THE MAGAZINES.

IT is a fact hard to explain, but familiar to all who habitually read them, that the larger Reviews are usually lively or dull, interesting or full of worn-out matter, all together. They do not select the same topics, they are not written by the same people, and they do not aim at the same ends ; yet it seldom occurs that one of them is all by itself especially colourless or brilliant. We suppose the explanation is that the same influ- ences, many of them unconscious, influence the whole literary class, and impel them to effort or reduce them to torpor at one

and the same time. Whatever the explanation, the Reviews are this month unusually full of matter treated in an unusually striking way. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, for example, in the Fort- nightly, lets himself go in a most unconventional way, writing with an angry birr in his words which leaves no doubt what- ever as to the genuineness of his disgust. He has been some time in England studying opinion, and, like most Anglo-Indians when not tamed by experience, its flabbi- ness and screaminess and vacillation make him positively sick, and induce him, in "One View of the Question," to relieve himself by burning invective. In the form of a letter from a Mussulman servant of a Native State, he pours out his diatribe, declaring that England is stricken with green- sickness, that her opinion is governed by women, and that the six hundred who rule her despise the sword, and believe that

the tongue and the pen rule all. From the droves of women soliciting in the streets, amid a population which in words ignores their existence, to the philanthropists who, "for all their unrest at the agonies of others, abandon no whit of soft living," everything stirs him to a wrath which expresses itself after this fashion :—

" If one cries in the streets, There has been an injustice,' they take him not to make complaint to those appointed, but all who pass, drinking his words, fly clamorously to the house of the accused and write evil things of him, his wives and his daughters ; for they take no thought to the weighing of evidence, but are as women. And with one hand they beat their constables who guard the streets, and with the other beat the constables for re- senting that beating, and fine them. When they have in all things made light of the State they cry to the State for help, and it is given, so that the next time they will cry more. Such as are oppressed riot through the streets, bearing banners that hold four days' labour and a week's bread in cost and toil ; and when neither horse nor foot can pass by they are satisfied. Others, receiving wages, refuse to work till they get more, and the priests help them, and also men of the six hundred—for where rebellion is one of those men will come as a kite to a dead bullock—and priests, talker, and men together declare that it is right becalm these will not work that no others may attempt."

Mr. Rudyard Sipling's words are often crude, and sometimes even unmannerly, but he speaks out with the passion of one in earnest in his yoke. The only remedy he sees is war, which may retune the nerves of the people and bleed out their fullness of habit; but he has not much confidence even in that, and thinks, like almost every Anglo-Indian, that one immediate consequence of the present mood will be the loss of India, unless, indeed, it be saved by the stronger. Anglo-Indians, with the help of some Native race assuming its government for themselves,—a contingency which people at home consider

unthinkable, but which in 1859 very nearly happened.—Mr. Daniel J. Rankin describes the Portuguese dominion in East Africa, in which he has lived, in most outspoken language.

It is, he says, a glorious region, full of fertility, containing the most beautiful harbours of the coast, but is given up to a people who cannot govern it, who work their own estates with purchased slaves, and are the allies of native slave- stealers, and who have lowered to an almost incredible degree the natural Negro standard of morality and civilisation. We will not disgust our readers with the worst paragraphs, but the following statements are repeated by every traveller and missionary who comes over :—

" These slave-owners have acquired their present status and power almost exclusively from the consignments of arms sent up by the Portuguese, and from the culpable encouragement given them by the colonial authorities. For months and even years they have from mere caprice completely blocked the waterway to trade, and closed the navigation to even the Government agents. The blackmailing of unfortunate traders is a matter of daily occurrence, as are pillaging, slave-raiding, wholesale massacres of innocent and offending peoples. On occasions, towns of a thousand and more men, women, and children have been butchered a outrance ! All these are the undeniable actions of a people whom Portugal claims as her dutiful subjects. And the per- petrators of all these atrocities against civilisation and humanity are nurtured and tacitly encouraged by a civilising and philan- thropic government. This is the price demanded and paid for the permission accorded to the Colonial Government, of occupying with a handful of Negroes, the decayed and ruinous posts of Sena, Tete, and Zumbo, and of enabling her to plausibly slur over the

• radical rottenness and ineffectiveness of her administration. Her military expeditions in this country are the hired slaves and fol- lowers of these river chiefs. Her so-called forts and military stations exist only conditionally on the prompt payment of the tribute demanded by the local owners. To advance her objects, chief is bribed into hostility against chief, and the country filled with blood and misery to promulgate this Christianising and civilising administration."

