SHOULD THE JEWS GO BACK TO PALESTINE ? NO! THEY OUGHT NOT, CANNOT, AND WILL NOT. IN Our Day for July, Mr. Cyrus Hamlin discusses the question as to whether or not the Jews should be restored to Palestine. It seems that

a large number of influential Americans-editors, preachers, lawyers, philanthropists, politicians, and some statesmenhave addressed to President Harrison the following petition :— We believe this an appropriate time for all nations, and especially the Christian nations of Europe, to show kindness to Israel. A million of exiles, by their terrible suffering, are piteously appealing to our sympathy, justice, and humanity. Let us now restore to them their land, of which they were so cruelly despoiled by our Roman ancestors. This, they think, should be done by the American Government securing the holding, at an early date, of an international conference to consider the condition of the Israelites, and their claims to Palestine as their ancient home; and to promote in all other just and proper ways the alleviation of their suffering condition.

Mr. Hamlin points out, first, that the Jews have forfeited all rightful claims to Palestine; secondly, that the statute of limitation can be pleaded against a right of property which has never been asserted for eighteen centuries; thirdly, that the people who now inhabit Palestine are its rightful owners; fourthly, that the Jews hate agriculture, and those who have been taken to Palestine will not farm the land; fifthly, that the Jews who already live in Turkish cities show no wish to move to the Holy Land; sixthly, that the sacred places of Christendom could not be ntrusted in the hands of the Jews; seventhly, that the mericans could not undertake the restitutien of the Jews without plunging the United States into the Eastern Question; eighthly, that the return of the Jews would imply the expulsion of the present inhabitants at the point of the bayonet, and the forcible importation of me million of unwilling colonists; and ninthly, that the Jews do not want to go back to Palestine under the present circumstances.

The re-peopling of Palestine with Jews is a moral impossibility. They will not go there as a subject people. Home rule they are not prepared for. The land cannot be purified

from that which would be defilement to a free Jewish state. They cannot be imported; or, if imported, they cannot be supported. Intelligent and thrifty labour may restore the desolations of the land; but for that the race is wholly unprepared. The men of learning and of moral power might form an oligarchy; but the manufactured Jewish State thus formed would soon destroy itself.

Notwithstanding all this, we may depend upon it that the fixed idea of millions of American Christians, that the Jews must be restored to Palestine, will sooner or later compel the United States Government to make a move in that direction. It would not surprise us in the least to find the stars and stripes floating over Constantinople in the early part of next century.

YES! THEY ARE GOING BACK NOW.

Major C. R. Conder, in the Scottish Review for July, writes on the Jews in the East, and answers the question in an exactly opposite sense. The present persecution of the Jews in Russia, Major Conder thinks, will produce, by the scattering abroad of the Israelites, results in foreign countries similar to those whi h resulted from the Huguenot dispersion, and, while injurious to the best commercial interests of Russia, will benefit other nations at its expense. Noticing the formation of the Society of the Choverie Zion, or Friends of Zion," he shows how the drift of emigration is setting in the direction of Palestine :

66

For more than ten years this movement has been growing. Colonies at Jerusalem. Artuf. Summarin, Latakia, and in the

Jordan Valley, have been initiated, which have in some cases prospered, though contending against all the difficulties which want of capital and of recognition have brought. The number of Jews in Palestine has, during that period, increased from about 8,000 to more than 100,000 souls, and already, without waiting for aid, other families are setting out for Jerusalem from Moscow and Odessa. The Jewish Chronicle, which represents the most cautious and moderate Jewish views, admits that "Palestine-hunger" has taken hold on the Jews of the East, who have no doubt discovered that the first venturers, who fled thither in 1881, have prospered more than they were thought likely to do. The old objection so often raised that the Jew will not engage in agriculture is not only answered by the words of their memorial, but has also been disproved by the success of Jewish agriculturists in America. The advantages of a similar language, and of somewhat similar manners in Palestine, to those natural to their race, are also felt, as compared with the strangeness of speech and custom in the distant new world, which alone seems open to those about to be expelled, unless permitted a shelter in the dominions of the Sultan or in Persia. The movement, at the very least, appears certain to add greatly to the Jewish population of Syria, and if as successful as its promoters expect, may in time make Palestine once more a Jewish country.

