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MUNICIPAL TRAMWAYS.

SOME RESULTS OF ENGLISH EXPERIMENTS. OUR excellent contemporary, London, November 22, published a report of the working of Leeds tramway under its new municipal management. Leeds has municipalised her street railways since February 2, with a result that she has reduced the hours of the conductors, raised their wages, added to these numbers the number of the passengers, paid the interest upon the money sunk, and made a profit of £1,550. They ought to have made a profit of £400 more if they had been able to carry out their determination to put by £2,000 a year as a sinking fund with which to defray the whole cost of the tramways and plant. The experience of Leeds supplements that of other towns; soine particulars concerning whose tramways are given in an interesting article in the Cosmopolitan for November, from which the following extracts are taken :

In many cities and towns of Great Britain the local authorities have the free use of the tramways between midnight and six o'clock in the morning, for transporting garbage, road-material, etc. This often saves the trouble and expense of much heavy trucking through the streets.

Among the leading cities of Great Britain which own their street-tracks are Liverpool, Manchester. Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. The county council of London has recently decided to take possession of the tramway systems of North and South London.

LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER.

Liverpool, some years ago, purchased and reconstructed its tramway lines, and has a system which, for thoroughness of construction, is regarded as a model of its kind. The city now owns about fifty miles of track, which are leased to a private corporation at about £600 a mile, the municipality keeping the tracks in order. The company is unpopular, and there is a strong public demand that the city shall assume the operation of the lines.

Manchester has about fifty miles of track all constructed by the city, the company operating the lines leased them in 1877 for a term of twenty-one years. The city receives about £20,000 a year for its fifty miles of single track; this, however, is not net revenue, for it is obliged to maintain the tracks and remove snow and ice in winter. A notable feature of the Manchester system is the treatment of employés. While they have to work twelve hours a day, they are paid 5s. a day for seven days in the week, but have to work only five days of the week.

BIRMINGHAM AND GLASGOW.

Birmingham owns about forty miles of single track, partly built by the city and partly purchased and reconstructed. The various lines are leased to several companies for twentyone years. For the first fourteen years the companies pay, beside their ordinary taxes, four per cent. annually on the gross cost of construction, including repairs, an for the remaining seven years five per cent. annually.

The example of Glasgow promises to be of particular interest, for the reason that the city has the privilege of operating its lines. The company's lease expired on July 1, 1894, and the city council decided, by the overwhelming vote of fifty to six, to assume the management of the lines.

The Glasgow tramway system has a length of thirty-one miles. It was built by the city at a cost of about £350,000. The accumulation of the sinking-fund will, at the expiration of the lease, leave the city burdened with only about one-third the cost, and the total receipts in rentals have been nearly £500,000. There is a demand for shorter working hours on the part of the employés and for lower fares. It is probable that both will be conceded under municipal management.

In Edinburgh, where the lines were also built by the city, the lease to the company expires in 1894. It appears likely that municipal management will also be assumed there. Out

of 155 tramways in Great Britain, twenty-seven are owned by the local authorities.

HUDDERSFIELD.

In Huddersfield, one of the great woollen manufacturing towns of Yorkshire, about twenty-five miles from Manchester, the street-car lines have been both owned and operated by the city for some years. Huddersfield has a population of about 131,000. The tramway system was built and equipped by the city at a cost of £86,000. On this sum, which was borrowed for the purpose, the city pays an interest of three and one-half per cent., but charges its railway department six and onequarter per cent. to cover depreciation, etc. In 1889 the net earnings were £4,300. The employés work only eight hours a day, or forty-eight hours in the week, and are uniformed at the expense of the city.

In Paris, the omnibus and tramway company pays to the city £40,000 a year, and, in addition, £80 annually for every omnibus and £60 for every street-car. As there were 639 omnibuses in use in 1889, and 300 street-cars, the receipts from this source must have been very nearly £70,000, making a total revenue from this company of something like £110,000. There are two other street-railway companies, from one of which the city receives £60 a year for each car, and from the other £30.

