THE MAGAZINES.

TrEE Contemporary has the best papers this month. It would be difficult to state the case against peasant-proprietorship in a more amusing or more striking way than Lady Verney does.

She has " visited " the peasants round Aix-les-Bains, Annecy, and Chambery, as she would have done in England, and has come to the conclusion that their lives are sordid, hard, and uncivilised, which is, in a certain way, true. There is another side to the picture, which she did not recognise, and when she is at home, English peasants do not express their bitterness- quite so freely, knowing well how the lords of the soil resent" dis- content ;" but she relates what she saw, or what she thought she saw, thoroughly well. The point she does not perceive is that the peasant who was so willing to sell his property had a pro- perty to sell, which is precisely what his British brother has not.

Would the small English squire, with half-drained land, be very unwilling to sell at a price, if settlements would let him ; or would Lady Verney, therefore, think squirearchy a ruinous institution ? About the over-toil of the women she is right, but if she will glance on a few pages, she will find Mr. Stanley Jevons denouncing the over-toil of Englishwomen as the direct cause of the infant mortality in English factory towns, and of the infanticide which, though exaggerated, undoubtedly prevails there. He does not pile up the horrors, but his figures are frightful ; and his remedy, the legislative prohibition of work in factories to all child-bearing women is, we fear, wholly im- practicable. Its result would be Malthnsianism, and without much good to the few children born. We believe the French plan, the crche, would be far better, because it would secure health to the children spared ; but the simple truth is, that laws cannot supply the place of the grand natural instincts. If mothers will not take the trouble to rear their children, nobody can do their duty. Neither overwork nor poverty kill out Irish children, or, a much more extreme case, the negro children of the Southern States. The women need training in their duties and in common sanitary truths, not laws to prevent their earn- ing a living. Lieutenant-Colonel Osborn, in his paper on Egypt, pleads strongly against annexation ; but his plea, that if we annex we must govern to the lakes, is a reason for conquest, not against it—the Delta possibly might govern itself—and his. argument is spoiled by his exaggeration :—

am aware that such a prospect will be an alluring one to many Englishmen who know nothing of the carnage, the fraud, the violence, and rapacity on which our Indian Empire was founded—and are, therefore, unable to see that a rule founded in wrong can never be productive of good, either to rulers or ruled. But to those who know British rule in India, not as it is depicted in official reports and the writings of official apologists, but as it actually is, and as it always has been, a more saddening prospect could hardly be imagined than that of another large portion of the earth's surface groaning under a repetition of the same blind and unteachable tyranny."

Does Colonel Osborn know of any rule not originally founded on violence, or does he really think the Indians would, as yet, be the better for our absence ? If he does not, what does he mean P and if he does, his view is too exceptional, and as we should, say, too opposed to evidence, to impress. We quite allow that he has a right to be heard, and that the blind re- fusal of the English to believe that there are two sides to their position in India is most irritating ; but he forgets the British side of the argument, as much as most men forget the native. Why does he, by the way, think that an independent European ruler in Egypt would govern better than an English Viceroy ? Our impression is, that after the first generation, at all events, he would unite European energy to Asiatic ruth- lessness, and be shot as an oppressor, no longer endurable even by Egyptians. The Ptolemies were better than the Pharaohs, perhaps, but we do not know much of the condition of the peasants under them. "Zululand After the War," by Mr. F. Colenso, is a most able plea for the restoration of Cetewayo, as the only alternative to the supremacy of John Dunn, and con- tains a statement which is to us entirely new :—" And what was the effect of our invasion of Zululand, so far as the people themselves were concerned? That we destroyed crops and immense quantities of provisions, and carried off herds of cattle innumerable; while we did nothing, by presents of seed-corn, to help to restore the balance of supply and demand in respect of a lost harvest, is not denied ; and in consequence, a dreadful famine prevailed last year in parts of Zululand (and is likely to recur this year), the wretched people being described by eye- witnesses as creeping on all-fours on the ground." Alderman Cotton exalts the City of London, which pays more to Income- tax under Schedule D than the seventeen largest cities in England put together; but the most interesting paper by far is Mr. Rae's, on "Christian Socialists in Germany," We knew how deep a hold the Socialist idea had acquired there, but we had, we confess, no adequate conception of the concessions made to it by the high Catholic clergy. Mr. Rae declares that Dr. Ketteler, the late Bishop of Mayence, baron, theologian, and philosopher, while objecting to lend money from taxes to industrial associations, laid it down that the Catholic Church,—

