THE MAGAZINES.

THE half-crown Magazines are rather sterile this month. We are slowly getting nearer to the facts about the Labour Question. Mr. John Burns's paper, in the Nineteenth Century for December, is thoroughly well worth reading. He is in places, as of old, vague and violent, and some of the remedies he suggests will strike experienced readers as impracticable ; but he is clearly trying to be reasonable, and to look facts in the face. He still declares that to be out of work gives a claim upon society ; but he draws a strong distinction between " loafers " and real workmen, and he denounces charitable "funds," like the Lord Mayor's Fund, in language of the bitterest contempt. He is sick to the death of " neurotic Christians and fanatical faddists, who combine universal brotherhood with incompetence and good salaries," and wants to be rid of the whole business of benevolence :-

" I go further, and as a trade-unionist, a member of a friendly society, and a Labour representative, knowing the life, the needs, and requirements of the working people, particularly the unskilled labourers and the unemployed, say that the time has arrived when the common-sense of all sections of the community repre- sented by an Act of Parliament should prevent utopian philan- thropists like General Booth and Mr. Arnold White, and all such unscientific amateurs and spasmodic manipulators of other people's charity, from making London, as they are, the happy hunting-ground of charitable debanchees, and the centre to which loafers and tramps are drawn from all parts of the country, to the confusion of the proper authorities, and the detri- ment of the London poor. . . . . . In spite of what some advocates of work for the unemployed may say, I contend, as a Socialist, basing my belief on an unequalled experience of the largest meetings cf unemployed that have ever been held, and as spokesman on every occasion for deputations on this subject to Government departments in the past eight years, that until the differentiation of the labourer from the loafer takes place, the unemployed question can never be properly discussed and dealt with. Till the tramp, thief, and ne'er-do-well, however pitiable he may be, is dealt with distinctly from the genuine worker, no permanent benefit will result to any of them. The gentleman who gets up to look for work at mid- day, and prays that he may not find it, is undeserving of pity. I have seen the most genuine and honest men at meetings mixed up with the laziest and moat drunken scoundrels."

Mr. Burns has only to go one step further, and learn that sponging on society is no better than sponging on the individual, to develop into a sound, hard-headed political economist. He would even feed the powerless through the Poor-Law, and confine the unemployed question mainly to the able-bodied who will work. For them he would provide first by establishing an Exchange Bureau of Labour to collect all statistics and direct the workers where to go; secondly, by giving them work, especially sewer work, in the streets ; and thirdly, by insisting on shorter hours, which, he sup- poses, would of itself distribute work more universally. He desires no big plans, industrial colonies, or the like, but the slow "absorption of the unemployed" into the existing labour fund. That is sensible, at all events, though we wish Mr. Burns had expressed his views on the expense of his projects; and the essay shows how experience will improve an agitator who really desires advantage for others than himself.—We have noticed the next paper, Mr. Mivart's " Happiness in Hell," elsewhere; and the two papers on girlhood, by Sir H. Maxwell and the Hon. Mrs. Lyttelton Gell, are not very interesting. The former says, in reply to Mrs. Lynn Lynton, that girls in the last century thirsted for amusement as they do in this, and were much the same kind of creatures, which is true enough ; while the latter says that girls in rich house- holds work too little, and have too much amusement. That also is true enough, but it is remedies, not assertions, that are now required. Mrs. Gell has no remedy to suggest, except taking up philanthropy as a business, and that does not attract all, or succeed always. Moreover, there is very little opposition to it now, so that anybody in that way inclined may begin at once. We should, ourselves, suggest study as an equally useful alternative, but that we feel certain the remedy, if one is desired, must come, and will come, from within. The old obstacle was a certain etiquette of idleness, and that has disappeared.—Mr. Jesse Collings' paper on Small Holdings, which he entitles " £38,000,000 per Annum," is well worth reading, but his teaching may be briefly summarised. The English pay to foreign countries £38,000,000 a year for the following articles :- Cheese ...

... £4,813,404

Butter ...

