THE MAGAZINES.

IT is a poor number of the Nineteenth Century. Mr. Justice Stephen gives us a good plan for the treatment of boycotting,

which is, briefly, to punish it as conspiracy whenever it produces material loss or suffering—the mental suffering being outside the sphere of positive law—but it is difficult to be greatly in. terested in "Nova Scotia's Cry for Home-rule ;" or Sir Wilfrid Lawson on Local Option; or Lady Pollock on the French Hamlet; or Lady John Manners on "Massage," the cure by

kneading the body, which is in vogue now for the second time, the first time having been just forty years ago ; or the Rev. J. Guinness Rogers's restatement of the argument for Disestab- lishment. There is something in each of these papers ; but the reader seeks novelty in a magazine, and finds too little of it in this number, unless it is to be found in Mr. S. C. Cumberland's reassertion of his own claims as a "thought-reader." Be, premising that he has given up the practice of his art or gift, or whatever it is, reasserts the existence of his exceptional power in the most absolute way, declaring the following stories literally true :— " I afterwards performed a somewhat similar experiment with the Crown Prince of Austria at the Rofbarg in Vienna. Only this time the animal thought of was an immense black dog. It was a strange sight to see the Crown Princess and the ladies of the Court tucking

up their trains and following his Imperial Highness and myself in our mad chase along the highways and byeways of the Castle ; for, in the first place, H.I.1.1. did not know where the dog was; in the second place, he, in the search for it, lost his bearings, and he certainly went to parts of the ()agile where neither he nor any Hapsburg had ever been before. Wherever his thoughts went there did I at once pro- ceed, and when he mentally paused in his perplexity I did nothing but stand still. But immediately the Prince got on the right track of the dog, I did not hesitate a moment in my coarse, bat proceeded to where he lay panting in his wealth of long shaggy hair, after evidently having partaken of a late and heavy dinner In my experiment with Mr. Gladstone, in the smoking-room in the House of Commons, on June 16th, 1884, a very remarkable thing occurred. It will be remembered that the then Premier undertook to think of three figures, and that I successfully interpreted his thoughts. Before, however, this result was arrived at the following hitch took place. I had without difficulty told the first two figures, Viz, 3 and 6, when I found that Mr. Gladatone's mind was wavering with regard to the remaining figure; and I had to beg of him to more firmly con- centrate his whole thoughts upon it. This he promised to do, and I therefore, without hesitation, declared the third figure to be 6 — making a total of 366—which Mr. Gladstone declared was the correct number. I then asked him why he had hesitated about the third figure, and why he had at first thought of 5, and had afterwards altered his mind to 6. The Premier seemed much surprised at the question, and he wound up by asking me bow I knew he had done so. I reminded him that be overlooked the fact of my being a thought. reader, whose duty it was to interpret such changes of thought, where- upon he said It is perfectly true that I did at first think of 365, the number of days in the year ; but when you had got the first two figures I thought that you, being such a sharp sort of man—you will pardon the expression '—(this with that sweet apologetic smile which his friends so dearly love and his opponents envy)—' might by sequence guess the remaining figure. So at that moment, remembering it was leap-year, I took the liberty of altering my number to 366. I am afraid thereby I gave you much unnecessary trouble.'"

Granting the second story, it ought to follow that Mr. Cumber-

land could almost infallibly tell the number of a banknote upon which his subject bad fixed his thoughts. Yet it is that

particular experiment which of all others most frequently fails.

The Maharaja of Cashmere was so impressed, Mr. Cumberland says, with his gifts, that he asked him to live in Cashmere as a supplementary Minister, the Maharaja's idea being that a man who could read his Ministers' thoughts would be invaluable.

The paper by Sir William H. Gregory, on the superior loyalty of liahomedans, as compared with Hindoos, is well worth reading. His idea is that gradually the Mussulmans of India have become better affected to our rule than the Hindoos, and now only require a little more sympathy in our administration. We cannot agree with his view, which seems to us inconsistent with the present rapid extension of Mahomedanism and the hopes it must awaken ; but the view is an original one, and worth considering. We can see literally nothing in Lord Brassey's "Flying Visit to the United States" which is worth printing, except his idea of the reason why the foreign sailor underbids the British. It is simply that British wages, which are to the English seaman a poor maintenance, enable the foreigner, especially from Northern Europe, to save and settle himself comfortably at home. That is doubtless correct, and is valuable as a result of independent observation ; but the rest of the article should have been left in manuscript.

The Contemporary is full of fair articles, some of them of much more than average interest. The first, on "The Army," is most temperately written, and by an officer who is not full of

old conservative ideas, and in its main thesis—the necessity of making our small Army perfectly efficient by picking command- ing officers, training the whole body of officers, and seeing that

all materiel is ready—we perfectly agree; but when the writer asks "the public" to enforce reforms, we fall into his despair.

