SEPTEMBER, 189%,

my Contributors

Me COUNTESS OF CORK

El WY HALL CAINE
SARAH GRAND
W. L. ALDEN

Se ROBERT BARR 4

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GRue lkEGEND

St

Rac ROS

en athe

Catia did the Repher say to the Rosg ?
“Van be Blowed |”

HE Zephyr could not help it! He could not

indeed ; though naturally as courteous a little

Zephyr as ever puffed Thistledown lightly across a
sunny meadow, he really and truly cou/d not help it.

But you shall judge.

Consider first what a weary spell of waiting this
fragile younger one of four had undergone, while his
two robust elder brothers were working their reckless
wills on, about, and around earth, sea, and sky. That
blustering bully from the North had wrought havoc
among brave ships, toppled avalanches upon lowly
cottages, and had scattcred destruction far and wide ;
that relentless venom-breather of the East had instilled

poison into human lungs, and infused tortures dire into
human limbs for many a dreary week, while our Zephyr
pined unheeded for the dawning of 47s long-deferred day.
But when it came at last, oh! with what glorious promise
it rose! Fragrance and radiance permeating the air,
warmth, beauty, and charm pervading all things: was
noi this a day of all others to bear unclouded happiness in its train?
So deemed at least young Zephyr, as, requiting with a soft caress the
jsunbeam on which he had been resting, he glided swiftly down it to visit
the gardens of Earth.

¢ For in a secluded nook of one such garden, sheltered from public gaze,
fand, as he fondly hoped, awaiting in maidenly expectation his coming,
Vou. I.—No. 5s. 615

4

616 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

was enshrined the long, though ___ secretly, worshipped object of his
adoration, in the form of ay wd budding rose on the verge of develop-
ment into flowerhood. Though \ her eventual hue was still unrevealed,
and her exquisite outline imper-
fectly indicated, the existing
suggestions of latent sur-
passing beauty had sufficed to excite all dormant
emotions in this susceptible Zephyr and arouse
his ardent aspirations. An occasional gently-
breathed whisper, while’ her vigilant thorny
guardians were engaged in perforating intrusive
caterpillars, had hitherto constituted the only
i possible expression of his feelings ; but, encouraged
: x by a slight bashful droop of greeting, or a
momentary swaying of her graceful figure in
the light flutter he sometimes ventured to create
he believed his suit to be not altogether with-
and bided in hope, scarcely tem-
‘anxiety, the moment, now at
emancipation from spinaceous
{, acceptance of his homage.
_ gaily onward, weighted with
» than how best to
@ into the fair pre-
* divinity, he caught
now a breath of
\) Mignonette, now
the Violet
perfumed
“a: 'y Bells, all

round her,
out response,
»ered with.
cael, of her ue “ah
thraldom and final \
As he floated 7 \ A
no greater care ¢ 4
grace his advent eN
sence of his®%
up on either wing, |
freshly-blown
a delicate waft from
Bed, and anon a richly-
tinkle of the Hyacinth %
freely bestowed on this //7A
gay young wooer so /
palpably hasting towards “%
his Lady Love. The stately
Lily, too, as he rust!ed by, half 4
bent her classical neck to. bid
him good speed; for no speck
‘of envy could taint that spot-

less bosom, though the il
dark Gilly Flower from her®

enforced station on the wall muttered
her discontent at being always overlooked for pert unfledged blossoms,
while the Lady’s Smock and Columbine exchanged coinciding views on
the superiority of fine garments over fine looks, and the London Pride, in a
toss of haughty disdain at the bare idea of a rustic beauty, nearly snapped
off the head of an unfortunate Bachelor’s Button, who had rashly ventured
to differ in opinion.

ier

THE TRUE LEGEND OF THE ZEPHYR AND THE ROSE. 617

Unheeding these clashings and clangs, on sped our Zephyr to his enchanted
ground, which he had nearly reached when his progress was suddenly
disturbed by the eruption into its current of an indignant and portly Bumble
Bee, who, too incensed to be conscious of his rudeness, bounced about,
humming loud denunciations of some indecorous flirtation carried on close
by. As neither apology nor explanation seemed forthcoming from this
irate patriarch of more highly-trained morals than manners, the Zephyr
placidly shook him off, but was incontinently arrested by the shrill
ejaculations of an excited Painted Lady Butterfly appealing loudly to his
sympathies on the score of the abrupt desertion of her own particular
Butterfly swain, so foolishly infatuated by a chit of a baby Bud ; but

ere the Zephyr had mastered the details of this hard case, his

vivacious interlocutor darted off in chase of a Purple Emperor,
descried by her keen glance in the distance ; and, while pondering
with involuntary misgivings over her meaning, he was startled by
a sinister chuckle from a Death’s Head Moth who had come up
unperceived. A more than usually fiendish grin overspread this
ghastly cynic’s countenance, but vouchsafing no enlightenment,
v4 he flitted away, leaving the Zephyr, perplexed and tremulous with
e vague apprehension, to pursue his course and arrive at his desti-

‘a nation only to find his dim forebodings all too sadly realised.

J Perched jauntily upon a neighbouring twig, with foppishly

4-y curled horns, and wings rakishly flopped in languid alternation,
; “ swaggered a huge Butterfly of the commonest yellow order,
a laying siege with familiar admiration to the Bud of buds, who,
| ina poise of unstudied elegance, and with still enfolded petals,

gave ear, half shrinking, half wondering, but all demurely, to his
extravagant compliments. On them, with the fierceness of a
tornado, burst the exasperated Zephyr, and sweeping this
unworthy rival with one blast to the ground, he turned
upon his idol, in wild forgetfulness alike of
propriety and good breeding, to hiss out
the deplorably low anathema recorded by

these pages . and by tradition.

w?

THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

If.

What did the Rase say
to the Zephyr ?

THE insulted Bud quivered
with anger, astonishment,
and, \ it must be
owned, °
a slight
mixture of fear.
For, limited
as was her

experience
of life, and
little as she had
foreseen the dire re-
suits of her thoughtless-
ness, an internal whisper hinted
that this censure, however crudely expressed,
4/7 might not be altogether unmerited, while the sight
of her quondam admirer grovelling in the dust with
besmirched wings and limply flattened horns, made
her tingle with shame at the thought of having for
one moment tolerated his presumptuous addresses ;
and a wave of colour stole through her form as she
felt how keen a pang must have impelled the gentle

Zephyr into so great a solecism of speech and
conduct.

With the instantaneous resolve to bring back her

half-escaped captive, awoke the unerring instinct of

her sex to guide her; and, timidly sinking her

SQ So ee incomparable head, she suffered her rounded

tc ase ~ petals to fall by slow degrees apart, until they but
imperfectly veiled the warm hue of her blushes.

At such a . sight could the already relenting Zephyr remain
unmoved? Ah, no!—transported with penitence and devotion, he hung
entranced over her, as, raising for a sccond her lovely face to glance
upwards with indescribable softness, she bashfully murmured, “ Blow
me, oh! my beloved, blow me!”

So, fanned into bloom by the breath of Love, and filling all space with
ineffable sweetness, one by one her glowing leaves expanded into the
adorable proportions of the Coupe d’Hébé, and the fairest of buds stood
forth the Qucen of Flowers !

ith
ide
for
eS ;
she
tle
ind

her
t of
her
ded
but

iain
ung
ince
slow

with
the
tood

THE TRUE LEGEND OF THE ZEPHYR AND THE ROSE. 619

I11.—Ghe Seyuet,

WOULD that we could take our leave of them in this phase of supreme
happiness, believing that it so continued without lapse or change! Would
that the all-compelling Spirit of Truth did not enforce the completion of this
idyllic episode, and lead us, albeit reluctantly, to the contemplation of its
latter state !
It were pleasant, were it not? to ignore for once the inevitable tendency
\ of earthly beauty and freshness to earthly decay and destruction, and
to imagine that Time’s not all-relentless strokes spare here a one and
there a one in his resistless course.
Alas! too transparently vain must prove such fiction. All know, or have
yet to know, otherwise ; and therefore none will marvel to learn that the
bright summer days which flew so swiftly for the unheeding lovers,
after ripening into grand maturity the early charms of the Rose,
proceeded no less rapidly, though impcrceptibly, to impress on
her fair countenance the stamp of Mortality.
The marks were at first so slight,—a little paling of her glorious
tints, a faint creasing of her lovely leaves, a gentle deflection
of the crect head,—that even the devoted Zephyr failed to
Ls observe them. But as they waxed gradually stronger
the change could not remain undetected by the broad
, , stare of the Sunflower, and was eagerly
Yj» written down by. the many-quilled Dahlia,
Next came with gossiping avidity a string
hey of buzzing idlers, headcd by the Gadfly
i. and closed by the trumpeting Mos-
» quito ; then, as the ye evil tidings
.., spread afar,
\ | the meaner
\ horde of
| crawlers— fat
| slugs, vora-
| clous cater-
q pillars and
B| greedy snails
\ —crept
silently
near,

620 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

waiting with loathsome patience for the downfall of Perfection and the
gorging of their foul maws.

In the midst of this malignant throng the brave Rose bore herself
gallantly, while the hard touches that day by day marred her loveliness were
powerless to taint her perfume ; for the sweetness of true love endures to the
end, and the consciousness of a few remaining loyal friends was not denied
her ; but the Heart’s Ease strove in vain to struggle within reach, the little
Forget-me-not lost power to make its comforting message heard, and the ,
mourning Rue could only grieve in silence. Unweariedly did the faithful |
Zephyr attend upon his loved one, but his strength too was gradually waning
in an unbroken spell of drought and sultriness, insomuch that even his skill |
in fanning seemed departing, while her steady supporters, the Night Dews,
found themselves in too sorry plight to continue their refreshing visits.

Thus, with her vitality ebbing slowly, down floated, first singly, next
by twos and threes, and, at length, in one countless odoriferous shower—
shedding fragrance alike upon friends and foes to the last—the final store
of her shrivelled but still balmy petals; and as the last leaf of her Book
of Life dropped into nothingness, with one long-drawn sigh the stricken
Zephyr died—away !

E. C. Cork.

VW | Wi)
| { Wi

| UAT LNN ALU | Wi] I LVN ASTUTE

7 TMT

(Engraved by W. Biscombe Gardner.

A STUDY.

[From an original painting by Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A.)J

‘*For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?”

i 2

HERE will be no one to see you off to-day, as I cannot go
myself,” my mother said; “but I suppose if I send you to the
station in the carriage you will be able to manage; and, now
that you are out, the sooner you learn to look after yourself
the better.”

*¢ All right,” I replied confidently, under the impression that

I had very little to learn. And so it happened that, on this
particular occasion in my early girlhood, I found myself, with
the most delightful sense of importance, travelling from London seawards, alone.

The sensation was more than agreeable—it was ecstatic. On the way to the station

I felt as if I had never been in a carriage before. I was looking at life from a

new point of view, and the people in the streets seemed to see me as I saw myself

—at least I fancied that their eyes expressed a different feeling for me from any that

had ever shone on me before; but I did not try to translate it. Being pleased and

happy myself, it seemed only natural that a pleased and happy expression should come
into every face that was turned towards me.

Having arrived at the station, found my train, and secured a seat, I began to loiter
up and down the long platform, ostensibly watching the people, but really, with the
happy conceit of youth, absorbed in myself, as it appears to me now; yet it was not
altogether conceit, but rather the blissful absence of that sense of comparison which
comes later on with chastening effect to show us our own unimportance. The sudden
sense of freedom had revealed me to myself all out of focus, as it were, and magni-
fied, as objects appear at first to one who has just recovered his sight; and I believe
if | had done a portrait of myself at that moment I should have made myself seven
feet high.

But pride goeth before a fall, and I was brought up out of this happy state with a
jerk which effectually upset the dignity of my demeanour. I had perceived that the
train was in motion, and it flashed through my mind that it was being inconsiderate
enough to depart without me. As it was the last one in the day that would suit my
purpose, I made a desperate dash for a carriage door, and scrambled in, regardless of
the howling officials on the platform who would have hindered me. In doing so I
became aware of exactly the same performance taking place at the farther end of the
compartment ; it was as if I had caught a flying glimpse of myself in a mirror as I
jumped on to the footboard, opened the door, and swung myself in, after the deliberate
manner peculiar to guards on the Underground. But, as often happens, although I
621

622 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE

had seen the thing done, the fact did not rise from my sub-consciousness to the
surface of my thoughts, in order to present itself for my consideration, for some time
after I had taken my seat.

The train slid out of the dingy station, and now everything was of interest. I
even strained my eyes to read the advertisements paraded on blank brick walls,
corners of squalid houses, parapets and arches of railway bridges, any- and everywhere,
till my brain reeled.

But then came a glimpse of the river. The unpolluted summer air streamed in
upon me. The summer sunshine, unthinned by smoke, lit up the landscape, sparkled
on the water, brightened the blue of the sky, whitened the clouds, reddened the
roofs, intensified the green, and flooded my whole soul with another kind of joy in
life, very different from that which I had just been experiencing. ‘There had been
excitement in the crowd, but here alone there was supreme content.

It was a torrid day ; but Fate had befriended me, for it was a cushionless third-class
compartment I had stormed, all open and airy, and also empty, as I at first supposed ;
but in this I was mistaken. There had been nobody visible to begin with, but, on
looking across after a while, I was surprised to see a pair of bright dark eyes just
appearing above the backs of the seats, at the farther end of the compartment. These
eyes were fixed upon me in a confident way; and involuntarily I felt, the moment
they met mine, that a flash of intelligence had passed between us. The immediate
consequence was, that the owner of the eyes, a lanky, dark girl, got up, fixed a
struggling bull pup under her arm, where she held it firmly in spite of its kicks and
yelps and snaps, clambered clumsily over the backs of the seats from her end of the
compartment to mine, regardless of any display she might make of lean legs by the
way, and sat down opposite to me.

“Two’s company,” she remarked oracularly.

“Quite so; but you were two to begin with,” I answered.

“Counting the bull pup,” she said, drawing the creature from under her arm as she
spoke. “Isn’t he a beauty?” She held him up by his forelegs, and shook him
playfully, addressing him the while in tender tones: “ Look at um’s chin, and um’s
legs how um bows ; and look at um’s werry magnificent nose ! ”

But the puppy, evidently not appreciating these compliments, began again to kick
and growl and snap impatiently, exercises which drew from his delighted mistress
assurances that “he was a game un, den!” as she settled him comfortably upon her
lap. He was already a formidable-looking creature, a brindle of exceptional beauty,
judged, of course, by his own standard of excellence.

* T bought him,” the young lady proceeded, “to draw Aunt Marsh. I want to make
her believe that the outcome of Woman’s Rights is bull pups. But now I’m beginning
to love him—‘a beauty, den!’—for his own sake. What a nuisance it is metaphors
will mix! I was just going to remark that Aunt Marsh is the kind of bull you must
take by the horns if you would get on with her; and that’s what I mean, only it isn’t
quite right, somehow. Now, my mother is sixty thousand times cleverer than Aunt
Marsh, yet she gives in to her—they’re sisters-in-law, you know—but I’m a generation
in advance of my mother, thank goodness !”

“T ought to tell you,” I observed, “ that I believe I know your Aunt: Lady Marsh,
is she not ?”

She looked at me with a pitying smile. “ Yes, that’s the person,”\she answered.
“ But, now, do you suppose that I’m quite such an idiot as to express myself so freely
to a stranger of whom I know nothing ?”

“Well, you have the advantage of me, for I am quite sure I have never seen you
before, nor have I ever heard of anything like you,”

2 ee es

THE SERE, THE YELLOW LEAT. 623

“ Anything like me! Now, that’s delicious. But you mean who amI? I can’t
abide that roundabout way of asking who a body is. But I'll tell you who I am, just
because you’re not egotistical.”

“ How have you discovered that I’m not egotistical ?” I asked.

“ Because you thought first of me rather-than of what concerned yourself. Most
people would have wanted to find out what I knew about them, and until I told them
they wouldn’t have taken any interest in me.”

* But you haven’t told me——”

“Oh, I’m Adalesa Shutt,” she interrupted offhand. “Adalesa Shutt-up is the
form it generally takes with the impolite. I may mention that my parents are
responsible for the name. They still survive.”

There was a pause after this, during which she hugged her brindle bull dog
absently, with her dark eyes fixed on a far-away point of the horizon.

While under the influence of her bright, sharp, slangy manner as she talked,
I had supposed her to be about fifteen. She wore her dress short, and her hair
hanging down her back in a thick plait, as girls of that age generally do; but
now, as she sat silently contemplative, she looked older.

“But why should you ‘draw’ your aunt, as you call it?” burst from me
involuntarily, as I watched her.

She turned upon me with her infectious smile.. “It is the only possible attitude
for me in her abode,” she said—“ a don’t-care-came-to-be-hanged kind of attitude.
I daren’t be docile or affectionate, because I have to keep her at a distance, otherwise

t

\. ‘ she would give me good advice. She did make me
\\ suffer the first time I stayed with her!”

\ ”

MK * But——

“Oh yes, I know all that,” she put in impatiently.
‘‘She’s the kindest woman in the world, you were
going to say. Everybody says so. But just you
observe! I would rather have a termagant to fight.
One wouldn’t be afraid of hurting her. But these
soft, sweet women bruise so easily, they make you
suffer all round. ‘There are your nerves and
your better nature both on the alert, while
your good sense is being outraged, and your
worst self is fighting to be up in opposition.
Heaven help me from having to encounter
a feather-bed woman ! ”

fey “But how did she make
Sf you suffer'?,”

*Oh—I'll show you when

we arrive.”

“How do you know I am
going there?” I asked in
surprise.

Again she looked at me, and

laughed, but only repeated: “T’ll
show you when we get there. Mind
you, I don’t suffer now.”

The train pulled up at a little country
station as she spoke, and we both
alighted. An open carriage was waiting outside for us,

'**You and John oa
must go inside. ” 3

624 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

“Ah, there is my friend Barkins,” Adalesa exclaimed, meaning the coachman.
“]’m going to drive, Barkins—Barkins bein’ willin’,” she added aside to me.

“You and John must go inside,” she further insisted, “because Mademoiselle
here only sits on the box. She always travels third class, and sits on the box.
Those are her ladyship’s orders. I have them here in my pocket”—-and she
slapped that receptacle.

The coachman hesitated, and looked at me as if for confirmation, but I preserved
my gravity. The misstatement Adalesa had made with regard to my usual mode of
travelling led me to infer that the rest of the story was rather more facetious
than accurate; but I would not have betrayed her for the world. I wanted to
see what next.

The coachman slowly descended from his box, keeping a wary eye on Adalesa
all the time, as if he were seeking a sign for his guidance, or suspected firearms.
As he descended on the one side, however, she scrambled up on the other, and
when she had seated herself he handed her the reins. I had followed her
on to the box, so that there was nothing now but for him and the footman to get
into the carriage.

“You'd better put the luggage in too,” Adalesa suggested ; and it was with a look
of relief that the men complied. “ Otherwise,” she whispered to me, “ any one meeting
the carriage, and seeing you and me on the box, driving the servants, might have
mistaken us for a travelling lunatic asylum.”

“Not such a very great mistake, perhaps, after all,” I ventured.

“Oh, my dear, speak for yourself,” she promptly rejoined; “as for me, there’s a
method, you know.”

She put the bull pup between her feet as she spoke, and tightened the reins ;
and then we were off—not at a wild gallop, as I quite expected, but at that rapid,
exhilarating trot at which only a good whip can keep a good pair of horses, I
understood the coachman’s easy acquiescence better now. It was evident that
the girl was accustomed to drive. She had that negligent look and attitude, and
apparently careless way of holding the reins, which betoken mastery of the art.
The road itself she scarcely seemed to see. Her eyes wandered away from it
on all sides, and at that moment one would have said they.were dreamy eyes,
seeking sharp contrasts of sunshine and shadow less than mystical effects of dimness
and distance.

The drive left impressions in my mind of a dusty road with heavy frondage of ferns
by the wayside, all drooping, as though wearied and reposing from the ardent summer
heat. ‘Then there came a fertile land, well wooded; the sheen of a copper beech;
low hills lifting a belt of sombre pines up to the azure of the sky; the grey-white
wool of sheep against the green of grass; the reflection of indolent cattle standing
ankle-deep in a pool; the heavy foliage on overhanging boughs; bracken on the
banks, and wild flowers everywhere. Adalesa pointed out two objects of interest
with her whip: “ Those chimneys there in the wood—you can see the smoke above
the trees—that is the house. And there, beyond, don’t you see? that shining line,
that is the sea—the sea!” She drew in her breath as if the very word were a joy
to her. But presently she burst out again in her usual way :

“T should think you feel like a figure in a farce,” she said, on seeing me glance
behind at the servants sitting solemnly with folded arms and their backs to the horses,
opposite our trunks, which arrogantly occupied the other seat.

Then we entered the chase, and began to catch glimpses of a great house among
the trees. Some places have an aspect of self-denial impressed upon every feature :
as you approach they seem to insist that you shall observe the economies they have

oe

- G8

(=

THE SERE, THE YELLOW LEAF. 625

had to practise ; but this was just the opposite. ‘There was a self-indulgent, spick-and-
span, affluent air about everything.

“Oh!” Adalesa exclaimed, “I begin to feel feather bedding about, don’t you ?
Nasty unwholesome stuffy thing, feather bedding. Aunt Marsh is by way of softening
me, rubbing off the rough edges, don’t you know. Just you watch !”

II.

Lapy MarsH must have heard the crunch of carriage wheels as we drew up at the
door, for she came hurrying down to meet us ; but the men-servants had hopped out
alertly, and we ourselves had descended from the box before she appeared, so that I
doubt if she ever knew how we had come.

“ Do come in, dears!” she exclaimed. ‘Come to the drawing-room and have some
tea. Evangeline is out. She will be so sorry. She had to go for a ride, but of course
she expected to be*back in time, only one can’t always calculate. Dear children! I
am so glad to see you. Why, you seem to have grown, Adalesa. You are certainly
taller and—and slimmer.”

“ Longer and lankier,” Adalesa translated, cheerfully.

“ But isn’t your dress ‘just a little short, dearest, for your age?” Lady Marsh
ventured in the gentlest way, when we were seated. She was known as “a szeet
woman,” “one of those whom it is restful to recall”; and I was not at all pleased to
find that that seed of corruption, the trick of absurdly associating her with feather beds,
had taken root in my mind ; but it had, and there it remains.

“ Long dresses!” Adalesa ejaculated: “no, thank you! I know what is expected
of long dresses.”

“Dignity, is it not, dear?” her aunt ventured, with a deprecating smile.

“ Yes,” Adalesa groaned; “and dignity, they say, is a mysterious carriage of the
body to cover defects of the mind.”

Iady Marsh sat down at the tea-table, and began to pour out tea. “ But, you see,
dear, men say such things,” she replied, in her gentle way.

“Ah—men!” Adalesa drawled. “ You see, I haven’t made up my mind to like
men yet—a man, perhaps, eventually—but men / too conceited, you know.”

“ Dear child ! what do you know about men ?”

“ Absolutely nothing,” was the frank rejoinder ; “and that’s why I wear short
dresses. I want to study man, and he only shows himself to short frocks. He’s off
guard with them. But I'll find him out! My angles fit me for the task. Thank
heaven for my angles! No man who looks at me will think of me as a young lady,
that most awful of human weaknesses.”

“T don’t like to hear you speak in that flippant way, dear,” her aunt deprecated.
“The man is the head of the woman, you know.”

“Yes, sometimes,” said Adalesa, judicially ; “and sometimes he isn’t, because the
woman is a leng way ahead of him. But the rule is much of a muchness, I believe.”

“Well, then, it would be a case of two heads are better than one in a household,”
her aunt answered, good-humouredly.

“Or too many cooks spoil the broth—you never know,” came the ready response.
“ But where’s my pup?” she broke off; then rushed from the room, exclaiming that
she’d forgotten him.

“That child’s sharpness is quite uncanny,” Lady Marsh remarked when she had
disappeared. “ But, oh dear, it is all so terrible—so very wrong-headed, you know!
And”—stooping over to speak in an undertone, as if the matter were not quite

626 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

delicate—“I am afraid it is all my poor sister’s fault. She is so sadly what they call
‘advanced ’—woman’s rights, the suffrage, short hair, and all that, you know.”

Lady Marsh spoke in a confidential tone, very flattering to a young girl from a
woman of her age and station, and also flattering in that it was natural to infer from
it that she thought I had been brought up in a superior manner.

Adalesa returned with the bull pup under her arm. “Isn’t he saee¢?” she
demanded, putting him down, and making him run towards her aunt.

“No!” Lady Marsh exclaimed, drawing her skirts together lest he should touch
her—“anything but sweet. Oh!—do take him away! How could you bring such
a dreadful creature here ?”

“* Dreadful creature !’” Adalesa repeated in an injured tone ; then picking up her

a
ee

* Adalesa returned with the bull pup. ‘Isn't he sweet?’ she demanded.”

grotesque pet she hugged him like a mother whose babe has just been insulted.
“And I thought—— Well, if it is womanly to be so hard-hearted, I’d rather
not be womanly.”

“My dear child,” Lady Marsh cried in consternation, “what have I done? You
don’t expect me to like that dreadful creature? I should be ashamed to have it seen
about the house. Who ever heard of a gentlewoman petting such a——”

Adalesa uttered a little scream. ‘“Don’t—don’t say nasty things about him. I
shall hate—any one—who doesn’t appreciate him.” She drew herself up, glanced at
me, and walked haughtily out of the room.

“Well!” Lady Marsh exclaimed for the second time. “Now, you see, my dear,
what comes of this nonsense—taking women out of their sphere and all that !”

“Do you mean,” I began, “that you think a fondness for bull pups——-” But

THE SERE, THE YELLOW LEAF, 627

here I checked myself, for I perceived that I was inadvertently playing into the hands
of the wicked Adalesa.

On my way upstairs to dress for dinner, I discovered that young person’s dark
head inserted in a doorway, round which she was peering. “Come in and kiss my
pup,” she said, persuasively, looking at me with languishing eyes.

“Tell me,” I said. “ How much of your late misconduct was by way of ‘ drawing’
your aunt, and how much was

“Innate cussedness ?” she suggested.

“ Innate cussedness !” I gravely repeated.

“Oh—you pays your money, e/ cefera,” she answered easily. “ But I’m dressed
and you're not,” she proceeded; “and you're late. Let me go to your room and
help you.”

I led the way, smiling a little to myself as I pictured the sort of help I thought I
might expect from her; but I soon found I was utterly mistaken. I had imagined
her awkward and inefficient, but found her deftness itself, and, what is more, she
was kind. It was loving service that she did me when she laughed at some
inartistic arrangement of ornaments I had devised for my hair, threw the artificial
things aside, and cleverly replaced them with fresh and fragrant flowers. And all
the time she talked!

“When I first saw you to-day I thought you were older than I am,” she said, “ but
it seems you are younger. You say such wise things, though, and look so grave, it’s
easy to be mistaken. But now I see you are only a babe with a big head, and you
want a lot of attention. You'll have to go through a period of feather-bedasia, and
you'll suffer ; but don’t be disheartened. Just do as Ido. Be vulgar, buy a bull pup,
and chatter.”

“T don’t in the least see what I’m to suffer from,” I protested. “ Your aunt
is charming.”

“ Yes,” she rejoined ; “didn’t I warn you that she was ?”

* And as for your cousin Evangeline ——”

“Now, stop,” she interrupted. ‘I won't let you commit yourself to ¢haé stupid
fallacy. Evangeline isn’t charming. I am the reaction from feather-bedasia ; she is
the consequence of it ; and she’s a pig.”

“JT don’t agree with you at all,” I answered decidedly ; “and I should think I
know as much about her as you do, for we were at school together ; and she was most
popular with all the girls.”

“Oh yes,” Adalesa answered, imitating her aunt. “She has such pretty manners,
as Aunt Marsh says, ‘so gentle, so refined, so unaffected ’—a whole string of adjectives,
a set formula that has been flung at me—no, I should say, gently insisted upon for my
benefit so often that Iam not likely to forget it. And then she always promised to
be a beauty, I suppose, which must have added greatly to her frestige with girls at
school. But all the same, she’s a pig. Why wasn’t she here to receive us to-day?”

“ Her mother said she had had to ride——”

“Her mother ought to know better than to excuse her. It was a fine day, and
Livangeline thought it would be more amusing to go for a ride than to come in the
carriage to meet us ; so she went, and she has not yet returned ; and that is Evangeline
all over. Oh, I know her! And so would you if you’d ever been here before. Have
you, by the way?”

“T thought you knew all about me! You seemed to say so in the train to-day.”

“T knew your name and address, for 1 read them on the luggage you were looking
after when you came into the station,” she answered, with charming candour. “I
saw you peacocking about as if you were somebody, and, as your belongings were

628 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

deposited under my eyes, I had the curiosity to look and see. If I hadn’t known
that you were coming here you wouldn’t have had the honour of making my
acquaintance so early in the day, for, although free with my friends, I am not in
the habit of picking up any goodness-knows-who for a travelling companion.”

“ Aren’t you ?” I said in surprise. ‘I should have thought——

”?

***Well, yes,’ she rejoined, ‘1 am sharp, very.’”

“You would have thought!” she exclaimed. “You innocent babe! You haven't
learnt to think yet. But you are very entertaining. I nearly missed my train watching
you. You were so smily and pleased with yourself and everybody else, anybody
could see it was the first time you’d ever been on your own hook. My, what a blush!
It’s running all down your back. Well, forgive me! I didn’t mean to wound your

THE SERE, THE YELLOW LEAF. 629

pride. But you’re too sensitive, my dear—as sensitive as you’re simple, and as trans-
parent. ‘Those who run might read your every emotion; and that would be rapid
reading too, for you suffer from a singular variety of emotions in a short time.”

“You seem to be a singularly acute young person,” I observed, bridling.

“Well, yes,” she rejoined, with unvarying cheerfulness, “I am sharp, very.” She
stood off as she spoke to see the effect of a big bow she had pinned on my
dress ; adding, as she looked, with her head on one side, “So you have never been
here before ? ”

“No,” I answered. “ Your aunt was a friend of my mother’s, long ago, before
either of them was married; but they hadn’t met for years until last season, when
Evangeline and I left school, and came out ; and then they renewed their acquaintance.
They agreed that Evangeline and I mustn’t consider our education finished simply
because we had left school; and as Evangeline is an only child, Lady Marsh entreated
my mother to let me come here for awhile to work with her. My mother is great on
the question of education. She says she has suffered all her life long from having
had hers curtailed, and she is determined therefore that her daughters shall have
every advantage that her sons have. If we are not clever enough to profit there will
be no harm done; and if we are she expects us to be thankful that we were allowed
to experiment and see what we could do, instead of being kept ignorant in deference
to a mere theory that we have no mental capacity. But of course we are not coerced.
Since I left school I have been allowed to follow my own inclinations, and I have
chosen to be taught the same things that my brothers are studying.”

“Gracious, how clever the child talks!” Adalesa exclaimed in her irrepressible
way. “It’s just like a book. Perhaps you learnt it by heart. I begin to suspect
you have a mind. What a terrible thing! But, anyway, what a blessing it is
you met me! A few years more, and you would have been unendurable.” She
stood off again, with her arms akimbo, and contemplated me from this new
point of view, derisively at first, but by degrees her face softened. “And so
you have come here to work with Evangeline, you innocent babe!” she said
humorously. ‘You must be clever. Only a very clever person would have done
such a stupid thing—a book-clever person I mean, not a world-clever person.
It isn’t human to be up to everything, and your world-clever people are all out
of it in literature, but your book-clever people fail in their knowledge of life. Now,
do you really suppose that Evangeline will keep up anything but showy accomplish-
ments? And even those she will only do superficially,—a little music, a little
drawing, rather more French because of the naughty books, which she reads
regularly, but never leaves lying about, for Evangeline is wise in her generation.
Yah, Simple Sincerity! Child of Light! Hot water, that’s what’s in store for
you here—perpetual hot water. You'll always be putting your foot in it.”

“You encourage me,” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” she answered.

Ill.

Havinc dressed me to her satisfaction, much as a nurse does a child without
consulting it, Adalesa made me a deep reverence, offered me her arm, and
conducted me downstairs in the most gentlemanly manner. She had quite taken
me under her wing by this time, and was prepared to pet and patronise me; but
somehow I did not resent her assumption of superiority, for her mind was more
mature than mine was, and I had to yield of necessity to-her force of character,
having no strength of my own at that time to oppose to it.

630 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

“ What a lovely old house!” I exclaimed, on our way to the drawing-room.

“Yes, it is like Uncle Henry,” she answered—“ big, solid, comfortable, strong,
warm, and good. He’s early English himself, and splendid. You'll see!”

He was alone in the drawing-room when we entered, in appearance a typical
English country gentleman of the best kind, standing on the hearthrug with his
back to the fireplace in the typical attitude. He received us both most kindly,
but with few words, contenting himself with looking from one to the other with a
benign smile on his face, as if he were sorting our separate attractions, comparing
and approving of us.

“That pig, Evangeline, has not been near us yet,” Adalesa giumbled. “It’s pretty
bad manners to me, but it’s downright rude to——”

The door opened as she spoke, and Evangeline herself, all in white tulle,
floated towards us, exclaiming: “So sorry. I was afraid you would think me
rude ”—she clasped her hands towards me with a little entreating gesture—“ but,
oh, pray don’t. I really Zave an excuse.”

“‘ Let’s hear what it is, then,” Adalesa answered bluntly.

“ My horse—I rode too far,” she commenced, stammering.

“That’s no excuse,” Adalesa interrupted.

“Dear, do excuse me,” Evangeline said to me; and when I found her so sweetly
apologetic I did excuse her at once, and, moreover, felt angry with Adalesa for
making such a scene, although the moment before, while under her exclusive
influence, I had agreed that Evangeline was rude. Now, however, with Evangeline
there to delight my eyes and soothe my senses with her gentleness and grace,
I could not believe anything of her that was not altogether lovely and adorable.

“You may say what you like,” Adalesa added; “but you have committed
a breach of hospitality, and for the honour of the family I take upon myself to
reprove you.”

“Thanks,” Evangeline said, smiling with unruffled sweetness.

Sir Henry sat down in an easy chair, fixed his eyes on some ferns in the
grate, and looked as if he had not heard; but when Adalesa went presently and
lounged on the arm of his chair, with her elbow on his shoulder, he took her
hand and caressed it gently.

Lady Marsh came into the room just then, smiling amiably as usual, and
dressed in an opulent manner. “ Adalesa, dear,” she said: “do move away.
You will make your uncle quite hot.”

Adalesa languidly complied, and Sir Henry leant back in his chair and looked
up at the ceiling. His silence struck me as significant. He seemed to be, either
by way of acquiescing in, or of utterly ignoring the sayings and doings of the ladies
of his family, a singularly indifferent or singularly neutral person ; and I wondered
if he always let Lady Marsh decide whether he was too hot or not, and that
sort of thing.

There were a few good pictures in the dining-room, and after dinner he showed

them to me, and told me anecdotes, also, about some family portraits that hung in
the hall, and some ancient armour. ‘The house was several centuries old, with a long,
unbroken family history, which was illustrated by most of its contents. ‘The old carved
cabinets, and everything else in the way of ornament, had their associations, and
even the furniture, some of it, had a history attached to it, to which I listened with an
honest interest that satisfied Sir Henry. Lady Marsh and Evangeline had remained
at table discussing the details of a dinner-dress they had seen somewhere ; but Adalesa

went with us, clinging to her uncle’s arm with both hands.
er ee a
“JT would have you observe that there are no meaningless feminine {ripperies here,

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1e

THE SERE, THE YELLOW LEAF. 631
she cried. “This has been the cradle of a sturdy race ; and it looks like it. I’m one
of the race,” she added, laughing up at her uncle.

“Dear child!” Lady Marsh exclaimed, coming out of the dining-room at that
moment, “don’t hang on your uncle so; you will tire him.” Then to me, in her
amiable way: “This is but a bare old place at present, but now that Evangeline is
old enough to take an interest in it, we must see what can be done.”

“Oh dear!” Adalesa groaned ; “if Aunt Marsh and Evangeline are to desecrate
the good old oak and ebony will be disguised in down cushions and dimity
no time.”

“ Dear, is that quite respectful ?” Lady Marsh exclaimed.

“No; nor would it be respectful for an alien to alter anything here,” Adaleas
rejoined doggedly.

it
it

-~

“‘He showed us miniatures,
arms, and ancient gems.”

“Tam afraid, dear, your uncle spoils you,” Lady Marsh said in her gentlest way,
and then swept on to the drawing-room, arm-in-arm with Evangeline. At the door she
looked back over her shoulder, and said to Sir Henry: “ Don’t make that child do
too much, dearest. She has had a journey, you know.”

“Which child?” he asked in an undertone, looking from one to the other, as
soon as the drawing-room door was shut.

“Neither,” Adalesa said, scornfully.

“Then take an arm each, my dears,” he rejoined, almost in a whisper, “and we'll
see what there is to be seen.”

From which I perceived that this benign-looking gentleman, seemingly so yielding,
was in reality a bold, bad man, capable of opposition, who had put himself in my
power ; and I slipped my hand through his arm, and smiled up at him confidently, just as

VoL. I.—No. 5. 42

632 THE PALI. MALL MAGAZINE.

Adalesa, on the other side, was doing. He beamed down upon us both, and led us
away to the library, where he lived as a rule when he was not out of doors; and
there he showed us miniatures, arms, and ancient gems of his ancestors, who seemed
to fill the great comfortable room as he talked about them, and to be nearer
to him than the wife and daughter, with their marvellous charms of manner, whose
tastes and interests were all.so modern, of the Society kind, so far removed, if
not so utterly opposed, to everything he cherished.

IV.

EVANGELINE had a sitting-room of her own, a sunny south room, and here we girls
were to work. We settled down to it next day, and during the morning Lady Marsh
looked in, “just to see how you are getting on, dears! And what are you doing?”
meaning me.

“ Mathematics,” I answered.

“Oh dear!” she exclaimed. ‘“ You must excuse me, dear child, but is it nice
for a young lady to study such a very masculine subject? A girl’s manner, you know,
should be so very different. ‘The woman’s sphere is to refine and elevate man.”

“ But do mathematics make one’s manners masculine?” I asked in alarm. I
was diffident in those days, as became my age, and the least shade of disapproval
made me unhappy.

“Well, they have not done so as yet in your case, dear child,” Lady Marsh
answered, with infinite tact. “ But still, you know, dear, they are not womanly
pursuits, You will not be fit for the duties of wife and mother by-and-by if you injure
your constitution now, I know your mother’s idea, but I cannot agree with her, and I
often tell her I am sure she would not now be the dear, sweet, zoman/y woman she is,
if she had been taught these new-fangled notions as a girl. I cannot think it is right
for young ladies to be educated like their brothers, and go to the university and all
that nonsense, getting such ideas! I don’t believe that a woman’s mind is inferior to
a man’s, you know—far from it ; and, in fact, in some things ”—she looked round and
lowered her voice—“ there can be no doubt as to which is the superior sex, only it
doesn’t do to say so, men make such remarks. But, as to professions for women,
and that sort of thing, why, fancy me a professional woman! Evangeline, dearest,
put your French away, that’s a good child, and get a story book. I am sure you
have done enough for to-day.”

When she had spoken she patted my shoulder kindly, smiled on us all, and left
the room,

* Now see what you have brought on yourself, with your mathematics !” Adalesa
exclaimed, her dark eyes dancing mischievously. ‘“ Aunt Marsh knew your mother’s
idea, and I believe she’s got you down here to cure you of it. That’s the sort of
kind thing she’s celebrated for. She suspected mathematics this morning, and came
in prepared.” ¢

Evangeline, who had risen with cheerful alacrity to put her books away, in obedience
to her mother’s suggestion, turned now from the bookshelf at which she was standing
dipping into a novel, and looked at Adalesa indignantly. “I don’t think it is nice of
you,” she said, “to speak like that about my mother. She must know better than
either you or I. Why, just think! You will own that we were intended to be healthy
and happy—that we require to be so in order to be equal to such duties as we have to
perform—and how can we be so if we go and injure ourselves with work we are not
fit for? It’s only common-sense, if you will think. Men were clearly intended to do

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THE SERE, THE YELLOW LEAF. 3
all the hard work, and keep us in comfort, and screen us from anything objectionable.
My ambition is to be a womanly woman. I think mamma is quite right.”

By this time I was feeling very uncomfortable. To be thought unwomanly seemed
to me as dreadful as to be thought wicked ; but yet I .felt there was something wrong
somewhere, for I could not see sex in a subject of study. Why should one be masculine
and another feminine ?

Evangeline had departed, and Adalesa was watching me with a grin on her intelligent
countenance. “There is no resisting a feather
bed, is there?” she asked. “Aunt Marsh is
on the war path, I think, this morning. -

She’ll go and order Uncle Henry’s
day till she’s feather-bedded

all the comfort out of it.

Let’s go and see!”

She jumped up, seized me
by the arm, and dragged me
away to the library, where we
found Sir Henry slowly pacing
up and down, deep _ in
thought. He looked from
one to the other of us almost
sadly when we entered, but
smiled indulgently at. Adalesa
when she dropped my arm
and, seizing his in_ her
energetic way, squeezed it
between both hands, and
then worked it up and down
like a pump handle, as_ if
she could get what she
wanted out of him so.

“Tell us about education,”
she demanded.

“ Ah — education,” he
answered. “Your aunt has
just been talking to me about
education. She thinks you
have been foolishly over
educated, and that has made
you rough ; and she fears for
this little lady here ”—mean-
ing me—“ che is anxious about —_ :
you, my dear. She has a “‘Adalesa seized his arm in her energetic way.”
great loving heart, and every
girl is her daughter. She wants you all to have a good time.” He used this last
expression apologetically.

“And so do you,” Adalesa exclaimed, on the defensive. She had dropped his
arm, and stood frowning intently, and biting one of her fingers between her words.
“But, isn’t it nonsense? Of course I’m rough. I’m rough on purpose. I’m rougher
here than anywhere. If I lived like Evangeline, in cotton wool, I should grow flabby ;
and she says it’s education! When she sees, too, that it hasn’t had that effect in this

634 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

other most notable case ”—looking at me. “‘iell me all over again about education,
Uncle Henry. I’m all ruffled. I want to know.”

Sir Henry began to walk up and down the room with his hands behind him.
“ What we learn is but a small- part of education,” he said, and it sounded as if he
were reflecting aloud. “It is what we think of things, not what we know of them—
our opinions—that affect our conduct. If you learn the multiplication table by heart,
and merely remember that you know it, the knowledge will have no consequence one
way or the other ; but if you are taught to think that because you know the multipli-
cation table you ought to be a very high-principled person, you'll find yourself
insensibly seeking to live up to that idea. If, however, on the other hand, you hear
continually that a knowledge of the multiplication table must be lowering in effect
upon the character—if it is insinuated that your taste will be corrupted by it and your
manners coarsened, until the notion that such a consequence is inevitable takes
possession of your mind in spite of yourself—then it is only too probable that that
will be the case.”

“Now, that is true!
of the fact.”

