Philadelphia. The truth of the old saying that the cholera saves more lives than it destroys will probably receive striking verification in the reduction of the zymotic death-rate which may be expected to result from the increased attention paid to the diseaseproducing conditions in which most of us pass our lives. The scavenger is abroad; tainted water-supply is being recognised as diluted poison; and last, a singular impulse has been given to cremation. The increasing difficulty of burying the hundred thousand corpses of which London must rid itself every year, and the growing conviction as to the transmission of epidemic disease by germs generated in the bodies of its victims, are having a strong tendency in favour at least of permissive cremation in all cases and compulsory cremation in case of death from contagious disorders. In Paris, the Municipal Council has already demanded the erection of crematories in the city cemeteries, and if the epidemic should travel westward from Egypt, it is just possible that cremation might be very generally substituted for subhumation.

In July the Suez Canal Company and its alleged monopoly absorbed public attention. In August the unlucky concession was already forgotten, and M. de Lesseps was left to levy toll undisturbed upon the commerce of the world. The pouvoir exclusif of M. de Lesseps having been recognised by the English Government, the two most popular suggestions for turning the difficulty are (1) the construction of a ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez railway like that which is now being laid across the isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico; and (2) the submersion of the Jordan valley by a flood let in from the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Akabah, past the base of Mount Carmel and through the basin of the Dead Sea. As the Record has already discovered that the execution of this dream of the modern engineer was foretold in the prophecies

of Ezekiel, there is perhaps no more to be said beyond the remark that neither in the case of the ship railway nor in that of the flooding of the Holy Land have the projects gone beyond the stage of speculative engineering.

The feeling excited by the unpopular recognition of the monopoly claimed by M. de Lesseps is but one indication of the revolt against monopolies that is perhaps one of the most striking features of our time. The extent to which that feeling has carried all before it in this country is shown by the extraordinary severity with which the legislature and the departments have fenced round the electric light. So far have they gone in safeguarding the community against the growth of a new monopoly that it is doubtful whether they have not checked the legitimate development of a new invention. The imposition of new stipulations on the railway companies by the Railway Passenger Act was unquestionably popular, and would have been more so if the real significance of its provisions had been more widely understood.

But it is in the United States that the most emphatic protests against monopoly and monopolists have been made this month. On the 18th of July the telegraph operators, linesmen, and other employers of the Western Union Telegraph Companies struck work at a preconcerted signal in order to enforce the following demands :— (1) One day's rest in seven; (2) eight hours' work a day instead of nine as at present; (3) equal pay for equal work for men and women instead of paying women, as at present, 50 per cent. less than their male colleagues; and (4) an advance of 15 per cent. in wages all round. The strike was persisted in for a month, but in the end the Western Union triumphed. The operators were beaten so thoroughly that they were compelled to repudiate trade unionism in writing before they were permitted to return to their instruments. But although the strike failed, partly through defective organisation

and partly from natural weakness of strikers in such a country as the United States, the struggle has left an impression on American opinion that is not soon likely to be effaced. The comments in the American press and the mental attitude of the Americans in relation to Mr. Jay Gould and the other millionaire monopolists of the day are very much akin to that with which the Socialists of Europe speak of the capitalists everywhere. Nowhere as in America do the financiers levy blackmail on such colossal scale, although the Christian usurer in Egypt and the Jewish Eastern money - lender in

Europe are not far behind in the rapacity with which they prey upon the community they infest. To extract five millions a year as interest upon the sum of ten millions advanced to the wretched fellaheen is not bad business from the usurer's point of view, but Europe affords no such examples of the operations of "the criminal rich" as are to be found in the exchanges of America. It is only in Chicago and in New York that gamblers are able to make bread dear throughout the whole world as a mere incident of a financial corner.1

own.

On the Continent, little has been stirring, save an abortive outbreak in Spain. Spanish affairs, notwithstand ing her many newspapers and her eloquent orators, are caviare not only to the general but even to the few who watch with close attention the progress of events in other countries than their It is well known in Spain that the classes which make revolutions not vocal. The world knows nothing of the intrigues of the barrackroom in which most pronunciamientos take their rise, and as for the other revolutionary force-the Socialist industrial proletariate in the large towns and in the southern provinces-it also lacks organs of intelligible speech. In these dark and mysterious depths discontent is ever present; that we know, and that is almost all we know.

