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is the best conductor of both heat and electricity. The price of the metal has undergone great fluctuations during the last thirty years. Its value in 1855 was as high as $90 a pound; in 1887 it had been reduced to $5 a pound. During the last year aluminium has been sold in New York City, it is reported, as low as 90 cents a pound.

THE LAST DAYS OF BALMACEDA.

AN English resident in Chili writes a brief paper

in Blackwood's for January on the fall of Balmaceda. It is very short, but vivid. He gives a very horrible account of the massacre of Lo Cañaz, when one Chilian was tied to a tree, cut with swords, and then burned slowly to death with lighted paraffin. Notwithstanding this, he heroically refused during the one long hour of agony to betray the hiding-place of his employer. After all was over Balmaceda took refuge in the Argentine Legation.

"The one room in which Balmaceda lived was in a disused part of the house, led to by a private staircase, with a door at the foot which was always kept locked. His food was prepared by a trustworthy woman-servant-the only person there, be sides his hosts, who knew of his presence. To avoid suspicion, she went out and bought his food every day, and cooked it on a little spirit-lamp upstairs.

"Balmaceda wrote incessantly, occupying himself in making an exposition of his conduct and plan of government; but this he afterward destroyed.

"One day when the door at the foot of the staircase had been accidentally left open, the children of the house ran up, and, playing about, began noisily to thump on the locked door of his room. They little knew that behind it, revolver in hand, stood a desperate man, who, hearing the sounds, and living in constant terror of his life, thought that his hiding place had been discovered by the people, and waited for death, determined to sell his life dearly. It was a dramatic contrast-the unconscious children at play on one side of the door, the fallen and desperate man, hidden in the darkness, on the other.

"But early on the morning of the 19th the sound of a shot was heard in his room, and on hurrying there Señor Uriburu found him lying on his bed, covered to the chest with a sheet, the revolver still in the nerveless fingers, and his head terribly shattered by the bullet, which had passed straight through the brain. He had killed himself in a most determined manner, for the left hand was also blackened with the powder, proving that while he held the trigger with one hand, he held the barrel with the other, lest it should slip and fail to destroy him. Death had been instantaneous. It proves his great force of will that he waited until the 18th of September had passed, and destroyed himself directly his full term of presidency had expired.

"When the Junta del Gobierno had been informed of his death it was resolved not to publish the event

until he should have been decently buried, to prevent outrage from the mob.

"With the utmost secrecy they managed to huddle his body into a coach and drive it that night to the cemetery, where an iron coffin was in waiting. And so in the darkness, hurriedly, and as if hiding some terrible crime, they buried the man who, less than a month before, had been the first in the land.

"It is a strange coincidence that Balmaceda committed suicide exactly one month after the massacre of Lo Cañaz, on the same day and at the same hour, and he was secretly buried in the vault of a kindly friend who had shown the same charity to the body of one of the poor boys killed in that massacre. They both lie together now, judge and victim."

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WALCOTT BALESTIER AND "THE NAULAHKA."

THE of the oflyters in the death of

HE last month of the old year brought a distinct

Walcott Balestier, the very gifted young American writer. Mr. Balestier died in Dresden, of typhoid fever, at the age of thirty-one. If the judgment of the highest literary authorities in America, and, what is even more emphatic, in England, be worth anything, this event has blotted out a star which was destined to wax into the first brilliancy. And the personal qualities of this young American distinguished him even more than his widely-recognized literary abilities. He had but to come and see in order to conquer the most valued and unattainable favors that literary and social London could surrender.

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His specific mission to Europe was as the agent of the United States Book Co., and, no less, as the partner of Mr. Heinemann in their scheme of the "English Library," in which they published Continental editions of English works in rivalry with the Tauchnitz editions. This venture is said to have been quite successful. Messrs. Heinemann and Balestier were the publication agents on the Continent for THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS.

It was rather his potential ability than the evidence already before the world which lead such men as Henry James and Edmund Gosse to predict a splendid future for young Balestier. Indeed, he seems to have presented the rare spectacle of a writer

One other desire of Tarvin's heart there is, next after Kate, to have the 3 C's railroad run through his native town and "make" Topaz. The 3 C's may be captured through its president's wife, and Tarvin, keen reader of human nature, finds that Mrs. Mutrie is to be captured through her passionate fancy for precious stones. In a supreme moment he promises to obtain for her the famous necklace of an Indian rajah, with pearls and rubies and diamonds of fabulous size-the Naulahka.

