THE MAGAZINES.

THE Fortnightly is full of bright papers. We do not, indeed, understand the motive which induces Editors of Magazines to publish articles about the second Duke of Wellington, an inferior person, of no interest to any human being outside his own im- mediate circle ; but there are other papers of decided interest. The anonymous one on England as a European Power is full of sense. The writer shows that England throughout her history never was so strong. The Navy, though some ships now build- ing might be pushed on a little faster, is the strongest in the world ; we have 150,875 troops ready, exclusive of those employed in the Mediterranean, and, of course, of the Indian Army, and we have 300,000 more trained men of whom a portion at least would volunteer. And, we may add, we could double these numbers if we offered fair civil wages and release from- the service the moment the war was over. All that is wanted is transport, which ought to be organised, and is not organised only because the people are possessed with the notion that we shall never fight upon the Continent. The paper is written by some moderate-minded politician who knows facts, and, while free of Chauvinism, is not in the least deceived by Englishmen's habit of depreciating themselves. Mr. Wilfred S. Blunt puts, in a strong light, the growing race-hatred in India between Europeans and natives. He exaggerates, as is natural, travellers in India never realising that eighty per cent. of the people never see a European, never hear of, much less read a newspaper, and are entirely unaffected by European ways ; but there is a substratum of truth in his account. It is a funny assertion, that the old Civilians were more gentlemen than the Competition men, the old Civilians having been usually the sons of traders, ship-captains, and Anglo- Indian officials, while the new men are, for the most part, sons of clergymen, professional men, and Anglo - Indian officers ; but it is true that the new men have not the old relation to the natives. They are thinking too much of Europe and its livelier intellectual life ; and they feel more keenly the distance caused by differences of civilisation. The natives, too, on the coast and in the great cities, have more Eng- lish education, and are hungrier for posts under Government. The atmosphere is more charged with dislike, though there is probably less violence. Mr. Blunt describes one case of oppression, which he himself witnessed; but such scenes are unusual, though no doubt, when the two civilisations clash, as they do very frequently in summer, about the question of decency in dress, the European is as arrogant as a superior who thinks himself in the right usually is. Mr. Blunt would, of course, deny the superiority, and there are points of view from which he is entirely right; but he omits to answer the question how the European comes there at all. One per cent. does not conquer ninety-nine per cent. without some superiority of morale. Still, the paper is worth thinking over, and with its latent thought we heartily concur. If the English are driven out of India, their want of manners will be in no small degree answerable for the catastrophe. We have men- tioned Mr. Percy Greg's "The Lords as a Senate" elsewhere, but must add here that his plan for reforming the House is to allow the Peers to choose fifty of their number—every Peer sitting who had a certain number of supporters, a very clever variety of co-optation—and the Crown adding a certain number of Life-Peers, many of whom might be Colonists. We see no reason, however, why such a House should be less obstructive than the present, as the House would still not change with the Commons, and there would be no means of en- forcing accord. The Life-Peers would agree with the Hereditary Peers, and would have less fear of the people. Your Hereditary has his son and grandson to think about. Colonel Keith Fraser's paper on Cavalry is overloaded with detail; but its main suggestions are simple,—that we need more men and horses to each regiment, and that commissions in the Cavalry and Infantry

should not be interchangeable. Both suggestions are probably sound ; but can he not make the first easier of adoption by re- ducing the coat of a cavalry regiment P Suppose we take the men as we do "A. B.'s "—as children. Captain A. E. de Cosson writes a sensible paper on the future of the Soudan, entirely free from the Jingo spirit ; but even he seems unable to suggest anything better than that we should hand over the country to the Sheiks, "under British protection," which is simply to annex the Soudan in an inefficient way. Why can we not recognise the Sheiks, and leave them to find a Sultan by the old process of natural selection—fighting the matter out P If we are responsible, then we ought to govern, instead of merely "protecting," as we are supposed to do in Zululand. Mr.

Escott's account of Bernal Osborne is pleasant reading, but it does not add much to the reader's comprehension of his friend. The point to be explained is not why Mr. Osborne succeeded, for he had ability, wit, and courage, but why he did not succeed more? It is difficult to suggest the reason, without annoying those who ad- mired him; but was it not because, as with so many of his race, his great powers were spoiled by a strain of insolence which made of all but a few secret and bitter enemies P Heine would not have suc- ceeded as a Minister ; and Bernal Osborne, in public, was a brassy Heine, with his tongue, instead of his pen, for a weapon.

That "he never struck at a friend" we can well believe—his race never do—but then he struck at everybody else, and every- body else in a day of majorities is strong.

