THE MAGAZINES.

"THE Savoy Dynasty, the Pope, and the Republic," by "A Continental Statesman," which is the first article in the Con- temporary Review, is one of those pretentious papers the whole value of which consists in the author's name, and that is concealed. It is intended to warn the House of Savoy that in adhering to the Triple Alliance it risks the loss of all that it has acquired, and, indeed, of a dethronement as complete as that of the Napoleons. France, the writer says, if war broke out, would give the rein to revolution in Italy, and the peninsula would become a Republic. That is quite possible if the Alliance is defeated ; but then, where is the certainty of that ? The risk would have been at least as great if King Humbert had joined with France, with this additional aggravation, that while Germany and Austria, if they had succeeded, would have sent him back to Piedmont, France, if she had succeeded, would have been hotly opposed to Royalty anywhere. The dynasty, if it is really fighting for itself only, has obviously chosen wisely, while if it is fighting for Italy, it can plead that France has never relaxed her hostility to the Kingdom, which is bated by French Republicans because it is a dangerous counterpoise in the Mediterranean, and by French Conservatives because it is at loggerheads with the Papacy. It is this double enmity which has forced Italy to join the German Powers, and to load herself with a military expenditure which is no doubt more than she can permanently bear, but which, if there is peace at the end of it, she may endure for another ten or fifteen years without irremediable rain. The jealousy between France and Italy, it must be remembered, is not a result of forms of government, but of difference in the peoples, and the Man who anticipates, as this essayist does, a "Federal Republic which would by degrees take in the whole of the Latin world," is much more of a dreamer than of a "Continental states- man."—Dr. Dale sends an interesting paper on Mies Naden, the young poet-philosopher who wrote so many striking verses, and who devoted herself to finding out the problem of the Whence and Whither, only to arrive, after all her thinking at the conclusion which the Hindoo sages formulated so many centuries ago. Everything, she thought, was really man's own creation,—that is, in truth, an illusion sprung from his own brain. "Oar universe," says Miss Na den, "is made up of

sensations and beyond sensation we cannot pass.

Practically we may say of self, as Paul of Christ. In

it are all things created, in the heaven and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers ; all things have been created through it, and unto it, and self is before all things, and in self all things consist." "The heavens and the earth, truth, beauty, the awful contrasts between right and wrong, the glory of the Supreme—she had come to think that

all are the creations of the grey thought-cells of the cerebral hemispheres." The single and the sufficing answer to that theory, which has captivated such acute minds, is, that even while expounding it, man knows that it is not true, for he him- self who expounds cannot be only an illusion. He does not, anyhow, invent his own mind, and in allowing that he does not, his theory is given up.—We do not feel quite certain whether Mr. E. Gosse thinks "the influence of democracy on literature" bad or good. Democracy, he says, receives readily, but forgets as readily, and is an exceedingly bad critic, buying 119,000 copies of the last "funny man's" book in the time during which Matthew Arnold sold 119 copies of " Friendship's Garland." He is, however, on the whole, hopeful ; and so are we,—because we believe that creative minds will continue to create, whether their works are popular or not. They have always been independent of "the public ; " and they will remain so even if the majority, as is quite possible, refuse to read anything, good or bad, except the newspapers of the day. Mr. Gosse, by-the-way, is greatly exercised by a very obvious puzzle. Why, he asks, does the public continue to read those who have once pleased it, whatever lapses into care- ieesness and levity they permit themselves? The answer is plain. It does not. It continues to try for a time, though in rapidly diminishing numbers ; but it does not read. .Endytnion did not pay its publishers, and of all who bought it, scarcely a tenth even pretended to read it through.—Mr. Hamerton's essay on "A Basis of Positive Morality" is as yet too incomplete for discussion. He promises a further paper, and as yet has only arrived at the conclusion that Nature does not punish im- morality, but only enforces her own laws irrespective of their educative effect. That is substantially true, or Nature could not so often punish the innocent ; but it does not help us on very far. Even the utilitarian does not rely on Nature for a system of morality, but on the opinion of man, with most of his instincts beaten out of him by protracted experience. Mr. Hamerton, we may remark in passing, exaggerates the failure of the great religions to enforce the morality they approve. They have generally succeeded in creating an ideal, always acknowledged, though no doubt in practice constantly abandoned ; and in the course of ages it is the ideal which prevails. It is, for example, Christianity which is creating sympathy, though whole generations of Christians have for long periods seemed to be without it.—Mr. Shaw Lefevre does not add anything very striking to the common view of recent Bulgarian progress; but the subjoined paragraph, which in substance contains his view of the subject, is worth quoting :—

