Franco German war. It was a bold stroke, and elicited from the Minister of Justice a purr of surprise and satisfaction: "A country which in the midst of such catastrophes recruits citizens like yourself is not to be despaired of." It is usually said that he was Jewish by birth, but he is now Christian by profession. A recent visitor to his sanctum in Paris says:

Of his personal appearance-his diminutive stature, but wide girth, his high forehead and bushy whiskers, his loose jacket and big French necktie-we know all that is to be known. Several revolving bookcases, well filled and within convenient reach of the arm-chair, with its back to the fire, which M. de Blowitz evidently uses, tell more especially of an intimate acquaintance with modern French literature. In one may be noticed a complete Shakespeare in German, also Père Didon's "Life of Christ" and "l'Aimanach Catholique;" on the mantlepiece beneath the portrait of M. de Blowitz are a statue of Faith and a crucifix. Of pictures there are several, and in the corner near the caricature is one of those charming half draped figures that only French artists can create.

THE MAN AS HE BELIEVES.

The composition of this interior, with the crucifix over the mantlepiece and the half draped figure in the corner, with a statue of Faith below the portrait of the great man, is very happy. M. de Blowitz has never hesitated to proclaim himself a Catholic of the purest water. At the very beginning of his career on the Times he promptly repressed the zeal of Laurence Oliphant, who was trying to convert him to a belief in the Prophet Harris, by the following explicit confession of faith:

"Excuse me," I said, "I think we might settle for good this question of proselytism, which might cause differences between us. I cannot accept the views of your prophet, which are based on pride. He has proved to you that you are greater than other men, because you have submitted to drive a dust-cart. I prefer the word of Christ, who taught us not to consider ourselves greater or better than other men, because we are dust ourselves. Humanity oscillates between atheism, which rejects reason, and reason, which bows to faith. Those who would substitute gravitation for the law of God, those who would explain the everlasting harmony of the world by successive aggregations arising out of chaos in fulfillment of an unconscious and sublime ordonnance, claim a greater effort from me than those who ask me to believe in one God and in the doctrine of the Trinity. When I have admitted that God created the world, I have expressed a belief certainly which makes revealed religions appear infinitely less miraculous, and a thousandfold more acceptable, than the theory of spontaneous creation and automatic development. That from the midst of the people of God trodden under the hoof of the pagan conqueror n the corrupt GræcoRoman world there should have arisen a prophet who, instead of hatred and revolution, preached charity, forgiveness, brotherly love, and good-will toward all men, was itself a greater miracle than any of those attributed to Christ during His sojourn on earth. Unless you can teach me a religion which inculcates precepts more sublime than those of the Divine Philosopher of Nazareth,

which your prophet does not do, leave me my faith without seeking to trouble it. You may make an unhappy man, but you will not make a disciple?"

A SEMITE?

That touch of disinclination to be made unhappy corresponds only too well with the new mission of Israel, as proclaimed this month by Herman Cohen, to leave much doubt as to the Semitic origin of its author. M. de Blowitz has also the Eastern love for bright color. An artist correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette, who called upon him seven or eight years ago at his residence, thus describes his appear

ance:

I was received by a short, stout, middle-aged gentleman, who spoke with a very marked foreign accent, and who was attired in one of the most fantastic and eccentric of costumes it has ever been my luck to come across. I hardly know how to describe it; it was a sort of mixture of gold-digger and corsair, with just a flavor of the bold buccaneer of the good old Adelphi dramas thrown in to help the blend. A red flannel shirt with a low loose collar, and a crest embroidered on the front, a long double-breasted coat of the same color and material, very baggy trousers, made of some Eastern-looking stuff with bright scarlet and blue stripes, tucked into embroidered Arab top-boots of the same vivid color; and last, but not least, on his head a large Astrakhan cap. M. de Blowitz only wanted a few yataghans (or whatever they call the daggers to match his costume) and some pistols stuck in his belt to make the whole get-up complete, from an artistic or theatrical point of view.

