Page images
PDF
EPUB

carried, it means that we are only at the beginning of a period of revolutionary legislation in religion, where the state will have to set its hand to the gravest of all conflicts, the suppression of the most sensitive yet obstinate of all forces, the tender conscience."

ITS HOSTILITY TO BOARD SCHOOLS.

The policy of the bill is distinctly hostile to the national system of education which was established twenty-five years ago. Its hostility is shown not merely by the increased subsidy to the denomina tional schools, so much as by the extent to which it handicaps the national system.

"The policy of the new bill aims rather at substituting a denominational for a national system of education, both elementary and secondary; or, more correctly, at subjecting the national system to such burdens and disabilities as will make the denominational the easier and more welcome alternative."

THE GROWTH OF THE ANGLICAN PRIESTHOOD.

To what cause are we to attribute this strange attempt to put back the hands of the clock? Dr. Fairbairn has no hesitation to attribute the reactionary policy of the bill to the new and portentous growth of priesthood among the Anglican clergy. The English parson is no longer an English gentleman; he is a member of the clerical cause, a priest, whose head has been completely turned by the doctrine of Apostolic succession. Dr. Fairbairn says:

"As a direct consequence of the intensity and completeness with which this idea has possessed and penetrated the clerical mind, we have the sudden and extraordinary development of those clerical claims which, though but lately mocked, are now coming to be felt and even feared as aggressive and controlling forces in the state. The claims which Englishmen used to regard as the exclusive and pernicious note of the Roman priesthood have become the familiar commonplaces of the Anglican; and the political action which we were accustomed to conceive as characteristic of the one priesthood is finding a correspondent expression in the political conduct of the other; and the courses and changes of the times have supplied them with the very occasions which were the opportunities needed for the exercise of their new energies and the embodiment of their new ideas. What we are face to face with is a policy which is to make the clergy the most permanent, the most widely distributed, and the most potent factor in the education of our people."

HOW THE NEW POLICY WILL WORK IN POLITICS.

The immediate result of this attempt to use the County Council for the purpose of making our new priesthood supreme in the national schools will be to make every County Council contest a conflict between church and dissent :

"So long, then, as this question of the denomina

tional schools remains, there is no escape from our religious differences being carried over into civil contests, or from our elections becoming occasions for high debate as to the rights of churches, the claims of the clergy, the use of formularies and the persons that are qualified to teach them. The humiliation of relig ion and the embitterment of our civil and political life seem to me the things which this bill is most fitted to create. And all this in order to secure that the living clergymen have a sort of semi-legalized place as the test and standard of orthodoxy. There never was a more fatuous policy or a standard at once so arbitrary and so variable. It exalts the class at the expense of the nation, and means that Anglican priests are better guardians of faith and religion than the English people. And of all forms of per sonal controversy this, as to the rights and privileges of a special order, is the meanest and most miserable. And, in these controversies, will not education be sure to suffer?"

Points For Substantial Amendment.

In the Nineteenth Century for June, Sir J. G. Fitch contributes an article of fifteen pages entitled "Some Flaws in the Education Bill." His remarks are not suggested by any party or political bias, but concern solely the interests of the children, and the permanent, efficient and progressive development of the schools. There is a great deal of criticism which cannot be noticed at length; but he has summarized what he has got to say in the following passage:

From

"In an Education bill for 1896, which is designed to supplement and in large measure to repeal the great act of 1870, it is reasonable to look for some sign of zeal for educational expansion and for the intellectual improvement of the nation. this point of view it must be owned that the measure now before Parliament is somewhat disappointing. It is not a very coherent bill. Its parts do not fit well together. There is no evidence in it of any clearly conceived educational purpose. Some of its provisions may prove of much value. The raising of the age of exemption from school attendance to twelve years, the transfer of the educational inspection of Reformatory and Poor Law schools to the Education Deparment, and the creation of a popular body constituted on the lines suggested by the Secondary Commission, with power to superintend the provision of secondary schools and to establish due rapport between them and the primary schools, are all measures from which great public benefit may be derived. But on the three points here submitted for consideration there is room for substantial amendment in the bill during its prog ress through committee. They are:

"1. The maintenance of the power of the central department to preserve and to improve the standard of educational efficiency.

"2. The adoption of reasonable safeguards for the economical and fruitful application of large additional grants from the Treasury.

"3. The need of measures for allaying, rather than accentuating, religious rivalries and strife.

"Without some reconsideration of these three vital matters the bill will inevitably create more difficulties than it will solve, and Parliament will have lost a great opportunity of placing our system of national education on an enduring and popular basis."