" Has never maintained an absolute right of property. Her divines have unanimously taught that the right of property cannot avail against a neighbour who is in extreme need, because God alone is absolute proprietor, and no man is more than a limited vassal, holding under God, and on the conditions which he imposes ; and one of these conditions is that any man in extremities is entitled to satisfy his necessity where and how he pleases. In such a case, according to Catholic doctrine, it is not the man in distress that is the thief, but the proprietor who would gainsay and stop him. The distressed have a positive right to succour, and the State may, there- fore, without violating any of the rights of property, tax the parishes, or the proprietors, for the relief of the poor. But beyond this the State has no title to go. It may legitimately tax people for the pur- pose of saving working-men from extremities, but not for the purpose of bettering their normal position."

Mr. Rae should have quoted chapter and verse. If Bishop Ketteler really said that, in so many words, as doctrine, and not as a casuistical deduction from the doctrine that without

free-will there cannot be sin, we venture to say that Rome would have pronounced his proposition heretical. It is the suspension of the Eighth Commandment. Canon Moufamg, the present leader of the Christian Socialists, is much more moderate, advocating, indeed, only Co-operation and a Poor Law, though his Poor Law would apparently establish in form what ours only establishes indirectly,—a legal minimum of wages. The Protestant-Christian Socialists go nearly as far as the Catholic, Rudolph Todt, a pastor in Old Preignitz, for ex- ample, laying it down as an axiom that Manchesterism is the antagonist of Christianity, and that "the Socialist ideas of

liberty, equality, and fraternity are part and parcel of the Christian system ; and the Socialist ideas of solidarity of interests, of co-operative production, and of democracy, have all a direct Biblical foundation, in the constitution and customs of the Church, and in the Apostolic teaching regard- ing it." Mr. Rae's paper, like every other paper we read on

the present condition of Germany, leaves on our minds the impression that the discontent there is profound, that there will be a fierce recoil from the over-strictness of the

social organisation, and that the revolution is not so far off in Germany as many believe. We have already alluded once or twice to Mr. Mahaffy's most interesting and, indeed, startling, paper on the Irish landlords. It is written from the Tory point of view, and advocates wholesale eviction as the best defence of property; but it comes to this, that Irish landlords are an ill-educated, idle, ignorant set of spiritless -beings, who neither combine nor fight, and who will sign any- -thing rather than see their amusements interrupted

The great and permanent cause of this condition of things is the want of education. How often, when I have been urging on parents , the necessity of sending a boy to school, have I heard the fatal formula, 'He doesn't require to work,' expressed in atone of assumed modesty, as if I had made a social blunder by presuming that the boy was, like myself, obliged to work for his livelihood. 'What does he want with education ?' said an old lady to me once, in the same 'connection; isn't he a fine, handsome boy, and can't I keep him till he grows up ? Then he will go over to England, and some rich lady will irate herielf to him.' She had before her eyes a case in point, where an Irish adventurer of the neighbourhood had secured a large fortune."

His judgment seems to us a harsh one, but there is a section of the landlords, as there once was in England, to whom it is applicable, and who have so discredited the Order, that England will not now even subscribe to help them.

The Rev. F. Barham Zincke has the post of honour in the

Fortnightly, with another of his papers upon peasant-proprietor- ship. The idea of "Land-owning Cultivators" is that American competition will very speedily render the English method of

cultivation, with its "three profits," impossible; and that the land must then be cultivated by its owners, employing little or no labour, and paying no rent beyond the original purchase.

