THE MAGAZINES.

IT might have been expected that the very doubtful success of the Contemporary's excursion into the regions of sensationalism

during the spring would have acted as a warning to the editor, and that the vamped-up and fictitious nature of the revela- tions contained in the article on the relations of Bismarck and the Emperor Frederick and his consort, would have put a stop to the discovery in the future of similar mare's-nests. Such, however, has not been the result, and this month's issue contains a paper on the Papacy—described on the title- page as "A Revelation and a Prophecy "—which for pompous fatuity is absolutely unsurpassable. Though the reader will soon weary of the windy rhetoric in which the Pope is now patted on the back, and now reproved with a good-humoured condescension which, while it notices, makes allowances for his weaknesses, it is impossible not to be amused by the assump- tion that the writer knows exactly what passes at the Vatican. The pith of the article, as we have noticed elsewhere, is contained in the statement that Leo XIII. did not wait for Monsignor Persico's Report before he published the Rescript, and that the Irish Commissioner was horrified by its ap- pearance. Monsignor Persico, we are told, had by no means advised the condemnations it contained, but had, instead, counselled the Pope to be led by the Irish Bishops, and to nothing that could look like helping the English Govern The display of more than official gravity with which th are supported is delicious :-

" These statements are not made without a f sense of the grave responsibility attaching to their publi ...don. They are capable of conclusive demonstration. The Po-pe has only to ask Cardinal Rampolla to bring him Monsignor Persico's Relazione, to note the date on which that report was read by the Pope, to compare that date with the date of the Rescript, and then to compare the recommendations of Monsignor Persico with the statements

t. facts made above. It is impossible, of course, for any one else to verify the accuracy of what will no doubt be regarded in Ireland as an astounding and almost incredible revelation, but the appeal may be made withcut hesitation to Rome. The Pope, the Cardinal State Secretary, and the Archbishop of Damietta know the facts, and they know that they are substantially as herein stated. This being so, is it not about time that a more charitable judgment of Monsignor Persico began to prevail in Ireland ? "

Probably most people will find this quotation sufficient. For the benefit, however, of those who would like, by means of internal criticism, to make a guess at the author of the article, and to find out who it is who so naïvely professes to possess an Olympian omniscience, we may notice the following facts.

At the beginning of the article there is a comparison of the Pope, Bismarck, and the Czar, in which occurs the following passage :-

" Prince Bismarck is intensely human He stands before us as the very incarnation of masterful man. He lives before us, com- plete in all human relations, with his wife, his sister, his sons, his dogs, his pipe, and his beer ; he touches the common life of his day at every point. It is the same with the Tzar : although in his case he is more withdrawn from the public gaze, he shares not less fully the ordinary life of the ordinary man. As father, as husband, as master, as friend, he is a man among men ; nor does the burden of empire separate him from the simple family joys and natural every-day cares of the human home. But the Pope stands apart."

In view of this charming piece of fine writing, it is hardly necessary to recall the name of the writer, who finds it as

difficult to keep the Emperor of Russia out of his pages as did Mr. Dick Charles I., and who would perish rather than not spell with a " T " the august monosyllable he

so frequently invokes. Then, again, we are told that it is " all Lombard Street to a China orange" in favour of the Pope adopting "a world-wide" instead of an Italian ideal. Who can fail to recognise the genuine thunder here ? More convincing, however, than even the Tzar or the " China orange" are the skilfully managed references to the efforts made to secure the services of the Pope " as Unionist emergency-man in Ireland," or the delicate and yet forcible phrase,—" They nobbled the Vicar of Christ by exciting the expectations of the Italian Prince." Readers of the Pall Mall Gazette can hardly have forgotten the magnificent head-lines,—" The ago. To find our old evening fare re-dished with such an air of mystery, and garnished by apparent peeps into the inmost Pontifical closet, is quite a pleasant surprise.—The rest of the Contemporary is fairly good. Mr. Harrison's sermon on "The Centenary of the Bastille" is vigorous and picturesque, though it is a little late in the day to talk as if any one con- tended that it was not a good thing to get rid of the ancien regime. No apology is needed for its destruction. What people do want to know, however, is why the French could not contrive to effect their revolution as we affected ours, or the Americans theirs,—without stupid, reckless slaughter. This, unfortunately, no centenarist has yet managed to tell us.

Mr. Mackarness's article on South Africa is a vigorous one. In it be draws an indictment against the interference of the Aborigines Protection Society, which ought to be answered by that meddlesome, if well-meaning body.

