THE MAGAZINES.
THE June number of the Nineteenth Century is a good one. The padding interests us rather less than usual, but there are at least five articles from which the reader may derive either entertainment or nutrition. We wish Dr. Jessopp would be a little more definite, and tell us distinctly what he thinks can be tine to make village life more attractive ; but there is instruction in the vigorous contrast he draws in " The Cry of the Villages" between the energy of the philanthropist in working for the citizen and his almost total neglect of the rural villager. The latter has nothing done for him, and is too poor to do anything for himself, while if he is capable, he lives under a special disability,—viz., the habit in villages of paying all labourers alike without reference to individual capacity. The new generation, therefore, as it grows up dis- gusted with rural wages, rural houses, and rural monotony, marches off to the towns where life is lively, and there are many chances. The girls feel this impulse even more than the boys, so that there are many villages where working girls are literally not to be found, and where, if there are any, they will not accept labourers as husbands. Dr. Jessopp seems to think that a wise liberality to villagers would prevent much of this dispersion • but we greatly fear that nothing short of peasant- proprietorship will prove sufficient. In every land the peasant loves the soil when it is his own, and then only.—Mr. Courtney's paper on " Parnell and Ireland" is admirable in its brevity and distinctness. In extraordinarily few words he proves that Parnell, as judged by his own disciples, had in him but little statesmanship, little foresight, and little care for the main grievances of Ireland. What he had to attract his countrymen was, first, an unquenchable dislike of government by a British Parliament ; secondly, an English kind of masterfulness ; and lastly, a certain readiness in turn- ing all weapons to account ; and these three qualifications gave him his ascendency. They would not, Mr. Courtney thinks, have given it to him for any lengthened period in a native Irish Parliament. Mr. Courtney, we see, is still hopeful of success in the great task of reconciling Ireland, if only the English will carry out a sound agrarian policy, and realise hilly that the Irish remain Roman Catholic to their heart's core. We agree, without being equally sanguine. The British will, we believe, settle the agrarian question, but whether they will ever be just to Catholics in purely Catholic questions we are not so sure. A large proportion of them are affronted by Catholicism as they are affronted by no other creed, and will pay for a Mussulman College or a University like that of Nuddea, which is purely Hindoo, more readily than for a Catholic University intended to teach Catholic students in a Catholic country.—The high estimate of Shakespeare in France to which Mr. Sidney Lee testifies will surprise many of our readers:— " In the nineteenth century Shakespeare was admitted without demur into the French 'pantheon of literary gods.' Classicists and romanticists vied in doing him honour. The classical painter Ingres introduced his portrait into his famous picture of 'Homer's Cortege' (now in the Louvre). The romanticist Victor Hugo recognised only three men as memorable in the history of humanity, and Shakespeare was one of the three ; Moses and Homer were the other two. Alfred de Musset became a dramatist under Shalre- speare's spell. To George Sand everything in literatureseemed flat
by the side of Shakespeare's poetry. The prince of romancers, the elder Dumas, set the English dramatist next to God in the cosmic system of the universe ; after God,' wrote Dumas. Shakespeare has created most.' "
Nodier in 1801 had said almost as much, declaring that while "from Shakespeare's works one can draw forth a philosophy, from no systems of philosophy could one construct one page of Shakespeare." It is true that his translators have altered his plays for the stage, making Othello, for instance, reconcile himself to Desdemona, but this was only, Mr. Lee explains, because the canons of French art require in the greatest of tragedians "correctness, an absence of tumult or of crime per- petrated in face of the audience, some observance of the classical law of unity of time, place, and action." Shakespeare was not emasculated out of scorn for him, but out of an over- weening respect for French modes of thought.—Mr. Taylor's talk with Raja Si,iaprasad about Jainism, though interesting, contains little that is new to those who know anything at all of that form of Buddhism, but it includes a sentence or two which to the majority of our readers will be entirely novel :— We endeavour to avoid even green vegetables, under the_idea that cutting the plant may hurt it. Our diet, as far as possible, is dry vegetable food. We would not needlessly pick a leaf from a tree, lest the tree should possibly feel pain' That- plants -are not unconscious, but share the attributes of men, is maintained in .the Jain scriptures. As the nature of man, it is held, is to be born and to grow old, so is the nature of the plant ; as the one needs food, so the other needs food ; as the one falls sick when damaged, so does the other ; as the one is not eternal, so the other is not eternal ; as the one has reason, so the other has reason. This the Jain com- mentators amplify by remarking that the plants observe the seasons and sprout at the proper time ; the seed always grows upward, and so on : all which would not happen if the plants had no knowledge of the things about them."
