Everywhere, save in England, manufacturers are earnestly striving to bring themselves into direct contact with their customers. The ship scheme is, we think, calculated to do good in distant countries, and it enables the agents on board to acquire information of great value, but it cannot be thorough in its operation nor of permanent value. Nor do we approve of Mr. Bidwell's suggestion, though it is well worthy of consideration. Consular officers have, as a rule, no sufficient technical knowledge to enable them to work a sample room advantageously. If their consulates are situated in important centres, they have quite enough to do without attempting to perform new duties, which would require a considerable amount of time and attention, if they are to be discharged properly. On the other hand, if the consul is not in a place of commercial importance, a sample room would be of little or no use. On the whole, we are of opinion, that a better plan would be to establish in certain well-chosen localities abroad fixed depots of samples and models of British manufactures. Consul-General Bernal, of Havre, recommends this scheme to the notice of the Government in his latest Report. He observes that the expenses would have to be defrayed out of a fund contributed to by members of the association formed for the purpose. The two essential points of management would be, to take care that those persons who were placed in charge should be thoroughly competent to explain the various details of the exhibits, and that, in marking the prices, the actual cost and the duty should be separately given.' One thing is certain,' he adds, that in these days of fierce and energetic foreign competition, backed up by protection, it is quite useless to sit quietly in a counting-house and expect customers to drop in of their own accord.'

Before such agents can be thoroughly competent to explain the various details of the exhibits,' they must be well versed in the language of the country where they are to promote the commercial interests of Great Britain. We are thus brought back to the first and the last great lesson we desire most strongly to inculcate— the absolute necessity for the practical study by young Englishmen of foreign languages. It is much to be regretted that the Local Examination Boards of Oxford and Cambridge do not insist upon a rigorous vivâ voce examination in French and German in preference to a system of mere bookwork, which teaches a boy next to nothing of practical value. In the lower forms even of our best public schools the rudiments of grammar, and something less than the rudiments of translation and correspondence, are imparted, frequently by teachers who have themselves

themselves never received a lesson from a Frenchman or a German. When the time comes, the pupil is sent up for the junior examination with no other preparation in modern languages than this, added to a hasty and imperfect study of some selected book. The natural consequence is, that when the youth leaves school-as he usually does immediately afterwards-he finds his knowledge of French and German to be wholly insufficient for any practical purpose, and he therefore proceeds to forget it as rapidly and as completely as possible. For a nation of business men, our educational machinery is singularly clumsy and ineffective. This, however, is a very large question, into which we cannot enter here. We have endeavoured to show that there are great and promising fields of enterprise in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa, which can be occupied by competent Englishmen quite as easily as by our German rivals. Whether the coming generation will be qualified to occupy them depends, in a measure, upon the interest the Government chooses to take in the trade of the Empire, but in a far greater degree upon the common sense, the energy, and the sagacity, of Englishmen themselves. The commercial supremacy of Great Britain is not yet a thing of the past, and it need never become so unless British traders decline to accommodate themselves to the changed conditions of commerce, and thus voluntarily abandon the proud position won for them by the skill and the intelligence of their fathers.

ART. VII.-The Sacred Books of the East, translated by various Oriental Scholars, and edited by F. Max Müller. Oxford and London. Clarendon Press, 28 vols. 1879-1885.

Trap to vershadow, in the public mind, the no less real

THE rapid progress of the last decades in scientific discovery

progress that has been made in historical research. And that this should be so, can be no matter for surprise. The results of scientific discovery are more easily understood, they affect more immediately the every-day life of the people, they appeal to a wider knowledge-inaccurate though it be and incomplete-of the elementary facts underlying the questions at issue. But it may be doubted, whether the most popular branches of scientific enquiry are not precisely those which partake most of the nature of history. And it is certain that one branch at least of historical enquiry that which deals with the origin and development of religious belief throughout the world—is attracting to itself an increasing degree of attention and of interest. There is ample evidence of this, in the number of popular handbooks on the various branches of the subject which have been lately issued to the public. But it is still better attested by the remarkable success of the very important series of original texts, the name of which heads this article. For these texts, even in translation, are by no means easy to be understood and appreciated, and they appeal much more to the scientific historian than to the general reader.

And this must necessarily be so. It is, no doubt, matter of entrancing interest to trace the gradual progress of that religious belief, which has had so overpowering an influence in the history of the past, and which will continue, so long as men are men, to have so overpowering an influence in the history of the future. But the records of that progress are disfigured by so much that is bizarre, are interwoven with so much that is strange and almost unintelligible to men permeated with modern ideas, are clothed in language so full of ambiguous allusions, that it requires a kind of special training to be able to use them aright. Translations when, like those under consideration, they are literal, necessarily and unintentionally present, not a paraphrase by the translator, but as nearly as possible the very words of the original. And, with the words, they retain also many of the difficulties of those strange old texts whose picture they purport to give.

