THE MAGAZINES.

THE Nineteenth Century contains a war article of remark.. able interest. It is the late Captain Cecil Boyle's account of the cavalry operations which resulted in the relief of Kim- berley and the surrender of Cronje. His descriptions of the advance from Modder Camp, of the charge of the Lancers, and of the beleaguerment of Cronje are not in the least laboured, and may be said without exaggeration to be among the best things written from the front. Though there is no elaborate attempt at character drawing, one gets also a striking picture of the ever ready, ever resourceful French, and of Colonel Haig, his wonderful Aide-de-Camp.--Another useful South African article is Dr. Moffat's plea for the good treatment of the natives. He confirms the view often represented in this journal, that the Boer treatment of the native was systemati- cally harsh and degrading, though doubtless many individual Boers behave well enough to the blacks. Dr. Moffat pleads, and we heartily support his plea, for a wise and generous native policy.—Colonel Rivett-Carnac gives an admirable account of the Swiss rifle clubs, which should be read by all who are interested in the subject,—and we trust they number many

thousands. He shows, among other things, that the Swiss Protestants manage to have Sunday shooting without offence, and he deals very effectively with the assertion that rifle clubs will injure the Volunteer movement. Instead they will foster it.—Mr. Wilfrid Ward sends what we cannot help describing as a somewhat pathetic paper on "Liberalism and Intransigeance," in which he uses his learning, his very remark- able dialectical ekill, and his acute intelligence to appeal to the authorities of the Roman Church to show a little more indulgence to moderate liberal opinion in the Church. At least that is how we read his article, but his words are so guarded and so limited, and his anxiety not to give offence is evidently so strong, that it is very difficult to write about his paper and feel sure one is not misrepresenting him.

But before Mr. Ward makes his appeal for allowing a mode- rate amount of criticism in the Roman Church, he is careful to show his docility to authority by denouncing in very strong language an unlicensed and indiscriminate hand- ling of spiritual themes. It is perhaps difficult for a Protestant, and one who believes firmly in the need for the free entrance of the liberal spirit into theology, and who holds, moreover, that "God fulfils himself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world," to be quite fair to this point of view. He finds it, for instance, hard to understand that a man so able as Mr. Ward should not realise that the restrictions he desires and regards as necessary must deaden if not destroy the spirit which quickens :—

" Freedom of discussion is one of the privileges which the neo- liberals masterfully demand from the authorities. But the very method by which the demand is urged is an object lesson in the necessity that it should only be granted with clearly marked limitations. If every man is to print without hindrance what- ever comes into his head, however libellous towards his neigh- bour or disloyal to authority, however ill-considered or tactless, the picture presented by Dr. Smythe's words will again be realised. In point of fact liberty of discussion for the experts is imperative in days of scientific and critical progress and political and social change ; liberty for the mob is quite another thing. And it remains for those who demand liberty for themselves to show those qualities which made good their claim to rank among the experts rather than among the mob. For as conduct and breeding are required by society before it recognises a man as a gentleman, however well he may be born, so a writer, however intellectual, belongs to the mob, so far as authority is concerned, if he loses the sense of what is befitting to an orderly member of the community and acts as an agitator."

"Opinion is but knowledge in the making," and if opinion is limited knowledge must be restricted. It sounds reasonable enough in the abstract to talk about allowing the experts to be

free to say what they like, and only putting the restrictions on the mob, but to carry this into practice a censorship is required to determine who are the experts and who belong to the mob, and such censorship always petrifies. The man who has got something new to say is seldom allowed to be an expert by the authorities, but is always liable to be regarded as a member of the mob whose unlicensed speech must be repressed.

You can only tell whether a man is an expert by letting him speak freely and judging impartially the value of what he says. No doubt Mr. Ward will reply that we miss his point by a failure in the sympathy of comprehension in regard to his view of authority. Very possibly. At any rate, his plea for "the adaptation of theology to the exigencies of the times," however timidly and anxiously expressed, is in the right direc- tion and has our sympathy, and perhaps there is more of free- dom within the limitations in which he somewhat ostentatiously appears to glory than might at first be supposed. The lawyers say that no man owns land in England, but has only a tenure thereof ; but nevertheless, if he obeys certain rules, he can deal with it as freely as if it were his own. So, no doubt, in the Roman Church a man, in theory, has no intellectual freedom, but if he keeps within certain rules and pays a conspicuous homage to authority, he can use an intellectual liberty which is, in many directions, very little restrained.

