THE MAGAZINES.
Tun articles in the dearer Magazines on the Home-rule Bill are not of enthralling interest. The article in the National Review against it, is a little too fierce in expression; and the one in Blackwood on the same side, though well written and thorough, is only original in the great stress laid upon the inequality among Members introduced into the House of Commons. The writer contends that the Irish Members will be "an inferior body, with limited powers of legislation, but practically unlimited powers of obstruction ; " and that the business of the House will be quite as much impeded by their presence as it is now. That is true, if they wish to impede it ; but we take it that their chance of patronage being at home, they will remain there, except when they may wish to "strike a blow for Ireland."— Mr. Justin McCarthy, in the Nine- teenth Century, accepts the Bill meekly enough, and Mr. Sexton makes only the reserve that the financial clauses are too oppresaive to Ireland, as the payments ought, he says, to be limited to the present gain from the country to the Imperial Exchequer. There will, he says, be no surplus ; and he wants a real one. England has not one that we know of, and we do not see why Ireland should have until she has produced one by economy and good government ; but the calculation shows the point round which the Irish Membera intend to fight, and, we may add, the point about which, if the Bill is carried, the conflict will be unending, the Irish Members using their SO votes to compel Britain to pay the whole charge for the National Debt and Army, though they will still claim an equal right to all commissions.—Mr. Redmond, in the Contemporary Review, also accepts and rather warmly defends the Bill, only denying its finality, though incidentally he insists. that the veto of the Crown must remain a fiction. Mr. F. Harri- son, however, the other commentator in the same review, makes a suggestion for a definite change. He would have the 48. Members of the Legislative Council to be created for Ireland be en officio the Members for Ireland to be seated in Westminster voting on all questions. That, he says, would be a Conserva- tive measure. It is, at all events, an original idea; but we question if it will find favour with any party. The Radicals will oppose it because of the high suffrage by which the Council is elected, and the Unionists because they are opposed to any Bill at all, and especially to any Bill which retains Irish Members. —The rest of the Contemporary Review is rather decidedly
dull, the most attractive article being one by Mr. H. E. Moore, called "The Unemployed and the Land." It is an account of the Dutch. and German Colonies of poor persons, none of which appear to be self-supporting ; while, in all, two features appear which it would be difficult to introduce in this country. The wages in all are far below Trades-Union rates, while in all rather sharp compulsion is employed :—
"The Beggar Colonies, previously referred to, taken over by the Dutch Government in 1859, have now been concentrated in one settlement, known as Veenhuizen, in North Holland. Any man found begging in Holland is brought before the magistrates, and on conviction is sentenced to a short imprisonment, followed by a term of from six months to two years of forced labour upon this colony. When I visited the colony in 1891, it appeared that all the men were engaged, during favourable weather, in the manual work of improving waste land and ordinary farming. By their labour large areas of what had previously been unproductive soil had been brought into a good condition of cultivation, yielding remunerative crops. During unfavourable weather, or when not wanted for the outdoor work, the men were employed in various indoor industries. Certain rewards are given for special industry, which are paid to the men at the expiration of their term. As to the financial results, the farming and industries are both ex- tremely well managed, and the returns are usually sufficient to provide for the maintenance of the men, but not to pay the costs of administration, which, as the colony is regarded as a penal settlement, are naturally heavy."
The number of beggars thus provided for is not distinctly
stated, but appears to exceed five thousand. There is no mention of female beggars. The Germans act upon a larger scale, and fifty thousand men have passed through their twenty-two labour colonies, with, it is said, beneficial results. The unemployed thus maintained receive no wages for their work, but are given on discharge a sum equal to 15d. a week for their period of detention. Mr. Moore is of opinion that all such plans are a little doubtful, but that the beat is for a Society to hire the men as labourers in the ordinary way. He thinks the capital required would be 230,000 for one 'hundred and fifty men, and that the future to be held up before the men should be the possession of a small holding. The total expense, however, of training and settling fifteen thousand men would exceed three millions, and the result would even then be imperceptible.—There is a short story by
Mr. P. Robinson, entitled "The Last of the Vampires," which some readers will find thrilling. The idea in it is a struggle between a man and one of the pre-diluvian animals, a "winged kangaroo" with a python's neck. It is a mere fantasy, but it does give one the creeps, which is, we suppose, a proof of the writer's imagination.—There is a long paper on "The Teacher's Training of Himself," by the Headmaster of Harrow, which is, if we may be pardoned the expression, a little too much in the Sandford and Merton style. This, however, has its value :—
"There is some advantage no doubt, in the study of educational history. It is a branch of literature to which English teachers have been generally indifferent. Nothing has been stranger or more painful in past days than the evident circumscription of their views. Each generation of schoolmasters has seemed to go to work as if there had been no schoolmasters in the world before themselves. The schoolmaster of one school has ignored the existence of other schools. How few books does he think of reading upon education! What does he know or has ever heard of the educational systems of Comenius, Pestalozzi, Froebel, or the Port Royalists P What of the theories of Sturm, Ascham, Locke, Rousseau, and Herbert Spencer ? The educational pro- fession stands alone in this respect, that men and women enter upon it, or, let me charitably say, used once to enter upon it, without the least regard to the theories, doctrines, researches, experiments, and inventions of their predecessors. It has been the most empirical of professions. It will not, let me hope, be so always. The time is coming, I believe, when every teacher will be required to possess some acquaintance with educational history and educational science. And, if it comes, it will be in a measure due to the efforts of a man distinguished in education— once a Harrow master—whose death, profoundly as it is regretted, allows me to speak the praise which he would have deprecated, if 'he were alive—Mr. Quick."
