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other items, as to all of which you shall have a proper account. When you want more, you had better draw on me, till things are settled. It shall all be done as soon as possible. It would not be comfortable for you to go away without money of your own, and I suppose you would not wish that he should pay for your journeys and things before you are married.

"Of course I made a fool of myself yesterday. I believe that I usually do. It is not any good my begging your pardon, for I don't suppose I shall ever trouble you any more. Good-bye, and God bless you.

"Your ever affectionate cousin,

"WILLIAM BELTON.

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Aylmer. He had said that she would be his sister, and she would take from him any assistance that a sister might properly take from a brother.

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She went down stairs and met Captain Aylmer in the sitting-room. He stepped up to her as soon as the door was closed, and she could at once see that he had determined to forget the unpleasantnesses of the vious evening. He stepped up to her, and gracefully taking her by one hand, and passing the other behind her waist, saluted her in a becoming and appropriate manner. She did not like it. She especially disliked it, believing in her heart of hearts that she would never become the wife of this man whom she had professed to love, — and whom she really had once loved. But she could only bear it. And, to say the truth, there was not much suffering of that kind to

be borne.

Their journey down to Yorkshire was Clara, when she had read the letter, sat very prosperous. He maintained his good down and cried, holding the bundle of notes humour throughout the day, and never in her hand. What would she do with once said a word about Will Belton. Nor them? Should she send them back? Oh did he say a word about Mrs. Askerton. no; she would do nothing to displease" Do your best to please my mother, Clara,” him, or to make him think that she was he said, as they were driving up from the angry with him. Besides, she had none of park lodges to the house. This was fair that dislike to taking his money which she enough, and she therefore promised him had felt as to receiving money from Captain that she would do her best.

WE have lost within one week two accomplished authoresses, Lady Theresa Lewis, the sister of Lord Clarendon, and Mrs. Gaskell. They were both novelists, Mrs. Gaskell the more remarkable. of the two, while Lady Theresa Lewis had done other valuable work, including Lives from the Clarendon Gallery, and quite recently edited Miss Berry's memoirs. Her novels, the Semi-Detached House and the Semi-Attached Couple, especially the former, were full of wit and lively observation. She died while on a visit to the Principal of Brazenose College, Oxford, having survived her husband only two years. Mrs. Gaskell's death was still more sudden. It took place at Alton last Sunday, while she was sitting and reading with her daughters. She had written much,

and for the most part well. Mary Barton, the first of the cotton-mill class of novels, is a tale of great power, and Cranford (probably her finest literary effort, unless her last book Wives and Daughters, surpasses it in its own line) is a study of "still life" of exquisite_workmanship. Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Miss Brontë, too, though not without grave defects, is a piece of biography not likely soon to be forgotten. We hope it may prove that Wives and Daugthers, which was to be concluded in the January number of the Cornhill, had received the final touches from its author's hand. Mrs. Gaskell had quite recently contributed several papers of true humour to the Pall Mall Gazette. — Spectator, 18th November.

2

From the Spectator, 11 Nov.

THE INSURRECTION IN JAMAICA.

We are still without precise intelligence from Jamaica, but enough is known of the condition of the island to justify us in a blank denial of the assertions that the negroes said to be in insurrection are influenced by Haytian agitators, and are themselves only too well off. They are badly off, so badly off that the island has for months been a perplexity to the Colonial Office, and that for seven weeks at least the Secretary of State has expected news of an attempted insurrection. Letters are even now in town from Jamaica in which the alarm of the local Government and the strange movements among the squadron are noticed either with ridicule or apprehension, and the few persons still keenly interested in the colony are well aware of a discontent which a trifle may have sufficed to blow into a flame. This discontent has been growing for years, and finds its ultimate root in two causes, one of which is ineradicable, except perhaps by long-continued prosperity, while the other is within the reach of Parliamentary action. The two are the increase of population and the character of the Legislative Assembly. The negroes, always prolific, as very poor races are every where apt to be, have since the emancipation multiplied with extraordinary rapidity. The climate suits them, the release from forced labour has increased the healthiness of the women, early marriage has been fostered as an antedote to the immorality customary in slave colonies, and though there is a terrible amount of licence remaining, it is not of a kind or degree to check greatly the increase of population. The pressure for subsistence becomes yearly greater, while the means of procuring it grow yearly less. Sugar, the grand staple of the export trade, cannot be cultivated to advantage without scientific appliances, that is, without capital, and capital has for years been leaving Jamaica, till only some 30,000 persons are now maintained by the ancient cultivation of the island. Other planting scarcely exists, and the negroes therefore are driven to hire little plots of ground, upon which they grow their food and some little tobacco, but scarcely anything else which can be converted into money. The island is therefore practically populated by cottiers, as poor as Irish cottiers, as dependent upon the harvest, and if it be possible still more unenlightened.