Sir Henry stopped a moment to look at us, and then resumed his walk. “ There’s
a great deal of cant rife just now ‘on the subject of women and their education,” he
observed, “ most of which, being summed up, amounts to a firm conviction that a
half-educated girl, a creature who has learnt to live for the pleasure of the moment,
to love for the joy of loving, and to'marry in order to secure as many of the good
things of this world as she can, is in every way a suitable and congenial companion
for an educated man, and an admirable specimen of the ‘woman’s-sphere-is-home’
woman. <A toy—that’s what the creature is, an unreasonable and illogical toy, neither
reason nor logic having entered into the curriculum of that kind of ‘womanly woman,’
it having been supposed that a large establishment is most admirably managed by a
mistress whose reasoning powers have never been cultivated, and a young family best
brought up on the superstitious practices solemnly confided in mysterious whispers by
Mrs. Gamp ;

The windows stood wide open, and Lady Marsh looked in at one of them.
“ Dearest children!” she cried, “don’t you see how fine it is? You ought to be out.
Adalesa, what are you worrying your uncle about? I am sure he doesn’t want you
here at this time of day.”

” Adalesa exclaimed, “and here are we two in evidence

V.

In the afternoon I went out for a ride with Adalesa. Evangeline would not
accompany us. She had a packet of sweets in her pocket, and was deep in an
entrancing novel by that time, from which she could not be induced to separate
herself for the rest of the day, and on the next she had a bad headache. “ Which just
shows,” her mother protested, with gentle emphasis, “ how very necessary it is to
supervise a young girl’s studies, and what it would be if the dear child were being
brought up, as too many young ladies are nowadays, alas! learning quite masculine
matters: it is really dreadful !”

Adalesa looked older and better in her riding dress than I had yet seen her, and
perhaps some consciousness of this had its effect upon her manner. So far, while
looking like a child, she had talked like a cynical worldly woman ; but now, as she
took her horse skilfully down a difficult rutty lane, her face fanned by the balmy
country air, heavy with odours of full-blown flowers, and at the same time freshened

THE SERE, THE YELLOW LEAF.

by the near neighbourhood of the sea, there came a far-away look into the girl’s eyes,
an expression of yearning tenderness which culminated, as seemed most natural, in a
long-drawn sigh.

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The lane we rode in was a steep by-way—a short cut to the shore, she said—only
just wide enough for our two horses abreast, and so uneven that we had to look well
to their feet. On either hand green banks, bedecked with foxglove and harebell, rose
high above us and before us, making the winding way look like a cu/ de sac, and

636 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

shutting out all view save that of the sky above us, a radiant strip of sky, intensely
blue—blue like a dark sapphire, and full of colour, which contrasted well with the
opaque blue-green of a belt of firs that crowned the summit of the bank and held
their heavy plumes up motionless against the brightness. The air was so still that
inanimate nature scarcely seemed to breathe ; but all about us a myriad atoms of life
buzzed, and chirped, and fluttered, rejoicing to be, making the most of their moment,
and claiming a kinship with us in inarticulate murmurs, quite untranslatable, and yet
becoming curiously comprehensible to some sense the longer we lingered to listen
to them. The horses glanced hither and thither with big sagacious eyes, flipping a
long ear swiftly towards each separate sound—now to the croak of a yellow frog in the
grass, and now to the cheep of a nestling up on a branch, the bleat of an unseen
sheep in the meadow above to its lamb, the low of a cow to her calf; seemingly
anxious to understand, nervously glad to know; gathering the import of everything
with an intelligence beyond ours, perhaps, that made them more one with the teeming
beings about us than we were.

But after that sigh Adalesa burst into the midst of my meditation abruptly.

“ Did you ever feel a glow in your chest, and have little warm shivers run down
your backbone, and all the time keep smiling?” she demanded.

“ No, never,” I answered decidedly.

“ Ah! then you have never been in love,” she observed in a disappointed tone.

thought, perhaps, with those eyes,—and you’re not so plump either.”

“T don’t see the connection.”

* Why—don’t you know? Oh, I think when girls are plump, like Evangeline,
it is because they haven’t felt much. Now, I’m skinny because I have a burning
fiery furnace within that consimes me. So many things—interests, passions,
affections,—-I don’t know what all! are fuel to my fire; it never goes out.”

“But love——?” I said, shy of the subject, yet aglow ona sudden with natuial
girlish curiosity about it, newly inspired; for the moment she mentioned love I
knew what was in the air.

She laughed, whipped up her horse, and rode on ahead recklessly.

When I overtook her we were in the open country, on a hard high road,
with a long level of fields on either hand, and not a glimpse of the sea.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Oh, I had forgotten,” she answered apologetically. “I was leading you
away in the wrong direction. I’m sorry—I was thinking. I was thinking of him!”
and she flipped at the hedge with her whip, and laughed in a shamefaced way.

“Of whom ?” I asked.

“Of my man,” she replied. “Oh, you’re obtuse! Don’t you gather? I’m
in love. Sometimes I’m sick with love—love-sick. But you don’t know what
that is, and you’re a little shocked!” She looked at me keenly. “You think
I am committing a breach of decorum. So it would be, perhaps, for most girls ;
but, don’t you see—with me—oh, you must let it be different with me!”

The high road was taking us towards a belt of wood now, above which the
chimneys of the great house appeared, smoking cheerfully.

“Why, we're going back!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, a little way,” she answered. “I’m sorry. I took the wrong turn. We
should have gone to the left through the wood, instead of to the right, down
that lane. But here we are. I’d better lead the way. Look out for your hat
under the branches ! ”

The high road ran through the wood at this point, and was bordered on
either side by trees, which looked like a forest of slender masts, canopied and

THE SERE, THE YELLOW LEAF. 637

curtained with greenery, through which the sunlight filtered in shining shafts,
making mystical pathways of dazzling brightness, beyond which the tender
gloom beneath the branches deepened perceptibly. Adalesa had turned off under
the trees, taking a diagonal course confidently, although there was no track that
I could see; but I followed her, now in sunshine and now in shadow, winding
in and out about the tree-stems, watchfully, like a princess in a land of weird
enchantment, who goes, with wide-open, wistful eyes, seeking to see deep into
the verdant shadows, in timidly glad anticipation of something to come that
would satisfy the hunger at her heart, that strange importunate ache.

Branches broken by last year’s storms crackled beneath our horses’ feet, or
their hoofs sank deep in delicious moss. Rabbits ran at our approach, and the
shrill cry or clumsy flight of a startled pheasant sounded oddly insulting, as if
uttered to injure the charmed silence. And here again there was life—superabundant,
palpitating, generous—a joyous riot, in which we were asked to join by every little
living thing that spoke. At first, in the wood, the soothing susurrus of leaves,
stirred by light airs, sounded incessantly, a sort of softly whispering sound, all-
pervading yet unobtrusive, not the main melody, but a manifold accompaniment.
Presently, however, we were seized upon by a mightier voice, muffled at first
and murmurous, but growing in distinctness and volume as we advanced; and
at the same time we ceased to see sunshafts and shadows through the wood;
the green depths disappeared; and now between the trees there sparkled into
view the yellow sands and the seas We had come out upon the shore, and both
involuntarily drew rein.

“Yes,” Adalesa resumed, as if there had been no break, “you must let it
be different with me. I take everything so severely—measles, whooping cough,
mumps, scarlatina—all infantile diseases. Each in its turn has threatened to kill
me, and now comes this new fever—love. I had to tell Evangeline even. I
should have died if I hadn’t said something to some one. But now I am sorry.
I wish you had come sooner, Simple Sincerity: you are another sort. If only I
hadn't told Evangeline that we are engaged !”

“Engaged!” I exclaimed. “ Secretly ?”

“ Yes : isn’t it dreadful ?” she answered, laughing at my horror. ‘“ But it happened
in this way. I was staying with his people, and he and I were always together
because we were the only young pair on the premises ; and at last—oh, the usual
thing, you know! And I wanted to tell Uncle Henry, but he seemed to dislike
the idea. My father and mother are in India, you know—that is why I am
here; and Percy said, weren’t they the proper people to be first informed? They
are on their way home by this time, I believe, round the Cape—oh the weary time
of waiting! months! And I hate to keep Uncle Henry in the dark. I always
tell him everything. But then of course there is Aunt Marsh. If I told him he would
make me tell her, and then we should have the affair confided to the whole county
in solemn confidence. At least,” she corrected herself emphatically, “Z don’t
believe he would tell her; he’s too good altogether; and besides, I’ve told him
lots of other things, but I can’t make Percy understand, and he says, too, that
his knowing would put the affair on quite a different footing—whatever he may
mean by that. I hate concealment myself; but perhaps he has finer feelings
than I have, for he says something about this being altogether sacred to ourselves—
not an ordinary concealment. It sounds all right as he puts it; but I am sadly
afraid I don’t feel about it quite what he does, because I want to tell. I must
talk. My joy bubbles up and bursts out so that I cannot contain it. There’s
a singing at my heart I can’t quite smother; if ‘only Uncle Henry suspected, he

638 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

would hear it and question me, and then I should be glad indeed—satisfied.
Now at times it is only a kind of half glad. However, are you relieved? Iam not
so sly as you suspected, perhaps.”

“T should never have thought you sly,” I declared.

“ Well, reckless then,” she replied, “as when I told Evangeline. That was an
instance of a bubbling up and a bursting out. If I had had Uncle Henry to talk to—
but there! Yet I know Evangeline is not to be trusted, for all her promises.”

“Oh, surely she will not betray you if she promised!” I exclaimed, shocked by
the accusation.

For a moment the cynical expression returned to Adalesa’s face.

“Tt just depends upon what will suit her own convenience,” she answered, with
her usual downright directness.

The horses, tired of standing, sniffed the salt air, tossed their heads, and
pawed impatiently.

“We'll let them go for a gallop in a minute,” she said; “ but first, just look at the
sea, and listen to it. ‘That inarticulate murmur is full of meaning to me now; and so
it is with the sough of the breezes in the branches and the rustle of leaves. Since he
came into my life I have awakened to full consciousness of a curious kinship with all
things, animate and inanimate. ‘The gladness in me, the singing in my heart, is all a
part of some great whole, some universal plan, something I 2xow, but can’t express,
But wait !—wait till you know it too!”

She had looked down at the sand as she spoke, frowning intently in the effort to
put what she felt into human speech; and her horse, as if waiting upon her words,
ceased for the moment to be restive ; the very sea-voice seemed suspended, and the
scene itself—sandhills, and shore, and grey-white, green-crowned cliffs, curving arm-
like about the bay, passed from my consciousness. I saw and heard her alone

till she stopped ; then the waves rang out their merry murmur, the cliffs whitened into
view in the sunshine, the breeze sang in my ears, the open space invited, and our
horses, with one accord, as though they felt our own fine impulse to fly, to be free,
plunged out from amongst the heavy, dry drifts, on to the smooth, hard sand, and
carried us off at a gallop into another world.

VI,

EVANGELINE came to my room late that night. We had not had an houi’s talk together
since my arrival. ‘The moon was near the full, and she found me with my window
wide open, luxuriating in the sense of stillness, which is peculiar to the exquisite,
shadowy, silent night.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, with a little shiver. ‘“Won’t you take cold? Isn’t that
mist down there on the meadows? and aren’t the trees black? It is all so
comfortless

I shut the window.

“Ah, that’s better!” Evangeline pursued, as she curled herself up in an easy
chair. “I love lays of the moon, and the sapphire solitudes one reads about ; but the
real thing falls far short of the description. I believe those rhapsodies are written in
bed at night, with the curtains drawn, and a big fire blazing. At all events, that’s the
best way to read them. One forgets then, as the poet seems to have forgotten, all
the unpleasant details—that it is chilly out in the merry moonlight ; fatiguing to linger
or loiter long, though it sounds so nice; and too damp to sit, couch, or recline on
anything growing or blowing. I love poetry, but preserve me from having to live it!

THE SERE, THE YELLOW LEAF. 639

Cushions and comfort are my delight, ease is my ambition, and all things ordered
to please me by some competent person as long as I live, my one desire !”

She cooed all this so prettily that I began to draw an invidious comparison
between the sound of her words and of Adalesa’s. The sense did not impress me.
The gentleness of her manner, the sweetness of her voice, and the charm of her
appearance disarmed criticism. One felt at rest in her presence ; one did not think.

She left the easy chair, and came and sat down beside me. “ Pet me,” she said,
putting her arms round me. “TI don't seem to have seen you at all since you came;
and oh, I have such lots of things
I want to talk to you about.

How pretty your neck is !—just
like a baby’s. I must kiss it!
I could eat you, I think, you're
so sweet! But you’re not very
responsive, I must say! I believe
you like Adalesa best. Tell me,
do you? I should be so
miserable if I thought you did.
But what do you think of her ?”

“T think her delightful.”

“So she is,” Evangeline
answered, returning to her chair.

“But isn’t it rather a pity, when

she’s so nice, that she shouldn’t

be perfect? She does say and

do such outrageous things. She
has gone and engaged herself
secretly.” This breach of confi-
dence slipped out so easily and

so naturally that I should have
hesitated at the moment to apply

any harsh epithet to it. “ Yes,”

she pursued ; “I met the man in
London afterwards, and now he

has become quite an ally of mine.
When he found I knew all about *
the affair, he said he was glad, and
would like to discuss it with me.
You do believe, don’t you, that men
and women can have Platonic friend-
ships? I think it so cynical for people
not to believe in disinterestedness. He says he loves to talk to me; and of course
there can be no harm when it is all about another girl. What do you think ?”

“JT think I am inclined to be sorry for the other girl.”

“ Oh, now that is not nice of you!” she said reproachfully.

“Well, the things that are said about the kind of man who spends all his time
with one girl in order to talk about another, are not nice either.”

“Oh, but I’m sure you would never judge a man by the unkind things people
say!” She said this so earnestly, so caressingly, she made me feel mean. “ And,
besides,” she went on gravely, “I don’t think he is quite satisfied, somehow. It is
not that he says anything, you know, only he makes me fancy—and I think it just as

. a
“She came and sat cown beside me.”

640 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

well that the engagement was not announced. If there is any change—if nothing
comes of it, you know, nothing can be said. I only tell you about it in confidence,
because I know you are safe, and I did so want to consult some one. You see, he
confided in me, and asked my advice, and I feel it is such a responsibility. But
perhaps Adalesa told you herself. I thought she might, as you get on so well——”
She stopped here, and looked at me expectantly, but as I only replied with a steady
stare, she demanded, point-blank: “ Did she ?”

“ How can you ask ?” I answered without emphasis, so as not to betray my friend ;
and I saw that she was baffled, but she did not like to repeat the question.

SARAH GRAND.

(70 be continued.)

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RUSSIAN JEWRY.
SCENES OF HOME LIFE IN POLAND AND THE PALE.

ENGLISH VIEW OF THE PERSECUTION.

N England. there appears to be only one view of the persecution of
the Jew in Russia: that it is a purely religious persecution.

“It is scarcely needful for me to say,” writes Mr. Herbert
Spencer, “that I condemn in the strongest manner all religious
persecutions, be it of Jews or any sect of Christians or adherents
to other creeds. An utter reprobation of the course pursued by
Russia in this matter is a necessary corollary from the views I am
known to hold.”

“So far as the Jews are concerned,” says Mr. Huxley, “I do
not find it alleged that they are other than industrious, thrifty,
sober people, devoid of any political by-ends.”

“JT am not well,” wrote Mr. Spurgeon at the end of 1891; “but if I had all
the health and strength that could fall to the lot of man, I should be quite unable to
express my feelings when I read of Russian intolerance towards Jews and Dissenters.
That this conduct should be sanctioned by a Church bearing the name of Christian
or Orthodox is as sad as it is strange. The genius of the religion of Jesus is love,
not oppression. Surely there must be thousands of Greek churchmen to whom the
persecution of other religionists must be shocking.”

Mr. Gladstone “hopes that a full and fair exposition of the facts, deplorable as
they are, with respect to the Jews in Russia, may gradually form a public opinion
favourable to humanity and justice.”

THE Russian VIEw.

Such, then (as seen in the zealous pages of Darkest Russia), is the English view of
the Jewish question in Russia—a view which takes account of the religious aspect only.
But the Russian view is a very different thing. It may be summarised as follows :—

1. A religious question.

2. A national question.

3. An economic question.

Of these nine-tenths are economic, and no more than one-tenth is national and
religious. The grievance of the Russian against the Jew—never yet stated in

641 E

THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

England with any precision or fulness—would appear to be capable of classification

under six heads :—

1. That he is a voluntary alien—a Jew, not a Russian—separating himself by dress
and custom from the people among whom he lives.

2. That his personal character is revolting; that he is dirty, heartless, and
impure.

3. That his religious character is hypocritical ; that he uses his religion to hood-
wink his God, and to deceive his sovereign.

4. That he is grossly ignorant and fanatical, and has both resisted and misused all
efforts to educate him.

5. That he is a bad soldier ; that he flies from military service ; and that he joins
himself to the Nihilists and other enemies of the Government.

6. That, above all, he is an immoral trader, a cheat, a base usurer, a friend of the
drink traffic, and that he has one morade for his dealings with his Jewish brethren and
another for his dealings with Christians.

THE RussIAN PEOPLE AND ENGLISH OPINION.

It is time we considered the Russo-Jewish question from the Russian standpoint.
We have dealt with it from the English point of view again and again, awakening
much moral indignation at home, but doing no good abroad. If we are to help to
form a public opinion in Russia that shall be “favourable to humanity and justice,”
we must begin by showing the Russians that we understand them, that we know the
history of their relations with the Jews who live in their midst, that we sympathise
with their motives where they are just and right, and only reprobate them where selfish
and cruel and mistaken. ‘Thus far, I fear, we have done nothing of that kind. With
the best impulses of humanity we have denounced the Russian people and their
methods of government, knowing both imperfectly. That has sometimes aroused
their wrath, and often provoked their ridicule.

I chanced to be in Russia when Mr. Herbert Spencer’s letter was first published,
and I shall not easily forget the howl of derision with which it was received. It
seemed to the Russians that the best men in England were finding no _ better
occupation than that of setting up their own Russian nine-pins merely for the
satisfaction of knocking them down. Mr. Gladstone’s “humanity and _ justice,”
Mr. Huxley’s “industrious, thrifty, sober people, devoid of political by-ends,”
Mr. Spurgeon’s “Greek churchmen,” to whom the doings of the Greek Church
“must be shocking,” and Mr. Spencer’s “ religious persecutions,” were all phantoms
of the air at which Englishmen might fire away until the crack’ of doom without
ever touching a reality which kept very close to the ground.

The Russians were not wholly wrong. Our English view of the Russo-Jewish
question has been partial and imperfect. This is not to say that the English public
has been misled. Still less is it to say that the American public has been so. If
there has been any misleading, the people of England and of America have misled
themselves. The noble and generous juices of the most unselfish race on earth
are more easily touched to pity and to indignation by the sight of oppression for
conscience’ sake than by the spectacle of suffering arising out of political or economical
differences. What wonder if for once the two nations, whose freedom is the freest
in the world, have troubled themselves to learn no more than that an ancient people
has been persecuted because it worships Jehovah only and not Christ as well!

But the truth is the whole truth, and the whole truth is the mightiest ally of the
wronged and the down-trodden. In the conviction that the strong case for the

RUSSIAN JEWRY. 643

Russian Jew is strongest in the light of Russian fact, Russian history, and Russian
opinion, I could wish to traverse the Russian impeachment point by point, and try to
show where the Russians are right and deserve our sympathy (as well as the sympathy

of all right-minded and enlightened Jews), and where they are wrong and their argument
is their reproach.

THE JEWISH CHARACTER.

No estimate of the conduct and fate of the Russian Jews would be right that
did not begin by taking account of the character of the Jewish people. They are
a hot-hearted race and not always a cool-headed one ; they are fanatical; they are
liable to extremes ; they are imitative, and they are responsive. This character-chart
may be questioned in part by those who know the Jews in one relation only, the
relation of business ; but it will be sanctioned by everybody who has seen them
under many conditions, in many lands and many Ghettos. The strange paradox which
pursues them in all external ways of life, in fortune, in fate, in history, in literature
(making them at the same time the masters of the world and its despised servants),
follows them into their own inmost characters. They are a nation without a country,
a Church without a Jerusalem ; they hold together throughout the ages in the teeth
of everything that is calculated to disperse them ; they observe their Sabbaths in spite
of commerce, and their habits in the face of progress; and yet they are, man with
man, more under the influence of their surroundings than any race that ever lived
in the world. If the Jew in Russia is not a Russian, he is most certainly a Russianised
Jew. The Jew cannot help but take his colour from the qualities of the people among
whom he lives. This is a fact that should never be forgotten. It is so in England,
in America, in France, in Germany, and it is even so in Morocco and in Palestine.
The Jews of Russia are a subdued race with the faults of a subdued race. They are
treated as dogs and cheats, and what wonder if they are developing or acquiring the
vices of doz3s and cheats? Persecution always lowers the
moral tone of a people, and the Russian Christians may be
right when they say that the mora/e of the Russian Jew is
going down headlong. Only a race of heroes could have
withstood the demoralising effect of the persecution which
has been going on since 1882, and heroes are not brought
forth in a whole race at a time. Every nation gets the Jews
it deserves because it has made them what it deserves to
find them.

THE Jews As ALIENS.

Perhaps the first thing that strikes the eye of the
traveller on approaching the frontier of Russia from the
countries of Northern Europe is the costume and general
appearance of the Jews. These are Polish Jews, for the
most part a feeble, sickly, pallid, and often puny
race. There are faces of all Jewish types among
them, from the noblest to the basest; but the
most common is long and thin, with more than the
ordinary proportion of aquiline nose, and with a shifty
expression in the egg-shaped eyes. The effect of this
countenance is intensified in its unpleasantness by a long
“candle” curl worn in front of each ear, and often descending “PW to the
level of the chin. These curls are called the “peies.” The dress of the Polish Jew

644 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

seems to consist of just two garments and a pair of elastic-side boots. They wear a
long kaftan, usually of black cloth, but often of black silk, and sometimes of alpaca,
cut on a model that is a compromise between the simple gabardine of the East

*

and the tailed and collared frock-coat of the West. Their hat is a peaked cap

like that of an English yachtsman, but higher in its sides, and always “ concertinaed”

to its utmost elevation in the front, and depressed to its greatest level at the back,
Now, this costume serves the Russian as a visible sign that the Jew is a voluntary

RUSSIAN JEWRY. 645

alien who keeps and guards his peculiarities as no one else does except the gipsy.
Certainly you may distinguish it from the costume of the ordinary Pole or Russian
of any class at a distance of five hundred yards. Undoubtedly it cuts off the Jew
from the people about him, reminding both that there is a difference of race between
them. It is at once a little matter and a very great concern.

One day I was walking with a Jewish friend from the west in a Jewish cemetery
in Galicia, waiting for a funeral of which I was anxious to see the Eastern rites. We
were whiling away the time by looking at the inscriptions, and they were nearly
all in the Hebrew language, and in the form of acrostics. Presently we came upon
a stone which, besides being inscribed in the usual way, was scribbled over with
a thousand pencillings on its flat face, and stuck full of little pellets of white paper
in its carved places. It was the grave of some Doctor of the Talmud, and the
pencillings and the pellets were the names of sick and dying people written on
the tomb by sorrowing friends in the hope that God would spare the lives of their
dear ones for sake of the good man who lay below. While we stood looking, a
Jewish boy came up. He wore kaftan and cap, but no elastic-side boots, and he had
the roguish face of a goat.

“That was my old schoolmaster,” he said, and he slapped the stone with the
familiar and affectionate slap which the gravedigger gives to the skull of Yorick.
And then he laughed and chuckled and crowed, as if with the memory of tricks
played on the good old man; or perhaps with the thought of spankings administered
by him whereof the smart and sting were gone.

“Well,” said my Jewish friend, “can you read his acrostic ?”

The goat face lengthened and the lips pursed out. No, he could not. He
knew enough holy language to follow the prayers in schu/e, but that was the end
of his Hebrew.

“Then listen to this,” said my companion, and he read the schoolmaster’s in-
scription aloud.

The goat face became very grave, and then took a look of bewilderment. Slowly
the boy’s eyes gazed at my friend’s barbered hair, and traversed his garments from
head to foot. Here was a mystery. A man come from goodness-knows-what region
who could read holy language and yet wore no peies, and was dressed like the
common gojim in a tweed suit of jacket and trousers!

The amazement of that Jewish boy in a Galician cemetery is the straw that tells
how the wind blows. For the Polish Jew, the accidental things of kaftan and peies
are wrapped up with the fundamental things of custom and religion. He knows they
cut him off from his Christian neighbours, but they are a part of all that is sacred to
him, and therefore he clings to them. Little and foolish as the whole matter may be,
the costume and the curl of the Russian Jew have played their part in the Russo-
Jewish question. Let me tell their story.

STORY OF THE KAFTAN AND PEIES.

The costume was not Jewish in its origin, and, so far as I am aware, it has nothing
to do with Jewish faith. I understand that it was originally the Polish peasant costume,
and was imitated from the Poles. But towards the end of the last century it had
become the distinctive costume of the Jewish people. When in 1792 Catherine
annexed Poland, her first intention was to leave the laws and customs of the Jews as
she found them. The Jews under Catherine were allowed to live wherever they liked,
and to dress as they pleased. Then came Alexander I., and he left things as they

646 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

were, except that he limited the Jews to the towns. The Church was tolerant in his
day,—it would be nearer the truth to say indifferent, for Russia, like France, was
under the influence of Voltaire and Diderot, and at a time when popular preachers in
both countries had dropped the name of Christ in their sermons and spoke only of the
“legislator of the Christians,” it was not worth while to trouble about the fashions of
an insignificant people who merely wore their hair and their coats a few inches longer
than their neighbours.

But in 1825 came Nicholas, and his first thought was to make his people one. No
longer were they to be merely Jews and Christians. They were first of all to be
Russians and good subjects of the Czar. There were to be no outward distinctions.
So the Jews were ordered to abandon their national costume.

. It was a good idea (good from the point of an absolute monarch), but it was
cruelly carried out. Nicholas was a fiery and impetuous soul, whose intentions
were nearly always good and whose methods were nearly always brutal. He wished
to do everything in a hurry, and in this matter of the costume of the Jews he was true
to his infirmity of over-haste. Nevertheless he punished some of his own officials who
carried out his wishes too brutally. The kaftan was sometimes stripped off the backs
of the Jews in the open streets, and their curls were often cut in public. The Jews
were terrified at such meddling with their national costume, and thought it the
forerunner of religious attacks.

Then came Alexander II., and he introduced measures of toleration. His aim also
was to make of the Jews good Russian subjects, who should be distinguished from the
Christians by their beliefs alone. But his methods were humane. He once said to a
member of his Privy Council that the Jewish question in Russia was to be solved by
the same means as in England and France. There were two periods in his dealings
with the Jews. The first period, a liberal period, began with his accession in 1856,
and ended in 1872; the second period, a reactionary period, began in 1872 and ended
with his death. He was perhaps the warmest friend, and at the same time (though
unwittingly), the deadliest foe of the Jew that ever sat on the Russian throne. He
began by permitting the Jewish people to wear the kaftan and peies, though the law
against these things was allowed to remain. Then the external distinction of Jew from
Christian became again more marked. But year by year the difference disappeared
by voluntary action of the Jews. At present the old law of Nicholas is practically
inoperative, yet in South Russia the peies is no more to be seen, and the kaftan is
becoming rare. Indeed, you may recognise the Polish Jew in the southern provinces
by those marks alone. The greater part of the Jews in Russia.are now reconciled to
the shortening of their coats and the cutting of their hair. They see that the kaftan
does not constitute the Jew, and that the absence of peies does not make the Christian.
But the Polish Jew has not yet advanced so far.

We who live in an entirely free country can think of no proper limitations of
costume except the limitations of decency—that a man shall not wear the garments
of a woman, or a woman the garments of a man. But where from political reasons, as
in Russia, or from religious reasons, as in Morocco, a distinctive manner of dress
makes a man an alien, who parades and proclaims his foreign nationality as loudly as
the town-crier in the streets, it constitutes an offence, and almost an outrage, and ought
to be put away. I say this reluctantly, for as an observer of life I should be sorry
to miss the variety which the Jewish costume gives. The average “ Pollack,” the
uncultured Polish Jew, can badly spare the one thing that makes him worth a second
glance. Poverty and oppression have already crushed out of his poor featureless
body nearly all sense of the picturesque.

RUSSIAN JEWRY. 647

THE JEW AND HIS COUNTRY.

As to the deeper matter of the alien spirit that is said by the Russians to
lie beneath the foreign dress, I would say emphatically that I have never seen it, and
I do not believe that it exists. The Russian Christian will tell you that while in
Germany, in England, in France, and in America the Jew is sometimes truly
outraged when you speak of him as a foreigner, in Russia such indignation is never
felt. I believe in my heart that this is a mistake. ‘The Russian Jew loves Russia and
is sorry to leave it. In the way of a grown-up child he is proud of it,—proud of
it as an Empire, that it is big and great, and a terror throughout Europe. There
is nothing more curious, perplexing, amusing, and even pathetic, than this love
of Russia in the poor miserable creature who has been kicked out of it. You
hear his story of official corruption and tyranny, of expulsion and privation on the way,
and your teeth gnash together, and you say, “If this is true of Russia, if it is
not a wicked subterfuge and a lie, how does God suffer such a country to exist?”
But the Jew does not share your anger. It is not Russia that he hates, because
it has wronged him, or the Czar because he is the enemy of the Jewish people ;
least of all ‘is it his Christian neighbours because they have badgered him ;—it is
only the Inspector General whom he could not conciliate, the “Antonoviches” whom
he could not bribe, the “ Tchitchikoffs” who could buy him up, bag and baggage,
body and soul.

On the frontier of Russia, within a mile of a frontier station, in clear sight of its
yellow-and-black posts and its soldiers on guard, an old Jewish woman who had just
crossed by help of a bcrrowed passport was brought up to me that I might hear her
story. The poor creature mistook me for a Russian officer sent to arrest her. She
trembled and wept, hastened to excuse herself, then tried to steal away, and when
escape seemed hopeless, she flung herself at my feet and prayed of me not to send
her back to Russia. It was a terrible scene while it lasted, and it lasted too long, for I
knew little or nothing of her language and could not reassure her instantly. * This was
my first experience of Russia, and I was appalled. What a country it must be from
which poor helpless women had to fly in terror such as this! All the world says
that the Czar himself is a good and noble man. Does he hear the cry of his people?
If he does not, then why has he created a thing that stifles that cry, a thing that buries
it as in a sepulchre and rolls over it the stone? Let evil men and tyrants shut
themselves up from the voice of their subjects, but for the good father of his people
there should be no sound more sweet.

Such were my feelings while that poor subject of the great Czar grovelled before
me, but I had imperfectly understood both her and her country. She was in fear
of being sent back home, but that was not because she hated Russia. She had been
born in it, and her people lay buried there. But she was going to rejoin her two sons,
one of them a discharged Russian soldier who had been expelled. Thus her emotion
was only a struggle between love of country and love of kin, wherein blood was
thicker than water. And this is the case with half the Jewish women who leave
Russia for the Argentine.

THE Hope or ISRAEL.

There is a sense in which the poorer Jew is not at home in Russia, but that is only
the sense in which he is not at home in Europe. Always before him there is the
dream of a day and a land to come, the day and the land of his restoration to the
place and power of his fathers. Prosperity may help him to put by the thought of it,

VoL. I.—No. 5. 43

648 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

culture may tempt him to deride the chance of it, but poverty and persecution keep it
fresh in his memory. If there is any difference between the patriotism of the English
Jew and the patriotism of the Russian Jew, that is the only ground of it. The English
Jew is rich and happy, or, at least, /vee, and he may be content to put by the haunting
thought of the glories that his race has known; but the Russian Jew is poor and
oppressed, and he cannot help. but dream his dreams of a time foretold when he shall

A Jewish Funeral.

be poor and oppressed no more. He may see no light before him, but his hope lives
on. His fathers have lived as he is living, but still he waits and trusts ; his comrades
are melting like wax under persecution, but nevertheless he will not despair. He
is like the convict doomed to imprisonment for life, yet looking for his release after
twenty, thirty, even forty years. He is sure that his time will come. He may be an
old man then, fifty, sixty, even seventy, but he will be still young. “TI shall live to see
it yet,” he thinks. Palestine is before him ; after all, he is a stranger in Russia. This
is the only sense in which the Russian Jew is an alien,

RUSSIAN JEWRY. 649

THE LAND OF THE RusSIAN JEw.

To know the personal character ‘of the Russian Jew it is necessary to see him at
home. This is a course attended by difficulty, and even some danger. ‘The next best
thing is to see him in the frontier towns and villages of Austrian Galicia, where he is
exactly the same man under a more liberal government, and therefore betrays more
freely his racial qualities. It was there (though I saw the Jew in Russia also) that I
made my own acquaintance with his character and ways of life.

The region to which the Russian Jew is confined, the Pale of Jewish settlement,
wherein alone, since the time of Catherine, he has had a legal right of residence, is
a district of about 800 miles long by 400 miles broad, stretching from the shores
of the Baltic on the north to the shores of the Black Sea on the south, and from
the eastern margin of Poltava to the western line of Podolia. But this large tract
is not all free to the Jew. ‘There is a Pale within the Pale. The Jew may not live
within fifty versts (about thirty-five miles) of the Russian frontier of Austria. He
may not live in a village, meaning by that a locality of indefinite size, ranging
downward from a thousand or five hundred inhabitants. Also, he may not live
in the holy city of Kief. Thus there are left to him about three towns with an
ordinary population of upwards of 100,000 people ; about four of upwards of 50,000 ;
about fifteen of upwards of 20,000; about fifty of 1o,ooo; about a hundred of
5000, and a vast number of .2000 or less. If these towns were occupied by the
Russian Jews exclusively there would be shelter and perhaps livelihood for about
three and a-half millions of their number. But there are nearly six millions of Russian
Jews, and if the law were strictly enforced (which it is not, never has been, never
will be, and never can be) there would be neither bed nor board for at least a million
and a half of the Jewish subjects of the Czar, who might as properly be shot down
and pitched into the sea as subjected to the full rigour of enactments which were
intended to fit the conditions, not of to-day, but of nearly a hundred years ago.

GALICIA AND THE PALE.

The Pale is not a region enriched by nature. Having seen something of the
world, I should say, without much fear, that there is hardly in all the earth a land
less favoured of God. From the point of the picturesque it is flat and featureless.
Swampy and ague-stricken plain, stretching for miles on miles, unbroken by trees
or hedges. Roads like canals dissect it; black in the south (where black loam lies),
light in the north. Rivers without banks fray off into ponds and broads and marshes.
Fields in formal stripes, like the patches of a patchwork quilt. -At long distances,
villages of log-houses, each with the cemetery within stone walls a little apart, and
the wooden cross, like a gibbet (generally leaning to the wind), at a space beyond. In
summer, green with the grass, and yellow with the crops, and red and crimson with
the poppy, the geranium, and the hollyhock ; but always drowsy with hot haze
and a palpitating vapour that rises up before the sun. In winter, white with snow
and grey with frozen water, which goes on and on like the surface of an unbroken sea.

Such is the steppe, the country of Galicia, Volhynia, and Podolia—a weary
waste, not so dead as the beds of lava in Iceland, for at least the birds sing and
the bees hum in it; but more disheartening, more sickening, and almost more
tempting to the blasphemy that this is a place where God is not. The true child
of the open air can see beauty wheresoever the sun shines and the green blade
grows ; he can find joy in all seasons, for every day has its own delight. But
oh the oppression of those marshy plains !—unlike the desert, for they touch your
imagination with no visions and no sense of awe; unlike the sea, for they fill your

650 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

inner eye with no pictures of a giant asleep; but like both when known too long
at a time, and your heart hungers for the sight of a mountain, and your blood rushes
to it at the first glimpse of something that has come at last between you and the
dominating and everlasting sky.

THE TOWNS OF THE PALE.

If it is little that God has done to cheer the spirits and brighten the minds of His
poor people in the Pale, that which man has done is nothing, or worse than nothing.
It must be partly the fault of the Jew himself that an entirely Jewish town is often
a disgustingly ugly, foul, and filthy place. If I had found the habitations of the
Jew only thus in the Ghettos of Russia, I should be tempted to lay the blame to
the account of his masters. But in the Ghettos of Galicia, where the Jews are not
always poor, and in the mellahs of Morocco, where they are frequently rich, I saw
uncleanness greater than anything of the kind round about. Let us not blink the
manifest fact—the poor and ignorant Jew is not a cleanly person, whether he lives
in the streets of Berdechief or in the slums of Whitechapel. His quarter is often
the most squalid and abject in the town—-squalid with a squalor and abject with
an abjectness which have little or nothing to do with his poverty. In many districts
of Russia, however, he does not suffer by comparison with his neighbours. Neither in
his home nor his person can any soapless son of Adam be dirtier than the average
Russian moujik.

Putting Odessa out of the question, and not considering Kief,—for the Jew who
is rich enough (always a powerful consideration in Russia) may live in the Krashtshatik,
the Christian district, as well as the Podol, the Jewish quarter,—the larger Jewish
towns of the Pale are, as far as I know, neither picturesque nor comfortable. They
give the effect of an interminable line of streets resembling the streets of old Clare
Market. The prevailing colour is yellow, the dominant odour is noxious, the ways
are narrow and often unpaved. In the busier quarters the shops are sometimes
spacious, but more frequently only chambers like passages, with no opening but the
doorways. The doors are generally colossal structures two inches thick, and clamped
with iron. When closed, as on Saturday, they give the street the appearance of
a line of prison cells. When open, they always display some rude pictorial sign
on the inner face. These are frescoes in red, and yellow, and blue, of corsets,
trousers, and caps, wigs and crinolines in skeleton. Such typology is necessary to
a people that have not, as a whole, been taught to read. The shops are of many
kinds, for the Jew at home cannot always be a broker or a butcher. But the word
koscher, in Hebrew characters, seems to shine out on the doorpost of every tenth
tradesman in every street! The food displayed within does not always tempt one by
its cleanliness, but the Jew has faith in it.

THE JEWISH SATURDAY NIGHT.

There can be no scene more full of life than an ordinary business thoroughfare in
one of the poorer Jewish towns in Russia on Saturday night. The eating-houses are
full, and the pathways are choked. There is a face at every open window up to three
stories high ; the air is full of the smell of fried fish, and of the nasal cries of the
butchers as they call on their customers to “buy! buy! buy!” There are screaming,
and shrieking, and bellowing, and every note of vociferation as Jew threatens to fight
Jew or to bring down on him “the curse of the Rabbi,” and then, like a true son of
Israel, repents of his purpose and weeps over his adversary and kisses him. And there
are laughter and much playful banter, and some public love-making that does not dream

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RUSSIAN JEWRY. 651

of being ashamed. One observes by the flare of the street lamps that nearly every
face has the Hebrew stamp on it, and that many of them are pitted with small-pox.

THE DRINKING CELLARS.

There is next to no outward sign of drunkenness, but here and there, not usually in

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In a Polish Synagogue.

Jewish quarters, one comes across a Jewish drinking cellar. You go down some half-
dozen steps to it from the street, and find it like an inverted honey-comb, built of brick,
and lighted both day and night by lamps or candles. It is like the comb of the
bee-hive, too, in the low hum and drone that pervades it. In each of the alcoves there
is a table, and around it sit people drinking. Usually they are little friendly groups of
Russians, often car-drivers or porters, sometimes tradesmen, sometimes students, and all

652 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

cordial in their cups, for liquor makes the Russ convivial. ‘There are few Jews among
them, for the Jew wastes no time as a drinker, but occasionally in a corner there is a
keen-eyed Israelite of the baser sort sipping his half glass of corn brandy, and listening
in silence to the unwise disclosures that are being made about him. And always the
Jewish tavern-keeper behind his counter lifts his tiny glass of vodki as you pass in or
out, and drinks his fraction of a thimbleful “To Peace!” or “To Life!”

MarkKET Day IN A LITTLE JEwisH Town.

The smaller Jewish town usually differs from the larger one in being more openly
squalid, dirty, and foully drained. It has the advantage of showing the Jew at closer
quarters. If he is a butcher you may find him slaughtering his beasts according to the
strict ritual of the law (a merciful ordinance as well as a cleanly one) by the side of the
town’s river—usually a reeking .open sewer, smelling horribly. If he is a confectioner
you may see him kneading his little twisted loaves, peppered with aniseed, in a
bakehouse that is cheek-by-jowl with an unwashed stable. If he is an artisan (a tailor
or shoemaker, a tinman or a locksmith) his workshop is usually the lower storey of a
square court, the middle space whereof is the manure-pit, ash-pit, and general cesspool
for the tenements that are built above. If he is a tradesman, a dealer in left-off clothes,
a hardware dealer, a dealer in crudely-coloured religious pictures and almanacks, a
dealer in odds and ends, or any other species of curator to the ragbasket of humanity,
he may by chance have a shop under a roof-tree, but more likely he has a stall in the
open town “ Ring,” which is nearly always a square. ‘To this public market-place once,
twice, or three times a week he brings his goods for sale, hanging them on the nails of
his wooden frames if they are coats or trousers, setting them in a rising gallery on the
unpaved ground if they are pots and pans, and swinging them across his shoulders if

they are long-legged boots, and he is so poor that he must needs make his own back

his perambulating stall.

It is high fair with him at mid-day,:and then his mart is a various and animated
scene. Crowds of people cover the ground—the Russian in his belted shirt, the Pole
in his kantoucher, the long yellow coat with red facings (the red conferatka he may not
wear), the Polish Jew in his silk kaftan, and the married Jewess in her shaitel. Women
fumbling the clothes and cheapening them, dealers snatching them away and praising
them ; dogs prowling through the throng and snarling, and the itinerant pedlars with
boots on their backs, and cataracts of shoe laces hanging from their button-holes,
ploughing along and shouting, “ How much! How much I say? What will you
give? A rouble? Mercy on my soul! But take it, take it in God’s name. I am
giving it away. You are starving me to death! My wife will be a widow, and my
children fatherless! You are shedding my blood in public! But take it, take it !”

Around and about are the toppling storeys of lofty, ill-built, yellow houses, and
at one corner stands the ancient synagogue, a dilapidated place, with flagged
floor, coarse unpainted seats, the women’s gallery behind gratings, covered by linen
cloths, and looking like the bars of a prison, frayed and greasy prayer-book, and rude
altar burning the unwaning oil.

In the midst of the bustling scene, lying quiet within its high walls, and rank
under its long grass and nettles, is the little space that was once the Jewish
cemetery, but is now disused, its gates taken off, its gateway bricked up, and
its pencilled gravestones seen no more by man, but only by the birds and the
stars. And under foot, running through and along, are channels of rain and
filth, the refuse of horses and houses, rotten, reeking, and slimy, sending up in the
rays of the hot sun of summer a dazzling haze of noxious vapour.

RUSSIAN JEWRY. 653

THE JEW ABROAD.

It must be allowed that in these scenes the Russian Jew does not show to
advantage. That even amid such surroundings he is capable of heroism the
records of persecution abundantly prove. But it is not the hero that usually
appears; it is (if I may say so without unkindness) the half-famished human
wolf fighting for food for himself and for his offspring. Let us not blink the
truth—the Russian Jew can bear his great troubles of eviction and expulsion
and even death with fortitude that is thrilling, and patience that is profoundly
touching; but in his fight with the lesser difficulties of life, the difficulties of
livelihood, of trade rivalry, of money-getting and saving, he cannot be called a
noble creature. He can be small and mean and capable of deceit and over-reaching.
In these respects he is not a whit worse than his average Christian competitors, but
if he were found to be baser beyond comparison it would have to be remembered
that, unlike his rivals, he has only the money outlook, that he knows he is an alien
who may be turned out of house and country, and can claim no succour from the
State in his hour of penury and destitution.

