THE MAGAZINE S.

NONE of the Magaziues contain this mouth anything very striking, though Mr. Julian Hawthorne commences in Macmillan, what promises to be a most original story. The most readable paper is, perhaps, Mr. Gifford Palgrave's account, in the Fortnightly Review, of Kioto, the ancient home of the Mikados, with its incidental notices of Shinto, the original creed of the Island Empire. This

faith is, according to Mr. Palgrave, based rather on a history than a religion, the believer in Shinto holding that Japan had originally a direct connection with the deities, who gave it its civilisation, and whose direct descendant is the Mikado, who is, therefore, by nature and right, not only absolute lawgiver, but guide, who needs neither pomp nor retinue, but is inherently and of necessity lord of every Japanese. This creed has no• regular priesthood, scarcely any ceremonial, and few tenets :- "' Shinto' is Japanese nature-worship in its most absolute form ; patriotism its first duty, the laws of nature and the- high deeds of Japanese ancestors its moral code, the Mikado its centre and embodiment, a noble life and admission among the demi-gods its reward. Such is its plan."

Mr. Palgrave believes that " Shinto," which seems to us, we confess, little more than a variety of that very ancient and wide-spread creed, the worship of the Customary, is still vigorous in Japan, and attributes to it everything good within the Empire:—

"For the results of Shinto we need only look on Japan herself ; and on the wonderfully high degree of true civilisation, that is, of honour, of courage, of social self-respect, of regard for others, of reverence for authority, age, and learning, of delicate artistic sense and practice, of subordination, of organised government, of courtesy, of cleanliness, of industry, that she has developed for herself and out of herself. Look also on the ready flexibility with which she takes up from other nations whatever may profit her, not crudely, not unintelligently, but modifying, altering, improving, to snit her own circumstances and requirements."

The death-note of Shinto and Japan will be one. In practice,

Shinto has become inextricably mixed with Buddhism in its Chinese and inferior form ; but it has revived since the

Mikados were released, and is still the mental habit, if not the religion, of the majority. We wish Mr. Palgrave had entered into more detail in his account of this belief, but he glides away into descriptions of Kioto and the Shinto shrines, of less interest, though full of novel and keen observation. The paper, however, which will be most studied is that of Mr. A. Frisby, "Has Conservatism Increased since the Reform Bills F" He asserts that Liberalism is slowly losing its hold over the larger constituencies, while Toryism is gaining. He proves this, as he thinks, by figures, the totals of the Elections for 1868 and 1880 being as follows :— The figures are absolutely worthless, 1868 being a year when the Liberal wave rose over the whole country, while in 1880, the great Tory wave was only just receding ; and they yield no -evidence themselves that in 1883 there will be one Tory Member

in Great Britain. We incline to believe, however, with Mr. Frisby, that the Liberal pivot is shifting, and that it is in the great constituencies that Toryism will have its future home. This is the case in America, and may well be the case here, the masses of the cities having obtained from Liberalism nearly all it has to give, and feeling the influence of the reluctance to change which marks the content. A gush of emotion, however, might alter the returns by thousands in each great borough, and make calculations as futile as we believe they usually are. There is nothing else to notice in the Fortnightly, for the " Page of Diplomatic History " only adds to our knowledge of Baron de Stael, Madame de Stael's Swedish husband, and a very uninteresting figure ; and the attempt to parody Tennyson's " Despair " is very poor. To quote Macaulay's onslaught on poor Montgomery, this verse seems to us a kind of Turkey-carpet parody. The colours of parody are in it, but they do not make a picture :— -" And the infinitesimal sources of Infinite Unideality

Curve in to the central abyss of a sort of queer Personality Whose refraction is felt in the nebulae strewn in the pathway of Mars Like the parings of nails Aonian—clippings and snipping of stars— Shavings of suns that revolve and evolve and involve—and at times Give a sweet astronomical twang to remarkably hobbling rhymes."

There is literary interest of a definite though thin kind, in Dr. Plumptre's paper in the Contemporary Review, on the connec- tion between Dante and England, or rather between Dante and Roger Bacon ; and we have read with interest Mr. Austin's answer to Mr. Matthew Arnold's "Canons of Poetical Criticism;" but the two most noteworthy papers in the Conteedporary are Mr. M. G. Mulhall's, on "National Wealth and Expenditure," and Mr. Mallock's, called " A Missing Science." Mr. Mulhall's is very short, and consists mainly of a few figures, gathered in most instances from official returns ; but it will be read with a certain amazement, even by men to whom such questions are familiar. Mr. Mulhall believes, on the evidence of the Probate Duties, that the national bequeathable wealth was, in 1860 £5,200,000,000 11887708-8o • 6,880,000,000

8,420,000,000 This enormous rate of increase accords with other better-known figures. The Government valuation of house property shows that the total has increased from 1,160 millions in 1860 to 2,210 in 1880, and the proportion, curiously enough, agrees almost exactly with the increase in the number of carriages. The enormous mass of the national wealth was thus dis- tributed :—

T860.