... 11,591,183

Margarine

... 3,558,203

Lard

... 1,720,051

Poultry, game, and rabbits

... 743,960 Bacon and hams... 9,441,761 Pork, fresh and salted . . ... 598,657

Potatoes ... • • • • • -

... 1,196,824 Eggs ... 3,505,522 Apples, raw ... 1,033,997 Total ... 438,203,562

Mr. Collings holds that the small farmers could supply the whole of this demand, and could, therefore, be nearly inde- pendent of corn, the low price of which so injures the large cultivator. That seems sensible, though we should like more evidence as to the profit on some of the articles. One expert will tell you that poultry never pays, while another expert admits a profit of £1 a week on the eggs alone. The diffi- culty is to understand why, if these things pay at wholesale prices, they are not produced. Is it all the fault of the middleman, who sweeps the c 3untry for them, but offers prices which make the housewives and dairywomen cry with spite and disappointment P—Mr. J. A. Farrer's account of his defeat in an election is amusing, though too slight ; and this paragraph is, as far as we know, new. Mr. Farrer found that the interest taken in politics is usually exaggerated :-

" I discovered that, strong as are many men's political feelings, only a minority have political opinions. The man who was a Conservative in Yorkshire, where the Conservative colour is blue, and became a Liberal on migrating into Westmoreland, where blue is the Liberal colour, rather than prove false to his ancestral colour, represents, on the whole, a high level of political intelli- gence in the North country. Life is a series of disillusions, but I never made a greater mistake than in sharing the popular delusion that there is a higher standard of political information and in- terest in the North than in the South. Sad indeed must be the case of the South if this idea has any basis of reality. But Mrs. Bagot's allusion to an idiot entitles me to boast that at all events no actual idiots ever honoured my meetings with their presence."

—The only other article which has interested us is the hasty sketch of Alaska by Lady Grey Egerton. It is ex- cessively slight—a growing fault, we note, in the heavier magazines—but it contains (pp. 997-98) a spirited account of a very wonderful scene,—Glacier Bay, the bay into which the Muir Glacier, the largest glacier in the world, empties 45,000 tons of ice every minute, with the continuous boom of

a cannonade.

Mr. Stopford Brooke's essay on Tennyson in the Con- temporary Review is a very striking one, but hardly admits of quotation, though we should like to quote p. 770, in which the

writer, who is necessarily without prejudice on that side, admits almost in terms that Tennyson held the Christian faith in a form much more definite than it is usual to believe. We did

not know that any competent critic had ever questioned that the poem, "Strong Son of God, immortal Love," is addressed to Christ. Where we should differ from Mr. Stopford Brooke most emphatically is in his dictum that Tennyson's Whiggism lowered the tone of his poetry:— "It had been far, far more right and natural, had Tennyson taken up the other side—a side just as necessary, even more necessary, for the advance of human freedom than the side of cautious and lawful development of liberty—the side of the rushers, of the passionate seekers, of the wild warriors, of the sacrificers whom the world calls insane, of the indignant men whose speech and action Tennyson thought were 'the blind hysterics of the Celt.' That way poetry lies : and that way lies the permanent influence of a poet on humanity, so far as this question is concerned."

That is an astonishing judgment. Was Shakespeare, then, no poet, or 'Virgil, or must every poet in all ages be a Radical? —We are sick of discussions on Uganda, and will only record that Mr. Joseph Thomson, a competent authority, thinks we ought to keep it, and grows even poetic in his urgency ; and pass on to Mr. Stuart-Glennie's paper on " Aryan Origins." Mr. Stuart-Glennie maintains that,

although the Aryans were white, they were not the White race, there having been an older one, traces of which still linger in Egypt, Northern Africa, and many other places. He thinks that the Aryans were a relic of these " Archaians,"

the main body having been destroyed by a great flood, and their earliest habitat the steppes of Southern Russia. It is all a little dreamy ; but it is curious to reckon Mr. Stuart- Glennie, with his acute disbelief in the Old Testament, among those inclined to accept the tradition of a White race of high civilisation existing before the Flood.—The most interesting paper is, to us, the account of Hans Denck, the Bishop of the Anabaptists, shortly after the Reformation. Born probably in Bavaria, and educated in Basle, he appeared in 1524.25 among the peasants of St. Gall ; subsequently in Augsburg, and latterly in Strassburg and Worms, preaching everywhere his doctrine, which must have borne much resemblance to evangelical Quakerism. He resisted no evil done to him ; he believed in intuition, or the immanent Divine Light; he held good conduct to be imperative and-