money. He contends, therefore, strongly for the enfranchise- ment of the soil, so as to admit of its purchase in small pieces. Mr. Zincke's argument is clear enough as regards the end to be sought, but he wanders from the French peasant to the American farmer in a very bewildering way. Which ideal of the two is he seeking, and does he not confuse the farmer of New Eng- land, who is not succeeding, with the farmer of the West, who is The mannreless farming of the West would hardly suc- ceed here. Mr. A. C. Swinburne sends a note on "Mary, Queen of Scots," which is really a view of her character. He believes all her enemies say of her, but thinks Darnley deserved death, and that she herself was a queenly woman, ruined in the frightful school from which she emerged, the murderous brothel presided over by Catherine de Medici. The editor condenses the "Memorials of Caroline Fox, the Falmouth Quaker," in a pleasant fashion, and adds to them an account of John Woolman, the New Jersey Quaker, who died in 1772, who was, perhaps, the first who ever protested against slavery, carrying his convictions to such a length that he would not draw a will containing a bequest of slaves. His writings had a great charm for Charles Lamb, and a distinct influence over John Mill, to whom they were given by Caroline Fox. Mr. Morley evidently believes he owed to them his admiration for "the stationary state," an ad- miration so unusual in men of his opinions. Mr. Grant Allen sketches Sir Charles Lyell with an admiring pen, which, never- theless, does not leave a pleasant impression. We suspect him of thinking Sir Charles, who was a gentleman in the technical sense, a bit of a snob—though he admits the defect was cured—and he is very impatient of his unwillingness to get rid of the idea of a Creation. Sir Charles Lyell ultimately accepted the ourang as his great-grandfather, but hinted that he was in con- sequence less proud of his pedigree, and Mr. Allen thinks that weak. Is not this prejudiced nonsense ?—

" He luckily escaped the conventionalising and stereotyping drill of our public schools ; he was never put through one of those dismal mills for crushing out individuality, into which we turn most of our best material, so as to grind it down to the Procrustean measure of Ovidian elegiacs and Aschylean trimeters. He went to three small private schools, first at Ringwood (close to home), then at Salisbury (where we had the very best boys in Wilts, Dorset, and Hants '—a touch of a sort that dies out of his letters or journals with the coarse of time), and finally, at Midharst, in the very heart of the Weald of Sussex. He was thus spared the brutal influence of compulsory football,' which would have been substituted for the pursuit of nature in a modern public school. His tutors, indeed, shook their heads at his solitary ways, but they only gently hinted that they were un- manly. Our enlightened modern head masters would have severely reprimanded him for 'loafing.'"

The notion that private schools foster originality is an odd one, more especially when, as in Sir Charles Lyelrs case, they are still devoted to classics. He liked, at one time, nothing better than making bad Latin verses. The number contains a third biographical sketch, that of Pietro Cossa, the Roman realist dramatist who died last August, and who, from the extracts given, must have possessed genuine dramatic power ; but the article of the number is the conclusion of Mr. Blunt's essay on " The Future of Islam." He still maintains that with the fall of Constantinople Mahommedanism will renew its distinctively religions character, and that a great empire will arise, with its centre either at Bagdad or Mecca, with 200,000,000 of obedient subjects. This empire, he thinks, England should foster and protect, she having an interest in the Mussulmans of India and of Egypt, while the natives of South Africa will pro- bably adopt Mahommedanism. She should, Mr. Blunt thinks, publicly guarantee the Khalifate, and even protect it from European intrusion into Arabia by force, accepting, if needful, a direct suzerainty over Yemen. He would even have her develop the pilgrimage to Mecca by all possible means, and build a railway from Jeddah to the Holy City. The proposal of so dreamy an enterprise, which would never be sanctioned by the English people, for the first time makes us doubt Mr. Blunt's judgment as to the forces now at work among the Arab races. Is it possible that he does not see that the protected Khalifate would be kept in order by its protector, and would, therefore, hate her, and that the British are as likely to permit an armed Protectorate of the Papacy ? That Mahommedanism may conquer South Asia, and will con- quer Africa, we believe, as we also believe that in Africa it will do good work ; but it is no business of Christians to help it to success, much less to protect it from the disasters which, once prosperous, it is sure to bring upon itself.

The Nineteenth Century opens with a poem by Mr. Matthew Arnold, on the late Dean of Westminster, which, though it contains fine stanzas, is not in his happiest vein, lacking in especial something of his usual lucidity and spontaneonsnes. This is fine :—

" The minster's outlined mass Rose dim from the morass,

And thitberward the stranger took his way.

Lo, on a sadden all the Pile is bright! '

Nave, choir, and transept glorified with light, While tongues of fire on coign and carving play ! And heavenly odours fair Come streaming with the floods of glory in, And carols float along the happy air As if the reign of joy did now begin.

Then all again is dark, And by the fisher's bark The unknown passenger returning stands.

—0 Saxon fisher ! thou hast had with thee

The fisher front the Lake of Galilee—

So saith he, blessing him with outspread hands."