In Berlin, the surface transit is in the hands of a street-car and an omnibus company. The Berlin company, notwithstanding its heavy obligations to the municipality, to which it pays £50,000 per annum, pays annual dividends of twelve and one-half per cent., besides accumulating a sinking-fund, which, when the concession expires, will result in paying the shareholders double the par value of their shares.

The writer of the article then goes on to describe the working of the tramway system in Australia. In Sydney the street railways were laid down by the colonial government. In Victoria, twelve municipalities, including Melbourne, made their own tramways and leased them to private companies for terms of thirty-two years, at the end of which time the entire property reverts to the public. The company pays the interest and creates a sinking fund, which will in time pay off the money which the municipality sunk in constructing the lines. A full account is also given of the experiment in Toronto, which is described as the most important instance of public control thus far known in America. It is rather cruel publishing all these details in an American magazine, where, as the writer admits, the street railways furnishi the most notorious and monumental example of corrupt municipal government, and steadily augment the responsible power of the plutocracy over the possessions, the liberty and the lives of the people.

Music Hall License.

MR. R. H. DAVIES, writing in Harper's Magazine on "The Show Places of Paris," refers incidentally to the license which is allowed in Paris at the open-air concerts, and contrasts it with the different response accorded to similar songs in New York:

Yvette Guilbert's songs are beyond anything that one finds in the most impossible of French novels or among the legends of the Viennese illustrated papers. These latter may treat of certain subjects in a too realistic or in a scoffing but amusing manner, but Guilbert talks of things which are limited generally to the clinique of a hospital and the blague of medical students; things which are neither funny, witty, nor quaint, but simply nasty and offensive. The French audiences of the open-air concerts, however, enjoy these, and encore her six times nightly. At Pastor's Theatre last year a French girl sang a song which probably not one out of three hundred in the audience understood, but which she delivered with such appropriateness of gesture as to make her meaning plain. When she left the stage there was absolute silence in the house, and in the wings the horrified manager seized her by the arms, and in spite of her protests refused to allow her to reappear.

MACAULAY, DISRAELI, THACKERAY.

THEIR PLACE IN LITERATURE.

MR. FREDERIC HARRISON is entertaining the readers of the Forum with a series of studies on the great Victorian writers. The first treats of Carlyle. In the September issue his subject is Macaulay, who, he says, has had the greatest body of readers, and is the most admired prose writer of the Victorian era. Mr. Harrison doubts whether his work has given him a foremost place in British literature; still, his verdict on the whole is favourable.

For my part, I am slow to believe that the judgment of the whole English-speaking race, a judgment maintained over more than half a century, can be altogether wrong... No one denies that Macaulay had a prodigious knowledge of books; that in literary fecundity and in varied improvisation he has never been surpassed; that his good sense is unfailing, his spirit manly, just, and generous; and lastly, that his command over language had unequal qualities of precision, energy, and brilliance.

Mr. Harrison then procce ls to criticise in detail the well-known passage in Macaulay's essay upon Von Ranke, in which he describes the Papacy. He says:

It is declamation-fine declamation-but we miss the musical undertones, the subtle involutions, the unexpected bursts, and mysterious cadences of really great written prose. Now Macaulay was a rhetorician, a consummate rhetorician, who wrote powerful invectives or panegyrics in massive rhetoric which differed from speeches mainly in their very close fibre, in their chiselled phrasing, and above all in their dazzling profusion of literary illustration.

"A GLORIFIED JOURNALIST."

Passing on to criticise Macaulay's History, Mr. Harrison points out that the habit of false emphasis and the love of superlatives are defects from which he cannot be acquitted. But although his superlatives are frequent, it should not be forgotten that his praise and blame are usually just and true. His style, with all its defects, has had a solid effect, and has done great things. He stands between philosophies and histories very much as the journal and the periodical stand between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay was a glorified journalist and reviewer:

There cannot be a doubt that Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" is immeasurably superior to Macaulay's fragment, in thought, in imagination, in form, in all the qualities of permanent history; it stands on a far higher plane; it will long outlast and overshadow it. Compared with this, Macaulay's delightful and brilliant pictures are mere glorified journalism.

