THE SIMPLON TUNNEL.

FROM an article by Leon Monete, in the Engineering Magazine, the following facts are taken. relating to the world's greatest tunnel and the immense labour of constructing it. Napoleon's road over the Simplon, nearly a hundred years ago, cost £700,000; the seven years' work (nearly) of making the Simplon Tunnel will cost about £3,200,000. "The construction of such a tunnel offered special difficulties which could not have been overcome twenty-five years ago."

The mountain is 12 miles high above the tunnel in some places, and at such a great depth the heat becomes excessive. The workmen had to support a temperature of 95 to 104 deg. F., while it was only 84 deg. at Mt. Cenis and 86 at St. Gothard. Special powerful air fans had to be used, and water sprays were employed to cool the inside of the tunnel.

The drilling of the tunnel began on August 1st, 1898, and should have been finished about May 1st, 1904; but delay was caused by the springs of hot water, unexpectedly met with, which flooded the tunnel. The two gangs of workmen did not meet in the middle of the tunnel because on the Swiss side the

THE LONDON OF THE FUTURE. MR. FRANCIS GRIBBLE, in the Grand Magazine, describes "London as It Will be."

1. Streets are being widened. The Strand will be 80 feet wide at its narrowest part. Piccadilly is to be widened to 80 feet. So will other great thoroughfares.

2. The Embankment is to be pushed westward from Parliament House to Chelsea; the Albert Embankment eastward-till London becomes a city of spacious quays, like Paris.

3. The permanent buildings to be erected presently in Aldwych and Kingsway are worthy of the dignity of this great improvement. There will be theatres among them-theatres somewhat like the new Gaiety; and there will be a fitting memorial to Gladstone, which Mr. Hamo Thornycroft is now designing. It will be a boulevard site too, with trees, arrangements having already been made that planes and acacias shall be planted and cared for by the County Council.

4. The Council contemplates providing house-room

work advanced more quickly, since the flow of the water was less than on the Italian side, only ten gallons per second instead of two hundred. The rock temperature sometimes reached 132deg. F., and to lower this temperature and ventilate the tunnel powerful fans sent from fifty to sixty million cubic feet of cold air per twenty-four hours along the tunnel. It is not generally realised that during the five years of work in the tunnel there was no stopping, except to verify the alignment, the gangs of men working in eight-hour or, sometimes, in six-hour shifts. Sometimes half a ton of dynamite a day was used for blasting the rock, which was often so hard that while the tunnel was passing through the granite the shops had to reforge and retemper up to 13,000 mine chisels every twenty-four hours. Progress was also delayed by some very soft rock being reached, by cold springs being encountered, and by various other causes. With one thing and another the cost works out at £1,000 per yard. The next longest tunnel, the St. Gothard, is 9'25 miles as compared with the 119 of the Simplon, and its construction took nine years. Its cost per yard, however, was only £140.

At

for nearly one hundred thousand persons; and it provides proper accommodation at low rents. Millbank there is already a complete colony of artisan dwellings. There will be numbers of such blocks in the London of the future; and there will also be numbers of cottage estates-estates for 6,000 persons at Norbury, for 8,000 at Tooting, for 9,000 at Hammersmith, and for 42,000 at Tottenham.

5. Trams electrified, with motor-ominibus connections, will run faster, oftener, and further than now; they will cross the bridges and run along the Embank

ment.

6. The Underground will be electrified, there will be an immense extension of the service of the Twopenny Tube. From Hampstead, from Highgate, from Finsbury-from quite a number of places.

7. The steamboats, will make the river a public highway.

8. Shallow tramways will run at thirty miles an hour under the most crowded streets. An experimental line is now under construction from Theobald's Road to the Strand.

THE SCHILLER CENTENARY.

THE NATIONAL POET.

