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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HOMESTEAD STRIKE. BY PROFESSOR BEMIS.

IN the Journal of Political Economy, published in Chicago, there is a very carefully written and valuable study of the Homestead strike from the pen of Professor Bemis, well known as one of the best authorities on industrial and sociological questions in the United States. The article, which is a very long one, is an attempt to present a statement of the causes of the Homestead strike, based upon the official investigations of the United States House of Representatives and of the Senate, as well as from other material believed to be reliable.

MR. CARNEGIE NOT TO BLAME.

English readers will be most interested in hearing what Mr. Bemis has to say as to the merits and demerits of Mr. Carnegie in relation to this strike. It would appear that Mr. Carnegie has been much sinned against in this matter, being made the scapegoat for the sins of Mr. Frick. The capital of the Carnegie Company is £5,000,000 sterling, and the value of the Homestead plant, not including land, is over £1,000,000, and the annual profit has been over millions of dollars for many years. Only once in the twenty-six years which Mr. Carnegie managed his own works was there any stoppage from strike or lockout in any one of his works, and he has always shown a disposition to sit down and wait until an agreement could be reached rather than to call in new men. Mr. Frick only became chairman and manager in April, 1892, and since that time the relations between the employers and employed were very different.

MR. FRICK THE REAL OFFENDER.

Mr. Frick, indeed, seems to have been the villain of the piece all through. The trouble would never have arisen if he had not trampled conciliation under foot, and forced on the struggle which has had such a baneful influence in embittering the conflict between capital and labour in the United States. The Committee of Investigation of the House of Representatives roundly condemned Mr. Frick and his officers for lack of patience, indulgence, and solicitude, and they say :

Mr. Frick seems to have been too stern, brusque, and somewhat autocratic, of which some of the men justly complain. We are persuaded that, if he had chosen, an agreement would have been reached between him and the workmen, and all the trouble which followed would thus have been avoided.

The upshot of the whole thing is that the responsibility for the industrial war at Homestead lies upon Mr. Frick, and Mr. Frick alone.

HOW MR. FRICK DEFIED MR. CARNEGIE.

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Professor Bemis tells us a very interesting fact, not hitherto known, which tends still further to clear Mr. Carnegie, and to saddle Mr. Frick with the sole responsibility for the trouble. Professor Bemis asserts that Mr. Frick not merely defied commonsense, but Mr. Carnegie's expressed directions. The story is as follows: After explaining the part taken by Mr. O'Donnell in promoting an amicable settlement, Mr. Bemis says that Mr. O'Donnell states, as did the President of the Trades Unions, that there was no disposition on the part of the employés to stand upon a question of scale, or wages, or hours, or anything else." All that was wanted was the reopening of the conference doors. This Mr. Frick refused, and every obstacle was placed in the way of the appeal to Mr. Carnegie.

Mr. O'Donnell's letter, cited above, had applied to Mr. Frick for Mr. Carnegie's address in order to telegraph him-Mr.

Carnegie being at that time absent in Scotland, and his address not being known to anyone in this country except his business associates. Mr. Frick refused to give the address: whereupon Mr. Reid obtained it from our Consul General in London, John C. New, and then cabled Mr. Carnegie, in which he accepted the terms proposed by Mr. O'Donnell, and urged that Mr. Frick be seen immediately with a view to effecting the settlement.

My informant (whose name is withheld) goes on to say: Mr. Frick was obdurate. He refused to consider the matter at all, denounced the strikers as assassins, and declared that if Carnegie came in person, in e mpany with President Harrison and the entire Cabinet, he would not settle the strike.

SOME FACTS ABOUT THE STRIKE.

It is not necessary to enter into the rest of Professor Bemis's paper, but one or two facts may be quoted which are very interesting. In the twenty-five years preceding 1892, outside the Southern States and Colorado the militia were only called out in thirty instances to settle labour troubles. Since 1892 they have been called out much more frequently. One result of the Homestead strike has been the prohibition by several States of the employment of the Pinkerton detectives.