"There can be no doubt whatever as to the general content and happiness and prosperity of the bulk of the population as compared with their past under Turkish rule. A friend at Con- stantinople who had recently travelled through the greater part of Bulgaria, told me that on his return he was asked by a Philo- Turk what difference independence could really have made in the lot of average peasants in Bulgaria, seeing that their taxes were somewhat higher now than they used to he. My friend in reply said he had put that very question to a Bulgarian ; the answer was, that 'it was true that they paid more in taxes than they did to the Turkish Government, but the difference was that they now got something in return for them,—namely, good roads, good schools, and security for property and life ; the money paid with one hand was spent by the other for themselves, while under the 'Turkish rule they got nothing in return for their taxes. He and his wife could not, under the old state of things, go out of the town, where they lived, to visit a vineyard which they possessed an the neighbourhood without being protected by thirty or forty well-armed persons. Now they could go there alone in perfect safety. They lived there without fear during the summer, un- guarded. Always when there, they rejoiced in their now posi- tion; sometimes they shed tears, thinking it was too good to be true, and that the Turks must be coming back.'" —" Camille Flammarion " has failed in his imaginative sketch of "The Last Days of the Earth." It has one striking idea, that the strenuous cultivation of the senses and the intellect may wear out the nervous energy of men till they all die at twenty-five ; but he makes no attempt to work it out, and ascribes the actual extinction of the race to the gradual cooling of the sun. He should have done more with such fine Imaginative material.—Mr. Brutus Wima.n fights earnestly for absolute free.trade between Canada and the United States. He is supposed across the water to be an annexationist; but he strongly denies this, propounding his actual theory in this terse paragraph :—

"If. material progress is the essential standard of success and happiness, then Canada would be enormously benefited by a free

relation with the United States. If the argument in behalf of annexation is that purely of material advantage, he who favours reciprocity, and thereby begets material advantage, completely annihilates the only consideration which would urge a political union. Therefore, so far as Canada is concerned, reciprocity and adherence to British connection go hand-in-hand, while the advan- tages that would flow from an unrestricted relation with a country so prosperous as the United States are so palpable as to need no advocacy."

We confess we see no answer to that contention.

We do not understand why the conductors of serious magazines still admit papers by Count Leo Tolstoi. Not only is his genius dead, but his power of expression. His paper of February on "Tobacco," in the Contemporary Review, was drivel ; and the essay on "Church and State," in this month's Fortnightly Review, is hardly better. Its essence is contained in the following silly paragraph :—

"Now true religion may be present anywhere, everywhere ; except, of course, where manifestly false religion holds sway over men ; that is to say, when the faith which is allied with violence —the State religion—prevails. Thus all so-called schisms and heresies may be in possession of the true faith, whereas of a cer- tainty it will not be discovered in the creed that is united with the temporal power. It may appear paradoxical, but it is none the less true that the appellations, 'Orthodox,' 'Catholic,' 'Protestant' faith, as these words are used in everyday language, mean neither more nor less than religion allied with the temporal power, mean State creeds, and therefore false religions."

It follows that if any State adopted a creed which Count Tolstoi acknowledged to be true, that creed would become false! What is the use of reading or publishing stuff of that kind?

