THE MAGAZINES.

St. Pauls of this month has a paper, evidently by Mr. Trollope himself, which will attract some attention. Mr. Trollope is a Northerner in sentiment and, we believe, an abolitionist, and has recently visited the States on an official mission, and the result of his inquiries is that "Reconstruction" as carried out by American Republicans has made the Negroes masters of the South, that apart altogether from the whole question of colour, the most ignorant section of the people, and those who hold least property, are the masters of the States. In South Carolina, for example, three-fifths of the Legislature are negroes, and nearly three-fifths pay no direct taxes, having no real property. They, however, control the whole of the State expenditure. They cannot read, but they make all laws for education. They live on alms, but they have a right to fill all offices :—" There never has been a tyranny attempted so wide in its reach and so cruel in its measures. The Pole can submit to the Russian,—not, indeed, without national degradation, but without personal disgrace. The Italian, who was accustomed to see the Austrian soldier in his streets and in his theatres, was subjected to a hateful enemy ; but there was no feeling of individual loathing against his master. In each case the tyranny has been very bad. But what was such tyranny to the subjection of the white men of the Southern States to the negro who the other day was his slave ? The Russian, too, and the Austrian, had some fitness for the task of dominion. Here they who are the least fit have been chosen,—so that the degrada- tion may be perfect." We state the case exactly as Mr. Trollope states it, and so stated there is one conclusive answer to it all. The system, tyrannical or otherwise, is that upon which the South always has been governed. South Carolina always has been ruled by her lowest-class men, without education, or property, or political knowledge. The only difference is that whereas the men were white before, they are now of many colours. It is true that the mean whites, instead of electing themselves to office, were persuaded and influenced and bribed into electing the planters, who were often men of education ; but the planters can lead a particoloured electorate just as easily as a white one, if they will only try. That an uneducated or vicious majority should rule is bad, but that is the fault of a democratic organization, not of anything peculiar to the South. It is as true of New York as of south Carolina, by the confession of all New Yorkers. Mr. Trollope appears convinced of the natural inferiority of the negro, and talks of St. Domingo as if the negro isolated from white example were any exemplar for the negro pressed by that example; but granting his ease, what does it prove? That the Negro ought, like the Bengalee, to have received absolute civil

freedom, and no political power until he had proved his fitness for command? Well, that is precisely the policy the North tried to carry out, and only abandoned when they found that the dominant caste was not content with it, was establishing Black Codes, and setting up the system of serfage once again. Nobody that ever we heard of likes negro suffrage for itself ; it was adopted as the only practicable expedient by which to avoid much greater evils, evils which threatened to involve the whole Union in perpetual

civil war. There is a curious paper on "The First Printer" in this number, ending in a decision that Laurence Coster first used

movable types, but that Gutenberg may have conceived the idea without previous instruction, and that he undoubtedly carried the art to far higher perfection. There is also an excellent description of that strange district of England, the lake district of Norfolk, the system of shallow lakes, half lake, half marsh, called locally "The Broads." There are fourteen large Broads between Lowes- toft and Norwich, offering unrivalled attractions to the sportsman who is not afraid of days upon the water. "The sportsman who has spent a fortnight in fishing and shooting over the Broads will smack his lips ever afterwards at the very remembrance. There he finds water-hen and coot in abundance, snipe of two or three species rising and twittering at almost every yard, wild duck, mallard, and teal whirring from amid their sedgy covert or splashing farther into it. Pike of a score pounds' weight may be captured, and lordly perch that will give a good half-hour's play. Bream, roach, and eels literally swarm the waters, whilst for size they can hardly be equalled anywhere else in England. In this district it is rare, indeed, to hear anglers speak otherwise of their finny captures than by the stone!" So numerous are pike that the writer has known them sold for manure, and on South Walsham and Ranworth Broads a salt tide will sometimes cover the water

with dead and dying fish. " Phineas Finn" is as good as ever, and altogether St. Path this month may take rank as the most read- able of the Magazines.

Blackwood comes next, perhaps, with its continuation of the

extraordinary article of last month upon Mr. Disraeli, an article which surely must be written by the ghost of Sir A. Alison. The

writer actually denounces Free Trade as having made meat and corn dear, and also brought in the habit of submitting to mob rule,

under which, unless household suffrage reconciles classes to each other, society must go to pieces. And he actually argues that Mr. Disraeli's speech of 1848 in answer to Mr. Hume is a proof of his consistency :—

"This is not at all a project to enfranchise the serfs of England ; this is not at all a project that tolls the labouring classes they shall take their place in the political constitution of the country. It is charac- terized by features totally opposed to the principles laid down by the honourable Member for Oldham. If there be a mistake more striking than another in the settlement of 1832, and in this respect I differ from the honourable Member for Surrey—it is, in my opinion, that the Bill of 1832 took the qualification of property in too hard and rigid a sense as the only qualification which should exist in this country for the exor- cise of political rights. How does the honourable Member for Montrose, the groat champion of the now movement, meet the difficulty? He has brought forward a project of which property, and property alone, is the basis; he has not attempted in any way to increase or vary tho ele- ments of the suffrage. It is impossible that any plan can be more hard, more common-place, more blunt, more unsatisfactory, or more offensive, as the speech of the honourable Member for Oldham shows it to be to the great body of tho working classes, than ono which recognizes pro- perty, and property alone, as its basis."