It is said that the Russian Jew is often cruel to his animals. ‘That may perhaps
be true. Certainly he has not the big, soft, tender, flabby, stupid, generous heart
of the Russian moujik, who will lie on the stove all winter, and drink in the vodki
shops half the summer, and,then feed his horse on the thatch of his roof when
the famine comes, and weep on its neck when he has to part with it. The Jew
is a thriftier and less affectionate soul. He may be capable of breaking the wind
of his horse with a heavy load going up hill, and straightway selling it at the top
for a sound animal. He may whip his mule on the sore flank, and kick his dog
on the limping leg. ‘These charges are made against him, and, taken broadly and
generally, not too literally, as typical instances of inhumanity, they may be just.
The faults are the faults of a subdued race, and it would be marvellous if the
uncultured Russian Jew were free from them. Just as he deals (so far as he can
or dare) with the world and the creatures of the world, even so has the world dealt
with him and his children. As the world deals with him so may he deal with
the world. Such has been the natural logic of the oppressed in all countries
and in all ages.

THE JEW AT Home.

The Russian Jew may be dirty, he may even be cruel, but he is not impure.
When he crosses his threshold he leaves his vices behind him.. All day long in
the market-place he may scheme like a conspirator to take his great enemy, Life
itself, unawares; but when night comes he returns as a child to his children, and
as a woman to the side of his wife. A man may ask no credit for love and care
of his own offspring. If he does not feel an instinct that calls him to cherish them,
or if he feels it and resists it, he is not only not a man but less than the meanest
of the creatures of God. Neither can a man ask credit for fidelity to the wife he
has married. If he knows nothing of a law of the human heart which demands
that he should do to the woman as he would have the woman do to him he is
a moral idiot, and, outside the domain of intellect, no better than a beast of the
field. But the fidelity of the Russian Jew amounts to a virtue, and his paternal
love to a heroism. He does not marry his wife; in a sense more strict than that
of Leonato, he is married fo her. She is never, or next to never, a woman of his

own choice, and he has neither “nay” nor “yea” in her adoption. His parents

MAGAZINE.

654 THE PALL MALL
purchase her by aid of a schatchen, a match-maker, who arranges the terms of
the transaction and is paid for his intervention, It would be more exact to say
that his parents sell their son, for it is the father of the bride who pays the dowry.
This part of the transaction is only a crude version of the farcical comedy that is
enacted in more enlightened communities, but the marriage of the Jew in the Pale
is no mere marriage of convenience. In five cases out of ten the Jew never sets
eyes on his bride until he looks at her through her veil under the wedding canopy.
It may even happen (as Mr. Zangwill shows in the profoundly touching episode of
old Haman and his old wife-sweetheart) that the Jew beholds his wife for the first
time when he sees a strange face on the pillow beside him in the morning. She
may be revolting to him, and his parents may have been deceived as to the value
of her fortune, but he is expected to be true to her. And she on her part must
submit to whatsoever misrepresentations have been adopted to dispose of her, and
to take the consequences in cold looks or dislike or hatred, or even blows. _ IIl-favour
heightens her price, but kinship with a great Rabbi moderates it. She cuts off her
hair when she marries her husband, and makes herself hideous to all other men
in a scheitel, a married woman’s wig, or perhaps only a band of black alpaca bound
across her brow. ‘Thus, body and possessions, she belongs to him, and is for ever
after at his mercy.
THE MARRIAGE-MAKER.

The marriage-maker is a despised person even in the Pale; but he is thought to
be a necessary one, for nobody whatever marries without his aid. There are both
male and female marriage-makers ; the competition between them is keen; their fees
are small, and always dependent on results. Therefore, the professional schatchen
is a professional liar, whose lying has far-reaching results, such as affect the chastity
of women, the fidelity of men, and even the love and tending that is the right of all
children.

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE.

I regret to find another argument for Count Tolstoi against the marriages of
romantic love ; but it is a fact that in spite of this powerful machinery of fanaticism
for the making of immorality, the Jew of the Pale, of Poland, and of Galicia is a
faithful husband and a devoted father. He has many temptations to be otherwise.
Marriage among the poorer Russian Jews is a marvellously simple ceremony. ‘The
patriarchal process whereby Jacob “took” Rachel was not more primitive. No
Scotch marriage of the irregular order can ever be more swift. In the presence of
ten witnesses, of whom the Rabbi is generally one, the man puts a ring on the first
finger of the woman’s right hand and says, “I take you to be my wife according to
the laws of Israel and Moses.” This is all that is essential. The woman’s consent
is not needful. Of course the law of Russia does not consider such marriages
sufficient. The State Rabbi keeps a civil register, and gives marriage lines; but
that is a thing superadded to the moral code of the Jew. And the ceremony of
divorce is yet more simple and speedy. The man can divorce a woman if he gives
her a written paper saying, “I divorce you.” No offence on the woman’s part is
necessary to be proved, no consent to their separation, no knowledge of the man’s
intention. If she takes the document out of his hand into hers, she is instantly a
divorced woman. All this is a rough-and-ready rendering of Mosaic law, unilluminated
by thought. Enlightened Hebrew congregations demand an ordeal less liable to the
abuses of caprice. But it is a proper ceremony nevertheless, and parents and
guardians of girls with beauty or large possessions have been known to adopt

RUSSIAN JEWRY. 655

precautions against their forcible marriage by casual ruffians in the street, and against
their unjustifiable divorce at the hands of mercenary husbands. Yet notwithstanding
this fatal facility, this one-sided duel of wrong, this battery for the assault of woman’s
chastity and for the protection of man’s immorality, the poor, ignorant Russian Jew
lives happily with his purchased wife, grows to love her and to cherish her, looks
like a miserable man when he is separated .from her, and is altogether a contrast
to some of his censorious Christian neighbours, who seem to get along together with
their wives only when they are living apart from them.

Jews RETURNING TO Russia.

I speak with more than common authority on this point, for I have not only
observation to guide me, but most material facts and figures. It is known that several
hundreds of the Russian Jews who were sent out by the European Committees to the
colony founded by Baron Hirsch in the Argentine, came back home of their own
choice after only a brief stay. This circumstance gave occasion for the rumour that
the colony had failed. But the voluntary return of the emigrants meant no such
mischief. I chanced to be at Hamburg when their ship arrived, and by help of
Mr. Henrichsen and Mr. Melchoir (leading Jews of that hapless city) I was able to
question them, and to hear their reasons. The reasons were various—-some of them
specious and some false; but fully half turned on the domestic affections. Their
women and children were in Russia; they could not live without them ; they had
tried, but could not do so any longer ; the managers had said that only when they
were able to keep their families in the New World would they be allowed to send
for them; it would be years and years before they could keep them there, for they
had “nothing but the earth and the sky.” So, if they might, they would go back
to the Old World after all.

Such was the story told in my hearing of nearly a hundred out of a hundred
and fifty of the Jews who came back from the Argentine. It may have been false
sometimes, and now and then a mere sop for sympathy; but after years spent in
observing life, I will not think so meanly of my skill as to belieye that I was mistaken
in the heart’s hunger which I saw written on so many faces.

HALL CAINE.

(To be continued )

AN IMPERIAL CITY.
WAS lately reading a paper by Mr. Grant Allen, entitled
“Postprandial Philosophy,” the spirit of which disclosed none of
that equanimity which Plato held to constitute philosophy’s
better part; denouncing London as a squalid village, unworthy
of honourable mention with Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Antwerp,
Munich, or Turin. In order that postprandial reflections should
rise to the level of philosophy it is essential that the dinner be
such as to stimulate the imagination and develop the more
generous side of the critic’s nature. But our philosopher had undoubtedly dined
badly ; and his criticism is deeply tinged with that pessimistic extravagance which
is too often associated with an inefficient chef He will allow our poor Capital no
virtue. London, he asserts, isn straggling, invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village :
it has no ground plan, no street architecture, no decorations, though it has many
“uglifications.” There is not, he affirms, a single street in London worth showing
to a foreigner, while the hopeless state of this shapeless, neglected suburb is the
fault of the old Corporation, of Gog and Magog, with their attendant Lord Mayors
and the vested interests they represent and perpetuate.

Now, it cannot be denied that there is some truth in this criticism, unpleasant
though it be to our national pride. The Corporation of London no doubt are the least
guilty parties, and the portion of the Metropolis which is under their charge is the
best ordered, and, from the utilitarian point of view, possesses both stateliness and
beauty. But we all allow that the general administration of London is infinitely mean
and inefficient, and that vested interests are chiefly to blame for the national disgrace.
But what I would suggest, in no spirit of patriotic prejudice, is that the meanness and
656

AN IMPERIAL CITY. 657

the squalor are only associated with the superficial adornment of the capital. Like the
beggar-maid in» Mr. Burne Jones’ picture, London is as a beautiful woman, fair of face
and noble of form, and only needs the transforming hand of some future King
Cophetua to strip off her sordid rags and clothe her in the lustrous raiment which
befits a queen. I have seen almost all the famous capitals of the world, Paris, Rome,
and St. Petersburg ; Constantinople and Cairo; New York, Washington, and Ottawa ;
Kabul, Calcutta, and Mandalay—and I do not know one which possesses more
conspicuously than London the necessary and inherent qualities of beauty and
splendour. There are doubtless cities, as Edinburgh, Venice, and Stockholm, which
are more picturesque in their surroundings, but London can only be compared with her
imperial sisters, which may be counted on one hand. Rome, Paris, Constantinople,
Vienna and Delhi, and perhaps Moscow, exhaust the list ; for it does not suffice for a

From the Ornamental Water, St. James’s Park.

city to be the capital of a rich and powerful nation to attain imperial rank. For this,
size and population are essential, but count less than antiquity and world interest, and
the fact of being to-day, or having been in the past, the centre of national, intellectual,
political, and social life.

For this imperial rank, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and the cities of America are too
new; while, as for the United States, the absence of a Court, and diffusion of political
influence and interest, which is the result of democratic and federal institutions,
prevent any of the large cities taking indisputably the first place. Washington,
which is in some sengSe the capital, is but a small town, of the size of Brighton
or Leicester. Other famous cities, such as Florence, Athens, and Jerusalem, are
provincial, and their special influence, intellectual or religious, however deep and world-
embracing, has not been imperial in its nature. Moscow may perhaps take rank
with ruling cities, though it has never represented a free and worthy national life ;

THE PALL MALL .MAGAZINE.

658

and Madrid can hardly be disregarded, although it was the home and centre of a
gloomy fanaticism which deluged the old and the new world with blood, and which
drove its most gifted children—Moors, Jews, and Protestants—to death or exile.
Among these famous cities Rome may, by the common assent of mankind, be
allowed the first place, while for the second London and Paris may fairly contend.
To-day it must be confessed that Paris is infinitely cleaner, brighter, and more suited
to the enjoyment of out-of-doors life than London. But these are matters which are
susceptible of change and improvement, and Paris has of late years fallen off, while
London has steadily advanced. London tends more and more to become the. world-
city, and to draw to itself the intellect, wealth, and beauty of other countries. It is, far
more than any American city, the metropolis of the United States as of the British
Empire, the central home of the two most powerful nations in the world—the
united Anglo-Saxon race. It is true that the American colony in Paris is a large and
influential one ; but it daily diminishes in favour of London. In Paris Americans live

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Lincoln's Inn Fields as they might be.

apart, in London they are at home ; while the cultured society of London, many times
as numerous as that of Paris, makes its social life infinitely more agreeable. If London
only possessed a climate it would be a paradise. If the delightful spring of this year
were the rule, the English would be the gayest of people, as they are now the most
open-handed and hospitable. But to the climate is due not only the gloom of the city,
but the anxious and depressed air of the people. What nation can be gay when the
possibilities of the weather are its constant preoccupation, and the recollections of
popular holidays only recall rainy skies and ruined dresses? The smoke and fog of
London are an ancient subject of complaint. In the month of June 1665, the
three members of “La Célebre Ambassade ; MM. Comminges, Courtin, and De
Veneuil—wrote bitterly of “les vapeurs du charbon,” and in 1713 another-French
Ambassador, Le Duc d’Aumont declared: “Tout ce que je désirais serait que le
brouillard, lair, et la fumée ne me prisent pas si fort & la gorge.”

In the natural and inherent elements of beauty London is superior to Paris. In
the first place, there is the noble and historical river, by the side of which the Seine
*

AN IMPERIAL CITY. 659

is little better than a ditch. Secondly, there is the succession of glorious parks,
the lungs of the great city, stretching from Whitehall to Kensington Palace, such as
are possessed by no other city in Europe. What view is there in Paris so beautiful
as that from the Buckingham Palace end of the artificial water in St. James’s Park,
looking towards the Foreign Office, or that from the bridge over the Serpentine.
The Bois de Boulogne is altogether charming ; but it is outside the city, and might
be rather compared with Richmond Park than Hyde Park. The more notable
buildings of London do not compare unfavourably with those of Paris. Westminster
Abbey ‘is more beautiful and interesting than Notre Dame, St. Paul’s than the
Panthéon ; while, in spite of some grave defects and over-elaboration of detail, there

Trafalgar Square as it is.

is no modern building in Europe which is superior in dignity, size, and beauty of
position to the Houses of Parliament. The Opera House at Paris is a magnificent
monument of lavish expenditure, far in excess of the result obtained, by a despotic
government with absolute control of the public purse. It would not be possible in
London ; nor do we require it, for there are many better ways in which we might
spend a couple of millions. With the exception of the Opera House, the London
theatres are superior in every particular, except in the important one of the acting, to
those of Paris. ‘The only modern building in Paris which I covet for London is the
Arc de Triomphe : not on account of its record, for the English have as many victories
to chronicle from Crécy and Agincourt to Tel-el-Kebir, but for its simple splendour
and completeness. It is indisputably the chief glory of modern Paris.

Before discussing the streets and street architecture of the two cities, a few words
are necessary on the conditions which have created them. Paris, as we see it to-day,

660 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

with its wide boulevards, and tall, monotonous, stone houses, identical in size and
form, is the creation of the Second Empire, and strategical considerations rather than
beauty were the chief thought of its designers. Before the time of Napoleon III.
the streets of Paris were far narrower and meaner than those of London; so much
so that M. Taine, a thoroughly competent observer, suggests that the Emperor
only rebuilt Paris so largely and liberally because he had lived in London. Writing
of the latter city, in his “ Notes sur Angleterre,” he observes: “ Paris est médiocre
& cété de ces $quares, de ces crescents, de ces cercles et de ces files de maisons
monumentales en pierre massive, 4 portiques, 4 facades sculptées, de ces rues si
larges ; il y en a cinquante aussi vaste que celle de la Paix: certainement Napoléon III.
n’a démoli et rebati Paris que parce qu’il a vécu & Londres.”

London, as we all know, has grown up naturally, without Government inter-
ference, to whose apathy, indeed, its squalor and defects are chiefly due. This
gives to many of its principal streets that irregularity of height. and style which
is the distinction and charm of London, as compared with the deadly commonplace
of the best Parisian streets. If any one thinks this monotony beautiful he can find
abundance of it still in London; but from the artistic point of view it is a fault,
and we may rejoice that it is slowly disappearing. The reconstruction of London
practically commenced when that of Paris was completed, about twenty-five years ago ;
and its inauguration was the embankment of the Thames, a magnificent work which,
though still incomplete in decoration, is unsurpassed in any European city. Those
who remember London in 1860 or 1870 will appreciate the enormous advance which
has been made, and which is ‘still continuing with ever-increasing rapidity. Some
of the great London landlords, notably the Duke of Westminster and Lord Cadogan,
have acknowledged their obligation to the Metropolis in a splendid and _ princely
manner; and if all landholders were equally enlightened the reconstruction of
London might safely be left in their hands. But this is far from being the case,
and some change in the law of freehold is essential, giving to leaseholders the
right, under certain conditions, of acquiring the freehold, and themselves improving
or rebuilding the property. Whichever political party carries such a measure would
probably obtain a long tenure of power in London, so great would be the stimulus
given to the building and allied trades.

The architecture of new London, in spite of many mistakes and extravagances,
is, on the whole, dignified and worthy. As examples, it is sufficient to mention the
new buildings in Mount Street, Duke Street, South Audley Street, Grosvenor Place,
and Grosvenor Gardens, Cadogan Square, Lennox Gardens, and Pont Street ; while
many business premises in the City, in Lombard Street, Broad Street, in Oxford Street,
Piccadilly, and the Strand, are models of commodious and splendid street architecture.
No city in Europe can surpass the business palaces with which the City is filled ;
but the traffic is so great that, to really inspect them satisfactorily and safely, they
should be visited on Sunday, or early in the morning before business hours. Even the
vast buildings at Albert Gate and on the Victoria Embankment have considerable
merit, and their sky line especially adds greatly to the beauty of the view from many
directions. A remarkable article on Architecture in last January’s Quarterly Review
is well worth perusal, and is as clever as it is suggestive. But the author is so hostile
to the Royal Institute of British Architects, that he will allow no goodness or beauty in
any work to which its members have put their hand. He even prefers the plain, not
to say hideous, houses which used to stand at the top of Grosvenor Place, and which
were of the dismal Georgian pattern with which we are too familiar, to the splendid
buildings which have taken their place. These have their defects, no doubt, and

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Trafalgar Square as it might be.

662 ‘THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

contain a great deal of wasted space, but they greatly add to the beauty and dignity of
Hyde Park Corner.

But the reviewer’s chief scorn is reserved for the Natural History Museum at South
Kensington, which he considers a typical product of the Royal Institute, of debased
taste, wasteful both in its decorative work and its useless halls, staircases and towers,
unsuited to the scientific collections it contains; while the stoneware, a mechanical
and moulded substitute for art, of a nauseous, reddish-yellow tint, produces an effect
which the critic considers revolting. I would directly join issue with him as to this
building, which is well proportioned, admirably lighted and ventilated, and one of the
most' satisfactory lately erected in London. I never enter it or drive past it without
a feeling of cheerfulness and pleasure. The terra-cotta work, which the reviewer so
dislikes, is a most happy discovery for London, and, resisting the influence of fogs
and damp, remains bright and clean for a far longer period than any other material
in use. Wherever employed, it lights up a street: witness the Constitutional Club

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Piccadilly and the Green Park,—a Suggestion.

in Northumberland Avenue, or the Congregational Church in Duke Street. The
architecture of the Natural History Museum may not be very original; but it is an
eminently pleasing, dignified, and suitable building, and the hypercritical arguments of
ten Quarterly Reviewers will not prove the contrary. Of somewhat similar style, though
more ambitious, and of inferior merit, is the Imperial Institute. But it is a
representative example of the later Victorian architecture ; while the vast additions to
the South Kensington Museum, which are now to be commenced, may do much to
beautify this somewhat gloomy and monotonous quarter. The Royal Institute of
British Architects may be as worthy of contempt as the Quarterly Reviewer insists,
but there is undoubtedly a very wholesome spirit abroad among British architects: an
impatience of the old types, Gothic, Classic, Renaissance, or simple Georgian ugliness.
It has been recognised that new London should have a style of its own for public and
private buildings, suited to the climate, the light, the disintegrating effect of the smoke,
the habits of the people ; and, in consequence, there have been built in the last twenty
years, in London, more houses remarkable for beauty, variety, originality, suitability, and
power, than in the preceding two hundred years.

89 2y6jw 3) sv aavnbg zuawnsjang

664 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

Very little of the improvement of the Metropolis is due to the initiative of the
Government. No public building, however urgently needed, is granted without years of
persistent worry. Like a sloth in a South American forest, the official screams and resists
if he is urged to move onward. It is upon the Government directly that the blame for
the worst of the blots and blemishes of London must directly fall. No matter which
party is in office —whether the witty Mr. Plunket directs affairs, or the amiable Mr. Shaw
Lefevre—there is the same record of apathy, waste, incompetence, and indifference
to the public interests. In minor matters, where the permanent secretaries to the
Department of Works are responsible, there is evidence of both energy and taste. It
is to Mr. Freeman Mitford and Mr. Primrose that we owe the admirable landscape
gardening and the beautiful flowers in Hyde Park, and elsewhere. But in street
improvement and public works, the inefficiency has long been a scandal. England is,
undoubtedly, with the single exception of the United States, the only country in which
a State Department would be permitted to so neglect its proper business, to outrage
public taste and waste public money. If the Department is attacked, the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, who is equally at fault, comes to its defence, and the blame is shifted
on to the last Administration, the County Council, or the Vestries. As if a Government
or a Department had any raison a’étre beyond efficiently doing its duty! If it is
unable to compel Councils and Vestries, it should make way for those who can. The
Metropolis is covered with the marks of the carelessness and blunders of the
Department of Works; and little improvement can be hoped for until the First
Commissionership ceases to be a political appointment, given to any partisan who
may understand architecture no more than shoemaking, and is entrusted, for a term
of years, to the most competent person who can be found. The present arrangement
is worthy of Laputa. If we were fortunate enough to secure a First Commissioner
of both energy and genius, the beautifying of London would be soon ensured. ‘Take,
as an example, Piccadilly, which is one of the famous streets of the world, and
even now far more beautiful than the monotonous and ugly Rue de Rivoli in Paris,
with which alone it can be fairly compared. How easily and cheaply might its

attractiveness be doubled! Sweep away the hideous iron railings, which suggest a
county jail; widen the roadway thirty feet from the Isthmian Club to Hyde Park
Corner, and throw out a broad and handsome terrace, with suitable balustrades and
wide steps into the Park, on which people might walk or sit in the full shade of the
trees. In accomplishing this there are no difficulties, and only eight half-grown plane
trees would require to be removed. Nothing would be taken from the Park which

was not restored to it many times over in usefulness and beauty.

Let us look for a moment at Whitehall, the most interesting street historically in
the British Empire, and which should form a worthy approach to the Abbey and Palace
of Westminster. For thirty years the Government have been vainly trying to pull
down the mean row of houses between King Street and Parliament Street, and, to my
personal knowledge, the project was farther advanced twenty years ago than it is to-day.
An energetic Board of Works would sweep them away in a month, and not only these
houses, but the whole nest of shabby dwellings between the India Office and the Abbey,
creating, what would be, for London, the only possible rival to the magnificent Place
de la Concorde in Paris. For Trafalgar Square is too shut in to be imposing ; though
it might be greatly improved if a Government which thought more of beauty than of
the favour of the roughs, were to remove the paving stones and turn the whole inner
area into a flower garden.

A stone’s throw from this standing disgrace to the Government at Westminster is
the desolation, the open wound, caused by the demolition of Lord Carrington’s house

AN IMPERIAL CITY. 665

opposite the Horse Guards, and next door to the Banqueting Hall. When the lease
fell in, the Government ruthlessly, under pretence of immediately utilising the space for
important public offices, pulled down this splendid house on which enormous sums had
been spent, in spite of the protests of the owner. For years the ground has lain idle,
a Golgotha of rubbish and oyster shells, in this historic thoroughfare, surrounded by
hoardings, and exposing in its hideous nakedness the back part of the abandoned
United Service Institution, and other squalid ruins. And now the First Commissioner
has the audacity to announce in the House of Commons that this scandal is to
continue for another seven years, and that the vacant space will not be utilised until
the Admiralty buildings on the Horse Guards Parade are completed. Let, at any rate,
the House insist that the vacant place be cleansed and laid down with grass, shrubs,

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Portland Avenue. A Suggestion.

and flowers until it is required, in the same manner as private munificence has adorned
the vacant ground adjoining the Courts of Justice.

The history of the new Admiralty is as discreditable to the Department of Works as
either of the preceding cases. In 1887 the Committee of the House of Commons who
recommended the buildings, declared that they would be ready in two or three years.
It is now 1893; and while the original estimate was £195,000, no less than £ 304,500
have been already spent, and the First Commissioner does not believe the buildings will
be completed till 1900. It is obvious that the contractors who built the palatial
mansions on the Victoria Embankment or at Albert Gate could finish the Admiralty
out of hand in two years; but the Government prefers to waste the public money,
exactly as they used to take seven years to build an ironclad, which they have now
discovered can be far more cheaply completed in two. So that, in addition to the loss
of £16,000 a year on the cost of the land, there is the rent of the houses of clerks
who are to be accommodated in the new building, p/us the loss on the vacant land on
the opposite side of Whitehall, which is not to be built upon until 1900, the value of

666 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.
which is estimated at £400,000. If a private company managed its affairs in this
manner it would soon be bankrupt. All this waste might be forgiven were the
Government intending to place a worthy building on this incomparable site. But the
elevation of the new Admiralty is altogether without distinction. In material, in decor-
ation, in design, it is mean and commonplace, and as pretending to express the public
taste of a great country; is a disgrace to those who sanctioned it.

These three examples, situated close together in Whitehall, are sufficient to show the
incapacity of the Government for taking action, and their indifference to such matters
as raising the public taste and beautifying the metropolis of the Empire. Those who

esire other examples may look at the horrible addition to the Embankment front

of Somerset House, or to the collection of rotting hoardings, corrugated iron sheds
and dilapidated shops and public-houses at Albert Gate, between Knightsbridge
Road and Tattersall’s, which would not be tolerated for a month in any other civilised
city ; or they may reflect on the fact, which is not sufficiently known to the public,
that it was by the personal influence of the late Mr. W. H. Smith as Member for
Westminster, that the whole of the beautiful gardens of the Victoria Embankment,
which forms the most splendid modern improvement of the city, were not laid ott in
building lots.

Into the numerous questions which concern the improvement of London—lighting,
cleaning, the abolition of smoke, the condition of the roadways, kiosks for newspapers
and refreshments, shelters for omnibus passengers, and innumerable other questions of
interest, I have no space in this paper to enter. I would only observe that if London
were adequately cleaned and lighted, its beauty would be very speedily acknowledged.
I know few cities, foreign or provincial, which are so inadequately lighted as London.
Even the lighting of the principal thoroughfares, such as Piccadilly, after the shops are
closed, is little superior to that in the reign of George III., the feeble gas jets giving
hardly more light than the oil lamps of our ancestors, while fashionable thoroughfares,
like Park Lane and Grosvenor Place, are left in all but Cimmerian darkness. I cannot
imagine this state of things being tolerated in any city except London, which is so vast
that no individual taxpayer exerts himself to set matters right. The traveller may
wander to the uttermost parts of the earth, to towns in the far West like Denver and
Cheyenne ; to obscure African or European towns, like Tangier or Syracuse, and he
will find them more brilliantly lighted with electricity than the imperial city of London.
In the matter of cleaning again. Has the pavement of London been ever washed
in the memory of man except by the rain? The condition of London in wet or damp
weather, which is ordinarily three parts of the year, is a disgrace. ‘The water-supply is
abundant ; there is an army of unemployed asking for work, and the authorities have
not sufficient energy or public spirit to form them into such a cleaning brigade as
in Paris, washing down the pavement and roadway of every principal street early every
morning.

The best hope of the regeneration of London is in the County Council, which has
already shown both energy and enlightenment in the preservation and improvement of
parks and gardens, and making a commencement in supplying music for the enjoyment
of the people.

There are many who distrust the Council and oppose any extension of its present
powers. This is a mistake. Nothing can be more ignominious than the rule of the
vestries under which we have groaned so long ; and our best chance of deliverance from
our grievances is in the extension of the power of the Council. I would give them
larger authority than at present over roads, buildings, water, gas, electricity, the
beautification of the streets, the parks, the architecture, sanitation. Indeed, the whole

le
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ic

AN IMPERIAL CITY. 667
machinery and material of our municipal life I would place in their hands, with the
sole exception of the police. Even the School Board I would like to see subordinate
to the Council, receiving its due share of the local taxation, and not an extravagant
share as at present. An educational board, independent of control, and its expenditure
regulated by no regard for the comparative merits of other claims on the common
purse of the taxpayer, is an anachronism far more glaring than that of the separate
administration of the City by the Lord Mayor and Corporation.

The police should always remain under the direct control of the Government.
They now represent, more perfectly than any other institution, the claims of London
as a great imperial city. They are indisputably the best police in the world, and
are so far the first that there is no second. I remember asking a very intelligent
Indian prince, on his return from England, what had most struck him there, and
he at once replied, “The London police.” All foreigners are impressed in a similar
manner. The patience and gentleness of the police; their courtesy to strangers,
women and aged people; their courage and resource, make them to me, as
to many Londoners, a constant object of admiration and esteem. There is no
position in life in which the best qualities of Englishmen are more conspicuously
shown than in the Metropolitan police. They cannot be improved, so it would be
an act of folly to change their masters. The second, and equally cogent, reason
against placing them under the Council is the obvious necessity that the protection
of the Sovereign, the Houses of Parliament and the public buildings and the very
heart of the empire, should be entrusted to no other authority than the responsible
ministry of the day. No sane European government has surrendered the control of
its metropolitan police, and any English minister who should propose it would deserve
to be impeached. If an example of the danger of entrusting the police of a great city
to a corrupt municipality be needed, New York furnishes the warning, where the Irish
police are far more a terror to honest citizens than to the criminal classes, and where
they break the heads of harmless people as merrily and light-heartedly as if they
were still enjoying the humours of Donnybrook Fair.

But the County Council is not at present so constituted as to satisfactorfly
perform its important duties, far less those wider and larger functions which should
be entrusted to it. It has not yet won the confidence of the taxpayers. Greater
dignity and authority should be conferred upon it, and at the same time it should be
so directed as to ensure an enlightened, sober, and continuous policy. It should
include all Metropolitan Members of Parliament, the number of whom will be largely
increased with the next Redistribution Bill. Its president should be selected from
among these by a majority of three-quarters or two-thirds of the Council, and he
should be a paid official with a salary of not less than £4,000 a year, so that his
whole time might be devoted to his important duties. The requirement of a
two-thirds majority would probably. ensure that he would not be a mere politician
but a competent man of business. He should be appointed for five years, with
the right of re-election by a majority as large as his original appointment required.

The number of the present members of Council should be reduced proportionally
to the increase in parliamentary members, and a certain number of gentlemen
whose advice would be valuable should be appointed ex officio—such as the First
Commissioner of Works and the Presidents of the Royal Academy and the Royal
Institute of British Architects. Thus we might obtain a Council worthy of London,
which would secure and retain the confidence of the citizens, and devote its energies,
now too often dissipated in party warfare, to the well-being, comfort, and adornment
of what must become the most beautiful and stately of imperial cities.

668 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

To preserve a proper continuity in policy, and to avoid crude and hasty decisions,
it should be ruled that, for every question of principle, additional local taxation,
the initiative in legislation, or change in the constitution of the Council, a three-quarter
majority would be needed ; while to start efficiently on their beneficent career the
coal and wine duties should be reimposed. ‘Their abolition was unnecessary and
unwise, discreditable to Conservatives and Liberals alike ; and both parties are now
heartily ashamed of a surrender which crippled the administration of London for the
sole benefit of coal merchants and middlemen.

The last question of importance concerns the City proper, with its separate
government by the Lord Mayor and Corporation, and its wealthy and powerful Guilds,
the twelve most important of which possess an annual revenue of upwards of half
a million sterling. To this rich spoil many Socialist eyes eagerly turn. Like Marshal
Blucher, they consider London a fine city to plunder. But we may hope that the
national conscience will insist on these enthusiasts understanding that to rob a
Corporation is as immoral as robbing a shop, and that the City will be allowed
to preserve her ancient rights and privileges. Should the time come when the
Corporation and the great Companies betray their trust and forget their duties,
their separate jurisdiction will not be supported by public opinion. But now the
City is the cleanest, best lighted, most orderly part of London, and the revenues
of the Guilds are utilised liberally and wisely for purposes of charity and for the
endowment of science, art and education. When the County Council have raised
the general administration of London to the standard of the City they may speak
with better grace of the abolition of its special jurisdiction and privilege.

LEPEL GRIFFIN.

‘‘ There she sat, her thin hands lying open on her lap.”"—See page 677.

EW people could guess why George Oakworth, master of the National
School at Cragside, extended the patronage of his friendship to Dick
Denholme, drunkard and law-breaker. He was a handsome, pale,
intellectual youth of twenty-five years, with a taste for botanising
and geological speculation ; while Dick, fifteen years his senior, was
a man of no taste whatever, unless the taste for ale be counted—a
being whose rough and dissolute aspect spoke with such unblushing
effrontery of his flagrant knavishness, that a little dissimulation might
have passed, in him, for a kind of negative virtue.

Yet the relationship which subsisted between them was that of
the most intimate comrades. They lived in the same cottage ;
they spent their Saturdays in long excursions; and it was

understood that those who wished to quarrel with the young teacher might
hope to indulge themselves also in the hostility of Dick. The opinion was boldly
hazarded by some that, if the truth could be told, George Oakworth was no better
than he ought to be, because a man is known by the company he keeps. There were
others who pointed out that the schoolmaster, out of motives of personal timidity,
had merely possessed himself of a stout defender. Not only were both these views
mistaken ones, but when the friendship was struck up it was Dick who took the
initiative.

Abandoning a hopeful career and the meretricious insincerities of a big city, George
Oakworth had sought oblivion and honest dealing in a village community. The first
week of his duties at the National School was disturbed by an incident which, trivial in
itself, sufficed to shape for a while his course of life. He had begun with a gentle hand,
hoping to interest the boys rather than to govern them ; and although some at times had
fallen happily asleep, and others—on the back benches—had exhibited a mortifying
preference for the furtive game called “noughts and crosses,” he had persevered with
heroic good temper. But one restless morning, the sharp crack of an explosive paper
pellet sounded on the wall behind him, and the school burst out laughing. His face
flushed, and his practised eye travelled at once to the delinquent, an overgrown and
lubberly youth named Puggy Cullingworth, who was accustomed to slaver on his copy-
book, and whom his father had sent to school at an age when it was no longer possible
to teach him anything.

669

670 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

Puggy sat at the endof a bench. Advancing upon him slowly, the teacher adminis-
tered a box on the ear which smote, as the lightning smites, before it was seen, and
which set a big bell booming in his head.

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The school felt that the incident had only commenced, and was thrilled with a
gleeful expectancy. Puggy had long been admired for his amazing effrontery and un-
manageable dulness. He could fight any three small boys of the normal school age,
and it was well known that old Scaife, who kept the school when he first came to it, did
not dare to frown at him. Consequently, when the effeminate new master, pale and
unsuspecting, advanced upon the raw-boned hero and struck him, an impressive silence
brooded in the room. And the wide-eyed onlookers were right. ‘The incident had not
terminated. When the young boor sprang to his feet with a cry of rage, the dominie
gripped him by the slack of his waistcoat, kneading his fists into the rebel’s abdomen,
and rushed him down the schoolroom till his back struck the wall, with a crash that
knocked all the breath out of his body and all the expression out of his face.

DICK DENHOLME.

671

“You big baby!” he cried hoarsely. ‘Go to your seat. If you had been more of
a man I'd have thrashed you!” And, turning to the rest, he added, with a quietness
of manner that was equally appalling with his fury: ‘I wish to treat this school as a
seminary of gentlemen ; but I will be treated as a gentleman myself.”

Which was very fine, but rather above the heads of his juvenile audience, whose
hearts were beating fast at the spectacle of this vivid and awful example. Moreover, a
clamorous bellowing of inarticulate threats and protests burst the next moment from
the humbled booby, and could not be subdued. Master Puggy Cullingworth was put
out of doors, and drifted homewards, while a blessed state of receptivity came
upon the smaller fry, and his dismal ululations died away gruesomely into the far
distance.

Nevertheless, when the school assembled the next day, the master noted a certain
restlessness among his pupils, the symptom of suppressed anxiety. He got more stupid
answers than usual ; and on several occasions, at the sound of passing footsteps in the
road, all eyes were turned towards the door. In vain he rattled on the desk with his
ruler: he only made the little wretches nervous.

At last curiosity got the better of him. ‘“ Does any one know,” he asked, “ why
Cullingworth is not at school this morning ?”

All hands went up.

“ Well?” he said, pointing to the youngest volunteer, a dumpy red-headed child
with honest big blue eyes.

“ Please, teacher,” that innocent lisped, “’cause his father’s comin’ to slug yo’ for
what yo’ did yusterda’.”

“Very well,” said the master. “Slates away now, and get out your history cards.”

3ut in spite of his sang frotd the feverish apprehensiveness increased ; and at last, when
a trampling of feet made itself heard on the playground gravel, with the sound of loud
voices,. the children mounted the forms to look out of the windows.

“Silence !” cried the master, in a sharp, metallic voice. “ Keep your places !’

The door was opened, and as if pushed into the room by the pressure of those
behind them, several hulking fellows made a trailing step or two forward from the
threshold, and paused sheepishly. All but the foremost took off their caps, and he was
scowling royally.

“Well, gentlemen,” said the schoolmaster, prompt to speak first, “to what may I
attribute this intrusion ?”

Ephraim Cullingworth—whom he had recognised by his unmistakable likeness
to the absent scapegrace—strode out and answered him. ‘None o’ thi damned
impidence !” he shouted. “ Wilt-a tak’ it standin’ or liggin’?”

Mr. Oakworth’s behaviour was admirable. ‘One moment, gentlemen, please,”
he said—his eyes had flashed and then turned grave—“TI am placed here in charge of
your children, and, whatever they may hear elsewhere, I cannot have bad language in
the schoolroom. We will discuss this affair outside.”

A murmur of approval passed through the crowd. Walking quickly past his
antagonist, he stood with the key in his hand while that individual, sulky and irresolute
as if he suspected a trick, hesitated before following the rest into the playground.
Then, putting the key in his pocket, he handed his coat to the nearest bystander—who
happened to be Dick Denholme—and said briefly, for every one’s hearing,

“T suppose you know what fair play is in Cragside ?”

“Comed to see it gi’en,” Dick answered with a grin. The ring was formed, and the
stripling offered his hand to his burly adversary.

“Keep that for my lad,” he said, “an’ frame tha [get ready] !”

?

ee

peer e ae

672 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

An " ‘
I'he result of the fight was a complete surprise. Less than five minutes sufficed,
amid a scene of unbridled enthusiasm, to demonstrate the master’s supremacy. His

oe
ee

~
*

challenger lay groaning, unable to respond to the call of “Time,” and he resumed his
coat, breathing hard, but without a scratch. A shrill shout went up within the school-
house, whose windows were thronged with wide-eyed faces pressed against the glass.

Dick Denholme spoke up like the funny man in a melodrama. ‘“ Nowthen!” he
cried, above the din of voices, “ther’ some on yo’ talkin’ o’ what ye’d do. Are ye
bahn to get agate? He’s here, is t’ lad, an’ just i’ fettle [in ‘form’]. He willn’t keep
yo’ waitin’.—What, ye’re back’ard 7 comin’ forrard? Well, then, he s’ll feight wi’ his
coit on. Six to one bar one—is’t a fair wager?”

3ut the victorious dominie cut short this flattering stream of banter. ‘“ Excuse
me,” he said stiffly; “I think we have wasted too much time already. Be good
enough to clear the playground as soon as your man can go with you.” And he went
in without further parley, leaving them to straggle away with as much dignity as they
could muster.

If he had cared to think of it, George Oakworth might have found in this rencontre the
means of becoming popular ; but as it was, he only made the acquaintance of Dick.
That uncomely outlaw was so seized with admiration of his skill as a boxer, that he
regularly waylaid him on the road home, and kept him in conversation with queer

DICK DENHOLME. 673

stories of village life. The sequel the reader knows. It should be added, however,
that old Mrs. Denholme, who soon afterwards became the teacher’s landlady, made
him so comfortable, and so plainly looked upon him as her ne’er-do-weel’s good angel,
that he found himself very much at home ; and further, that Dick had fewer occasions
for over-indulgence in malt liquor than aforetime, and began to respect himself
accordingly.

In one particular only did Dick find the schoolmaster an uncongenial friend. He
could never bring him to talk sympathetically of affairs of the heart. Yet he made to
him a most intimate confession, which, until then, had never passed his lips.

“Ye willn’t hardly believe it,” he said—they were lying one afternoon among the
heather of the parish common—*“ but there’s a lass i’? Cragside parish ’at ’ould
wed me to-morn if Aw could but keep teetotal. Aye, there is. Aw’m a gaumless
[stupid] fooil, mate, that’s what Aw am. Shoo’s t’ grandest lass i’ four parishes, an’
Aw do believe shoo fancies me! But—vwell, tha knaws. Aw git droughen wi all my
mates but thee.”

George Oakworth, prone on his back, with his hat tilted over his eyes, listened to
this touching avowal in absolute silence. Most people would have divined that, in a
man so youthful, this kind of taciturnity indicated a recent disappointment ; but Dick,
in his innocence, admired it despairingly as a mark of superiority.

“Tha thinks Aw’m soft, mebbe,” he said, raising himself on his elbow from a
similar position of repose. ‘“‘ But tha’s nivver seen her. Eh, lad! shoo’s like a fine
mornin’ i’ t’ springtime. It maks a man’s blood dance just to look at her!”

But the teacher’s cynicism was not long to be left undisturbed. On a summer
evening of the very next week, as he struck into a wonted field-path on his way home-
wards, he came face to face with a romantic adventure. Walking with his gaze bent
upon the ground, he became conscious of a female figure standing right in his path,
and mechanically raised his eyes. For an instant he faltered in his stride: the girl’s
glance was upon him as if she would speak, and in the whole course of his life he had
not beheld so superb a creature.

Her clear beauty of complexion, and the lusty health and strength which confessed
itself in every generous line of her queenly figure, were the features which first amazed
him. She was clad in a homely print gown, which might have fitted her when it was
new, but which she had so outgrown that its seams were bursting on the rounded arms,
and it was only held across the ample bosom by a few precarious buttons. Her
smooth and lustrous brown hair was auburn where it was touched by the sunlight, and
set on the back of her graceful head she wore a huge straw sun-hat, in an advanced
stage of dilapidation.

“You mustn’t go this way,” she said, and advanced her hands as if she would
push him back ; for he had been about to pass her when she found her tongue.

The teacher smiled, and raised his hat with a town-bred courtesy.

“Why not?” said he, glad of the chance to stop and feast his eyes upon such fresh
and salient loveliness. What ripe, sweet lips she had! and how tender was the blue of
her lustrous eyes !

“Eh, you mustn’t, Mr. Oakworth. They’ve planned to fettle you down yonder. I
heard ’em planning it yesternight, when they were drunk, and they’re drunk to-day.
They'll do it, for sure.” And then she became conscious of his too eager gaze and of
her own astonishing boldness, and blushed to the roots of her hair, and looked the
picture of modest distress.

“T think I dare face them with you to stand by me,” said the graceless rogue.
“Are you going that way?”

?

MAGAZINE.

“Me! Nay, I’m going home again, as quick ’s my legs “ll carry me!” And with
a Parthian glance, that seemed to rest
upon him a thought longer than it

might have done, she tripped away
along the path by which she
had come.

