As might have been expected, Mr. Strachey is unable to say with any confidence whether the legislation has been beneficial or harmful. In his final summing up he says: The above survey of manufacturers and trade will probably be thought to have established that no single answer can be given to the inquiry, How far has the industry of the German Empire been helped or hurt by protection?" And immediately after he says: "There can be no doubt that jute has been almost kept alive by the tariff of 1879, while woollens and worsteds owe it at most a trifling debt, silk nothing. Analyzing cotton apart we obtain a divided result; spinners have been enriched at the cost of weavers, and the foundations of certain new branches of business have been laid. Then, if soda and table oils have thriven, aniline dyes and alizarine have not; while the effects of the tariff on ceramics, glass, and paper are almost invisible. So with metallurgical products; the blast furnace may have been mainly kept in fire by the subsidy from the State, and ironwares have gained, while machinery has been thriving on its own intrinsic merits." It is obvious, however, that the tendency of protection is to promote the growth of manufacturing industry. When the home market is kept clear for the home producer it would be odd indeed if he did not thrive. On the other hand, since foreign products are excluded, the general body of consumers are compelled to pay dearly for what they consume. In the opinion of one school this is not a disadvantage in the long run, because the establishment of a varied industry is held to be so great as to be worth paying for; in the opinion of an other school, industries bolstered up in this way never can stand alone, and the country, by diverting its industry from its natural course, is preparing for itself in the long run only misfortune. As regards Germany in particular, however, it must always be borne in mind that the real object Prince Bismarck had in view in the legislation of 1879 was much more political than commercial. He needed a larger revenue, and it was easier to obtain it by protective duties than in any other way. Meanwhile the main point that comes out from Mr. Strachey's report is that the duties, whether they have benefited or not, certainly have not injured German manufacturers in such a way as to disable the country from competing most severely with even the most advanced countries. While our own silk trade has practically died out, Mr. Strachey shows that the silk trade of Germany is fairly prosperous, and that it is competing even with Lyons with very considerable success. Again, in some departments German manufacturers are competing successfully with our own manufacturers, while every year Germany is emancipating herself more and more from dependence upon British manufactures. A curious instance of the way in which great inventions act in disappointing the calculations of the most far-seeing is contained in this report. Until the Thomas-Gilchrist process of steel manufacture was invented the German manufacturers were dependent for their iron material to a very large extent upon this country; but the new process enables them to use German iron almost exclusively, and thus Germany is becoming independent of this country even for pig iron in the manufacture of steel. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Thomas-Gilchrist process has been adopted more generally in Germany than in England, and that the German converters are of greater capacity than our own. The truth seems to be that the progress of Germany depends much more upon the education of her people and upon their scientific knowledge than upon any legis lation or other advantages. The workpeople all have the advantage of technical education; they have benefited, too, from the universal liability to military service, and they appear to be more sober and more amenable to discipline than our own workpeople; but it is mainly in the training of the employers and in the possession of scientific skill that Germany excels. Our manufacturers are not as well educated as the Germans generally. They do not know as many languages, for example, and they do not take the trouble to study the needs of their foreign customers. They rely too much upon the superiority of England already acquired, and take too little trouble to perpetuate that superiority. The Germans, on the contrary, feel their inferiority, and endeavor to make up for it by the cultivation of skill and knowledge. To take a single instance, the German sugar trade is beating all competition, simply because the German chemists are the best in the world. And the manufacturers spare no cost in availing themselves of the chemi cal skill that is at their disposal. On the other hand, against whatever advantages may be possessed by Germany in the way of longer hours and cheaper wages, is to be set the new State socialist legislation, which is imposing burdens upon employ. | in the readiness of the government to give ers that may be set off against any disad- traders any support they need has great vantages the English employers labor influence. Obviously a German at presunder. Much more potent than cheap ent is much more likely to engage in risky labor, and perhaps not less influential than enterprises in Africa or the far East than widespread technical education and scien. is an Englishman. Lastly, the French tific skill, is the influence of military suc- indemnity must have aided German entercess, and the exaction of a heavy indem- prise immensely. The indemnity amountnity from France. Writers and speakers ed perhaps to two years' savings of the on economic subjects attach entirely too whole German people, and the addition of little importance to the influence exercised so immense a sum to the resources of the upon trade by great national achievements. empire must have enabled German trade A people who are elated by victory have to expand at a rate that it could not have much more courage to embark in every increased at under other circumstances. kind of enterprise than a people who are This aspect of the case is perhaps the not, and almost all experience shows that most serious, for it cannot be doubted a period of great national success is also that the proof afforded by Germany of the a period of rapid advance economically. advantage a nation derives from exacting Nor is this surprising when we bear in a great indemnity from a vanquished foe mind that enterprise means a disposition will tend in the future to encourage wars to take a hopeful view of ventures on for the very sake of the indemnities they which people embark. Confidence, too, will bring. ARMSTRONG'S GUN.- Formerly guns were made of compositions known as gun-metals; now steel can be made having all the needful toughness and elasticity. At first it is rough bored, should it not, as in the case of the Benbow gun, have been cast hollow. To bore it is a long job, continuing night and day from Monday morning to Saturday afternoon, and takes, even in the case of a thirty-feet barrel, more than a week. It is a work of exceeding care, for the slightest deviation in any direction would spoil the ingot. After the rough boring the tube is taken on the crane to the oil-pit to be tempered by being raised to a red heat and dipped; and it then comes back for the fine boring. In our 110-ton gun this will occupy three months, during which time the cutters pass up the tube three or four times, each pass taking two or three weeks, each paring away a thinner shaving than the last, until in the final pass perhaps only the fivehundredth of an inch will be removed. The next process is turning the outside to receive the coils, and this is now going on with the gun in front of us, the bright steel shavings curling off like lengthy paper spills, looking so innocent, and being really so hot that our hands cannot hold them. As the huge lathe goes slowly round and some of the lathes have twenty-feet chucks and sixty-feet beds-the cutter seems to strip the shavings off as easily as a finger-nail would gouge them out from a cylinder of soap, and the rest seems to travel up the slide no faster than the hour hand of a clock. The turning being ended, the barrel is ready for the hoops, which are forged in the hoop-shop at the other end of the factory. The hoop is taken to one of the twenty-five feet drilling machines. Its inside is cut out to be just a little smaller than the barrel. It is then taken back to the forge and re-heated by gas to a less than a red heat, and it is then slipped over the barrel, while cold water is run through the bore to keep all cool. When this is done the gun is upright in a pit, the rings being dropped on to it by the crane. The gun is now built up and ready for rifling. A 10tonner will take a month on the rifling machine. A drum the size of the bore is thrust down it. At the end of the drum is a toothlike cutter, which can be set at any pitch, and as it comes back out of the gun it cuts a groove, which it has to traverse again and again until it is of the requisite depth and width. Were there no other arrangements the groove would be straight, but by means of the sloping bar on which the framework travels a rack is worked against a pinion, the pinion receives its twist, and the drum, gradually turning as it retires, gives the spiral curve of the rifling. As the slope of the guide is constant the curve is constant, and the pitch of the rifling can be altered at will by the pitch of the bar. Over each groove the cutter has to travel perhaps a dozen times, and, as there are eighty grooves to finish, the cutter may have to make over nine hundred journeys, at every journey taking off from a fiftieth to a twenty-fifth of an inch. Were the cutter to go wrong, the fourteen miles it may have had to travel up and down the bore would have been travelled in vain, the gun would be spoiled, and £15,000 of work and material thrown away. When the guns are rifled, cleaned, and completed, an impres sion in gutta-percha is taken of their insides, and they are taken away to be proved, unless they are for our own government. One of the trial ranges is at Ridsdale, thirty-five miles away to the north-west; the machine guns are tried near Rothbury; and the big guns go to the tidal range near Silloth, on the western coast. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year. free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. Words in common, as "pensive," From the other ye borrow. If diff'rence between ye If pale Thought wear an air Or urge we more just Yet are suffering and doing If the rapt air of Thought We call fitly "abstraction," While Sorrow's onslaught We say ends in "distraction," Both terms but declare, By co-equal concession, By your kinship, what mean ye, By deep Thought to be friended? With objects of sorrow? Twin sisters I deem ye, Pale Thought and lean Sorrow; Each her lineaments seem ye From the other to borrow. Academy. JOHN OWEN. From The Contemporary Review. DISESTABLISHMENT AND DISENDOW MENT. BY DEAN PLUMPTRE. THE "burning question" of the day might well seem to be by this time al most, or altogether, exhausted; the arguments on this side and on that to have been threshed out to the last grain of wheat, the last particle of chaff. If I avail myself of the offer of the editor of the Contemporary Review to let me say in its pages what I have been unable to say elsewhere, it is because I find myself in the present instance, not for the first time, unable to enlist myself without reserve under either leader in the conflict. compelled, in greater or less measure, to adopt the parte per se stesso,* which has in every age, before and after Dante, been the portion of those who would not echo the cries of parties, and who sought to avoid the falsehood of extremes. hesitate to give unalterable pledges about anything; but the electors, especially the two millions of new electors, have a right advise? what do you think right? and to to ask, What do you wish? what do you look for more satisfying answers than they have yet had from any leading Liberal statesman, except Mr. Childers and Mr. W. E. Forster. In the tone of Mr. Gladstone's manifesto, and his letter to Mr. Bosworth Smith, we note the wish to avoid the question, to relegate it to the "dim and distant future," so that there may be "peace and truth truth in other matters of Liberal policy - peace and and for the Church itself, in his days. the desire that the work, in any case, may not come into his hands to do; the faith, it is just to add, that the spiritual life of the Church does not depend on the temporal accidents of its establishment; the endeavor to leave, as his last legacy to the led, the expression of his feeling that, great Liberal party which he has so nobly whenever the change shall come, it should be carried into effect in the spirit of a large-hearted and generous considerateness. But I confess that I think with Mr. Bosworth Smith that we might have hoped for more than this. the Irish Church disestablishment might But the experience of have taught him, as it has taught others, how soon a question which seems in the "dim and distant future," may come very near, how "the bolt falls from the blue," how the cloud that hovers on the horizon no bigger than a man's hand may spread over the whole political firmament, and bring with it the tempestuous winds which compel even the experienced navigator to change his course, perhaps, also, to save his ship, by throwing a Jonah, who is held responsible for the storm, to the howling waves. And therefore, I think, it was natural enough that we should wish to know whether, in Mr. Gladstone's judg. I have no wish, however, to take my place among the trimmers, the waverers, the waiters upon Providence, the "molluscous politicians." I will say at once that I should look on the disestablishment, and yet more on the disendowment, of the Church as a great, though probably, not an irreparable, misfortune for the English people; that I cannot conceive any combination of circumstances, short of such a change as would make the English Church what the Irish Church was in 1868, in which I could do otherwise than vote against it, and if compelled to "accept the inevitable," do otherwise than accept with a protest. What I most deplore is that the virus of opportunism seems, in this matter, to have emasculated the energies of our statesmen, that those who ought to lead seem content to follow. It is perfectly true that no statesman can resist, as things are, the will of the people as declared by an overwhelming majority of the House of Commons, and I can un-ment, the time had at length come when derstand a statesman thinking it his duty, as the least of two evils, to give effect to that will, even when it is against his own convictions. A pupil of Peel may well "So 'twill be well for thee A party to have made thee by thyself." DANTE, Parad. xvii. 69. (Longfellow.) the present position of the Church of England was so far identical with the past mand, on all principles of a strict, inexoraposition of the Irish Church as to deble equity, that it should be subjected to identical or analogous treatment. Was it, as that Church was, an incubus, an insult |