OUR ILLUSTRATED LONDON LETTER.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume V, Issue 46, 15 November 1890, Page 9

OUR ILLUSTRATED LONDON LETTER.

MR W. H. SMITH. Mr Smith has always been a prolific source of humour to the professional and unprofessional caricaturist and jokist. One of this fraternity came to me last week with the ‘ exclusive ’ piece of information that the right hon. gentleman will shortly be gently lifted upstairs as ‘ Lord Bookstall !’ Joking apart, there is no doubt that Mr Smith is anxious to escape from his trying position in the Commons, and changes in the Cabinet are inevitable. In such case, the position of Mr Matthews and Mr Raikes would also have to be considered, for the unanimous voice of all parties is that they have failed. Mr Matthews, there is every reason to believe, would be sacrificed, but the intention is to reward (sac) him with a judgeship, and the exigencies of the public service must await the accommodating death or retirement of some occupant of the Bench. As for Mr Raikes, he is likely to weather the storm, and there will be no change in his department. The leadership of the House of Commons is the post around which angry forces are likely to rage. It is a well-known fact that there has been considerable jealousy’ between Mr Goschen and Mr A. J. Balfour, and although the Chancellor of the Exchequer has always officiated as leader of the House in the absence of the First Lord of the Treasury, it is said that the Chief Secretary would strongly resent his appointment to the leadership. Lord Hartington was regarded as the man who could relieve the Government from their difficulty, but his lordship sternly refuses to join the Ministry, on the pretext that he can be of more service to the Unionist party byretaining an independent position. As a last resource, the Government are credited with the extraordinary desire to call Lord Randolph Churchill back into their councils, and the proposal is so far regarded with seriousness that parties in Paddington are preparing for a fight. I met one of the local leaders of the Liberal party the other day, and he informed me that they had already approached a prominent member of the late administration, with a view to securing a strong canditate to oppose Lord Randolph. This is just the kind of development that will immensely please the Member for South Paddington, but it will be strange if Lord Salisbury consents to his recall. MR W. E. FORSTER. The statue of Mr AV. E. Forster, erected opposite the School Board offices on the Thames Embankment, is a tardytribute to the leading educationist of the century. A man of the utmost integrity and devotion to principle, yet Mr

Forster’s memory—such is the paucity of party gratitude—is probably now more dearly cherished by those who were once his i>olitical foes than by the party with which he was all his life identified. He was born into the simple and unassuming fraternity, the society of Friends, and one of his earliest public acts was his mission to the distressed districts

in Ireland, in the severe winter of 1846, to distribute the Famine Relief Fund raised by the Quakei body. Although defeated at Leeds in his first contest for Parliamentaryhonours in 1850, Bradford, another of the industrial centres of his native county, unanimously gave him its confidence two years later, and remained faithful to him to the end when less constant friends failed. It was as Vice-President of the Council on Education that Mr Forster first achieved renown, and in the State-aided schools of England he has in every parish a lasting memorial. When Mr Gladstone retired from the leadership of the Liberal party in 1875, everyone looked upon Mr Forster as his natural successor, but, even depreciative of self, this great man shrank from the responsibility lest, as he put it, ‘ I should not receive the general support without which I ought not to attempt to fulfil the duties of a most difficult and honourable post.’ It was on Mr Gladstone’s return to the helm of state that Mr Foister performed the great administrative woi k of his life, when for two years he governed Ireland amid circumstances of exceptional difficulty and distress. Even those opponents who applied to him the attribute of ‘ Buckshot ’ could not deny the heroism and determination with which he faced, at personal risk, the forces of passion and crime arrayed against him. His great coup was the wholesale imprisonment of the Parnellite party, and it was the discussions which arose out of this stroke of policy that brought about his resignation. The statue now erected is after the design of Mr Richard Pinker, and gives a good reproduction of Mr Forster’s rough and careworn features.

