SOME MAGAZINES.

THE Fortnightly cannot be reproached with want of political Catholicity. Its editor allows three writers—Mr. R. B. Brett, Mr. E. Dicey, and Mr. H. Labouchere—to state their opinions, and they are all different. Mr. Balliol Brett expects a heavy majority for the Liberals at the polls, the electors rallying to two cries,—Disestablishment and Land Reform ; and he hopes it will be utilised to give us a new tenure such as Mr. Chamber- lain would approve, and a new Cabinet with fewer Peers, and Lord Granville, at all events, left. out. Mr. Brett would also concede to Ireland "a fair and reasonable measure of Home Rule," which nobody in Ireland will accept. Mr. E. Dicey, on the other hand, intends to vote Tory, maintaining that the Empire is more important than the country, and that the Tories will keep up the Empire best. They will also, he considers, yield least to the new idea of State inter- ference, and will be slowest to make undue concessions to Ireland,—the two latter being very disputable propositions.

Finally, Mr. H. Labonchere states what he hopes to see the Democracy do. There is certainly no want of clearness about his wishes, or the language in which he conveys them. He wants the Church disestablished and the Lords abolished, to establish triennial Parliaments, pay Members of Parlia- ment, grant Home-rule to Ireland of the most extreme character—far beyond Home-rule in Massachusetts, where the Legislature cannot impose an import duty or extinguish the obligation of a contract—cut down the Crown to £20,000 a year, convert tenants into owners by State loans, make of leaseholders freeholders, abolish indirect taxation as "only worthy of savages," adopt a graduated income-tax, and put a smashing duty upon great inherited fortunes. He would, for example, place a 30 per cent, duty upon a million, and 20 per cent. more upon any legacy out of that million which exceeded 250,000. We wonder how long it would be before a man with a million transferred it to French Rentes or invested it in America. Mr. Labouchere does not seem to perceive that an impoverished Crown would be an independent Crown, the King becoming the recipient of endless legacies, and the Royal Family looking out, as the Continental dynasties do, for wealthy marriages. In foreign policy he would adopt the American system, and meddle with nobody unless they meddled with us ; while he hints that the rise of a new couche sociale to Executive power cannot be long postponed. The article is as fall of bright sentences as it is of impracticable or dangerous dreams. A " Philo-Turk " sketches "Men and Manners in Constantinople" with an amusing but rather feeble pen. There is, he says, no Turkish "

society" in Constantinople, Turks not caring about "society," and their wives, of course, never mixing in it ; and without Turks in the Turkish capital, " society " is not important. It is composed of the Ambassadors and their suites, a few mem- bers of the haute finance, a few merchants, Jews, and Levan. tines, and—that is all. The Armenians, though they possess much power, are rarely seen; and the Greeks keep them- selves to themselves. Constantinople is a place, in fact, where a few minute and rather corrupt knots of persons are watching each other and the world, under the general control of five Ambassadors. The Germans seem to be the most numerous, Prince Bismarck, when he wants to punish an officer but not to ruin him, permitting him to accept service with the Turk. The following sketch of Said Pasha, the Grand Vizier, would have been even more valuable a few days ago, when he had not been dismissed ; but he may return to power :— " He is, physically, just the opposite of what one would expect a Grand Vizier to be. There peers up at you, from above, a little in- significant figure of diminutive stature and rather crooked build, a deadly pale face with queer irregular features ornamented by a long black beard, and with no particular characteristic to strike your attention until you see a pair of glittering, piercing black eyes closely observing you. Thoge eyes do everything. As conversation pro- ceeds, you forget all the rest of the man, and address yourself to the glowing orbs of the dignitary. His voice also is peculiar : cold, deliberate, passionless, every word carefully weighed and carefully spoken. Unquestionably you will have been talking with a very remarkable man, of keen intellect, clear design, and immense tenacity and strength of purpose. In a country where every Minister, more especially a Grand Vizier, is looked upon principally as a target for volleys of intrigue, Said Pasha has for five years, with, I believe, only two interruptions of very short duration each, stood firm and unmoved, and is at this time more securely rooted in power than ever. But in society he never appears."