“QUIDA" ON THE EVILS OF ROYALTY.

THE

HE brilliant English writer "Ouida," whose true name is Louise de la Ramée, has an article in the June Forum entitled "Ego, et Rex Meus: A Study of Royalty." A more caustic and at the same time a more convincing arraignment of royalty as an effete and pernicious institution has never been written. There has come to be a fashion lately, even in republican countries like the United States, of dealing gently with the survival of monarchy in the European countries; and that which our sturdy republican ancestors viewed with abhorrence and disapproval we have come to look upon with easy tolerance if not with respect and approval.

"Ouida" takes the ground in this article that the chief interest in the study of royalty does not so much lie in its political influences, good or bad, as in its social influences; and she demonstrates exhaustively that the social influences of royalty in Europe are disgustingly bad. Royalty in England makes a nation of snobs and sycophants out of a nation that otherwise would be sturdy and self-respecting. The British nation pretended to be plunged into grief at the death of the Duke of Clarence in 1892, and pretended to be convulsed with joy at the marriage of the Duke of York in 1893. counterfeit sentiments, whether in the press or in the multitude, are unwholesome. They make hypocrites of a nation and waste the people's best emotions on shams." We cannot quote much from this article, but it is packed full of truth, and of incidents and circumstances which illustrate the truth.

A PITIABLE POSITION.

"Such

"The office which royalty might have fulfilled with unexampled facilities for influence in it would have been that of arbiter elegans; royalty might have made manners, society, conversation, reception, fashion, all feel and follow its example. But it has never had anywhere the wit, the grace or the originality necessary for the office.

"Royal people are much to be pitied. No one ever tells them the truth; they are surrounded by persons who all desire to please, that they may profit by them. It is impossible for them to be certain of the sincerity of any friend. They are never alone, and they can scarcely escape in their sleep from the stare of watching eyes, and the strained ears of eaves-droppers. They probably never in their lives get a genuine answer to any question which they may put. There is always a young Raleigh to throw a cloak over any gutter; and if

they wished to learn the truth incognito like James of Scotland they could not do so, for photography has everywhere preceded them."

"Ouida" proceeds to discourse upon the vulgarity of the royal tastes, and upon royalty's failure to promote art, architecture, literature, sports or manners by any exercise of wise discrimination or judicious patronage.

THE ROMANOFFS, FOR INSTANCE.

"It will be alleged that the royal taste is deformed and misled by the public taste, but if royalty be incapable of controlling and elevating public taste it pronounces at once its own effeteness. The government of Russia is the worst in the whole world; it is a brutal absolutism founded on a rotting bog of corruption; the present family of Romanoff is not ancient; its blood is chiefly German; it has neither historical nor national interest or value. Yet we were told, a few months ago, that the hope of this dynasty being continued in the direct line sent thrills of ecstasy through every Russian breast from the ice of the Baltic to the palms of Crimea. If the Russian moujik indeed extracted any satisfaction from that prospect we are only once more reminded of the axiom that every people has the government it deserves. The extinction of the Romanoff line might be considered a cause for rejoicing; that its continuance should have been regarded as such proves that the human race is as yet far behind in intelligence the bison and buffalo who select for their leader the wisest, strongest, best of all the herd."

All the trivialities of royalty, declares our author, become ludicrous in an age in which they have lost such symbolism as they once possessed.

OR THE HOHENZOLLERNS.

"The Emperor William likes to change his uniform half a dozen times a day, and has, it is said, more uniforms than there are days in the year. From this point of view, but from this alone, his continual nominations to the command of foreign regiments can be of use to him; and to the guild of the army-tailors. They show perhaps more philosophy than they are given credit for in supporting it. Human nature must seem to them a very poor, mean, truckling thing; a creeping thing of pliant spine, oiled tongue, and insatiable appetite for favors. Only an immense vanity like that of William II. of Hohenzollern can make them content with themselves or with their worshipers.

"Royalty in its adversity may arouse great qualities in its adherents, but in its prosperity its mora] influence is entirely mischievous on all who come under its influence. It generates subserviency, hypocrisy, and egotism; and it suffers itself from the contrecoup of these creatures of its loins. And so in a minor degree does every courtier; statesmen, who ought not to be courtiers become so perforce, to the injury of their character. That a Chatham should have to bow in silence before a Guelph is an

unjust penalty attached to office. That a Bismarck should have to thank a Hohenzollern for his favors is a degradation to humanity in its highest intellectual form.

