THE MAGAZINES.

THE Fortnightly Review for September is, on the whole, a bright number, though it suffers, like every other monthly, from that division or spreading of the best work which has followed the establishment of such a myriad of magazines. We can never again expect such a publication as the Fort- nightly was once, when occasionally every article was one to draw breath over. We have mentioned elsewhere Mr. Harrison's furious paper, " How to Drive Home-rule Home," which will be read by few with assent, but by many with interest,—the writer saying in lucid words precisely what many Radicals are trying in private to say with much circum- locution. With almost every word Mr. Harrison says, we dis- agree heartily ; but thoughts such as his have still a certain charm for us, because so few will go beyond them. To recast the Constitution in order to quicken a particular Bill is advice which, at all events, has not the demerit of timidity, a foible, we confess, which we never expect in Mr. Harrison's writing.—The novelette, too, at the end of the number, "Profit and Loss," is worth reading. Mr. Harris always die-

plays power and cynicism, though his method rather jars. This time his object seems to be to describe the strange limita- tions in criminality which often affect a criminal. His hero, in many respects excellent, commits, in order to win a fortune and a bride, a colossal fraud on the fire-insurance offices, and throughout only half feels the shamefulness of his act. He feels, however, keenly the danger of a little negro girl, who he finds, to his horror, may perish in the conflagration he has himself created. He saves her at the risk of his life, and then accepts his sufferings from the deed of heroism as expiation for his crime, and receives the congratulations of his neighbours—who formally, in deputation, pronounce him a hero—with only a brief self- questioning left unanswered. We know he will take his share of the plunder unrepentant. Mr. Harris has described the conditions of breeding, &c., which have produced such a man as Tryon with exceeding cleverness ; but a doubt as to the reality of the character will force itself in. Are thieves, in the moment of theft, capable of heroism, held to be supererogatory, even by the community which applauds P Mr. Harris will answer that there are two men in every skin, and that is partly true ; but is one of them ever a consciously selfish thief, and the other a self-suppressing hero P—The Astronomer-Royal of Ireland tells us all that is known about Mars, and decides that it amounts only to this,—that sentient beings may exist there. The chances are much greater in Venus ; but the power of observing Venus is limited by her brightness. We wish Sir Robert Ball would tell us all distinctly what are the limita- tions on the power of a telescope, and the chances of over- coming them ; and whether sensitised paper may not be able to watch Venus, though the human eye cannot.—M. Lanin gives an account of the filthiness of Russian cities, from which it would appear that the people practically sleep in cesspools. It is sickening to read, and gives us, who have seen cities without sanitation of any kind—though not, it is true, Russian cities —a sense of exaggeration. M. Lanin writes as if mere mud were poisonous ; but one has heard of mud baths, and if mud killed, or helped to kill, no rice-growers could live.—Mr. J. Huntly McCarthy introduces us to an unknown Swedish poet, who is, he says, the embodiment of pessimism, and whose main subject is always the duel between the sexes, the woman apparently striving always for dominance. As far as we can judge from the description, August Strindberg has as unhealthy a mind as Ibsen, without his flashes of insight, and is, moreover, a misogynist.—Mr. F. T. Piggott gives an interesting sketch of Japanese life, the new point of which is the existence of the soshi, a class of young men over- educated for their means, who, in despair of careers, take to redressing wrongs, usually by force, and who interfere in everything in the name of the people, dispersing, for instance, any unpopular meeting with improvised clubs.

The soshi seem to be a combination of the Russian student with the Australian larrikin ; and one reads with some pleasure of a police which is too strong for them :—" The system of police is very efficient ; it is so omniscient that every member of this very numerous band is known by name ; it is so omnipresent that his whereabouts at any given moment is also known. A certain amount of latitude is allowed them, but the moment there is real danger in the air, a law, popularly known as the Peace Preservation Regulations,' is put into force. Without warning a notice is issued that all soshi are to leave Tokyo and to keep outside a certain radius

for a given time. I am not in the least exaggerating when I say that in a couple of hours the city is swept of this turbu- lent community." Is that not, by the way, a new and very

effective way of dealing with malcontents who make dis- turbances P—The son of the late " Count Gleichen," Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, German Prince-sailor, sends an account of his father, of some interest because of his birth, and the curious variety of his adventures. He says that he once saved the life of Lord Wolseley, then a subaltern in the 90th Regiment :—