Major Conder also describes the Karaite Jews, a distinct stock from the Rabbinical Jews; the Askenazim, who derive their name from Ashkenaz (Gen. x. 3), an Armenian people, and represented in Europe by the Jews from Poland, Austria, Germany and Russia; and the Sepharadim, descendants of the exiles in Spain. It is in connection with the Askenazim that the problem of emigration has chiefly to be solved, and they, by centuries of oppression and isolation in northern climes, are generally very poor and greatly inferior in physique and culture to the Sepharadim, the most influential of the Jewish people.

HOW THE RUSSIAN JEWS COME TO ENGLAND. MRS. BREWER, in the Sunday at Home for August, begins a series of papers on the Jews in London. She says there are now 80,000 foreign Jews in London, of whom 45, live in the East End. Of these, 25,000 are Poles or Russians; 40 per cent. of the Jewish population are occupied in tailoring, and of these workers two-thirds

are women.

These immigrants are not conveyed hither in British ships, but in German vessels trading between Hamburg and Tilbury. The people are embarked without bedding or necessaries, and huddled about all over the ship. Last year one line alone, trading between these two points, brought_over 4,000 passengers, most of them Polish and Russian Jews, 80 per cent. of whom were destitute.

The German ships with their freight of foreign Jews, as a rule, reach the dock in the night, and discharge their passengers very early in the morning. The opportunity of seeing for oneself the actual condition in which they arrive, or the treatment they receive from those who loaf about the landing-places, is therefore rare. Fortunately or morning we were informed by telegram that a vessel was coming in, and, starting at once, we reached the Thames in time to meet it. On being rowed to the ship, we were glad to see on board the agent from the Jewish Ladies' Association, and a gentleman on the Committee of the Jewish Board of Guardians.

The scenes witnessed by the river-side are, as I am informed, sometimes heart-breaking; nor is it easy to see how things are to improve so long as the German ships are permitted to land their passengers when and where they please. As it is, the agent of the Jewish Ladies' Association, who attends every boat that comes in, does much to mitigate the sufferings and discomfort of the immigrants. Many of the immigrants have been sent by the Jewish Board of Guardians to Australia and America, where they are

Zoing well. In 1890 they assisted 214 immigrants to emigrate; they are doing a beneficent work among the Jewish poor; they know their wants, their struggles, and help without pauperising them. The number of inmates passing through the Jews' shelter in Leman Street in the year ending October, 1890, was 1,399; of these 91 went to the United States, 269 to their native places, and 17 to other countries, while 518 remained in the United Kingdom; there is no record of the others. If we include the help given by the Mansion House Committee in connection with the Jewish Board of Guardians, the number assisted to emigrate last year was 415.

Mr. Arnold White, it may be mentioned, has returned from Russia, where he has been received with great kindness by the authorities, who appear desirous of co-operating with Baron Hirsch in the attempt to settle the Jews abroad.

WHY THEY LEAVE RUSSIA.

Mr. C. B. Roylance Kent, writing on the subject in the National Review for July, sums up in favour of the Jews. I quote from his article the text of the May laws. (1) As a temporary measure, and until a general revision has been made in a proper manner of the laws concerning the Jews, to forbid the Jews henceforth to settle outside the towns and townlets, the only exceptions admitted being in those Jewish colonies that have existed before, and whose inhabitants are agriculturists.

(2) To suspend temporarily the completion of instruments of purchase of real property and mortgages in the name of Jews; as also the registration of Jews as lessees of landed estates outside the precincts of towns and townlets, and also the issue of power of attorney to enable Jews to manage and dispose of such property.

(3) To forbid Jews to carry on business on Sundays and on the principal Christian holidays, and that the same laws in force about the closing on such days of places of business belonging to Christians shall, in the same way, apply to places of business owned by Jews

(4) That the measures laid down in paragraphs 1, 2, and 3 apply only to the Governments within the pale of Jewish Settlement.

ARE THEY A BLESSING TO ENGLAND?

