Significant Books on Politics and Economics

A REVIEW of what purports to be the year’s output of significant books in English on politics and economics may well begin with some definition of the degree of significance which entitles a book to stand in this category. For our purposes a book may take rank in this class for either of two reasons. It may be significant in itself, by reason of its theme, or because it stands as a type of widespread social sentiment. Books of the latter class may be essentially unsound and in the long run ephemeral. But what may prove ephemeral in the course of a generation is often of sufficient moment in its day to warrant careful scrutiny and criticism.

This double warrant for including in our survey books that will live and books that will perish may at the same time exclude some works of sterling merit, if they traverse only a narrow defile of scientific territory. For the specialist, books of this latter class may well prove most interesting, and even most momentous. The purpose of this review, however, is to mediate to the general reader the leading ideas that motive works which cover the broader and more obvious tracts of social life. In the general domain of political philosophy and history we detect the note of significance first in a little volume which, while technically a study of a great charter of liberty, sounds faintly the possible revival of a type of political philosophy over which the evolutionary political science of to-day has too frequently been read as a burial service. Thence we shall glance at a group of four representative studies of political problems from the respective standpoints of national psychology, descriptive analysis, practical administration, and international law. These, with a brace of volumes on city government, its needs, and its reform, will comprise our significant works on politics. In the field of economics and sociology four general groups of studies seem to cover the field fairly. The first group deals with social pathology, — the never-failing problem of the social debtor ; how he is to be treated, and how the swamp of poverty, crime, pauperism, and social failure is to be drained or its noxious influence abated. No books dealing with present industrial conditions can be more truly significant than those which deal, not with the wealth of nations, but with the poverty of individuals. The second group has to do with industrial organization, the trust, and its menaces, real or imaginary. Third comes a vaticinal group of social prophets, minor and major, hopeful and despondent, some with pseudo - evangels, and others in the rôle of cynical Cassandras, though curiously enough our figure of speech just transposes the sexes of these latter-day prophets. Fourth and last, come two systematic works on political economy, one a classic dating from the eighteenth century, but in a new dress, the other brand-new from the anvil of current economic speculation.

At the risk of being voted a hopeless Bourbon at the outset, I venture to call attention first of all to a most unpretentious little book on the Declaration of Independence.¹ A very good way to effect a revival of true patriotism in this day and age, is to study the history and the philosophy of what Dr. Friedenwald calls “the least comprehended of all the great documents produced as a result of our political development.” It is certainly a singular thing that while innumerable tomes have been devoted by hundreds of learned pundits to the Constitution, its great predecessor is still

The first is invoked daily, the second is read only on its birthday. The Constitution follows the flag; the Declaration follows the fire-cracker.

The parliamentary history of this great pronunciamento is a most interesting story. The necessity for substantial unanimity was foreseen long before its adoption. Most curious of all, this substantial unanimity was attained only by a political revolution in each of the colonies where the aristocratic or oligarchic element had control of the legislature. Owing to legislative instructions against coming out with a declaration of independence, many of the delegates to Congress could not originally vote for the adoption of such a measure. “The contest for independence in the later stages,that is, just before July 4, 1776, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and to almost an equal extent in New York, Delaware, and Maryland, became virtually not less one between the people and the aristocrats for control, than one between the United Colonies and Great Britain.” Some may perhaps learn with surprised regret that “the mythical legend of the blue-eyed boy waiting outside the door" of the hall of Congress to carry to his aged grandsire, the sexton bell-ringer, the news of independence, originated in the “fertile imagination of . . . George Lippard,” and first appeared in that gentleman’s Legends of the Revolution. Baseless also is the tradition that connects the ringing of the so-called Liberty Bell with the events of the first glorious Fourth.

But while Dr. Friedenwald will not countenance any of the fungoid sentimentality that has grown like a parasite about the story of the Declaration, he strikes out manfully in defense of the immortal document itself, both as a literary production and as a deposit of political wisdom and experience. He is as hard on the “uncritical awe ” of its early worshipers as on the “cultivated distrust” which leads Mr. Barrett Wendell, in his Literary History of America, to echo Rufus Choate’s verdict that the Declaration is composed “of glittering and sounding generalities of natural right.” Professor Tyler’s more favorable verdict on the purely literary merit of the Declaration as evinced by its surviving endless iteration in public is found much truer to the facts. “Nothing which has not supreme literary merit has ever triumphantly endured such an ordeal.” Choate and Mr. Wendell, it is pointed out, apparently overlooked the concrete character of the detailed historical” Facts Submitted to a Candid World,” to whose discussion two chapters in this volume are devoted.

A review is a poor place to break a lance for a discarded theory of politics, but my own conviction that the philosophy of natural rights has been unduly discredited, aud that it is still bound to have its innings, and in some measure its substantial justification, leads me to cite the following paragraph of this very suggestive study: “Nor can the evolutionary theory of the origin of government and society, now generally accepted in some form by teachers of political science, be made the basis for any such popular uprisings as have been the outcome of the older philosophy. The latter is instinct with life, and can therefore readily be made to appeal to the emotions of men, through which alone great movements are achieved. The organic philosophy appeals only to man’s reason, and as yet only to that of the higher thinkers. Upon such a foundation no great social or political movement ever was nor ever yet can be builded. Future generations will have recourse, in their uprisings, to the old guide, or else will seek a new, as yet not in evidence. ”

