THE MAGAZINES.

THE Nineteenth Century is, on the whole, the most vivid of the- Magazines for September. Mr. F. Harrison, on "The Dead- lock in the Commons," is as eloquent as usual, and more argu mentative, his paper being one of the very best yet added to the discussion. He demands changes in the House of Commons' procedure much more thorough than any likely to be sanctioned, bat he describes the evil existing with a force which justifies his demands. He maintains that the House is becoming an ad- ministrative body, controlling all departments even in details,. and that this is the final cause of its failure to perform its other functions of legislating, and criticising general policy. , He would relieve it of much of its administrative work, by the appointment of Standing Committees, with power to examine Ministers and documents ; and would invest it with power to close any debate, speech, or proceeding, under fixed rules.. There is little doubt these changes would be advantageous; but while the second will probably be adopted, the first will be strenuously resisted. It is opposed to the modern idea of Eng lishmen that the whole procedure of Parliament should be public, and that the real use of interpellations is to inform not Parliament only, but the whole community. It would be- impossible to prevent the House from publicly criticising- its own Committees, or to diminish the responsibility of the Cabinet for the ultimate action taken, which responsibility would be a constant source of debate, involving every detail it is intended to exclude. Mr. Harrison's paper should, however, be carefully read, as it brings before politicians in the most vigorous way the absolute necessity for reform. A still better- paper is M. Joseph Reinach's defence of the Scratiu de Liste, by far the most perfect we have seen. M. Reinach main- tains that the Scrutin de Liste produces better candi- dates, inasmuch as only men of mark are acceptable to entire Departments, while inferior men are acceptable to- arrondissements. The latter, moreover, become too dependent on influential electors, and as such men are always seeking small appointments for their friends, the Deputies are compelled to press the Ministers, to the ruin of the national services. M. Reitiach does not, however, perceive that the cure for this evil• lies in competition, or answer the objection that the eminent candidates will be presented to the Departments by a central electoral committee. His statement that M. Grevy personally influenced thirty Senators to reject M. Bardoux's Bill through fear of a Gambettist Ministry, which would reform too much, is curious, but not conclusive as to M. Grevy's motive. He may have feared, as we should undoubtedly fear, too complete a loss of "touch" between Deputies and constituents. Six hundred angels might govern England well, but they would not repre- sent England. "The Future of Gold," by M. gmile de Laveleye,. will also be read with a certain interest. The Belgian econo- mist believes that the production of gold is rapidly decreasing, as the surface mines become exhausted, and the miners are driven back upon the auriferous quartz—it has already sunk from 235,000,000 a year to 220,000,000—that the need of metallic currency is increasing, and that, consequently, it will within no long period be imperative to remonetise silver. If this is not done, the appreciation of gold noted by the fall of prices will go on until all commerce will be deranged, and the trade of the•

world seriously restricted. M. Laveleye's statement of the decline in the supply seems to us irresistible, and certainly will produce considerable consequences. Whether one of them will be the remonetisation of a metal now unprecedentedly cheap, which cannot be priced in gold at any fixed ratio, is questionable. It is, however, more than probable that currency will be one of the pressing questions of the immediate future, and that it will be settled internationally, and not, as hitherto, by every nation acting separately. The Rev. T. W. Fowle's paper on " The Place of Revelation in Evolution " is thoughtful and, indeed, able, but hardly suited to a magazine. The necessary com-

pression has injured it. We do not understand, for example, what he means to imply when he says," The arrival of a being in our planet from another planet would be a supernatural

event." In what sense would it be supernatural ? It would be natural, surely, though a fact proving that there were con- ditions in Nature of which we previously knew nothing. It might be supernatural, if conditions certainly existing, such as gravitation, were suspended for the purpose by divine fiat, but it would not be necessarily supernatural of itself. Sir W. Thom- son suggests such an arrival as the most natural explanation of life on this planet. The very curious and subtle argument that the pleasure a Christian has in believing is one proof of Christ- ianity, because intellectual pleasure of that kind is always

derived from an internal consciousness of the relation between the belief and Truth—as we see in a child who takes pleasure in geometry—proves, surely, a little too much. Why should not a Hindoo use it as proof of his doctrine of Maya (illusion), which seems to him to explain so much and gives him such permanent pleasure, as an explanation of his relation to the

universe, that it is next to impossible to root it out of his mind, even when he has adopted opinions with which it is incon- sistent ? We do not see that Lord De la Warr has added much to our knowledge of "the position in North Africa," or that it can be beneficial work to excite English jealousy of France by absurd arguments like this :—