SCHILLER died on May 9th, 1805. Dr. Wolf von Schierbrand, in the North American Review for April, takes this fact as a peg on which to hang an interesting and sympathetic appreciation of Schiller, whom he regards as pre-eminently the national German poet, the favourite poet of German youth and German women. The popular notion that Goethe holds the first place among German poets is, he maintains, disproved by the fact that millions more of Schiller's works have been sold than of those of any other German writer. Schiller's dramas are always on the stage, and quotations from Schiller are found on every German tongue. Dr. von Schierbrand maintains that :

Goethe has never been "popular" in Germany, though a few of his works have been. He has always been, and he remains to-day, the poet of the select few; and not only Heine, but such second-rate stars as Uhland, Theodore Körner, Kleist, Hauff, have been, during nearly all this time, successfully vying with him for the prize of popularity. If ever a poet could be termed "national," in the broadest sense of that word, it is Schiller.

Schiller was the poet who, until the German Empire was unified, inspirited the whole of the German nation :

The Sehiller conception of the world; his notion of country, home and family, of love, honour and duty; his belief in the brotherhood of man, the oneness of the universe, and the inherent goodness of the human heart; his idea of Divine government-these things, within a decade of the poet's death, became part and parcel of the German soul.

After the war Schiller was dethroned, and nearly every young German deemed himself a Bismarck, a disciple of Nietzsche. During the last fifteen years this false god has been dethroned :

Once more the German people, high and low, recognise in him the poet who most admirably expresses the German soul at its best, the national consciousness at its truest.

When the Körners offered him an asylum in Dresden for a time, in 1785, he was almost at starvation-point; this was the time when he wrote his magnificent "Song to Joy," as well as his "Don Carlos." When Goethe secured for him a professor's chair of history in Jena, the salary was 200 thalers (about 145 dollars) a year. In those days, and until his death, apples and strong coffee had become his inexpensive passion. The apples he usually kept in a drawer of his writing-desk, and their odour, he claimed, furnished him inspiration. When he wrote his last, and perhaps most finished, drama, "William Tell," a year before the end came, he was so overworked and badly nourished that at night he kept himself from falling asleep at his work by munching apples and steeping his bare feet in cold water. When he wrote his "Fiesco," while a fugitive at Mannheim, he lived joyously on a diet of potatoespotatoes baked, boiled, fried; potatoes, of which he had bought a cart-load from a peasant, and which with their bulk took up about half the floor space in his garret. No wonder his health broke down! Even Chatterton affords no more pathetic spectacle. Abject penury was Schiller's portion through life.

Nevertheless, as Dr. von Schierbrand exultantly declares :

The year 1905 sees, then, Schiller among the few generally recognised great poets of the world. His message in the main still rings true to our ears and to our hearts.

A FRENCH APPRECIATION.

On the occasion of the centenary commemoration of the death of Schiller, C. A. S. de Gleichen, a descendant of the poet, contributes an article on Schiller to La Revue of April 15th.

Madame de Staël's judgment of Schiller, says the writer, has never been equalled or surpassed by any biographer of the poet. She wrote:

Schiller was a man of rare genius and perfect good faith. No career is more beautiful than the literary career when it is followed as Schiller followed it. He was admirable for his virtues as well as his talents. His conscience was his muse. His writings were himself; they expressed his soul, and he did not conceive it possible to change a single expression if the inner thought which inspired it had not changed. He lived, he spoke, he acted, as if the wicked did not exist, and when he depicted them in his works it was with more exaggeration than if he had really known them.

A CITIZEN OF FRANCE.

The writer recalls the interesting mark of sympathy accorded to Schiller by the revolutionary government at Paris in nominating him a French citizen. The document was wrongly addressed, and did not reach the author of "The Robbers" till October, 1793! He acknowledged it as a document from the dead, for Danton and Clavière signed it, a letter accompanying it bore the signature of Roland, and Custine had charge of it during his first German campaign; and all were dead before the document reached its destination.

"DON CARLOS."

