THE MAGAZINES.

THE most instructive article in the half-crown magazines of this

month is'Mr. F. Scudamore's in Blackwood_OR the late Khedive. It is a_history, of Newfik's reign hy an eyewitnessof its events, ,who,writes with decision, and is coolly, even harshly impartial. He avill not alter the-general estimate of Tewfik Pasha, whom he describes very much as we did, as essentially a cultivated fellah, very submissive, very loyal, brave -when courage was

-to be shown by endurance, not brave -when • the • situation -required of him- an energetic initiative ; but he will probably dissipate _the kind of halo which, since -Arabi was a prisoner, has gathered -round his head. Arabi, Mr.' Scudamore says, remained always thoroughly a fellah, extremely ignorant, quite unpractical, and though given- to moralising speeches, at heart a'vindictive Arab

the early-part of 1882 hatred of the Circassian9 filled Arabi's little mind, and he had been but a'few days in power before all of them whom he could seize under any pretext were in prison. There he visited them by night,: and sought to obtain by torture evidence that would enable him to take the life of his enemy, Osman Rifky. -Many- tragedies have been enacted in Egypt, but it is difficult to believe that any more hideous brutality has ever been practised so near our own day than that which-this heartless :and cold-blooded peasant directed each evening in the Abdin prison. At length the Khedive stepped between Arabi andhis victims, and saved them from death by torture by a sentence of banishment."

If that is true, and Mr. Scudamore signs his name to his article, and had every opportunity for learning facts, English sympathy with the " captive of Ceylon " would-appear to be a good deal wasted. Mr. Scudamore does not believe in "Egypt for the Egyptians," and gives as one illustration of 'what would follow the English evacuation, the proposal accepted by the majority of the Egyptian Legislative Council, less than three years ago, for the suppression of brigandage :-

" 1. Amputation of the right hand and the left foot, followed by capital punishment. 2. Amputation as above, and crucifixion. 3. Amputation as above, capital punishment, and crucifixion. 4. Capital punishment and crucifixion. 5. Capital punishment alone. 6. Crucifixion alone. Crucifixion consists in binding the con- demned alive upon a scaffolding, killing him by piercing him in-the body with a spear, and leaving the corpse exposed for three days.' Upon a gibbet fixed perpendicularly in the ground are attached two cross-bars, one a certain distance above the other. The con- demned is bound upon this structure with arms and legs out- stretched to the utmost. In this position he shall be pierced in the left breast with a spear, which must be burned in- the wound until deathshall ensue.' " The Fortnightly opens with an unpublished poem by ;Tames Thomson, written in 1882, and full of his peculiar pessimistic- thought and sad melodiousness. This verse, craving for man

even a new deception if only it may lift from him "the enormous weight of all the heavy ages piled on us," is, as an expression of what should be the pessimist's desire, very fine :—

" 0 antique fables! beautiful and bright,

And joyous with the joyous youth of yore; 0 antique fables ! for a little light Of that which sbineth in you evermore, To cleanse the dimness from our weary eyes, And bathe our old world with a new surprise Of golden dawn entrancing sea and shore."

—Sir John Lubbock's valuable paper on the County Council, with its revenue of 23,234,000 a year, is in the main a protest like our own against government by committees, and a plea for the creation of a City Cabinet. A complete change would require an Act, but some improvement is pos- sible even with the present statutes It would, I think, be .better_ if in future the chairmen of committees were elected by the Council, -not, as at , present, by the committee itself, and were entrusted with greater 'responsibility As to current business; that, -subject to confirmation by the Council, the chairmen should select their own committee-men; and that

-the chairman of the Finance Committee should be, as it were, the Chancellor of the Exchequer." This would give the

a certain coherence, as the Council would choose the chairmen from the dominant party; but while the committees, which alter in composition according to attend- ance, can overrule their chairmen, the improvement would be but alight. What is wanted is to make them responsible Ministers.—Mr. Russell's strongly worded protest against denominational education in Ireland will be read-with tain interest; - but is it not a little belated ? The Unionists- are resolved that Ireland shall have the same educational system as Great Britain, and the Liberals, with the Irish Catholics as their necessary allies, cannot heartily fight against the .change. Mr. Russell is afraid that the- result will be that Protestant children in the South and