Mr. Robert A. Pinkerton testified that in the previous twenty-six years his detective force had furnished men in about 70 strikes, and had been employed against over 125,000 strikers in all parts of the country. (Senate Report, pp. 242, 247.) The cost of the strike was very heavy:

Mr. Frick testified that the strike cost the men in wages during its 143 days about a million dollars, while the loss of the Company is not given. It is known, however, that it must have been heavy. The cost to the State, writes the State Treasurer, was $440,246.31.

THE FALL OF WAGES IN THE STATES.

Perhaps one of the most startling facts brought up by Professor Bemis is the extent to which the wages of Mr. Carnegie's men have dropped in the last few years:

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"JOSIAH FLYNT," who speaks as an expert in the science of Tramps, propounds in the Century the method for eliminating them:

(1) All charity shown to beggars should be put into the hands of municipally employed specialists. (2) Each town should have a police rendezvous for vagabonds, conducted on such principles that the seeker of work should be entirely distinguished from the professional tramp. (3) The latter must fall under a system of graded punishment and enforced labour in institutions where he will be continually in contact with law and order. (4) The juvenile tramp must be speedily eliminated from the problem by penalties imposed on his seducers.

A GREAT PRINTER.

THE PLANTIN-MORETUS MUSEUM.

IN Velhagen for August, Herr Friedrich Schaarschmidt has an account of the Musée Plantin-Moretus at Antwerp and its famous founder.

THE ARTIST-CRAFTSMAN.

Christoph Plantin, who was born near Tours in 1514 first took up printing at Caën, and did not find his way to Antwerp till 1549. The city on the Scheldt was then the centre of commercial and intellectual life for the North of Europe, and here, it would seem, Plantin's first occupation was rather bookbinding than printing, just as his former master, Robert Macé, the printer of Caen, was bookbinder to the University in his city. At any rate, Plantin in his first years at Antwerp did bookbinding, and displayed great skill in making articles of leatherboxes, cases, etc.-which he decorated with gilt and inlaid work, and turned out in a state of perfection hitherto unknown in that country.

HIS FIRST PRESS AT ANTWERP.

Soon misfortune came, and Plantin's attention was directed to bookselling and the art of printing, as a more practical mode of earning a livelihood. According to his son-in-law, Jan Moretus, Plantin one evening was taking a box that had been ordered to Çayas, the secretary to Philip II. of Spain, when some men, mistaking him for some one else, attacked him, and he was severely wounded in the arm. But he was glad to escape with his life, and the weakness of his arm which was the result of the encounter proved such a hindrance to him in his handicraft that he decided to set up a printing establishment. He had already opened a shop in which he sold books and his leather wares. The first book which he printed was a small octavo volume, "Giovanni Michele Bruto, La institutione di una fanciulla nata nobilmente, 1555," and it was followed in rapid succession by books of the greatest variety till 1562, when another serious interruption in the master-printer's career took place.

A PARIS HOUSE.

During the Inquisition, Plantin was suddenly accused of publishing an heretical book, "Briefve instruction pour prier," and by order of the Regent, Margaret of Parma, a search was made in his house, and three of his works were seized. He fled to Paris, and refused to return till a thorough inquiry could prove nothing against him. Thus he escaped arrest, but his three unhappy assistants were condemned to the galleys. During his absence Plantin got some friends to sell all his possessions at Antwerp, and in the meantime he started a bookshop at Paris, and, it may be, was associated with some printing works there. The following year he was able to return, and four friends joined him in forming a new business, of which he himself became head.

THE THREE SONS-IN-LAW.