Without the presence of mind to

cry “ Good-bye!” or “ Thank

you!” George Odakworth
stood very stupidly looking
after her, and then—turned
back to follow. Once she
glanced over her shoulder, per-
haps to see if he had heeded
her warning; but, whether she
suspected his manceuvre or was
merely satisfied, she looked behind
nomore. Her pace quickened
presently into a run, so rapid
that, himself walking, he
could not keep her in sight ;
and coming soon afterwards
to a place where the road
divided, he had to abandon
the pursuit.

It was within a month of this
adventure that Mrs. Den-
holme’s lodger, in explanation
of a sudden change in his
habits, volunteered the remark
that he thought it bad for his
health to sit up reading so
late as he had been used to
do, because it deprived him
of the morning air. Nature,
he declared, never looked so
beautiful as when the dew
was still on the grass and the
smell of the cool earth was in
the air. And the simple soul,
who almost loved him, told
him that he looked a vast deal
better for early rising already
—“pearter ” was the word she
employed. All she wished was
that he could persuade “that idle
lad” to get up earlier too. Deary
me! He lay abed sometimes till

nine o’clock, when the best of the day was gone.

Stealing silently downstairs one balmy morning at four o’clock or thereabouts,

DICK DENHOLME. 675

Mr. Oakworth discovered the cause of Dick’s apparent slothfulness. A couple of
hares which he had not noticed overnight lay on the slopstone ; and Dick was out in
the yard in his stockinged feet, laboriously scraping a coat of fresh soil from his
hobnailed boots. Palpably, he had not yet been in bed. As their eyes met
the poacher started, but Mr. Oakworth, merely shaking his head, turned and
went indoors again. On several occasions he had seen his boon companion come
in of an evening with similar spoils, which he was understood to have “won in
a raffle”: and Dick’s luck in raffles was so extraordinary that he had thought it
prudent not to pry too closely into the method of their manipulation. It did not
occur to him that on this occasion at all events his own behaviour must appear
a little curious in the eyes of Dick, trained as he was by his way of life in habits
of acute observation.

He hurried through the fields with the rapid stride of a man who either has
too much in view, or is too familiar with his path, to spare a glance for
objects by the way. Dipping after a while into a copse of beech and birch and
mountain ash, he picked his way confidently through the hazel and briar under-
growth, and, crossing the head of a gorge which the trees concealed, he arrived
behind a high stone wall on the farther side. Thence, from a distance of twenty
or thirty yards, one looked upon Ephraim Cullingworth’s farm. His approach in
this fashion had been masked until the last moment, but oh! éfourderie! it had
been observable from the window of his own abode up to the point where he had
entered the wood.

He stood impatiently waiting, tearing up the long tangled grass about his
feet, and strewing it on the bushes. For odd moments he drowsed in pleasant
reveries, vaguely smiling; and then fell to again on the grass and the leaves
with a vehemence that startled the big thrushes into flight. Besides which, he
sighed often, and turned pale and red by turns, and otherwise behaved in the
most eccentric manner. Ten minutes passed, or something less or more (time, we
know, is not counted by the clock alone), ere the lithe and upright figure of
Maggie Cullingworth, first seen by him on a certain evening which the reader wots
of, appeared in the trellised porch of the kitchen-garden and moved sweetly towards
him into the home pasture.

She was carelessly swinging a basket, and thinking, you are to suppose, of nothing
at all, which, as Hamlet said, is a fair thought for maids to think. To and fro she
went, gathering mushrooms to line her basket ; and behind the stone wall a pair of
ardent, longing eyes watched her till she was hidden by an envious knoll. And
thereupon the owner ‘of those eyes turned aside down the darksome glen, and made
his way unseen to a dense thicket of holly, where, in the dim depth of it, there was a
natural alcove, softly carpeted with dry leaves. And here he waited again, his head
in a whirl.

A rustle among the branches, and his wood-nymph came peeping. But as
he stepped eagerly forward she beat a quick retreat, and stood laughing at
him from behind a hazel-bush and shaking her lovely head. He, the rascal,
approaching her with a look of tame supplication, made a sudden dash and
caught her round the waist to snatch a kiss; but, adroitly, with a moist palm
laid upon his mouth, she baulked the proffered embrace, and still laughed upon
him over her rosy arm. The tantalising situation! Her face so near his own
that he could perceive the most marvellous new and gleaming beauties in it,
her glorious blue eyes looking right into his, and dancing with frank enjoyment
of his baffled ardour.

THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

“Oh, Maggie!” he said,
with a quick-piercing pang,
“you promised ”—and let
her go.

“Now then!” quoth
Maggie, ‘‘you’ve spilled ail
my mushrooms.”

He began to pick them
up, but she would not let
him do so much as that for
her, and hastened to do it
herself, manceuvring all
the time against another
surprise.

Well?” she asked, when
they had finished, and she
stood facing him with one
hand on her hip. “Is that
all? Where’s your gather-
ing ?”

He had to confess that
he had forgotten to look
for any.

Maggie tossed her head.

“Oh, Mr. Oakworth!”
: she said, mimicking his
doleful manner exactly, “ you promised !”
| This rustic goddess, with her liberal
| ~\44ee- manners and her virtue ever on the qui

vive, put him quite out of countenance.

‘, His glance rested upon her with an ex-

pression she had not hitherto seen in him—an

. expression grave and piercing, before which her eyes fell and the

beat of her heart quickened. How pure and womanly she seemed to him to
be, in that moment !

“Come,” he said softly, “we'll look for them together.”

She understood, and did not meet his glance. This open love was of a new
complexion. They walked side by side down the glen into the pasture, neither
speaking a word. Once or twice her keen, familiar ear detected a crackling of fallen
twigs in the underwood on the opposite slope. She would have been all eyes at the
sound a few minutes ago, but now she gave it no heed.

The quiet happiness, which on that bright morning began to flow into George
Oakworth’s life, was balm to an old raw wound. But while it healed that sore, it
mingled as vinegar upon nitre with certain dregs of memory, and set them in a ferment.
Into the fair heaven of an innocent love he entered, as many and many a man does whose
youth has been spent in some big city, with trembling and with bitter self-reproach. He
said to himself, as many a man does, that he was in no wise worthy of this chaste and
beauteous being with whom a heedless fate had graced his pathway. But, he lacked,
like all such men, that sublimity of heroism which would have refused the boon. It
may be that he prized it so much the more highly. There was at least one un-

important person who would have approved his reasons, whatever they were. “ Puggy”
Cullingworth in those days found him perfectly delightful, and passed in one short
week from his habitual mood of hate, vented behind the teacher’s back in surreptitious
moppings and mowings, to a condition of hero-worship that did him credit.

But in his roseate egotism the schoolmaster neglected Dick; and that affronted
patron fell tragically away from grace. He was drunk daily, and never merry in his
cups. ‘Their long and intimate rambles were ended ; their pleated ties of friendship
had somehow come all undone ; Dick’s budding self-respect and his comrade’s fostering
interest had vanished together—and Dick was a lost man.

Coming home one Friday evening, glad that his labours for that week were over,
the insouciant lover found his landlady shedding quiet tears as she went about her
work. In some strange way he was irritated ; but when he had eaten the meal that she
spread for him, and had sat a while smoking in the twilight, his heart smote him, for
he realised on a sudden that she must then have been sitting for some time in silence
and semi-darkness in the little scullery behind the living-room. He arose and looked.
There she was indeed, her thin hands lying open on her lap, her jaw fallen, and her
dim eyes gazing out of the tiny window upon the last grey streaks of daylight in the
western sky. He was shaken by a gruesome apprehension on perceiving her so. She
made no sign, and it struck him that she would look like that if she were dead.

“Mother!” he said, in a voice that sounded strange to himself. . It was a
name he had called her by sometimes, half in jest and half in affection, and now
it came involuntarily to his lips.

She turned her head, and rose hastily to put away the tea-things.

“No, not that,” he smiled, holding out his hand. ‘“ There’s no hurry. But what’s
the matter to-night, mother ?”

She pottered back into the kitchen, and fumbled with the lock of a drawer, from
a corner of which she took out something. “Reyk me down t’ lamp, wilt-a?” she
said, ‘an’ Aw’ll let tha see.”

He took it down from the high mantelshelf; and when she had lighted it, she
laid before him on the bleached harden cloth a framed pencil-sketch, yellow with
age behind the glass that had been put over it to keep the flies off. It was the
portrait of a chubby boy, with his hair combed smoothly down to his eyebrows, and
a comical look of speechless weariness on his face.

“ Aw wor thinkin’ o’ times goan,” she said, “an’ they moidered me a bit. Ye'd
hardly fancy ’at he wor ivver like that, wo’d ye? Eh, but Aw mind it weel. His
uncle James did that pictur’, one Sunday o’ t’ efternooin, an’ Aw can mind t’
little lad poolin’ a button off his jacket, thro’ bein’ forced to sit quiet so lang.
Aw’ve kept it i’ that drawer sin’ his father deed, for he took a mislikin’ tul ’t when
he growed up, an Aw’re flaid [afraid] he’d burn it. Aye, he’re a grand little lad.
He used to say, ‘Mother, when Aw grow up a big man, Aw willn’t git droughen
like my father. Then Aw can win [earn] summat, cannot Aw?’ But someway he
he’s ne’er done mich.”

The frail old woman pushed up her spectacles and wiped her eyes.

“But there’s some ’ats waur,” she resumed, more cheerfully. ‘ Aw s’ould be
thankful. He’s rare an’ fond of his shiftless owd mother. Aw’m little use now.
If Aw could think—if he didn’t seem—— Eh, dear!”

Suddenly she began to weep without restraint, rocking her body to and fro in the
chair, and gripping her shrunken arms.

“Aw fancied, when ye com’,” she went on, “’at he mud git steadier like; an’
he did mend ; but latterly—Aw cannot tell what to think on ’t. He used to drink

DICK DENHOLME. 677

678 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

just wi’ his mates like, as it leeted [happened] they com’ together. But there’s summat
strange : he’s nut been out o’ liquor for three wik, an’ this nooinin’—they browt him
home, an’ he—he didn’t knaw me.”

The teacher was alarmed, and profoundly touched. Three weeks drunk, and
he not to know it !

“We must have a doctor to him,” he said—and unwittingly added the last straw
to the burden of the mother’s grief, for in Cragside a-doctor is not often called in
except in grave cases.

He had much ado to assuage her fright, for Dick proved to be comatose and
horribly livid; and when he got back from the surgery, he found her trembling
from head to foot. But when, having used the stomach-pump and applied other
restoratives, the doctor gave her some medicine and said that the rascal would be all
right by Monday if he could be kept in the house, she took courage again, though
crying a little after the doctor left her.

A period of delirium followed. George Oakworth undertook the duties of nurse,
and sat with his friend for three nights and two days. He found him pitifully changed
—unshaven and dirty, yellow-skinned and haggard. He saw him cower, and boggle,

a

go a :
re

Pata cai

DICK DENHOLME. 679

and fight desperately, beset by phantom horrors; and, still more monstrous, he
saw the abject palsy of mind and body which succeeded to the frenzy. It was
his part to oppose an unyielding resistance to the tricks and entreaties by which
the miserable sufferer, with incessant iteration, sought to regain his liberty and
renew his debaueh. Only in the small hours of Monday morning, when Dick
sank at last into a healthy slumber, did he cease from the horrid vigil. Then,
absolutely worn out, he fell asleep instantly where he sat.

He was roused by a click of the latch on the bedroom door; but roused so
imperfectly that he did not at once connect the sound with any cause. But it
was broad morning, and starting up in fear of being late at school, he saw that
Dick was gone. He bounded downstairs. As he entered the kitchen, Dick was
hurriedly closing a drawer where both of them knew that the table-knives were kept.
George Oakworth strode over to him.

“Vou fool!” he said.

The poor devil turned to him meekly, and moved toward the staircase again.

“Tr'll bide [keep],” he muttered.

“Nonsense, man!” cried the young fellow, sick with dismay. “TI shall want you
best man one of these days.”

fo

=

Dick had the piteous gaze of a wounded animal. His eyes wandered.

“ He doesn’t knaw,” he gasped.

“Cheer up, old man,” urged his nurse and preserver. “ What is it I don’t know ?
Tell. me.”

“Say nowt, mate,” answered Dick feebly, steadying himself by the wall and
avoiding his questioner’s eyes ; “but it’s my lass ’at ye’re coortin’.”

Mrs. Denholme, coming downstairs an hour later to begin the labours of the
little household, found George Oakworth lying on the big sofa, his hands under
his head and his eyes fixed upon the ceiling. If her sight had been good, she
would perhaps have been struck by his excessive pallor; but he bade her good
morning pleasantly, almost tenderly, and filled her with joy by announcing confidently
that her son was himself again.

“7 don’t think,” he said, “ he’ll drink like that any more.”

While she busied herself lighting a fire, he went up to speak to the convalescent.
Dick, who was sitting on the bedside, looked up shamefacedly as he entered the
room.

“Good-bye, old chap,” said the teacher, holding out his hand.

Dick started to his feet.

““Ye—ye munnot do that!” he cried.

But the hand was still extended, and the teacher was even smiling.

* Aw willn’t hev it!” he burst out, hysterical. ‘“ Ye’re a better man nor me.”

So George Oakworth laid hold of the coarse fist that was clenched on his
comrade’s knee, and grasped it warmly with both hands.

“Tt’s you that don’t know,” he said. “ Good-bye ; and—God bless you !”

A man feels like a coward at such times, and the schoolmaster got out of the
house without saying a farewell to Dick’s mother. He could write for his boxes
when he should need his books again. Again? Would he ever have the courage to
begin life a third time? Was it worth while ?

He must leave some message for Maggie, to make Dick’s happiness sure if he
could. What a fool he had been! The first time, that was comprehensible ; he
had been green, eager, and careless, and the woman had been—well, none of these.
But a second time! His cheeks burned and his ears tingled. A country wench

VoL. I.—No. 5 45

MALL MAGAZINE.

680 THE PALL

had now the laugh of him; a wench that carried the perfume of hay and of cows
about her. How it pierced through him to think of it, and of her smile, so loyal and
artless, and full of the promise of sweet things, that he could never look at her longer
than a moment or so!

Last time he saw her he had nearly kissed her. ‘They were together by a brook,
in close concealment among the nut trees, she sitting, and he lying at her elbow,
gazing on the pure outline of her face, the pretty coral of her little ear, and the
rounded neck. ‘The temptation came upon him to snatch a kiss just there where
the skin is whitest. Why didn’t he do it? A kiss—a thing very sweet to think
of, and borne lightly by the conscience. Heavens! what would he not give,
now it was all over and past—what would he not give to be tempted so again?
All over and past! ‘The chance to touch her hand as he walked by her side, and
her gown when the briars caught it, the gentle melody of her voice in simple talk,
the soft magic of her eyes when she said, ‘‘ Good-bye : it’s milking-time ”—even the
sight of her tripping away across the dewy grass.

Here was the place where he once had her in his arms for an instant—only once
and let her go so easily—let her go as if she were not a prize for the gods. She had
been there that morning, without doubt, two hours ago at most. Was that her voice
calling the dog? Ah, if he had but kept the tryst instead of falling asleep like a
fool! But Dick! The thought made him shiver with a thrill of horror which before
he had not felt.

He found a pencil and a bit of paper; and, still shaking, he wrote some formal
words of parting :

“Drar Miss CuLLINGwoRTH,—I am going away, for I have no right to see you
again. I was never worthy to be your friend; but I assure you I did not know till
this morning about Dick. Make him happy. He loves you more than he does
his life. Good-bye. ‘There have been no pleasanter times in all my life than those
walks and talks with you. Good-bye. For you there are happier things in store ;
but I hope you will sometimes spare a kind thought of remembrance for one who
is for ever—YourR DEVOTED ADMIRER.”

He folded the note, and fixed it with his scarf-pin upon the trunk of an oak
tree, by the mouth of their holly-grove. It pleased him a little to think of the
scarf-pin as a keepsake. It had been his mother’s gift to him; and there was
no woman else so worthy to keep it as this rustic maiden for whom his heart was
bleeding. He must have been mad to think of her for one instant as false, as
like ——-

He had barely time to hide, warned by the familiar click ot a gate, before she
came in sight of the spot where he had been standing. He crouched among the
bushes, trembling at the thought of being found there ; and oh! the dolorous pang
that pierced him when a little cry of joy announced that she had seen the note.

In the moments of dizzy throbbing confusion and heart-sickness that followed,
he was vaguely conscious of hearing a moan and something like a fall; but when
he came to himself, starting and beginning to listen intently, he wondered whether
it was possible that Ae could have made those sounds. But, if not—if it was Maggie,
and she was lying there! Heavens! did she love him, then? and so much, so
strangely ? He came out from his hiding-place, and stood, with white face and
listless hands, distracted with indecision. He could not leave her so; but to go

to her was never to leave her again.

DICK DENHOLME. 681

A heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder, and shook him much as an electric
discharge shakes one.

‘* Drew }

Of all men in the world the least welcome. His eyes restless with a hidden intent,
and his manner betraying a frightful affectation of gaiety.

x &
7 Bi ",
ayy.
s
444°

“ Aye, Dick !” he said, with a short laugh that sounded cynical and fierce. “ Dost
think Aw didn’t knaw wheer ye do yo’r sweetheartin’ ? ”

The schoolmaster made a gesture of desperation.

“For God’s sake,” he burst out, ‘don’t let’s quarrel here. Go and see to that
poor girl. I dare not.”

Dick laughed again as the younger man began to speak ; but at the allusion
to Maggie, though he could not have understood it, his face grew suddenly grave,
and his lips moved queerly.

682 - THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

“ Nay,” he replied, speaking quickly and between gasps, “ that’s what Aw’ve comed
for. Ye knaw nowt what ye’re doin’. If it be agean her will—an’ thee goin’ away,
mate, fro’ Cragside-——-Damn it, we’re mates, lad—we’ve been like mates, choose
how !”

The schoolmaster looked at him, comprehending nothing yet.

“ Sitha, Aw willn’t hev it! Dost hear? Aw tell tha Aw cannot thoil ’t !”

He was shouting, and his face was like that of a furious man.

There was a rustle in the thicket of holly, and Maggie, a vision of loveliness among
the dark leaves, stood gazing out upon the two men, very pale and wild-eyed. A
moment later, with a tremulous cry of mingled fright and joy, she had thrown herself
upon the schoolmaster’s breast, and was whispering eagerly, “ You won’t go now! Oh,
say you won’t go! I should die, I think.”

He clasped her passionately, with a great sob and the blindness of sudden tears.

“Tha sees !” blurted Dick unheeded ; “shoo’re noan o’ my lass. Dunnot stand
theer like a stuck sheep! Dang tha, tha maks me wild!” And he plunged headlong
down the side of the gorge.

Dick’s matchmaking was disconcerted for a while by the unappeasable sulkiness
of Ephraim Cullingworth, Maggie’s turbulent and raffish father. But she came of age
a few months later, and one bright morning in the winter they were married quite
happily without his consent. The merrymakings at George Oakworth’s new home
near the schoolhouse were presided over by Dick in his predestined and voluntary
capacity of best man. At their height they were interrupted by the sudden appearance
of the malcontent, who came noisily in without knocking, and waved aside the outraged
chairman, who had started up with a prodigious look of ferocity.

“Tt’s all reight,” he said, with a bearish unceremoniousness which was meant
to pass for good humour. ‘’Course it is. Bud tha’s gitten a rare wench for thi
wife, George Oakworth. Hesn’t ta now? By !

, shoo’s t’ bonniest 1’ ten parishes !
Well, gie’s thi hand. Aw wodn’t ha’ let her goa, but, dang it! tha’s ta’en her—-an’ tha

knaws how to keep her, Aw judge.”
Saying which, he made a show of “sparring,” and burst out laughing at himself,
and at the joyfulness of their welcome.

J. KEIGHLEY SNOWDEN.

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[After Sir Joshua Reynolds.)

THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.

PART III.

ILLUSTRATED BY FACSIMILES OF OLD PRINTS IN THE COLLECTION OF Dr. PARR.
aa ‘ AYS Beauty to Fashion, as they sat at the toilette,
‘If I give a charm you surely will spoil it,
When you take it in hand there’s such murth’ring and mangling,
Tis so metamorphos’d by your fiddling and fangling,
That I scarce know my own when I meet it again,

Such changelings you make both of women and men.’ ”

And Fashion, protesting against this reproach, winds up her defence by :

‘* Vet, say what you please, it must be allowed
That a woman is nothing unless @ /a mode.”

True, from all time, and true now, Fashion is the passe partout to many
follies, and blinds the eyes of her votaries to the absurdities she leads them to.

“It is better,” says Horace Walpole, “to leave the Mode to its own vagaries ; if
she is not contradicted she seldom remains long in the same mood. She is very
despotic ; but though her reign is endless, her laws are repealed as fast as made.”

In former papers we have portrayed the ladies as they appeared in their towering
head-dresses and enormous hoops. In 1789 every head was lowered, and gradually
the clothing became so scanty that, it was said, the dressmakers dreaded the approach
of summer, fearing that no clothes would be worn, and that their occupation would
be gone :—

‘* Beauty now wears each hour some changing dress,—
One day scarce any, and the next day less.”

The discarded hoops were replaced by enormous cork bustles over which the dress
projected to an unnatural and alarming size. The neck and bosom, hitherto exposed
683

684 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

and bare, was now hidden under a structure of wire covered with gauze or muslin

| “ The Siege of Cork.”

which puffed out from under the chin. ‘The hair, no longer high, was correspondingly
wide and frizzed out @ /a herisson—“ hedgehog fashion.” Large curls or loops hung

THE FOLLIES OF FASHION. 685

down the back, the whole surmounted with plumes of feathers or garlands of flowers.
The gowns, open in front, had short trains ; fancy petticoats were worn, and gauze or
cambric aprons. The hands were tucked into big muffs, or carried large fans.

Muffs were carried more for Fashion’s sake than for the sake of comfort, and nothing
surprises one more than to reconcile the scanti-
ness of the clothing with the severity of the
winters. Again and again we read that for two
months the Thames has been a firm highway.
Ten weeks of frost are recorded, cutting winds,
heavy falls of snow, several inches of ice over
the frozen Serpentine; yet Fashion remains
inexorable, and “the dashing skaters who take
the lead in agility and grace,” and “the sonnish
females who throng the banks,” consider them-
selves amply clothed if to their cambric gowns
they add a gros de Naples spenser, or a twilled
sarsnet pelisse. As a slight concession to the
piercing winds and _ thick-ribbed ice, these
reckless fair ones sometimes permitted their
necks to be gracefully entwined by a swans-
down boa, or they carried a muff of ermine,
leopard, or Siberian goat skin. Muffs were
not considered inconsistent with evening dress ;
made either of fur or “long and slender, of
plain white satin elegantly tamboured.” They
were worn at the opera and the play.

To’see and be seen was the chief object in
going toa theatre in those days. “The pleasure
of a play is to shew one’s self in the boxes, and see the company and all that,” says
a lady to her milliner in 1773 ; in which year the chief ornament of the stage was an
actress with such consummate taste in dress, that a paragraph in the Macaroni and
Scavoir Vivre Magazine for 1772 says: “Ladies are referred for, everything relative
to elegancies of fashion to that celebrated priestess of taste Mrs. Abingdon.”

Mrs. Abingdon began life as a flower girl, with the soubriguet of “ Nosegay Fan,”
and lived to create the part of Lady Teazle, and “to set the fashions to all the fine
ladies in the three kingdoms.” “All her spare time,” we read, “was occupied in
running about London to give advice to aristocratic ladies on the important subject
of new dresses and new fashions. . . . No drawing-room, marriage, or entertainment
was given but Mrs. Abingdon’s assistance was requested. In this manner alone she
made from £1500 to £2000 a year. Her dress on and off the stage was perfect, and
much studied and copied. . . . In London to say ‘It is like Mrs. Abingdon’s’ was
sufficient to stop the mouths of grumbling fathers and husbands.”

Those meretricious aids to beauty, the too free use of which we, in this age,
condemn, were lavishly indulged in by all classes of a past day. In a curious satirical
poem published in 1690 we read :

‘* Mouches for patches to be sure

From Paris the ¢72 fine procure

And Spanish paper (rouge) lip and cheek

With spittle sweetly to belick.
* * * *

And that the cheeks may both agree

Plumpers to fill the cavity.”

686 THE PALL

MAGAZINE.

MALL

At different periods of the seventeenth and eighteenth century it was a fashionable

practice with the ladies to spot their face with black patches, and we still frequently
see the small circular boxes of Battersea enamel which were carried in the pockets
in case these beauty spots fell off and had to be renewed. ‘The manner in which the
patches were placed indicated the politics of the fair wearer, and stringent rules are
given to avoid fine faces being improperly patched.”

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“ Darby and Joan.” (Miss Farren and Lord Derby).

A correspondent in the ew Lady's Magazine for 1787 says :
“ Patches may be reduced to nine sorts which ought to be placed in the following

manner :—

1. The passionate, or smart, patch, at the corner of the eye.
2. The majestic, almost in the middle of the forehead.

3. The gay, on the brink of the dimple caused by a smile.
The ga//ant, in the middle of the cheek.

5. The Aessemg, at the corner of the mouth.

6. The brisk, near the nose.

7. The coguettish, wpon the lips.

8. The discreet, or prudish, under the lower lip.

9. The concealing, upon a pimple.

“Those who advert to these rules may be convinced that a promiscuous manner

of patching may be productive of ill consequences and lead the enamorate to many
a mistake.”

About the year 1733 female hawkers of toilette mysteries chose the Mall and the

THE FOLLIES OF FASHION. 687

Park for the sale of their wares. ‘ Pomatum, my lady, of all sorts,” says one of them ;
“Jip salves, night masks ; right chemical liquor to change the colour of the hair, and
trotter oil and bear’s grease to thicken it ; fine mouse-skin eyebrows that will stick on

iD ine etill 4

“ The Lopsided Beauties.”

RONDA

sO as never to come off . . . and to blind the men (who will sometimes be examining),
I carry artificial flowers, ribbons, and gloves.”

Again, in the early years of the present century an advertisement tells us “I have
all sorts of the finest tinctures to brighten the hair and to colour the lips . . . all sorts
of cushions, plumpers, and bolsters , I have artificial brilliants of all waters, whether

688 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

for the bright eye, the piercing eye, the sleepy eye, the bold eye, the swimming eye ;
and the smoothest mouse-skin eyebrows of all colours.”

“The City Tailors Wife.”

These advertisements recall a ballad of the seventeenth century, in which ladies
are solemnly warned against the use of such allurements and are told:

** And women, all whom this concerns,
Tho’ you offended be,
And now in foule and rayling terms,
Do swagger and scold at me,
I tell you, if you do not mend your ways
The devil will fetch you all one of these days.’

’

THE FOLLIES OF FASHION. 689

As a protection from the sun, ladies then made use of their large fans. Parasols
seem to have been unknown. In a description of the “ Ladies’ undress for August,”
inthe Westminster Magazine for 1777, we read: “ The most elegant and delicate ladies
carry a long japanned walking-cane, with an ivory hook-head and on the middle of
the cane is fastened a silk umbrella or what the French call a pariso/, which defends
them from the sun and slight showers of rain. It opens by a spring, and it is pushed
up towards the head of the cane when expanded for use.”

The fine old gentleman in the foregoing print carries an umbrella, an adjunct to
dress at that time not often seen. Ladies found them inconveniently clumsy and
heavy; and the caricaturists pointed out that the large hats, puffed-out petticoats,

“The Shower”

and buffont fronts rendered umbrellas unnecessary, as these useful garments could
give shelter to a family.

Except to pay visits and to promenade in the parks, gardens, and fashionable
resorts of the day, women of position never walked. Indeed, a “ constitutional ”
would have been to them an impossibility ; for the mere suggestion of a leather boot
or shoe, with a sensible stout sole, would have disgusted the sensitive fair ones.

‘* Let a pair of velvet shoes
Gently press her pretty toes ;
Gently press and softly squeeze,
Tott’ring like the fair Chinese.”

Little wonder that the poor ladies tottered! To walk at all when mounted on
peg-like heels, often three inches high, seems-all but impossible ; and it became the
fashion—a fashion imported from France—to carry a tall cane, that support might be
given to the body.

ee

|

690 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

For a short period boots made of dogskin were introduced ; but whether from pity
to the canine species, or disgust at the enlarged appearance of their feet, ladies set their
faces against the fashion, and the tripping French shoe was again seen to “ wanton
on the foot of beauty.” So late as 1805 we read that, “the Diana buskin was the
fashion in spring, but now the slipper of Thetis bears the palm”; and the Bed/e
Assemblie of 1812 informs its readers: “For walking, half-boots of nankeen, pale-
blue jean, or grey kid, fringed round the top and laced behind, are much in favour ;
and for familiar visits the Grecian sandal of black or very dark silk or satin, laced and
bound with a very opposite light colour, has lately been much adopted.” In the
month of March we learn that “ half-boots of orange Morocco have been seen in Hyde
Park, but among our e/eganfes Pomona sandals and Roman boots of white Morocco
continue in high estimation.”

With the short clinging draperies then worn our grandmothers paid as much
attention to their feet as to their faces, an attention highly necessary when “ petticoat
transparencies just reach the calf of the leg and display a fine ankle to great
advantage.”

Bustles had disappeared, buffonts were soon to follow ; but as in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth the pious Latimer had fruitlessly expended himself in denouncing “ artifi-
cial hips and roundabouts,” so now the bishops preached in vain that the fashion
of scanty garments was scandalous and indecorous. Deaf ears were turned to their
sermons and their censure, and no result followed except a number of caricatures too
coarse for reproduction. As formerly with the hoops Fashion had defied every censor,
so now she continued to give countenance to a style of dress which servéd to
accentuate rather than to drape the figure. “Stays are now very much thrown aside,”
writes an arbitress of fashion, “and the exquisite contour of a fine Grecian form is
no longer disguised in impenetrable and hideous armour. After this intelligence it is
needless to acquaint our fair readers “ that the waists are considerably shorter” ; indeed,
the bodice gradually diminished until we read that “a corset about six inches high
was the only defensive apparatus between the necklace and the apron strings of a
fashionable belle.” In the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine for 1795, there is a protest from
Jemmy Jumps, a stay maker :

** For heaven’s sake, dear ladies, part

With anything,—your head, your heart,

Your very brains,—nay, what you will,

But keep your wazs¢, oh, keep that still !

You lose, consider, half your charms

When folded in a lover’s arms ;

And ’stead of goddess,—angel call’d,

You'll be as Wo body extoll’d.”
But in spite of all remonstrances, for many years clinging scanty skirts and bare necks
and shoulders continued to be the fashion ; and when corsets were worn, we are told
that “they must be laced tight as strength can draw the cord.”

Other fashions came and went. The fan at one period to be found in the hands
of women of all classes, dwindled from a size large enough to give wind to turn the
sails of a mill to a mere toy, and then was laid aside. Pockets were of necessity
abandoned, and every “aspirant to elegance” carried a reticule, which Dibdin
laughed at in one of his popular songs. A sailor just returned from sea is surprised
at the change in his wife’s garments :

‘** But what, ’bove every thing beside,
Did Jack most furiously displease
No pockets did she wear, to hide
Her pincase, wipe, and bunch of keys.

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Elegant French Morning Costume.’
691

»

692 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

‘*Thus harum-scarum would she fling,
Her gear at random, without rule ;
Her handkerchief crammed in a thing
The women call a ridicule.

‘* As to the ridicule, Jack said,
He wished each girl such things who chose
Might have the snuffles in her head,
No muckinger to blow her nose.”

In its turn the reticule was crushed by a notice that, “even in undress, a
handkerchief must supply the place of a bag. In one corner the money is put
and a knot made, the other corner is passed through the ring of the keys and
another knot made. ‘This is inconvenient, but such is the dictate of Fashion.”

About 1770 Fashion decreed that two watches must be worn, and _straightway
every leader of the mode appeared with two—one hanging on each side, the one
worn on the left side being a fausse montre covered with silk, with sprigs in
gold thread embroidered on it. This was probably to avoid the tax which, for
a time, was placed on watches.

The adornment of the head has always been an important study in dress, and
the varying shapes of the hats defy description. A bare enumeration of their names
would fill a paper. In May 1775 the Zady’s Magazine enumerates the new sorts
of hats—‘“ The City Hat,” The St. James’,” “The Ranelagh,” ‘ Macaroni,”
“ Otaheite,” “The Skimming-dish Hat.” “The Calash,” introduced by the Duchess
of Bedford, was a formidable arrangement made like the hood of a carriage, to
be pulled over the head by a string which connected itself with the whalebone hoops.

‘** Hail! Great Calash ! o’erwhelming veil,
By all-indulgent Heaven,
To sallow nymphs and maidens stale
In sportive kindness given.

‘* Safe hid beneath thy circling sphere,
Unseen by mortal eyes,
The mingled heap of grease and hair
And wool and powder lies.

** From the bald head should pad and /ée
And loads of horsehair fall,
Fear not the loose disorder’d pate—
Calash will hold it all.”—177¢.

Some of these head ornaments were as ridiculous as they were disfiguring ; others
added to the charms of the pretty faces which peeped from under them. ‘Then
came the Arethusan mob, the Nuremberg nightcap, the Grecian cap, the Mameluke
turban, to be worn over Brutus crops or with “ Medusa locks in tortuous twists
about the face.” “The curls very dishevelled” or plaited round the head in the
Sappho and Cleopatra style. Nor were bonnets forgotten. ‘Their shapes varied as
much as the hats, and a different one was required for each toilette and occasion.
The divorce of Lady Ligonier, after the duel between her lord and Count Vittorio
Alfieri—Italy’s most tragic poet, and in this case co-respondent—created such a
sensation among the ladies, that, according to the papers, a famous milliner invented
a new fashion in bonnets to be worn at trials of this kind, “the great advantage of
which is that it renders a fan unnecessary. This bonnet is called /a Coguine.” _

When St. James’ Park was no longer the fashionable promenade, the Green Park
became the evening resort of the deau monde; and we read that fabulous sums

“4A Lady with Calash.”

Mais vous sages Anglois qui méprisent nos gouts,

Vous aves des folies tout aussi bien que nous;

Oh! grand Dieu, quel malheur, quel étrange embarras
Quoi? donc cette caléche a causé ce fracas !

693

694 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE

were paid for the privilege of throwing out bow windows on the Park side of the
Arlington Street houses. From these could be best seen the crowd who, in evening
dress, made it their after-dinner lounge, and it was here that in the summer of
1790 ladies first appeared with veils to their bonnets “to the infinite annoyance
of the gentlemen, who called them ‘lace curtains.’” The St. James’ Chronicle for
October of that year, says that the fair ones have “made more false steps since
the commencement of this face-concealing fashion than appear on the records of
gallantry for many years before.”

Louisa PARR.

“ The Invisible Téte-a-téte.”

ROME IN AMERICA.

HERE is a common idea, no less absurd than it is
widespread, that the spirit of Roman Catholicism
is hostile to all. progress; that it is a monarchical
and reactionary spirit utterly opposed to freedom
of thought or opinion in matters of religion, educa-
tion, or politics. It is this idea which animates
the enemies of the Church of Rome the world
over, and which is strikingly prevalent among non-
Catholic thittkers in the United States of America.
There many worthy, but somewhat shortsighted and
prejudiced individuals, can see in the establishment
and increase of Catholicism in their midst nothing
but the ultimate destruction of the unity of their
Republic, the hindrance to all progress, the death-
blow to all freedom. Some regard the Church of
Rome as a hopeless anachronism, a feeble survival

of medizevalism ; others, as a source of constant menace and danger. And yet, if

the Church but carries out her highest aims, acts up to her loftiest ideals, she
will in the end be a source of safety, and not of peril, to the great Republic

in whose midst she has taken so firm a root. This is a bold assertion; but I

hope to show within the scope of this article that it is not made without good

grounds, and without a well-founded belief in its sincerity and truth.

And I may here state that, although myself a staunch adherent of the Anglican
Church, I went recently to the United States, taking with me letters of introduction
from Cardinal Manning to the chief American prelates, in order that I might make
a careful study of this question on the spot. I trust, therefore, that I am fairly
well qualified to express a duly thought-out opinion on the subject.

In the first place, then, it must be remembered that the spirit of the Church
of Rome is to be ever “he Church of the nation in which she lives. Without
conceding one jot or tittle of those principles and dogmas which she holds dearest,
which are the very foundations of her well-being, and upon which, as upon a rock,
she is so firmly established that she cannot be shaken, yet in matters of policy,
in affairs of State, it is surprising to note how frequently she moves forward on

VoL. I—No. 5. 695 46

696 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

clear, broad, well-defined lines—lines laid down for her by those whose experience
is the experience of ages. In whatever country, therefore, she seeks to establish
herself, she recognises in matters of civil government that that form is the legitimate
one which is the adopted one.

She understands and accepts the great changes which have come in civil and
political institutions; so that alliances between the Church and State which were
in past ages commendable and necessary, she now regards as no longer advisable
or even possible. She is not a mere medizeval crystallisation precipitated into the
midst of this vast, pulsating, energising nineteenth century. She is not a mere bundle
of cold theories, impossible dogmas, and worn-out creeds, thrown down to lie idle
at the feet of an onward-rushing, striving, earnest, and vigorous humanity. Herself
a great power, full of undying life and of irresistible energy, so far from being
hampered by her past traditions, she glories in them, and is encouraged by the
memory of them, whilst every moment she is applying the experience gained in
ages gone by, and in every part of the known world, to meet the exigencies of the
present, to be ready for the immediate future.
In her the heart of humanity beats for ever
against the heart of humanity.

Nowhere is this more clearly seen to be
true than in America. Here the Church is on
her trial as she has never been since that
moment when she first reared her temples amid
the palaces and glories of Imperial Rome.
Here, for the first time in the history of the
world, and with a sharpness of contrast hitherto
unseen, the old and the new are confronted
with one another. Here face to face they stand
—the Grand Old Church, the Glorious Youthful
Republic; and meanwhile the world looks
breathlessly on. For a crisis is at hand.
This is a tide in the affairs of Rome which,
if she takes it at the flood, will lead her on

Cardinal McCloskey. to such fortune as even she has never before
experienced.

Discussing this subject the other day with Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, he
finely remarked to me, with his epigrammatic neatness, that the Mississippi will
never allow itself to be dominated by the Tiber. I do not know that the Tiber
desires to rule over the Mississippi; but we may rest well assured that, whatever
happen, even the father of waters itself will never get the better of that turgid
yellow stream upon the banks of which for three thousand years have stood the
successive empires, once political and now ecclesiastical, that have so steadily and
grandly ruled the world.

Even in the vast new Republic beyond the seas traditions have their power
and their influence. Rome there as elsewhere marches on with unwearying, irresistible,
unhindered footstep. But, as I have suggested, with all her glorious traditions, she
is not guilty of the fatal mistake of living upon them. She is proud of them, as
who would not be? She is inspired, but not dominated by them. They only spur
her on to fresh effort. As a well-known American prelate has recently declared,
her work is in the present and not in the past. It will not do for her to understand
the thirteenth better than the nineteenth century; to be more conversant with the

ROME IN AMERICA. 697

errors of Arius or Eutychus than with those of contemporary infidels or agnostics ;
to study more deeply the causes of Albigensian or Lutheran heresies, or of the
French Revolution, than the causes of the social upheavals of our times. American
Catholics seek no backward voyage across the sea of time; they ever press forward.
They believe that God intends the present to be better than the past, and the future
to be better than the present. The tendencies and movements of the age, which
affright the timid, are providential opportunities opening the way for them to most
glorious victory. They regard the conversion of America as tantamount to a
conversion of the whole world; for in America, what I may term, for lack of a
better word, Modernity, which sums up the whole experience of the bygone ages,
reaches its climax. ‘To conquer America, therefore, is to conquer the world. “ The
movements of the modern world,” as Archbishop Ireland, of Minnesota, has well
expressed it, “have their highest tension in the United States.” There, natural
order, as opposed to the supernatural, is seen at its best; there it displays its
fullest strength.

Again, the freedom of Republicanism is not only fully extended to, but is
gratefully accepted and intensely appreciated by, the Church of Medizvalism. This
is a fact scarcely as yet realised by the ordinary European, or even by the American
Catholic, or Protestant, for the matter of that. But the paragraph as to religious
equality in the national constitutions, drawn up so many years ago, upon which the
whole well-being, and indeed the very existence of the Republic depend, is what
more than anything else gives the foreign Church that has established herself in its
midst her greatest power, all her hope for the future. Rome in the Republic is free,
freer than ever she has been before, freer than she is anywhere else to-day.

“T was boasting in Rome,” said a distinguished prelate to me a short time
since—‘“ I was boasting that the Catholic Church was really free only in America.

“The officer of the Inquisition to whom I was talking objected: ‘ But the Church
there is not protected by the State.’

“*Tndeed she is,’ replied I, ‘even if that protection be only negative ; for the
fathers of the American constitution, regarding questions of religion as matters for
the individual conscience only, wrote that, “ Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or pv ohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So that we
need no State protection; we can protect ourselves. And even if in all respects
we are not fortunate, surely it is better to get some misfortunes through liberty than
good fortunes through tyranny.’ ”

I think that I have now very fairly paved the way for my three suggestions
concerning the work, both present and future, of the Roman Church in America,
and the position that she can make for herself in the great Puritan Republic.

In the first place, she must exist 7 the people, for the people, dy the people. She
must set herself, if she is to do any good at all, or if she is to obtain any firm or
lasting establishment whatever, to the bettering of humanity. In the persons of
her priests and bishops American Rome must show to the world that, what Mr. Stead
has well termed a humanised Papacy, is not only possible, but an absolute, warm,
living, pulsating, energising fact.

Secondly, and this follows the first as the night the day, she must show herself
not only abreast of the times, but in advance of the times. And if she keeps herself
abreast of the times as they are in America, then she is abreast of the whole world.

And, thirdly, she will probably—nay, almost certainly—prove herself a political
factor of the highest importance in the preservation—or, indeed, in the very building
up—of the unity of the great Republic.

698 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

These three phases of her work, the carrying out of which in their entirety will
most thoroughly justify her presence and existence in the United States, are the phases
upon which, during the remainder of this article, I propose to speak.

First, then, Rome, to really take up her rightful position in the Republic, must
demonstrate to that Republic that a humanised Papacy is not only a possibility, but
an absolute glowing fact. And already, it must be conceded, she is in a fair way
to do this.

Nobody who has seen for himself the manner in which Catholicism in America has
identified itself with the cause of struggling and suffering humanity can doubt that
it has at heart the present well-being to the full as much as the future welfare of
its people. The American Catholic priests understand well that their duty lies not
exclusively within the sanctuary, that if they would hold the people, and exert due
influence in the country, they must go out into the highways and byways, and wipe
the tear of sorrow, and lift up the fallen, and urge onward the masses of men. Bishops
and priests are taking hold vigorously of social questions. All realise that the great
mission of the Church in America is by the influence of her ministers and her teaching,
conservative and yet merciful towards the weak, to save society midst its present
strugglings and vicissitudes. Catholic socialism, so-called, has been instituted specially
to counteract the irreligious tendency of materialistic socialism in denouncing the
shameful inequalities, which are as absolutely contrary to the spirit of Christ as to
the spirit of a Republic which declares all men to be born free and equal.

The Church here recognises the fact that labour has its sacred rights as well as
its dignity. It believes that paramount among the natural franchises of the labouring
classes is their right to organise or to form themselves into societies for mutual
protection and benefit ; and it recognises the fact that in this right thus to organise
lies the safety of a vast community, as that which, for instance, exists in America.
For this right implies a confidence in the honesty and intelligence of the masses.

