assuaging of international antipathies that has been brought about in part by the fierce enmities that rage within the Irish ranks. Mr. Redmond is prepared, he tells us, to accept eagerly all the good things the Unionist Administration may propose to offer Ireland. It is perhaps a little uncharitable, but the impression left on the mind by reading his article is that he would much, very much, rather receive "kindness" from Mr. Gerald Balfour and his friends than from Mr. Justin McCarthy and the Irish Parliamentary party. The Government has, therefore, every encouragement to proceed in its policy of doing everything for the Irish that they want, save and except the one thing they want most of all the right to do for themselves instead of having things done for them.

National

The Principle Mr. Redmond gives his apostolic beneof the diction to Mr. Plunkett's scheme for Social Union uniting Irishmen regardless of party in Ireland. differences in furtherance of such measures of improvement as all Irishmen believe to be necessary. Mr. Justin McCarthy stands aloof, apparently fearing lest, by rubbing shoulders with a Unionist, he may endanger or weaken Home Rule. - Mr. Redmond's faith strikes outsiders as being robuster. If Mr. Plunkett can but evoke from the Irish chaos the phenomenon of an Irish cosmos, on however small a scale, he will do more for Home Rule than will be effected by any number of excommunications of Timothy. For what Englishmen and Scotchmen need to be convinced of is that there is sufficient common sense among Irishmen to render it impossible for a Home Rule Parliament to become a Donnybrook Fair. At present, on this side St. George's Channel, we have an uneasy suspicion that Irishmen are ready to forswear the Multiplication Table and abjure the Ten Commandments if only they can "jab in the eye" some other Irishmen with whom they have a difference of opinion. When we see that Unionists and Nationalists are prepared to desist from the hereditary pastime of cutting off their nose to spite their face,when they prove they love their country more than they hate each other, then the time of their deliverance will draw near. At present the success of Mr. Plunkett's Committee is the only good news from Ireland; that, and the announcement of Mr. John Dillon's approaching marriage. The priests and bishops are quite a large enough section of the Irish nation to be sterilised by celibacy without lay politicians following their example.

The Boom in

Mr. Asquith made two speeches, last month a moderate sensible party speech Settlements. on Colston's Day at Bristol, and a brief but earnest discourse in advocacy of Social Settlements at the inaugural meeting of Browning Hall, Walworth. Mr. Asquith's latter speech has helped to remind the outside public that there is quite an astonishing agreement among practical philanthropists that of all methods of grappling with the social problem, by far the simplest, the most obvious, and the most practical is that which Arnold Toynbee initiated and Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel first embodied. At Browning Hall representatives of the Broad Church Toynbee, and the High Church Oxford House, attended to bless the Settlement at Walworth, which has its headquarters in an old Congregational chapel, and has as its Warden a Congregationalist. Canon Barnett's paper in the Nineteenth Century sets forth lucidly the salient features of the Settlement, so far as they have been developed by experience, and it is earnestly to be hoped that the attention thus given to the subject may lead to the multiplication of these social centres, until we have at least one to every 100,000 inhabitants in our great cities.

The

there. There is the common life shared with the common people; a knowledge of their wants gained by close neighbourliness, and an anxiety to help born of actual experience of clamant human needs. Army may serve up too much theological sauce with its sociological strong meat, but the meat is there, and nourishing and wholesome it is. No doubt there are many who would prefer it without the sauce. But until they show some determination to supply the meat, it is not reasonable to pay much attention to their negative criticism of the S. A.

mittedly unsolved. The police now even refuse to allow the homeless wanderers to sleep on the seats on the Embankment. If they find any one asleep they wake him up. The workhouse casual wards are full to overflowing. In at least two of our great workhouses the overcrowding is almost criminal, the inmates having to sleep in the corridors. Yet this winter-of all times in the world-it has been deemed wise and expedient and humane to forbid the Salvationists to receive more than 550 men at their Shelter in Blackfriars, Every night they are besieged by hundreds of men who want a place to shelter in till morning, and who are willing to pay a penny for the warmth and the piece of bread that every person receives at the Shelter. By dint of utilising forms and chairs they were able to crowd 800 into their premises. But because it would admittedly be better if each inmate had more air space, the magistrate arbitrarily cut down the numbers to be admitted by 250. What is to become of the 250 nobody knows, and nobody seems to care. In order that the remaining 550 may have more cubic feet of air than they care for, 250 others have to wander the pavement all night. Of course the proper remedy is to provide another Shelter. But another Shelter means a capital outlay of £1,000, and where are the public-spirited philanthropists, or, if you like, the shrewd speculators who will provide that sum? One thing is certain. If the magistrate and the medical officers who are responsible for this limitation of the Shelter at Blackfriars had to spend but one December night as their 250 victims have to spend it, they would rapidly modify the complacency with which they reflect upon the results of their handiwork.

