He had organized fifteen thousand night schools for adults ; it was with difficulty that he succeeded in tarry off forty thousand pounds against the fatuous resistance of the Council of State. There was the whole system of public instruction to re-organize, and he could get nothing. They preferred to employ the gold of the country in maintaining the ladies of the ballet, in building barracks and palaces, in gilding monuments, the dome of the Invalides, the roof of the Sainte Chapelle. It was in vain that men like Jules Simon, Pelletan, Duruy, Jules Fevre, cried out year after year, ' There must be millions for education, or France is lost.' The Government was deaf. It denied nothing to pleasure, to luxury, to ostentation. It denied everything to education."

Mr. Mill's paper on "Treaties," though well worthy attentive thought, seems to us in the main only one more speculation on the old point of casuistry—the obligation of engagements made under duresse—and we do not see that he has added anything very new towards the settlement of the dispute. Clearly there must be some validity in such engagements, otherwise human law ends, for human law is to the unwilling duresse, and a man might re- pudiate any contract whatsoever, as made to satisfy human law. And clearly also there must be a limit to the validity of such engagements, otherwise a man would be bound by a promise made during torture, or by signatures forced from him without any even unwilling consent of his mind. But the point between those two at which obligation ceases to be binding is not fixed by Mr. Mill, and we doubt if it can be defined. Certainly it can never be defined by the sufferer under the obligation. A man may suffer intolerably under a debt, and it may be wise in a Court to relieve him, but it can never be endurable that he should relieve himself.

Blackwood gives us in " Why is Prussia Victorious ?" a sketch of her internal military system, the only defect of which, in our eyes, is that it does not consider one very

important doubt. Is nothing to be allowed for individual genius, for the splendid skill with which the Prussian Army

has been guided ? We have a notion, which we submit to the able soldier who penned the article, that the Prussian Army, under certain circumstances, might be a dangerous machine ; that if badly led its defeat would be in a paralyzing degree a defeat of the nation, which is rendered liable by the very perfection of its

organization suddenly to lose confidence in itself. The Army

d efeated, there is nothing to fall back upon,—no nation which can say to itself, " This is not our fault," this is reparable. The loss caused by the destruction of anything must be in proportion to

the perfectness of the thing destroyed. We do not say such destruction is even possible in Prussia, but we should like to see that weak spot probed a little. The paper on " Thoughts suggested

by the War" is less interesting, full of the old common-places about the illusions of France, and her destiny if she does not

change her idiosyncrasy and become something other than France ; and England " shutting up," and all that series of ideas, born of a confusion between a tumble and a catastrophe, of which England is now so full, and which a month or two hence she may so earnestly strive to forget. Our fathers said all that in '92, and we said it of America in 1863, and it was all wrong. Nations are not abolished in three months, and all France has suffered is trivial compared with the suffering of Prussia

after Jena. Macmillan has nothing on our topic except some extracts from Wesley and Dr. Arnold, intended to support the German' view of the war, and prove that dissoluteness is always punished—one would think Berlin was a church—and that Francs-tireurs ought to be murdered wholesale. We did not think so in the Indian mutiny, but held the resistance offered by scattered civilians to the regular forces attacking them—for the sepoys were regular forces fighting under national leaders— very heroic indeed ; but then, you see, we were Englishmen, and these are only French. And finally, Fraser avoids the subject,

except in a comparison between the American War and the Franco-Germanic, which seems to us very fanciful and rather poor, and the conclusion suggested by General Badeau absolutely gro- tesque. The General says, "Again, as has already been noticed, the preponderance which the Germans enjoy is vastly greater than was that of the North, leaving apparently still less hope to the besieged of to-day. The rebels were even more united than the French are now ; a partizan war was far more general, and was never so harshly put down by the national troops in America as by the Germans now. France, too, like the South, finds no friends to help her ; she may have sympathizers among other nations or other Governments, as the South had ; but if Austria and Italy wish her well, they render her no more assistance than the Emperor Napoleon did to the rebellion in America. France must fight it out alone, as the South did. Will the parallel hold out to the terrible close ?" That seems to us to contain as many errors as sentences. In resources the North was at least three times as rich as the South, while Germany is but a sixth greater than France, even in population. The rebels were not united like the French, for one-third of their whole population, 4,000,000 out of 12,000,000, sympathized strongly with the North, and the same " terrible conclusion" is not only impossible, but is not desired, the most excited professor in Germany not having the faintest idea of keeping France as part of the Germanic Con- federation.