passage to Cathay. The Willoughbys in India in the seventeenth and eighand Chancelors of the sixteenth cen- teenth centuries fought and intrigued tury were the Captain Wiggineses of for mastery? Of course, these combats the nineteenth. England's successful by commercial pioneers were suppledaring on the seas drove the Spaniard mented by the decisive national conwild with irritation and apprehension, flicts in which England so amazingly and induced Philip to organize the Ar- improved her position. France lost mada which was to have crushed En- Canada, and her chance of an Indian gland out of existence, but involved in- empire was destroyed forever by the stead the irrevocable loss of power and genius of a discontented clerk. She represtige to Spain. Nor did Spain effect taliated by aiding the revolted Ameriher own discomfiture only. Portugal can colonies to assert their independwas united to her in 1580, and the re- ence. In all directions during two cenverses Spain suffered at the hands of turies chartered companies led the way, both Dutch and English undermined and the empire as we see it to-day, with and diminished the Empire of the Por- the exception of Australia, is the retuguese in the East. England began the sult in the main of trade enterprise, seventeenth century by enlarging the gallantly upheld in the final resort by scope of her ambition. Raleigh with the imperial army and navy. Nelson imagination fired by the stories of and Wellington in the beginning of the El Dorado, went on voyages of dis- nineteenth century, confirmed the sucovery which brought him no re- premacy to which the way was paved ward, but which our Own day by Drake and Blake, Clive and Wolfe, has shown were not wholly devoid of aided by a myriad host of heroes whose reason. "It has been left to the present names survive only in such invaluable century to prove that gold mines exist records as the letters of the East India on the site of the fabled El Dorado; for Company, a first volume of which Mr. it is there that the well-known caratal Frederick C. Danvers published a few diggings are situated," says Mr. James months ago. What strikes one as most Rodway, than whom none is a better remarkable in the survey of four cenauthority. Raleigh did not find El Do- turies is the manner in which the Anrado, but he established a claim to be glo-Saxon race either superseded considered the father of English colo- others or secured that for which others nization by taking possession of Vir- risked so much. Whilst Canada was ginia in the name of the virgin queen. taken from the French, the Cape of Good Hope, where the Dutch established a station first in 1652, was sold to Great Britain after she had occupied it for some years; in the West Indies French and Spanish and Dutch all yielded us up something; in the East Indies, third-comers as we were, we carried to a triumphant issue the policy which others mapped out. Even Aus Soon after the shattering of the Spanish Armada, the English turned their attention to the possibilities of direct trade with the East by the Cape Route. Queen Elizabeth, on the last day of the sixteenth century, granted the charter of the first East India Company. With the seventeenth century we enter on the romance of commerce embodied in the chartered companies; the struggle for world supremacy is henceforth carried on not by semi-piratical patriots of the Drake order, but by merchant adventurers, who formed themselves into licensed corporations. How valiantly the representatives of the French, Dutch, and English companies 1 The West Indies and the Spanish Main, by James Rodway, F. L. S. "The Story of the Nation Series." London: T. Fisher Urwin. 1896. 2 In the recent Dupleix celebrations, it was gen erally agreed that Dupleix was the first to conceive the idea of establishing an empire in India governed from Europe. The credit for that farsighted notion surely belonged to Albuquerque, who, Mr. Stephens says, was the first since Alexander the Great to dream of European dominion in Asia. 3 Letters received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East, vol. i., 1602-1613. With an Introduction by F. C. Danvers. London: Sampson, Low & Co., 1896. tralia is ours by a piece of sheer good we have triumphed. The explanation fortune. The mystery of the discovery of the island continent yet remains to be cleared up. On the strength of evidence contained on a wooden globe in the Paris National Library, it has been held that the discovery occurred in 1499, but Mr. Collingridge, in the work to which allusion has already been made -a critical examination of cartographical evidence and a weighing of pros and cons, almost as wonderful as Mr. Harrisse's "John and Sebastian Cabot" -points out that verification is needed. At the same time, Australia was known to be in existence-Marco Polo seems to have been aware of the fact in the thirteenth century-and in 1595 a Spanish expedition was sent out under Mendana to found a colony on the Australian continent! Mendana missed Australia altogether, and it was not till near the middle of the seventeenth