" Tbe political and commercial importance of Tripoli to England is probably very little understood. An examination of the Consular Reports for the past six yearn will, however, show that two-thirds of the export and import trade of the country is carried on with Great Britain and Malta. In 1880, 123 British vessels visited the port of Tripoli; £84,000 worth of British manufactured goods were im- ported, as against £26,000 worth of foreign fabrics ; and England received esparto fibre of the value of £188,576. In 1878, sheep and oxen, valued at £15,850, and corn, worth £26,052, were exported from the town of Ben Ghazi to Malta."

The independence of Tripoli may be important to us, for the

sake of our control in Egypt, but it is certainly not affected by a trade which we should not lose, and the profit of which is less than that of the income of a third-rate commercial firm.

The number of the Contemporary Review is decidedly dull. With the exception of the article on Dean Stanley by Miss Wedgwood, there is nothing which attracts the ordinary reader.

We do not know the type of man, though we admit he exists, who can read essays like Mr. Lenormant's on " Ararat and Eden" with either pleasure or edification ; and though it is heresy to say so, are not greatly interested in Mr. Herbert Spencer's account of the growth of the "militant type of society," and its necessary tendency to an elaborate hierarchy, with a despot at the top. If the author were not Mr. Spencer, we should venture to say the thought, though true, was hack- neyed, and that the illustrations were carelessly selected. We should have said that Roman society was strictly militant ages before it submitted to a despot, and that during the most dangerous wars of Rome it was governed by a large Committee, that England was governed by a Parliament during its most militant period, and that there was no evidence in our recent history of a military spirit spreading. To us, the following paragraph seems foolish :—

" The remaining example to be named is that furnished by our own society since the revival of military activity—a revival which has of late been so marked that our illustrated papers are, week after week, occupied with little else than scenes of warfare With. in the military organisation itself, we may note the increasing assimilation of the Volunteer Forces to the Regular Army, now going to the extent of a movement for making them available abroad, so that instead of defensive action, for which they were created, they can he used for offensive action ; and we may also note that the tendency shown in the Army during a past generation to sink the military character whenever possible, by putting on civilian dresses, is now checked by an order to officers in garrison towns to wear their uniforms when off duty, as they do in more militant countries. Whether, since the date named, usurpations of civil functions by military men (which had in 1873-74 gone to the extent that there were 97 colonels, majors, captains, and lieutenants employed from time to time as inspectors of science and art classes) have gone further, I cannot say ; but there has been a manifest extension of the military spirit and discipline among the police, with the effect that wearing helmet-shaped hats, beginning to carry revolvers, and looking on themselves as half-soldiers, they have come to speak of the people as civilians,' and in some cases exercise over civilians' an inspec- tion of a military kind ; as instance, the chief of the Birmingham police, Major Bond, whose subalterns track home men who are un- steady from drink, but quiet, and prosecute them next morning; or as instance, the regulation by policemen's commands of the conflicting streams of vehicles in the London streets. To an increasing extent the executive has been over-riding the other governmental agencies; as in the Cyprus business, and as in the doings of the Indian Viceroy under secret instructions from home. In various minor ways are shown endeavours to free officialism from popular checks ; as in the desire expressed in the House of Lords that the hanging of convicts in prisons, entrusted entirely to the authorities, should have no other witnesses ; and as in the advice gis en by the late Home Secretary (on May 11th, 1878) to the Derby Town Council, 'that it should not inter- fere with the chief constable (a military man) in his government of the force under him—a step towards centralising local police control in the Home Office. Simultaneously we see various actual or prospec- tive extensions of public agency, replacing or restraining private agency. There is the endowment of research,' which, already partially carried out by a Government fund, many wish to carry further; there is the proposed Act for establishing a registration of authorised teachers ; there is the Bill which provides central inspec- tion for local public libraries ; there is the scheme for compulsory insurance."