Mr. Ilume's proposal was household suffrage, which Mr. Disraeli has carried with an addition expressly intended to exclude electors not possessed of any property at all, and not, therefore, contribut- ing to direct taxation. "Cornelius O'Dowd " is not so good as usual, but the number contains a brilliant sketch of the "Young Chevalier" from the Stuart point of view, and a singularly dis- criminative article on Bunsen, whose chief merits and chief defects are summed up in this thoughtful paragraph :— " Full as he was of truth and honour, there is a certain amiable hum- bug, an involuntary exaggeration of his own feelings, friends, and person, visible in the story, which belongs to his very nature. Such a man is ready above all others to recognize the hand of Providence in his suc- cesses, and to glide lightly out of any bond of theory which might have kept him from the full enjoyment of the good things supplied by God. The same sentiment swells out and dilates all his emotions. His likings are all loves, his admirations enthusiasm. We should think he held Niebuhr above all men, did we not find him using as exalted language about that good confused dilettante Frederick William, who, when stress and trouble came, had to give place to his harder-handed brother. This expansion takes away, it is true, the perspective from the picture, and gives a certain pre-Raphael monotony, as of men and things on one level, which is sometimes trying to human nature ; but though the reader feels the want of humour which makes this possible, it does not interfere with his kindness for a soul so truly harmonious, genial, and affectionate."

The best paper in Fraser, though it is not a satisfactory one, is

"On the Failure of Natural Selection in the Case of Man," a failure for which the writer accounts by arguing that selection is impeded by civilization, that only the very rich and the very poor marry early, and that the ditty of continuing the race thus falls mainly to classes enfeebled either by luxury or by want of healthy nutri- tion :—

"Both marry as early as they please, and have as many children as they please, — the rich because it is in their power, the poor because they have no motive for abstinence ;—and as we know, scanty food and hard circumstances do not oppose but rather encourage procrea- tion. Malthus's prudential check' rarely operates upon the lower classes; the poorer they are, usually, the faster do they multiply ; cer- tainly the more reckless they are in reference to multiplication. It is the middle classes, those who form the energetic, reliable, improving element of the population, those who wish to rise and do not choose to sink, those, in a word, who are the true strength and wealth and dignity of nations,—it is these who abstain from marriage or postpone it. Thus the imprudent, the desperate,—those whose standard is low, those who have no hope, no ambition, no solf-denial,—on the one side, and the pampered favour- ites of fortune on the other, take precedence in the race of fatherhood, to the disadvantage or the exclusion of the prudent, the resolute, the striving and the solf-restrained. The very men whom a philosophic statesman or a guide of some superior race would select as most quali- fied and deserving to continuo the race are precisely those who do so in the scantiest measure. Those who have no need for exertion, and those who have no opportunities for culture, those whose frames are damaged by indulgence, and those whose frames are weakened by privation, breed ad libitum; while those whose minds and bodies have been hard- ened, strengthened, and purified by temperance and toil, are elbowed quietly aside in the unequal press. Surely the 'selection' is no longer 'natural.'

The evidence on the point is exceedingly imperfect, but we are -inclined to say, neverthel,ss, that all that is great nonsense. If the writer will make inquiries in the Slave States he will find that the notion of breeding a grand race of men as we breed a grand race of cattle has been tried under the most favourable circum- stances, and has invariably failed, from the operation of a law of which he takes no cognizance, namely, that human beings are not animals as to the affections, and that among them free choice is one condition of the improvement or even the continuance of a race. The writer says :— " A republic is conceivable in which paupers should be forbidden to propagate; in which all candidates for the proud and solemn privilege of continuing an untainted and perfecting race should be subjected to a pass or a competitive examination, and those only should be suffered to transmit their names and families to future generations who had a pure, vigorous, and well developed constitution to transmit ; so that paternity should be the right and function exclusively of the elite of the nation, and humanity be thus enabled to march on securely and without drawback to its ultimate possibilities of progress. Every damaged or inferior temperament might be eliminated, and every special and superior one ho selected and enthroned,—till the human race, both in its manhood and its womanhood, became one glorious congregation of saints, sages, and athletes,—till we were all Blondins, all Shakespeares, Pericles, Socrates, Colurabuses, and F6nelons."

