THE MAGAZINES.

THE Nineteenth Century has three articles oft India, the grave charges brought against our rule, and our future policy. Mr. Elliot G. Colvin, who is at work in Rajputana, defends in an effective argument the British raj. He treats, among other things, of famines, past and present. The causes, themselves wholly natural, which bring about these calamities have of late been exceptionally active, but the trouble has been, on the whole, successfully dealt with ; and this success—a most significant fact—increases. We do much better than we did fifty years ago, partly owing to the railways, which Mr. Keir Hardie thinks that India ought not to pay for. In former days, as far as we know, Indian Governments made little or no attempt to deal with famines. The people were simply left to die. Our readers should look at a book noticed elsewhere, Travels in. India. We see how little in the past rulers did for the people, and how much they exacted from them. In one case we find that under the old system nine-tenths of the gross produce were taken ; under the new, one-half of the net would be pretty near the mark. Sir Edmund Cox, who is high in the Police Service, deals no less instructively with his side of the matter. The third article is a somewhat startling utterance by the Rev. J. A. Sharrock, who has been for many years engaged in missionary work, and at one time presided over an Indian College. His first recommendation is to abolish the Government Colleges, to let the higher castes educate themselves, and to spend the money on the teaching of the Swims and the Pancha.mas. Another counsel is,—do not be ashamed of your Christianity. No one—this we can easily believe—thinks the better of us for this. But the question is beset with difficulties.— Mr. J. Ellis Barker in "The Land, the People, and the General Election" wishes to establish a class of small freeholders, whom he would help by Protection. Does he not see that to go to the country with the proposal of a food-tax, however small, would be to ensure a debeide even worse than that of 1906 P— Mr. Alfred Mond, on the other hand, argues for the Increment-tax. Does he not know that the value of agricultural land has diminished since 1875 by more than two hundred millions of pounds P Is it not hard specially to tax the land where from much the same causes it has risen in value? Continental analogies, on which Mr. Mond dwells, are valueless. Surely he knows that in these countries it is raised in value by Protection. Land should be treated as a whole, as every other kind of property and industry is treated.--Mr. Archibald Hurd in "Our 'Lost' Naval Supremacy" defends the policy of the Admiralty. Mr. Hurd. would reassure us as to our safety by sea, but then, in order that we may not feel too secure, Mr. Harold F. Wyatt terrifies us with visions of invasion by air. It will yet be some time, we take it, before an army of one hundred thousand men with parks of artillery, &c., will be transported by aeroplanes.—It is a relief that we can read what Mr. E. Vincent Hewaxd has -to say about Halley's comet without the terror which this visitor would have struck into our ancestors. It is due, it would seem, next April, but will come, alas ! with diminished splendour, and not be favourably situated for dwellers in the Northern Hemisphere.—We must not omit to mention Mr. Pett Ridge's humorous "Virtues of the Londoner." It is as good reading as one of his novels.

The greater part of "Episodes of the Month" in the National Review—twenty-four pages out of a total of forty— is occupied with the Report of the Naval Sub-Committee in the matter of Lord Charles Beresford's indictment of the Admiralty. We have said what we had to say on this subject, and need not repeat it ; probably we are in general agreement with Mr. Maxse. On the Budget question we have no doubt; here the Jacobin party has triumphed, and we do not quarrel with the National's invective. We certainly join in regretting that the Duke of Westminster did not try conclusions in a Court of Law with his assailant —It would have been interesting if Lord Alan Percy had told us precisely what he wants by way of a National Army. As far as we can understand him, he asks for an Army which could take an equal hand in a Con- tinental war-game with the Great Powers,—which could afford some three hundred thousand men to fight a twentieth- century Leipzic.—Mr. Courthope's paper on" Party Govern- ment and the Empire" ends, as we expected, in a complaint that Lord Salisbury did not take up a constructive Conservative policy. If he had, we are told, the foreigner would have been by this time taxed for our benefit,— would have been paying, for instance, something towards all the food which we consume, except, of course, maize and bacon, which we were to allow him to import free of expense. Here the politics proper in the number come to an end.—Something, however, is to be learnt from Mr. A. Maurice Low's views on American affairs. If he thinks that the display of Protctionist tactics which has ended in the latest tariff is a creditable one, there is nothing more to be said—it is to be noted that the little coyness there was about the name of Protectionist has wholly disappeared—but we are pretty sure that the English consumer when he comes to feel the pinch will cry out. He is less patient than his American kinsman, and he has been used to other things.—Sir George Arthur gives a very able appreciation of Lord Kitchener's military policy in India. He is sure that it makes for efficiency.—A grave question in social matters is raised by "Mrs. Harris" in the article on "Nursing Homes." Do fashionable physicians and surgeons really exploit their patients by sending them to homes of which they share the profits ? We shall want a great deal of very clear proof before we accept so damaging, and also per as so unlikely, a chaige.—Sir Home Gordon has something severe to say about the Test Matches. Certainly there has been a strange collapse. But this is true to a certain extent of all amateur play. Commonly the amateurs occupy most of the best places in the batting averages ; this year they are noticeably absent. —We must mention, though we cannot dwell upon, Mr. H. Ives's most interesting account of "George Borrow in Russia." His work there preceded his far more famous labours in Spain.

