THE MAGAZINES.

TILE Channel Tunnel is mach discussed in the Magazines, but we do not see that the controversy is in any way settled. All the writers go on repeating the old assumptions.

Lord Brabourne, for example, in the Contemporary, will have it that increase of intercourse diminishes the probability of war, and that remark will probably be accepted as a truism. It is not even a truth. National hatred is sometimes quenched by freer intercourse, as has been the case between England and Scotland ; but it has sometimes been developed by it, as has been the case between German and Slav, between German and Frenchman, and, we fear, between Englishman and Irishman. Certainly, no intercourse could be more unrestricted than that between North and South in the United States, where there was not even a customs' line, or a difference of language, or a broken railway gauge, and where, nevertheless, the whole population on both sides agreed to fight out their quarrel to the bitter end. Colonel Beaumont, again, in the Nineteenth Century, thinks he has disposed of his adversaries, when he has shown how the "Tunnel could be flooded at will, quite forgetting that the dispute is not as to the order being executed, but as to its being given. Which Minister will he trust to drown a few hundred innocent countrymen, because an angry Legitimist, with good means of information, has sent him a secret letter revealing a Franco- Irish plot for the capture of the Tunnel by surprise ? In the five papers in the two magazines, all good and clear, the follow- ing paragraph by Sir Garnet Wolseley seems to us the only great addition to the argument. After pointing, as we have done, to the certainty of fresh panics, he says :—

" There is a very important aspect of this question which has as yet been little considered. I allude to the respective effect which the successful invasion of England would have upon us as a nation whilst we still retain our insular security, and whet it would bo were we 'united with the Continent by a tunnel under the Channel. Let us examine this a little. If England were now successfully invaded, the enemy's army, having reached London, could dictate its own terms of peace to ns. Let us assume those terms to be the payment of say 1!600,000,000 and the surrender of our Fleet. England is so small, that it could be very easily overrun by a victorious army, for Woolwich—our one great arsenal—in his possession, we could not arm and equip a new army. We should have no other course open to us but compliance with these terms, but in accepting them wo should have at least one grain of comfort and of hope left to us, for it would be felt that we should thereby rid ourselves of the enemy's hateful presence. If we were worthy of oar ancestors, there would be no good reason even then why we should despair of the common- wealth.' If our spirit was healthy, we might still become once more a great nation With the successful invasion of England under existing circumstances, we should lose well nigh all except the power to re-esta- blish ourselves again as a great nation ; but the successful invasion of England after a Channel tunnel had been constructed would be our final destruction as an independent people. Let us assume that the enemy's army were in occupation of the Thames from London to Woolwich, he would naturally demand, in addition to the terms already described, that the Dover end of the tunnel should remain for ever in his possession, in order to prevent ns from ever again attempting to raise a new army or build a now fleet. He would naturally warn us, If you ever presume to infringe the terms we have now made with you by attempting to create any new army or navy, we will forthwith send back troops by the tunnel to bring you to reason.' The perpetual yoke of servitude would be ours for ever."

In other words, the Tunnel, even if it did not facilitate inva- sion, would treble the bad consequences of a successful raid. We cannot imagine what the answer to that argument can be, and it ought to be a final one.