The Rev. S. Singer stoutly maintains in the English Illustrated Magazine for August that the Jewish paupers, whose arrival fills Mr. Arnold White with such dread, are a very desirable class of emigrants. He says:

The bulk of foreign Jews enter into no manner of competition with the British labourer on his own field. Among a thousand dockers, for instance, there may be one or two Jews, and they are English-born. The coal porters may be in favour of anti-Semitic legislation, but it is doubtful whether a single Russian Jew is to be found among coal porters. What the Russo-Jewish immigrant has done is to enormously develop one branch of industry-the cheap boot trade, and to create another-the cheap clothing trade. Time was when the British workman hardly ever dreamt of wearing any garments that had not first done duty to a more aristocratic body, and did not come to him with faded or "renovated" glories. Now he can attire himself in a new suit of clothes at a lower price than he had to pay for an old clothes outfit. There may not be quite so much style about the new and cheap article; but working men feel as keenly as others that there is a certain homely dignity in being the original and sole possessors of such raiment as they can afford, Who is it shall say them nay? If England to-morrow copied Russian methods and expelled her Jewish cheap tailor hands, the whole of the trade would pass to German manufacturers. already keen competitors with English houses in this branch. As it is, the Jewish labourer who earns his wages here spends them here. As to driving the native workman into pauperism, this flimsy charge vanishes before a couple of solid facts. At the moment when these words are being penned, two interesting pieces of information lie at hand. The one is a return of statistics of pauperism, issued 25th June, which

points to this noteworthy circumstance, that the very lowest rate of pauperism ever yet recordei, whether in England and Wales or in the metropolis, was reached in the fifth week of April last. The other is a comparative statement of the number of paupers, indoor and outdoor, for the second week of June, during the last four years. The figures show a constant decrease, being 92 502 in 1888, 89 632 in 1889, 88,559 in 1890, and 88,231 in 1891-an increasing population with a diminishing rate of pauperism. What becomes of the contention that the Jewish immigrant is driving the native workman into the workhouse?

His paper is illustrated with sketches of one or two. lovely Jewish women, who would be a desirable addition to any community.

PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF THE JEWS.

M. LEROY BEAULIEU, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. for July, adds an extremely interesting chapter on Jewish physiology and psychology to his series of articles on 66 Anti-Semitism." Jews generally, he tells.

us, are longer lived than their Christian compeers. According to an American census, which he quotes, the expectation of life of a Jewish infant is fiftyseven years, while that of a Christian infant, born under the same conditions, is only forty-one years. Also, contrary to the usual Christian experience, the chances of life of Jewish men are greater than that of The race is often described in figurative language

women.

as a "masculine " race. It appears from the statistics. quoted by M. Anatole Leroy Beaulieu that the epithet is. literally applicable. Not only have Jewish men better chances of life than Jewish women, but the number of male infants born is greatly in excess of the number of female infants. It is learn also interesting to that though the actual number of children born is rather less in Jewish proportion to than to Christian parents, the number of Jewish children reared is much greater. Thus the Jewish population of the world is steadily increasing, not only actually like all others, but relatively to Christian races. There are also fewer still-born infants among Jews than among Christians. These facts are supposed to be directly traceable to hygienic and other customs which form part of the Jewish law, but with those that have been mentioned and a few others that are less notable, the physiological advantages of the Jewish race come to an end. Jews are usually undersized and ugly; they have an unusually high proportion of deformed people; and if they have few still-born children they have, on the other hand, a larger than average proportion of idiots. This set of facts is again to be traced to known physical causes. Psychologically it is to be observed that the Jews are among the most nervous people in the world. They have suffered for generations from the neurotic maladies with which the contemporary Christain world is afflicted. Probably the cause has been the same. They have for many generations lived principally by the brain, and though their abstinence from alcoholic liquor is a point in their favour, deranged intelligence is a frequent curse. That Jews are clever is one of the few facts which is universally known about them. Another interesting statement which seems to throw special light on the question of the political treatment of the Israelitish people is that in order to find the distinctive characteristics of the race most thoroughly marked, it is necessary to go East, where they are kept in the position of a separate people. As they travel Westward and become one politically with the other races of the countries they inhabit, the physiological and psychical peculiarities disappear.

THE LUCK OF LORD ARTHUR SCORESBY.

ONE OF MARK TWAIN'S STORIES.