Plantin's only son died young, and as he had five daughters, three of whom became wives to three important members of the business, it was evident that the founder of the celebrated printing establishment must look to his sons-in-law to carry on the work of his life. Franz van Ravelingen, a man of great learning, was chief proof-reader, and to him Plantin gave his eldest daughter Margaretha. The second daughter, Martine, was the wife of Jan Moretus, who became the foreign representative of the Antwerp house, chiefly at Frankfort-on-the-Main, where he attended the fairs regularly. Ravelingen was more of a scholar, having been a Professor at Leyden

University, but when a branch was opened at Leyden in 1583 Plantin entrusted him with the management of it. A third son-in-law was Egidius Beys, who married Magdalena, Plantin's third daughter, in 1572, but from 1567 he had been manager of the Paris business. Moretus, besides being foreign representative, had charge of the bookshop in the neighbouring street, and as he was the most closely associated with the master he naturally was the son-in-law who was best initiated in the ideas of his father-in-law. He therefore became the real successor to Plantin, and the business remained in his family till 1876.

THE POLYGLOT BIBLE.

So far back as 1566, Plantin had made up his mind as to what should be the great work of his life-a Biblia Polyglotta, and events were greatly in his favour. The Reformation was directing scholars and others to the sacred writings, and Frankfort and even Heidelberg were ready with financial support for such an enterprise; but it was Çayas, his former patron, who made Plantin known to Cardinal Granvella, and King Philip, acting on the advice of the Cardinal, commissioned the printer to execute the work. Besides an extraordinary sum of money, Philip sent Arias Montanus, his court chaplain, as a scientific and religious superintendent, and the eight volumes were put through in the most perfect style, 1569-1573. In recognition of these services, Philip appointed Plantin sole printer of church books for all countries under the Spanish Crown, and in the centuries which followed this was the staple work of the PlantinMoretus press.

This success did not enable Plantin to amass a fortune, and in 1583 we see him a bankrupt, leaving the Antwerp house with Jan Moretus, while he founds another house at Leyden, which Ravelingen afterwards conducted when his father-in-law returned. Plantin died at Antwerp in 1589, and no more fitting motto could have been chosen for his printer's mark than that which had been his life. motto-Labore et constantia.

THE MUSÉE PLANTIN.

In 1876 the city of Antwerp purchased the Antwerp house for 1,200,000 francs, and out of it was created the Musée Plantin. It is a two-storey house, built in 1761 by Franz Moretus on the site of five small houses, and the entrance is from the Friday Market Place. Everything in the Museum has been arranged as far as possible as it was under the printer's management, and everything of interest in the place has been faithfully preserved. In the shop, for instance, there are the scales for weighing gold pieces, the Catalogue, and the " Mother of God" over an inner window looking into the countinghouse. In the sitting-room there is some beautiful oakcarving, and among other things three clavichords which bear testimony to the taste of the owner.

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Several rooms were set aside for proof-reading, so that authors could make their corrections undisturbed. of these is called the room of Justus Lipsius, one of the few authors paid a salary by his publisher, and a portrait of the scholar hangs in the room. There are ten portraits by Peter Paul Rubens in the house. To many the typefounding room, the founts of type, and the printing presses will have the greatest interest. In 1565, Plantin had seven presses; ten years later, fifteen were in use; and in 1572, twenty-two; whereas Stephanus, the famous Paris printer, never had more than four going. Velhagen gives us a plan of the building, with many excellent illustrations of the interior, besides a number of portraits of the leading celebrities of the firm.

A BIG BOOKSELLING CENTRE: SIMPKINS AS AN INDEX OF POPULAR TASTE. THAT important centre of civilisation known as "Simpkins," or more precisely as Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., the wholesale bookselling house for town and country, is the subject of one of Mr. W. J. Gordon's pleasantly instructive articles in the Leisure Hour. "There is," he says, "no house in the world in which so many different kinds of books are kept in stock, and none in which the pulse of current literature is better known." It takes at least some of about ninetenths of the books published; over 120,000 varieties of books are the average stock. The firm "orders its brown paper by the twenty tons at a time." "Almost any book in print could be had for the asking in two or three minutes." The supply rooms consist of mazes, with paths a yard wide running between walls lined with pigeon-holes, which are crammed with books. Each maze is a "town" of books, and the "streets" run in alphabetical order. The books are grouped in sizes, the larger being put in the suburbs, the smaller and cheaper in the centres. Only "live" books are kept in stock. The dust is allowed to accumulate as a sign, and, when it is noticeable, the work is removed to make room for

a successor.