It is, however, more than audacious to criticise Mr. Spencer on his own topic ; and we pass on to Mr. Goldwin Smith's defence

of the Canadian tariff, which he justifies, on the ground of an absolute necessity, created mainly by the mother-country. It was in obedience to " Imperial " policy that the American Colonies accepted confederation, and the immense and costly public works that confederation involved ; and on account of those public works that the Dominion has incurred debts in- volving liabilities which cannot, in such a country, be met by direct taxation. These works, he believes, would have been needless, had not the Home Government desired to make of Canada a counterpoise to the United States. Mr. Smith depre- cates also the military expenditure to raise a volunteer army against a foe who will never come, anti if he did come would come in irresistible strength ; and laughs at the notion of a Canadian Court, which has failed before it was fairly established. He advocates strongly a commercial union between the Dominion and the United States, and evidently believes that, in spite of the strong feeling of loyalty to England now existing, political fusion is a mere question of time. Mr. Arthur Mills' account of New Zealand in 1881 contains nothing either original or attractive ; and we gladly turn to Miss Wedgwood's fine tribute to the character of Dr. Stanley, which she sums up in these few words:" Arthur Stanley joined the sim- plicity of a child of five years old to the cultivation of a grey-haired man and the goodness of a pure woman." Add that he had humour—which is seldom a child's quality, and occasionally something of a child's petulance, as in the controversy about the monument to the Prince Imperial—and we have the essential nature of the man. Miss Wedgwood gives but one illustration of his humour, but it is singularly characteristic :—

" At times it seemed as if his position as a Church dignitary took to himself the aspect of a certain masquerade. I remember well the half-comic air with which he said, ' I should so mach have liked to ask the Pope his opinions about himself' (in recounting an inter- view with him, if I remember right), and there was something inex- pressibly engaging in the playfulness with which he added, I can't quite fancy thinking myself infallible ;' and then came a humorous little pause, as if be was just asking himself whether, after all, that might not be compassed, and he conoluded much more decidedly, 'But certainly I can't conceive thinking all the Deans of Westminster infallible.' "

With her view of his great intellectual peculiarity, that his mind was essentially historic, so historic that he often cared for an institution rather on account of its long history than its use, we coincide ; but we think her a little too lenient to the Dean's literary foible, a preference for the pictorial over the exact narrative of events. He was much less careful to state particularly in his history of the Jews what he believed had happened, than to make the popular account of what had hap- pened at once probable and interesting. The total impression of Miss Wedgwood's sketch will, however, be recognised by his friends as singularly faithful.

The most interesting paper in the Fortnightly, indeed to us the most interesting in the Magazines, is Mr. W. S. Blunt's con- tinuation of his account of the Khalifate, which be calls " The

Future of Islam." His account of. the Kb alifate itself is familiar

to students of the subject, but many of them will be unaware of the imperfect tenure by which the House of Othman hold it— properly speaking, they retain it only till a descendant of the Koreish is strong enough to put in his claim—and of the hold which the idea of the office has over the present Sultan. His predecessor, Abd ul Aziz, had originally caught at it, but soon. sank into luxury, and it was reserved for his successor to make it the cardinal point of his policy :- "In youth he was, for a prince, a serious man, showing a taste for learning, especially for geography and history ; and though not an diem, he has some knowledge of his religion. It may, therefore, be taken for granted that he is sincere in his belief of his own spiritual position—it is easy to be sincere where one's interest lies in believ- ing ; and I have it from one who saw him at the time, that on the day soon after his accession, when, according to the custom already mentioned, he received the sword at the Mosque of Ayub, he asto- nished his courtiers with the sudden change in his demeanour. All the afternoon of that day, he talked to them of his spiritual rank in language which for centuries had not been heard in the precincts of the Seraglio. It is certain, too, that his first act, when delivered from the pressure of the Russian invasion, was to organise afresh the propagandism already begun, and to send out new missionaries to India and the Barbary States to preach the doctrine of his own Caliphal authority to the Moslems in partibus infiddiuni. His lan- guage, too, to strangers from external Islam was from the first that of a spiritual rather than a temporal prince, and with the European Ambassadors ho has used this position consistently and most effec- tually. It is no mean proof of Abd el Hamid's ability that he should have invented the Mussulman non possumus with which he has die- eoncerted our diplomacy. In private life he is said to be regular at his prayers, though it is also said that he conforms to the custom of Turkish Sultans in as regularly espousing a new slave each Friday. He is at the same time a liberal patron of dervishes, workers of miracles, and holy men. These he is at pains to seek out and receive honourably. In his administration he conforms, wherever he is him- self the actor, strictly to the Sheriat, and on doubtful points consults always the Mufti or Sheykh el Islam. He has shown no inconsider- able firmness in resisting European demands, when they contravened the canon law."