The Nineteenth Century is, as a whole, dry. Mr. Harrison, most indefatigable of essayists, discourses pleasantly on "A Breakfast-Party in Paris," where he heard a great many conflicting views on the political situation, all pointing to the desire for a political change of some sort or other; while the Rev. Father Barry writes an inconclusive paper, entitled " Wanted—a Gospel for the Century.", With the sort of socialism which Father Barry advocates we have little patience. The world is bad enough, no doubt ; but to argue as if Paris, London, and Vienna were worse now than they were two, three, or six centuries ago, is simply nonsense. People talk as if cruelty, sensuality, and intemperance were discoveries of the end of the nineteenth century, and forget that but for occasional outbursts of hysterical religion, the mass of the population in the Middle Ages was less rather than more materially minded than our own. The line Father Barry takes is illustrated in the following passage :—

" Is there a greater sin than to murder men by slow starvation ? The rich non-producer—be he Jew, Catholic, or infidel—dyes his hands in that sin every day he lives. He is part and parcel of a system which calls itself the social order. What if we told him seriously, told ourselves first of all, that there is no genuine social order save the kingdom of Christ, into which the idle rich ea nuot

enter ? It has been argued that Dives, who does nothing but lounge at the clubs and spend thousands on his enjoyment, is not without his uses ; that he points to the rewards of toiling ambition. I ask in reply, What place is there for Dives in the kingdom of Christ ? Do we find in him, or the system to which he belongs, aught of that threefold reverence which, to Goethe's mind, made the sum of possible religions ? His attitude towards things above is Agnosticism ; towards things around him scepticism ; towards things beneath him cynicism. Cynically he buys (with money not earned by him) the labour of the working-man's son, the purity of the working-man's daughter. `Yes,' he may answer me, it is a free bargain ; both are willing to sell.' When he has wrought his will upon them, he flings the son to the workhouse, the daughter to the streets or the hospital. Let those who are not ashamed to call themselves Christians, ponder these things. They say they believe in a living Christ. When will they open their eyes and judge the nineteenth century, and their place in it, as He did the first ? Or will they rather imitate their high rulers of two hundred years ago, and neglect or persecute social science, in like manner as these did physical, putting under a ban the interpreters of God's visible world ?"

Surely the cant of making the rich man and the scoundrel identical is just as mischievous as that which would ascribe virtue alone to the well-to-do. Would Christ have denied justice to a man because he had a fall puree? We shall not mend the age if we start with the assumption that every poor man is an angel, every rich one a. demon.—Mr. Atherley Jones—a young Radical Member who sits for North-West Durham—writes a paper on "The New Liberalism," which shows how exceedingly widespread is the demoralisation that has attacked the Gla,dstonian Party. Usually it is the Min.isterialists who begin, at the end of the third or fourth Session of a Parliament, to show signs of disintegration. In the present instance, however—if we are to believe Mr. Atherley Jones, and he gives 'good reasons for his faith—it is the Opposition that is breaking up. In the first place, the writer complains that the New Liberalism, by which he means, apparently, the ideas represented by Mr. Labouchere's party, is not given its fair share in the counsels of the party. This, he considers, weakens it in the country. Next, he declares that the Irish Question does not interest the electors. On this point we will quote his own words :—

" It is remarkable that with all the iniquities of the present regime in Ireland there has not been one single incident to stir English feeling to its depths and produce that sentiment of indig- nation and sympathy which is the motive-force essential to the early attainment of the Home-rule policy. Mr. Michael Devitt some time ago complained that Mr. Gladstone had not treated the Irish Question as he did the Bulgarian. The answer is obvious : Ireland is not Bulgaria. To the sane Englishman Mitchelstown. is not Batak ; the Irish constabulary are not Bashi-Bazouks, nor Irish. magistrates Turkish pashas. Mr. Gladstone, indeed, attempted to Bulgarianise ' at Nottingham in 1887: his attempt went perilously near to the ludicrous. The evictions at Glenbeigh probably moved English sentiment more largely than any other recent event in Ireland, but the Plan of Campaign,' the greatest tactical error of the Irish movement, generally regarded by the prejudiced or uninformed as of dubious morality, impressed the English mind with the idea that the Irish tenant was, after all, very capable of protecting himself against the exactions of his landlord. Again, it has unfortunately so fallen out that the most tragic and painful incidents have always had a dash of the comic or the ridiculous ; so the outrage at Mitchelstown was clouded by the grotesque extravagances of the coroner's inquest and the anti-climax of Colonel. Dopping. Indignation at the im- prisonment of Mr. O'Brien was counteracted by merriment over the story of his stolen breeches and the smuggled suit of Irish frieze. The Government have indeed been fortunate in their administration of coercion; they have never once dangerously outraged public opinion. That the Home-rule movement does not arouse enthusiasm among the masses is abundantly testified by the failure of public meeting and the equivocal results of by-elections. In spite of the unprecedented efforts of Home- rule propagandists, save when under the adventitious attrac- tion of a popular speaker, meetings are sparsely attended,

and audiences are generally cold and often apathetic. Nor indeed does the present or prospective condition of Ireland predicate any large or rapid extension of English interest in Irish politics. There can be no doubt that the land legislation has created a material change for the better in the condition of the Irish tenant. The decrease in the number of pending evictions

from an estimate of something like 40,000 in 1881 to an estimate the most extreme of 10,000 in 1888, the reduction of rental since

