THE MAGAZINES.

Metz grave Magazines, the Magazines which devote themselves to heavy subjects, have this month decidedly-the advantage. We 'have mentioned elsewhere the best paper in the Fortnightly, the attack on constitutional monarchy by Mr. Frederic Harrison, a

t aper full of sense, enforced with a fiery kind of eloquence, but .weakened by inattention to arguments which weigh heavily with the graver politicians, such as the effect of an ancient system of society, based in theory at least on the incommunicable quality of birth in restraining the influence of wealth, and the consequent tendency towards pecuniary corruption. To put the thing in its most vulgar and brutal form, "it would not pay" a great English politician to make a million by taking bribes, because the opinion of a society not theoretically based on wealth would be more im-

portant to him than any luxury which the possession of wealth could possibly secure. That is, we admit, a poor and negative result of any system of government ; but still it is an indis- pensable one, and one which, as Mr. Harrison admits, our system does most completely secure, even when, as at present, "the prime minister and the majority of the ministers belong by origin, and by every instinct of their natures, to the great order of middle-class traders. They are bourgeois even in their faults, down to their passion for petty economy. They are men of the

caste of Necker or Peel, glorified bankers' clerks, with a happy turn for debating,—useful and valuable gifts, but in no sense those of a true aristocracy ; rather the type of a superior order of aldermen. No aristocracy in the world would ever have stooped to our base commercial wars in the East, and our yet baser com- mercial peace in Europe, cauponantes helium, cauponantes pacem." If experience is worth anything, it shows that pecuniary purity is the difficulty of Anglo-Saxon political organisations, and that

corruption is the danger with that race of any system based theoretically upon election ; and although Mr. Harrison may assert

that monarchy is a "very trifling element" in "the almost un- exampled standard of pecuniary honesty maintained" in English political life, he has still to prove that the system of which a monarchy is the centre is not the basis of that high stardard.

We confess openly that this is our fear, that we dread pecuniary corruption, that but for this dread we should scarcely think the Monarchy worth fighting for, but that we gravely believe its influence to be a serious check and corrective to that master evil. Social elevation is the object of all, and society under the Monarchy is ruled by men who regard the taking of a bribe as an inexpiable offence. It does not under our system pay a man to be a Fisk, and that is—we say it with deep regret —a benefit which we can hardly overestimate, and for which the Republicans provide us with no sufficient security. That is the first argument for monarchy as it exists here, and the second is unconsciously stated by Mr. Harrison himself :—

" Does the Monarchy, again, secure us from perpetually criticising and recasting the Constitution? Nothing of the kind. There exist no people but the French who are so constantly occupied as we in remodel- ling the machinery of government. Now a real monarchy does guarantee a people against this, which is, at the very best, a waste of power ; a sham monarchy provokes it. The Russian, and even the Prussian, system presupposes that the people on the whole accept the general framework of the State ; of all people, the French alone excepted, we seem the most dissatisfied with ours. Our internal political history of a hundred years now has been one interminable history of reform bills and reform acts ; attacks on the House of Lords, on the Established Church ; struggles of class with class, and one order with another, to get power, and recast the Constitution ; ballot agitations, charters, reform leagues, manhood-suffrage, single-chamber and women-suffrage agitations succeed in weary round. Almost the whole of our really serious struggles have turned on the persons by whom, not the way in which, power was to be exercised. It is one long series of Constitutional amendments, in which every element and fixed point in the constitution has been attacked and defended, undermined, revised, botched, amended, and re-amended again, like the Bankruptcy Acts."

Just so, and all that goes on without its ever occurring to any man that civil war is possible, that any man or party could by possibility aid his views by appealing to physical force. Can that be said of any other form of government existing or hoped for in the world? There is nothing else of particular moment in the Fortnightly, for S. Castelar, though wonderfully eloquent on "The Republican Movement in Europe," is not equally instructive ; but we should like to mike a passing remark on the " Eustace Diamonds." Mr. Trollope has flagged once or twice in this story, but in these chapters he is at his very best, and we believe the whole book will ultimately furnish the beat proof we could adduce of his peculiar power as the photographer, not the analyst or the historian, or even the painter, but the photographer of modern society.

