PUBLICATIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8538, 11 April 1891, Page 1 (Supplement)

PUBLICATIONS.

The mosb prominent contribution in the January issue of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine is one on " The Memoirs of Talleyrand," which are just about to be published. lb is said that the publishers of the Century gave £1000 for an advance copy of the memoirs. Mr. Whitelaw Reid, the American Minister at Paris, writes an excellent introduction, giving a sketch of the life and the personality of Talleyrand. The memoirs do not conduct us to the most interesting period of, Talleyrand's career. At present he is lefb in America. - The journal is, however, .-jaoeb jntereafcipgj and

shows the views taken of affairs by one of the moat extraordinary men of Europe in modern times. " A Romance of Morgan's Riders" is a story of the war, divided into three parts, written by three officers actively engaged in the celebrated raid made by Morgan. The other articles are all good matter, and, as is usual with the Century, they are exquisitely illustrated. We quote the following from Mr. Whitelaw Reid's sketch of Talleyrand's career : —

Sir Henry Bulwer has a phrase that, in a way, measures him: "He was the most important man in the Constituent Assembly after Mirabeau, and the most important man in the Empire after Napoleon." But to gauge fairly his extraordinary public life it must be remembered that he held place and gained in power for forty years after Mirabeau's death; and that he had been one of the leading men of France before Napoleon was heard of, and remained a minister and an ambassador of France long after Napoleon had eaten out his heart at St. Helena. Yet, in spite of .his amazing career, his countrymen have not been generally disposed to speak well of him. Napoleon called him a silk stocking tilled With filth, and on occasion addressed the same epithet directly to him. Chateaubriand said of him : " When Monsieur Talleyrand is not conspiring, he is making corrupt bargains." Carnot said: " He brings with him all the vices of the old regime, without having been able to acquire any of the virtues of the new one; he has no fixed principles; he changes them as he does his linen, and takes them according to the wind of the day— philosopher, when philosophy is the mode; a republican now, because that is necessary in order to become anything. To-morrow he will declare for an absolute monarchy, if he can make anything out of it. I don't want him at any price.' Mirabeau called him "this vile, base, trickster ;" and again wrote: "It is dirt and money that he wants. For money lie has sold his honour and his friend. For money he would sell his —and he would be right, for he would be trading muck for gold." He had taken office under Louis XVIIL, and was representing France at the Congress of Vienna, when Napoleon suddenly came back from Elba. He merely discovered that his liver was a little out of order, and he must go to Carlsbad. "The first duty of a diplomat," he observed, after a Congress, " is to take care of his liver." When things went wrong, says Sainte-Beuve, he always had trouble with his liver. In fact, a few months later, after Waterloo, there were fresh symptoms of the same disease so long as Louis XVIII. regarded him askance; but the moment he was reappointed Minister of Foreign Affairs all was well. The harm Talleyrand did was chiefly to individuals. The good he done was to France. His public action in the Constituent Assembly was most important and, in the main, most judicious. The French writers of that period, and even down to the day of his death, habitually ascribed sinister motives to every act, and professed to find his hidden hand in many* excesses of the Revolutionary party. But he can only be fairly judged now by what he is known to have done ; and by that standard there is no Frenchman who might not be proud of his record in the Constituent Assembly.

The writing itself is rather more carefullyworded than one might expect. Talleyrand is not so frank, and does not say so many disagreeable things as anyone knowing his character from other sources would anticipate. When he went to America he was furnished by Lord Lansdowne with an extremely cordial letter of introduction to Washington, but that statesman flatly refused to receive him, and, as Mr. Reid says, " Talleyrand never forgot or forgave the slight." Talleyrand in his memoirs about his stay in America says nothing about Washington. Talleyrand's remarks about government and commercial policy are always wise and moderate, and in his writing there is an absence of that cynicism so conspicuous in his sayings in conversation. The Westminster Review for February has an interesting article on the book of the day, " Lord Houghton's Life," by Mr. T. Wemyss Reid. Jeannie Lockett writes on " The Labour Battle in Australia," taking- the following line — In its inception there is no doubt whatever that the contest was the result of a mistaken course entered upon by the labour organisations in obedience to the command of their leaders. At the same time a certain amount of responsibility must rest upon the employers, in connection with the developments resulting from their refusal to meet the labour representatives in conference. It is true that the'asked-for conference might have had absolutely no effect in bringing about a termination of the conflict, but it would at least have shown that the employers were willing to avail themselves of any peaceable means towards securing that end, which did not call on them to concede the principles forming the basis of their position; and it would have prevented oven the shadow of an excuse for a resort to a display of hostilities which has since led to serious breaches of the pence. With regard to some of the tactics resorted to in the earlier stages of the conflict, which had for their outcome the intimidation and, in a few cases, actual maltreatment of non-union labourers, while looking upon them with disapproval, it must be _ borne in mind that they are the invariable incidents of conflicts leading to the enforced idleness of thousands of workmen; and there is reason for believing that the leaders of the movement exerted themselves in the direction of the maintenance of discipline among the men under their control, with a view to preventing breaches of the law; but for later acts perpetrated by unionists on strike, which bear evidence of being the result of a certain amount of organisation and combination, the leaders of the movement must be held in a very great measure responsible. There is a very good article on " Domestic Service" by A. Amy Bulley. Here is the position which the writer takes up:— . The fact is that domestic service, as it has existed hitherto, is a survival from a social state of things which has passed away, and, being now an anomaly, it is disappearing with as much rapidity as may be. It was all very well when tne maid or the man shared the life of the household when Pepys chose a page boy because he could sing a part and join in the family glees, or when, in country houses, maids and farm servants formed a little society, whose accepted leader was the head of the house ; when such a scene as that which Goldsmith depicts between Mr. Hardcastle and his servants was a faithful portraiture of the manners of the time. Servants then naturally stayed on until they married; and" if they did not achieve matrimony, the ties that bound them to their adopted family had generally grown too strong to be broken. In either case, therefore, they remained. But now when " life below stairs" is totally distinct from life above, and the strong class feeling which I have described has had time to develop, the existence of dwellers within the household who are yet not of the family is felt—on one side at any rate, and that the side which is most concerned be intolerable. The institution in its present form is doomed, and it must go. If what I have so far maintained is correct, the outlook may justly be regarded as serious. We are reaping the result of a one-sided and unequal social development, and the penalty is likely to be heavy. Evolution knows no mercy; if we do not perceive its course in time to fall in with it, we shall be swept aside like withered leaves. I take it for granted that the efforts of servants will be directed in the future, as they have been in past, towards obtaining more definite limits to their hours of work, and in this they are almost certain to succeed. Service may be provided in the future for limited portions of the day by a central institution, the servants going in succession from one house >to another, or households may combine to secure the services of a given staff of servants, each individual being engaged to do a specified amount of work. The first plan is already in practice for laundry work, charing, carpet - beating, window-cleaning, and many other household operations, and it is proposed, I believe, to add doorstep scrubbing to the list. An example of the second plan may be found in some of the recently-established * residential chambers for ladies in London, where service beyond a certain stipulated amount cau always be hired at so much an hour. The plan is said to work well. A third possibility is the total disappearance of the class of domestic servants, each family doing its own household work. This, however, is not in line with the tendency of the age, which is strongly towards specialisation; but it may appear in a slightly altered* form by a large number of the educated classes devoting themselves to domestic work as a profession.