IN Harper for August there is a brief paper, entitled "Luck," by Mark Twain, with the note, "This is not a fancy sketch: I got it from a clergyman who was an instructor at Woolwich forty years ago, and he vouched for its truth.” The story tells how one of the two or three conspicuously illustrious English military heroes of this generation, whom he calls Lord Arthur Scoresby, was an absolute fool who owed all his success in life to having been born lucky. The reverend gentleman who is made responsible for this story told Mark Twain that forty years ago, when young Scoresby went up for his preliminary examination he was so stupid that the clergyman's heart was filled with compassion for his miraculous stupidity and ignorance. Thinking that he was certain to be plucked, he coached him in Caesar in order to give him a chance of falling easy. his amazement, he went through with flying colours, by a strange lucky accident having been asked no questions outside the narrow limits of his drill. The same thing followed with mathematics, when, thanks to lucky coaching, he took a first prize. The same luck followed him on the outbreak of the Crimean War; he was appointed to a captaincy in a marching regiment. His instructor followed him, feeling sure that his blunders would ruin him, so he followed the simpleton to the seat of war.

To

And there-oh dear, it was awful! Blunders ?—why, he never did anything but blunder. But, you see, nobody was in the fellow's secret-everybody had him focussed wrong, and necessarily misinterpreted his performance every timeconsequently they took his idiotic blunders for inspirations of genius; they did, honestly! His mildest blunders were enough to make a man in his right mind cry; and they did anake me cry-and rage and rave too, privately. And the thing that kept me always in a sweat of apprehension was the fact that every fresh blunder he made increased the lustre of his reputation! I kept saying to myself, he'll get so high, that when discovery does finally come, it will be like the sun falling out of the sky.

He went right along up, from grade to grade, over the dead bodies of his superiors, until at last, in the hottest moment of the battle of --, down went our colonel, and my heart jumped into my mouth, for Scoresby was next in rank! Now for it, said I ; we'll all land in Sheol in ten minutes, sure. The battle was awfully hot; the allies were steadily giving way all over the field. Our regiment occupied a position that was vital; a blunder now must be destruction. At this crucial moment, what does this immortal fool do but detac the regiment from its place and order a charge over a neigh bouring hill where there wasn't a suggestion of an enemy! "There you go!" I said to myself; this is the end at last." And away we did go, and were over the shoulder of the hill before the insane movement could be discovered and stopped. And what did we find? An entire and unsuspected Russian Army in reserve! And what happened? eaten up? That is necessarily what would have happened in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. But no; those Russians argued that no single regiment would come browsing around there at such a time. It must be the entire English army, and that the sly Russian game was detected and blocked; so they turned tail and away they went, pellmell, over the hill and down into the field, in wild confusion, and we after them; they themselves broke the solid Russian centre in the field, and tore through, and in no time there was the most tremendous rout you ever saw, and the defeat of the allies was turned into a sweeping and splendid victory! Marshal Canrobert looked on, dizzy with astonishment, admiration, and delight, and sent right off for Scoresby, and hugged him, and decorated him on the field in presence of all the armies!

We were

And what was Scoresby's blunder that time? Merely the mistaking his right hand for his left-that was all. And order

had come to him to fall back and support our right; and, instead, he fell forward and went over the hill to the left. But the name he won that day as a marvellous military genius filled the world with his glory, and that glory will never fade while history books last.

He is just as good and sweet and unpretending as a man can be, but he doesn't know enough to come in when it rains. Now that is absolutely true. He is the supremest ass in the universe; and until half an hour ago nobody knew it but himself and me. He has been pursued, day by day and year by year, by a most phenomenal and astonishing luckiness. He has been a shining soldier in all our wars for a generation; he has littered his whole military life with blunders, and yet has never committed one that didn't make him a knight or a baronet or a lord or something. Look at his breast; why, he is just clothed in domestic and foreign decorations. Well, sir, every one of them is the record of some shouting stupidity or other; and, taken together, they are proof that the very best thing in all this world that can befall a man is to be born lucky. I say again, as I said at the banquet, Scoresby's an absolute fool.

HOME LIFE IN FRANCE.

BY MR. P. G. HAMERTON.

MR. HAMERTON has one of his charming pictures of French life in the Forum for July. After describing the life of the aristocracy and of the wealthy classes, he proceeds to discuss the life of the middle classes :

An Englishman who begins to know France is struck at first by the small number of servants in the middle classes. The incomes are usually limited, and the French bourgeois has long since come to the conclusion that a small house, few servants, and few children are the practical solution of the question how to save money out of a small income. private dwellings of shopkeepers are often ill-arranged, badly lighted, and insufficiently ventilated. Some are so dark, so confined and malodorous, that one hardly knows how children can be brought up in them.

