literature also. In theory, correction is possible with it: it sets its type in solid lines, and if you want to add or subtract a comma, the whole line must be set all over again. In practice, the re-setting and re-casting of the whole line means too much trouble and time and expense; therefore the comma is not corrected, and bad work is the result. The reader is annoyed or confused or misled by mistakes, or else he is taught to believe that in the art of writing trifles don't matter. The writer is forced to acquiesce in the same heresy. He must not revise and correct, and in time, by dint of seeing many scandalous blunders in his work, learns to accept blunders in spelling, in grammar, in style, as a necessary condition of literature-of which disease literature must eventually die.

You who have seen your noblest sentiments, your most resounding phrases pass under the harrow of the Linotype will confess that this is no exaggeration. The Linotype made for bad writing; the Monotype, giving out work as easy of correction as hand-set types, if it does not make directly for good writing, at least does not make against it. It does affirmatively make for good printing. In the meantime, it is permitted to welcome a machine which, whilst, like most of its breed, it makes life swifter and more exciting, does not, like many, leave it uglier than it found it.

G. W. STEEVENS.

RHODES AND THE RIGHT OF WAY

"R

EMEMBER, remember, the Fifth of November "-an old catch-word, almost forgotten, of religious faction in the little island which is the Mother Country to South Africans. These out-worn battle-cries seem strangely meaningless in the ears of men who found Jesuit fathers at work when they went forward into an unknown country, now known as Rhodesia. Yet the name, Rhodesia, which spells toleration and comradeship to the first pioneers of that great country, seems, at home, to evoke the ghosts of dead political and religious passions.

Rhodesia, to its founders, recalls Mother Patrick, Father Kerr and Father Hartmann, Mr. Rhodes, the Rev. John Mackenzie, and Sir Charles Warren, not as Tories or as Radicals, Catholics or Nonconformists, Colonials or Imperialists, but as human beings, who-for one or other reason, political, religious, or humanitarian, it makes no matter-threw in their lot with the natural expansion of English civilisation towards the north. In South Africa Englishmen and Dutchmen, Catholics and Protestants, British soldiers and Colonial statesmen, Soldiers of the Crown and Soldiers of the Cross, all forwarded this expansion. But, now, when it has been effected, a small chorus of detraction is heard: a chorus enlisted from camps curiously diverse. Not "misfortune," but in this case, the good fortune of South Africa and humanity, has made strange bed-fellows"; for Mr. John Morley and the German Emperor, Mr. Arnold Forster and Mr. Page Hopps, Dr. Leyds and Mr. Leonard Courtney, are all exercised in their minds. And it is, thank goodness and Mr. Rhodes, not the Fifth that we are to remember, but the Fourth. For on the Fourth of November, 1897, His Excellency Sir Alfred Milner, G.C.M.G., &c., will declare the railway from Cape Town to Buluwayo open; and by the railway I mean the thousand four hundred and sixty miles of steel rails and iron sleepers imported from England to South Africa.

46

Now, how has this been done? Up to '84 the Government of the Cape Colony had opened scme seven hundred and forty miles from

Cape Town to Kimberley, then practically the limit of the British Right of Way to the North. Between the frontier of Cape Colony and what is now Rhodesia lay Bechuanaland. This no-man's-landlarge as a European State-stretched between the Transvaal Republic solemnly constituted in the east by Mr. Gladstone in '81 and German South-West Africa, idly discarded by us as worthless in '83, on the west. Through this no-man's-land ran the Right of Way from the Colony to its hinterland, Rhodesia; thus inexplicably restricted by the caprice of the British Government and the resultant apathy of the Cape Government. Though restricted, it was still large, judged by a European standard; but it was not secure. In point of fact, it had been not only narrowed but also jeopardised. To bar the Right of Way, President Kruger had encouraged two raids, and, through his agents, Gey van Pittius and Groot Adriaan de la Rey, founded the two Republics of Stellaland and Rooigrond. Now, the Rev. John Mackenzie had in it taken up the labours of Moffat and Livingstone among the Bechuana tribes; and in consequence of the outrages perpetrated by the filibusters of these two bogus Republics -projected by President Kruger to block the Right of Way-Mr. Mackenzie, “who had long been engaged as a missionary in promoting the interests of the Bechuanaland people," was invested with the authority of Deputy-Commissioner. But the attacks on the natives, who claimed British protection, continued, and his efforts on their behalf proved unavailing; so Mr. Rhodes was appointed to succeed to Mr. Mackenzie, and Mr. Rhodes succeeded where Mr. Mackenzie had failed. The Stellaland Republic was ready, on terms, to recognise the British flag; the Rooigrond Republic was not. And the Rooigrond Republic, though north of the Stellaland, and then remote, was still a block to the Right of Way: a most pernicious thing to eyes which looked to a larger future. So Mr. Rhodes, as Deputy-Commissioner, recommended an Imperial Expedition, and Major-General Sir Charles Warren made his progress through the country. As a consequence the sphere of British influence was extended to the Zambesi, and the Right of Way to Rhodesia was preserved.

But, as every one ought by this time to know, a sphere of influence must be confirmed by effective occupation. Followed, accordingly, the effective occupation of Rhodesia by Mr. Rhodes-the organisation

* Official handbook-Noble.

of the Pioneer expedition and its successful march of a thousand miles; the founding of Salisbury, the capital of Mashonaland; the defeat of the Portuguese at Massakessi; the check to the Boer invasion on the Limpopo; the conquest of Matabeleland, necessitated, so Mr. Gladstone declared, by the interests of humanity; the founding of Buluwayo; and the record construction, by Mr. George Pauling, of the last five hundred miles of line. It is all of it "another story"; but none at all of it would have been possible or intelligible unless, thirteen years ago, Mr. Rhodes had taken steps, contemplated years even before that, to checkmate German intrigue and Boer aggression. To-day he has his reward; and on the Fourth of November, '97, His Excellency Sir Alfred Milner, High Commissioner of South Africa, will, in the presence of representatives from the Parliaments of Great Britain, Cape Colony, and Natal, declare the railway from Cape Town to Buluwayo open.

SOUTH AFRICA.

H

A SUMMER OF UNREST

ISTORY has learnt to concern itself less with princes than with peoples, or we might expect the summer of 1897 to be inscribed in its pages as the Summer of Unrest. The populations of Europe have been as quiet this year as last, or as in any other of the decade: flurried, of course, in a holiday-making way, by the coming and going of kings and emperors on some tremendous mysterious business, but with no burning desire or discontent to distract them from their own affairs. Certain great cities would have been less gay without those magnificent arrivals and departures, but there is no reason to think that they would have been in the least bit grieved. In its origin the stir has been princely and imperial altogether, and now, when all is over, we are to understand that the one anxiety of the disturbers was that nothing should be disturbed. Peace, they one and all protested, was their sole purpose; and this, indeed, may be believed, though on a first impulse we might be inclined to say that if peace was really their object, its better means of attainment would have been the strict devotion of each potentate to home affairs.

Yet there has been no deception, or, rather, no one need be deceived who takes the common declaration of Czar, President, Kaiser, and King literally, though without confining it to its simplest meaning. Each of these great ones declared, whenever the solemn moment recurred for raising his glass, that first and last he was resolute for peace. A distinguished foreign statesman is reported to have said that his confidence in the future would be more serene if this word "peace" had been uttered less often. In so saying he was too suspicious, perhaps and not suspicious enough. The word may be accepted as quite sincere, though not as signifying necessarily that nothing is to be disturbed. No doubt the word does yield this meaning, and it is seemingly the one that we are expected to amuse ourselves with. But there are others of various shades, and when they are considered it appears that the only meaning which King and Kaiser, President and Czar can be held to is, that the main object of their conferences was to