Government treats with the French "No treaty, agreement, or convention can be made without the approval of the French Government.

Government upon equal terms. If this position had not been accepted,! M. Grévy had the opportunity of then and there setting the matter right. But as he did not, it must be concluded that the French do not consider that they have a protectorate in the real sense of the word.

"P. S. You have asked us whether the

Queen's Government may, as heretofore, continue to negotiate commercial treaties with foreign powers.

treaties are not contrary to the stipulations of “Undoubtedly, as far as such commercial the treaty of the 17th December, 1885.”

The second clause of the same I had received the commands of the Article states that "Malagasy abroad Queen, that should the letter defining will be placed under the protection of the terms of the treaty not be satisfacFrance.' This is more advantageous tory, I was in no case to attach the sig. to Madagascar than France; and refers natures, but to break off negotiations. to an understanding that any Malagasy The treaty, therefore, must be read by who may be in Europe without means have the right to apply to a French consul, who would be bound to send them back to Madagascar.

I here append the text of Articles I. and II. just referred to:

"ART. I.-The Government of the Republic will re resent Madagascar in all its foreign relations. Malagasy abroad will be placed under the protection of France.”

"ART. II.-A resident representing the Government of the Republic will preside over the foreign relations of Madagascar; without

interfering in the internal administration of the States of her Majesty the Queen."

The following is an extract from an explanatory letter I was instructed to obtain from Admiral Miot (Jan. 9, 1886), in order to leave no doubt upon the interpretation of the treaty:

"His Excellency the Prime Minister has ordered you to define the meaning of para graph 1 of Article II. of the treaty, which

the light of the appendix, without which it is null and void. M. Patrimonio and Admiral Miot were invited by the Queen to visit her at the capital. They reached the capital with a strong escort on the 30th January, 1886. They were received in audience by the Queen, and a grand banquet was given in their honor. Thus the unfortunate war between France and Madagascar came to a conclusion with the end of the year 1885.

by the late war? She has lost nothing What has Madagascar lost or gained that she greatly values and she has preserved her independence. One of her ports is in the occupation of the French troops; but then those troops are virtually prisoners. Her position after the treaty of peace of 17th December, 1885, was concluded, is for effective purposes better than it was before; the nation has been consolidated; successful resistance to the aggression of a great European Power has added to the moral courage of the Malagasy nation. The lesson has been learned that, the white man is not so very superior to the dark, especially when the latter is fairly equipped to meet his white adversary. They know that this is not to be done with bows and arrows, but with arms of precision. They have learned the value of disci

pline. They have not been over- the more widely our cities extend their matched in diplomacy by the French. boundaries the more valuable does It is true the Government has agreed all space become which is left open to pay £400,000, but it is not as a war and unspoiled. And the unparalleled indemnity to France; it will be paid by increase in our national wealth, industhe Queen to indemnify the subjects of tries, and inhabitants which the last all the Treaty Powers who may have half-century has seen-and particularly suffered losses during the war. Prac- the latter portion of it-has undoubttically France undertakes to give Mad-edly been attended with the inevitable agascar a clear receipt, and upon pay- drawback that for all of us dwellers ment of these various indemnities in towns, whether rich or poor, the guarantees to discharge all other claims, country has been made more and more which in December, 1885, amounted distant, vitality to that extent diminto £800,000. A little over a month ished, and health made more difficult ago, the Comptoir d'Escompte lent to sustain. . .

the Malagasy Government 15,000,000 The importance of open spaces to francs, and the French troops have the health of the community can evacuated Tamatave. The policy of hardly be overrated. The late Dr. the French Government in the matter Farr conclusively showed that the rate of the loan is judicious, as it will of mortality varies with the density of guarantee future peace. I cannot the population-the greater the density, prophecy what years may bring to the higher being the death-rate. It pass, but I am well assured from my is not, therefore, a mere sentimental experience of the firmness of the desire for peace and quiet, or for Malagasy disposition, that France will never acquire a "protectorate" over Madagascar.--DIGBY WILLOUGHBY, in The Fortnightly Review.

natural beauty, which those can plead who object to the erection of houses around them in the spot where country lanes and pleasant fields have heretofore existed. They lose with the peace and quiet some of the freshness and purity of the air, and that loss entails a dim

OPEN SPACES IN GREAT TOWNS. inished vitality.

What is to be done? Open spaces It is only of comparatively late years must be secured, or the general health that this question has risen to the will suffer. It is no doubt a new and surface, but now it is every day grow-not altogether pleasant idea that we ing in interest and importance. And should have to pay for fresh air, as we inevitably so. For as long as a country do for gas or water; but the conditions is not thickly inhabited, as long as in of our town life are making it imperathe largest town the poorest dwellers tive. After all, do we not, in a fashare within an easy walk of green fields ion, pay already for fresh air? Is not and shady lanes, breezy hills or pleas- the occasional flight to the seaside or ant woods, there can be no pressing the Continent in some sort a tributenecessity for securing certain open money which we offer at the shrine of spaces for breathing and recreation the goddess Hygeia? On the other places. But the more thickly we come hand, we must remember that in buy to live upon the ground, the more ing open spaces we are benefiting those thickly we plant smoky furnaces and ho are too poor to get an annual trip manufactories up and down the land, easide or foreign parts; whereas,

will have to be made in as thorough and systematic a manner as the different conditions will allow.-Blackwood's Magazine.

