THE MAGAZINES.

THERE are good papers in the Nineteenth Century for November, but we cannot count Signor Crispi's essay on "The Dual and the Triple Alliance" among them. It is

practically a mere assertion that the Triple Alliance has secured peace to Europe, while the Dual Alliance must pro- duce war, because if its basis were not a secret agreement to recover Alsace-Lorraine for France and give Constantinople

to Russia, there could be no reason for keeping its terms secret. That is surely a little far-fetched. May not its basis

be a promise of help if either France or Russia is attacked by more Powers than one, and the reason for secrecy be the method of help, which might include, for example, if France were invaded, an occupation of Jutland Anything Signor

Crispi writes must have some interest, because he was so recently Premier of Italy ; but in these pages he has con-

tributed nothing to his readers' knowledge, and very little to their power of forming a judgment. Indeed, we fear his statement that Alsace-Lorraine accepts her present fate is in the main misleading. She submits, no doubt, but does she accept ?—Sir Robert Giften's dictum that either gold or silver will do as the basis of a currency is valuable as the opinion of a great expert ; but he does not prove the second pro-

position, only affirming that fluctuations in external exchange do not matter while internal exchange remains steady. Gold

will therefore do for England and the West, silver for India and the East. Can England and India be regarded as foreign countries P If they are not, but countries whose finances are inextricably linked together, have not we at present two

currencies in one Monarchy, one of those currencies steady and one incessantly fluctuating ? Sir Robert's paper is, how- ever, well worth reading ; and his advice to reopen the Indian mints cautiously and slowly, and then leave currency alone, is

at all events distinct.—So is Professor Mahaffy's advice upon education. In an essay, which it is a pleasure to read for its brightness and definiteness even if we do not agree with it, he says that he has changed his earlier views, and that as educa-

tion is getting spoiled, he is inclined to argue for the following proposition :—

"I have now come to believe in the separation of subjects according to the wants of our pupils ; and as I think that, in the primary schools, agricultural teaching should be the main thing in country Board Schools, industrial teaching in the towns, so I think that while we must always have for the classes of wealth and leisure a high education in literature, in philosophy, and in mathematics, we should have for those who cannot afford this luxury equally good special training, which shall not be mixed up and confused with the other, with the false and vulgar notion that by so doing we shall make it either more dignified or more efficient."

This means, we suppose, in practice that those who have not to earn their living should enjoy the old and sound training of the mind, and that those who have to earn it should be saturated with useful knowledge. The Professor, as usual, argues well, but the result of his new conviction would be,

we fear, to deepen the cleavage between the " Haves " and the "Have-nots " to an unprecedented degree. They would almost cease to understand one another. If universal instruction is to produce any political good at all, it must be by estab- lishing or increasing a common sympathy and mutual intelligibility independent of class.—Mrs. Hogg endeavours to strengthen the argument against permitting factory work to be done at home by a terrible picture of the " fur-pulling " industry which employs a whole district in South London of wretchedly paid and most unhealthy and overworked female industrials. We agree that the factory can be placed under better sanitary conditions than the home ; but we cannot believe that therefore the right of adults to labour as they please can be rightfully impaired. If an industry spreads disease, the right to regulate it belongs to the community ; but if it does not, the mere fact that it is unhealthy gives no such right. The community might as well dictate the kind and quan- tity of each individual's food.—Major Lugard, an officer of immense experience in Africa and of the soundest judgment, sends a most vehement protest against permitting any liquor traffic in our African dominions, backed by an opinion which, so far as we know, is absolutely new and original. He thinks the unlimited sale of cheap spirits in Africa will sentence the negroes to the fate which has befallen the Maoris and other Polynesians. Alcohol, and especially bad alcohol, will first degrade and then extirpate them. Of the first consequence there is no doubt, but is there any evidence of the second ? If there is, why does it not follow in the Southern States of America P Major Lugard would deal with the evil by compelling dilution of the liquor, and by placing on it increasing taxes, beginning with Is. a gallon, till the taste having ceased to spread, it would be possible to venture on total prohibition. Long study of the question among the brown races has convinced us that alcohol is

dalgerous to them and to the negroes, but that no legislation is of any use except total prohibition. High taxes are met by illicit distillation, and have, moreover, this enormous draw- back, that if they succeed the State is never able to give up the resulting revenue. In Russia even voluntary abstinence

from drink is looked on with disfavour, as directly injurious to the Treasury.—Mr. J. Morley sends a brilliant mono- graph upon Guicciardini, whom he is inclined to consider one of the greatest, if not the greatest, historians in the Renaissance. He was an oligarch, a man nearly without conscience, and a fatalist ; but he profoundly understood mankind, and the sneers at his style have been borrowed from an enemy. He was a plain, steady writer, though he indulged in very long sentences. He was, in fact, a considerable historian, though he thought nothing of philosophic history in the modern sense. Mr. Morley states that latter fact in a paragraph so charming that we must extract it:—

