No one will, we imagine, be careful to answer Mr. Grant Allen, who in a startling paper (Contemporary Review for October) propounds the query, Why Keep India? The possession of this vast continent is costly alike in blood and treasure; it alone gives England an interest in the Eastern Question, and thus plunges her into digiculties with European Powers; it probably weakens her military strength by preventing conceuttration of her armies and fleets which ought' to be always in a position to protect her from invasion, and her commerce from interference. Its loss need not exclude English cottons from India, and anyhow India seems likely within a few decades to be exclusively an exporter of manufactured cotton goods; it would lighten national expenditure, for India has never paid her way; it would close the existing school "of militarism, of predatory tastes and aggressive instincts, and of organised brutality." To the question what would be the fate of the Indian peoples loft to the mercy of rival adventurers, a chaos of bandits, free-lances and petty princes, all hateful and hating one another, "the answer is simply this—the problem is not one of practical politics all." And thus after leading his readers a dance through catalogues of what are very real and practical benefits and evils, Mr, Grant Allen informs us that he was indulging in a mere dialectical exercise like that awful weekly discussion about Haunibal whether he should march on the city from Cann or retire with his dripping batallions, which used to drive the hearers mad in Juyenal's day. But supposing the question were asked in earnest, the suggested solution is certainly not one to be arrived at without consideration of a vast number of subsidiary questions which are not 6o much as glanced at, Such, for instance, as the moral effect on England and on her neighbours of any voluntary abandonment of acquired territory. We should have men and ships set, free, it is true, to guard our narrow insular boundaries and our coast, but would the spirit of the people remain the same, or its prestige, wherein lies half or more than half of any nation's physical strength as against hor rivals? Commerce would assuredly soon follow abandoned territory into other hands. If, some hundreds of years hence, there should exist a consolidated, self-supporting and self-governing Indian Empire holding to the English Crown by some such tie as binds the Colonies, the question may at that remote period enter into the region of practical politics. But until then such schoolboy exercises as Mr. Allen's may be qualified as merely useless only when they do not prove distinctly mischievous.—The Rey. Henry Lansdell, who appears to be connected with some English missionary society, contribute san interesting aceunt of a journey made last summer through Siberia, He was struck by the excellence of the means of transit along the route which he followed, but it is only a narrow strip of land on either side of the principal land and water highways which is inhabited by Russians or brought under cultivation. No less than thirty native tribes or nations occupy Asiatic Russia, and the most of these are hunters, The land is marveliously fertile, and the annal rent per acre over a belt some 600 miles wide to the north of the Obi is 34d. Abundant cereal crops are raised "by scratching the surface," a fact of vast importance when taken in connexion with the recently proved possibility of reaching the Obi by sea in about three weeks, Mr. Lansdell found that the generally received accounts of systematic barbarity practised on the Siberian exiles are grossly exaggerated. The convicts are well fed and clothed, and no very strict account is kept of the amount of work they do. They are allowed nine hours' sleep out of the twenty-four in summer, and twelve in winter, and are permitted many indulgences, such as the receipt of money and correspondence from friends. The account given of various aboriginal tribes dwelling in the Amoor territory is full of interest, and the description of Nikolaefsk and Wladivostock will well repay perusal as more modern than anything elsewhere accessible in print.—The great question of the day is treated under two aspects by Sir Edward Fry and Mr. John Rae respectively. The former, under the title of Theology and Materialism, enumerates the evidences of design in nature offered by the molecular constitution of matter so far as it is known or surmised.
No theory however beautiful, simple or elaborate does more than ce-ordinate phenomena; " whatever has been put into atoms by way of definition can be got out of them by the way of effect, but nothing more. The facts of physics and chemistry admit of being stated in terms of molecules and atoms, and molecules and atoms so defined are of course adequate as causes of the effects from which the causes were, in fact, deduced." But life, consciousness and. emotion cannot be accounted for by any of the physical phenomena presented by the matter of which animal bodies are composed. There is therefore a residuum which is at any expositor's service, but which, if explicable at all, must be explained by the existence of something extra-material.—Mr. Rae discusses Recent Speculations on Primitive Religion in a spirit purely critical, going over the ground already laboured by Spencer, Max Miillerand many others, pointing out at what points all the theories hitherto advanced fail to account for the observed phenomena, and justly concluding that nothing has as yet been est lished beyond the fact of the universality among mankind of some vague notion of an invisible power external to individual—The Contemporary closes with a definitive history of the persecution of Galilee by the Roman Inquisition, from the pen of Professor Reusch, who has examined the original documents and has thus been enabled to upset the legend of torture as well as to bring Galileo's vacillating and occasionally tricky conduct into light. The writer is bitterly anti-Roman in his sympa-thios. His paper, by the way; is defaced by the most ridiculous misprints in the Latin quotations.
On opening the Wineteenth Century one naturally turns first to the translation of Liu's diary, kept during his joint mission to England with Kuo in 1876. The Minister starts with the conviction that the great emperors and statesmen of China were by no means inferior in ability or wisdom to the men of the West, and as they did not introduce railways or countenance mining there is nothing to be said in favour of either. The English are ignorant of everything except the road to wealth, and along this they are rushing headlong to ruin, while China in placid wisdom regards them with a pitying eye. The Japanese are contemptible on account of their ready acceptance of foreign ideas; yet for all that there is something, however uninaportant, in European civilisation, for on the whole a London street is somewhat wider, somewhat cleaner and better paved and somewhat better lighted at night than a street in Peking, But this isa small matter. China is in possession of that wisdom of the prudent which is to understand his way, and she has not yet learned that in much of wisdom such as she has got is much grief—Again tums up the inevitable discussion of religious matters. Mr, Frederick Harrison subjects to ruthless criticism the foundations of existing creeds, condemning all as supernatural and hypothetical, and claiming that human religion must rest on human morality and rational philosophy and science. This will be so. no doubt when the human family reaches that ultimate stage of perfection towards which (according to Mr. Herbert Spencer) it is hastening. The worst of it is that about that time the world will (also according to Mr. Herbert Spencer) have become uninhabitable. Meanwhile, something in the shape of a religion based on emotion is absolutely indispensable, for if it be not supplied, people will supply themselves with.it,—Following out a line of thought precisely similar to that pursued by Mr. Justice Fry, the Bishop of Carlisle in a friendly criticism of Professor Huxley's Crayfish, insists that all philosophical investigations, when pushed to the limits of our powers, transcend the material universe and carry the minds into regions in which physical science does not find itself.—An excellent article on Alexander Dumas pire must not be left unread, @utyorts.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.