charges, contractors' commissions, and in the purchase of materials. The corporation under discussion will probably enjoy peculiar advantage in the construction of steel buildings from the fact that the steel trust president is to be a director. But any corporation erecting one building instead of five upon the same plot of ground would enjoy large economies in this respect. In the building itself there will be greater opportunities for light courts, thin partitions, and economies of space in every particular. The elevator equipments could be very greatly improved, as well as securing the savings incident to the operation of only one plant.

"In the conduct of these large buildings there will be yet more economies. The layman little realizes the quantity of supplies necessary for the extensive office structures in our cities. Great Great economies could be effected through large purchases in brick. With a tremendous building under a single management, there could be great division of labor in the matter of janitor service, there would be necessary only one superintendent. The collection of rents could be economized. It would be possible also to place in such a building unusual conveniences for the benefit of the tenants and still preserve the net economies which have been specified. The idea of having a stenographic establishment, a bookstore, a soda fount, a barber shop, a manicure establishment, a dentist, an oculist, a surgeon, a physician, and others in a great office building has already been partly developed. It is possible to do much more."

AGRICULTURAL TRAINING FOR WOMEN.

THE

HE Countess of Warwick is at the head of a movement in England which has for its object the education of the daughters of professional men with large families and small incomes." In establishing the so-called Reading Hostels the object of the countess was twofold. She wanted to make a new opening for educated women by training them in the lighter branches of agriculture, and at the same time to benefit the farming interest by raising an army of trained women to do battle in its service. The first of the Reading Hostels was opened in 1898, and accommodates twenty four students. Brook House, opened in 1899, accommodates fourteen, and the Maynard Hostel sixteen. In 1900, a pair of six-room cottages were built, and two large greenhouses erected. There were nine and a half acres of land rented for practical work. The students are instructed in gardening, poultry-rearing, bee-keeping, and dairying. They

have no laboratories, however, so that all scientific work has to be done at Reading College, which is very dear.

Lady Warwick started with a capital of £1,500, but now the time has come for launching out on a larger scale. She wants £30,000 to build an agricultural college for women. The appeal in the Times and at the Mansion House only brought in £600. The fees for the students at the hostels which are already opened vary from £65 to £126 a year, including board and residence and training. Starting with 12 students in 1896, 168 have now attended a longer or shorter course of training. Lady Warwick would like to fix a minimum limit of two years for training, but she would not exclude short courses, and lectures are given to non-resident students in the neighborhood. Every student who has been through the full course of training has obtained a salaried post on leaving.

A COLLEGE AND "SETTLEMENT

SCHEME.

To help on the movement she has founded an agricultural association for women, with the Woman's Agricultural Times as its official organ. This association, started in February, 1899, now numbers thirty patrons and one hundred and thirty-two associates in many parts of the world. Her dream for the future is that several women should take a cottage and several acres of land to start with, so as to form women's agricultural settlements in various parts of the country. She would have them work it on the allotment system as a market garden, or horticultural farm, or small dairy farm, combined perhaps with beekeeping or fruit-growing. Three students have already applied for cottages next year. She has opened a new department of work at Reading this year for colonial training. The course extends over one year, of which three months will be devoted to each of the following groups :cookery, housewifery, laundry and dressmaking, dairy and poultry-farming, flower, fruit, and vegetable gardening. The students are taught to find substitutes for every-day necessities, such as making their own yeast from the potato. Their training, in fact, will consist very largely in doing without things. With the £30,000 endowment Lady Warwick says an agricultural college could be founded which would take in between fifty and sixty students under one roof. could build their own laboratories, supply their own teachers, and rent two hundred acres of ground, on which all the practical work could be done.

They

Lady Warwick makes her appeal to the British public through the pages of the New Liberal Review for August.

66

THE FIRST PUBLIC MAN INTERVIEWED IN ENGLAND.

'WHO

HO was the first public man ever interviewed in England?" Sir Wemyss Reid, in Great Thoughts, says it was Mr. W. E. Forster, about 1880 or 1881. And Mr. W. T. Stead was the interviewer.

"Mr. Stead interviewed Forster on his return from the East. Mr. Forster came to see me immediately after the interview appeared, and I reproached him for having countenanced such an abominable innovation from America. We had a long discussion, and in the end agreed that while the ordinary interview was not a thing to be encouraged, yet that the interview in which a man stated his views on some great topic of interest might be useful to the person interviewed and to the public generally."

Mr. Forster, however (says Westminster Gazette), was much blamed at the time for having submitted to being interviewed.

As the subject seems to be of some interest, Mr. Stead himself recalls, in the English Review of Reviews, the circumstances in which this first interview took place :

"Mr. Forster had just returned from a visit to Bulgaria. I called upon him, and after a long talk, I said I thought what he said was very interesting, and ought to be made known to the public, and asked for his permission to jot down what I remembered of his conversation, to pub lish it in the Pall Mall Gazette, offering at the same time to send him a proof. When I wrote out the interview, knowing the prejudice to which Sir Wemyss Reid referred, I did not venture to print it as an interview with Mr. W. E. Forster. I simply guarded his susceptibilities by describing him in the proof as an English public man who had recently returned from the East.'

"When Mr. Forster got the proof, he returned it to me with a few corrections, striking out an English public man,' and putting in his own name. He said to me :

"Don't you think that the chief importance of my observations is that they are my observations, and therefore ought to be published in my name?'

"I said of course I thought so, but I never thought he would stand it, because there was such a prejudice against interviewing public

which they are expressed. At the same time,' he continued, I think it is only right to the man interviewed that he should always have an opportunity of revising his interview in proof, on the strict understanding that the public should never be told that he had seen the proof. Otherwise, if he is known to have revised the proof, he is liable to be held to any statements therein contained almost as much as if he had written them with his own hand.'

"There is much good sense in this; and, excepting where it has been absolutely impossible, I have always submitted proofs of interviews to the interviewed, and have never proclaimed the fact, unless with their permission, that the interview had been revised by its subject."

THE

SWINBURNE ON DICKENS.

HE times indeed are changing when the Quarterly Review allows one of its contributors to sign his contribution. This novel departure for the Quarterly has been made in honor of Mr. Swinburne, who fills twenty pages of the July number with an appreciation of the work of Charles Dickens. It is interesting, but it possess es little of the charm of the best of Mr. Swinburne's prose and verse. Its interest, indeed, lies more in the judgments which he expresses than in the style in which his criticisms are couched. As usual, Mr. Swinburne is somewhat lavish in his laudation, but, contrary to his wont, he uses the lash but sparingly.

"THE CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. His severest censure is reserved for the "Child's History of England." He says:

"I cannot imagine what evil imp, for what inscrutable reason in the unjustifiable designs of a malevolent Providence, was ever permitted to suggest to him the perpetration of such a book."

What ailed him in this book was its "cheapjack radicalism." But Mr. Swinburne reserves his chief scorn for those who have adversely criticised Dickens. Those who deny truthfulness and realism to the imagination of genius of Dickens are blatant boobies." "The incredible immensity of Dickens' creative power," he says, "sufficed for a fame great enough to deserve the applause and the thanksgiving of all men worthy to acclaim it, and the contempt of such a Triton of the minnows as Matthew Arnold."

This is nothing to what he says of George Henry Lewes, whose criticism provokes him to speak of the "chattering duncery and the impudent malignity of so consummate and pseudosophical a quack as George Henry Lewes. Not even such a past master in the noble science of

defamation could plausibly have dared to cite in support of his insolent and idiotic impeachment either the leading or the supplementary characters in A Tale of Two Cities.'"

DAVID COPPERFIELD" AND "GREAT EXPECTA-
TIONS."

But Mr. Swinburne cannot stand Little Nell. "She is a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads." He does not think very much of "Nicholas Nickleby; he does not consider "The Old Curiosity Shop" is in any way a good story; and he is not enthusiastic about "Dombey and Son." But of almost all the other novels he

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

has nothing but unstinted praise. Dickens' two best novels, Mr. Swinburne thinks, are "David Copperfield" and "Great Expectations." David Copperfield" he says:

Of

From the first chapter to the last it is unmistakable by any eye above the level and beyond the insight of a beetle's as one of the mas terpieces to which time can only add a new charm and an unimaginable value."

For the perfect excellence of this masterpiece he finds no words too strong. The story, he says, is incomparably finer than "Great Expectations." There can be none superior, if there be any equal to it, in the whole range of English fiction, except "Vanity Fair" and "The Newcomes," if even they may claim exception. There can surely be found no equal or nearly equal number of living and ever-living figures.

DICKENS' LAST GREAT WORK.

"Great Expectations" was Dickens' last great work. The defects in it are nearly as imper

ceptible as spots on the sun or shadows on a sunlit sea.

Barnaby Rudge" can hardly, in common justice, be said to fall short of the crowning phrase of being a faultless work of creation. In "Martin Chuzzlewit," that neglected and irregular masterpiece, his comic and his tragic genius rose now and then to the very highest pitch of all. Sairey Gamp has once again risen to the unimaginable supremacy of triumph by revealing the unspeakable perfection of Mrs. Quickly's eloquence at its best. He says:

"We acknowledge with infinite thanksgiving, of inexhaustible laughter and of rapturous admiration, the very greatest comic poet or creator that ever lived to make the life of other men more bright and more glad and more perfect than ever, without his beneficent influence, it possibly or imaginably could have been."