The Rev. N. MasNicol's "Spiritual Forces in India" in the Contemporary deals with another side of the subject treated in Mr. Sharrock's article noticed above. It is not so definite ; the author has no suggestions to offer ; but he says much that makes us feel how serious the situation is. He certainly touches the point when he writes: "Already there is evidence that the combination of Indian religious intensity with Western science and Western politics is producing in some cases a chemical product as explosive and as dangerous as picric acid."—A. kindred subject is dealt with by Dr. Newton H. Marshall in " Emptres and Races." Two forces which we may call centripetal and centrifugal are at work in the modern world. On the one hand, the great Empires are more and more completely absorbing nationalities ; on the other, nationalities, or rather races, are more and more passionately asserting themselves. We see this in India, in the Ethiopic movement in South Africa, in the racial struggle which appears to loom in the future of Austria- Hungary. Dr. Marshall notes a fact which certainly does not make the prospect more hopeful, that Christianity seems powerless in the face of racial antipathies, while Islam is able to overcome them.—In his summaries of "Foreign Affairs" Dr. Dillon makes some strange revelations. What he knows about Persia does not make him hopeful. "A country is in a bad way where money is as difficult to find as political wisdom." What he has to sty about Spain in Morocco is very serious. "The cause of Spain in Melilla is unjust because the Spaniards, bent on expanding their possessions beyond the boundary which is theirs by right of conquest, obtained a mining concession illegally, defended it by violence, aroused the anger of the Riff population, and brought on a colonial war of a malignant character." The Melilla colonists, who lived by selling firearms to the natives, "cutting sticks for their own backs," as Dr. Dillon puts it, thought to do some mining, and bought the concession, but bought it of the Pretender Bu Hamara, who happened to be strong at the time, and the man appro- priated the money which should have been distributed among the tribesmen. Unfortunately all Europeans are in the same boat, and if one misbehaves the boat is apt to go over.—" Granvelle's " "Roman Imperialism" is a grave indictment of Papal policy. It is far too large a, subject to be discussed here ; but one statement is so strange that we cannot refrain from quoting it. The Papal authorities are anxious to convince the world that they are not deaf and blind to what is going on. Hence the Biblical Commission. But whatever suggestions this Commission may make, the ultimate decision rests with the five Cardinal members. Of these five, 1‘ two only can read Greek, one only knows the elements of the Hebrew tongue."—Mrs. Bosanquet's "Local Distribution of Poverty" is an interesting paper suggested by one of the circulars issued by the Poor Law Commission.; Madame Emma Marie Caillard's "Christianity and Subjective Science" is a plea for the spiritual element in religion; Mr. E. A. Foord in "The Repulse of the Saracens from Europe" discusses one of the most important crises of European history; and Mr. Edmund Gosse tells us about a French novelist, M. Andre Gide, who deserves to be better known than he is on this side of the Channet.

