From The Leisure Hour. and a number of firms have offices and agencies in all the seaports. Under the system of cultivation, the planters reserving a third of the produce and handing two-thirds to the government, there is room for a large amount of compulsory service — little different from slavery, at least in the districts requiring field labor for coffee and other produce. THIS magnificent island, once in the possession of England, but now the property of the Dutch, is nearly the size of Great Britain, and has a population about half as great. But out of the eighteen million scarcely thirty thousand are Europeans. The bulk of the people are Javanese of the Malay race, with about two hundred thousand Somabaya is the principal place of Chinese, and of Arabs, Hindoos, and export for sugar, and there are large other races little more than twenty-five ship-building docks there, besides a thousand. A large part of the island is great floating dock, a naval arsenal, and uncultivated, with mountains, forests, extensive forts and batteries to protect swamps, and great volcanic tracts, wild the harbor. The government monopoly and desolate. But the parts under in sugar has of late years been much culture are amongst the most fertile relaxed, owing to the action of the and productive in all the tropics. Tea, Liberal party in Holland. Up till now, coffee, spices, sugar, indigo, tobacco, tin, are among the numerous products exported, and which bring great wealth both to the planters and to the trading companies of the Netherlands. the sugar-planter made his bargain with The capital, Batavia, the chief city of Dutch India, has a population of about seventy thousand, and there are several other towns, Buitenzor, Bantam, Samarang, Rembang, with large population. Banjumaas, the capital of a rich district, nominally under a native ruler, is said to have fifty thousand inhabitants. The religion of the natives is Mohammedan mostly, but there are near the seaport of Cheribon, has a popstill many heathen throughout the isl-ulation of about forty thousand natives and, and the Christianity of the Dutch on it, and they furnish the necessary is not of a very decided or aggressive kind. Batavia has an English Church and chaplain, and other Europeans have chapels and ministers according to their creed. cultivation for the estate, keep the roads and bridges in repair, and for this they receive no less than four-fifths of the whole crop, the remaining fifth going to the proprietor. There is much to Batavia not being healthy at most interest a traveller in Java in studying seasons, the residents of position resort the land tenure and cultivation system to Buitenzor, forty miles distant, where as practised by the Dutch, and the many there is better climate and magnificent striking scenes of tropical vegetation scenery on every side. The governor-will reward the lover of the beautiful general has his palace here, a handsome and picturesque in nature. edifice with splendid grounds and gardens. Hotel life in Java is very luxurious to Europeans, and the mansions of the wealthy planters abound in every comfort. There is a large trade carried on with America as well as Europe, The flourishing condition of Singapore must have considerable effect on the prosperity of the Javanese ports, but the wealth of the island is great, and the Dutch are justly proud of their possessions in the East, Fifth Series, Volume LXXXII. } No. 2553.- June 3, 1893. { From Beginning CONTENTS. I. HIPPOLYTE TAINE. By Gabriel Monod,. Contemporary Review, III. THE COUNCILS OF A NATION, IV. THE FINANCIAL CAUSES OF THE FRENCH V. OUR ARCTIC HEROES, Chambers' Journal, Nineteenth Century, Macmillan's Magazine, Woman, Cornhill Magazine, VI. MY PUPILS IN THE Great Karroo, VII. A JEWISH WEDDING, 578 640 TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. A DREAM OF OUR BIRTH. EACH man, before he takes his mortal birth Ere yet upon him rises life's sad sun Dwells in the Eden of a perfect earth, Where living unpolluted waters run : Thoughtless of sin, and ignorant of sorrow, He passes peacefully from morn to morrow. There, as on earth, the measured seasons roll, With days of innocence and nights of rest. Haply such labors as delight the soul, With fruit that neither moth nor worm molest, Are there the sinless spirits' recreation, Blest with contentment in a lowly station. Sealed to their vision is the Book where lie The countless mysteries of good and ill; They live forever in the Father's eye, And love unquestioning his ways and will. No problem agitates their reason's powers, As that of life and death perplexes ours. We cannot say their knowledge is so high: They are contented with the light of heaven, Nor seek to know the infinitudes that lie Beyond the sphere which to their sight is given, Better and wiser in this pure condition Than we with all our restless mad ambition. There are the fairest of this earth's delights Its pride of forests and its wealth of sea Spread out before their eager happy sights, Without the sully of mortality. No sign of death is there forever telling That they have fallen from a loftier dwelling. Ah, with how sudden and how deep a woe There comes that death to them which we call birth!