FOOTNOTES:
[B] The published statistics of the Russian press are manifestly untrustworthy; but the post-office returns of St. Petersburg show that 82,000 copies of daily and 40,000 of weekly papers, with 50,000 copies of monthly periodicals, are yearly sent to the provinces. The largest circulation (26,000) belongs to M. Katkoff's Moscow Gazette (Moskovskiya Vedomosti). Besides the native journals, 17 German papers, 5 French, 4 Polish, 2 Tartar and 1 Hebrew are published in Russia. Of English papers, the Manchester Guardian, thanks to the number of Lancashire workmen in the interior, has the widest circulation: the Times comes second, the Illustrated London News third.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
The Atlantic Islands as Resorts of Health and Pleasure. By S. G. W. Benjamin. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Invalids and pleasure-seekers have here a guidebook to the summer and winter resorts of the North Atlantic, from the desolate rocks called the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the ever-bland Madeira and the over-bright Bahamas. The varied company of the isles embraces even Wight, where Cockney consumptives go to get out of the mist, and the Norman group consecrated to cream and Victor Hugo. The author's good descriptive powers are assisted by a number of drawings, many of which are finely done and well discriminate the local character of the different places, latitudes and circumstances of life. He does not appear to be much of a valetudinarian himself, or he would hardly have been able to venture on and report for our benefit so wide a range of travel and experience; but his preference obviously is for the island most thoroughly tempered to the needs of an enfeebled constitution, and which welcomes most wooingly those whose first craving is to keep alive—Madeira. Such of us as associate their earliest recollections of the name with the annual cask of wine will read with interest that though the wine, thanks to the oidium or some malady of that sort, is a thing of the past, the spot retains many other charms ample to justify a trip to its shores by a more roundabout way than the slow and direct or costly and circuitous routes laid down by Mr. Benjamin. Teneriffe ranks close to Madeira, and the Valley of Orotava, scooped out of the flank of the famous peak, is recommended as simply perfection for sufferers from "pulmonary complaints, rheumatism or neuralgia," and beneficial even in Bright's disease. The thermometer in this happy valley stops at fifty-eight degrees in winter, and averages from sixty-eight to seventy-two degrees in summer. Should you find this temperature too inclement, you can descend to the port at its mouth and luxuriate in a range of sixty-four to eighty degrees. Where we write the figure at this moment is ninety degrees in the shade, and those semi-tropical outposts of the anciently-known world seem arctic.
Bermuda, New York's onion- and potato-garden, is presented to us in a less fascinating light, owing possibly, in part, to the fact that Mr. B. does not like onions, and was nearly stifled on his return by the odor of that nutritious esculent under battened hatchways. But he sees a great deal to delight sound travellers, and objects mainly in behalf of the sick to the climate, which is only a modification of that of the continent, with an extra tempest or two thrown in. In protesting against the antiquated mode of landing maintained by Bermudan conservatism, he thinks a more modern, rational and convenient plan would be hooted down by the wharf-mob in the spirit of "Demetrius the coppersmith." We believe the Ephesian was a maker of silver images, though Alexander may have been actuated by a like motive in opposing Paul's proceedings as not good for trade.
Speaking of landing-places, that of Columbus is transferred, in a notable note on the Bahamas, from Cat Island to Watling's Island. The former has no lake, as the latter has; and Columbus insists on a lake. He also went in one day with oars around the north end—a feat impossible in one case and easy in the other. Watling, for this and other reasons dwelt on by English surveyors, is on the new maps rebaptized San Salvador, in rectification of euphony not less than of historic truth. If now equally successful inquiry could be brought to bear on the identity of the Discoverer's bones, claimed alike by Hayti and Cuba, it would be an additional comfort to the lovers of fact.
Steam-service is steadily growing more frequent, regular and expeditious, and the next generation of Americans will doubtless pack their portmanteaus as lightly for the Canaries, the Loffodens and the Galapagos as that now in being does for Appledore or Mount Desert. For individual health, relaxation or enjoyment, not more than for the general invigoration and well-being of the race, we need to be on easier terms with the sea. The old maritime spirit, so striking to the eyes of Burke, seems to have died out from among us. If we are to have a brilliant and assured future, we must not look for it wholly to the land. It may not rise sheer, Britain- and Aphrodite-like, from the breast of ocean, but it must yet rest partly upon that most solid of supports, the ever-shifting wave.
The Principles of Light and Color. By Edwin D. Babbitt. New York: Babbitt & Co.
Were we to open this book about the middle we should be disposed to set it down, on the strength of its latter half, as a contribution to the literature of the Pleasantonian (or blue-glass) school of natural philosophy. This impression would be humored by the bluish tint of the paper upon which it is printed. But an inspection of the entire work would show that it is something more comprehensive and ambitious, not to say more interesting and suggestive. It is the product of a bold and original, if not exactly close and systematic, thinker—one who, with a longer and severer experimental training in the fields he has chosen for exploration, would command the respectful attention of leading scientific men. He begins with the reflection that, "in spite of the wonderful achievements of experimental scientists, no definite conceptions of atomic machinery, or the fundamental processes of thermal, electric, chemical, physiological or psychological action, have been attained." He proposes to remedy this failure, and to carry the natural sciences to their "basic principles." He proceeds to speculate with great ingenuity on the nature of light, the form, relations and movements of atoms, the action of electricity upon them, the constitution of the atmosphere, mode of creation of the solar system, and the rationale of chemical affinity. From these lofty regions he stoops to his conclusion in the new science of "chromo-therapeutics." He undertakes to define and explain the alleged effects upon mind, soul and body of all the colors of the spectrum. Among these colors he assigns the place of honor to blue, that tint emanating from the frontal portion of the brain in rays visible to certain finely-organized individuals, and being associated with the highest intellectual faculties. Red belongs to the opposite pole of the cerebral sphere, and holds special relations with the grosser part of man's abstract nature. In this mysterious region of inquiry he joins hands with some questionable allies, such as the Spiritualists, the phrenologists and the mesmerizers. The power of the clairvoyants he does not doubt. Indeed, he claims to have used it himself, and to have fattened on it, his present weight of one hundred and eighty pounds having been attained, he tells us, together with perfect health, by the judicious employment of "these subtler agencies." One is tempted to ask, in view of such a result, why waste time on the color-cure when the mesmeric system succeeds so admirably?
Should we demur to these eccentricities of an enthusiastic savant, he would perhaps point us to similar excesses in some of the acknowledged lights of intellectual progress, and cite as a recent instance of the madness of too much learning the ascription, by the brilliant yet matter-of-fact and practical Tyndall, of almighty "potency" to matter. Of course we should reply that Tyndall was a sincere and earnest student, and not a charlatan or a fanatic; whereto our author might respond, and respond justly, in sharp disclaimer of the latter brace of characters. He seems to be sincere: he can read and think, and does both, as the first part of his book, and much of the rest of it, show. He would have escaped the imputation we have suggested as not unapt to be cast upon him, secured a full hearing in a more respectable quarter, and gained higher aid in the development of his ideas, had he been less hasty in forming and stating some of his ultimate conclusions and the practical application of them. Many very able men who have preceded him in scientific labor, and who do not believe that "the bowels will be aroused into animation" by the exhibition of "a small strip of yellow glass three inches in depth, bordered by its affinitive violet," to the umbilical region, or that "Major Buckley developed one hundred and forty-eight persons so that they could read sentences shut up in boxes or nuts," would listen attentively to what he has to say on the anatomy of an atom, metachronism and "chromatic attraction."
Around the World in the Yacht Sunbeam. By Mrs. Brassey. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Some of the best books of travel we have had lately have been written by women. Their way of looking at new things, even if superficial—which is not by any means always a safe assumption—is pleasant and refreshing after the more sober, philosophic and blue-booky style of comment we are accustomed to be favored with by observers of the other sex. Many valuable trivialities are lost by the effort to go deeper than the surface. The phases of life, manners and scenery which strike one in a rapid tour are perhaps most instructive, and certainly most entertaining, when reproduced just as they appear. The light female touch, which revolts at figures and documents, is well suited to that work, if work it can be called. The male traveller, we know, does much of his research when he gets home, keeping up, however, with a view to that end, a solemnly didactic frame of mind all the time he is abroad. He is thus apt to give us less of what he sees than of what he thinks—an error into which a woman is less prone to fall. She is less critical, less ashamed of being startled and pleased, and more frank and naïve in her confession of it. She resembles in this respect the delightful voyagers of the Middle Ages—the Polos, Batutas and Mandevilles—who were too much occupied with the novelty of everything they saw to bore us with their opinions, and who were untrammelled by the slightest idea of publishing a résumé of political, religious or economic conclusions when they got home. What an infinitesimal proportion of us understand even our own country! Why, then, obscure and flatten our impressions of foreign lands by supposing, and preparing to make others believe, that we can understand them after a cursory study of a few weeks or months?
Mrs. Brassey is not a literary woman. She has no "mission," and makes no pretensions to culture. She simply chronicles a tour made in her husband's yacht, accompanied by two or three young children and as many friends. But she has good sense, good temper and character, and what she writes fully justifies her husband's prefatory statement, that "the voyage would not have been undertaken, and assuredly it would never have been completed, without the impulse derived from her perseverance and determination." Unprepared by special study, and quite devoid of science, she yet notes well, and interests us in, the animals, plants, human occupants and natural phenomena generally of the countries visited. And without any command or affectation of imagery or fine language she is very graphic in her descriptions of sea and shore. Her account of a visit to the great Hawaian volcano is one of the best we have ever read, being simple, terse and vivid, without the overloading with detail that spoils so many of the pen-pictures of the day.
The trip was made in eleven months of 1876-77. The route lay from Chatham to Madeira, Rio, the river Plate, Valparaiso (through the Straits of Magellan), the Society and Sandwich Islands, Yokohama, Hong-Kong, Singapore, Ceylon, Aden, Alexandria, Malta, and so on back to England. It thus threaded a large part of the tropical world, and we are led to perceive a greater variety in tropical life and scenery than we are in the habit of realizing. The rapidity of movement facilitated this, as it brought the different points more closely together, and made what there was of contrast more striking. Not that the movements of the party were uniformly hurried either, for weeks were spent in Rio, the Pampas, Chili and Japan, and sufficient stoppages made at many other places. The slow passage through the stormy Straits makes us acquainted with the savages of the Land of Fire and their picturesque country, decidedly more damp than fiery. Japan was reached in the season of ice and snow, and the author, wrapped in furs and ulsters, was puzzled by the native contempt of the thermometer as shown in their wooden-walled houses with paper partitions and the popular passion for the lightest possible raiment. We join in her amazement at the proceedings, on a frosty morning, of the propellers of her jenrishka—or, as it is punningly termed, pull-man-car—who, compelled by law to wear their clothes in town, deliberately stopped when they struck the country and divested themselves of almost the last stitch—a performance paralleled in the opposite hemisphere by a party of Fuegians, man, wife and son, who came off in a canoe to trade, and stripped themselves utterly of their one garment of fine sea-otter skins in exchange for beads and tobacco. The author seems to have armed herself against surprises of this and all other kinds, and to have set out prepared to accept outlandish ways as they came, and look on the bright and reasonable side of everything. She manifests no national prejudice, whether against savage or civilized people, and commends frankly American carriages, railways, tramways, calicoes and canned fruits wherever she meets them; and that is, for one or another item of the list, nearly everywhere. Our manufacturers will read with interest the compliments recorded as paid by their customers, actual and possible, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans to the superior merit of their fabrics as compared with those of Manchester.
Altogether, should Mrs. Brassey's yacht be ready for another circumnavigation before ours, we do not know that we should refuse the offer of a spare berth.
Art-Education. A Lecture by General William Birney. Delivered February 6, 1878, before the Washington Art-Club. Washington: Art-Club.
This brochure is mainly a sketch of the consequences to industrial art of the English Exhibition of 1851, or a consideration of the fruits of the South Kensington Art-School. The humiliation of England in that Exhibition is well known, and the way in which she profited by the bitter lesson is full of instruction to this country. Thoughtful Americans, whether directly concerned in the welfare of laboring men or not, remember uneasily the troubles of last year, listen with compassion to whatever sounds of distress come from the assemblies of those who call themselves "workingmen," and look with anxiety for evidence of returning prosperity and contentment. All Americans worth mentioning are workers and are in sympathy with labor. If any "workingmen" think that there is a large or powerful class in this country opposed to the interests of labor, they should at once dismiss the notion, and look further for the cause of their troubles. Considerate people see that the "workingmen" should take a wider view of their situation than most of them seem to do; that they should look above and beyond the ranks of partisans for the light they need; that they should listen to those who will discuss their problem with the coolness, the disinterestedness, the unhesitating honesty which characterize the leading scientists of the day in other fields of inquiry. Such are the speakers and writers they should invite to their assistance. Instead of wasting their breath in expressions of self-admiration, in threadbare platitudes about the nobility and rights of labor, in appeals to the omnipresent politician, in complaints against labor-saving machinery, in talk about the Eight-Hour law, it would be more encouraging if they would try to supplant foreign workmen by simply excelling them in workmanship, and try to find employment by the creation of new industries. Higher education in industrial art is the stepping-stone to this.
As the depression is the result of a combination of causes, it is not probable that a panacea exists. Complete restoration will come from several remedies, each having its due effect in its own time and place. But perhaps the most potent of all, one indispensable to thorough and lasting prosperity, is thus revealed by General Birney:
"Although the United States has not hitherto directed her attention to art, her manifest destiny is to do so. The necessity of events will compel it. We have entered upon a long peace, in which we shall have to compete with civilized nations for the supply of the markets of the world. A population of forty millions cannot exist in comfort when they sell to the world nothing but agricultural implements, sewing-machines, revolvers, clocks, corn, cheese and cheap cottons, and buy everything else from it. The end of that course must be national ruin.
"For self-preservation, we must manufacture: we must have skilled labor. The rapid increase of scientific knowledge makes art a necessity. As science throws men out of employ, art must provide employment. The scientist and artist must walk hand in hand. The invention of labor-saving machinery for the farmer, enabling one man to do the work which formerly required ten, is rapidly driving men from the country to the cities. The invention of other machinery is rapidly throwing large numbers of workmen out of employ. Political causes are adding to this evil. How to put the unemployed millions to work is the problem of the day. The salvation of the country depends upon its solution. The nation stands before each public man demanding that he shall read the riddle or be destroyed.
"One of the helps to a solution, if not a solution, is the introduction of skilled labor. It takes but a few men to fashion a ton of iron into bars, but a thousand are not too many to work it into watch-springs. Five men can make all the coarse pottery used in this District: it takes five hundred to make its decorated ware and porcelain. Rough hand-labor is being superseded by machinery. But the demand is greater than ever before for skilled labor, both to manage the machinery and to take the product where machinery has left it and fashion it into value by the art of the decorator. Such a workman plies his handiwork at his own house, teaching his sons the secrets of his trade. He is the necessary coadjutor of the machine-owner, and has no need to resort to the brutal methods of Molly Maguires and trades-unions to get a fair reward for his labor. Let demagogues rant about our danger from competition with the pauper labor of Europe! We never were, and never will be, injured by that. What we should fear is the skilled labor of well-paid, cultured and educated artisans."
The French, who won so easy a victory over the English in 1851 in the manufacture of whatever directly augments the luxury and elegance of life, now fear that England will overcome France on her own ground. An able Parisian, criticising the Exhibition of 1878, and acknowledging the facts it reveals, asks the French government to send, at the public expense, a hundred workmen every year to Great Britain as a means of keeping French artisans abreast of British and holding their own in the markets. Ours is not a paternal government. If it should send a hundred men to England, half of them might be political bummers, whose chief study would be, not how to learn to work for the benefit of their countrymen, but how to live without work. The American people are as individuals supposed to take care of their own business. Do our trades-unions and labor-clubs and workingmen's associations send a hundred picked men abroad every year for study and practice? Are they too conceited or ignorant to realize what most concerns them? Thousands of foreign subjects are earning money from us, while thousands of our countrymen are suffering. This is not the fault of those foreign workmen, nor of the American purchasers of their artistic work, nor of our government. It is in a great degree because Americans have not the skill and taste to take up material where machinery leaves it, and lay it down beautified by the touch of real art. An "appeal to the ballot-box," the sovereign remedy of a true American for every ill; the enactment that two and two shall make five, which is about what the Eight-Hour law amounts to; the declaration by statute that so much of one metal shall equal so much of another metal,—has there not been enough of this? Would not a few hundred well-educated emissaries of our trades-unions and labor associations kept in the technical schools and workshops abroad be of rather more value? "How many of the graduates of the South Kensington Art-School, and artisans whose ability is traceable to it, might have been induced to try here the fine work which now, in England, is making the French tremble for their laurels, by a judicious use of the money which public halls, meetings, brass bands, processions, delegations, disturbances, transparencies, lobbyists, blather-skites and strikes have cost the 'workingmen' of America?"
Books Received.
The Army of the Republic: Its Services and Destiny. By Henry Ward Beecher.—How to Spend the Summer; Where to Go; How to Go; How to Save Money. (Christian Union Extras.) New York: Christian Union Print.
Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society, Customs, Manners, Morals and Home Culture. Compiled from the best authorities. By Mrs. H. O. Ward. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates.
Gabrielle; or, The House of Mauréze. From the French of Henri Gréville. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers.
Hathercourt. By Mrs. Molesworth ("Ennis Graham"). (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Hints to Plumbers and Householders. By W. L. D. O'Grady. New York: The American News Co.
Poems and Ballads. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Second Series.) New York: R. Worthington.
Pauline, and Other Poems. By Hanford Lennox Gordon. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
How to Take Care of our Eyes. By Henry C. Angell, M. D. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
Rothmell. By the author of "That Husband of Mine." Boston: Lee & Shepard.
Maid Ellice. By Theo. Gift. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Chips from Many Blocks. By Elihu Burritt. Toronto: Rose-Belford Publishing Co.
Bluffton: A Story of To-day. By M. J. Savage. Boston: Lee & Shepard.
Somebody Else. By G. P. Lathrop. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
His Inheritance. By Adeline Trafton. Boston: Lee & Shepard.
Poems. By W. T. Washburn. New York: Jesse Haney & Co.