"Prince Victor was one day riding back from the trenches to camp, when he passed a stretcher bearing the body of an officer in the 90th. As he knew the regiment well, he lifted the handker- chief to see who it was, and recognised Wolseley's face, which was then covered with blood from a deep wound in the cheek. Thinking he saw a slight twitching in the face, he called a naval doctor (Irving by name) to look at him, much to the indignation of the army surgeon who had passed' him as dead, and who shouted

to him to 'leave his dead alone.' Undisturbed by his remarks, Prince Victor tried to extract a jagged piece of stone sticking in the wound, and the pain apparently brought Wolseley to, for after a little brandy had been poured down his throat, amid more asseverations from the army doctor that he was dead, he sat up, exclaiming, No more dead than you are, you fool ! '"

The September number of the Contemporary Review is a good one, though, perhaps, a little over-serious. The first article, by Mr. Albert Shaw, an American, is an exceedingly well-written defence of the American Federal system, as the best method of creating a great and powerful Empire. He certainly shows that the Americans have applied their system to widely diverse regions with success ; and that their sym- pathy for Irish Home-rule, which he declares to be universal, is therefore natural; but when he recommends the same scheme for adoption in the British Empire, he forgets certain important points. He thinks, if England and the Free Colonies were federated, they would, of necessity, hold together as American States have done ; but where is the evidence of that P Their interests are not identical, they will have different aspirations, and they would detest the heavy common taxation necessary for Imperial defence. He forgets, too, that history cannot be ignored, and that England if pressed, would rather give up her Empire than be ruled by an alliance among vast distant communities such as the Colonies in another century will become. The United States grew out of a group of Colonies ; England, since she has known herself, has always been an independent Kingdom. For her to submit to a Parliament seated, perhaps, at Cape Town as the most convenient place, and practically swayed by the vote of Australia, South Africa, and Ireland, is almost unthinkable.

Still, the article is pleasant reading, and brings home to us with unusual force the genuineness of the American faith, that Federalism can be worked anywhere and over any distances if only the people will heartily accept it. It is to be noted that Mr. Albert Shaw leaves India, and all Crown Colonies with dark populations, outside his calculation.—Mr. John Rae, in "The Growth of Industrial Peace," has collected a great variety of instances in which Boards of Conciliation have tended to harmony between masters and men. In the manufactured iron trade, for example, strikes have been stamped out. There are two Boards of Arbitration, one for

the North of England and one for the Midland Counties, and- " Since the establishment of these Boards, in the North of England in 1869 and in the Midlands in 1872, there has been nothing whatever in the nature of a strike in the former district, and only one strike in the latter, and even that one was too in- significant to deserve the name ; for, as Mr. Hingley explained it, it was only a small discontented section of the men who repudiated one of the awards of the Board of Conciliation ; but, finding themselves strongly condemned by the rest of the trade, eventually gave way. Strikes, and even the very disposition to strike, seem to be thoroughly stamped out in this industry. Mr. Trow speaks of them as if they were matters of settled im- possibility : We cannot have a strike in our district : our rules do not allow of it.' And he says in another place If you will search the pages of history you will not be able to find in those pages any parallel case where any system adopted has been of so much advantage to the workmen, to the employers, and the trade of the district, as arbitration has been to our workmen in the North of England.' Mr. Aucott de- scribes their former state as one of incessant antagonism between master and men, the peace of the district being constantly broken and impaired by ill-considered action on the part of a few em- ployers who would not treat with their workpeople ; but now, he said,' we have got rid of all that.' Mr. Hingley was not less emphatic on the part of the employers in his testimony to the same purport. Asked whether employers could now carry on their industry without fear of interruption and danger of strikes, he said : Yes, we have ceased to fear anything of the kind.' " That is really important testimony, and it is only part of a most instructive essay, the evidence of the working of the Boilermakers and Iron and Steel Shipbuilding Society being

