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cultivation of the coffee berry-and tepid souls and well-fed bodies. The

the natives-and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population." Mr. Jarndyce, on requesting Esther Summerson to inform him what she and Ada Clare thought of Mrs. Jellyby, received a reply which may interest those who are wondering what became of husband and children during the time the Suffragette was engaged at Westminster "fighting" for her vote. The following is the reply Mr. Jarndyce received to his question: "We thought that perhaps it is right to begin with the obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted for them."

The "sorrowful splendid past" of the civil war has few names of young men on its death-list more worthy of eulogy than Charles Russell Lowell's, and his "Life and Letters" of which Mr. Edward W. Emerson has made a volume, must, even now, forty years after his death, be counted among the memorable books of the season. In his great kinsman's poetry his figure is forever enshrined as it seemed in its last great moment of sacrifice, but the story of the ways which brought him to that noble end has not attained the immortality of a book until now. Mr. Emerson guards himself against undue enthusiasm with caution almost unique among American biographers, and hardly equalled by any one except Mr. Charles Francis Adams, but perhaps wise in these days when new men have arisen who knew not Joseph. and find it brilliantly clever to disparage the deeds of arms that would never have tempted them to part their

letters of General Lowell himself are supplemented by many others written to him or about him by his friends, the fine flower of the State in their day, but his own show a wonderfully tine character, and give the reader a possession forever, a vision of young knighthood. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Under the apt and alluring title of ""Nature's Craftsmen" Dr. Henry C. McCook groups in one delightful volume the fruits of long study of those tiny creatures of the insect world, -ants, bees, wasps, spiders, etc. whose busy lives and diverting traits escape the ordinary observation and are known to comparatively few even of Nature lovers and students. The book is scientific, in the sense of being an accurate record of close and affectionate study; and it is popular, in the sense of being written in a style so pleasing and so free from technical detail as to be easily understood by the unscientific reader. If it is true that the undevout astronomer is mad, it is scarcely less true of the entomologist: for from the almost infinitely little as well as from the infinitely great lessons on the Divine wisdom and beneficence are to be drawn. Dr. McCook's work is not less valuable because he is not blind to this aspect of his subject. Some chapters of the book have appeared in Harper's Magazine and other periodicals, but a large part is new and so much as is old has been rewritten and rearranged. One hundred or more illustrations from nature add to the interest and attractiveness of these charming nature-studies. Harper & Bros.

SEVENTH SERIES
VOLUME XXXV.

No. 3284 June 15, 1907.

CONTENTS.

FROM BEGINNING
Vol. CCLIII.

I.

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A Colonial Study of London Civilization.

Grossmann

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By Edith Searle

NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER 643 A Poet's Wife. By Florence Mac Cunn GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE 652 The Enemy's Camp. Chapters XVII and XVIII. (To be continued) MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE 662 The Last O'Hara. By Andrew James BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE 670 Go to Skellig! By H. Kingsmill Moore MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE 681 Culture in the Crucible. By T. H. S. Escott

V.

VI.

VII.

Worry.

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LONDON QUArterly RevIEW 688

The Cry of the Russian Children.
The Nationalist Decision.
Hungary and the Austrian Elections.

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A PAGE OF VERSE

642

THE NATION 642

642

703

Sea-Roses. J. E. Healy
The Touchstone. E. Nesbit
Gift-Flowers. A. Hugh Fisher
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A COLONIAL STUDY OF LONDON CIVILIZATION.

The articles' that have been published in this Review on the subject of English insularity have brought out very clearly the divergence of type between the Englishman and the New Zealander. The first two articles express the views of a Colonial, born and educated in his own country, who has already had some career there and whose claim to represent its indigenous opinion is not much affected by an attack published in the humorous columns of a local newspaper of dissimilar politics. The reply of the Rhodes scholar, expressing the inherited or imported view, is that of a New Zealander educated at Oxford; but even he treats England with a certain detachment and draws contrasts which practically concede the growth of a separate nationality. Our "Motherland" is, and must be, the country that bore and bred us, and the sentiment that gives the title even to the land of our forefathers is either unreal or unpatriotic. New Zealanders, however, are not a new or "young" people, springing from unknown savage sources like the Tongans or Fijians; they possess as fully as any native-born Briton the intellectual heritage left by our common ancestors; all the centuries of English history that precede the last fifty or sixty years are their own. It is only from that date that they diverge. They are a British people, who from the outset were more adventurous and less trammelled by convention than the majority of their countrymen, and who, having settled in an untamed country

1 "A Colonial View of Colonial Loyalty" (The Nineteenth Century, October 1903); "The Insularity of the English" (The Nineteenth Century, April 1906, The Living Age, May 12, 1906); "Insularity of the English: Another Colonial View" (The Nineteenth Century, September 1906).

and amidst primitive circumstances, dropped off much of the social prejudice and superstition, the fossiled traditions and antique customs, and at the same time lost much of the artistic and polished perfection of style and appearance that characterizes twentieth-century England. Briefly, the main difference is that the English are conserving and polishing an ancient type of society based on the predominance and happiness of a small section of the nation, while the Antipodeans are laboring to evolve a newer and more comprehensive social system. Those who return to the home of their ancestral race find themselves face to face with a gigantic and highly developed civilization. Either their imagination is overwhelmed or else an instinct of criticism is aroused. Had there not been a critical spirit in New Zealand, the country never would have attempted to avoid the old social evils, but would have slavishly copied good and bad alike. Mr. Thomson's statement that all who remain long enough in England must fall in love with the conservative spirit, might be less questionable if he had written "in Oxford" instead of "in England." For in the venerable university town, with its architectural beauty, its consecrated traditions, its aloofness from the vulgar struggle for wealth and position, the conservatism of old forms shows its most attractive aspect.

But it is London and not Oxford which is the true product of old-world civilization; London which almost blots out the rest of England by its own supreme significance. Now London, instead of converting all Colonials to the ancient class system, has converted to uncompromising State Socialism several who were once inclined towards

the so-called "Conservative party" in New Zealand; because they see in the industrial proletariat the terrible price that must be paid for Conservatism. Not all may see it, or care to see it. It is not a sufficiently amusing sight to tourists. No individual Colonial can claim to speak for the whole colony. Some will criticise, some will admire, each according to their temperament. London must be with all either a grande passion or a mortal antipathy. So it has been amongst provincials, and so it is still. Its literary lovers have been fewer than its haters, probably because its civilization is materialistic and unspiritual. To Edward FitzGerald the city was hideous and monstrous; Gissing painted it as a sordid modern inferno; its own Cockney poet described it, in one of the most profoundly gloomy poems ever written, as "the City of Dreadful Night." Yet in hate as well as in love it draws to it all talent that is free to move, just as it did in the days of Shakespeare or of Goldsmith. It is a huge emporium that forces the smaller shops off the field of competition, or reduces them to the position of supporting a bare existence by supplying immediate local needs. Even Edinburgh has had to abdicate its old literary sovereignty; no young Scotch poet or philosopher of our days dreams of seeking a career in the city that was once the Athens of the North. Nor can any British colony hope to compete even within its own boundaries with the enormous supplies of literature poured into it from the British market. Englishmen sometimes resent the high places which Scotchmen win for themselves in the Church, the Government. in literature and the professions. But it is Scotland that is the loser. Its nationality is yielded up and its intellectual vigor is drained away to feed the greatness of the metropolis. The same centripetal movement has begun from the farthest colonies. What the British

Empire has been to the world, that London now is to the Empire. The greatness of our ancestral race lies in its enormous national digestion. It swallows up tribes, races, territories, whole empires; and not only swallows but assimilates them, suppressing native characteristics or making them subservient to its own expansion. Far beyond the limits of its nominal dominion its influence has spread, conquering more by persistent and invincible faith in itself than by cannon, and substituting everywhere the English style in dress, architecture, food, and customs for the native style. But in London the force is that of attraction instead of diffusion abroad. Here come the provincials, the Scotch, the Irish, the Americans, the Colonials, the for eigners; for pleasure, for education, for a career, or for a refuge. The city sorts them out for its various uses, grinds down their distinctive features, fits. them into its own scheme, and turns them out not so much individualities as atoms of a social system. Something of the original substance may be left, but first and foremost all citizens must be Londoners, and only in the second place Devonians, Cornishmen, or North Countrymen. In the case of Colonials the process of assimilation is more rapid, because their distinctive character is as yet only "in the making," but amongst them too there is an unassimilated remnant.

In trying to discover anything like a uniform design amongst this heterogeneous web of material, an onlooker is continually perplexed by inconsistencies. Modern travellers have a trick of stating that the country they happen to be describing-America, China, India. or Russia-is a land of paradox and a bundle of contradictions. This is a safe remark to make of all communities, and may serve to qualify any dogmatic generalizing about the cosmopolitan millions compressed within the narrow

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