1881 by approximately no less than 20 per cent. throughout the country, the assimilation, by means of trades-unionist organisa- tions, of the financial relations of landlord and tenant to those of employer and employed, the improved values of agricultural pro- duce, have transformed Irish agitation from an agrarian warfare in which politics played a subordinate part into a political move- ment which finds its most potent ally in what remains of agrarian discontent."

That these reflections are substantially true will be admitted by most reasonable men, we can hardly doubt. Still, we should fear that their author will not gain the good-will of his chiefs for having made them. Mr. Atherley Jones, at the end of the article in question, gives us a statement of the views of his special section of the Gladstonians, which, as far as their object goes, are satisfactory enough. When he says that it is the business of the statesman to devise "reforms by which, without violence to persons or shock to the principles of public morality, there may be compassed for our people a wider diffusion of physical comfort, and thus a loftier standard of national morality," we and all true Liberals will agree with him. " This," he tells us, " is the new Liberal- ism," This, we may reply, is also the old,—the Liberal- ism of Cobden and of Bright, the Liberalism of Lord Hartington and of Mr. Chamberlain. What we object to, and what we will never cease fighting against, is not the ideal object, but the insane and ruinous methods proposed for its accomplishment. When proposals are made in the name of Liberalism which could have no other result but misery for the working classes, all true Liberals must withstand them, no matter what amount of vituperative epithets they may have to endure in consequence.—Mr. Gladstone's paper on " The Phoenician Affinities of Ithaca,'' which is the only other article we have space to notice, is some- what technical. Though its contents are more suitable to an annotated Homer than to a magazine, it is not without interest.

The intention of the article is to show that Ithaca was not fully Hellenised in the time of Ulysses, and that Phoenician in- fluences had very largely affected its people, religion, and " dietary." The evidence adduced by Mr. Gladstone cannot, however, be reproduced here, and we can only say of it that it is marked by the writer's minute and loving knowledge of the Homeric poems.

In the Fortnightly, Mr. Karl Blind pulverises once again Mr. Gladstone's appeals to the example of the civilised world in regard to Home-rule, and shows that every instance chosen by the leader of the Opposition tells against instead of for

his Irish policy. The claims of Sweden and Norway, Den- mark and Iceland, Russia and Finland, Austria-Hungary, the Swiss Confederation, and the German Empire to illustrate the blessedness of Hothe-rule, are each specifically examined, and shown in reality to afford ample proof of how dangerous to the safety of States is the dual system of government. As a half-way house to unity, the plan of linking together autonomous countries may be a necessary expedient. As a solution of internal provincial difficulties, or as a means of producing a real Union, the system utterly breaks down. Complete separation or incorporation is the necessary outcome of such political conditions. Here is Mr. Karl Blind's account of Sweden and Norway, which Mr. Gladstone at Launceston held up as an example of " the almost magical working of the system we recommend."

" Does Mr. Gladstone really recommend the system of Sweden- Norway for this country ? Has Mr. Gladstone never heard of those Norwegians who aim at yet fuller independence than the system of mere personal union, with its almost magical working,' confers upon them ? Has he not heard of the nine years' bitter conflict between the Norwegian Storthing, or House of Commons, and King Oscar IL—a conflict which was only settled for a time In 1884 by the appointment of Mr. Sverdrup as Minister-President at Christiania ? Sweden has nearly five millions, Norway not quite two millions of inhabitants. On the strength of his superior power as ruler of Sweden, Oscar H. was supposed to aim at domineering over the Norwegians, and setting aside their consti- tutional rights. This, at least, was their contention, and the King was often charged with aiming at personal government as much as Charles Stuart did. The Selmer Ministry, who supported the King, were put on their trial in Norway, and condemned as guilty of a violation of the Constitution. Even at the very moment when Mr. Gladstone lauded the perfect harmony between Norway and Sweden to the skies, a fresh conflict was raging there. Such was the tension that the monarch went in person to Christiania for the purpose of consultation. Making use of the threefold division of parties, he resolved upon compelling the appointment of a Cabinet which upheld his own views. Whilst the Radicals were ready to accept a compromise with the defeated Liberal Ministry, so as not to let the Government fall into the hands of the Conservatives, the King is said to have roundly declared that a man like Rector Steen, a firm Liberal, was for him ' quite im- possible.' Finally, the King brought about the nomination of a moderate Conservative Ministry, with Mr. Stang at its head. Great has been the rage of the advanced Liberals at this right royally enforced solution. Bjornstierne Bjornson, the eminent poet and popular leader, writes If a man like Steen, who has not his equal in Norway as regards intelligence, capability for -work, and progressive sentiment, is "quite impossible" for all times to come, simply because the King dislikes him, then the King himself becomes impossible for us ; for his words imply a breach of our treaty with the Royal power.' Even as Sverdrup had been the man of the situation five years ago, so—Mr. Bjornson

