themselves, who told them that a little farther on there was a dangerous piece of water which they had been unable to pass, for it was covered with ice just so thick that the horses could not break it through, yet not thick enough to support the weight of coaches and waggons, and the current beneath was so rapid as to afford little chance of escape to those who once fell in. Indeed, one large coach, drawn by four horses, had become jammed in the ice, while attempting to pass, and was so deeply and firmly embedded, that the horses, the driver, and all the occupants, men, women, and children, were drowned. When our party set out again, therefore, they thought it well to hire a guide and take a circuitous route to avoid this dangerous spot. The road recommended to them was said to be good all the way to Custerlot, but when they had passed Rheda, it was found to be completely inundated, frozen over, and impassable. The road was narrow, the banks steep, and the horses were sunk above the girths in water and ice, as with great difficulty and no little danger they struggled up the bank and into the meadows which bordered the road, dragging their respective vehicles after them. The cook's wagon had the narrowest possible escape from being overturned into the water; but all at last were safely landed. The cold, meantime, continued so severe as almost to disable those who were exposed to it. "The captain always travelled with a large French poodle, which did duty as a muff, and enabled him to keep his delicate white hands tolerably warm.' On they went again, now over frozen fallow ground, now breaking their way through fields of ice, now wading through water, now jolting along over ploughed fields, which racked both carriages and occupants almost to pieces, and now crossing an extemporized bridge of planks, which had been laid across some deep water running with a strong current, and was but just wide enough for the vehicles. The heavy baggage-wagon was the only one to be damaged, and that was left behind at a farmhouse to be repaired, the driver being directed to follow his master by the marks left by the wheels on the frozen ground. On they went, zig-zagging in and out of plantations, through fields and drifted beds of snow, so deep that it was impossible to foresee what would happen for two minutes together. They fell in with no other travellers, nor even a single human being of any sort, so no wonder they looked upon the country as "an untrodden, unknown wild." The jolting and twisting were intolerable and exhausting, from the constant muscular exertion required to enable them to keep their seats. Frequently they were obliged to take to the road, or any such apology for a road as presented itself; now they passed over ice which bore their weight for a certain distance and then gave way, when all fell in together, with a general shout of "danger ahead," and every effort was needed before they could extricate themselves; then they would get on the ice again, and in a few minutes the same scene was repeated, much to the alarm of the finespirited horses. In one place they encountered a deep hollow, filled with water and frozen hard, except in some parts where it had been broken; the carriages dropped in with alarming force, and the poor struggling horses, up to the girths in water, could hardly be made to continue their fearful work. Some of these pitfalls were scarcely more than three or four feet long, and when the carriages got jammed in them, which they did every few minutes, for they only emerged from one deep, ice-filled hole to fall into another still deeper, the kicking and plunging of the horses was something fearful. To add to the difficulty of the journey, every here and there was a "gate," that is, a long piece of wood, very large and bossy at one end, and very taper at the other, being supported on a swivel. These gates or barriers not being set sufficiently wide open, required the utmost dexterity on the part of the drivers, to avoid either dashing against the side-posts, or having the taper end of the log of wood driven through the body of the vehicles. Even where the road was what might be called good, in comparison, it was still so bad that no farmer's wagon would have attempted it, and the only wonder was that the carriages did not sustain more serious damage. Travellers we found as rare as birds of paradise [writes Mr. Reinagle]. Not one did we ever meet either on foot, on horseback, or being could find a safe footing anywhere in in a wagon. these straits and ravines of ice, water and mud, years old. No repairs ever take place in all the north of Germany. The fact was that no human It would indeed have been a matter of danger to meet even a man on horseback, for in certain parts of the road it would have been impossible for him to pass. After leaving Bielfeld the travellers proceeded as before, advancing barely one mile an