A second article on Schiller appears in the April Deutsche Rundschau. Here Alfred Gercke gives a history of "Don Carlos"; the origin of the drama, its problems, changes, criticisms, etc. It is a very

long and difficult drama, but it seems to have suffered alteration and cutting down. The plan of a play on "Don Carlos" was conceived in 1782, and during the first half of the following year Schiller devoted himself to the writing of it at Bauerbach; after an interval of nearly a year, the work was resumed at Mannheim and gradually completed in Saxony, so that it was the summer of 1787 when the play was quite finished. The writer says Schiller's "Don Carlos" was never really finished, and he ought to have re-written it. But the first three acts being in the hands of the public, Schiller attempted to adapt the second half of the play to what he had already published, and in the interval Schiller himself seems to have undergone considerable change in his ideas. It was the critical moment of his life when he had to decide whether he was born to be a poet or not. The first scenes of "Don Carlos" are described as having been written with his heart's blood; in no other drama have the heroes so much soul, pulse, and nerve from the poet himself, and to them he imparted his own views and feelings.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW.

A WHISTLER OF THE STAGE. WE shall soon have to hire a slave to whisper in the ear of Mr. Shaw "Remember thou, too, art mortal !" A few weeks since Sloane Square was almost blocked up with carriages when the King was pleased to go to see "John Bull's Other Island," and now we have both the great quarterlies treating him quite seriously as a dramatist of genius and a serious reformer. The apotheosis of our Dramatic Whistler is bewilderingly sudden. The Edinburgh Review considers him

as a reformer-a voice crying in the wilderness of trivial work and mean ambition, a voice still hoarse with exhortation, still a little forced from having had to carry over the heads of a crowd.

His supreme gift as a dramatist is to produce an impression of life which seems and which is more real than reality. His plays seem to write themselves :

Mr. Shaw contrives to make even his most serious work simmer with laughter, but the humour is evolved, not added; epigrams are not stuck on the outside of the talk like sugared almonds, and even his wit suffers, as it should suffer, when removed from the setting.

Considering the difficulty of seeing Mr. Shaw's plays on the stage, one must be grateful to his ingenuity in making them acceptable in the study.

Problem has ever been at the root of his work. No drama without conflict; no conflict without something to decide. All life worthy the name is a problem; and every play that would reproduce life must be either a problem or a platitude. A people that is unconscious of having problems to solve, that has outlived its interest in the interpretation of life, is beginning to be at the end of its intellectual resources. Senile decay is as surely indicated in a nation as in a man by a dull acquiescence in the immutability of things; and the literature of a waning race is almost always diverted from the great questions of conduct before it expires in æsthetic trivialities. Hence Mr. Shaw's determination "to accept problem as the normal material of the drama,” and his understanding of drama the presentation in parable of the conflict between man's will and his environment," are a pledge at least of vitality in his ideas, and vitality working itself out as creative philosophy is the supreme necessity to the art of the stage.

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PHILOSOPHIER.

Of Mr. Shaw's philosophy a good deal has been said. It is, indeed, a little too novel for the creation of popular drama. But years have already modified its novelty to himself, and, as he shortens sail, the years will bring the van of the public within more certain hail of him. The defiant assertiveness of the earlier plays has given place to tolerance.

Greater work than he has done he may yet do; but it must be conceived by a less contentious spirit and wrought in a serener air. He has done for us a deal of much needed preaching; but while it needs but the understanding of what men should not be to equip the Preacher, to the Pardoner must be discovered the deeper mystery of what they are.

A NEW WAY TO PLAY SHAKESPEARE.
AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT.

THE April number of the Deutsche Rundschau is an unusually interesting number. Herr A. Brandl, who contributes an article on the Playing of Shakespeare's Plays, thinks the long pauses between many of the acts and scenes spoil the illusion and are extremely inartistic. This is notably the case in the tragedies of "King Lear" and "Hamlet," and in the KingDramas, where the numerous pauses tend to break up the pieces into a series of tableaux. If "Hamlet" could be presented in two hours, how different would be the effect!

An interesting experiment is to be made at Weimar this month, when "Richard II." will be played with practically no intervals between the scenes. Weimar does not possess a revolving stage, but to get over the difficulty a middle curtain is to be used. Played in this way the most important scenes will come more into the light, and the minor ones can take their proper place. The writer takes each act in turn and shows how the curtain will be used between the scenes to avoid the usual pauses, while the attention of the spectator will be better concentrated on the leading action, and the scenes merely intended to arouse sympathy will fall more into the shade.

