Tae Spectator's political articles are upon subjects which were temporarily interesting to people at home, but are not very brilliant reading for us out here. Therefore me may pass them by and proceed to the per on "Invisibility." The writer opens saying "we should like to know precisely what people mean when they talk about invisibility?" Journalists and reporters were then saying that the Whitechapel murderer disappeared as if he had the gift of invisibility, or that he comes and goes as if he had eaten temseed and were able to be invisible at will and so on in the penny-sensational style. The Spectator doubts if they know what they mean, and guesses, that impalpable rather than visible is that which they intend. The word "invisible" implies that the man continues to be, yet is not; but the greater part of mankind "use the word as meaning that which is but cannot be seen by the eyes. This is the sense of the description of the disciples whose "eyes were holden." The writer then says We all know that in certain moods and under certain circumstances, we can see without seeing; and this occasional addition. that, although the sence of becoming percipient, we are yet aware that we have seen in some more exclusively material method. 'The phenomenon must happen constantly in a very' extreme way in the case of some somnambiulists, the eyes being wide and the retina therefore receiving everything, yet there being, properly speaking, no night. "The second operator, whose ald is indispensable, is temporarily locked up. All things are seen, and yet they are in the truest sense "invisible." The phenomena of somnambulism have been produced, in certain conditions supposed to be "hysterical," by one will acting on another, and there is, therefore, no difficulty in believing that a stronger will, a higher intelligence—higher, demean, in the scale of power—could suspend, perception in a whole crowd.
In an escape like that of the Whitechapel miscreant, even if he passed—as he may have done—straight through a considerable crowd, there is nothing extraordinary or in the least transcending the regular circumstances of every-day life. It seems to us remarkable because we know what he is; but no one in the crowd could know. No one in it probably even saw him. We do not really see one-tenth of the people we pass in the sttest even tion ne to true seeing is not performed.
look at them, because the second opera: The intelligence is uninterested, and remains passive, and there is no sight. If nothin, falled attention. to him, the Whitechapel murderer would in a crowd ora well-frequented street be 4s invisible as if he possessed the Creamed. Those who met him would see him rogative of which the story-tellers have as little as if they were sleep-walking. To secure that immunity from the operation of intelligence, however, the man must have given no provocation to the intelligence to Nake ap,—that is, he must either have presented no aguishing him from the rowdy or he must have. presented. some one peculiarity which prevented thought, when afterwards excited, from fixing upon him in connection with a crime.
Following this We have one on the "Praise of Insensibility" founded on a story of Maori indifference to pain or insensibility to it which was given by a correspond. ent in the previous week's number. This Maori, Finding that he could not adapt his boots to his fact, straightway adapted his feet to his boots by cutting of a of the big toe of each foot, stand wound with the coarse flax of the country, and keeping the boots on for three or four days till the wounds had quite healed, takes one back to the Spartan traditions of indifference to pum. Perhaps the S Loy who, rather than betray his theft of the fox, let without betraying the pain it gave him, did the fox eat away a sensible portion of his side not, after all, suffer very much more than the Maori felt no scruple: in-inflicting on himself rather than sterile the pleasure of displaying his fine pair of hots. "There both ure. have been races which do not suffer any this like what the same physical operations we inflict upon most of us, and whose members are all the more at liberty to go where they Ker the insensibility of their nerves. Yet we lease and do what they will with their bodies,
usually regard insensibility as a sort of discredit, classing it with blindness, deafness, dullness of touch, and all the various incapacities which, however, can hardly be got rid of without admitting' a whole host of other incapacities to do what we please.
The Saturday defends Lord Lytton's address to the students of Glasgow University which some radical newspapers had severely criticised. His Lordship eaid that private and political morality were differs ent, and should not be judged on the sane grounds. This appeared very alarming to such journals as the Pall fall and the uncompromising Gladstonian papers, but the Saturday takes, as might be expected, a sensible man of the world view the subject without prejudice one ts or the To any one, onthe contrary, who approaches other, Lord Lytton will be found Yo have talked very much good sense on a subject which is practically not much less important to nations than the science of personal preser vation is to individuals. Some individuals are slow to learn even this science in its perfection; but the merciful arrangenients of a universe, wherein it is ordained that, if yon put your finger in a candle, the impropriety Bf that proceeding is ut once perceived, and not soon forgotten, enforce a certain knowledge of it on all. it is not so easy for nations to learn the ways that belong to their physical peace; and, as if it were the eusiest thing in the world, there have riven up at divers times, but never so much as lately, persons complicate the difficulty by false teachings of a peculiarly dangerous' kinl. With two of these teachings, or groups of teaching,—the Identity-of-Morality theory and the Arbitration theory—Lord Lytton dealt at such length as he could afford, though of course not exhaustively. Indeed, he could, no doubt, have expanded the first and most tant part of his remarks into a considerable treatise. No more pestilent and abominable heresy has ever been started in politics than that abuse of the moral point of view at which Lord Lytton glanced; though, very properly in a presidential address, he did not snake much personal application of it. That there is no such thing as International Morality would be, as he showed, an absurd as well as itself an immoral preposition. But the proposition that the laws which govern public and private morals are universally the same is quite as absurd—and we fear it iis' be said, when the motives of the persons who usually advance it are considered, infinitely more immoral. For it is never advanced by them except for purposes of private conve-niece. Probably no transaction of our time has been better justified by the true view of Public Morals and more thorough wicked from the point "of view which asserts that public and private morals an the last Boer war. And that war, it is hardly necessary to say, was deliberately undertaken and, until it became materially" inconvenient, ruthlessly carried on by Mr. Gladstone, the t upholder, when it suits him, of the Identity theory. On the other hand, no proceeding could. be more utterly immoral in the eyes of Public Morality, and few more westiouable in the eyes oven of private morality. than the Transvaal Convention. And yet this was accom plished by the same person. Of the criterion
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.