The Greeks must have had some vague idea of the same kind, but so far as we know the wildest humanitarianism of Europe has stopped short of this theory which, if logically carried out would render the feeding of a people nearly impossible.—Dr. Llewelyn Davies pleads eloquently for a moderate form of Erastianism, in which 'we understand him to sympathise with the idea which Erastus really defended,—viz., that the com- munity should be free to rule, and the Church to evangelise ; and the Rev. A. C. Deane in an article on the "quantity and quality" of the Church points out that the number of candi- dates for ordination is yearly decreasing, having sunk steadily from fourteen hundred and twenty-eight in 1894 to twelve hundred and seventy-six in 1898, while the proportion who are gradutes of Oxford or Cambridge is now under 68 per cent. There are many causes perhaps for this decline in the number and status of the clergy ; but the main cause is un- doubtedly financial, the Church having lost in tithe and glebe forty-five millions sterling in the last twenty-five years.
We expected rather more from Dr. Fairbairn's paper on "Religion in India," in this month's Contemporary Review," than we found in it. It is admirably written, temperate, and full of a kind of knowledge ; but we cannot trace in it any definite conclusions, unless indeed it be one which, as stated, is too crude. The following is admirably put, but we should hesitate in calling it exactly true:— "Hinduism is not a single religion, but a huge encyclopedia of distinct and independent worships ; it is not a unity either of thought or custom, but an immense multiplicity of sects and their observances. It may be described as the amalgam of all the religious ideas and usages of all the Indian peoples through all their past. To no two classes in no two places is it exactly the same thing. Its one permanent and distinctive feature is its social order ; where caste is Hinduism is, where caste is not Hinduism will not condescend to be. Grant this fundamental institution, and it will be tolerant beyond the wildest occidental dream of toleration. It spreads not by the conversion of individuals, but of tribes or peoples. Its unit is not the person but the family ; for the individual it has no place, with him it can do nothing, and for him it does not care : but the family, or the aggregation of families which we term caste, is to it all in all. It is more by his fulfilment of his domestic duties, his fidelity in his paternal functions and obligations, than by his ritual conformity that a man's orthodoxy is judged."
