THE GRAVER MAGAZINES.

TnE Contemporary is this month the most interesting magazine. The paper on "Contemporary Life and Thought in Germany," by Professor von Schulte, is a most exhaustive and interest- ing history of the conflict in Germany between Catholicism and the State, which has ended in making all German Catholics Ultramontanes. The Professor, though well inclined that the State should resist the diffusion of the dogma of Infallibility, holds that the Government entirely missed the right path. He declares that the people were, previously to 1870, entirely unaware of the dogma, and the priests entirely opposed to it ; and that if the Government had assured to every priest his cure, even if his Bishop sought to deprive him for recusancy on the point, the episco- pate would have been powerless. instead of this, which would have emancipated the people, the Government passed the Falk Laws, and so produced among the people an impression that their religion waste be abolished, and that they were in honour and conscience bound to stand by it. Professor Schulte does not attempt to prove his thesis by argument, and still less by rhetoric, but by a narrative of facts, of the highest interest to those who desire to under- stand the question. Dr. Donaldson gives a fine picture of the position of women in ancient Greece, remarkable for the evidence it contains that in the Homeric time the theory of capture still mastered opinion, and that a woman like Helen, who was carried off from her husband, was not considered either bad or disgraced. Her business was to be submissive to her captor, and to please him, and it was no fault of hers that he fell in love with her. He also brings out strongly the subordination in Sparta of all ordinary ideas of morals to the sense of the necessity for breeding a vigorous

race, an object in which Dr. Donaldson thinks the Spartans suc- ceeded :—" For about four or five hundred years there was a suc- cession of the strongest men that possibly ever existed on the face of the earth. The legislator was successful in his main aim. And I think that I may add that these men were among the bravest. They certainly held the supremacy in Greece for a con- siderable time through sheer force of energy, bravery, and obedience to law." We should like to hear Dr..Donaldson's evidence for the physical superiority of the Spartans. Were they any bigger or stronger? They were better disciplined, but the moment other States—Thebes, for instance—discovered their secret, and formed small standing armies, their superiority -disappeared. They had the only standing army in Greece, and so they won battles ; but that is all they ever did, though they sacrificed all the objects of life to that one end. Gymnastics will develope a man's muscles, but we see no evidence that the super- induced muscular quality is transmissible or transmitted. On the contrary, the only race that for a thousand years has known nothing of the gymnasium or of agricultural labour, and has lived in Ghettos and non-sanitary places—the Jewish—is among the most persistently healthy. There is a remarkable and, on the whole, unfavourable account of the poor-law experiment at Elberfeld, which the writer, the Rev. W. Edwards, holds

to be injurious to the moral fibre of the people ; but the most original paper in the number is Mr. Francis Peek's, on

JEonian Metempsychosis." Mr. Peek, on many points extremely orthodox, either believes or wishes to discuss the doctrine that a bad man is punished, or rather trained, by his soul being reclothed in the flesh in this world, and there suffering a good deal till the evil is gradually worked out of him ; or he becomes so bad that he goes on from stage to stage, inhabiting body after body, until at last he reaches the moment when the world is to perish, and is burnt up with it. Mr. Peek even suggests that an idiot at Earls- mood may have had a previous life, in which he had earned that position as his punishment. The theory, though it has strongly attracted Oriental minds, seems to us wholly baseless. It has no evidence behind it, and it does not meet the problems to be solved. Continuous life has little meaning without continuous consciousness, nor is there any training in a penalty of the mean- ing of which the sufferer is not aware. The paper is, however, really curious and interesting, if only because of the depth of dis- content with existing theories which it shows to exist among most respectable and church-going people. Lady Verney's paper on the French Exhibition is not very instructive, the information in it not being new ; but it is vivid, and contains some stories of which this is, perhaps, the most striking. The writer is speaking of the indiscriminate slaughter committed in Paris by the soldiers from Versailles :-

"In one case we were told hew a fonrne'e ' of men, women, and boys were set against a wall to be shot; the soldiers were raising their guns, when a lad of perhaps fourteen or fifteen called out entreatingly to the officer, 'My mother will not know what is become of me. Lot me go into that porter's lodge for two minutes, and send her my watch. I give my parole d'honnenr I will come back l' A mother's name is always a strong word to conjure with in France; the officer let him go, probably intending and expecting him to escape. At the end of the two minutes, however, the boy came running back, and set himself against the wall :—' A prdsent je suis pi et,' said he, breathlessly. The officer gave him a kick,—probably pity at that moment might have been dangerous with his own men. Va-t'en,' said he ; and the child scoured off, as the bullets disposed of the rest of the prisoners."