continues—all political life in Norway will henceforth be bound up with the name of Steen. At a mass meeting of several thousands on July 14th, when the centenary of the taking of the Bastille was celebrated, Mr. Bjornson, as chief speaker, attacked the King in no measured terms, amidst thundering applause. ' That Swedish-born King,' he exclaimed, asserts that we have no right to influence the composition of his Cabinet. If that is his opinion, then the danger of having a Swede for our monarch and army-leader is great indeed. Our demand will henceforth be : "Either the fullest self-government, the fullest equality with Sweden, or the Compact will be dissolved !" We hold our beauti- ful land to be much too good to become Swedish. You men, into whose faces I am looking, have certainly not the appearance of Swedes ! I propose to you: " Norway for the Norwegians !" (Nine times," hurrah ! ")" These last occurrences,' says a report, ' have not only diminished the number of the friends of the Com- pact with Sweden, but have once more made the fierce flame of a national hatred flare up, which among races so nearly akin has the appearance of madness.' In presence of such events, Mr. Gladstone must excuse us for considering him not a very safe guide in Swedish and Norwegian affairs. For either ho knows these facts, and then his reference to the ' magical working' of the union of hearts in the North is a strange one indeed ; or he does not know them, and in that case he speaks without book on a very grave subject."

Another interesting article in the Fortnightly is that giving an account of the great entrenched forts which now encircle Paris. The perimeter of the new line of forts will, when completed, be about ninety English miles.

The National this month is not very readable. The serious articles are of no special interest, while the lighter papers,

except perhaps " London in the Seventeenth Century," are more than ordinarily flimsy.

The New Review keeps up its attempt to realise the ideal of the evening newspaper editor in a monthly form. M. Flourens—we suppose, the late Minister of French Foreign Affairs—writes of the relations between France and Russia since 1871, but not in a manner which will bear compression.—The " Two Views of the German Emperor " are in exact opposition. Mr. Bigelow, an American, makes him out a strong, kind-hearted, serious young man. The other (not signed) represents the Kaiser as vain, rash, and pompous, and, while he believes himself supreme, in reality a tool of the Bismarcks. Which view is true we cannot say, but there is no question which is the best article. Mr. Bigelow's paper is straightforward and sincere in tone, while the other shows a tiresome striving after epigrams and rhetorical invective.—In " The New Treasure Hunt," Mr.

Tighe Hopkins describes how the hero of the voyage of the Falcon ' is about to set sail in a bond-fide hunt after pirate

gold.

Of the minor Reviews, Macmillan's is, as usual, the best,— the editor apparently having secured a monopoly of the old type of thoughtful, well-written, literary essays. Lovers of Mr. Pater's severe classicalism will delight in his "Hippolytus Unveiled," which, besides showing a wonderful sympathy with

the Hellenic religious ideals, is inspired by a feeling that has possessed hundreds of students before. What would we not give to know something of the early Attic deme-life, and " its picturesque intensely localised variety in the hollow or on the spur of mountain or seashore "P Not less charming than Mr. Pater's article, though in a different way, is an anonymous paper on Orlando Bridgman Hyman, a " coach " who lived in London, and read with his pupils in a lodging in a street off the Edgware Road, where three cats sat each on her dictionary as the tutelary deities of the old scholar. Hyman seems to have afforded an example of scholarship in the widest and best

sense—of a scholarship such as hardly exists now—and his memory has been preserved with singular skill and freshness by the writer in Macmillan.— In Murray's Magazine, the

first paper deals with the • Carnot family, but except that it points out the high moral qualities which have always dis- tinguished the race, is not very noticeable. A readable

paper is Mr. Victor Morier's account of his journey from the Kara Sea to the Obi, of which the first part is published this month.