Significant Books in Economics and Sociology

THE current output of books dealing with social philosophy emanates from two distinct sources. The remedial instinct intent on righting social ills is one source; the purely scientific impulse is the other. The first voices the growing protest at social maladjustments. The second perpetuates the strong tradition of unbiased scrutiny into social phenomena, regardless of any ulterior programme. From the standpoint of human interest the literature of revolt or reform is the more significant. From the standpoint of pure science the colorless analysis is the more valuable.

Culling over the literature of 1905, I should place at the head of works of the first class A Modern Utopia.¹ In point of literary presentment it is easily first. Utopias are so numerous that it requires something very like genius to create one which shall be essentially novel. A thin and unreal atmosphere commonly enwraps them. However engaging the terrestrial paradise they shadow forth for the masses, they are not alluring to the individual. If the Guardians of Plato’s Republic should ever turn their backs upon us, we should inevitably yawn. Utopias, moreover, are generally detached, delocalized, without anchorage in space or time. Mr. Wells’s Utopia is in another planet, of course, but its geography is the familiar geography of Switzerland. Throughout his narrative he contrives to effect a double illusion. We see the shifting background of the action as though it were portrayed in the moving-picture series of a biograph. The dialogue of the two adventurers from our planet is synchronously produced by a figure in front of the lantern, who reads from manuscript. All this may sound like a merely ingenious device at realistic presentation, but the trick is unique. Mr. Wells, moreover, has genuine humor of the Anstey type, and the two rovers from our world are admirable foils to each other. One is a typical British Philistine from “Frognal ” who is forever sentimentalizing about an unhappy love affair. “ He had known her before he got his professorship, and neither her ‘ people ’ nor his — he speaks that detestable middle-class dialect in which aunts and other things with money and the right of intervention are called ‘people’ — approved of the affair. ” The other adventurer, of course, voices — often in soliloquy — the philosophy of the WorldCure. We should naturally expect the usual stage properties of Utopia, — socialized ownership of the agents of production, liberalized marriage institutions, universal peace, a World-State, and the like. In due measure they are forthcoming, but the curious, the altogether significant feature of Mr. Wells’s Utopia is their subdued, their subordinate rôle. No one has ever hit off our author quite so aptly as Mr. Chesterton, who says: “ The most interesting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he is the only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing . . . but it is no mere change of opinions . . . the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions.” This is the really curious thing about Mr. Wells and his version of Utopia. Instead of blaspheming Malthus, which is the best recognized test of collectivist orthodoxy, Mr. Wells insists “that Utopia will control the increase of its population. Without the determination and ability to limit that increase, — no Utopia is possible. That was clearly demonstrated by Malthus for all time.” Instead of preaching the union libre, Mr. Wells is seriously convinced that “there are two lines of reasoning that go to establish a longer duration for marriage.” Worse still, Mr. Wells distrusts universal suffrage, and deplores “that hasty despair of specialization for government that gave our poor world individualism, democratic liberalism, and anarchism.” He finds it necessary to found an order of Samurai, a voluntary nobility, — Knights of the Holy Grail, we might term them, — to insure anything like happiness and virtue in Utopia.

Aside from its literary power, Mr. Wells’s book is shot through and through with unmistakable divinations of the real nature of the social universe; and in a day when the tide toward socialism is sweeping us all from our moorings, it is no small consolation to see that the shrewdest navigator in the opposing fleet is tacking in unmistakable manner for a port that may prove a common haven for us all.

Second only to Mr. Wells’s book in point of literary skill comes The Long Day,² the story of a New York working girl as told by herself. In holding the interest of the average reader this book will even forge ahead of A Modern Utopia, for a full appreciation of the Utopia implies considerable knowledge of social philosophy on the reader’s part. One who has a fair acquaintance with “slum novelists" and their literature will begin The Long Day with very alert distrust. It begins : “The rain was falling in great gray blobs upon the skylight of the little room,” and so forth. At once the suspicion of fiction masking as fact is aroused. But one cannot proceed far before the genuine character of the specific scenes and incidents becomes unmistakable. To those who have lived in a great city and have seen the innumerable swarm of working girls emerging from the shops the story has a fascinating interest. And yet in a sense the very skill with which the experiences of the heroine are massed, confessedly in climacteric fashion, and with an artistic disregard of the duration of the entr’actes, creates a false impression. Her rescue is effected by such a miraculous dea ex machina that one’s first query as to the average girl in the shop is “ Who, then, can be saved ?” If it were not for the remarkable candor and sanity of the Epilogue, one would strongly suspect that the whole tale was a consummately artistic literary fraud. Those who have shed “ the tears of sensibility” over Mr. Hunter’s bathos entitled Poverty will sit up and rub their eyes when the erstwhile working girl concludes that “the harsh truth is that, hard as the working girl is ‘worked,’ and miserable as her remuneration is, she is usually paid quite as much as she is worth.” Those who bring a railing accusation against our industrial system as one which makes the traffic in honor a necessity to the woman wage-earner will gnash their teeth to be told frankly that “a clean room and three wholesomely cooked meals a day can be furnished to working girls at a price such as would make it possible for them to live honestly on the small wage of the factory and store.” But it is to be feared that our self-constituted Cassandras will never have the patience to read on in the book until our working girl, speaking for her class, tells them that “a live and progressive church . . . can do for us, and do it quickly and at once, more than all the college settlements and all the (women’s) trades unions that can be organized within the next ten years could hope to do.”