66

ENGLISH SNOBBERY.

Insincerity is a disease which eats through and rots all social life, but it reaches its apogee in courts. It is said that Disraeli on being asked how he had managed so completely to fascinate and subjugate his royal mistress, replied to the indiscreet question: "I never contradict!" It is of course the courtier's most essential obligation. The salt strong sea breezes of contradiction must never blow As all must away the cobwebs from royal brains. lose to them at cards, so all must agree with them in speech. It were difficult to decide to which this is the more injurious, to themselves or to their subjects.

"Courts are the field in which the bacteria of snobbism are most readily propagated. Fulsome sycophancy is sown by it broadcast like the murrain. In the recent nuptials of the Duke of York a dignitary of the English Church was not ashamed to write an ode calling such a marriage "The Fairest Scene in all Creation!" Could sickly silly hyperbole swell itself to more nauseous folly? To make presents on these nuptials dockyard laborers, longshoremen, river boatmen, village peasants, mechanics, miners, parish school children, cottagers, weavers, carpenters, bricklayers-the whole, in a word, of the poorest and hardest worked members of the nation-were bidden, in terms which admitted of no denial, to give up a day's wage or the price of a week's meals to assist in purchasing some necklace, bracelet, or other jewel for a young lady who is to be the future wearer of the crown jewels of Great Britain! And there was not heard one single voice of all those who could speak with authority to protest against this abominable farce, this iniquitous extortion, this robbery of the poorest to enrich those made richest through the nation! Verily the populace is a too meek and long-suffering creature."

PHYSICAL DEFECTS OF THE ROYAL BREED. "Nay, it perhaps speaks well for their good sense and self-restraint that sovereigns are not more often and more ungovernably mattoid. Given their consanguinity in marriage, their hereditary nervous maladies, their imprisonment in a narrow circle, their illimitable opportunity of self-indulgence, the monotony, the inquisitiveness, the publicity, which lie like curses on their lives, the maddening interference and investigation of their physicians,-w must give them honor that they remain as entirely sane as some of them do and retain tastes as natural and impulses as good as many of them show. They are moreover heavily and cruelly handicapped by the alliances which they are compelled to form, and the hereditary diseases which they are thus forced to receive and transmit. The fatal corporeal and mental injury of royal families due to what the

raisers of horses call "breeding in and in" cannot be overrated, and yet seems scarcely to attract any attention from the nations over which they reign. The royal races of Europe are almost one race, and that German. They form one large clan, not by any means mutually attached yet with enough preponderant likeness to constitute a solidarity of family interest as against public liberty. Mental and physical diseases are common to them, and so also are certain attitudes moral and political. They are almost always great feeders, and tenacious of frivolous and arbitrary precedence and distinction."

66

A COUPLE OF LADS.

There are two little boys now conspicuous in Europe, one is eleven and the other eight years of age; one is a crown prince and the other a crowned king; the former is the most dreary and self-conscious little prig that ever was drilled in pipeclay and buckram, and the other is still a high spirited child, bold, saucy, and lovable; but both the Prussian Kronprinz and the Spanish Rey Niño have already but one thought in their young heads: War. The pompous little German lieutenant only lives for dreams of strategy, manoeuvres, kriegspiel, and importance of buttons, the dignity of stripes and grades, the superiority of gunpowders and chemicals: and the bright Niño climbs on Marshal Campos' knees and begs to be told how Moors were killed in Morocco, Cubans in Cuba, and how many years he will have still to wait before he too can have the joy of killing them."

These are a few extracts from an article which in these times of coronations and great ado about crowned heads ought to make every honest American citizen thankful that just one hundred and twenty years ago our forefathers repudiated allegiance to a European monarch.

[blocks in formation]

Miss Sellers gives the following summary of his life: "Karl Ludwig was born at Schönbrunn in 1833. His father, the Archduke Franz Karl, who thought much more of orthodoxy than of science, handed him over in very early days to the care of the Jesuits. The voice of the Church is to him as the voice of God: at its cominand he would plunge a nation into civil war without a scruple, or lead the most hopeless of crusades. In 1853 he was sent to Galicia as a sort of unofficial Viceroy, that he might have an opportunity of learning something of the science of ruling. He made such good use of his time while there that at the end of two years the Emperor was able to appoint him to the Gov

ernorship of Tyrol. At that time the Archduke was two and twenty, full of life and vigor, and he threw himself into the duties of his position with an energy that spread consternation among the somewhat sleepy officials by whom he was surrounded. He was in Tyrol to rule and rule he did, on the whole wisely and well. He worked indefatigably, performing all the functions of his office with the most scrupulous exactitude.