But we object with pain to see lines as fine as the next two spoiled by a horrid artificialness, like the one we have itali-

cised :—

"For this and that way swings • The flux of mortal things, Though moving inly to one far-off goal.

—What had our Arthur gain'd, to stop and see, After light's term, a term of cecity, A Church once large and then grown strait in soul ?"

Mr. F. Harrison's paper, on "The Crisis of Parliamentary Government," will be read just now with close attention and interest. His contention is that a reform of the procedure of the House of Commons is inevitable, if only because the fierce light of democracy now beats on it, as it once beat upon the Throne; and that reform must include two changes,—the right of ending debate which we call the cloture, and the transfer of discussion in Committee to real Committees. The right of cloture he would vest in a bare majority :—

"I am very strongly of opinion that the only satisfactory authority to declare it is a simple majority; that the only efficient machinery is a direct and simple vote. I hold to this for the very reason which is sometimes appealed to by the opponents of this scheme, viz., for the sake of the freedom of discussion, and for the protection of inde- pendent members. It may seem a paradox at first-sight ; but when we work it out in practice, it is quite true that to put the power in the hands of a bare majority is far less dangerous than to put it in the hands of a large majority. A right permanently vested in a majority and constantly in use, as familiar as going into the lobby and part of the ordinary incidents of debate, is far less liable to abuse, far less likely to awaken personal bitterness, far more likely to be used justly and properly, than a special right of a penal character, vested in a functionary or in a special majority, and used only in crises and moments of extreme irritation. If the power is reserved to a two-thirds majority, two things follow : it can only be exercised by the sufferance of (and in practice after compromise with) the official opposition ; in the next place, it necessarily assumes a penal and hostile form, because it is only used against some special group."

In fact, "the power to close debate is a mere incident of voting," and all "the reasons for committing the right of legislation to bare majorities, are reasons for giving the bare majority a right to close debate." Mr. Harrison would have ten Committees, of from eleven to twenty-one members—he prefers the smaller number—who should be chosen by Mr. Hare's system of voting, thus ensuring impartial distribution, and who should on certain occasions sit all together. They would lick every measure into shape, would hear all whom it was necessary to hear, would keep their proceedings secret, and would sit independently of the sittings of the House. Our great fear from such a scheme is that the whole House would discuss the report of any Com- mittee just as lengthily as it does now, and that the gain would be less than would be obtained from allowing the Ministry, when a Bill had been once debated, to draft it, and submit it for acceptance or rejection. Mr. Harrison's proposal should, however, be very carefully studied, and especially page 28, on the method of election. Mr. A. J. Balfour sends an able review of Mr. Morley's Life of Cobden, in which he objects strongly to Mr. Cobden's bitterness against the large landed proprietors, who, the writer contends, . represented the middle-class of the counties. He was full "of • the ordinary Radicalism of his day," and saw every social dis- 'Unction more clearly than the cardinal one between the capitalist and the labourer. Mr. Cobden's opinions are open to that criticism, but what does Mr. Balfour mean by the following

sentence,--" An aristocracy is a class which governs inae- pendently of, and if need be, in opposition to public opinion." That is the definition of an oligarchy. An aris- tocracy is a class possessing by right of birth privileges

refused to the community. English Peers do not govern, but they are strictly an aristocracy, because they possess the right of initiating or vetoing legislation, without being elected. Professor Goldwin Smith discusses a less pressing subject, "The Machinery of Elective Government," in an essay which is really devoted to the question,—What is to be done when party questions are all settled ? a period he thinks approaching. He believes that the remedy would be a remodelling of the Constitution. He would abolish the House of Lords, and not replace it by any Senate, elect the House of Commons by indirect election through the municipalities, and make the House elect an Executive Council or Cabinet of Ministers for a fixed term. The school certificate should be the single qualification of electors, and the number of the Commons be limited to two hundred. There should be no President ex- cept the President of the Council, and, of course, though this is only implied, no King. That Constitution might work well, probably would, if the Council did not prove always refractory ; but we do not see that the plan has much practical application to England. Mr. Goldwin Smith is bitterly antagonistic to female suffrage, on the ground that women cannot be, or, at all events, will not be, made fully "justiciable," and therefore cannot be fully responsible, an argument which we think is only temporary. Women in power would be hanged for its misuse as readily as men.