The Nineteenth Century contains, besides the four papers on the Tunnel—by Lord Dunsany, Colonel Beaumont, Mr. Gold- win Smith, and Mr. J. Fowler, the last in advocacy of a Rail- way Ferry across the Channel—and a most entertaining descrip- tion of the American " National Park," as it is called, the Yellow- stone Valley, with its geysers and natural wonders of all kinds, a very plain-spoken paper on " Land-owning as a Business," by Mr. Bence Jones. Mr. Jones maintains that " feudalism," as itwas called, suited everybody very well, and that the best alternative is for the landowners to get rid of their tenants and farm them- selves, growing as little corn and as much grass as possible. If they will not do this, and still let their farms, then the farmers must keep stock, go in for dairies, and generally farm like the tenants of Cumberland and Westmoreland, who have hardly suffered from the recent long depression. The landlord should advise this and assist in it, and if necessary compel it, stand- ing ready, if the farms are thrown on his handi, to work them for himself. We do not doubt that this advice is sound, if landowning is to be a business ; but Mr. Bence Jones hardly realises how novel would be the system he desires, or how completely it would throw a majority of landlords into the hands of bailiffs. They may know vaguely how to farm, but they will not give up their liberty, or bind themselves to the soil as completely as under such a system they must. We question, too, whether the system of working large estates without tenants would, for any long period, be borne in England; whether it would not be considered hostile to the national weal, and terminated by a law distributing landed property at death. England is too small for latifundia, and the disappearance of the middle class from the counties would very soon attract attention and create political dismay. Mr. Kebbel fights the new Rules of Procedure by the argu- ment that they will reduce the coherence of parties, and that this mast be a Liberal disadvantage, but he hardly cares to prove his own proposition. Apparently, he anticipates most effect from the institution of Committees ; but he is not very clear, and seems rather disposed to defend the utility of parties than to resist or forward any coming change. We have rarely read a less satisfactory paper from Mr. Kebbel, who, as a rule, fights with temperate words for some definitely Tory end. Sir A. J. Arbuthnot's paper on the opium trade is well worth read- ing, but is be not fighting a shadow ? Does any considerable party propose to suppress the manufacture of opium in India? That could do no good to anybody, as Turkey and the Southern States of the Union would instantly supply the vacant market, perhaps with a much more dangerous drug. The true question is whether the Government of India should not abandon the manufacture, simply taxing Behar opium, as it now does opium made in Malwa, and whether it should not permit the Govern- ment of China to put on import duties. If those duties would limit consumption, the answer of India would be clear ; and it is on that point, not the advantage of suppression, that argument is required. Would the Chinese, if the imported opium were taxed, give it up, or substitute for it the native drug, which bears to the Indian article the relation that Irish tobacco would bear to a Havannah cigar? It is cheaper, but worse in its effect. Canon Jackson contributes a curious paper on "Amye Robsart," the object of which is to show, partly on the evidence of new documents discovered at Longleat, that Leicester's guilt is still extremely doubtful. There is some reason for accepting the theory that Amy Robsart killed herself, and as much for ima- gining the death a pure mischance. That the principal witness against Leicester, his kinsman Appleyard, perjured himself, is proved by his own confession, recorded in a letter from Sir Henry Neville to Sir John Thynne, June, 1567. Three more papers conclude the discussion on vivisection, one being from Sir William Gull. He deliberately defends the " baking- alive " experiments, on the ground that 20,000 persons are every year "baked alive" by scarlet-fever, which produces precisely that raising of the temperature in human beings which Claude Bernard produced in animals by putting them into the oven. It seems to 113 that this is not an argument, but a mere assertion that we may, in pursuit of knowledge, produce any pain that Nature produces. If so, why may we not infect human beings, supposing that possible, with cancer ? What gives us the right so to infect rabbits ? There is no explanation of the difficulty in such an argument, but only a restatement of the precise proposition which anti-vivisectionists deny. Sir W. Gull suggests that it is better to hart animals to obtain knowledge than to hurt them to obtain food ; but, in the second case, are they hurt ? They are killed, but they either are or maybe killed more mercifully than Nature kills them. Almost all _ animals in a wild state kill their own kind when sick, and it is more than probable that the ultimate " motive " of Nature in implanting that apparently cruel instinct is to spare the beasts the torture they must otherwise undergo in a, death from star- vation. A sick animal, left to itself, must die slowly of hunger. Mr. Fleming's paper is a very able statement of the argument for inoculation, with a view to the detection and prevention of Animal disease.

In the Contemporary Review, perhaps the ablest paper is the conclusion of the Duke of Argyll's on "Agricultural Depres- sion," which comes to a result from which, we fancy, few men will differ :— " There are two ways in which a man who hires land from another can take precautions against preventible risks in his enterprise : one is that of hiring it for a term of years so long, that with average seasons he can safely reckon on an adequate return : the other is, that if he prefers a yearly tenancy he should stipulate for a definite scale of reimbursement for specific outlays, in the event of his desiring or being obliged to leave it before these outlays have been repaid. There may be, of course, a combination of both these methods. There may be leases securing a lengthened tenure of enjoyment at a speci- fied rent, and also specified repayments of specified kinds of outlay. The system of occupation which stands between these two—tbe system of yearly tenancy without any written and definite agreement as to compensation for improvements in the event of removal—is, I think, unbusinesslike, and must tend to discourage improvement."