To this population, over-numerous, poverty-stricken, and ignorant, the Legislative Assembly adds a number of coloured im

migrants imported from India and used up at a frightful pace, and refuses justice, education, and a sound system of conveyance. That Assembly is elected by less than 2,500 voters in a population of 441,000, and legislates exclusively in the interest of the planters. These latter are as a body inheritors of the slaveholding ideas, and sometimes of the slaveholding morality, and they have refused all measures in the interests of the blacks, wasted half a million sterling on coolies, who die like sheep, passed a whipping Act which recalls the tone of the old Black Code, and imposed enormous duties on English imports, duties so heavy that, as was publicly stated in the Assembly the negroes were falling back upon nakedness to avoid the cost of clothing as raised by the last tariff. They could pay in kind, but they cannot in cash, and they have no means of raising more. The planters will not buy of them, the dealers do not like the half-cleaned produce which is all they as cottier cultivators can offer, and in many cases the right of eviction is used as in Bengal, to compel the tenantry to cultivate particular articles and sell them to the owner at a fixed price. Of one such case we have the details, as of others which prove that the true substitute for slavery, fair wages for fair work, has not yet entered the island imagination. The greatest grievance of all, however, is the refusal of justice. Jamaica has been organized on the country-gentleman system, the owners being the sole magistrates, and the owners are said to be unfair towards the coloured population. It does not matter much in a political point of view whether this charge is true or not. Observers like Dr. Underhill, a cool, shrewd man, whose evidence is distrusted because he is Secretary to the Baptist Mission, but who is a layman and not a negrophile, think it has a foundation, the planter even when upright being swayed by a feeling of race engrained into his very heart. Successive Governors, too, have thought it, and have pleaded for stipendiary magistrates, but the Assembly is jealous of its electors' power, and absolutely refuses to change the system. Whether however the charge is true or false, it is believed to be true, and that belief is fatal to any confidence between Governors and governed. The negro when injured will not apply to the magistrates, and when summoned accepts his sentence as a "white oppression," while all civil contracts fall hopelessly out of gear. Knowing that he has to deal with a poor employer, the negro refuses to make a binding contract, and when engaged by the day bolts,

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unless regularly paid. He cannot recover his wages by law, and therefore can and will give no credit, while the planter who wants him only for half the year is often unable to pay until the crop is in, that is, until the negro has abandoned his own crop for the uncertain chance of obtaining his employer's wages. There are no county courts available, and the negró finding no redress from the civil law, believing in none from the criminal law, ignorant by legislative defect, and self-indulgent from the absence of result to his self-restrant, falls back absolutely upon the little plot which is not his, to which he can get no lease, and which he is not permitted by the conveyancing system to buy. When that plot fails the world falls from beneath his feet, and for the past two years it has failed from drought, failed till the people were in places actually without food there is no poor law till they, among the vainest of races, leave their children without clothing, till in places they deliberated whether they, like their fathers, had not better fly to the mountains. The accidental publication of a letter from Dr. Underhill to Mr. Cardwell, which had so impressed the Secretary that he forwarded it to Governor Eyre for a report, blew the discontent into a flame, and meetings of coloured men were held, demanding higher wages, education, better representation, an end to immigration, and the exemption of raw materials from import duties. None of these demands were complied with; the Governor, though admitting the badness of the governing class, condemned the negroes, and an unlucky placard was published by authority, headed "The Queen's Advice," and containing in other words the answer which Pharach gave to the children of Israel, "Ye are idle, ye are idle." This increased the irritation to its height, and some accidental circumstance, most probably a movement anong the West Indian Regiments, who are principally liberated Africans, has, we doubt not, caused the explosion which has led to the demand for troops. It cannot be a very formidable one, for the negroes have no arms, and unless the black soldiers have joined it, it is difficult to see why they alone were not strong enough to put it down.

