found in the same neighbourhood, deposits of decomposed serpentine rock between Mount d'Or and Unia, in the islets of Belep and Yandé, in Oland Bay and elsewhere. But we have no space to devote to the mineral riches of New Caledonia. What we have already said about them is sufficient to indicate their great value and importance, besides the fact that they are mostly owned, not by French but by German and British capitalists. We trust that our experiences of the uitlander troubles at Johannesburg may not find a repetition in this Antipodean French territory. Absit

omen.

Admiral Cyprian Bridge's forecast of the future developement of the Western Pacific is, we venture to think, too pessimistic. It does not seem to him that the Pacific islands are likely for generations yet to come to be of any use to mankind at large. To be of any profitable use for Europeans is, perhaps, what he meant to say, for he added: Fertile as they may be, they can only be made productive 'with labour of which no man can say where it is to be 'obtained.' Whether it may be the best for the natives themselves that their lands should be exploited for the profit of the European race is a question of ethics which we would rather not answer too plainly. The senior foreign secretary of the London Missionary Society has put the question lately as to how far it is justifiable for any one Power to hand over to any other Power sovereign rights in islands over which it has not itself exercised any sovereignty in the past, and to deal with the people as if they were part and parcel of the soil, without any personal right to express their preference. Such was the case with Madagascar, it may be remembered, in 1890, when the Hovas, who had been christianised by the London Missionary Society, were handed over by us to a French protectorate, wholly against their will, an act which led to disastrous wars and calamity, whose effects are even now not wholly assuaged. In like manner we have now handed over to the mercies of the Germans, together with the islands of Samoa, some thirty-five thousand Samoan Christians, of whom at least thirty thousand have been, and are, under the direct care and instruction of our Congregational and Wesleyan missionaries, who have been careful, as we are told, not to anglicise their pupils. This is the acme of political morality at which we have arrived on the close of the nineteenth century. Indeed, trade interests would appear to be everything nowadays, when even the Union

Jack has come to be looked upon as a commercial asset.'

The French missionaries, on the other hand, regard with complacency the appropriation of native lands and the disposal of the natives themselves, but only when they are savages, and we know that the Samoans cannot be regarded as barbarians. Hear what Monseigneur Vitte, Vicaire apostolique of New Caledonia, has to say on this subject :

'C'est un principe adinis chez les nations civilisées, que les peuplades sauvages ne forment pas un peuple proprement dit; qu'elles ne possèdent pas ce pouvoir social nommé par nous l'Etat, ni tous les droits qui lui appartiennent. Naturellement incapables de triompher par elles-mêmes d'une barbarie qui les rend dangereuses, elles peuvent être conquises légitimement, par toute nation civilisée et soumises à ses lois. Or, une de ces lois est que toute terre non occupée est du domaine de l'État, et que celui-ci a le droit d'en disposer pour le bien public.'

To which M. Carol adds :

'Quand, sans provocation, nous dépossédons de son patrimoine (la chose s'est vue) un peuple organisé, autonome, régi par des lois fixes, avide de progrès social, déjà fort avancé en civilisation, mais ayant ce grand tort de n'avoir pas la peau de la même couleur que la nôtre, nous commettons, vis-à-vis de ce peuple-là, une violation du droit des gens.'

The present administration in New Caledonia certainly seems to be acting fairly towards the Kanakas; and our rule in New Guinea is apparently proceeding on right methods. Some writers have supposed that the gradual depopulation of the Pacific islands has been going on for years, even before the appearance of white men on the scene, and that the Polynesians are fated to disappear before long. But in some of the islands-such as Tonga and Savage Islands-there seems to be a renewal of the lease of propagation; while in the Gilbert or Kingsmill Islands we are told::

'The overflowing swarms of population are a continual source of surprise. Some of the islands seem to form one great village. The very smallest of these atolls, only two miles across, has a population of from 1,500 to 2,000, while Taputeuea has from 7,000 to 8,000. The population of the whole group is estimated at over 40,000, while the area of dry land is not more than 170 square miles, giving more than 230 persons per square mile, while in some of the islands it is said to reach 400 per square mile-a density of population certainly unequalled in the world in any area where the people depend for food solely on their own exertions.