hour, and still beset as they had been for days and days by hard frost, ice, and snow. As the day advanced, rain fell in torrents and was succeeded by a heavy fall of snow. The travellers now began to think and hope that they must be drawing near Pyrmont, though no signs of it appeared, and the road became rather worse than better. The chariot fell into a large hole, where it was in great danger of being entirely swamped; then all the carriages got jammed in as fast as if they had taken root, and it took two hours' hard work to extricate them. They had entered the principality of Waldeck a day or two previously, but had travelled so constantly through forests, to avoid the so-called roads, where it was possible, that for hours together they saw no human habitation, and they could not accurately tell whereabouts they might be. Not a road in Waldeck ever got mended, according to our writer, and great lumps of rock constantly threatened to overturn the vehicles. The cook's wagon did get upset at last, but this was the final catastrophe of the kind, for shortly after smoke was seen rising above the trees in the distance, and in another half-hour the weary travellers drove up to the Bath Hotel, Pyrmont, where they were met and joyously greeted by the friends who had arrived before them, and were filled with as much surprise at the sight of the large rooms, good-looking furniture, tables and chairs, as if they had never seen the like before. Though it was now the month of March, the cold was still so severe that M. Devaux was wearing a "huge fine sable-skin muff." The frost did not finally break up until the middle of April, having then lasted four months, during which time the numbers of lives lost and the misery endured are probably almost without a parallel. The papers from which the above particulars and extracts are taken were compiled by Mr. Reinagle from his diaries in the year 1853, and he thus winds up the narration: Were I or any of us to live a thousand years, we could not forget the thousands of miraculous escapes for our lives we had encountered. I, the author of these memoranda, have reached my eightieth year minus one month. BARON VON REINAGLE, R.A., 1853 From The Spectator. SIR GEORGE JESSEL. SIR GEORGE JESSEL, Master of the Rolls, and head of the Court of Appeal, died early on Wednesday morning, March 21, after a dangerous illness of some weeks, during only the last two days of which did he consent to remit any of his usual work. Sir George was by common consent the ablest judge on the bench, and the ablest probably in the annals of English history, if, at least, the rapid despatch of business be taken into account, as well as the soundness of the judgments and the breadth of the legal principles embodied in them. Less brilliant than many other judges of his time in mere form, he far surpassed most, if not all, of them in the rapidity and efficiency of his judicial work. As a barrister, he had few equals, and we have heard, on what we believe to be good authority, that during the last twelve months of his solicitorgeneralship, a year of strain which no doubt permanently affected his constitution, his fees amounted to the enormous total of £23,000. Moreover, Sir George Jessel's work was never superficially done, and during the latter years of his judicial work he undertook the duties of vicechancellor of his own university, the University of London, which he discharged with extraordinary fidelity and ability. He died at the age of fifty-nine. The late judge was absolutely faithful to his hereditary Jewish creed, and was buried yesterday in the Jewish cemetery at Willesden, among his own people. One of the greatest administrative forces in England has disappeared with Sir George Jessel. A more extraordinary intellectual engine than his brain has not been seen at work in our generation. Great as he was as a pure lawyer, he was still greater in the despatch of business; for the speed, and the marvellous accuracy on the whole with which he worked at so great a speed, were certainly neither rivalled nor approached by any contemporary of his own. People called him a very strong man, and so he was, but in his own line his swiftness was more marvellous than his strength, and, indeed, sometimes misled him, though it would hardly be just to say that the State would speed, for his mistakes were rare and have gained by any subtraction from that trivial in proportion to the efficiency of the industry which his great velocity of thought enabled him to achieve. He was what Carlyle would have called “a great 4444 imperious, if it rides rough-shod over weaker and slower intellects, and to this extent Sir George Jessel was imperious. But it was, strictly speaking, the imperiousness of high faculty measuring itself against what usually proved to be weaker faculty, not the imperiousness of prestige, audacity, or caprice. Indeed, of caprice there was