THE MAGAZINES.

THE number of Irish articles in the magazines of this month is considerable. The most instructive paper is one by Mr. Gillen, in the Nineteenth Century, in which he tries to give the economic facts of the "value of Ireland to Great Britain." According to him, that value is exceedingly small. The population lost, if Ireland were separated from the sister-island, would be a seventh of the whole; or if Ireland were separated, but not Ulster, only one-twelfth, "less than the growth of our population every decade : "—

• ‘ We grow a new people in (belt Britain equal to the whole dis- affected part of Ireland at the present time every ten )ears. In a few generations, at this rate, Ireland must become relatively to Great Britain very little more than a somewhat larger Isle of Man or Channel Ialands. To let Ireland split partnership would differ in no way in kiwi, and comparatively little in degree, as fur as business i8 concerned, from letting the Isle of Man remain a separate State."

The loss to the Income-tax from such separation would be a fraction more than 5 per cent., and the loss to the total national wealth would be about £70,000,000 a year out of £1,200,000,000. Irish capital Mr. Giffen estimates at one twenty-fourth of that of the United Kingdom; while her total trade with us, imports and exports together, is only £40,000,000, or 215,000,000 less than that of Australia, and £26,000,000 less than that of India. Mr. Giffen is inclined just now, we think, to minimise the im- portance of Ireland ; but he is a careful statist, and there can be no doubt that it is habitually over-estimated in English thought. Our people, misled by the traditions of a time when Ireland was a third of the United Kingdom, have not realised yet the enormous results of the rapid rise of Great Britain and the slow decline of Ireland in the statistics of the Kingdom. Still less have they understood the comparative poverty of the sister-island, which possesses nothing that can be called resources, except a certain quantity of inferior arable land, and a larger quantity of fairly rich, though very unequal, herbage. The economic difficulty is the first difficulty of Ireland, and those who wish to understand it should study care- fully Mr. Giffen's figures. There are four more papers on Ireland in the number, but they do not interest us much. The multitude of " precedents " collected by Mr. Shaw-Lefevre seem none of them to apply to a Kingdom in which the seceding province hates the people it quits with an unreasoning but durable hatred, and hates impartial justice even more, the only real analogy being the case of Alsace- Lorraine. That province is supposed sometimes to be autono- mous, but is really governed by the Stadtholder who is appointed by the Emperor, the right of the elected delegates being limited to suggesting legislation and forwarding petitions. Lord E. Fitzmanrice's picture of the difficulties of duality in Austria- Hungary is interesting, but hardly applies, Austria and Hungary being nearly equals, which Britain and Ireland are not ; while Mr. Frank Hill's paper seems to us a mere statement that Britain is going to grant Home rule, and that it will "strengthen the Union." "Things cannot be worse than they are, and they may be a good deal better." That may be true, though we do not see that the Funds are much affected, and yet the way to make things better may not be Home-rule,

The Irish paper in the Contemporary is not signed, and strikes us as poor, the writer begging the two great questions,— one that Ireland would be content with less than practical inde- pendence, and the second that Irishmen would cease to hate Great Britain if Home-rule were granted. The former assump- tion is contradicted by all Mr. Parnell's speeches out of England, and the latter by experience. The Irish-Americans are free of British rule, and hate us all the more. Lord Hobhouse finishes his papers on " Free Land " by recommending a limitation of settlement to lives in being, and the aboli- tion of primogeniture, which does not strike us as quite covering the whole ground. It would not sufficiently sweep away the difficulties of transfer arising from the search for title. Perhaps they cannot be swept away ; but to sweep them away should be the ideal. Mr. Arnold White pleads strongly for State-aided emigration, especially to South Africa ; but he only convinces us that information should be more carefully diffused. " Planting " Colonies only results in transporting at vast expense the very men who have not the energy to go unaided and unwatched, and who, therefore, when they arrive, rely on others than themselves. If South Africa is so fit a spot for colonisation, why do not colonists ga there of themselves ? They swarm to the United States, and are slowly filling up Australia. The answer is that no Colony in which white men and dark men are to perform physical labour side by side has ever succeeded yet. The white man, or at least the white Teuton, either retires or makes the dark man work for him. Mr. Quilter, in a very clever paper, advises amateurs to take more pains and they will do better, art "being never easy except to the incapable," and shows them how to take more pains to advantage ; and Sir T. Brassey urges strenuously that greater care should be used to prevent inhumanity at sea. His remedies would be to disqualify any captain convicted of inhumanity, and to compel Consuls to do their duty more effectively ; but we suspect we must go farther than that. The source of tyranny at sea is the want of a restrained but effective discipline which would secure the men from all blows not regularly inflicted and recorded. It is said to be impossible to secure this ; but we do secure it in Queen's ships. Mr. W. Besaut, in "From Thirteen to Seventeen," is, as usual, most amusing ; but he has serious things to say. He believes our national education ruined by want of continuous study, which might be secured through evening classes, and by some moral failures, for which he suggests no remedy :— "On last August Bank Holiday I was on Hampstead Heath. The East Heath was crowded with a noisy, turbulent, good.tempered mob,

enjoying, as a London crowd always does, the mere presence of a multitude ; there was a little rough horseplay and the exchange of favourite witticisms, and there was some preaching and a great singing of irreverent parodies; there was little drunkenness and little bad behaviour except for half-a-dozen troops or companies of girls. They were quite young, none of them apparently over fifteen or six- teen. They were running about together, not courting the company of the boys, but contented with their own society, and loudly talking and shouting as they ran among the swings and merry-go-rounds and other attractions of the fair. I may safely aver that language more vile and depraved, revealing knowledge and thoughts more vile and depraved, I have never heard from any grown men or women in the worst part of the town. At mere profanity of course these girls would be easily defeated by men, but not in absolute vileness. The -quiet working men among whom they ran looked on in amazement and disgust ; they had never heard anything in all their lives to equal the abomination of these girls' language. Now, they were girls who had all, I suppose, passed the third or fourth standard ; at thirteen they had gone into the workshop and the street ; of all the various contrivances to influence the young, not one had as yet caught hold of them ; the kerbstone and the pavements cf the street were their schools; as for their conversation, it had in this short time developed to a vileness so amazing."

Something more than evening classes seems to be needed there, and is secured in country villages, viz., a sharp pressure from civilised opinion, and some direct moral tuition, which shall in- duce the children's own parents to teach them self-restraint. Part of the evil is, no doubt, imaginary, and arises from a degradation of manners rather than of morals, but part of it is real. The most thoughtful article in the number, and to us the most readable, is Mr. Bryce's on "The Relations of History and Geography," a short but striking study of the effect on men of geographical circumstance. The most remarkable paragraph is one on that gradual closing-in of the world, owing to rapid com- munication, which so greatly increases the complexity of all politics ; but we cannot resist the temptation of quoting what to us is certainly new, the visibility of Parnassus from nearly all Greece :—

" It is hardly going too far to say you can see Parnassus from all the higher ground of eastern and central Greece. You can see it from all &node, from the long valley of which it stands np as the church of St. Mary does when you look along the Strand. You can see it from many parts of Attica, from the Acropolis of Athens, for instance; you see it from YEgina, in the Saronic Gulf ; you see it from most parts of Argolis ; you see it from the northern coast of AchaiA. Of coarse, you do not see it in the middle of Arcadia or in Laconia ; hut when you go west to Ithaca to visit Ulysses in his borne, you see Parnassus again stand up grand and grey on the eastern horizon. Think what an importance that fact has had. The central point of Greek history for many purposes is Delphi, and a great deal of Greek history centres round the god who has there his sanctuary. How much this visible presence of Apollo must have affected his worship, and all the associations which the Ionic "race had with him. What a difference it must have made when you were actually able from your own home, or when you went to the top of your own Acropolis, or sailed to the neighbouring port, to see this Parnassus, to know that hard by the cleft beneath the two peaks there was this oracle and this sacred home of the lord of light and song."

The Fortaightly has nothing very striking, though Mr. W. Beatty-Kingston's sketch of a foreign correspondent's duties and of his occasional responsibility is eminently readable. His extraordinary account., however, of the treachery of a great states- man, who told a correspondent to announce that if certain laws were passed by a foreign State he had decided on war, and then when the laws were withdrawn denied the whole story, wants both dates and names. It is told, we suppose, of the German Chan- cellor, France being the country threatened ; but no German will believe it without a thorough sifting, which in its present form it cannot obtain. The article by " Diplomaticus " is a savage attack on Greece, as a contemptible little State of no more importance than Monaco, and entirely ignores both the great internal progress of Greece, and the plain get that, weak or strong, she can fire the magazine. We are not much impressed by the paper on "Law and License," though it is perfectly true that no people put down license when they choose in so high-handed a fashion as the Americans :—

"The terrible riots of July, 1877, are a case in point. The move- snent originated with a strike among the 'freight hands' of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway Company, and assumed such enormous proportion na to extend to nine States of the Union. The strikers were 'band fide working men,' and they had grievances which secured them a large amount of public sympathy. But to enforce their demands they determined to seize the railways. This WU deemed a declaration of war against the Commonwealth. Peremp- tory orders were given to use whatever force was necessary to restore railway communication and protect the traffic. The State militia was called out, and regular troops were despatched to the scene of disturbance. The self-evident truth' that the rioters had inalien- able rights' to life and liberty did not save them from being shot clown as in open war, or taken and imprisoned. The following

extract from the general orders' issued by Governor Hartranft, of Pennsylvania, will show how a Democratic Government can act.

All other means of quelling riot and restoring order having first been exhausted, the officer commanding the troops shall notify the rioters that they will be fired upon unless they promptly disperse. The order to fire will then be deliberately given, and every soldier will be expected to fire with effect. The firing will continue until the mob disappears.'"

The writer would dispense with the reading of the Riot Act ; but he does not suggest a substitute, and a mob must have some warning. The French roll of the drums is, perhaps, as good as any, but does not provide for the intervention of the civil power. The object, we must remember, of using force is not to slaughter, but to restore order. The article of an "Artisan," who writes on the same subject, is spoilt by the extraordinary vagueness which just now ruins most artisans' utterances ; but if he is sincere in believing that the condition of a regenerated society is "self-crucifixion," he is on his way to see clearly. Only, why will not self-denial do as well as self-crucifixion ? Mr. Bockett will not get a few million Christs. "Parisian Hells " is a statement that baccarat clubs are practically tolerated in Paris, and that baccarat is a gambling game. Both statements are true, but not very instructive. In no capital has gambling been totally suppressed, and the difference between baccarat and betting with bookmakers is imperceptible. The paper on "The Army and the Democracy" is sensible enough, but practically it would involve the introduction of a new and higher class of non commissioned officers, who would see that barracks were not made disagreeable to fairly educated men. Can we secure such officers without spoiling the good private's best chance ?

The NationaZ Review contains three noteworthy papers,— a fierce, over-fierce, attack by Mr. Bosworth Smith on Liberals who have joined a Home-rule Cabinet ; an admirable sketch of Grattan's Parliament and its proceedings, by Mr. Derwent ; and a discussion on Socialism, introduced into Mr. Mallock's new novel, "The Old Order Changes," which, to those who know his principal figure, will seem exceedingly clever. Mr. Mallock tries to be fair, too ; and we wish he had put to "Mr. Foreman" the problem,—What he would say about purely intellectual work.

How much of the profit of Teanyson's "In Memoriam," for example, woull he give to the poet, and how much to the compositors ?

Macmilbin publishes Mr. F. Palgrave's first lecture as Pro- fessor of Poetry at Oxford, which, if anything, rather exaggerates

the influence of the poet as the man of his time. It has happened that a great poet has had moulding influence, Virgil being, no doubt, the best illustration ; but what sort and extent of influence would Mr. Palgrave attribute to as great a poet, Shakespeare ? Was he a motive force in the world's progress ? What are the fruits of his "unacknowledged legislation" ? Mr. Palgrave's leading idea is in this sentence, but we wish he had proved its accuracy in the case of Shakespeare :—

"It is surely probable that if Greece could be imagined without Homer, Rome without Virgil, Italy without Dante, England without Shakespeare, not only would each nation have lost one of its highest sources of personal, and as it were, private, wealth, and we with it, but the absolute current of its history could not have followed its actual course ; nay, that it would have missed, in each case, some- thing of its best and most fertile direction."