Captain Hawley Smart, in the present state of the turf, is inclined to the opinion that racing is deteriorating, and may, perhaps, be given up, the rascals who hang on to its skirts becoming more and more intolerable. Captain Smart is an authority, and certainly not an intolerant one, he holding that an owner, when he has entered a horse, is not bound to win with him. We hold, on the contrary, that he is bound, and that to " scratch " a horse for one's own advantage, or to "elect to win" with the one of two which the public did not -expect, is unfair. Captain Smart admits a great deal of swindling, though the old practice of "nobbling" or laming horses has declined, and evidently thinks the clever ones may ultimately kill the golden goose. We hope they will, but we are not sanguine. Bourses survive panics, and swindles too. Miss Lewis sends, in "Our Masters," a most amusing account of her adventures as a teacher. She conquered the rough lads who made up her classes, and who were all sharp and all ignorant as fish ; but she does not seem very hopeful. Some work and some loaf about, and both do it in obedience to a kind of fate, the very kindness of the very poor seeming to injure. They will let idlers, and even criminal idlers, sponge on them for years without complaint.

Mr. Shaw Lefevre's contribution to the Nineteenth Century on the "Land Question" is one of the weightiest which has yet appeared. Mr. Lefevre writes without temper and without rhetoric ; and his judgment, derived from large personal experi- ence, is that the effects of primogeniture are bad, and of settle- ments injurious, even from the aristocratic point of view, and that free transfer will rapidly diffuse property. He thinks there is a market for patches, and a good one, and would facilitate sale by every possible means. He doubts, however, whether loans will do any good, the new yeomen or peasants being too heavily weighted ; and points out the enormous liabilities the State would have to undertake :—

"To create by such means one yeoman owner of 100 acres in each one of the rural parishes in England and Scotland would involve an advance from the State of more than 250,000,000, and for this one- fortieth part only of the cultivated land would be dealt with. To produce any considerable effect the loans from the State must be of very great amount, leading to an enormous increase of the National Debt, and probably to a rise in the rate of its interest."

He trusts, therefore, in freedom first of all, and calls attention to the fact that one-twentieth of all land in England is still in

the hands of the Crown or of State Commissions, and might beneficially be split up. He is in favour of assigning gardens to cottages under a Sanitary Act ; and would even in certain cases expropriate land, and allow the rural authority to let or sell it at a fixed price,—a Council being far more willing to do that business than existing Charity Trustees are. On the abso- lute necessity of fundamental changes, if the rights of property are to be protected, he has no doubt whatever. The Bishop of Carlisle's paper on the "Uniformity of Nature" is a singularly temperate essay on this thesis, that the observed uniformity is only perfect so long as new causes are not introduced. New causes, however, are introduced,—for example, human will, which has visibly given to this planet an appearance which would not have arisen from physical laws alone. If, then, that new factor did introduce change in the uniformity of processes, which is indubitable, why should not other causes, such as the Divine Will, introduce them ? Yet if that is allowed, the possibility of "miracle "—mind, we do not say the fact—is at once admitted. • Uniformity can only as yet be scientifically asserted of those physical facts which have physical causes only. If immaterial causes affect them, uniformity ceases, as in • all works of man. Mx. W. C. Borlase sends a paper advising the Church to seek separation from the State, which may produce dis- cussion. His idea is that the Church should organise itself, and then demand separation upon the basis of retaining the life- interests and other recent endowments, and allowing the remainder to be expended for the relief of the condition of the poor. Mr. Traill, in his bright, but unsympathetic, criticism of "The Novel of Manners," comes to the conclusion that the art of writing such a novel is for the moment extinct among us; but the most remarkable paper in the number is called "Natural Heirship," by the Rev. H. Kendall. Mr. Kendall has cal:misted, we dare say accurately, the numbers of people who may spring from one pair of human beings ; and finding it, like every other number arrived at by geometrical progression, enormously large, has deduced therefrom some strange conclu- sions. We are all kinsmen in the most direct sense :—