As Cardinal Gibbons told me when I alluded to his wise counsel to the Pope
on his Holiness’s intention to interdict
the Knights of Labour: “I am entirely
on their side,” said his Eminence to me,
“though I have often been condemned

for upholding associations banded _ to-
gether for political purposes. I recognise,
of course, that in such combinations
there may be dangers ; but if they are
to be forbidden on account of possible
dangerous results, why, then, good-bye
to all progress, and to all freedom.
Here is where the Catholic Church
would step in as a friend and as an
adviser. She acts as a benefactor when
she intervenes. between employer and
employed, and suggests the most effectual

means of diminishing, or even removing,
the causes of discontent. The Church

tweesicrs | would help the Knights of Labour, and
Cardinal Gibbons. all members of similar organisations, so

long as they are rightfully resisting
capitalists who would cruelly oppress them. Our 7é/e here is to live the life of

ROME IN AMERICA. 699
the people, to understand them, to make our influence felt. We American clergy
realise this fact in a way in which it is impossible for the clergy of older countries
to realise it.”

I cannot better conclude this part of my argument than by quoting from the
eloquent sermon preached by the Archbishop of Minnesota to the Centennial
Conference of American Catholics, held at Baltimore last November: “The time
has come,” said he, and I quote him literally—‘“the time has come for ‘salvation
armies’ to penetrate the wildest thicket of thorns and briars, and bring God’s Word
to the ear of the most vile, the most ignorant, and the most godless. Saving those
who insist on being saved, as we are satisfied in doing, is not the mission of the
Church. ‘Compel them to come in,’ is the command of the Master. This is not
the religion we need to-day—to sing lovely anthems in cathedral stalls, and wear

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Catholic College, Georgetown.

copes of broidered gold, while no multitude throng the nave or aisle, and the world
outside is dying of spiritual and moral starvation. Seek out men, speak to them,
not in stilted phrase, or seventeenth-century sermon style, but in burning words
that go to their hearts as well as to their minds. . . . These are days of warfare,
days of action. It is not the age of the timid and fugitive virtue of the Thebaid.
Into the arena, priest and layman! Seek out social grievances ; lead in movements
to heal them. Peep mercifully into factories at etiolated youth and infancy. Breathe
fresh air into the crowded tenement quarters of the poor. Follow upon the streets
the crowds of vagrant children. Lessen on railways and in public service Sunday
work, which renders for thousands the practice of religion impossible. Cry out against
the fearful evil of intemperance, which is damaging hourly the bodies and souls of
countless victims. ‘This is religion pure and undefiled.’ This will secure the age
to God’s Church.”

700 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

I come now to my second point, nor do I think I shall have much difficulty
in proving that the Church in the Republic is making very earnest and successful
endeavour to show herself not only abreast of the times, but in advance of the times.
And that means much in America.

In the first place, then, she keeps abreast of the times in that she increases and
multiplies with them. A fruitful Church is a flourishing Church ; a flourishing Church
is a progressive Church. Figures are uninteresting, but they are sometimes undeniable.
Those that I append are, moreover, trustworthy, for they are taken from an un-
prejudiced source—the Mew York Herald. 1 must draw attention to the fact that
the personal figures refer only to communicants, excluding altogether the thousands
of those whom I may term lapsed Catholics, but who are yet, by birth and training,
members of the ancient Church. ‘The Mew York Herald for Sunday, August 2nd, 1891,
thus speaks :

“The census report gives the number of communicants, making the returns for the
Roman Catholic Church uniform with those of Protestant denominations. For the
first time we have now an authoritative statement of the numbers of communicants in
the various Catholic dioceses. It will be seen by this that the Catholic Church in the
United States is a body of gigantic proportions. Its churches are scattered throughout
the length and breadth of the land. ‘The old New England of the Puritans is now the
New England of the Catholics. The ecclesiastical province of Boston, which reports
1,004,605 communicants, is next, numerically, to the province of New York, which has
1,375,404 communicants. ‘The grand totals of the Church are on a magnificent scale.
There are 10,221 church organisations, 8765 church edifices, with a seating capacity
for 3,366,633, valued at $118,381,516, and 6,250,045 communicants. ‘This is more
than half of all the Protestant denominations combined, which in 1880 numbered
10,065,963 communicants.”

In addition to this it is interesting to note that there are upwards of 70 Catholic
colleges, 40 theological seminaries, and
220 academies. These establishments are
supervised by 75 bishops and 14 arch-
bishops.

That “the old New England of the
Puritans is now the New England of the
Catholics” is a serious statement ; yet it is
one for which its promulgators have good
foundation. There is no doubt that the
development of Catholicity in New England
has been wonderful, and here is one ex-
planation of it, an explanation well estab-
) lished by statistics. The descendants of
, \ the Puritans have arrested their own de-

The first building erected at Georgetown. velopment by a limitation of family. The
Irish—and latterly the French Canadians

who have settled in New England in great numbers—-have, like all honest Catholics,
an innate as well as a religious horror of any interference with the course of nature,
and, in consequence, they are rapidly possessing the land. It is quite in accordance
with the old Bible promise on the subject of children that the man shall be happy
whose quiver is full of them. The Catholics are happy, and they shall not be afraid
to stand with their enemy in the gate.

ROME IN AMERICA. 701

The decline of population in New England is a remarkable fact which attracts
general attention in the United States, and forces itself on public notice in a hundred
different ways. For instance, once thriving and teeming farms are fast becoming
desolate wildernesses. The want of the farmers is sons and daughters. They are
rearing up none; ° Rachel mourns for her children because they are not. From
Connecticut come startling facts on the decline of Congregationalism—the dying
out of the once dominant religion, formerly so tyrannical. No young people are
growing up to fill the old meeting-houses ; no children to come rushing out of school
with merry glee. The New York Suz, in a recent issue, makes the smallness of
Congregationalist families the topic of a special article. The Congregational Church
has 492,000 members, and 325,000 households. ‘The New England race has dwindled
to this! Scattered all over the country, the body once so active, so dominant and
energetic, has shrunk from what it once was in ancestral New England to one-third of
a million families in forty-four states and the few territories. A family can be scarcely
less than father, mother, and one child. Yet only one-half the Congregationalist families
are Church members. Each household is represented by one member and a half.
None are growing up to supply the steady loss. The baptisms last year amounted only
to 8889. On an average of thirty-seven families only one child was born, or, at all
events, brought to be baptised. The Sw remarks:

“Tf this Puritan Church-is not raising up sons and daughters to take the places of
the fathers who are passing away, how can it hope to grow and flourish as it did when
families of eight, ten, and twelve were common among the godly people of New
England ?”

How prophetic, then, are the words of the old New England Congregational
minister, the Rev. Joshua Hopewell, to the immortal Sam Slick, well-nigh sixty years
ago: “ ‘Sam,’ said he, ‘ we’re agoin’ to have an established Church ; it may be a very
good Church, and it is a great deal better than many we have; but still it ain’t the
Church of the Pilgrim Fathers.’ ‘What Church, minister?’ said I. ‘Why,’ said he,
‘the Roman Catholic Church: before long it will be the established Church of the
United States.’ ”

Now, when it is remembered that New England has been for two centuries
the very temple of Puritanism, the importance of the statements here fearlessly
made, that it is fast becoming the very stronghold of Catholicism, cannot possibly
be under-estimated. For to win the fight in New England is to win it all over
America.

But if the Church in the Republic is really to keep pace with the onward rush of
events in that marvellous country, she must keep the pace in every particular, otherwise
her increase will be a curse to herself and to the country at large. Quality, not quantity,
is what must first be considered. The precipitation of vast hordes of ill-educated,
untrained, and unintelligent persons upon the wide-spreading lands of America would
be little less than a calamity. It is not sufficient for Rome in the West to be fruitful
and multiply and replenish the earth. She must provide that her offspring be
burgesses of pure life and wholesome morals. They become citizens of no mean city :
let them take heed that they be worthy of their inheritance. Here, again, I come to
the conclusion that the Catholic Church is doing her best to secure this end, is aiming
at a consummation so devoutly to be desired.

Her task, however, is indeed no light one. I realised this to its fullest extent as I
sat in the great Jesuit College of Georgetown talking to some of the Roman Hierarchy
on the question of Catholic instruction and education, and my heart sank at the thought

702 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.
of its magnitude. But as I gazed into the shrewd Roman faces of Bishop Keane,
the Rector of the Catholic University
of America, and Monsignor Campbell,
a prelate of the Society of Jesus, and
Provincial of the Jesuits of Maryland
and New York—faces in which, how-
ever, were easily discerned the ’cuteness
and enterprise of the energetic Yankee

I took heart of grace, and hoped for
the best. For those faces told me, in
a far more literal sense than it might
be supposed, that the old was merged
in the new, that Romanism was fused

es with Puritanism, Medizevalism was lost
LOS in the vast sea of Modernity.

It is quite a moot point as to which
party most influences the other in this
Bishop Keane. strange fellowship; whether Rome
dominates America, or America
triumphs over the Italian element. But in the faces of my friends I took comfort ;
the good qualities of the Old World and the New were equally present. And I
reflected, as we sat a moment in deep stillness, that if the Church can but rise
out of her lower self, with such men to guide her she will not fail to accomplish
the work she has undertaken, or to win in the race that is set before her. I
glanced out of the window, and see! away down by the silver waters of the historic
Potomac, I caught a glimpse of the beautiful Washington Memorial. ‘There, like
Cleopatra’s Needle, it stands, and you cannot get away from it. It is seen from
everywhere ; it dominates the whole city. Pure, chaste, virginal, its beauty, its pathos,
its sublimity grow on one day by day, and all day long

** That slim Egyptian shaft uplifts
Its point to catch the dawn’s and sunset’s drifts
Of various gold.”

And is it not so with the Church in the great Republic? Is it not thus, indeed, that
Rome in America is actually showing herself? Towering aloft, pure, proud, pitiful, in
the midst of a great people ; gazing back on the long, dead Eastern past ; steadfastly
looking forward into the golden mists of the far new West, illumined by the light of ages,
hopeful of the brilliant future. These were my thoughts in that moment of silence.

I broke it reluctantly. Bishop Keane had just been declaring that his people did
not seek to make their Church a National Church, so much as to make it keep pace
with the times and with the aspirations of the country.

“ But, sir,” said I, “can you so rise above your old traditions, many of which are
hopelessly out of harmony with the spirit of to-day? ‘Think, Bishop Keane, of the
massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day, and of the Holy Inquisition; how do you get
away from or how do you explain those dark blots in your Church’s past history ?”

The prelate replied : “Can you not see that these mistakes were rather political than
ecclesiastical, committed by the State rather than the Church—though I admit the
Church permitted such action ? But in those days all Churches persecuted. There is
no place for the Inquisition in a free country to-day, and God forbid there ever should
be. We have better methods. We would even do away with ordinary ecclesiastical

ROME IN AMERICA. 703
condemnations. Our advice to the holy See, in dealing with the Church in America,
is to let condemnations alone. ‘The world is not governed by these, but by persuasive
presentation of the truth. We regard the Protestant sects as our brethren. Our
Cardinal follows in the footsteps of Dr. Carrol, the first Archbishop of Baltimore, who
declared: ‘It never was our doctrine that salvation can be obtained only by those
actually in the communion of the Church.’ As to your objections: the Church
that once condemned Galileo now provides some of the greatest astronomers of the
day. In this very college in which we are sitting this moment, the first and oldest
Jesuit College in America, there is a magnificent observatory ; and within the next few
weeks the father in charge is about to publish a work of original investigations
conducted here. And within these walls has been contrived a new application of
photography to star transit, which will have an important effect on astronomy
generally.

“ But,” he went on, smilingly, ‘our advance with the times is not carried on in the
skies only: we are progressing wonderfully with the ordinary education, first of our
clerics, and then of our laity. ‘Take for instance the Catholic University of America,

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The Catholic University, Washington.

over which I have the honour to preside. Do you think for one moment that we
devote all our energies to turning out priests who shall be only priests—-men who know
theology and nothing else, nothing of the world or of matters secular? Here, in America,
before all things our American Catholics must be prepared to contend against atheism,
and free-thought, and scepticism, and the like. ‘They, of all men, must keep pace with
the times, must strive to discern the future, must be able to give a reason for the faith
that is in them. The smallest part of their education is that which comprises Catholic
theology. It is an obligation on our men to know thoroughly the other side. ‘There-
fore in the four years they are at the University, they learn to trace the connection
between science and dogma. They make a profound study of the principles of morals
as applied to society, with a psychological study of normal and abnormal mental
conditions. Their cosmological course involves no small knowledge of chemistry,
physics, geology, and paleontology. ‘They are thoroughly well-versed in sociology,
literature, and history. In learning all these things they seek only to know the truth,
and the truth shall make them free. We strive as earnestly as any of our Protestant
fellow-countrymen for the cause of universal education. God is Light, and in Him is
no darkness at all.”

704 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

Thus the eloquent Rector of the great Catholic University of America. His state-
ments go far to disprove the very unwarrantable assertions made by certain ill-informed
Protestants that Catholics are ignorant, bigoted, and hopelessly in arrear of the times ;
out of touch, in short, with the spirit of the age.

And as regards the desire of the Catholics to control the religious education of their
children, who can reasonably blame them? Mr. James Russell Lowell assured me, only
a few weeks before his death, that he
considered the demands of the Catholics

ASS fair and reasonable, and in accordance
SS with justice and common-sense. Both
* Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop John
ay) Ireland informed me in the most earnest

manner possible that they did not desire
to interfere at all with the State schools
as at present constituted. On the con-

Yy- — trary, they gloried in them. ‘“ Withered be
a >>» the hand raised to destroy them,” said the
“iy Yi? Archbishop. No, these two splendid
s f prelates, Americans and loyal Republicans

ee .
$Y) J to the very core, would bitterly resent

any attempt to hinder free education as

granted by the State. All they ask is to

James Russell Lowell. be allowed to give their own religious

education in their own hours, —this

religious education to go hand in hand with the secular teaching provided by the

State. As Dr. Ireland has well pointed out, the State school, by ignoring the religious

instruction of its children, is doing harm to the State. Therefore Catholics, while as

earnest as their Protestant brethren for the retention of the admirable secular

education of the State system, would add to it the religious education, not only of its
own Church, but of all the other Churches in the Republic.

In no smallest respect do such men as Gibbons and Ireland lag behind in the
onward march of civilisation. ‘They strain every nerve that, in every particular, the
Church shall be well abreast of the times, and even in advance of the times. ‘ The
Church,” says one of them, “must prove equal to the hour and the occasion. It must
enter into the spirit of the twentieth century, and into the spirit of the times and of the
conditions of its environment, and it must have both pluck and push. In addition
to these qualities, however, it must give evidence of an unquestionable intellectual
superiority ; it must dominate by its erudition, and its rules of conduct must be based
on reason and science, in order that it may prove the most powerful educational
organisation. ‘To effect this we must have a thoroughly educated clergy, who, at the
same time, shall be thoroughly American, and imbued with American ideas. Our
foreign priests have not divested themselves, and do not divest themselves, of the old
spirit. ‘They are bound down by the past. What we want is a new generation.” In
America the Church is free from all trammels. It can act as it thinks proper ; it enjoys
the completest autonomy ; it is in close touch with the people. Many, even non-
Catholics, are turning to Rome as the one great social force necessary to maintain the
people in the right path. And the Church, animated with new youthfulness, feeling
itself really and truly American, divested of all care for the past, and full of hope for
the future, is ready for the battle.

Yes, the Church, as represented by her officers, is ready, but are the soldiers in her

ROME IN AMERICA. 705

ranks equally prepared? The weak point undoubtedly in the Church of Rome is the
lack of energy and spontaneous, harmonious, and united action on the part of her lay
members. ‘They leave all to their priests, their officers. But the Colonel and the
subalterns cannot possibly fight the battle single-handed ; the private soldiers must
follow where their officers lead. Archbishop Ireland frankly concedes to Protestantism
a lay energy and promptitude of action which are not to be found in his own Church.
In his recently published “ Tries at Truth,” Mr. Arnold White fondly dreams of a
Christian Church in which there shall be neither priests nor ministers, churches nor
ordinances. This, taken by itself, is an ideal impossible of realisation. He might as
well plead for a fleet without ships and officers, or an army without generals and
captains. But his main argument contains a grand truth. He would have a Church
where a// are servants of the Most High, a// banded together to do His work, a//
striving to bring to pass the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. So must it be with the
Church in the Republic. Her humblest members are called upon to strive to the
uttermost. Lay energy, lay action, lay thought and promptitude will avail what the
teaching or even the most devoted self-sacrifice of the clergy cannot hope to accomplish.
It is no good that priests and prelates spend and be spent, whilst the lay members of
their flock are given over to a political scoundrelism which would put to shame the
vilest outcasts of humanity. It is of little avail that the priests of the Church preach
glorious truths, or raise aloft pure ideals, whilst a timid and reactionary press dare take
no step onward and upward in the higher life of its Church. There is a great work
for the Roman Catholic laity in the American Republic. -And if they but realise this,
the Church, like a mighty army, brilliantly officered, splendidly disciplined, perfectly
manned and equipped, will move on to victory.

And so, if all these her ideals are carried out in their entirety, it goes without
saying that the Church will speedily become an important, if not the most important
political factor in the Republic. She will become a factor that will not permit itself
to be left unreckoned with in the calculations of any politician, or body of politicians,
desirous of exercising an influence either for good or evil in the States—a factor that
more than any other in American politics will go towards the construction and the
maintenance of unity in the Republic. Rome, say what we may, and however much
we may dislike or seek to explain away or absolutely deny the fact, Rome, nevertheless,
is the one great Church—the one vast political as well as ecclesiastical organisation
that speaks with authority, with a voice that zw¢// be heard. And especially must it be
remembered that the Church in the Republic I am so fondly depicting will be, not the
Church of Medizevalism, or of the Imperial City, or even of the Vatican of to-day.
Rome in the Republic will be American Rome; it will be Puritan Rome, it will be
emancipated Rome. It will not be Rome as we have hitherto known it, hampered
and fettered by canons and rules centuries old, and altogether and hopelessly
incompatible and out of touch with the spirit of to-day. It will be Rome
Americanised—in other words, frankly democratic. And American Rome will find
it her duty, and indeed even now finds it her duty, to modify or abolish those canons
and laws which are absurd and ridiculous in the vast, new, young Republic. Rome in
America glories in the proud traditions of the past ; she is inspired and encouraged by
them, but she does not live upon them. In her western avatar she is puritan and
English, even more than she is medizval and Italian. It is quite true, in another
sense perhaps than Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes meant it, that the Tiber will never
dominate the Mississippi, but it is equally true that the Mississippi may flow into
the Tiber. And I believe that the day will come, when, if she will but act up to
her loftiest ideals, and in accordance with her noblest traditions, republican Rome,

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THE MALL MAGAZINE.

706 PALL
Puritan Rome, will dominate not the United States only, but the whole English-
speaking world.

Rome, with her old traditions undimmed and illumined by the spirit that once
animated the Pilgrim Fathers of
the Republic, will be possessed of
a power and of an influence un-
dreamed of even in the days
her loftiest supremacy. If she can
but rise above her antecedents
and how great an “if” is this

what may she not accomplish ?
Emancipated, tolerant, democratic,
American, who shall say what is
not in store for her, or what is
beyond the accomplishment of
such a Church? But if this
ideal of mine is ever to become
other than such stuff as dreams

.

are made of, it will be readily
understood that she must be com-

pletely nationalised and naturalised
throughout.
Archbishop Corrigan. Nor is this difficult of accom-
plishment when we remember that
the Roman Church is chiefly remarkable for an endless plasticity and an inexhaustible
faculty for adaptation, which modern biologists have taught us to recognise as the
condition precedent of life. In the highest and best sense of the word she follows out
the precepts of the Apostle, and becomes, anywhere and everywhere, all things to all
men. She never changes in her dogmas, her principles of morals, or her essential
constitution. She may, she does, change in points of discipline, in practical application
of principles according as circumstances are altered, and in her general exterior bearing ;
her garments take the colour of her environment. And this power of adaptation on
her part—itself an essential of vitality—is nowhere more remarkably displayed than in
America. ‘The States are jealous of foreign influence. ‘The Church feels that she has
no right to exist in America as a mere foreign establishment. Catholics desire no
outward form of union between Church and State. They claim their rights as citizens
of a free Government, and they demand for the Church no other rights than those
which the law gives to all forms of voluntary association among citizens. And is not
this Christ’s own ideal of the Kingdom of Heaven? Certain narrow, prejudiced people
will continue to judge Catholics from what they may have said or done under other
forms of government or in other ages. Such critics are mistaken. Parties change,
and the relations of men with them change also ; and the relations of Catholics to the
State in America are entirely different from the relations of like kind in other places
and times. They know their niche in the Republic, and they fit themselves to it
loyally and unreservedly.

With regard to the increasing hordes that are ever flowing into the great Republic,
it is generally conceded, even by her enemies, that the Church of Rome will do more
than any other body in the States, not only to Christianise them, to humanise them,
and to render them fit and capable citizens, but also to establish them in the land
of their adoption. Not the most prejudiced Puritan, the most bigoted Protestant, the

ROME IN AMERICA. 407

most loyal Republican, but acknowledges quite frankly and truthfully, and with nothing
of arriére-pensée, that in the case of anarchy or of revolution, the influence of Rome
will ever be healthily conservative, and will ever be exercised in favour of the Govern-
ment, and to restrain the wild passions and headstrong impulses of various foreign
elements—elements that otherwise would continue to be a source of daily-increasing
menace and danger to the unity and happiness of the States. America is now
universally regarded as the “ dumping” ground for the Old World, which considers
itself privileged to precipitate her surplus populations upon the wide-stretching prairies
or the already overcrowded cities of the New World. All this seething mass of
Bohemians and Hungarians, Swedes and Germans, Irish and Italians, can be held
together only, by ecclesiastical ties. This presents not only a serious problem to
be solved by the Government, but it constitutes, at one and the same moment, the
chief difficulty that confronts the Church, and provides her with the one great
opportunity of proving to the world the real tangible nature of her power and of
her influence. For it has now become the aim and duty of the Church in America
to unite, fuse, mould, assimilate into one homogeneous and harmonious whole the
various nationalities that come beneath her care, and to inculcate not only one form
of Christianity, but also a heartfelt allegiance to the political principles of the country.
Priests, as a rule, recognise this fact. The question, of course, is a very difficult one ;
the problem to be solved ‘is very vast; so much then the greater will be the credit
to the body that solves it. In exact proportion to the difficulty of gaining the victory
will be the Awdos acquired by the victors and the influence they will subsequently
be able to exercise.

It was not always so. In the early days of emigration Roman Catholic priests
and bishops were invariably, like their people, strangers and pilgrims in a foreign
land. ‘The Church then necessarily wore a foreign aspect. ‘This was inevitable, and
But the foreign aspect is now wearing away. The
majority of American Catholics are now born in America, and are American to the
very core. Bishops and priests understand that, while Catholics, they must be
Americans. ‘The whole tendency of the Church
at the present day is to make faithful, loyal
Catholics and loyal Americans.

yet undesirable for many reasons.

Laudable as is this tendency, and glorious
the consummation ultimately to be attained, yet
the work does not progress without meeting
difficulties from these very foreign elements
within her ranks. Germans, Poles, Bohemians,
French, and Italians make a strong fight for
their own customs and tendencies ; and, under
the guidance of Herr Cahensley and other
mistaken leaders—blind leaders of the blind

are endeavouring, as far as possible, to give

each insignificant ethnical unit its own repre-

sentative on the Episcopate. From every point

of view, ecclesiastical as well as political, this

would be suicidal. If their ideas triumphed, Archbishop John Ireland.

we should see in America an Italian Church, a

German Church, a Hungarian Church, a French Church. Their rulers would establish
and maintain a foreign unit in every state, would create an tmperium in imperio in
each locality.

THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

708

Not so Cardinal Gibbons and his assistant prelates. These wiser and wider-minded
Catholics realise the intense importance, if the Church is really to carry out her mission
in its entirety, of Americanising and nationalising as rapidly and completely as possible
bishops, priests, and people, remembering always that the spirit of the Church is to be
the Church of the nation in which she works.

And now is her dream on the very verge of actualisation. Her prelates are not
foreigners ; they are not aristocrats; they are Americans to the core, attached heart
and soul to the principles of democracy, seeking only to build up each and all into
the true union of the Republic. Their one desire is to see a free Church in a free
country, teaching to the varied inhabitants of that country the universal brotherhood
of man and the all-fatherhood of God, without which, as both they and I hold,
no Republic can hope to exist. And if the Church but succeed in the carrying
out of these her ideals, she will no longer be the Church zz the Republic, but the
Church of the Republic beloved of all her children,—Rome, the Mother of the
world.

RAYMOND BLATHWAYT.

[Zhe Author desires to acknowledge with thanks the assistance he has recetved from
Messrs. Burns & Oates.]

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Mee
*

NEEDED rest, and so I went to Holland. In order to rest properly
one needs a flat country. Many people go to Switzerland to rest,
and thereby commit a grave error. In that perpendicular country
one is continually tempted to climb up to the edge and look out
over the world below ; whereas in a flat country the impossibility of
ever reaching the horizon is so self-evident that one is content to
remain placidly in the same place, and think only of the flattest and
most unexciting topics.

I utterly disagree with those who think that it is possible to
become perfectly familiar with a country by spending two days in it ;
and that to be carried through a city by an express train entitle one to

be regarded as an authority as to that town. Nations and cities cannot be studied in
this superficial way. If you want to become really familiar with the architecture, the

galleries, and the public resorts of a town, and also to know the politics, the literature,
the manners, and the morals of its inhabitants, you must spend from twelve to twenty-
four hours in that town. ‘This will seem a hard saying to the American tourist who
wishes to write a book on, say, “German Traits,” or to the English globe-trotter who
contemplates an exhaustive work on the “Origin and Development of American

Civilisation ” ; but it is nevertheless true. If you wish to be thorough you must pay

the price of thoroughness.

I spent no less than four days in Holland, twenty-seven hours of which I passed in
Amsterdam. There can therefore be no doubt of my qualifications for writing of
Holland in general and of Amsterdam in particular. I like them both. ‘They are
calming to the mind, and there is probably more sleep to the square bedstead in
Holland than in any other country in Europe.

I reached Amsterdam by train from Brussels, and passed through a number of
able and deserving towns, which I studied, though of course in a somewhat superficial
way, from the window of my railway carriage, or the refreshment room of a railway
station. There was Rotterdam, well known in history as the residence of a merchant
with a peculiar leg. There was Schiedam, dear to chemistry as the place where
“schnapps” were invented. ‘There was also a town variously known as “ s’ Graven-
hagen,” “La Haye,” “Haag,” and “The Hague.” I did not like it, for I hate a
town that does not know its own name. Nevertheless it is only fair to say that
Bedeker speaks kindly of it, and says in effect that it is a perfectly respectable town.
Still pursuing my way to Amsterdam, I passed through Leyden, where Puritans and
709

MALL MAGAZINE.

710 THE PALL
electric jars were once produced ; Haarlem, a town apparently named after a suburb
of New York, and to all appearances quite as capable of shaking its inhabitants with
malarial fever ; and finally reached the Amsterdam railway station, which is situated in
about the middle of the harbour of Amsterdam.

I think it has been remarked by some previous explorer that Holland is flat. ‘The
surface of the country is unbroken except by the dykes, and the horizon is as_ the
horizon of the sea would be if it were dotted with windmills as well as with ships.
The men that one passes on the country roads are, with hardly an exception,
immensely wide. ‘This is an illustration of the familiar scientific truth that men

expand or contract in proportion to the horizon of the place where they live. Thus
the mountaineer of Switzerland, owing to the excess of mountains in his native land,
seldom sees a horizon that is more than half a mile distant from him, and grows

The New Market-place, Amsterdam.

tall and thin, shooting upwards in a perpendicular direction instead of expanding
horizontally. The Dutchman, on the contrary, whose horizon is limited only by the
curve of the earth, grows laterally, and at about the age of forty-five is nearly globular,
being almost as wide as he is tall. The same is of course true of the Dutchwoman ;
and if one travels in Holland on a Monday, as I did, he gains an idea of the width of
the Dutch matron, which is simply appalling. He has but to glance at the teeming
clothes-lines in order to comprehend But this is a subject that can only be
adequately treated in the columns of a scientific journal.

The Dutch are an eminently healthy people in appearance. They are bright-eyed
and ruddy-faced, and the fact that they survive the incessant use of tobacco, grown in
the Dutch colonies, proves that they must be wonderfully robust. I am convinced
that man attains his highest physical development in a damp and foggy land. It must
be the fogs of London that produce the athletic young men and the superb young

I=

I=

eo = ~~

ve

A DUTCH EXTERIOR. 711

women that are the admiration and envy of the rest of the world. France is far drier
than England, and, as a consequence, its people have shrunk until they resemble a
nation of prematurely old boys; while in hot and dry Calabria and Sicily man is even
smaller still. In Holland, on the contrary, where the winter fogs are more persistent
than they are in London, and where everything is so damp that wine waters itself, no
matter how tightly it is corked, and you have to wring out the sugar that you put in
your coffee, men, women, and children are, if anything, more obtrusively healthy than
is the average Englishman. If you want to cultivate a fine breed of men water them
profusely. I have little doubt that were every Frenchman to be played upon with a
hose for an hour every morning and an hour every evening the race would gain four or
five inches annually.

The girls of Amsterdam, who have just begun, so to speak, to expand, are
wonderfully pretty. In fact, they bear a curiously close resemblance to English
girls, and half a dozen times while walking in Amsterdam I was momentarily surprised

“
Bas
“ .

ae @ oe , ! ial, ii We

PM

ee
a

>.

A Drawbridge, Rotterdam.

to hear young ladies, whom I had assumed to be typically English, speak Dutch ;
which is something that I think no self-respecting English girl would do.

I studied the language carefully, with the help of Bzdeker and the signs and
notices at the railway stations, and I do not hesitate to say that it is wholly uncalled
for. It is simply German misspelled and lengthened out to an unpardonable extent.
For example, I saw an advertisment which began Enge/schekleedermakerij ; and if any
responsible Dutchman will undertake to defend such a word I should like to hear
him try ‘it. Then at every railway station a large placard sternly orders you to
“ Past op de Zakkenrollers.” Now, 1 had no zakkenrollers, and I would not have taken
any as a gift; and yet I was constantly told by that offensive proclamation that I
must “ Past op de sakkenrollers.” 1 am proud to say that I never once complied with
the order, and I don’t think wild horses could have made me do it. You see, I
looked upon the thing as a matter of principle. Many English girls learn German,
and when they speak it I almost like the language ; but I really could not listen to
an English girl who should go so far as to speak Dutch. Yet, in a spirit of fairness,
let me remark that in a Dutch newspaper I saw a leading article entitled “A//er/‘e.”
The editor did not spell very well, but he was, at least, exceptionally frank.

VoL. I.—No. 5. 47

MALL MAGAZINE.

THE PALL

we \ All Holland is intersected by innumerable canals. They take
the place of hedges and fences, and do not have to be
“(, either pruned or painted. ‘Their
existence is a proof of the gm
sobriety of the Dutch, in y,
spite of the fact that A
Holland is the land of
gin. If the Dutch
were a drunken
people, they would
fall into their canals
and drown them-
selves, toan extent jf
that would soon
depopulate the

; country.

Uf

Y YY Wd

w///

These canals
are also one \\
reason why the \W
Dutch are so \
domestic in their
habits. A Dutch-
man knows that if he goes S&
out after dark the chances are that he will
WV fall into a canal. Consequently he stays at home, and remarks to his
¢ wife that he loves her too dearly to think of spending an evening away from
her. If there were as many canals in England and France as there are in Holland,
England would be sober, and Frenchmen would make the acquaintance of their wives.
The usual method of locomotion in Holland is by |
boat. If you stand by the roadside and look
across the country, you will be constantly —
surprised to find steamboats, schooners,
sloops, and galliots sailing across the
meadows ; for the canals disappear from
4 sight at a short distance, owing to the
ra flatness of the country, and the
=. vessels that navigate them seem to
BL be sailing over the turf and
among the grain. ‘There are
| \ so many of these vessels —-
y that they must be a fruitful 7
source of accidents. ‘The 9) \
farmer who is mowing a field
is constantly liable to be run down |
by a steamboat, or to have the bow-
sprit of a sloop suddenly thrust among pity gl
his ribs; a state of things which must ma
make agriculture a somewhat exciting /
and venturesome pursuit.
I cannot understand the winds of Holland. I have
frequently seen two parallel canals, down one of which a vessel would

j

y)

GZ

Y,
ae

1th Md tae) ) Lt : +
fe
a se :

A DUTCH EXTERIOR. 713

be sailing with a fair wind, while another vessel, with an equally fair wind, would
be sailing up the other canal. Of course you will say that each vessel had
the wind abeam; but such was not the case. Each vessel had the wind nearly
astern, It is hence evident that the Dutch construct their canals, as they do
their railways, on a sort of double-track principle; though how they manage to
have one wind for the down canal and another for the up canal is more than I
could find out. I suppose I did not know the language well enough to under-
stand everything.

Windmills have also, I think, been mentioned in connection with Holland. They
are as the sands of the sea in number, and perform the constant labour of pumping
out leaky Holland; for no Hollander would venture = |= ————____
to deny that his country leaks badly. The at ao
thousands of pumps, worked by wind power,
manage to keep the water under ; but one
shudders to think what would happen
y were the wind to cease to

blow, say, for two whole

Se ae

We ess

A picturesque corner of Rotterdam.

, days, and the leaks to be permitted to have their own way. Probably Holland
4 would founder in less than forty-eight hours. Fortunately the wind, seeing the
advantage of having a perfectly flat country to blow over, constantly blows, and
the pumps are never compelled to remain idle. Night and day the pumps are
kept going, until they suck, and are then allowed a temporary rest. The windmills
| are built on pivots, so that they may be braced sharp up or squared in, as the
case may be, to meet the direction of the wind. It was probably the experience
gathered in working the windmills, and keeping at the pumps, that made the
Dutch in former days a nation of sailors. The windmill is not unlike a fast
Dutch galliot in build; and when a man has learned to manage the sails of a
windmill, and keep the pumps going. he has learned the most important points of
old-fashioned seamanship.
The railway traveller learns to dislike the windmill, because of its apparent
giddiness and fondness for waltzing. As the train passes a dozen windmills at

714 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

different distances, the nearest ones begin to waltz around the more distant ones,

and the traveller’s eyes presently begin to ache, and he expresses views as to

windmills which would hardly be fit for publication. Personally, I cannot but think

that if the Hollanders were thoroughly to caulk their country, and so stop the leaks

permanently, the plan would be an improvement on their present system of relying

exclusively on pumps. ‘There is no doubt that Holland could be made tight, provided
yv

Tower of the Mint, Amsterdam.

the inhabitants were willing to incur the necessary expense. Were she to be covered
with a layer of concrete a foot thick, she would be perfectly dry, and the enormous
expense of building and sailing thousands of windmills would be avoided. However,
the Hollanders have a right to do as they please, only if they could prevent their
mills from waltzing before the eyes of the railway traveller it would be better both
for his eyesight and his morals.

In the course of this exhaustive study of Holland I shall of course be expected to
say something about the favna and the %ora of the country. The latter seems to

A DUTCH EXTERIOR.

“I
~
uN

consist exclusively of cabbages and tulips, and I must firmly, even if sadly, condemn
tulip salad. Among the fauna the storks occupy a prominent place, at all events in
books. I did not see any of them, as they were all absent in Egypt, personally
conducting parties of small birds. ‘The courtesy of the stork in carrying small birds
on his back, to spend the winter on the Nile, is as well known as his devotion to his
aged parents; a devotion much dwelt upon in scientific Sunday School books. I hope
it may be true, but I confess I should like to have the evidence carefully sifted.
Indeed, I should like to have some proof of the existence of storks in Holland. I
‘have seen a good many pictures representing the favourite residences of leading
storks ; but I never saw any ore who had really seen a stork. Moreover, I should like

|

UBER
—
ms

(aiid Maree ora
>

<=
An Amsterdam Street.

to know if the stork spells himself correctly. I have always had a feeling that his

right name is “stalk,” and that his transformation into “ stork” is a cockneyism.

Still the stork may be all right, and may be full of devotion to his grandfather, and

of kindness to small birds. We whose acquaintance with birds is chiefly confined to

sparrows ought not to judge all birds by those dissolute city vagabonds.

There is a peculiar bird in Holland which seems to the traveller to be a sort of
combined duck and crow. He wears a dark pair of wings over a light grey under-
jacket, and when you see him flying over a field, or engaged in stealing grain, you at
once recognise him as a crow who has passed into second mourning. But observe
him more closely, and you shall see that he has the bill of a duck and is web-footed.
The bird is not a regular duck, for I have seen scores of ducks in the windows of
restaurants, and have eaten my share of ducks of various species. I am_ therefore
prepared to maintain that ducks do not fly over miles of territory at a stretch, and do

v>

716 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

not steal grain,—that is unless they are wild ducks who know not the moral law.
These Holland birds are not wild ducks, for they spend most of their time in
farmyards, and I am forced to the conclusion that they were originally crows, and
developed web-feet and duck-bills in consequence of their prolonged residence in a
leaky country. I did not eat any duck while in Holland, and no prudent man who
had observed the peculiarities of the Holland ducks would eat them. ‘The best that
can be said for them is that they are a sort of converted crow, and I do not like crows,
no matter what professions they may make.

The scare-cat is an ingenious but artificial animal, which I have never met outside
of Holland. It is a large and apparently ferocious dog, made of terra cotta, or other
comparatively cheap material, and placed in the chicken yards of Dutch farmers to
discourage the advances of cats. ‘The theory is, that the Dutch cat, who desires to
steal chickens, and who beholds this fraudulent animal on guard in

the barnyard, will immediately fly in terror to the nearest i Wag ~
shelter. is is : Jutch cats »y lack the intelligence Pt ae
shelter. If this is true of Dutch cats, they lack the intelligence Pe |

ax.

of the other members
of the race. Fancy
frightening the British cat with
an artificial dog! She would simply
look at him with a scornful smile, =
and proceed to steal under his very
nose. ‘The scare-cat, however, would ,
hardly be as numerous as it is in

Holland, unless its efficacy were a

well-established fact. Perhaps it is «

the excess of water in Holland, and A characteristic Canal scene.

not the prevalence of scare-cats,

which has driven most of the Dutch cats over the border into Belgium, where they
seem to be thoroughly at home.

There was one thing which gave me a high opinion of the intelligence of the
Hollander. He has his tricycle drawn by a horse, instead of driving it with his
personal legs. ‘The most frequent vehicle to be seen on the country roads is a three-
wheeled cart, drawn by a horse, or at all events by a Dutch substitute for that animal.
The great superiority of this plan to that of propelling a tricycle with the human legs
is self evident. My physician has long tried, though vainly, to induce me to sentence

A DUTCH EXTERIOR. 717

myself to hard labour on the tricycle. Iam now willing to meet him in a spirit of
compromise, and to take to tricycling provided I may do it in the Dutch manner.
Amsterdam, to which we have arrived at last, is commonly known as the Venice
of the North. At least so I was informed by seventeen different persons during my
stay in the former city. It is something like Venice. For instance, it has very

nearly the same smells ; also it has water in its canals—a phenomenon which occurs
at Venice, except when the tide is very low. But you cannot make a Venice merely
by digging a few canals and providing them with appropriate smells. The Amsterdam
canals are, it is true, numerous, but they are not in the least Venetian. They are
wide and they are bordered, not with palaces, but with trees, behind which are rows
of sharp-gabled houses, that are about as Venetian as are the pork packing establish-
ments of Chicago.

Nevertheless, a city may have its merits even if it cannot be a genuine Venice.
Amsterdam is certainly wonderfully quaint and attractive. It is a place which is
curiously restful, although the streets are often crowded, and the shops appear to be on

Mount Alban's Tower.

the point of doing a thriving business. ‘The dwelling-houses impress you as being full
of beds, and the occupants always seem to have just got up and had their morning
bath. There must be a good deal of work done in Amsterdam ; yet nobody seems to
work, and the whole population wears the air of people who intend to finish their
pipes before engaging in the business of the day. There are numerous huge ocean
steamers lying in the port, and you know from the advertisements hung up in the
corridors of your hotel that they will presently sail away across the Dutch meadows
towards the open sea; but nobody appears to be engaged in loading or unloading
them, and they pass the time in smoking as idly as the men who lounge on their
decks. The spirit of rest pervades all Amsterdam, which is a rhetorical way of saying
that it is a lazy place.

There are a few, but not many, picturesque buildings in Amsterdam, and there is
an unlimited amount of fog, at least in the winter. I should say that the average
Amsterdam fog is twice as wet as a London fog ; though of course it lacks the solidity
of the latter. You can run against it without being bruised, and fragments of it

718 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

never stick in your throat without dissolving. Of course it is nearly always wet under
foot, and the mud is of a peculiarly slippery character. I can imagine Amsterdam as
being really beautiful in summer; but then nobody, so far as I can find out, ever
goes there in summer. ‘The Briton always goes away from home in winter. ‘This is
because he is patriotic, and wants to see the rest of the world at its worst. He goes
to Italy at the season of rains and searching winds ; he goes to Paris either in March
or November, and thereupon decides that the climate is worse than that of England ;
and when he goes to Amsterdam he chooses, as I did, the time of year when no modest
and self-respecting Dutch town would dream of being seen without its wrap of fog.
If you will follow my advice you will go to Amsterdam in June.or July, and having
first carefully read this article, so as to feel as familiar with Holland as with your
native heath, you will find it one of the most charming places for a prolonged stay,—
say of thirty-six hours—to be found anywhere outside of the five-mile radius of
Charing Cross.

W. L. ALDEN

PEOPLE WE HAVE MET. (No. 8.)

HE French Minister of War sat in his very comfortable chair in
his own private yet official room, and pondered over a letter
he had received. Being Minister of War, he was naturally the
most mild, the most humane, and least quarrelsome man in
the Cabinet. A Minister of War receives many letters that, as
a matter of course, he throws into his waste basket, but this
particular communication had somehow managed to rivet his
attention. When a man becomes Minister of War he learns for

the first time that apparently the great majority of mankind are engaged in the

manufacture or invention of rifles, gunpowders, and devices of all kinds for the
destruction of the rest of the world.

That morning, the Minister of War had received a letter which announced to him
that the writer of it had invented an explosive so terrible that all known destructive
agencies paled before it. As a Frenchman, he made the first offer of his discovery
to the French Government. It would cost the Minister nothing, he said, to make
a test which would corroborate his amazing claims for the substance, and the moment
that test was made any intelligent man would recognise the fact that the power which
possessed the secret of this destructive compound would at once occupy an unassailable
position in a contentious world.

