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for letter-carriers, and may be inspected [pared with other Religions." This, in-
on the editorial premises. The Moonlight deed, is one of the favourite topics of the
lectures schoolboys on the use of gymnas-native press, and missionaries could hard-
tics, for want of which, it says, "some of ly do better than include the Hindoo jour-
them are really skeletons, and present a nals in their curriculum of study. A
ghostly appearance." An aged gentleman shock might perhaps be given to some of
who is about to marry a young girl, "fresh their stereotyped notions about the con-
with divine bloom," is described as a "de- version of India. Native Opinion, a very
crepit old buffoon," and it adds that "the well-written paper, expresses the busy,
only remedy for this widespread evil is to commercial spirit of Bombay. The Moon-
hold it up to the scorn and derision of the light, its dreamy name notwithstanding, is
world." The Hindoo press is forming pub- highly practical. Nothing, for example,
lic opinion, and it has many mutually re- could exceed the conscientious painstaking
pellant classes to preach to-young India, of the recent analysis and summary of
fresh from college, and inclined to vaunt questions on the land revenue which it had
its smattering of learning; old India, stub-prepared for the consideration of any pos-
bornly adhering by the old paths; and the sible native delegate to the Finance Com-
foreigner within the gate. Some of its mittee sitting in London. Hasty work,
bitterest utterances are directed against however, would be inexcusable in the case
certain evil effects of contact with this su- of native journalists. The publications
perior race-notably that of intemper- are weekly. The Bengali and Native Opin-
ance. The Bengali, objecting that a rise in ion appear on Sundays; the Patriot and
the tariff would interfere with "John Moonlight on Monday, and the Mitrodaya
Bull's drunken pastimes," writes:
on Friday.

The native press of India has sometimes The missionary and the brandy-bottle are held been accused of disloyalty, and it certainly to be the pioneers of a certain kind of civilisa-writes with a freedom and boldness untion, and our country has had enough of both dreamed of ten years ago. It indeed enthese precious commodities. The desire to be like our betters is so strongly implanted in the joys far more liberty than in these days human mind that we feel almost inclined to has fallen to the lot of the French press. Overlook the beastly conduct of several of our If there is any disloyalty, however, it is educated countrymen, on whom wine and spirits rather hinted than expressed. The Patriot have been fatal poisons. asserts that the importance of England to India is axiomatic." In its loftier style Not unfrequently, however, the quiet sar- the new Viceroy is described as "he to casm and delicate side-hits of the native whom the people look up as to their earthjournalist contrast instructively with the ly Providence under the Queen's benign coarse hammer-strokes of his Anglo-Indi- sway." Native Opinion declares that "all an brethren. Hindoo journalists write in classes of the natives of India pray with the best English of their "masters." Of one heart that the sun of the British raj the fact that the writers are not English- may continue to shine on their land." men the reader is reminded only by the These journals profess to be fully alive to Occasional introduction of an hyperbole the great blessings of British rule -sefull of Oriental extravagance; or, more curity of life and property, and, on the rarely, by such expressions as "too in- whole, impartial justice. But throughout fant," or "evolving an idea from the bow- this pleasant harmony there runs a plainels of his own consciousness." For style, tive discord significant of the unrest of variety, and scope of subjects, for culture national aspirations, and of a conviction and general ability, the Hindoo Patriot un- that "the two civilisations of England and questionably stands first. It would be India will never coalesce." Hindoo jourdifficult to overpraise the calmness, pa- nalists are quite candid on the point. tient good-nature, and thoroughness with" Western science" and "the British Raj' which it discusses matters in which na- are valuable, they admit, as stepping-stones tive interests are vitally concerned. towards that grand result of the future Next comes the Bengali, with its occa- when, in the words of the Bengali, India sionally characteristic outbursts of Ori- shall have "elbowed her way to a place ental English, and its special leaning among the nations." This dream of final towards philosophic subjects especially emancipation from the "beneficent pupilthe system of Auguste Comte. Its lively age " of the conqueror determines the little contemporary, the Mitrodaya, has a tone assumed by the native press on every like tendency, and has lately been pub-prominent question of the day admislishing articles on Christianity as Com- sion to the public service, education, and