The

The following observations concerning the position of women in French households will be read with interest:French politeness to women and French kindness to children have placed men at a disadvantage in home life since the old paternal authority has died away. There is a clatter of small talk, and unless the father can take a share in it, he may sometimes feel solitary at his own table. He is but one of the members of a little democratic home parliament that receives or rejects his opinions without deference. Again, in French families, particularly of the middle classes, the preponderance of the mother is very strongly marked. It is easily explicable by very evident causes. She rules the house in detail, she gives orders to children and servants, so that the father appears infrequently as an acting authority. She wins power by her activity and attention to detail, and by her presence. The father is away during the daytime, and is considered to have but two duties in life, regularity in monthly payments for household expenses and regularity at meal times. The monthly payments are not seen by the children, still less the labour and intelligence that go to the earning of them, but they feel the maternal power. The servants are usually women, and man cannot command women; he may ask for services, gently-he does not give orders as he would to a man servant.

Rather overpowered at home by the feminine and infantine, or puerile, majority, the Frenchman often, though not always, seeks refuge in the cafe, where he goes for a little intercourse with mature minds of the male sex. Taking French life as it is, with the predominance in home life of the feminine and the immature, and the rarity-in comparison with England-of hospitality in the house, the cafe seems to be a necessary institution. The explanation of it is not the need of drink, which might be had at home, but the want of masculine society.

DO THE AUSTRALIANS HATE ENGLAND ? ALAS! YES. BY MR. D. CHRISTIE MURRAY. THERE is an article, melancholy though brightly written, in the Contemporary Review for August, which embodies a half-truth which would be very serious if it were really the whole truth, It is unpleasant enough as it is, but it is well not to exaggerate its importance. Mr. Christie Murray, an English journalist who has been on a lecturing tour through Australia, has spent two years among its people, and has come back with the Sydney Bulletin on his brain.

66 THE MOST MISCHIEVIOUS JOURNAL IN THE WORLD."

He says:

The journal just named is very capably written and edited. The brightest Australian verse and the best Australian stories find their way into its columns. Its illustrations are sometimes brilliant, though the high standard is not always maintained. And having thus spoken an honest mind in its favour, I leave myself at liberty to say that it is probably the wrongest-headed and most mischievous journal in the world. People try to treat it as a neglectable quantity when they disagree with it. But I have seen as much of the surface of the country, and as much of its people as most men, and I have found the pestilent print everywhere, and everywhere have found it influential. It loses no opportunity of degrading all things English as English. England and the Englishman are as red rags to its bull-headed rage. There is a class of working-men who take its absurdities for gospel, and it is one of the factors in the growing contempt for the Mother Country which is noticeable amongst uninstructed Australians.

No doubt there is an element of truth in this, but to regard the Thersites of the Australian press as if it in any real way represented the coming conviction of the Australian democracy is to pay Thersites a compliment at the expense of the democracy which will be bitterly and rightly resented at the Antipodes.

THE WHITE AUSTRALIAN NATIVES.

The Australian Natives' Association, which so many people in this country persistently confound with a society devoted to the interests of the black fellows-for with us a native never means a colonist, but the coloured man whom the colonist dispossesses-oppresses Mr. Murray's imagination. He says:—

The Association is large and powerful. It includes within its ranks a great number of the most capable of the rising men, and of the younger of those already risen. Speaking broadly, its aspiration is for a separate national life. It will "cut the painter "-that is the phrase-which ties it to the old ship of state. There are many of its members, and growing in numbers, who hate England and all things English. There are men, not stigmatised as dullards or as fools, who publicly oppose the teaching of English history in the State schools. The feeling against England is not a fantastical crank: it is a movement growing yearly in strength. The strongest current of Australian feeling is setting with a tide of growing power against the Mother Country. That this statement will excite anger and derision in the minds of many Australians is certain.

The Australians who will be excited to anger and derision by this statement will have a good deal to say for themselves. At the same time it is well to recognise that those Anglophobists of the Antipodes have some reason to complain of the Mother Country. Mr. Murray specifies these reasons, one of the chief of which is a dread of immigration.

