THE MAGAZINES.

THE only political paper of importance in the Reviews for April is Mr. Chamberlain's upon Home-rule, called the "Bill for the Weakening of Great Britain," in the Nineteenth Century. In this article Mr. Chamberlain presses home the argument that Ireland in time of war could, if she chose, refuse assistance to Great Britain, and in all human proba- bility would refuse it. She would not fight France in grati- tude for past sympathy; the United States on account of inti- mate relations with her Irish population; or Russia, because in a Russian war our necessary alliance with Italy would be unpopular with the Irish priesthood. Moreover, even in time of peace Ireland will contribute more than a million-and-a-half less than her share towards the Imperial expenditure, and pro- bably will not contribute even that, for smuggling will be- come a patriotic duty, and will not be punished by the Irish Executive. Mr. Chamberlain does not add that Ireland can virtually forbid recruiting by refusing facilities for it. —Mr. W. S. Blunt's paper on "Lord Cromer and the Khedive" is, it is known, a statement of the Khedive's case, carefully corrected by himself. He maintains that the English are intensely disliked in Egypt; that their reforms, except as regards finance, are absurdly exaggerated; and that the Egyptian rack-and-filecannot be depended upon as against the Khedive. We ought, therefore, to retire, retaining our control over the Canal by a force at Suez, and abandoning the effort to "keep Egyptian Bonds at an unnatural par." The whole article is, in fact, a plea for Egyptian independence under the autocracy of the Khedive, who, it is obvious from the same paper, has made, or is prepared to make, an arrangement with the Sultan, under which the Otto- man Government will support him. That is, of course, the precise situation from which Europe rescued itself by authorising British intervention.—Major-General A. Dray- son maintains that many of the evils to which flesh is heir, and especially sleeplessness, and all the ills produced by want of exercise, can be cured by rapid breathing during about two hours a day. Everything depends, he declares, upon the allowance of oxygen inhaled ; and he protests that all who do desk-work do not obtain enough, as they, in fact, after a little time, breathe only exhaled air. There is a certain amount of truth in what General Drayson says, but we wonder how he accounts for the extraordinary differences observable among men upon this point. There are people who literally cannot breathe without what they call " air,"—that is, air from outside, and people who literally cannot endure outside air, and are never at their best except in rooms which those around them consider almost stifling. The latter, of whom the present writer is one, must want the double supply of oxygen just as much as the rest. Why can they easily do without it ? Is not the necessity dependent, at least to a large extent, upon what is called " constitution," about which as yet we know so very little P---Mr. Courtney maintains that silver in its relation to gold has been reasonably stationary—that is to say, it has fallen only as other com- modities have fallen—and proposes a plan which is that of neither the bimetallist nor the monometallist. He would cir- culate silver to an unlimited amount at a ratio slightly lower than the present :- "Assuming that the existing market value of silver showed a ratio between it and gold of something between twenty-three and twenty-four to one, and that a law was passed providing that the Mint should receive silver bullion and grant certificates therefor which should be legal tender at the ratio of twenty-five to one, what would be the effect of such a law ? It would be inoperative until, by the rise in gold or fall in silver, or both movements, the ratio of twenty-five to one was reached, but it wouldprevent appreciation or depreciation, or the effect of both going further, There would be no dislocation of markets, no scattering of gifts, but a level platform would be reached, and apprehensions of further sinkings of exchanges would disappear. If after a time, through gold being more easily produced in the Transvaal, or silver less easily produced in Nevada, the ratio of twenty-five to one became too high to be operative, silver would cease to be brought into the Mint to be exchanged for certificates, and wo should return to monometallism."