not a trace in the master of the rolls, and of the sense of his own prestige, and of audacity, only so much as must accompany more or less the consciousness of singularly high powers. Of course, these powers were limited in number, though they were, speaking com. paratively, almost unlimited in degree. Sir George Jessel had not, like the great Jewish contemporary who achieved a still higher fame in politics, any unique insight into other men. He was not skilful in the use of social weapons. He had no great stores of banter or wit at his command. His speeches in Parliament were not of the first order, even for the speeches of a solicitor-general. He was not as persuasive as Sir Henry James, nor anything captain of industry," only the industry in issues as Sir Farrer Herschell. Marvellous as his powers were, they were probably never shown to less advantage than during his short Parliamentary career. For in the forms of things he was not a master. He was deficient in tact, in the art of literary and popular exposition; and appeals to feelings he either despised or could not understand. Even as a lawyer, he had not that command of caustic and ironic dialectic which gave to some of his earlier contemporaries, like Lord Westbury and Vice-Chancellor Knight Bruce, so unique a fame. Sir George Jessel's intellect went straight to the sub wasted time with the apparel in which they were dressed up. He was a Titan in his way, but part of his force consisted in his inability to deal with the mere superficial forms of argument, and the necessity he felt himself under of going straight to the true issue. That is why we ventured to call him a captain of industry; for he always sought to economize industry to the utmost, and probably it would be difficult to find any two of his contemporaries, however eminent, who, taken together, got through so much sound work in the same time as he did, without ever knowing apparently what overwork meant. His appetite for work was something vast. Nothing pleased him better, when he came to the end of one heavy task, than at once to undertake From The Spectator. another which he might easily have de- achievements, so strong, and yet so ac- SOCIALISM AND ANARCHISM AT GENEVA. THOUGH among the thirty thousand foreigners who have chosen Geneva as their temporary dwelling-place there is a considerable proportion of Russian Nihilists, French Anarchists, and German Social Democrats, the authorities are never in fear of dynamite, and the slender police force keeps order without difficulty. This arises from the fact that, except for religious enthusiasts, the Genevan gov ernment is one of the most tolerant in Europe. Revolutionary refugees enjoy privileges there which they can command nowhere else on the Continent, and they are careful not to risk expulsion by proceedings of a nature to imperil the public peace or embroil the Confederation with foreign powers. Sometimes, as in the case of Prince Krapotkine (who was expelled for publishing, under his signature, a too violent protestation against the execution of Sophia Petrowska, and parading the town at the head of an Anarchist procession), they overstep the line which divides liberty from license; but as a rule, they take their measures so well, that the police have rarely to interfere. For inSir George Jessel was a curiously ac- stance, if the Révolte, which preaches the complished man, at college both a first- gospel of dynamite and the duty of murrate mathematician and a good classic, der with a ferocity that is positively that he was a considerable Hebrew scholar appalling, were openly conducted by forwas, perhaps, not remarkable, considering eigners, they would certainly be expelled his race and faith, otherwise also a good and the paper suppressed, a fate that a linguist, and at one time he had a good few years ago befell the Anarchist Avant and scientific knowledge of botany, as Garde, of Chaux de Fonds; but the nomwell, we believe, as of others of the classi-inal editor and publisher being Swiss, ficatory sciences. Indeed, part of his grasp of law was due not only to the immense keenness and swiftness of his general intellect, but to his marked capacity for sound classification. His ability was, however, all in the region of what is called positive knowledge. He had little taste and little special capacity for philosophy or literature, though he was so strong a man that there was no subject on which he had informed himself at all on which his judgment was without value. However, it was for his swift and accurate discharge of the highest judicial work that he will be best and most justly remembered. In our time, there has been no administrative engine so marvellous in its they cannot be touched, albeit, as is wellknown, the contributors are Russian refugees and French Socialists. The avowed Anarchists at Geneva are probably under a hundred. Even on so important an