" There was nothing, Denck conceived, real or permanent in the world but God. Sin and all evil not sent upon us by God for our good are emptiness and vanity, and must vanish into nothing- ness. Goodness is the normal state of man, sin being like disease and death. In accordance with the essential nothingness of everything opposed to God, Denck did not believe in a personal devil, but regarded all who were not obedient to the Divine will as possessed by a spirit of evil. The practical outcome was a doctrine of self-renunciation by which the Word of God, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, the Spirit of Divine love, had free course in the hearts of men and was glorified in their lives. It was only when this took place that men could be said to be dead to the law. As long as they lived in any degree to themselves, they were necessarily subject to a moral law. What that law was the Scriptures had gradually revealed. Beginning with Moses and the Decalogue it ended with Christ and the Sermon on the Mount."

Denck was, of course, accounted an arch-heretic; but his writings had a singular influence over many minds.

The papers in the Fortnightly are none of them very striking, the most noteworthy being, perhaps, Dr. Momerie's confession of faith, called "Religion, its Future." We do not see that it differs greatly from ordinary Unitarianism, Dr. Momerie arguing strongly for Theism, though he holds

that God may not be omnipotent, for immortality as abso- lutely necessary if the pursuit of pleasure is not to be the occupation of the wise, and for Christ as the highest of the "prophets," the man who reached the loftiest ideal. This argument for the being of a God is well and clearly put :-

" Reason can only grasp what is reasonable. You cannot ex- plain the conduct of a fool. You cannot interpret the actions of a lunatic. They are contradictory, meaningless, unintelligible. Similarly if nature were an irrational system, there would be no possibility of knowledge. The interpretation of nature consists in making our own the thoughts which nature implies. Scientific hypothesis consists in guessing at these thoughts ; scientific verification in proving that we have guessed aright. 0 God,' said Kepler, when he discovered the laws of planetary motion, I think again thy thoughts after thee.' There could be no course of nature, no laws of sequence, no possibility of scientific pre- diction, in a senseless play of atoms. But as it is, we know exactly how the forces of nature act, and how they will continue to act. We can express their mode of working in the most pre- cise mathematical formulae. Every fresh discovery in science reveals anew the order, the law, the system, in a word, the reason, which underlies material phenomena. And reason is the outcome of mind."

—Mr. Grant Allen sends a pleasant sketch of that devoted servant of science, "Bates of the Amazons," which contains at least one new fact upon his subject. The great naturalist in his renowned expedition underwent sufferings which he never recorded. He told his friends once, in an unusual interval of communicativeness, " how on that expedition he had at times almost starved to death ; bow he had worked with slaves like a slave for his daily rations of coarse food; how he had faced perils more appalling than death ; and how he had risked, and sometimes lost, everything he possessed on earth, with a devotion that brought tears into the eyes of grown men who heard him."—" Ouida's " savage indictment of our present society, with its vulgarity and its gross worship

of wealth, will be read with interest by all the pessimists ; but though it is all as true as it is vigorous, it pro.. duces a false picture. There is another side. There never, perhaps, was a time when wealth was so misused, and never a time when it was so freely devoted to good uses. Unfortunately, the description of this side does not lend itself to effective epigram.—Mr. Redmond's plea for the dyna- miters is, first, that they were tried and punished as political prisoners, which is true, but only half the truth ; and, secondly, as regards one at least of them—Egan—that he was innocent. The only solid argument he produces is, however, that the Judge who tried the case thought that, as regarded his being a dynamitard, " there was a shadow of a doubt." It could not have been strong, or he would have pleaded with the Home Office in Egan's favour.