When I saw M. de Blowitz he was habited in more ordinary fashion. But Mr. Fullerton notes that when he is at the seaside he always holds a kind of court on the beach, where he, "picturesque in his colored flannels," is the cynosure of every

eye.

A PARTING WORD OF ADVICE.

M. de Blowitz may be Jew or Gentile, but in or out of his flannels he is a very picturesque individuality and a first-class ambassador of the press. So for the present I will take my leave of the Interviewer in Ordinary for his Majesty King Demos by quoting the following very sensible hint:

I am going, for the benefit of younger journalists, to give a hint which a good many of them whom I know I would do well to keep in remembrance. When a man gives a correspondent an important piece of news, the latter should remain with him for a time, but change the conversation, and leave him while it has turned on something quite insignificant. If the correspondent take his departure abruptly, a flash of caution will burst upon his informant. He will reflect rapidly, and will beg the journalist not to repeat what he has said till he sees him again. The information would be lost, and the correspondent would suffer an annoyance that might have been saved if he had heard nothing. A newspaper has no use for confidential communications it cannot transmit to its readers.

M. de Blowitz must be hailed as unquestionably the dean of the stationary ambassadors of the people.

"Tom Brown's School Days, "-generally in those plastic years of the early teens when the deepest and most lasting impressions may result from such winning sermons as Judge Hughes cunningly worked into that classic. Robinson Crusoe and "Tom Brown" are our boy epics. Critics who can be suspected of no envy have found that Mr. Hughes' masterpiece was "thin," that its humor was false, that its style was naught, that the standards of boy-excellence were beefy and unfeeling; but after forty years, the story of Rugby life still furnishes the one pre-eminent example of the schoolboy in fiction. It has even been translated into French-how the pupils of a lycée can understand it, much less like it, is a mystery; and if any final evidence is needed of its triumphant and irresistible veracity, one need only add that the English boys of the rival public schools admit its sovereignty.

TOM WAS THE TYPICAL ENGLISH BOY.

It is right to begin a sketch of the bright, earnest life just ended with a retrospect of this tale,-in the face of the fact that the extraordinary popularity of the one book has veiled from the general public the other manifold activities of Thomas Hughes. For the story of Tom Brown was not only his magnum opus; it embodied the very essence of his creed of life, a creed to which all his work as educator, social reformer, colonizer, pamphleteer, theologian, conformed with an exceedingly rare degree of consist ency. Perhaps there was never a more consistent life, in the best sense, than Hughes', and the key to it is in the simply told adventures of Tom Brown at Rugby which have delighted and inspired the English-speaking boys of four decades. The Tom in the book,-who, despite the author's assurances to the contrary, is clearly the same Thomas who wrote Hughes, Q.C., after his name,-was one of the great family of Browns," an average healthy English boy, "born and raised" amid the quaint village surroundings of that Berkshire whose rustic games and ceremonies Mr. Hughes never tired of describing. Tom's earliest education corresponded closely with that short curriculum prescribed for the Persian youth, and after an unsatisfactory experience with a private school, the youngster boards the tally-ho for famous Rugby. Arnold is master; he is Mr. Hughes' ideal teacher of men and boys, and his character is confessedly drawn from "real life." His ways of trying to make the savage boy a manly Christian are Mr. Hughes' ways; the very strong ethical teaching of the story has its centre in the Master of Rugby, who is, by force of simple boy-like enthusiasm for good

Doctor

things, invested with the attributes of the unfailing hero and ruler within his little kingdom.

