absurd even for the intellect that forms the court of Victoria. How dare a partial old woman, wearing on her brow an absurd circle of gold, imagine that she confers distinction upon a Ruskin or a Browning by pinning a tawdry bit of tinsel to his breast? Technical Education. Looking at the educational statistics of Britain and Germany, we are struck by the immense difference between the amount of technical education given in the one and that given in the other. In Germany they seek to make good workmen, in Britain they seek to make nothing in particular. It is only the inherent vigorous and earnest purpose of our British workmen that keeps us from taking a back-place in manufacture. But this cannot last. We must have technical education if we do not wish to be driven from every market. The fact is that in Britain we give everything to those who do nothing, and nothing to those who do everything, Wales and Her Members. Among the rank and file of the Liberal party in Wales the greatest dissatisfaction exists with the Welsh Members of Parliament. The Welsh people are intensely Radical; they have to maintain an alien Church and a band of grasping landlords, and yet no determined effort has been made by their members to obtain redress from Parliament. At the last General Election it was difficult in some constituencies to get many of the new electors to the poll owing to the disgust felt at the inactivity of the men they had cheerfully supported a year before. It is significant that at political meetings in Wales the name of Michael Davitt is received with loud cheers. Buckingham Palace. The suggestion that Buckingham Palace should be used for the Imperial Institute leads to the idea that the building might be used for some better public purpose. The site is worth at least £70,000 per annum, the rent of the building, at an ordinary estimate, would be some thousands a year, and we are told that it is crammed in every quarter with pictures, valuable china, and other objects of art which belong to the nation. Thus, the value of the whole property cannot be less than one hundred thousand per annum, from which the public derive no benefit. If the Queen visits the Palace four times a year, which would be an exaggerated estimate, the cost amounts to twenty-five thousand pounds a visit. Religious Inequality. The Forest of Dean affords an illustration of the unjust manner in which property is taken from the people and given to the Episcopal Church. Previous to 1829 the Commissioners of Woods and Forests had no power to make grants of land as sites for churches, but in that year an Act was passed for the Forest of Dean enabling them to give five acres of land in each case, and to take from the Consolidated Fund a sufficient amount to raise the income of three country churches to £150 a year each and to invest money for repairs. If a working man requires a cottage, or the people require a chapel or a school, the land is charged from £240 to £320 per acre. Sites for Board Schools are charged at these rates, but for an Established Church and National Schools the Commissioners can and would grant a site of five acres, free of charge. Thus is religious inequality maintained, while we are constantly told that the Established Church is supported out of its own property. Wanted-a Prince. The vacancy caused by the removal of Prince Alexander of Battenberg from the throne of Bulgaria seems difficult to fill. Several eligible candidates have been applied to, but they all with one accord have made excuse. There is a course still open to the bereaved nation, which we would recommend them to adopt. Let them advertise in the DEMOCRAT for a prince, offering a salary of a thousand a year, and many better men than the House of Battenberg ever produced-or is ever likely to produce--will proffer their services-men whose services would be of real value to the nation. There is always a Nemesis Austria and Prussia took their share of the spoil. A free nation, a noble people, were handed over to utter and fearful serfdom. It was a deed sufficient to make men believe that God, engrossed with the multitude of other worlds, had handed this one over to the powers of darkness. Since then the Poles have formed one sentence an idea very prevalent among those Last century, when Poland was partitioned, who only think that they think. He says— this wise man of Blackwood-"We cannot fence out evil by Act of Parliament any more than we can fence out disease and death." Now, it is somewhat disheartening towards the close of the nineteenth century to be told, even and death by Act of Parliament. all our sanitary legislation in vain, all our draining and building, our measuring and cleansing Go, Blackwood, and tell that to the marines. the heart and brain of anarchism in Russia. They have been the hideous nightmare of the throne. And now that Austria and Germany are vexed with perpetual fears of their vast and savage neighbour, they feel that Poland. would have meant for them comparative security. With a free Poland they would towards the East have been secure, and could have pursued the path of peaceful development. For want of it they groan under monstrous armaments, and political life is one unceasing terror. any The Lords and Home Rule. Once more the Derby windbag is refilled and the Derby bagpipe sounds. He has been boasting what the House of Lords would do with Home Rule Bill that might come before it. Lord Derby is a great politician. He left the Colonial Office amidst a general impression that five uninterrupted years of him as Colonial Secretary would have left Britain without a colony on any sea. His power of sympathising with popular movements, that he has thus conspicuously manifested, makes his opinion of peculiar value regarding the relations of the Lords and the People. My poor Lord Derby, when the people have made up their minds how, when, and where they want Home Rule thou and thy House of Lords will be borne along like foam on the top of the wave. By Act of Parliament. Blackwood for December contains an article on "Home Rule for Scotland" that is poor, even when judged by the ordinary standard of Blackwood's political writings. But the sage who wrote it is a sententious sage, and he expresses in in Blackwood, that we cannot fence out disease What! Is Salisbury's Phrases. Lord Salisbury is a "master of gibes and sneers," as Disraeli truthfully and feelingly