AUSTRALIAN ANTIPATHY TO IMMIGRATION. England is the one country in the world which could, under existing circumstances, or under circumstances easily conceivable, seek to send any appreciable number of new people into the colony. Therefore England is to be feared and

hated, and any scheme which may be promulgated in favour of further emigration is to be resisted to the uttermost. Men talk of war as the answer to an attempt to deplete by emigration the overcrowded labour markets of the home country. Australia will never, except under compulsion, allow any large body of Englishmen to enter into possession of any portion of her territories. The ports for emigration on a large scale are finally and definitively closed.

That Australians object to undesirable immigrants or to a mass of newcomers landed on their shores in quantities too great to digest is no doubt true, but it is the height of fantastic absurdity to imagine that three million people seated round the rim of a continent which is capable of carrying at least a hundred million can ever close their gates against the overflow of the population of an overcrowded world.

AUSTRALIAN CHARACTERISTICS.

Mr. Murray questions the English character of the Australians, although nothing more strikes most people, including Americans, than the fact that the Australians are really Englishmen under a milder sky. Mr. Murray says:

The first unescapable belief of the English traveller is that the Australian is a transplanted Englishman, pure and simple. A residence of only a few months kills that opinion outright. Many new characteristics present themselves. To arrest one of the most noticeable-there is perhaps no such pleasure-loving and pleasure-seeking people in the world. Again, there are more theatres and more theatre-goers to the population than can probably be found elsewhere.

Although he does not assert it in so many words, Mr. Murray implies that the real religion of the Australians is a worship of athletics. The worship that is accorded to successful athletes is in excess even of the popularity enjoyed by Bob Chambers, of Tyneside, in days gone by, or by Archer, the jockey, in more recent times in our own country. Yet the Australians, although given to the worship of athletes, are not themselves an athletic people.

The worship of athleticism breeds a professional or semiprofessional class, but it is surprising to note how little an effect it has upon the crowd of city people who join in all the rites of adoration.

Mr. Murray believes in Federation—that is federation of the Australians; but if, as he seems to believe, the Sydney Bulletin represents the inner convictions of the Australian people, federation of the Australians is by no means likely to result in a wider system of federation with the English-speaking people throughout the world.

Mr. Murray is to follow this paper by another, which will be read with the interest naturally excited by any one who is fresh from the scenes which he describes, even although we do not altogether accept his sweeping assertions as to the trend of events. Mr. Adams in the Fortnightly takes the same view, but much more strongly.

JENNY LIND AND THE STAGE.

A METHODIST VIEW OF THE THEATRE.

THE London Quarterly Review, the organ of the Weslevan Methodists, reviewing Jenny Lind's Life, devotes sone space to the wider question of the moral atmosphere of the stage. The reviewer says:—

Jenny Lind's generous hope and aim was "to elevate the whole tone and character of her profession." And if any one person could attain that aim, surely it was this high-souled and oyally-gifted being. But the enfranchisement of the operatic stage from its baseness is unaccomplished yet; not even Jenny Lind sufficed for such a deliverance, though she herself came forth unscathed from the fiery furnace, "nor had the smell of fire passed on her."

A recent critic has ascribed to Mdlle. Lind's "innate Puritanism" that deep inner repulsion for the stage which grew on the great vocalist amid all her dramatic triumphs, and led her at last t› forswear those triumphs for ever, just when they were most dazzling. Her letters from Paris show that, not her Puritanism, but her purity, revolted from certain methods in vogue there to secure success for actress or singer, when they appeared before what she candidly called the first audience in the world."

It was no preconceived Puritanic aversion for the theatre which made Jenny Lind, an actress from childhood, recoil from the system prevalent in the dramatic world of Pariswhich bred in her the fixed resolve never to appear on that stage. Nor was it any mere prejudice of an inbred Puritanism, but only her own uprightness, simplicity, and spirituality, which revolted against the envyings, jealousies, and backbitings inseparable from a theatric existence-crawling basenesses which the sun of her prosperity quickened into reptile life about her, till the very splendour of her great success in London helped to intensify and render immutable her resolve to have done with these things once and for ever.

And none can now say she did not well. Her greatness as an artist really gained when she left opera and devoted herself to oratorio. The delight she gave was not less, the power for beneficent utility was not inferior, the pure joy of the artist in her lovely art and its elevating influence was far greater than when she had worked amid the detestable tracasseries of the theatre. Never once did she repent or look back, longing, to the actress parts of which she had once felt the full fascination.

