Imagination is thrown away when it devotes itself to imagining what is so grotesquely impossible. How differently does a real knowledge of the human heart clothe itself in fiction! Take, for instance, the way in which the fraternal affection between Tom and Maggie Tulliver is treated in The Mill on the Floss; its half-animal growth, its dumb persistence, its misunderstandings and repulsions, and then its momentary self-revelation in the ecstasy of death. These primary emotions are not simply spells to conjure by, magical ingredients which we can throw into the cauldron of human passions and change it in a moment from blood-red to sky-blue. They are the simple impulses of complex action; they are lifelong forces which modify the character as a partial access to light modifies the growth of a tree.

No doubt it is difficult to imply all this within the narrow limits and amid the thronging incidents of a play; difficult to paint an emotional history which shall be catastrophic without being discontinuous. M. Hugo's catastrophes are too apt to snap the thread of his story. Triboulet as a spiteful court fool is despicable; Triboulet as an injured father is almost sublime; but there is little more connection between his speeches in the two characters than is involved in the appearance of the same name at their head. The want of any real conception of the interaction of human beings upon each other is felt throughout. The most potent genius cannot create other personalities wholly out of its own: the greatest like the least of us, if he would understand his fellows, needs laborious observation, patient analysis, and, above all, that power of sympathy which steals like daylight into the heart's hidden chambers in whose lock no key will turn.

It is the want of knowledge, the want of truth, which has left M. Hugo no reincarnation of Shakespeare,' but only the most magnificent of melodramatists.

The want of truth! It is hardly credible how this moral defect, this reckless indifference to accuracy of assertion, has infected M. Hugo's works. We could forgive an absence both of the historical and the scientific instinct, if our author at least took care to be correct in details. We could forgive carelessness in details if a true instinct for history or for science determined the general effect. But too often all is wrong together, and, worse still, this quagmire of falsity is surrounded with placards emphatically announcing that every inch of the ground is firm.

I have neither the knowledge nor the space to go through the hundredth part of M. Hugo's blunders. Nihil tetigit quod non confuderit. Engineers and physicists will explain the absurdity of the engineering and the physics which make up so large a part of Les Travailleurs de la Mer. Men familiar with the languages of Brittany and of Guernsey have shown how M. Hugo has transferred dozens of words from a Guernsey dictionary to put into the mouths

of Breton peasants. Men who know the slang and the ruffians of Paris will bear witness to the gratuitous arrogance of his pretentions to this unsavoury lore, in which he is, as compared with Gaboriau or Zola, as a child to a professor. We can all judge of his etymology of the name of that famous Scotch headland,'' The First of the Fourth.' We can all estimate the verisimilitude of the tale of the fortunes of that great peer, Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie, a voluntary exile from his truly British country-seats of Hell-kerters, Homble, and Gumdraith. Yet, if we are to take M. Hugo's word for it, he knows more about every country in Europe than the natives themselves. Il est bien entendu,' he says in a note to Ruy Blas, on which M. Planche's sarcasm has fixed, 'il est bien entendu que dans Ruy Blas, comme dans tous les ouvrages précédents de l'auteur, tous les détails d'érudition sont scrupuleusement exacts.' Methinks M. Hugo doth protest too much. For in support of his assertion that he is intimately acquainted with the language, literature, and secret history of Spain, he deigns only to furnish us with an explanation of the word Almojarifazgo. Almojarifazgo! One is tempted to embark upon a 'key to all mythologies,' on the strength of a sound acquaintance with the etymology of Abracadabra.

There is one subject-his own Notre-Dame-on which we might have trusted that M. Hugo would have been safe from attack. But when we come on a description of this sanctuary as consisting of 'deux tours de granit faites par Charlemagne' our confidence vanishes with great suddenness. For it is certain that there is not an ounce of granite in the towers of Notre-Dame, and that Charlemagne had just as much to do with building them as Caligula.

It is of course on the moral side that these inaccuracies are most important. There is no question as to M. Hugo's powers of acquisition, comprehension, memory. He might easily have become a real savant, a real historian, if he had given to other subjects the same kind of attention which he has given to versification and grammar, if he had cared as much for what he said as for the style in which he said it. But here once more his self-adoration has interfered. It has taught him that he is supra scientiam, that neither Nature nor History can possibly have any secrets hidden from him, that a royal road has taken him to the very source and fount of things. And when he asserts that some preposterous misdescription of nature, some staring historical blunder, is absolutely correct, we must not think that he is wilfully trying to deceive us. We must remember how easy a man finds it to forget that external facts have any existence independent of his own mind; how soon the philosopher's ipse dixit becomes convincing to the philosopher himself.

FREDERIC W. H. MYERS.

[To be concluded.]

VOL. V.-No. 27.

3 F

THE DEPRESSION OF TRADE.

THE prolonged depression of trade has been the subject of bitter recrimination. The following pages will be written with the desire of promoting more cordial relations between labour and capital.

The decline has been more marked in the home than in the foreign trade, and it has been greater in the values than in the quantities of our exports. The most important items in our export trade are the cotton, woollen, iron, and steel manufactures. In cotton there has been an increase in quantity; in woollen yarn an increase; in iron and steel the falling away in value is considerable, though the quantity exported has increased. In machinery the growth has been important both in quantity and value.

In a recent report to the Board of Trade, Mr. Giffen has given a summary of the changes of prices in the cotton and iron trades between 1861 and 1877. Having minutely and elaborately analysed the variations in the price of the raw materials, and the finished products of the textile and metallurgical industries, he arrives at the conclusion that the reduction of our export trade since 1873 is a reduction, not of volume, but of price. If the prices of 1873 had been sustained, the falling away in the values of the exports of enumerated articles of British and Irish produce would have been less than a million sterling on a total of one hundred and ninety-one millions and a half.

6

It is difficult to ascertain with accuracy how far the fall in price has been compensated by the fall in the cost of raw material and wages. In any case, as Mr. Giffen remarks, the fact that the trade in 1877 was not greater than in 1873 amounts to a real retrogression,' allowing for the increase of population in the interval. The average level in prices is lower than in 1861. Employment is scarce, and business unprofitable. The effects of the depression extend far beyond the classes directly engaged in productive industry. It is therefore a matter of national importance to ascertain, and, if possible, remove, the causes which have led to the present melancholy condition of affairs. The misfortunes of every country are felt more or less by the other members of the family of nations. We share, by an international participation, in the happy fortunes of a

thriving people; and, on the other hand, we cannot look on unmoved when a neighbouring territory is desolated by war, or its resources are shattered by commercial disaster. When, therefore, we seek to discover the causes of the crisis from which we are at present suffering, our inquiry must be extended beyond our own borders.

Trade with India has been prejudicially affected by the depreciation of silver. This revolution is due, as it was recently stated by the Prime Minister, to the determination of France and Germany, the one with sixty millions and the other with eighty millions of silver, to establish a gold currency. The trade with India and China has suffered from another cause,-from a pernicious system of long credits, and the reckless competition for business on the part of discounting financial and banking institutions. The recent revelations in connection with the Glasgow Bank have brought to light abuses, which have long prevailed, and have been widely extended. An almost incredible amount of over-trading must have been carried on, when the representative of a single firm admitted that, within the space of some ten years, his losses had exceeded 2,000,000l..

Let us now direct our attention to another quarter of the globe. Previous to the outbreak of the civil war the people of the United States were by far the most extensive consumers of our manufactured products. The vast expenditure caused by the war led to an increase of taxation, and to the imposition of prohibitory tariffs on foreign importations. The sudden exclusion of foreign goods had the effect of raising prices, by an amount at least equal to the duties imposed. The issue of an inconvertible paper currency, as it was pointed out by the late Professor Cairnes, accelerated powerfully the upward movement. The development of manufacturing industry was artificially stimulated by a narrow and unwise course of legislation. Railways were extended beyond the requirements of traffic, and the productive capacity of mills, factories, and ironworks was multiplied tenfold. The dearness of labour gave a renewed impulse to the American genius for the invention of labour-saving machinery, the effect being to aggravate the tendency to over-production, which had been originated by other causes.

It has been calculated by Mr. Wells that, while the increase in population in the United States from 1860 to 1870 was less than twenty-three per cent., the gain in the product of the manufacturing industries during the same period, measured in kind, was fifty-two per cent., or nearly thirty per cent. in excess of the gain in population.

The American manufacturers, with all their skill in the substitution of mechanical for manual labour, cannot produce as cheaply, under a rigid system of protection, as they would in an open competition with all the world. They may revel in the monopoly of their home market, but they cannot compete in neutral markets with a country which has adopted a free-trade policy. When, therefore,

the home consumption falls away, a collapse ensues.

In the United

States the power of production had been increased to such an extent, that it would have been impossible for manufacturers to find a market for their goods, even if the former demand had been sustained. But the consumption was reduced owing to the rapid fall in wages, and the diminished incomes of holders of railway and other securities. The import trade was suddenly contracted by the same causes. As the United States had long been the most important consumers of British goods, our exclusion from that market, by the combined operation of the prohibitory tariff and the diminished purchasing power of the American people, was a grave, and it has thus far proved a permanent, disaster.

If we turn to Germany, we find our trade suffering from another foreign commercial crisis. The causes, that have brought about the recent financial and commercial misfortunes of Germany, have been ably set forth in a pamphlet by M. Wolowski. The sudden acquisition of an enormous capital, by the payment of the war indemnity exacted from France, produced an effect on the German people, which is compared by M. Wolowski to the sudden appearance of a mirage in a thirsty desert.

Every description of industrial enterprise was undertaken with rash precipitation, and on a vast scale. The agricultural population gathered into the great cities, causing a portentous rise in rents and in the cost of living. The working classes were dazzled by the sudden rise of wages; they lost their self-control, and became self-indulgent and extravagant. The landed and the middle classes suffered from the general increase in prices and the cost of living, and they too sought for compensation in wild and disastrous speculations. The effects of the commercial mania, which followed upon the military triumphs in France, have not yet disappeared; and although our trade with Germany has been more satisfactory than in other quarters, it cannot be doubted that its volume would have been greatly increased, if our customers had been more prosperous, and their purchasing power had not been impaired by the loss of large sums in wild and unsuccessful adventures.

The same spirit of speculation was carried from Germany into Austria. In 1870 and the three ensuing years the financial resources of the country were committed to numerous railway and other undertakings, absorbing all the available capital, involving a heavy load of debt to foreign countries, and anticipating by a generation the legitimate requirements of the empire. We have felt the consequences of the subsequent and inevitable reaction in the diminished purchases of our Austro-Hungarian customers.

It is not, however, by commercial speculation alone, or chiefly, that the commerce of Continental Europe has been reduced to its present state of depression. The rivalries of military despots, the de