The Contemporary is full of good papers, but the best for the average reader is Mr. O'Connor Morris's analysis of Irish character, one of the most eloquent papers recently offered to the public, and specially eloquent in its fairness, a very unusual quality of Irish thought. We doubt if the causes of the social influence of the Catholic Church in the land have ever been more accurately stated than in this striking passage:—

" Only his religion has been to the Irishman emphatically a mom. It is to him, as probably to no other contemporary Christian, the one fast that is trustworthy, and of which he can be nationally and without reserve proud. While in the rest of Europe the Catholic Church iden- tified herself with Governments, and was the nursing mother of kings, conservative of media:mai forms, a champion no doubt of equality before God, but opposed to equality among men, in Ireland she has persistently maintained the personal rights of the poorest. She has organised resist- ance to legal or other tyranny. She has preserved to a certain degree the communistic and revolutionary traditions of the earlier Christianity, while her moral force has never been weakened by Eraatian partnership with the powers that be. Catholic faith in Ireland ascends from the lower strata of society ; it is expansive, and not repressive, and it is in sympathy with certain elements of the present social ferment. Its vitality in the actual disruption of Europe is of incalculable importance, and Mr. Huxley may well be concerned at the front it shows to the leaders of 'positive' thought. It retains the affections, for it has best championed the rights, of those millions of working-men who have issued from the Irish hive. Even the contact of French and English com- munists it can safely suffer, for in a certain sense it is strong to assimi- late revolutionary forces, being free of pledges to any established government. In consequence, no Irishman is Voltairean, or desires the humiliation of his ecclesiastical rulers. L'Infame ' has been his best friend. Popery has preserved for him the magna charts of his human dignity, and he is proof against the spells of Comte and the fascinations -of physical religion, for he has suffered and found support in his suffer- ing from his unwavering faith. The Christian code is the basis of his social life. Not feudal association, not English common law and custom, not tradition, Kettle or Teutonic is the groundwork of the household ties, the family union, the =Anal faithfulness, the habitual purity which are leading traits of Irish manners. Whatever his political crazes and his temporary outcry, the Irishman feels perhaps better than he understands, that he needs no new social gospel, seeing that he is already possessed of the true elements of prosperity. He does not, it is true, set as high a value as we do on broadcloth and blacking, but his rags cover a wiry if somewhat spare frame, conscious of its personal value, strong even to bloodshed in obstinate attachment to home, but incapable of half the crimes common in wealthier communities. We think the Irish peasantry miserable and even degraded, yet the un- happy degradation of accepted pauperism is hardly known in Ireland. The professional tramp has no existence, though the halt and the blind believe the charity they seek to be their due."

The main defect of the Irishman, according to Mr. Morris, is want of truth ; not merely the habit of lying, but want of truth to himself, as well as to other people ; but he brings into prominence the fact so often forgotten by Englishmen, that no race except the French has in the same degree the faculty of attraction. Italian, German, or Belgian, no conquered province of France quits France with her own consent, and successive waves of immi- grants into Ireland have all become more Irish than the Irish them- selves. We think that a great thing to say for the Anglo-Saxon, who no doubt absorbs and assimilates all races with white skins, though he fails egregiously, and in a most imbecile manner, if the akin has any tinge of colour, and why do we refuse to consider it a great thing when displayed by our Celtic brethren? The quality of sympathy, in which they are strong, is the one from which Christian philosophers hope most. There is a fine paper also on the Hindoo belief in Immortality, by the Rev. A. M. Fairbairn, a real con- tribution to the history of theology, to which we should take only this one exception. We doubt if the word " immortality " can wisely be used to describe any Hindoo view of the future. It mis- leads men bred in Christian theories. As we understand this august Paganism, the Brahmin philosopher, though confident that a living soul exists in man, and will exist when the shell has perished, has never fully conceived the idea of continuous life, has always expected either transmigration, or absorption, or expan- sion, or some other form of new life for the immortal spirit. Mr. Fairbairn has evidently perceived this, but he employs a termi- nology which may deceive his readers, as it has for a century deceived those missionaries who have wasted their power in attack- ing the Hindoo creed, without attacking the much more powerful and defensible Hindoo philosophy.