HIS FIRST WIDOWHOOD.

When in 1856 the Archduke brought his bride. home to Tyrol, he was welcomed by the whole population with an enthusiasm which excited no little astonishment in Vienna. But the people of Monza tell how, one September day in 1858, they saw their Viceroy enter the palace laughing and talking with those around him, la joie de vivre in person. Within a week they saw him again, and he had the face of a haggard old man. The castle flag was flying halfmast high, for the Archduchess Margarethe was dead. She died after a few hours' illness, in the eighteenth year of her age. Karl Ludwig's grief was terrible. For the time being he was distraught. If the Italian war had not come when it did he would probably now be a monk. But he is not the man to desert his country when the enemy is at the gate. As soon as it was known that war was imminent the Archduke hastened back to Tyrol, where the people rallied around him with enthusiasm. They were sorely troubled, however, at the change that had come over their young Viceroy. Not only was he

beg are ashamed; and he seemed to know instinctively when and how to give it.

HIS THIRD WIFE.

"In 1871 the Archduchess Annunciata died, to the sincere regret of her husband, to whom she had been a devoted friend and true helpmate. Two years later, to the astonishment both of the world and his own family, Karl Ludwig announced his intention of marrying again. This time he had found a bride for himself, and a very charming one too. She is a daughter of Don Miguel, the Portuguese Pretender, and was only seventeen at the time of her marriage. She is exceedingly beautiful, brilliantly clever, and has most winning manners-an odd combination of royal stateliness and almost childlike simplicity."

In Vienna they would have been delighted to see his wife Empress, but there were grave doubts as to the Archduke, whose intense clericalism filled the politicians with dismay: "Oddly enough, the populace are immensely proud of his grand seigneur bearing. The only grievance they have against him is that he has too many priests around him. In Hungary the general feeling with regard to the Archduke is much less friendly than in the other divisions of the Empire, for the Liberal Magyars have no sympathy whatever with the antediluvian.”

THE LATE SHAH AND HIS SUCCESSOR.

careworn and sorrow bound, but he seemed to have DR. J. C. WILLS writes on things Persian in

lost all touch with life. It was noticed, too, that wherever he went there was always a priest within hail."

HIS SECOND WIFE.

Notwithstanding that he had lost all touch of life, he consented, in deference to the exigencies of the dynasty, to take a second wife in order to rear up an heir to the Austrian throne. Miss Sellers

says:

"He merely accepted, and none too gratefully, the bride his family provided for him. Nevertheless, the marriage proved a fairly happy one. The new Archduchess Annunciata of Naples was a sensible, good-natured woman, who adapted herself with admirable tact to her difficult position."

After the war of 1866 great poverty and distress prevailed in Austria, which the Archduke set himself to relieve: "Before long he was at the head of every important philanthropic undertaking in the Empire. He was the possessor of great wealth inherited from the Italian branch of his family; and he distributed it among the needy with a generous hand. Nor was it only money that he gave. Every appeal to him for help received his personal consideration; and he devoted endless time and thought to devising schemes for the prevention of pauperism as well as for its relief. He was always on the alert, too, to give a helping hand to those who to

the Fortnightly Review for June. He does not think that the death of the late Shah will make much difference :

"As Persia was under the government of the late Shah, so it will probably remain under Mozaffered-din. The policy will be the same-Russia will be played off against England, England against Russia. In the north the Russian influence will preponderate, while we shall continue to regulate matters in the Persian Gulf. Concessions will be given and afterward retracted; a bribe will never be refused by any man, be he king or peasant; and Persia will remain a nation of highly civilized barbarians, ruled by a benignant despot. Persia changes not; she only decays.'

Speaking of the sovereign whose long reign was ended by the assassin, Dr. Wills says:

