THE MAGAZINES.
Mn. JOHN REDMOND'S article in the Nineteenth Century- " What has Become of Home-rule P "—should finally disabuse the minds of those who have been inclined to fancy that the Parnellites did not mean business when they declared that their.policy in future would be to force a Dissolution. Mr. Redmond sees that the only chance for getting Home-rule passed into law is a mandate given at a General Election expressly taken on that point. But the only chance of obtaining a Dissolution on Home-rule is an immediate appeal to the country. If the policy of filling up the cup is pursued and the Gladstonian party gets locked in a deadly straggle with the House of Lords, all hope of obtaining a clear pronouncement on the Home-rule issue must be abandoned. The Irish question will simply disappear in the vortex of a great constitutional struggle. How much it has disappeared already is shown by a quotation which Mr. Redmond gives from a speech made by the Gladstonian candi- date at Birkenhead. Here are Mr. Lever's words :— " They would have a great many red herrings drawn across the trail by the Conservatives, and the first would be Home-rule. Home-rule had been the foremost plank in the Liberal platform, and they carried it, and it was not their fault that the Irish were not enjoying its advantages. What, therefore, had Home-rule to do with this election ? (A. voice, Nothing!) There were many other questions, however, which had to do with it. Since entering that hall he had received an anonymous letter which said that the only point in which the writer differed from him was Home-rule. He wished to ask that gentleman, if he was with him earnestly and heartily, and wished to see other Liberal measures carried through, to vote for him (Mr. Lever), as Home- rule could not be touched by this Parliament."
On this, Mr. Redmond makes the following comments,—com- meats not unnatural, it must be admitted, in a sincere Home- ruler :— "Home-rule a red herring across the trail' ! A pretty state, assuredly, for the great question on which Mr. Gladstone went out of office in 1886 to sink to in 1894, although Mr. Gladstone's party is now once more in office and Mr. Gladstone himself is still alive and in the full enjoyment, happily, of all his intel- lectual faculties'! When the question of Home-rule has come to be, in Liberal opinion, a mere device of the Unionist enemy to prevent the Liberal party from pursuing its proper aims, the situation for Irish Nationalists, who have been hoping and struggling for a settlement of the Irish question on constitu- tional lines and by constitutional means, has, indeed, become so painful as almost to excite despair."
It is obvious that Mr. Redmond is right when he infers that elections won under the cry," What has Home-rule to do with this election ?" could not be counted as victories for Home- rule. Who could deny the right of the Lords to declare that elections of the Birkenhead kind were not mandates for the reintroduction of the Home-rule Bill P—" England and the Coming Thunderstorm : a German View," by Dr. Felix Boh, is a pretentious, rather than a powerful paper. Amidst the solemn incoherencies with which it is crowded, we get the impression that the writer believes that the French lightning is most likely to fall on England, that Germany is inclined to be in friendly alliance with this country, and that we acting together in the bonds of "faithful friendship" can outweigh "all tur- bulent and bellicose elements in the scales on which the fates -of the future will be decided." Possibly a true view, but not a very new one.—" The Press in Turkey " will amuse readers who have any journalistic experience. All censors are foolish, but Turkish censors are simply inane. It is not permitted to use the phrase" his or her Majesty "of any Sovereign but the 'Sultan ; and if the butter is not, laid on thick enough when his name is mentioned, the paper gets a warning. "The Shadow of Allah upon Earth" is language much too short, sharp, and laconic. This is the sort of thing which is expected and required :—" The finest pearl of the age, and the esteemed centre of the Universe ; at whose grand portals stand the camels of justice and mercy, and to whom the eyes of the kings and people in the West have been drawn ; the Sultan of the two Shores and the High King (Khakan) of the two Seas; the crown of ages and the pride of all countries; the greatest of all Khalifs."—" Babies and Monkeys" will be read by mothers with feelings of scorn and indigna- tion, and the writer will be pretty freely told, we expect, that he may know a great deal about apes, but very little about the nursery. Possibly some of the resemblances are in reality scientific facts, but many of the ideas are absurdly fantastical. For example, we are gravely informed that "the very manner in which babies are got off to sleep— by rocking in the arms or in a cradle—is an inheritance of arboreal or monkey-like ancestors, because the rocking is an imitation of the to-and-fro swaying of the branches, and such swaying would be the natural accompaniment of sleep with arboreal dwellers." Mr. Buckman goes on to hint that the lullaby about "baby on the tree-top" is a reminiscence of the origin of man. It is certainly singular, he says, "to find that nursery ditties contain references to matters arboreal, as if there were some lingering tradition in the human race of ancestors who lived in trees." Here is Pickwickian science with a vengeance! Another example is to be found in the following sentence : "Darwin considered that the tree- climbing propensity of boys was a relic of monkey-ancestors, but he made no observation on the stair-climbing instinct of infants." Perhaps, however, the best Pickwickism of all is the declaration that the habit of children "of picking at anything loose, any piece of wall-paper especially, so as to tear it off," is a survival of "a monkey-practice of picking off the bark from trees in order to search for insects." Even women's dislike of snakes is traced to the fact that snakes eat young apes. But how about a woman's instinctive loathing of mice and cock- roaches P Cockroaches do not molest baby-monkeys, and yet the average woman, new and old, would as soon face a cobra.