Different as are Mr. Wells and the anonymous author of The Long Day, they both share in the saving grace of humor. There are innumerable flashes of it in The Long Day. One is tempted to quote many of the good things,—of how “ Lame Lena” had found the secret of earning good wages in “makin’ of your cocoanut save your muscle; ” and of the vain effort of the young gentlewoman to interest her class of settlement “pants-makers” in Ruskin’s Crown of Wild Olive and Ethics of the Dust. But those who read will not miss their reward.

Far inferior to The Long Day, but destined, perhaps, to excite equal attention, is a volume devoted exclusively to the interests of the children of the working class.³ It is exceedingly difficult to know what attitude ought to be taken toward a study of this kind. So far as it seems likely to promote investigation into the conditions it describes, the volume deserves a hearty welcome. So far as it serves to acquaint the better-conditioned classes of the community with the way the oncoming generation of the laboring poor is handicapped in childhood, it ought to be bidden godspeed. It unquestionably discloses evils of the greatest magnitude in connection with the employment of minors. Much of its power is due to the fact that the author has a first-hand knowledge of the sufferings he describes. It is, however, a question whether his massing of effects does not create a picture too sombre to fairly mirror the real truth. Nor does the rather imposing citation of authorities at the end of the volume convince one that the conclusions drawn or the remedies suggested are universally free from taint of error or unwisdom. The author is apparently a downright honest lover of his kind, but he weakens his rugged plea for the children of the poor by allowing his editors to besprinkle his page with falsetto doggerel recounting the “woes unnumbered” of childhood. Martineau says somewhere that, certain instincts furnish very proper incentives to action, but very poor food for reflection. And, paraphrasing the dictum, one is disposed to opine that The Bitter Cry of the Children may furnish a very proper startingpoint for investigation, but a very poor lot of conclusions in which to rest.

In fortunate contrast to the volume just under consideration come a trio of booklets devoted to social amelioration, all of which, for balance, sanity, and level-headedness, command unstinted commendation.⁴

The first of the trio is an inaugural lecture by Dr. Edward T. Devine upon the occasion of his induction into the new chair of Social Economy in Columbia University. The lecturer continues to be the Director of the School of Philanthropy which is conducted by the Charity Organization Society of the city of New York. The newly founded chair to which he accedes has much the same purpose as the School of Philanthropy. It represents, therefore, a new and highly interesting departure in university instruction, to wit, the analysis of social conditions, their pathology, their remedy, and practical training in the various kinds of activity for social betterment. Dr. Devine has previously laid the public under frequent obligations to him by his clear-sighted discussion of social needs. But he has never heretofore reached the high note that sounds clear through this discourse like “the trumpet of a prophecy.” His comparison of the Pioneer, the Captain of Industry, and the Social Missionary makes excellent reading. If one may sample the address, the paragraph on the Social Missionary’s heritage from the pathfinder may well be cited. “Pioneers create for us the true heroic age. Here in America they are no distant, prehistoric, superhuman, unintelligible beings. They are our own immediate forbears. They pushed into the undiscovered country for the very joy of larger living. Their blood runs in our veins, and we share in certain moods something of their tingling nerves, their high courage and indomitable will. They have not only given us the earth for a heritage; they have given us also a free spirit and an instinct for domination, — a sort of rudimentary organ which hears from many domains the voice calling to us clearly, more seductively than sirens ever sang, that there is ‘ something lost behind the ranges,’ something waiting for us, and bidding us go find it.”

Curiously enough, as if to exemplify the spiritual relationship between pioneer and social reformer, comes Mr. H. Rider Haggard’s report on the labor colony idea as a plan to relieve the congestion of British cities. Mr. Haggard’s little volume is an attempt to rescue from obscurity a blue book which he offered originally in the capacity of special commissioner to inspect and investigate the Salvation Army colonies in California, Colorado, and Ohio. His opinion of the success of these colonies is high; and his plan for governmental subvention of similar efforts to be engineered by the Salvation Army, “or any other well-established and approved social, charitable, or religious organization,” is a tolerably convincing one. It commends itself the more readily because it is not unmindful of the larger bearings of the projects. The proposer has wrestled with the objection that such colonization would but create a temporary vacuum in the slums, bound speedily to be refilled by an equal amount of human wreckage created by the self-same conditions that now make for urban congestion. One is the more disposed to accord the project a tolerant ear from the fact that it bespeaks a discriminating estimate of the people who can thus be aided and those who cannot. When the commissioner is told that his plan is futile “because it does not go to the root of the question,” because “it does not provide for the scum and the dregs of our city society,” he fairly disarms his critics by admitting their objection frankly. He is emphatic on the point that “no system formulated by the brain of Man” can provide for the “adult dead-beats,” “born-tireds,” “breakages,” alcoholics, tramps, hoboes, criminals, sneaks, halfwits, dissolute women, and the like. . . . “With their children something can be done — perhaps; with themselves little or nothing.” I, for one, am disposed to go far with a man who gives such credentials of sanity; and, whatever else may be true of the organization of which he treats, I am willing to believe that, in this respect at least, “the poke bonnets and military caps worn by the professors of corybantic Christianity” may show the way to a helpful social departure; and that in leading a large city class “back to the land” they are, as Mr. Haggard reports, “ fulfilling their great and self-imposed office with a wholehearted humility and patience worthy of the first founders of the Christian Faith.”