What we want to know is, if an international rule can keep silver at the price of one twenty-fifth of gold, why should it not keep it at its old price of one-fifteenth? The proposal really assumes that silver has nearly touched bottom ; " but where is the proof of that? The whole ten- dency of science is to reduce the cost of extracting the metal at every point except the wages of the labourer. Suppose silver should pay, as this writer believes it will one day, at ls. an ounce, or £1,760 a ton, what will be the value of Mr. Courtney's scheme P--Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild has finished his paper on the financial causes of the French Revolution, and certainly explains with some clearness the causes of the bankruptcy of the State. They were summed up in two ; the weight of the debt constantly accumulating, and the astounding extravagance of the Court. When Madame de Pompadour died it was found that she bad received £1,450,000 from the Crown, though its whole income was ender £15,000,000 a year. The expenditure of the Court at the death of Louis XV. reached one-eighth of the entire revenue ; and even in the time of Louis XVI. new grants of pensions were perpetually made, reaching in 1781 to nearly one million sterling.—Mr. Knowles has never yet obtained that article from the Mikado which we have always indicated to him as the blue-ribbon he should seek; but he has this time an article from a King, the King of Sweden, discoursing upon Charles XII. He has not finished; but we cannot say he has added much to our knowledge except upon one point. Charles XII. was not mad in his long residence in Turkey. He very nearly prevailed on the Sultan and his Vizier to declare war on Russia; and had he succeeded, and beaten the Russians by their aid, the verdict of history on him, and probably the whole course of history, would have been revolutionised The first paper in the Contemporary, " The Pope and the Bible," is an admirable piece of satirical writing, but leaves the reader in doubt as to the writer's theological position. He professes profound reverence for the Pope, and profound con- tempt for the "teaching Church," by which he means the Jesuits ; but we fancy if the Pope declared the whole Bible inspired, he would be in a very singular position. He obvi- ously does not believe that himself, and we do not clearly perceive how any Papal declaration can make him do it. His object, of course, is to prove what is quite true, that the Roman Catholic Church has never pinned itself to the text of Scrip- ture, or defined inspiration, and of his method, the following paragraph is a fair specimen :-

" One instance will suffice of the intellectual slovenliness with which articles of belief are formulated for the benefit of the whole 'crowd'; slovenliness which reminds one of the mental attitude of the absent-minded lecturer who eloquently descanted upon the unutterable feelings of joy with which Columbus's father and mother must have been filled on the day of his birth at finding themselves the parents of the renowned discoverer of half the terrestrial globe. Father Brandi, writing in 1893, declares that Pius VII., who died in 1823, Pius IX., who departed this life four- teen years ago, and our present Holy Father, decided that in the present conjuncture the temporal power of the Pope is indispensable to the freedom of the Church. The same teaching Church ' tells us that Moses, when he divided the limits of fields which the Israelites did not yet possess, and gave minute directions about the leprosy of their houses while they were yet living in tents, spoke by anticipation, as a prophet. But shall we likewise place Pius VII. and Pius IX. among the prophets, or would it not be more respectful to their memory to elevate the Rev. Father Brandi's dogma to the dignity of an Irish Bull ? "

—Sir Charles Gavan Daffy, who sat in an Australian Parlia- ment while members were paid and unpaid, is, on the whole, in favour of paying them. " The practice of paid Parlia- mentary agents almost disappeared, and the country insisted upon a higher standard of political morality, as well as a more punctual attention to their duties from men who were freed from all personal burdens connected with their position, both before and after election." Especially, he thinks, the practice tends to reform abuses of patronage ; the Member who is paid getting rid of the idea that he has a right to payment of some sort or other. That is certainly not the case in France, and Sir C. G. Duffy himself frankly owns that many in Australia are by no means satisfied with the results of the new system :-

" It has made it more difficult, they assert, for men fit for public functions to get into Parliament, and in many cases reduced the popular Member, who used to be the guide and leader of the people, to be something little better than their lackey. Persons holding small local employments which brought them into habitual communication with the mass of the constituents, secre- taries of municipal councils, rate collectors, and the like, used the opportunity to solicit the higher position and salary of a representative; were ready to make extravagant and disastrous promises to obtain seats, and when they obtained them, to become the agents in Melbourne for the petty private and personal transactions of the electors. The Labour Party, which threatens to become a serious impediment to the working of responsible government in Australia, is, they affirm, the natural result of paid Members. The salaried delegates of a trade naturally desire to become the paid representatives of the community, and some- times succeed in their design."