Mr. Lionel Phillips contributes "Some Observations on South Africa" to the Contemporary which will repay attentive perusal. As regards the real aims of Afrikanderdom, he quotes from the Volksstem of January 27th, 1897, a letter in which

Mr. J. S. Smit, Transvaal Railway Commissioner, refused to disclaim the report of a speech in which he had formulated those aspirations :-

"No, Mr. Editor, the British and the Dutch Afrikander will never live in unity in this world, as little as the Hollander and the Englishman. The one must be the ruler, the other must be the subject. To this uncertainty an end must be made. In our political existence there should be no uncertainty, and that must be attained whilst we have still men in our midst who were witnesses at Boomplaats, Durban, Laingsnek, Ingogo, Amajuba, etc. When I expressed my opinions on certain public occasions, a few papers, whom the shoe fitted, made some remarks. All good and well, that sort of friend whose heart feels pain because I call a spade a spade, and am no party to covering up things under the mask of peace, may very easily be soothed."

In regard to the settlement Mr. Phillips is all for conciliation within certain limits : "The British flag is not-to be hoisted as the emblem of the ascendancy of British citizens over Dutch citizens, but as the guarantee of equal treatment to all."

Again, he hold's that whilst it is advisable to make English the official language of the whole country, the use of Dutch should be permissible to all deliberative assemblies, and in the Courts of Law. Unlike Mr. Herbert Paul--who in his article, "A Topheavy Administration," has no more doubt that the Republics will regain their independence than he has that the sun will rise to-morrow—Mr. Lionel Phillips does not share the opinion of those who believe that after the war the bitterness of feeling will be greater than it has been in the past. "On the contrary," he contends, "the mutual respect which has to some extent been established by the bravery displayed on both sides will make Englishmen and Dutchmen in the future regard each other with less disfavour." We may note that Mr. Phillips very effectually retorts on those who regard all capitalists as dishonest and unscrupulous by asking :—

" What sum entitles its possessor to that opprobrious title ? As a matter of mere gold-greed, would not the 'capitalist' have done better by aiding and abetting Kruger's corrupt government than by opposing it ? So late as March of last year the Trans- vaal Government made an effort to split up the 13itlanders by offering to settle the industrial grievances, if, in retuin, the representatives of the mining industry would express themselves content with the political conditions ; but these insidious pro- posals were rejected, and 'capital' refused to accept any terms which did not include those elementary rights of citizenship for which the people were clamouring."

M. Yves Guyot writes vivaciously and suggestively on the psychology of the French Boerophiles and Anglophobes. E.g. :—" A Boerophile—an intelligent man, but hypnotised by Dr. Leyds—said to me one day, The Boers are vegetarians.'

Levaillant showed us a century ago that they were the greatest flesh-eaters in the world." Again :—" The French- man has got the idea that the Boer is a peasant like the French peasant, and he sticks to it. In real truth, the Boer is a monogamous Bedouin who reads the Bible." Once more :—

"Most French people imagine that gold is obtained in the same way as truffles are ; that you have simply to gather it, only it is mineral and not vegetable. So they talk of the adventurers who pounced upon the gold mines like a flock of crows on a field of wheat Dr. Kuyper, who is a man of importance in Holland, calls them the vultures. To him, as to the French, the working of the mines is a kind of pillage, which ruins, not enriches, the Transvaal."

The chief fault we have to find with M. Yves Guyot is that. in our opinion, he immensely exaggerates the power of the Vatican and the Society of Jesus in organising and fomenting

Continental Anglophobia.—Mr. Poultney Bigelow in his analysis of the hostile attitude of the Germans towards England and America finds the motive in jealousy rather than ignorance, though it is "a widely accepted notion in Germany that India is groaning under the British yoke, and

that her famines are in some way the product of British cruelty." Inter alia he declares that "it is a pet idea with most Germans that in some ethnological manner the Trans- vaal may become the nucleus of a Teutonic State which in time may be absorbed by a combination of German East and West Africa. The Boer talks a patois not far removed from - Mecklenburg Platt Deutsch, and when Paul Kruger first met

Bismarck they are said to have conversed in that jargon." We welcome Mr. Bigelow's frank admission that the war in

South Africa was a necessity none the less for his unsparing criticism of Messrs. Rhodes and Jameson and his tribute to the courage and the motives of many of his Boer friends. Mr. Bigelow concludes an excellent article with the following

interesting passage :—

" The German has difficulty in piercing this web of hypocrisy, of brutal jingoism and cynical financial reasoning. But if he does, he finds beneath a warm national sentiment which has drawn to the battle-field youngsters from every county and every colony in defence of an ideal—the unity of an Lapin.