" In the deeper problems of political philosophy, he shows no interest. Is history an unmeaning procession across a phantom scene, a fantastic cycle of strange stage-plays, where conquerors, pontiffs, law-givers, saints, jesters march in pomp or squalor, in ephemeral triumphs and desperate reverse ? Or is it, again, the record of such growth among civil communities as the naturalist traces in the succession of organisms material and palpable, and is the historian's task to find and illustrate the laws by which the long process has been moulded ? Or is it, as Bossuet would per- suade us, the long and solemn vindication of the mysterious pur- poses of God to man, the ordered working of the Unseen Powers as they raise up states and empires and cast them headlong down again in stern and measured rhythm ? How far have great events sprung from small occasions, and vast public catastrophes from puny private incidents ? The extraordinary individual, an Alexander or a Cwsar, how far is he the agent, how far the master, of circumstance? Is he, in the broad aspect, only the instrument of forces viewless as the winds, a strenuous helmsman on a blind driving tide, or is he himself the force that shapes, resists, con- trols, compels ? All this, Guicciardini would have said, is not history, but the interpretation of history ; I am historian, not interpreter ; my task is to narrate a given series of events, to show their connection with one another, to set out the character of political men, to describe parties and personal ambitions, to tell the story, and leave you to draw your own moral if you can find one."

The November number of Blackwood is even unusually good. There is an estimate of Tennyson which is almost a literary curiosity, the writer's deep admiration being shot through and through with a certain unwillingness to admire heartily, due apparently to some difference of creed ; and there is an account of life in China, called "Tiger Majesty," from the admiring phrase in which Chinamen acknowledge that the Court has been at once just, violent, and cruel—a combination they greatly like—which seems to us singularly instructive. It certainly deepens the impression that between the thought of the European and the thought of the China- man about justice there is a great gulf fixed. It brings out, too, a fact of which most Englishmen are unaware,—that the

misgovernment of China does not go deep, the immense majority of the people being steadily let alone to manage their own village affairs.—The paper of the number is, however, Mr. Joseph Conrad's, a writer of whom, we are ashamed to say, we have previously known nothing, but who must possess genius of a very rare and peculiar kind. We do not remember ever to have seen so vivid a painting of the Asiatic of the Far East, the Asiatic who has too much instead of too little energy and imagina- tion, as in " Karain : a Memory." Karain is a positively new figure in literature, a true Malay with the half insanity which the Malay so frequently exhibits, yet a human being whom a

European can at least partially understand and admire. The way in which Mr. Conrad contrives to surround his characters with the influence of that strange island world, and to infuse into his reader for the moment the Malay code of ethics, is really admirable, though doubtless it is facilitated by a scorn of Europe, it ways and its conditions, which he takes little pains to conceal. That story, only twenty-six pages, is worth to those who long for writing which is not of every day the coat of the magazine twice over. Take this momentary glimpse of the Strand merely as a taste of the author's method :-

A watery gleam of sunshine flashed from the west and went

out between two long lines of walls ; and then the broken con- fusion of roofs, the chimney-stacks, the gold letters sprawling over the fronts of houses, the sombre polish of windows, stood resigned and sullen under the falling gloom. The whole length of the street, deep as a well and narrow like a corridor, was full