Mr. Tom Mann, on the other hand, is clear that not only Members of Parliament should be paid, but members of Town Councils and the like, his main reason being that, until they are, such posts will be monopolised by the wealthy, who will not pay attention to the democracy.—M. Gabriel Monod sends a thoughtful sketch of Taine, exceedingly honorific as regards his perfect sincerity and independence, but condemnatory as regards his philosophic system, which he rightly defines as one of inflexible determinism. "Given an author or an artist, he infers what he must be from the race, the medium, and the moment ; and, having thus mastered his individuality, he deduces from it all his acts and all his works." The redeeming point of his system was, says M. Monod, that he never ignored a fact, to which we should append the rider that he never ignored one if he saw it, but that he sometimes saw only what he wanted to see, Englishmen hardly recog- nise in him a critic who is open to blame for an over- genial view of England as compared with France. He was "an energetic incarnation of the scientific spirit," if it be true that the scientific spirit does not recognise the possibility of will, or the existence in Nature of an element of mystery.— The only other paper of interest is M. Lanin's sketch of Con- stantine Pobedonostseff, the head of the Russian Synod, who of all men has most influence with the Czar. M. Lanin bates him evidently, but is much more just than is usual in his por- traits. He holds M. Pobedonostseff to be emphatically an honest man, entirely believing that it is his mission to stamp

out heresy, and capable of acknowledging to the Czar that he has made a mistake, and that his previous advice ought to be set aside. He is, however, on certain points impervious to argument, and in the conversion of heretics he is adamant, and, to an extraordinary degree, successful :— " M. Pobedonostseff sits on the crest of a vast wave of reaction which is submerging sects, creeds and parties, and he listens with that ghastly smile of his to the fallacy of the sectarians, who hug the delusion that persecution is but a more effectual mode of propagation. Stundism, Lutheranism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam in Russia are all doomed to die—nay, they are even now fast melting away like ice-floes drifting into southern seas. Of a Church of several million Oriental Catholics, which flourished when Pius IX. was Pope, not a soul is now left to keep the remembrance from dying. The Buddhists of Siberia are being taken every year to the rivers in hundreds, stripped, shaken, sworn at, dipped and then told that they are Christians, and may go home and offer a sacrifice to their ugly idols in thanksgiving for the boon. Fifty years more of the Ober-Pro- curor's tactics, and the orthodox Church will have swallowed up its rivals as completely as Aaron's rod devoured the rods of the Egyptian sorcerers; and the grandsons of those who now groan and lament because of religious persecution, will bless the man who had the energy to carry out the work of unification, even at the cost of moral progress."

Western men will not readily believe the truth of that account, but if they will read history a little more, especially the history of Charlemagne, and of the crusade against the Counts of Toulouse, they may find reason to reconsider.

The April number of the Fortnightly Review is not an interesting one, but it contains an unusually convincing paper on the financial results of the Home-rule Bill. The essayist, who is evidently an expert, believes that the Bill will result in a certain loss to the Imperial Exchequer of £900,00U a year, or, say, a capital sum of -C32,000,000, and in a probable loss of many millions more, from reluctance or inability to repay the agrarian loans. Moreover, the Irish Government, so far from having a surplus of £500,000, as Mr.