Germans misjudge us because at this moment they are not in- clined to Credit us with the same motives they claim for them- selves. We ask our German friends to believe that we do not wage war merely because some money speculators and filibusters are interested. We are ashamed of such elements in our national life, and we beg Germans to believe that on both sides of the Atlantic are honest public-spirited men seeking to do good rather than evil. And, furthermore, we beg Germans to remember that wherever the Union Jack waves, there German commerce enters on the same footing as that of England, and that the German in Hong Kong is treated more liberally that the Englishman in Kiao Chow. England has been the policeman of the Far East for now more than fifty years, and what commerce Germany and the rest of the world enjoy in those wateas is owing to British administration, honesty, enterprise, and money. The English flag has carried civil liberty to every colony over which it has waved, and Germany has no reason to think that England in South Africa will depart from the traditions established in Australia and Canada, in Hong Kong and Singapore."

Miteterlinck's article in the Fortnightly Review on "The Evolution of Mystery" will greatly attract and interest his

aamirers. To ourselves it seems both obscure and weak, though we humbly acknowledge that the fault may lie in our own want of comprehension. As we understand him, Maeterlinck wishes to say that the consciousness of mystery around us gives life its grandeur and poets their motive, but that the explanations of that mystery hitherto received—God, heaven and hell, fatality, heredity, and the rest—are all dying away from human thought. Nothing remains but mental evolu- tion, or rather, induction, which is the more satisfactory the more closely we observe. Nay, something else, he says, does remain, the growing doubt whether the universe may not be profoundly indifferent to man as a negligible quantity within it. That last remark is shrewd. It is quite possible that a new per- ception of the magnitude of the universe may take a strong hold of human imaginations, with for all kinds of materialists

a most depressing effect. It would not weigh strongly on the Christian, for who can estimate the potential value of any spirit that lives for ever P—The Fortnightly seems interested

in mysticism, Mr. Ernest Rhys giving us a paper on the "New Mysticism" as developed in Miss Fiona Macleod, a variety which seems to us to be rather Gaelic dreaminess.—We are not greatly interested this month either in Mr. Lilly, who denounces party government—the alternative to which, as things are, is a despotism of experts—or Mr. J. Milne, though

he shows us that Sir George Grey, the great Governor of New Zealand, advised the federation of South Africa ; and are rather disgusted by Mr. A. Symons's eulogy, of Ernest Dowson. Mr. Dowson's poetry seems to us all affectation, and he himself a man who, by his admirers' testimony, loved

sordid squalor, squalid places and the people who haunt them, and drank and hasheeshed himself not only to death, but into imitations of Mr. Swinburne's verse. If that is really an admirable person, we can only say we prefer the nearest ploughman.—Mr. F. E. Garrett's account of President Kruger is a really powerful attack on that per- sonage, but before we fully accept it we should like to know more of the evidence on which the charge of corruption rests.

Mr. Kruger's wealth is not of itself sufficient evidence. A man with a large salary, and grand opportunities of invest- ment, may grow rich in seventeen years without taking bribes. We do not say the Krugers were never bribed, but we do say that the evidence is as yet inadequate to sustain that grave charge.—Mr. J. A. R. Marriott should not have called Sir W. Hunter "a great Anglo-Indian." He was not that, though he was a great Anglo-Indian writer, with a genius for making obscure history interesting, and possibly, sake showed in "The Old Missionary," a genius also for tale.

writing of a very high class indeed.—The last paper in the Fortnightly is entitled "Lord Rosebery and a National Cabinet." The main idea of the article is that Lord Rosebery

and Mr. Chamberlain should form a kind of triumvirate, in which Mr. Balfour would possibly be allowed to play the part of Lepidus. The whole paper has an unreal ring, and there is something very funny in the solemn warning that

Mr. Chamberlain had better not rouse Lord Rosebery, as the noble Lord when roused is what East-Enders call "a fair

terror."

Sir Rowland Blennerhassett follows up his interesting article in the March National Review on Continental hostility to England with a paper on "England and the Dual Monarchy" in the current number of that DAPle117. The aim of ti,e present article is to emphasise the debt that we owe the Emperor Francis Joseph and the Hungarians for their

consistent friendliness during the past few months, and to

point out how an opportunity may shortly arise enabling na to requite him and them for this friendly attitude. Sir Rowland Blennerhassett is of opinion that although the time is not yet

ripe for the occupation of Albania by Austria, their great success in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary's pressing need for a further outlet to the sea, and above all the fact that the Roman Catholic Albanians and better-class Mahommedane are ready to meet Austria half-way—all point in the direction of a reconstruction in the Balkans that must primarily benefit the Hungarian Crown, and so indirectly be to the advantage of Great Britain. Sir Rowland admits that the