MR CECIL RHODES. Mr Cecil Rhodes, the new Premier of the Cape Colony, is one of those men who, having managed their own affairs successfully, aie held to have given thereby a pledge of fitness to manage these of other people. He is a comparatively- young man, being well on the right side of forty, ami has a fine frame to help him in carrying forward his great ideas. Yet he went to South Africa as a mere lad, so delicate that it was a question whether he would survive the voyage—another of the numerous instances of the wonders that marvellous climate is able to work. An authority has lecently stated that there are parts of South Africa in which, it' a man only reaches them alive, he can hardly help getting well and strong, and Mr Rhodes might well be chosen as an illustration of that declaration. He has achieved distinction in almost every business enterprise he has touched, ami whether looked upon as the ‘ Diamond King ’ who brought about the consolidation of the great De Beers mines, and saved Kimberley from ruin, or as the founder of the vast enterprise named the British South Africa Company, he appears head and shoulders above the vast majority of even the giants of energy and resource which our noble colonial empire has produced. Politically, Mr Rhodes must be regarded as a man ot * great ’ ideas, ami if some persons do think him a little ‘ previous’ as the slang of the day- goes, in giving £lO,OOO to the Parnellite funds in order to draw from Mr Parnell a declaration on the colonial side of Home Rule, the incident may be well taken as indicating his enthusiastic desire for the forward progress of Greater Britain. Before everything, he is an Englishman and has unbounded faith in the future of his countrymen all over the world. Mr Rhodes is, nevertheless, though the holder of a University degree, essentially a plain man, and all his wealth has not tempted him into greater luxury of living than sharing chambers at Kimberley with a friend. He loves the company of the shrewd men he finds at his club, and has, so it is said, been ‘ given up ’ by the ladies. MR GEORGE LEWIS. For once Mr George Lewis's phenomenally successful record as a divorce maker, has been crossed by a signal failure, though with no reflection on his legal acumen. The sage of Ely-place did his best, as the progress of the case showed, but it was clearly a matter of ‘ no case,’ and the great Huguenot family must reconcile themselves to the fact that in the ordinary course of nature, Miss Belle Bilton will become Countess of Clanearty. It is reported that a reconciliation has been effected ; let us hope that it is so. Reverting to Mr George Lewis, what a personality he has become in London life ? Who doesn't know < leorge Lewis ? Ask the • man in the street ’ in the far east or the distant west, and probably you will be sarcastically referred to the policeman, who, as the popular song asseverates, is the authority on all questions from the timeo'day to thelatest topic. Mr Lewis is now 57 years of age, and harks as smart as the most ‘ killing ’ dandy in the west. Portraits ami caricatures have made his face so familiar that there is no mistaking the man when you see him in life. When he gives to the world his reminiscences—if he ever does -what a fund of interesting reading there will be. Just call to mind that he is the man who made his mark in the prosecution of the Directors of

< fverend and Gurney's bank, who prosecuted the famous Madame Rachel, the restorer of female beauty, and Dr. Slade, the spiritualistic medium. And was lie not the leading spirit in the Dilkeand Colin Campbell cases? But these are as naught to his work as solicitor to Mr Parnell and the Irish party in the recent Commission. It is open to question whether any solicitor of less fame and ability could have pulled the Irish party through that crucial period of its career. BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF EAST CENTRAL AFRICA. (A> British East Africa Co. (B> Claimed by Germany, surrendered to England. (C> Claimed by England, but surrendered to Germany. (0) Zanzibar coast lands to be ceded to Germanv. (A &B) South African Co. and British Territories Portectorates and Claims 18S0. (C D) German Territories Protectorates and Claims 1890. The dotted lines show the boundaries of the territories noted above, and the black line the route of Stanley's last expedition. I am not going to attempt anything nicely critical on the subject of Mr Stanley’s great book, ‘ln Darkest Africa,’a thousand pages written in fifty days, and the publication of which last week will remain the sensation o» the literary world for some time to come. What I want to do is to earnestly recommend the work to all who can either buy or borrow it. We have had a good deal of it already in the skeleton form of lectures and letters it is true, but it is the details which are alike charming and worthy of the closest study. Their suggestiveness is amazing when they are pondered over, and we are brought by meditation face to face with many of the most interestingproblemsof civilization and missionary enterprise. Not so much, however, because MrStanley discusses them, as because he does not. The great explorer is eminently a matter-of-fact writer. He gives you what is eminently a ‘ narrative ’ and leaves it to your own intelligence to make deductions, saying in effect, ‘ Here is the story. I leave you to pieaeh the sermon yourselves.' To say that *ln Darkest Africa 'is as exciting as a romance would not only be trite, but unjust to the book. It t.s - a romance for all who have any imagination in them. Those who take my advice and read the two volumes, will be frequently struck with the little regard Stanley has for literary elegance, or even for correct literary construction. But they will find in him the full man—not the writer who, as is too often the case with writers and preachers, says much because he has little to say, but the man who produces grist from the mill because lie has previously been industriously employed in getting in a liberal

supply of good wheat. ‘ln Darkest Africa ’ shows the intrepid traveller, too, in the light of a critic, generous when he is necessarily severe, and one who is aide to treat savage races not only with prudence but with humanity, on which points his enemies have not been slow to complain of him in relation to his previous journeys. I tepeat that Stanley’s book is one to be read and pondered over, and read again.

An Object Lesson : Trustee (solemnly) : •Do you remember the Sabbath day?’ Citizen: ‘Yes, sir ; that is the day on which you don't let us into the Metropolitan Museum.’