—Mr. Mallock describes, with a certain savagery of con- tempt, the position of Mr. Labouchere, the wealthy aristocrat and successful financial speculator who now poses as the leader

of the English Democrats. He admits him to be a clever man with a habit of hitting the nail on the head ; but maintains that he is not sincere, that he "is a political Puck who has stuck on his shoulders the head of a political Caliban," and who mistakes a kind of fire-damp which has been repeatedly generated in English history for the explosion of a volcano. He does not even understand England, but only the House of Commons, for in England—which, according to Mr. Labou- chere, is "the country," Scotland, Ireland, and Wales being separate States—a heavy majority is Conservative :—" Instead

of the Tories only having a majority in the country with the aid of the Liberal Unionists, they have in the country, as Mr.

Labouchere uses the word, a solid majority of between eighty and ninety over the Liberal Unionists and the Radicals put together."—Miss Amelie Rives, the gifted Southerner, author of "Virginia of the Virginians," sends, in the form of a story, a defence of the doctrine of euthanasia, one more

development of the modern passion of pity for any suffering under our eyes. She does not discuss the moral question, does not

seem even to have reflected that pain may be a discipline, and that, at all events, only He who trusted us with life can have a right to withdraw it ; but is wholly consumed by pity. Our utter rejection of her teaching must not, however, blind us to the pathos and the force which she infuses into her painful story.—Mr. Bent's "City of the Creed" is an account of the condition of Nimes., where the Nicene Council sat, now a walled city filled with ruins, and inhabited by Turks and some sixty poverty-stricken Greek families :—

" The walls of Niccea, the brave old walls, which stood there to welcome and protect the holy Fathers of the Councils, which for long withstood the attack of the Turks under Sultan Orchan, and to which Godfrey de Bouillon laid siege during his crusade, are still there, and in pretty much the same condition as when Strabo described them. They are massive double walls, with a hundred and eight towers in the inner circle, and a hundred and thirty in the outer, and in the shelter of these towers you now find the encampments of nomad tribes—Gipsies, Yuruks, and so forth — whose aspect makes you feel if your revolver is in its place, and heave a sigh of relief when you have left them well behind. At the Stamboul gate you pass under an inscription of the date of Trajan, and at this gateway, in the second row of walls, you are confronted by two huge mask heads four feet high, relics doubt- less from the old theatre, used by later inhabitants to adorn the chief entrance into their city. Another gate is adorned by quaint old Greek has-reliefs; and at the Lefke gate the aqueduct is still in use which Justinian built for supplying the city with water. The Yeni-ser gate has over it a laudatory inscription to Marcus Antoninus, and by this gate it was that Sultan Orchan entered NiCEBEL with his victorious army in 1333, when the city of the creed was for ever lost to Christendom."

—Perhaps the best-read, however, of all the papers in the Fortnightly will be Mr. W. M. Fullerton's comparison of English- men and Americans. It is very clever, sometimes more than clever, and interpenetrated besides with a curious love for England, which we have noticed in many Americans even when in critical mood, as the land of rest. The substance of Mr. Fullerton's criticism is that England always thinks a little behind the world, but it is stated amidst paragraphs like

these :—

" Americans, in proportion as they get culture, like England. And Englishmen take to Americans, as the phrase goes. This is a highly entertaining fact, and most significant. I hear Americans in London constantly asserting that they like to be here. They regard it as the most 'livable' city in the world, and England, of which London is the eye, the most 'livable' of countries. An Englishman, listening to this praise, is intensely gratified; and more than ever does he regard England as the centre of the solar system The American accent and intonation are in- tolerable to him ; but the fund of life the American carries with him is exhilarating in England. He is rale a boy coming back to the aged father and mother and brushing up the wits of the old people. The father believes that he forgets more nightly than the boy has ever known. But the freshness of his points of view, the depth and speed of his intuition, the engaging power of quaint suggestion, the inevitable alertness of mind, the buoyancy and enthusiasm of his average mood, all these characteristics and qualities are so unexpected, so fresh and helpful, that the father cannot but admire, although he may be a good deal shocked."