Sir John Willoughby gives us a good account of the occupation of Mashonaland, which he declares to be one of the three grand gold-fields in the world. He found gold every- where, expects a great rush of miners, and asks for the new Colony, with its 200,000 square miles of splendid soil, nothing but direct access eastward to the sea. That is essential, because the cost of conveying 100 lb. of goods to Cape Town by the southern route is 65s., and by the east- ward route only 10s. 8d. The route is at present Portuguese ; but Sir John Willoughby has evidently no doubt of the power of the new settlers to persuade or compel them to grant a free transit, if not ultimately to cede its full control.—Madame de Bury does not increase our knowledge of Madame de Maintenon, though the degree in which the misery of poverty had eaten into her soul is very well brought out. The essayist is, however, far too tolerant, and actually calls Scarron, whom everybody else describes as an obscene buffoon, "a noble. hearted but infirm old man."—The Duke of Marlborough describes American railways as, on the whole, hopeful invest- ments, though they have hitherto been mismanaged, and confirms the English belief that they are falling more and more into the hands of millionaires, who use them as counters in the game of amassing fortunes. The Duke says the American public is indifferent to their proceedings, and advises the formation of an English syndicate of capitalists, who should acquire the control of some central system of lines, and insist on profitable management. The American millionaires, who are far richer, abler, and more unscrupulous than our own, and who would possess the sympathy of the State Legisla- tures, would ruin any such syndicate in five years, or more probably compel it to abandon its principles, and go into the millionaire pool. The hope for America is not in any com- bination of that sort, but in the popular weariness of high rates, Stock Exchange plots, and gigantic accidents—Mrs. E. Lynn Linton declares that everything in life is an illusion —love, friendship, and the "divine voices," all together— and that as maturity advances we find this out. Do we P We should have said that one definite mark of the present age was that the power of yielding to illu- sions increased with years, and that youth, not age, was nowadays the time of general scepticism. Does Mrs. Lynn Linton imagine that the power of feeling optimist illusions has died away, say, in Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Herbert Spencer P—Mr. J. D. Botirchier gives us a most readable, indeed charming, account of an expedition with Prince Ferdinand to the Rhodope ridge, where he found the great Monastery of Rib, the focus of the national religion. It is a vast building, with domes and towers and battlements ; and its Abbot is a mighty fisherman as well as ecclesiastic ; but the resident brotherhood has shrunk to sixty or seventy monks, who maintain, according to their visitor, the old ascetic discipline. Mr. Bourchier believes that the future of

Macedonia will be with the Bulgars, whose stubborn tenacity makes them more than a match for the Greeks; but it must be remembered that he had been living in an atmosphere of Bulgarian opinion.—Piofessor Dowden, in an article on "Amours de Voyage," gives an interesting account of Fabre d'Eglantine, afterwards Danton's secretary, and best known perhaps because he invented the revolutionary names for the months. He seems to have been a poetic enthusiast, very weak, very much given to love-making, and very full of him- self, but with observant eyes. Here is his sketch of some labourers under the old rogiene, just outside Beaune :—

"After dinner I strolled abroad, in order to hold more intimate converse with you; my steps led me to a place whore I was fully convinced that, hard as is my own lot, there are yet on earth beings more unfortunate than myself. There is, in this city of Beaune, an ancient chateau, of which only the four walls remain. In the depth of the walls are still certain little subterraneous hollows which were formerly little doors or embrasures. In these dreadful places, which pen cannot describe, men, women, and children reside. It makes one shudder to look in. An opening two and a half feet wide, and seven or eight feet deep, the floor of which is strewn with a little straw to serve as bedding, and where a fire is lit without a chimney, forms the most tolerable dwelling. place in this abode of misery. A man and woman occupy it. Hard by lives an old man in the embrasure for a cannon, which his in- dustry has transformed into a bed with some stones and some faggots ; such is his domicile ; further on is another of like kind. But what shocks one's feelings most, what horrifies one's sense of humanity, and rends one's heart, is to see a miserable creature, who lost his arm while working in the forest, his wife, and three young children, lodged in a frightful subterranean hole to which the blackest dungeon were a palace. The water reaches one's ankle ; the cold is deadly ; no windows, no fireplace, no furniture, no bread, no clothes, no covering at night; the whole of this wretched family huddle on a pile of half-rotted straw, resting on stones which raise it to the surface of the water. It is nothing to describe such misery ; one must see it. I cannot understand after this how any man can venture to complain of his lot."