Kate, of course, is the other bird to be killed with this journey to the East. So we find this young man in India, at Rhatore in Rajputana, his mind set on two things-his sweetheart and the wonderful necklace. A more striking and picturesque contrast could not have been conceived than Tarvin at the court of a native Indian prince. Strength and weakness, heat and cold, life and death are hardly greater contrasts. But he of Topaz makes a conquest of the maharajah over the merits of a fox terrier and a revolver trick, and becomes, for the moment, an indispensable part of the royal economy.

About so far has the story progressed. It is to be presumed that the opening chapters on the American stage and the character and "make-up" of Tarvin throughout are the work of Mr. Balestier, while the shift to the East will now bring Mr. Kipling's pen to bear.

HENRY JAMES ON LOWELL.

HOSE who look into Henry James' Atlantic

Iwith the full consciousness of power, deliberately Monthly paper expecting to find an elaborate

waiting for years of maturity in order to do the very best life-work. But he was far from being silent. At the age of twenty-three he produced his first novel; in the same year a life of James G. Blaine was dashed off in odd moments, and since then he has contributed short stories to Harper's and the Century. At least until the appearance of the novel which the Century has in hand from his pen, Balestier will be best known as the joint author with Rudyard Kipling of "The Naulahka," the brilliant serial novel now running in the last-mentioned magazine.

"THE NAULAHKA. "

A "Story of West and East," it begins in the westernmost parts of the new West, in the small mining town of Topaz, Colorado. Here is the home of the heroine, whose individuality so far is contained in the determination she has formed to spend her existence trying to make the life of the Hindustani woman better worth living.

The hero is "Nick" Tarvin, genius of Topaz, and epitome of the dauntless, throbbing, rushing West, builder of towns, projector of railroads, founder of improvement companies, and boomer of gold mines, whose every word is real and fresh as it is apt to be slangy. He is head-over-heels in love with Kate, and scores probably the first failure of his life in trying to prevent her from going there. It is not that she isn't fond of him, but that she loves her dream of duty better.

analysis and critical estimate of "James Russell Lowell" will be disappointed in so far; but the discursive essay which they will find is a charming substitute. We have had the same manly sympathy and appreciation that Mr. James shows in many previous tributes to Lowell, who, of course, commanded all but universal sympathy and admiration, but in this paper before us there is a masterly elegance, yet calm dignity of style, which marks it peculiarly appropriate and worthy of him who wielded "his large prose pen" with such magic.

But though he begs off from the less welcome task of criticism, Mr. James must adopt certain points of view of his own.

A MAN OF LETTERS, FIRST.

"It was in looking at him as a man of letters that one got closest to him, and some of his more fanatical friends are not to be deterred from regarding his career as in the last analysis a tribute to the dominion of style. This is the idea that his name most promptly evokes to my sense; and though it was not by any means the only idea he cherished, the unity of his career is surely to be found in it. He carried style-the style of literature-into regions in which we rarely look for it; into politics, of all places in the world, into diplomacy, into stammering civic dinners and ponderous anniversaries, into letters and. notes and telegrams, into every turn of the hour-absolutely into conversation, where, in

deed, it frequently disguised itself as intensely colloquial wit."

MR. LOWELL AND LONDON.

This is more particularly the subject on which we feel Mr. James is the man of all men to dilate, and he does dilate so charmingly that it is a hard task to keep quotations within the limits of reason.

London, he says, is a "great personage," who plays with her courtiers. "She is the great consumer of spices and sweets; if I were not afraid of forcing the image I should say she is too unwieldy to feed herself, and requires, in recurring seasons, as she sits, prodigiously at her banquet, to be approached with the consecrated ladle. She placed this implement in Mr. Lowell's hands with a confidence so immediate as to be truly touching-a confidence that speaks for the eventual amalgamation of the Anglo-Saxon race in a way that, surely, no casual friction can obliterate. She can confer conspicuity, at least, for the hour, so well that she is constantly under the temptation to do so; she holds a court for those who speak to her, and she is perpetually trying voices. She recognized Mr. Lowell's from the first, and appointed him really her speaker-in-chief. She has a peculiar need, which when you know her well you understand, of being eased off with herself, and the American Minister speedily appeared just the man to ease her.