West will be educated in Catholic schools ; but with a. strong conscience clause, where will be the harm of that,

or how, in a Roman Catholic country, is it to be avoided ? With Mr. Russell's demand that, if education is to be made compulsory, it shall be made more efficient, all parties can agree. The Session, however, draws so near, that it will be well, before discussion grows savage, to await the Government Bill.—We are rather sick of discussions on marriage, and we do not see that Mr. Wordsworth Donis-

thorpe's paper tends towards any practical solution of present difficulties, even if they are not exaggerated. He suggests- marriages for one year, with right of separation after a further year's delay. He thinks that the tendency to monogamy.is- now so strong, that this new liberty would only beneficially relax,, not destroy, the present institution. That may possibly be true as regards a majority; but what would be the result on • the minority ? This, at all events, that the -women de-

serted as soon as they ceased to be attractive would be- utterly miserable. All women, moreover, who are not protected by the possession of capital—that is, an immense -majority—would become jealous slaves, for they would always be fearing repudiation. Apart from morals, marriage is the grand protection of all women and most children, —that is, of about three-fifths of humanity. Fortunately, though there may be some danger of a relaxation in the- laws of divorce, Englishmen have about as much intention of abolishing the principle that marriage is for life, as of abolishing -trial by jury. Lady Malmesbury's answer to Mr. Donisthorpe's paper is an admirable one, for she uses the-

only argument it is really worth, ridicule by illustration.—

'Mr. Theodore Bent describes the " Road from 'Mashona- land " aid •the Portuguese possessions as practically im- passable for ordinary emigrants, bearers being untrustworthy, and beasts liable to death from the tsetse-fly. He bids emigrants wait until the railway is constructed, and cen-

sures the South Africa Company for spoiling their own 'prospects in Mashonaland by over-hurry. The means of

communication, he thinks, should have been established first. That seems sensible ; but we have known our countrymen overcome greater difficulties.

Lord Tennyson's ode of seventeen lines on the death of the Duke of Clarence in the Nineteenth Century shows him in full possession of his old mastery of stately and thoughtful melody. If the "toll of funeral" is an infelicitous expression, the mag- nificent lines which follow—Death is "no discordance in the roll

And march of that Eternal Harmony Whereto the worlds beat time,"

not only redeem the fault, but suggest that to such a poet the privilege may be safely left of using language as be will.

Lord Bramwell's paper on cross-examination is substantially a plea for the present system, on the plea that the Courts actually do justice, and is rather beside the complaint, which is that they might do it still even if appearance in a witness- box were not a terror to honest men.—Mr. Mead, a Metro- politan Police Magistrate, argues strongly against allowing the accused to give evidence in criminal cases. He believes that accused persons have already sufficient opportunities of suggesting the true defence, and is greatly afraid of increasing the prevalence of perjury :— " This suggests the last argument on this subject, which on account of its importance should rather be in the foreground. One has only to consider the vast number of persons who are being tried day by day, whether before magistrates, at quarter- sessions, or assizes, to realise the immense amount of perjury that will be committed. To say nothing of the shock to religious sensibilities which the continual disregard of an oath presents, it is a grave question whether it is right to offer a person an irresistible temptation to commit a crime much graver in many eases than that with which he is charged. The perjury which would be committed would of necessity in almost all cases go un- punished, and for a man to commit perjury in defending himself upon a criminal charge would be considered a very venial affair indeed. An oath would thus in the course of time be degraded, and the deplorable spectacle of men continually lying with im- punity would lead to considerable laxity amongst all classes of witnesses. Of late county court judges have commented in severe terms upon the perjury which prevails in their courts, so that any change which would increase the disregard of the truth in courts of justice is much to be deprecated. It may be said that to be logical we should revert to the system of excluding parties to a civil action from the witness-box. The obvious answer is that in nearly all such cases the stake is infinitely smaller and the probability of a prosecution for perjury con- siderably greater."

