ART. IX.-REVIEWS OF BOOKS. Slavery and Secession in America; Historical and Economical. By THE 1861. THE object of the author' in this work, as he informs us in the preface, has been to trace the origin and development of that antagonism between the Northern and Southern sections of the American Republic which has brought about the present deplorable internal strife, and which, it seems probable, will result in the dissolution of the Union.' This is done with fulness and thorough accuracy of information. Mr. Ellison sees in slavery the fons et origo malorum, and he shows how that question has tinged all the public politics of the Union throughout its history. His views on this matter are sound results from historical facts. The work is divided into four parts: the first, descriptive of the rise and progress of slavery in the United States; the second, the history of the secession movement; the third, 'a comparative view of the influence of free and slave institutions in promoting or retarding the general progress of the two sections of the country, as exemplified in the present condition of the Northern and Southern States;' and the fourth discusses emancipation. There is added an appendix of documents, political and statistical. A more complete, clear, or satisfactory exposition of the American crisis could scarcely be desired; and a careful perusal of this volume would tend much to correct the views of many in this country relative to the war in the United States. The Sons of Light. A Paper prepared for Reading at the Visitation of the Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells at Dunster, on the 25th of April, 1861, on 6 Teetotalism and the Liquor Traffic. By the Rev. Henry Gale, B.C.L., Rector of Treborough, author of Apostolic Temperance.' London: Caudwell. THIS is a spirited attempt of the author to place the question of teetotalism and the liquor traffic before the minds of the clergy. Mr. Gale introduces both Biblical criticism and the opinions of eminent authors into his paper-a mode of reasoning commonly weighty with divines. It will not be easy to reply to the arguments of the Rector of Treborough; and we sincerely hope that clergymen generally may give this important matter the careful examination which Mr. Gale's pamphlet and the cause it advocates, demand. The Temperance Advocate. The Organ of the British Temperance League. Published at Bolton. THIS is a weekly paper, commenced in July last, and entirely devoted to the temperance cause. It is ably edited, contains an admirable digest of general news, gives considerable space to the record of teetotal advocacy and progress, and presents portions of higher literature. We rejoice in the appearance of this newspaper, and recommend it to all who wish to be informed of the temperance movement. Its extensive circulation would be a national boon. Address of the Very Rev. the Dean of Carlisle in the City Hall, Glasgow. Scottish Temperance League, 1861. THE words of the Dean of Carlisle are always smart and earnest, and in this address are made to touch a vital matter of our social life. The Dean is an uncompromising teetotaler, and argues with much zeal that all others should join the abstinence cause. The Christian serving his Generation: a Sermon preached on the Anniversary of the Scottish Temperance League. By the Rev. W. M. Taylor, M.A., Liverpool. THIS sermon is able and eloquent, and admirably adapted to the theme. It is worthy of circulation, and will serve to commend the principles it advocates to Christian minds. The Social Reformer. Grahamstown. THIS is a monthly devoted to temperance and social reform in the Cape Colony. It is conducted in a good spirit, and contains very readable matter. The Sailors of New England; or, Prohibitions on Land and Sea. Illustrated by some Yarns by Old Salts. By Peter Sinclair. A REPRINT of several papers happily written, and calculated to advance the temperance cause. The Edited by the London: James The British Herald. Rev. W. Reid, M.A. Nisbet and Co. THIS monthly paper is conducted by one whose name is extensively known by his successful editorship of the British Messenger,' from its commencement until its circulation was the largest of any religious paper in Europe. The Herald' is even more able than the Messenger.' Its contributions, theological, biographical, and hortatory, both in narrative, essay, sketch, and poetry, are all well written and intensely practical. It deserves, and we trust will receive, as extensive a circulation as its gifted editor formerly obtained. A Few Words about Cotton. For the Cotton Spinners and Millowners. London: Wertheim and Co. THE necessity for cotton from other fields than the United States has turned the attention of practical men to the West as well as the East Indies. The brochure before us advocates Jamaica as a suitable soil for the cultivation of the cotton plant. The Life-boat, a Journal of the National Life-boat Institution. AN excellent serial, devoted to a noble cause. As a means of promoting a philanthropic object, the publication of a monthly magazine is of great value. Information and appeal, clothed