occasion as the recent manifestation in memory of the Paris Commune, they could not muster more than one hundred and fifty, of whom at least one-half were outsiders. Social Democrats who seek to reorganize society rather by a revolution of the State than its utter destruction are more numerous, and include in their ranks a score or two of Genevan artisans and a few workmen from German Switzerland. On Sun. day last they, too, celebrated by a meeting the anniversary of the Commune. The | It is the conception of this truth that meeting was held in the Tonhalle, the as- has constrained men like Krapotkine and sembly-room of a café brassier, and ex- Reclus to the adoption of Anarchism; and cept that the chairman was armed with a between Anarchists, and State Socialists bell, which he frequently used, and the there reigns a feud as bitter as ever audience smoked hugely and consumed reigned between orthodox Mahomme. much beer, the proceedings did not differ dans and their Shiite brethren. At Gematerially from those of an English meet- neva, they could not so far sink their ing. Touching oratorical effect, how differences as to celebrate in common the ever, the speeches were decidedly superior anniversary of the "epoch-making" Comto the speeches generally delivered at mune. political gatherings in England. Dul- The words faim, misère, prolétaire, ness the audience would by no means were often in the mouths of the speakers tolerate. If an orator became a little at this meeting, yet it was abundantly tedious, he was warned by cries of "A evident that none of them was either Peau!" and "Plus haut!" either to poor or hungry, and it may be doubted if speak better and louder, or sit down. The they had any right whatever to represent former of these expressions did not, as the prolétariat whose cause they profess may be supposed, signify that he was in to plead. Workmen some of them may danger of being thrown into the lake, but have been, at any rate they said so; but that recourse to the decanter of water that almost all were of the well-fed sort, stood before him might, perchance, en- dressed in broadcloth, and in no respect liven his waning eloquence. On the save by their red badges distinguishable other hand, the speeches were marked by from the bourgeoisie whom they are an entire absence of argument. The style never tired of reviling. Shortly before of these was that of Rollo's address to the termination of the proceedings, a the Peruvians, dear to our childhood, remarkable incident occurred. While an and of Bruce's address to his soldiers be- impassioned and elegantly attired Socialfore the Battle of Bannockburn. They ist was denouncing traders and employers abounded in such phrases as "Down with in the accepted fashion, a sturdy, brownthe aristocrats!" "Crush the bour-faced fellow, one of the very few genugeoisie!" "Restore to the disinherited the fruits of their labor;" and wealth and tyranny, poverty and virtue, were treated as convertible terms. The government of Switzerland received no better measure than that of neighboring monarchies. One speaker, who described himself as a Swiss workman, adduced as proof of the inefficiency of the present republican institutions that in Geneva-relatively to its size one of the richest of European cities there are people who lack bread, and that multitudes of Swiss citizens are every year compelled to seek abroad the work they cannot find at home. The panacea for these evils is, of course, the establishment of the social republic; in other words, of Socialism organized by the State. How this is to improve matters, or how any conceivable scheme can protect men from the consequences of their own folly, idleness, and improvidence, nobody condescended to explain. The new republic, moreover, as described by some of its advocates, would, if it could be established, be one of the most grinding tyrannies the world has ever seen. ine, hard-fisted sons of toil in the room, asked the speaker to "show his hands." This demand was warmly supported and as warmly opposed, whereupon a disturbance ensued, and the manifestation ended in a free fight and a general ske. daddle. This incident goes to prove, what those who have studied the question already know, that the prolétariat has not yet become Socialist, and that real poverty is least among the causes of Socialism. Its causes are rather to be sought in the spread of knowledge, and the decay of faith. Education is sharpening men's faculties, giving them new desires, making them more apprehensive as to the future and more envious of the rich, at the very time that the increase of scepticism, by depriving them of the hope of immortality and destroying the idea of duty, renders them more resolute to enjoy the present. There are observers who think that the Communistic movement is only in its infancy, and in this opinion the present writer is reluctantly constrained to concur. |