At the farthest possible remove from the philosophy of natural rights which is mirrored in the foregoing study of the Declaration is Émile Boutmy’s analysis of the motive force of British politics.² M. Boutmy belongs to the Bagehot rather than the Bryce type of political writers. Averse to a detailed analysis of all the parts of a political organism, he is intent on flashing upon a whole system a new light, in which its salient features will stand out in sharp relief. He finds, or thinks that he finds, the dominant trait of English character in its passion for activity, in the persistent disquiet in the nerves and muscles of that aggressive race. This accounts, in his judgment, for the characteristic features of the varied activities of the English. To this he ascribes the low flight of their philosophy, which has no real liking for the thin, cold air of metaphysics; to this is due their defiance of the classical unities in their literature, and to this is credited their indifference to a unifying conception of science, so long as they have a half-dozen working hypotheses which organize respectively the phenomena of as many particular fields. To this may also be traced, so M. Boutmy contends, their self-government, which renders a bureaucracy in many spheres unnecessary because the surplus of race energy creates a volunteer magistracy. The life of action, if it has not atrophied their capacity for abstraction and logical generalization, has stunted its exercise. Their political psychology in its lowest terms is thus reduced to an aversion to abstractions. This in turn is attributed mainly to the climatic environment which makes mental reaction slow and its imaginative products scanty and mean. The book is what one would expect of a writer of M. Boutmy’s race and temperament. It is piquant, varied, plausible in spots, interesting all over, — and fatally unconvincing. The solution is too neat to be true. “I disbelieve because it is simple.” If climate and natural environment are mainly accountable for the political traits of the English, why did not the early Britons develop something of those traits; or why do not the English in the tropics unto the third and fourth generation show some marked variation from the type ? The English dress which the work bears is fair on the whole, but the translator’s unsure foothold in the region of idiom occasionally reminds one of its Gallic origin.

A rather novel method of portraying political phenomena — differing alike from the impressionist school of Boutmy and the detailed descriptive analysis of Bryce or Ostrogorski — is represented by Professor Macy in his study of party organization in this country.³ It might be called the Method of Representative Types and consists in the recognition of persistent varieties of political machinery in our different states. It thus supplies a needful corrective to the notion that one is so likely to read into current delineations of our political machines, that they are all exactly alike in structure and working. That a close family resemblance is commonly to be detected is true, but it is equally true that the Machine in Pennsylvania is quite a different mechanism from the Machine even of the same party in Massachusetts. In the South, on the other hand, since the downfall of the régime of government by bayonets, the political organization of the dominant party has, in Professor Macy’s words, “resembled rather the Irish Home Rule League than a political party.”

So much evil is commonly laid at the doors of our political parties that they are certainly entitled in equity to the defense offered by Professor Macy in their behalf. In some degree it is probably true, as he asserts, that they have served as a vehicle for voicing national aspirations and for promoting national political education. Thus by making the choice of the President practically a popular election, they have knocked out many political bulkheads which the framers of the Constitution imagined would serve as permanent water-tight political compartments. When at the door of the Machine so many evils are laid, it is well to remember that it has at least allowed us to navigate the Ship of State en famille.

Quite distinct from the study of national political psychology and from the analysis of party organization is Mr. Cleveland’s volume⁴ upon the four most prominent public questions connected with his two administrations. These were the Chicago strike of 1894, the bond issues, the Venezuelan boundary controversy, and the struggle with the Senate in his first term over the President’s right to suspend officials from office without interference by the Senate or accountability to that body. Delivered originally, with a single exception, as university addresses, these four papers form a legacy of political wisdom with which the student of our latter-day political history must reckon. The position assumed by Mr. Cleveland in three of these problems has been substantially vindicated by the subsequent trend of events. Thus, after the sharp conflict with the Senate, the repeal of the Tenure of Office Act was confession and judgment in one, that the President had succeeded in maintaining his constitutional prerogatives. So, too, the outcome of the administration’s policy in the Chicago strike and in the sale of bonds for the maintenance of the Gold Reserve is by this time manifest to all men — except the incorrigibles. But the explosive approval that followed the Venezuelan Message liberated not only a wide-sweeping breath of patriotic fervor, but also the bloody vaporings of the miles gloriosus, and thus induced a condition charged with danger which continued a menace until it was fired into a blaze in 1898.

In varying measure these papers manifest a well - grounded irritation at the Senate’s constant tendency to legislative aggrandizement on executive authority. Lapse of time has made for leniency in many of Mr. Cleveland’s judgments, more particularly in his verdict upon Governor Altgeld’s aberrations in 1894; but age apparently cannot stale nor time wither the ex-President’s animosity toward the Senate. In this he is certainly in line with many of his countrymen. It would be hard to find in this country a community so phlegmatic as not readily to respond with emphatic and noisy appreciation to the laudation of the great office of our Chief Executive and of most of its incumbents. But nobody, I suppose, ever heard a cheer given for the Senate as a body. There may be good senators, but there has not been within our recollection a good senate. With most of us it has a bad name. State legislatures gird at its indirect method of election. The press fumes about its secret sessions; public opinion chafes at its overweening presumption that masks under the exasperating title of the Courtesy of the Senate; and if an individual hitherto unknown is brought into prominence in connection with a senatorial vacancy, we are disposed at once, as was Charles Lamb in the case of the old lady’s favorite preacher, to “damn him at a venture.” Its exclusiveness, its arbitrariness, annoy, irritate, and exasperate us. We feel, with the distinguished author, that its corporate hostility is something to be “contemplated with all possible fortitude.” We chuckle when that august body is officially informed that offices created by Act of Congress are “unembarrassed by any obligation to the Senate as the price of their creation. ” When the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary reminds his brethren of the toga that a presidential refusal to transmit private papers for their scrutiny vividly reminds him of the communications of King Charles I to Parliament, it is delicious to learn of the President’s feeling of assurance that the Senate of the United States was not “a bloodthirsty body, and that the chairman of its Committee on the Judiciary was one of the most courteous and amiable of men — at least when outside of the Senate. ” Even when our attention is directed to the fact that the final outcome of the Venezuelan matter was a treaty made directly between Great Britain and Venezuela — “a fortunate circumstance, inasmuch as the work accomplished was thus saved from the risk of customary disfigurement at the hands of the United States Senate,” we feel that the thrust is well deserved, so accurately does it describe the recent holding-up of the reciprocity and arbitration treaties by that arrogant legislative corporation.