— That leaving of their paradise to go From tearless Eden to distressful earth; How loth they leave, with glances backward turning To where the angel stands with symbol burning. Poor exiles from a dear delightful home, The stainless fields of innocence and bliss, Whose light must vanish from them as they roam Through tangled paths of such a world as this! As from the visions of a quiet sleeping That ends in nightmare, they awaken weeping. Weeping- and yet they know not why they weep, For earth is very fair, and God is kind; And as we oft, on rising from our sleep, Lose memory of the dreams we leave be hind, So do these sons of God and heirs of glory Lose all remembrance of their earlier story. And yet the dreams have not deserted quite; Some gleams of mystic memory linger still, That make us vaguely struggle for a light To clear the vapors that elude our will. Sometimes a sudden flash, as quickly fleeing, Points through the shadows to a former being. Sometimes a visitant with pinions bright Pierces the cloud of misery and sin; Sometimes in solitude of silent night The doors are opened, and we enter in ; Sometimes we hear a sound of distant singing, Like bells of buried cities strangely ringing. Do there not come strange voices from the sea, Callings and whispers from the winter wind, That strike upon the ear familiarly, And waken ghostly echoes through the mind? Do not the forests from their green depths call us, And in their sylvan solitudes enthral us? Like cuckoo-calls across a land of flowers, That grow the fainter as the year grows late, So through our life, but most in earlier hours, We bear some instincts of a former state; But when the Present's battle-cries awake us, These softer whispers of the Past forsake us. Born to a land of sin and strife and woe, Where good and evil blindedly embraceWe win the passports that shall let us go From stress of travail to a nobler place; Knowing the certain goal of our endeavor Must be to rise and live with God forever. ARTHUR L. SALMON. Blackwood's Magazine. From The Contemporary Review. BY GABRIEL MONOD. mistress, and scientific truth for his end and aim; each strove to hasten the time when a scientific conception of FRANCE is discrowned. A little the universe should take the place of while ago it was her privilege to pos- the theological conception; but while sess two of those encyclopædic minds M. Taine believed it possible, without which contain in themselves the whole ever venturing beyond the narrow limits knowledge of their time, which sum up of acquired and demonstrable fact, to all its tendencies, intellectual and moral, lay the foundations of a definite system, and look out upon nature and history M. Renan delighted himself with the from an elevation which enables them visionary glimpses of sentiment and to obtain something like a bird's-eye reverie into the domain of the uncerview of the universe. Within five tain, the unknown, and even the unmonths these two men, so unlike in knowable, and loved to throw fresh personal character and in the qualities doubt upon established conclusions, of their work and thought (and there- and to warn other people against a fore all the more, the two of them, an fallacious intellectual security. Moreincarnation of the diverse aptitudes of their race and country), these two, universally recognized as the most authentic exponents and the most authoritative teachers of the generation which flourished between 1850 and 1880, have been taken from us in the plenitude of their powers, M. Renan in October, at the age of sixty-nine, and M. Taine in March, at the age of sixty-four. I will not indulge in the easy and deceptive pastime of drawing a parallel between them, nor weary the reader with a catalogue of forced and illusory likenesses and contrasts in order to pass a judgment on their relative merits as idle as it would be impertinent. I will only point out in passing that both these men-true children of our democratic modern society-rose, by dint of their own genius and efforts, from a position of humble obscurity to fame and honor; that each (like so many of the great writers of this century-like Chateaubriand, like Victor Hugo, like Lamartine) lost his father in early life, and was brought up by a mother whom he tenderly loved; and that, apart from the circumstances which drove the one from his seminary and the other from the public schools, the life of each was unmarked by any adventure other than the adventures of the intellect, and was devoted without interruption to literary or professorial labors, lightened by the simple pleasures of the fireside or the circle of friends. Each took science for his over, the action of Renan had something contradictory about it. He was . claimed by thinkers of the most opposite tendencies. He paved the way, to some extent, for the momentary reaction we see around us against the positive and scientific temper of recent times. In his irony, as in his flights of fancy and of hope, he seems to soar above his time and above his own work. M. Taine's work, on the other