century that the Dutch beyond all doubt explored the shores of Australia, or New Holland, as it was at first called. In the very hour when the English were taking possession of Botany Bay, a French fleet appeared on the horizon! The philosophy and practice of modern colonization and empire are exhaustively illustrated in the history of the four hundred years at which we have glanced. In 1497 European knowledge of colonization was confined to the Mediterranean, and in the main to its north-eastern shores. The sixteenth century was three parts complete when England began to think of founding a colony in the New World; in the East trade and not empire, until circumstances forced it upon them, was the sole aim of the English. We have in the intervening centuries seen several powers spend their treasure and their blood in the attempt to secure an empire beyond the seas. Spain and Portugal and Holland administer to-day mere remnants of their once extensive possessions; France is mistress of wide stretches of territory in the East, only because she is prepared, at any sacrifice, to found, if possible, the empire which in the last century seemed so nearly hers. Other powers failed where is simple. They never learned the secret of colonization on the one hand, or secured sea-power, the indispensable condition of empire, on the other. Possessions which are colonized by officials are not colonies; and colonies which are bled by the mother country are certain, sooner or later, to seek relief in independence. England learnt her first lesson in 1776. Her pre-eminence at sea alone saved her from eclipse, and enabled her to survive the loss of dominion and of prestige. She learnt another in 1857. The American Rebellion and the Indian Mutiny were in their way imperial blessings. They showed us the things we must not do if we would retain the loyalty of our colonies and dependencies. Greater Britain and British India are a success to-day because the imperial authorities have grasped the vital truth, in the bitter school of experience, that colonies and dependencies must be administered in their own as much as in the mother country's interests. If men of other countries seem incapable of colonization, save under the British flag, are not their prosperity and contentment, when they take up their abode in a British possession, to be explained by the watch-word of progress-freedom? If Spain realized that truth there would be no Cuban rebellion to-day, and if France appreciated it, her new empire beyond the seas would stand a stronger chance of permanency and profitable development. With all her sea-power, England could not retain her American colonies, and it is because she now unites sea-power for herself with freedom and unchallengeable justice for her dependencies, that all good patriots look to the time when the empire. whose beginnings may be traced to 1497, shall federate for its own sake and for the sake of civilization. An imperial conference is to be summoned in the present year, and from all corners of the empire the celebration of the queen's reign will bring proof of loyalty and devotion. Mr. Chamberlain has set himself, with patriotic but none the less businesslike enthusiasm, the splendid task of making the festivities of June next a magnificent object lesson in the essential unity of the British race. No fitter time could be found in which statesmanship and patriotism might combine to take a step towards the great goal of Imperial Federation. The past justifies big aspirations for the future; our heritage is one which we should not only strive to preserve, but to improve upon. Let that be the moral of our reflections on 1497--1897 and all that the interval teaches and implies. EDWARD SALMON. From The London Quarterly Review. HENRI ROCHEFORT'S ADVENTURES.1 If it be true that "modern history tends neither to tragedy nor to comedy, but to sensational melodrama," M. Rochefort's life, as here presented, may be taken as a typical epitome of one part of modern history. It has not been without its touches of true tragedy, and comedy in all its shapes is found in it, but melodrama in excelsis is the most complete and accurate description of this chequered and astonishing career. The story loses nothing in the telling, but, after all deductions on the score of personal bias and of literary exigency, it will take its place among the most amazing and romantic stories of the time. A restless, turbulent, ungovernable spirit, born, as he himself says, with the "instinct of revolution," M. Rochefort has been, throughout his public life, a political Ishmael. "Out with you, but not that I may take your place!" has always been his maxim towards all constituted authorities, and, not unnaturally, those authorities have not relished his disinterested attentions. His hand, in politics, has been against every man and every man and every government he has assailed has of necessity been against him. 1 The Adventures of My Life. By Henri Rochefort. Arranged for English readers by the author and Ernest W. Smith. 2 vols. London: Edward Arnold. 