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the various grievances that may be summed It ends by likening India to "a poor pa up in the word over-legislation. It is also tient" whose case is one of "negative revealed in such minor points as the Re- treatment, active treatment having brought former's suggestion of national biographies, the patient to this pass this miserable to be written by natives instead of by and pitiable pass." This "curse of overEnglishmen, and to be substituted for the legislation " is attributed to the Englishborrowed school-jargon about Cromwell man's want of sympathy with, or ignoand Pyrrhus. It also explains the pecu- rance of, native character. "Want of symliarly mournful tone of such productions pathy," "want of understanding," this is as the Moonlight's mourning for the Rajah the great grievance of the native press, the of Kolapore; a chief who had not been special charge which the natives bring "annexed," or his death would not perhaps against "our masters," for whose valuable have so "filled our heart with inexpressi- qualities they profess the most genuine adble sadness." We have no space to dwell miration, and than whom, they are ever on the native view of the questions re- eager to acknowledge, no better masters ferred to above; but it may perhaps be are possible. It would be curious to inworth while to show what is thought of quire how far, if at all, this want of "sym"the curse of over-legislation." In an ar- pathy" is owing to the system of open ticle headed "Utopia," in the Bengali of competition; but it may stir the blood of May 4, the Government is described as old Anglo-Indians to hear the members of working the legislative mill with a rapid- the Company Bahadoor" described as ity hitherto unparalleled in the history of "the great souls." As it is, a "note" of subthe world." Mr. Campbell is a "marvel- missive, despairing protest against the cold lous man with a brain like the witches' dead weight of unintelligence is present in cauldron, boiling and fermenting for ever, almost every column of every fresh numand chimeras instead of witches dancing ber of a Hindoo journal, and can escape no around it." The article thus concludes: reader but a dull one. It may be that Manchester aspect of English character has what may be generally described as the been too exclusively presented to native contemplation. The traditional Manchester man, with his ears "stuffed with his cotton," and his vulgar ethics of money-making, is to the Oriental the most lovely phenomenon in creation; and he is especially ridiculous when, with his eye on his ledger, he talks philanthropically of 'England's sacred mission in India." On this point, as on others, the native press is a faithful reflex of the native feeling. The Patriot preaches against that Manchesterism which means by activity, restlessness; by progress, railways, cotton, and the income-tax. We are assured that, in spite of our railway sleepers, telegraph wires, and steam engines, we are as remote from India as ever, and that we have yet to accomplish her "moral conquest." A study of Hindoo journalism would be useful and interesting in many ways. Meanwhile what At last there is a ray of hope. Within the it behoves the "dominant race to considlast two months a new statesman of the most er most attentively is the assertion that to promising antecedents has landed in the capital, Englishmen native life is as a sealed, book, and assumed the helm of affairs. All eyes are which they may bind, rebind, and gild acturned towards him, all picture him as the sav-cording to the newest patterns from Euiour of society and the messenger of truth rope-with, for result to themselves, a

If ever a statue be voted for the ruler (Mr. Campbell), I advise you Utopians to have it of the following description: A rider with a wheel in one hand and an arrow in the other. The arrow will be the symbol of haste, and the wheel of incessant activity, whereas the horse will be a fit representative of his hobby. In a similar strain writes the Hindoo leading journal of June 24. Ever since 1858 peace has been

bellicose, not a calm, serenely sweet beauty, but
a horrible shrew afflicted with restlessness.

Oh the Mill of Misery! it has broken down the
backbone, muddled the brain, crushed the com-
forts, annihilated the peace of the nation.
It almost looks like a pastime, the way the mill
works. But the pastime is the Master Miller's.
It has proved very near the death of the others.
What power shall stop the infernal ma-
chine even for a season?