CURIOUS PENANCE FOR RISKY READING.

The seasonal fluctuations in the trade reveal strange moral tendencies. They vary thus:

In September the sales begin to rise, to drop a little in midNovember, and rise again until they touch their maximum in the week before Christmas. That is the great period of presentation, when books are bought, not to read, but to give away. Early in January the decline is enormous, but at the close a rise occurs, due to the educational works required by the schools. Down go books again until Lent. Then it is that the women betake themselves to the Imitatio and its crowd of imitators, by way of amend for their excursions into the doubtful and suggestive. The coincidence is too striking to be overlooked; whenever there is a boom of an "advanced" novel in November, there is a greater run than ordinary on "devotionals" in the following Lent. During Holy Week the sale of Lenten literature thins out, and by the Thursday is utterly lost amid a crowd of guides and holiday hand-books. During Easter week the stream of outdoor books continues to flow, and "educationals" rise for the schools, but week by week, though the outdoor stream runs strong all through the holiday months, the book-sales drop until the opening of the chief publishing season in September.

WHAT BOOKS SELL BEST.

"Bread-and-cheese books-those from which something is learnt either compulsorily or as a means of money-making-are the backbone of the bookselling trade. School-books have long lives. . . . In short, the books that sell best are those of which the world' hears least." In novels the fashion is now for stories setting forth the superiority of woman. The "three volumer is moribund. The shilling shocker is on the down grade. Pamphlets have commercially very little in them.

Shakespeare is perennial, and seems to sell more than all the rest of the poets put together. . . . Next to Shakespeare the most popular poet is Milton. Even now, Tennyson is the most popular poet on the list, barring Shakespeare and Milton, while Browning is among the lesser lights. Longfellow is another poet in much demand in town and country; Cowper, too, goes steadily; so does Hood. Wordsworth, who only made £140 out of his poetry in twenty-six years, is now high in

favour."

THE GREATEST LIVING POET OF SPAIN. SPANISH takes its place with English among the few tongues which may be called world-languages, and the vast extent of Spanish-speaking humanity ought to make us ashamed of our scant knowledge of great modern Spanish writers. We have reason to thank Sir George Douglas for his sketch in the Bookman of Gaspar Núñez de Arce, whom he describes as in effect the Poet Laureate of Spain. Núñez has recently received national recognition and coronation as the pre-eminent Spanish poet of the time; and

that his reputation is not confined to the Peninsula is amply proved by the fact that, within the space of six years, over eighty editions of his poems have appeared in the United States, Mexico, Chili and Columbia.

Gaspar Núñez de Arce was born at Valladolid, 4th August, 1831, and his early years were spent at Toledo. Our space does not admit of biographical detail, so it must here suffice to state concisely that he has been in his time journalist, Member of Parliament, Governor of a Province, Under-Secretary of State, and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

HIS WORKS AND HIS FAITH.

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Among his more famous works are mentioned "Gritos del Combate" (Shouts from the Battle), a brilliant and impassioned denunciation of the political evils of the time; "Raimundo Lulio," a romance "of almost unexampled brilliancy; ""The Idyll," "a charming sketch of the love of boy and girl; La Pesca" (The Fishing), a tale of homely conjugal love; the "Lamentacion de Lord Byron"; "La Selva Oscura" (The Gloomy Wood), in which Dante tells anew his life story; and "La Vision de Fray Martin " (Vision of Brother Martin Luther), the last two being philosophic poems.—

In politics, as has been shown, Señor Núñez de Arce holds the view of a Moderate Liberal, or as we should now say in this country of a Conservative. As a philosopher, amid the general overturning of systems, religious and moral, he clings persistently it may be instinctively, but it would be the height of injustice to say blindly-to a Transcendentalism which nowadays many people would call old-fashioned,-affirming whenever opportunity occurs his belief in the personality of the Deity, in the unchangeableness of the moral law, the rights of conscience, the responsibility of the human being, and the absolute necessity of an Ideal which shall act, so to speak, as the salt of life and preserve it from corruption.