"Mr. Lowell immediately found himself, whether to his surprise or no I am unable to say, the first of after-dinner speakers. It was perhaps somewhat to the surprise of his public there, for it was not to have been calculated in advance that he would have become so expert in his own country-a country sparing of feast-days and ceremonies. . . . It was a point of honor with him never to refuse a challenge, and this attitude, under the circumstances, was heroic, for he became a convenience that really tended to multiply occasions. It was exactly his high competence in these directions that constituted the practical good effect of his mission, the particular manner in which it made for civilization. It was the revanche of letters."

ENGLISH-SPEAKING FOLK UNITED IN HIM.

"Not only by the particular things he did, but by the general thing he was, he contributed to a large ideal of peace. We certainly owe to him (and by 'we' I mean both countries-he made the plural elastic) a mitigation of danger." The "common admiration" for him strengthened the bonds of peace. He knew how to work the spell which would quiet the "prying Furies" of international dissension. "The spell that worked upon them was simply the voice of civilization, and Mr. Lowell's advantage was that he happened to find himself in a supremely good place for producing it. He produced it both consciously and unconsciously, both officially and privately, from principle and from instinct, in the hundred spots, on the thousand occasions, which it is one of the happiest idiosyncrasies of English life to supply "

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THE WASHINGTON "SPECIALS." HERE is a readable article in the January Cosmopolitan by T. C. Crawford on "The Special Correspondents at Washington." Many people will be surprised to learn what influential and well-paid positions some of these gentlemen hold. These are the political correspondents, who are not required by the great papers they represent to spend their energies in describing matters and events of merely social importance. They must be men of sufficient cultivation, ability and tact to obtain the confidence, or at least the good will, of the great political leaders. The volubility of the lesser congressional fry will not suffice. Mr. Crawford takes pains to explain that the true inwardness of important affairs can only be obtained by going to the fountain-head. The "specials" are the only beings who can do this. Mere Congressmen can't. "I once heard," says Mr. Crawford, "an honest member of Congress say that he read the New York newspaper for the purpose of finding out what was going on in the House of Representatives."

"SECRET SESSIONS OF THE SENATE.

There is something naïve in the way this writer proves the infallibility of those great institutions, the New York Associated Press and the United Press.

"The executive sessions of the Senate are supposed to be secret. Their proceedings are held behind closed doors, while Senators are pledged by their honor not to mention a word of what takes place behind them. Yet the two news services can always be trusted, in the event of any session of importance, to furnish an accurate report of what takes place, even to a record of the votes cast in a close or exciting contest."

ELECTRICITY GALORE.

The stereotyped exciting incident of two rival newspaper men madly racing for the same wire, the successful one setting the operator at work on the Old Testament while his despatch is getting written--all this must be banished to the dusky realms of tradition. For now each chief correspondent has his own private wire running to his editorial room in New York or Chicago or Cincin nati. And outside, the large telegraph offices have been organized so elaborately that it would hardly be a possible feat to "stick" them. The Washington office of the Western Union alone has sent out over 400,000 words in a single evening.

"I once gave Mr. Young, the chief of the Western Union's operating room, a public document containing 15,000 words. Under the conditions given, the document could be had for only half an hour. It was not possible to copy it, and the document could not be marked or disfigured in any way. Mr. Young took this precious paper, separated deftly its numerous leaves, distributed it through his great office, and in twenty-five minutes' time the 15,000 words were on the register in New York, and the document, without a spot upon it, was restored to its owner.

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NERVES AND COLLEGE GIRLS.

N the January Atlantic Annie Payson Call

au important theme in paper on

"The Greatest Need of College Girls." She points out that while the woman's college proper has been modelled after the traditional and existing college for men, the former has failed lamentably in one fundamental department-physical culture. While the authorities that be of our great men's colleges have all they can do to restrain students from overindulgence in athletics, the gymnasia of Vassar, of Smith, and of Wellesley are ill-attended, inadequate in their influence, are bétes noirs to the college woman; "they take up too much time."

THE NECESSITY OF RELAXATION.

