THE MAGAZINES.

THE Fortnightly contains a- paper about "Modern Spiritualism," noticed in our last issue ; one on the "Power of the Farmers," by Richard Jefferies ; and one on "Agricultural Wages in Europe," by T. E. Cliffe Leslie, all papers more or less worthy of attentive study. Mr. Leslie's is, perhaps, at the present moment the paper of most general interest. He maintains, and indeed proves, that the rise in the price of agricultural labour in England is not an isolated fact, but part of a movement visible all over Western and Central Europe :— " In Belgium, where farm wages had been rising for twenty years, they have lately sprung in some districts from 2fr. 50c. to 3fr. 50e. and up- wards. In France, M. de Lavergne estimated the general rise in the decade 1855-1865 at 20 per cent, but it was much greater in many places, and continued down 'to the war. Dr. Beer and Professor von der Goltz put it at 60 per cent. in the north of France in the last twenty- six years ; and one cannot doubt that the rise throughout the country would have been greater and would be still going on, but for the late war, the drain of money which has followed it, and the uncertain state of political affairs. Dr. F. von der Goltz, Professor of Rural Economy in the University of Konigsberg, a writer of great practical experience, in the new edition of his work on the German agricultural labourer's question, measures in money the rise of the wages of the classes of labourers referred to at 100 per cent in the Rhine Province, and from 50 to 60 per cent, in the eastern province of Prussia, in the last ten to twenty years. A table of agricultural wages in the last number of The Journal of the Agricultural zociety for Rhenish Prussia puts the rise in one district at from 75 to 100 per cont, in the last four years, in another district at 200 per cent, in the last twenty years, and in a third at 200 per cent in the last. ten years. At Tiibingen in Wiirtem- berg, Dr. Gustav Cohn tells me the rate was Is. 2d. a day in 1850-1855, Is. 4d. in 1860-1865, is. 8id. in 1866-1870, and is 28.00.in 1874. At Virissen, in the Rhine Province, on the border of Westphalia, Mr. W.. Wynne, a resident English engineer, states :-4 Ten years ago agri- cultural wages were Is. 2id. a day, measured in money ; about that time railway works commenced, and they rose very quickly. At present they are about 2s. a day—a fall after the exaggerated rates of last year.' Mr. White, British Consul at Danzig, one of the best informed and most

intelligent Englishmen in Germany, although remarking (April 27) that 'the prize of labour in Germany has quite lately entered into a retrogressive stage,' measures the general rise in the price of agricul- tural labour at from 50 to 100 per cent, in the last twenty years, and speaks of great alarm on the part of farmers with respect to the future."

It is probable that in most of these cases the rise in wages has been caused in part by a Hats in the cost of provisions, but Mr.

Leslie maintains that other causes are also at work, one being the increase of wealth, another the desire for more civilisation, and a third the increased application of labour to manufactures. He believes the increase will be durable, that the resistance of farmers in England is useless, and that England may lose the greater part of its rural population, the people refusing to remain unless they see a good chance of obtaining farms of their own. He denies the effect of emigration in raising wages, us they rise in France and Belgium, where people do not emigrate, as well as in Germany and England, where they do ; but remarks, for the benefit of English squires, that the greatest emigration from Germany is from districts where popu- lation is thin, estates large, and the chance of independent posses- sion of a farm very remote indeed. Mr. Harrison's paper on France does not interest us so much as his papers usually do, but his main conclusions that France, for the present, is honestly desirous of peace, and that she is still working out the Revolution, are, we believe, sound, and noteworthy as coming from a man whose sympathies are entirely with the defeated country. It should be noted, as a strong confirmation of Mr. Harrison's view, that M. Gambetta, speaking after his article was written, and to the peasants of Central France, strongly advocated peace.

