been shown how they resemble those recorded in the writings of the early Christians; and, lastly, their similarity with these strange manifestations in the epidemic at Morzine has been pointed out. All appear identical. We have in all the same convulsions, the same fits of coma, the same delusions, the same insensibility to pain in the person possessed, the same delirium and violence; yet, in Ceylon and Savoy at least, the same harmlessness of that violence with regard to others. In all these exists the same belief in the futility of ordinary and human means of cure, of the necessity for prayer and exorcism.

It is to be regretted that more attention has not been paid to a subject so curious in itself, and so deeply interesting to the unhappy sufferers from such delusions. Thousands upon thousands of our fellowcreatures implicitly believe in the power of supernatural evil influences, and are, in point of fact, subject to seizures of a fearful description, differing, as it seems, from all nervous disorders known to science, which, by universal consent

in countries where they are prevalent, are directly ascribed to demoniacal possession. The power of imagination and the fixed belief in the preternatural character of these affections produce upon the minds of these unfortunate people an amount of wretchedness very little known and very little appreciated. "The influence of demonism," writes Mr Hardy, "is almost universal, and it is impossible to understand the religious position of the Singhalese without placing before the mind the real character of the dread power by which they are led captive. Only those who have held immediate and unreserved communication with them can have any idea of the misery they endure on account of their belief in the evil influence and power of wicked spirits. It extends to all times, persons, circumstances, and places.'

This is said, by an unimpeachable authority, of Ceylon only. What must be the state of the countless numbers throughout the world who believe, and appear to themselves to have too good reason for believing, in Demonology?

THE condition of her Majesty's Ministers is at this moment as pitiable as their worst enemies could desire it to be. They have contrived, in the course of four or five months, to render themselves contemptible in the eyes of the whole nation. No man of any note in Parliament, be his political opinions what they may, has the smallest confidence in them. No portion of the public press, with the single exception of the 'Daily Telegraph,' so much as pretends cordially to support them. Their internal divisions, hardly concealed at the outset, are become common topics of conversation at all the Clubs; and the course into which their legislation-or, to speak more correctly, their attempts at legislation has fallen, points to one issue, and only one, which cannot now be far distant.

This is not a state of things which will give satisfaction to any, except to designing apostles of Republicanism. Being Tories ourselves, we cannot indeed pretend to say that we are sorry for the Administration, constituted as it is, much less that we desire its continuance. But as lovers of the country, and of the institutions on which its greatness depends, we feel that the exhibition which the present Administration is making of itself, strikes at the very root of all good government; and whatever goes to render good government more difficult than it has long been, cannot fail to create in us more of anxiety and of indignation than of triumph.

These are, we allow, strong expressions, which, however, we will endeavour to justify, by taking a rapid survey of the more important of the political events which, in the course of the bygone month, and under Ministerial guidance, have occupied public attention,

and created, so to speak, public opinion.

When last we met our readers, her Majesty's Ministers were engaged in attempts to cover their disgraceful shortcomings in the matter of the cattle plague during the recess. Their first attempt went to prove that all which could be done was done, and that anything like legislation on the subject would be at once absurd and mischievous. Failing in this, and discovering that Parliament was against them, they prepared a bill in a hurry, and in a hurry introduced it into the House of Commons. At once, and in the most unceremonious way possible, the measure was taken out of their own hands. It was cut, carved, altered, and improved to suit the views of a member of the Opposition.

Another bill, intended to supply what was still manifestly wanting, ran its course, pari passu, with this, and both reached the Lords in such a state that not a single peer, either on the Ministerial or Opposition side of the House, would take charge of thein. The result is, that the Government has been driven to do at last what it ought to have done at the beginning, and because of its neglect in not doing which, the Legislature found it necessary to interfere. It has assumed, upon compulsion, the responsibility from which it shrank before the screw was applied. And now, at the eleventh hour, Orders in Council are issued, such as the Commissioners appointed to investigate the case long ago recommended, and which, had they appeared in time, might have stayed the plague, or, at all events, restricted its ravages within limits comparatively narrow.