And then it breaks into a rhapsody over
the new Viceroy :-

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From The Spectator.

PHYSICAL PREJUDICES.

prejudices which were once accepted as truths, and many of which still linger in the popular mind, defying reason and argument and even experience. Perhaps the strongest of them all, one that affects literature and influences more or less all writers of fiction, is the prujudice about strabismus, the notion that a cross-eyed man is necessarily more or less evil. The

Do tall men and men of large physique dislike and distrust little men? We have, we think, once or twice met with the traces among tall men of a feeling of that kind, quite real, though unacknowledged even by themselves, and it crops out now and again in print. Some one wrote to manufacturers of tales all affirm this, and the Times a year or two ago a letter in which he avowed that he could not in spite of his reason like little men; we saw it recently stated in a novel that little men are usually cunning and always timid, and a writer in the Liberal Review penned a week or two since an entire thesis in which the existence of a hostile feeling, a kind of resentment in tall men at the selfassertion of little men, was assumed all through, and deprecated, though not justified. This writer thought the origin of the feeling was the conceit and self-opinion of little men -a failing which of course would be more noticeable in them than in equally conceited but heavier human beings; but the dislike, if it exists, would appear more usually to take the form of a faint dread, as if little men must have a sinister mental capacity to make up for their lack of physical weight. Some such feeling must, consciously or unconsciously, have influenced the people who originally invented the old Northern legends of dwarfs and giants, in which the dwarfs are always so malicious and so clever, the giants usually so good-natured and so stupid, and have produced the very curious general impression that the great men of earth have been men of less than average stature. There is no foundation whatever in history for the idea that size of body affects the brain, for if we take Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, Wellesley, and Thiers to be little men, Moses, Charlemagne, Mohammed, Luther, Goethe, Frederic the Great, Bismarck, and dozens of others have been beyond the average either in height or bulk, and some of the greatest names have been those of men of average size. The prejudice against size may, however, have had an historic origin, civilization having first sprung up among the lighter-limbed races, who would appear to their conquerors very feeble beings very much to be dreaded for their wisdom. That is the universal feeling at this moment in Northern India among the warrior races about the Bengalees, the lightest and ablest race in Asia. The contrary idea, the dislike of little men by big ones, if it really exists, must be one of the hundred physical

it is an article of popular belief which nothing can shake, yet it is demonstrably groundless. If it were not so, we should be forced to conclude that as the affection is curable by an operation, an oculist with his fine instruments can modify his patients' moral qualities, a clear reductio ad absurdum. There are hundreds of persons in Great Britain who at one time looked two ways at once and now look straight, yet no alteration has taken place in their moral characters. The idea is, in fact, a mere prejudice arising from the notion that if a man cannot look you straight in the face he must be dishonest, a notion only true when the inability arises from a momentary operation of the mind. The dislike would extend to one-eyed men, does so indeed in some minds, but that it is usually overborne by the sense of pity for a misfortune. It is of a piece with the strong prejudice existing in some places against left-handedness, a peculiarity usually an accident or habit, and as absolutely without connection with the character as any other not strange enough to arouse in its possessor that passion of selfpity, and therefore of envy, which is the key to the malignity constantly, and in thousands of cases falsely, attributed to hunchbacks. It probably has its origin in some remote connection with the belief, once nearly universal, that the "right" was the lucky side, the one approved by the divinities, a belief still embalmed in our own habitual use of the word "sinister," which means only "left," but bears with it the impression of the old doctrine of the Augurs that the "left," was the unlucky, and therefore bad side of things, the side on which omens should not appear. The other prejudice on this subject, that left-handed men are unusually strong, is, we believe, equally ill-founded, and arises either from an observation of cases in which men have an unusual facility in using both hands as monkeys clearly have or from surprise at an unexpected method of attack, the secret, we imagine, of the success of left-handed bowling. The existence of this particular fancy is the more odd, because în popular slang a "left

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handed way" of doing things means an | villain is now usually red and with deficient awkward way of doing them, and nurses eyelashes, but formerly he was always carefully correct any tendency to the habit dark and beetle-browed, a prejudice still which, we should add, seems to be much rarer in women than in men.