The Venezuelan controversy and the related question of our entire foreign policy afford a ready transition to the discussion of Mr. Edgington’s volume ⁵ on the Monroe Doctrine. It would be a great gain to clear thinking if somebody — perhaps the Century Dictionary — would give us a clear-cut definition of the Monroe Doctrine, which thereafter must be observed ubique, semper, ab omnibus. Mr. Cleveland apparently considers the Monroe Doctrine synonymous with “the American doctrine which denies to European powers the colonization of any part of the American Continent.” He implies also that it would be forfeited by “ taking our lot with nations that expand by following un-American ways.” The learned author of this work on the Doctrine, after an exposition of over a hundred pages, contends that “the colonization feature of the Monroe message is not in harmony with the Acts of Congress, the decisions of the Supreme Court, and the practice of the Government in its foreign relations. ” Mr. Edgington tells us that “there can be no doubt but that the American people of all parties are in favor of the Monroe Doctrine or a general foreign policy which has taken that name” ! Apparently “the general foreign policy which has taken that name,” in Mr. Edgington’s apprehension, connects itself with our essaying the rôle of receiver general for the defaulting states of South and Central America, and devising “means for preventing revolutions, internecine strifes and wars ” amongst them by “federating” the soidisant republics of that continent into a few great states, where the suffrage shall be placed in the hands of the property owners. At all events, he is sure that we cannot, tolerate the laws of those countries which require foreigners there resident to waive their right of appeal to their own governments in case of injustice done them by the aforesaid Latin republics. Whatever one may think of these conclusions, it is certain, if we may judge by the unconstitutional rôle which the Administration recently attempted in San Domingo, that Mr. Edgington’s opinion has obtained official approval in high quarters.

In rounding out this survey of significant works on politics it would be improper to omit all mention of the year’s contributions in aid of what Bryce calls “our one conspicuous failure,” namely, the government of cities. Two volumes ⁶ upon this theme present themselves for comparison, and claim careful notice, not so much on account of the intrinsic novelty of their contents, as because they typify two representative but radically opposed diagnoses of civic remedies. Professor Goodnow in his previous studies had contrasted the two distinct functions of the city. In this volume he again pits the city as the local agent of the state government over against the city as the minister to the peculiar needs of the urban community. The actual control which the state has commonly exerted over the city has largely been a legislative control engineered by the political Machine of the dominant party for partisan ends. Municipalities have thus largely lost their autonomy, and their efficiency as servants of urban needs has been fatally impaired. Failure to recognize this fundamental difficulty has led to a long but fruitless search for some kind of machinery for cities which will make for decent government. The various devices that have been tried Professor Goodnow recounts. First the city council was despoiled of its administrative powers, and irremovable administrative boards were created in its stead. The boards, in turn, have been largely replaced by single-headed departments with a commissioner at their head. The commissioners, again, have been made the viceroys of the mayor, and in more than one instance the tendency has manifested itself to find the solution of the vexed problem in a mayor-dictator. The chase thus far has disappointed the reforming pursuers: and Professor Goodnow’s tone is that of the baffled but intelligent hunter who refuses, somewhat mechanically, to despair of the brush, but who has a very keen appreciation of the windings of the long run, and of the futility of using the various brands of patent anise-seed, such as the Referendum, which hopeful rustics are sure will run Reynard to his hole. City life is “ on the whole, not favorable to the development of good government,” and Professor Goodnow has “grave doubts as to the efficacy of any mere change in the legal relation and position of our cities. ” He concludes, in a somewhat resigned tone, that “there is something the matter with city government in the United States which strikes deeper than mere governmental machinery. ”

Doctor Wilcox’s civic forecast, in contrast to Professor Goodnow’s, is very hopeful, and his programme very extensive. Doctor Wilcox thinks that “for people generally salvation depends upon an improved environment.” Consequently he espouses a wide-open system of municipal socialism, and welcomes types innumerable of civic machines for perpetual motion.

Of all drawbacks to political reform there is none to compare with the halfbaked reformer. To the intelligent worker for progress he is a scourge, and to the godless spoilsman he is a blessing, a very present help in time of trouble. This type of crude enthusiast always has some cheap-John device to “transmute leaden instincts into golden conduct,” some quack remedy that cures all the ills that mortal flesh is heir to, some claptrap notion that is to precipitate the millennium to-morrow. His crotchets repel the hardheaded voter, and confirm the cynic in the belief that evil is a surd in the sum of things that defies elimination. To-day it is the Referendum, or the Initiative. Tomorrow it is what is termed the “Recall,” — an ingenious device whereby, on the petition of a certain number of electors, any public officer, on penalty of forfeiting his office, must immediately stand for reëlection. I have no doubt that Ostracism in Athens was lauded to the skies by this class of nostrum fakirs, and that they sincerely believed that, the perpetual oyster shell was the price of liberty. To this class, in my judgment, Doctor Wilcox unmistakably belongs. The significance of his book lies not in its applicability to municipal problems, but in its indication of one of the greatest practical obstacles to a realization of a better day.