This propaganda has been in part successful. The Arabs in Arabia, though not conciliated, are doubtful ; the Arabs of Africa are accepting the Hanefite doctrine with a certain en- thusiasm, as their only defence against France, and among the Turkish Mussulmans reverence for the Ottoman Khalif has strongly revived. It will need, however, some very conspicuous success to conquer the minds of all Mnssnlmans; and without it, on Abd el Hamid's death or fall, a new Khalif may yet be pro- claimed belonging to the Koreish, and with him Mahommed- anism will take a new departure, and the Arab mind, a much brighter one than the Ottoman, be again in the ascendant throughout the Mnssulman world. If that ever happens, Europe may have one more desperate fight with Asia, before it has established its ascendancy. We shall await with the deepest interest Mr. Blunt's view, which he promises for another number, of the line a movement counter to the Ottoman Khalifate would take. This article alone is sufficient to justify the magazine; but Mr. Lathbury contributes an able, though, to our minds, unsatisfactory plea for those Liberals who oppose the Irish Land Act as contrary to sound policy and economic Science. He maintains that the belief in " the virtue of ownership" is well founded, and that under the Act ownership is destroyed, nobody being really owner. The landlord cannot do as he likes with the land, or the tenant either. Hence, he believes, injury must result. There is something in this argument, and would be more, if the Act were not a bridge to peasant-proprietorship, but there is not quite so much as Mr. Lathbury thinks. There is full owner- ship in Irish land, though it has been transferred from Mr. Landlord to Messrs. Landlord, Tenant, and Co. If the copar- cenary agree, anything can be done. Moreover, if Mr. Lath- bury lives in London, he must be well aware that ownership in solution is not always fatal. The rights of a freeholder who has let a London house for ninety-nine years and of his tenant are much more incomplete than those of an Irish landlord and tenant, because under settlements and agreements landlord and tenant could not, even in unison,do as they like with the house ; but the house does not suffer, and the property both in the free- hold and the lease is very real, being about as saleable an article as exists. The paper, however, is well worth study ; and so is Mr. Grant Duff's elaborate defence of the official action in the Transvaal, the best yet made. The only answer to it, indeed, is that, having once assumed the responsibility for the territory, we ought to have kept it. Miss Christie's criticism of the National-School books is very good. There is no department of education in which slow and careful but thorough-going reform is so much needed, or is so checked by the pressure of the "interests" which grow up round all accepted school- books.

There is a pleasant chapter in Macmillan, by Mr. A. Hare, upon Dean Stanley. It adds little to what was known of the man, but it is full of details of his childhood, and enables us to see the shy, quiet lad, not strong, but full of poetry, who blossomed more, perhaps, than any lad did under Arnold's watchful guardianship. He suited his master, who appreciated keenly his pupil's grace and purity of character and tendency to literary effort, and who succeeded in removing his pupil's objec- tions to subscribing the Articles by the argument that entire assent to any bundle of propositions was nearly impossible. He was proud of him, too, as a scholar, feeling with all a schoolmaster's pride that up to Arthur Stanley's time Rugby had not quite done as it should in the contests for University honours. We quote, though it is aside from the main subject, a pleasant description of the old Palace at Norwich, known to so many Norfolk men :—

" Most delightful, and very different from the modern building which has partially replaced it, was the old Palace at Norwich. Ap- proached through a stately gateway, and surrounded by lawns and flowers, amid which stood a beautiful ruin,—the old house, with its broad, old-fashioned staircase and vaulted kitchen, its beautiful library looking out to Mousebold and Kett's Castle, its great dining- room hung with pictures of the Nine Muses, its picturesque and curious corners, and its quaint and intricate passages, was indescrib- ably charming. In a little side-garden under the Cathedral, pet peewits and a raven were kept, which always came to the dining- room window at breakfast, to be fed out of the Bishop's own hand."

There is not much more of great interest in Macmillan, but Miss Laffan's " Weeds " is another illustration of her power of photographing little-known phases of Irish society ; and we have enjoyed the bit of descriptive writing, albeit a little thing, called, " How I Found the Dotterel's Nest." It hap a trace of that felicity of natural description which used to be a speciality of Blackwood, and of which, by the way, there are in this month's number two specimens, one in the story called " Uncle Z," and another, " With Christian Abner in the Oberland."

