are beginning to learn, the most trustworthy of informants. Every tourist contradicted every other. No country became conceivable to us, even when we had read through a whole library of such books. A whole army of such travelers, when they had combined all their contributions to the common stock, had told us little or nothing worth knowing or printing. Mr. Tuckerman in his America and Her Commentators has given us a review of the American branch of this literature, as amusing as it is exhaustive; and the clever caricature of it in one of the Atlantic Almanacs, derived all its point of wit from its substantial truth to life.

Russia has had plenty of poor books written about it, and a few that are very good. The Marquis de Custine's book was maliciously unfair, but it made the country a conceivable one. Baron Von Haxthausen's was written under a theological bias which made him incapable of being a just critic; but he had looked below the surface of Russian life, and won the honor of discovering the Mir or village community, and of giving it a political significance. Julius Eckardt writes from the standpoint of a German resident of the Baltic Provinces, who fiercely resents the attempts to Russify that half-Teutonic district. All these men had their special bias, and yet they gave us the best books about Russia that were accessible to any general reader, whose interest in politics, or whose acquaintance with Turgenef and other Russian writers, led him to seek for fuller information about the great Slavonic Empire.

Mr. Mackenzie Wallace has given us a work on Russia, whose merits are that it represents a longer and a closer study of the country than has ever been devoted to it by any foreigner; that it is more attractive in matter and graphic in style than any other, that its author possesses the special information and interest which have enabled him to depict every side of Russia's variegated life con amore; and that he writes in a friendly but impartial spirit. There is no recent book of travel that can at all compete with this in interest. Mr. Schuyler's Turkestan, for instance, is a very excellent book, but after reading the first volume, the appetite for the second is not voracious; and where he touches on points in which the diplomafist feels no special interest, such as the Dervishes, he writes superficially and meagerly, though picturesquely. But he who finishes Mr. Mackenzie Wallace's Russia, is chiefly concerned that there is no second volume of equal size; and although the author is not a man of specially religious character, he writes about the Greek Church, the Dissenters and other Heretics, in a way that shows his share in the theological culture of his native Scotland. His sketches of the Mir, of the life of the various sets of landholders, old style and new style, and of the effects of the Emancipation of the serfs, are of great interest to the student of social science; they correct many false impressions at present current, especially as regards the wealth of the Russian princes, and the im

provement of the sert's position by emancipation. What he says about the character of the Greek Church, and of the parish clergy, would hardly do for a tract in the interest of that Russo-Greek Committee, which is laboring for the union of this Church to one branch of Protestantism. The truth is that the Roman Catholic Church stands far nearer to Protestants, than does this its fossilized and unspiritual rival in the farther East.

With the methods of Russian government, Mr. Mackenzie Wallace is no more enamored than Mr. Schuyler. He speaks of them with a candor which cannot be soothing, and which no doubt explains why even the proof-sheets of the work were suppressed on their way to the Grand Duke Constantine, President of the Imperial Geographical Society.

The book is a library in itself, of the fullest, freshest, most authentic information. The American edition, except the lettering on the cover, is an excellent specimen of book-making.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Philology. By John Peile, M. A. Literature Primers. 18mo. Pp. 164. Cloth, 50 cts. New York: D. Appleton & Co. [Porter & Coates.

Classical Geography. By H. F. Tozer, M. A. Literature Primers. 18mo. Pp. 127. Cloth, 50 cts. New York: D. Appleton & Co. [Porter & Coates.

Two Lilies. By Julia Kavanagh. 12mo. Pp. 443. Cloth, $1.50. New York: D. Appleton & Co. [Porter & Coates.

Second

The Elements of Banking. By Henry Dunning Macleod, M. A. edition. 12mo. Pp. xiii. ; 270. Cloth. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Bessie Lang. By Alice Corkran. Leisure Hour Series. 16mo. Pp. 298. Cloth, $1.25. New York: Henry Holt & Co. [Porter & Coates. The Wine-Bibbers' Temperance Society. 16mo. Pp. 76. Cloth, 75 cts. Boston: Lee & Shepard. New York: C. T. Dillingham.

Annual Report of the Comptroller of the Currency to the Second Session of the Forty-Fourth Congress of the United States. 8vo. Washington: Government Printing Office.

Aloys. By Berthold Auerbach. Translated by Chas. T. Brooks. Leisure Hour Series 16mo. Pp. iv. ; 263. Cloth, $1.25. New York: Henry Holt & Co. [Porter & Coates.

Idols and Ideals. With an Essay on Christianity. By Moncure Daniel Conway, M. A. 12mo. Pp 351. Cloth, $1.50. New York: Henry Holt & Co. [Porter &

Coates.

THE

PENN MONTHLY.

JUNE.

THE MONTH.