At the forefront of significant works on our industrial life come four volumes on social pathology. Dr. Roberts’s book ⁷ affords the best introduction to the group, although, as its sub-title indicates, it is really a study of all phases of the social life of an important industrial group, and not of its pathological side only. At the same time, inasmuch as the workers in the anthracite fields are largely Sclavs, and typify the dominant modern immigrant class, as well as illustrate many, perhaps most, of the acute phases of social distress found everywhere in this country, it is not unfair to make this work the vestibule to the study of social pathology. It is a volume intensely vital, charged to the brim with reality. It bespeaks the knowledge of the eye - witness. The ever bubbling spring of eternal joyousness even in the hovel and in the midst of need is not overlooked. Unlike many who make a knowledge of the seamy side of life their foible, the author’s direct, first-hand, manysided knowledge of manifold facts is aërated, liberalized, and organized by a sound knowledge of the fundamental facts of social existence. Dr. Roberts does not minimize the necessity of a rising standard of life, but he remembers, what the charity expert too often forgets, that “to attempt to fix the laborer’s income by a standard of living, regardless of his productive power, is to attempt the impossible. ” To the indiscriminating gabble about “race suicide” his bracing conclusion is most refreshing, that — “If the social status of the working classes is to be permanently improved, restriction of natality must have a larger part in their creed.” The cheap philosophy now current about immigration also receives some knock-out blows at his hand. He demonstrates that “the English-speaking section of our (that is, the anthracite) population is being forced up by the Sclavs.” He stoutly combats the notion that in the absence of immigration the labor necessary for the development of our industries would have been supplied by the natural increase of the original stock. “The consensus of opinion among superintendents and foremen in the anthracite coal industry is that the mines could never be operated if they depended upon the native born for the labor supply.” Dr. Roberts’s volume is generously illustrated, and the judicious selection of scenes reënforces the text. In everything, save only the proofreading, particularly where citations from other languages than English are made, the book deserves unstinted praise.

With Mr. Hunter’s book on Poverty⁸ we come to the more delimited study of sosocial mal-adjustments. To Mr. Hunter poverty means the anxious state of those who may get a bare sustenance, but “are not able to obtain those necessaries which will permit them to maintain a state of physical efficiency.” Poverty as thus defined is distinct from pauperism. Pauperism implies no mental agony, for there the struggle has been given up and resignation has produced a relatively comfortable state of despair which accepts any chance mitigation of its lot as so much to the good. There is a certain literary quality to Mr. Hunter’s book which will insure it a wide vogue. Those who feel vaguely that industrial society is in a bad way will find that this volume strengthens their impressions. Those who like to do their “slumming” by proxy will find in Mr. Hunter an admirable guide. The inferno of the tenements, the misery of the poor and sick, the perplexity of the alien, and the sorrows of the children harnessed to the wheel of toil, are all set forth vividly, and with a certain kind of pathos.

But with all this granted, Mr. Hunter’s book is not one that commands our confidence. His eloquent misgivings as to the extent of poverty in this country — he is sure that there are ten millions, and thinks there may be as many as fifteen or twenty millions in poverty as defined above —are based on unsubstantial statistical sallies. When he essays to formulate and apply the well-known laws of population, or to elaborate the economic effects of immigration, he flounders so egregiously that our distrust of the solidity of his judgment is more than confirmed. Worse than all else, for those who value crystal-clear sincerity of thought and utterance, is the recurrence of the more than occasional note of pseudo-pathos and literary falsetto. Self-revelation by carefully motived indirection, and melodramatically repressed heart-break, suggest something dangerously near the poseur.

Dr. Devine’s volume ⁹ is the most practical one of the trio specifically devoted to remedying the ills of society. Its object is to inform those desirous of practicing helpful charity, and to equip them for their concrete task. The position which the author holds — he is the General Secretary of the Charity Organization Society of New York city — has furnished him with a large fund of experience, which is clearly and systematically put at the reader’s disposal. Part I comprises the general principles on which scientific charity is based, and is most admirably done. There is a finality and rigor about it which betray the practical administrator. And while one may dissent from some of the obiter dicta, such as the approval of public school instruction as to the physical effects of alcohol, or the rather slighting tone in which relief systems under church control are characterized, the general programme laid down and the detailed circumstances in which it is worked out command instant respect and ungrudging approval. In Part II almost one hundred pages are devoted to actual cases of typical relief problems. The “case method” is evidently applicable to other sciences than law. The last two parts are given, one to a historical survey of the practice of charity, public and private; and the other to the affording of relief in disasters such as the Chicago and Baltimore fires, or the Slocum disaster. No one who is interested either historically or practically in the subject of charity can afford to neglect this volume.

It is but passing from the individual to the universal to turn from Dr. Devine’s treatise to Professor Henderson’s encyclopædic compend¹⁰ on the same subject. This substantial volume of over seven hundred pages is a comprehensive account, arranged primarily on a geographical basis, of the organization of charity in the most important nations of the modern world. In this work Professor Henderson has had the aid of a competent corps of collaborators.