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visible in those queer books, most of them extremely old, which profess to explain The existence of a dislike for any visible dreams and help fools to see their future. malformation is intelligible enough, as is If we are not mistaken, there exists at this also the attribution of bad qualities to that moment a quite definite impression that which is disliked,-e.g., the popular notion brown men are abler than fair men,.an of the innate ferocity of the dumb- - but it impression for which the only visible founis not so easy to explain the mass of latent dation is this, that brown men in England prejudices about the colour of the hair and have usually some touch of Southern, or eyes, prejudices from which we venture to Celtic, or Jewish blood, and are apt, theresay no cultivated man is entirely free. It fore, to be a little more vivacious. Quite is nearly impossible to believe that any half the men now at the head of affairs in relation can exist between character and England are very fair men, and one, certhe colour of the hair or eyes, yet thou- tainly not inferior in mere intellectual sands of otherwise intelligent persons are force to any of them, has always had white influenced by such notions in their daily hair; while of the four greatest poets, life. Every conceivable variety of charac- only one can be called dark, and he is not ter exists among the peoples of Southern raven-haired. There are no statistics to Asia, including India, yet it may be said, quote, of course, but the probability is speaking broadly, and allowing for disease, that the majority of English great men, or albinoism, or other accidental peculiar-like the majority of the population, have ity, all hair and all eyes among those tens been brown-haired, with eyes of some of millions are of one and the same colour. shade of grey,-though the fancy that inBoth, though varying in every other re- duces novelists to invest all their soldiers spect, are always black. Yet in spite of with keen grey eyes is a fallacy, most of this and of every-day experience English- the great soldiers having been brown or men do constantly associate colour in hair black-eyed men. There can be no more and eyes with moral qualities and mental reality in the queer prejudice of most capacities, and this from mere prejudice, brown men and women that blonde wowithout attempting to formulate a theory. men are "shallow-hearted," for if it were The notions, for example, that sandy- true here it would be true in Germany, haired people are weakly deceitful, that where the ablest people believe, again red-haired people the true bright red without reason, exactly the contrary. are exceptionally malignant, especially if This particular prejudice is the more unpock-marked, and that people with steel- accountable if, as is usually believed, the blue eyes are unfeeling, are almost im- tendency of men and women is to admire movable by any amount of evidence. So and marry the type, particularly as to is the notion, consecrated in Dickens' complexion, to which they do not belong. writings, that cadaverous people 'are cruel To account for such prejudices is as diffi-they are often exceptionally gentle cult as to dissipate them, but we presume and this other, which has passed into a their original source was race-hatred, reproverb, that the special shade of grey tained after its reason had disappeared, which is condemned as green indicates and after races had become so mixed, that envious acerbity. There is not the faint- in obedience to the law of atavism, people est reason for that belief, which Shakes- of the same family, same capacities, and peare possibly entertained, though in same character will present "half-a-dozen "Troilus and Cressida he says "the different types. eagle hath not so green, so fair an eye as Paris hath," making of the colour a merit, -and which so angers Mr. Trollope that in his last novel he sings a hymn about green eyes as tokens of an affectionate nature. The whole theory is knocked on the head at once by George Eliot's re- THE Assembly will meet again very mark that people often inherit features shortly at Versailles, and the French Govwithout their orginal meaning, the phy-ernment is taking the opportunity to gauge sique having been transmitted but not the public opinion as to the course which character, and by the evident mutability ought to be taken by the Assembly and of popular impressions in the matter. A the Government when the Session begins.

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From The Saturday Review. CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGES IN FRANCE.