were to combine their wits and energies, so it is impossible to suggest the fresh, wholesome flavor, the naïve unconsciousness, the honest boy barbarism, of "Tom Brown's School Days" to those mortals who have not read it. But to the boy who has in this book lived at Rugby with Tom and "Scud " East, a mention of the landmarks in the careers of these two veritable youngsters is an instant re minder that they have furnished him with his most powerful impressions of things good to do at school, and the way a self-respecting boy ought to do them. Did any battle description ever exceed in moral enthusiasm, in high loyalty, and reckless bravery, that stupendous football struggle which initiated young Tom in the most sacred rite of schoolboy sports? Was there ever a more undeniable hero than Old Brooke, or one surer of the worship of all boys, young and old? The career and downfall of Flashman the bully; that memorable, that Homeric combat between Tom Brown and Slogger Williams

in the defense of weak Arthur; the thrilling race of hare-and-hounds; the treeing of Tom by Velveteens; and the final cricket match when the hero, having passed through the harassing vicissitudes of successforms," seems to have attained the very last ive" glory of nineteen years, a set of whiskers and the captaincy of the school cricket team-these are memories to conjure with!

THE RUGBY IDEAL.

But besides being one of the stories-which can be counted on one's fingers-that immediately capture and hold the attention of the universal boy, and leave him gasping in eagerness after fine, true, manly, forceful things, there is in "Tom Brown's School Days" the whole round of sympathies for which Mr. Hughes lived. He himself was a Rugby boy, under Dr. Arnold. He believed that the life at a great English public school served to bring out the best virtues of the average Englishman. He was himself a notable feature on the football and cricket fields, and held that they were the surest foundations of health, happiness and manliness in a boy. He loved out-of-door country life with an eager, buoyant strength, which led him to regard it as the greatest regenerating influence on earth for stale minds, hearts and bodies. His faith was implicitly fixed in the Rugby system of self-government, where the bigger and wiser boys were in rather despotic charge of the smaller ones. He hated bullying worse than any other form of sin, whether it was from a hulking boy at school or grinding social conditions in London. And finally Judge Hughes was throughout his life blessed with an untroubled belief in the tenets of the Established Church. This faith was inextricably blended with his mighty friendships for Arnold, Maurice and Kingsley, and it was an integral portion of the great Rugby master's system of training his boys.

"TOM" HUGHES AS A MUSCULAR CHRISTIAN. "Tom Brown's School Days' was written in 1857, when Mr. Hughes was a young lawyer of thirty-four. He was in politics an advanced Liberal; his public activities were always concentrated on measures which promised to affect the moral and material standards of workingmen and the poor. He threw himself passionately into a struggle to brighten and better the lives of his poorer brethren with just the spirit that brought Tom Brown to fight for his weak little Rugby friend, Arthur. "Tom" Hughes was a busy and fairly successful lawyer. Bound to his office from ten till five, he and his chosen band of workers met at six in the morning and eight in the evening to found a society for the promotion of workingmen's associations. Mr. Hughes saw revolutionary possibilities in the idea of co-operation, and so persistently did he follow this belief that it was necessary for him at one time to maintain membership in no less than eighteen different co-operative associations. The group of devoted men among whom he was easily the most

and decency were to be expressed only by meditative and timid lives protected from the rough contact of the world. This effeminate ideal of the righteous life could not, of course, be appreciated by the people, and there was a general hunger extant for the heathen virtues when Hughes and

Kingsley came on the scene with their "Christian Socialism" and "Muscular Christianity." This mighty cricketer, this broad shouldered, fresh faced athlete, this cheery, sympathetic man, almost too "tolerant of the intolerable," this Tom Hughes, who loved the things that boys loved, who was too true to believe that another man would lie-such a man was as good as any heathen of them all, and neither he nor the doctrines of Christ lost through his interpretation of them to the masses.

THE TRIUMPHS OF THE CHRISTIAN SOCIALISTS. At the end of the century we may have grown a little weary of the phrase "Muscular Christianity." or, rather, of the vulgarities which have sometimes masqueraded under it, but in the fifties it was not only a new and wholesome ideal; its devoted disciples had the fine true ring which comes from glorious earnestness and self-forgetfulness. At any rate, where the "Chartists" had failed, the Christian Socialists," with their Rugby standards and methods, won in no indecisive measure. In one

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ceased, and the form of Christian earnestness appealed to the people.