stated, but he usually applies his language to the wrong side. For instance, he speaks of the Irish "Plan of Campaign " as "organised embezzlement" which is an exact description of the land system which the plan of campaign is designed to modify. He speaks of "confidence between man and man "" as the foundation of "prosperity, industry, and progress." Very true, but what confidence can there be between man and man when the national rulers abuse their trust to create privileges for themselves, vote the land of the people into their own title-deeds, and impose on industry burdens which it is impossible for it to bear. Again, he says that the Conservative party are "resisting doctrines that would be fatal to the development of industry, of wealth, and of well-being in any community of mankind." This is exactly what land restorers are doing. Experience shows, what sound theory proves, that private property in land is "fatal to the well-being of any community of mankind." Does anyone imagine that we can go on paying ground-rents which are constantly increased, so that the people become more and more crowded and starved, and as the people get poorer and poorer the landlords get richer and richer? With such a system it is only a question of time; the downfall of the people subjected to it is certain, and unless the system is changed both rich and poor must be involved in one common ruin, such as that by which where nobly endowed scholars dream away a ancient nations were overtaken. Senseless Adulation. Nothing has tended more to the weakening of the Liberal party than the habit of offering profound homage to Mr. Gladstone, which seems to be expected of every speaker who addresses an audience from a Liberal platform. It must be excessively distasteful to Mr. Gladstone himself. He does not shut his eyes to the fact that he and his party have made the greatest tactical blunder of modern times. Whatever object he had in view there would have been no use in breaking up the last Parliament which, from a Radical standpoint, was the best Parliament we ever had. Mr. Gladstone admitted that his Irish measures were prepared under the greatest pressure to which he had ever been subjected, and that he made unsuccessful concessions to powerful interests, and yet his adulators insist upon praising his mistakes and compel him to hark back to plans which he desired to abandon. There is no indisposition to credit Mr. Gladstone with the magnificent services which he has rendered to Liberalism in the past, but to praise his recent blunders is to turn the whole business into burlesque. Owen's College. The story has, within the last few months, been ably told of how Owen's College, Manchester, rose to its present size and usefulness. Suffice it to say that this midland university, with its vast influences to improve our arts and manufactures, to carry knowledge into the market and the workshop, to bring all classes of men and women together upon the broad and universal platform of culture, had a hard and heroic struggle, and that those who fought the battle often despaired of the victory. Now, is it not hard that education should have to fight so many bitter battles when education is endowed in this country as it is endowed nowhere else? While education is struggling and starving through the country, Oxford and Cambridge are the haunts of learned idleness life of finical uselessness. These universities have lost their high traditions, have grown fat in ease, are plethoric, and need to regain their vigour to have a half of their endowments employed otherwise and elsewhere. Conservatives are not Radicals. Lord Salisbury has issued from his hermitage, and has informed the world of this startling fact. There are to be no Liberal measures, no yielding to the wishes of the people, no efforts to relieve the terrific woes under which the nation groans. The Conservatives have donned the Radical red, but they are Conservatives still. Labouchere in Scotland. A Scotch correspondent writes:-"Mr. Labouchere has become one of the realist powers in our new politics. We do not call him an orator. He has no power of building mountainous and cloud-capped sentences up, at which the tired intellect strains and struggles in vain. But he has that which the orators have not, he can be read, whether he speaks for two minutes or two hours. He is more witty than any other politician of the day, and his speeches contain more sound sense and more practical applications than could be gathered from a whole ordinary platform. The audiences feel that before they heard him they have been listening to the sham politics of sham politicians. The naked reality of all he says, the calling of a fool a fool, and a knave a knave, is terrible to many simple souls. When they hear or read him first they think that such a man is the sign of the world's ending Becoming more familiar with his witty truthfulness they think that this does not so much matter if the old bad world makes way for one new and better." But Mr. Labouchere is far from being a sound Radical, or he would not have supported the Irish Bills. Tennyson. We carefully separate Alfred Tennyson the poet from Lord Tennyson the politician. The first we love and honour as the source of pleasure-pure, sweet, and unfading--a poet than whom none ever wrote with a gentler and nobler pen. As a politician we esteem him capable of talking nonsense more eloquently than any other man now extant. The new Democracy is hateful to him, but then his knowledge of it is as accurate as the geographical details of the Baron Munchausen or Sir John Mandeville. Thus we have read his latest volume with great poetic pleasure and a little political scorn. He complains that the Democracy is shoving the best aside to make room for the worst. By the best he means the aristocracy, by the worst the elect of the people. Of course the eagle eye of Lord Tennyson for a weeping muse does not pause to mark such facts as that while Britain has been governed by an almost unbroken line of royal blackguards America has often been ruled by gentlemen as blameless and as lofty in thought and act as Tennyson's own idyllic hero. Such facts do not naturally occur to a poet laurate. A Novel Difficulty. Was ever nation plagued as is Democratic America It has so much public money that it does not know what to do with it. While other countries with their kings, and armies, and