The Duke hankers, of course, after absolutely free contract, as we should, if land were an article extensible in quantity, or were not, like air and water, of prime necessity ; but in this para- graph he has conceded the right of the State to give to the tenant an absolute right to compensation, either in money or in time of enjoyment. That is, from his point of view, a very

great concession, and is all that moderate land-reformers are now asking, the demand for free sale in England being only a demand for a method deemed infallible of securing the com- pensation. The two most readable essays in this number are, however, Mr. Wallace's, on the monkey, and M. Auguste Vita's. on the recent financial crisis in France. Mr. Wallace's paper is

beyond condensation. It is a monograph, nearly complete in itself, though, of coarse, extremely compressed, and leaves on the ordinary reader's mind a curiously deep impression of his own ignorance about monkeys. We must, however, extract one paragraph, in which Mr. Wallace argues that we overrate the monkey, because of his supposed likeness to ourselves :-

"This relationship to the lowest of the mammalian tribes seems inconsistent with the place usually accorded to these animals at the head of the entire mammalian series, and opens up the question whether this is a real superiority, or whether it depends merely on the obvious relationship to ourselves. If we could suppose a being gifted with high intelligence, but with a form totally unlike that of man, to have visited the earth before man existed in order to study the various forms of animal life that were found there, we can hardly think he would have placed the monkey tribe so high as we do. He would observe that their whole organisation was specially adapted to an arboreal life, and this specialization would be rather against their claiming the first rank among terrestrial creatures. Neither in size, nor strength, nor beauty, would they compare with many other forms, while in intelligence they would not surpass, even if they equalled, the horse or the beaver. The carnivora, as a whole, would certainly be held to surpass them in the exquisite perfection of their physical structure, while the flexible trunk of the elephant, combined with his vast strength and admirable sagacity, would probably gain for him the first rank in the animal creation."

Is Mr. Wallace quite sere as to the comparative intelligence of monkey and elephant P The Hindoos, who have watched

both for ages quite close and under singularly favourable cir- cumstances, their monkeys not being captive, yet living among them, have decided the other way. The monkey certainly has the higher power of expression, and that must be some evidence of in- telligence. M. Vita gives a fall account of the creation of the Union Generale with Catholic funds, its transfer to the manage- ment of M. Bontonx—whom he evidently regards as a fanatic, and not a rogue—and of its fall under the weight of its own premiums. The rise in the value of the shares was so enormous that the Union Generale and its affiliated institutions, without business, and never having declared a dividend beyond 5 per cent on its original capital, represented a nominal market value of £40,000,000 sterling. This is the sum lost by the holders of shares ; but, of course, much of the loss was only the loss of imaginary profit, and all of it involves only a transfer from hand to hand. Individuals have lost millions, but France has lost nothing, except the usufruct of a small capital for a short period. Professor Brougham Leech's argument for " compensa- tion to Irish landlords " will be read with interest, because he actually condescends to figures. He contends that the land- lords legally owned their property ; that Parliament has, for

good reasons, deprived them of part; and that they, therefore, are entitled to -compensation. This compensation should be equal to fifteen years' purchase upon the income lost, namely,

one-fifth of the total rental of the area affected by the Act. This total rental is £10,000,000, and one-fifth is £2,000,000, from which must be deducted £500,000 for rents only recorded by the agents, but never received. The total compensation would then be £1,500,000 multiplied by 15, or £22,500,000. This sum the Professor would distribute by granting three years of the judicial rental to each applicant, thus incidentally giving to the generous landlord much more than to the rack-renter. The postu- late granted, this is a sensible and moderate scheme, but the postu- late cannot be granted. The very theory of the Act is that a " fair rent " exists, and that a landlord has no right to ask more. To give him compensation, therefore, is to pay him for having wronged his tenants of so much, and is no more just than it would he to pay an employer who overworked his apprentices for cancelling their indentures. He is entitled to their labour, not to overwork them. Mr. Blackley'a paper on " Land and Labour" deserves reading, for its remarkable lucidity, though throughout he begs the main question, and treats land as if its tenure could be arranged without reference to State neces- sities. His argument would compel the State to leave a single buyer, if he bought in open market, in possession of all Eng- land. Would he leave him in uncontrolled possession of a monopoly of air or light, or does he think the Water Companies in London are robbed because their rentals are limited by law P

The Fortnigldly is a little dull, the best paper being Mr. Freeman's critique upon Mr. Jowett's " Thucydides," which is, in brief, a complaint that Mr. Jowett did not complete his original design of writing essays on Thncydides, instead of translating him, with notes. Mr. Freeman feels scorn for people who like notes upon Thncydides, yet cannot read him in Greek, which rather passes our comprehension. He say no one who cannot read the original will want grammatical notes. Possibly not, and yet he may be glad of a translation so patient that the translator has explained even his method of arriving at the original. Would Mr. Freeman, when reading the Bible or the Koran, be deterred by the fact that his translator showed a learned acquaintance with Hebrew or Arabic ? Mr. Melvin's paper should not have been called " Italy as it Is," but Italy as it appears to an intelligent farmer. The account is decidedly interesting, but rather sug- gests Sir Tatton Sykes's groom. He was sent " to see Lon- don " for the first time, and, of course, took an interest in the Parks. On his return, he was asked for his opinion of the mighty city, and replied, "Fine piece of grass, very fine ! but a little scattered." Mr. Melvin sees Italy as a great farm, worked partly by peasant proprietors, partly by tenants who give half the produce to the landlords, and partly by tenants, as in England, who have their farms revalued on the expiration of each lease, and either receive from the land- lord or pay to him the difference in value resulting from their cultivation. The soil is generally good, the peasants have the advantage that the shade of their trees does not injure the crop —the light and heat are too all-pervading for that—and the agriculture seemed to Mr. Melvin very good, and the tenants comfortable. There is, however, one great drawback to the agricultural situation. Though Italy possesses 57,000,000 acres of culturable land, "equal to the whole of Great Britain," and has only nine millions of inhabitants dependent on agriculture alone, three millions of these are "labourers," who are wretchedly poor, earning in many places less than a shilling a day, and nowhere receiving more than ls. 8d. They have no cottages, but herd in the small towns ; die rapidly of diseases produced by bad living, and arc a permanent danger to the well-being of the country. Mr. Melvin doubts, however, whether, if they were decently paid, there would be much rent left for the landlords. His remarks generally leave the impres- sion that Nature has done much for Italy, that it is not over- populated, but that the very poor agriculturists are neglected and hopeless. Mr. Galton defends once more his plan of col- lecting facts about mankind, their size, health, &c., in large quantities, a plan, which we would suggest, he could, in part, carry out effectually by a thorough examination of the armies of Europe ; and Mr. Grant Allen apologises for the decay of criticism in England, which he attributes to the practice of re- porting about books, instead of criticising them, more especially in newspapers. Does not Mr. Allen, throughout his article, confuse criticism proper, which seems to us to flourish as much as ever, with newspaper criticism, mach of which necessarily is, and should be, like the article we are writing, mere book- tasting ? The book-taster has a function, and a useful

one, though it is not precisely criticism. Dr. G. Yeo defends vivisection as practised in England, on the two- fold plea that anaesthetics are generally used, and that some anti-vivisectionists have been guilty of exaggeration. He will not allow that vivisection is immoral, alleging that it is absolutely necessary to the well-being of men, and seems inclined to think that because Christ said his disciples were of more valve than many sparrows, therefore he would have permitted vivisection. At least he says, "I may point out that the only recorded miracle of our Lord in which he can be said to have caused the least pain (except that of catching a fish), was that in which he alleviated human suffering, and at the same time inflicted pain, not upon one, but on an enormous number (about two thousand) of the lower animals. And I like to bear in mind the texts which seem to have an accurate bearing upon the subject. ' Ye are of more value than many sparrows.' How much then is a man better than a sheep P" It is difficult to answer such an argument, which assumes that if there be, as there probably is, a creature worth many men, therefore man might be tortured, not that such being should survive, but that he should, during a momentary life, have a little less pain. The account of the Irish Fenian movement of 1867, by an ex-Fenian, is now only historical ; but it is full of suggestive matter, and Englishmen may read its concluding sentences with instruction :--

" What burning grievance, whatdirect oppression did you complain of ? The land grievance had not then caught possession of the popular mind. Repeal was not your party cry. The Irish Church you cared little about. What then ? Well, the fact is, that the famine years, and the ill-concealed satisfaction of an ignoble portion of the British Press at the diminution of the population that followed, had made us indignant ; and the late Lord Carlisle's bland assurance that 'Ireland was fit only to be the fruitful mother of flocks and herds,' our being treated as the great draw-farm of England, the cold-blooded taunt of the late Prince Consort—that ` the Irish were no more worthy of liberty than the Poles,' these, with the denial to us of our national flag, of the right to bear arms and distinguish ourselves under its folds,—it was pare sentiment, in fast, urged ns on."