Millions sterling.—

1870. 1880.

Houses 1,160 1,620 2,200 Railways 348 530 730 Shipping 40 66 120 Bullion ... 95 118 143 Furniture, books, tic. ... 330 400 500 Stock-in-trade 420 500 600 Public works ... 200 250 350 Lands ... 1,740 1,930 1,950 Cattle crops, &c. 460 480 400 Sundries 87 66 127 Invested abroad 320 920 1,300

5,200 6,880 8,420

The value of agricultural lands, it should be noted, has sank heavily, quite £7 an acre, or 220 millions for all England, but the totals have been brought up again by the rise in

SUMMARY.

LIBERAL. TORY.

1868. 1880. 1868. 1880.

Mbeerms7V-'oters. Mbeenir; bee Voters. Men- Voters. bars n'---;"---'e. Voters. Very small consti- 13... 14,184 17... 16,518 86...112,626 88...147,069 24... 96,000 31...124,266 5 43,19311... 60,956 45 .287,224 43...365,770

Totals 173..553,227 190..714,579 tuencies Small constituen- cies Moderate -sized constituencies Large constituen- cies Very large consti- tuencies

24... 15,052 20... 17,343 141...105,41139...128,539 34...100,350 27...113,658 15... 46,532 9... 56,797 17...172,551819...290,966 131..439,863 114..607,303 the value of suburban lands, till the income-tax assess- ment for lands only has risen from 641 millions in 1870 to 691 millions in 1880. The total expenditure of the nation amounts to 1,093 millions a year, of which rates and taxes cover 125 millions, or more than 11 per cent ; and the

savings exceed 177 millions, or a third more than the whole taxation. Mr. kfulhall affirms that this bewildering prosperity has been accompanied by a much more equable diffusion of wealth, and promises to give the figures in his next paper. Mr. Mallock's " Missing Science" is, it appears, the science of human character, which he thinks might be deduced from extensive and minute observation of individuals. He hints, for example, that the passion of equality has never been displayed by men who had not been disappointed or persecuted by Government, or in some way personally interested in the matter. If we could prove that, then he thinks we could lay it down as a basis of thought that the effort for equality is arti- ficial, and the realisation of that dream inconsistent with per- manent human character. We very much doubt, remembering

that there are always three Johns in every John, as 0. W. Holmes has put it, whether a science of human character can be deduced from observation, and are quite certain that the

illustration selected is absurd. Equality has been taught chiefly by two kinds of men,—men possessed with the passion of pity, like Rousseau, and men possessed with the sense of the necessary equality of all before the Infinite. The doctrine can be dedaced from Christianity, and was taught as a dogma by Mahommed, who, though he limited equality to Believers, expected all men to believe. To this hour, there is more social equality in Mussulman countries, where envy scarcely exists, all situations being decreed by God, than in France, where envy is said to be the motive-power. We do not care about equality much, but no great moving force among mankind has ever had its origin in a mere baseness. Mr. Mallock might as well say that the horror of theft is based solely upon greed. Mr. Sydney Buxton, in his conversation upon Fair-trade and Free-trade, is often happy, but we wish he had expanded the following by a few lines. Much of the dis- parity between exports and imports is undoubtedly due to enormous receipts of interest on foreign investments, and the puzzle is how the capital. gets sent out without swelling the exports more. Mr. Buxton says :-

" And now take the case of capital lent to a foreign country. I lend nominally £1,000 to a friend in America, which he invests in some profitable business, and advantages by the loan ; he is to pay me 10 per cent. interest, and repay the capital in ten years. My loan is sent over in goods—as it is not sent in gold—and figures in the export table, and costs are only perhaps £900, which will be equiva- lent to £1,000 when it arrives in America. Each year, then, for ten years the imports are swelled by £100 of goods representing the interest, and £10 representing the cost of transport of these goods ; and on the tenth year they are further increased by £1,100, being the capital repaid and cost of transport. That is, on this transaction alone, the exports would have appeared as £900, and the imports as £2,200, and both parties would have benefited."