I question whether any one will ever rise up from the task of reading this volume from cover to cover, without entertaining serious doubts of the psalmist’s dictum, — “Blessed is he that considereth the poor.” Nor would the doubt arise merely from the length of these combined articles, nor from any lack of excellence on the part of their learned authors. The really mournful things that oppress the spirit are the subject-matter itself, the social conditions out of which the ever clamant necessity for charitable assistance arises, the bungling diagnosis of the real needs of the poor, the abortive efforts at helping them, the frequent unwisdom of private benevolence, and the callous roughness of public relief. When one thinks of what charity might ideally be, the gladsome and willing extension of a helping hand to a necessitous fellow mortal, without constraint on the part of the giver or loss of self-respect on the part of the recipient, a mutual service where kindness and gratitude exactly counterbalance one another; and when one thinks of the hideous thing that actual charity so frequently is, it is impossible not to be overwhelmed by the “eternal note of sadness” which suggests

The widest generalization of a practical character to be drawn from this bulky volume is the well-proved necessity in our public charities for the legally recognized right of visitation on the part of the unofficial benevolent public. The legal power of direction and control over such institutions vests properly in an official board or commissioner. But without the intelligent and sympathetic inspection of unpaid but benevolently inclined private persons, abuses in management are all but certain to arise. There will never be found an automatic administrative substitute for enlightened personal interest and activity in the work of public benevolence. Without such unofficial coöperation, institutional charity becomes what the cynic has termed “the sterilized milk of human kindness.”

The four volumes just passed in review jointly suggest certain wider reflections upon the whole subject of the ills of society. The perennial crop of social tares, such as pauperism, vice, and miscellaneous disability, indicates that such diseases can no longer be regarded as sporadic, but proves them to be universal. There is something rotten, not only in the state of Denmark; but there is everywhere a perennial growth of diseased tissue in the body politic. The old order, it is true, has all but ceased when

The mediæval doctrine that “the poor are with you always and whensoever ye will ye may do them harm” — by indiscriminate doles of money or goods — has no longer any standing with the scientific charity worker. It is now recognized that charity of that description “never faileth ” — to fail. On the other hand, our public and scientific measures of relief and reformation seem powerless to reach the root of the evil.

The truth of the matter is this, that the attitude of modern governments and peoples toward this whole matter of social distress is in the highest degree anomalous. To reduce the area of such distress to a permanent minimum requires, first, the refraining from the relief that only pauperizes, and second, the aggressive sterilization of the classes which breed the evil. There is no doubt that the matrix of social distress is the almost unlimited freedom of the socially defective classes to multiply their numbers. A stringent policy of extensive institutional detention with the segregation of the sexes would alone extirpate the germs of the evil. The trouble is that society has not, and I much doubt if it ever will have, the nerve to enforce any such policy. In this matter of perpetual social misery we are too intelligent and too sympathetic to be easy in mind, and not courageous enough to be free. So we potter along with a sop here and a dole there; and the millions that are expended, while they doubtless relieve a vast amount of present misery, are almost like water poured into a rat-hole, so far as permanent betterment is concerned.

The social prophet, like the poor, is with us always, and possibly the most striking Jeremiad of the year comes in the guise of an estimate of our industrial system. The Theory of Business Enterprise,¹¹ by Professor Veblen, is a singular instance of how economic philosophy is sometimes infected by tendencies rife in widely separated fields of thought. Through the transparent veil of this sociological essay one gets many a glimpse of the cosmic irony of Ibsen and the nihilistic doctrine of Nietzsche. A very readable quality is thus imparted to the speculation by the author, but at the cost of a most unenviable frame of mind. Professor Veblen has a preternaturally vivid insight into the pathological side of business and society; and he follows remorselessly the poisoned tract which his critical scalpel has discovered. But his exploratory incision suggests nothing for “the healing of the nations,” and from his lips there falls only the thinly disguised irony which mocks the misery of them that perish. The morbid element in economic life has for him so great a fascination that it blinds him to the normal and healthful aspects of industry, and the business world in his apprehension becomes but a congeries of “embossed sores and headed evils.”

And yet, despite the fact that the author’s attitude renders the highest approval from either the scientific or the ethical standpoint impossible, the book is an uncommonly suggestive one. The penetrating glance into certain broad and seamy aspects of our industrial life prompts to a reflective testing of one’s social beliefs and ideals.

The heart of the book centres in the analysis of modern business enterprise. The author contends that it is no longer the making of a livelihood, but the accumulation of profits, which motives the direction of modern enterprise. Industry is carried on for “business,” not “business ” for industry. Pecuniary gain is, on the whole, frequently associated with industrial disturbance, not with industrial welfare. The old-fashioned Captain of Industry has therefore become a wrecker of trade. The business man of to-day directs his attention, not to the surveillance of processes, but to the “alert redistribution of investments.” Only rarely does the entrepreneur cumber himself with “ the coördinating of industrial processes with a view to economics (sic) of production and heightened serviceability.” The loan market is a sphere of pecuniary legerdemain,for “funds of whatever character are a pecuniary fact, not an industrial one;” nor do they “increase the aggregate industrial equipment.” The remuneration of business services bears “ no determinable relation to the services which the work in question may render the community,” but represents only “parasitic income.” Hence the “traffic in vendible capital (that is, securities) is the pivotal and dominant factor in the modern situation of business and industry.” Business depression is to-day primarily “a malady of the affections” of the business man, not a dearth in the output of consumable goods “except as measured in price.” “The persistent defection” in hoped-for profits must become a “chronic depression . . . under the fully developed régime of machine industry.” For this “persistent defection” of profits there are but two remedies: “an increase in unproductive consumption ,” or a curtailed output. “ Wasteful expenditure” on war and armaments by governments in their “policy of emulative exhaustion” may help; but, “barring providential intervention (sic) the only refuge from chronic depression is thorough-going coalition” of industry (that is, trusts). But even this in the course of the Great Year is unavailing, for the “cultural incidence of the machine process” has eradicated from the wageearning class all reverence for “natural rights ” and all belief in the philosophy of private property, in both of which modern capitalism is rooted. This cultural growth of the machine-tender is necessarily “of a skeptical, matter-of-fact complexion, materialistic, immoral, unpatriotic, undevout. ” While “ business discipline ” therefore tends to conserve “the bourgeois virtues of solvency, thrift, and dissimulation,” and tends to maintain among wage-earners the useful sense of “status or fealty involved in the concept of sin,” it stands to lose at the last, although for a time, by playing on “the happy knack of clannish fancy,” called patriotism, it may prolong its dominion by using the military power of governments to open wider markets in lands now “ pecuniarily unregenerate.”

