The three monthlies which we are in the habit of reviewing in these columns contain in their September numbers comparatively little of special interest, or calling for discussion, Mr. Froude's powerful and luminous article on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century sums up the long catalogue of English failures to acclimatise English ideas of order and government in that country. Excessive severity and careless leniency have alike been tried. Official acts performed in accordance with the policy prevailing at the moment have boon weakly disavowed, and brutal outrages, committed in revenge for duly authorised repressive measures, have been allowed to pass unpunished. Wherever the fault lies, the series of experiments tried in Ireland has had for its outcome the moral and material ruin of the whole people, One might almost seriously say that the climate is at the bottom of it all, for original Celts, Celts crossed with a Norman strain, and the descendants of settlers of English or Scotch birth have all alike proved hopelessly turbulent and impracticable. Mr. Froude pretends to have discovered an infallible remedy. As he is one of the blood and iron school of politicians, he naturally reverts with satisfaction to the brief period during which Cromwell alone of all past and present rulers "seriously tried to govern" Ireland, Although "England has never been intentionally cruel, her alternations of weak indulgence and spasmodic violence have been worse than cruelty. She dreads the public shame of having again to put Ireland down," but " the one indispensable requirement is authority armed with power to make the law obeyed. A Government which would make the law respected, which would ha.g murderers caught in the act, would insist on hanging them, and if juries would not convict, would call on Parliament to suspend trial by jury, and pass an Act for trying of criminals by a commission of judges, would drive the devils out of the country." Perhapsso. Drum-head courts-martial and an unlimited supply of hemp may succeed in the future. The misfortune is that they have been tried in the past without producing results of permanent or appreciable advantage.—A very interesting article is devoted to the history of the successful efforts made in France within late years to put an end to the conflict between capital and labour by making workmen sharers in the business adventures of their employers, The system was inaugurated forty years ago by Leclaire, a Parisian house-decorator, and it has since been developed largely by the establishment of a mutual aid society, and its efficiency and beneficence proved by the rapidly growing fortunes of the hi and the pecuniary and social position enjoyed by the employés.—Mr. Ruskin is never so wildly rhapsodical or #0 amusingly self-appreciative as to smother his rare genius and keen humour, His study of Byron is a masterpiece taken in its entirety, while his analysis of the elements of nobility in prose and verse bears the true note of discernment. Very roll is his description of the culminating point of Wordsworth's intellect in the discovery that "heaven rhymed to seven, and Foy to boy," and very telling his scornful indication of the present age as one wherein no salvation either of queen or realm is any more possible to God unless under the direction of the Royal Society, —Racing men will be interested in a discussion of the claims of horses of Arab blood toan honourable place on the turf, Arabian horses have long fallen into disrepute in England, chiefly, as Mr. Scawen Blunt believes, on account of the withdrawal from the Mediterranean horse marts of the breed preserved by the Anazeh tribe, and not at all to any real deterioration in that breed, from two of which, Ras-el-Fedawi (imported about 1710) and Godolphin, every horse now running on the turf deduces his origin, To sportsmen we recommend Lord Dunraven's Colorado Sketch, in which the writer's delightful knack of describing scenery, and his power of vividly reproducing the chances, hopes, disappointments and triumphs of sport in unexplored regions are both successfully brought into play.—Heidenhain's lately published book on animal magnetism furnishes Mr, Romanes with the subject for a singularly bald account of the phenomena of hypnotism, fo those who are curious about these strange vagaries, which, by the way, wore much more fully investigated by Braid nearly forty years ago than recently by the Breslau professor, we would recommend Carpenter's Mental Physiology and a little book by the same writer entitled Mesmerism, Spiritualism, de, Braid's book, The Power of the Mind over the Body has long been out of print.
The Duke of Argyll's article on The Unity of Nature in the Contemporary will, we think, commend itself to every serious student of the phenomenal universe, The writer starts from an axiom of unquestionable truth by defining knowledge as the perception of relations. When once we get fully to understand that reasonings about things in themselves are necessarily futile, and that to know a thing means only to know it in its relations to other things, we may hope to make some real progress. Until then we cannot, For an indefinite number of ontological theories may be framed, all mutually destructive, but each explaining as well as any other the actual objects of perception. Thus, as Liobnitz pointed out, were the whole universe to shrink suddenly or gradually to the size of a nat, we should be unconscious of the event provided only that everything, ourselves included, shrank in precisely the same ratio,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.