The writer offered personally to convince the Minister of the truth of his assertions,
provided they could go to some remote spot where the results of the explosion would
do no damage, and where they would be safe from espionage. The writer went on
very frankly to say that if the Minister consulted with the agents of the police, they
would at once see in this invitation a trap for the probable assassination of the
Minister. But the inventor claimed that the Minister's own good sense should
show him that his death was desired by none. He was but newly appointed, and
had not yet had time to make enemies. France was at peace with all the world,
and this happened before the time of the Anarchist demonstrations in Paris. It
was but right, the letter went on, that the Minister should have some guarantee as to
the dona fides of the inventor. He therefore gave his name and address, and said that
if the Minister made inquiries from the police he would find nothing stood in their
books against him. He was a student, whose attention for years had been given
to the subject of explosives. To further show that he was entirely unselfish in this
matter, he added that he had no desire to enrich himself by his discovery. He
had a private income quite sufficient for his needs, and he intended to give, and

not to sell, his secret to France. The only proviso» he made was that his name
should be linked with this terrible compound, which he maintained would secure
universal peace to the world, for, after its qualities were known, no nation would
dare to fight with another. The sole ambition of the inventor, said the letter in

Copyright 1893 in the United States of America according to Act of Congress by Robert Barr.

719

720 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

conclusion, was to place his name high in the list of celebrated French scientists.
If, however, the Minister refused to treat with him he would go to other Governments
until his invention was taken up, but the Government which secured it would at
once occupy the lead among nations. He entreated the Minister, therefore, for the
sake of his country, to make at least one test of the compound.

It was, as I have said, before the time of the Paris explosion, and Ministers were
not as suspicious as they are now. The Minister made inquiries regarding the
scientist, who lived in a little suburb of Paris, and found that there was nothing against

him on the books of the police. Inquiry showed that all
BE a he had said about his own private fortune was
Lo —_—— ~~ true. The Minister therefore wrote to the in-

ventor, and named an hour at which he would
receive him in his private office.

The hour and the man arrived
together. ‘The Minister had had
some slight doubts regarding his
sanity, but the letter had been
so straightforwardly written, and
the appearance of the man him-
self was so kindly and benevolent
and intelligent that the doubts
of the official vanished.

“TI beg you to be seated,”
said the Minister. ‘We are
entirely alone, and nothing you
say will be heard by any one
but myself.”

“JT thank you, Monsieur le
Ministre,” replied the inventor,
“for this mark of confidence;
for I am afraid the claims I
made in the letter were so extraordi-
nary that you might well have hesitated
about granting me an interview.”

The Minister smiled. “I understand,” he said,
“the enthusiasm of an inventor for his latest triumph,
and I was enabled thus to take, as it were, some
discount from your statements, although I doubt
not that you have discovered something that may
be of benefit to the War Department.”

The inventor hesitated, looking seriously at the great official before him.

“From what you say,” he began at last, “I am rather afraid to tell you, my
discovery is so extraordinary that in my letter I was obliged to make my claims so
mild that I fear I erred in under-estimating rather than in over-stating them. I
have the explosive here in my pocket.”

“Ah!” cried the Minister, a shade of pallor coming over his countenance, as
he pushed back his chair. “I thought I stated in my note that you were not to
bring it.”

“Forgive me for not obeying. It is perfectly harmless while in this state. That
a beneficent peculiarity if I may so term it—of this terrible

‘The hour and the man arrived together.”

is one of the peculiarities

A NEW EXPLOSIVE.

721

agent. It may be handled with perfect safety, and yet its effects are as inevitable
as death,” saying which, he took out of his pocket and held up to the light a bottle
filled with a clear colourless liquid like water.

“You could pour that on the fire,” he said, “with no other effect than to put
out the blaze. You might place it under a steam hammer and crush the bottle to
powder, yet no explosion would follow. It is as harmless as water in its present
condition.”

“ How, then,” said the Minister, “do you deal with it?”

Again the man hesitated.

“T am almost afraid to tell you,” he said ; “and if I could not demonstrate to your
entire satisfaction that what I say is true, it would be folly for me to say what I am about
to say. If I were to take this bottle and cut a notch in the cork, and walk with it neck
downwards along the Boulevard des Italiens, allowing this fluid to fall drop by drop
on the. pavement, I could walk in that way in safety through every street in Paris.
If it rained that day nothing would happen. If it rained the next or for a week
nothing would happen, but the moment the sun came out and dried the moisture,
the light step of a cat on any pavement over which I had passed would instantly
shatter to ruins the whole of Paris.”

“Impossible!” cried the Minister, an expression of horror coming into
his face.

“T knew you would say that. Therefore I ask you to come with me to the
country, where I can prove the truth of what I say. While I carry this bottle around
with me in this apparently careless fashion, it is corked, as you see, with the utmost
security. Not a drop of the fluid must be left on the outside of the cork or of the
bottle. I have wiped the bottle and cork most thoroughly, and burned the cloth
which I used in doing so. Fire will not cause this compound even when dry to
explode, but the slightest touch will set it off. I have to be extremely careful in its
manufacture, so that not a single drop is left unaccounted for in any place where
it might evaporate.”

The Minister, with his finger-tips together and his eyes on the ceiling, mused
for a few moments on the amazing statement he had heard.

“Tf what you say is true,” he began at last, “don’t you think it would
be more humane to destroy all traces of the experiments by which you dis-
covered this substance, and to divulge the secret to no one? ‘The devastation
such a thing would cause if it fell into unscrupulous hands is too appalling even
to contemplate.”

“T have thought of that,” said the inventor; “but some one else—the time
may be far off or it may be near—is bound to make the discovery. My whole
ambition, as I told you in my letter, is to have my name coupled with this
discovery. I wish it to be known as the Lambelle Explosive. The secret would be
safe with the French Government.”

“JT am not so sure of that,” returned the Minister. “Some unscrupulous man
may become Minister of War, and may use his knowledge to put himself in the
position of Dictator. An unscrupulous man in the possession of such a secret
would be invincible.”

“What you say,” replied the inventor, “is undoubtedly true ; yet I am determined
that the name of Lambelle shall go down in history coupled with the most destructive
agent the world has ever known, or will know. If the Government of France will
build for me a large stone structure as secure as a fortress, I will keep my secret, but
will fill that building with bottles like this, and then-——”

“‘Lambelle was waiting for him, holding by a leash two sorry-looking dogs.”
722

A NEW EXPLOSIVE. 723

“T do not see,” said the Minister, “that that would lessen the danger, if the
unscrupulous man I speak of once became possessed of the keys; and, besides, the
mere fact that such a secret existed would put other inventors upon the track, and
some one else less benevolent than yourself would undoubtedly make the discovery.
You admitted a moment ago that the chances were a future investigator would succeed
in getting the right ingredients together, even without the knowledge that such an
explosive existed. See what an incentive it would be to inventors all over the world,
if it were known that France had in its possession such a fearful explosive! No
Government has ever yet been successful in keeping the secret of either a gun or a
gunpowder.”

“There is, of course,” said Lambelle, “much in what you say; but, equally of
course, all that you say might have been said to the inventor of gunpowder, for
gunpowder in its day was as wonderful as this is now.”

Suddenly the Minister laughed aloud.

“T am talking seriously with you on this subject,” he exclaimed, “as if I really
believed in it. Of course, I may say I do nothing of the kind. I think you must
have hypnotised me with those calm eyes of yours into crediting your statements
for even a few moments.”

“All that I say,” said the inventor quietly, “can be corroborated to-morrow,
Make an appointment with me in the country, and if it chances to be a calm and
sunny day you will no longer doubt the evidence of your own eyes.”

“Where do you wish the experiment to be made ?” asked the Minister.

“Tt must be in some wild and desolate region, on a hill-top for preference.
There should be either trees or old buildings there that we can destroy, otherwise
the full effects can hardly be estimated.”

“JT have a place in the country,” said the Minister, “which is wild and
desolate and unprofitable enough. There are some useless stone buildings, not
on a hilltop, but by the edge of a quarry which has been unworked for many
years. There is no habitation for several miles around. Would such a spot be
suitable ?”

“Perfectly so. When would it be convenient for you to go?”

“T will leave with you to-night,” said the Minister, “and we can spend the day
to-morrow experimenting.”

“Very well,” answered Lambelle, rising when the Minister had told him the
hour and the railway station at which they should meet.

That evening, when the Minister drove to the railway station in time for
his train, he found Lambelle waiting for him, holding, by a leash, two sorry-
looking dogs.

“ Do you travel with such animals as these ?” asked the Minister.

“The poor brutes,” said Lambelle, with sorrow in his voice, “are necessary for
our experiments. They will be in atoms by this time to-morrow.”

The dogs were put into the railway-van, and the inventor brought his portmanteau
with him into the private carriage reserved for the use of the Minister.

The place, as the Minister of War had said, was desolate enough. The stone
buildings near the edge of the deserted quarry were stout and strong, although partly
in ruins.

“T have here with me in my portmanteau,” said Lambelle, “some hundreds
of metres of electric wire. I will attach one of the dogs by this clip, which we
can release from a distance by pressing an electric button. The moment the dog
escapes he will undoubtedly explode the compound.”

724 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

The insulated wire was run along the ground to a distant elevation. The dog
was attached by the electric clip, and chained to a doorpost of one of the buildings.
Lambelle then carefully uncorked his bottle, holding it at arms’ length from his person.
The Minister watched with strange interest as Lambelle allowed the fluid to drip in
a semicircular line around the chained dog. ‘The inventor carefully re-corked the
bottle, wiped it thoroughly with a cloth he had with him, and threw the cloth into one
of the deserted houses.

They waited near, until the spots caused by the fluid on the stone pavement in
front of the ‘house had disappeared.

“ By the time we reach the hill,” said Lambelle, “it will be quite dry in this hot
sun.”

As they departed towards the elevation, the forlorn dog howled mournfully, as if
in premonition of his fate.

«*Will you press the electric lever?’ said Lambelle.”

“T think, to make sure,” said the inventor, when they reached the electrical
apparatus, “that we might wait for half an hour.”

The Minister lit a cigarette, and smoked silently, a strange battle going on in his
mind. He found himself believing in the extraordinary claims made by the inventor,
and his mind dwelt on the awful possibilities of such an explosive.

“Will you press the electric lever?” asked Lambelle quietly. ‘ Remember that
you are inaugurating a new era.”

The Minister pressed down the key; and then, putting his field-glass to his eye,
he saw that the dog was released, but the animal sat there scratching its éar with its
paw. Then, realising that it was loose, it sniffed for a moment at the chain. Finally,
it threw up its head and barked, although the distance was too great for them to hear
any sound. ‘The dog started in the direction the two men had gone; but, before it
had taken three steps, the Minister was appalled to see the buildings suddenly crumble
into dust, and a few moments later the thunder of the rocks falling into the deserted
quarry came towards them. The whole ledge had been flung forward into the chasm.

There was no smoke, but a haze of dust hovered over the spot.
a“

A NEW EXPLOSIVE. 725

‘My God!” cried the Minister. ‘“ That is awful!”
“Yes,” said Lambelle quietly ; “I put more of the substance on the flagging than
I need to have done. A few drops would have answered
quite as well, but I wanted to make sure,
You were very sceptical, you know.”
The Minister looked at him. “I beg of
you, M. Lambelle, never to divulge this secret
to the Government of France, or to any
other power. Take the risk of it being
discovered in the future. I implore
you to reconsider your original inten-
tion. If you desire money, I
an will see that you get what
ha: a you want from the secret
yp . : “3 * funds.”
Lambelle shrugged his
shoulders.
“TI have no desire

for money,” he
said ; “ but what
you have seen
will show you
that I shall be
the most famous
scientist of the century.
The name of Lainbelle
will be known till the
end of the world.”

“But, my God,
man!” said the
Minister, “the end
of the world is here
the moment your
secret is in the pos-
session of another.
With you or me it would
be safe; but who can tell
the minds of those who
may follow us? You are
putting the power of the Almighty
into the hands of a man.”

Lambelle flushed with pride as the pale-
faced Minister said this.

“You speak the truth!” he cried. “It = «my @oas’ cried
is the power of Omnipotence.” the Minister. ‘That is awful !'”

“Then,” implored the Minister, “re-consider your decision.”

“T have laboured too long,” said Lambelle, “to forgo my _ triumph
now. You are convinced at last, I see. Now then, tell me, will you,

726 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

as Minister of France, secure for your country this greatest of all
inventions ?”

“Ves,” answered the Minister; “no other power must be allowed to obtain
the secret. Have you ever written down the names of the ingredients ?”

“* Never,” answered Lambelle.

“Ts it not possible for any one to have suspected what your experiments were? If
a man got into your laboratory—a scientific man—could he not, from what he saw
there, obtain the secret ?”

“It would be impossible,” said Lambelle. ‘I have been too anxious to keep the
credit for myself, to leave any traces that might give a hint of what I was doing—if,
for instance, I became ill.”

“You were wise in that,” said the Minister, drawing a deep breath. ‘“ Now let
us go and look at the ruins.”

As they neared the spot, the official’s astonishment at the extraordinary destruction
became greater and greater. The rock had been rent as if by an earthquake, to the
distance of hundreds of yards.

“You say,” said the Minister, “that the liquid is perfectly safe until evaporation
takes place.”

“Perfectly,” answered Lambelle. ‘“ Of course one has to be careful, as I told
you, in the use of it. You must not get a drop on your clothes, or leave it anywhere
on the outside of the bottle to evaporate.”

“‘ Let me see the stuff.”

Lambelle handed him the bottle.

“Have you any more of this in your laboratory ?”

“ Not a drop.”

“ If you wished to destroy this, how would you do it ?”

“T should empty the bottle into the Seine. It would flow down to the sea, and
no harm would be done.”

“See if you can find any traces of the dog,” said the Minister. “I will clamber
down into the quarry, and look there.”

“ You will find nothing,” said Lambelle confidently.

There was but one path by which the bottom of the quarry could be reached.
The Minister descended by this until he was out of sight of the man above ; then he
quickly uncorked the bottle, and allowed the fluid to drip along the narrowest part
of the path which faced the burning sun. He corked the bottle, wiped it carefully
with his handkerchief, which he rolled into a ball, and threw into the quarry.
Coming up to the surface again, he said to the mild and benevolent scientist: “I
cannot find a trace of the dog.”

“Nor can I,” said Lambelle. ‘Of course when you can hardly find a sign
of the buildings it is not to be expected that there should be any remnants of
the dog.”

“Suppose we get back to the hill now and have lunch,” said the Minister.

“Do you wish to try another experiment ?”

“TI would like to try one more after we have had something to eat. What
would be the effect if you poured the whole bottleful into the quarry and set
it off?”

“Oh, impossible!” cried Lambelle. “It would rend this whole part of the
country to pieces. In fact, I am not sure that the shock would not be felt as far
as Paris. With a very few drops I will shatter the whole quarry.”
“Well, we will try that after lunch. We have another dog left.”

“*1 could not do otherwise,’ he murmured.’

45

728 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

When an hour had passed,
Lambelle was anxious to try
his quarry experiment.

“ By-and-by,” he said,
“the sun will not be shining
in the quarry, and then it will
be too late.”

“We can easily wait until
to-morrow, unless you are
in a hurry.”

“T am in no hurry,” re-
joined the inventor. ate |
thought perhaps you might
be, with so much to do.”

“No,” replied the official.
“Nothing I shall do during
my administration will be more
important than this.”

“T am glad to hear you say
so,” answered Lambelle; “and QSseue
if you will give me the bottle again .

I will now place a few drops in the
sunny part of the quarry.” ‘‘Lambelle was anxious to

The Minister handed him the try his quarry experiment.”
bottle, apparently with some reluctance.

“T still think,” he said, “that it would be much better to Le
allow this secret to die. No one knows it at present but '
yourself. With you, as I have said, it will be safe, or with
me; but think of the awful possibilities of a disclosure.”

“Every great invention has its risks,” said Lambelle
firmly. “ Nothing would induce meto forgo the fruits of my life-work. It is too much
to ask of any man.”

“Very well,” said the Minister. ‘Then tet us be sure of our facts. I want
to see the effects of the explosive on the quarry.”

* You shall,” said Lambelle, as he departed.

“T will wait for you here,” said the Minister, ‘and‘smoke a cigarette.”

When the inventor approached the quarry, leading the dog behind him, the
Minister’s hand trembled so that he was hardly able to hold the field-glass to his
eye. Lambelle disappeared down the path. The next instant the ground trembled
even where the Minister sat, and a haze of dust arose above the ruined quarry.

Some moments after the pallid Minister looked over the work of destruction, but
no trace of humanity was there except himself.

“T could not do otherwise,” he murmured. ‘It was too great a risk to run.”

ROBERT BARR

a A

8,9 BE

Bile

Drawn by G. L. Seymour.)

“THE CALL To DuTy.”

— wom

oe ae ee a a

Sh oo = | 7 =
ies moa Se oe
\ 2 5 rsd pe een ee dae Le tec IE

LT

SOCIETY—THE REMNANT.

LL countries and all epochs have had
their periods of social topsyturveydom

and moral dévergondage, when virtue

seems to have been a dead letter
and folly and vice reigned triumphant.
Nevertheless, there has always been
the remnant. Hidden from public
view as they might have been,
there they were — those seven

®. thousand who had not bowed
the knee to Baal, and who
remained faithful to the better
way. The old law of Numa
did not want for followers,
even when Messalina haunted
the gardens of the Pincio and
Nero criticised the beauty of
his murdered mother. Piety
and pity were not dead when
the Borgias brewed their hell
broth for enemies and incon-

\ ; y : venient friends alike. When the
ig — Piedmontese women flung them-
<a > et '

selves by dozens at the feet of
the young Emperor, who came in
pomp and remained for love, there were still maidens with well-clasped zones and
wives whose husbands had no cause for fear. When Charles II. made Chiffinch
his companion and confidant, all women were not like my Lady Castlemaine ;
likewise, when Du Barry was the uncrowned queen at Versailles, France had her
full contingent of those who preferred their undistinguished honour to the glittering
corruption surrounding the place of the King’s acknowledged mistress.

Even so now, when women notoriously unfaithful to their husbands are met at
the “best ” houses, when snobs and tuft-hunters have elbowed and corkscrewed their
way into high places, and millionaires without h’s are accepted as equals by the
blue-blooded and high-nosed,—even now we have the self-respecting remnant ; and
the remnant will have none of these things, and bow neither head nor knee to Baal.

729

730 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

In the articles on Society which have appeared lately, Lady Jeune’s is the
only one which recognises the existence of a section too honourable and_high-
spirited to be toad-eaters or tuft-hunters. Yet even Lady Jeune speaks of these
honourable and self-respecting gentlefolks as a class somewhat apart from those who
make what is rightfully called Society—meritorious folk enough, but strangers without
the gates, and having no blood relationship with the porphyrogeniti. Now, it is just
this position that I deny, and just this section of which I would speak.

As well-born, as well-educated, as well-mannered as the kings and queens of
Society—I am not now speaking of the highest nobility, who form a class apart-
these self-respecting gentry make no effort to wriggle into smart houses, and would not
exchange one shred of their independence to be received on terms of apparent equality
by those who, according to conventional appraisement, are above them. The word
“apparent” is used advisedly; for no high-born aristocrat looks on a commoner,
whoever he may be, as his equal; and the title of My Lady is as a chemical agent
which alters the very composition of the blood, and dissolves out of it all its
commonness. This is true even of those who acquire the rank into which they
were not born. As with Lady S-——, who, to an untitled friend born and bred
on her own social plane, criticising a third of exactly her own original condition,
said, with ineffable disdain: “I do not mind saying it to you, for you are too good-

natured to take offence ; but she (Mrs. K——) has such middle-class manners !”
The self-respecting gentry know this, and refuse to lower their pride to the base

level of touters for a recognition which has always in it the element of contempt
for inferiority. This element shows itself plainly enough in Lady Cork’s article and
in that of “A Woman of the World”; and so far both these ladies are frank and
straightforward. They divide Society into the “born” and the “not born,” and
think the mingling together of the fringes a national disaster. They despise those of
the “born” who, for the sake of good dinners and fine entertainments, countenance
Lady Midas and invite Sir Gorgias to their “small and earlies.” They ridicule
Sir Gorgias and his lady for their very success in worming themselves into the
Society whereto they have no natural claim, and to which their introduction had
been effected only by money. They deprecate the admission of the Jews into the
Auis clos of caste, and lament the time when Almack’s was the Paradise through
the gates of which not the loveliest Peri of them all, if an Israelite, or “not born,”
could hope to pass. They are at odds all through with the democratic wave which
has swept together in one heap the pearly nautilus and the coarse sea-snail ; and
by their frankness they have done infinite service to the self-respecting remnant,
who already know what they have confessed, and so far have strengthened the
weaker-kneed of the class.

Democratic as Society may be in its pursuit of pleasure, following after every
leader that appears, and confounding in one mad swirl base notoriety and honourable
fame—money scraped out of to-day’s mud and estates inherited for generations—
the fact of class-distinctions still holds good; and both those who are born in
the purple, and those whose chrism-cloth was homely tan, know this truth, and
act on it. The gilded snob does all he knows to be admitted into smart houses.
If his gilding be thick enough, the smart houses open their doors to receive him
with apparent cordiality and secret disdain. The tie between them is as untrust-
worthy as were Michael Scot’s ropes of sand, and depends solely and wholly on the
thickness of the gilding. The marriages made between the two classes are always
of the same kind as that of the lioness and the mouse ; and the purple never really
fraternises with the tan. Those rich snobs who marry high-bred impecuniosity are

SOCIETY—THE REMNANT. 731

no more received into the inner intimacy of the wife’s family than the pretty
foreigner is received into the intimacy of the proud Roman sisters—those well-
born, well-married noblewomen, who regard their brother’s alien and plebeian wife
as no higher than his legalised mistress. Between the two a barrier is fixed which
is never thrown down. High-bred impecuniosity rejoices in the affluence which the
gilded snob has given her; but rejoicing is not reciprocity. She receives all and gives
back nothing; and the man least considered in her own house is the master of that
house—the one who plays the meanest part in the social and matrimonial drama is
the husband of the wife who fills the stage which he himself has built and furnished.

This is the cup of degradation which certain of the baser kind do not refuse
to drink for the sake of a high-sounding alliance that annihilates their independence
and destroys their individuality; but all the lowly-born who have become rich by
their own exertions are not of this degraded type, and every one knows wealthy
families who are content with friends, if not quite of their own original status,
yet of not such social supremacy as obliges the one to crawl while giving the
other cause for insolent airs of patronage and superiority. Content to enjoy the
fruits of their own industry and intelligence—content to make those about them
happy—to surround themselves with beauty for the sake of beauty, not for the sake
of ostentatious display, these too are of the remnant which do not bow the knee
to Baal—too sincerely self-respecting to be snobs or tuft-hunters.

The laxity of the age in morals is for the most part passed over lightly, and if
confessed is apologised for and excused, chiefly on the ground of its improvement
on certain notorious epochs. But no candid observer can deny the fact of this laxity ;
as indeed must needs be, with the greater freedom given to young women and the
fewer duties left them to fulfil. The present period is remarkable, zn/er a/ia, for the
loosening of home ties once held so sacred, and for the distaste for home life, once
so venerated and loved. Restlessness and discontent have taken the place of the
former quietude and serene acceptance of the lot marked out for them, characteristic
of English girls. Desire for excitement, adventure, pleasure, and above all longing
after those apples of the Tree of Knowledge, make home the dullest place in the
world to our young modern Eves, and the father and mother the most irksome
companions. Even husbands of their own age pall on them after a time ; and that
satiety should destroy love and render marriage unmitigated boredom is one of the
accepted canons among the railers at things as they are in favour of things as they are
not and can never be. With these young wives maternity counts as a horror, if not a
degradation. They abhor children, and Shakespeare’s famous aphorism is no more
true to them than the fifth commandment had power over them when girls, or than
the seventh has terror for them as wives. Whether they love their lords or not,
maternity is a curse they willingly run all risks to avoid; and when they do have
children their first care is to shuffle them off on to any one’s hands but their own—
their next to delay the introduction of their girls for so long as is decently possible
their last to get those girls married out of hand, no matter to whom, so long as they
can shake them off their own skirts, and free themselves from inconvenient witnesses
and possible rivals.

Here again we have the remnant. There are still to be found, even in Society,
sweet, natural, tender women who love their babies and welcome them into the
world into which they have been brought by no will or act of their own. There
are still to be found young and pretty mothers who give up gaieties dnd festivities
that they may be at the bedside of a sick child, and who, while looking more the
sisters than the mothers of their grown girls, introduce them at the right age and

732 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

neither shunt nor suppress them. Certainly there are mothers who let their
daughters go to the right or the left unchaperoned, while they themselves carry on
the old game of intrigue with new and varied playfellows; but the remnant exists,
and to these clean-minded and clean-living women, faithful wives and devoted
mothers, we take off our hats, as to King Edward’s Countess of Shrewsbury, and that
pearl among wives and mothers, Lady Rachel Russell.

We get a little insight into the wide-spread prevalence of what is surely dangerous
flirting, if not absolute intrigue, by Sunday visiting at certain houses. In some the
hostess frankly says she does not care to have women at all. She wants only
club men and politicians, with whom to discuss the sal’ent questions of the day :
vomen, with their flirting and frivolity, are out of placé and out of tune; and this
position is intelligible enough. Other houses are frankly open to both sexes. These
belong to the remnant. But others again are intended for men only; and even
of these it is wished that none but the favourites should call. Before you know
this, and if you are a woman who makes Sunday calls, you get your initiation into
the secret ways of those houses by a process as painful to yourself as it is disagreeable
to your fair friends. You call at this house and that, to. find two people in earnest
conversation together—conversation of the kind which does not like interruption.
Woman-like, she recovers her self-possession the soonest ; man-like, he shows temper
and is sullen. You, the innocent Jonah whose presence has wrecked this little bark
of confidential intercourse, bowed under the sense of your involuntary iniquity, talk
fast and probably talk foolishly—only anxious to get through your necessary five
minutes before you may convey yourself and your embarrassment out of the room.
If this happen to you twice or thrice in the same day, it leaves on you the most
depressing sense of gross blundering. Then you wish that you had never been born ;
for perhaps these unexpected revelations have shattered what was once a delicate and
dainty little image ; and one more illusion has gone like an iridescent bubble burst
into empty air.

For the self-respecting remnant both tact and discrimination are of primal necessity
in their dealings with Society. To churlishly refuse the proffered friendship of those
on the higher rungs of the social ladder—rungs which are higher than your own-
is to write yourself down a snob of the snobs, when that friendship is sincere,
simple and human. It all depends on that sincerity, that simple humanness, and
on your own estimate of the motive which prompts the offer of that right hand of
fellowship. If the motive be frankly sincere, the acceptance should follow suit. But
if you are asked as a kind of lion whose roaring is to be a feature—a modern
Samson to make sport for the nobly-born Philistines, then are you a cur if you accept,
and unworthy of the grand old name handed down to you by your English forefathers.

This kind of thing is the enduring temptation and constantly recurring difficulty
of successful artists. The Leo Hunters of Society are never idle, and their traps
are set, their nets are cast at all four corners of the social jungle. It is not the person
they care for, only the name. Nor is it fame they regard, so much as notoriety. An
outrage against good taste and decency, if well boomed and talked about, is a bigger
passport than an achievement that has escaped the desecration of blare and gained
only the distinction of appreciative praise. This nice difference in the spirit is
discernible only by the remnant. The ruck of the strivers after private pelf and public
notice are too eager in their race to care for nice differences. To see their names
in the list of my Lady Fourstars’ guests is all they desire. Little they reck whether
they are asked out of regard for themselves or respect for what they have done, or
for the mere fact that they are notorious and by their notoriety stand as advertisements

SOCIETY--THE REMNANT. 133

for Lady Fourstars herself. Anyway, they are willing to hire themselves out for the
pleasure of seeing their names in the list; and if you speak to them of self-respect
on the one hand or of self-degradation on the other, you speak a language as foreign
as if you exhorted them in Chaldean or warned them in Hebrew. They are not
of the remnant, and they bow their knees to any number of Baals without the tender
excuse of Naaman when his master leaned on his hand in the House of Rimmon.

This does not say that we are free from the obligation of paying our shot in
Society. We all must, some in one way, some in another. We must contribute
our share to the general quota, either by our birth or our wealth, our beauty or our
brains, our fame or our influence, or it may be only by our manners and our power
of talk. No totally insignificant and undowered person can possibly hope to be in
what is called Society—that is, asked by those who value the outsides of things
alone, and who demand the guid pro quo. The best wife in the world, the most
meritorious mother, the dearest father, brothers and. sisters to swear by, if neither
handsome nor witty, neither rich nor well-born, if contributing nothing to a room
in dress, name, appearance, conversation, will not be largely invited, save by those
intimates who know and respect them. If these undistinguished persons are touched
by the curse of social ambition, they will eat dirt by the peckful for the sake of
appearing here and there. If they are of the remnant, with a sufficient amount of
good sense and the power of recognising conditions, they will accept their portion
of social effacement with the dignity of those who understand their true worth, their
real position, and do not wish for fictitious acknowledgments.

In all professions and all social circumstances can be found this remnant of the
self-respecting, who disdain the arts by which others forge or wriggle their way to the
front. In art and literature are the two sections of the rockets, with the charred stick
to follow—-and of the steadily flaming cressets, that burn quietly on to the end—those
who are “ boomed ” by interested friends and backers, and those the worth of whose
work is their sole claim to public consideration. It must be confessed that this last
section is in a woful minority in these latter times, and that writers and artists trust
more to the power of the boom than they do to the intrinsic worth of their work. But
the fame brought by the former method is illusory and transitory. It sells the books,
and brings good money to the pocket of the author: so far, indeed, it is neither illusory
nor transitory ; but it does not secure the success of future issues, if those issues are
unworthy of success. The glamour of a boom lasts but a short time, and no self-
respecting worker either values or desires it. The wise know that sooner or later
most of us come to our deserts. Those who have been buoyed up by wind-bags get
caught on sharp places, which pierce their supports and let them down like stones.
Those who have done the best they know, steadily, faithfully, through temporary
neglect but ever-increasing recognition, come at last to the goal of their desire—
whence they can never be dislodged. The self-respecting worker keeps steadily on,
indifferent to hostile criticism save when it conveys a real lesson of better advice, and
with but one aim—to do the best he knows. The boomed worker is spasmodic,
hurried, and always under strain and apprehension. His dominant endeavour is to
surpass himself, not in the intrinsic quality of his work, but in its sensationalism of
thought, or it may be of narration. He plays to the gallery, and the gallery likes that
which is hot i’ the mouth. His demonstrative friends have been his real undoing, and
the charred stick is bound to come down. This is, as was said, specially true of
intellectual workers in this present noisy day. But we must never forget the remnant
—those quiet, conscientious, and independent workers, whose pride disdains _fire-
works, and whose honour is in their own thoroughness.

|

734 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

Again, in politics we have the remnant of honest men, whose convictions carry
them beyond the considerations of party, its advantages, its emoluments. Of these
are the Liberal Unionists—those men who are too conscientious and self-respecting to
sell their souls for place, and too manly to be led by a name into the mire into which
the party has deliberately walked. Never in our history before has a body of men
stood out in fairer light than these Liberal Unionists, who have coalesced with the
Conservatives, and gone out from the ranks of their old party to save the Empire
from destruction, and to protest against the degradation of the House as ordained by
Mr. Gladstone. The fight they make is hard and heavy, uphill all the way, and to
a certain extent foredoomed to present failure. They cannot hope to destroy that
craven-spirited majority which takes its orders from gutter-sparrows and village
ruffians—to bring back to the sense of English honour and English patriotism the
recreant sons of the Mother who for place, power, and party, do not hesitate to defame
and betray her. The Conservatives, grand as they are, are in their natural groove. It
costs them nothing to oppose the mischievous treason of this degraded party, led by
the once famous and now lost leader and arch-traitor. But the Liberal Unionists have
had to sever old ties and stand foot to foot against old friends. They have had to go
into exile, and make friends of those who erstwhile were strangers and opponents.
They have been truly the remnant of the faithful, saved from the evil seductions
which have brought their weaker brethren to the place where all honest men despise
them, all good patriots execrate them, and all self-respecting Englishmen blush that
they bear the same name as themselves.

And, by the way, this anti-English spirit, this unpatriotic madness, has spread far
and struck deep into the vitals of this politically degenerate time. One continually
meets in Society with men who are not ashamed to confess that they are absolutely
destitute of the sense of patriotism. England is no more to them than France ; and
even less than France, inasmuch as the “artistic” element in France is greater than
in England; and to these flabby descendants of the men who fought at Crecgy and
conquered at Waterloo “art” stands before patriotism, and the shape of a jug, the
special shade of a colour, the technique of a picture, throw far into the background
such prosaic considerations as loyalty and self-respect, love of country and national
dignity. If it were not such a flabby age as it is, all these men would be severely
boycotted. Let like herd with like, and let the traitors be dismissed from the presence
of the patriotic. The remnant did not consort with the worshippers of Baal or the
sons of Belial, and the intrinsic fitness of things remains the same under all changes
of name and form.

The great ladies condemn the smaller fry who push for a footing on the golden
stair. Those great ladies are themselves to blame, partly by their own greed for new
experiences—and oh! ye enriched proletariat, remember that you are new experiences
to the porphyrogeniti, as much so as if you were black fellows or Aztecs !—and partly
by their descent into walks of life and action unfamiliar and inharmonious. Those
milliners’ shops, set afloat by certain members of the aristocracy, have been as nails in
the coffin of class consideration. If titled folk are poor, and their own kith and kin
will not support them, they must work that they may be fed, like others whose blood
has not a tinge of blue, and whose chrism-cloth was homely tan. But if titled folk
are merely idle at home, and craving for new sensations—craving, too, for what they
hope will prove a profitable turn-over of their margin—and on account of this come
down into the labour market and enter into competition with the bread-winners fighting
for simple sustenance, then are they more than déc/assées, then have they forgotten
the best traditions and finest formulas of their order. There are, however, the noble,

SOCIETY—THE REMNANT. 735

stately remnant of men and women to whom wod/esse cblige is a living phrase, and self-
respect as potent an influence as religion itself. Indeed, it is religion ; for the sect of the
Stoics never dies out, and here too the remnant holds its proud head high and refuses
obeisance to the popular Baal of the hour. That popular Baal to the aristocracy is
competition in work for wages with the poorer members of society who have to work
if they would live. “The dignity of labour ”— in itself and when used sincerely a fine
phrase enough—has become with these self-forgetting aristocrats a word of degradation.
The spell upon them is not noble striving to do homely things well, but the hope of
ignoble gain and success in yet more ignoble competition. In this competition they
play with loaded dice. They know that their name will be a powerful make-weight for
acceptance, and that merit alone will not sway the leaders’ choice. Every penny which
these titled and influential workers make for their superfluous expenses, and on the
strength of their social position, is taken out of the mouths of the impecunious, to
whom it is of vital need to earn bread for themselves and their families. And, con-
gested as the labour market is on all sides, this incursion of the uncovenanted is a
direful hindrance to the well-being of the needy, already jostling one another too rudely
among themselves.

The remnant of the well-portioned who have gifts and capacities do none of these
things. They are content to be artists and “ workers” for the pleasure of their own,
and the joy they themselves take in their achievements. The remnant do not care to
advertise themselves by exhibitions, by competition, by receiving payment, even for
the professed purpose of charity ; but nobly, and in the old grand style of the sheltered
woman, they keep sacred the things they do, and content themselves with home applause
and private delectation.

This is the remnant into the houses of which the modern social element does not
enter. They do not associate with men to whom their butlers could give points—-with
women less refined than their maids. Noamount of gilding could make these people
acceptable ; and no intrigue whereby to effect an entrance could be successful. They
stand by their own order, and maintain the dignity of inherited caste. Notoriety is as
offensive to them as ill-breeding, as ostentation. They see no charm in that kind of
impudent cleverness which has assumed heroic proportions of late: the cleverness
which here ignores a notorious past in favour of a decent present—there outrages
all sense of feminine decency, as well as forgets the limits of geographical accuracy.
Such “fame” as this the remnant of the truly noble reject, as they would turn aside
from the phosphorescent shine of corruption. They refuse to hold terms with the
undesirable, however big the posters setting forth their names—however bright the
shine of what is substantially corruption.

In a lovely little knot apart stand the remnant of fair women who have not bowed
the knee to the Baal of rampant egotism under the name of a mission, and self-display
under the name of political action. No platform orators are they, appealing to men’s
passions, euphemistically styled their reason; no disturbers of an ancient civilisation,
which the sovereign’s coronation oath undertakes to respect, for the sake of the career
it opens and the emoluments that career includes. To this remnant home duties
lie closer and are more sacred than wild tramps in foreign lands for the conversion
of content into discontent, quietude into restlessness, the claustral life befitting the
religion, the morals, the habits, and the climate, into the half-Amazonian freedom
which does as much harm as good even in the colder north and west, and which
would be so disastrous in the south and east. The remnant among modern women
are as beautiful and pure, as orderly and as modest, as were ever their predecessors
in the finest days of history. The type has not died out; it is only overshadowed

736 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

by the more vulgar self-assertion of the rowdy kind—those blatant, noisy, and unsexed
Wild Women who have gone beyond the line of feminine modesty, as the best of all
ages have traced it, and left to the remnant the guardianship of the holy books and
the care of the sacred fire. Were it not for this remnant, indeed, we might well
despair because of the things we see and hear. But the seven thousand save us, and
the chosen people have always their representatives.

In this remnant, then, lies the hope o: the future. It was the salvation of the
past. In the worst time of Rome’s corruption it existed, as one might find sweet
flowers hidden among weeds and filth ; and what can be said of Imperial Rome may
be said of every other country and every other epoch. There has always been the
i remnant ; self-respecting, honourable, faithful to the better way, loyal to the finer
traditions. _When all society seemed to be given over to hopeless corruption, in the
quiet homesteads, far removed from the glare of Courts and the noise of cities, noble
men and women lived in the grand simplicity of virtue, and reared their children
to respect the gods and themselves. When men openly laughed at morality, and
women notoriously bartered chastity for gain, and gave away the true for the false,
the remnant kept the record clean ; and by degrees the best outran the worst.

So now as in the past.

Undeclared by public blare, the remnant of self-respecting men and women hold
that dignified place of silent personal pride which accepts no bribe and offers none—
content to be and not to seem, to have and not to beg. Undeflected by fear or favour,
they eschew the worship of a remunerative Baal, and prefer instead the more barren
honour of loyalty to their own dignity. They neither fawn on the great nor sell
themselves to the rich. They neither prostitute the columns of their paper to hoist
a second-rate worker into a first-class place, nor themselves fetch and carry and fawn
and cringe for the friendship of the influential contributor, of the able editor. To them
pride is as necessary as the air they breathe ; and with the breaking of that pride their
life would be at an end. How, indeed, péople can live whose pride has melted into
baseness is a problem for which they have no answer. It belongs to the same class
as those tremendous surgical mysteries by which human beings can live with half their
brains cut away. Rob the remnant of their self-respect, and you take the heart out
of them for good and all. And even as modern surgery has not yet come to this
power, so have the remnant not learnt the secret of uniting self-debasement with
self-respect, which self-respect is the very life of their life—that modern version of the
Old Law of Numa which they cherish as the vestals cherished the sacred fire.

reper ary cara

E. Lynn LINTON.

THE PARTRIDGE.

¥ all the game birds the partridge is most familiar to those
who live in the country: every child that toddles after its
brothers and sisters of larger growth through the fields and
meadows knows well the call of the partridge, and the whirring
a fe flight of the bird.

- é pie If Scotland can claim'the red grouse as her national game bird,

ore igs a England may certainly lay claim to the grey partridge as her own;
™ although the compact-looking, active bird is to be found in suitable localities
i throughout the United Kingdom. Cultivation, which is, as a rule, so injurious
to wild game birds, has proved beneficial so far as the propagation of the
partridge is concerned; for he, like the sparrow, thrives best close to the
cornfields, or, I might say, wherever agricultural pursuits are in full working
order.

The bird’s range is a varied one; he is in the fields as a general rule, no matter,
whether the crops of wheat, oats, barley, turnips, or mangolds are on or off, the
greater part of the year is passed by the partridge in the fields. Some writers have
mentioned moor-partridges in a way that might almost lead the general public to
believe that we have two distinct species of the bird, or, at least, a well-marked
variety of the common one ; but this is not the case: we have only one grey partridge,

When I write of fields as the bird’s principal habitat, both by day and night,
737

738 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

my readers must understand that the hedgerows and banks that enclose those, also
the tuffety borders of the grazing meadows, are to be included. Moor-partridges are
wild-bred birds, which have been brought out on the moors, which are separated,
in our Southern counties, only by a splashed bank from the cornfields. Having been
hatched out on the moor, they, together with old birds, naturally frequent it, and they
“jug ” or squat closely together there at night. The fields are visited certainly, but
the principal food supply will be gleaned from their wild hatching-out place ; and they
fly farther and run longer distances, also they are a little smaller and darker than
those that keep entirely to the corn and the root lands. The food they get on the
moors is, in a great degree, like that of the blackcock and red grouse, and their flesh
is naturally darker than that of the other birds. The coveys found on the moors are
wilder also, and far more gun-shy, than are those of the lower grounds. When they
are on the wing you can very often watch them fly clean out of sight without dropping.
These little differences are all I have been able to observe between the two; and
in the Surrey heathlands we have a goodly number of these moor birds.

Scattered grains of corn, various seeds from the vegttation of the fields, far too
numerous for us to mention, and those creeping and flying hosts that frequent the
corn lands,—slugs, worms, beetles in their mature and their immature stages,—flies
and green food, with bits of sharp gravel swallowed to help digestion, form the
principal bill of fare of this bird. ‘Those that live on the moors eat the green tender
shoots of the heather, and, in the season, the whortle berries and those of the dewberry
or trailing bramble.

The finest birds for size and plumage are found in some of the Southern and
Eastern counties. Where the corn and marsh-land join each other there is the perfect
home for our birds. How often have I seen the coveys come whirring from the yellow
corn on to the wide green flats which were quivering in the heat, in order to visit some
of the countless ant hills, where the great hares resting between the old mole-heaps
started up as the birds dashed over them! Golden cornfields, vast stretches of green
flats, bordered by the tide, whilst a few sails dotted the water, made a very agreeable
picture. The partridges found something there to please them certainly ; for, added
to ants’ eggs, there were the grasshoppers in thousands. As you moved along you
would be covered by these nimble skip-jacks. Good food and shelter, with warmth—
for at that time our marsh summers were hot ones—made all the difference to the
size and plumage of the partridges which were found there in such great abundance.
One of my friends, who shot on his own marshes with one of Manton’s muzzle-loaders,
using either a Spanish pointer or a curly-coated setter—only seen now in old sporting
works, such as Daniel’s and others of a like nature—used to leave a brace now and
then when he passed our house. It was proper partridge shooting then—not driving ;
and what was then considered a fair day’s sport would be laughed at now. But the
birds were cleanly killed by real sportsmen who knew how to shoot. Some of my
readers will probably say mine are old-fashioned ideas. So they may be, but I am
not able to alter them. When a brace was given to me in those days the feathers had
a bloom on them like that on a bunch of grapes. No sportsman at that time would
allow the plumage of the birds that fell to his gun to be “ mucked about,” if he could
possibly help it.

Fishing and shooting are, I know, wide apart as sports, but the good old rule
for feather will apply equally well to fin in this matter. A good all-round angler, if he
has had luck, will turn the fish out of his creel in perfect order, a layer of fish and a
layer of sedge or fern alternately. Out they come, a glittering heap, with their scaling
perfect ; and, when treated in this manner, they form really the most beautiful picture
of still life the eye can rest on.