1

The recent elections have greatly altered, vising a system by which there shall be a
the position of parties, for it may now be gradual transition from the old to the new,
assumed, as the basis of all discussion, that instead of a violent crisis and a general
the present Assembly does not represent chaos of wild views and discordant am-
the country. If there were a general bitions. No one can say that the object
election the Republican party would not he is aiming at is not a very good one, if
only greatly increase its strength, but only he can attain it.
would probably have a large majority. There are three principal heads of con-
On the other hand, the triumph of the Re-stitutional change to which attention is
publican party, elated with success, intoler- now, under Government guidance, being
ant of its adversaries, and believing itself directed in France. These are the posi-
to have a divine right to trample every tion of the President, the creation of a
opposing faction in the dust, might easily Second Chamber, and the dissolution and
be the death of the Republic. Then, again, re-election of the Assembly. Unfortu-
if France wishes for a more Republican nately each of these topics opens out fields
Assembly, it is equally clear that she does of almost unlimited discussion, and takes
not wish to lose the services of M. Thiers; Frenchmen down into the very depths of
and therefore, even if the Monarchical par- theories of government. The question of
ties are left out of consideration, there are the position of the President is so far sim-
at least three political forces which, if pos- plified that men of all parties seem agreed
sible, must be got to work together-M. that M. Thiers should be the President.
Thiers, the Republicans who want a moder- M. Louis Blanc is stated to have suggested
ate, comprehensive, and durable Republic, that it would be advisable to do without a
and the Republicans who want the estab- President; but if one man is not to be at
lishment of a Republic after their own the head of affairs, several must be, and
peculiar type, involving the political an- France cannot look back with much satis-
nihilation of all who disagree with them. faction to the days of the Directory. As-
M. Thiers has the advantage, or the dis-suming that there is to be a President, how
advantage, of the initiative. It is he who, long is he to be in office, and what are to
if he thinks fit, can make definite propo- be his powers? A feeler was thrown out,
sals;
and from the line taken by the jour- although perhaps from no official source,
nals specially devoted to him, and from the to ascertain whether public opinion would
hints which his personal adherents let drop, sanction the. bestowal of the office on M.
it is evident that he would like to effect Thiers for life; but the notion received no
while there is yet time some arrangement support, and has been allowed to die away.
which would ensure his own position, If he is to be made President for four or
lighten the objections of Conservatives to five years, who is to appoint him? The
a permanent Republic, and yet engage the Assembly can scarcely do so, for it can
support of the more extréme Republicans hardly affect to bestow powers enduring be-
in the Assembly. If the Assembly were yond the term of its own existence, and the
dissolved now, and a strongly Republican mere attempt to exceed its powers would
Assembly returned, it would at once pro- raise the dangerous question whether, now
ceed to draw up a new Constitution after that it does not represent the country, it
its own pattern. This would lead to two ought to be the author of great constitu-
evils the Constitution would in all tional changes. Hitherto the Assembly
probability be the scheme of one single has been content with agitating the ques-
party in France, and to break it up would tion of the Vice-Presidency, so that some
be the sole object of every other party; one might be ready to take the place of
and secondly, the time and energy of the M. Thiers if a sudden calamity deprived
new Assembly would at its first start be France of his services; and the names of
absorbed in the dangerous and distracting M. Grévy, the Duke of Aumale, and the
task of Constitution-mongering. M. Thiers Duke of Audiffret-Pasquier have been put
is now apparently endeavouring to find forward according to the fancies of different
some means of preventing a mischief which political parties. The Vice-Presidency is,
might easily plunge France into anarchy however, clearly only a temporary shift,
and civil war, and the mode by which he for a Vice-President could only hold power,
hopes to effect this is by persuading the if called on to act, under the authority of
existing Assembly to make certain consti- the present Assembly, and the only im-
tutional changes, the general drift of which portance attached to his office would arise
would be to make a new Assembly work from the influence over the elections to a
mainly in a groove marked out for it by new Assembly which, as acting head of the
its predecessor. M. Thiers is, in fact, de- Government, he might possibly wield. The

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