The National has two contributions of singular charm,--. " A Reluctant Evangelist" and "Leafless Woods and Grey Moorlands." The first is a short story by the author of A Study in Colour, and deals, like all that writer's work, with the West Indies. It recounts in language which goes straight to the heart a tragedy which must often happen in real life,— the tragedy of a perfectly ordinary, matter-of-fact, comfort- loving, lower middle-class girl, who marries a missionary, and finds living in a place like Hayti, where her children die or get demoralised, and where her own health and comfort are changed to fever and squalid misery, a hell upon earth which she cannot and will not endure. The false situation for the woman produced by marriage to a saint and a hero is capable of being treated in endless ways, but it has seldom been done with more pathetic insight than in this little story. We cannot help sympathising with the poor little mean- spirited "h "-less cockney woman, whose happy English life has been so utterly wrecked by her husband finding St. John's book on Hayti in a public library.—" A Son of the Marshes" is quite in his best vein in "Leafless Woods and Grey Moor- lands," for he does not there tie himself down to the details of natural history, but gossips pleasantly about old country things and habits. He is especially delightful on the strange liquors that the people of the Surrey MOOTS and heaths make out of the wild fruits that grow around them in such profusion. Here is his account of " varjaioe " "Just as we are going down a path we meet two youngsters who have come up it with a large ‘trug ' full of crimson and gold fruit, crab-apples, our own wild English fruit, beautiful to look at, and eatable now, after their thorough ripening off under the leaves. The youngsters said they should have let 'em lay there a bit longer, but they knowed the wind had unhapped 'em, and they reckined as they'd better got 'ern afore they fell down.' They had got 'mother' more than a bushel for 4. varjuice'; and these were going to be put by for Christmas and the New Year. Some of our readers may not be familiar enough with woodland specifics to understand that crab vinegar is called varjuice' ; it is the cleanest, sharpest, and most aromatic woodland produce that I am acquainted with. Nearly all cottages own a small press, for their fruit crops are large in the outlying districts ; so the crabs are simply ground up, pressed, and the juice pure and simple is put in stone bottles, and kept ready for use. If it is a case of sore throat, this is a gargle that will cut its way through any- thing, as they say, cleansing as it goes. Then if any part is inflamed, a linen bandage lightly placed on, saturated with var- juice,' will cure it, as I know from experience."
Note that the article contains a receipt for elderberry wine. It mentions also the curious fact that a good deal of household furniture among the poor goes from mother to eldest daughter. The presses and tubs, for making the country wines and pre- serves, and also "the very large stone bottles, are heirlooms; you will hear them say, My mother left me these, I was eldest darter like ; an' her mother left 'em to her.' "—An interest. ing and informing article in the National is that on the Belgian elections, by M. Luis de Lorac. His feeling is evidently a very gloomy one, both in regard to the Socialist victories and the lack of seriousness shown by the electors, He thus sums up the situation :— "Stronger than the Liberals, and a third as strong as the Catholics, so far as mere numbers are concerned, in the new Chamber, they [the Socialists] are perhaps in reality stronger than either, because they are more alive, more united, and more active. Their numerical strength must increase ; that of the others must, in default of the appearance among them of some great and inspiring leader, diminish; and as the new element de- velops, and the old elements shrink, so Belgium will draw near to the trials which are in store for her. Even at this moment it is the King alone who holds together the existing fabric of the State. He is not unpopular anywhere, and among certain classes he is intensely popular ; he is very patriotic ; he has spent large sums on the beautifying of his kingdom, and especially of his capital. But even now, if the King were no longer a factor in the situation, there would probably be an upheaval, and five or ten years hence, if the King were then to die, a Republican Revolution would, so far as I can see, be inevitable. He has no son; his brother, the Comte de Flandre, has declined the succession ; and the Comte's only surviving son, Prince Albert, a charming boy of nineteen, is, very undeservedly, unpopular with the masses, although he is beloved by all who know him."