That is a strong argument, but does it not rather tend to a complete remodelling of our present laws and practice with regard to perjury ? Is it not the fact, by-the-way, that perjury is less common in judicial proceedings on the Con- tinent than it is here P Certainly confessions are more common.—Mr. Dicey's paper on Tewfik Pasha is not as nutritive as Mr. Scudamore's in Blackwood ; but this, as a trait in his character, is new to us, and completes the portrait

'' of him as essentially a native Egyptian :-

" Unlike his father, he was a devout MusEralman, and his sub- jects soon perceived that under his reign the interests of Islam would not suffer from the fact of the country being under a British protectorate. Though a most attached and—in as far as the truth about the interior life of the harem is ever known abroad —a most faithful husband, he was personally hostile to the emancipation of women from the restraints under which they are placed by the laws and usages of Islam. All attempts on the part of several of his Europeanised relatives to adopt the habits of Western life met with his grave disapproval ; and he even viewed with disfavour the existence of intimate social relations between his Mahometan subjects and the European colony. Some of the jeunesse dores of Cairo, who, inspired by the example of British officers, tried to start driving four-in-hands at the Schoubra promenade, received a direct warning that any continuance in the practice would involve the displeasure of the Court."

—" Cardinal Manning in the Church of England," by Mr. B. G. Wilberforce, throws little light on his real character, but shows that he knew how to win the enduring love of a rural flock, and suggests the probably false thought that he always regretted his quiet parsonage at Lavington.—Rear..

Admiral Seymour's account of " The Present State of the Panama Canal" amounts, as far as we see, to this. A fifth of the work has been done. To do the remainder will take £36,000,000 at least, and then the proprietors will only have a canal with locks, which impede greatly the passage and number of ships, and will have to build and maintain gigantic works to protect the canal against destruction by the floods of the Chagres River. It is not likely the money will ever be spent. more especially as the Americans adhere to their counter-project of a canal through Nicaragua.—There is a pleasant criticism by Mr. J. Morley of Mr. Harrison's " New Calendar of Great Men," pleasant not only from the charming

style which should never have been wasted on politics. but from its appreciation and depreciation of the names selected. Even Mr. Morley's toleration for everything independent of Christianity breaks down, we are amused to see, when he finds

Frederick the Great canonised in the " New Calendar," and even raised to a place by the side of St. Paul. Mr. Morley,

however, even under this terrible provocation, argues and does not laugh.

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's reminiscences of Carlyle still furnish the most readable paper in- the Contemporary Review.

Carlyle talked much of Ireland, then in the throes of the famine, but the newest portion of his talk was about literary celebrities. He does not seem to have been generally as malignant as he was about Derwent Coleridge; but he admired nobody very heartily. His judgment on Mr. Rintoul, the founder of this journal, that he believed in nothing, was, we feel sure, erroneous. The late Mr. G. Hooper, who was years with him as sub-editor, always declared that Mr. Rintoul was the most sincere of Liberals, as Liberals then were, and always worked under an impulse to benefit the world by liberating it from all sorts of chains. Naturally, Carlyle, whose one idea was compression, could not understand his impulse, though he recognised his ability. This sketch strikes us as accurate :—

" I asked him if Emerson's ideas could be regarded as original. He replied that Emerson had, in the first instance, taken his system out of Satter' and other of his (Carlyle's) writings, but he worked it out in a way of his own. It was based on truth, un- doubtedly ; but Emerson constantly forgot that one truth may require to be modified by a precisely opposite truth. He had not a broad intellect, but it was clear, and sometimes even profound. His writings wanted consistency and a decisive intelligible result. One was constantly disappointed at their suddenly stopping short and leading to nothing. They were full of beauties—diamonds, or at times, bits of painted glass, strung on a thread, which had no necessary connection with each other. He frequently hit upon isolated truths, but they remained isolated—they nowhere com- bined into an intelligible theory of life. I asked him if he found more in the man than in his writings. He said, No ; when they came to talk with each other their opinions were constantly found to clash. Emerson believed that every man's self-will ought to be cultivated, that men would grow virtuous and submissive to just authority, need no coercion, and all that sort of thing. He knew there were men up and down the world fit to govern the rest; but he conceived that, when such a man was found, instead of being put in the seat of authority, he ought to be restrained with fetters, as a thing dangerous and destructive. He bore, how- ever, with great good humour the utter negation and contradic- tion of his theories. He had a sharp. perking little face, and he kept bobbing it up and down with Yissir, yissir' (mimicking), in answer to objections or expositions."