of a sombre and ceaseless stir. Our ears were filled by a head- long shuffle and beat of rapid footsteps and an underlying rumour—a rumour vast, faint, pulsating, as of panting breaths, of beating hearts, of gasping voices. Innumerable eyes stared straight in front, feet moved hurriedly, blank faces flowed, arms swung. Over all, a narrow ragged strip of smoky sky wound about between the high roofs, extended and motionless, like a soiled streamer flying above the rout of a mob A clumsy string of red, yellow, and green omnibuses rolled swaying, mon- strous and gaudy ; two shabby children ran across the road ; a knot of dirty men with red neckerchiefs round their bare throats lurched along, discussing filthily ; a ragged old man with a face of despair yelled horribly in the mud the name of a paper ; while far off, amongst the tossing heads of horses, the dull flash of harnesses, the jumble of lustrous panels and roofs of carriages, we could see a policeman, helmeted and dark, stretching out a rigid arm at the crossing of the streets. ' Yes ; I see it,' said Jackson, slowly. ` It is there; it pants, it runs, it rolls ; it is strong and alive ; it would smash you if you didn't look out ; but I'll be hanged if it is yet as real to me as . . . as the other thing . . . say, Karain's story."

The National Review, in addition to its " features "— the "Episodes of the Month," which is a history of events, the account of American affairs, and the Colonial Chronicle (devoted this month mainly to the West Indies), has a variety of papers bearing on the currency question. The National Review is, in fact, now the principal organ of bimetallism. We suppose its conductors thought it their duty to publish the strongly bimetallic opinion of Mr. A.

S. Ghosh, the Calcutta Professor, but it was scarcely wise. He brings out effectively the loss which those Indians who hoard have sustained through the closing of the Indian mints, but his essay bristles with statements which most European economists will pronounce mere fallacies. He says, for instance, that the famine in India was a famine of money and not of food, and then adds :—" Owing to the low exchange, wheat and other food-stuffs had been constantly leaving India to find a better market in gold countries. This antecedent drain of food-stuffs rendered the country less capable of coping with the famine ; consequently we have to thank the present depreciation of silver for another phase in India's misfortunes."i Both statements cannot be true, unless, indeed, the people of India exported corn and rice out of pure charity, receiving nothing in return.—There is a striking review of Tennyson's life, in which Mr. Leslie Stephen, while admiring both the great poet's powers and his character, the first note of which he believes was sweetness, contends strongly that he was no philosopher. He had no positive message to give. "Tennyson, even in the In Memoriam, always seems to me to be like a man clinging to a spar left floating after a shipwreck, knowing that it will not support him, and yet never able to make up his mind to strike out and take his chance of sinking or swimming." May not the spar be the appointed instrument of safety ? It is more daring,

perhaps, to strike out—though we should not praise the courage of the man who "struck out" from a ship—but why is it more philosophic ?

Mr. Bryce's paper in the Contemporary Review on the New York Election reads to-day a little belated, but he tells us one thing that is worth remembering. Many of the best men

in the Union, he says, hold that "the machine "—that is, the party organisation—is essential to the safety and good government of the Republic, and therefore adhere to it, regretting but pardoning the bad nominations it makes. They are afraid, it would seem, of seeing the masses of electors dissolve into heaps of sand, blown this way and that by every gust of opinion. There is a good deal to be said for

their view, but we do not see why an organisation cannot be strong without being corrupt, or why local organisa- tions should be so entirely distrusted. The community does very well in this country without "bosses," and so it did in America before they were invented. One thing has always puzzled us about American elections, the rarity of the occasions on which party voters use the secrecy of the ballot to break away from the party organisation.—The

second American article in the number is by Mr. Carnegie, the Pittsburg millionaire, who asks the question, "Does America Hate England F" His answer is a curious indication of a certain confusion which undoubtedly exists in the American