But Mr. Swinburne again and again returns to "David Copperfield," "which is perhaps the greatest gift bestowed on us by this magnificent and immortal benefactor."

PRAISE FOR A TALE OF TWO CITIES."

"A Tale of Two Cities," he says, is the most ingenuously and inventively and dramatically constructed of all the master's works, but "Hard Times" is greater in moral and pathetic and humorous effect. Of "A Tale of Two Cities," Mr. Swinburne says that this faultless work of tragic and creative art has nothing of the rich and various exuberance which makes of Barnaby Rudge' so marvelous an example of youthful genius in all the glowing growth of its bright and fiery April; but it has the classic and poetic symmetry of perfect execution and of perfect design."

6

Of Little Dorrit, " whom he describes as "Little Nell grown big," he says it contains many passages of unsurpassable excellence. "The fusion of humor and horror in the marvelous chapter which describes the day after the death of Mr. Merdle is comparable only with the kindred work of such creators as the authors of 'Les Misérables' and King Lear,' and nothing in the work of Balzac is newer and truer and more terrible than the relentless yet not unmerciful evolution of the central figure in the story."

6

DICKENS AND THACKERAY.

Comparing .the posthumous fortune of Dickens and Thackeray, Mr. Swinburne says:

"Rivals they were not and could not be ; comparison or preference of their respective work is a subject fit only to be debated by the energetic idleness of boyhood. In life Dickens was the more prosperous; Thackeray has had the better fortune after death."

NOT

RUSSIA IN MANCHURIA. OTWITHSTANDING Russia's formal evacuation of Manchuria, there are not wanting signs that the country will remain, commercially and industrially, to a great extent Russianized. A French traveler lately returned from that part of the world does not hesitate to call it Russian Manchuria. This traveler, M. Legras, records his impressions in the first July number of the Revue des Deux Mondes. M. Legras seems to have been allowed to go pretty much where he pleased, and the impression which his journey made upon him may be thus summarized. His first idea was that the Russians had been guilty of a capital mistake in leaving nearly three thousand kilometers of their great railway at the mercy of a population which has not submitted to them. It is true that they have accumulated troops, and have signed treaties

with native proprietors; a method which secures to Russia the fruits of annexation without any of the responsibilities. It is this which will prevent Russia from permitting any commercial competition in Manchuria. The conditions under which the railway has been built were so contrived as to make it against the interest of China to grant concessions for railways without injuring her own interests, so M. Legras comes to the conclusion that Russia has nothing to fear in Manchuria so long as peace is maintained. Of course there is the risk of local troubles, and in the event of a general conflagration, such as he holds might result from the establishment of the Japanese in Korea, both the economic and the military situation would be threatened.

PIERRE LOTI'S TRAVELS IN INDIA.

PIERRE LOTI contributes to the second

but at the same time it is not less true that they cannot be secured against a sudden cutting of the railway or against various attempts upon their interests. The Russians have run this risk for various reasons, of which the most important are two, the one commercial and the other political.

THE RAILROAD.

The Trans-Siberian Railway is a sort of hybrid; in its origin, whatever may be the official version, it was a purely military line, and was planned in consequence of the warnings of various governorgenerals of eastern Siberia, who had always made a great point of the danger which this unarmed Russian colony was running face to face with China, and destitute of quick communication with the capital. The belief in the commercial success of the enterprise was at first extremely small, so much so that the stations were placed at great distances from one another, and only at points where a fair amount of traffic might be reasonably expected. In spite of all, however, the traffic of the Trans-Siberian Railway grew and grew. The little stations had to be multiplied by two, and even then were not enough.

WILL RUSSIA MONOPOLIZE MANCHURIAN
COMMERCE?

M. Legras shows that the continuation of the Trans-Siberian Railway through Manchuria is really a sign of the pacific intentions of the Russian Government. He also makes it clear that the evacuation of Manchuria by the Russians does not extend to the railway, which will continue to be guarded by Russian troops. Russian occupation will continue to be a reality in the sense that Russia will proceed to develop the resources of the country in partnership, so to speak,

a long and exquisitely written paper of his experiences in the territory of the Maharajah of Travancore. It was his privilege to see that delightful, intimate India, where the tourist does not penetrate, and he sings its praises in French so exquisite that to attempt to translate it seems almost a sacrilege. The great Indian temples, with their innumerable series of pillars, and their colossal statues of gods and goddesses, naturally make a profound impression upon this writer, so sensitive to beauty in all its forms.

JEWS AND CHRISTIANS UNDER BRAHMIN RULE.

Suddenly he sees in the shade of a banyan tree, near an ancient idol of Siva, a personage in a violet robe, with a long white beard, calmly sitting down reading. Actually it is a bishop, a Syrian bishop, but how strange to see him in this country of the mysteries of Brahmins! Yet it is really perfectly natural, for the Maharajah of Travancore has about half a million Christian subjects. These do not represent the triumph of modern missionary effort; their ancestors built Christian churches here in epochs when Europe herself was still pagan, for these assert that Christianity was brought here by St. Thomas, who came to India about the middle of the first century. It is, to say the least of it, more prob able that they are descended from Nestorians who emigrated from Syria. Not less interesting is the fact that in the north of Travancore e are to be found descendants of Jews who emigrated after the second destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. It is pleasant to relate that under the benign rule of the Maharajah there are no religious feuds; each religious community practices its faith in peace and toleration.

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE MAHARAJAH.

M. Loti has the seeing eye of the true traveler, and it is impossible to do more than mention a few of the scenes which aroused his interest and inspired his pen. He describes the remarkable Zoological Gardens at Trivandrum, where the fauna and flora of India are preserved under conditions absolutely similar to the undisturbed jungle. He visits the Maharajah himself, and rejoices that this prince has had the good taste to remain Indian, and not to assume the ugly Western dress. M. Loti was intrusted with the mission of presenting to his Highness a French decoration, and when he had discharged this duty he conversed with the Maharajah about Europe, which the prince is prevented from visiting by the strict rules of his caste. He also talked with the Maharajah on literary subjects, and found him a man of cultivated and refined intelligence. Some days afterward M. Loti was presented to the Maharanee; this is not the wife, but the maternal aunt of the Maharajah. In Travancore, names, titles, and property are inherited on the female side; indeed, in this state women have actually the privilege of repudiating their husbands at their pleasure.

THE FUTURE OF THEOLOGY.
NDER the title of

Theology as a Science," Dr. Paul Carus contributes a very thoughtful article to the Monist for July. It is a very metaphysical article, and one the phraseology of which would be incomprehensible to the general reader. He believes that theology has a future, but he would prefer to call it theonomy, in order to differentiate it from theology, as astronomy is differentiated from astrology. This theology of the future is a new science, the roots of which lie partly in philosophy, partly, in the scientific treatment of history, partly in ethics, partly in an application of art, and partly also in poetry and belles-lettres, the religious literature being, to a great extent, hymns and recitals. The basis of this theonomy is the same as that of theology, -namely, an appreciation of the factors that shape our ends; that is, God. The name of God, says Dr. Carus, remains quite as appropriate for the new conception of the eternal norm of being as it was for the old. Here is the theonomical definition of God:

"Moreover, the eternal norm of being is actually a harmonious totality of laws of nature, a system of truths, a spiritual organism, or a body of immaterial influences which condition all the details of becoming, and these creative factors of life are omnipresent as they are non material;

they are eternal as they are indelible; they are possibility of being improved, forming the unimmutable as they are perfect, and beyond the changeable bedrock and ultimate raison d'être of existence."

Theonomy is not merely philosophy; it is also based upon a study of the positive forms of historic religion. It is a grand and noble science, and the scope of its development is an infinite potentiality. Dr. Carus believes that the future will not be less religious, but more religious, and that our religion will be purer and nobler and The horizon of religion is expanding, and when theology becomes theonomy the old orthodoxy is not surrendered, but fulfilled and completed.

truer.

THE WESTMINSTER STANDARDS.

Discussing the attitude of the theonomist to the creeds of the existing churches, Dr. Carus asks what may be done to meet the difficulties felt by the Presbyterians who recently attempted to revise the Westminster Confession of Faith. He answers the question by declaring that he would not revise the confession of faith, but would define it in such terms as to bestow the necessary liberty of conscience on Presbyterian ministers, without involving the change of a single letter in the Westminster Confession, and without causing a break in the historical tradition of the Church. A method by which he would effect this is to draw up the following preamble and resolution, which would be a substitute for the present declaration of adhesion to the Presbyterian creed:

Whereas, divine revelation is the unfoldment of truth;

Whereas, God speaks to mankind at sundry times and in divers manners;

Whereas, Jesus Christ spoke to us in parables, and the Christian confessions of faith are, as their name implies, symbolical books;

Whereas, religion is a living power and life means growth;

Whereas, that is the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world; and, finally, Whereas, centuries of unparalleled growth have added much to our better comprehension of religious truth; Therefore, be it resolved that we, the duly elected representatives of the Presbyterian Church, declare

That we regard the Westminster Confession of Faith and other formulations of belief in ages past contained in the symbolical books as venerable historical documents which were, from time to time, on certain occasions, and for specific purposes, composed by the legitimate and legally appointed representatives of our Church;

That we justify the spirit in which they were written, but deny that they were ever intended to bar out from us the light that the higher development of science and the general advance of civilization would bring;