He clung always with a genial pertinacity to what was hopeful and elevating. He was positive and generous where Whistler was negative and cynical. His easily kindled enthusiasm for what was noble silenced the critical and discriminating faculties of the intellect.

We are not, then, to look to Watts for perfection; each picture of his was a struggle to express some idea which stirred his emotions. He was bound to be experimental and tentative in his efforts to find for this the expressive symbol. And the very importance of the ideas to him, the high duty which he believed lay upon him to utter them to the world, prevented him from a curious preoccupation with the mode of their embodiment.

As to Watts's future position among the world's great artists, the reviewer finds it far more difficult to prophesy than in the case of Whistler. His verdict is not altogether favourable to Watts.

Whistler accomplished something which had never been done before, accomplished it finally and definitively. It is something palpable and evident, but it scarcely claims the very highest rank. But Watts calls up perpetually the memory of the greatest creators, of Michelangelo, of Titian, of Rubens; and, if we are perfectly frank, his work will not quite stand the test thus inevitably applied. To the present writer it seems that Watts belongs to the race of the great improvisers, the race to which Tintoretto, Blake, and El Greco belong, rather than to the race of the supreme creators, the kindred of Titian or Rubens whom he emulated.

MR. H. G. WELLS ON SOCIOLOGY. THE distinction of the Independent Review for May is a very valuable paper by Mr. H. G. Wells on "The So-called Science of Sociology." He takes his start from the first year's record of the Sociological Society. He points out the unsatisfactory diversity of opinion with regard to sociology. It "is evidently one of those large vague words to which everybody attaches a meaning no one can express." But, he avers,

I believe that to go back into metaphysics, into that field Comte and Herbert Spencer so scornfully refused to enter, is the way to get round the tangle which at present condemns sociology in its totality to futility.

With this bold start, Mr. Wells goes on to run full tilt at the modern deification of science, the so-called knowledge that yields to "the illusion of exactitude." Of that illusion he pillories Comte and Herbert Spencer as eminent apostles.

THE UNIQUENESS OF INDIVIDUALS."

Then he proceeds :

Yet it is quite possible to hold, and there is a growing body of people who are beginning to hold, the converse view-that counting, classification, measurement, the whole fabric of mathematics, is subjective and deceitful, and that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variability increases, because individuality tells more and more. Chemistry and physics give results more in harmony with mathematical assumption than, for example, bacteriology, bacteriology than mineralogy, miner. alogy than Mr. Bateson's horticultural experiments, these than the generalisations of zoology, and these than anthropology, simply because, in each case, the science is dealing with a larger, more complex unit, and with a smaller number of units; and individuality is creeping in. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalise about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely is the minority belief, the belief on which this present paper is based.

DARWIN'S NOT THE "SCIENTIFIC METHOD." He goes on to say that the so-called scientific method really only comes up in the science of which the individuality of the units can be pretty completely ignored. Then, with characteristic boldness, Mr. Wells proceeds to state that :

The great advances made by Darwin and his school in biology were not made, it must be remembered, by the scientific method, as it is generally conceived, at all. There was no essential difference between the establishment of his generalisations and any intelligently conducted historical research. He conducted a research into pre-documentary history. He collected information along the lines indicated by certain interrogations; and the bulk of his work was the digesting and critical analysis of that. For documents and monuments, he had fossils and anatomical structures, and germinating eggs too innocent to lie, and, so far, he was nearer simplicity. But, on the other hand, he had to correspond with breeders and travellers of various sorts, classes entirely analogous, from the point of view of evidence, to the writers of history and memoirs.

COCKSURE SCIENCE."

He remarks that to most people the word science He adds:conveys the quality of certitude.

