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tious waste; even great retinues of lackeys and splendid equipages are not quite orthodox. Everything in the recent circumstances of America's life tends to make of the woman, her social activities, her ways of going on, the single relief element for the strenuous life of the pioneer turned "hustler."

Of course, nothing is really so simple as this sounds. There are other factors affecting directly the sex relation. Some cause, possibly climatic, has certainly reduced the intensity of sex emotion. This is, of course, a suggestion incapable of proof. But few who have studied closely the conventional bearing of American men and women towards one another will doubt it. The very freedom of association between young men and women attests it, possibly induces or assists it. It would perhaps, be too much to say that sex emotion has faded into sentimental interest; but the change is something of this nature. The conventional simper of admiration in the man, the free glance and firm tone of confident selfpossession in the woman, attest it. Much vivacity of feeling on the surface, coldness below. Read that most polished example of the American society novel, "The House of Mirth." What do you find?

The whole run of circum

stances in the plot is that of a romance of passion; the author evidently thinks she is telling such a tale. But no spark of passion is kindled, though the combustibles are heaped up with almost reckless extravagance of art. Nor is this a solitary witness. So far as fiction holds the mirror to American nature, it exhibits a quite significant paucity of sex emotion in its more spontaneous and mastering flow. If this is well founded, it goes some way to explain not only the facile relation of the sexes, even in the most conventionalized American society, but the skill of the women in the arts and crafts of social intercourse. For strong sex emotion

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That she owes anything to her intellectual superiority over the male of her kind cannot be conceded. For no such superiority exists. She reads more and talks more, because that belongs to her decorative function. The thought of America owes little to her. Though she has long enjoyed ampler opportunities of education than the other sex, her contribution towards serious literature, art, or science is small, almost negligible. Almost all the best brainwork in America, even in the fields where women are most occupied, is done by men. Nor are women the best talkers, though the business man's wife gleans from her books and women's clubs a larger assortment of ideas, which she handles with more skill and freedom than is common in an English drawing-room. This sprightly talk seldom rises above the patter of the social stage, and the custom which always "gives the word" to the woman usually acts as a preventive of real conversation. Most inquiring English visitors are sadly familiar with the experience of companies where some man of intellect and judgment worth listening to is kept in silence by the chatter of his commonplace wife and daughter, who deem it their rôle to entertain the guest. Woman in a word is the "show" in successful America, somewhat overdone and too exacting to the eyes of a European audience, but clever and very creditable to the management.

It is probable that the real net influence of woman in America may be greater than elsewhere, but that is not the influence of the American woman

of the wealthy classes. The strength of American womanhood lies in the better habits of comradeship and domestic equality among the great hardworking settled masses of American The Nation.

citizens in the farms and villages and smaller cities, where the steady pressure and the sober earnestness of daily life do not lend themselves to feminine excesses.

THE ROUMANIAN "JACQUERIE."

This Roumanian jacquerie is for many reasons a most serious affair. In the first place, it is an explosion based upon grievances which are felt, not only by the six million peasants of Roumania, but by the twelve million or SO peasants of Eastern Austria, and the eighty million peasants who, in a rough way, cultivate and maintain the Russian Empire. That the movement has commenced first of all in Roumania is due to a change in estate management; but the substance of the peasants' grievance exists, though not in so acute a form, throughout Eastern Europe. The Boyars, or great landlords, of Moldavia and Wallachia, the two great Turkish provinces from which the little kingdom was formed, constitute a class by themselves. Their moral has been destroyed by their long subjection to Turkish tyranny and now that they are free they are the most luxurious, most dissolute, and most extravagant of all European nobles. They are all in debt. They are compelled to wring the last farthing out of their tenants, and they have recently discovered a new and most successful method of exaction. Being, like most men of their kind in Southern Europe, very lazy. they dwell in the towns, and farm their estates to bailiffs for a fixed quit-rent. leaving them to obtain from the peasantry the utmost they can squeeze. The majority of these bailiffs are clever Jews, who, armed with the whole powers of the landlords, and backed by the officials whom they "conciliate," de

mand double, and in some cases triple, the accustomed rents, which were already heavy; and this takes from the people who, it must be remembered, have no alternative mode of living-the whole produce of their toil beyond the barest and roughest means of subsistence, means so attenuated that they are compelled to live in rotten huts and to starve not only themselves but their wives and children. It is probable that the bailiffs, belonging as they do for the most part to an oppressed and detested class, use their new position without mercy, and, like the intendants of the great French estates before the Revolution, insult and worry the peasants with a certain sense of gratification. The new system has been borne through a few fertile years, but the land has been overcropped, and now that a lean year or two have arrived the peasants-who, it must not be forgotten, have all passed through the military mill-have risen in insurrection. They know nothing of passive resistance, they are boiling with a hate which has risen to bloodthirstiness, and, like all peoples who have been trodden into savagery, they have in them, like the French before the Revolution, an element of Eastern cruelty. They plunder and burn out the bailiffs, and slaughter the landlords, sometimes with circumstances of abhorrent cruelty. There are stories, for instance, which are believed, at least in isolated cases, to be true, of their plunging their victims into boiling petroleum. The Gov

ernment, of course, does its best to maintain order; but the Army with the colors, though excellently disciplined, is not large, and its Generals find it difficult at once to defend the small towns and protect the scattered estates, and are compelled, therefore, to call out the Reserves. The Reservists are almost all peasants, they sympathize with the sufferings of the insurgents, like them they hate the Jews, who monopolize every kind of productive industry except agriculture, and before restoring order they murder the Jews and pillage the estates. The insurrection creeps on from district to district, till throughout Moldavia and Wallachia there is a roaring jacquerie such as, except in Galicia in 1848, has not been seen in any section of Europe for a hundred years. The King, who is a really able man, is prostrated with sickness. The Government, which is Conservative-that is, nominated by the great landlords-has thrown up the sponge; and its successor, which is taken from the Liberal Opposition, must, if it is to avoid interference from its great neighbors, Austria and Russia, restore order swiftly, and can only do it, after it has tried palliatives, by proposals which, however their meaning may be hidden in legal phrases, must involve large measures of confiscation. One of them, it is reported, will authorize the State, . whenever a quarrel between the landlord and his tenantry becomes visible. to take the control of the property into his own hands. The owners of the soil, in fact, are to be treated en masse as it was proposed in Ireland to treat Lord Clanricarde. External order will of course be restored, but it needs no economist to prove that the very basis of society will be upset throughout Roumania, which has for years been considered in Western Europe the best governed of the Balkan States. The loss will not fall upon the landlords exclusively, but upon all who have lent

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them money, upon the banks which have cashed their creditors' bills, and upon the little towns which have been plundered or have found their petty commerce brought to a standstill by the disorders.

A jacquerie like this, whatever its termination, has a lesson in it for all Europe. It has been assumed by all statesmen and almost all observers that in the great collision between Labor and Capital which is now shaking European society the steadying influence is the stolidity of the peasants, who have always been ready to furnish soldiers, and who are supposed to have an instinctive regard for the security of property. That idea is substantially sound so long as the peasants own their little farms; but as we have seen for generations in Ireland, and as all Asiatic statesmen have recognized for ages, when the cultivators rent the soil in patches, and are liable to increasing or indefinite demands, the doctrine ceases to be true. The peasants then suffer like artisans, and being armed with the instruments of agriculture, or, in Europe, having passed through the military mill, they insurrect with more readiness and much greater effect than their rivals, the workmen of the towns. They are, too, much fiercer, more ignorant, and from their position as scattered communities are able to make a better fight of it with the soldiers, who, again, are for the most part drawn from their own ranks. This is the grand danger throughout Eastern Europe, and it is very doubtful indeed whether it can be removed without a transfer of property so great and so violent that it would make all property insecure, and would incidentally extirpate or cripple the only class which, having the leisure and inclination to cultivate itself, has begun at all events to be civilized. That class is not numerous enough to defend itself with its own hands, it cannot depend perma

nently on the soldiers, and it has, therefore, before it only two alternatives. One is to fly as the French nobles didand it is this which is being generally adopted-and the other is to submit to low permanent quit-rents imposed from above, and accepted by the losers with the sense of insufferable injustice. If King Charles, who is thoroughly aware of the dangers of the situation, and who bitterly reproaches the statesmen who have just resigned for their want of prevision and energy, can suggest a compromise other than this, he will The Spectator.

show himself the first statesman, as be has long since been accepted as the first soldier, in Eastern Europe. In Russia, in Austria, in parts of Italy, and in most of the Balkan States the Roumanian jacquerie, whether successful or defeated, will immensely increase the excitability of the peasantry and the perplexities of statesmen, already overloaded by problems which as yet no man of genius has arisen with sufficient mental power and sufficient daring to attempt to solve.