That is a capital explanation of the imports ; but why, in the year in which the loan was sent out, did not the exports rise ? If we invested, say, 50 millions in 1880 abroad, how did it get out in goods, without our perceiving that we were paid for them in securities, and not goods ?

Much the cleverest paper in the Nineteenth Century is Mr.

J. Woulfe Flanagan's, on the resemblance between the pro- ceedings of the Irish peasantry in 1881, and those of the French peasantry in 1791. The object is, of course, to justify repres- sion by force, but Mr. Flanagan forgets that another deduction might be drawn. France has never been so happy, or so rich, or so free from attacks on property as since the Revolution. The remaining papers are not of much interest, not even Mr. Manes Gaskell's monody over the approaching euthanasia of the Whigs ; and we must reserve our space for some comments on the three defences of vivisection pat for- ward by Sir James Paget, Professor Owen, and Dr. Wilks, which we have read with very great regret. Sir James Paget's is, of course, much the ablest, because it is much the most temperate of the three, and the only one of them which seems to express a mind even disposed to acquiesce in the present Act, so long as it is administered in the spirit of sympathy with the practice it was intended to restrain. Dr. Wilks expresses, and expresses without any knowledge of his opponents' case, the cry of the profession for the repeal of the Vivisection Act ; while Professor Owen says as many contemptuous and bitter things as he can of the agitation against vivisection. But all these writers assume, without making the least attempt to prove, that if only you can show vivisection to be effectual in diminishing the loss of human life and health, or even in increasing the knowledge which ought to diminish the loss of human life and health, the question is at an end. Thus, Sir James Paget says, for instance, of the experiments on the ligature of arteries in diminishing the number of deaths by aneurism, which, he thinks, are five hundred fewer a year than they would have been, if we had now only the knowledge of ninety years ago on the subject :—" No one who can fairly judge, after many years' active practice of surgery, will doubt, I think, that at least one- fifth may be assigned as the share due to experiments on animals, —say, at least one hundred lives a year in this one department of surgery ;" and he treats this as a perfectly unanswerable argument. But what would he say if any man were to argue that because thousands of lives would be saved every year by giving up war, and letting weak nations submit without resist- ance to the strongest, therefore war should at once cease ? Would he not think of it as, Fropter vitas, vivendi perdere causal? And is not that exactly what the opponents of vivisection think of the lives saved by the torture of animals. A great many more lives might be saved, as we have repeatedly argued, and as a correspondent urges in another column to-day, by subjecting criminals condemned to capital punishment to critical physiological experiments ; and yet no one comes forward to urge this. The truth is, that there is no argument of which men make so light as that it will save life, or even mitigate suffering, when any moral evil is incurred by that saving of life or mitigation of suffering. There are other immoral practices which mitigate human suffering, and which, in the opinion of some physicians, save life, yet none of the great men who argue for vivisection would venture to recommend them. The real question, then, is as to the immorality or morality of torturing the lower animals for man's benefit. And it sheds no light at all on this question, but only throws dust in the eyes of the public, first to minimise carefully the torture actually inflicted on these miserable victims, and then to exaggerate the torture inflicted in other ways on animals by the selfishness of the public. The difference between cruel modes of destroy. ing vermin, or cruel field-sports, and vivisection, is this,—that while the former are steadily kept down, if not gradually dis- appearing, under the disapprobation of all humane persons, the latter is urged upon us with more and more peremptory authority every day, by a whole profession, who offer for it no excuses, but on the contrary claim for it the righteous sanc- tion of all the world. If the physicians have their way, Professor Ray Lankester's vision of a separate physiological profession, inflicting a geometrically progressive number of painful experiments on animals every year, in the pursuit of new biological laws, would be, before long, realised.—Principal Tulloch contributes a masterly estimate of the late Dean of Westminster, as well of his strength as of his weakness ; the best estimate, on the whole, of the most remarkable man,— remarkable at once for his " picturesque sensibility " and for the absence of any dogmatic foundation to his convictions,— whom the English Church has had to boast of in recent times.