Even this does not content Mr. Harrison, who proceeds to dismiss Macaulay's History as not so much journalism as an historical novel drawn from authentic documents. It is interesting, but it is not history. Mr. Harrison concludes his essay by a lament that Macaulay was not a great historian as well as a magnificent literary artist.

DISRAELI A POLITICAL SATIRIST.

Mr. Harrison's October study is a vivid and brilliant sketch of Disraeli's place in literature. He regrets that Disraeli's political leadership has obscured his literary reputation, but looks forward to the Jingo Premier being some day forgotten in the Man of Letters.

Disraeli, he holds, "belongs to that very small group of real political satirists of whom Swift is the type." His satires "bring him into the company of Swift, Voltaire, and Montesquieu." He has "touches of their lightning-flash irradiating society." Yet

His romances as well as his satires are wholly unlike anything English; and though he had brilliant literary powers, he never acquired any serious literary education. Much as he had read, he had no learning, and no systematic

knowledge of any kind. He was never, strictly speaking, even an accurate master of literary English. . . . But since Swift we have had no Englishman who could give us a vivid and amusing picture of our social and political life, as laid bare to the eyeof a consummate political genius.

WIT, PARTY-MAKER AND PROPHET.

Passing to consider his works in order, Mr. Harrison premises that

He did not produce immortal romances-he knew nothing of an ingenious plot, or a striking situation, or a creativecharacter-but he did give us inimitable political satires and some delicious social pantomimes; and he presented these with an original wit in which the French excel, which is very rare indeed in England.

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Vivian Grey" is a lump of impudence; "The Young Duke" is a lump of affectation; "Alroy" is ambitious balder-dash. . . . The books on which Disraeli's reputation alone can be founded are Coningsby," ""Sybil," and "Lothair." As a sketch of the inner life of the Parliamentary system of fifty years ago "Coningsby" is perfect and has never been approached. No novel before or since ever created a political party and provided them with a new programme.. Coningsby" and "Sybil" really did this.

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It shows astonishing prescience to have seen exactly fifty years ago that the Church of England might yet become a considerable political power, and could be converted, by a revival of Mediæval traditions, into a potent instrument of the new Tory Democracy. When we consider all the phases.

of Tory Democracy, Socialistic Toryism, and the current type of Christian Socialism, we may come to regard the ideas propounded in "Sybil" as not quite so visionary as they appeared to the Whigs, Radicals, Free Traders, and Benthamites of fifty years ago.

THACKERAY'S "COMEDY OF MANNERS."

The November number gives Mr. Harrison's estimate of Thackeray. He specially insists on "his consummate mastery of style," a style "at once simple, pure, nervous, flexible, pathetic and graceful." This "places Thackeray amongst the very greatest masters of English prose, and undoubtedly as the most certain and faultless of all the prose writers of the Victorian age.' And it was "perfectly formed from the beginning" and maintained throughout: a "prodigious precocity in style and "uniform perfection of exact composition " which are "perhaps without parallel in English literature.” His "force" lay in the comedy of manners.

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Repelling the charge of misanthropy, Mr. Harrison feels obliged to admit-.

that in all these twenty-six volumes and hundreds of men and women portrayed, there is not one man or one woman having at once a noble character, perfect generosity, powerful mind, and lovable nature; or one man or one woman of tender heart and perfect honour but has some trait that tends to make him or her either laughable or tedious. It is not so with the supreme masters of the human heart. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination that was far stronger on the darker and fouler side of life than it was on the brighter and purer side of life. He saw the bright and pure side; he loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and the foul.

CROMWELL AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. THE LORD PROTECTOR AND THE SECOND CHAMBER. MR. FIRTH in Macmillan's Magazine has an interesting paper which has very direct bearing upon present controversies. In the December number he publishes the first part of an essay in which he attempts to set forth Cromwell's opinions as to the Peers and Second Chambers generally. As Lord Rosebery quoted Cromwell as a precedent for his racehorses, so he may invoke the Lord Protector in defence of his plea for a Second Chamber. Cromwell, as every one has learned to recognise by this time, although the leading figure in a great revolution, was one of the most conservative and the most opportunist of politicians. At the beginning of his military career he earned for himself the reputation of being a violent anti-lordling, which his subsequent actions in no way justified.