The first duty of the Government, it is clear, is to put down the insurrection. Whatever the evils inherent in the present system, and they are many, the violent uprising of an ignorant population is not the remedy for them, and they must if needful be reduced to order by the strong arm. That done, however, it will become the duty

of the Imperial Government to re-organize the land, if necessary by measures of revolutionary breadth. The old order of things has broken down. The Assembly, convened on a plan two hundred years old, is a nest of jobbers, and the planting class is alike by hereditary feeling and by circumstances disqualified for the possession of absolute power. If they were angels they would be disqualified by the ineradicable distrust among those they govern, begotten by two centuries of misrule, and being what they are, average Englishmen, with strong prejudices, declining capital, and the moral tone of a passed-away state of society, are entirely unable to attract the confidence of those beneath them. On the other hand, there is no class in the country to whom their power can be transferred. The mulattoes are not educated, and encourage race hatreds of their own, and the negroes must be educated before they can be trusted with the franchise. There is no iron necessity, as in the Southern States of America, for giving them power in order that they may not be trampled on, for an authority exists in the island competent to secure justice. The Queen's representative, and he alone in Jamaica, possesses at once the requisite knowledge, the needful confidence, and the indispensable freedom from class interest, and to him all power should, as in Ceylon, be temporarily confided. If Mr. Cardwell doubts as to the condition of the island, let him send out a royal commission of inquiry, or if, as is probable, he knows facts as strong as any commission could gather, let him at once propose to Parliament the conversion of Jamaica into a Queen's colony. Ceylon, with its hostile races and labour difficulties, prospers under that régime, and any Governor who has served in the Mauritius, or Ceylon, or India would be able to re-arrange society upon the double bases of peasant proprietorship and swift redress for civil or military injury. There is no danger to the planter in such a change, for the Governor would be a white, and the stronger the laws against fraud, the greater the influence of capital and ownership. Transform most of the taxes from customs duties into direct imposts, as Earl Grey recommended, and the negro must work to earn them, while a new tenure for the waste land, a system of compulsory education, and a little increase in the means of communicating between the interior and the sea, will speedily give him means of payment. The talk about negro indolence is pure rubbish. There is no settled race upon earth which is indolent, the Bengalee slaving nine hours

a day, and the Neapolitan tilling his land with as much assiduity as a Dutchman, and the negro is only lazy because he never reaps the reward of labour. Ten years of strict, equal government, administered by a man who can press hard when needful on either race, and who will attend to physical improvement, will, we believe, make the island as prosperous as Ceylon, where, with no slavery and a native population which will not work for wages, the people import European goods to the extent of a pound a head per annum, and the Treasury is so overflowing that the Colonial Office has quarrelled with the planters by issuing an order that they shall pay for their own troops. Nothing short of a radical change like this can, we are convinced, save the island, which is full of natural resources, from sinking finally into the condition of a great tropical pauper warren, hopelessly insolvent, and requiring to be garrisoned with at least five thousand men. A possession of that kind is worse than useless, and it rests with Mr. Cardwell to avoid a calamity which may yet interfere with the prosperity budgets of many years. He has a great opportunity before him, and may yet prove to the public that he possesses the one quality opinion does not attribute to him-governing force.

From the Spectator, 18th November.

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THE rebellion in Jamaica, and its bloody suppression, at the cost of 200, or as some reports say, near 400 lives, some of them women's, taken with no further security for justice than court-martial trials, which practically mean of course trials without any defence for the criminal, must at least produce that thorough investigation of our system of government in Jamaica which would have been deferred for years but for such an outbreak. Had the Fenian outbreak really occurred in Ireland, England would scarcely have tolerated the summary infliction of capital punishment on hundreds of prisoners, without any conviction before a criminal tribunal, even if the outbreak had begun with atrocities such as were threatened in the letters of the Fenian conspirators, or such as have apparently been inflicted on some of the upper classes of Jamaica. In the present state of our knowledge of what has actually occurred, it would almost seem that there have been ten times as many executions of rebels as crimes of personal violence committed by them. That of course may be a false inference, due to the insufficiency of our news, and there may be excuses for violent

measures of repression, which in Ireland we should not have, in the small force at the disposal of the Governor when the outbreak first occurred. But whatever the truth may be, a rebellion which has provoked-and still more, if it were possible to speak of it as a rebellion, which has justified-the summary execution of hundreds of her Majesty's subjects, in an island whose whole population is not larger than that of a first-class manufacturing town, and this when the rebellion did not to all appearance even touch more than a tenth part of the population, cannot, after its suppression, be passed by without searching inquiry into causes and remedies. What has happened in Jamaica is probably equivalent to the reckless shooting or hanging by court-martial of upwards of 200, perhaps nearly 400, persons for insurrection in a population not larger than that of Derby,