The Englishman, says Mr. Fullerton, thinks all the world barbarian, except America and the Colonies, which are only immature. Still, he likes these immature persons, for their freshness relieves the immense ennui of his routine life. The American, on the contrary, does not live the routine life, but an over-excited one,—over-stimulated by the thirst for money which we so recently described. Upon this point Mr. Fullerton is entirely at one with the Spectator :— " The American's aim is not, as usually in England, to get money enough to live in such a way as to live well. He does not recognise that the only good of money is to buy leisure to be wise. But with eye fast fixed upon the coin itself, the dazed vision magnifies it into a good for its own sake. In America, on the whole, money is at present the chief condition of power. By money man is enabled there to crane himself above the dead level of uniformity. Hence, in general, America has not reached the point that England long ago attained, in which it can afford to cultivate other gods than Mammon. With such an ideal and such a cult arise everywhere sordidness of motive in the worshippers, and mediocrity if not actual vulgarity of aspiration; everywhere, that is, apart from the university centres of culture and the sections dominated by piety and the churches. But the piety of the churches, while sincere, is often sadly lacking in culture, whereas in England its hypocrisy has often testhetic or patriotic sanction, while it is really more enlightened."

The whole paper is full of acid-sweet criticism of England, like this :—

" The misty air which hovers over it and on the slightest pro- vocation touches it with softening blue, seems charged with opiates. England, summer England, is a Circe's garden, where the passing traveller never gets even a single revealing whiff from the stagnant pools of slime in the pig-pens so carefully hidden. The wind never blows from that quarter, for the air above the heads of moneyed England is never troubled; nor is there any circulation or current from below,—the cool, conventional, calm atmosphere of upper England seeming eternally satisfying, and nothing heated or mephitic ever rising to insult the too nice nerves of those who dwell above, or send sickening warning of any rottenness beneath. The towers of Westminster grow daily, as one gazes, more and more beautiful. The cabs continue to glide easily and cheaply over noiseless pavements. Your tailor calls you sir,' and never asks for money, and the school-children curtsey as they pass. The moonlight lies with beauty rare upon the grand sweep of the Thames at Richmond, and sleeps upon the meadows by the stream. Windsor, serene, majestic, dominates her park with dignity of far-seen towers. The lanes of Devon

wind and wind between their high hedges tangled with moss-rose in curves of sweetest and most suggestive charm."

Mr. F. Hill's essay in the Contemporary Review on "The Future of English Monarchy" is a bit of a curiosity. There

is plenty of thinking in it, and some absurdity. The account of the gradual change in English thought about the Con- stitution from the time when Mr. Bagehot wrote to the present day, is exceedingly able, as also is the develop- ment of the argument that the Swiss Referendum may possibly remedy many of the evils inherent in our de- mocracy; but we can scarcely understand the bitterness of the attack upon the nobles for serving the Crown in the great household offices. That gentlemen should not be menials, is, in brief, Mr. Hill's idea ; but is not that really this,—that all

service degrades ? Why does it degrade Mr. Hill likes the Monarchy on the whole, and would even greatly increase its power by leaving it the initiative in submitting the Referendum

to the people ; yet he ends his essay with this sentence, which he must pardon us for saying is little better than nonsense :—

"English Royalty must not merely be seen in the discharge of public functions which cannot so well be performed by any other institution. It must also be seen to be the monarchy of the whole people and not of the upper classes only, and must disentangle itself from those conditions which reduce English nobles and ladies to the rank of menials, acting in an ignoble farce of Low Life Above Stairs."

What is that but to say that all ceremonial is farcical, or that an officer cannot carry a standard without performing " menial " office ? If it is so wrong for a Sovereign to keep gentlemen about him to do him service, is it not wrong for anybody to keep servants at all ? We could understand that argument, though we rank service higher than Mr. Hill does.

But if it is allowable to serve, why should service to a superior degrade the gentleman ? Surely there can be no degradation where there is entire unconsciousness of it.—Mr. Haldane's paper on the Eight-Hours question is a solid piece of reason- ing, supported by facts which seem to us to prove conclusively that the labourers who make out the strongest case for an Eight-Hours Bill—viz., the miners—not only can secure an eight-hours' day for themselves through their Unions, but, except in one small district of West Scotland, where their organisation is weak, have actually done so. We cannot con- ceive an answer to the statement in p. 244, and only regret that we have not space to extract it in full. It should be studied by every man who speaks upon the question, who may also frequently read the following with advantage :—

" One would imagine from the current talk that the working-man voter was almost without exception a person of definite and almost ferociously pronounced opinions. Nothing is further from being the case, as those who have most to do with the business of getting his vote know. He is generally, but not always, a strong Radical. The reason is that he feels that certain existing institutions have prevented him from getting near to that equality of opportunity which he would like to see brought about in the interests of him- self and his children. But he has no very definite notion of the way by which this is to be obtained, and he looks to political discussion and the newspapers for information. On both of these, by the way, he often bestows a good deal more attention than his more well-to-do middle-class fellow-citizen. As a rule, he is quite open to conviction. And if there is anything certain it is that he has not made up his mind in favour of Parliamentary restriction of his hours of labour. He will want to hear a good deal about the effect on both wages and the labour market before he does. He is, in short, very much like the ordinary mortal whom we used to meet at the polling-booths before the franchise was extended."