unmitigated aristocracy have to witness the awful growth of a crushing debt, the problem before America, the problem that is puzzling her statesmen and dividing her people, is the enormous surplus that is left over after all the purposes of state have been liberally fulfilled. More money coming in than what is going out, and the poor politicians of the United States, who lack the kind assistance of that great spending department an aristocracy puzzling their intellects to know how to avoid that dreadful doom of wicked nations-a huge and growing national treasure! We are not so troubled; we have no growing national treasure to vex us; we have the glorious privilege of being poor. For this we thank our old nobility, bless 'em! Science Preaching Democracy. Common people, beware! Do not allow your honest blood to mingle with the aristocratic fluid, let not your daughters intermarry with men of rank and title. Unerring science has of late been preaching a Democratic sermon, and it tells us how corrupt and feeble is the breed of aristocracy. It has an unfailing tendency to lunacy and disease. Only its mixture from time to time with common blood, with the blood of the working people, prevents it from degenerating into a race of monsters that physicians would need to smother at their birth. Let honest people then beware of the blood taint of those who are of Norman lineage. Christianity and Aristocracy. It is a startling fact that Esoteric Buddhism is making more progress among Christians than Christianity is making among Hindoos. The reason lies in the defilement of Christianity with the aristocratic idea. Our missionaries are "superior persons." They are too far in advance of Paul to make themselves all things to all men. In philosophic attainments and intellectual acuteness they are often the inferiors by far of those whom they regard as "poor benighted heathens." In short, they carry into the evangelization of India the same spirit that the House of Lords carries into British politics. Men preaching to children could hardly assume a higher standpoint. We regret that it is left to a secular paper to point out this notorious and deplorable fact, but the religious papers are so busy about subscriptions that they have no time to see how the subscriptions are spent. Railways. A writer in the Fortnightly once more contends that railways should not be held as private property, but should be held by the State to develop the resources of the State. This view is coming to be very prevalent among business men. They see that continental countries by their cheaper railways overcome the natural advantages of Britain. It is cheaper to send goods from Hamburg to Berlin than from Liverpool to Manchester. One cause of this is found in the enormous prices that, in this country, have been paid for ground values. When railways were made the landlords reaped a magnificent profit, and they have been reaping a magnificent profit every day since. The value of the railways. does not nearly express the amount that railways have added to their property. A very moderate tax put fifty year ago on the increment caused by railways on land values would by this time have paid off our National Debt, and enabled us to run our railways at merely a nominal charge. This only the Chartists saw, and if then we had followed their advice, to-day a nation, twice as we would have been, as prosperous as we are. We never could understand why a brewer was considered, if not quite, almost aristocratic. But when it comes to a publican giving himself airs, the thing is a roaring farce. In Sydney, N.S.W., a respectable troupe of coloured gentlemen went a singing to get money for some religious purpose, which is quite as good a way of getting money as any other. But the hotel keepers of that great city refused to receive coloured people into their hotels. They would not lower themselves by "waiting on niggers." An incident of that kind justifies the wildest temperance oratory that was ever launched against "the trade.” Poor G. Barnet Smith. He has written a book about the Queen. And he tells us at the beginning how he is going to write it. He doesn't believe in the soft sawder nonsense, doesn't B. Smith. We are to get something artistic from his classic pen, and the dark touches are to be thrown in to relieve the monotony of angel tints. That being so, we searched microscopically for the shading. We searched in vain. It is all angel tints, and except Smith is going to publish the shading in a separate volume we fail to see how he carries out his design. Even the case of poor, wronged Flora Hastings is put down to the blundering of Melbourne! Such books do the Queen harm for they create a revulsion of public feeling. Smith's book should have been called a "Study in Butterine of Queen Victoria." Under the Gilchrist Trust, lectures have in places been delivered to the people. But one of the best lectures is that read to us all when we are told whence Dr. Gilchrist's fortune came and how it grew. In 1801 he invested £17 10s. in Australian land. A few years ago his trustees realised that property for £70,000. Now, Dr. Gilchrist was a good and a great man, and this money was spent in the doing of incalculable good. But in Australian land how many men have made, in the same way, even more money who were not great and were very far from good, and in whose hands it has sometimes done incalculable ill. Happily, Australia is waking up. :0: CHAIN up the wolves and tigers of mankind. Cowper. THE facetious Thomas Hood, passing through a dirty locality, said it gave him the slumbago. WHAT you leave at your death, let it be without controversy, else the lawyers will be your heirs. Ir is singular to observe how much is indicated the rainbow of peace, or the bended bow of disby the eyebrow. Some one has called the eyebrow cord. A SCOTTISH clergyman recently prayed that "all thieves, landlords, and publicans might be brought to see the error of their ways." THE French crown jewels have been sold. Why not sell the jewels of the British erown? Even if we must have a king, why must that king perch an idiotic toy on the top of his head? Such gauds Pokey Wanky Wum, who with a pair of boots and bring the British monarch to the level of Hokey an old hat thrills his courtiers to loyal awe. Here is a quotation from a list of goods "poinded" for rent due "at the instance of the Hon. Lord Macdonald": |