So without calling in Chinese immigration, which our Australasian colonies would not tolerate, or even without negro or that Indian coolie labour by which the Mauritius sugar plantations were rendered so profitable not many years since we may be able to find a hardy, prolific, mixed race of labourers, said to be of an energetic temperament within our British possessions, capable of making the fertile soil of the West Pacific islands productive of sugar, cotton, and other crops, which have formerly made fortunes for our planters in the West Indies and elsewhere. Some of the islands, such as Espiritu Santo, are much larger than Mauritius, where crops of cane producing 130,000 tons of sugar for exportation have been obtained. But although our class of traders in the Western Pacific has improved very much in the last few years, the Germans are still ahead of us in this respect, for they send out clerks better educated than ours, capable of speaking French and English besides their own language, while our young Englishmen can seldom speak any language except their own. Fortunately,

the natives of Polynesia learn English with more ease than German; and even in New Caledonia the Kanakas acquire English in the neighbourhood of the mines where our Cornish miners are at work.

Certainly for some years to come our object should not be to extract all the profit possible out of our new possessions in the Western Pacific. Our first duty is towards the native inhabitants, and our chief endeavours should be directed towards saving them from parting with their patrimony to all those grasping syndicates and monopolising companies which spread their financial trail over whole archipelagoes. Should a generous policy be carried out, more for the benefit of the native populations than for the exhibition of a prosperous budget, we may look forward to a sure recompense in the loyalty of the inhabitants, and therefore an inexpensive administration over them. Romilly tells us how when he arrived out in Fiji in 1879-a friend of Sir Arthur Gordon, without employment-he was sent off in command of a party to make the natives of a neighbouring island, Kandavu, pick cotton to pay their taxes. This is decidedly unpleasant reading. But that is too often the first object of a civilian official despatched by the Colonial Office to take charge of a newly acquired possessionto make it pay, to show a surplus.* Admiral Cyprian

* We must point to Mr. Woodford's modest budget for the Solomon

Bridge indicates the right path to be pursued when he writes:

:

'As we have chosen to go to New Guinea uninvited, we are bound in honour to do all the good we can to the races who have not resented our intrusion, but have received us as friends. If we do not take the proper steps, we shall soon find that we have a wolf by the ears. We have a noble chance-we are not likely to have another-of showing that Englishmen can rule barbarians without exterminating them or dispossessing them of their lands. I believe it possible to make New Guinea happy, prosperous, and civilised; I also believe that it may, and in no long time, be made self-supporting. But the right method must be adopted, and a system to suit politicians here and in Australia may be utterly unsuited to the conditions of the country. If the latter be adopted, the natives will deserve all the pity we can give them.'

If our foreign and colonial officials in Whitehall would take into more consideration the honour of the flag which our naval and military officers have ever in mind, we might have fewer of these diplomatic games of chance and skill in which the weal of fellow creatures is passed from hand to hand like the counters of Napoleon :

'Whose game was empires, and whose stakes were thrones,
Whose table earth-whose dice were human bones.'

Islands as

policy.

a promising indication of a more righteous and humane

ART. X.-Henry Hart Milman, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. A biographical sketch by his son ARTHUR MILMAN, M.A., LL.D. London: 1900.

THE great prominence which the High Church movement has assumed in the ecclesiastical history of England during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, and the extraordinary success with which it has permeated the Established Church by its influence, have led some writers to exaggerate not a little the place which it occupied in the general intellectual developement of the time. In the universities, it is true, it long exercised an extraordinary influence, and Mr. Gladstone, who was by far the most remarkable layman whom it profoundly influenced, was accustomed to say that for at least a generation almost the whole of the best intellect of Oxford was controlled by it. It possessed in Newman a writer of most striking and undoubted genius. In an age remarkable for brilliancy of style he was one of the greatest masters of English prose. His power of drawing subtle distinctions and pursuing long trains of subtle reasoning made him one of the most skilful of controversialists, and he had a great insight into spiritual cravings and an admirable gift of interpreting and appealing to many forms of religious emotion. But though he was a man of rare, delicate, and most seductive genius, we have sometimes doubted whether any of his books are destined to take a permanent and considerable place in English literature. He was not a great scholar, or an original and independent thinker. Dealing with questions inseparably connected with historical evidence, he had neither the judicial spirit nor the firm grasp of a real historian, and he had very little skill in measuring probabilities and degrees of evidence. He had a manifest incapacity, which was quite as much moral as intellectual, for looking facts in the face and pursuing trains of thought to unwelcome conclusions. He often took refuge from them in clouds of casuistry. The scepticism which was a marked feature of his intellect allied itself closely with credulity, for it was directed against reason itself; and though he has expressed in admirable language many true and beautiful thoughts, the glamour of his style too often concealed much weakness and uncertainty of judgement and much sophistry in argument.

Many of those who co-operated with him were men of