It is said that "Tom Brown's School Days" not only made the fortune of its publisher, Macmillan, but gained for its author a seat in Parliament, which he held from 1865 to 1874. He was not a great parliamentarian, though his advantages of ready and forceful oratory stood him in good stead in his advocacy of those educational and economic measures which affected the welfare of the workingmen. In 1869 Mr. Hughes' name was honored with the addition of the letters Q. C., and thirteen years later he was made a County Court Judge, whence his usual appellation-though, indeed, the more endearing form of "Tom" Hughes was the favorite form of address with those who knew him, even if it were only through his writings.

DOCTOR ARNOLD.

OUR STOUT FRIEND IN THE CIVIL WAR.

It was in 1870, during his Parliamentary career, that Judge Hughes visited the United States. It was inevitable that he should receive a tumultuous welcome, for during the darkest moments of the Civil War he had stoutly maintained the righteousness of the Union cause. With his characteristic enthusiasm, which was called forth powerfully by the idea of the North's championship of the slaves, he was roused to a fighting pitch at the lukewarm recognition in England of what he considered the Federal rights. It was in this phase of his many enthusiasms that he made a great friendship with James Russell Lowell. It must have been a rare treat to see these two big, bearded men over their pipes and their stories, brimful of physical and mental energy; sane and happy in their lofty ideals and eager beliefs; kindly toward all men, and chiefly toward those who most needed kindness. Biglow papers could not have found in any other human being a more sympathetic chord than in the broad breast of democratic "Tom Hughes." He fairly gloried in them and would read them through the whole morning nd on into the afternoon. Lowell wrote him, on the return fromthe American tour:

The

"Parting with you was like saying good-by to sunshine. As I took my solitary whiff o' baccy, after

I got home, my study looked bare, and my old cronies on the shelves could not make up to me for my new loss. I sat with my book on my knee and mused, with a queer feeling about my eyelids now and then. And yet you have left so much behind that is precious to me, that by and by I know that my room will have a virtue in it never there before, because of your presence. I would rather have the

kind of welcome that met you in this country than all the shouts of all the crowds on the Via Sacra of Fame. There was 'love' in it, you beloved old boy, and no man ever earns that for nothing-unless now and then from a woman. By Jove! it is worth writing books for such a feeling as that."

THE NEW RUGBY" COLONY.

Thus it was not as a critical tourist that the author of "Tom Brown's School Days" visited us. He made hosts of friends in Chicago, New York and Boston, and conceived in that expedition the idea of his famous co-operative Tennessee colony. Seeing in this new world the broad reaches of beautiful land practically unappropriated, his heart yearned within him to have the freedom of the open air, the wholesome inspiration of working in the fields, the great opportunities for expansion, the absence of idle city temptations-for the many unoccupied and dissatisfied young men with whom he had been With such a man as Tom working in London.

Hughes such dreams do not remain dreams without a quick and fair struggle for reality. A site for the "New Rugby" colony was chosen and bought near Cumberland, Tennessee. With such a leader and such a programme, there was no lack of colonists, and within a short time no less than three hundred men were actually present on the co-operative estate. Some were young university men, others were intelligent members of the laboring classes, but most were the sons of English farmers of the better grade. The idea of the colony is presented in Mr. Hughes' book, written to answer the thousands of applications which come to him. "Of the many sad sights," he said, "in our England, there is none sadder than this, of first-rate material going helplessly to waste, and in too many cases beginning to turn sour and taint, instead of strengthening, the public life." He believed, in a far cheerier spirit and a more immediately practical vein than the Tolstoian advocates of "simplification," that the great cure for such incipient moral disease was a return to the soil " and the pursuits of agriculture. But land was too dear in England.

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THE IDEAL OF THE ENTERPRISE.

"What you have to do is to discover some place in this broad planet where you may set to work on the best conditions; where the old blunders have the smallest chance of repeating themselves, and these new ideas, that new spirit which has done so much to make England impossible for you in these days, will have the best chance of free development. You want to get your chance to start in a