Blackwood has little except "The Maid of Sker," which we con- tinue to admire, and which will be recognised when published as a book, as a very original, though possibly not popular, novel ; and a sketch of Thackeray, by an American, valuable for a letter which appears to set out almost formally the great writer's religious faith, a faith which may be summed up in a profound belief in the Fatherhood of God :— "I never feel pity for a man dying, only for survivors, if there be such passionately deploring him. You see the pleasures the under- signed proposes to himself here in future years,—a sight of the Alps, a holiday on the Rhine, a ride in the Park, a colloquy with pleasant friends of an evening. If it is death to part with these delights (and pleasures they are, and no mistake), sure the mind can conceive others afterwards ; and I know one small philosopher who is quite ready to give up these pleasures ; quite content (after a pang or two of separa- tion from dear friends here) to put his hand into that of the summoning angel, and say, 'Lead on, 0 messenger of God our Father, to the next place, whither the divine goodness calls us!' We must be blindfolded before we can pass, I know ; but I have no fear about what is to come, any more than my children need fear that the love of their father should fail them. I thought myself a dead man once, and protest the notion gave me no disquiet about myself,—at least, the philosophy is more com- fortable than that which is tinctured with brimstone."

A pleasant faith, and a sufficient, if only it were possible to forget that He is our Father here too, and that for some inscrut- able purpose He allows here toothache, and gout, and fear, and all the evils which to a large proportion of mankind make this life a protracted agony even for the good. Why should the next world be for them so very pleasant a place ?

Incomparably the best paper in Fraser is the one on the "Agricultural Strike," and incomparably the most sugges-

tive paragraph in it is the one quoted below. It does not in any way settle the question, indeed it obscures it, for the writer assumes what we believe to be false, the necessity of the farmer or middleman to agriculture, and lays far too much stress on the English land laws, game laws, and so on, as obstacles to the improvement of the condition of the labourer. They would all matter very little if he could combine to obtain a tenancy in the soil, but still this statement of the ultimate economic fact, if things go badly, that is, if profit can

not be got out of better work and better distribution of the work, is exceedingly valuable :— " It may well be questioned, indeed, whether the whole amount of the income which the farmers of England receive, both as remuneration for their own skilled labour and profit upon the capital employed by them in their business, would be sufficient to pay the increase in wages which is asked for, or is certain soon to be asked for, on behalf of the labourers ; while a general reduction in rents to the amount of 20 or 25 per cent. would certainly supply a fund sufficient for this purpose. There were 750,000 male agricultural labourers in England and Wales above the age of twenty at the census of 1861; if they were to receive an average in- crease of 5e. a week, it would amount to close upon £10,000,000 per annum; a proportionate increase in the wages of the males under twenty, and of the women and girls employed in agriculture, would probably amount to half that sum : the total increase would therefore be some- where about .£15,000,000. We need not waste words in demonstrating how impossible it is that this amount should come out of the profits of the farmer ; but assuming the rental of England to be £60,000,000, a re- duction of rents to the extent of 25 per cent, would furnish the sum re-, quired. This sacrifice of a quarter of the sums now received by the landowners would not inflict any real loss or suffering upon those whose incomes were thus diminished. The incomes of the Peerage, we are told, average £20,000 a year. It makes no difference to the true happiness of a family whether they have twenty or fifteen thousand a year to spend mainly upon the luxuries and frivolities of existence ; but a wage of 18s. in place 4129. a week, does make all the difference to a family between the possession of a decent home, with sufficient food, clothing, means of education, and the absolute want of these, the first requisites of a happy and useful life."