The same dominant note of a wellweighed and patient opportunism which runs through the volumes of Dr. Devine and Mr. Haggard proclaims their affinity in spirit with the admirable summary of conclusions reached by the Committee of Fifty after its ten-year investigation of the liquor problem. This summary is the essence of the five detailed volumes already published by the Committee.⁵ It confirms one in the belief that the best guarantee of sanity in a student of society is a wise distrust, born of experience and philosophy, in the existence of any social panacea. Those who want in a nutshell the well-sifted results of the painstaking study of the liquor question by competent, disinterested, and philanthropic experts will do well to canvass this brief compend. No real evil is extenuated, and nothing is set down in malice. The scourge of drink is not minimized, and its relation to crime and pauperism is most temperately, but most convincingly drawn. The physiological effects of liquor are set forth in such fashion that no physician can take exception to the exposition. At the same time, the pseudo-scientific character of so-called temperance instruction in the public schools is unmasked. The remedial aspect of the matter is treated with breadth and sanity. Not the mere extirpation of the saloon, but the devising of healthful substitutes for the saloon, is the desideratum. Nor is the heart of the difficulty left untouched in the masterly exposition of the cure. We are brought up with the oldfashioned but eternally valid doctrine that the ultimate remedy is found “only in the souls of individual men. . . . There is no salvation for the mass as a mass.” It is a homely truism, but an eminently reassuring one, to hear that “those forces that make for the development of personality are, in the last analysis, the forces that are doing the most to overcome the evils of the liquor traffic.”

The three remaining volumes⁶ devoted to reformatory propaganda trace their heritage to the genius of Henry George. His was a mighty spirit, and the impulse that he originated still ferments like yeast in the intellectual processes of the Georgian Epigoni, Nothing was finer from the standpoint of doctrinal consistency than Henry George’s steady refusal to admit the parity of social evils. To him there was one central scourge, — private property in land, — and if he lent aid and succor in various battles against passing phases of monopoly or privilege, he made it clear that these concrete abuses were only phases of the deeper-seated cancer in the body politic. There was something that smacked of the conscious infallibility of the prophet in his refusal to modify even the wording of his great work when once it had been finally cast in its printed form. But nothing, apparently, is immune to the Higher Criticism, not even the faith once delivered to Henry George; and the three volumes under review illustrate three types of departures from the original body of doctrine. Least in its divergence is The Menace of Privilege. Even here it is the flaunting excesses of the trust magnates, the “Princes of Privilege,” that draw down the imprecatory fire; and, while the all-sufficient remedy with Mr. Henry George, Jr. is that of his father, — the abolition of private property in land, — it would seem as though the capitalist as such, rather than the landlord, is the logical target for his arrow. Much in Mr. George’s case must be explained, and may be generously condoned,on the ground of filial piety. But this close adherence to the formulas of Progress and Poverty has fatally impaired the book as a new source of revolutionary inspiration. Indeed, it reads like an artistic catalogue of the sins of the mighty, — bitter, censorious, mordant. There was no lack of material, as we all know, but the author seems often to show an intentional or a blind refusal to discriminate. Deliverances are often garbled and distorted, — particularly in the second chapter of the seventh book, — and are made to say what suits his purpose of invective or imprecation. In the analysis of social conditions, it is not a whit in advance of Progress and Poverty. It panders merely to the class hatred of those who have long been obsessed by an idée fixe, and “disgorges into the general world" the “embossed sores and headed evils” which an angry man has gathered from the public prints.

The other two volumes stand less nearly related to the single-tax gospel. In the case of Mr. Howe the primal impulse has been a practical one, though energized by his vision of the City Beautiful. But the enginery of the tax on land rentals seems to him so essential an instrument of realizing the Hope of Democracy that he is quite at one — so far as urban policy is concerned — with the founder of the doctrine. He does not so much differ from the single-taxers as he superadds to their platform. The stern individualism of the senior Henry George — for, except in the matter of land ownership, he was individualistic to the core — becomes transmuted in Mr. Howe’s hands to a generous belief in governmental initiative and coöperation. In short, Mr. George’s ideal was justice, while Mr. Howe’s is civic welfare, which he believes will be powerfully subserved by the tax on land values.

