THE MAGAZINES.

THE Nineteenth Century contains this month no less than sixteen papers, most of them readable, but no one of them of any particular importance. Perhaps the best is Mr. Archi- bald Forbes's account of the events at Sedan on September 1st and 2nd, 1870, in which he corrects from his own observation many narratives previously received as historical. He does not, however, contribute anything absolutely new, except in regard to a few details. He leaves it very clear that it was the Emperor himself who capitulated, and that General Wimpfen, who commanded in chief, would have continued the resistance, or sacrificed half the Army in the effort to break through. He asked the Emperor in writing to place himself in the midst of the troops, who would force a passage through the German lines ; but Napoleon took no notice of his letter. Mr. Forbes says the Emperor had no military position, and seems to think he had no right to overrule General Wimpfen while the latter was in supreme command ; but we imagine this to be, at all events technically, an error. Every Euro- pean Sovereign is Commander-in-Chief of his own Army, and when present, can give a supreme military order which no more injures the dignity of any General, however high his rank, than the order of a Colonel injures the dignity of the senior Captain. We wish Mr. Forbes had added a definite opinion whether an attempt to break through was or was not impossible of success. If it was possible, the attempt should have been made whatever the sacrifice, for France could then have made peace on far better terms. The Emperor, how- ever, was an exhausted man, who on September lst " mooned about" the field for hours doing nothing; and the soldiers, maddened by defeat, had become, within Sedan at all events, an undisciplined mob.—The gist of Mr. Norman Lockyer's paper on " New Stars " is to show that all the fresh evidence tends to prove that what are called "new stars" are enormous lights produced by the clash of swarms of meteorites, such as constitute both the comets and, in a number of cases, the nebulae. The evidence is derived from spectroscopic observation, and can, of course, be tested only by expert astronomers ; but the theory certainly hangs together well.—Mr. W. Frewen Lord speaks unhopefully of the prospects of Italian finance, unless Italy can obtain German or English aid to set the Treasury straight ; but we do not see how even a financier of Mr. Gladstone's skill could render much assistance, since, as Mr. Lord himself admits, the root of the mischief is the multiplication of offices, supplemented by very general peculation in the revenue de- partments. A strong King, after a public appeal to the people, might dare to encounter the hatred of whole classes of dis- missed officials ; but certainly no Minister could, and least of all a Minister known to be leaning on foreign advice. We cannot agree with Mr. Lord that a large settlement of foreigners in Italy especially as landed proprietors would improve matters, or, indeed, tend in any way to produce revenue or check waste. Italy is not Egypt, to be regenerated by foreign management. —Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild never gives himself space enough to let his great knowledge and pleasing style exercise their full effect; but in his account of French eighteenth- century art, and the admiration still felt for it in this country, he adds a valuable scrap to general information. Few people are aware of George 1V.'s claims to rank high among art- collectors. " The acclimatisation of French art might only have been temporary had not the Prince Regent come forward at this crisis, and settled its destiny in this country. He was endowed with the most exquisite taste, and availed himself of the unique opportunities of the time with a profusion that, however, was always tempered by good judgment. He never refused a fine cabinet or a first-rate piece of china, but if it was not absolutely above criticism, it was rejected, or bestowed on a favourite. He made Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace storehouses of art treasures, and trained a school of collectors who profited by his example. Personal friends were his principal agents, but he also availed himself of the services of lesser notabilities, and in his French cook he found a most intelligent purveyor, not for his table only, but for his galleries. Thus while in France the art of the eighteenth century was neglected, in England it steadily advanced in the estimation of a discriminating public, and there appeared soon, that best of all indications of an increased demand, the forger. The fashion which had been set by George rv. was further developed by the impulse it received at the hands of a new art patron," the Marquis of Hertford, whom the Baron describes, as most men have done, as a man of exquisite taste and a bad heart. He dearly loved outbidding his closest friends, and once snatched from the Empress Eugenie a relic of Marie Antoinette which she ardently desired to obtain. Latterly no one would bid against the Marquis. —Mr. Traill continues his amusing account of the minor English poets of the present day. He now counts fifty-seven of them, and is half-inclined to believe that a poetic faculty has come into the race, specially shown in the growth of terse-makers into real though minor poets. We are by no means disinclined to accept that theory, which certainly co- incides with our own observation during the past half-cen- tury ; and if it is true, it would suggest that the modern fury for education is developing imagination as well as know- ledge. It certainly does that in all branches of science, and in the observation of Nature, and we do not see why it should not do it in literature also. Only, if it does, why, in the name of perplexity, does not the desire to read poetry increase too P All publishers tell you that it does not, though there is a demand for the works of a few, probably more ardent, certainly more widely extended, than has ever been known before.—Lady Cork's reminiscences of " the social changes of the past fifty years " are entertaining though scrappy, and contain two or three stories as good as this. Lady Cork is speaking of the worship paid to Mr. Hudson, the Railway King, and his wife:— "The rage which prevailed through one London season for having very large entertainments graced by the presence of this essentially unpolished couple would appear simply incredible, had not social history in this, as in so many instances, repeated itself again and again. Countless, as may be supposed, and totally un- leavened by good nature, were the anecdotes circulated in ridicule behind their backs, while from interested motives all honour was shown to the faces of this unsuspecting pair, and the lesson thus afforded of the meanness of human nature when permitted to break through the restraints of good breeding and good feeling was neither edifying at the time nor pleasing to recall The most innocuous of these raecontars was, if I remember rightly, the account of poor Mrs. H. being lionised over the abode of a peer of high rank and shown the bust of Marcus Aurelius, on which she gazed with reverence, inquiring with bated breath ' if that was the late Markiss P' " It must not be forgotten that Mr. Hudson, unlike most

