THE MAGAZINES.

WE have noticed before the wail of the eldest sons which occupies the first pages of the Nineteenth Century, but there are three other papers on the House of Lords. One, by Mr. Goldwin Smith, contains a curious and valuable suggestion, that the House of Lords might of its own motion and strength reform itself by electing for every Parliament its own beat. men, or allowing certain grades of official Peers to do the work, and making it etiquette for the remainder to stay away. That the House can do this is certain, because- it has done it, the lay Lords foregoing their right to sit on all trials in favour of the better qualified Law Lords,. and it is just the body to adhere to an arrangement of that kind, which might easily be so managed as to leave both parties sufficient debating strength. That does not, of course, meet the democratic difficulty, but it is a good suggestion. Both Mr. Burt and Mr. Wemyss Reid, the former representing the Labour party, the latter the New Radicalism, would leave the Lords existing; but extinguish their veto even for one Session, their only right being to send back a Bill for reconsidera- tion. The effect of this, of course, would be that Peers would be powerless, yet disqualified for the Commons. Neither essayist, however, suggests how this is to be done, Mr. Bart leaving the question alone, and Mr. Wensyss Reid only asserting that the Lords will yield when the nation has pronounced its will. The Lords, we may be sure, will submit to no arrangement so obviously unjust, and the nation will either have to agree to a compromise, or work its will through measures avowedly revolutionary. We wonder, by the way, how much authority Mr. Wemyss Reid has for his assertion that the body of the people hate the House of Lords. It is always denounced, he says, with applause at public meetings ; but then, fortunately, the great body of the people do not attend public meetings. We believe with him that reform of some kind cannot be avoided, but we also believe that before anything can be done, the nation must accept a particular plan which certainly will not be the absurd one of leaving the Lords, but withdrawing all their effective powers.—Mr. Davitt's paper on "The Evicted Tenants Problem" will not convince many who are not con- vinced already. He thinks the "Plan of Campaign" an extreme proceeding, but throws the blame of the transaction upon the "necessities of the situation," and the refusal of the Government to pass another measure of relief. That argu- ment is nothing but the old assertion that, if a man is hungry, he may steal a spoon, and even if it palliates the guilt of the Campaigners, is no argument for those who instigated them, and who were not hungry at all. Mr. Davitt's plan for compensating the new tenant, who is to be evicted without appeal, is for the reinstated tenant to pay him half the value of his holding, the other half to be taken from the Church Temporalities Fund. Practically, that means that the new- evicted tenant should get half his rights. The reinstated tenant cannot pay him at first, and will not pay him afterwards. If he asks for the money too frequently, the Moonlighters will send him warning.—Mr. E. Dillon's paper on "A Neglected Sense" is pleasant to read, but not quite conclu- sive. He thinks that men are gradually losing the sense of smell from disuse; and notes that, although we still delight in the smell of flowers, we never use artificial scents, except as incense, or in a lady's toilette. Is he aware that an im- mense number of persons dislike even these uses of artificial scent ? The writer, for example, thinks incense delightful, but has repeatedly asked the question of his friends, almost always to receive the same reply, "incense is too sickly."

Mr. Frederick Wicks goes through the statistics of the Trades-Unions with considerable care, his object being to ascertain whether Unionists are or are not a considerable factor at elections. He finds that they have 268,884 votes or 5i per cent, of the total, but this is not evenly distributed. Deducting the miners, the total voting strength is only 4.1 per cent. of the whole.—The most readable paper in the Nineteenth Century is undoubtedly the one on "The Queen and her 'Permanent Minister," the Prince Consort, by Mr. R. Balliol Brett. He considers that the Prince Consort was virtually King, and that he, and not Lord John Russell, overthrew Lord Palmerston in 1850. No Minister, in fact, ever gained anything like his ascendency, which was natural enough, and formally admitted by succes- sive Ministers as arising of necessity from the position. It did not modify the Constitution, for Ministers had simply to deal with a King instead of a Queen; nor do we precisely see, as Mr. Brett does, why the people, as years advanced, should have grown tired of it. If the Queen and her husband had differed the situation might have become perplexing, but as they always agreed the Ministry suffered nothing, except, perhaps, in having to deal with a slightly stronger -will than they expected.—There is a curious paper in this number on English rule in India by the Rajah of Bhinga. He asserts that the " power-seeking " Baboos of Bengal are distinctly disloyal ; that, disguised as ascetics, they preach to the people against the British as cow- killers; and that in a short time the British raj will be defended only by British soldiers. He has evidently a horror of the idea of being governed by Indians of any kind if they are chosen by examination or election; and records, with bitter regret, that under the influence of the present system,

the Talukdars' Association in Oudh, the most aristo- cratic body in the country, has had to lower its flag and accept the programme of the Indian Congress, as otherwise it would have obtained no seat in the Imperial Legislative Council.