The Contemporary for June is singularly interesting. It opens with an instalment of Mr. Gladstone's argument to show that the Trojan War, as chronicled in the "Iliad," contains a nucleus of historical truth. Mr. Gladstone analyses first the points in which the discoveries at Hissarlik appear, in his judgment, to confirm the descriptions given of Ilium and its people in the " Iliad," and then turning to recent Egyptian discoveries, he investigates how these bear on the evidence for the historical existence of the races, and the relative politions of the races, mentioned in the Homeric poems. Mr. Gladstone infers from the mention of the Darden name in the Egyptian records, that the overthrow of Troy may have happened from 1300 B.C. to 1200 B.C., there or thereabouts ; and from the mention in the same document of the Achaian name, that the fall of Troy, if historical, might have happened between 1350 B.C. and 1300 B.C. He is to continue his argument in a future number. Mr. Llewelyn Davies contributes a thoughtful and able answer to Mr. Leslie Stephen's paper on Mr. Maurice's theology; the only fault of the reply being, in our opinion, that be does not frankly admit Mr. Maurice's very subjective way of dealing with purely criti- cal questions concerning the authenticity of documents. That a good deal may be said for Mr. Maurice's extreme distrust of the confident tone of the modern destructive criticism, we admit. But the only point of view from which much can be made of that distrust, requires us to admit equally the haze of doubt in which the positive results of orthodox criticism are involved, and this Mr. Maurice was never inclined to do. We think Mr. Davies is perfectly right in repudiating with some warmth the notion that Mr. Maurice appealed to the ordinary British Christian ' from the learned critic of the Bible. But it is certainly true that he did appeal, as Mr. Davies grants, to the moral and spiritual experience even of the very ignorant,—and this, too, sometimes, as evidence for the divine authority of narratives or writings, though the question at issue may not have been so much one affecting moral guidance as historical accuracy. And he carried this so far, that we at least could instance but one case in which Mr. Maurice ever used language which appeared to admit a single clear error in Scripture,—that instance being the odd comparison put into our Lord's mouth by one evangelist between the burial of Jonah for three days and nights in the whale's belly, and Christ's burial for three days and nights in the heart of the earth, a forced prophetic analogy which Mr. Maurice apparently regarded as nnauthentically ascribed to Christ, as well as in itself unsound,--and even this error he only admitted in the most cautious and ambiguous terms. Mr. Maurice ]was, we think, the greatest religious teacher of our time ; but he had never cleared up his own views as to the true test of historical authenticity, and his instinctive Conservatism on the subject was, we think, more really open to Mr. Leslie Stephen's criticism than Mr. Davies is inclined to admit. For the rest, and on all the more important points, Mr. Davies's reply is full of weight and strength. To Mr. Greg's second threnody on "Rocks Ahead" we have devoted sufficient space elsewhere. Lord

Lyttelton has a paper, not quite fair, we think, to Mr. Abbott, on whose manual of unsectarian teaching it is founded, to show the great difficulty of undogruatic religious teaching. No doubt he is quite right in saying that all definite religious teaching has more or less of dogma in it. You cannot teach children to pray with- out teaching them that there is a God who hears prayer ; you cannot teach children to believe that Christ hears prayer without teaching them what most modern Unitarians will strenuously deny; but the friends of undogmatic teaching have never proposed to use the word in a sense that is not simply relative. And to our minds, Mr. Abbott's admirable little book solves the question as the old Greek solved the problem of the possibility of motion, by actually teaching what the parents of hardly any Christian denomination object to their children's learning. There is also in this Contemporary a good literary article, which is not quite so common in this magazine as it might be, a paper pointing out the subtlety and delicacy of some of Lord Lytton's "Fables in Song," by the Rev: Eames Davies ; a very temperate and dignified reply by Professor Tyndall to assailants who appear to be given to needlessly sharp invective ; and finally, an interesting article by Archbishop Manning on "Christianity and Antichristianism," in which our admission that, a priori, it was natural to expect that a divine revelation would be protected by the power which gave it, and that almost all Churches had more or less assumed the existence of an infallible authority accessible to human believers, on the subject of doctrine, either in the shape of a Church organisation, or in the shape of an infallible book, is made good use of. The Archbishop quotes, of course, from the New Testament the chief passages tending to prove that the gift of a divine " Spirit of Truth" to the Church, regarded as the "mystical body of Christ," was of the very essence of the Christian revelation. Nor would any Christian deny this. We should only question what a (‘ Spirit of Truth "in this sense really means. Is it a power of accurate discrimination between one doctrine and another, or a spirit which vivifies the apprehension of spiritual things, and brings the believer's soul into real communion with God and Christ ? If the former, dogmatic infallibility is asserted in Scripture to be given to the Church ; but if the latter, then what is given is not intellectual infallibility at all, but only that vision of and sympathy with Christ's character and nature which constitutes in itself a" spirit of truth," but is quite consistent in Suite minds with erroneous intellectual conclusions. In the former case, the gift to the Church is an intellectual infallibility which may be quite divorced from moral fidelity ; in the latter, it is a gift of moral and spiritual aid which must imply more or less,— though often rather less than more,—of vivacity in the intellectual apprehension of the divine being and character. As far as we know, there is no passage in the New Testament in which the "Spirit of Truth" is nearly SO likely to mean dogmatic infallibility as what we should call moral and spiritual illumination. With many of the Archbishop's positions in confutation of Mr. Stephen we at least heartily concur.