THE people who expected to see Russia make it a seven weeks'

or a seven days' war, are beginning to discover their mistake. The two combatants are much more evenly balanced than has been thought, especially by Americans, with their exaggerated notion of Russia's strength. The Czar has indeed the larger empire, and represents a civilization of a higher order. The worst abuses of his government are remediable; they are not a part of the popular faith, nor, therefore, essential to the system. But in political organization, Russia occupies the very lowest place in European Christendom; its methods are the worst known in Europe outside of Turkey itself. No intelligent friend of the Eastern Christians but must deplore the remissness of the other great Powers, which has given Russia the opportunity to constitute herself the guardian of these struggling nationalities and to control their future.

On the other hand Turkey, if less powerful in the command of men and other resources, and cursed with a system of government and social organization which for all peaceful purposes is irremediably bad, and the worse the more it is reformed, does possess in that system a powerful engine of war. And she is determined to use it to the utmost. The war has been proclaimed a holy war, or "war of zeal," and the Moslem troops are excited to every sort of fanaticism by the appeals of Mollahs, Dervishes and other apostles of the crescentade. She is prepared to make a stubborn resistance.

at every point. The first real battle of the war, fought at Batoum on the Asiatic line of operations, seems to have resulted in a decided repulse to the Russians, while the passage of the Danube in the presence of a Turkish army has been found no easy undertaking. The want in Asia of a natural frontier of strategic importance seems to have been the only reason for the earlier collision in that quarter, as the Russians are evidently pushing forward on both lines of invasion with equal energy. And the fact that she is everywhere establishing her system of civil government in the Asiatic towns and districts she has occupied, shows that she has made up her mind to stay.

The superiority of Turkey on the sea has enabled her to blockade the Russian forts on the Black Sea, but it was not the reason for dispatching her fleet to American waters. It was fully expected by the Russians, and they had many more reasons for the expectation than are known to the public, that England would at once take the part of Turkey on the outbreak of the war. It was that they might be out of the reach of the British navy that her ships were ordered to American waters, and they would doubtless have secured the right to remain here by landing their cannon, if the war party in the British Cabinet had had their own way. It is since the defeat of that party by Lord Salisbury and his friends that they have sailed under sealed orders.

ONE English Liberal leader has had the courage to speak out his mind, and run the line of division between the honest and the halfhearted friends of the Eastern Christians. Early in the month Mr. Gladstone gave notice of resolutions censuring Turkey for her rejection of the demands of the British government, and proposing a resumption of the foreign policy of Canning, which led to the independence of Greece. At once Sir John Lubbock, a Liberal of the radical type, gave notice that he would move the previous question, and from almost every quarter came denunciations of the resolutions, as threatening the dissolution of the Liberal party. Mr. Gladstone is one of those perverse and troublesome people, who believe that the Almighty may have higher ends in view than the preservation of a party, and that in the long run more is achieved by doing what is simply right, than by following the tortuous lines of party policy. And he has accomplished great things by his resolutions, for the great majority of the Liberals-a majority which

did not include Bright, Forster, Goschen or any of the Manchester school-voted for his resolutions, though after he had withdrawn the strongest and the most practical of them. He forced the Administration to speak out; he showed to all Europe that the moderate or peace party in the Cabinet, led by Salisbury, has overborne Mr. Disraeli, and has secured pledges and assurances of a pacific policy, which could have been obtained in no other way. Nothing less than the actual annexation of Constantinople by Russia, or an interference with the Suez Canal, is to be a ground of war. And the whole of the European provinces of Turkey may, therefore, be raised to the status of Servia, or even of Roumania, and the Russian frontier in Asia may be pushed far west of Mt. Ararat without anything being done that will be thought to justify interference. This information is of the first importance to Russia; for the avoidance of a collision with England has been from the first a controlling motive in her policy. The knowledge exactly how far she can go without provoking a collision, will have great weight in her determination how far she will go.

Besides this, Mr. Gladstone has again elicited such an expression of English opinion as shows that the enthusiam of last summer is not even dormant, but alive and vigorous in all quarters, and that he is a true representative of the nation's views. In every part of the island there was a clear and altogether spontaneous outburst. of approval of his resolutions, and this not less in the very constituencies represented by his Liberal opponents than in his own at Greenwich. Hundreds upon hundreds of meetings were held within a week, and one and all were of the same tenor; while in London the only attempt to rally a meeting of another sort broke up in confusion, the Russophobists who denounced the Russian treatment of Poland, being met by outcries denouncing the English treatment of Ireland as no better. It is quite possible that the next general election will show that Mr. Gladstone has England with him, and that this new Cave of Adullam, though it contains Bright this time, will be treated as was the old one. When England's better self is aroused enough to make itself heard, Manchester is not its organ of utterance.

MARSHAL MACMAHON has given Gambetta his opportunity. The imperialist soldier has always been a mistake at the head of a French Republic. He has not understood the rôle, nor compre