Rescue Work.

It is all very well to say, Let the SalvaMrs. B. Booth's tion Army provide bigger and better Shelters. The Salvation Army makes sixpence go further than any one else can make a shilling, but after all the Salvation Army cannot conjure up sixpences from the pavement. A few crumbs from the table of our South African millionaires would enable the poor Lazarus of London to get a shelter for his head of nights. But Dives nowa-days saves his crumbs for his own use. Otherwise, surely Mrs. Bramwell Booth would not be left plaintively imploring for help to enable her to extend the admirable rescue work to which she has devoted her life. The revenue raised for this department alone now exceeds the whole revenue of the Salvation Army when she joined the Booths, but still it is insufficient. There are few spectacles more sadden

ing than that of a repentant Magdalen imploring for an opportunity to regain a life of virtue, and refused the opportunity owing to the absence of the necessary funds. No fewer than 12,000 girls have been dealt with in the Rescue Homes of

the Army. The expenditure amounts to £10,000 a year. If some of the other Churches which do no rescue work of their Own would compound for their abstention by subscribing to those who are in active service on the field the present difficulty would be overcome. But, unfortunately, those who do least can afford least. It is those who do the most who are always doing

more.

The Salvation Army in India.

General Booth, who has visited South Africa, is now in India, where he has been joined by Mrs. Tucker, formerly in the Indian Civil Service, but now one of the most important members of the Headquarters staff. Before leaving this country, Mrs. Tucker drew up a scheme for coping with the extreme poverty that prevails among many families of the Indian population. The Governor of Madras, it seems, some time ago publicly appealed to any religious or philanthropic organisation to undertake the task of settling the starving people upon the waste land. General Booth has responded to this appeal in a scheme which has received the approval of many eminent Anglo-Indians, and which he is now about to submit to the notice of the authorities in India itself. The task is one of enormous difficulty, but there seems to be good reason for believing that General Booth has succeeded in gaining a stronger hold upon the imagination and sympathies of the natives in India than any other religious teacher of our time. The political consequences of this alliance between such a church militant as the Salvation Army and the lower caste natives in India are as yet but dimly perceived. One thing is quite certain, and that is that the spread of Salvationism in India is much more likely to be destructive of the hateful spirit of Anglo-Indian insolence than any other agency that can be conceived. How far India will be governable by a handful of white men if India is Salvationised is a question upon which it is possible to hold two opinions, but that it will then be impossible to govern India without a very considerable alteration in the methods, and above all in the tone at present prevailing in many sections of the Indian Civil Service, is a matter on which there is no room for any difference of opinion.

The Ship

Strike.

The work of social amelioration to which building Lord Salisbury pledged his Ministry has not made much progress since the General Election in one notable department of the national life. It may indeed be said to have gone back. The one conspicuously good work of the late Administration was the success with which they intervened for the settlement of disputes between capital and labour. But now the wretched quarrel between the masters and workmen in the shipbuilding trade at Belfast is allowed to drag on week after week, inflaming angry passions, and spreading the gangrene of industrial demoralisation far and wide, on the Clyde as well as in the North of Ireland, and Ministers so far have done nothing. Even Colonel Saunderson, staunch Unionist as he is, has felt moved to press his party chiefs to intervene with a view to settle this industrial civil war. He says:

I should suggest that Mr. Arthur Balfour or Mr. Chamberlain should offer on the part of the Government to consider the whole question of the strike and arbitrate on the merits of the case. Not long since Lord Rosebery took this course with success-why not Mr. Balfour or Mr. Chamberlain? Should the Government decide on some such course, it would be open to either the masters or the men to decline such arbitration. But the result of such refusal would inevitably throw on the side so refusing the heavy responsibility arising from the continuance of a strike.