THE LAST TRIUMPH OF THE ART OF LANGUAGE.

Never, perhaps, in the whole history of Spanish literature, has the stately and sonorous Castillian language found a worthier wielder. To speak of his style as to the last degree chastened, as scholarly, as recalling the style of Tasso, would be natural, but would convey an erroneous impression. For, though all this it is, the impression left upon the reader's mind is not one of scholarliness, correctness, or refinement, but of nature of spontaneity, limpidity, and ease. The last triumph in the art of language seems, in fact, to have been achieved.

FRIEDRICH WILHELM WEBER, who wrote the wellknown poem "Dreizehnlinden," died on April 5th, and almost every German magazine has honoured him with an appreciative obituary notice. He was born in 1813; and on Christmas Eve, 1877, he placed under the Christmas tree, as a present for his daughter, the neatly-written manuscript of " Dreizehnlinden," his first poem; and sixteen years later, on his last Christmas Eve, the sixtieth edition of his work lay under his Christmas tree. Besides writing poetry, he was a doctor of medicine, and for over ten years was a member of the Prussian Diet.

THE BIG WHEELS OF THE WORLD.

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.

IN Cassier's Magazine Mr. T. H. Coggin has a paper on the Ferris and other big wheels, in which he points out that the greatest attraction in the Midway Plaisance at the World's Fair, although an engineering feat of great ingenuity and interest, was not after all such a very new. idea. For example, the tension principle introduced by Mr. Ferris, and regarded by him as one of the chief points in the wheel, was well known and practically applied forty years before the designer of the Ferris wheel was born, and for the last forty years it has been prominently in practical use in America. Mr. Coggin goes on to give some particulars of other remarkable wheels. He says:

The two great sand wheels used by the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company at their stamp mills in Lake Linden, Michigan, for the purpose of raising their waste sand and water, so as to carry the sand farther into the lake, are built on the tension principle, applied in a different method than that used in the Ferris wheel, but no less a complete embodiment of the principle. These wheels were designed in 1888 by Dr. E. D. Leavitt, of Cambridgeport, Mass. They are 54 feet in diameter over all, and 11 feet wide, having a capacity to raise in twenty-four hours 30,000,000 gallons of water and 2,500 tons of sand.

But Dr. Leavitt laid no claim to the discovery of a new principle, knowing full well of a water wheel, built upon the same principle, which had then been running nearly forty years. This wheel was designed by Mr. Henry Burden, so well known as one of the founders of the Burden Iron Co., of Troy, N.Y. As early as 1840 he had designed and constructed a water-wheel on the tension principle. This wheel was run nearly ten years, but coming to extensive repairs, on account of defective timber, a new one was built on the same principle in 1851. Its diameter is 62 feet over all; width 22 feet, and its weight is about 230 tons. It has 264 radial tension rods and two tangential rods. It is the largest overshot wheel in the United States, and with a limited amount of water transmits about 550 horse-power by a gear on its rim through a pinion to the main shaft, and after forty-three years of constant running is still in perfect working condition.

The writer then refers to Sir William Fairbairn, the eminent English engineer, whose long and large experience in mill work, including water-mills, gives him and his writings a wide reputation among engineers all over the world. That engineer, in his volume "Mills and Mill-work," describes some wheels designed by himself:They were erected at the Catrine Works, in Ayrshire, between the years 1825 and 1827, and in 1851 he wrote that "these wheels, both as regards their power and the solidity of their construction, are, even at the present day, among the best and most effective structures of the kind in existence. They have now been at work upward of thirty years, during which time they have required little or no repairs, and they remain nearly as perfect as when they were erected."