mind. He professes, we do not doubt quite sincerely, the

strongest recognition of the tie of kinship, but says that America gets angry, and will go to war whenever any European Power attacks an American State in order to settle a territorial question. It does not seem to occur to him that the fact of a State being European does not cancel its right to justice in the Western Hemisphere, or that it may have a. territorial claim—France had one the other day against Brazil—which it would be dishonourable to forego. Of course, if the Union is prepared to compel every American State to do justice to Europeans the question ends, but if not she has no right of interference except her power to interfere. —Mr. Arnold White explains very clearly and sensibly the position of the Russian Government with regard to the Jews, but his remedy seems to us unpractical. The Russians, he says in brief, fear the Jews as intellectually so much their own superiors that, if they were left free, they would in ten years Judaise the whole Administration. They consequently keep up the laws which shut them out from all careers. That is, we believe, a true view of the situation ; but how it could be remedied by a European Congress to consider the Jew auestion we cannot perceive. No nation able to resist will allow "Europe" to settle its internal administration ; and if admission to the Universities and to office is not an internal question, what is P—With these exceptions, the articles this month are not of much interest, Mrs. Weld's upon Lord Tennyson (her uncle) being too entirely eulogistic to contribute anything towards an understanding of the man. His great virtues are admitted, and now we want to know some- thing of his mental peculiarities.—Sir E. Verney's account of "The Inhabitants of Milk" only confirms the popular view that boiling, especially boiling at a high temperature, makes milk more wholesome; but he gives a useful hint about cleaning milk-cans or other vessels used for the storage of milk. They ought to be steamed for some minutes, as nothing else really cleans them : — "An interesting experiment was made with two cans in summer ; one was thoroughly well cleaned in the ordinary way, the other was sterilised by steam for thirty minutes ; in the first the milk went sour in twenty-three hours ; in the second in twenty- eight and a half hours ; and the first can was found, on examination, to contain twenty-six times as many bacteria as the second. The same experiment repeated in winter showed that the sterilised can kept the milk sweet for nine hours longer than did the other."--Dr. Dillon's account of "The New Political Era" strikes us, in spite of its eloquence, as rather thin. It amounts to this : that England is hated on the Continent, that when attacked she yields too easily, and that her Government is very badly informed. The hatred among a certain class evidently exists, but does it go deep among the peoples ? It may ; but one notices that the moment war is in prospect the Governments shrink back as if uncertain of their peoples' feeling. As to our habit of yielding easily, look at our recent acquisitions; and as to information, does any Government know more ? It is perfectly true that a blunder was made as to the defensive strength of China ; but was any European Court more enlightened than ourselves?

Mr. Walter Sichel tries in the Fortnightly Review to show that the "spirit of Toryism" is identical with the spirit of patriotism and healthy insularity, but he is not particularly successful Liberals can be as insular as Tories, and as patriotic. Were Canning or Palmerston really Tories ? The true distinction between the parties is the old one, that Tories are those who by temperament are doubtful of the future and disinclined to risk what they possess, and Liberals are those who by temperament believe in the future and will risk anything to attain it.—" Diplomaticus," who at heart, we fancy, entertains Mr. Sichel's idea, writes ably to prove that we conciliate France too often and quite ineffectually, his main illustration being, of course, West Africa, where he says we have been plundered. He even believes that but for the restraining influence of the Czar Great Britain and France would be at war. We quite believe that France in West Africa has been both unjust and rapacious, but we would ask " Diplomaticus " whether we have not been rapacious too, and whether he is really prepared to govern all the profitable regions peopled by dark people without adopting the conscription. Supposing even that we could govern all Africa not on the Mediterranean, which we doubt, where is the force to garrison so vast a territory to come from P—Colonel Sir G. S. Clarke's paper on the requirements of the Army may be summed up almost in two sentences. We need a field force at home, capable of mobilisation to any threatened point in the Empire, of at least forty thousand men. But we need almost as much as this a distinct official statement of what the military requirements of the country really are. No such statement has ever been made, and it is doubtful whether the Departments are even now thoroughly informed upon the point. It is one beneficial result of our haphazard system that we have now five hundred and thirty thousand armed and drilled men, a force without a precedent in our recent history; but the organisation is too incomplete to give us the f all control, or, indeed, any efficient control, of this vast mass of defensive strength.—Mr. Kershaw's paper on "The Future of British Trade" is well worth reading, but we cannot but think it too pessimistic. Trade in our time has always been going to foreign countries, but it stops here nevertheless, kept, we think, by that inner energy of the people, the fluctuations of which are not re- corded in Somerset House tables. No doubt the competition grows hot, but the victory will remain with the most compe- tent trader, and the Englishman may be that if he pleases. Mr. Kershaw looks for a remedy to an Imperial Zollverein; but that would undoubtedly cost us all our trade outside the limits of the Empire. The true remedy is to work harder and push trade more energetically ; but we fully admit that each of those palliatives has its limits. The trade of the world must be in the end a fixed quantity, and when that quantity is supplied expansion will become impossible. To each decade, however, its own difficulties ; and we believe as little in pro- phetic commerce as in prophetic politics. Who would have believed that Coventry would grow rich again through the demand for an instrument of locomotion which twenty years ago was almost unheard of P