Unfortunately, as yet Ministers have made no sign of any readiness to bestir themselves in this matter. There is small chance of getting arbitration adopted as a substitute for international war, when internecine disputes like this are allowed to rage week after week without any determined effort to compel the disputants to submit the merits of the case to the arbitrament of reason.

The Kaiser

With the exception of this unhappy "Squat on the strike there is small symptom of any Safety Valve." increase in the bitterness which divides classes and masses. In Germany, on the other hand, both parties seem to be approaching a crisis. When Professor Delbrück can be prosecuted for the most moderate of criticisms of the Government in a magazine article, and when the proprietor of so reasonable and respectable a journal as the Ethische Kultur can be consigned to a fortress for three months -the Public Prosecutor clamouring in vain for the severer sentence of nine months' imprisonment-it is evident the Kaiser means to try the policy of sitting on the safety valve, which it was hoped he had abandoned. Among the latest items of intelligence from Berlin is the announcement that—

The Chief of Police in Berlin gives notice of the summary closing of eleven Social Democratic clubs, including six

Reichstag electoral clubs, the Socialist Press Committee, the Agitation Committee, the Local Committee of the Party, the Club of the Party Delegates, and the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

The Emperor is believed to be "bent upon using force, regardless of consequences, even if it leads to a life-and-death struggle." If he does, he will find that it will have serious consequences, and the end of it will be not life, but death. No doubt the Socialist agitation is very annoying. So is a London fog. And the Kaiser will find his artillery is almost as impotent against one as it would be against the

other.

Anti-Semitism in

In Austria, the form taken by social discontent is that of a violent agitation Austria. against the Jews. Dr. Lueger's re-election as Mayor of Vienna, with the consequent dissolution of the City Council, led to a debate in the Reichsrath, which was interesting as revealing the savagery with which the Jews are hated in Vienna. One of the speakers was not ashamed to assert that at Jewish festivals the food is sprinkled with a dark dust which is made from Christian blood! There is reason to believe that if the masses had their way in Central Europe, the Jews would lose their eye teeth, if indeed they were permitted to escape with their lives. It really seems as if it will be necessary before long to reconstitute the Kingdom of Jerusalem, if only to give the Jews a centre from which diplomatic intervention would be possible on behalf of the scattered and peeled remnant of the children of Israel. Jabez Balfour has been convicted as a The " Rare Rogue "Jabez swindler, and two sentences of seven out of sight years' penal servitude, not to run concurrently, have been passed upon him. amid the vindictive cheers of a multitude of his victims who assembled outside the court. Thus has come to pass that which I predicted some months ago when I observed that this rare rogue would soon disappear from public gaze, seeing that he had no longer been able to evade the jurisdiction of the tribunal of his country. That very obvious observation cost me exactly £180. I was fined £100 for contempt of Court, and the rest of the money went in costs. Such are the penalties that overtake the prophet even when he prophesies truly, if his prophecies are a little too previous.

at last.

"Mr. Mayor,

If I may be permitted to condole with my Lord." myself upon the severity of the penalty of expressing the universal opinion of Jabez Balfour, I may perhaps be permitted to felicitate myself upon the success of another prophecy, the utterance of which possibly helped to bring about its

realisation. Writing some years ago on the British aristocracy as forming no small portion of the Wasted Wealth of King Demos, I ventured to look forward to a day when our peers would take active part in municipal work, and even dared to suggest that princes of the blood ought to consider the municipal service quite as honourable as that of the army or the navy. The latter part of the prediction remains unfulfilled, but the former part has been realised in quite an extraordinary fashion. According to the list published of the mayors elected last month, no fewer than eleven peers have been elected as the chief magistrates of as many towns. Among them are the following :— APPLEBY-Lord Hothfield. CARDIFF Lord Windsor. DUDLEY-The Earl of Dudley. LIVERPOOL-The Earl of Derby. LONGTON-The Duke of Suther- WHITEHAVEN-The Earl of

land.

