NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11537, 23 November 1900, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The outlook in Germany at the present time is far from being reassuring. According to the sagacious and well-informed Berlin correspondent of the London Times, " there, has seldom been a period of greater national discouragement and anxiety" than that through which the German Empire is now passing. The political and commercial conditions prevailing are such as to fill thoughtful observers with gloomy forebodings. From every quarter the Govempnent are assailed by critics who are both venomous and unanswerable. Everyone who is familiar with the mutual relations of the States that make up the German Empire is well aware that it needs a very skilful hand on the reins to prevent obvious jibbing. Hitherto the Empire has brought glory and well-being with it, and the personal popularity and ability of the first Emperors have averted any open discord. But is is extremely possible that any grave blow to the Imperial prestige or to the* country's wealth would suddenly reveal inward commotions in the German

Empire of which a» yet we hate little con. ception. Fiiel is ready piled for it. The Clericals hate the Empire of the Folk Laws. So do the millions of Socialists, a force to be reckoned with, though the attempts to suppress them have made it hard to ascertain their real strength. They are bitter foes to militarism, and therefore to the Empire. Since the death of Liebknecht they have shown a disposition to unite with the Liberal party, which is likely to make them more formidable, because more reasonable, than they have yet been, though they have already inspired such tenor in their opponents that the average well-to-do Prussian speaks of a Socialist almost as bitterly as of a Jew. Blacker than all are the signs, too numerous to detail, that Germany is very possibly on the verge of a great indus'trial and commercial crisis. The fabrio of Prussian society is unstable as an inverted pyramid; the workman is discontented, tb« commercial classes have plunged into spec* lation, the upper classes have the monopoly of the bureaucracy and the army. The Kaiser has tried to force the pace ir all departments of the nation's life, and his people havo readily seconded him. In the attempt to capture the markets of the world, Germany has sold her goods under cost price until her capital lias run dangerously low. Her commerce has in consequence had to support itself largely by means of the great financial houses. It is a " kept" commerce, and the financiers, who are naturally timid, will call in then capital on the first cleai signs of a "slump." Then the mischief will go on accelerating. Already Government stock is steadily declining, with the result that last September the Imperial Treasury was driven to the extraordinary step of floating a loan of four millions sterling on the American market, which has occasioned something like a permanent panic on the Berlin Bourse. It is a familiar maxim that economic crises have wide effects on political affairs, and it is by no means inconceivable that the domestic troubles of the German Empire may some day develop so as to occupy the whole resources of the Kaiser. United Germany has, nc doubt, a great national future, but to those who read the signs of the times in conjunction with the history of the past her immediate outlook is by no means so promising as many people imagine.

Secrecy is well maintained in Russia. It seems almost incredible that a well-planned design to assassinate the Czar and Czaritsa should have been discovered a month before the fact became publicly known, but such appears to have been the case, as the telegram from the London Daily Telegraph's correspondent at Sebastopol, which we publish this morning, was the first intimation to reach England, four weeks after the occurrence, of a desperate attempt, which was happily found out just in time. We learn that a student of Moscow University, a youth of good social position, whose father is a post-captain in the Russian Black SecFleet, laid a mine outside a tunnel near Sebastopol, by the side of the rails over which their Majesties were to Fravel on their way to Livadia. As is well known, it is the custom in Russia whenever the" Czar is about to make a journey to have the entire rout: diligently patrolled for a fortnight before the day. Thousands of soldiers are necessarily employed in this duty if the road is of any considerable length, and the Imperial family nave good cause to be assured oi the necessity of these precautions. Several attempts were made to wreck the Imperial trains during the reign of Alexander 11. One of the most successful occurred in 1879, when the Czar owed his life to the fact that

