book before us. Nor is the time spent in perusing these descriptions of a "city in the heavens" to be regarded as wasted or unprofitably employed. We have the authority of Plato for thinking that it is by imagining a community that is free from the innumerable hindrances and imperfections so inseparable from any human endeavour after reform, that we can most readily discover and most vividly realize what should be our ideals, and we come back to ordinary life with our minds elevated, our desires purified, and our zeal stimulated by the higher, purer atmosphere we have been breathing. It is another advantage to be gained by the consideration of ideal communities, that it is thus we can apply abstract, deductive reasoning to political and social questions. When we can in thought isolate causes, we can follow them out in their effects with greater clearness and completeness, and gain a conception of their results, before we try to allow for all the multifarious conflicting influences that are operating in the world around. The construction of Utopias is, however, attended with some danger. There is the unavoidable temptation to leave out of account all inconvenient and unanswerable objections, and to draw attention to those facts and considerations only that will make for the conclusion we desire to draw. If an author yields to this temptation, he is no longer writing seriously, and must be judged from a different point of view. A satire, or a skit upon society may be amusing or may be unutterably boring, according as it is treated with lightness of touch and quickness of insight or the reverse. It is not always easy to distinguish at once whether the author of a book of this kind intends us to regard him as a prophet teaching great truths, or a satirist mocking at the foibles and failings of the age: this is the case with the book before us. The author appears to be talking to us seriously, and, if he intends to jest, the fun is not of a very amusing character; but, at the same time, there seems little that can be taken au serieux in the scheme he propounds. It is scarcely worth while to give us quotations from various speakers and writers as to the momentous problem offered by the growth of the vast towns of the present day; but it is perhaps a good idea that people possessed of money and the desire to benefit their neighbours could do good work by buying up building estates and laying them out in well-considered dwellings, taking care to retain sufficient land for open spaces and the necessary public buildings. So far the scheme is distinctly good, though not original, but the details of this scheme, as given by Mr. Howard, seem to be the outcome of a dream, and that a sufficiently unpleasant one almost to be called a nightmare. We should not care, even were it possible, to live in a circular city with streets radiating at regular distances from the centre, a railway exactly girdling it round, and absolutely no room for individuality or personal taste. Further, as each city is to contain a population of exactly 58,000 souls, with subsidiary cities encircling it at a little distance, all apparently self-contained and self-sufficient, we are not told how large industries are to be carried on, or what provision should be made for mines and such branches of production as require concentration in particular localities. In fact it is useless to attempt to follow out the vagaries of the various short and simple methods of reform that are produced from time to time. We may have the assurance that the evil in the world may be largely diminished, or even ultimately eradicated, but it will not be by any royal remedy that will accomplish its aim readily and painlessly. Were there no other weak point in Mr. Howard's scheme, it would be condemned by the omission from it of any provision for the religious life of the community--an omission, unfortunately, only too common in presentday Utopias. At the same time, it is one of the most hopeful signs of the times that men and women of every school of thought are more and more earnestly trying to find or invent an earthly Paradise-not merely a place for their personal happiness and enjoyment, but one where the lives of all shall be bright and beautiful, and more like what human lives ought to be than is at present possible. It is therefore good that books such as this should be written; there are people who are attracted by a dream who might not be so by a more sober scheme. We may not care to read the book, but perhaps others may, and may be led thereby to ponder what can practically be done here and now to make our large towns tolerable; and when once the problem has been honestly faced we shall be some way on towards its solution. E. A. PEARSON. SHORT NOTICES. Par ALBERT MÉTIN. LE SOCIALISME EN ANGLETERRE. This is a very readable and useful sketch of contemporary Socialism in England. It is in no sense critical or profound, but it gives all the facts and relevant details. Mons. Métin has spared no pains to make his survey as complete and impartial as possible. Every variety of Socialism is represented, and, as far as possible, in its own language. Biographical sketches give colour to the narrative, and the bibliography