CURRENT THOUGHT.

in our annual excursions to those places, we are benefiting our own selves alone. In old days, when we were not all so densely packed together on the ground, rich and poor alike were able in a short stroll to get out of hot dusty streets into cool green lanes and fields. Then the annual flight was, at any rate for the middle classes, a luxury, and not, as now it has become, one of the necessaries of life. We talk of the wear and tear of town life, and we notice how greatly it tends to increase as the years go by and the towns grow larger and larger. Is not this very much due to the fact that the air we breathe gets more and more vitiated, more nearly approximating to an Beecher: "The death of Mr. Henry Ward exhausted receiver? And where is this to end? No one can tell. As

regards London, a very careful calculation was recently made by Mr. R. Price Williams; and in a paper read before the Statistical Society on the 16th June 1885 he showed that unless any altogether new and unforeseen contingency occurred, the population of London within the twenty-nine registration districts of the metropolitan area, which had risen from (in round numbers) 2,800,000 souls in 1861 to 3,800,000 souls in 1881, must by 1918 have risen to 7,000,000 souls, or nearly doubled the present number.

THE "SATURDAY REVIEW" UPON HENRY WARD BEECHER.-If any one is in search for specimens of choice black guardism couched in more or less good English, he will be abundantly gratified by reading the successive numbers of the London Saturday Review-a journal the writers for which are supposed This is the fashion in which that jaunty to represent the cream of English newspapers. journal speaks of the death of Henry Ward

Beech r has been made the subject of some rather nauseous outpourings on this side of the Atlantic. The American newspapers are naturally eulogistic; and there is no doubt that in the exquisite style which he brought very near perfection 'deceased was a champion boss preacher anyway.' He honored this belast occasion he threatened the rhetorical sunighted country with three visits, and on the premacy of Dr. Joseph Parker, who is never to be mentioned without the additional statement that he holds forth at the City Temple every Thursday at twelve o'clock precisely. Mr. Beecher delivered in that classic spot, sacred to the Muses, the Graces, and the Evangelists, a sermon which caused Mr. Spurgeon to pray for him, and which was considered by many people without theological bias to be a particularly stupid and vulgar piece of blasphemy. The intense silliness of With these facts before us, who will the man was perhaps his most remarkable deny that some clear and distinct characteristic. He lived seventy-three years provision is absolutely necessary, in order that some portions of the space which is at present unoccupied, but which must in the near future be covered with buildings, shall be rescued and kept open for all time? The cardinal facts to be recognized and insisted on is that pure air is proved to be as necessary to human health as pure water; and though it may be a somewhat more difficult task to supply pure air than it is to supply pure water in the requisite quantities, the attempt

in the world without discovering that language, to have any real value, must be connected with thought. It is not worth while, and it would be repulsive, to rake up his pointless jests on the doctrine of the Trinity. There never was a more forcible illustration than Mr. Beecher of the truth of Lord Roscommon's famous saying that Want of decency is want of sense. The astounding and perplexing fact is that Mr. Beecher's inevitable departure from this world should call forth in English journals a chorus of ministers of religion, to whatever denominafulsome adulation. There are very few tion they may belong, who are not Mr. Beecher's superiors in piety, and knowledge,

and in taste. It is an offence, for which we' they would be left, that is all.' If this is, apologize, to mention him in the same sen tence with Mr. Spurgeon. Mr. Becche, no doubt, opposed slavery, as did thousands of better and wiser men than himself. It was scarcely a distinction for a Northerner to be an Abolitionist. Mr. Beecher was also the brother of a remarkable woman, a woman of peculiar though narrow genius, who still survives to reflect upon literary triumphs forty years old. But that is a circumstance which hardly accounts for the hysterics of British journalism over the death of a lapsed American Congregationalist. Mr. Beecher would have been less celebrated, or, at any rate, less notorious, if he had not been accused of undue intimacy with the wife of the gentleman who succeeded him as editor of the Independent. The husband brought an action, and the jury could not agree. But the advertisement told, and unhappily had its effect in England as well as in the United States. The accusation was made in 1874, and in 1878 Mr. Beecher abandoned the doctrine of Eternal Punishment. Perhaps he found that, as a wittier countryman of his once said, our people would never stand it.' Perhaps he was influenced by the prejudice which Dr. Pusey attributed to Lord Westbury.

I grew up,' said Mr. Beecher of himself in his peculiarly sickening way, I grew up as pure as a woman. There can, of course, be no doubt that he understood his business, and that he greatly delighted by his jokes a large congregation of very rich, very irreligious, and very illiterate people. We should be sorry to think that American humor was a contradiction in terms, like German silver or French leave. But the fact that Mr. Beecher was reputed a humorist leads itself to that conclusion. An admiring biographer, who is apparently sincere, has recorded two specimens of Mr. Beecher's 'humor.' The first relates to a distinguished man, now no more, of whom various opinions were held in his lifetime, but whom his bitterest opponents would not desire to class with Beecher. It runs as follows:-'Bishop Colenso thinks he has shown there are mistakes in the writings of Moses. Very likely And suppose it should be shown that Moses never wrote them at all, what then? It would be shown, that is all. And suppose they should be taken out of the Bible, what then? They would be taken out, that is all. And how would it be with those that are left. Why,

indeed, American humor, which for our part we decline to believe, we can only say that we should flee for refuge from its devastating influence to the poetical writings of Mr. John Greenleaf Whittter, or the historical writings of Mr. Bancroft. The second specimen, which is too dreary to quote in full, even as a warning, contains this description of a penitent. So the man cries, and cries, and cries, and feels bad, and feels bad, and feels bad. This is the way he pays for his insurance.' Surely the gibberish of a Jamaica negro in a paroxysm of revivalist insanity would be preferable to trash like that. 'Many of his sermons,' we are told, 'read like the finest table talk of a cultivated lawyer, physician, or merchant who has seen the world.' Is it absolutely necessary that Englishmen should take leave of their senses when they write about Americans. Lawyers, physicians, and merchants, indeed! What grocer, or hairdresser, or tallow-chandler who had seen the world from the top of an omnibus, or mingled with the giddy throng of fashion at Rosherville, would tolerate such stuff as we have quoted? It is deplorable that the English press, which is read by cultivated Americans at home and abroad, should not exercise a little more discrimination and restraint. The Barnum of American religion has a sufficient memorial in a record of the sums which he realized by the auction of his pews."

THE RUMINOUS Cow.-The Boston Journal of Education prints the following "composition," in the form of a letter written to her teacher by a girl who is now a pupil in one of the best taught schools in that city. Unfortunately we are not told how long the writer had been a pupil in that school:

"I would Like to tell you what i hav learned about the ruminous the cow is a Domestic animal and the cow has four stumachs the cow is a domestic or tame animal. The cows eyes are made so that they can see back of themselves as well has forward and Sideways. the cow is found in every Country. The cows horns are made out of buttons and knife handles The cow chew gress and vegetable. The cows skin is made out of beef. The cow is divid into three groups. The cow is the most useful animal the cow is a clothen footed animal. In side of the cow horn is a pith."

WHAT WOMAN IS FITTED FOR. | absence depends not on sex but on circumstances. Surely, it is impossible There are women who have long to live in the age which Darwin has held that even the physical incapacities enlightened, and refuse to believe that of their sex are the result of circumstan- this may be and in all probability is ces; the frame adapting itself through the true view of the matter. ages of inheritance and natural selec- It would be a miracle indeed if the tion to the surroundings that formed work which has been going on for ages its destiny. But such opinions have among all things that have life should been rather working underground than have passed over one-half the human forcing their way to the surface, per- race, suspending its influence over haps through the despair felt by their them alone, of all creatures on the advocates of obtaining a hearing, since earth's surface. If we admit this view, claims far less thorough-going have however, that women have become what been denied with contempt and mock- they are by their circumstances, we ery, the time, seemingly not being ripe have to admit that our present system for them. In spite of Darwin's great of society is wrong and unjust, inasdiscovery, in spite of the word "Evolu- much as it still places one sex in a detion" ringing in our ears on all sides pendent and cramped position, and does and in connection with every other its best to force all women, with their topic, the same fruitless old ground has varied characters and powers, into the been gone over and over again in re- same kind of occupation. Women, spect to the woman question, just as if after a long graduation in wrong and no such thing as Evolution had ever suffering, find themselves now, in the been heard of! What are woman's age of awakening, at an immense qualities now? is she now man's 'equal, disadvantage in consequence of inis she now capable of all that she aspires capabilities which were not originally to be and to do? Bebel, in his book involved in their organization-a dison "Woman," says, "If a gardener or advantage which counteracts their agriculturist were to assert that a efforts to advance, or worse still, which given plant could not be improved or deprives them even of the desire of perfected, although he had never given advancement itself. "Man," it has it a fair trial; or may be had even hin- been said, "is strictly his own creator, dered its growth by wrong treatment, in that he makes himself and his conhe would be regarded by his enlightened ditions according to the tendencies he neighbors as a simpleton." Then, on encourages. For tendencies encouraged the subject of genius, he says, "The for centuries cannot be cured in a amount of talent and genius in male single life-time, but may require ages humanity is certainly a thousand times for their cure. greater than that which has hitherto been able to reveal itself; social conditions have crushed it just as they have crushed the capacities of the female sex, which has for centuries been oppressed, fettered, and crippled to a much higher degree." This far higher degree of fettering, then, has kept back the genins of women, in fact, often prevented it from arising at all, though the

A little knowledge of the history of woman from the earliest times will show how her conditions were made and encouraged for her by men, who through the circumstance of her motherhood (the curse might one not say, looking back along the terrible vista of the ages?), were able to enslave her to their will. But the fact of this long adverse race-education is invari