THE PARTRIDGE. 739

The partridge, like that blessed bird of the Highlander, the red grouse, is con-
sidered to be a bird of good omen throughout the whole length and breadth of the
country side; for when his cheery call sounds from furrow and ridge the spring is
coming, and summer will follow. Then, also, there is good to be got from the fresh
scent of the ploughed fields ; for there is truly life in the earth.

The plough has been left turned up on its side on the edge of this large field for
two hours or more ; warm showers have fallen at intervals through the day, and the
sun has gone down, leaving a great broad line of saffron light edging the tops of the
distant hills, with a great mass of warm grey rain clouds above it. Plovers come
flapping from the sheepwalks on the hills above to the fresh-turned furrow below;
it is too dusky to see them after they have settled, but their murmuring weet-zweets
fall on the ear ; and then comes the chir-chir-chir-chir-chir-up-up, chir-er-er, chir-chir-up
of the partridges, with a rush. Others sail over head as we lean over the old wooden
gate that leads into the field, and a long jerking shadow flits past us, crossing the
fresh-turned furrows ; it is a solitary hare that is hastening to join a regular hare frolic
on the slopes of the upland pastures.

No game bird that I am acquainted with is more able to take care of itself
than the partridge is. I have known the birds lose their wits at times under
exceptional circumstances, but not very often; for the partridge is the picture of
dashing alertness. ;

It has always been a joy to me to see a large covey melt away, so to speak,
out of sight in a fallow field, where they have been confidently feeding, when we
have very cautiously let them know that we were looking directly at them. ‘The
old cock, that at times would stand nearly on end just to look all round him, I
have seen lowering himself, as if some spring within him was gently getting limper
and limper. Through my field-glass I have noted the outside birds raise their clean-
cut heads for a second or two, then lower them, depress their tails to the ground,
and glide towards the others ; a few brown dots showing, now here, now there, and
the large covey is soon invisible if on a fallow field—not stubble, but old fallow lea.

All our game birds possess this moon-seed property of making themselves practi-
cally invisible when there is any necessity for their doing so.

Before these violent changes occurred in our favourite Surrey moorland haunts
I used often to amuse myself by watching black game being properly set up in a
glass case. A blackcock in full breeding plumage is one of the most imposing
and conspicuous birds you can look at; though the bird is out of his proper place
when he is with the bird-preserver. The place to observe him is when he goes to
feed on a dark patch of moor bog, with white and grey bleached stones cropping
out of it. You will not see him before he dashes up in front of you; but this
has often taken place when my eyes and ears have been opened to their widest.

These few notes taken from the life, made as I have wandered, sketch-book and
note-book in hand, and the birds before me, in the summer, and also in the bitter
winter weather, have nothing to do with keepers or poachers.

The so-called exposure
of poaching manceuvres is utter nonsense.

Rest assured that when keepers grind
their teeth in impotent rage at certain jobs, they do not know much about how
the thing is done, or they would certainly put a stop to it to save their places ; and
poachers who are up to their business hold their tongues about it. When I read
of whole coveys being netted, field after field, I feel simply disgusted at the mis-
statements ; for if ever a bird slept witi one eye open, it is the partridge. As to
the green plover, that frequents the same open fields, he walks in his sleep, and
moans out his fezwét-weet-weet-weet !

One thing I am positive of: twenty pheasants come to grief for every single
5 yy g ) g

740 THE PALL

MALL MAGAZINE.
partridge. I should just like to see fields—at least in the Southern counties—swept
over with gossamer silk nets, in the way some gentlemen, who know so precisely how
the thing is done, try to explain so lucidly.

Partridges pair, and they are devoted parents, not only when the chicks are out,
but also when their broods are fully fledged. The wiles and shifts both parents
will use to lure you away from their young, whom you so frequently startle from off
some of the numerous ant-hills that crop up from the turf and ferns, must be seen
to be credited ; it would be useless to attempt the description of it. Broken wings,
broken legs, fits, and death-throes, all are gone through, close to your feet, in less
time than it has taken us to mention these assumed afflictions, giving the young
plenty of time to get to cover in all directions and into all sorts of places. Then,
again, if you keep very quiet, you will presently hear the old birds call, and in less
than a minute the little family will be busy round some ant-heap, as if nothing had
disturbed them at all.

COCK PARTRIDGE,

No one ever dreams of hurting the innocent creatures ; there is the traditicnal
folk-lore, and there are woodland laws, fully recognised by all classes. These have
not the least bearing on the game laws, but they are equally strict, and must be
acted upon. Even if some did feel disposed to break them, they could not do it,
unless they were willing to be cut by all wood dwellers.

Two very different kinds of ant-hills supply the eggs or ant pupz to the young
of game birds, and of partridges in particular. First, there are the common emmet
heaps, or ant-hills, which are scattered all over the land ; go where you will, you will
find them. ‘These the birds scratch and break up, picking out the eggs as they fall
from the light soil of the heaps; the partridges work them easily. But the ant-eggs
proper—I am writing now from the game-preserving point of view—come from the
nests or heaps of the great wood-ants—either the black or the red ants. ‘These
are mounds of fir-needles, being, in many instances, as large at the bottom in
circumference as a waggon-wheel, and from two to three feet in height ; even larger

THE PARTRIDGE. 741

where they are very old ones. ‘They are found in fir woods, on the warm, sunny
slopes under the trees, as a rule, pretty close to the stems of the trees. The
partridges and their chicks do not visit these heaps, for they would get bitten to
death by the ferocious creatures. ‘The keepers and their lads procure the eggs of
these ; and a nice job it is! A wood-pick, a sack, and a shovel are the implements
required for the work. Round the men’s gaiters or trousers leather straps are tightly
buckled, to prevent, if possible, the great ants from fixing on them, as they will try
to do, like bulldogs, when the heaps are harried. ‘The top of the heap is shovelled
off, laying open the domestic arrangement of the ant-heap, and showing also the
alarmed and furious ants trying to carry off their large eggs to a place of safety ;
but it is all in vain! Eggs and all, they go into the sack. In spite of every
precaution, the ant-egg getters do get bitten severely, for the ants would fix
anything. They spit, as the men term it, their strong acid venomously. When a
lot of heaps have been harried it smells as if some coarse kind of aromatic vinegar
had been poured out under the trees.

The ants revenge themselves in this fashion: they fix you with their pincers, then,

HEN PARTRIDGE,

bending their bodies between their legs, they eject the acid into the wound their
strong pincers have made. ‘Thousands upon thousands of the creatures can be seen,
raised up on their legs, their bodies bent underneath and forwards, spraying formic
acid in all directions. If you place your hand over the great hollow in the heap
it will get finely covered with it. I have been bitten by wood-ants, and have had
to bear it; but it was a sore experience. No notice is taken of what a keeper or
his lad may say when under punishment from ant-bites; they had need be forgiven
if they use improper words to the grindstone after they have come home from
ant-egg getting.

These heaps are harried for the home-bred birds; that is, home- and hand-fec
ones, both pheasants and partridges, hatched out by small game hens—game fowl kept
specially for that purpose—from the eggs that have been taken from the outlying nests.
Other strains of the domestic fowl are used, but the game hens are the favourite foster-
parents. When the birds are fed with the eggs, as many of the ants as it is possible
to get rid of are kept out, but some are sure to be mixed up with the eggs, and these
fix on the feeding birds, making them jump off the ground. The common emmets,
the creatures that the wild birds feed on—their young broods particularly—are
harmless, but the large wood-ants are not. I have known them pull creatures to

742 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

pieces and eat them up so cleanly that their skeletons have been far better prepared
than you would see them among specimens got up for anatomical purposes; in
fact, some, who know what the ants can and will do, place small animals, ranging
from rabbits and squirrels to mice, and birds, from the size of a partridge down to
the golden-crested wren, in their nests. Ifa perfect skeleton is required of a viper,
snake, slow-worm, toad, frog, or either of the lizards, place the reptile in one of these
fir-needle heaps in some lonely place in the fir-woods—one that is not likely to
be visited—and you will get what you want.

In a dead, hard winter—in fact, such a one as our last (1892-3)—our friend
the partridge is not put to it like his larger associates are, for the bird naturally is
a ground one; all his living is got from it; he lives, broods, and jugs there. No
matter how deep the snow may be, or how intense the frost, it does not cover up all
places completely. Brambles, thorns, and dead bracken, tore grass, and bent tuffets
may, to all appearance, look covered up, but it is not really so ; underneath all is warm
and dry, and not a vestige of snow will you find there, unless you kick it in with your
foot, or hit it with your stick to make it fall. Nature’s own pure covering this is,
wherewith to protect her children. They know where to go, and how to form their
shelters from all the winds that blow. As to feeding, not one-tenth part of the wild
fruits and berries are gathered by human hands; and as to the plants that bear seed
of some kind, who can tell how many provide food for the game birds, for they riper
and fall, being unconsidered hedgerow and field plant provender.

Hawkweeds, thistles, ground brambles, the trailing kind that runs over the pastures
in places here and there, forming low clumps a few inches in height, are not exactly
what a farmer would like to see in his pasture lands ; but as some of these at one time
were part of the common lands, cultivation has not quite got rid of the vegetation
indigenous to common land. No matter what the farmer may think, the birds know
this is their own feeding range ; for the hedge dykes that surround these rough pastures
have a growth of their own of kixes, wild parsnips, moth mullein, long grass and
brambles, all of which are very long in decaying. ‘They dry up hard, and droop down ;
their stems may be broken by the winds, but there they are, snow-covered certainly, but
warmly covering in the dry ditches below them, so forming fine warm shelters for the
partridges. Birds do not feel cold as common humanity does ; for putting quite on
one side the feather quilts with which they are covered, their blood is much hotter than
our own—that of game birds particularly so.

There they are, about the middle of the field, heads down, backs up, and their tails
drooped, busily feeding round the dead stems of some weeds and low brambles. ‘Ten
or a dozen'of them there are, I fancy; for you can count more than you can see at all
times ; and we can plainly see the bunched-up backs of nine.

They are picking and scratching round and amongst the trailing brambles. None
of the brambles lose all their leaves in the winter ; green and withered leaves can be
seen on them, no matter how hard the weather may be. As the small fruit with large
seeds is not considered worth picking, it drops, when dead ripe, and falls on the
ground ; the pulp rots, but the seeds remain there, well protected by the tangle above
them ; and the birds know of it. When hard times come they know where food can
be found, and they get it as a rule. There are no rules, however, without exceptions.

Partridges jug or roost in a sort of round robin fashion, their heads turned outwards,
and their tails of course the reverse way. This is all right, and very nice when
weather permits it ; but just before the sun, like a globe of fire seen through the cold
grey clouds, gets very low down, the partridges make for warmer-quarters. I have
remarked in some of my articles on natural life, furred and feathered, how very closely
wild creatures at times will come to the localities where man has his home and

THE PARTRIDGE. 743

surroundings. ‘The subject of this present article is a keen bird, and from time
beyond record his race have kept near the tillers of the soil.

If I wished to. find a covey at night, in such weather as I have just alluded to,
I should know where to look for them ; and I should find them, snug and warm as
toast, where no breath of wind or biting frost could reach them. But just where that
particular place is, I must certainly decline to tell; and for very excellent reasons.
I do not kill birds, nor have I the least wish to do so. One thing, however, I will
say about it, and that is, the partridges would be where most would probably never
dream of searching for them.

The bird’s natural enemies are comparatively few, taking into consideration his
ground habitat. Raptores, in Southern countries—the sparrow-hawk excepted—are
very few ; and this hawk rarely kills the partridge, for the reason that hedgerow birds
are so abundant, and they are a far easier quarry than our swift bird. I could, if I
thought it necessary, give authentic information of the large bags of partridges made in
past years ; but as this article deals more with the natural history of the brave bird
than with the sport he provides, such records need not be given.

Although the larger Raptores in Southern countries are conspicuous by their
absence, when migrating time comes round some of these long and wide-winged
beauties pass over the Southern countries in small numbers—a couple of pairs, or a
single pair, as the case may be.

Sometimes a few buzzards—a very few—either the rough-legged, common, or honey
buzzard, are brought singly to me to look at, and there it ends.

The only chance we have now of looking at one or two of the larger sort is when
the corn is cut, and the partridges feed and shelter more in the root crops, turnips
or swedes by preference. Mangolds, or “ wuzzles,” they work as well, but the turnips
are favoured by them most. Harriers, at one time—the hen-harriers— were frequently
to be seen on the wide heaths, commons, and moors which were so very numerous in
this district, Surrey. ‘These when changes came about were killed, of course ; at least
folks killed all they could.

After forming their hunting-grounds for so many years, it is not to be wondered at
if a pair still pay a passing visit when on flight, for the line of country is still the same ;
that at any rate has not altered in its formation, although new comers have scratched
about a bit.

“ What are you looking at, my man, so intently?” I asked of a lad who was sheep
tending.

“Why, them ’ere big birds—hawks o’ some sort. I think they be arter the
partridges.”

Where 2”

“Oh, you'll see ’em, no fear; they are gone up the walley now, they'll come back
agin. ‘They’ve bin goin’ backwards an’ forrards fur sum time now. Don’t ye hear
the birds holler? ‘They’re frittened at ’em, I ken tell ye. There they be! Ain’t
they big uns ?”

A pair of hen-harriers these were, partridge hawking—the grey cock and the
larger ring-tailed hen—a fine sight. ‘They had not struck a quarry yet, for partridges
do not let hawks get them if they can help it. The pair evidently thought they had
been wasting time for no purpose, for they dashed past, over to a large field of swedes ;
and here something must have told them they would meet with better success, for they
set to work like a couple of pointers.

We could see nothing of the partridges for the leaves. Once the ring-tail made a
pounce, and we could hear the covey shriek in terror; but no capture was made.
Presently the harriers changed their tactics, and they hunted the lines of swedes

Vout. I.—No. 5. 49

744 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

backwards and forwards for a time, nearly over the whole length; then they shot back
and worked across it, beginning at the far end, and working towards us. Not a foot
of that field did the pair appear to miss, for we saw them well, as we were standing on
a bit of a knob of ground overlooking the field.

“ They’re workin’ on ’em up close now ; jist the same as my old dog corners my
sheep. Them ’ere partridges wun’t be able to put up with much more on it.”

Nor did they ; for at the last flight up the whole covey dashed out screaming from
the corner of the field. Like lightning the hawks pounced—clap—clap! A cloud of
feathers flew as each struck their bird, and that pair of harriers breakfasted on
partridges.

“A SON OF THE MARSHES.”

‘© HEN-HARRIERS”

Gfarinda’s eauly.

HE tree may win the stripling
With its clusters round and red,
And a shepherdess may languish
Till his stlly mouth is fed;
But Clarinda has an orchard
Where sweet circles grow for me,
And no shepherd, though he covet,
Dares approach my cherry-tree !

The mistress airs her velvet
Ev'ry Sunday down the arsle
As the sunburnt farmers titter,
And the saucy nilkmaids smile ;
Though wt cost a mort of money
And can make the children stare,
‘Tis a thistle to the softness
That Clarinda’s cheek doth wear.

But when my sweetheart dangles
In the Avon as tt goes
Fler feet, and cattle ponder
On the marvel of her hose ;
Not a virgin ever trusted
Such a comely white as this
Lo the chilly river fingers,
And for water-lips to kiss /

NORMAN GALE.

4
Y
Y

BR

~

THE PRODIGAL SUN—SIGNS OF THE SILLY SEASON—VAGARIES OF CONSTANT CORRE-

SPONDENTS—VANITY FAIR AGAIN—DOES SATIRE

DO ANY GOOD ?—STEAD AND

SPOOKS — GROUSE AND MELODRAMA —IS ROBERT BUCHANAN A MAN ?— THE
PLAGUE OF BIOGRAPHIES—FLORAL ADVERTISEMENTS—LONDON versus ABERDEEN
—PROFESSOR BAIN—THE FOUNTAIN PUN.

AOR many moons now have I gone
oy about beneath the morbid influence
— of a man I created—a man who got
married by reason of a snowstorm the like
of which the oldest inhabitant could not
remember. My man took him a wife because
he felt he ought not to cheat his grand-
children out of so good a story. ‘Ah, my
little ones, during that fearful frost an ox
was roasted whole below London Bridge,
without setting the Thames on fire!” Now,
that man is riding me—I cannot shake him
off. I know he will drive me to the altar
and play best man. It is not the Royal
Wedding that has turned my thoughts to
matrimony and tales of a grandfather! ’Tis
not that I may be able to mumble of the
glories of the illuminations, and of the twenty

thousand loyal voices singing “ Daisy! Daisy!”
in the Strand at two o’clock of the morning;
no, it is simply the weather of this year of
grace that is luring me to the nuptial knot.
Verily, it has been our Anmus mirabilis. As
far back as March the sunshine was so con-
tinuous that one felt frightened at one’s
felicity, and tempted to sacrifice a day and
do some work. Chaucer is avenged on the
cheap humourists ;, Spring is vindicated for
a generation, and May is merry beyond the
reach of slander. The English summer has
turned up at last, to testify to the good faith
of the poets; and though for the next fifty
years winter spend the summer with us, the
old tradition will flourish, not to be tarnished
by wind or rain. One swallow does not
make a summer, but one summer makes

746

WITHOUT PREJUDICE,

an epoch. But why all this extravagant
spilth of sunshine? why this waste in one
year of half a dozen fine seasons? The
prodigal sun again !

was °@ so intense det an Ox was
e roasted under London
4 EEONS _ Bridge (in the shade,
: ‘mind you) without
fire! And a Neapolitan
ice, Charley, fetched
—” But no, I must
not think these volup-
tuous thoughts. That
* Way marriage lies !

ap OR this year’s Silly Season the weather
has supplied an excellent topic, of
which, you see, I have already taken
advantage. I do not know ifI have “spotted”
the favourite, for I have to make my book so
long in advance that I do not even know the
names of the entries. Perhaps we shall hold
a public court-martial over the loss of the
Victoria, and decide to husband our re-
sources by going to war ; perhaps we shall
be arguing whether the new Laureate is a
poet ; perhaps we shall discuss what to do
with our parents.
SIGNS OF THE SILLY SEASON.

A gooseberry that groweth green and great,

A serpent round the sea serenely curled,

A lonely soul that fails to find a mate,

A boy redundant in a teeming world,

A sister yearning for dead sisters’ shoes,

A life that longs for death, or after-life,

A ghost, a mistress whom her maids abuse,

An erring judge, a French or German wife,

A child’s long ear or holiday, a slum,

A man gone bald, or drunk, a coin’s design—
Should things like these across your paper come,
Conclude the Silly Season will be fine.

you
have
ever been
struck by
the o

catholicity — not
say the self- contradictori-
ness — of the constant
correspondent. The
creature will enter
with zest into any

obscurest

747

discussion ; there is no topic too small for it,
and certainly none too great. The following
letters, carefully culled from the annual con-
tributions of a lady whose epistolary career
I have followed with interest, will indicate
the delicious inconsequence that has made
them for me such grateful reading ;—-
1888.
SIR,—

There is nothing in life worth purchasing
by pulsations and respirations, The world is a
dank, malarious marsh, with fitful Will-o’-the-Wisp
flashes of false radiance—a vast cemetery waiting

for our corpses, There is no such thing as
happiness.
“Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravin’, shrieks against”
the idea. Youth is an illusion,

and old age an apprehension.

maturity a regret,
Fortunately Pro-
vidence has sent us a panacea-—Universal Suicide.
I an, Sir,

Yours obediently,

AGATHA P, ROBINS.
1889.
S1r,—
Surely ‘‘A Mad Englishman” and

‘* Dorothy X.,” who maintain so glibly that country
life is more enjoyable than town life, fail to realise
how much of our pleasure depends on human
jntercourse. It is given only to poets to talk with
trees. Nor can ordinary mortals find
‘Sermons in stones,
Books in the running brooks.”

We need the cathedrals and the libraries that are
to be found only in the great centres of national
life—yes, and also the art-galleries and the theatres.
Of course, if people will martyr themselves to keep
up appearances, and want to live in a fashionable
neighbourhoed, they will not find town life either
cheap or pleasant. But if they are content to live
outside the aristocratic radius, they can find many
a comfortable villa, with baths (hot and cold) and
back gardens which may easily be converted into
rustic retreats (I would especially recommend
rhododendrons). If you are also not above omni-
buses (taking a cab only when it rains, and
selecting a driver who does not look as if he would
swear), and are satisfied to go to the pit, then I
feel sure London is not only as cheap as the
village,
return for your money.

but gives you a far greater
Newly-married couples
in especial often make a great mistake in settling
in the country for the sake of economy. It is
only in the town that they can really lead a tranquil,
happy life, enriched with all the
culture and civilisation.

resources of

Sir,
Yours obediently,
AGATHA P.

I am,

ROBINS.

748 THE PALL

1890.
SIR,—
The failure of marriage
be glossed over any longer.
** A Woman of No Importance ”

is too apparent to
oA Ve a ed
deserve the thanks
of every honest heart for their brave outspokenness.
Too long has this medizval monstrosity cramped
our lives. The beautiful word ‘‘ Home”
a doll’s
Marriage is misery in two syllables.

conceals
house or whitewashes a_ sepulchre.
How can
people be happy chained together like galley-
slaves? It contradicts all we know of human
nature,
* Love, free as air, at sight of human ties
Spreads his light wings and in a moment flies.”

Away with this effete Pharisaism !

Let us realise
the infinite possibilities of happiness latent in the
The world is longing for
freedom to love truly, nobly, wisely, many.

I an, Sir,

blessing of existence.

Yours obediently,
AGATHA P. ROBINs.
1891.
SIR,—
I can testify by personal experience to the
fact that
teriorating.

the manners of our children are de-
Coming up to the Metropolis for a
Bank Holiday, I
without
what
my own expense—even from respectably-

day’s excursion last could

not walk anywhere

ribald temarks—and, was worse, at

dressed children. Let those look to it who
‘“Teach the young idea how to shoot.”
I thank

always been cast in

Heaven my lot has
a sweet
where

Devonshire _ village,

N contagion of ill-conduct

IX has not yet spread

| * among the juvenile population.
I am, Sir,

§ Yours obediently,

AGATHA P,

ROBINS.

1892.
SIR,—

Have your flippant correspondents, ‘‘ Poly-
gamist ” and ‘‘ Illegal Brother-in-Law,” any con-
ception of the thousands (ay, tens of thousands) of
hearts that are languishing in misery because they
cannot marry their deceased sisters’ husbands ?
And all because of a text which is not to be found
in the Bible! Fie upon you, ye so-called Bishops,

“Dressed in a little brief authority,’
Abolish this unrighteous law, I say, and let floods
of sunshine and happiness into a million darkened
homes.
I an, Sir,
Yours obediently,

AGATHA P. ROBINs.

MALL

overt rearing \

MAGAZINE.

UT, after all, is it fair to juxtaposit
Agatha’s letters? What if one were
to collect the leaders of any news-
paper on any given subject, before or after any
event? I have met Agatha P. Robins in many
other places at many other times. Sometimes
she is interested in the best substitute for
shirt-buttons or for Christianity, sometimes in
the problem of living on a thousand a year,
sometimes in the abolition of stag-hunting.
It is difficult to trace exactly when “ The
Season” ends and “ The Silly Season” gas
It needs the finest discrimination
to know when the ad-
jective comes

in — : eS

without a wordly training, r\
indeed, you cannot tell WY;
the one from the other. But /,m

won
the past masters of the social z= Shine
art proclaim that “The Season”: is ~~ =
‘ dead, and we bow our
bamwgaett heads in reverence.
e * Yes, it is vanished, that
a focus of futilities, that
wonderful Season, that phantasmagoria of
absurdities, of abortive ambitions, over which
a hundred humourists have made merry:
it is dead, with its splendours and _ jubila-
tions and processions—dead as the ropes of
roses in St. James’s Street. Often have I
debated the potency of satire, again and
again have I suggested to learned friends a
scientific and historical investigation of the
popular belief that satire moves mountains
or even molehills. But they agree only in
shrinking from the task. To take only the
last half-century : we have had one supreme
satirist who harped eternally on the failings
of fashion and the vanity of things. In
his novels society saw itself reflected in all
its attitudes and postures and _posings.
Not one meanness or folly escaped. What
Professor Huxley has done for the crayfish,
that Thackeray did for the Snob. He
studied him lovingly, he dissected (9
him, he classified every variety
of him. A thousand disciples,
less gifted but equally re-
morseless, followed in the
Master’s footsteps. Pusch
took up the tale, and week by week repeated
the joke. It was heard in drawing-room
recitations to the accompaniment of pianos;
it even went on the stage. Ladies rushed

New

into print to expose foibles men never
guessed, and to say of the sex at large what

less gifted women say only of their personal
friends. For years we have never ceased for
4 a moment to hear

] 7, 7 the lash of the
Vy whip, the swish of

the birch, the
whizz of the arrow,
the ping of the
bullet, the thwack
of the flail, the
thud of the ham-
mer, the buzzing
of the hornet.
And what does it
all amount to?
How much execu-
tion has been
done? Is society
purer or nobler?
Have less daugh-
ters been sold at Vanity Fair, or more
invitations been sent to poor relatives? Has
Jones got better manners or champagne?
Is Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkins more distant
to duchesses? Did my Lady Clara Vere de
Vere consider whether Hood’s seamstress
was at work on her court gown? Is anyone
wiser or kinder or honester for all the literary
pother? Are the diplomatic corps less macu-
late than in the days of Grenville Murray ?
Have we not, on the contrary, cast on our
own imperfections the complaisance of an
eye educated in the superior imperfections
of our neighbours ?

O, here is a new satirist arisen, Sarah
Jeannette Duncan, who, in Zhe Simple
Adventures of a Memsahib, sketches

Anglo-Indian Society in a manner that would

not discredit Thackeray—and with something,

too, of Thackeray’s haunting sense of the
pathos of the dead Past and the flying

Present. But will the memsahib of to-morrow

take warning by the fate of Helen Peachey,

who went out to India in all her bridal
bravery, in all her youth and freshness ? Will
she escape exchanging the placidity of Fra

Angelico’s piping cherubim for the petulance

and ring-shadowed eyes of the seasoned

matron? Will she be on her guard against

shrinking to the prejudices and flirtations of a

coterie, dying to all finer and higher issues ?

Will she worship virtue more and viceroys

less? Alas, I fear me not—no more than

Pagett, M.P., will leave off talking of solar

myths, or foolish things cease to be done

WITHOUT PREJUDICE. 749

under the deodars. Will Hogarth keep wine-
bibbers from the bottle, or can you make
men sober by acts of L’Assommoir? Will
Madame Bovary stay a sister’s fall, or Sapho
repel an eligible young man? Will the
Dunciad keep one dunce from scribbling, or
Le Tartufe elevate a single ecclesiastic? As
well expect “ long firms” to run short, and the
moths to avoid the footlights, and the fool to
cease from the land. “ How gay they were,
and how luxurious, and how important in
their little day! How gorgeous were the
attendants of their circumstance, on the box
with a crest upon their turbans !—there is a
firm in Calcutta that supplies beautiful crests.
And now, let me think! some of them in
the Circular Road Cemetery—cholera, fever,
heat-apoplexy ; some of them under the
Christian daisies of England—probably
abscess of the liver.” Yes, madam, we know
it all} we recognise the Thackeray touch.
“And soon, very soon, our brief day, too, will
have died in a red sunset behind clustering
palms, and all its little doings and graspings
and pushings, all its petty scandals and
surmises and sensations, will echo further and
further back into the night.” True, most true,
and pity ’tis ’tis true. But meantime we will
go on with our little doings and graspings
and pushings—yes, madam, even you and I

who have realised the vanity g@ of all
things ; for the knowledge <7 thereof—
this, too, is vanity. “And . it was

/striv-

all a_ striving and a
ing, and an ending in (j ) nothing,
and no one knew Git what they
had lived and /~ ~~ “"=worked for.”
Yea, so it is, Fraulein Schrei-
ner. And still” , = we are living on

and oh! { baad ,_- how hard we work
= 7 ME on African farms or
otherwhere) to express artistically

our sense of the futility of life!

VANITAS VANITATUM.
A rich voluptuous languor of dim pain,
A dreamy sense of passionate regret,
Delicious tears and some sweet, sad refrain,
Some throbbing, vague and tender canzonet,
That mourns for life so real and so vain,
Wherein we glory while our eyes are wet.

9AM afraid, if I pursue this investi-
gation, I shall end by believing that
satire is simply an zsthetic satisfaction

75°

—the last luxury of the sinful. Ridicule,
we are always told, is a tremendous de-
structive—an atmosphere in which nothing
can live. But is it? Christianity, Kings
and War are little the worse for the jets
of mockery that have been playing on them
for two centuries. In Swift's day the wits
at the coffee-houses regarded religion as a
farce that even the Augurs could not keep
up any longer without public winking ; yet
Diderot and the encyclopedia are dead,
and the bishops we have always with us!
It was thought War could not survive
Voltaire’s remark that a monarch picks up
a parcel of men who have nothing to do,
dresses them in blue cloth at two shillings
a yard, and marches away with them to
glory—but here is our Henley singing a
song of the sword, while all our novelists
are looking to their weapons. Despite
Heine’s sarcasm, the collection of English
kings is as incomplete as ever. A _ passing
fad can, perhaps, be made to pass along
a little faster, but it only makes room for
another. True, Pusch killed the craze for
sunflowers and long necks ; but then Punch
invented it. It was merely made to be
destroyed brilliantly, like a Chinese cracker
or a Roman candle. Folly is older than
Punch’s jokes, and will survive them. Snob-
bery and self-seeking, pettiness and stupidity,
envy, hate and all uncharitableness, were no
secret to the mummies in the British
Museum.
rivers yo, thither they go again.” Are there
not a hundred sayings in Ecclesiastes and
Menander, in Horace and Moliére, as apt to-
day as though fresh from the typewriter?
One of the learned friends to whom I
proposed the thesis contended that Perseus
and Juvenal at least are out of date. But
this was merely my learned friend’s ignor-
ance. Is it not the truest piety to conclude
that those things which the ridicule of the
ages cannot kill deserve their immortality—
that Kings, War, and Christianity play a part
in the scheme of creation, and that even
snobbery and jobbery, folly and fraud, rouge
and respectability, and horseracing, bounders
and politicians, the prize-ring and the mar-
riage market, are all necessary to the fun of
Vanity Fair! They are thrown up by the
flux of things for Honesty to set his heel on.
So houp-la! On with the dance ! louder, ye
fiddlers ! faster, O merry-go-round ! ay,
not so glum, ye moralists and _satirists,

“Unto the place whither the 2

THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

philanthropists and preachers ; link hands
all—ducdame,
aducdame | —
and thank the
gods for keep-
ing you in
occupation.
Wo has
should we - e ———
do without our fools? The question seems
put for a Silly Season correspondence.
Come, gather, fools all. Ye could not be
better employed than in answering it. For,
mark, brother-satirists mine, you cannot kill
the Silly Season correspondence. And you
cannot kill Ghosts. Perhaps because they
do not exist. No other dead thing is so
tenacious of life as your ghost. If ridicule
were really fatal, we should have given up
the ghost long since. Consider the fires of
burlesque through which he has passed
unscathed. What indignity has been spared
him? Now at last he is to encounter the
supreme test—he is to be taken seriously.
Mr. Stead has the matter in hand—or should
one say, the spirit? Once a quarter there

will be a pilgrimage to Borderland (terms,

10s. 6d. per annum). who

Mr. Stead,
believes in himself in a way that is refreshing
in these atheistic times, will either rehabilitate

the ghost or lay him for ever. Now, for my
part, I am quite willing he shall be treated
scientifically, like the aforesaid crayfish, or
the Mammoth, or the movement of glaciers;
and that Clairvoyance, Telepathy, Wraiths,
Spirit Photography, Magic, Astrology, Theo-
sophy, and the rest shall have a fair hearing.
I have myself wasted hours in making a hat
climb and do tricks. You and another
person—a pretty girl by preference—join
finger-tips round the rim of the hat, which
rarely disappoints. But whether its perform-
ance is due to the generation of a current
of electricity, or to unconscious muscular
pressure, or to both, I have never been able
to decide. The faithful will do well to re-

member that the moment the Supernatural is
attested and classified, it becomes as natural

as anything else. The world is only made
to look more ridiculous than it appears
already if our deceased friends really rap
tables and pull off our bedclothes, as Miss
Florence Marryat’s did. Certainly such
spooks add nothing to the dignity and
sanctity of the scheme of creation, and are no
friends to religion. That charming woman,
Mrs. Besant (who up to the moment of
going to press is still a theosophist), is always
rushing at conclusions ; and even Mr. Stead
considers that the best working hypothesis is
the existence of unembodied intelligences,
invisible but capable of impressing the mind
—a theory already exploited in fiction by
Robert Barr in his clever tale “ From whose
Bourne,” wherein the disembodied intelli-
gence of Lecoq blunders badly in tracking
a criminal. Theosophists, being gifted by
Heaven with an absence of humour, propound
some propositions so absurd that they do not
deserve to be true. Their reading of the
riddle of this painful earth explains obscurum
per obscurius. Where is the point of a pro-
gression through stages, in the absence of a
continued consciousness? What does it
matter if I am not myself, but somebody
else in his fifth plane? And why do the
Mahatmas live in such out-of-the-way places ?
They are like your debtors—always out when
you call, while your letters to them return
marked “Gone away. Left no address.”
Decidedly I agree with Mrs. Besant’s anta-
gonist, Mrs. Frederika Macdonald, that it is
better to bear the religions we know than fly
to others that we know not of.

ND you cannot kill Grouse. At least I
I sometimes suspect there are
others of the population equally in-
competent, and perhaps still less inter-
ested in battues; though the Twelfth
figures in everybody’s calendar like a
Church festival, and the newspapers
devote leaders to it, and the comic
papers have pictures, and sometimes
even jokes about it, and you would
think the whole population of these
islands struck work and went a-
shooting with gillies and dogs and
appropriate costume. But A
that is the craftiness of the -
editors, from Mr. Buckle and Mr. Yates
down to the editor of the Halfpenny

WITHOUT PREJUDICE. 751

Democrat —they make the humblest of us
feel we are in the best sets, [Korree paace_]
so we all cume up to town ie
for the season, and are seen
at three parties a night, and
we ride in the Park, and we
go to Henley and Goodwood
to a man; and we yacht at
Cowes, and pot grouse in Scotland
—still with the same _ wonderful
unanimity ; and we hunt with the

hounds, and run with the salmon,
and keep our Christmas in country

houses, and come up smiling for the

New Year, ready to recommence the same
old Sisyphean round. I suppose the people
who really do these things could be exhibited
in the National Gallery, but the space their
doings fill is incalculable.

Sy ND you cannot kill Adelphi Melo-
cl drama. True, several specimens of it

have latterly died an early death ; but
that was because the authors, stung by the
new criticism, weakly developed aspirations
after literature and romance.
was the old stage-carpenter, Mr. Pettitt, ”
called in, and the old machinery of
murder’ set going again, than the
old pilgrimage set in to the
temple of the brothers Gatti
(Gatti Adelphi, as the Greeks
would say). Mr. Pettitt
the cleverest playwright (as
distinct from playwriter)
of the day; he is a Surrey Sardou, and
never makes a failure, except when assisted.
Now, I have a piece of advice to offer to
the Italian gentlemen who have done so
much for our drama. It is, that they run
their theatre on a principle of duality be-
fitting their joint management. Let it be
the home of Melodrama and Burlesque, the
same play serving for both genres. Let,
say, Mr. Sims—who is so clever
in either species—write the pieces
—each melodrama being its own
burlesque.

But no sooner

is

there, with a serious meaning

droll in the burlesque, will
secure the brothers two au-
diences, and after eight o’clock I guarantee

An extra dash of
colour here, an ambiguous line

in the melodrama and a

752 THE PALL
standing room only. The simple will come
to weep and thrill, the cynics to laugh and
chuckle. And everybody will be happy.

aN sooth, is not the world divided into
RE those who take the great cosmic
drama seriously, and those who treat
it as farce? On the one hand the workers
and the fighters, on the other the journalists,
politicians, and men about town. Yet have
the workers and the fighters the nobler part.
A genuine emotion, an earnest conviction,
vitalises life. The day-dreams of hungry
youth are better than the dinners of prosaic
maturity, and a simple maiden in her youth
is worth a hundred epigrams. I had rather
be an Adelphi god than a smoking-room

satyr.

IMNay-

Wi He writes for those to whom litera-
~ ture makes no appeal. Literature
is a freemasonry of the highest minds, and
that poetry is Greek to the masses I should
scarcely have thought a “Question at Issue ”
demanding substantiation from Mr.
Gissing. Mr. Gosse must know
eclipse which darkened England at the
passing of Alfred Tennyson was invented
by the newspapers and the poets who out-
raced one another to weep upon his tomb.
Look upon Mr. Booth’s map of East London,
with its red lines showing the swarms of
human beings who live ignobly and die
obscurely, and realise for yourself of what
import the cult of beautiful form is to
these human ant-heaps. Walk down the
populous Whitechapel Road of a Saturday
night, | or traverse the long slimy alleys of
Rotherhithe among the
timber wharves, and
discover how many of
MW your countrymen and
contemporaries are living
neither in your country
nor in your century. To
Mr. Henry James, the dull
undertone of pain and sorrow is part of
the music of London—such harmony is in
zesthetic souls. But the dull and the gross,
who only suffer and endure, the muddy
vesture of decay closes them in and they
cannot hear it.

HO shall blame the melodramatist ?

George
that the

MALL MAGAZINE.

A HAT shall literature do for these? In
Ra great smoky Midland town, on
dreary pavements, under sloppy
skies, I saw a girl who was a greater argu-
ment for melodrama than all the cheques
of all the managers. She was going to
her work in the raw dawn, her lunch in a
package under her arm ; the back was bent
and the face was pale and pinched, but
there was a slumbering fire of romance in
the deep-fringed eyes, and suggestions of
poetry lurked in the shadows of her hair ;
and at once my breast was full of stirrings
to write for her—only for her—a book full of
beauty and happiness and sunshine, and,
oh ! such false views of life, such inaccurate
pictures of the pleasures of a society she
would never know. The hero should be
handsome and brave and good, with a curl-
ing moustache ; and the heroine should be
beautiful and true, with an extensive ward-
robe; and the clouds would come only to roll
by, and the story should die away in an
odour of orange-blossom, and in a music of
marriage-bells. And there should be lots
of money for everybody, and any amount of
laughter and gaiety, and I would give dances
twice a volume, and see that all the girls had
partners, delightful waltzers with good con-
versation. And there would be garden-
parties (weather permitting invariably), and
picnics without green spiders, and sails with-
out sea-sickness. And as for truth and realism
—fie on them! We can create a much nicer
world than nature’s. Why be plagiarists,
when we can make universes of our own ?

poets when he launched his brilliant
lines against “The Dismal Throng.” But
Mr. Buchanan’s invective—like Miss Marie
Corelli’s—would be more forcible if it were
less indiscriminate. To attack Shakespeare
and Tupper in the same breath were to
do Tupper a good turn Moreover, it is
but a few months ago that Mr. Buchanan
appeared as the author of one of the dis-
malest poems of the century,—pessimistic
as “Queen Mab”—following it up by an
avowal in the Daily Chronicle that he
could not believe in God because of the

agonies of his pet monkey. Here we have

him once more a rampant theist and optimist.
so self-contradictory

He is that I am

WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

reluctantly driven to the belief that he is an
honest man. But why does he not write
under my title ?

#R are there many Buchanans whom
we have all been ignorantly confound-
ing? The biographer of the future
will be wiser. He will distinguish between
the poet Buchanan, who knows nature,
and the dramatist of the same name
who doesn’t. There is a second poet,
Thy Byronic, and brilliant, who is only
i nominally the same as Buchanan the
mystic (not to be confused with
6 Buchanan the ma-
2) terialist, who is of a
, corpulent habit, and
\ lunches at Rule’s).
i\«\ There is also
i Buchanan the
Complete Letter-
Writer, who is
unrelated to
§ Buchanan the
author of “ Chris-
? tian Romances,”—
who, in his turn, suffers from being often
identified with the Buchanan who writes
novels for the old person; and it need
hardly be said that none of these gentle-
men is Buchanan the essayist, or Buchanan
the business man, who lives in a fine
suburban villa. They were all born in
different years, and some of them are dead.
Several are men of genius, and one or two
are Philistines whom the others dislike.

%|UT the biographer of the future will
| hardlybe able, even if he takes all these
men for one, to make a bigger book
than Lady Burton has made out of her hus-
band. I yield to none in admiration for the late
Sir Richard ; but I could wish his widow had
treated his life as untenderly as she treated
some of his risky translations. No man can
possibly deserve two huge volumes. The
perspective is all wrong. Bossuet got the
history of the world into a fifth of the space.
Moral : Beware of biographical widows.

VIVE LA Mort!
Wa, HEREFORE do the critics rage ?
’Tis the biographic age!
Every dolt who duly died
In a book is glorified

753

Uniformly with his betters ;

All his unimportant letters
Edited by writers gifted,

Every scrap of MS. sifted,
Classified by dates and ages,
Pages multiplied on pages,

Till the man is—for their pains—
Buried ’neath his own Remains.

Every day the craze grows stronger,
Art is long, but “ lives” are longer.
They who were the most in view
Block the stage Jost mortem too.

Hark the tongues of either sex—
Reminiscences of X !

Of his juvenile affections

Hundreds write their Recollections,
(None will recollect their writings)
Telling of his love for whitings
Fried in butter, or his fancy

For bananas, buns and Nancy.

Thank the gracious gods on high,
Every day some “ Life” must die :
Death alone is our salvation.

Though ’tis dubious consolation

That of all these countless “ Lives ”
Only the Unfit survives.

WONDER if this evil would come
within the scope of the “ Society
for Checking Abuses of Public Ad-
vertising” ! Certainly the eyesore evil is
not the sole abuse of advertisement. Yet,
as it is the easiest to tackle, Mr. Richardson
Evans may effect some good by his plea
entitled “The Age of Disfigurement.”
Whether London be beautiful, as Mr.
Henry James certifies, or the monstrous
wen that Mr. Grant Allen, with his fondness
for extreme proposition, would make it out, it
is not improved by mural decorations repre-
senting ladies with their back hair down, or
demons cycling down chutes. Within bounds
advertisements do no harm—they are a sort
of artificial vegetation that springs up to hide
walls and blank hoardings. But they do not
keep within bounds ; they are a leprosy on
the face of the earth. How disgraceful the
long unlovely street of advertisements that
leads to our South Kensington exhibitions !