even more striking. This society, which includes 95 per cent. of all men in the trade, settles wages with employers and guarantees fidelity, actually paying up any loss caused by bad work. " At Hartlepool a vessel was lately being built in a hurry, and the men employed upon her thought it a good opportunity to strike for an advance of two shillings in the teeth of the agreement under which they were working. The shipbuilding firm immediately wired to the executive council of the trades union an account of the situation. The council wired back at once, asking them to pay the advance in the meantime, and proceed with the work, because they knew the vessel was needed in a hurry, and they did not wish to cause any delay; but when the vessel was finished the council com- pelled the men who struck to refund the money, and then sent a cheque for the amount to the firm that paid it." Men who will act in that way will easily secure industrial peace ; the difficulty is to make them do it. We have, however, noticed before that the very powerful societies usually take juster views of their responsibility for the general welfare of the trade than the smaller and more fluctuating societies. They probably, for one thing, attract abler leaders.—Dr. Louis Robinson also sends a most ingenious paper upon " Canine Morals and Manners." His theory is, that the friendship of the dog for man arose from the dog's habit of hunting in company, and his perception that, when so hunting. man was useful to him. His habit of fidelity to his companions was essential to his existence, and was extended to man as the ablest dog in the pack. A house-dog instantly warns his master and his family that strangers are approaching, and the wild dogs or half-wild dogs do the same thing for each other. Dr. Robinson even thinks it probable that a dog regards his master as also a dog. We should, he says, " bear in mind that there is, affecting the dog's point of view, almost undoubtedly such a thing as cynornorphisni, and that he has his peculiar and limited ideas of life and range of mental vision, and therefore perforce makes his artificial sur- roundings square with them. It has been said that a man stands to his dog in the position of a god ; but when we con- sider that our own conceptions of deity lead us to the general idea of an enormously powerful and omniscient Man, who loves, hates, desires, rewards, and punishes, in human-like fashion, it involves no strain of imagination to conceive that from the dog's point of view his master is an elongated and abnormally cunning dog ; of different shape and manners, cer- tainly, to the common run of dogs, yet canine in his essential nature." That is ingenious, but hardly explains the curious attachments that dogs will form for strangers ; or their insane jealousy of each other if the master makes favourites. The paper is most interesting ; and the explanation of the dog's habit of wagging its tail when pleased seems more than probable. It is with all dogs the signal that game is in sight, and as that is the pleasantest moment of a dog's life, wagging has become his general expression of pleasure.

The Nineteenth Century is full of lively papers, the most readable—to us, at least—being the Rev. B. G. Johns on " The Protective Colour in Animals." Every one has known, we believe, the general theory that many animals take on the colour which renders them least visible,—arctic foxes, for example, being white,—but few are aware of the rapidity with which some living things produce this change. Mr. Johns found in his shrubbery a number of spiders, all brown, yellow, and grey, except one particular lot, which were all white, because they wanted to hide in the white flowers of the wild carrot. " When the caterpillar, says that keenest of all observers, Mr. Grant Allen, lives on a plant like grass, the ribs or veins of which run up and down longitudinally, he is usually striped or streaked with darker lines in the same direction as those of his food-plant. When on broader leaves, having a midrib and branching veins, his stripes run obliquely at exactly the same angle as those of the leaf. And of this I find ample proof in the larva of a score of small butterflies to be found in this very wood." By far the most remarkable of all, however, is the trout, which seems to have the power almost at will in a few days of assimilating his colour exactly to that of his surroundings. A gay-coloured trout, after living for a few days under a dark archway, "will come out into the still water black as night ; " and of two trout, one in the silver-coloured Meavy, and one in the brown Cadover—two streams which meet in one pool—one is silver and the other brown. A still more remarkable in- stance is that, " having once taken, in a Dartmoor stream, a small trout of a dark olive-brown, I carried him off at once to a neighbouring cottage, and there set him in a large basin of clear spring water. The basin was lined with snowy white, and the next morning my sable troutlet had lost every shade of black, and was robed in silver-grey almost as white as the walls of his prison. To make assurance doubly sure, I then filled the basin with a mass of dark brown moss and weeds out of the stream, and the next day found that the captive had resumed his old tint, and was hardly to be discerned from the sombre surroundings in which he loved to hide." The strangest fact about the matter, as Mr. Johns observes, is that the fish, insects, and birds which have this power do not flourish better than rivals .without it. "Along the coping and in the crevices of an old grey brick wall I often find the grey and brown chrysalides of certain small moths and butterflies, exactly matching the colour of their hiding-place, and there- fore safe; but not twenty yards away, hung on to a withered stalk or twig, I also find the chrysalis of some other similar flies, yellow, black, or brown, and certain, therefore, to be de- tected by the first hungry sparrow or tit that comes by."— General Sir John Adye sends what seems to us conclusive evidence of the value of short service in creating an army, and adds what is to us new proof that the popular belief as to the necessity of veterans for India is an illusion. The boys stand the climate better than seasoned bands. Sir John denies that under the new system the proportion of boys has increased, the figures being in a thousand men :-

Proportion per 1,000 men

Year Under 20 Between 20 and 30 Over 30.