for it is pretty clear that the rebellion had not extended to the west of Kingston, and has not affected anything like the whole population to the east of it. Some of the despatches of the officers charged with the suppression of the rebellion have, too, been written in a tone of vindictive and vulgar triumph over their bloody measures. Colonel J. Francis Hobb, of the 6th Royals, writes in a style which, if it had been adopted by a Northern General in the late war, would have been held up to public loathing. Thus:-"I have Paul Bogle's valet for my guide, a little fellow of extraordinary intelligence. A light rope tied to the stirrups, and a revolver now and then to his head, cause us thoroughly to understand each other; and he knows every single rebel in the island by name and face, and has just been selecting the captains, colonels, and secretaries out of an immense gang of prisoners just come in here, whom I shall have shot to-morrow morning." Now either these bloody measures were due to a comparatively legitimate panic in which case the danger must have been fearful, and the rebellion therefore one exciting universal enthusiasm among the black population, and then, we think, it will be pretty clear that the system of government must be both improved and strengthened; or, as is pretty clear, they were beyond what the circumstances justified, and taken in the violent passion of caste-hatred and revenge for the outrages committed by the negroes, and in that case there can be little doubt that justice demands a thorough investigation. The calamity is great in any case. But we may trust that it will force upon us the consideration of measures not only

and cemented with them by the fixed ice lining the shores; the whole crushed together, by the action of wind and tides in a confined area, into a perfect wilderness of gigantic ice masses, through or round which no progress can often be made without actual quarrying. Such is its roughness for sledge travelling, that fourteen days were occupied by Dr. Hayes in effecting a journey across the ice of 40 miles. The northwest coast, for land-sledging, is not more promising. It is mountainous and interrupted by another strait, bearing west, nearly opposite the Great Humboldt Glacier, between the parallels of 79° and 80°. Dr. Hayes, however, writes with the most perfect confidence of the accessibility of the Pole, but adds his conviction to that of other navigators that the next attempt should be by way of Spitzbergen. If by sea, in the month of August, when the seas are the most open. If by sledge, in the month of March, before the ice is broken up.

Athenæum.

W. E. HICKSON.

From the Saturday Review.
MRS. .GASKELL.

method of treatment, sometimes not rising above a level which has been reached by many other English story-tellers for whose books a very moderate tenure of popularity may be predicted, sometimes one-sided in social views, sometimes indiscreet in following her personal impulses too blindly, Mrs. Gaskell has yet achieved a success which will live long after her, and in which all connected with her may well feel an honourable pride.

and stronger command of the interest and
sympathy of the general public. Mary Barton
will be comparatively forgotten, for all its
power and its pathos, when the two novels
which mark as it were the opposite poles of
Mrs. Gaskell's powers in writing.
ford and Sylvia's Lovers
read and widely admired.

Fictions composed, as Mary Barton and North and South were composed, to inculcate a particular doctrine or point a definite moral for the benefit of a purblind or obstinate age, are apt to spoil their case by overstatement; and, even apart from their chances of exaggeration, they necessarily labour under a drawback, as permanent works of art, by their didactic tone. Mrs. Gaskell wisely perceived, before she had written many novels, that the highest end and aim of novel-writing was not to improve the outside world into a juster sense of the rights of the operative or any other special class, but to produce a picture of some phase of human life which should be intrinsically true. She gained the knowledge that the power of the novelist to impress a lesson lies in the perfection of the art with which the lesson, whatever it may be, is kept out THE unexpected announcement of the of sight; and in ceasing to write for an obdeath of Mrs. Gaskell will have been re-ject, she acquired a more comprehensive ceived with genuine regret by many who did not enjoy personally the pleasure of her acquaintance. It is a loss to a wide circle whenever a justly favourite writer dies in the fulness of energy and the maturity of power; and this was the position which Mrs. Gaskell occupied before the public at the time of her decease. She had written herself into a well-deserved popularity, not Cranford is, in its way, the most perfect confined to Great Britain alone; her later of Mrs. Gaskell's creations, and we do not fiction, gave no reason to fear that her imag- hesitate to say that it is the most perfect ination was wearing threadbare, or her man- little story of its kind that has been pubner growing conventional; and she seemed lished since the days of Miss Austen. It is not likely to lose for many years to come, a picture of the very small and peculiar sothe power or the inclination to write. Since cial circle of an English village, drawn with the appearance of Mary Barton some seven-minute and accurate, but never wearily mi teen years ago, few seasons have gone by without leaving some record of Mrs. Gaskell's literary industry, although she never fell under the imputation of publishing too rapidly. The list of her works given in this week's journals is not quite a complete one, but it is correct enough to remind contemporary critics how gradually and honestly the authoress had worked her way into permanent public favour. Without being unique, or in any sense extraordinarily original in her range of subjects or in her

Cran

are still eagerly

croscopic, observation. The extreme quietness of the life which it describes is carefully suited with a narrative style of singular purity and simplicity, which increases its charm in reading very considerably, and will materially assist in maintaining its popularity to a later time. Of actual story there is very little; the placid movement of life in such a village as Cranford could scarcely co-exist with anything like a crisis of passionate or active interests in the minds or fortunes of the individual members of its peace

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