HIS EARLY ATTACKS ON THE LORDS.

The cause for this was in the attack which he made upon the lethargy of Manchester. Mr. Firth says:

Manchester was, according to Robert Baillie, “a sweet meek man," but his meekness now deserted him, and he retorted with the greatest acerbity. Not contenting himself with denying the charges of military misconduct or political lukewarmness, he accused Cromwell of attacking the House of Lords and the peerage in general. He had once trusted Cromwell, he said, but of late he had been obliged to withdraw his confidence. "I grew jealous that his designs were not as he made his professions to me; for his expressions were sometimes against the nobility; that he hoped to live to see never a nobleman in England, and that he loved such better than others because they did not love lords." Cromwell, added one of Manchester's witnesses, had rejoiced when Royalist peers were slain, saying "that God fought against them, for God would have no lording over His people." He was even reported to have told Manchester to his face that things would never be well till he was but plain Mr. Montague."

Cromwell carried his point. The self-denying ordinance was passed, and the New Model made short work of Charles Stuart and his friends. Two years after Naseby the army met to decide what should be done in the way of constitutional revision. There were two parties: one for demolishing the House of Lords, and the other for a dess drastic method of dealing with them.

THE COMPROMISE OF 1647.

Cromwell sided against the more advanced party. Ultimately, at his instance largely

a committee was appointed to consider by what constitutional changes its continued existence could be reconciled with the safety of the nation and with the practical supremacy of the representatives of the people. One plan suggested was that the Lords and Commons should sit as one House, in which case the thirty or forty lords qualified to sit would be permanently outvoted and made powerless. Another was to give the House of Lords merely a suspensive veto on the laws presented by the Commons. But the solution finally adopted was much more complicated than either. It was to be declared that the power of the House of Commons extended "to the enacting, altering, and repealing of laws, to the conclusive exposition and declaration of law, and to final judgment without further appeal, and generally to all things concerning the Commonwealth." While the supremacy of the House of Commons was thus to be established, the House of Lords was still to exist, though its legislative and judicial rights were to be reduced to a minimum. For the future, as in the past, laws would be presented to the Lords for their assent. But whether they assented or not, any law enacted by the House of Commons would be binding on all the Commons of England. If the House of Lords dissented, all that it could do would be to exempt the persons and estates of

its own members from the operation of that law. In similar fashion peers who were officers of justice or ministers of State were to be accountable to the judgment of the House of Commons for any mal-administration, but those who held no official position were to retain the right of being judged by their peers.

Events, however, marched too rapidly for this committee. The Rump Parliament beheaded the King and abolished the House of Lords, and was in its turn turned out into the streets by Cromwell and his men. The government of the Commonwealth was then placed in the hands of the Lord Protector and a single Chamber. Under this instrument two Parliaments were held. The first was dismissed because it would insist on meddling with fundamentals which Cromwell held to be beyond its power, the second by getting into a wrangle with the Lord Protector about James Naylor, a blasphemous Quaker.

HOW HE WAS CONVERTED TO A SECOND CHAMBER.

This convinced him of the necessity of a Second Chamber, Mr. Firth says:

The quarrel between the army and the Parliament in 1647, followed by the breach between the two powers which ended in the rupture of 1653, had produced in the minds of the officers a deep distrust of omnipotent Parliaments. They had learned, as they said in one of their declarations in 1647," that Parliament privileges as well as Royal prerogative may be perverted and abused to the destruction of those greater ends for whose protection and preservation they were intended, viz., the rights and liberties of the people." A House of Commons of unlimited powers, always in session, not content with its proper business of legislating but taking upon itself by its committees to supersede the ordinary courts of law, uniting in itself the legislative, judicial, and executive powers, seemed to Cromwell and his officers "the horridest arbitrariness that ever was exercised in the world."