The sting of this indictment of the industrial world lies not in its novelty nor in its finality, but in its partial truth. The doctrine that the pursuit of business affords the frequent opportunity of undeserved gain, and that, among a society where mutual service is the rule, a clever scamp may live by his wits, is as old as Aristotle. Retail trade, it may be remembered, was condemned by that philosopher, as an unnatural art of money-making. Professor Veblen would exonerate the retailer, but fears for the social welfare when entrusted to the corporate directorate.

Professor Veblen’s wholesale cheapening of the operations of the workaday world, veiled though it be by frequent protestation of conformity to the conventional industrial creed, is bound after all to prove a boomerang. Its paradoxes may awake the reader from dogmatic slumbers, its epigrams may tickle his ears with their mordant cynicism, but neither his heart nor head will respond to its skepticism or its pessimism. “A conscientious person,” says Burke, “would rather doubt his own judgment, than condemn his species. . . . He will grow wise, not malignant, by his acquaintance with the world. But he that accuses all mankind of corruption, ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.”

If Professor Veblen has erred by making “all the horizon dark,” Mrs. Gilman in her prophetic essay has erred by refusing wholly to confine herself to terra firma. In Mrs. Gilman’s Human Work¹² every page is festooned with a meretricious brilliance which is apt to conceal the philosophical shallowness within. Whatever else we shall discover about human work, hard-won experience has settled somethings about it for good and all. The first is, that if we totally disregard all remuneration of labor, and look at labor per se, whatever zest and pleasure may attach to certain occupations, there is connected with labor, as a whole, an enormous net balance of pain, irksomeness, weariness, suffering, and misery. Ruskin, whose economic philosophy is frequently as eccentric as Mrs. Gilman’s, has at least not stumbled over the true nature of labor. “Labor,” says he, “is the contest of the life of man with an opposite. Literally, it is the quantity of ‘Lapse,’ loss, or failure of human life, caused by any effort . . . labor is the suffering in effort.” In brief, it is “ that quantity of our toil which we die in.” The second fact that economic experience has made plain is that to induce men to undertake even ordinary labor, the most effective stimulus is the prospect of bettering their individual condition from the standpoint of material welfare. It was one whose plummet had sounded depths more profound than the social shoals which Mrs. Gilman so coquettishly dredges who sagely remarked that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”In the face of these basal facts, to talk glibly as Mrs. Gilman does in this volume about human work becoming intrinsically so enticing that human beings will eventually rush into it with enthusiastic élan is downright folly. And to propound the further doctrine that the altruistic desire to better society is likely to prove a more powerful incentive to industry than self-interest has ever been is to write one’s self down a faddist and a dreamer.

With the discussion of trusts we enter upon the more narrowly bounded region of economics proper, and from out of the prodigious output of opinion on this problem two representative volumes deserve especial notice. The first is Mr. Montague’s Trusts of To-Day,¹³ and the other is Mr. Moody’s Truth about the Trusts.¹⁴

Mr. Montague’s volume arrays itself in the same class of works as those of Jenks, Meade, and Ely. Like them he has drawn his material largely from the evidence taken before the Industrial Commission. The arrangement of topics is his own, and the argument is rather less suggestive of abrupt transition than Jenks’s excellent disquisition on the same theme. The conclusions which Mr. Montague arrives at are not very dissimilar to those of Jenks. In his general attitude toward the trust Mr. Montague has, in our opinion, chosen “the better part.” What this attitude is may be inferred from the following citations. “Briefly stated, the trust problem resolves itself into this: If the trust deserves to live, the savings of combination must be found real and legitimate; the first class of evils, flowing from the mere fact of monopoly, must be proved either self-corrective or able to be corrected by statute; the second class of evils, resulting from the particular form assumed in the organization of existing combinations, must be shown to be self-corrective or capable of correction by statute.” “Politically, the interests of the consumer, of the competitor, of the investor, and of the State overshadow mere perfection in industrial efficiency; unless the present trusts can show that practical monopoly is shorn of its mediæval terrors, they must be destroyed like so many economic Frankensteins. ”

In the matter of capitalization Mr. Montague is less satisfactory. It is a superficial view of the matter to say that “the proper capitalization is that which so adjusts the amount of securities to the earnings as to make the stock sell for its par value.” When a corporation is first organized, the amount of its earnings is more or less problematical, not to say conjectural. After a corporation is organized, its earnings will vary from year to year. To make the amount of securities at the outset sell for par is no guarantee that future earnings on that capitalization, or in fact on any capitalization, will ever be realized. How to keep adjusting the amount of securities after organization so as to make them bring par when earnings fluctuate, is a problem to whose solution Mr. Montague contributes nothing.