That statement will read to many far too optimist, but it is one repeated by all foreign observers, and most of those who have really tried to convince a roomful of workmen of an un- popular truth. They seem to make no impression, but their words sink.—Mr. W. H. Spence's account of a voyage with General Gordon adds some curious details to what is known of the hero's life, and in particular explains his resignation of his appointment as Lord Ripon's Military Secretary. He could not endure the life of a Court. "The true and only reason he had, he said, for leaving India was that he could not put up with the ways and customs of the high social circle in which he was expected to move. Dress for dinner, dress for evening parties, dress for balls, dress and decoration, decoration and dress ! day after day. I could not,' said Gordon, stand the worry of it, and rather than do so I gave up the appoint- ment.' "—Archdeacon Farrar's tribute to the late Bishop of Durham is an eloquent and just one, though it is always a pity in such a sketch to leave out shading so completely. The one weak point in the Bishop's capacity—not his character—was the one which his intimate friends, of course, could not see, a certain difficulty or slowness in deciding between the relative abilities of the men with whom he came in contact. He was incapable of a prejudice, but he was apt to like too strongly.—The ablest article in the number is Sir C. Gavan Duffy's on Australian Federation, which contains a complete history of that movement, and shows how near it has already been to accomplishment. He thinks that a deputation from England, consisting, say, of Lord Carnarvon and Lord Rosebery, would in a few months smooth away all remaining difficulties. We are sorry to see that Sir Charles still retains the old Colonial feeling about the Colonial Office as a blundering department of the State. It makes mistakes, no doubt, but surely it is entitled to say to some of its critics, " Circumspice."

In the Nineteenth Century, Mr. Knowles has a collection of articles of great instructiveness, and one of them, that called "The Naturalist in the Pampas," of great interest, but some of them are a little too technical.—Outsiders, as he himself suspects, will hardly understand Mr. Blackburn's, on "The Illustration of Books and Newspapers," or Sir J. Adye's, on "The Glut of Junior Officers in the Army."—Mr. Knowles, however, did well to give place to the paper by Fung Yee, late Secretary of Legation in London, on Chinese railways, if only because it contains the memorial addressed by the Governor of Formosa to the Emperor on the subject. That document will clarify many men's notions as to the ability of Chinese statesmen. It is useless to discuss it just now, because the railway project has for the time been thwarted by popular opposition ; but buyers of the magazine should keep it as a mine of information. The whole article is a curious proof of the editor's cleverness in extracting essays out of people not naturally given to writing, and revives a hope we once ex- pressed before, that he will one day induce the Mikado to descend into literature, and give us, say, his views on "The Future of Japan."—One of the most readable articles in the number is Mr. Kebbel's extremely temperate argument in favour of the absorption of the Unionists into the Con- servative Party. He thinks that, failing this change, the allied parties may be beaten at the General Election, in which thousands will vote for Home-rule because they wish Radical- ism to triumph. In other words, the way to defeat the united forces of Radicalism and Irishism is to swell the ranks of the Conservative Party, which naturally opposes both. We disagree, on the opportunist ground, if no other; but Mr. Kebbel's free- dom from spitefulness invests his writing with a certain per- suasive quality. —Mr. Charles Edwardes reminds us all, in good time, but in far too brief a way, that Crete contains two popula- tions, and that the Sphakiots, or mountaineers, whom even Rome could hardly subdue, are hereditary enemies of the Moslem, and greatly feared even by the Turkish soldiers. We wish he had entered into more detail, and, above all, told us more of the present strength of these highlanders, and the help they could give in resisting an attempt, should it ever be made, to crush out the spirit of independence in Crete. Mr. Edwardes, who is no partisan, and who has a kindly word for the Mussulman inhabitants of Crete, evidently thinks that nothing short of union with Greece will completely content the Christian population.