But no incident had more effect in convincing him of the necessity of a Second Chamber. "Here," said a member, summing up the dispute about Naylor's case, "here is your power asserted on the one hand; the supreme magistrate on the other, desiring an account of your judgment. Where shall there be tertius arbiter? It is a hard case. No judge upon earth." It was evidently necessary that there should be some power established to judge between the Protector and the Parliament when they differed as to the interpretation of the Constitution, and to support the Protector in defending against the encroachments of the legislative authority the rights guaranteed to all Englishmen by its clauses. Such was the view which Cromwell expressed to a deputation of a hundred officers who came to him in February, 1657, to protest against the proposed revival of the monarchy and the House of Lords. By its proceedings of this Parliament, you see they stand in need of a check, or balancing power, for the case of James Naylor might happen to be your own case. By their judicial power they fall upon life and member, and doth the Instrument enable me to control it?"

By way of providing a check, or balancing power, it was decided to constitute a Second Chamber, the nomination for the members of which was left entirely in the hands of the Lord Protector. Mr. Firth here breaks off his narrative, which will be continued next month.

A WRITER in Blackwood's Magazine maintains that the New Woman, or rather the movement from which she springs, has at its bottom an economic cause. The real trouble of the woman of the moment is not that men are wicked, but that men will not marry her. And the real reason why men do not marry her is because they cannot afford it. It is not because they would not marry if they could; but, says the writer:

The real reason must be sought in the bad times, in the gloom and uncertainty of the present business outlook,

ALPHONSE DAUDET AND HIS OPINIONS.

By R. H. SHERARD.

IN McClure's Magazine, Mr. R. H. Sherard has recently given a description of the home life of Alphonse Daudet, his method of work and opinions. The novelist lives, it appears, in the fashionable Faubourg St. Germain quarter, on the fourth floor of a house "which is reputed to possess the most elegant staircase of any apartment house in Paris!" but Mr. Sherard happily devotes only a page to upholstery, and gets rapidly to the more important facts of his existence.

A native of Provence-his name indicates a descent from Moorish settlers--Daudet's "childhood was as miserable a one as can be fancied," its most vivid recollection a terrible fear of mad dogs. Once he nearly met such an animal:

Since then I have an absolute horror of dogs, and, by extension, indeed, of all animals. People have reproached me for this, and say that a poet cannot dislike animals. I can't help it. I hate them all. I think that they are what is ugly and vile in nature. They are caricatures of all that is most loathsome and base in man; they are the latrines of humanity. And, curiously enough, all my children have inherited this same horror for dogs.

The nervousness which these confessions of childhood disclose shows itself again and again through the novelist's life: it is the one note which makes itself apparent in everything that he told Mr. Sherard. As a child he longed for the sea. "How I devoured the first novels that I read, 'Midshipman Easy,' by Marryat, 'Robinson Crusoe,' and The Pilot," he says. Daudet's first poem appeared in the Gazette de Lyons in 1855, when he was only fifteen, and soon after that, he says, "I entered upon a period of the blackest misery, of the darkest Bohemianism":

I have suffered in the way of privation all that a man could suffer. I have known days without bread; I have spent days in bed because I had no

pass months without touching a pen. I write very slowly, and revise and revise. I am never satisfied with my work. My novels I always write myself. I never could dictate a novel. As to my plays, I used formerly to dictate them. That was when I could walk. I had a certain talent in my legs. Since my illness I have had to abandon that mode of work, and I regret it. I am an improvisator, and in this respect differ from Zola.

The illness to which he here refers has left him, Mr. Sherard says, in the saddest state:

He cannot move about the room but with the help of his stick; he has many nights when, racked with pain, he is unable to sleep; and it is consequently with surprise that those who know him see that he never lets an impatient word or gesture escape him, even under circumstances when one or the other would be perfectly justifiable. The consequence is, that Daudet has not a single enemy in the world. There are many who do not admire his work; but none who do not love the man for his sweetness, just as all are fascinated with his brilliant wit.

Of his memories and of the war M. Daudet has a good deal to say; but it is his literary tastes which are the most interesting to English readers:

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M. ALPHONSE DAUDET.

boots to go out in. I have had boots which made a squashy sound each step that I took. But what made me suffer most was, that I often had to wear dirty linen, because I could not pay a washerwoman. Often I had to fail to keep appointments given me by the fair-I was a handsome lad and liked by ladies--because I was too dirty and shabby to go. I spent three years of my life in this way-from the age of eighteen to twenty-one.