What then are the Sacred Books of the East? Ex Oriente Lux,' was the bold motto which the managers of the Oriental Translation Fund placed above the beautiful vignette adorning

the

the title-page of each work they issued. And their figure of the sun rising out of the Eastern waves covered a real truth. It is from the East that almost all, if not all, religions have come. We know too little about the origin of the Egyptian and Mexican civilizations to be able, with absolute certainty, to class them as exceptions. And who can read for us the Mexican picture-writing, or tell us whether it has preserved a sacred book? The Sacred Books of the East are then the records of the deepest and most earnest thoughts of early times in all those countries where religion had its most complete and most rapid development. And the series of translations published under that title would naturally embrace them all. It has not, however, been thought necessary to include a new version of our own Bible, translations of which are already in every hand. And, in spite of the rapid progress made in recent years, the decipherment of hieroglyphs and cuneiforms has not yet reached, in accuracy and certainty, to the level of the high standard aimed at in this series. The Sacred Books of Egypt and of the Euphrates Valley are not, therefore, at present included in the undertaking. Should it become possible, before the series is completed, to give trustworthy versions of them, they will, it is hoped, be added to it before it is finally closed.

Those as yet published are six volumes of Zoroastrianism, four of Confucianism, and two of the Korân; forming a total of twelve volumes devoted to the sacred literature of non-Indian countries. Very naturally and properly a somewhat larger space has been devoted to India; partly because we English are, or ought to be, specially interested in that great continent, partly because it has been the birthplace of the two great religions which still have the greatest influence in Asia, Brahminism and Buddhism. We have three volumes of the theological and ethical speculations of the Brahmins, three of their ritual, four of their sacred laws. And we have three volumes of the rules of the Buddhist Order of Mendicants, three of their ethical poetry and prose, and one volume contains a version of a Chinese Buddhist poem on the life of their teacher. Besides these, one volume is devoted to the sacred books of the Jains, a religious body still remarkable for the wealth and influence of its followers, and in its origin as old as, or perhaps even older than, the beginnings of Buddhism.

This is a stately list, and when the reader considers that these volumes are the work of the foremost scholars of the day in the various fields of study which they cover-and there can be no better judge of such scholarship than the distinguished writer whose duty it has been to select the authors-he will understand

how

how trustworthy for historical and philological accuracy they are likely to be. Most of the work is also entirely new. A small proportion had previously appeared in translations more or less accurate and complete, into one or other of the better known European tongues. But by far the greater proportion consists of new versions of hitherto untranslated books, versions which would in all probability not have been made at all, had it not been for the inauguration of this connected series of the Sacred Books of the East.

A special feature of the whole series is that it contains no extracts. Each book is given complete-with all its errors of thought, its odd conceptions, its redundancies of expression-or not at all. This method has its disadvantages, but these are greatly outweighed by its value. Nothing is easier than, by means of carefully selected extracts, to convey an entirely erroneous idea of the average standard of thought in ancient books. Let us confess it boldly. The sacred books of the East are not edifying reading. Instructive they most certainly are. But they are instructive, least of all, in the direction in which. their authors thought they would be most so. They teach us not so much what to believe, or what we ought to do, as what the purblind have believed, and what the foolish have done. They teach us, above all, how slow and painful were the steps by which mankind advanced along the road, not from error to truth, but from greater error to less. In this, the highest and best direction of their mental activity, men were not different from what they were in more worldly matters, in the arts of war, in their efforts after material comfort or after social well-being. There are isolated passages in these books of great beauty, of deep religious feeling, even of rare insight into the realities of life. But there is much more that is monotonous, mistaken, wooden, even absurd. We must not turn to them for the sake of any expected revelation of sacred mysteries. Their interest is a real human interest-an interest like that which we take in watching the mind of a child unfold itself, and gather strength and shape, and struggle through ignorance, and even much misconception, into comparative freedom and light. Light has arisen in the East. But those who, with poetic fervour, have hoped that from the wisdom of the East would come the glorious many-tinted light of truth, will be disappointed to find that it is only the clear and cold-and withal somewhat dry-light of stern, historical fact.

And on one important point, on which there has been much discussion, these sacred books of the East neither throw, nor can be expected to throw, any light at all. They have nothing,