In the Fortnightly Mr. Grant Duff concludes his admirable study of Emilio Castelar, without that general judgment upon his powers for which we had hoped. He evidently admires him chiefly as an orator, but believes him to have a mind capable in an unusual degree of reception, and therefore capable of develop- ment. in the numbers of his sayings quoted in this chapter we see unusual power of perceptiveness, but fail to note any origi- nality, unless it be in oratorical turns. This metaphor is a fine one, though in English it sounds turgid :—" Gentlemen, we have believed long enough that the sword is the only social lightning- conductor. The sword, like all metals, instead of repelling, at- tracts the thunderbolt. Place on the highest point of society that lightning-conductor which is possessed by Switzerland, Belgium, England, and the United States,—the lightning_ conductor of the civil power and of legality." Mr. Morley's paper on the Lancashire Strike is full of suggestive matter, but he gives no judgment as to whether the masters or the men were right. He attributes the actual strike to faults of temper and failures of tact, but points out very strongly that the I quarrel, bitter as it was, was a household quarrel, and was not fought a out rance :—" Throughout the present strike, for instance, thousands of workmen have continued to live on in cottages for

which they could not pay the rent, and for which in many cases they never will pay the rent, although the cottages belonged to

the very masters whom they were fiercely resisting. Yet such a word as 'ejectment' was never heard. The most violent master in

his most embittered moment was not reckless enough to think seriously of forcibly exercising his legal rights as a landlord." Mr.

Morley dreads unlimited competition, as tending ultimately to the importation of degraded Eastern labour, and would have society,

in considering trade disputes, remember that among it foremost interests is the maintenance of as high a type of life as possible among the workers. He dislikes even fluctuations in wages, as being fatal to thrift; but he does not suggest how, in trades wherein labour is the great expense, fluctuations can be avoided. We have mentioned Mr. Arnold on "Irish Catholicism" elsewhere, but must quote one passage here :— " Its dogma and its confident assertion of its dogma are no more a real source of strength and permanence to the Catholic Church than its Ultramontanism. Its real superiority is in its charm for the imagina- tion,—it s poetry. I persist in thinking that Catholicism has from this superiority a great future before it, that it will endure while all the Protestant sects (in which I do not include the Church of England) dissolve and perish. I persist in thinking that the prevailing form for the Christianity of the future will be the form of Catholicism, but a Catholicism purged, opening itself to the light and air, having the con- sciousness of its own poetry, freed from its sacerdotal despotism, and freed from its pseudo-scientific apparatus of superannuated dogma."

A non-sacerdotal Catholic Church seems to us a contradiction in terms, but we want to ask Mr. Arnold a more sceptical question than that,—Why does he assume so much progress ? Why should not the Catholic Church of the future, he not believing it to be divine, be infinitely worse, instead of better, resistance to it being just sufficient to compel the confessors to relax their laws, and " expand " the precepts of the Church, until they no longer worry a degraded world? That has happened often enough with Churches. Mr. Goldwin Smith's "A Word for Indignation Meetings" wants an appendix. lie says, with epigrammatic truth :—" Nature has broken the mould in which Pitt and Castle- reagh were cast, and Lord Beaconsfield, who fancies that he has resuscitated Toryism, has, in fact, created or rather organised Jingoism, being the Auto-Jingo in his own person ;" and he writes a most eloquent condemnation of Jingoism. But we want to

know what he thinks has been the cause of Jingoism, with its spirited foreign policy, music-hall morality, and secret delight in trampling on the moral sentiments of the orderly. The natural product of the English soil is Islington, not Vauxhall. He hints that the cause may be the breaking-up of beliefs, but we find Jingos by the dozen who are orthodox to foolishness. It is not any breaking-up of beliefs which evolves Lord Cranbrook. Mr. Herbert Spencer continues the strange collection of facts con- nected with ceremonial observance which he calls an essay on "Ceremonial Government," and Mr. Saintsbury gives us a just review of Octave Feuillet, which we may sum up by quoting a single passage of his own :— " He tries to make his heroines fascinatingly sinful, and at the same time, itnprovingly moral. The result is that they do not fascinate, and that they do not edify us. The term honnete femme is always on his lips when he is describing their temptations. But as one of his French critics remarks, with admirable bluntness, ITne honnete femme n'a pas de ces tentations: So also is it with his heroes. They stand shivering on tho bank, hesitating between the I dare not' of their honour and the I would' of their inclination, until when, as they always do at length, they take the plunge, we have no foaling left for them but rather wearied contempt."