The best article in the Contemporary—that by Sir T. Wade on the Corean War—we have alluded to elsewhere.—Mr. Frederic Harrison writes on " The Amalgamation of London," and of course writes well. What he says on the subject of the police is worth noting :— "The question of transferring to the Council the control of the police of the Metropolis (with an area that extends into five other counties, and is more than six times as large as the county of London) is a question that remains for Parliament ; it is one which lay outside the scope of the Commission ; and it is to be hoped that any scheme of amalgamation will not be burdened with this highly explosive problem. As a personal opinion, the present writer sees the strongest reasons for supporting the views of the Commissioners. He cannot surrender his belief, which so often separated him from his former colleagues when a member of the Council, that the control of the police of the Metropolis must continue in the hands of the Imperial Government, as it does in other countries."
The Fortnightly has an article on Corea, China, and Japan. It is clear that Mr. R. S. Gundry, the writer, like the rest of the experts, has in reality been taken by surprise, and does not quite know what to make of the situation. The article has, however, a good many facts of interest. The following passage gives a view which should not be missed :— "The open season is not yet over, and Count Yamagata may have in store for us some dazzling surprise like those with which he opened the campaign ; but if he is unable to deal such a blow as will bring China to her knees, before winter sets in, the respite may enable her to put a bettor face on affairs. Time and winter are certainly in her favour. Time will enable her to collect her resources, while Japan will be subject to the strain of a long and costly occupation. Winter in Corea and Manchuria is bitterly severe ; and the Japanese are believed, rightly or wrongly, to be less tolerant of cold than the northern Chinese. Even the capture of Moukden might lose some of its charm if the blow failed of immediate effect, and the prospect of having to bold it during the winter, at the cost of keeping open communication with Soul, had to be faced."
Mr. Savage-Landor's "Burning Questions in Japan" is a very amusing paper, but it is not political. The writer is evidently somewhat inclined to be on the side of those who do not take the Japanese seriously, but regard them as belonging primarily to the region of comic opera. Still, he thinks that when, "as years go on, their capricious and somewhat childish nature shall have somewhat altered and become more serious ; when, instead of taking things lightly as they have done till now, they will go to work to adapt Western civilisation to themselves instead of adapting them. selves to Western civilisation, I am certain that both as individuals and a nation, the Japanese will have a great future before them."—Sir Robert Ball, writing on the possi- bility of life in other worlds, thus sums up the matter
No reasonable person will, I think, doubt that the tendency of modern research has been in favour of the supposition that there may be life on some of the other globes. But the character of each organism has to be fitted so exactly to its environment, that it seems in the highest degree unlikely that any organism we know here could live on any other globe elsewhere. We cannot conjecture what the organism must be which would be adapted for a residence in Venus or Mars, nor does any line of research at present known to us hold out the hope of more definite knowledge."
On the whole the Fortnightly under its new editor promises to retain its readability.
Blackwood has an article on "China's Reputation Bubble," by Colonel Henry Knollys, R.A., which gives a most unfavour- able account of the Chinese Army. Oddly enough, too, he is inclined to doubt the efficiency of the Japanese soldiers, of whom he has had personal experience :— "No ; the Jap will remain a Jap, do what you will to dress him, and arm him, and drill him as a European soldier. You may discipline him into military semblance, but you will never manu- facture him into a vieille moustache.' Relax the stringency of barrack life, or set him to campaigning work, and Nature will insist on reasserting herself : the soldier will rapidly revert to coolie instincts,—a thoroughly well-behaved coolie, but still a coolie."
Yet Captain Younghnsband says the Japanese soldiers are quite equal to Goorkha,s ! Which story are we to believe?
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