Mr. Reeve’s volume acknowledges the original impetus received from the elder George. Whatever else may be true of The Cost of Competition, it illustrates one tendency to perfection, — that no thinker of active mental temperament can finally rest in Mr. George’s programme as allsufficient for economic regeneration. Such a thinker will either react against the doctrine of Progress and Poverty, and veer toward Rae’s proposition that “land is as much the creation of man as anything else, and everything else is as much a gift of God as land.” Or else he will not content himself with the socializing of land alone, but will logically insist on socializing all the other means of production. The single-tax theory is, by its very nature, in unstable equilibrium. Mr. Reeve represents the latter type of logical departure away from George in the direction of a more inclusive collectivism.

Mr. Howe’s book will be very differently rated according as one is in quest of inspiration or information. It has life, vigor, movement. It is imbued with a healthful optimism. It is, without doubt, the counterpart of able, self-sacrificing, and hopeful civic effort on the writer’s part. The patriotic public service that it will inspire can hardly fail to result in making for the public weal, however far short it may come of realizing the writer’s dream. But if we assess the book in the cold, clear light of impartial criticism, we shall hardly fail to discover that the foundation of fact is absurdly inadequate to support the superstructure of conclusions. Mr. Howe depicts in lively fashion the ideal city that is to be, with its teeming millions. He finds the tap-root of our present political decadence in the fact that unscrupulous business men, mostly seeking or enjoying franchises, have bought up the government, body and soul. He discovers the way out through municipal ownership and operation of public utilities. Finally, in order to pay the bills of urban socialism, he proposes to confiscate the rentals from urban site-values.

This is a perfectly intelligible programme. There is no particular use in describing it as socialistic, though there is no very evident reason why its projector should disclaim the name. But it fairly exposes itself to strenuous objection in the off-hand way it alleges the financial success of municipal ownership in Great Britain and this country. A serious student who will take this slightly diluted asseveration for scientific proof does not begin to know the elements of what scientific proof is. The truth is, Mr. Howe’s enthusiasm sometimes runs away with his judgment. No one not totally out of touch with current work in economics would ever hazard in cold print the statement that “there is something queer about the familiar contention, especially common in universities, (sic) that land is a factor of but little importance in modern industrial life.” Much must be allowed to the fiery zeal of the reformer. We may not measure the vision of the prophet with the common yardstick. But while our fellow mortal has a perfect right to speak with unknown tongues, he must excuse the weary plodders amongst us who still use the alphabet, and must not ask us for belief, unless he supplies us with evidence.

The third volume in this subgroup, Mr. Reeve’s Cost of Competition, is exempt from the characteristic defects of its two predecessors. It does not ask us to take declamation for reasoning. Its social vision may be astigmatic, but it is unmistakably penetrating. It does not have to fumble through its pockets when asked for its credentials as an accredited messenger from the realm of scientific thought. It will undoubtedly suffer, so far as popular apprehension is concerned, by reason of its very excellence. The more than occasional employment of mathematical analysis will close its best pages to the generality of readers. Mr. Reeve subdivides his assessment of the seamy side of our industrial life into two divisions, the first treating of its economic cost, the second of its ethical cost, — to the winners no less than to the losers. It would be a stout optimist, indeed, who would minimize the social cost of competitive wealth-getting. That it involves waste in advertising, soliciting of trade, cross freights, no less than in a thousand other ways, no sane observer can deny. These are all incisively instanced by our author. To avoid this social waste he proposes a plan whereby the prices of goods shall no longer be the sport of competitive bargaining, but shall be set by governmental authority apportioning to each producer a remuneration proportioned to the “life-supporting power” of each producer’s product. Such authoritative price - fixing, which will, of course, be a continuous function of the State, he assures us, could be patterned after the “central office” of a big manufacturing plant which credits various departments each with the value of its respective contribution to the final product. Mr. Reeve’s plan apparently allows private possession of goods which have been produced by the owner, or acquired by him through exchanges at State-sanctioned prices, but only so far as such goods are actually used by the possessor for enjoyment. The lending of money at interest, or the exaction of payments by individuals for the use of productive agents, he apparently inhibits.

To Mr. Reeve’s indictment of “capitalism” on private property in productive agents, the typical economist, for whom our author has scant patience or respect, would emphatically demur. The demurrer would be based on the average effect of “ capitalism ” as affording a powerful stimulus to the creation of productive agents. There is one thing worse than having individuals idly pocket incomes from the rentals of productive agents. That worse thing is a society so scantily provided with productive agents that there are no incomes for either idlers or workers to pocket. As to the all-wise State bureau that is to fix exchange ratios in Mr. Reeve’s renovated Utopia, the objection seems pertinent that such a bureau is not so much impossible as superfluous. What is termed the market constitutes a smooth, self-acting, economical bureau for price-setting. Our author, in his analysis of barter, fails wholly to inquire what effect is produced upon the margin of unfair gain to be obtained by bargaining when, instead of two traders facing each other in exchange, there are thousands interested in buying and selling the same commodity. In world markets for the staples, the “forced gain,” which Mr. Reeve makes the virus of our economic life, can be shown to be a vanishing quantity.