754 THE PALL
It has been suggested that flypapers should
be so sprinkled as to produce an esthetic
design in dead flies, so as to introduce beauty
into the homes of the poor. It would be
more in harmony with the age to lay out our
public gardens with floral injunctions to use

oer

Brag and

3’s hair-dye and C’s corn-plaster.

display are the road to riches, and the trail
_I take credit to
myself for having been among the first to
cry in the wilderness ; but the critics
them! —say it is all empty paradox.

of vulgarity is over it all.

bless

THANK you sincerely, Mr. Arthur
Cawston, for the honour you have
done me in dedicating to me your
“Comprehensive Scheme for Street Im-
provements in London.” All the same I
cannot afford to buy a copy, though I hope
many of your other “ Fellow-townsmen ”
who share the honour with me will put down
their guineas. Like Mr. Grant Allen, you
allow too little for the charm of irregularity
and historical association—for odd bits and
queer views coming unexpectedly round the
corner to meet one, for ancient
gardens and fragments of field in the back-
ways of Holborn, for quaint waterside alleys
and old-world churches in out-of-the-way
turnings—for everything, in fact, that has the
charm of natural growth.

strange

I would not give
up Booksellers’ Row for a thousand improve-
ments in the Strand. Where shall you find
a more piquant peace than in the shady
quadrangles that branch out of the bustle of
Fleet Street, and flash a memory of Oxford
spires or Cambridge gardens on the inner
eye? What spot in the world has inspired a

nobler sonnet than Wordsworth’s on West-

minster Bridge?
= lh Fiala... Who would ex-
oe halle change our happy

incongruity for the mechanical regularity of
the mushroom cities of the States?

Paris

MALL

MAGAZINE.

has, no doubt, made herself beautiful ; but
she could have afforded not to be much
better than she can afford to be. Mr.
Cawston holds up Glasgow as a model city—
a pioneer—and the splendour of its municipal
buildings is as the justice of Aristides. But
if an ugly woman does not dress well, who
should? With all its civic spirit, Glasgow
remains grey, prosaic, intolerable—the cham-
pion platitude of commercial civilisation.
Aberdeen would have been a far finer example
of the schematic city of which theorists
dream, There is something heroic about
the spaciousness of its streets, the loftiness
of the buildings, and the omnipresence of
granite—a Tyriazean spirit, which finds its
supreme embodiment in the noble statue of
Wallace poised on rough craglets of un-
polished granite, and of General Gordon
with his martial cloak around him. If
Edinburgh be the Athens of Scotland,
Aberdeen is its Sparta. And yet after a
while Aberdeen becomes a weariness and an
abomination. For you discover that it is
one endless series of geometrical diagrams.
The pavements run in parallel .lines, the
houses are rectilineal, the gardens are squares
or oblongs; if by chance the land sprawls
in hillocks and _ hollows, nevertheless, is it
partitioned in rigid lines. The architecture
is, equally austere. The very curves demon-
strate the theorem that a curve is made up
of little straight lines, the arches are stiff and
unbending, and wherever a public building
demands an ornament, a fir-shaped cone of

straight lines rises in stoic severity. In vain
one seeks for a refuge from Euclid—for an

odd turning or a crooked by-way. To match
the straightness of their streets and the
granite of their structures the Aberdonians
are hard-headed, close-fisted, and logical

(there is a proverb that no alien can settle
among them), and when they die they are

laid out neatly in a rectangular cemetery
with parallel rows of graves. Even when
they stand about gossiping they fall naturally
into geometric figures: if two disconnected
men are smoking silently in the roadway,
they trisect it; and if another man arrives
he converts the company into an equilateral
triangle. I am convinced the moon shrinks
from appearing in Union Street except it is
in perfect quarters, and hides timidly behind
a cloud unless its arcs are presentable.
Professor Bain was born in Aberdeen. This
accounts for much in our British metaphysics.
Aberdeen produced the man who vivisected
Shelley’s “ Skylark,” and explained away the
human mind and all that is therein ; Aber-
deen educated him, graduated him, married
him, gave him the chair of Logic in her
University, and finally made him Lord

Rector. Bain thinks entirely in straight
lines. He is the apotheosis of the Aber-

donian, which is a warning. against regular
cities.

patriotism by the example of
vincial cities, Mr. Cawston does not
allow sufficiently for the size of London. It
swallows us all up; there are twenty pro-

pro-

Vincial cities in its maw: it is not a city, but
a province. We cannot rouse ourselves to
an interest in Brixton and Camberwell, in
Poplar and Highbury. There is no glory
in being a dweller in so amorphous a city,
whose motley floating population is alone
sufficient to stock a provincial town ; there

can be no sense of brotherhood in meeting
a Londoner abroad, still less a Middlesex
or Surrey man.

Devonians may feast off

WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

755

junkets and cream in touching fellowship,
and the hearts of Edinburgh men stir with
common memories of Princes Street; but
a Cockney, who has far more to be proud
of, is overwhelmed into apathy. It is only
in a compact city that one can develop that
sense of special belonging which George
Eliot contends is at the root of so many
virtues. I might just as well be taxed to
beautify Dublin as Canonbury, for all the
difference it would make in my grumblings.
Sweep away the slums, Messieurs the Re-
formers, then it will be time enough to think
of ornaments.

GRANT you London has been made
a little prettier by the new fountain
in Piccadilly Circus Lord
Shaftesbury’s memorial may agreeably re-
mind us of The
fountain leaks woundily, though, and | must
protest against the petrifaction of a mere
pun. If the Stone Angel—who is perpetu-
ally overbalancing himself to shoot
arrows into the ground—is not in-
tended to represent Shaftesbury, it
This is
the Old Humour with a vengeance.
The setting up of stone puns is a
new and terrible precedent. We

have Gladstone q >

Balfour by two pairs of balls stuck on a
golf-stick. The idea must have
grateful gift of

where

the existence of virtue.

has no meaning whatever.

‘
shall re
commemorated by a gs =<"
dancing monolith, and : -

been the

some poor creature Lord

Shaftesbury had been kind to.

1. ZANGWILL.

VEXED QUESTIONS.

The Editors are not responsible for the opinions expressed by Contributors under this heading.

The Case for Gold.
BY WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR.

N considering the historical development and present position of the Silver
Question—its momentous importance as the great monetary problem of the
nineteenth century, its world-wide consequences, its curious phenomena, and

the pedantic oddities of the amateur financiers who in the past have approached it
from both sides—one cannot but wonder what the scientific opinion will be, one
hundred years hence, upon the delusion of bimetallism.

Of late the perplexity arising from an effort to do a thing in itself impossible—
namely, to establish absolutely a parity between gold and silver—has been constantly
on the increase. The chief agitation has come from the United States of America,
where in 1814, at the close of the second war with Great Britain, the ratio was
arbitrarily fixed at one ounce of gold to fifteen of silver. But the proportion then
existing in Europe being one to fifteen and one-half, the American money-brokers
exchanged fifteen ounces of silver for one of gold, which they forthwith sold in
Europe for fifteen and one-half ounces of the white metal—an ingenious operation they
repeated indefinitely to their own profit, though with the effect of draining America
of gold and flooding it with foreign silver. To check this tendency the ratio was
summarily changed to one ounce of gold to fifteen and nine-tenths silver, the consequence
whereof was to make it profitable to send silver to Europe and recall gold. The
influx of Californian gold in 1850 suddenly disturbed the proportion between the
metals to the great advantage of silver; while in 1870 a counterwave of silver from
the western mines once more abruptly depreciated that metal, and raised the relative
value of gold. In 1863, the American Civil War necessitating the issue of paper

Copyright 1893 in the United States of America according to Act of Congress by William Waldorf Astor.

VEXED QUESTIONS. 757

at a depreciation ranging from 50 to 150 per cent., both metals were swept from
circulation, and the American monetary problem passed to the phase of a return
to specie payments, which was not accomplished until thirteen years after the
restoration of peace.

It was during these years, when the country was flooded with a depreciated
currency, that a belief arose, chiefly among the western rural population, that cheap
money means abundance—an amiable fallacy largely adopted by the advocates of
bimetallism. As a matter of fact, cheap money is always debased, and consequently
dishonest money. <A cheap dollar is one of less than standard value, be it the
greenback dollar of war times, worth only twenty-five or fifty cents, or the Bland
silver dollar of fifteen years ago, worth seventy-five cents. But, at the time, people
noticed only their nominally high salaries and wages, the easy abundance of notes
in circulation, the seemingly good price paid for crops and manufactures, without
taking into account that the dollars they received were really worth but a fraction
of their face value. It was forgotten that at the close of the American Revolution,
when cheap money saw some of its palmiest days, a soldier’s pay for a month
would only buy a breakfast; while in the Southern Confederacy, where “cheap
money” reached a climax, a planter’s income for a year scarcely sufficed to pay
for a suit of clothes. And so it came about that when the financial situation of
the United States made it possible for a wise Secretary of the Treasury to withdraw
two billion greenback dollars from circulation, the remainder at once gained in value,
though, of course, prices fell in proportion. ‘The Western States raised a cry against
Jastern capitalists, and several cities which had borrowed heavy sums in New York,
which they had intended to pay in depreciated paper, denounced the “ Shylocks,” to
whom they feared they would now be obliged to pay gold or its equivalent. It was
then generally claimed, and it is still occasionally asserted, that a fixed monetary standard
is a mischievous device of rich men, in disregard of the obvious fact that the poor are
the first and greatest sufferers from a debased and fluctuating currency. Had the
American Silver Party then commanded the power, it would have made all United
States Government securities thenceforth redeemable in Silver Certificates, which is
equivalent to redeeming one promise with another less good. Failing in this, it
secured the passage in Congress of the Sherman Bill, which should have been
entitled “An Act to compel the United States Treasury to spend sixty million
dollars annually in buying what it does not want.” The effect of that Bill is to
oblige the United States Government to purchase four-and-a-half million ounces
of silver monthly, in spite of which the price of silver has fallen to forty-one pence
per ounce, and is still further declining, partly because of its constant production
from inexhaustible mines, and partly because there is an unconquerable aversion,
the world over, to the use of silver in bulk.

This buying process goes steadily on. The United States Treasury is overloaded
with silver it cannot put in circulation, and which can never be re-sold for the price at
which the Government buys it. The beneficiaries of this operation are the Silver
Kings, who must be an object of envy to manufacturers generally, who would likewise
greatly profit were an Act put in force obliging the American Government to buy their
products.

The bimetallic prospect has been, however, for some years clouded by the
exportation from America of ominously large sums of gold, the net outgo during the
year 1891 amounting to about seven million sterling. As this process, if continued,
would ultimately have put the American Republic on a silver monometallic basis,
resembling that of China, India, and several South American nondescripts, the common

758 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

sense of the country took alarm, and raised so violent an agitation of the bimetallic
sophism that, as a means to divert attention, the Silver Party imagined an Internationa,
Conference, whose purpose should be to make such terms with foreign markets, to the
advantage of American Silver, as should not only stop the outflow of American gold, but
enable the United States Treasury to unload silver bullion abroad. ‘That Conference
assembled at Brussels in November 1892; and if there be truth in the American
saying that nothing succeeds like success, then surely the Silver Kings’ Conference
will be remembered only by its failure. ‘The American delegates held the affirmative
in favour of bimetallism, and were met by emphatic replies. France answered that
there is no prospect of the substitution of bimetallism for monometallism; Russia
dismissed the proposal for an international agreement to regulate the parity of gold
with silver by a curt zon possumus ; Italy declared that nothing could be done without
the co-operation of Great Britain; the English delegates would make no appreciable
concession ; Germany, Austria, and Sweden adhered to the gold basis. Stripped of
circumlocutions as laborious as the obiter dicta of a German Professor, the consensus
of European opinion, as delivered in reply to the American proposals, meant this:
That, despite the theories of financial d//etfanti, it is absurd to suppose that a debased
or fluctuating currency can lead to genuine prosperity; that the honest price of
commodities will always be their value expressed in terms of gold ; that it would not be
honest to pay the principal or interest of a gold obligation in anything else than the
equivalent of gold; that Europe does not want Nevada silver at a high and arbitrary
valuation ; that monetary problems are no more to be governed by Act of Congress
than are the rising and setting of the sun; that a silver sham dollar of seventy or eighty
cents cannot be the equivalent of a gold dollar of one hundred. But long before the
Conference adjourned, or even before it met, it was well understood to be no part
of its mission to champion such absurdities. Half the world knew that President
Harrison’s motive in proposing the Conference was to postpone serious consideration of
the troublesome Silver Question until after the Election of November 1892 ; that public
opinion, as well as the American press generally, regarded the Conference merely as a
political expedient, designed to go through certain perfunctory motions ; and that it
was sedulously kept from view that Wall Street formally opposed the silver delegates
and their bimetaHic programme.

Since the adjournment of the Brussels Conference without the financial crash
which it was vehemently predicted would follow its rejection of bimetallism, a tentative
effort has been made in the United States Senate to repeal the mischievous folly of
the Sherman Bill. The attempt failed, because the new Democratic Administration.
which is monometallic in policy, has resolved, with Machiavellian astuteness, that the
existing financial embarrassment shall not be remedied until the American community
has been so effectually singed, that it will be loth, hereafter, to listen to the blandish-
ments of Nevada. In consequence the American Treasury continues, as required by
the Sherman Bill, to add four-and-a-half million ounces of silver monthly to its heavy
store ; the disorganisation of trade is aggravated ; the New York stock market droops ;
industry and commerce reflect in all directions the popular uncertainty and
apprehension ; and during the first six months of this year the net gold export from
America exceeded /welve million sterling. This outflow of gold should remind the
Nevada Silver Kings of the truism that inferior money will always drive out better
money if given the chance to do so. An example of this came near actual
demonstration in England two years ago, when, had Mr. Goschen’s project to introduce
one pound notes been adopted, its first effect would have been the general withdrawal
of sovereigns from circulation.

VEXED QUESTIONS. 759

In an article entitled “The Currency Crisis in the United States,” published in
the June number of the Fortnightly Review, may be read the remarkable declaration
that “The entire American nation is anxious for a bimetallic currency.” It would
not be easy to make a statement more widely at variance with facts. Were bimetallism
the desire of a majority of Americans, it would be in force in the United States
at the present day. But as evidence that such is not the case, a majority of the
people’s representatives in Congress have declared themselves opposed to bimetallism ;
and it is these representatives of the American popular majority who will shortly be
convened in special session for the express purpose of repealing the unstatesmanlike
Sherman Bill, which event, it is hoped, will give bimetallism its quietus for a long time
to come.

I believe the maintenance and integrity of contracts to be the essence of all
prosperous commercial relations ; and as the gold standard admittedly fluctuates less
than any other, there is, in this single circumstance, strong reason for adhering to it
as the most nearly stationary measure of the obligation of contracting parties. Silver,
on the contrary, fluctuates as coal and iron rise and fall; and its ratio to gold can
no more be made permanent than can the quotations of the market price of silver
ore. It is an inevitable condition of silver production that the value of the metal
varies, and hence it is conspicuously unfit to be, itself, a measure of value. What
would be thought of a gallon measure that, after holding eight pints yesterday, should
expand to nine to-day, and might shrink to seven to-morrow? So long as a majority
of the human race recognises that cheap goods and plenty are the conditions of
profitable trade, and that scarcity and depreciated money mean hard times, so long
will it be apparent that bimetallists are merely seeking to constrain the world to
the use of a coinage it rejects in place of a better which has been in use for ages.
And credit, which is the motive force of the financial system of nations, as of
individuals, will always be dependent upon the simplicity and integrity of a single
standard of money value.

In considering the currency question as it exists in Oriental countries, where it
is a momentous feature of the pending monetary problem, we are met by the
difficulty of having to deal with semi-savage communities, whose ignorance is part
of their religion, and whose knowledge of finance has not yet passed the stage of
hiding their savings. The Hindoo and the Chinaman hoard the precious metals
precisely as, some centuries ago, they were hoarded generally throughout Europe,
until the inventors of bills of exchange, who have been our masters and instructors
in all monetary matters, demonstrated that something more profitable can be done
with our talent than burying it in the ground. I believe that China and India must
eventually be similarly educated, and will ultimately adopt a gold standard, because
their natural tendency must be to do business on a cash basis, owing to the risk
resulting from keeping transactions open for long periods. They will gradually
awaken to an understanding of the fact that the fluctuation in value of their silver
currency, in dealing with other countries, curtails their credit, and, by diminishing
trade, proportionately reduces profits. It will also be brought home to them, when
they have progressed beyond their present elementary stage, that capitalists will never
invest in the securities of any country whose interest is payable in silver, owing to
the uncertainty of the return they are to receive. The future tendency will be that
every country which balances its budget with a surplus will command a gold standard
with a paper currency always redeemable for gold on demand. Moreover, as less
bullion is actually used now than in former days, relatively to the world’s population
and to the extension of trade, credit will come to be the basis of a universal monetary

VoL. I.—No. 5. 50

760 THE, PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

system. At present, gold actually passes in only a small number of transactions,
the usual medium being a promise to pay the equivalent of gold. The marvel of
the twentieth century is destined to be the increased efficiency of capital, owing to
the improved and extended organisation of credit, whose development, supplemented
by extradition laws, will be such that, apart from all ethical considerations, it will not
pay to be dishonest.

The essential weakness of the bimetallic argument is that it rests upon hypo-
thetical assumptions, whose effects must be equally conjectural. Fortunately for the
advance of civilisation, it is not probable that in the next century, when the human
race will progress in wise and valuable knowledge, its financial interests will be
allowed to decline, or its currency to degenerate. It is not likely that, in this
practical age, the financial centres will suffer a thing so delicate and vital as their
standard of value to be trifled with at haphazard ; and, so long as this remains the
case, it may confidently be affirmed that it will be impossible to accomplish any
monetary scheme of world-wide bearing which encounters the joint condemnation
of the City of London and of Wall Street of New York.

WILLIAM WaALDporRF ASTOR.

The Case for Silver.
BY W. H. GRENFELL.

OME years ago, walking from the House of Commons with a companion, the
conversation turned upon the general fall in prices and the unproductiveness
in most instances of commercial enterprise.

Being at the time a stern and unbending member of the gold school, and knowing
nothing whatever about the matter, the answer was to me simple enough. “ Well,
of course we are suffering from a glut; overproduction is at the root of it; and
then you must remember the cheap and rapid communication by land and sea, the
spread of the telegraph, the numerous and daily increasing number of inventions
which economise labour and greatly increase production, besides a hundred other
like reasons which must tend to cheapen commodities.”

I looked at him triumphantly, expecting to see him visibly shrunk ; but his eyes
had a dreamy, not to say weary, look in them; and at last he said, “Oh, yes! I
know all about that; but there is another side to the equation which you and
your friends always ignore, and that is the money itself. Is that always the same,
or does that vary? I mean, taking the world as a whole, would an increase in
the money volume, trade and population being the same, tend to raise prices, and
a decrease tend to lower them? If the whole world measured everything by gold,
and half the gold were suddenly swallowed up by the sea, would not prices tend
to fall proportionately? And if from the beginning of the world gold and silver
had been used conjointly as a measure of value, and some important nations of
the world suddenly discarded silver, would not that lower prices by decreasing the
money volume, and in the second place, if the par of exchange were destroyed,
produce a disastrous confusion in the trade between gold- and silver-using countries ?
Now, this is exactly what has happened. Germany, after receiving an enormous war

f

VEXED QUESTIONS. 761

indemnity (£ 200,000,000) from France, was persuaded to give up her silver standard,
and to adopt a gold standard in imitation of England, under the impression that
England’s commercial prosperity was due to her go/d standard, whereas her commercial
supremacy was founded when she was bimetallic. That was the first step: Germany
absorbed £80,000,000 of gold, four years’ gold supply of the whole world (the
United States and Italy following her lead), and threw her discarded silver upon
the market; and France and the Latin Union (Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and
Greece) closed their mints, which had been open to the free coinage of silver, having
no wish to help Germany out of the difficulty which she had created for herself.
Bimetallism, which had worked admirably for two hundred years and more, was
knocked on the head. Gold immediately went up in value, from the extra demand
suddenly placed upon it, and silver consequently compared to gold went down.
Then arose the silver question: before this there had been no silver question,—
silver and gold had been as one money: henceforth there will be two measures
of value with no link between them, the one measure of value being silver used
by the greater part of the world, and the other gold—and with gold appreciating,
and silver steady indeed as compared with commodities, but depreciating as compared
with gold, how can there be any trade carried on between a sé/ver-using country and
a gold-using country on any rational basis? In contracts lasting three months or
more the fluctuation may be so great as to wipe out all profit. It will not be
trading, but gambling. But the most serious question involved in this demonetisation
of silver, if it takes place on a large scale—and no country will like to be last in
the scramble for gold—will be the general and steady fall in prices. Now, nobody
can compete against a falling market; it is so much better to sell your business,
or wind it up, than to go on seeing your profits diminishing year by year till they
become losses, your plant and machinery worth less and less every year, while the
interest on the money you have borrowed remains the same: sell out, wind up,
what is the use of hanging on till you are bankrupt? Ah! I see a terrible time
coming if something is not done to stop the contraction of the currency! Just
consider for a moment. The gold production of the world now is about twenty
millions per annum; at the height of the Californian discoveries it was thirty-six
millions—and you must remember that at that time bimetallism was in full swing,
and America and Germany were on the silver basis. Since then trade and population
have increased enormously, and. we have had a smaller supply of gold and a much
greater demand for it, owing to the demonetisation of silver. If there is anything in
the quantitative theory of money, must this not of necessity produce an ever-
increasing appreciation of gold and fall in prices, with despair, bankruptcy, lowered
wages, strikes, and repudiation following in its train? I see that you are interested
in this question: allow me to send you some bimet is

“Oh, thanks very much,” I said, hastily pulling out my watch, “I am afraid I
must be off”; and I fled with all the righteous indignation of the true worshipper
of the golden calf, together with some grave doubts as to my friend’s sanity and
moral character.

However, he sent the pamphlets. I didn’t read them for along time, any more than
I should have read treatises on perpetual motion, the elixir of life, or the philosopher’s
stone. Bimetallism, like golf, is an acquired taste, and a taste which it takes
some time to acquire; but when once acquired it gets a good grip of you: it makes
many dark things seem clear; it supplies the only clue there is to the fall in values
which has taken place since 1873, and it leads to the study of a subject which has
a more important influence on the welfare of mankind than any other which can be

762 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

mentioned. Curtency questions, too, like golf, seem at first sight dull, pointless, and
profitless ; but when you have been once shown round the course, and have got
your clubs together in the form of the countless and excellent pamphlets on the subject,
and have got in and out of the ratio and other bunkers, you warm up to your
work ; and finally, when you begin to realise all the iniquities that have been
perpetrated in producing this disastrous contraction of the currency, the sufferings,
the long struggles against falling values, the evictions, the foreclosures, the bank-
ruptcies, the reduction of wages, the strikes, the want of commercial enterprise, the
consequent increase in the number of the unemployed while timid capital lies idle,
and the many other evils attendant on the criminal imbecility of demonetising one-half
of the money of the world, you begin to burn with the seva indignatio inspired by
a righteous cause, and spend all your spare moments on the currency links.

At last one day I happened to look at one of the works which my friend
had sent me: it was Mr. Robert Barclay’s “Silver and Gold Question,” and it
would have been impossible to begin with a better one. The book opened at
p. 12, where there is a table showing the production of gold and silver in the
world, and the ratio between the two—from the time when France fixed the
ratio at 154 to 1, in 1803, down to 1884. This table is most instructive. It
shows that, as long as bimetallism and free coinage was at work on the Conti-
nent—that is, from 1803 to the disastrous year 1873, when the fear of the action
of Germany and the United States made the Latin Union close their mints to the
free coinage of silver—so long did the ratio remain practically steady at the point
fixed by law. And there was a most remarkable fact which especially impressed
itself upon me—namely, that the period in question, signalised by this wonderful
steadiness of the ratio maintained between gold and silver, was also a_ period
signalised by the most wonderful difference in the relative amount of gold and silver
produced in the world. Thus, in the year 1849 the production of gold was 574
millions, the production of silver was 7°8 millions, and the ratio between the two
was maintained at 15°80; in the year 1852 the production of gold rose roughly
sevenfold—-that is, from 5°4 millions to 36°6—while the production of silver
remained about the same (namely, 8°1), and the ratio between the two remained
at 15°57, thanks to France, who kept her mint open to the free coinage of both,
and weathered the storm.*

* While on the subject of the ratio, it may be remarked that the ratio between gold and silver
during the 1600 years before the birth of Christ varied only from I to 12 to I to 13°33; with the
exception that in the time of Alexander the Great (a gold collector) one ounce of gold was worth
only 134 oz. of silver, and in the time of Czsar (another gold collector) an ounce or gold was
exchanged for only 8°93 ounces of silver; compare the papers laid before the U.S. Senate, by
Senator Jones, May 12th and 13th, 18go.

During the next 1500 years, up to the discovery of America, silver never fell below the ratio of
14°40 to 1 of gold.

From 1497 to 1680 silver never fell below the ratio of 15°14 to 1 of gold.

From 1680 to 1872 the ratio remained steady, the highest variation being 1 to 16°25 in the
year 1813.

From 1873, when the demonetisation of silver began, the ratio has been steadily going up ; and
now that the free coinage of silver has been put a stop to in India, it is impossible to say what
point may not be reached; and much depends on the attitude which the United States may
take up.

N.B.—The stocks of gold and silver in the world (the product of all time) are estimated to be
about equal: the production of the last five hundred years is set down as—Gold, $27,240,000,000,
silver, $27,435,000,000. (Compare the report of the Silver Committee, 1876 ; ‘‘ The Double Standard,”
by H. H. Gibbs ; ‘‘ The Ratio of Value between Gold and Silver as Money,” by J. N. Siderholm.)

VEXED QUESTIONS. 763

After the financial revolution of 1873, and free coinage at the ratio of 154 to 1
had been given up, the table showed that gold appreciated steadily compared
with demonetised silver at an ever-increasing ratio—which is a yery fair indication
that bimetallism had been successful in keeping the ratio steady, the variation in
the production of the two metals having never since been as great as it was during
that period.

Having got so far, and found that bimetallism was no new thing, I finished the
treatise, and got most interested in the question; and during the last nine years
have read many books on the subject, and become a bimetallist, or rather an anti-
contraction-of-the-currency man, and a terror to my friends.

In studying this great question one can either go the long course or the short
course: the long course would include what the acknowledged thinkers have said
on the subject of money, such as Adam Smith, M‘Culloch, Mill, Ricardo, Locke,
Alison, Bastiat, and in more modern times, Jevons, Giffen, Alexander Del Mar (‘The
Science of Money,” ‘“‘A History of the Precious Metals,” “A History of Money,”
and “ Money and Civilisation”), and many others ; or you can go the short course,
which is quite sufficient to get a good grasp of the subject, and read the evidence and
report of the Gold and Silver Commission, the reports of the various International
Monetary Conferences, “’The Silver Question and the Gold Question,” by Robert
Barclay, “ Silver and Gold, the Money of the World” (Prize Essay) by Sir Guilford
Molesworth ; “ Bimetallism and Monometallism,” which shows why Mr. Gladstone’s
Irish land legislation has failed, by Archbishop Walsh ; the writings on the subject of
Professor Foxwell, and many others equally to the point too numerous to mention.

Having now exhausted a considerable proportion of my allotted space, and having
said very little of what I intended to say, I should like to suggest a few thoughts on
some of the most important questions involved, not in my own words, but in the
words of writers on economic subjects of established reputation.

Let us begin with

THE QUANTITATIVE THEORY OF MONEY,

and see what has been said on that subject by recognised authorities.
John S. Mill says :

“That an increase of the quantity of money raises prices, and a diminution lowers
them, is the most elementary proposition in the theory of currency, and without it we
should have no key to any of the others.”

Also in his “ Treatise upon Political Economy ” :

“The value of money, other things being the same, varies inversely as its quantity,
every increase of quantity lowering the value, and every diminution raising it in a ratio
exactly equivalent.”

James Mill also says :

“And again, in whatever degree, therefore the quantity of money is increased or
diminished, other things remaining the same, in that same proportion the value of the
whole, and of every part is reciprocally diminished or increased.”

John Locke (“ Considerations,” published 1690), said :

“Money, while the same quantity of it is passing up and down the kingdom in trade,
is really a standing measure of the falling and rising value of other things in reference
to one another, and the alteration in price is truly in them only. But if you increase or

lessen the quantity of money current in traffic in any place, then the alteration of value
+ ts in the Money.”

764 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

Cernuschi says :

“The purchasing power of money is in direct proportion to the volume of money
existing.”

Ricardo says (in reply to Bosanquet) :

“The value of money in any country is determined by the amount existing. . . . That

commodities would rise or fall in price in proportion to the increase or diminution of money,
I assume as a fact that is incontrovertible.”

These quotations might be largely added to ; but perhaps they are sufficient, and
we can pass on to the next question—

Is THE VOLUME OF MONEY BEING DIMINISHED ?

That the volume of metallic money throughout the world has during the last
twenty years been diminished compared with the extra demand, can hardly be denied ;
and it has been diminished at a time when the increase of trade and population
demanded an expansion and not a contraction of the currency. During this period,
though the production of gold has fallen off from thirty-six millions per annum, at the
time of the Californian gold discoveries, to about twenty-three millions per annum
now, an enormous fresh demand has been created for gold, owing to the action of the
countries which have discarded silver. ‘Thus it is estimated that Germany has taken
eighty millions of gold, Scandinavia seven millions, Italy six-and-a-half, and the
Netherlands six millions—all this being quite an extra demand upon the gold of the
world, owing to the adoption of new currency regulations ; while the United States,
which used in ten years to export gold to the extent of about eight millions, is now an
importer of about seven millions sterling. India is apparently going on to a gold
standard; and if the United States discard silver, we shall have nothing to look
forward to but universal bankruptcy. Mr. Goschen put the new demand for gold
made by Germany, Italy and the United States at £200,000,000. (Bankers’ Institute,
April 18th, 1883.)

As Alexander Hamilton said :

“To annul the use of either of the metals as money is to abridge the quantity of the

circulating medium, and is liable to all the objections which arise from the comparison of
the benefits of a full with the evils of a scanty circulation.”

Before the French Monetary Convention in 1869, M. Wolowski said :

“ The sum total of the precious metals is reckoned at fifty milliards,—one half gold, one
half silver. If by a stroke of the pen they suppress one of these metals in the monetary
service, they double the demand for the other metal, to the ruin of all debtors.”

Adam Smith says :

“Increase the scarcity of gold to a certain degree, and the smallest bit of it may be
more precious than a diamond.”

Oh, but it is said that cheques, banks, bills, clearing-houses, etc., have economised
the use of metallic money to such a degree that these quotations are no longer
applicable. Is this the case ?>—No.

Mr. Giffen (Journal London Statistical Society, March 1879) says :

“The United Kingdom was very fully banked before 1850, the growth of banks and
banking business having since been no more than in proportion to the increasing wealth

of the community.”
%

VEXED QUESTIONS. 765

Mr. J. B. Martin, in a paper read before the London Statistical Society, showed
that the London bankers made exactly the same percentage of their payments in coin
in 1880 as they had made in 1864. Mr. Senator Jones gave other instances as well in
the International Monetary Conference, 1892.

What are the Results of a Decreasing Money Volume and a Fall in Prices ?—
Mr. Giffen (‘‘ Recent Changes in Prices and Incomes Compared,” 1888) says :

“The fall of prices in such a general way as to amount to what is known as a rise in the

purchasing power of gold is generally, I might say universally, admitted. . . . It is obvious
beyond all question that these effects may be important. . . . The weight of all permanent

burdens is increased compared with what would have been the case had there been no
appreciation. . . . The debtors pay more than they would otherwise pay, and the creditors
receive more. . . . Appreciation—or, in other words, an increase—in the value or purchasing
power of the standard coin is a most serious matter for those who have debts to pay.”

And he goes on to say that all the evidence seems to point to a continuance
of the appreciation.

W. H. Crawfurd (Report to Congress, 1820) says :

“All intelligent writers on currency agree that when it is decreasing in amount, poverty
and misery must prevail.”

David Hume : :

“A nation whose money decreases is actually at that time weaker and more miserable
than another nation which possesses no more money, but is on the increasing hand.”

Alison, “ History of Europe” (continuation), vol. i., p. 18, points out in graphic
language that two of the greatest events in the world’s history were both directly
connected with the currency. (1) The fall of the Roman Empire was in reality
brought about by the failure of the gold and silver mines in Greece and Spain.
It was bankrupt, and could not pay its way. (2) The dark ages were put an end
to by the discovery of the New World, which replenished the empty coffers of the
Old by the masses of gold and silver it poured into them, under the effects of
which commerce and industry throve and prospered, enterprise was rewarded, and
an age of great prosperity ensued.

As Hume says (“‘ Essay on Money ”) :

“When money flows into a country everything takes a new face: labour and industry
are given new life; the merchant becomes more enterprising, the manufacturer more
skilful and diligent. . . . But when gold and silver are diminishing, the workman has not
the same employment from the manufacturer and merchant.”

What is required is a stable measure of value, “a fair and permanent record
of obligations over long periods of time,” and in order to be stable it should
increase with the increase of trade and population; and instead of this, while trade
and population are increasing, with gorgeous imbecility we are decreasing the money
volume of the world by slowly demonetising one-half of it. This may be a good
thing for the creditors, who get back the value of a great deal more than they
lent; but it is a swindle to the debtors, and the charge of fixed burdens in
England is put down by Mr. S. Smith, M.P., at from a hundred and fifty to two
hundred millions a year. In the long run, however, creditors will not be benefited,
as the debtors will not be able to pay them, and in times of shrinking values it
is very difficult for them to find profitable investments even if they are paid.

Mr. Samuel Smith, M.P., also says on this subject :

“My own honest belief is that, had we in the last fifteen years [this was said on
December 13th, 1888] been engaged in a gigantic war, and doubled our national debt,

766 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

we should not have had more pressure upon the industries of the country, than has resulted
from the enormous decline in prices brought about by this appreciation in the gold
standard.”

Who are these Borrowers ?—Practically and roughly speaking, the borrowers are
those who are engaged in the great industries of the country, which are carried
on by money borrowed under various forms. The charge for this borrowed money
in a great many instances remains fixed, and the capital has to be repaid. As
money appreciates and prices fall the borrowers find it more and more difficult
to meet these charges; they have to make reductions, and perhaps finally to
give up their business. These reductions are ‘frequently made, not by lowering
wages all round, but by dismissing such hands as are not considered absolutely
necessary. This enforced idleness swells the army of the unemployed, and the work
is less efficiently performed. Wages take some time to come down, partly owing
to the disinclination of the employer to reduce them if he can possibly avoid it,
and partly to the power of the various trades-unions. But come down they must
if prices continue falling, and then will come the rub. High prices or low prices
are not the question; it is falling prices which it is impossible to struggle against
under modern conditions of carrying on trade.

Those Evils have been Foretold—Speaking at Glasgow in 1873, Lord Beaconsfield,
then Mr. Disraeli, used these remarkable words :—

“] attribute the great monetary disturbance that has occurred, and is now to a certain
extent acting injuriously to trade—I attribute it to the great changes which Governments in
Europe are making with reference to their standard of value. This, I know myself, arose
from an opinion extremely prevalent among the statesmen of Europe, and among distinguished
economists and merchants abroad, that the commercial prosperity and preponderance of
England were to be attributed to her go/d standard. . . . It is the greatest delusion in the
world to attribute the commercial preponderance and prosperity of England to our having a
gold standard. Our gold standard is not the cause, but the consequence, of our commercial
prosperity.”

Again, on a motion of Lord Huntley in the House of Lords, he said :—

“r

There is another cause which is perhaps the most important of them all,—gold is every
day appreciating in value ; and as it appreciates in value, the lower become prices. . . . It
is not impossible that, as affairs develop, the country may require that some formal investiga-
tion should be made of the causes which are affecting the price of the precious metals, and
the effect which the change in the value of the precious metals has upon the industry of the
country and upon the continual fall of Arzces.”

Also Mr. Ernest Seyd, before the Latin Union had stopped the free coinage of
silver, and Austria-Hungary, Germany, the United States and other countries had
gone on to a gold standard of value, made this most remarkable and unfortunately
true prophecy :—-

“It is a great mistake to suppose that the adoption of the gold valuation by other states
besides England will be beneficial. It will only lead to the destruction of the monetary
equilibrium hitherto existing, and cause a fall in the value of silver, from which England’s
trade and the Indian silver valuation will suffer more than all other interests, grievous as the
general decline of prosperity all over the world will be.

“The strong doctrinism existing in England as regards the gold valuation is so d/cnd,
that when the time of depression sets in there will be this special feature : the economical
authorities of the country will refuse to listen to the cause here foreshadowed ; every possible
attempt will be made to prove that the decline of commerce is due to all sorts of causes and
irreconcilable matters. The workman and his strikes will be the first convenient target ;
then speculation and overtrading will have their turn. Later on, when foreign nations,

VEXED QUESTIONS. 767
unable to pay in silver, have recourse to protection . .. many other allegations will be
made totally irrelevant to the real issue, but satisfactory to the moralising tendency of
financial writers. The great danger of the time will then be that, among all this confusion
and strife, England’s supremacy in commerce and manufactures may go backwards to an
extent which cannot be redressed when the real cause becomes recognised and the natural
remedy is applied.”

These are quotations which no currency article from the anti-contraction point of
view should be, and very few are, without.

Mr. Alfred de Rothschild at the last Monetary Conference—all honour to him
—also appeared among the prophets in support of silver, and his prophecy was not
long in justifying itself. He said (Report, p. 21) :

“. . . Ifthis Conference were to break up without arriving at any definite result, there
would be a depreciation in the value of that commodity (silver), which it would be frightful
to contemplate, and out of which a monetary panic would ensue, the far-spreading effects of
which it would be impossible to foretell.”

We have sown the wind, and we shall soon reap the whirlwind.
Mr. Bertram Currie boasted at the Conference that the Bank of England would
always meet its obligations in gold ; but How does the Bank of England stand?

Although it undertakes to pay in gold, it compares badly with the other great
banks, as the following table shows :—

Go.p. SILVER. TorTAaL.

1. Bank of France. ; . 66,000,000 5 1,000,000 117,000,000
2. Russian State Bank . 96,000,000 (?) 96,000,000
3. United States Treasury . 48,000,000 91,000,000 ) ah

. “oer 7 I 5 5,000,000

New York National Bank . 15,000,000 1,000,000 }
4. Bank of Germany . d . 37,000,000 12,000,000 49,000,000
5. Bank of England . ‘ . 26,000,000 26,000,000

The idea that the Bank can meet emergencies in gold seems rather mythical. At
a recent crisis she had to go, hat in hand, to the despised bimetallic Bank of France,
to get a sum of £3,000,000 ; and if the Bank of France had not been complaisant
she would have found herself in great straits. Supposing an organised attack were
made by enemies upon the Bank of England, how could she protect herself under
the present system of small reserves and promises to meet obligations in gold?
Again compare

THE BANK RaTES OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE,

AVERAGE RATE OF 7 AVERAGE RATE OF
No. oF , | No. or - ;
eeiaaie Ten YEARS tera SEVEN YEARS
CHANGES. (1875—1884). | CHANGES. (1865—1871).
Bank of England . 66 £3 38. 11d. 59 £3 8s. 4d.
Bank of France. 13 cS as. ta. 6 £3 os. Gd.

The bimetallic Bank of France is becoming more and more the centre of the
financial world,—the position once held without dispute by the Bank of England—
and her banking system has enabled her to survive catastrophes, such as the
revolutions of 1830, 1848, 1852, the war and war indemnity of 1870, and the Panama
fiasco. (Cp. “ Gold and Silver Money,” by John M. Douglas, p.. 2.)

A word more, and I have done. There are many fallacies hugged by
monometallists, or rather those who say “I don’t know anything about it, you
know, but I’m a monometallist,” which I should like to allude to, but space will
not admit. There are two, however, to which I may, perhaps, for one moment, refer.
The first is the general belief that the United States of America have masses of silver
with which they want to flood the European markets. ‘This I believe to be an entire

768 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.

misconception. The silver in the United States Treasury is performing the function
of serving as money by circulating in the form of notes, and these notes are not more
than is required by the enormous country they circulate in, as is shown by the
careful tables compiled by Senator Jones, who shows that silver has rather appreciated
than otherwise. The second is that silver can be produced to almost an unlimited
amount. This I believe to be also a misconception. The great silver mines of the
world have been the Potosi, the Comstock, and the Broken Hill. ‘The first two are
played out,—in fact, of late years the Comstock has been producing 60 per cent. of
gold to 40 per cent. of silver, and America has now been so thoroughly ransacked for
generations, that it is more than improbable that another Comstock should make its
appearance. The scientific and expert opinion given at the Brussels Conference pointed
to the fact that the production of silver, both in the States and in Mexico, had reached
its maximum, and would in the future fall off: as, indeed, Prof. Suess (‘“ Future of
Gold”), of the University of Vienna, states will also be the case with gold, as nine-
tenths of the stock of gold existing in the world has been obtained from “ placers,”
which are becoming very rare, and the production of gold must be less and less.
“Tt is certain,” he says, “ that gold alone will never become the money of the world,
in which the needs of industry will be met.” (Brussels Conference Report, p. 139.)

Hence there is not much fear that, keeping in view the increase of trade and
population, more silver will be produced than is required in the world. It should
also be borne in mind that silver, notwithstanding that it had some scurvy tricks
played upon it, besides being produced of late in greater abundance, has still
maintained its value when compared with the mass of commodities. Both
Dr. Soetbeer and Mr. Sauerbeck, who have compiled the most careful tables on
the subject, make out that silver, instead of depreciating, has slightly appreciated.
It is only when it is compared to gold, which has appreciated steadily for the last
twenty years, that silver appears to have depreciated.

A restoration of silver to perform the functions which it has performed from time
immemorial, and which cannot possibly be performed by gold alone, will not prove
a cure for every evil: it will not make the seasons more propitious for agriculture ;
it will not stop rash and ill-considered commercial enterprises; it will not put an
end to the speculative craze existing in human nature; it will not make the idle
industrious, or spendthrifts thrifty; but it will put an end to a monstrous system
under which the borrower has to pay an unearned increment, increasing every year,
to the creditor ; to a system which makes trade and commerce less and less profitable
every year, while it strangles enterprise ; to a system which spreads discontent, swells
the ranks of the unemployed, and leads the way to bankruptcy and despair. The
theme is an important one; if regard is had to its wide-reaching effects, it is ‘he
most immediately urgent one for the consideration of mankind. Little can be done
in the space of one short article ; the most that can be hoped is that some expression
of fact, or quotation, may incite the reader to search for himself, and find out if these
things are so.

W. H. GRENFELL.

PALL MALL MAGAZINE DRAWING COMPETITION.
No. 3.

“The Principal Incident of the Summer Holidays,”
AS ANTICIPATED BY

(a) PATERFAMILIAS. (4) MATERFAMILIAS. (c) EpirH (aged nineteen).
(2) Dick (aged fourteen).

OMPETITION No. 3 seems to have appealed to the imagination of our
§ readers, as we have received a very much larger number of drawings from

competitors this month than for the previous competition. Large, however,
as is the number of competitors, we have been unable to award the prize for
any one set of drawings. We do not prohibit artists from competing who contribute
to the pages of this Magazine, but we feel that it would be unfair to the number
of Amateur Artists who compete, and for whose encouragement this competition
was established, to allow them to carry off the prizes. It is for this reason that,
although Miss Vera Christie’s se¢ of drawings is perhaps superior to the others,

we have decided to give prizes to the following competitors :—

H. STRATTON, 51, Nevern Square, 8.W., £5.
W. J. URQUHART, 3, West Street, Southfields, Leicester, £2 10s.
MISS VERA CHRISTIE, Bryanston Square, W., £5.

We give our readers facsimile reproductions of the various drawings, and cheques

for the amount of the prizes have been forwarded to the Competitors.

Ep. PP. M. mM.

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