There is no very conspicuous paper in the Nineteenth Century this month. The Rev. T. W. Fowle writes a long and careful expo- sition of a theory that conscience is the result of a slow evolution in the mind of man, which began with a consciousness of his claim to exist,—of his right, as it were, to be let alone by the hostile forces around him. This improved gradually into a per- ception of mutual rights, and thence into conscience as we now see it, with its spontaneous and instantaneous action :— "To sum up, then, the result of our investigation, the conscience which we now possess is the primitive sense of a rightness duo to one- self, resulting from the struggle for existence ; extended to others, as men entering into the social state perceived a likeness to themselves in their fellows; intensified and sanctioned by the urgent pressure of external law in the political state; becoming a law to itself, as men became capable of feinting abstract notions ; and saved from egoism by the Christian development of the Hebrew monotheism."

We confess that theory does not satisfy us ; it does not account either for the self-suppressing action of the conscience, which makes it often rather a drawback than an aid in the struggle for survival ; or for the identity of kind, though not of degree, in the conscience of all mankind. No evolution explains to us the instinct that truth is right and false- hood wrong, which is found in savages of a very low type,— e.g., the Coles, and under circumstances when lying would be a convenience in the struggle for existence. Mr. Fowle's paper is rather ingenious than persuasive. Mr. Howell's account of the International Association is instructive. He describes the formation of the society, and derides the popular belief in its powers and its organisation. He says that in England it never had more than 500 paying members, and was almost without funds, its members finding the means to attend its congresses only by hiring themselves to the journals as special reporters of their own proceedings. He considers the theories of the International absurd dreams, but denies their complicity in the attempts to assassinate the German Emperor, remarking with some acuteness that Dr. Karl Marx, who never answers any charge against his followers, has distinctly repudiated this one. Colonel C. B. Brackenbury draws from the recent cam- paign the deduction that field artillery should be protected from the fire of rifles by movable iron shields, and Sir D. Wedeter- burne pleads for the Protected Princes of India, whose claim to exist, however, be greatly weakens by his praise of the experiment at Bhownugger, where a two -beaded Premiership, one head being a European official and the other a Brahmin, secures excellent results. The Prince, to be useful, must be as able to govern alone without the European tutor. Sir David takes a very gloomy view of Indian finance, believing that a collapse impends perpetually over the Indian Treasury, and that ultimately the alternatives will be bankruptcy or sweeping retrenchments. As the sweeping retrenchments are quite possible, we do not believe the danger imminent, though Parliament is not half sensitive enough about Indian loans. The discussion in the "Modern Symposium" on the comparative value of the popular judgment in politics and the educated judgment is brought to a conclusion, after a very eloquent discourse by Mr. Gladstone, who presses the history of Christianity into his service in a most effective way.

The method of discussion is not, however, a happy one. Those who take part in it are not really debating, and their proposals and rejoinders often pass each other without direct collision. A séance of experts, whose talk was first taken down and then care- fully edited, would be far more effective.

Fraser bas some interesting papers. There is a very instructive, detailed sketch of the Constitution of Norway, which enjoys the most democratic monarchical system in Europe ; and we have read with real pleasure the account of the Academy of the Arcadi—that is, the organised literary society of Italy during the eighteenth century—though the author, like almost all writers on Italy, is embarrassed by the wealth of his materials. He utterly rejects, we perceive, Madame de Stael's view of the character of Corinne, the improvisatrice, and is in- clined to believe that the original of her story, Maria Maddelena Morelli, called in literature " Corilla Olympica,"

was an impudent adventuress, who must, however, have had abilities, to excite such enthusiasm and such hatred as she did

throughout Italy. The Pope crowned her in 1775, and the Romans lampooned her, and the exact truth as to her qualities is probably the same as the exact truth as to her face. She was pretty, but she squinted. The most valuable contribution to the number is, however, a series of unpublished letters from

Coleridge, Southey, and Lamb, to Matilda Betham, the daughter of the Rector of Stoke Lacy, who in the early years of the century enjoyed in London "a brief period of literary and artistic success." The following, from Charles Lamb, about 1815, is intensely characteristic :- "My head is in such a state from incapacity for business, that I certainly know it to be my duty not to undertake the veriest trifle in addition. I hardly know how I can go on. I have tried to get some redress by explaining my health, but with no great success. No one can tell how ill I am, because it does not come out to the exterior of my face, but lies in my skull deep and invisible. I wish I was leprous, and black jaundiced skin-over, and that all was 88 well within as my cursed looks. You must not think me worse than I am. I am determined not to be over-set, but to give up business rather, and get 'em to allow me a trifle for services past. 0 that I had been a shoemaker or a baker, or a man of large independent fortune. 0 darling laziness ! heaven of Epicurus ! Saint's Everlasting Rost! that I could drink vast potations of thee thro' unmeasured Eternity—Otium cum vel sine dignitate. Scandalous, dishonourable, any kind of repose. I stand not upon the dignified sort. Accursed, damned desks, trade, commerce, business. Inventions of that old original busybody, brain-working Satan- Sabbathless, restless Satan. A curse relieves; do you ever try it ?"