The other side of the Evicted Tenants question is stated with

ability and moderation by Mr. T. W. Russell in the Fort- nightly Review. He maintains that the moral responsibility for the evictions complained of rests with Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Dillon, and not with Great Britain ; and that to force the 4,158 evicted farmers back on reluctant landowners, or upon

the State as purchasers, the 1,548 honest men now in posses- sion of the holdings being compensated, is an impossible policy. The tenants have no money, and could give no security for an advance. Moreover, if the tenants evicted under Mr. Balfour must be reinstated, so must the tenants evicted under Mr. Morley be; and where are we to stop ? And finally, the example will be of the worst possible tendency for all honest men. How will the Ulster farmer regard it ?-

"Here are what he looks upon as a body of lawless, dishonest men,—men whose rents are lower than his own, and who are as well able to pay as he is. They have kept the country in hot water for thirteen years. They have stained the land with blood and covered it with disgrace. And as a reward, not for honesty and good citizenship, but for dishonesty and crime, the Government of the country deliberately proposes to compel the landlords to sell the freehold of the land to these men,—i.e., if they decline, as of course they are certain to do, to take them back as tenants. Here, therefore, we have Compulsory Sale decreed for the lawless and dishonest, aud withheld from the industrious, the thrifty, the law- abiding, and the loyal. Does Mr. Morley think, does any sane man think, that the Ulster farmers will stand this ? "

Mr. Frederic Harrison's paper on Constantinople, though a little screamy in places, is a brilliant one. He brings out with startling force the unique position of Con-

stantinople as the one city which, for fifteen hundred years, has never ceased to be the seat of an Imperial Government, the centre of all life and sovereignty in South-Eastern Europe and North-Western Asia. Incessant sieges, incessant misfortunes, have alike failed to deprive it

of a position which it owes to geographical advantages that can never be altered, and which have secured its grandeur through a period compared with which London, Paris, Berlin, or St. Petersburg have been great only for a limited space of time. "It is a type of Conservatism, of persistency and constancy paralleled, amidst change, decay, and defeat. This miraculous longevity and recuperative power seem to go counter to all the lessons of Western Europe; or in the West they are to be matched only by the recuperative power of the Catholic Church. The city and the Church, which date from Constantine, have both in these fifteen centuries shown a strange power of recovery from mortal maladies and hopeless difficulties. But the recovery of temporal dominion is always more rare than the revival of spiritual ideas. And in recu- perative energy and tenacity of life, the empire of the Bosphorus, from Constantine to Abdul Hamid, is one long paradox." Mr. Harrison believes that, in possession of a Power with the means to maintain a fleet, Constantinople

must recover its old maritime ascendency, and be once more, or rather continuously, a seat of empire. That also is the belief of the majority of statesmen, and the secret of the fierce efforts made for so long a period to maintain the decaying power of the Turk, who is only locum tenens, for fear lest a real ruler should lay his hand on the greatest position within the

older half of the globe.—Mr. G. Bernard Shaw's answer to Mr. Mallock on Socialism is also brilliantly written; but we do

not see that its central thought comes to much. Mr. Mal- lock's argument is, that the riches of a State are due to ability rather than to labour, to which Mr. Bernard Shaw replies, in effect, that granting this to be true, ownership is not due to ability. Concede that Stephenson, and not the labourers, created the railway system, and still the owners of railway shares did not get their wealth from ability. Why should it not be taxed till the nation owns it, or at least as much of it as it wants ? That seems to us an evasion of the point. Labour nowadays claims all, because, it says, it created all; and Mr. Mallock says it did not, labour undirected or mis- directed being a powerless force. If that is conceded, then the locus standi of labour falls through, or its advocates

must, at least, find another argument. The mere fact that to-day's owners of shares have done nothing to create rail-

ways is no reason why they should be deprived of them. They have done nothing to create their eyes, but the State has no right to put them out. The Fabians must find an ethical basis for their theories; and where is it P except, indeed, the right of the multitude, because it is a multitude, to make itself more comfortable P—Signor Napoleone Colajanni sends a paper on the Italian Bank scandals, which is, at all events, outspoken enough. We should like to know how

many libels there are in it. His conclusion is that the ruling men of Italy are corrupt, have taken money from the Italian banks, and have sheltered themselves from punishment by Parliamentary influence. Yet it seems certain that Signor Giolitti, whom the essayist deems worst of all, allowed a full inquiry into bank affairs, did not influence the report, and allowed it to be read in Parliament in all its severity before he had read it himself. Signor Colajanni may be in the right; but he would convince more English- men if he were not so savagely bitter. His general conclusion, by the way, is that Italy is sick of Parlia- mentarism, but he suggests no alternative. Who is to be Dictator if the electors are not P—Count Gleichen's paper on Tunis is curious. He believes the Protectorate is a source of weakness rather than of strength to France, first from the jealousies it excites, and secondly, from the inability of the French to colonise. In the whole country she has only 10,030 French subjects, of whom only 619 are agriculteurs ; while there are 13,000 Maltese, 50,000 Italians, and 1,500,000 Moors, the latter of whom in the Great War may rise in insurrection. All that may be true, but it is not quite final. The figures for India are far worse than those for Tunis, yet the English in India get along very well. Count Gleichen admits fully that Tunis costs France nothing, except the pay of the garrison she stations there, which is not additional expense. The problem of the value of dependencies is not solved yet by any means, but we get little light from comparisons between the settlers and the natives. Suppose, what we believe to be true of India, that the fewer the settlers outside the services, the less the difficulty of governing?