VACATION CHRISTIANITY.*

We have felt from time to time a not inconsiderable respect for Mr. Campbell. We have known him on several occasions to refuse either to toe a political line or to kiss the foot of some sectarian pope. We have heard of his telling the impeccable working men of London what he thinks of them, and of his arranging to repeat the information in their presence. All this argues pluck, but it is all compatible with an absolute want of humor and of a sense of the fitness of things. Let us admit for a moment that the times require a new message; Mr. Campbell is a young man to have acquired the certainty that he has the particular new message that the times require. He will answer that, if he waits till he gets old, the new message will probably have become once more the old one:

But at the last, why, I seemed left alive Like а sea-jelly weak on Patmos strand,

To tell dry sea-beach gazers how I fared

"The New Theology!" By R. J. Campbell, M.A., Minister of the City Temple. London: Chapman and Hall. 6s.

When there was mid-sea, and the mighty things;

Left to repeat, "I saw, I heard, I knew,"

And go all over the old ground again.

But such an answer does not excuse the two faults which must always be associated with Mr. Campbell's pronouncement upon the so-called New Theology, which he must by this time be rather tired of hearing described as not "theological," and still less "new."

First, it is absurd to ask us to give serious consideration to a book which in its introduction purports to deal with its subject "in some comprehensive and systematic way," and in its concluding chapter is described as "the task which has occupied the greater part of my winter resting-time." Any one who walks along Holborn Viaduct in Febru ary knows the duration of Mr. Campbell's resting-time; it stares you in the face and makes you see in a moment the absurdity of an effort at recasting Christianity in the course of three weeks. We could imagine that at the end of years of steady reading and dili

gent gymnastic a theologian might be in good blood to write currente calamo a statement of what has been slowly and laboriously revealed to him:

Oh, such a life as he resolved to live, When he had learned it,

When he had gathered all books had to give!

Sooner, he spurned it.

But here is a man who puts pen to paper during a holiday at St. Ives; writes, as he says, "before a window overlooking the heaving waste of waters on a rock-bound Cornish coast," and, though he has but three weeks in which to re-state his faith, can stay to notice that "it is a stormy day." What is the result? A slipshod, slangy, often quite grotesque explanation of what we have no doubt are the sincerely entertained ideas of his heart and his mind. By consequence he allows himself to describe the God of "ordinary churchgoing Christians" as One who is "greatly bothered and thwarted" by human depravity and who "takes the whole thing very seriously." Also he patronizes the author of the fourth Gospel as an “exceedingly able writer." The Outlook.

Secondly, Mr. Campbell makes the hopeless mistake of expounding his creed as if his own personality had any importance in connection with it. We have no patience with those who attack him on the ground of his unfaithfulness to the trust deed of the City Temple, unless they are at the same time members of that congregation, but equally we have no patience with Mr. Campbell's insistence on the fact that "chapter and verse" for all that he here avows "can be produced from my published sermons." That is a purely domestic matter, like his reference to "the controversial methods of the editor of the British Weekly." The public have no concern with either. When we have a more laborious, a more conscientious exposition of what Mr. Campbell would have his generation believe, we shall consider it with the respect that is its due. Meantime we can only express our regret that a sympathetic preacher of many gifts and graces should have essayed so lightly a task which years of toil may yet enable him to perform with credit.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

"The Warden" and "Framley Parsonage" follow "Barchester Towers" in the new group of books in Everyman's Library; and although "Doctor Thorne" should come between them in the regular order, it is probably safe to assume that both that and the remaining two volumes of the Barsetshire Series will be added so that the reader may have the most charming group of Trollope's stories complete in this edition.

It is sixty years or more since George Dennis completed the studies and observations which found fruit in his

work on "The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria"; and the mystery of the origin, the language, the religion and the institutions of the Etruscans remains nearly or quite as complete as when he wrote, in spite of researches and discoveries in the interval. Mr. Dennis's work is now reprinted in Everyman's Library, in two volumes, with a map and plans and a hundred or more illustrations.

Among the works of solid and enduring value included in the latest volumes of Everyman's Library are Samuel Coleridge's essays, notes and lect

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