How is the public, which knows nothing, to do it ? The first step towards a real reform is to fuse the Commander-in-Chief with the Ministry at War, and give the Minister, who then must

be a soldier, an ex-officio seat in both Houses ; bat that is a reform which the public cannot carry. It is the states- men who need to be impressed and compelled to combine against the prejudices of the Crown, not the public which needs to be excited. Mr. R. E. Prothero gives us some curious

information on "Agrarian Outrage in France." In Picardy, it appears, much of the land is still held by peasant tenants, who claim tenant-right,—that is, the right to hold or to transfer their farms so long as they pay the rent settled by custom, and usually proportioned to prices. They maintain, in fact, co- 'proprietorship with the landlords. The law of the land does not recognise their claim, and for a century or more very strong measures have been tried ; but whenever a landlord breaks the unwritten law, or an interloper steps in, the peasants resort to boycotting, outrage, or assassination. Evidence is never pro- curable, and the right is still maintained, though it is dying under the slow growth of a peasant-proprietary. Extreme violence is now rarely used, because the landlords submit, but-

" In 1865 a landlord threw a number of small tenant right holdings into a single farm, expended considerable capital on the erection of buildings and other improvements, and let the whole to a Belgian farmer. Four years in sucoession the crops were no sooner housed than they were burned. In 1870 they were only saved by being threshed in the open field. The landlord was compelled to come to terms with his evicted tenants. In 1845, the farmers of Bouvincoart refused to pay an increased rent. Judgment was obtained against them for the amount ; it remained unpaid. Finally a company of soldiers was sent to enforce the payment. The villagers were armed and had mounted an old cannon, captured from the Spaniards in 1636, upon four coach wheels Mr. Jenkins quotes the authority of M. Baudrillart to prove that in 1868 there were ten cases of inceadiarism before the criminal courts which were attributed to the droit march& The two following instances occurred within the memory of a man still under thirty. At Chipilly, a village between Corbie and Bray, a landlord took his land into his own hands. His house and farm buildings were burned to the ground. In the same neighboar- hood, thirteen horses belonging to a depointeur had their tongues cat out. Within the last thirty years, in the Beighbourhood of Peronne, a landlord re-entered upon a number of tenant-right farms, and culti- vated them himself. The droit do marche demanded that, when tired of farming, he should relet the land to the representatives of the original tenants. Instead of complying with the usage, he let them at an increased rent to the mayor of the commune. A few weeks later the mayor was found drowned in a well."

It is curious to see that the farmers defy and defeat a Govern- ment so irresistibly strong as that of France, which, moreover, when necessary, employs military force. Mr. M. G. Mulhall sends a paper of astonishing figures, illustrating "The National Growth." In the ten years ending 1883, though the Kingdom has sent away some 330,000 emigrants—the total in thirty-five years has been nearly seven millions (6,710,000)—the population has increased from 32,800,000 to 36,700,000, or, say, by a new Belgium, and the general advance may be thus expressed :—

Population increased ... ... 12 per cent.

Wealth 11

... 22 „ Trade

/1

... 29

Shipping

... 67 ,, Instruction

19 • •

The number of paupers has sunk from 48 per 1,000 to 27, and the average of committals from 69 to 59; while the total of money involved in bankruptcies has declined from 225,000,000 to £18,000,000; and the consumption of alcohol from 2.33 gallons per inhabitant to 119. We may remark, en passant, that the popular notion as to the superior sobriety of England is entirely wrong. lathe richer Kingdom, people drink 1-90 gallons per head of alcohol, while the Scotch content themselves with 1-67, and the Irish with only 1.23. The only two depressing items in the tables are the decrease in the birth-rate, which, as compared with marriages, has fallen in all three Kingdoms, and the increase in the amount of lunacy, which has risen, especially among paupers. There were 258 insane paupers in 1875 to each 100,000 of the population, and there are now 280. Mr. Mulhall is inclined to suspect the increased consumption of meat has something to do with this, but we should attribute it much more to the increased horror of pauperism, and, indeed, of discomfort of all kinds. The poor dread poverty till their brains fail. The total account shows vast progress, and we do not know, remembering the crowded state of the islands, that a diminished birth-rate is much to be regretted. The real evil is the determined set of the population towards the towns, which is not due only to our tenure, though that helps, but is increased by the distaste of the partly educated for agricultural labour. Canon Isaac Taylor, in "Domesday Survivals," shows us how permanent many of the features of our country-life have been since Domesday, the very names of the fields having often survived all changes ; and Mr. Clark Russell prints a curious little treatise on "Sea Phrases." The latter is interesting, but not perfectly satisfactory, the subject needing more philological learning than Mr. Russell claims. A good many nautical words are, we suspect, Asiatic in their ulti- mate origin, having come to us by way of the Levant trade, or even down from the old sailors who carried the Crusaders to and fro. "Stevedore," for instance, a stower of cargoes, can, we fancy, be pushed very much farther back than the Portuguese navigators from whom we got it. Mr. Stuart Bendel pleads strongly for " Disestablishment in Wales ;" but when he complains of the recent neglect of Welsh interests, he should recollect to what that neglect is due. Everything is neglected except Ireland, and Wales only suffers in company with England.