In the Fortnightly Mr. Andrew Lang enjoys himself thoroughly in exposing a seventeenth-century impostor who has taken in a number of historians, including Lord Acton. The knave in question gave himself the name of James de la Cloche, and Mr. Lang calls him "the master hoaxer." He presented himself to the General of the Jesuits—Oliva—in Rome in 1668. He professed to have been brought up in Jersey, and showed two certificates signed and sealed by Charles II., in which the King acknowledges James as his eldest natural son. Charles asks that James should be received by the Jesuits, and looks forward to the time when he will be ordained a priest, as then he (the King) will be able to "exercise in secret the mysteries of the Catholic Church." The certificates were of course forged, and their author cleverly makes Charles say that no communications are to be sent to him except through James. In due course Oliva received other letters through the same channel purporting to be from the King, and it is in one of these that Mr. Lang has found the key to the mystery. Former historians have overlooked the fact that in the letters Charles is made to display ignorance of the whereabouts of his .mother, speak- ing of her as living in London, when in truth she was in France at the time. Charles is also made. to say that in the event of the death of the Duke of York without children this James would become King, being the eldest illegitimate child ! By means of these blunders Mr. Lang is able to show that not only Oliva in Rome, but also Lord Acton in Cambridge, were both imposed upon by this unknown man, who emerged from "the subterranean deeps of rascaldom." —31x. Edward Salmon writes a most interesting paper on Admiral Charles Saunders, Wolfe's colleague at Quebec, who has received too little attention from history. Saunders was a man who seems not to have been famous only because he had not the supreme opportunity. Everything he undertook he executed worthily, from his early command of the small ship in which he accompanied Anson on his great voyage round the world to the time when he co-operated with Wolfe and maintained, to use his own words, "a perfect good understanding between the army and the navy." During the peace which followed he was made a Commissioner of the Admiralty, and showed his independence and probity by refusing to provide posts for the Duke of Newcastle's proteges. But he was described by an officer in Wolfe's army. as "a friend of friendless young men and a dis- coverer and rewarder of merit"- Of. Saunders Horaee :Walpole wrote : "No man said less or deserved more."— .Those interested in 'psychical matters will find an account in Mr. Podmore's article, "From the Dead or the Living P" of some of the striking phenomena called "cross-correspondences" which are now being investigated. Instances are here given of messages written automatically by three different people on the same day in London, Cambridge, and India, which when examined show a close connexion with each other. Mr. Podmore only deals with a small amount of the material collected by the patient researches of the Psychical Society. —Mr. C. de Thierry writes a paper of sensible advice to young Englishmen about to settle in South Africa. Chiefly he insists that the prospective Colonist before fixing on his abode should make a tour of the country, and on no account buy land before his arrival. He advises, as perhaps the best method of acquiring a knowledge of the different conditions and possibilities of the land, a period of enlistment in one of the mounted police forces.

People who have been disquieted by the sensational accounts of political unrest, culminating in assassination, in India would do well to read the wise and temperate article in Black- wood by Sir Andrew Fraser. He points out that the problem of -higher- education- in law, medicine; and engineering should now be seriously reconsidered; and -holds that it -would be infinitely better that this education should be given in India - itself. The system of sending young students to England. cuts them off from the influence of their families, and throws tJaem into the arms of designing and unscrupulous revolu- tionaries. It seems that it was because Sir Curzon Wyllie

had realised this danger, and did all he could to counteract it, that he was struck at. Sir Andrew Fraser tells us that "if Government would earnestly take the matter [higher education in India] up, it would receive warm support and co-operation from the best of our Indian fellow-subjects. The need for sound general and technical education—healthy education physically and morally—in India itself is now more than ever realised." The necessity for the Government dealing very severely with the murderous agitation is pointed out. If it is not coped with, the result will be that the police will find that the only way to protect the English officials in India will be to limit their accessi- bility to the natives ; "but it would be bard to conceive a greater injury to sound administration in India than that our officers should cease to be accessible."—" Loud Sing Cuckoo !" is a story of an outpost in Africa full of both humour and pathos. The characterisation is excellent.

"Small Henry," the impish black boy with ready wit and mischievous impudence, lives before us. The tragic side to the story is the madness which overtakes the English officer, living for months without a book and a fellow white man, at an isolated outpost. Let us hope that the relief which came was not too late. The author, who does not give biz name, writes with uncommon ability.--" Old Irish Travel" is a delightful article rescuing from obscurity different accounts of visitors to Ireland in the eighteenth century. Bush, who made the _hazardous journey in 1784, reached Dublin after

" jumbling " up and down the Welsh mountains on his road. He seems to have been struck by the duelling and excessive drinking of his hosts. Some of these, to prevent moderation, knocked the stems off the wineglasses, so that a full glass

could not rest by the drinker's side on the table. But by far the most entertaining account of Ireland was written by a French emigre, the Sieur de Latocnaye, who made a prolonged walking tour, and recorded his impressions. His explorations were only put an end to by the impending rebellion.