Australia has no doubt its "seamy side," but the Hon. J. W. Fortescue writes too bitterly in the Nineteenth Century. His charge is, that the Australians borrow too lavishly, and that the rural districts are sacrificed to the towns, towards which the population swarms. The charge of borrowing is true ; but most of the money has been spent on railways, and though they as yet pay only ai per cent., while their capital was borrowed at 4, the difference will disappear in a few years, and can hardly crush Colonies possessed of such resources. It is more to the purpose that the labouring voters are all in favour of borrowing, so that they may have work on high wages ; but the increasing stringency of the market speedily corrects that. The New Zealanders, for instance, have been compelled to resort to sharp. RC01101311.C8, and have done it. As to the movement towards the towns, that occurs among ourselves also, and is, in part at least, nothing but a corollary of the modern discovery that for production to be cheap, labour must be aggregated in crowds. Mr. Fortescue believes in the necessity of irrigation for Australia, but says that irrigation does not pay, and that the money advanced by the State to Irrigation Trusts will ultimately be lost. That is possible, but by no means proves that irrigation by the cheapest methods available will never pay. The Colonies, like all new countries, will have their vicissitudes ; but meanwhile, the bulk of their popula- tion is well satisfied, and they believe in themselves to an almost comic extent. Would they be so optimist without reason ? The English at home certainly are not.—Prince Krapotkin argues from the extreme strength of the tribal organisation among some savages, that early man had a high idea of the protective value of societies, and owed much of his ultimate progress to his original altruism. Savages often avoid fighting within the tribe, even upon grave provocation. The deduction Prince Krapotkin wishes to draw from his facts, which he collects with skill and describes well, is that Socialism is natural to humanity. Very likely it is ; but how does that prove that it is better than individualism ? Re- venge is the earliest of instincts, but is not better than for- bearance. The highest altruism consists in suppressing the envy which is the basis of the Socialist passion.—Mr. W. E. Bear, a most competent witness, deprecates the multiplication of small farmers by State aid. His idea is that— "It is so important to afford the first stepping-stone to a 'career' for the farm-labourer, that almost anything calculated to place land up to about ten acres within his reach might be tolerated. But the farmers of twenty to fifty acres are the worst farmers in the country, as a rule. They do no good for themselves, unless they have some other occupation than farming, and they are cer- tainly of no advantage to the community. They employ scarcely any labour, grow wretched crops, keep the most miserable descrip- tion of live-stock, and impoverish the land. In the struggle for existence they have been pretty well wiped out, except in the dairying and fruit-growing districts. They have too much land for the spade and not enough for the plough, and corn-growing ia not remunerative enough to bring in a decent income on such small areas."

How does Mr. Bear account for the fact that the whole in- stinctive movement of Asia and Europe, outside this little island, has been towards peasant properties, and that no people which has adopted that system has ever abandoned it P As the method involves excessive and continuous labour, is, in fact, only made profitable by waste of labour, it must surely have something to recommend it. If the capitalist system of cultivation is so superior, why has it not been adopted in the United States, which are, in fact, cultivated almost exclu- sively by freeholding peasants They prefer the word

"farmers," but they do very little through hired labour.—

Mr. A. P. Laurie, in an essay significantly headed "Is it to be Civil War?" urges that the Scotch railway-men were right in their recent strike, and as regards their demand for shorter hours, illustrates their position by the following admirable story :—