And even when this terrible period of poverty had passed, Daudet's life was by no means a bed of roses :

As to my success: About, writing for the Athenæum. came to see me in 1872, to ask me what I was earning. He was writing something about the incomes of various men of letters, and, making up my accounts, I found that the amount of my average earnings at that time from literature was five thousand francs a year. Two years later, that is to say in 1874, I published "Froment jeune et Risler ainé." which brought me a great reputation, and greatly increased my income. Since 1878 I never made less than a hundred thousand francs a year, including my plays and novels.

Daudet does not resemble his friend and confrère, the author of "Nana," in being a regular worker :

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My way of working is irregularity itself. Sometimes I work for eighteen hours a day, and day after day. At other times I

As to my literary creed, it is one of absolute independence for the writer. I have always rebelled against the three classic traditions of French literature; that is to say, the French Academy, the Théâtre Français, and the Revue des Deux Mondes. I consider the Academy a collection of mediocrities, and would hold myself dishonoured to be one of them.

And he goes on to say that it is in his son, Léon Daudet, in Maurice Barrés, and in some other young men, lies the future of French literature.

I must quote one more passage from this interesting article, which has a particular importance at the present moment. He was speaking of the Panama scandals:

"If the people haven't revolted," he said, "and if there has been no revolution caused by abominations which only a few years ago would have caused barricades to rise in every street of Paris, it is because, as I have noticed, a complete transformation has been effected in the character of the French people, during the last ten or fifteen years, by the militarism to which the country has been subjected since the enforcement of the new army laws. The fear of the corporal is upon every Frenchman, and it is discipline that keeps quiet the men who, fifteen years ago, would have protested at the point of the bayonet against the abominable scoundrels who are plundering France."

The Teaching of Housewifery.

WRITING in the North American Review for November, Miss Elizabeth Bisland pleads for giving women more technical training in the work to which they have for the most part to devote their lives. She says:

The old practical rule-of-thumb apprenticeship of the household having passed away, something should replace it. Why should not schools for girls give courses of instruction in housewifery-not the mere cooking of chops or dusting of chairs, but instruction as to how houses should be made and furnished and their sanitation assured; in the chemistry of cooking. of foods, and of assimilation; in the laws of physiology and hygiene, and something about fundamental economics, of which the average woman is totally ignorant, though she is the spender and distributor of the money the men accumulate?

MR. KIDD OVERHAULED. BY PROFESSOR HENRY SIDGWICK. "POLITICAL Prophecy and Sociology" is the title of a suggestive study by Professor Henry Sidgwick in the National Review. He runs full tilt against George Eliot's saying that prophecy is the most gratuitous mistake that men commit. He boldly affirms that "all rational action is based on belief of what is going to happen; all experts in all practical callings are always prophesying." He goes on to remark on the increase in the importance of prophecy owing to the increased prevalence of the "historical method" of dealing with Social questions, but he suggests the limits within which forecasts have value. The late Mr. Pearson, he says, failed in scientific grasp of the laws of social evolution. His empirical forecasts proceeded too boldly on the assumption that what is will continue to be, or that what has happened will happen again. Mr. Sidgwick reminds us that Individualism once seemed as inevitably the coming millennium as Collectivism does to many now; and remarks "how impossible it would practically have been to prophesy on empirical grounds any one of the revivals of religious sentiment that have taken place during the history of Christianity." He points out that Comte's Own criterion of the effective establishment of a science-the test of consensus of experts and continuity of scientific work-is not satisfied by the present progress of social dynamics. Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution is adduced as proof. While sympathising with Mr. Kidd's complaint of historians' lack of guiding generalisation, Mr. Sidgwick thinks Mr. Kidd's book is likely to confirm the historians in their distrust of the generalisations of the professional sociologist whose knowledge is apt to be distinguished by range rather than depth or accuracy. He cites Mr. Kidd's assertion that "the freemen of Rome could hardly be said to work; they fought and lived on the produce of fighting"; and contrasts the story of Cincinnatus and the system of colonisation. He sets the political evolution of Attica against Mr. Kidd's remark that in all the Greek City States the ruling classes had a military origin. In Mr. Kidd's survey there is much that is true and much that is new. "The difficulty is to find anything that is both." Of the mediæval Theocracy, the Christian religion and the Teutonic invasions were equally essential factors; but "Mr. Kidd seems to treat the barbarian irruptions and their consequences as a negligeable quantity." Mr. Kidd speaks of "the ultra-rational sanction" attaining in the European Theocracy of the fourteenth century a strength and influence never before known. Mr. Sidgwick contrasts the Avignon paper of this period with Plato and Aristotle, and suggests that the "narrow and egotistical morality of Greece as shown in the latter is preferable to the religion of altruism, the former exemplified. further criticism, Mr. Sidgwick proceeds:

After

I do not deny that, in spite of the facts just mentioned-and many others of the same kind-there is still an important element of truth in Mr. Kidd's arguments; but the truth, as he presents it, is distorted by exaggerations and omissions not only into error, but into absurdity. And there is similar exaggeration in what he says of the superior altruism of Protestant nations since the Reformation.

But I have perhaps said enough to explain why I think that Mr. Kidd has left the science of society where he found itunconstructed, so far as the laws of social development are concerned. It is permissible to hope that progress is being

made towards its construction: and doubtless the study of biology would be a valuable preparation for any thinker who may attempt to further its progress. But I think that the biologist who is to succeed in this attempt will have to know a little more history than Mr. Kidd.

MORE GOSSIP BY SIR EVELYN WOOD.

SIR EVELYN Wood's charming reminiscences of his boyhood in the trenches before Sebastopol are continued in the Fortnightly, but not concluded. When they are reprinted, as I presume they will be, they will form a very delightful volume of stories about our last great European war, which will be a universal favourite especially with boys. His pages teem with adventures personal and otherwise. Take, for instance, this story of how he was frozen tight in a battery:

In the second week of December, I went to sleep in the 21-gun battery about 8 p.m., when it was freezing, and I was more anxious to get out of the wind than into a dry spot. The wind dropped and it rained about 2 a.m., when, although I felt I was getting wet, I was too tired to rise. When I tried to do so just before daylight, I could not move, the water having frozen around me, for with the coming day the temperature had fallen. My comrades carried me back, and putting hot bottles to my feet and around my body, with loving care and attention saved me from frost-bite.

Notwithstanding this experience he maintains that:The climate of the Crimea, though more variable, is but little more inclement than that of the North of England.

The frightful destruction of life was due, not to the exceptional ferocity of the elements, but to the scandalous lack of provision on the part of our own Government. He says:

England gave its little army, however, neither enough food, clothing, nor even medicines. We did not understand feeding men, and animals fared still worse.

In proof of this assertion his pages literally bristle with ghastly stories of cruel privations heroically borne, which no patriot can read without mingled pride and shame. Speaking of the failure of the Commissariat Department, he says:

Supply by contract failed in two great wars during the last thirty-five years, and it is unlikely we shall during war trust to such a system in future; but unless our Commissariat officers buy during peace they will not know their business in Direct purchasers should, I think, be the rule at all large military stations.

war.

His article abounds with homely pictures of the reality of war; as for instance, take the following:

Few men till late in December had more than one shirt, which they had worn incessantly day and night for weeks. During the last week of October, when the days were pleasantly warm, our soldiers tried to wash their only shirt, and every afternoon in the trenches the covering parties might be seen sitting naked, and picking vermin of all kinds from their garments. Now, their hair and bodies swarmed with lice: they had but one pair of lace boots, which when wet, they were afraid to take off, lest they should fail to get them on again.

THE Woman at Home's Christmas number has, besides its fiction, a copiously illustrated account of the Queen of Italy, which will be found noticed elsewhere.

Archivo do Districto Federal is published by the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. The last monthly number, just received, is well printed on good paper, contains one plate, and has an ornamental cover. The object of this publication appears to be to form a collection of documents for a history of Rio de Janeiro.

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