Fraser's most readable paper is a sketch of Nassau Senior, which contains, besides an account of its subject, extracts from the most valuable of his observations. It is curious to read this, written in 1843, nearly forty years ago. Senior was then in Ireland, and he writes :—

" Houses and ricks are burnt ; cattle are maimed, tortured, or killed ; families are visited by parties of banditti, who inflict cruel torture, mutilate their limbs, or beat them almost to death. And men who have in any way become obnoxious to the insurgents, who have opposed their system, or refused to participate in their outrages, are murdered in open day These punishments are exemplary, rather than vindictive. In general, the victim is not the proprietor who has ejected a tenant, but the peasant who has succeeded to the vacant tenement ; it is not the landlord who exacts a rent which the self-appointed legislators think too high, but the tenant who pays it ; it is not the farmer who has hired a stranger, but the stranger who

has ventured to be hired Ireland is governed by two codes, dissimilar and often opposed—one deriving its validity from Acts of Parliament, and maintained by the magistrates ; the other, laid down by the tenants, and enforced by assassination."

We do not seem to have advanced much, but at least we have discerned that the war was agrarian.

The Cornkill, besides its stories, of which there are three, one " Nemorosa," very attractive, has a charming, gossipy paper, on the old English essayists, which, however, shows one curious failure. We doubt if the writer, for all his admirable estimate of Addison, quite enjoys or even sees Addison's soft humorousness, quite separate as it is in English literature,— for Goldsmith's humour lacked that flavour of tender pity,—and the same want is indicated in the sketch of Charles Lamb, whose sense of humour is treated as if it were an intellectual disqualification : —

" There is a self-consciousness abed him which in some moods is provoking. There is a certain bigotry about most humourists (as of a spoilt child) which has become a little tiresome. People have come to talk as if a sense of humour were one of the cardinal virtues. To have it is to be free of a privileged class, possessed of an esoteric system of critical wisdom. To be without it is to be a wretched, matter-of-fact, utilitarian pedant. The professed humonrist con- siders the rest of mankind as though they were deprived of a faculty, incapable of a relish for the finest literary flavours. Lamb was one of the first representatives of this theory, and is always tacitly warn- ing off the profane vulgar, typified by the prosaic Scotchman who pointed out that his wish to see Burns instead of Barns' son was impracticable, inasmuch as the poet himself was dead. The preten- sion is, of course, put forward by Lamb in the most amiable way, but it remains a pretension."

The sense of humour is not a cardinal virtue, or a virtue at all, but surely it is one of the intellectual totalities without

which the mind is imperfect. Suppose we said that So-and-so was an admirable critic, but had no sense of proportion. There is a clever paper on the " Old English Clans," the Saxon families or septa who gave their names to so many English localities, 411 of pleasant, learned gossip of this kind :—

" In the old continental England, the clans each lived in their own little township or territory, surrounded by a wild belt or mark of forest, marsh, or heath, and cut off from all similar townships by this intervening neutral ground. The clan was, in fact, a little inde- pendent commonwealth, with its own land, its own village, and its own slaves. And so the townships were each called after the name of the clan which inhabited them. When the fierce English pirates went forth to conquer abandoned and defenceless Britain, they went forth clan by clan, each leader embarking his men, his women, and his children in his keels or long-boats, and carving out for himself a new little territory or petty principality in the more fertile and cultivated soil of the deserted Roman province. Hence the local nomenclature of south-eastern Britain was widely altered by the English conquest. The Dodings and Heardings and Horn. ings of the new-comers cared little for the ancient British or Roman names. Their ham or tun was Horningham or Doddington ; and they did not trouble themselves to ask their Welsh serfs for the older title of the ruined villa or homestead. That, however, by no means proves that the English settlers exterminated every Welshman they found upon the soil. The Dutch in South Africa call their new home- steads by their own names—Rorke's Drift or Vanrenen's Kloof—but we know that they have not exterminated the Zulus, for all that. Dozens of negro buts cluster round the Dutch Boer's farmhouse ; and so I believe dozens of Welsh serfs bad their cottages around the homestead of the English lord. At any rate, be this as it may, the local names of south-eastern Britain are now almost exclusively Teutonic ; but the physique of the peasantry is largely dashed with the long skulls, dark hair, and bronze complexion of the Celtic and Easkarian aborigines."