We should say, on the contrary, that Hinduism is in its essence the doctrine that man, by maintaining his personal and ceremonial purity, can rise from stage to stage until he is either lost or absorbed in Deity,—that is, in the spiri4al All of which everything that appears to be certain is but a.. phenomenal emanation. The observance of caste is one
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method of ensuring this purity, but not the only or the highest method, the Sunyasee, who reaches absorption by dominating the flesh, being independent of all caste laws. No one, how- ever, who is interested in Hinduism, the one faith which has succeeded in completely dominating not only the ideas but the daily conduct of its votaries, can read Dr. Fairbairn's paper without pleasure, or without the wish that he would expand the result of his observations into a book.—Mr. R. Wallace, M.P., in "The Seamy Side of Imperialism" protests against what we may call "mucky Imperialism," the desire of .'conquest for the sake of gain or the gratification of pride, in words which are very eloquent but exaggerated. It is almost nonsense to say that in the Soudan we have substituted one despotism for another, and quite non- sense to say that if we had been sincere we should, after breaking the Khalifa, have left a free people to organise its own government. The free people would have been again enslaved within six months. If con- quest is always wrong, however the powers derived from conquest may be used, then, of course, Mr. Wallace has a case; but is not that, in view of the history of the world, a rather large assumption ? There is surely something of prejudice in a sentence like the following:—" To a man of democratic spirit there cannot be a more reactionary and intolerable 'puppy' than the average Anglo-Indian, unless it be the average member of the permanent Civil Service." That being so, why does the democracy at every turn call upon a per- manent Civil Service to realise its ideals, increasing that service and enlarging its functions as it does with every decade ? There is plenty to be said on Mr. Wallace's side, and it should be said, but to be effective there must be more moderation and a recognition of the fact that in the present condition of the world the white race can by its leadership confer upon the dark races advantages worth all, and more than, the pay which it takes in return. Freedom is an excel- lent thing, but not the freedom of a boys' school from its tutor's ascendency. That is only anarchy. — Madame Darmesteter sends an entertaining and most instructive sketch of "the social novel" which in France to-day, as in the France of 1785, has suddenly superseded the love-story, and "the old Provencal theme of the married lady, her husband and her lover." The afaire Dreyfus, like the afaire of the Diamond Necklace of a century ago, has suddenly superseded every interest which preceded it, and threatens to produce an entirely new literature, in which for the moment M. Anatole France is the great producer. The most important incidental remark in Madame Darmesteter's review is that France is at last wearying of the uniformity and rigidity of her educational system :—" She sees no reason why at Lille and at Bordeaux, at Nancy and at Nantes, Aix en Savoie, and Aix en Provence, all these little schoolboys who are so unlike each other by tradition and habit, by race and by the requirements of their future lives, should be forced into the same mould and compelled, willy.nilly, to learn just the same tasks at just the same hours." One can but hope that it is so, but if this uniformity is not an expression of the instinctive genius of France, how did it come 9—Mr. A. J. Wilson in "The Art of Living on Capital" repeats his usual sombre warning that we are eating up our resources, which is, of course, true, but not more true than that we are eating them up when we feed ourselves. We are getting strength in the eating, or if not, still we must eat. Mr. Wilson says that the owners of a successful mine ought not to distribute all its profits, but husband part against the in- evitable day of exhaustion. Most true as regards the share- holders, but is it true as regards the community What does it matter to that entity whether the profit of digging is all divided in one year or distributed over thirty The profit has been made, and must enrich its makers, whether suddenly or slowly. That market prices for most stocks are too p high is probably true, but how does that affect the entire State ? At worst it can only enrich one class at the expense of another, leaving the total wealth the same.—Con- found the bacteria ! Here is Mr. G. Clarke Nuttall arguing that if we cultivate the bacteria of tobacco properly we shall have tobaccos of fine flavour. Let tobacco-growers read, but let the public smoke in peace.—M. Albion W. Tourgee argues that if Great Britain and America can agree they will constitute a grand force making for peace. The paper is striking, but the writer is over-given to generali- sations. He says, for instance, " a free people, a government based on public opinion, a people whose interests demand commercial opportunity, is always in favour of peace," unless, indeed, it is unjustly treated or moved by the oppression of others. Is not the reservation fatal to the general proposi- tion 7 An interesting article on "Russia's Great Naval Enterprise" —in other words, the establishment of intercourse between the Baltic and the Black Sea by a waterway from Diinamiinde, on the Gulf of Riga, to Kherson, on the estuary of the Dnieper —stands first in the Fortnightly for June. The original estimate of this great engineering exploit, which cannot, in the writer's view, be completed in less than eight or ten years, was £28,000,000. He contends that if this undertaking does not make Russia a great naval Power, it will at least strengthen her position, and while she will be a constant menace to Constantinople, it will render her practically unassailable in her own waters. But if Russia, as he antici- pates, thereafter resolves to extend her waterway to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, she will at once lose the invulnerability which has hitherto been one of her great sources of strength.—The case for the Out- landers is effectively put in " The Transvaal Crisis : a Voice from the Rand." Amongst minor grievances the following is worthy of note :—" Our water supply is merely poisonous : a ' death-trap' visitors of a scientific turn have called Johannes- burg. Whether we like it or not, we must be poisoned or drink aerated or mineral waters ; and the President has lately put a tax of 3d. a bottle on all mineral waters, except the particular one which is in the hands of one of his conces- sionaires." The writer disclaims all desire to see the Transvaal " mopped up," to use Mr. Rhodes's phrase :-
There need not be—for it is far from desirable that there should be—the slightest change in the form of government. The Transvaal is a republic, and a republic let it remain ; but let it be an equitable republic on right lines. There need be no fighting to secure this ; there only needs, on the part of the Suzerain power, a little gentle assertion of her interest in her 'last and largest Empire.' If she will make that, she will have her reward, not in the reformation of the Transvaal only, but in an increased prestige throughout South Africa. If she withholds it she must make up her mind to lose her paramountcy in the Transvaal of to-day and in the confederated South Africa of to-morrow."