In the Contemporary Mr. Freeman pleads for a reform of the Lords, not unlike the one suggested by Mr. Greg,—the House to be filled with men elected by co-optation and aided by certain Life-Peers. He gives, however, an instructive account of the de- velopment of the Lords, which, he says, is "a history of un- reasonable pretensions, growing sometimes into open usurpa- tions," all or nearly all of them being in the direction of hereditary right and exclusivism. Mr. Freeman entirely justi- fies our assertion that the King originally summoned Peers for one Parliament, and that the right of a man once summoned to be always summoned, and of his son to be summoned after him, was a usurpation. So, he maintains, was the exclusion of Lord Wensleydale, the right to create a Life-Peer by patent being clearly in the Crown. The points are not important, but they defeat the claim of the House to exist as it is by imprescriptable right. The most important political paper is, however, one by Mr. A. Forwood, the Tory leader in Liverpool, who advocates equal electoral districts arranged so as to separate town and country. This scheme, he says, would give us this result :—

"England and Waleo would have 480 members instead of 482 Scotland I, SI " II tt /I 59 Ireland I/ 3, I/ 95 „ „ „ 103

The members for England and Wales would be allotted as follows : —280, or thereabouts, to urban constituencies, instead of 295 as at present ; and the counties would obtain about 200 in lieu of 187, which is the share of representation they at present possess."

We shall have, we fancy, to make the legal hundred secured to Ireland by the Union the unit of distribution, and other details matter very little. The Tory notion that urban and rural views of politics are in their very nature distinct, is a mere fancy never quite true, and now dying under the influence of better inter-communication. Before 1831, the country freeholders were the backbone of the Liberal Party, and the farmers are Tory now, chiefly to conciliate their landlords. In counties where Cavendish or Russell influence is strong they are all Liberals, as they also are in Scotland, where landlord ascendancy has been broken. M. Taine sends an eloquent description of "Social- ism as Government," which will delight the great majority of Englishmen, his view being that Socialism is fatal to individualism, to progress, and to happiness, that it demands of the State work too heavy to be done, and that from the enormous resistance it awakens it can keep itself ascendant only through murderous terror. Is not this a little unfair P We also distrust Socialism utterly, not believing even its cardinal dogma, that every one is entitled to a main- tenance; but surely a State could be conceived organised on the principle that the community owned all property and would distribute both labour and income according to its judgment. Peru was so organised, and so, in most respects, is the Russian

Mir, the unit of Russian society which has endured for centuries. All the same, we are indebted to M. Taine for the epigram that the object of Socialism is "the logical creation of a curtailed type of hnmanity, and the effort to adapt the living man to this type." Sir John Lubbock pleads, with almost needless

vehemence, for the establishment of a national school of forestry, a proposal which almost proves itself. To a country possessed of poor land, hardly any industry is more profitable than arbori- culture—for example, £40,000,000 have been added to the value of the French Landes ;—forestry demands special knowledge of a kind which only States can accumulate, and yet we have no ap- proach to a school. The Indian Government has a magnificent one in its Forest Department, and derives from it 2250,000 a year ; while it is stated that in the New Forest the mismanagement is so great that 50,000 acres will shortly be mere wild land. Mr. Gordon Cumming sends an amusing paper on "Mechanical Modes of Worship," the principal one being the well-known "prayer-wheel," covered with written prayers, which are twirled at will in the direction in which the letters of the language used are written. This wheel was once not only in use, as is supposed, in Thibet, but in India, Japan, and China, and even, says the essayist, smiling, perhaps in Scot- land. At least, a worthy "old Scotch minister" "had a large collection of old manuscript sermons, which he stored in a cask. Every time he had occasion to preach he avoided the respon- sibility of exercising human judgment in his selection by giving the cask a twirl, and whichever sermon first slipped out was deemed the Heaven-selected discourse most appropriate to the occasion." Be it noticed that the Scripture-wheel is sup- posed to perform the actual duty of prayer, and not merely to suggest prayer—the usual excuse in Europe for any mechanical observance. There is an excellent, and we think impartial, sketch of the parties in the coming Presidential election, by Professor C. K. Adams, notable for the distinctness with which it brings out the tendency in America to form groups. There are a dozen such groups already, all controlling thousands of votes, and baffling the calculations of experienced politicians. The Pro- hibitionists, the Labour Party, the Greenbackers, the Irish, the Independents, are among these groups, and may at the last moment, by withdrawals, upset the most favourable chances. Mr. Adams mentions a report that General Butler is secretly supporting Mr. Blaine, and confirms the story of the import- ance which, in this election, will be attached to private scandals.