Macmillan, besides Mr. Hawthorne's new novel, has a lively sketch of Dr. Whewell, by the Bishop of Carlisle, whose judg- ment upon his friend may best be quoted in the following three lines :—" The abundance of his resources was so great, that upon almost any subject he seemed to be able to argue best and to know most in any company in which you chanced to meet him." We turned with much interest to the " Irish Question," by R. Pigott, late editor of the Flag of Ireland, but there is not very much in it. It is a satisfaction to know that one formerly so strong a Nationalist thinks that in the Land Act the citadel of Irish discontent has been attacked, but Mr. Pigott does not explain why so few Irishmen, now that the main grievance has been redressed, support the Executive, unless it be in the follow- ing sentence :—" The Government will have to deal with that in- tangible feeling of dislike, not to say hatred, of England which most Irishmen inherit as their birthright, and which is fostered and kept alive, not merely by heartless and interested agitators for their own selfish purposes, but by the bumptiousness of minor British officialism." Mr. Pigott knows all classes of Iiishmen. Why does he not explain in detail the causes of this feeling, which to most Englishmen is a mere puzzle, and which is certainly not due to the only cause he assigns, the bumptiousness of minor officials who are Englishmen ? How many Irishmen ever see minor officials, and as the class is bumptious everywhere, why do Irishmen especially hate them so much ; or hating them, why do they not confine their hatred to them, like the London roughs, who hate the police while trusting and respecting the Stipendiaries ?

Blackwood has an excellent paper on some recent French novels; a description of the Boers of the Transvaal, from which they would appear to be very like the mean-whites of the Southern States in all except industry ; and an article on the " Canonisa-

tion of Cobden," in which the writer plays the part of the advo- cates diaboli. He does his work with a will, as may be imagined, when we say that he thinks Sir Robert Peel never was a con-

vert to Free-trade, but only bought the League as a support to his own staggering Government. "He never evinced more than a feeble and half-hearted belief in Free-trade dogmas, except when he was driven by the Protectionists to stand upon the defensive." The writer might as well say that the arithmetician has only a faint-hearted belief in the Rule of Three, except when he is forced to stand on the defensive.

The novel paper in Fraser is the "New Departure in Russia," which, however, does not prove to our minds that there has been any new departure at all. The essayist, like most Russians, holds that the autocracy of the Czar is essential to Russia, as the autocracy of Parliament is essential to England ; but granting that, we do not see that Alexander III. has used his absolute power to any good purpose. He has chosen new men, the writer says, but they are very like the old ; and he has referred every great measure to Commissions of experts, which is merely a method for delaying action. These Commissions may have informed the Emperor, but as yet they have effected nothing either for good or for evil ; and

to all appearance they will effect nothing, except add to the multitude of able but useless reports in the archives of the Empire. There is a fine paper by Mr. Ernest Myers on the three modern English satirists, Byron, Carlyle, and Thackeray ; but it requires expansion, if only for limitations. What makes Mr. Myers give the impression that in Colonel

Newcome, Thackeray described his ideal ? Thackeray always seems to us to pity Colonel Newcome as much as he admired him, and to hold his guilelessness in a faint contempt, as a quality not fit for this world. We note that the very temperate and well-informed writer who discusses the position of the House of Commons regards the clOture as impossible, and predicts that it will be debated month after month from February to August, till it is thrown out. Has it occurred to him that a dissolution on the cloture is quite possible. and that if a dissolution resulted in a plebiscite in its favour, the Speaker would terminate debate ?

The Canaan has little except its stories, and a fine critique upon Carlyle as a teacher of ethics. The essayist makes a point which is, we think, true, and has not been sufficiently dwelt on,—the very faint distinction in Carlyle's mind between lying and fiction. An unveracity, though quite unconscious, was to him a lie ; and he even retained and expressed a certain hatred of fiction as an art, regarding it almost as criminal, as well as idle. This, too, is very good :—

" If [in reading Carlyle] you can get rid of your prejudices for the nonce, you will certainly be rewarded by seeing visions such as are evoked by no other magician. The common-sense reappears in the new shape of strange vivid flashes of b amour and insight casting undisputed gleams of light into many dark places, and dashing off graphic portraits with a single touch And if there is something oppressive to the imagination when we stay long in this singular region, over which the same inspiration seems to be brooding which created the old Northern mythology, with its grim gigantesque semi-humorous figures, we are rewarded by the vividness of the pictures standing out against the surrounding emptiness ; some little groups of human figures, who lived and moved like us in the long-past days ; or of vignettes of scenery, like the Alpine sunrise in the Saner Resent us, or the sight of sleeping Haddington from the high moorland in the Renzinidcences, as bright and vivid for us as our own memories, and revealing unsuspected sensibilities in the writer. Though he scorned the word-painters and description-mongers, no one was a better landscape painter."

We are wholly unable, however, to agree that, with Carlyle,, right makes might. If he ever thought that when drawing the portrait of Cromwell, he abandoned the idea, consciously or unconsciously, when sketching in that abominable old tyrant a Frederick the Great's father. His true view we hold to have been the utterly untenable one,—that which succeeds has proved itself to be in such accord with the veracities, that it must of necessity be right. Nothing ever succeeded like Jacob's swindle.