It is no use for Mr. Charles Waring to prove, in the Fort- nightly, that the State ought to purchase Irish railways till we know what the State is to be. If Ireland is to govern her- self, his advica is sure to be followed ; but whether shareholders will like the result as well as the peasants will, may perhaps be questioned. The Rev. G. S. Reaney once more describes out- cast London, with the usual tendency to scream instead of arguing ; but, like everybody else, fails to suggest a working remedy for the evils he deplores. His notion is that the rich and the statesmen can alter everything ; but how are they to set about it P They are willing enough if the way is shown ; but no way is shown except almsgiving, which fails, and - does not even, if Socialists may be trusted, create kindly feelings between rich and poor. Mr. S. Plimsoll declares, in an article on "Parliamentary Procedure," that the Closure by itself will not save time enough, and recommends that Friday sliould be surrendered to Government, that questioning should be limited, and that notices of motion should be given according to their relative importance, which is to be settled by the votes of Members given by their initials on the notices on the papers now circulated. Those may be improvements, but we fear reform must be a little more drastic. The review of English history as it appears in the caricatures in Punch, is again extremely interesting, and will, we hope, be expanded into a book not written quite so jottily (that word ought to live) ; but, to us, the most readable paper in the number, after Mr. Huxley's, noted elsewhere, is Mr. Grant Allen's "American Jottings." That really contains something, more especially when he is strictly scientific, as in the following para- graph, which most of our readers will, we fancy, find full of

• positively new information :—

"All northern America, as we see it to day, is the natural result of this terrific orgy of profound glaciation. The great continent always does things on the big scale ; and when the ice set to work to ruin the smiling fields of the genial Pliocene period, it ruined them in good earnest, as if it really meant it. From the Atlantic to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, and from the latitude of Maryland up to the eternal snows, all America still suffers visibly to the naked eye from the havoc wrought by that long and widespread secular calamity. The mountains, to be sure, have slowly weathered down in process of time, and vegetation has spread tentatively among the rifts and ravines excavated on their flanks ; but in most places even now where there are still or once were mountains, the greater part of the laud remains as mere shining flats of polished rock, naked and not ashamed, or barely covered with a girdle of foliage strewn here and there upon its rugged loins. The moraines and drift still occupy the better part of the intervening spaces ; and though the native vegeta- tion here grows thicker and lusher, the cultivated fields attest abundantly, by their frequent heaps of picked-out boulders, with what ceaseless toil in these stony basins tillage has been brought up at last to its present low and shabby level. It is only in a few rare spots by the river-sides, in the Eastern States at least, that any depth of allu- vial soil, spread over the surface by floods since glacial times, gives rise to meadows of deep grass, or to cornfields which approach, at a dismal distance, our European standard of good farming. I speak, of course, of the East alone. In the West, the profounder alluvium of the great central basin has had time to collect, from the Missis- sippi and Missouri tributaries, over the vast areas which form the American and Canadian wheat-belt. It is the Great Ice Age, too, that is mainly answerable for the very inconvenient and awkward distances between American cities. For eastward but few spots exist, and those mainly along the river valleys, that lend themselves readily to human tillage. The greater part even of old-settled Massachusetts remains to this day under primeval forest, and will probably remain so, at least as long as an acre of wheat-land con- tinues unoccupied in the unencumbered plains of the Western grain- belt. Immense areas in the Eastern States are naturally far more unfit for agricultural use than any part of Wales or the Scotch High- lands. The only district of Britain, indeed, that can give the faintest idea of such unconquerable barrenness may be found in the elopes of the Llawllech range, that stretches at the back of Harlech and Barmoutb. Hence it happens that the population in Eastern America concentrates itself entirely around a few great Atlantic commercial emporiums—New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore; straggles somewhat more sparsely up the agricultural valleys of the Hudson, the Connecticut, the St. Lawrence, or the Ottawa ; and leaves the vast ridges of intervening highland or low ice-worn plateau in almost untouched and primitive wildness."

We venture to say that account is nearly the exact reverse of the general English idea about the Eastern States of the Union. It is, however, confirmed in part by all American writers upon the subject, and by the present condition of agriculture in such States as Massachusetts. We say here that farming does not pay ; but in Massachusetts, freehold farms are every year thrown up rather than pay the taxes. The enormous mass of American prosperity constantly blinds us to the poverty of particular districts. New England by itself is a country possessing a very poor estate, and incapable of becoming rich except through manufactures. The latter portion of the article is not of so much interest, the writer confining himself to the fauna and flora of the South ; but it is all worth reading.