Baron Ferdinand Rothschild, in the Nineteenth Century, writes a thoughtful paper, which he calls "The Financial Causes of the French Revolution." It is really, however, an essay on the taxation of France before 1793, and adds little or nothing to the information given by De Tocqueville and Taine. Everybody admits now that the inequalities were monstrous; and what we want to know is, why a revenue which maintained Louis XIV. in a kind of Imperial state, and
paid for constant wars, proved utterly inadequate to support Louis XVI.? How much was raised in his reign, and what became of it, that there never was any in the Treasury? Did the Court and its pensioners eat the whole surplus after the Army and Navy were paid; and if they did, why did they eat so much more than under Louis XV.? Why, too, up to the last minute, for instance during the regime of Calonne, was it always so easy for the Court to borrow, that "the debts" began to crush the Exchequer ? Who lent that money, what was the total, and why did the lenders give trust P—Professor A. R. Wallace describes the 'Inaccessible Valleys of the World," even those of California, which are fenced in by walls of smooth rook thousands of feet high, as all the results of erosion by water. That theory has been gravely disputed, but Mr. Wallace believes it capable of conclusive proof. Some valleys in New South Wales are nearly as inaccessible as those of California, the Grose valley, for example, being lined with pale sandstone usually 1,600 ft. in height, but rising at the upper end to 3,000 ft.—The Chief Rabbi's paper on "Jewish Wit and Humour" is not very brilliant, and his best illustrations are from Heine. They leave like all similar papers the impres- sion that the Jewish mind, though full of sarcasm, is not very open to the impression of the incongruous, that a Jewish Sydney Smith is in fact nearly impossible. We rather wonder why that 15 80 in so intellectual a people, and incline to the idea that lambent humour is lacking rather to the Jewish literary class than to the Jews. Certainly it cannot be present in large quantity in the Chief Rabbi, or he would hardly have quoted this poor and patent riddle as a specimen of the humour of Jehudala Hallevi, "the sweetest post-Biblical singer of
Israel" "It has an eye, and still is blind : A boon to man and womankind : It gives us raiment far and wide, And yet it naked does abide."
—Mr. W. H. Wilkins does not tell us much that is new about "Hansoms and their Drivers," except that Hansom was an inventive engineer, who sold his patent for £10,000 to a com- pany whieh failed and never paid him. He only received 2300 for his invention, though as he lived to 1881, he saw it become "the gondola of London." —Mr. Justice Ameer All maintains that India, as well as England, suffers heavily from the fall of the rupee ; but the only bit of unquestionable evidence he gives, is that India has lost sixty.seven millions over the official remittances to England since 1882. It is a great sum, but it is not a ruinous one, especially as Indian trade has steadily expanded. The Judge maintains that the rise in the price of food, which he proves by tables, has been most severely felt ; but he forgets to add that India produces her own food and a great deal more, and that there are at least two producers for one con- sumer. He recommends the adoption of a gold standard, the closing of the silver mints, and the retention of the rupee only as token-money worth is. 6d, He does not say where the gold is to come from, or how the token-money is to be kept at its value, unless it is always and easily exchangeable for gold.
The Fortnightly opens with a curious and valuable paper, the condensation of statements by many men of business on their opinion as to the cause of "The Present Depression in Trade." The general body of opinion is that the depression has been caused by over-speculation and its results, by pro- tective tariffs, and by the nearly universal prevalence of low prices, or as most of the writers prefer to put it, by the appre- ciation of gold. It will last probably for another two years. The object of the writer, we should add, is clearly to pro- mote the theory of bimetallism.—Dr. Haffkine, in a paper on "Vaccination against Cholera," states some interesting results of Dr. Pasteur's vaccination against anthrax in sheep : " M.. Pasteur demanded that a portion of each flock should remain unvaccinated ; 35,550 sheep were accordingly inoculated, whilst 25,100 were left untouched. At the end of the season 44 of the first had died of anthrax, that is to say, 1 in 740; whilst of the unvaccinated sheep 320 had perished, that is, 1 in 78. Vaccination had therefore reduced the mortality to about one- tenth of the usual number. The proportion has since remained the same. The following year, 348,170 sheep, 47,817 bulls and cows, and 2,325 horses were inoculated. In France alone more than 300,000 sheep are now vaccinated yearly. The majority of the assurance companies have made vaccination against anthrax obligatory in their contracts."