The English Review gives us this month one of Mr. Max Beerbohm's brilliant caricatures. It is a study of Mr. Lloyd George. To convey in words the waywardness of the line, or

the intensity of the characterisation, is impossible. No other caricaturist knows how to combine so well the extremes of subtlety and exaggeration. This drawing is worth many a page of such squalid writing as Mr. J. E. Malloch's short story, or of such a strange medley as the "Modern Poetry" with which the magazine opens. Here goblins, night and day spirits, first and second horsemen, beggars, an Abbe, and a drunken schoolmaster are mixed together, without apparent results, in "most admired disorder."—Mr. Oswald Craw-

furd writes an interesting paper on "A Law in Literary Expression." He says "Stated in its plainest terms, the law isithis, That the length of the phrase—not the sentence, but its shortest fraction, the-phrase- must be measured by. the breath-pause In other words, in order to attain to lucid utterance, the phrase must -contain no more words than can be spoken in the interval between the tracing

of two breaths." -

The writer goes on to give exempla. of the reengnition or dis- regard of this law. The earliest instance he quotes of the use of the breath-pause is from the Wycliffe Bible, the style of which is a true rellexion of natural speech. It is-remarkable that later the Authorised Version preserved this qtiality, though pedantic learning • was doing so mueli to ciente a purely artificial manner of writing. Mr. Crawiurd plaeè together a passage from Bacon and an enormous sentence from the Areopagitica. If these two are read aloud, there is no question as to Milton's disregard of breath-pauses. But four lines of his poetry show that the poet had this subtlety of art as well as every other.---Mr. W. T. Goode, writing of

"To-day in Madrid," says that his observations on the spot dis- covered a very widespread condition of dissatisfaction in Spain.

The King is unpopular, and merely regarded as an ornamental puppet, and both political parties are distrusted on account

of their corruption. We are told, too, that there is a very real hatred of the monastic Orders, which have increased greatly ; and among their enemies are to be found-the secular clergy, whose position under the dominance of the Regulars has become intolerable. Mr. Goode thinks it "possible that in, the mountains of Gurugn both Government and Dynasty

may find a Sedan. When I suggested to the publicist before- mentioned [a Madrid editor] the possibility of a disastrous ending, he looked horror-stricken and said : In that case I think not a monk would be left alive in Spain."

The first article in the United Service Magazine, by Lieutenant Dewar, deals with the Admiralty and a Navy Staff. We cannot summarise the article as a whole, but may mention some of its general conclusions. "It is no use," says the writer, "talking of a Staff unless we institute a definite scheme of Staff training." "A Staff," he goes on to sly, "is an organism of slow growth." At present we have no Staff. Fleet pageants, he very wisely points out, "inspire the public with confidence, but we must not forget that victory lies in immaterial things,' and that one of the most important of those things is a properly constituted Staff system." Again, he tells us that under the present system

"it is not thought necessary to study the art of war as a whole, and the authorities pretend (and perhaps believe) that a piffling and scrappy three months' course is all that is wanted. Adminis- tration is their particular forte ; they themselves have never studied the art of war and they think it unnecessary to do so. Accordingly one is not even allowed to discuss Staff administra- tion at the Naval War College—which contrasts strangely with the United States Naval Academy, where so far back as 1888 the course included lectures on foreign Staff systems and methods of administration. The Admiralty is so enamoured with its own form that you must not even speak of any other form."

curious article is "War Paint for the King's Ships," describing bow our ships have been painted in the past, and how Nelson when his fleet lay off Toulon painted his ships in such a way as to deceive the eye and make them look larger and more important than they were.—" A Territorial Infantry Brigade," by "Onlooker," is an interesting article.

We may give from it a quotation of words used by Sir John French :—

"I regard the careful and judicious selection of divisional commanders and brigadiers of the Territorial Army as the absolute corner-stone upon which the whole structure of efficiency must rest. The task entrusted to them is of a more difficult nature than in the case of regular troops, and I believe that young, capable, and active men are as essential in the former as in the latter."

These words contain the root of the whole matter.