It is well to take note that though Jenny Lind, with her poetic spirituality, affords the most striking instance of a very successful actress becoming imbued with a deep abhorrence of the stage, she does not stand alone in it. Macready's "Reminiscences" testifies as strongly to the writer's aversion for his own profession, and the almost morbid dread he felt lest any of his own children should be drawn to embrace it-a dread which made him deprecate for them such shadows of acting as charades and tableaux vivants. This curious loathing for an occupation that brought both fame, and profit, and social success, is even more vividly expressed in Fanny Kemble's delightful 'Record of a Girlhood," where that brilliant popular favourite, whose dramatic genius was a direct heritage from player-parents of stainless character, and who herself was sedulously guarded from the common perils of actress-life, bears, notwithstanding, her strong testimony against the calling in which she and her family had earned only distinction and esteem.

No one will attribute to "innate Puritanism" these instinctive feelings of the child of the Kembles, or ascribe to inherited prejudice the apprehensions which made her add to her daily prayers an earnest entreaty for protection against the "subtle evils" of her profession. What injury it might work to its most blameless members the girl had early perceived, in the "vapid vacuity" of Mrs. Siddons's latest years, in the "deadness and indifference" of a soul whose higher powers had shrivelled and perished in the stifling artificial atmosphere of the stage. That melancholy wreck of a fine

intelligence and a noble womanhood was itself the most convincing argument against the life that, under the most favourable conditions, could produce such results. The vital difference between Jenny Lind and the two distinguished artists just cited is, that her testimony assumed the shape of a resolute act, and is therefore far more impressive than theirs, limited to eloquent words: her heaven-born wings of song enabling her to soar out of the prison in which they still had to drag their chains for years.

THE AFRICAN MADNESS.

IS IT A POLITICAL EPIDEMIC ? BY MAX NORDAU. IN the Asiatic Quarterly for July Max Nordau has an article entitled "Rabies Africana: The Degeneration of Europeans in Africa. Nordau declares that the zeal for annexing African territory is a veritable epidemic, which is most deadly in those from whom mental health, wisdom, and self-control might have been expected. He attributes this mental curse to two sets of people: the hypocrites and the cynics. The hypocrites say they take Africa for the benefit of the natives, and the cynics say that we pocket Africa for our own profit. Nordau declares that the only European culture which we bring to the African is rum, and if its importation was forbidden half the interest in African culture would disappear. In order to enable the natives to buy strong drink they have to work. Why should the negro work harder than he does at present? Why give him a taste for intoxicants and cotton rags, which increases labour, from which he is at present enviably free? As for the preaching of Christianity to the Africans, Nordau thinks that many of them are capable of giving lessons in patience and toleration to more than one of the European nations who want to civilise them. As for the slave trade, that is largely due to the European greed for ivory, and its suppression is rendered impossible by European jealousies. Leaving the hypocrites he then turns to the cynics, and asks what hope they have of ever making money out of their possessions. So far as they have gone at present it would be cheaper for the taxpayer to pay the salaries of the African soldiers and officials and keep them in Europe :

The inter-tropical countries of Africa do not allow of permanent European settlements, industrial operations, and the establishment of families. A German traveller has graphically said: "Where there is water in Africa, and something can grow, there the climate is murderous. Where the climate is healthy, there is no water, and nothing can grow." The most virile white people degenerate in hot regions in a few generations, until they become scarcely more than the shadows of their ancestors, if they do not die out entirely from barrenness and disease. The settlers between the tropics not only fail to advance the civilisation which they have brought, but they soon have nothing left of their birthright except a debased language and the self-conceit of caste, none of the distinctive physical or intellectual features of which have been retained. The Equator will become (in case of European immigration) a fearful caldron for human flesh to melt and evaporate in. It will be a revival of the ancient Moloch-worship. The nations of the temperate zone will cast a portion of their children into the jaws of the fiery furnace, and thus manage to retain room for the remainder. Of the selected, healthy, robust, and cheerful Europeans in Dar-es-Salaam two out of three were ill. Those who preach to Europeans the advisability of settling in Africa can only have one object in view: to rid Europe of people who are in their way; but in that case it would be more honest and hardly more cruel to embark the wretches of whom it is desired to clear Europe, and to scuttle the ships on the high seas. Colonisation of the inter-tropical regions of Africa by the white man can never be carried into effect. If the schemes should succeed in enticing Europeans, the lot of the victims cannot be doubtful.