Macmillan for June is rather noteworthy among Magazines. It has no less than four first-class papers, — one by Mr. Wedmore, on "The Masters of Etching ;" a second, by Miss Octavia Hill, on the "Homes of the London Poor ;" a third, on "Female Suffrage," by Mr. Goldwin Smith ; and a fourth, on Mr. Froude's "English in Ireland," by Mr. W. E. H. Lecky. One of these is nominally a review, but the writer brings knowledge of his own probably as great as that of the author he criticises; while the other three are entirely original, Miss Hill, for example, relating the story of the experiment in Glasgow upon which, as she hopes and we hope, it may be possible to found a scheme for the rebuilding of London. This plan was commenced in 1866, when the Glasgow Municipality found 50,000 people huddled upon 80 acres, in shocking dens, without air, or light, or the possibility of supervision. The municipality, always strong- handed from the circumstances of the city, obtained power from Parliament to levy a rate of sixpence in the pound, and to destroy, rebuild, or sell these houses. They bought a large amount of property before commencing, pulled down, rebuilt, opened new streets, introduced air and light, erected houses in the suburbs, and effected a thorough sanitary reform, at an expense which, though originally estimated at £200,000, cannot now be £50,000, and may very readily be nothing. It was found that as the wynds were cleared, private speculators were very ready to build houses for the workmen ; and as the work was not hurried, there was very little inconvenience and no opposition. It is to a similar scheme applied to London that Miss Hill looks to improve the dwellings of the poor, and for a similar scheme that the Home Secretary intends, it is said, to allow an expenditure of I2,00'),000. If anything is to be done, an Act of Parliament is imperatively required, if only to settle the difficulty of ownership in the sites ; but if skilfully managed, the undertaking need not cost half the sum allowed, the regular profit on rebuilding, reletting, and buying being, in Miss Hill's experience, five per cent. The rents, moreover, need not be higher, the artistic method of covering the ground saving much space, and the height of most of the houses being capable of increase. Mr. Wedmore's paper on the "Masters of Etching," is delightful reading, especially for those who want intelligible and not technical criticism, and care for the lives of the artists almost as much as for their productions. His account of Rembrandt's work is, perhaps, the best, though he is hard upon a painter whose incapacity of beauty was rather a love for realism than a contempt for the ideal ; but this is sound criticism. After speaking of a kind of pity that inspired Rem- brandt often to depict loathsome forms of human suffering, he says :— " And here his religion is distinctly a spiritual gain to his art. Where then, and why, is it a loss ? It is a loss because, somehow or other, with all this useful faith in a better future—faith which the true Renaissance held but slackly, and showed but little in its art—the art of Rem- brandt has no scope for wide imagination : no sweet and secret thing is revealed through it : there flows through it to the minds of men no such divine message as even we of these latter days can road in the art of the earlier Florentines. True and real, very likely—it is rarely high and interpretive. The early art of Italy, fed on a fuller faith, could do more with infinitely smaller means. Turn from the soberest of Rem- brandt's sacred pictures—the picture most filled with piteous human emotion—I mean the Death of the Virgin' ' which is real as the death of his mother—turn from this to the still glowing canvas on which Botticelli has imaged his conception of a Paradise with countless com- panies of little children, children only, round the throne of God, and in circles ever more distant, the great ones of the world—the last, who were first—and you fool at once, more strongly than can be told by any words, what Netherlands Protestantism has cost to• Rembrandt ; for, instead of this parable and this revelation, he can give you but a human sorrow."