So far as the movements of comets and electric trams go, there is no doubt practically cocksure science; and indisputably Comte (who saw nothing very much in Plato) and Herbert Spencer (who couldn't read Kant) believed that cocksure could be extended to every conceivable thing. The fact that Herbert

Spencer called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the non-individualising quality of his primary assumptions, and of his mental texture. He believed that everything was finally measurable; he believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an evolutionary product from an original homogeneity; and the thought that it might be inextricably in the nature of things probably never entered his head. He thought that identically similar units build up and built up atoms, molecules, inorganic compounds, protoplasm, conscious protoplasm, and so on, until at last the brain reeled at the aggregation. This piling up from simplicity to incalcul able confusion was really all the individuality he envisaged, and it is all the individuality science ever does seem to envisage. WHAT SOCIOLOGY IS NOT.

Mr. Wells insists that we must all boldly face the fact that hard, positive methods are less and less successful just in proportion as we deal with larger and less numerous individuals. And consequently :—

We shall realise that all this talk of the organisation of sociology, as though presently the sociologist would be going about the world with the authority of a sanitary engineer, is and will remain nonsense. We shall regard with a less credulous. charity sociology imitating zoology, and parodying physiology, and emulating the viler obscurities of the theorising biologist. WHAT SOCIOLOGY IS.

He agrees with the Positivist that sociology stands at the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences. "In these latter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there is only one unit."

:

In humanity we encounter consciousness, we encounter self-will, and he reaches the conclusion :Sociology must be neither art simply nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge rendered through personality, that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature.

THE SCIENCE OF UTOPIAS!

On this basis he proceeds to insist that we shall have to substitute for the classification of the social sciences an inquiry into the chief literary forms that subserve sociological purposes. One of these is history, such as Buckle's, Lecky's, Atkinson's, Gibbon's. He thus leads up to his second source:

The history of civilisation is really the history of the appearance and reappearance, the tentatives and hesitations and alterations, the manifestations and reflections in this mind and that, of a very complex, imperfect, elusive idea, the Social Idea. It is that idea suggling to exist and realise itself in a world of egotisms, analisms, and brute matter. I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias-and their exhaustive criticism-is the proper and distinctive method of sociology.

THE TRUE METHOD.

Mr. Wells has now reached his constructive principle, and asks, if sociology is the description of the ideal society and its relation to existing societies, would not this give the synthetic framework required? All the sociological literature beyond the province of history that has stood the test of time and established itself in the esteem of men is frankly Utopian. The method that he suggests is therefore as follows:

The institutions of existing states would come into comparison with the institutions of the Ideal State, their failures and defects could be criticised most effectually in that relation, and the whole science of collective psychology, the psychology of human association, would be brought to bear upon the question of the practicability of this proposed ideal.

INCITING TO ASSASSINATION.

A SCANDALOUS ARTICLE ON THE TSARINA. I HAVE repeatedly drawn attention to the extraordinary malignity of the attacks upon the Tsar which have appeared from time to time in the Quarterly and National Reviews. I pointed out that the natural and inevitable deduction that would be drawn by the readers of such articles was that the sooner the Tsar was murdered the better. How absolutely just was this criticism is shown by the publication of a leading article in the Daily Express of May 1st, based upon the latest effusion of this pseudonymous writer, which appears in the current number of the National Review. The worst of it is that the moral of this latest outpouring is that its readers can hardly fail to come to the conclusion that the Tsarina should also be assassinated, for she is declared to be the chief culprit. Now, much has been said that ought not to have been said about the Dowager Empress, our Queen's sister; but hitherto not all the anonymous advocates of murder have ventured to assail the Empress, who, as Princess Alice's favourite daughter, was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

"The Tsar," says this anonymous reviewer, "is become the one hindrance to the well-being of the people." The Tsar is weak, but he is influenced for evil by his wife :

The writer maintains that the Tsar's weakness has been aggravated by injudicious but well-meant efforts on the part of the Tsaritsa to cure it. "A soft feminine voice uttering loving words and bracing exhortations in the language of Shakespeare stimulated him to endeavours which took a wrong direction. Nicholas having dismissed his ambitious Minister, the halo of the Tsardom departed from him, and he thenceforward submissively hearkened to the soft sweet voice in the boudoir, 'Show them that you are a real Monarch, whose word is law.""