he had changed trains at the last moment. His successor, Alexander 111., had similai narrow escapes. On one memorable occasion, near Borki, in 1888, the saloon in which he was travelling was partially wrecked, ? footman was killed while in the act of handing the Czar a cup of coffee, and 20 others lost their lives. The present Emperor has hitherto enjoyed entire immunity from these outrages, or, if such attempts have been made, the police have succeeded in hushing them up. It was hoped, therefore, that the active Nihilists had been terrorised into inactivity, but, in the face of the incident recorded by the correspondent, that nope appears to be little justified. This student had succeeded in charging a long iron pipe With the most destructive explosives, and when his mine was subsequently discharged in Sebastopol the results were such as to prove that it must infallibly have destroyed the train if it had been fired at the proper moment. But fortunately his continued presence in the vicinity of the tunnel had been noticed, and he was promptly airested and laid by the heels. It used to be the boast of the Nihilists that they never sought to assassinate a woman, but in this case, as in the outrage at Borki, the Ozaritsa was to accompany the Czar, and Nihilism, we fear, is hardly more disposed to be chivalrous than the Anarchists, who glorified the thrower of a bomb in the crowded theatre at Barcelona. The correspondent seem? inclined to connect this plot with the assassination of the King of Italy, and it will be remembered that it was freely stated at the time that the Czar of Russia and the German Emperor had been marked for destruction. Hitherto, however, there has been no evidence of any connection or inter-communica-tion between nihilism and anarchism. The assassination of kings may be the common aim of both, but there is the sharpest possible contrast between the brutal and uneducated ruffians who represent anarchism in action—the Ravachols, Caserios, and Lucchenis—and the highly-educated Nihilist conspirators, who have suffered the death penalty in Russia, or have been banished to Siberia. The most extraordinary feature of Russian nihilism is that it recruits its ranks from people in good social position. Its theories have a curious fascination for women, and it is most dangerous because the universities are hotbeds of its growth, and because it attracts to itself all the elements of political and social unrest which can find no other outlet.

The world, as Henry Taylor, the author of "Philip Van Artevelde," tells us, knows nothing of its greatest men. That is even truer of its greatest scholars. They are too often born to blush unseen. One has just passed away, who, through one of the dozen most learned men on this planet, was probably unknown even by name to the vast majority of readers. Thomas Davidson was an American by adoption, but not by birth. He came from that nursery of strong men where in his time they did liberally cultivate literature on oatmeal Aberdeen. He would, says a writer who knenv him well, have delighted Goethe ; the Wanderjahre of \Yilhelm Meister was Davidson's own life. He, too, held that " to give room tor wandering the world was made so wide." As thorough an American as though he had been born within the shadow of Bunker Hill, he nevertheless was so classic in feeling that he yearned for the " palms and temples of the South," and he had his wish gratified. Attached, largely through Longfellow's generous influence, to the examination department of Harvard University, he soon had the opportunity of repairing to Athens, where h< studied Greek archaeology. And here it may be said that perhaps Davidson was one of the greatest linguists of his age. Well grounded in Greek and Latin (able, after the good old mediaeval plan, to speak as well as to read Latin), he obtained complete mastery ot modern Greek within a few months of reaching Athens. He could make a speech in lihat

language as easily as did Mr. Gladstone in the lonian Islands. He spoke and read French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norse, with absolute ease. He did his philosophic thinking in German rather than in his own tongue. He acquired later on complete proficiency in Hebrew and Arabic, and was fairly well versed in Czech, Russian, and Magyar. He never forgot a single word he had ever learned. His admiring friends tested him on one occasion in Greek. He never missed once, giving not only the ordinary but exceptional meanings, and stating in what authors they were to be found. Ho could repeat most of Aristotle's "Ethics " from end to end in the original. He knew word for word that difficult second part of " Faust" which at times baffles even German professors, but his supreme love was Dante. He knew the whole of the "Divina Cornmedia," and students who have read his introduction to Scartazzini's handbook to the great Tuscan, know how Davidson entered into the very soul "of Dante. Thus did this simple, hearty, big-brained Scottish-Ameri-can wander over the globe. To-day in his little villa in the Italian Alps, to-morrow in a lovely rose-covered villa in Capri, again among the slashed-faced students of Heidelberg then at Athens, or at rooms in London,' or in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge, 01 under the shadow of the State House in classic Boston—thus did he absorb culture study the world, and charm and entertain his hundred friends. Outside the ranks of the profound Catholic scholars, there are few who can say they have mastered the "Snmma;" one of those few was Mr. Davidson. One must not hold him finally to anything, but at the time he wrote his learned work on "Rosmini," the modern Catholic antagonist of the Jesuits, he certainly believed that Aquinas, based on the philosophy of Aristotle, had come nearer to solving the great riddle of being than any other thinker. In addition to the work on Rosmini, which is scarcely appreciated in England, Mr. Davidson must have somo credit for stimulating the Pope in the preparation of his celebrated Encyclical on Aquinas. There are not, it is safe to say, many laymen who have had three hours' confidential talk on philosophy with Leo XIII., but Thomas Davidson was one. Ho was also intimate with some of the religious Orders, and knew not a little of the inner life of the Catholic Church, with whose art and devotion ho sympathised as much as ho detested its politics. He loved Italy as a man loves his bride, and in Rome he foregathered with the veteran Mamiani and others who had helped in the risorijimento. His work on Aristotle as an educational thinker, is one of the finest and most helpful treatises on education written in our time. His essay on the Parthenon Frieze (which he interprets as embodying in marble the dream of Pericles of a united Greece) may be right or wrong, but it is a most learned and interesting piece of work.