Dr. Haffkine wants cholera vaccination to be made obligatory in some districts of Siam and India, believing that cholera would be thereby extinguished in those districts. It might be, though smaller experiments still look doubtful ; but there would be a previous result,—namely, a desperate insur- rection. The readiness of Indians to submit to vaccina- tion arose from their belief that anything coming from a cow must increase, and not decrease, their ceremonial purity, —Mr. W. Basil Worsfold's account of Dutch society in Java, though not very new, has a certain interest. There are fifty thousand Dutch in Java among twenty-three millions of people ; and of these, a large proportion educate their children in the island and never think of returning home. Being a leisured and aristocratic class, they have a tendency to become cultivated ; and, indeed, except in one singular detail, they live in the Anglo-Indian style. Men and women in their own houses have adopted the native dress, slightly modified ; and Mr. Worsfold evidently considers that in both sexes it is too scanty. The Anglo-Indians have never given way to this temptation ; but it is curious that the Dutch in Chinsurah did, the difference arising, we fancy, not so much from incapacity to bear the heat, as from a greater sympathy with native ideas of dress. The Englishman, in fact, thinks what his kinsman will think of his dress, while the Dutchman is content if he satisfies native ideas of propriety. We fancy the lighter dress must be the healthier, but we believe there are some curious facts to the contrary recorded in military history. Men march farther, it is said, in trousers than when barelegged.—Professor J. Sully chats pleasantly enough, though now and then a little garrulously, about dreams in a paper called "The Dream as a Revelation." He contends that dreaming often unveils us to ourselves, giving a freer play to individual characteristics. He gives an instance of this which is worth quoting :— "A friend of mine tells me, and I believe him, that he is per-
fectly matter-of-fact and unimaginative during the waking state, but that when asleep he indulges in the wildest flights of fancy. Thus he once dreamt of visiting the Crystal Palace with some friends, of their all leaving their bodies outside, and of his finding, 4M going out, that somebody had gone off with his body, In another dream he met a stranger to whom he felt strongly attracted, and was afterwards told that the interesting person was himself as he was to be three years hence. Such quaint freaks of phantasy in one habitually unimaginative seem to point to the existence of germs of faculty which have never in this limited world of ours found their external developing conditions, their proper nutritive soil,"
The imagination, of course, always existed in the sleeper, was habitually restrained, and in sleep, got, as it were, loose from its fetters. We do not understand Professor Sully to pro- pound any theory of dreams, except that they are thoughts while the sleeper is in "a condition of maimed consciousness." —M. Frederic Carrel sends a bright though rapid account of "The College of France," the great teaching institution which was founded by Francis I., and has ever since attracted to its chairs, now forty in number, some of the keenest intellects of the country. Its speciality has been the singular independence accorded to its professors, who, almost from the first and in days of bitter persecution, have contrived to say their own thoughts, sometimes with marked effect upon the national mind. The College, indeed, like most successful institutions, has always borne on it the impress of its true founder, Ramus, the early sceptic who in 1543 dared to attack Aristotle and elevate Socrates, and after a short but brilliant career was put to death by the Due de Guise during the massacre of St. Bartholomew.—The Bishop of Bedford records his belief that everything in London is slowly im- proving in spite of its increasing size, and more especially the character, or rather the civilisation, of its working women, and repeats with great seriousness his advice, the result of long experience, to the Temperance party to strike first at the infamous quality of all liquors sold in the working districts. The spirits in particular are almost poisonous. Mr. Charles Hancock describes the well-known " familis- Ore " of Guise, the industrial Colony founded by M. Godin on a modification of the co-operative principle, which has worked exceedingly well. Mr. Hancock spoils his instructive paper by too much tedhnical detail, which, however, it was Probably his object to give.—The number ends with another essay by Mr. J. A. Symonds on the "Renaissance," called The New spirit?, full, too, of his It is full of thought and knowledge, and belief that the great enemy to independent thought is theological conviction. We wish he would write a separate paper on the Emperor Ferdinand the Second, that Julian redivivus who was suspected of being a Mohammedan, and was really, we should fancy, an entire disbeliever who had caught a preference for Asia over Europe.
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