While this was going on that coup d'état took place which, not with

out a bungle, suspended the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland. The act of vigour, for such we admit it to be, was perhaps necessary, but it came with the worst possible grace from a Ministry which, only three days previously, had, in a speech from the throne, assured both Houses of Parliament that the law was strong enough to vindicate itself, and that Irish juries and Irish judges were equally to be depended upon. It was accepted without a remonstrance, except from a small section of the usual supporters of the Ministry sitting below the gangway; but it brought with it no political capital whatever to its authors. On the contrary, public attention was at once drawn to the unbecoming leniency which a previous Whig Government had exercised towards the prime movers in the Fenian conspiracy; and Lord Russell and his colleagues eat, as is fitting that they should, the fruit of the tree which Lord Palmerston and the same colleagues had planted. Meanwhile the policy of Parliamentary Reform-the very keystone of the arch on which their existence as a Government ostentatiously rested-they took good care to cover with a veil of mystery which no profane or vulgar eye was allowed to penetrate. Deputation after deputation waited upon the First Lord of the Treasury, bring ing free gifts of advice, and hungering and thirsting for information. The advice was received with that courtesy and grace which marks all the noble Lord's intercourse with strangers; but the deputations were sent away empty. All that they could extract from the head of the Administration amounted to this, that he was, as it were, a bee working in a glass hive; and that, like other bees when they are busy, he preferred plastering over the glass with wax, which it was not his purpose to remove till it should suit his own convenience. So, also, in the House

of Commons, as often as a reformer rose-and, one by one, many rose

to ask questions, they received from Mr Gladstone civil answers, which amounted to this, that they had better mind their own business and leave him to take care of his. What, under such circumstances, could the Liberal press do? The Times,' the Daily News,' and the 'Star' wrote for a while vaguely yet hopefully. By-and-by the vagueness in their tone became more marked, its hopefulness less decided. The 'Star,' bound by its allegiance to Mr Bright, and believing, or affecting to believe, in the understanding at which he had arrived with the Government, required that the compact between them, as Mr Bright had explained it at Rochdale, should be fulfilled to the letter. A six-pound franchise in boroughs, with a ten-pound franchise in counties, would satisfy every wish, for the present, of the great Liberal party, because whatever might be necessary besides would follow in due time-the people, not the Ministers, being thereafter the masters of their own destiny. But anything short of this, as it would show that the Ministers distrusted the people, so it must lead, of necessity, to the prompt and absolute withdrawal of confidence in the Ministers by the people. Not so the Times' and the 'Daily News.' The former was no advocate for a mere lowering of the franchise. It did not choose to see all other classes of voters swamped by the lowest. It was indignant that Mr Bright should dictate, or appear to dictate, to the Government; and went in for some measure which, leaving the franchise in the hands of the middle classes, should so distribute the electoral privilege as to bring the House of Commons more than it is into unison with the feelings of the people. The Daily News,' on the other hand, would be satisfied with no arrangement which,

like a six and ten pound qualification, must still exclude the great body of working men from exercising the rights of free men. Thus pelted on every side with questions, arguments, and remonstrances, the Ministers, though squabbling among themselves, did their best to maintain towards the outer public an attitude of dignified reserve. They could not preserve that attitude long. Their quar

rels oozed out. The results of the inquiries which they were known to have instituted came by some mysterious process to light; and there appeared one morning an announcement in the 'Times 'that they had wisely abandoned their plan for a mere lowering of the franchise. This was followed the same evening by a paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette,' which, considering that it preceded by several days the official announcement of their scheme, must have very much surprised that section of the Cabinet which is not in the habit of letting newspapers or their editors into its confidence.

"It appears," said our contemporary, on the 6th of March," that as soon as they had decided on the principle and outlines of their reform, they began to collect information about it. As soon as they had fixed their franchise, they called for returns to show how many and what sort of persons that franchise would admit. The result is said to have startled and staggered them not a little, and when published will surprise the public as well as the Ministers. It appeared, we understand, from the statistics furnished to them by the local authorities, that so far from there being scarcely any working men upon the register-so far from the labouring classes being' serfs,' as Mr Potter called them, or outside the pale of the Constitution,' as Mr Bright and Mr Forster phrase it-from 20 to 22 per cent of the electors now upon the list belong to the working class. It is rumoured, indeed, that the first returns received gave the proportion as high as 25 per cent, and that they were sent back for reconsideration and re-inquiry, under the impression that there must have been some strange blunder or

misconception in the matter; but further investigation has confirmed the main conclusion-viz., that from one-fifth to one-fourth of the actual Parliamentary constituency of England consists of those very classes who were believed to be virtually excluded from the franchise, and whose admission was the object and plea of the contemplated Reform Bill. Naturally enough, when they came suddenly upon this pregnant and unsuspected fact, Ministers must have felt it incumbent upon them to reconsider the whole question, and materially to modify their course. Perhaps, also, they began to think that they might not have been quite wise in rejecting Lord Elcho's proposal for a commission of inquiry, when even they, who had been talking and planning and promising Reform for the last fifteen years, were in ignorance of so significant a circumstance."

Embarrassing as in this matter the Ministry felt their position to be, it was scarcely more so than the dilemma into which, on other points of no mean importance, pledges rashly given, with a view to purchase support at the general election, had driven them. The questions of National Education and of the establishment of a Roman Catholic University in Ireland, had fallen into a groove on which they never counted; and as soon as Par liament met, their perplexity, as well as the causes of it, came to light. The Chief Secretary, whom they had discarded with as little respect for his feelings as for their own credit, blurted out questions which the Chancellor of the Exchequer found it at once inconvenient to answer and impossible to evade. He could not deny what Sir Robert Peel was in a position to prove, yet shrank from avowing a policy which the House of Commons was very He therelittle likely to sanction. fore fenced with the matter before him, and fenced in vain. It came out, in spite of his best efforts to conceal the fact, that the Cabinet stood committed to all that the Ultramontanists had demanded; and that if these pledges were redeemed, as they ought to be, elementary educa

tion in Ireland would cease to be what it now is, and a royal charter would enable a purely Roman Catholic University to grant degrees. This was bad enough; but worse followed. Since pledging itself to this policy, the Government had arrived at the conclusion that Parliament could never be brought to sanction such a direct reversal of the policy of the last thirty years; and finding that they must either violate their pledges or resign their seats, Ministers bravely determined to violate their pledges and keep their seats.

They are still smarting under the pain of this humiliation when another overtakes them, not, perhaps, so palpably manifest to outsiders, but still sufficient to attract the attention and draw down the censure of the more thoughtful portion of their own party. Pursuant to notice, the member for Dumfriesshire called the attention of the House to the connection which subsists between Fenianism in Ireland and Fenianism in America, asking, at the same time, why remonstrances on so grave a subject had not long ago been addressed by the British Government to the Government of the United States.

"There were many ways," says the "Times,' "of dealing with the facts brought forward by Mr Walker, and the course adopted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if not the worst, was certainly not the best of them. Unlike Mr Oliphant, he did not affect to make light of the Fenians considered as a political body, nor deprecate interference with them on the ground that it would give them in the eyes of the world a degree of importance to which they were not entitled. On the contrary, he spoke strongly against them; obliquely censured the Government which conuived at their vagaries; and then, as if there had been danger to England in the discussion, entreated the House to let the subject drop."

If it be inconvenient to the Government, in its collective capacity, to be called to book on the score

of our relations with foreign countries, and especially with America, much more awkward for the Chancellor of the Exchequer in particular are resolutions affirming the necessity of increased economy in the public expenditure. And if these resolutions come from his own side of the House, and are strengthened and supported by apposite quotations from his own speeches, though he may prevail upon Parliament to refrain from dealing with them as party questions, he cannot escape from them except with a very perceptible loss of prestige. Of this nature was the attack of the member for Brighton upon the estimates, as yet undiscussed, and Mr Gladstone's lame and impotent defence of the same. Mr White is by no means either the most brilliant or the most influential senator in the House of Commons. He is, however, a member of the great Liberal party-a steady supporter of Liberal principles-and, till of late, was understood to be one of the most enthusiastic of Mr Gladstone's admirers. A great change seems suddenly to have come over him. His faith in the reforming and economical Chancellor is shaken, and he assigns his reasons for this falling away from an old creed in terms which are at least sufficiently solid and marvellously explicit :