—Mr. J. G. Butcher, M.P., contributes a useful historic I summary of the events which led up to the Declaration of Paris, and a lucid commentary on its terms. He reminds us that though never formally embodied in a treaty, or, so far as England is concerned, formally sanctioned by Parliament, it has since 1856 been practically acceded to by all civilised nations except the United States, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. He is careful to add, in point of fact, that while reserving their liberty of action, the United States have always since that date, and notably in the recent war with Spain, acted in accordance with the rules laid down in the Declaration. The greater part of the article is devoted to an examination of the first and second rules—which abolish privateering and allow the enemy's goods carried in neutral ships protection from seizure—with a view to answering the questions : Is it to the interest of England to withdraw 7 and Would England be justified in withdrawing 7 To both of these Mr. Butcher returns a negative answer : " Unless we are prepared to treat our international engagements as waste- paper, and the hostility of the world as a negligible quantity, we must remain content to accept the benefits, and to submit
to the obligations, arising out of the Declaration of Paris."— The Rev. H. de B. Gibbins suggests as a remedy for the evil summed up in the label "Made in Germany," the establish- ment of a Department of Commercial Instruction " on the same lines, somewhat improved maybe, of the much-abused, but not altogether inadequate, Department of Science and Art at South Kensington with all the proper machinery of examinations, guidance, and grants." But why "somewhat improved maybe " Why not " immensely improved of course "?—The pith of Mr. Joseph Ackland's " Twenty-five Years' Financial Policy" is to be found in the concluding paragraph :-
Reviewing the twenty-five years it appears that, exclusive of the Post Office, the revenue has increased from £68,521,915 in 1874-5 to £105,747,353 in 1898-9, an increase of upwards of 54 per cent., as the price to be paid for a spirited foreign and expansionist policy. And when we ask who has chiefly contributed to this in- crease we find that while' the-contribution of Customs and Excise has fallen from 73'83 to 55.95 per cent. of the tax revenue, the con- tribution of income and property taxes has risen from 26.17 to 44.05per cent. ; and while income tax was at the rate of W. in the 15 ,1 . t now at 8d. When we inquire what steps have beeh taken by pruning and grafting to fertilise the revenue and develop new fruitage, we can only discover Mr. Gladstone's creation of the beer duty in place of the malt duty, and Sir W. Harcourt's rearrange- ment of the death duties ; the prolific fruitage of both changes having sustained the enormous burden of expenditure of recent years. Whether we look at the growth of expenditure, the in- cidence of the burden, or the methods of procedure, all alike cry aloud for return to the old Liberal watchwords, Peace, retrench- ment, and reform:" —The solidity of the number is relieved—as by currants sparsely • scattered through a massive structure of suet—by some lighter articles, by far the best of which is Mr. Shelley's appreciation of Hood, containing some extremely interesting extracts from unpublished letters in the possession of the nephew of Hood's wife. The letter to his sisters-in-law on p. 997 is wholly delightful. Describing how he had killed a viper on the Downs near Hastings, he continues : "They are called adders, tell your father, because two and two of them together make four." Hood's father-in-law, it should be ex- plained, was a Mathematical Muter in Christ's Hospital.