66

The late Shah was a good king, an amiable despot, a firm, wise, and merciful ruler who had the welfare of Persia at heart and was neither a tyrant nor a voluptuary. His pleasures were simple in the extreme; he was a sportsman par excellence, a man who delighted in the hunting of big game, a fine shot with gun or rifle, one who, like the late king of Italy, rejoiced in violent exercise as a relief from town life and the cares of state. The late Shah was no idle or vicious despot; he did not smoke, and his diet was of the simplest, and he was a merciful king. He it was who did away with the

hateful custom of the Shah presiding in person at executions. It was said outside the country that the late Shah was a monster of avarice; this was hardly so, for the vast sums exacted as fines and bribes from the grandees of the kingdom were not spent in show and riotous living, but placed in the royal treasure house as a nest egg for the evil days that may come to his successors. The long struggle that took place between the late king and an arrogant priesthood lasted for many years, and the Shah succeeded in shaking himself free of the mollahs, and in reducing their enormous claims upon the public purse. Persia is no longer a priest ridden country. The vast wealth in jewels and specie left by the late Shah will be inherited by the new one, and fifteen millions are not too high an estimate of its worth, the great globe of gold incrusted with huge gems being valued at one million sterling, while the historical diamond, the Deryah-i-Nûr, or Sea of Light, and a vast treasure of gems, cut and uncut, among which are strings of perfect pearls as big as sparrow's eggs, form part of the largest and most valuable collection of precious stones in the world; these and the cellars full of coined gold, mostly English sovereigns and Russian imperials, and bars and ingots of pure gold, all pass with the bejeweled peacock throne, the spoil of the conquerer Nadir, to the fortunate Mozaffer-ed-din, who commences his reign as the wealthiest monarch in the world."

[blocks in formation]

MR

IN THE SULTAN'S PALACE.

RS. MAX MULLER, in Longman's Magazine, describes a visit which she, accompanied by her husband and son, paid to Constantinople some time ago. Professor Max Müller was received with great cordiality by the Sultan, who decorated him, and gave him every facility of seeing over his private rooms, which are not usually shown to the outsider:

"The Sultan had said that we were to see his private museum, library and garden, and accordingly when we left we found one of the chamberlains and the Grand Ecuyer waiting to show us those parts of the palace to which no strangers are admitted. I believe we were the first foreigners (except the famous traveler Vambéry, who is an intimate friend of the Sultan) who had ever visited these parts of the palace. Leaving the kiosk where we had been received, immediately behind the room used by the ambassadors at the Selamlik, we walked up the steep hill down which the Sultan drives to the Mosque, and passing through the principal entrance to Yildiz, we turned to the left. On our right rose the high bare harem wall, higher than any prison walls in England; a closed and carefully

guarded doorway admitted us inside these walls. Leaving a beautiful kiosk to our right, and passing through a narrow passage, we came sudderly on a scene of marvelous beauty.

A FAIRY SCENE.

"Yildiz stands on the summit of the highest hill of the capital, and here before us lay a large lake or artificial river, covered with caiques and boats of all shapes, an electric launch among others. The gardens sloped to the lake on all sides, the lawns as green, the turf as well kept as in the best English gardens. Exquisite shrubs and palms were planted in every direction, while the flower beds were a blaze of color. The air was almost heavy with the scent of orange blossom, and gardeners were busy at every turn sprinkling the turf, even the crisp gravel walks with water. The harem wall, now on our right, rose no longer bare, but covered to the very top with yellow and white Banksia roses, heliotrope, sweet verbena, passion flowers, etc. Thousands of white or silvery gray pigeons--the Prophet's bird-flew in and out of a huge pigeon house, built against the walls. half hidden by the creepers, and the whole scene was lighted up by the brilliant eastern sunlight, in which every object stands out so clearly that one's sense of distance is almost lost. At the end of the lake is a duck decoy, where H. I. M. often amuses himself with shooting, and far beyond this we could catch glimpses of the park sloping away toward the Bosphorus.

"Beyond the pigeon house we entered a building consisting of one long room, filled with treasures. This is the Sultan's private museum. Here are collected and beautifully arranged all the presents that he has received, as well as innumerable valuable objects that belonged to some of his predecessors. "We could have spent hours in examining everything, but time was limited, and we were taken on to the private stables, still within the harem walls, holding twelve of the most perfect Arabs, used by the Sultan for riding and driving in the park of Yildiz. They were all white or gray. course we saw no dogs anywhere -they are held of no repute in the East; but I was told the Sultan possesses a peculiarly fine breed of white Angora cats, to which he is devoted, and whose progeny he sometimes gives to friends, but I saw none of them. The only pet we saw was a large cockatoo at the harem gate, who uttered some unknown sound I suppose Turkish-as we passed."

THE LIBRARY.

Of

The library was reserved for a special visit, for the Sultan expressly desired his illustrious visitors to see his books in the library, of which Mrs. Max Müller says:

"We found a charming old Turkish librarian, speaking no language but his own, but proud of and devoted to the books under his care. He had six or eight intelligent assistants. We were soon seated at a table, a carefully prepared and very full

« PreviousContinue »