is full and accurate. It would be difficult to find a book which contains so much interesting information within such a small compass. THE LIQUOR PROBLEM IN ITS LEGISLATIVE ASPECTS. By FREDERIC H. WINES and JOHN KOREN. [342 pp. Crown 8vo. 6s. Houghton and Mifflin. Cambridge, U. S. A., 1897.] This book should be in the hands of all temperance reformers. It represents the result of a most instructive and painstaking investigation, made under the direction of a small sub-committee appointed by a larger committee composed of fifty members, which was formed in 1893 for the purpose of concentrating attention upon the liquor problem in the United States. America is a huge storehouse of experiments in dealing with the evils of the drink traffic; and this book provides us with a concise and impartial statement of the general effect of the legislative measures adopted by eight typical states. There is also a brief introduction, signed by Charles W. Eliot, Seth Low, and James C. Carter, which summarizes the conclusions to be drawn from the special reports. The book is in every way an admirable study of the facts under consideration. ECONOMIC FATALISM. NEW commonplaces are more common than the statement that we live in an historical age. The logical sciences have fallen into disrepute, and all studies, to the regret of John Grote and other less distinguished men, have run to history. The so-called Science of Political Economy furnishes the most remarkable instance of this tendency, and few speculative targets bristle with so thick a forest of critical arrows as the famous, the unfortunate, and the superseded economic man. The writers of the present day have, at any rate, learnt the blessed doctrine of relativity. Whether they profess to write National Economy like List, or to restate economic principles like Marshall, or to suggest the lines of economic advance like Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, their primary concern is to analyze the existing economic structure and to trace the laws which have governed its development. Like Mr. Gradgrind, they have an insatiable appetite for facts. It would ill become a mere amateur in Political Economy to quarrel with the abundant repast of knowledge which these and other most eminent writers have prepared for the student. There can be no question not only that they have deepened and defined our knowledge of economic and social history, but also that they have modified economic opinion in many most important directions. A considerable number of obstacles which the science of the early part of this century had raised in the path of the improvement of the labouring classes have now been found to be compact of false psychology and erroneous logic. The Wage Fund theory has long disappeared; the effective desire for accumulation has been shown to be not the sensitive hot-house plant of J. S. Mill's imagination, but a hardy annual thriving on small profits and watered by hard times; the VOL. IX.-No. 3. U wastefulness of competition has been revealed by manifold and striking appeals to experience. Fact has never replied to theory with more point and cogency than in the chapter on the Verdict of the Economists to be found in the second volume of the Sidney Webbs' Industrial Democracy. Hegel is responsible for the observation that nothing great was ever done without passion. The real motive-force which has supplied this critical onslaught upon the school of Ricardo has proceeded, of course, from the affections rather than from the intellect, from the sympathy aroused by the contemplation of the abiding misery of the poor. It was this spectacle which led Henry George to discover that wages were paid out of profits, and has induced other writers to elucidate a moral and an economic justification for collective bargaining. According to the acknowledgment of one of the most scientific writers upon Economics, it is the study of the causes of poverty and the question whether poverty is necessary at all "which gives to economic studies their chief and their highest interest."1 Passion, however, has now discarded theory, and summoned in whole armies of facts as auxiliaries. In the late thirties or forties the Chartists fought the economic man with the natural man. They claimed certain natural rights—such as the "six points"-just as the economists claimed for their creation certain necessary liberties if the production of wealth was to be maintained or increased. The cry of the Chartists was not an ignoble cry, but it could not, any more than the economic man, stand the critical investigation of philosophers. The ideals of the Radicalism of that day were perhaps less practical as they were certainly more political than the ideals of the modern trade union. Where they talked of abstract rights, their descendants talk of concrete wages. The whole imagery of political conflict is steeped in a solution of metallic currency. We reason of workmen's compensation, of the taxation of land-values, of the minimum wage, of direct employment. The question of Socialism is no longer argued on the old high platform of abstract rights; and even the Hegelians are, let us hope, finding out that Marshall, Principles of Economics, p. 4. |