Mr. Moody’s Truth about the Trusts has at least the merit of making public some convictions more often held than avowed. The author is the editor of the very useful Manual of Corporation Securities,—a repository of information as indispensable to the investor as Poor’s annual volume on Railroads to those interested in transportation. But a very extensive knowledge of corporation finance is no guarantee of enlightened views on public policy. Burke and Debrett are doubtless accurate sources of information as to the genealogy of the peerage, but I see no reason for thinking that their opinion would be decisive, or even very valuable, upon the question of reforming or abolishing the House of Lords. Even the gifted compiler of Who’s Who I should not accept as final authority upon the issue, “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven ? ” Mr. Moody frankly admits that his view of trusts is what may be called the Wall Street view, and he is certainly right in thinking that he offers the reader something in startling contrast to what he terms “the labored treatises of college professors.”There is no beating about the bush in such expressions as the following: “The saying that ‘ monopoly is the mother of trusts’ is therefore logically admitted to be true. But so also is it claimed than (sic) monopoly is the mother of our entire industrial civilization.” While “in the abstract,” it is conceded that monopoly “may work injustice and inequality in some ways between man and man, yet it is pointed out that the general benefits to the larger organism of society are generally so great that they must inevitably counterbalance the lesser temporary evils.” Mr. Moody’s philosophy is the same as that set forth in the Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus : —

The naïveté of Mr. Moody’s apologia may be inferred from his citing with approval the confidential dictum of the manager of one of our larger trusts. “This talk of the elimination of competition is all nonsense. Competition is keener than ever to-day, but it is of course carried on on a larger plane. Where formerly the small producer competed to reduce his costs and undersell his competitors by the ordinary means of great economy and superior efficiency, he has now gone beyond that point; he has passed the mean level where he can recklessly compete and survive, having found that he must look to other and better methods to obtain advantages over competitors. The advantages he now seeks are not so crude. They consist in going to the root of things, in acquiring and dominating the sources of supply and the raw material; in controlling shipping rights of way; in securing exclusive benefits, rebates on large shipments, beneficial legislation, etc.”

This is delicious. It sounds as though Dick Turpin were explaining that he had got beyond the vulgar delving that attended “ the constant service of the antique world,” and had found it much more profitable to enforce “ a thievish living on the common road.” It will not surprise the reader after perusing these “elegant extracts” to learn that Mr. Moody, in his haste to narrate the history of concrete trusts, can devote but three pages to reviewing “So-called Remedies,”or to find him predicting that the recently created Department of Commerce and Labor in its scope “will not go beyond that of a mere statistical bureau.” Mr. Moody’s crass provincialism, — for Wall Street can be as provincial as Botany Bay, — his colossal ignorance of past industrial history and current public opinion, have combined with his courageous utterance of his convictions to create one of the most powerful socialistic documents of our day.

While not exclusively a discussion of the trust problem, Mr. Edward Atkinson’s latest volume of statistical essays¹⁵ may best be docketed with the foregoing group. One of Mr. Atkinson’s four disquisitions is specifically entitled “The Tendency to Individualism rather than to Collectivism in the Manufacturing and all other Arts.” One accustomed to the usual terminology of social economics sits up and rubs his eyes when he finds Mr. Atkinson speaking of “the collective or factory (sic) system.” Such usage recalls Mr. Edwin Cannan’s remark on Ricardo’s definition of rent: “Like most people who have not had the advantage of a literary education, Ricardo was apt to think that a word ought to have whatever sense he found convenient to put upon it.” Be that as it may, the boundless — one is almost inclined to say, the hopeless — optimism of Mr. Atkinson reveals itself in such a typical conclusion as that, “In the end, the individual enterprises must be more effectively managed than the high (sic) combinations, and will, within a reasonable period, bring them to a cash basis or displace them wholly; ” or in this final bouleversement of all economic probability that “the power of consumption is limited, the power of production is unlimited. ”

Considered in his literary manifestations, I do not know of a more troublesome personality to classify than Mr. Atkinson. He suggests an incredible blend of Pythagoras, who found in abstract number the essence of truth, and of the energetic Sir John Sinclair, who danced one evening in a suit of broadcloth which the same morning had been growing in the shape of wool upon the back of the sheep. His ingenuity in the tabulation of statistics, and his still more ingenious deductions from his figures, suggest Artemus Ward’s definition of a crank, — one who can prove four times as much as any other man believes, and who believes four times as much as he can prove. In spite of it all, Mr. Atkinson so frequently figures as a public-spirited protagonist of worthy but unpopular causes, and displays at times such Yankee shrewdness in cornering a fact that the phlegmatic logician and economist had never suspected, that it is impossible not to feel for him a certain high regard. If Mr. Atkinson often makes the judicious grieve, and compels them to quote sadly to themselves non tali auxilio, his vivacious pen has certainly added much to the gaiety of nations, and as often increased the stock of harmless pleasures.

By right of age and dignity Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, in what promises to be its definitive form for many years to come, should be set at the head of recent significant publications on economics. The editor, Mr. Edwin Cannan, had an indefeasible title to give the Father of Political Economy an authoritative reintroduction to this generation. More than any other of the hundreds of critics and commentators of Adam Smith, Mr. Cannan has established beyond peradventure of a doubt the genesis and the filiation of the cardinal doctrines of the Wealth of Nations. Indeed, the shrewd surmise which Mr. Cannan originally ventured as to the origin of the various parts of that work, and the way this surmise obtained astoundingly close verification by the fortunate recovery of a student’s notes taken upon Smith’s earlier lectures, constitute one of the most remarkable episodes in recent literary history. Along with his demonstrated insight into the heart of this classic, Mr. Cannan brought other gifts of a rare order to his task, — tireless scholarship in ferreting out the ipsissima verba of the text, and withal an invigorating freshness of vision into the realities of industrial life, a doughty logic, and a dash of cynical humor. I know of no better way of describing Mr. Cannan to those unfortunates who know him not than by saying that he might easily have been the historic individual who, to the hackneyed argument, “a man must live,” replied, “I do not see the necessity.”