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These wheels were 50 feet in diameter and about 11 feet wide, and transmitted their 240 horse-power from internal segmental gears attached to the rims, the gears being 48 feet 6 inches diameter, of 15-inch face, and 31-inch pitch. Speaking further of the practice of using this principle in the construction of wheels, Mr. Fairbairn said that it was principle most generally practised in the construction of improved iron water-wheels. The two chief points in the construction of these wheels are identical with those which seventy years later were claimed as new in the Ferris wheel, and which, meanwhile, had been successfully applied by both Mr. Burden and Mr. Leavitt. But even Mr. Fairbairn claimed no originality in the use of this principle, but wrote that "it was reserved for Mr. T. C. Hewes, of Manchester, to introduce an entirely new system in the construction of water-wheels, in

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THE 72-FEET OVERSHOT WHEEL IN THE ISLE OF MAN. feet by means of wood trust rods having supports. The power thus transmitted operates a system of pumps in a lead mine, the duty of which is raising 250 gallons of water per minute to an elevation of 1,200 feet. The water is brought some distance to the wheel in an underground conduit, and is carried up the masonry tower by pressure, flowing over the top into the buckets. This great wheel was constructed some forty years ago, and is said to have been running continuously during all this time.

But the big tension wheel now being erected in London will throw the Ferris wheel into the shade, for this one will rise to a height of over 300 feet, and will accommodate 1,600 people in its forty cars.

REV. DR. CLIFFORD, writing on his first sermon in the Young Man, gives a glimpse of the educational beginnings. of a man who has now after his name a quite extraordinary number of letters, denoting high academic degrees:"How poor and feeble that sermon was, I need not say. I was not half-way through my sixteenth year. I had left school before I was eleven, and had worked in the lace factory, when the Factory Acts were not yet applied. To be sure, I had sought knowledge early and late, from books and from men, in the street and in the fields; but I am appalled at the crudities of these first efforts."

THE GREAT NAPOLEON ON THE PASSION OF LOVE. PERHAPS the most interesting contribution to the French August reviews is a dialogue on love in the Revue de Paris which is affirmed to have been written by Napoleon Bonaparte in the year 1791, whilst he was acting as Lieutenant at Valence. M. Masson, who is a great authority on all that concerns Napoleon I.'s private life, vouches for the authenticity of the MS., and explains in a preliminary note that the Des Mazis who played the part of interlocutor in the curious conversation recorded was at the time these pages were written Napoleon's dearest comrade and friend.

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Bonaparte: "I do not ask for a definition of the passion. I myself was once in love, and have retained sufficient recollection of the feeling to eschew those metaphysical definitions which obscure rather than make clear. I do not deny the existence of the feeling. But I consider the passion injurious to humanity and fatal to individual happiness. Love is full of evil, and Divine Providence could not do the world a greater favour than to deliver us from the passion."

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Des Mazis: Without love the world might come to an end for all I care."

Bonaparte: "Do not look at me with such indignation, but answer me truly why, since you have been dominated by the tender passion, have you given up society? Why are you neglecting your work, your relations, your friends? You spend all your day walking about alone, waiting impatiently for the moment when you will see Adelaide. If you are suddenly called upon to defend your country, what will you do? What are you good for? Can one who is wholly influenced by the behaviour of another be trusted with the lives of his fellow-creatures? Can a State secret be confided to one who has no will of his own?... Ah, how I detest a passion which can thus change an individual!... A glance, a hand pressure, a kiss-what are in comparison to them your country or your friends?... You are twenty years of age, and can choose between giving up your profession and continuing to act as a good citizen If you adopt the latter course, you must be ready to do anything and everything for the State-you must take up arms, become a man of business, even a courtier, if the interest of your country demands it. Ah! how ample will be your reward. Time himself will stand still, for your old age will be surrounded by the respect and gratitude of your kind. . . . You enslaved by a woman! Des Mazis: " No, sir, you have never been in love!" Bonaparte: "I grieve for you. What! you actually believe that love leads to virtue. Why the passion proves a stumblingblock every step of the way. Be sincere. Since this fatal feeling grew upon you have you ever thought of any pleasures but those of love? You will do good or evil according to how your passion sways you, for you and love are one. As long as the feeling lasts you will be influenced uniquely by the passion. . . . Yet, you must admit that the duties of a citizen comprise the active service of the State. . . ."

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THE DIVERSITY OF DIVORCE LAWS.
PLEA FOR A UNIFORM CODE.