1896. At one time or another [he says] I have experienced nearly every imaginable sensation. For more than a quarter of a century I have been like a man on a switchback railway, continually plunged from the highest summits into the darkest depths. . . . I have tasted every joy and As journalist, deputy, and outlaw, I have chewed the cud of every bitterness. . . moved in all classes of society. . . . I have been shaken by events, and played a rôle in nearly every catastrophe. He does not tell us that he has attacked his enemies with every poisoned weapon in his armory-every poisoned weapon to be found in any fiend's armory-pursuing them with hatred that has never scrupled to insult the living and revile the dead, and that in the midst of all the virulence and violence of his political career he never once was visited by even a momentary qualm of conscience or remorse. But this, and much more in the way of ostentatious irreligion and malicious wit, of barbarous delight in raking up old scandals and parading new onesrarely and faintly relieved, here and yonder, by a gleam of kindly feeling towards the helpless and oppressed-is only too apparent in the pages of this purely pagan book. The only way to read it with composure is to skip the scandal heaped around the name of Marie Antoinette, of Josephine, of Napoleon III., of the Empress Eugenie, of Gambetta, and, by a shameless piece of candor, that of the writer himself; to shut one's eyes to "the extreme examples" which abound in it of "the application of the imagination to contemporary history;" to believe implicitly in M. Rochefort and to yield one's self to the stream of his pellucid and vivacious narrative. If at the close we find it difficult, in spite of all his biting wit and ruthless savagery, to understand how such a man, a man of noble ancestry and not without the cultured tastes of the noblesse, should choose and glory in a life of hardship and of exile, from motives inconsistent with the honesty and the integrity for which he would seem to plead, it will not be from any failure in his self-assurance, which is consummate, or in the unflagging spirit by which, to the end, his pretences are sustained. Born in 1831, Henri Rochefort was just of the right age to be carried away by the exciting events of 1848 and 1851. His grandfather, the Marquis de Rochefort de Lucay, a distant descendant, it is said, of an offshoot of a sovereign house, the original Counts of Champagne, had lost his title at the French Revolution, together with his immense estates, valued at ten million francs, in the Berri, not far from George Sand's literary home at Nohant. His father, plain M. Rochefort, was penniless, and, but for his scanty earnings as a dramatist, the family would have been brought up in the direst penury. Henri was a youth at the College of St. Louis, in the Rue de la Harpe, when Louis Phillipe escaped from Paris, and he made his début in politics by scaling the college walls with some companions and joining the Revolutionists. "Shut up!" they cried to the astonished Latin professor, when he began his lecture, "they are murdering our brothers;" and off they started helter-skelter through the streets. Aunt Guérin appeared at a window overlooking the quais and was stupefied to see her nephew, looking like a brigand, with his hair blown out in the wind, hurrying through the streets of Paris at the head of an armed troop to attack the palace of the kings. I heard her call the children and scream, "It's Henri!" I looked up, waved my hand, and continued my triumphal way. On leaving college, Rochefort had to earn a livelihood and to help his family to live. From the first he felt that he was born to be a writer, but it was not until after he had exhausted other means of living that he trusted to his pen. Several years were spent as tutor and as clerk in the Hotel de Ville, before he found his métier as a writer of lampoons. He had written one-act plays and poems and had acted as dramatic critic in his room in the Rue Saint Victor-a garret into which "the light came from above, like a bad example." At the age of twenty-two he was admitted, as a penny-a-liner, on the staff of the Charivari, "the writer to pay for every line beyond the first hundred." On this, and on another forgotten journal, he acquired "the art of saying something while appearing to say nothing," as in one of his first onslaughts on Napoleon III. "We have bad news of the emperor to-day. He is better." For several years he worked for Villemessant, the founder of the Figaro, and distinguished himself by the wit and virulence of his attacks upon the emperor. "You don't want to become an academician, do you?" said Villemessant, on engaging him. "Oh, no!" "Well, then, go ahead! Don't be afraid of letting your pen follow your caprices. Hurl jokes at everybody and make everybody laugh." The free hand thus given him had a good deal to answer for. By the time the fourth number was published he had two duels on hand, which led his colleagues to declare that he was in luck's way. In 1867 he wrote the famous article on the emperor's exploits as a