Austrian Germans are hostile to us, but quotes the testimony of Count Liitzow as indicating that whatever may be the

future of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, "the Slays, especially the Bohemian Slays, will support the policy towards England which is known to be favoured by the Emperor Francis Joseph."—Mr. Massingham writes pessimistically on "The Decline of Liberalism," assailed on the one hand by Socialism, on the other by Imperialism. The most interest- ing part of the article is a very able and damaging criticism of Lord Rosebery's qualifications as a reorganiser of the Liberal party. Mr. Massingham denies him courage and strenuous- ness :—

"His attitude is absolutely detached : it is largely based on a kind of luxurious demagogy ; and such a career, one feels, possesses no real element of moral or intellectual strength. Lord Rosebery cannot be dined and wined into power again, and from any kind of collective action he shrinks. And what does Lord Rosebery offer? Unionism against a Unionist Government. Imperialism against an Imperialist Government. A broken party, to be broken up into more pieces still, with a view to its reconstruction. Truly these are Greek gifts."

—Admiral Marse, of whose serious illness his many friends have heard with sincere regret, contributes some pungent

observations on the campaign based on his recent visit to Kimberley and Bloemfontein. In particular we may note his remarks on the moral effect of khaki :—

This dull drab colour has, socially, an excellent levelling effect. Deference to military character or personality replaces the deference to aristocratic rank, which is the bane of English life. The prince disappears in the officer or the man. Earned rank has its due. It is a pity that all London society cannot be put into khaki for a term of years, so as to break down the snobbish adulation for rank and riches which now infects it."

—Rear-Admiral Fitzgerald's paper on "The Training of Seamen in the Royal Navy" is laudably free from class pre-

judice. On the burning question of the naval engineers be speaks with frankness and good sense :— " Already the engineers are calling out for executive rank and executive titles. This is quite natural, as they see that they do most of the work, and that the maintenance of our modern ships in a state of fighting efficiency is the business of mechanics and not of sailors. I do not think the engineers will get their wish just at present, but this agitation is a sign of the times which must not be ignored ; and it is not difficult to foresee that unless our Executive—both officers and men—receive a more mechanical training than they do at present, they will be gradually ousted by the engineers and artificers. The law of the survival of the fittest is an universal one, and the Navy will be no exception to it. The ' sailor ' as we have hitherto known him cannot survive long, as there is no place for him on board a modern man-of-war. Steam and machinery have battled with the elements, and defeated them far more signally than ever the Jack Tar did in his palmiest days."

Of the miscellaneous articles no one should miss the Rev. H. C. Beeching's essay on "Passion and Imagination in

Poetry," or Mr. Leslie Stephen's study of Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

The writer of the usual monthly review of the operations in the field in the June Blackwood denounces, amongst other instances of "misplaced sentiment," Lord Methuen's graceful

tribute to the memory of Count Villebois de Mareuil and Lord Roberts's shaking hands with General Cronje. If these were mistaken acts—which we greatly doubt—they are infinitely more excusable than the resentment which broods over their perpetration.—General Frank Russell, writing on "Sur- prises in War," contends that the attitude of Parliament and the public is really to blame for the existence of the "stupid officer." He trusts, therefore, that the nation and the Parlia-

ment will learn from the present war that "their officers need facilities to acquire instruction not hitherto granted them; that in future, opposition to Manceuvre Acts, calculated to render them ineffective, will not be tolerated; and that the few thousand pounds necessary to carry them out will not be grudged." He is of opinion that in regard to appointments, "every effort is now conscientiously made to prevent those who are notoriously incompetent being intrusted with the lives of others." We shall be interested to see what the military cor- respondent of the Westminster Gazette has to say to this.

The writer of "Concerning our Cavalry," the third military article in the number, very properly insists on the great value of this arm as proved by the present war, in the face of the depreciation of the highest military authorities. He dwells also on the necessity of cavalry officers being men of alert and trained intellect, but abstains from saying anything about the ridiculous cost of living in certain regiments which keeps so many good men out of the cavalry. The military authorities have contrived to pay an exaggerated deference to the maxim which emphasises the dangers of putting a beggar on horse- back.—Of the miscellaneous papers, the experiences of an English tutor in Persia, to whom was entrusted the education of the sons of the senior brother of the reigning Shah, is the most curious and entertaining ; Mr. Gillington's "Ballad of Foulweather Jack" is a rattling piece of versified narrative; while the "Musings without Method contain a most sym- pathetic and attractive study of the personality of the late Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson.