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besets such coins. Good shillings can be made by private coiners and exchanged for sovereigns. A handsome profit could be made by making shillings as good as those of the Mint, and then buying the more valuable gold contained in sovereigns with them. This does not take place, because the profit is not sufficiently large to give adequate insurance against the risk of detection; but if silver were to become much cheaper, it could hardly fail to happen that excellent shillings would be forged abroad, and sent to England to buy sovereigns. In that case, either that more silver should be put into the shilling, or more shillings be counted to the pound, would become absolutely necessary. Without such protection, England would be stripped of her gold coins, and reduced to shillings. The good money would leave the country, the inferior would stay.

It is desirable to mention a mode of international payment of debts due by one country to another which is daily carried on to an immense extent, and strikingly illustrates the nature and action of money. These payments are made with bullion—that is, with gold or silver uncoined, in its natural state of bars or ingots of metal. The necessity for such a payment in coin or metal arises from the fact that one country has bought from another more than it has sold to it, and consequently must pay the balance with some form of money. The transmission of coin would be subject to the inconvenience that the coin sent over would be a stranger in the new country it entered: the stamp would be a troublesome surplusage, ultimately requiring to be effaced by melting. What has been said above has shown that gold coin does its work by means of the value of the metal, gold: and thus we can understand that an equal weight of bullion will be accepted as a payment equivalent to the same weight of gold in coin, without the encumbrance of the stamp.

The process by which the quantity of the bullion required to be sent across is calculated is somewhat complicated, but on many accounts it is very important to understand it. Let us suppose that England has bought more French goods than France has bought of English goods: she has to remit a quantity of gold of the value of the difference to France. The debts which this remittance is made to pay are all counted in French francs: the traders of France have so many francs to receive of England. The calculation is effected by means of what is called the rate of exchange-that is, the number of francs which are the equal in value of the English pound or sovereign. The par of exchange, as it is termed, indicates the exact equal value of a sovereign in francs. Thus, a sovereign and a 20-franc napoleon are compared in weight, and it is found that the sovereign contains a little more gold in weight than 14 napoleons: true par being about 25 francs and. A French creditor, therefore, who has to receive payment from England, must receive a sovereign, that is, the gold contained in a sovereign, for every 25 francs he is entitled to receive; and that

quantity of bullion is sent to him from England. He gets the gold of as many napoleons as his bill amounts to. This explanation supposes that the calculation is made when the exchange between the two countries is at par-that is, when the sovereign will fetch in French money exactly as much gold as it contains. But the exchange is seldom at par, and the variations are sometimes serious. This, however, is a matter which it is impossible to enter into in this place.

It remains now to explain paper-money; want of space compels me to reserve this matter for a future opportunity.

BONAMY PRICE.

DIRGE

AFTER HERRICK.

HE is dead; but do not weep,

SHE

Nor thick not so for her

This fair sunlight with thy sighs-
She is gently gone asleep;

Peace now, lest thy fretful stir

Fright the soft dew from her eyes.

Look upon her gentle face

Love and quiet thoughts are there-
See how yet some latest smile
Makes of her lips a lurking-place,
Faintly courts thee-would beguile
Thy so sick despair.

Lay her sweet i' the earth

No flower which breath of the next Spring
Calls from the bare turf above her

Is half so fresh, so pure a thing;

Her life was all an innocent mirth,
Then sweetest, being over.

Death hath taken but to save

Sweet her maid-mates! hither, and strew

Over her virgin grave

Flowers, not yew.

Here no painful heart be throbbing!

No voice go out in wildered sobbing!
No idle eye drop here

The profanation of a tear!
Only--if't must be so-a sigh,
Yet more for Love than misery.

THE ENGLISH NATION AND THE ZULU WAR.

HE good name of England is the most precious inheritance of

Englishmen. Under any conditions the task of keeping it untarnished must involve the need of constant care and circumspection; but it cannot fail to be imperilled if the nation ceases to exercise its sovereignty or allows its representatives to act as if they were irresponsible. No greater shame can be incurred by a people than the guilt of unjust wars unjustly waged; and the nation is chargeable with the full extent of the wrongs, if it fails to make itself acquainted with the true circumstances, and at the least to redress the injuries which have been committed. The spirited foreign policy of the present Government has given us lately a series of wars, against all of which the conscience of a great part of the British people has risen in strong revolt. They are wars the causes of which are said to lie in strange political entanglements, out of which there is, we are told, no path except that of self-interest. They are also wars in which the agents of the nation have found excuses for treating the defenders of invaded countries as criminals and traitors. This charge has been held forth as a justification of summary executions and of wholesale slaughter inconsistent with the usages of civilised warfare; and these deeds have been done in conflicts for which the consent of the nation has not been asked, and of which no warning was given until it was too late to prevent them. Of these wars one is still dragging on its weary length among the rugged spurs of the Himalayas; another has been lately brought to an end by the capture of a South African chief, against whom, if the tales told be true, there have been committed acts of deliberate bad faith and wanton cruelty which must make the British name a byword of scorn to barbarians who still possess some sense of truth and honour.

These are serious charges, which must be tried before the tribunal of the nation. Of the Cabul war I say nothing. The issues involved in that struggle are so complicated, and may become so terrible and far-reaching, that a complete sifting of the whole matter may with some confidence be looked for even in the present Parliament, if it lives to transact any business. For the recent Zulu war there is some danger that the people may remain ignorant of facts which, if established, are as disgraceful as any recorded in the history of modern warfare, and may, therefore, fail to call the wrong-doers to account. That war may be the fruit of mistakes made thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, and the tracing out of its more remote causes may troublesome and repulsive task; but in justice and in honour the nation cannot evade the duty of determining whether the guilt of

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plea for the invasion of Zululand was or was not furnished by persistent and systematic slander and abuse of Cetshwayo (Cetewayo) before the peace was actually broken; whether a war stated at the outset to be one against the sovereign only was or was not carried on with cynical cruelty against the body of the people; and whether, for getting the chief into our power, means were or were not employed which, if adopted in European warfare, would cover with infamy those who stooped to make use of them.

The wrongs done to the Zulus in the name and under the professed sanction of the British people may be the necessary consequences of wrongs done long ago to the Boers; but it is not easy to see how faith broken with Dutchmen can lessen the guilt of faith broken with the Dutchmen's enemies. Whatever be the origin of our mistaken and blundering policy, the narrative of its results is a dark and melancholy tale, on which Mr. Froude has lately expressed his opinion in his lectures delivered at Edinburgh.' The worst feature in the story is the frequent breaking of engagements deliberately and solemnly entered into. A convention with the Boers, made nearly thirty years ago, pledged us to treat the Orange River as the boundary between British territory and that of the Free State and the Transvaal. About eighteen years later the land with which we had bound ourselves not to interfere was found to contain diamond mines of unknown richness. The promises made to the Boers were without hesitation broken, and broken in a fashion so disgraceful as to make it impossible to excuse the Government on any plea except that of ignorance. In Mr. Froude's words, 'A case was got up to show that the land where the diamonds had been found did not belong to the Dutch at all, but belonged to a native chief.' No sooner was the land wrested from the Transvaal State than this chief vanished. It appeared,' says Mr. Froude, that we had cracked the nut, kept the kernel, and given Waterboer the shell. He was away somewhere on a slip of wilderness which he had been allowed for himself and his tribe. We have heard much lately,' he adds, about treaties and the faith of treaties. In modern European history no treaty has ever been broken with more deliberate shamelessness than the treaty of Aliwal was broken by us when we annexed the Diamond Fields.' As a source of difficulties multiplying and extending on all sides, this crime or blunder has been to us a very hydra. The government of the Diamond Mines was a dangerous post. The two Dutch states on either side regarded it with angry eyes; and from the Cape Parliament no help was to be looked for. But the mines must be defended, and the only alternative was to employ natives who at the end of their term of service should be allowed to carry home the weapons with which they were furnished. Thus, in spite of the protests and opposition of the Dutch population, Kafirs, Zulus, and

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Two Lectures on South Africa, delivered before the Philosophical Institute,

Basutos were abundantly supplied with arms of precision; and in this fact English and Dutch colonists alike saw a standing menace. In Natal the fear of native risings reached a pitch which rendered panic on the slightest alarm inevitable. The storm broke on the head of Langalibalele. The young men belonging to this chief had, like the rest, earned their weapons at the Diamond Mines. The Natal magistrates insisted that they should bring the firearms to be registered, and thought that they had settled the business cleverly by keeping those which were brought. The supply was naturally soon stopped, and Langalibalele declined to obey the summons for his own appearance. He had no guarantee for his safety; and simply because he would not come, and for no other reason, the Governor headed the Colonial army in person, and fire and sword were carried through the whole district.' Langalibalele was not an independent chief, and the colonists thought that by way of punishing him for an offence which he had never committed, or, so far as appears, had thought of committing, they were dealing him no harsh measure in trying him as a traitor and sentencing him to lifelong imprisonment.

'Here,' Mr. Froude remarks, 'the matter might have rested had it not been for the courage and honourable feeling of one man. To the disgraceful unanimity of Natal sentiment a single exception alone was found. . . . . It was no light matter to stand alone against an infuriated population, and tell them to their faces that they had been cowards and brutes; yet this Bishop Colenso dared to do. He not only spoke the truth in South Africa; he was determined that it should be known in England. He collected evidence: he printed it and sent it home; he followed it himself, amidst the curses of his colonial fellow-countrymen, to carry his complaint before the Imperial Government.'

The Bishop of Natal has come forward now to do the same work of truth and justice for the unfortunate chief who has been smitten down, whose lands have been ravaged, and whose people have been slaughtered, to suit the schemes of Sir Bartle Frere-schemes which have been disapproved and censured by the Colonial Secretary, but which, like those of the Indian Viceroy, have their authoritative sanction from a higher quarter. It is of vital importance that the British nation should know whether this chief, for whose equitable treatment they are responsible, has been dealt with righteously or iniquitously; and the unwearied patience and unfailing exactness with which the Bishop of Natal sifted, in the case of Langalibalele, details of facts misrepresented, distorted, and falsified by blind and unreasoning terror, furnish a strong presumption that in the case of Cetshwayo he has exercised the same judicial care and impartiality. That the quarrel arose from calculations of British interests, which the present Government are never tired of parading, no one probably doubts or denies. It may have grown out of the change of policy rendered necessary by the annexation of the Trans

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