sportsman, in which he said that when the emperor went shooting there was always a rabbit which "pretended to fall dead." This coup de lapin might have cost the paper dear. Pietri commanded Villemessant to appear again at the Prefectorial Bureau, It was there pointed out to him how insulting it was to the majesty of the throne to allege that the three hundred and fifty rabbits composing the bag were one and the same rabbit, which had contented itself with shamming dead, and had disappeared behind the scenes to come forward again like the supernumeraries in a military spectacle on the stage. The Figaro was not suppressed, but Rochefort was required, as the alternative, to quit the staff. His next move was to start the Lanterne, the little red-backed weekly pamphlet with a lantern on the cover, and-a rope. This brought him worldwide notoriety, and is still called up by every mention of his name. It was a veritable tomahawk to the emperor, and a torpedo to the empire. In the earlier numbers, sold by hundreds of thousands, Rochefort set himself to prove the emperor's illegitimacy, and ridicule his title and his claims. He complained that he had been misunderstood. In reality, he had always been profoundly Bonapartist; only, he had claimed the right to choose his own pet hero in the dynasty. He had chosen one that was apocryphal. "As a Bonapartist, I prefer Napoleon II. In my mind he represents the ideal of a sovereign. No one will deny that he has occupied the throne, because his successor calls himself Napoleon III." The emperor was a Dutchman, and no Corsican at all. Any weapon was good enough for me to use to sap the respect with which they affected to surround that official dummy called "the person of the sovereign." Ah! that unfortunate sovereign. I twisted and wrung it like an old towel. I wrote the following, for example: "The State has commanded M. Barye to execute an equestrian statue of Napoleon III. Everybody knows that M. Barye is one of our most celebrated sculptors of animals." The eleventh number of this venomous publication contained a veiled incitement (so it was interpreted) to assassinate the emperor. The paper was seized, and Rochefort, to evade arrest, escaped to Brussels, where he soon became the guest of Victor Hugo, who encouraged him to prosecute his paper warfare with unceasing virulence. The glimpses Rochefort gives of Hugo's home-life are most interesting. In the poet's dining-room there stood a great armchair which no one was allowed to occupy. Between its arms the dead are supposed to take their seat and listen to the conversation. The poet's bedroom was his study. It was an attic, through the roof of which the sky was visible and the rain came down. Rochefort had the privilege of entrance to this sanctum. I used to open the small door of the tiny room with all sorts of precautions, for fear of treading on the wet pages of manuscript that, not daring to put one upon the other, he used to spread out on his bed, on the mantelpiece, and on the floor. In consequence, to take my place, I had to execute a sort of egg dance. As proof of the rapidity with which he worked, the bluish paper of medium size on which he wrote scarcely ever had time to dry before he started on a fresh sheet. It is true he used to spread out his lines to such an extent that each page only contained a dozen at the outside. One morning I asked him rather indiscreetly: "When you have finished one of these pages, what have you earned?" "About a hundred francs," he answered. Hugo was as regular in his habits as John Wesley. "Every evening, however absorbing the conversation, or whatever the number of visitors, he would be off to bed exactly as the clock struck ten, while he always rose at six precisely." One morning he was up at four to fortify his guest with parting counsels and poached eggs before he started out to fight one of his innumerable duels. Throughout these months at Brussels the Lanterne was issued week by week, but under the greatest difficulties. How to pass it through the frontier was the problem, and the ruses by which it was smuggled into France were most ingenious and amusing. A cigar-dealer, who was friendly with employee of the French Legation at Brusthe Hugos, told us that he had bribed an sels to smuggle cigars into France in despatch-boxes, which, owing to the diplomatic immunity, were not examined by the customs authorities on the French frontier. He lent us one of these boxes, and the stratagem answered admirably, until one day the minister of foreign affairs received a consignment of cigars instead of his diplomatic papers. The Lanterne was not seized, but we knew the rose was blown, and that our next batch would never get beyond the frontier. We then sent them stuffed in plaster busts of Napoleon III. himself. We circulated the report that these statues were destined to replace the out-of-date ones in the municipal offices throughout France. As there were thirty-six thousand communes, we gave ourselves a very substantial margin. Our employees walked past the French Customs officers with a bust on each arm, |