" It is morally certain, then, that all Englishmen of this genera- tion are descendants of William the Conqueror and of Alfred the Great, and all the nobles of their times whose posterity have not died out. When we read in history of a brave deed done by an English- man seven centuries since or more, we may say with confidence it was done by one of our fore-elders. And when we read of one at that distant period who was a dishonour to his country, we may say with certainty he also was one of our ancestors It is often said respecting a distant relative, he is a thirty-second cousin.' The truth is, perhaps, that he is a second or third cousin. As to thirty- second cousinship, it is startling to find that the whole human race comes within this line of consanguinity. By the ordinary unimpeded ratio at which ancestors multiply, they would amount in the thirty- second generation to 4,294,767,296; and reckoning for all the checks to this ratio through the blending of lines of ancestry, they must be reasonably estimated at the entire population of the globe, as high in fact as they can possibly go. The Kaffir and the Hottentot; the Japanese and the Chinese, are doubtless all of them the reader's thirty-second cousins, or nearer."

Consequently, the true way to regulate the descent of property is to compel equal division at each succession, till the quantity

is so small that the State may take it without cruelty, and thus in time nationalise all property ! The fallacy, of course, in this amazing argument is that, because the descendants of a pair might null iply in the way described, therefore they do, whereas they do not. The descendants of Jacob are still under six millions; while there are families, like the great Brahmin caste, which certainly have never mixed their blood, and are not our kinsfolk at all. When Mr. Kendall says every Englishman must be a descendant of the Conqueror, he is also affirming that he must be a descendant of each of the Con- queror's sixty thousand companions. Now, as no man can have sixty thousand ancestors all alive at once, Mr. Kendall is talking nonsense, and any theory based on which is neces- sarily worthless. He should study Fourier's plan for paying off the National Debt. He will there find that if one keeps fowls long enough, and never eats the eggs, there will at last be eggs produced by the descendants of one pair sufficient to sell for, say, a thousand millions sterling. The only objection is that the hens would, before this consummation, have eaten up all food-supplies, and thereby placed a final check upon the multiplication of their descendants. Mr. Knowles is quite right in publishing an intellectual cariosity, but many of them would be a little tire- some. We commend "Jeannie Lockett's " account of " Female Labour in Australia" to all English housekeepers who grieve over their servants. There the complaint is not that the female servants are bad, but that they cannot be obtained at all. The native-born girls will not take service, and the immigrants are too few. The wages do not seem to be very high, the average being 230 a year for a housemaid, with everything found, and fixed holidays; bat they often cannot be obtained at all, and the mistress does the work herself, with the help of a charwoman on 4s. a day. Advertisements are of no use, as no one comes ; and at the registry-offices the mistresses are put through a smart cross- examination. The trim remedy would seem to be the Viennese plan of combination ; bat the Anglo-Saxon does not like that, and the English wife in Australia, therefore, who cannot afford 2100 a year in wages alone to cook and housemaid, can never be independent of the risk of being left alone. It seems hard that it should be so, when so many girls starve in England ; but only a portion even of the State-aided immigrants will take service. There are too many other things to do ; and even a poor seamstress can make her pound a week.

Cardinal Newman shows us, in the new number of the Con- temporary Review, that his right hand has lost none of its cunning, and his thoughts on the outlook for religion in the future will come upon all, for many reasons, with a peculiar and solemn impressiveness. His essay is entitled "The Development of Religions Error," and purports in part to be a reply to some strictures in an earlier number of the Review by Principal Fairbairn. But the interest of the paper on its controversial side is comparatively slight Dr. Fairbairn had, somewhat hastily, and• with an asperity of language curiously die- proportioned to the evidence he brought forward in his own support, preferred a charge which has again and again been anticipated and guarded against in the later editions of the Cardinal's works,—the charge of implicit scepticism, and of a view of religious faith which would make that faith little more than the "faculty whereby men believe those things which they know to be untrue!' This charge is based on the Cardinal's teaching in his "University Ser- mons' and in the " Apologia " with respect to the usurpations of human reason,—teaching since amplified and completed in the "Grammar of Assent." In the later editions of two of these works there are full explanatory notes, which Dr. Fair- bairn apparently has not read, as to the exact limits within which human reason is disparaged. But the interest of the Cardinal's paper lies especially in the fresh lights which he has been led to throw on his view of the matter. It is not too much to say that for the last fifty years he has been striving to bring more and more clearly into relief the fact that religions belief and religious scepticism involve a difference of view far deeper than can be represented by a mere series of arguments ; that at every turn a man's reasoning is influenced by his con- scious or unconscious assumptions ; and that his mind will travel towards belief or towards unbelief, according as these assumptions, which rapidly become a part of his very nature, are religious or irreligious. Reason, coloured by and guided by the declarations of the moral sense, acknowledging the supre- macy of conscience, accepting and assimilating the precepts of Christianity, leads to natural religion and onwards to Christ- ianity. But the mind, in thus submitting without question to intimations from above, is said to act on the principle of faith. Reason, as contrasted with faith, and as acting without any such guides or restraints—reason which is heedless of the in- ternal monitor, and which adopts as its assumptions and first principles those which it finds at hand in the world, based upon a disregard of the spiritual instincts and a purely empirical philo- sophy—travels gradually towards scepticism. And as, on the one hand, there is a natural development of religious doctrine, so, too, there is a development of religious error,—an ascending and a descending scale, as the Cardinal has called them in a note to the later editions of the "Grammar of Assent." This much he has in one shape or another told us before now ; but the stress he lays in his present essay on the unnatural influence and authority which false and sceptical assumptions acquire by the combination and association of those who have adopted them is, we think, new and most important. There is a constantly growing tyranny exercised over us by the repre- sentatives of the irreligious philosophy, who acquire an arti- ficial authority, based chiefly, not upon the intrinsic force and plausibility of their first principles, but upon the insistence with which each abets the other in affirming them to be indubitable. That man has no rudiment of a faculty whereby he may know God, that conscience has no authority save to tell us what is for the prolongation and greater intensity of the life of our race, that the Christian morality is outré, or one-sided, or narrow ; —these and such-like principles are loudly asserted to be the outcome of "exact thought ;" and, to use the Cardinal's own words, "assumptions and false reasonings are received without question as certain truths on the credit of alternate appeals and mutual cheers and intprimaturs."—The Duke of Argyll, in his essay on "Land Reformers," fights for the existing tenure with, we think, less than his usual force, making, in the course of his argument, immense assumptions. For instance, he says the interest of the State and of an agricultural owner must be identical in the long-run. Why must they P Because, says the Duke, the owner can only get the best out of agricultural laud by increasing its produce. Very true ; but suppose he does not wish for the beat return, but wishes for sport, status, or a reputation for liberality instead P The Duke objects also to free cultivation for the same reason, saying :— "As it never can be to the interest of any owner of land to prevent his tenant from raising the most profitable crops which are consistent with good husbandry, it is quite certain that the demand for free cultivation' means cultivation free from the restraints which owners must impose in self-defence against the scourging and impoverishment of their land." Cannot a landlord mistake his interest ? As a matter of fact, the usual rule about straw is a distinctly bad rule, lowering receipts and impeding the purchase of manure ; while the old "four-course shift," once so nearly universal, is abandoned by the best farmers. The theory of the thing, at all events, is that the farmer knows his own business better than the landlord, and that the latter, in assuming to teach the farmer, is like a picture-buyer telling the artist how to paint. Free cultivation may be repudiated as an interference with free contract, but on no other ground. The Duke, too, might allow something for both professional pride and the liking for experiment. The dealer does not get custom who is always teaching his customer ; and the farmer, on the economic theory which the Duke is maintaining, is nothing but the landlord's customer, to whom the landlord, if the old etiquettes are to be maintained, ought to touch his hat. Lady Brassey's good-humoured gossip about "Mr. Gladstone's visit to Norway" is a little too gossipy, and, indeed, contains nothing of interest beyond the fact that the Norwegians knew all about Mr. Gladstone, and a sketch of Baron Rosendal, the last Norwegian noble, the Dodo of his class. By-the-way, is Lady Brassey quite sure of her facts ? There used to be four titled families in Norway, survivors of a numerous caste. There is a good deal of information in the oddly-named paper, "English Money in South Africa," the writer, Mr. G. Baden Powell, in particular denying that the black man resists the competition of the white. He affirms that the black men in South Africa perish before the white, but are kept up by incessant immigration. Drink kills out the population, and the taste for it spreads like wildfire. Mr. Powell questions the industry of the native of all tribes, though he admits exceptions ; and the truth seems to be that, like many other kinds of men, he will not work steadily for wages. He does not want to get on, in fact, and prefers, when he has cash, to do nothing. We seem to have heard of Englishmen with the same tastes. Mr. Baden Powell also tells us that the Boer system of management involves not so much cruelty to the natives as their expulsion. The farmer with his 6,000 acres wants a few native herdsmen, and he keeps them and expels the rest. In the Orange Free State the natives have been thus expelled, until they are now only equal in numbers to the white men. In Natal there are 400,000 natives to 40,000 Europeans. The Contemporary con- tains also an interesting, though rather hostile, account of John