As a matter of fact, no such reduction will occur, as anybody will acknowledge who knows the rentals paid for minute patches of land, but the fact that this is the worst that could occur, that the sweeping away of little squires who seek to live without labour is the worst that could happen, may comfort many apprehensive politicians. The whole article is worth reading, as is the paper on the "Unsettlement of the Alabama Claims," in which Mr. Glad- stone's permanent inability to understand America is brought out by a most hostile, but still accurate pen. We, like most English- men, had forgotten that Mr. Gladstone, who in October, '62, declared that Jeff Davis had made a nation, in June, 1863, reiterated his opinion in these strong terms :-

"I do not believe that the restoration of the American Union by force is attainable I do not believe that a more fatal error was ever committed than when men—of high intelligence, I grant, and of the sincerity of whose philanthropy I, for one, will not venture to whisper the smallest doubt—came to the conclusion that the emancipa- tion of the negro race was to be sought, although they could only travel to it by a sea of blood."

Septimiva has ended in St. Paul; and is on the whole a failure,

which a wise editor will do well to leave out of Hawthorne's collected works. Though it contains a few paragraphs full of eerie thoughts such as would hardly have occurred to any man save the author, it is as a whole weak, and lacking in originality.

Hawthorne, as we have pointed out before, uses once more the vulgar old recipe for immortality, a concoction of wonderful drugs, instead of one of the scores of spiritual fancies he might have employed, and he evidently grew weary of the task he had set himself before it was nearly done, altered his plan, and ended his story with a catastrophe of which the central idea might have been suggested by any manufacturer of melodramas. The notion of a liquor producing such extasy that life dies of delight is poetic, but it is in no way the notion which Haw- thorne when he began his tale had set to himself. Nothing

else interests us in St. Pauls this month, though the regular reader of magazines will probably be satisfied

with T. A. Trollope's account of an Arch-conspirator, Pierre Lenet, the adviser of the nobles who adhered to Conde and "the Princes" against Mazarin, and his sketch of the women who managed the intrigue, and especially of the Duchess de Chatillon, the mistress of the great Conde, and one of the ablest intriguantes of her age.

Macmillan, besides the stories, gives us three exceedingly read-

able papers, one of them by Mr. Gifford Palgrave, on the brigands of ancient Arabia, full of his special knowledge and power. These brigands are still the heroes of Arab legend and song, and one of them, named Thabit, has become a kind of hero. The Arabs believe him to have been possessed, and though he lived the life of a bandit, trading in murder, and preferring attacks on his own clan, his poems have lived down to our own time, and seem from the few specimens given by Mr. Palgrave to have deserved their life. It is not often that a professional brigand has described himself, or his own conception of himself, in words like these :—

" Nor exults he nor complainwhe ; silent bears whate'er befalls him, Much desiring, much attempting ; far the wanderings of his venture. In one desert noon beholds him ; evening finds him in another ; As the wild SU lone he crosses o'er the jagged and headlong ridges. Swifter than the wind unpausing, onward yet, nor rest nor slackness, While the howling gusts outepeeded in the distance moan and faulter. Light the slumber on his eyelids, yet too heavy all he deems it ; Ever watchful for the moment when to draw the bitter faulchion ; When to plunge it in the heart-blood of the many-mustered foemen, While the Fates bystanding idly grin to see their work accomplished. Loneliness his choice companion ; and the guide-marks of his roam- ing—

Tell me, whither guide the mazes of the streaky spangled heavens ?"

Dr. Dalrymple's paper on "Asylums for Drunkards" is interest- ing, but far too vague. That a man may be aided to renounce drinking by pleasant society in a Temperance Hotel, for that is the life of an American Drunkards' Asylum, is likely enough, but we should like a little more proof that the temptation does not revive when the outside world is regained. Dr. Dalrymple's figures are somewhat hazy, and his advocacy of legal restraint a little suspicious. Anybody can be made sober in a prison, but will he keep so when he is free ? Dr. Dalrymple hardly claims more than 30 per cent, of cures, and we should be inclined to doubt 'whether the number of reformations in ordinary English life, without the aid of Asylums or Legislature, is very much less than that. If it is, the teetotallers must tell a great many falsehoods, a charge for which there is no proof. The writer of the paper on "Social New York" draws a pleasant picture of the life of young girls in that city, a life apparently all dancing, bouquets, and pleasure parties, but seems not to perceive that it must somewhat prematurely exhaust joyousness, and has in it far too much of meaningless frivolity. The constant intermingling of the sexes may be a good thing, and the Americans have certainly discovered how to make it a safe thing ; but the almost total exclusion of married people, however young, from all gaiety, the devotion of all time in youth to mere amusement, and the mad expenditure, suggest a somewhat reckless selfishness. Bouquet- giving may be a pretty custom, but when a bouquet costs two guineas, and " belle" wears five, which she throws away next morn- ing, one wonders who toils to support all that extravagance. It is true the girls make excellent wives, and sometimes, not always, devoted mothers ; and that the men grow up courteous and kindly ; but this little picture does not, we confess, strike us as absolutely charming :—