Gladstone calculates, would have a deficit of £300,000, and would, therefore, be entirely unable to raise money. This calculation is independent of any fall in the Revenue resulting from the Home-rule Bill itself, though • such fall is nearly certain, and of any expenditure incurred in the suppression of civil war. The Irish Government

would therefore be compelled either to impose new direct taxes, or to effect enormous reductions in expense, which is Mr. Gladstone's idea, but is certainly not the Irish way of doing things ; or to repudiate the payment of what would be looked on as tribute to Great Britain. The article, which is written with great moderation, should be read by every Member of Parliament before the discussion comes on in Committee.—The Hon. George Curzon sends an interesting account of Siam which will serve to correct many current im- pressions as to the condition of that Kingdom. The country is practically governed by the Royal Family, an immense clan of the King's half-brothers, many of whom are Royal by both sides,—the Kings of Siam, to preserve their pedigree, marrying only their own half-sisters. Some of these men are

able, and the disposition to go forward in Western ways is considerable, the whole Administration, from top to bottom, being in the hands of young men ; but the people are far from energetic, the labourers are mostly slaves who have sold themselves to their creditors for life, and in the interior the Administration is still exceedingly corrupt. The forests, which are a source of great wealth, are being recklessly cut down ; and the river-channels, which are the only means of com- munication, are allowed to silt up. The efforts to exploit the mines of the interior have not yet been successful, and it is remarkable that, while English is the second language of Bangkok, and the English do 88 per cent. of the total trade, the exploration of the interior is mainly performed by French- men.—Mr. A. R. Wallace sends a paper, all too short, on the question whether acquired characters are inherited, and decides, with many physiologists, that they are not. He does not even believe that the dogs' habit of turning round before they sleep is an inherited survival, but thinks it may still have use, natural selection preserving those dogs which, by turning round, smooth down all prickly or dangerous grasses.—Mr.—or is it Miss F—Coulson Kernahan writes a study on the American poetess, Mrs. Moulton, of .which we can only say that the examples given in no degree justify the

eulogium passed, though we admit, in the following expres- sion of the horror of death, which some natures feel so keenly, a certain eerie force :-

" You have made this world so dear, How can I go forth alone, In the barque that phantoms steer, To a port afar and unknown ?

The desperate Mob of the Dead— Will they hustle me to and fro, Or leave me alone to tread The path of my desolate woe ?

Shall I shriek with terror and pain For the death that I cannot die ? And pray with a longing vain To the gods that mock my cry ?

Oh, hold me closer, my dear !

Strong is your clasp—ay, strong ; But stronger the touch that I fear, And the darkness to come is long !"

--It is a curious and pleasant experience to be able to agree with "Oujda," who pours out an eloquent shriek of seven

pages, called " Poor Abel," against the tendency of the day to admire Cain, especially in Italy, where all sympathy goes out to the murderer and not to his victim. "In Florence last month a young man killed his mother by cutting her throat in the presence of his grandmother ninety years old. There was not the smallest provocation. They were in good cir-

cumstances, and she was devoted to him. Poveretto ' cried the public, Come ha guastato it suo avvenire P Their sym- pathies were with the youth who had spoilt his future." The victims of the Panama swindle, says " Ouida," are countless but unpitied, all pity being reserved for Ferdinand de Lesseps, and everywhere that unhappy Abel, the minority, is being clubbed by Cain, the majority, without ever pro- voking the righteous to resist. "Demos is but Cain," says '4 uida," a blasphemy which she may rely on it will be quoted

against her years after all other offences are forgotten. She might almost as well have called the Press Cain.

The most notable paper in the National Review is Mr. T. E.

Kebbel's on "The Radical Rush." Its essence is a statement that Conservatism will lose the battle unless it can win the counties, and that the only way to win them is to split up big farms into little ones. The labourers, says Mr. Kebbel, do not want Home-rule or Disestablishment, or any other great change. They want farms. He would therefore establish in every county an association for splitting, up estates into small holdings. There is sense in the proposal, if it is prac-

ticable; but we want to know three things. Why is a small farmer expected to be Conservative P A small freeholder usually is, but why a small farmer P Who is to pay for the new buildings ; and why, if this is the panacea, does it not work in Ireland P There the electors are, in a majority, small

farmers with an excellent tenure.