"It does not require acute perception to find the greatest physical need among women in our schools and colleges. A collective need is most often an exaggeration of the average individual shortcoming. No one who has been an inmate of a large college for women will deny the general state of rush and hurry which prevails there. 'No time,' is the cry from morning until night. Worry and hurry mark the average condition of the school-girl. If she is not hurried or worried herself, through the happy possession of a phlegmatic temperament, she cannot entirely resist the pressure about her. The spirit of the place is too strong for an individual to be in it and not of it. The strain is evident in the faces of students and teachers. It is evident in the number who annually break down from over-study. More pitiably evident is it in those who have not wholly broken down, but are near enough the verge of disaster to have forgotten what a normal state of mind and body is."

This rush through life with its casual-and consequent accompaniments of morbid conscience and self-consciousness is wracking the mothers of an already too nervous race. The writer before us has no hesitation in ascribing the superiority of English women's colleges over our own to the more robust physical conditions of students in the former. But it would be actually a minor evil if it were only that our Vassars and Wellesleys did not produce a Miss Fawcett once in a while. It is when this nervous, over-wrought college graduate, who has rushed and trembled through three years of exami nations, is wedded to a likewise rushing, nervous, over-wrought American business man, that the great evil comes; when they become the parents of small nerve-bundles, who will hurry through life as their father and mother did, only a little more so-that is the misery of it.

WHAT A MODEL COLLEGE WOULD DO.

"Let us suppose a school started in the United States, having in its scheme a distinct intention of eliminating all hurry and worry, and training girls to a normal state of active repose. Suppose that to be the main idea of the school. To get rid of the 'no-time' fever the teachers would need to

accept the fundamental principle that it is not the acquisition of knowledge, but the training of power to think, which is the justification of school or college. A girl can at most gain in her school life but an iota of the knowledge which is possible to her, but she can gain the power of acquiring knowledge. ... When a girl feels rushed she begins to lose mental power in proportion, however well she may seem to work at any one time.

"There must be vigorous exercise, plenty of food carefully chosen, long sleeping-times; a friendly attitude and perfect confidence between students and teachers must be cultivated, but without emotionalizing." Then "there still remains for our school a distinct power to cultivate, a power to be gained through repose; not a forced, a studied, or a flabby repose, but a natural repose which is self-forgetful and often delightfully active."

The writer's practical suggestions and hints as to how this regenerating "freedom" is to be attained are most valuable. She outlines the work of a class in physical culture. In its exercises, she lays the greatest stress on the systematic cultivation of In the calisthenic or rhythmic deep breathing.

other exercises for "suppling up" the joints and muscles the motions should never have a suspicion of nervous jerkiness, but should only be rapid when rapidity comes with a natural ease.

THE FOUR HUNDRED OF WARD M'ALLISTER.
N the new monthly, the Beacon, there is a rather

society life. Mr. Chauncey Van Hudson is the writer, and he calls his paper "A View of the Four Hundred."

NOT BRILLIANT, BUT THEY ARE GOOD.

Mr. Van Hudson hastily sketches the former state of purity of the Knickerbocker aristocracy and its subsequent survival, in spite of certain influences of people who wore their "Van" at the wrong end. It is somewhat interesting to note that in the good old days, too, the West End of London and its denizens were worshipped quite as at present.

Then this writer gives his "view" of the Four Hundred. He thinks that they are innocuous.

"Uninteresting, alas! they ordinarily are. Their conversation is of triviality trivial. For art and literature they usually care not at all. An opera box with them is a place in which to show dresses or persons, receive callers and chatter banalities. And there is nothing more noticeable about their gorgeous houses than the unused look of the books in the library. But at the same time they are virtuous. And another good point about these women is that they generally accept bad fortune gracefully." And our attention is called, too, to the somewhat dubious charitable labors of the gilded feminine youth.

AND THEY ARE HEALTHY.

Mr. Hudson thinks that, like their English exem plars, the Knickerbocker youth of both sexes are

robust and healthy. Drag hunts, polo, pigeon-shooting and the like do not, he points out, go with excessive dissipation. As for the maiden, "she plays games, rides, walks and swims, and the display of feminine terror is to her the worst possible bad form. So, also, is it bad form to pretend, as women pretended a generation or so ago, that it was unfeminine to eat heartily. On the contrary, if it falls to one's lot to lunch one of these damsels a thoroughly safe order is a sirloin steak and a bottle of claret; her mother would probably have preferred an ice or some tea."