Mr. Goldwin Smith we have noticed already, and Mr. Lecky's paper is one more crushing exposure of Mr. Froude's unfairness in judging of the history of Ireland, from which we can afford to take but one remarkable fact. It is, in Mr. Lecky's belief, cer- tain that had emancipation been granted, the Rebellion of 1798 would n ever have occurred. The people did not want to receive the boon from insurrection :— "The Catholics would far sooner have obtained the boon from the Parliament than from the Revolution. Passionately attached to their faith, they looked with horror on what was passing in Franco as on the special manifestation of Antichrist. Their sympathies were not with Paris, but with La Vendde, and the Catholic nobles and prelates were violently opposed to the United Irishmen. At the same time, the contagion of a great revolution and the presence of an active party offering the Catholics emancipation as the price of adhesion could not be without its effect."

The Cornhill also has a paper on the Agricultural Llbourers, entirely friendly to their cause, and containing a statement the exact force of which we should like to ascertain :— " We could point, again. to Western villages where one-third of the houses are vacant, where the young men have disappeared, where the land is going out of cultivation. The younger labourers have gone abroad, or to the North. ' Oh !' say the farmers, 'they will come back ; such an one has done so already. They will find they were better off here.' Not so. More than five hundred men had left one Western county more than six months ago ; loss than five per cent, have returned ; from those that have remained come nothing but good accounts of their changed circumstances. Those who drift back are those who would work nowhere, who prefer to shuffle where hands of any sort are wanted. But these cases are known, while the farmers will not recognise the fact that the flower of the village are those who go and stay, not those who go and return."

Has land really gone out of cultivation, or is it only cultivated in a different way ? The little poem on "King Fritz," found among Thackeray's papers, contains two verses in his happiest vein, but is, as a whole, poor :— " Reclined on the softest of cushions His Majesty sits to his meats,

The princes, like loyal young Prussians, Have never a back to their seats.

Off salmon and venison and pheasants Ho dines like a monarch august ; His sons, if they eat in his presence, Put up with a bone or a crust.

"Ho quaffs his bold bumpers of Rhenish, It can't be too good or too dear; The princes are mado to replenish Their cups with the smallest of beer.

And if ever, by word, or grimaces, Their highnesses dare to complain, The King flings a dish in their faces, Or batters their bones with his cane."

The paper on Schliemann's discoveries in the Troad is an ex- ceedingly able argument, somewhat too bitterly pressed, to show

that while the enthusiastic German has discovered relics of curious archmological interest, he has not found Troy, and still less King Priam's treasure. The writer believes that the true site is Boun- arbashi, which Schliemann scarcely examined, and that the best work for an antiquarian would be to excavate systematically the site of the Grecian Camp, where relics might be found buried. which would settle for ever the historical or unhistorical character of the traditions on which Homer founded his marvellous song.

Blackwood has several good papers, a chatty, good-humoured criticism of "The Poets at Play" being perhaps the most readable, but the one which interests us most is "The Romance of the Japanese Revolution." The writer does not attempt to solve that political puzzle, the sudden surrender by a powerful oligarchy of all claims to rule, but he states it with great force, and every ap- pearance of intimate knowledge of the facts. His mistake, we suspect, is his tendency to underrate the religious authority of the Mikado. It is quite true that the Daimios attacked him, which is an odd way of showing reverence ; but it may also be true that, once set free, he may have been absolute even over them. That happened to the Popes over and over again, and even to the descendants of Timour, who, though puppets for years, would, if once released, have been able to gather armies by their mere- summons. The writer's remarks on the number of disbanded' troops in Japan and their probable influence on the country are most shrewd, and have been confirmed since be wrote, the Japanese Court having found it essential to let them expend their energiee on the conquest of Formosa, and possibly other expeditions.