Mr. Cannan in his preface explains that he has printed the text of the last (fifth) edition issued in Smith’s lifetime, and has traced in the footnotes the textual variants from the earlier editions. He adds characteristically that he has retained the spelling of the fifth edition and has “steadily refused to attempt to make it consistent with itself.” How indefatigable has been his attempt to run down Smith’s sources may be gauged from his remark: “That many more references might be given by an editor gifted with omniscience, I know better than any one. To discover a reference has often taken hours of labor, to fail to discover one has often taken days.” Mr. Cannan’s experience as a college lecturer gave him one invaluable clue to the sources of Smith’s writings. This clue is what he has elsewhere called “academic atavism,” — the tendency of a young professor to fall back in time of need upon the notes he has taken at the feet of some elder Gamaliel.

The deadly parallel between the order of topics in Smith’s early lectures and in the lectures of Smith’s former teacher, Dr. Hutcheson, prompts the surmise that “when Smith had hurriedly to prepare his lectures ... he looked through his notes of his old master’s lectures (as hundreds of men in his position have done before and after him).” This, one may protest, is ingenuity pushed too far, —or, as Smith said of a butcher’s work, is “a brutal and an odious business.” Pray, Mr. Cannan,

It is hard to say just what is the proper tone in which to speak of a modern treatise on economics, however excellent, when it is thrust by circumstances into juxtaposition with such a classic as the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith’s great work has attained to what Dr. Johnson pronounced literary fame, — namely, outliving a century, — and this it is which makes one cautious and circumspect in heralding prematurely the excellence of a volume damp from the press. Without making any pretension, however, to the supreme literary art of the older work, Professor Fetter’s book ¹⁶ may challenge comparison, on the ground of its intrinsic excellence, with any systematic treatise on economics that has appeared since the days of John Stuart Mill. It is significant of the degree of specialization that has been attained in economics, that when one takes up the task of elucidating the peculiar merits of this volume, there is an overwhelming temptation to begin by referring to the modern theory of value. To be caught in this snare, however, would mean, in a non-technical review like this, to forfeit all further claim on the general reader’s intelligent interest. It seems best, therefore, to begin with a more general contrast between Adam Smith and our author, to illustrate the changed attitude toward society of the early and the modern economist.

Adam Smith lived in the pre-dismal age of the science. His outlook was by no means cheerless, although he schooled himself to entertain only meagre hopes of industrial improvement. It may be remembered how Smith, despite his convictions on the rights of the matter, said that to look for the eventual realization of free trade in England was Utopian. Thick clouds did not gather over the science of economics until his mantle had descended upon Ricardo. But since Carlyle’s damnatory characterization, the economic horizon has grown decidedly more bright. This volume of Professor Fetter’s, for example, is typical of the modern economist, who commonly entertains a sane hopefulness untouched by optimistic vagaries. The contrast between the early and the later economist in his attitude toward the laborer is instructive. The classical economists assumed toward the wage-earner a somewhat patronizingtone. This was the price that the worker had to pay for the economist’s tolerance of aught which — temporarily or permanently — was supposed to make for the laborer’s higher standard of living, whose leveling effects were viewed with apprehension by Squire and Parson. The modern economist, like Professor Fetter, is avowedly democratic in outlook and sympathy. Finally, the classical or orthodox economist was a stickler for laisser faire, the simple “ system of natural liberty,” and a minimum of state interference in trade or industry. The modern economist regards laisser faire much as the old-school physician regards the dictum contraria contrariis, — a bit of unfounded metaphysics which happens to be identified with the use of many sane medicaments. Here again Professor Fetter is typical of the modern breed.

But while representative of the modern economist in all these respects, Professor Fetter’s claim to preëminence among modern systematizers is based on other considerations. He is the first who, having broken with the old foursquare schematization of economics under the well-known rubrics, — Production, Exchange, Distribution, Consumption, — has built a new and logically compact structure. The intensive study of economics in the last quarter of a century had led many writers to put extensive patches upon the garments of their predecessors, with the frequent result that thereby the rent was made worse. This volume is new woven throughout. The permanent claim to the highest scientific recognition to which Professor Fetter will doubtless be entitled is founded upon his masterly resolving the problem of value into three phases, — the value of goods ready for the consumer, the value of the momently accruing income derived from durable agents, and the all-pervading influence of time as a determinant of value, especially — though by no means exclusively—in the problem of capitalization or estimating at their present worth a series of future incomes seen down the perspective of the future. As a by-product of this inestimable service to the systematization of economic thinking is the gratifying result that intellectual commerce is thereby in large measure restored between the economist and the practical man of affairs. Ever since Ricardo’s day economists have had an esoteric doctrine. They have delighted in the most unreal of definitions; they have gloried in propositions needlessly paradoxical. It has thus come about that men of business have often either wholly mistaken their meaning or have been unable to catch the mystic grips and passwords in vogue amongst them. Not the least service of this work is that it breaks away from this mystifying usage,

“ And what we mean we say, and what we could, we know.”