The last article in the Contemporary Review will be, perhaps, the most generally read. There has always been great curiosity among Protestants to know what the Roman Catholic Church teaches as to the inspiration of the Bible, which appears sometimes, at first sight, to conflict with the continuous Inspiration of a divinely guided Church. As a matter of fact, Rome has never given any authoritative definition of her creed upon the subject, and it is curious to find a Catholic complaining, as in this paper, that Leo XIII. has gone too near. The Pope has, we need not say, given no utterance intended to be received as infal- lible, but he has, it appears, stated his own opinion very strongly and in public. In an Encyclical dated Novem- ber 18th, 1893, his Holiness affirms, following a decree of the Vatican Council, that the Bible has God himself for author—" Spiritu Sancto inspirante conscripti Deura habent aactorem "—and lays down rules of interpretation:—

" They are all summed up in Augustine's comprehensive rule upon which the Sovereign Pontiff dwells with manifest admiration —that whenever a new fact is discovered by science, and so con- clusively established that it cannot be called in question' it be- hoves us to set about proving that it does not run counter to Holy Writ; but if a new scientific proposition be found incompatible with the testimony of the Bible, then it is our bounden duty to demonstrate that it is most false, or if we cannot accomplish this we must at least firmly believe—without the shadow of a doubt— that it is so."

The essayist, we may remark, though a Catholic, is not in the least disposed to agree with his Pope, whom, indeed, he detests with a vehemence which all his tricks of style cannot disguise.—The papers in the Contemporary this month are all a little heavy, even that of Mrs. Sheldon Amos, who thinks that the daughters of the cultivated obtained eman- cipation from an example of factory girls, and that factory girls have the advantage "in most of those things which denote true womanliness as dissociated from questions of polish and culture." That is not, we think, precisely the account given of them by those who labour among factory girls, in London at all events.—We find it difficult to read about" The Lords and Betterment," even in the Contemporary ; but there is something new for the lighter-minded in the account

by Mr. E. Gosse of M. de Heredia, the poet just admitted to the French Academy. He is a Cuban, a descendant of one of the Conquistadores, and his claim to be an Immortal is that he has written a volume of exquisite sonnets called "Les

Trophees," a thirteenth edition of which has been printed within the year :— " And this, indeed, must be confessed at once, that those who seek for tender notes and sunken lights, the vague sympathies of the soul, the melancholy music of experience, may go elsewhere ; the poet of 'Los Troph6es ' is not for them. No man has less been touched by the malady of the age, no one is less attracted to the unknown and the distressful. M. de Heredia gazes straight at clear and beautiful things seen in a blaze of light ; almost every sonnet of his gives an impression of translucent air and brilliant sunshine. Alone, among French poets of to-day, the prevailing note of his work is joyous and heroic. Those ages of the world's history please him in which the symbolism of the imagination was sumptuous and noble. He possesses not a little of the grandiloquence of the race from which he sprang. His sonnets have the sound of a clarion, the human voice concentrated and upliftal by being blown through fine brass."

That may be just criticism, for we do not know M. de Heredia, but it does not attract us towards him. A song blown through brass is surely an unhappy image.—Archdeacon Farrar writes a paper on Temperance, called "Mistakes about Abstainers," which begins very reasonably, but drifts at the end into this rather excited style :— " No one can estimate the force of this inducement so intensely as those of the clergy who, like myself, are brought into almost daily contact with, or cognisance of, tragedies the most brutal, miseries the most unspeakable, the depths of Satan, the horrible degrada- tion of womanhood, the death and anguish of children, the catastrophe and devastation of homes, the abnormal debasement of souls, the chronic and revolting squalor, the unspeakable, im- measurable, and apparently illimitable areas of human misery in its most unmitigated forms, which have their source and origin in the temptations forced upon the poor by the shameless multipli- cation of gin-shops and public-houses."

How are they forced upon the poor P—hundreds of thousands

of the poor pass them every day and never enter. The weakness in the remainder must surely be in themselves,— The interest of Mr. Maseingham's paper on "The Old Premier and the New," practically centres in the following sentences:— " The transition from Mr. Gladstone to Lord Rosebery represents the inevitable landslip from the old to the new Radicalism " :—

" We see now, indeed, that any other step than a Rosebery premiership would have been instantly fatal to the Liberal party. To have had average Gladstonianism without the quick salt of Mr. Gladstone's genius, and without its vast and impres- sive emotional background, might have been almost as unfortunate as would have been Mr. Gladstone's decision to come out about 1859 on Lord Derby's side instead of on Lord Palmerston's."

Does not a landslip usually involve a good deal of ruin, and give proof that the foundations of the land were very insecure