" There were many drivers on the North British Railway who had hardly seen their children till the strike, and who enjoyed the holiday immensely, because for the first time they learned what home life meant. One man told the writer of this article that, returning home on account of the strike, he was met by one of his children, who, running into the house, said to her mother, Here's the man comin' that sleeps hero whiles V" That is most effective ; but why does a writer so graphic spoil his case by such incessant threatening? He says in effect, that if employers will not recognise the Unions, and thus change their despotism into a partnership with the men, the latter, "inspired by an idea," will continue the fight even should industry be destroyed. Who would suffer by that,—

the capitalists who can transfer their energies to other countries where their directing skill is allowed free play, or the workmen who cannot ? We are entirely on the workmen's side in the matter of reasonable hours ; but it seems to us that even on that subject their advocates adopt too bullying a tone. Customers cannot be bullied into purchases, and the capitalist, if he is nothing else, is a purchaser of labour offered him for sale. If the workmen can supersede him alto- gether by combination, which will not be impossible when they have learned to submit to elected managers, well and good ; but till then the customer must have, and will have, a voice in selecting the kind of ware he wants.—Mr. Frederic Myers, in "Science and a Future Life," repeats his incessant assertion that it is in the domain of psychology that we must search for scientific evidence that something in man will live again. He maintains that as yet observation in this direction has only just begun, and that already we are accumulating in the facts recorded by the hypnotisers, evidence of the highest value, proving for instance, as they do, that the mind will work when consciousness, as ordinarily understood, is wholly suspended. We have repeatedly supported Mr. Myers's plea for steady in- vestigation, but we must remind him that it is dangerous to push the deduction from the phenomena of hypnotism too far.

They prove that the action of mind is partly independent of material conditions, but do not of themselves prove that they can be wholly independent. The death of the body terminates, at least to human eyes, unconscious cerebration as completely as conscious. We are only as yet in presence of a certainty that there are laws of mind of which we know nothing, not of a certainty that among those laws is the deathlessness of mind. We believe that, as a fact, as fully as Mr. Myers does ; but his reasoning only helps the belief, and does not by itself establish it.—Mr. Nele Loring's paper on the shocking sufferings of cattle in their transit from Manitoba to.

England will raise in most minds a sense of despair as to the future of the trade ; but much of the misery which almost destroys the value of the beasts might be prevented by careful management. Thirst, for example, can be prevented altogether, both on the railway and at sea ; and we do not see why the steers should be allowed to gore each other as they are. Why not tip the horns with pads thick enough to prevent any wound beyond a bruise. The greatest difficulty of all will, we fancy, prove to be the crowding, which is nearly unavoidable if the beasts are to be sold at a profit, unless, indeed, they could be carried on huge rafts, and

only towed by steam power.--Lord Acton, we see, doubts whether we have Talleyrand's Memoirs as they were written ; but thinks they prove him to have been a greater statesman than he is generally believed to be. He was, thinks the com- mentator, a convinced Liberal :— "At a time when it was said that there were only two tolerant prelates in the Church of France, he was one of them. If it cost a sceptic no meritorious effort to emancipate the Jews, the ex- bishop of Autun attested his sincerity in an hour of passion and peril, by insisting that the State has no authority over the conscience of citizen or monarch, and that the priests who refused the oath must be protected against the popular rage. He deems it the interest and the duty of France to rest content within her own wide borders, and to respect the integrity and independence of other countries by the same law as her own. He pleads for non-intervention in 1792, and still more in 1798, as plainly as in 1830. He acknowledged more and more that every people has the right to shape its own government, and maintained that France would have done well to create a United Italy, an independent Poland. As an avowed convert to the doctrine of Nationality and Revolution, he doubted the supreme masterpiece of political com- promise and half measures, the Orleanist monarchy, and exhorted Lamartine to reserve his genius for a worthier cause than the support of a baseless throne. At the height of authority and fame he defies the wrath of his Government, and compels Louis Philippe to refuse for his son the proffered crown of Belgium."

Does the evidence amount to more than this,—that Talley. rand always saw what was possible, and detested policies which involved stretching one's hand so far that it could not be drawn back ; that, in fact, he was a statesman who appreciated moderation