The borderland between works advocating organic changes in our economic structure and works which are devoted to a colorless scientific view of social phenomena is found in four volumes, three dealing with our railroad problem, and one with our colonial policy, It is rather remarkable, when we consider the flood of printed matter precipitated by the silver question, that the railroad issue has evoked so scant a response from the press. The small output has made possible a very searching inquest into its merits, and criticism at this time may almost be limited to a judicial summary of the consensus of expert opinion.

The searchlight of investigation has beaten most severely on Professor Hugo R. Meyer’s volume.⁷ It is not unfair to say that the conclusion of his high argument has been generally discredited. Despite the wealth of erudition paraded in the footnotes, the cautious reader puts the treatise down, unsatisfied, incredulous. That government attempts at rate regulation have always resulted disastrously from the larger standpoint of economic welfare puts too heavy a strain on sober students of transportation. When railway men themselves concede the existence of certain evils demanding legislative remedy, it will hardly do to preach laissez faire. In one respect the volume presents a pathetic side. To its making there evidently went the most laborious toil. If it fails to arrive at conclusions with which sober readers can concur, the writer is at fault neither in point of patient research nor in intellectual honesty. The conviction is forced upon one that his is a type of mind which, however widely it may sift facts, will inevitably find only reasons for its preconceptions. In a Froude, where there is combined with this tendency both wit and a constructive imagination, the result may be well worth while. Unfortunately, railroad administration affords little scope for the exercise of these subsidiary qualities, even if Professor Meyer possessed them. In common fairness, it must be said that the tide is running so strongly against this book that some of its really good points are in danger of undue disparagement. The description and defense of the “basing-point” system in our Southern states, whether true or not, is highly ingenious. The account of the collection of grain at the primary markets and its distribution from these centres is a real contribution to our knowledge of transportation. And the author rightly insists on the fact that the selfish demands of localities for special transportation privileges would be an obstacle to governmental regulation. Hence, unqualified condemnation of the book is unfair. Because we feel that we require confirmation of the author’s conclusions as to German and Australian railroads is no reason why we should discredit his sententious verdict that “in the conflicts of interest which are a necessary incident of progress, few men practice a broad and liberal patriotism, when interest affords the incentive and institutions afford the opportunity to do otherwise.”

For the other two books ⁸ on railroads, the meed of praise has been deservedly liberal. Mr. Haines sweeps a rather wider horizon than Judge Noyes, and covers railroad construction, operation, and finance, as well as the matter of rate-fixing. Still, the two volumes finally converge in their discussion of restrictive legislation. It is significant that a practical railroad man like Mr. Haines and a railroad president like Judge Noyes are at one in conceding the necessity for further remedial legislation. Judge Noyes devotes the greater part of his book to the question of rates. But so central is this theme that the book easily takes high rank in our American literature of railway economics. Mr. Haines’s chapter on ratemaking is below the standard which he elsewhere maintains in his book, but in general the two volumes supplement each other admirably. He who masters them both will have no mean equipment in the science of transportation.

Both volumes, however, are equally subject to a common criticism. They over-estimate the technical legal difficulties attendant upon Congressional regulation of interstate commerce. There savors much of the ultra-scholastic about such contentions as that the fixation of rates is in its essence a legislative power and may therefore not be delegated by Congress to a tribunal; or in the contention that the determining of the reasonableness of rates is a purely judicial function, and therefore may not be entrusted to a commission. One feels, on reading these deliverances, almost like the “cornfield lawyer” in the Senate, who sardonically remarked that the people could be so happy “if it were not always for the dear old Constitution.” The truth is that the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers cannot, from the nature of things, be absolute. A court which punishes for contempt exercises executive power. A Congress which determines the right of its members to their seats exercises judicial power. And a railroad commission which shall combine both powers, subject to court review where Constitutional guarantees are involved, is not going to be denied us by the Supreme Court, if the voice of Congress is quite unmistakable in the matter.