We have noticed the most interesting paper in the Nine- teenth Century," A Farm that Pays," elsewhere ; and the num- ber is deficient in articles of importance. Mr. Lionel Ash- burner's answer to Mr. Seymour Keay's account of "The Spoliation of India," though often conclusive—as where he shows that the " overtaxed " ryot of Bombay sells his holding for forty years' purchase—is so loaded with minute calculations

as to be intolerably dull reading. Like most Anglo-Indians, Mr. Ashburner can instruct, but from some incurable defect— is it the want of a sense of proportion P—he fails to entertain.

We do not want Blue-book in a magazine, but boiled Blue-book. We do not, after careful reading, understand precisely what Miss C. O'Brien is driving at, or whether she approves Irish emigration or not. The only subject on which she is distinct is the danger of Irish emigrant girls, if left without supervision, falling into the hands of vicious men, which is, we suppose, equally true of emigrants from any other country. Father Cody only shows us that at Fort Augustus and elsewhere there are monasteries in Britain conducted on the old rules in the old way, and en- titled, as Protestants will think, to the old praise and dispraise ; and though we approve Miss Toynbee's tea-parties for the poor in the Edgware Road, we are not greatly interested in the account of them. They succeed, and we can hardly imagine a more convincing proof of the general joylessness of the lives of the poor. The people sit, not moving about, and listen to music or to reading :—

"From the first the really poor have come, and at first it would not have been untrue to say the very rough, and even the very dirty. But hands and faces have been gradually cleaner, manners more courteous, though never at any time has there been the smallest disorder or anything approaching to interruption, which would be as completely put down by the good feeling of the company as in any drawing-room. Sexes and ages have as a rule kept apart, the elderly ladies liking to gossip about their ailments and their domestic afflic- tions together, the girls to compare their bits of finery, and the young men to sit near each other, turning over a volume of prints, for the most part in silence, but with a grateful sense of companionship, listening in the readings to the new power of the English language, in which perhaps for the first time they have recognised that there was more than one too familiar adjective. One young man, who has grown in a year from a rough into a gentleman, told me that he had heard of these afternoon's quite accidentally, but had from the first day he attended them walked three mike to them from big lodging and three miles back, without missing a single Sunday." Perhaps the most readable article in the number is Sir J. Pope Hennessy's, on "Lord Beaconsfield's Policy in Ireland." Lord Beaconsfield, he says, detested Orangism, and in 1844 uttered the following famous sentences :— "A dense population in extreme distress inhabit an island where there is an Established Church which is not their Church, and a territorial aristocracy the richest of whom live in distant capitals. Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien Church, and in addition the weakest Executive in the world. That is the Irish question. Well, now, what would honourable gentlemen say if they were reading of a country in that position ? They would say at once, 'The remedy is revolution.' But the Irish cannot have a revolntion ; and why ? Because Ireland is connected

with another and a more powerful country What, then, is the duty of an English Minister ? To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by force."

In practice, Lord Beaconsfield would, Sir J. Hennessy believes, have abolished the Irish Church, granted fixity of tenure, and created a kind of French Administration. He does not prove that Lord Beaconsfield would have done any one of the things he thought wise, but be does prove that Lord Beaconsfield had a sympathy with Ireland wanting to many of his party.

Macmillan does not give us much, and Mr. 3/orison's little

sketch of the late Rector of Lincoln is disappointing. He does not explain him at all, but considers him a man devoted to learning, or rather to knowledge, partly from inquisitiveness, and partly because knowledge is the only guarantee against error, but of little use in the affairs of life. Considering what a sardonic side there was to Mr. Mark Pattison, this is curious :—

"This want of self-reliance was more painfully apparent in common action with other men. No one who wished to keep intact his just reverence for the Rector should have consented to sit with him on a committee. He seemed abashed, not only by opposition, but by the bare possibility of it. I have had the honour—I should, perhaps, rather say the misfortune, considering that the result was injurious to my regard for him—to sit with him on various committees, and I never heard him make a suggestion, positive or negative, of the slightest practical value, and others, with larger experience than mine, have told me the same thing. It must be admitted that this was a grave defect."

Is it not possible that the following story may be the explana-

tion :—" On one occasion, when I was speaking of the mistakes we are apt to commit in estimating our importance in the world, he answered with his characteristic emphasis, Yes ! Take your worst opinion of yourself when you are in most depressed mood.

Extract the cube root of that and you will be getting near the common opinion of your merits." There is no source of weak- ness equal to self-confidence, except, perhaps, the total want of it.

Bla,ckwood's politics get worse and worse. They are the mere utterances of hate ; but the novel, the "Waters of Her- cules," is becoming admirable. One does not expect at this

time of day original love-making, but the intercourse of Baron Tolnay and Gretchen Ascelinde is entitled to that praise.