MR. HENNIKER HEATON Concludes in the New Review his plea for a uniform code of marriage and divorce law for Christians throughout the British Empire. Here are some of his statistics in comparative divorce:—

In England there is one divorce to 577 marriages, in Russia 1 to 450, in Scotland 1 to 331, in Austria 1 to 184, in Belgium 1 to 169, in Hungary 1 to 149, in Sweden 1 to 134, in Holland 1 to 132, in Baden 1 to 100, in Roumania 1 to 94, in France 1 to 87, in Germany 1 to 62, in Prussia 1 to 59, in Denmark 1 to 36, in Saxony 1 to 33, in Switzerland 1 to 21, in Italy 1 judicial separation to 421, in Berlin 1 divorce to 17, in Vienna 1 to 43, in Paris 1 divorce or separation to 13. Iu

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WHAT TRICKS A DON JUAN MIGHT PLAY.

Inspired by his researches, certain enterprising dramatists are preparing to present on the stage some of the more striking contrasts he has shown in the world's marriage-laws:

Such a piece might, perhaps, be entitled "Round the World's Divorce Courts in Sixty Days." The hero, Don Juan, first marries in Ireland. He takes a second wife in Scotland, and a third in England. The law declares all these unions to be both legal and illegal, for want of uniformity. As the United Kingdom has become too hot for him, he starts, a much married man, from Liverpool. He might be divorced and remarried half-a-dozen times in the States; he could commit bigamy and trigamy, and yet escape punishment by putting in at Constantinople, and becoming a subject of the Sultan. He might, with a copy of my articles in his pocket, commit every imaginable matrimonial offence, and yet find an asylum in some land with a medieval marriage code. He might in one country by royal permission marry his grand-aunt, in a second his niece, in a third his deceased wife's sister; and yet, though he would be considered a depraved Scoundrel in England, he might live all his life with the three ladies in Turkey, and be regarded as a model of the domestic virtues. If he deserted them, Mussulman opinion would pronounce him a heartless villain; while British public opinion would view his desertion as a laudable return to respectability. If a wife talked too much, he could take her to Japan, and get rid of her; if she drank too much, a visit to Melbourne would entitle him to relief from the Victorian Courts.

The Superlatively Feminine George Meredith. IN the Free Review for August Mr. Ernest Newman devotes twenty pages to the study of George Meredith and his novels. He says:

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Mr. Meredith is always on the woman's side. A lady once told Amiel that he was "superlatively feminine"; the characterisation would apply very accurately to the Meredith of the later novels. "The Egoist" is so exquisitely delicate an analysis of a woman's feelings in relation to a man who offends, not through over-grossness, but through over refinement, that one might be reasonably pardoned for supposing the author of it to be a woman. It is noticeable that his last three novels "The Egoist," Diana," and "One of Our Conquerors - have been mainly a statement of the woman's side of the case, a pleading that could hardly be equalled for force, delicacy, insight, and pathos. If you consider the extremely tenuous nature of the interest in "The Egoist," you will be all the more astonished at the rare psychological ability with which that interest is maintained throughout. We unconsciously become feminine in sensation and emotion in the reading of the novel; we feel something of Clara's subtle, feminine shrinking of the flesh at the approach of Sir Willoughby's caress. In "Diana," not all the abortive attempts at wit can make us do anything but love and sympathise with the noble woman who has the courage to stand against the masculine grossness of the world; while "One of Our Conquerors," which, perverse as it is, contains some of the finest of Mr. Meredith's writing, is planned on large motives and is supremely pathetic in interest. In all these books he achieves his wonderful success because he is " 'superlatively feminine." And reading him in this light, one smiles at Diana's story of the girl in her service who had a "follower." "She was a good girl; I was anxious about her, and asked her if she could trust him. Oh, yes, ma'am," she replied, I can; he's quite like a female.'' It is sad to think that Mr. Meredith himself, possessing as he does this desirable virtue of being quite like a female, has not yet become a favourite of the sex in England. It may be that the feminine reader is more perplexed at him than the masculine in this respect.

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