The fickleness of popular interest strikes one forcibly on turning from the three works on railroads to Mr. Willis’s treatise ⁹ on our foreign problem, — the Philippines. The truth is that we are tired of the Philippine question. The glamour attendant on conquest has faded. The “trust for civilization doctrine,” which reconciled the American republic to our retention of the islands, is becoming wearisome. Now that business enterprise sees little opportunity of commercial exploitation in the islands, selfish interests in Congress content themselves with defeating measures that would extend Philippine markets to the prejudice of American growers of sugar or tobacco. The subsidy-seeking shipping interests amongst us still hope to monopolize the shipping of the archipelago. But public interest is languid. The annual drain of $20,000,000 on our treasury is not relished by Congress, but it seems unavoidable. We try to forget the whole wretched business, and groan internally when a wholesome massacre of bandits with their wives and children occasionally discloses the skeleton in the national closet. Most people who think soberly about the question are probably agreed that the natives as a whole are unfit for self-government, and are equally agreed that it is little less than a national misfortune that we must govern — or misgovern — them. For this reason Mr. Willis’s book must intrude on unwilling ears. Nor does he soften a whit the plain, objective tale. There is no resiliency in his exposition. The civil government is sketched without sympathy, — a disguised oligarchy. There is even lacking adequate appreciation of the benevolent motives of such a governor as Secretary Taft. The educational system is characterized as sadly inefficient. The ecclesiastical policy in the matter of the friars’ lands is held to be more than dubious. The decadence of social morality since our advent is said to be undeniable. Only in the matter of scientific sanitation, and in the negative policy of preventing corporate land grabs, is our policy commended. Business and agriculture are said to languish, and there is little or nothing to relieve the sombre picture. It is a Pandora’s box with Hope left out. For that very reason it will not satisfy even those who concede the substantial truth of its specific assertions. But the book ought to be provocative. It challenges the defenders of our colonial policy. By silence they simply plead guilty at the bar of conscience. If they can file a reasonable demurrer, they ought to do so. It is to be hoped that the book may incite to more intensive study of the situation on the spot. No task is more needed than an envisagement of the mutual attitude of the islanders and ourselves in the light of even-handed equity and good will, which selfish interests on both sides ought not to be allowed to pervert or stifle. To acquiesce in our present mood of opportunist ennui is just neither to our wards nor to ourselves.

We reach the wholly irenical group of significant books in our subject, with the admirable series of Selections and Documents in Economics ¹⁰ which is appearing under the editorship of Professor William Z. Ripley. In his preface to the first volume of the series, Trusts, Pools and Corporations, the editor declares that his aim is a deliberate attempt at “ the application to the teaching of economics of the case system, so long successful in our law schools.” He is careful to add that the material thus assembled is designed for use in the domain of descriptive economics. It would certainly imply an indiscriminating analogy that would seek to employ the case method in the teaching of pure economic theory. But in the field indicated these selected readings and cases admirably supplement the usual text-books, and put the essence of the most suggestive collateral material in the hands of every student. As labor-saving devices alone, they will amply repay their cost. The discussion of typical cases in the field of trusts, labor problems, public finance, and sociology ought to impart to their study a sense of reality and vitality which is wholly lacking to an abstract lecture syllabus.

Worthy of notice in connection with the group just adverted to, and similar to it in purveying much well-sifted information in short compass, is M. Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu’s The United States in the Twentieth Century,¹¹ So far as material is concerned, there is comparatively little in this compend which could not be extracted from the Abstract of the Twelfth Census. Indeed, the author admits frankly that the census reports have been his main mine of facts. However, he has traveled recently in this country, and has thus added to his well-known scientific equipment a visual knowledge of our economic life. Our French critic’s volume gives rise to the suggestion that when Congress next authorizes the taking of the census, an adequate appropriation should be made for editing its results. The specialist will, of course, at present give careful heed to the census statistics. He must. The general reader of fair intelligence may occasionally cull out from the tables of figures bits of information in which he has a particular interest. But there is waste in the expenditure of millions for statistical findings, often of great significance, and their subsequent editing in so unattractive a form as never to invite any general attention. It takes a certain amount of genius to turn the dryas-dust figures into gold nuggets, but it can be done. And in some measure this is what M. Leroy-Beaulieu has effected. That he is a foreigner who sees us at a peculiar angle and from a viewpoint different from our own, only augments the interest with which he invests his volume. And, while his book was written primarily for his own countrymen, it has not suffered in translation, — which is high praise, — and ought to obtain a wide reading in this country.

Hardly a year has passed of late without the appearance of a new economic systematizer. This year it is Professor Seligman who figures in this rôle. It was not necessary for him to publish this volume ¹² to substantiate his title to be considered the most erudite of American economists. There are others more original, more sharp-sighted, and better equipped with intimate expert knowledge of particular provinces. There is probably no other comparable to our author in the range of his reading and in bibliographical lore. But erudition has its perils, no less than its advantages, and the volume under discussion will abundantly attest this. The generic adverse criticism to be passed on the book is that the author has not succeeded in dominating the almost perplexing variety and richness of the material on which he has drawn. In an introductory text it is preëminently necessary to subordinate the details to an organizing central conception. Here this volume is defective. For the beginner in economics downright error is less dangerous in the long run than a weltering distraction of ideas. It is a cruel paradox that the inexpert reader, with this treatise in hand, runs the aforesaid risk because of the author’s very wealth of information.

The significance of this volume lies mainly in its indicating the trend of thinking in the matter of distribution. The older traditional theory insisted on the intrinsic difference between land and other productive material agents. Land was a gift of God, capital the product of labor. Capital could be increased, land could not. Land must be measured by area, capital by dollars. Land rent was a lump sum, the hire of capital was always a percentage. Rent did not enter into price, interest did. Between them was an impassable gulf fixed. It was in large part against this central conception that Professor Fetter a few years since flung his shining spear, and the old school today are visibly on the defensive. Professor Seligman all but renounces them. Analyzing the three essential theses of the time-honored doctrine of rent, he remarks: “So far as these statements are true, they are not peculiar to land rent.” But, either weighed down by the traditional view, or essaying an ill-judged attempt at mediation, he wavers, and holds that “because of the social significance of such relative changes (namely, alleged differences in changes of land values and the values of other things), it is legitimate to put land into a separate category.”