are

1 See a remarkable article on this subject in the North American Review for August.

Discontent in the army, at non-promotion or the loss of commissions, is a pretty constant force, and in Spain the mutinous subaltern habitually sighs for pronunciamientos and plenty of them. The proletariate, fed by constant comtemplation of lurid ideals of a millennium to be inaugurated by making a bonfire of all that is, uncompromising and even savage, finds no voice in the Cortes or in the press. It is a dumb beast exceeding fierce, and when goaded by hunger and harried as it often is by the exactions of gombeen men, no one knows to what lengths it may go. The Constitutional system in Spain is a mere simulacrum of Parliamentarism. Neither the army nor the revolutionists, nor even the Carlists, make themselves heard in the Cortes, which is little better than the arena of faction, and the happy hunting-ground of office-seekers. Hence every movement on the part of the army or of the masses sends a quiver through the whole administration. This month the garrison of Badajos revolted. It was but a small affair that collapsed almost as soon as it began, but it had the effect that the first trembling of the earth has upon those who live in regions haunted by earthquakes. It might be nothing, or it might be the signal for a general explosion. It did not stand alone. There were spurts of revolt near Barcelona, among the artisans, near Logrono among the troops, and at Seo D'Urgel where the garrison repudiated its allegiance to King Alphonso. For a moment Europe waited wondering whether the young king was about to be ingulfed. But the insurrection did not spread. Vague and contradictory telegrams were despatched from Spain, but their general effect was that the insurrection had been stamped out, and that all danger was passed.

In France the great political event of the month has been the triumphant success of the Republicans at the elections to the Councils General on

August 12. The Republicans, who

had been of late somewhat unfortunate

at by-elections, hardly expected to achieve so decisive victory all along the line. Despite the loss of M. Gambetta, the discredit attaching to the finance of the Republic, and the anticlerical policy of its chiefs, the electors rallied to the Republican candidates, and gave to that party a majority in the Departmental Councils. Even Corsica proved Republican, nor did Brittany escape.

The Chambers have risen after a prolonged session in which practically nothing was done except the passing of the Bill reforming the judiciary: it gives the Minister of Justice absolute power over the magistracy for three months, after which it is hoped that no further process of purgation will be required. The conventions with the railway companies have been approved by the Chamber, but they await the sanction of the Senate. M. Ferry's Cabinet has survived, and therein it has done more than was anticipated. It is only a pis aller, and it holds its own because there is no other to put in its place. The actively aggressive policy of France abroad. is still persisted in. In the Far East, the French are making war, not on the Black Flags of Tonkin, but upon the Emperor of Annam, at his capital of Hué, which has this month been blockaded by the French fleet. At Madagascar the situation remains the same. Even if the Madagascar difficulty is tided over-and the. French have by no means seen the end of their troubles in that island, where they are blockaded by land without supplies at Tamatave a further difficulty assails us in the Southern

Pacific. Our colonists in Australia have not unnaturally taken alarm at the proposal to ship 5,000 of the refuse of the French criminal classes as free settlers to New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. They are preparing to annex the whole unappropriated Pacific rather than permit French criminals to be shot, like so much garbage, at their doors. A collision August 23rd.

between French criminal emigrants and our colonists at the Antipodes would speedily involve us in the dispute.

While France is for the hour drifting into a course which may involve her in calamitous complications with Great Britain, her ever watchful enemy on the eastern frontier loses no opportunity of strengthening the bonds of alliance between Germany and Austria. The two Emperors met this month at Gastein, and their interview, even though it may have been purely formal, reminded the world that the great Peace Bund of Central Europe continues to exercise its influence undisturbed in favour of the status quo, plus a certain steady orientation on the part of Austria. Of this latter tendency there are many signs. Indignation prevails at Vienna against Roumania for the visit of General Brialmont; and the ostentatious patronage of King Milan of Servia, together with the persistent development of the Slav element within the bounds of the Empire-Kingdom, all point in one direction. On the other hand, it begins to be seen that the pressure eastwards is not to be left unopposed. Russia is organising the opposition. The daughter of Nicholas of Montenegro has been married to Peter Karageorgevich, pretender to the Servian throne a warning to King Milan. Prince Alexander of Battenberg has been reconciled to M. Zankoff, the leader of the Bulgarian Liberals, a signal for the union of all Bulgarians against the common foe. And last, but by no means least, the Prince of Montenegro has been welcomed as honoured guest by the Sultan on the first occasion that the ruler of the Black Mountain ever accepted hospitality at the hands of the Commander of the Faithful. There is no prospect of any early disturbance in the Balkans, but the two rivals are already arraying the forces between whom the contest may yet have to be fought out.

an

EVENING is falling slowly on this Alpine valley. Little by little the lines of slanting sunlight across the distant mountains have sunk into the bosom of a sea of shadow, which has swept over all the ample hollows and slopes touched an hour ago with such aerial radiance. The nearer pastures have given up their green to the invading darkness, while between them and the purple mass on the horizon gleams the lake, a blue abyss, over which this high valley seems to hang suspended. Above the sharp mountain outline lies a delicate transparent heaven lit by the last faint reflection of the vanished sun-or is it the first wave of the incoming moonlight? The grass at our feet is still alive with grasshoppers, chatterers unabashed by darkness and this soft silence, to which everything else is surrendering itself; while in the fragrant depths of the meadow the eye distinguishes the dim outlines of a multitude of flowers. Far off, the sound of bells haunts the climbing pine-woods; and on the steep grass walls of the valley, the voices of the returning haymakers mingle with the bells, the stream, the breeze, only to deepen and sweeten the breathing stillness of the newborn night.

How perennial is the charm of the Alpine world! Year by year it yields itself afresh to all who ask from it refreshment and rest. For us, tired children of the cities, as for Obermann in his niche among the snows of the No. 288.-VOL. XLVIII.

Dent du Midi, an hour on these heights seems to hold more of what really makes life than weeks among the lowlands. We bring, as it were, our lives in our hands, eager to plunge them deep into this mountain peace and freshness. For the moment snow and stream, lake and valley, seem to exist only for us, who have journeyed to them, like pilgrims to a shrine; it is for us, wanderers and sojourners, with our needs, our stains of travel and of labour, that all this lives and glows and softens, that flowers and trees and Alps maintain their healing and unalterable beauty.

It is an innocent and beneficent illusion the traveller's sense of possession, this longing appropriation of all he sees to himself and his own wants. And yet a little closer looking into the soft infinity of the Alpine evening ought to be enough to banish it. For as the darkness deepens, along the stream, on the sloping meadows, on the lower fringes of the pine-woods, there steal out the lights which tell us of farm and vacherie, of households where the haymakers are gathered round the hard-earned meal, of the child spelling his lesson for the morrow's school, of the mother at her sewing. It is as though the true possessors of all that treasure of earth and sky were asserting themselves in these twinkling lights against the clamorous philosophising self of the sojourner who would fain have Switzerland all

his own. A little sympathy, a little

H H

quick responsiveness, and they will beguile him away from himself into this homely world, clinging so closely to the peaks he climbs but once and leaves behind, till they have kindled his imagination with the thought of the peasant race into whose flesh and blood all that he sees has entered, and to whom the towering Alps are bound by the habits and the struggles of centuries. Then if, touched with a new impression, he leaves the valley behind him in the morning sunlight and climbs into the heights, he will notice perhaps with a keener eye than before the sights and sounds of human life with which the mountains are overflowing. All the gigantic slopes seem to be alive with bells, though it is but rarely that one catches the brown forms of the pasturing cows. High up on the winding path-below, beside the stream, boys and maidens are jodelling and singing to each other, while chalet succeeds chalet, and under the brown eaves one sees the peasant woman passing in and out or sitting bowed over some household task. There is no mountain country so peopled and so human as Switzerland. Explore all these high valleys, swept by trailing clouds, and you will find them everywhere inhabited and used and traversed at heights three times greater than those which mark the furthest limit of cultivation for a Scotch or Cumbrian peasant.

When the traveller once begins to feel the curiosity he should as to the life which goes on in these farms and vacheries, when he is first fired with the impulse to bridge over the gulf between himself and the people who inhabit the country he is but flitting through, there are many sources of information open to him. The Swiss have their historians, their collectors of folk-lore, their economists, their makers of statistics, like other people. But if he wants not so much to know as to feel and realise, let him walk into the next town, and pillage the library of all the novels he can find written by a Bernese pastor of forty years ago, under the pseudonym of

Jeremias Gotthelf. If, like the present writer, he asks for them in French-speaking Switzerland, he will find them in the French translations of Buchon, and although, if he has the literary instinct, he will rebel a little against translations, let him plunge into the first volume handed to him, and he will soon find cause for modest doubts of his German vocabulary, had he been left without M. Buchon's aid to grapple with all those German-Swiss peasant idioms, which in French are racy and strange enough. However, the translations are good and spirited. M. Buchon, a Franc-Comtois novelist and poet of eminence, prepared himself for his task by some years' residence in Gotthelf's country, and his dread of the exacting French public made him cut down and soften the sermonising element in his author, with which one must indeed have much patience if one wants to understand the man and his books, but which in the German sometimes assumes proportions quite fatal to the reader's powers of endurance. And then there is the compensation of knowing that if on the further side of those distant snowpeaks the peasant talks German, on this side of them he talks French. And in the uplands, at any rate, it is the same peasant, busied with the same tools, eating the same food, governed often by the same religious ideas, whether he talks French or German. So that in passing from one language to another, Gotthelf's characters and thoughts are still at home as it were. The tongue of the translation is not alien to the things that it holds; practically it has been modified by the same physical influences, and tamed to the same needs as the speech which it replaces.

Albert Bitzius, afterwards known to literature by the pseudonym of Jeremias Gotthelf, was the son of a Swiss pastor, and descended from the ancient bourgeoisie of Berne. The name Bitzius was originally Sulpicius, and occurs pretty frequently in documents of the Bernese neighbourhood of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen