and with ink entering the date, inking over the money already entered in pencil, and affixing his or her initials, and also entering the account in the ledger cash book. Two persons will do this more expeditiously, one to fill up the books and read out to the other, who finds the proper line by number and name, and enters the sum at once. When all the transactions have been thus entered the cash book must be added up, and the money counted to see if it corresponds. In case of fresh deposits a new book is prepared for the depositor, and returned with the others belonging to the same class. The books, arranged in classes as before, are returned to the teacher, who gives them out in the afternoon or next morning, and the money is taken to the post-office on the first opportunity. This work is done at Brampton by the chairman of the Board assisted at times by another of the members. The population of Brampton is 3,000. The average attendance in the three departments of the school is 389. The deposits since the opening of the bank have amounted to 1,2581. With statistics, however, this paper is not concerned. Nor is there any need for me to dwell on the benefit resulting from the bank to the school or the parish. Such benefit is the same in all schools and parishes, and has been well explained by Miss Lambert. I am only concerned to show how the obstacles to the spread of the system arising from the labour entailed upon the teachers may be overcome. I left Brampton in 1884. But the bank is still carried on in the same way as in my time. The chairman, or some other member of the Board, goes on the collecting day to the board-room, which is close to the school. The deposits of each department of the school are brought to him, and he goes through the process above described. It occupies him about an hour. At all events that was about the average time I took to do the work. Now surely there is not, or there ought not to be, a single school in London the managers of which could not carry out this mode of working a school bank. When one hears or reads of the attention now paid in London to social subjects, of well-worked' parishes, of bands of district visitors, of Charity Organisation committees, of zealous men going down to live at the East End, &c., it seems simply ridiculous to suppose that in any district some men or women cannot devote an hour a week to a work which, requiring no other qualifications but a businesslike habit of mind and ability to keep accounts, is yet deemed to be of such importance as to justify a demand for its recognition in the Code. H. WHITEHEAD. A GERMAN VIEW OF MR. GLADSTONE. As long as I can remember, it has been the fashion on the Continent to shower abuse on England for misgovernment of Ireland. Some used to throw the whole blame on the unsympathetic, the harsh and imperious character of Englishmen ; others tried to attribute the unsatisfactory condition of Ireland to the unfitness of nations with parliamentary institutions to govern other countries. Violent haters of England kept on upbraiding her, as Mr. Gladstone does, for severity practised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a period, forsooth, when humanitarian views were reigning supreme in the rest of Europe, when massacre and plunder and wars of religion were unknown in Germany! People found little to say concerning the measures passed since 1829, and they did not give England due credit for the Reform Bill of 1868, the Irish Church Disestablishment of 1869, the Land Bills of 1870, 1881, and 1885. They refused to recognise that the Irish themselves are principally to blame for having derived so little advantage from the generous legislation of the last twenty years, and they were too partial to acknowledge that unlimited private property in land and similar institutions, which are at the bottom of Irish discontent, were introduced and kept up by Englishmen without the slightest notion that anybody could get on without them, and to a great extent with a firm conviction that they were conferring a signal benefit on the conquered race, which regarded land as tribal property. That the behaviour of England to Ireland was, as a rule, not commented upon with complete fairness, is easy to explain. In the first place, nations are as subject to envy as individuals, and not likely to overlook a fault in their rival. Jingoism and Spreadeagleism everywhere need nourishment; hatred and contempt keep them alive; like the village or town gossip, they relish no food more than the iniquities and shortcomings of others; it makes them feel superior. In the second place, journalists who, from motives of prudence, refrain from sharp criticism on home affairs, have always been in the habit of venting their indignation, ill-humour, and sarcasm on foreign nations and governments. And it is, unfortunately, not in Moscow alone that such writers flourish. It is a pleasant thing to stand up for the cause of humanity, to display love of justice and an abundance of fine feeling and sentiment. In countries where the blood, liberty, and money of the subject are held rather cheap, and where a hasty word can lead to imprisonment for a twelvemonth, newspapers and their readers enjoy drawing attention to coercion and misgovernment abroad and overlooking it at home. In the third place, rackrenting is unknown in Germany, and land no more fetches an inordinate price. The lower classes have for the last fifty years been wise enough, in spite of their governments, their ruling classes, and their pseudo-economists, to escape by migration, and especially by emigration, the fatal consequences of over-population. Had prejudice against emigration been joined to wholesale contempt of the great truth preached by Malthus and J. Stuart Mill,1 competition would have allowed German proprietors to rackrent tenants and crofters; and had these crofters been told by men of education that they had a right to claim acres enough to live and thrive upon, independently of other work, we should now, in some parts of the country, no doubt be facing a dangerous agrarian movement. Fourthly, absenteeism is strongly disapproved of in Germany, and so rare, that I might say it does not exist. All proprietors farm their own estates, unless they own more than one; and then they rarely let them, but generally farm them by agents well versed in agriculture, and acting in every respect as personal representatives of the owner. How is it, then, that notwithstanding all these considerations public opinion in Germany has perhaps been even quicker and less hesitating than in Great Britain to range itself on the side of the Liberal Unionists versus the Home Rulers? Already in 1884 and 1885, when the Representation of the People and Redistribution of Seats Bills were under discussion, we felt astonished at the alacrity with which parties proceeded to democratise the Irish electorate and were ready to allow an unruly province more representatives than it was strictly entitled to, in an assembly far too numerous for all practical purposes without them. The occasion. seemed so propitious a one for limiting their number. Some of us were thoroughly aware of the danger of bringing in a new Reform Bill before sedition had been vanquished. And when the Conservatives did not shrink from bidding for the Parnellite vote, we feared that England had ceased to be the land of hereditary wisdom, as our fathers used to call it, and we predicted serious dangers for the 1 I am aware that statistics have proved how, for a time, under particular circumstances, the production of food on the globe can increase at even a quicker rate than population. But of what avail is this if the purchasing power of the average member of a community does not keep pace with the increase of his family? If we bear this fact in mind, we shall not venture to speak otherwise than with respect of the doctrine of Malthus and Mill. May the voice of their successors be listened to before a catastrophe takes place. British Empire. Soon after Mr. Gladstone had brought in his Home Rule Bills, the majority of the Conservative and National Liberal press, and even the most noteworthy of independent Radical papers, the Frankfurter Zeitung, recognised that the adoption of Mr. Gladstone's two bills could hardly fail to lead to either separation or anarchy, and in both cases probably to a reconquest of Ireland. If some organs of public opinion were slower than others to take this line, the following three reasons may partly account for it : 1. It was not in the interest of some editors and contributors to the periodical press to make their readers too suddenly aware of the reticence that had been practised with regard to the Irish question. It would not do to say too much at once about the generous intentions of the three Land Bills or about the glaring ingratitude with which the Irish Nationalists had received those gifts. Time was needed to veil the gradual change of language. 2. Some again were seized by enthusiasm at the sight of a venerable statesman glowing for justice and humanity, unmerciful for oppression, and sacrificing to cosmopolitan sentiment all national feelings and prejudices. They felt in honour bound to make common cause with British Liberalism, and to protect it against attacks proceeding from quarters where little or no sympathy was known to exist for representative government and predominance of parliaments. They took for granted that such a popular man as Mr. Gladstone must have the touch of the new British electorate, that English democracy was determined not to permit coercion, and that it would insist on Ireland for the Irish. They considered the Tories incapable of letting landlordism fall and putting an end to its abuses. They looked upon the elimination of the Irish members from the parliament at Westminster, and the establishment of peasant ownership by the Land Purchase Bill, as a good set-off to the creation of an independent Irish legislature. This was e.g. more or less the position taken up and ably defended by the chief Liberal weekly paper, the Berlin Nation. 3. Another, and, I am happy to say, a still smaller section of the German press, full of envy of British prosperity, and of antipathy to, or jealousy of, English liberty, thought that it was not Germany's business to inquire what consequences Irish Home Rule might enta il on our great commercial and industrial competitor, and that German is had no reason to deplore the self-sought ruin of the British Empir; e, were it to take place. Among the causes which are rapidly diminishing the ranks of anti-Unionists in my country, two are clearly preponderant, viz. the analogy of the position of both Great Powers in respect of seditio n at home, and the identity of the danger that threatens them fro n abroad. In the first place, Germans have been reflecting what they would 1887 A GERMAN VIEW OF MR. GLADSTONE. 421 do if boycotting were practised in Elsass, if a national league were I do not think anybody will deny that such would be the action > |