Thoroughly to canvass the author’s attitude toward even the more important theoretical questions is here impossible. But too often he seeks to synthesize the irreconcilable. Thus he tells us that in one sense capital involves the roundabout method of production; in another sense capital synchronizes labor and consumption. The older individualistic doctrine of marginal utility is introduced, and then fused into the newer, the more mysterious doctrine of “social marginal utility.” The book is eminently unfinal. Its premature synthesis is not going to issue in agreement, but in disruption. Instead of allaying strife among economists, it is going to breed misunderstandings. It is certain to be a mine of endless casuistry, an inexhaustible source of economic litigation. A singular fancy possesses me when I try to symbolize the contents of this volume and its probable effects. I picture it an inviting pâté de foie gras en Bellevue. Through the quivering transparency of the gelatinous aspic envelope I can see no end of toothsome morsels, — chicken-livers, mostly from Professor Fetter’s “novel and suggestive” incubator, sweetbreads that hail from Chicago, Austrian truffles, Marxian mushrooms, and nameless tidbits that savor of “pure capital,” — the whole garnished with a gay bibliographical bouquet. But this mélange is held together by the most tenuous and fragile of films, and only the most intrepid of gormandizers may attempt to digest and assimilate its varied contents.

American economists have of late become accustomed to an annual treatise on money. Kinley, Scott, Laughlin, and Aldrich have each produced within the last five years a notable contribution to the field of monetary science. Mr. Charles A. Conant is the last to “take up the wondrous tale,” in two substantial volumes ¹³ of almost four hundred and fifty pages each. To his task Mr. Conant brings some very unusual qualifications. He has had practical experience as a banker. He has labored at the arduous task of monetary reform at home and abroad. He has read widely and discriminatingly in the history of the subject. He has not taken the ill-considered position that financial experience renders the abstract study of money and banking superfluous. He has struggled with the terminology of the academic economists, and has even caught the infection of the phrase, “marginal utility.” It would be strange if, with all this in his favor, he had not produced a work which supplements certain lacunae in our knowledge of the subject. In particular, his account of the adoption of the gold standard in southern and Oriental countries is of importance, because Mr. Conant himself, in the case of currency reform in Mexico and the Philippines, may properly boast quorum pars magna fui. Moreover, his views on the technique of banking, and in particular on note issue, carry unusual weight, coming, as they do, from one who knows the business both on paper and in practice. It is small disparagement to add that Mr. Conant lacks a fine sense of verbal felicities, and alternately adopts and condemns the same phraseology. Thus he quotes Jevons with approval as to the abhorrent usage which leads careless thinkers “to speak of such a nonentity as intrinsic value,” and yet Mr. Conant himself uses the very phrase in his formal definition of money. Sometimes this carelessness verges on something worse than contradictory usage, and approaches contradiction in terms. The “vital factor in the choice of the metals as the material for money” is “that they represent an article the demand for which is insatiable.” The phrase, obiter, reminds one of “Coin” Harvey’s “infinite demand” for silver. But if the demand for the precious metals is “insatiable,” discussion as to whether there is any danger of an excessive supply of gold would seem, to put it mildly, superfluous. So far as Mr. Conant’s discussion of the so-called quantity theory of money is important, it is simply because it discloses the moderate view of a practical, well-read, judiciallyminded, and experienced banker. If Mr. Conant’s citations were not so apt, he might be justly accused of loading down his book with a potpourri of authorities. Certainly not less than two hundred pages are wholesale transfers from works on money; but he has so fortified his own discussion with appropriate quotations, whose origin is always indicated, that in some respects his work gains by thus becoming a ready source-book of information. Mr. Conant has read so widely in this field that it is surprising to find, neither in the text nor in the extensive bibliography, any mention of that most important piece of work in the monetary field, — Fisher’s Appreciation and Interest. It seems not at all unlikely that we may soon perforce be compelled again to canvass the currency problem. The seemingly persistent disorder in the loan market can be explained only on the theory that the banks are not curbing wild speculation as they ought in their rôle of trustees for the commercial community, or else on the hypothesis that our system of note issue requires to be made more elastic. It is well that we have in Mr. Conant’s work, especially in the second volume, so admirable a guide. The business world, so distrustful of the theorist, will absorb sound theory from a banker like Mr. Conant, sans le savoir.