Stuff, simply ! 'rho same man and woman were father and mother of Napoleon and Jerome, of the genius and the Beeotian, and there is not a family circle in England in which some house- hold does not contain a sage and a fool, a hunter and a cripple or a consumptive, sprung from the same loins. The whole argu- ment, like the nasty nonsense about the marriage of cousins, is utterly vitiated by the fact that man has in him something which animals have not, and which affects him as materially as author of races as in every other capacity of life. 'rile writer says igno- rant and miserable races multiply fast, and so do luxurious families. They don't. Savages scarcely multiply at ; the often quoted example of Ireland is probably the result of moral causes, and is certainly wholly exceptional ; and aristocracies die out. The royal caste, which preserves its pedigrees, has scarcely, if at all, increased its numbers in five centuries, during which it ought to have multiplied to scores of thousands. The truth is, we know nothing whatever about the laws of human multiplica- tion, have no sufficient facts to prove why a race like the English covers the earth, while a race like the Hebrew does not. Nothing else strikes us in this number, though we are beginning to besensibleof high realisticpower in " Oatnessiana," and of a singular faculty for minute analysis of character. Here is a wonderfully happy touch, which few will be fortunate enough to pronounce wholly unreal :—" A tartness not wholly unpleasant, so much was it allied to animation, and so frank as to be almost genial, was the utmost amount of temper which Mrs. Wedderburn was in the habit of displaying."

The Cornhill is full of good, mediocre papers, of which the most interesting, perhaps, is the one devoted to dress, the object of which is to indicate appositeness as the cardinal rule of taste in millinery :—" A lady's outdoor dress in the country should always be one in which, if she did milk a cow or make hay, she would be

' picturesquely and becomingly, even if really unsuitably, dressed for the occasion. Tried by this test, silk and black lace and all sorts of gauzy materials would be condemned, and, I think, rightly, as unsuitable to the country. For the seaside a similar test might be founded upon the possibility of carrying any given costume into

a boat. This test would be even more exclusive than the last ; and should, perhaps, be less rigorously applied, though it ought never to be quite lost sight of." Morning dress, evening dress, and dress suited to the season should be regulated by their appositeness, should suit the time and the season, while a dress for church should be just showy enough and Quakerish enough not to attract attention at all. Fashion should be regarded, like the rules in a game of skill, not so much as rules regulating the play, as rules within which the play must be played, a law intended "to give scope for ingenuity in observing it "—a really clever remark. Always provided that the writer's " rider " is obeyed, that no woman wear what she knows to be ugly on herself in deference to we do not know a better or more useful description of a law which, whether we like it or not, can enforce itself, and inflict very severe penalties. This, too, is good, but is, as the writer acknowledges, rather hard upon the middle class, to whom com- pleteness is the most expensive of luxuries. "Far better wear a complete set of bog-oak ornaments, than an amethyst brooch with emerald bracelets and pearl earrings. Far better wear a linsey- wolsey gown with carefully chosen and corresponding collars,. sleeves, petticoat, gloves, &c., than a rich silk with fragmentary and ill-combined appointments." The writer cautions his or her readers against too much thought in the arrangement of dress, as tending to produce a costume which appeals to the mind rather- than to the eye, whereas the lookers-on judge by the eye ; but he might have spared his advice. The half-dozen women in the world capable of composing an intellectual dress are capable also, of remembering, perhaps with the faintest suspicion of scorn, that it is not by reflective intellects they are going to be judged. Women dress to please men, and there never was a man yet who judged a dress good because, though ugly, it had an msthetic mean- ing. He would say that, and look round for the nearest specimen of unconscious prettiness.

Macmillan in an able but prejudiced paper condemns Baron Bend as Austrian Premier for his German proclivities, and argues that the Empire must rest if it is to exist at all upon its Slavonian half, and proposes that concessions should be made to them as well as. to Hungary. "The appointment of Czech officials and the use of the Czech language in the local departments, the grant of full powers to the Bohemian Diet over local affairs and the local budget, and the appointment of a Czech minister to represent the interests of the Bohemian kingdom at Vienna, would remove all the principal grievances of the Czechs ; and the grant of similar concessions to Galicia, and to the Slavonians of Istria, Carinthia, &c. (who were represented at a diet of their own in 1747), would restore order and loyalty among the populations on whom the very existence of Austria now really depends." Right, possibly, but after all, is an empire which has to be so governed worth the governing, is it not better and easier to perish ruling scientifically than to exist conceding all demands to inferior civilizations ? There is a marvellous paper also by Mr. Huxley in the shape of a popular lecture on the chalk formations, or, as he phrases it, "On a Piece of Chalk," which is about as perfect a specimen of "popu- larized science," that is, of science made intelligible to outsiders by clear thought in lucid phrase, as we ever remember to have seen. It does not admit of condensation, but to all readers not profoundly versed in geology and given to like clear- statements we recommend it as an intellectual luxury. What with "Realmah," "The White and Black Ribaumont," and a very well-worn series of arguments in defence of women'a right to know and to teach anatomy and physic, lilacnzillan is very heavily weighted. We suppose we must all hammer away at the

question for some years more, but it is very tedious work, more especially as nobody will be logical. We- believe women may be surgeons without losing one particle either of their virtue or their modesty, a fact everybody acknowledges when, they nurse soldiers in hospital. But suppose it is not so, suppose they are injured as much as any doctor anxious for his fees could possibly suggest, they would be less injured than by frequenting the Haymarket, and with that the law never interferes. If there be such a right as liberty, it includes a woman's right to learn and teach anatomy if she pleases ; and to forbid her by law is tyranny,. and tyranny without excuse, till we make both sexes modest by Act of Parliament.