The real argument against female suffrage is that all govern- ment rests on force, and that to dissociate physical force and legal right is to destroy government altogether. No female vote, even if unanimous, could shut English dram- shops. Neither soldiers nor masses would obey it. Mr.

Louis Greg writes a very needless paper on the right of an Agnostic to go to church, which he defends because the example is good and harmony is good, and the defence of one's power for good is good, 8:c. Surely the argument is simpler than all that. The Agnostic denies that he knows or can know, but does not deny that he wishes to know. Surely, therefore, he may go anywhere where he can or may, or thinks he can or may, or thinks it even possible he can or may, get light. He does not accept the Church by going to church, any more than he accepts a lecture by going to hear it. Provided he sits quiet, nothing compels him to join in the worship, if that is repugnant to him ; and the minister who is worth his salt would welcome him, as readily as Christ did any " agnostic " of his day who called himself a Sadducee.

Blackwood gives us a most interesting sketch of the interior of Kairmin, a city of mosques, colleges, and monasteries ; and twenty pages of unpublished "Marginalia," written by Cole- ridge, on his books, and sent by him to Mr. Green, the surgeon and disciple who ultimately became his executor. Many of these marginalia are long, as, for example, some smashing annotations on Malthus, and some are very fine. This rebuke of a very common error is singularly apt. Southey remarked that a person who opposed the customs of the world was a humourist, upon which Coleridge writes :—

"The question should have been—Is the individual who condemns and opposes the world and the world's laws' necessarily a humour- ist ? Was John the Baptist a humourist? Simon Stylites was. Yet they both defied the world and the world's laws. But this is the prominent fault of the author, that in order to give zest and scenery to commonplace thoughts, he turns truth into falsehood by raising generals into universals. The old adage, Extremes meet,' might have saved him from this."

The following remark upon Mesmer's first book seems to us to have strange meaning in it somewhere, though we frankly acknowledge that it is beyond our interpretation :—

"I think it probable the animal magnetism will be found connected with a warmth sense, and will confirm my long, ng-ago theory of volition as a mode of double-touch."

This collection of sayings will make this number of Blackwood of permanent interest for a great many who enjoy literary caviare.

Macmillan relies this month almost exclusively on Mr. Julian Hawthorne's "Fortune's Fool" and Mr. Raven's "Diversions of a Pedagogue," but the reliance is justified. Mr. Hawthorne has introduced into his story a child who is, so far as we know, absolutely original—a child at once keen and eerie, a little woman of the world, and a witch ; and Mr. Raven positively revels in relating stories of the blunders and absurdities of boys. This answer as to the history of the Venerable Bede, at all events, sounds true ; no human being could have invented any- thing so delicious :—" The Venerable Bede was a historian, known in his own day, from his extreme antiquity, as Adam

Bede." Mr. Raven has an idea, which we do not remember to have seen before in print, but which is certainly true, that many boys pride themselves on their matter-of-factness, and gives the

following illustration. A boy was asked to give the history of Hero and Leander, and sent up this as his essay :—

"Leander was a young man, who was in love with a young woman, and between them was a large piece of water, so that if he wished to see her he would have to cross it ; so be resolved to swim it. He reached the opposite shore all safe ; but in coming back, the journey was too long, the tide very strong, and he got the cramp, and was drowned."

Fraser for January contains, among other rather thin papers —the best of which is an account of " Cervo," a village on the Riviera, with a wonderful church, built by coral-fishers out of the profits of a coral bank that has disappeared—a story by Mr. Malcolm MacColl, which reads, till its close, like a matter-of-fact account of a ghostly mystery ; and a furious attack on the Irish Land Act, remarkable as being the work of Mr. G. Brodrick, the Warden of Merton, heretofore known as a determined Liberal. He condemns it in foto as immoral, im-

politic, unworkable, and "of sinister origin," and suggests that the only remedy is to change the rent into a fixed-rent charge, buy it of the owner for the State, and let the State collect it as a land-tax. He does not suggest how this is to be done, or how a State, governed by a representative body in which 105 members represent these very tenants, is to levy a perpetual rent, but contents himself with insisting that this is the only course. It might be a wise one, if the operation were manage- able, but it is too big, and the difficulties too hopelessly complex. It is the old story. When landlords are concerned, the State has no rights.