Macmillan gives us a song on the charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava, by Mr. Tennyson. It is not quite equal to "The Charge of the Light Brigade," but there runs through the melody a strange sound of the movement of cavalry, and the lines glow with the fire of battle and triumph, more especially the last stanza :— " But they rode like Victors and Lords

Thrb' the forest of lances and swords In the heart of the Russian hordes ;

They rode, or they stood at bay—

Struck with the sword-hand and slew, Down with the bridle-hand drew The foe from the saddle and threw

Underfoot there in the fray—

Raged like a storm or stood like a rock In the wave of a stormy day ; Till suddenly shock upon shock Stagger'd the mass from without, For our men gallopt up with a cheer and a shout, And the Russians surged, and waver'd, and read Up the hill, up the hill, up the hill, out of the field, Over the brow and away."

Mr. Hawthorne's " Fortune's Fool " is continued, but we do not like the new chapters. The writing is as vigorous and separate as ever, but the author is letting his imagination run riot in improbabilities. The cruel fight between the pedlar and the carter might have happened, but not the interview between the pedlar and the heiress. Girls in England, even if odd, donut tell unknown pedlars that they are heiresses, or discuss Undine with them with emotion. Mr. Macfarlane's paper on "Property versus Person" has already been quoted everywhere, and certainly

the comparison of recent sentences upon brutes guilty of cruel or horrible outrage and mere thieves suggests some painful speculations. The Judges are right in thinking that theft tempts, but are they right in denying that brutality

tempts too P We presume that in many of the cases quoted, the Judge could give a reason for his lenity ; but on the surface of the reports, a stranger would be apt to believe that in England the person was not protected at all. Mr. B. F. C. Costelloe's view of Russia, with the whole peasantry still devoted to the Czar, seems to us inconsistent with many facts ; but he gives authorities for his opinions, and is not immoderate.

He confirms the reports of the Czar's seclusion :—

" Upon this, the Council of Three [Nihilists] met somewhere, and resolved that as there was now no further hope of the Czar coming to his senses, his Majesty and his Minister Ignatieff must be condemned to death. The Court was duly apprised of this resolution, and from that date the panic, already great, has been almost ludicrous within the palace. The rumours a the Czarina's state of mind are well known, and are probably not much exaggerated. The Czar is practically a prisoner in one of two or three easily-guarded castles. New plots are known to be afoot, and many arrests have been made, of which, of course, as little as possible is said. The Czar is not a coward, and is distinctly obstinate. There are no signs that the more Liberal states- men are at all likely to return to power."

Mr. Costelloe states, as the result of his experience, that the Russian administration is infamous, and that officials are still all bribe-takers ; but admits that the town administrations are fairly free, and not corrupt. He would not abolish the auto- cracy, but would raise the educational level, and introduce com- paratively complete freedom of speech,—precisely the Panalava' proposal.

The remaining magazines contain comparatively little of great note. In the CornhUl, a new novel, " Damocles," has reached a second number, and is going, we imagine, to be a most striking story. The author has a distinct, though gloomy, genius, and a rare capacity of observation, which in one point she occasion- ally misuses. She makes common-place people talk common- place, which is perfectly truthful, but occasionally tedious to the reader. Another article, which we can hardly be mis- taken in attributing to Miss Thackeray's, or rather Mrs.

Ritchie's, lively and graphic pen, gives a most interesting• sketch of the work of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, which the writer quizzes for its long name, while praising it heartily for its most excellent work and making us realise vividly what that work really means.. It contains charming sketches of the rough little "scrubs," who are so often saved by this society from the worst possible fate. And this amusing paper will, we trust, do what it is intended to do,—swell the funds of one of the most genuinely charitable of London institutions, but one which is, nevertheless, sorely in need of the sinews of war. Blackwood has nothing striking, unless it be the description of life in the wilder parts of the Far West, called "The Newest American Railroad," which is exceptionally vigorous and bright ; and the " padding " in Fraser is heavy.

The account of Basutoland, by "Alfred Aylmer," is, however, well worth study ; but we find ourselves confronted by a difficulty. Where did the writer obtain that account of the speeches of Rantzani, the educated Kafir chief, who in 1865 threw off his clothes and civilisation together P If the

account is authentic, pages 332-335 in this month's Fraser contain one of the most remarkable contributions ever made to the mental history of savages ; but one wants evidence of authenticity. The speeches are supposed to be given verbatim, but they read like speeches placed in the chief's mouth. Did the Missionaries report them, and, if so, which is probable, what is the degree of exactness ? That the incident is true, we have no doubt, but we want evidence as to the words said, which Mr. Aylmer did not, apparently, himself hear.