Nelson Darby, the friend of Francis Newman, and founder of one branch of the Plymouth Brethren. His tenets had nothing very distinctive about them-; but he exercised an amazing personal influence, and lived and died a sort of Pope to his followers.

We were guilty last month of an unintentional injustice

about Macmillan's Magazine, fancying that the new editor, Mr. Mowbray Morris, bad taken up the reins. He does not assume

his post till November. The present number does not contain much, except an extremely interesting sketch of a Swiss village, by Mr. Mnrrough O'Brien. Though evidently a Home-ruler, he is both temperate and exact ; and his description of a Swiss Commune as it exists in a Canton where population does not increase, will give a new weapon to the advocates of peasant- proprietary. The drawback, which he estimates too lightly, is the low ideal of life, and the steady sacrifice of the individual to the community. The system is, however, a hopeful one ; but does Mr. O'Brien think his countrymen would ever adopt it " Janet Ross " sends a striking sketch of Tarentum as it is, and appears to believe in that extraordinary variety of hysteria known as the- tarantismo. The patient having been bitten by a tarantula, dances for three days under an uncontrollable impulse, and is then quite well. The writer, however, has never seen the dancing, and we confess to some share of the incredulity of the local priest.

In the National Review, a writer who does not sign his

name, admits that Mr. Gladstone's Manifesto has healed up breaches in the Liberal Party, and says "it would be idle to deny that this old, nefarious, but not yet obsolete, coalition places the Conservatives at a grave disadvantage," although they, if the Whigs and Radicals separate, "are by far the strongest party in the country." Are they Is that not a statement based upon the figures of the old constituency which have ceased to have any meaning ? There are some fine verses by the Bishop of Derry on "The New Atlantis," the world where science and faith are• reconciled, from which we select these three :—

" Patience ! God's House of Light shall yet be built, In years nnthought of, to some unknown song, And from the fanes of Science shall her guilt

Pass like a cloud. How long, 0 Lord, how long ?— When Faith shall grow a man and Thought a child, And that in us which think; with that which feels Shall everlastingly be reconciled, And that which questioneth with that which kneels.

But for the New Atlantis—for the Church Where faith and knowledge .heart-rtnited dwell — I think it lies far-off beyond our search, Enfolded by the Hills Delectable."