in such language as is used in this paper, is likely to perpetuate and extend the benevolent operations of the Life-boat Institution. The Present State of Education. The Census of 1861. Parliamentary Reform. Lectures by Handel Cossham, Esq., Bristol. MR. COSSHAM is a true friend of the people, and an active exponent of social science in theory and practice. Whatever he has to say on any of its branches demands respectful attention. We are glad to learn that he has been delivering popular lectures on the above subjects. We quite disagree with him on the subject of education both as regards its promotion by the State and the compulsory system, to which Mr. Cossham is opposed. But his lecture contains, nevertheless, much sound and useful statement, and evidences Mr. Cossham's earnest desire to advance the education of the people. The Census of 1861 is well discussed, though the printed lecture is brief. The lecture on Parliamentary Reform is very able. This World or the Next? By the Rev. W. Clarkson. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co. Mr. AN earnest appeal to young men. Clarkson does not think it possible to make the best of both worlds, and goes against Mr. Binney's celebrated work on the affirmative side of that question. The best of this world he declares is not a legitimate object of Christian pursuit.' But it is surely Christian to pursue business earnestly on right principles. And do not right principles, with persevering industry, generally succeed? Honesty. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co. AN excellent work for men in business. The Test of Truth. An argument and a narrative. By Mary Jane Graham. Eighth Edition. Simpkin, Marshall, and Co. A REPRINT of a work brief in words but singularly forcible in argument. The Scientific Basis of the Temperance Movement. An Address to Medical Students of Glasgow University. By J. M. M'Culloch, Esq., M.D. London: Alliance Depôt. LET our readers put a copy of this pamphlet into the hands of medical men in their neighbourhood. Temperance Policy Reviewed. Reprinted from the Christian News.' THIS is evidently by a writer fully informed upon the subject he has taken up. Meliora. ART. I.-1. Ragged London in 1861. By John Hollingshead. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1861. 2. London Labour and the London Poor. A Cyclopædia of the Condition and Earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work. By Henry Mayhew. 3 Vols. London: Griffin, Bohn, and Co. OUR UR great cities are at once a history and a criticism of our progress, philosophy, and philanthropy. They tell their own unvarnished tale. We cannot blink our eyes to their meanness, cover their despair, or forget their shame. Day by day they chronicle themselves, trampling out in joy or woe, on hard and stony pavements, their wail or pæan, lyric or epic, euthanasia or epithalamium. Their greatness confronts us everywhere: their littleness and misery only at home. Our Londons and Liverpools, Manchesters and Birminghams, are known in their vastness and speciality wherever the English name has been murmured and the English nation has been represented. Even wandering Arabs and barbaric Bechuana give forth, like sea-shells, some lingering murmur of their might and mystery. But the guilt, the misery, and raggedness that hurtles in the alleys and courts of either of these four centres of civilization, wealth, and commerce, they know not, yea, too many of us, know not. Who shall reveal it? Local inspectors, and those hard-working, chivalric clergymen with whose names and labours, as far as London is concerned, we have now become acquainted for the first time, together with such men as Mr. Henry Mayhew, Mr. Hollingshead, and others, are alone fully able to estimate the drawbacks, gauge the depravity, and tabulate the weak shamelessnesses of the city life of this nineteenth century. Here even they must stop. Its influence upon this, as well as upon the next generation, it is impossible they should have the prophetic discernment to calculate, and so they leave it there, a blot, in all its hideousness and spectral leer, as a lesson for all men, and an especial problem for acute but erroneous philosophers. There, too, we must also leave it. A city life is significant alike of the weakness and strength of human nature. It opens problems that cannot be discussed in Vol. 4.-No. 16. X these pages, it furnishes men with arguments and hypotheses, leading to every possible and erratic philosophy, and it breathes upon most of us a witchery of sadness, a spirit of restlessness, and a fitful fever of scepticism. We leave others to descant as they may, and with justice, upon the triumphs and grandeurs effected in education, morals, and manners by such assemblages of people, such perpetual centralization. As critics and teachers, yea, prophets and apostles, it is our duty to point to the darker shades of the picture, to bring out the dance of death from beneath the shadows of the elm, and divert attention for a time from cathedral and church, museum and institute, free library and reading-room, to the great sea of raggedness and wretchedness that breaks and booms around them, settling in scum and filth almost within the domain of the priest, the mansion of the rich, and the sweeping robe of the Pharisee. We would do so hopefully yet sadly, soberly but not despondingly, believing in neither an old-clothes nor Malthusian philosophy. The evil and wretchedness about him it is a man's duty to point out, that it may be mended and not mourned over, that its subjects may get out of it and not be immolated therein. Whatever there may be around us that is wrong, impious, miserable, fretting its way into our cities and towns, trailing along our fields, and tinging our lives with mourning and mockery, is significant only as so much work to be done, as every death and every birth the register records is eloquent of what has been, might have been, and is to be achieved. The world is full of work, work too of no nice kid-gloved order, but stern, stalwart, Herculean toil. All cant about the nicety and prudery of Wisdom can be no longer tolerated. If of old she dwelt personified only with mystic and ascetic, she has long since left their company as a more homely, Socratian goddess, affecting neither dress, deception, nor niceties of speech, but passing from palace to prison, from home to hospital, library to garret, Mayfair to Field Lane, as one who possesses an universal password, an unfailing talisman, an eternal invisibility. One day she discourses with Kant, Humboldt, Herschel, and the next with Howard, Wilberforce, Buxton, and whosoever will have her for a companion, and discourse with her upon anything between nightly refuges and theories of the universe. She has none of that aversion to evil that some wise and good men have imputed to her and then adopted for themselves. If men had never meddled with disease, we should have had less health; never intermixed with the insane, less sanity; never studied crime, less honesty; never familiarized themselves with sin, less moral renovation. The two works we have placed at the head of this paper deal with different aspects of the same question, and are mutually reflective. Mr. Mayhew's work comprises an amount of infor Tinkering Philanthropy. 299 mation upon the London poor, their histories and habits, that entitles it to a foremost rank in that peculiar literature which is now becoming so common, the literature not of common life only, but the commonest, oddest, and most out of the way. A private commission of inquiry, conducted on purely public grounds, and spreading itself now over a period of ten years, it is rich in materials for the divine, the novelist, the statistician, and, if the biographies which are gathered into its pages be reliable—and we see no reason to doubt them-it reveals the secret springs and inner germs of much that were otherwise unaccountable and almost mythical. He brings up before us specimens of almost every class he describes, and as we know them more familiarly, there is much that is less harrowing and less repulsive than many might have imagined. Poverty is by no means deficient in the development of some of the noblest, if rudest, virtues in the human character; and there are recorded for us instances of self-denial, heroic struggle, and sublime endeavour that touch up the picture into almost poetic grace, and send memory, slipping through old time, to revel in the works of the ancient masters. 6 Mr. Hollingshead's book is more modern and more modest. He does not attempt to dramatize, so to speak, the ragged life of our metropolitan byeways, or enter into lengthy details about the lives and habits of the people he has visited. Familiar with London life in all its lower phases from his earliest boyhood, and invested with nothing more pretentious and exhaustive than the character of a special correspondent of a daily newspaper, he has merely endeavoured, as he says, to beat the bounds of metropolitan. dirt and misery, and show us how a million of people are living, and for the greater part are content to live, in this same year of grace. He has done his work honestly, if not thoroughly. His book is opportune and useful in many ways. It supplies us with new facts for old arguments, and is not only a survey of the question from the time we are at,' but is an indirect expositor of the peculiarities of human amelioration. As we read we cannot escape the recognition of the fact, that what he terms tinkering philanthropy, like all movements that are human, is subject to fluctuations and moves by peculiar saltations that almost defy, when they seem most to favour, the formulation of the positivist. A fierce crusade, national and local, now and then breaks out, and enthusiasts imagine that everything will fall before their committees, vestries, boards, and byelaws. They work hard and fast, tooth and nail, head and heel. But the citadel of dirt is still unstormed, and its environs flout their impurities upon every hand. Then there is parleying and diplomacy, hesitation and lethargy, but still the foe spreads and increases. When the Select Committee of the House of Commons sat, in 1840, to inquire into the Health of |