Dealing with the issue of the Tsar's famous manifesto, the article proceeds :-" The critic will doubtless read the manifesto with indulgent eyes when he learns that it was the handiwork of a devoted wife, whose wish-born thoughts were shaped by a loyal seaman. Prince Putyatin, with the help of Shirinsky Shikhmatoff, actually wrote the manifesto by which the destinies of 140,000,000 human beings were to be decided. Putyatin and Shirinsky Shikhmatoff! Who, the English reader may inquire, are they? Who, almost every Russian would ask, are these wire-pullers behind the scenes?

Prince

The Daily Express, summarising the article under the suggestive title "Killing no Murder,” says :

Everyone has left him; his one strong Minister has been dismissed; the Council which dragged from him the rescript-of the genesis of which the article tells an amazing story-has not been again convoked. Grand Dukes are being converted to constitutionalism by dozens. Everyone is anxious to clear himself of the odium of having supported the autocratic principle which was once the breath of his nostrils, and even the voice of the Dowager Empress is lifted, as we have already heard, in favour of the representative principle which, according to M. de Witte, carries with it automatically the downfall of the autocracy. The Tsar, in fact, is left absolutely alone, save for that boudoir council, consisting of a devoted but imprudent wife, which the writer of this article holds chiefly responsible for the mad policy at present pursued, and for the terrible end to which that policy is surely leading. A weak neurotic, continually urged to show himself the strong man in defence of rights divine and indefeasible, Nicholas II. is squandering his last few moments of grace.

The author of the article who, in his bitterness, even revives the old story of the medium Philippe, proclaims the end of the autocracy in the following

terms:

"The Boudoir Council may no longer play havoc with the nation.... Autocracy has heated its palace with sparks, and must now do penance in the ashes." The Tsar's kindred and friends may still happily shape his fate. "But they have no time to lose."

With only

The writer of the "killing no murder" article in the Express thus moralises over the delay of the "event" -a nice euphemism for murder. He says:This Cæsar's Ides of March are not yet past. intelligent guesswork to guide us, it is useless to speculate on the probable manner of a desolate country's emergence from her trouble. The dramatic act which we have so long expected has been so long delayed that the edge of morbid curiosity has been blunted. But something decisive must surely happen soon. And already, when we read such an article as this in the National Review, we can see what a rent the envious Casca made."

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It only remains to be added that the same number announced, on the authority of its St. Petersburg of the paper which contained this disgraceful article correspondent:

An epoch-making Imperial decree conceding liberty of conscience to all Russian subjects was promulgated to-day. It constitutes the greatest social reform accomplished in Russia since the emancipation of the serfs.

Not Revolution, but Erosion.

"R. L.," writing in the Fortnightly from St. Petersburg, congratulates himself upon the insight which enabled him months ago to ridicule those who foretold revolutionary earthquake in Russia. What is happening is not earthquake, it is erosion:

It is not the destruction of the autocracy, but the destruction of Russia, with which we are threatened. The erosion of general anarchy is swiftly wearing away the whole social fabric. Though there is no visible chance of oppression being torn from its throne, there is more than a chance of general chaos in which organised State and organised people will for a time cease to exist. It was from such social dissolution that the Romanoffs three centuries ago saved Russia. Its recurrence may save Russia from the Romanoffs.

The lack of dramatic, masterful personalities at the head of either of the contending forces-tyranny without a tyrant pitted against rebellion without rebels-presages an unheroic peace.

Among all the Tsar's Ministers and high officials there is believed to be only one-the Governor-General of St. Petersburg-who sincerely believes that the autocracy can be permanently maintained, and that repression can maintain it; who believes, therefore, that he is engaged in a good and necessary work. The watchword of the Throne to-day is laissez-faire, which in practice means that Ministers do nothing but shed tears and wait for events on the principle that nothing can be worse than the things that are to-day, and that the scales of justice and the sword of repression are handed over to underlings with full authority to do as they will and full absolution from responsibility.

THE Sunday at Home opens with a paper on Osborne, the King's gift to the nation, and its fitting up as a convalescent home for officers of the army and navy. An interesting illustrated account is given of how this has been done.