A review of last year’s literature of social philosophy would be incomplete without mention of two works on sociology,¹⁴ Professor Blackmar’s Elements of Sociology, and Professor Small’s General Sociology. It is difficult for students of the special social sciences to be quite just to the sociologist. The point of view of the economist, the historian, and the student of politics is perceptibly different from what it would have been, had the study of sociology never attained something of its present vogue. On fair consideration there is much to be said in justification of one of Professor Small’s chance utterances, that “Sociology . . . must remain more a determining point of view than a finished body of knowledge.” The very existence of this somewhat inchoate science has at least served as a useful reminder to other workers in the more delimited social provinces that their task is in some respects a provincial one, that they must not mistake their conclusions for the whole truth, that there are other considerations to be reckoned with besides those which they assess in their own bailiwick, and that human society is an infinitely complex thing, and not fully to be appreciated from a single standpoint.

In short, we are indebted to the sociologist for some of our humility, and we ought to be free to express our obligation. Moreover, the student of the more delimited portions of the social domain ought by this time to recognize that there are particular branches of inquiry, such, for instance, as the origin and development of family relations, which fall outside of the recognized boundaries of the special sciences of society. We have no right to excommunicate the social investigator from our fellowship because he refuses to be called by one of our familiar names, — economist, historian, anthropologist, or the like. But when all this is said, it must be confessed that the sociologists have too often invited the merited reproach of quackery. Nor do the two volumes under review altogether escape this charge.

Professor Blackmar’s Elements is a singularly ineffective and eminently mediocre book. It affords no real penetrating insight into the nature of society. It has no intrinsic coherence. Empty it of what is essentially law, politics, and economics, and it becomes a stringy set of observations on social evolution, social pathology, and social ideals. It lacks character in its definitions. To define “culture” from the standpoint of sociology as “giving up old habits of thought and action for new ones with higher ideals ” is an instance of confusion. What Professor Blackmar has defined as culture is in reality conversion. His account of the law of survival through selective struggle drips with treacle fit for a Sabbath-school periodical. To describe the principal methods of sociological investigation as “the statical, dynamic, and statistical methods, respectively” is about as logical as to divide animals into quadrupeds, insects, and blue-bottle flies. Moreover, even the Elements of Sociology ought to allow, out of four hundred and fortyfive pages, more than a bare fourteen to the discussion of “Social Laws.” This little nest of “laws” is a rare jumble, whose character is not unfairly conveyed by the half-page discussion devoted to each law. Associology this will never do.

Professor Small’s portentous volume of seven hundred and twenty-nine pages he calls a “conspectus” or a “syllabus.” In reality, it is a titanic compendium. Its thesis is that “ the central line in the path of methodological progress, from Spencer to Ratzenhofer, is marked by gradual shifting of effort from analogical representation of social structures to real analysis of social processes.” It would have been impossible, in the absence of the author’s italics in the Preface, to disinter this thesis from the mass of débris under which the thesis lies buried. It does not require seven hundred and twenty-nine pages of exposition to show that Spencer’s sociology involved an extended analogy between society and living organisms, while latter sociology insists more on the struggle for existence. And the truth is that, besides the extended criticism of Spencer, Schaeffle, and Ratzenhofer, which constitutes the core of this work, there are in it hundreds, literally hundreds, of voluble detours into other fields of social speculation. For this very reason no review of the volume can be at all adequate which does not traverse an almost endless sociological tract. No one can read the volume through without feeling a sort of hopeless dejection.

for the Gargantuan energy that does not hesitate to print, as chapter ten, nine consecutive pages of disjointed titles, which comprise the table of contents to Schaeffles’s Bau und Leben, is beyond the reach of any reproach that bases itself on literary grounds. Walt Whitman’s “catalogue method” is simply nowhere, in comparison with Professor Small’s unwearied printing of lists of titles as essential chapters in his text. Chapters twenty-nine and fifty are awful examples of this form of typographical crime. But the dejected feeling that Professor Small’s book produces is mainly because of one’s inability to convince one’s self that the author believes there is any real truth or importance in this wordy farrago. It would be unfair to suggest that he regards the whole thing as a hideous logomachy, but at least one reader found in the whole treatise nothing that fell quite so like balm on the wounded spirit as Small’s momentary lapse into skepticism when he says, “It” (the quest of sociology) “flies so uncontrollably from one aspect of humanity to another, we not only waver in our faith that the problem may be solved, but, if all the truth must be told, we sometimes wonder whether, after all, a real problem exists.”

The truth is, I believe, that no such real problem as the author proposes does exist; and if it did, no finite mind could grasp it. For Professor Small insists that we must attempt to comprehend at one and the same time the length and the breadth, the height and the depth, of the entire essence of the process of human association. “A maturer stage of knowledge must approach nearer to comprehension of the whole as a whole.” It is his “demand for the universal” that so discourages us, — this striving “toward a final stage,” and this conceiving the object as it “would look to an omniscient mind.” Moreover, as if to pile Pelion on Ossa, he will not encourage approach to this ecstatic vision by intensive study of special fields. The part of the sociologist is “to counteract the tendency of specialists to follow centrifugal impulses.” For example, he disparages the study of primitive man, and remarks thereof,— “the best that we can get from accounts of primitive men are hints about what to look for in our acquaintances” ! The primary task of the sociologist, apparently, is to stand on the housetop, and to discourse of methodology. I believe this to be the consummation of folly.