millionaires, was supposed able to bestow wealth on those he advised, and that a great many of his projects succeeded.

The number of the Fortnightly Review for March is, from its conductors' point of view, one of the best that has ever appeared, every article being either interesting or startling. To the latter category belongs Mr. Henry Blanchamp's " Thoughts of a Human Automaton," a plea for determinism, with which we may hereafter deal more at length ; and to the former, Sir R. Temple's essay on the marvellous growth of population in India. He estimates the population of the Indian Empire at 289,000,000, or more than seven times the popula- tion of France, or 40,000,000 more than that of all Europe west of the Vistula. The increase in the last ten years has been 30,000,000 clear of annexations, or nearly 3,000,000 a year. This seems dangerous ; but the increase of trade and of the

agricultural produce keeps pace with the increase in popula- tion, while there is a slow but marked and visible rise in the rate of wages, owing, apparently, to greater demand for skilled artisans. Over the whole area the population is not too thick—

only 150 to the square mile — though there are regions, notably round Benares, in Behar, and near Calcutta, where its density is frightful, nearly 900 to the square mile. The number will probably be 300,000,000 in 1900, and Sir R. Temple believes that famine will be a perennial difficulty. No human skill can prevent occasional droughts, and when they occur, though the body of the population, aided by State relief, will survive them, the body of the feeble classes will be in danger. The peasants will be safe, for they save; " but below them there is firstly a great class of farm labourers who have nothing to do or to earn when the fields are scorched and the crops withered. Secondly, there is a great class of small handicraftsmen and makers of country wares ; the purchasers and customers, being obliged to economise during the scarcity, cease to purchase

and to deal; so the workers fall into enforced idleness. Thus the number of the unemployed grows alarmingly. For these two classes relief works are provided. Thirdly, there is

everywhere a large class of aged, infirm, or otherwise afflicted people who, in Europe, would fall upon the poor-rates, but in India are supported by private charity. In time of scarcity

the charitably disposed are preoccupied in supporting them- selves, and so the fountains of charity are dried up. And

these poor people, too feeble to work, are the first to be maintained under the care of the relief authorities." The amount of human drift is large even in England ; but India will have eight times our population, and its impotent classes, sick labourers, aged labourers, orphans, and the in- curably lazy, necessarily count by millions. Sir R. Temple, therefore, though he regards the increase of the population as, on the whole, a source of strength to the Empire, admits also that it may involve serious dangers, especially to finance.

One source of hope there is. The people dislike applying for relief, and that healthy pride may, as education spreads, develop further down.—Lord Kelvin, better known as Sir William Thomson, sends an instructive paper on " The Dissipation of Energy," a statement of the arguments which, in his judgment, prove that the energy of the sun depends on a. shrinkage perpetually going on, so that its store is essentially finite, and is much less than it was three hundred thousand years ago. Consequently, unless the laws of the universe alter, which is the highest improbability, the sun must ulti- mately lose its force, and " within a finite period of time past the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted." If therefore, as we should draiv the deduction, man is not a spirit, he is a useless ephemeris proceeding out of nothing into nothing, and with no motive except his own comfort for making any effort to advance. —Professor Lombroso sends a very short paper, which, we fancy, will rouse for him a nest of hornets. He affirms, on the evidence of great surgeons, whom he names, and of experiments made with the electric algometer, that women have distinctly less nervous sensibility than men, the propor- tions being as follows :—" Among no less than fifty women of the lower classes general sensibility was represented by 90 mm., and sensitiveness to pain by 53 mm. ; among an equal number of men of the same condition the figares were respectively 94 mm. and 64 mm." Women, therefore, feel pain less than men, and this is the real cause why, though exposed to special dangers and more badly treated, they, as a whole, live longer. The statistics, we confess, do not impress us. They do not cover a sufficient area, the comparative sensibility of men, and even of classes of males, differing very widely. There are men who feel pain like hares, and men who only feel it like foxes, a fact well known to the dentists, whose evidence the Professor quotes. His fifty men were probably peasants.— The well-known Stepniak gives masses of statistics to show that Russian agriculture is declining because the surface of the soil has been exhausted, and the Russian peasant, being kept in ignorance by an autocracy, will not plough deep enough. Would he plough deeper under a British Viceroy P Those assertions are easy to make ; but why is not China exhausted under its autocracy, which cer- tainly teaches nobody P That something is wrong in Russia, seems manifest from the despair which governs its thinkers ; but deeper ploughing does not strike one as a remedy. They are always saying those things in India, but the native agriculture outlives its critics.—Madame James Darmesteter writes a curious chapter on the mediaeval history of the Jews in Southern Europe. Everywhere they were wanted as physicians, money-lenders, and distributing traders ; everywhere the Kings were disposed to shelter them, as sponges to be squeezed ; and everywhere the populace at short intervals rose on them, massacred them in heaps, and compelled the Kings to banish them from the land. Madame Darmesteter does not think the outrages were instigated by the Church. On the contrary, the Jews in the Roman States were fairly well off, the Popes repeatedly forbade their per- secution, and the steady policy of the Holy See was to reduce their influence by making of them a separate and banned race, without active persecution. The details she gives of their value to commerce are exceedingly curious. —Archbishop Walsh denies absolutely that the Catholic Episcopate in Ireland desire to produce a " Catholic atmo= sphere," as it is called, either in Protestant schools or mixed schools. Their claim, he contends, is confined to schools attended by Catholics alone. He produces a quantity of evidence as to his own demands and those of his colleagues ; but does he not protest a little too strongly ? We should have thought that a Roman Catholic Archbishop must desire, and therefore must strive for, a Catholic atmosphere in any school containing one single Catholic. Why he is to blame for so striving, his point of view being considered, we do not see.

The Bishop of Ripon, in the Contemporary Review, bears generous testimony to Mr. Spurgeon, but brings out, perhaps unconsciously, his subject's intense belief in Calvinism as the only true creed. He accepted the doctrine of election, in par- ticular, in its hardest form, believing, with Jonathan Edwards, that none are saved without grace; that God distributes grace as he chooses, that is, arbitrarily ; and that election is " nothing but God's purpose to do what he does do." Why,

then, preach? The doctrine is the Mahommedans', and makes of God a Sultan of the sky.—Lord Hobhouse's able and rather bitter defence of the County Council, which he considers a much-slandered body, is not new. He affirms that the rates on London as a whole have not risen, the Council, though it raises the rates on rich parishes, having diminished the rates on poor ones. We presume he refers principally to the raising of the assessments ; but he does not answer the grand objection to that system, the comparative secrecy it secures for extrava- gance. Everybody can see an increased poundage ; nobody can see when any assessment is raised £60 or £70 a year, to all appearance by mere arbitrary will. The article, however, will hardly be read for political purposes, as the elections are held to-day.—Sir Charles Gavan Duffy continues his reminiscences of Carlyle. This instalment is not quite so interesting as usual, but we must extract one story, told by Sir Charles himself, which perfectly illustrates—though he does not tell it for that reason—the instinctive pessimism of the Irish people :-

" Some of the most significant maxims I could recall were Irish sayings, which I heard from my mother when I was a boy, and Irish legends, revealing the deep sagacity which lay at the bottom of the national character. Here was one : In a dear summer, as the famine periods were called in Ireland, a small farmer was in- duced by his wife to send out his father to beg. The old man was equipped with a bag, a staff, and half a double blanket, which the frugal housewife prepared for him. After he was gone, she in- quired for the moiety of the blanket to make sure he had not carried it off. When the house was ransacked in vain, the father thought of asking his little son if he had seen it. Yis, father,' the boy replied, I have put it by till the time comes when I'll want it." What will you want with it, Owen alma?. ?' inquired the father. Why, father,' replied the boy, you see, when I grow up to be a big man, and I'll be sending you out to beg, I'll want it to put on your back.' " The English boy, under the same circumstances, would have said : I'll keep the blanket till I'm rich, to remind me how

we lived when poor.'—We see little value in the Rev. W. Tuckwell's comparison between village life in England and France ; but there is value in the description of the labourers' demands by so experienced a sympathiser :-

" At any rate, the labourer is resolved and is unanimous as to what an Allotment Act must grant to him. He claims for the parish council which he postulates clear legal power to take from the landowner compulsorily, at a fair agricultural rent determined if necessary by a Land Court, with perpetual tenure so long as the rents are paid, as much land as he requires, and security for any buildings he may erect upon it. And this will be only one among the functions of his parish council. He would have it supplant the overseers and churchwardens, manage the schools, control the public-houses, assume trusteeship of local charities, exercise powers of sanitation, present applicants for parish relief, create village halls, reading-rooms, recreation-grounds, establish village hospitals with trained nurse and midwife ; its members being elected, in fair proportion to the population, by the single, secret vote."

And all that is to be paid for out of the rates ! How much, when it is all done, will be left of property in the parish? The village would be a suburban Paradise, deserted because nobody could live in it.—General Booth, in his account of "Social Problems at the Antipodes," regrets the crowding of Australians to the towns, and states his idea of the remedy :—

" I would then lay it down absolutely that charity must come to an end. There must be no more giving out of doles. Money must not be handed over to the destitute unless they are prepared to make a return in labour. Those who are unable to work must be supported, but the idle able-bodied men must be compelled by Government to work. Idleness must be treated as a crime. Having instructed the people in the necessity for a return to agriculture, the Government must transfer them from the crowded centres to the agricultural districts by compulsion if all other means fail."

The Government is, in short, to apply the " beneficent whip." Well, it may come to that ; but why is compulsion of that sort more Christian than the old form of compulsion,— leaving people to choose between hard work where work is always possible—that is, on the land—and starvation P The philanthropists are getting as " hard " as the economists, and though the change is healthy, it is also a little odd.—Every one interested in the subject of pensions for old age should read Canon Blackley's paper thereupon. He supports Mr. Cham- berlain in principle, but makes mincemeat of his particular scheme. He denounces the State payment of the £15 con- tribution in particular, showing that it will involve a heavy tax upon the taxpayer of to-day in order that the taxpayer of forty years hence may not have to pay his proper share for the support of the poor alive in his own time.

They may also read with advantage the account in the National Review, by Mr. Holloway, M.P., of " a successful experiment " in Stroud. There a Society grants sick-allowances and old-age pensions, upon the principle that each man pays a monthly contribution ; that the Society invests its funds in the best securities it can find ; and that each man is paid in pension the exact value of the sum at his credit when he reaches the prescribed age, minus the exact value of any allowance paid for sickness. The regular payment, though there are many classes, seems to be id. a day, and id. a month extra for each year of the payer's age beyond thirty. These payments secure to him 7s. 6d. a week in ckness, an old-age pension—amount not specified—and a sum of money at death. The Society is excessively popular, the subscribers pay regularly, and so sure is Mr. Holloway, after seventeen years' experience of success, that he says :- " If Parliament should decide to supplement this with a moderate grant, there is not a working man living who could not secure for himself respectable comfort in his old age ; and if any neglected those easy facilities for acquiring such obvious advantages, they might justly be left to the tender mercies of the workhouse." There is hopefulness in that paper, and would be more if it were possible to do without any Parlia- mentary grant beyond the equivalent of the right to the " house," to enforce a State audit, and therefore to give a State guarantee for the funds. We presume, however, that the trustees do not limit themselves to Console.