The first article in the National Review, "The' Case. for Dissolution," is an adroit but, in our opinion, entirely uncon- vincing piece of special pleading. The argument is almost entirely based on strategical expediency. The Government, in fact, is urged to dissolve mainly, if not entirely, in order to "dish" the Radicals. We should be very sorry to think that "Carltonensis " has any weight in the councils of the party to which he gives such unpatriotic advice.---Mr. W. R. Lawson's article on " The Coming Russian Loan " resolves itself prac- tically into a hostile criticism of M. de Witte's new financial policy. Mr. Lawson's attitude might be'summed up as Timeo Russos et dona ferentes. He admits that M. de Witte's over. tures to English capitalists are seductive, but advises the British investor to be cautious before he yields to them. The last paragraph contains an ingenious proposal :— " One more interesting question this prospective Russian loan suggests. Why should not the foreign loan • system be taken into consideration at the Peace Conference in connection with the bloated armaments to which it so largely contributes ? At least one half of the Great Powers of Europe would have smaller armaments to-day if they had not been able to borrow money to build them with. That being so, surely a short and simple means of checking their growth would be to make borrowed money contraband of war. The British representatives at the Conference might propose that when two Great Powers were at war or preparing for war no other Great Power should allow its subjects to lend money to either of them. How would that suit the Czar and Mr. Stead ? We fear neither of them would welcome it with their favourite invocation, In God's name I' British capitalists and investors may, however, act on it in their own name by declining M: Witte's invitation to assist him in financing with British- money the Russian foreign policy of Penjdeh, Port Arthur, and Pekin, and her domestic policy in Finland."
Godfrey Lushington's masterly and exhaustive analysis 'of the published evidence in • the Dreyfus case is published in a special Supplement, and will be found of the utmost value to the general reader. The editor in his "Episodes of the Month " adds some illuminating comments,— notably the following:—" It has long been known that forgery was employed to maintain the original condemnation ; it is now known that forgery was employed to obtain that con- demnation. This puts a very much worse aspect on the Dreyfus case than it has yet borne."—Amongst other interest- ing articles in an excellent number we may notice a Curious study on the training of twin boys, from the ages of four to seven, on the Pestalozzi-Frcebel system, and Mr. Bernard Holland's thoughtful essay on " The Present Popularity of Omar Khayyam," which ends with a remarkable speculation on the ultimate and spiritual. result of. our • occupation of India.
Blackwood opens strongly this month with the hitherto un- published narrative, written in 1822, of a Lieutenant in the Navy who, joining as a midshipman in 1804, was captured by the French in' the same year, and on his release in 1814 had been the inmate of twenty-one different prisons.. The pictures of Napoleon in undress, so to speak, certainly do not con- duce to hero-worship. Another interesting sketch is that of Colonel Dillon, the Irish spy. The necessary editorial revision has been judiciously effected by Profeesor Dowden. —Mr. Greenwood's article on "A Tyranny of Sentiment" is _ an extremely able _piece of destructive criticism directed against " New Lights" in politics; and takes the place of 'the " Looker-on's" article, discontinued 1.4:the present number.--Another excellent article is that on Dreyfui, "the negative ruler of France," as the writer happily styles him; while Mr: Alexander Macdonald continues his stirring experiences as a pioneer in Klondike ; Zack " contributes the opening . chapters of a serial entitled On Trial " trbe " is a most stimulating record of a visit to London in May by a country cousin who knows his mind and speaks it with refreshing candour, whether the subject be the novels of Misi Fowler, the' decorations of St. Paul's, the portraits of Mr. Sargent, dresses in 'the Park, or Mr. Pinero's new play.—The criticism of the Americans in "The Case of the Philippines" is legitimate enough; but there is absolutely no excuse for the insertion of the tasteless poem, " The Kentucky Girl."
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