" A college boy of fifteen or seventeen in New York will make visits to his girl friends of thirteen or fourteen, and treat them with thorough courtesy. He will have plenty to say to them, and will say it naturally, —not in the least off his ease, and yet not as a general rule forward. It is his ambition to know many of them, to be a favourite with them, and their pursuits and amusements out of school will be in common. These boys go into society at a ridiculously early age, and are often very indifferently educated. Many of them of course are readers, and make up in later life for any early deficiencies, but many are apt to have an extremely low intellectual standard: being quite contented with that amount of knowledge or native smartness that will enable them to succeed in importing fancy dry goods or in selling stocks and gold in Wall Street : and yet with all that there will generally be found a 'grace of courtesy' ingrained in them which makes it impossible for them to be otherwise than polite to a lady, or indeed to any other human being."

Cornhill continues "Old Kensington," the wild story called "Pearl and Emerald," which we do not pretend to understand, yet always read, uncertain whether it is the production of a fool, or of a man giving the rein to some odd spirit of satire ; but the two best serious papers are "Horace Walpole," a most thoughtful and keen-sighted sketch, well worth the whole price of the maga- zine, and "Gambling Superstitions." The writer of the latter

paper opens a curious vein of thought. He wants to explain the most remarkable of all gambling facts, the exist- existence of persons who at games of pure chance, with the "pull of the table" against them—that is, the fine of 1 per cent. on every stake—have yet made fortunes by gambling, have even in one or two instances, such as Garcia's, kept on making fortunes for many years :—

"To remove from the question the perplexities resulting from the nature of the above-named games, let us suppose that the tossing of a coin is to determine the success or failure of the player, and that he will win if he throws head.' Now if a player tossed ' head ' twenty times running on any occasion it would be regarded as a most remarkable run of luck, and it would not be easy to persuade those who witnessed the occur- rence that the thrower was not in some special and definite manner the favourite of fortune. We may take such exceptional success as corre- sponding to the good fortune of a 'bank-breaker.' Yet it is easily shown that with a number of trials which mast fall enormously short of the number of cases in which fortune is risked at foreign Kursaals, the throwing of twenty successive heads would be practically ensured. Sup- pose every adult person in Britain—say 10,000,000 persons in all— were to toss a coin, each tossing until ' tail ' was thrown ; then it is practically certain that several among them would toss twenty times before 'tail' was thrown. Thus, it is certain that about five millions would toss head' once ; of these about one-half, or some two millions and a half, would toss 'head' on the second trial ; about a million and a quarter would toss head on the third trial ; about six hundred thou- sand on the fourth ; some three hundred thousand on the fifth ; and by proceeding in this way—roughly halving the numbers successively obtained—we find that some eight or nine of the ten million persona would be almost certain to toss 'head' twenty times running. It must be remembered that so long as the numbers continue large the pro- bability that about half will toes 'head' at the next trial amounts almost to certainty. For example, about 140 toss 'head' sixteen times run- ning: now it is utterly unlikely that of these 140, fewer than 60 will toss ' head ' yet a seventeenth time. But if the above process failed on trial to give even one person who tossed heads twenty times running—an utterly improbable event—yet the trial could be made four or five times, with practical certainty that not one or two, but thirty or forty, persons would achieve the seemingly incredible feat of tossing head ' twenty times running. Nor would all these thirty or forty persons fail to throw even three or four more 'heads.'"