1871 190 490 820 1891 158 748 94

Nor are the men too short; at least, their average is greater than that of both Germany and France, though in all three countries that average is decidedly lower than the height of what we consider good-sized men. In England, it is 5 ft. 4 in. ; in Germany, 5 ft. 1.6 in. ; and in France, 5 ft. 0'6 in., figures

which certainly show that, while classes have grown tall, the population as a whole remains a short one.—Sir Herbert Maxwell sends an appreciative account of the " Last Great Roman," Stilicho, who defended the Em- peror Honorius, but who by race was a German. Sir Herbert considers that his whole career proves his loyalty to the Emperor, who at last had him murdered, and then killed out his family—it is supposed upon some palace report that the great soldier was disloyal. There is hardly a character in history more doubtful than that of Stilicho, and we suspect that Sir Herbert, while right as to his loyalty, underrates his brutality.—Dr. Jessopp sends an account of a family tragedy, which he calls "Swanton Mill." It is a wonderful bit of realism, whether it is fact or fiction; but it is surely a mistake to leave the reader doubtful. We presume it to be dramatised fact ; but the humorous Doctor leaves that to be guessed by the reader, only averring that the main incidents were related to him, apparently by his heroine's descendants. The dialogue can hardly have been retained by tradition.— Mr. G. Strachey, British Minieer Resident at Dresden, con- tributes a chapter to Carlyle's biography, declaring that his "Rose•Goddess" was Miss Kitty Kirkpatrick, with whom he fell in love, and whose recol ection haunted him through life.

In the course of his reminiscences, Mr. Strachey quotes Carlyle's letter of con 'olenc3 on the death of his mother, a dear friend. It is singularly at variance with the popular idea of Carlyle's asperity :—

" Chelsea : 7 December, 1846.—I receive with deep sorrow, as you may imagine, your melancholy news this morning. Your noble mother now gone was the first friend I acquired in this country, was the oldest and dearest friend I anywhere had in the world ; a truer, more generous, or higher soul I have never known. And now, all on a sudden, she is snatched away, I am to see her face no more, to hear her kind voice, or commune with her noble heart no more. In such cases words are very vain ; nor will I add any. I desire to offer an affectionate sympathy to Mrs. Hare, in this her great distress : let her live worthy of such a mother. There is no other consolation but what lies in that direction. With many thoughts which it would be profane to write ; with remembrances which will not quit me while I live, I remain with true participa- tion, yours faithfully always, T. CARLYLE."

In the first political article in the National Review, "Regulus" dwells strongly on the fact—as he assumes it to be—that Mr. Gladstone cannot, at his age, personally perform the duties of Leader of the House of Commons, and asserts that the younger Members of the Unionist Party intend to insist that they should be performed. We question if the House will follow them, the feeling for age being universal; but it is unquestionable that, if Mr. Gladstone cannot pilot his great Bill himself, nobody else can. We suspect, however, that those who reckon on his want of strength underrate the pres- sure Mr. Gladstone can put upon himself for any duty that he thinks imperative. Battle wakes him even now, though he may suffer afterwards from the effects of the fray.

The novel running in Blackwood, " Singularly Deluded," in- cludes this month an account of a ship on fire, written with unusual realistic power. The author must have seen a cata- strophe of the kind, or he would hardly have thought of the old lady who takes refuge in suicide from her own terror.

The number contains, moreover, an interesting account of Wazan, the city where the Shereefian family of Morocco, the rivals of the Sultan, hold their court. It must be a horrible place, choked with ruffians of all kinds ; yet one can gain some distinct glimpse from Mr. W. B. Harris's account of it of what life in Granada or Cordova must have been like when the Moors held sway there. Mr. Harris entirely confirms the accounts of the deep reverence in which the family is held by all Moors, and which preserves it from the enmity of the Sultans of Fez. He says little of the present Shereef, but speaks with pleasure and respect of the next heir, Muley El Arbi.