SHEFFIELD-The Duke of Nor-· folk.

WARWICK-The Earl of Warwick.

Lonsdale.

Republics

Uncrowned.

In the great Republic across the sea, Crowned and where there are no hereditary titles, but where every other man, woman and child is president of something or other, if only of a committee in the nursery, the marriage of Miss Vanderbilt and her millions to the Duke of Marlborough has attracted much more attention and newspaper comment than would have been excited by any marriage in this country, save that of the heir to the throne. The millionaire, however, although worshipped and feared, is not trusted. The plutocrat in America could not get himself elected anywhere, whereas in this country the aristocrat beats all comers whenever he chooses to enter the lists. It is curious how persistent is the superstition that the United States are more democratic than the United Kingdom. The Monroe doctrine, for instance, brings out quite unexpectedly the survival of the archaic notion that Britain, because monarchical, is a less democratic country than the United States. The real fact, of course, is that we both are popularly governed communities. We live under a

living sovereign whom we have reduced to the position of a graceful figurehead, and have a landed aristocracy which retains its titles and its estates, because it is, with all its short-comings, liked and

From Puck.]

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.

trusted by the democracy. The Americans live under the sovereignty of the Dead Hand of a written constitution, and their aristocracy of wealth is hated and distrusted all the more because it has no titles, and spends all its energies in building up gigantic fortunes. Wealth is hereditary in the States, and that fact is likely to have more influence on their history than the hereditary titles of our peers will have

on ours.

The

Meanwhile the superstition that the Venezuelan United States is in a peculiar sense Dispute. Republican, whereas we are Monarchical, is being utilised for all it is worth in order to bolster up the case for intervention in Venezuela. If British subjects in Guiana would but repudiate their allegiance to the British Empire, and set up in business as a British Republic, no American citizen would object to them eating their way into the heart of Venezuela. All the difficulty arises from the prejudice against the monarchy-a prejudice that is as old as George III., and ought to have been buried with him. At the same time it is well to recognise that our American cousins do imagine that because they have an elective chief of State they are, in a special sense, more Republican, and therefore more of a self-governing democracy than Britain. It is a delusion, no doubt; but popular delusions, like carburetted hydrogen in a coal mine, make naked lights dangerous which otherwise would be safe. And as this Vene

zuelan frontier dispute is one of these naked lights which may bring about an explosion, it is sincerely to be hoped that Lord Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain will see to its prompt settlement without loss of time.

Outside Venezuela there is not much Other AngloAmerican likelihood of any serious disagreement Questions with the United States. General Miles, the Commander-in-Chief, has been suggesting the repeal of the treaty which forbids either the States or Canada to keep warships on the Great Lakes, but it is not likely his suggestion will be taken seriously. Mayor Pingree, the redoubtable dictator of Detroit, has a more serious grievance. He wants the treaty abrogated in order that the Detroit shipbuilders may get their share of the Government navy contracts. But it ought not to be impossible to meet Mr. Pingree's grievance by allowing the builders on the lake shore to construct, under bond, such naval vessels as can be delivered through the canals. The one trouble that haunts some American minds, the possible collision with England about the Nicaragua Canal, has been indefinitely postponed by the Report of the Canal Commission appointed by President Cleveland last spring. According to this Commission the canal will cost not less than £26,000,000, twice as much as was estimated. They declare that no canal can be built in the way which the Maritime Company proposed to make it. The Nicaragua Canal, therefore, is "up the spout," like the Panama Canal, and the anticipated difficulty cannot arise at least before.. next century.

The Novem

The November elections went Republican ber Elections with a vengeance. Even last year's in the States. Democratic defeat was less decided than the disaster which everywhere overwhelmed them. Tammany gained a barren victory in New York City by aid of the Germans, who resent the enforcing of the law of the State against Sunday sale of drink, but everywhere else the Democrats went down like ninepins before the Republican legions. Even Kentucky, for the first time, went Republican. As it seems to be now quite certain that the Republicans will elect the next President, the choice of a candidate by the Republican Convention which will assemble early next year will command more attention than usual. The Democrats are discussing the possibility of nominating Mr. Cleveland for a third term. The dearth of strong, commanding personalities among the Democrats is very marked.

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