hand, while more limited in range, has a solid unity and a rigid logical consistency; and it is in strict relation with the time in which he lived, at once acting powerfully upon it, and giving it its fullest and most complete expression. I. TAINE was the theorist and the philosopher of that scientific movement which in France was the successor of the romantic movement. The romantic movement itself— the work of the generation of 1820-1850 — had been a reaction against the hollow, conventional, and sterile art and thought of the age which preceded it. To the narrow and rigid rules of the classical school of the decadence it opposed the broad principle of the freedom of art; for the servile imitation of antiquity it substituted the discovery of new fountains of inspiration in the works of the great masters of all times and countries; while the dull uniformities of a mechanical style gave place to the varying caprices of individual taste, and the seized upon in the concrete reality, that is to say, scientific truth. This tendency of the time was so general, so profound, so truly organic, that it characterizes, consciously or unconsciously, every form of intellectual production. We note its presence no less in the paintings of Meissonier, of Millet, of Bastien Lepage, and the open-air painters than in the plays of Augier, no less in the poetry of Leconte de Lisle, or Hérédia, or Sully-Prudhomme than in the historical works of Renan or of Fustel de Coulanges, no less in the novels of Flaubert, Zola, or Maupassant than in the writings of philosophers like Taine himself. harrowness of a tame and timid ideol- | shape for himself a vague and purely ogy to the broad horizons of a spiritual subjective ideal, it held fast to one comeclecticism which found room and rec- mon principle of life and art, the search ognition for all the great doctrines that for truth-truth, not as an abstract in their turn have swayed and capti-intellectual idea, subjective and arbivated the minds of men, and which trary, not as one of those visions of the even professed to reconcile philosophy imagination which people dignify with with religion. But, brilliant as was the name of truth, but truth objective this epoch of our intellectual history, and demonstrable, sought for and with its men of genius and its works of art-much as it did for the emancipation of taste and thought, and much as it gave to both art and literature of life and color and newness, it still fell short of fulfilling the hopes it had inspired. It was mistaken in asserting as a basal principle of art that liberty which is only one of its essential conditions. With its superficial eclecticism, its confused syncretism, it was lacking in unity of action, in definiteness of aim, in organic principle. It had replaced conventions by new conventions, the antiquated rhetoric of the classic writers by a rhetoric which from the first day seemed also faded; it had fallen, in its turn, into vague declamation and The movement had had illustrious noisy commonplace; and it had made precursors; Héricault and Stendhal, the fatal mistake of supposing that ef- Balzac, Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve, and forts of imagination and flights of fancy Auguste Comte; and others besides could take the place of serious study these, had anticipated it. But it was and acquired knowledge, and that the not till after 1850 that scientific realism secret things of history and the human became the organic principle of intelheart could be got at by guess-work and | lectual life in France. By that time it delineated with a clever sweep of the pervaded everything. Alike in poetry brush. Its philosophy, at the same and in the plastic arts we find the same time, had fallen into utter helplessness, while obstinately refusing the fresh impulsion of the spirit of research which was even then creating a new science of nature and of man, and relaying the experimental bases of psychology. striving after technical accuracy, the same effort to come to closer terms with nature, to adhere more strictly to the historic verity. The novelists, whether they are describing the present or reanimating the past, become scrupulous in their observation of life and The generation which came to its full manners, and exacting in their demand age about 1850, or within some twenty for positive evidence. Flaubert emyears after, while it retained to a great ploys the same methods in depicting extent the legacy of the romantic school | the manners of a Norman village as in its rejection of the antiquated rules describing those of the Carthaginians of the classicists, its assertion of the freedom of art, and its hunger for life, and color, and variety-nevertheless took a very distinct departure of its own. Instead of leaving an open field for the play of individual sentiment or imagination, and allowing every one to during the war of the Mercenaries. Bourget analyzes the characters in a novel with the precision of a professional psychologist; and Zola goes the length of introducing physiology and pathology. The poetry of Hérédia and Leconte de Lisle is steeped in erudition, |