—There are quite a heap of reminiscences of Cardinal Manning, among which we like Mr. Meynell's best. He brings out the Cardinal's gentleness, and a certain vein of simplicity which was in him. Mr. Waugh's is far too adoring, and Mr. Bunting's shows, to our mind, that the Cardinal could be a good many things to a good many men. It is difficult to us to

believe that he really thought of Dr. Fairbairn as a "brother in Christ." A step-brother would be a possible description of his view of the relation.—Sheikh Djemal ed Din's account of Persia is worth reading, because it gives the other side of the usual picture. He describes the country as a land of horrors, in which there ie no justice, all property is seized by the Shah and his agents, and every one's daughter is liable to be violated by the police. The Shah himself he describes as a man whose mental powers are worn out, and who is, besides, a monster of cruelty. It must be

remembered that the Sheikh himself has suffered at the Shah's hands, and that the recent successful resistance to the tobacco monopoly suggests that, if the people as a body were so

hideously oppressed, they could soon end the oppression.

The Sheikh desires English interference; but do his country- men P—The remaining articles in the Contemporary are a little too heavy, and one by Mr. F. Peek and Mr E T Hall,

on " The Unhealthiness of Cities," is almost unreadably technicaL It is most important to get rid of sewer-gas, but it is not an entertaining subject to read about, or, except to builders, a very instructive one.

We have already noticed Mr. Chamberlain's paper in the National Review, and there is another by Mr. St. Loe Strachey

on " One Vote, One Value," to which we may call attention.

Mr. Strachey describes strongly the over-representation of Ireland, and suggests a plan by which her surplus of twenty Members, together with the surplus of three Members in Wales, might be distributed even in this Parliament. He

takes away one Member from the Irish counties with least population, and disfranchises the boroughs of Kilkenny, Newry, Galway, and Waterford. Then he believes it safe to

affirm :—

" That the matter would not be one of any great diffi- culty, and that a body of Boundary Commissioners, instructed to divide the twenty-three members between London, the suburban counties, Lancashire, and the West Riding in pro- portion to the populations of these districts, -would have little or no difficulty in preparing a fair and satisfactory scheme within a very short time. The Commissioners would first deter- mine arithmetically what share of the twenty-three should belong to London, what to the suburban counties, what to Lancashire, and what to the West Riding. This ascertained, they would readjust the representation of those areas with as little disturbance as possible of existing divisions."

The plan is a good one, but we doubt if Parliament will stir until it can introduce a logical system of equal electoral districts. If the principle is to be " one vote, one value," inequality between counties or boroughs must be abolished as completely as inequalities between countries. The main obstacle is, we believe, the dread of each Member that he may have to seek election at the hands of new constituents Mr. Edwardes is entertaining in his account of Naples, which from his sketch we must accept as one of the wickedest cities on the globe. The following paragraph summarises his judgment :—

" No people enjoy life with more zest than the Neapolitans. There is not a mood of which they are capable that they do not cultivate to its extreme limit. They are the most religious people in Italy, and the most immoral. Their vocabulary would lack half its force if the saints and the Madonna were exiled from it. There would be a startling halt in the increase of the population of the city if it were decreed that for ten years all its illegitimate children, born in the meantime, should be put to death. The people would love their priests less if they did not implicitly rely upon them to make a clean sweep of their manifold sins whenever it was requested of them."

Neapolitans seem to be saved from the consequences of their vices by a certain childishness which clings to them all, and a strong feeling of pity for the suffering :- " A tale is told of a girl who, being ill, was wont to receive daily two spoonfuls of cod-liver oil from a Neapolitan hospital. She was allowed to carry it away with her. After a time she had so much improved in health that the dose was denied her. In explana- tion of the storm of sobs and wailing with which she received this announcement, it came out that she had regularly bestowed the nasty stuff upon a poor old woman, who had made a meal off it."