THE HEBREW MERCHANTS OF NEW YORK.

A

MONG the most striking of the facts which Richard Wheatley relates in his Century article on "The Jews in New York" are some statistics of their business importance. The Hebrew population of about 250,000 give the following results.

"Dry and fancy goods absorb the energies of 514 firms, the aggregate rating of whose capital is $58,000,000. Names of proprietors are as familiar in the mouth as household words to multitudes of shoppers.

"In the manufacture and sale of clothing-Mr. Max Cohen, editor of the American Hebrew, being the authority-there are 264 firms with $24, 000, 000 capital; 31 firms, with over $7,000,000 invested in business, are in the cloth trades; 169 firms, with $12,000,000 invested, make and sell hats and gentlemen's furnishing goods. Tobacco and smokers' articles engaged the attention of 165 firms possessed of $15,500,000 capital in 1890, while 94 firms, with $10,000,000 capital, are pre-eminent in the wine and liquor trade. Jewelry, precious stones, and optical goods employ the activities of 133 firms and the power of $8,500,000. Leather findings and hides are but little less acceptable objects of commerce, judg ing from the 83 firms with nearly $7,000,000 of capital that deal in them. So is it with paints and glass, bought and sold by 38 firms, with a capital of nearly $6,000,000. Furniture, bedding, and upholstery statistics furnish the names of 37 firms whose $2,750,000 are utilized in the production and sale of these articles. Seventy-four persons or firms have invested about $5,000,000 in the meat business, and 416 about $37,500,000 in miscellaneous trades. The average rating of capital controlled by all these 2,018 merchants is $207,388,000.

"In no city have the Jews been more successful as traders than in New York. 'Of the 400 buildings on Broadway from Canal Street to Union Square the occupants of almost all are Hebrews, over 1,000 wholesale firms out of a total of 1,200 being of that race. Hebrew firms also predominate on the streets contiguous to Broadway within the territory named.' Nor elsewhere have they been more successful, on the whole, as bankers and financiers. The 35 firms whose average rating in 1890 was over $13,000,000, but whose available capital is, in all probability,

$100,000,000 or more, include the names of Seligman, Hallgarten, Wormser, Lazard, Scholle, Kuhn, Loeb, Schiff, Ickelheimer, Speyer, Schafer, and many others, some of whom are more conspicuous for philanthropy and patriotism than for wealth.

"Holdings of real estate by the Jews in New York are estimated at from $150,000,000 to $200,000,000, and five-eighths of the transfers are said to be for their account."

A GOOD TIME COMING.

HERE are some rather attractive thoughts in a

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on Mechanical Invention," contributed by Dr. W. T. Harris to the Monist.

He considers that the printing-press and the steam-engine are the necessary stepping-stones to music, poetry, architecture, sculpture, painting"these fine arts portraying man's victory over wants and necessities."

THE INCREASE OF COMFORT.

But more striking is the optimistic view which Dr. Harris takes of the constant increase in individual and collective production, and the results we are to expect therefrom.

"The average production of man, woman, and child in the United States increased in the thirty years between 1850 and 1880 from about 25 cents per day to 40 cents per day-an increase of over 60 per cent. This means the production of far more substantial improvements for human comfort. Finer dwellings, better roads and streets, fences for lands, drainings and levellings, and the processes necessary to bring wild land under cultivation, artificial supplies of water and gas, the warehouse and elevators, and the appliances of commerce, and, finally, the buildings and furnishings of culture, including churches, schools, libraries, museums, asylums, and all manner of public buildings. Great Britain, the leading nation in commerce and manufactures, according to the returns for 1888, distributed comfortable incomes of $1,000 and upward to each family of 30 per cent. of the entire population, and the remaining 70 per cent. averaged $485 per annum (for each family). France provided incomes of $1,300 per annum for 24 per cent. of its families. This shows what great capitalists are doing for the creation and distribution of wealth. Italy showed by its income returns that less than 2 per cent. received incomes of $1,000 and upward, while 98 per cent. of the families averaged less than $300 income. Italy makes little use of steam power and labor-saving machines."

SOCIALISM UNNECESSARY.

To such an extent is this geometrical progression of production raising the standard of living in the countries that most foster mechanical invention, that Dr. Harris believes society will need no revolu tionizing.

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