refusal to accept the employers' apportionment of work in cases when the spheres claimed by different sections of the trade overlap; and the refusal to submit matters in dispute to a committee of conciliation prior to the withdrawal of workmen. To these complaints the reply of the Plasterers' Society has done little more than disclaim official cognisance of their existence, and the Masters' Association, suspecting a determination to evade or to temporise, has been led to threaten a lock-out from March 6, unless concessions are meanwhile made. The men's Society has meanwhile issued a circular to its members professing to ask them for their opinion on the claims and complaints made by the employers, but in reality doing little more than to ask for a vote of support to their own executive, and this has been obtained. It would appear that in this case the men have made a false start through the unauthorised action of a section of their members, but that the action of the duly authorised executive has since been weak in dealing with its own constituency and unconciliatory in dealing with the employers. It is regrettable that the latter did not content themselves for the moment with resisting the coercion imposed upon non-union foremen, and raise the other questions by giving due notice of a claim for the revision of the agreement that is supposed to be in force to regulate the relations of the Operative Plasterers' and the Master Builders' Association. The sudden and threatening action of the latter is, however, sufficiently explained by the continued and harassing policy of a body of men who have been tempted to abuse the economic position of exceptional strength that the conditions of the last few years have secured them. THE British Association for the Advancement of Science will meet this year at Dover, on September 13. Mr. Henry Higgs is President of Section F; Mr. Edwin Cannan will act as Recorder, and among the other Secretaries are Mr. Bowley, and Mr. Flux. THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JAMES BRYCE, M.P., has been appointed. Vice-President of the British Economic Association. DR. ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS, author of the well-known Institutes of Economics, President of Brown University from 1889-98, has lately been appointed Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools. THE Professorship of Political Economy at Leipsic vacated by Professor von Miaskowski, has been filled by Dr. Wilhelm Stieda, previously professor at Rostock, a name familiar to the readers of Conrad's Jahrbücher and Schmoller's Jahrbuch. He is also the author of several substantial works. SINCE last we went to press there has passed away a leader of economic thought in Germany, Professor Karl Knies, equally dis tinguished for the revolt against abstract reasoning which characterised some of his writings, in particular his book on "Political Economy from the Standpoint of Historical Method," and for the effective use of abstract reasoning which characterised other of his writings, in particular his book on "Money and Credit." An obituary notice, which we are expecting from an eminent German authority, has unfortunately not reached us in time to be inserted in this number. WE regret to have to announce the death (February 7th, 1899), of the Comte de Chambrun, the munificent founder of the Musée Social, which, (as we mentioned in a former number, vol. vi, p. 497), was designed to collect, arrange, and distribute information about social questions, and appears to be nobly fulfilling that design. THE first volume of a Year-book of labour legislation has been issued by the Belgian Labour Department (Annuaire de la Législation du Travail, 1re Année, 1897. Published by the Belgian Labour Department, Société Belge de Librairie, 1, Rue Treurenberg. Brussels, 1898.) As described more fully by our correspondent on a former page (135), it contains the text (in French) of the laws concerning labour, which have been enacted during 1897 in Belgium, Germany, Austria, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Norway, Holland, Roumania, Switzerland, and the United States. We have received a communication from a Committee of the "Association pour la Défense des Detenteurs de Fonds publics (Antwerp)," soliciting an answer to the following questions :— 1st. "Upon whom is the responsibility to fall for the payment of the Cuban debt incurred by the loans of 1886 and 1890?" 2nd. "If Cuba should pass into American hands, or become an independent state, should the guarantees given to bondholders, that is, a first charge on customs duties and internal taxes of the island, remain good?" "If," continue the Committee, "you will kindly give an answer to the foregoing questions, you will do much, not only to elucidate the points. in discussion in regard to the Cuban debt, but you will have contributed to the establishment of a rule which shall govern similar matters in the future." As we go to press we learn that the remains of Turgot, whose resting place had been a mystery, have been discovered in Paris, and that it is proposed to bury them in the Panthéon. RECENT PERIODICALS AND NEW BOOKS Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. December, 1898. Old Age Pensions. SIR HENRY BURDETT. A plan modelled on the author's Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses, which has worked for nine years. An Experiment in Colonial Expansion. Right Hon. LEONARD COURTNEY, M.P. (President). The example of the Congo Free State, under the protection of the King of the Belgians, is not encouraging. The Belgian administrators have suffered from the climate, the natives from the exactions of ivory and rubber. The revenue of the Congo State presents a continued deficit; the trade of Belgium with Central Africa shows little expansion. On the Representation of Statistics by Mathematical Formula. I. Prof. F. Y. EDGEWORTH. For the representation of groups, such as human statures, barometric heights, &c., preference should be given to those formula which are akin to the law of error, since it is a priori deducible that this law tends to be fulfilled when numerous independent causes are at work. A certain deformation of the law is appropriate to slightly asymmetrical groups. This construction affords a simple representation of correlation in cases of asymmetry. Deaths in Childbirth. R. G. SALMON. Referring to Mr. Coghlan's article of September, the author constructs a table showing the number of children to be expected from marriages between couples at certain ages; e.g., if the bride's age is 38 and the bridegroom's 43, the number of children that may be expected is 1.14. The Statistics of Wages in the United Kingdom during the Last Hundred Years. (Part I). Agricultural Wages. A. L. BOWLEY. An immense compilation of material is subsumed in "general index numbers," showing the growth of money-wages in England and Wales from the percentage 53 in 1767-70 to 100 in 1892, a growth of which the continuity is interrupted by a decline before 1850 and after 1872. This general average is constructed from averages special to each county, by taking the simple arithmetic mean, a course necessitated by the impossibility of obtaining proper weights, and justified by the following test : "I have experimented on several of the columns with several systems of weights, and find that all systems, even the most arbitrary, give results practically identical in the general average." The Economic Review. January, 1899. Foreign Competition in Relation to the New Trades Combination Movement. E. J. SMITH. The author's scheme (described in the ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Vol. VIII., p. 276) can be worked so as to prevent the foreigner selling his surplus productions in England without profit. The Economics of Bargaining. J. A. HOBSON. Co-operative Ideals. H. W. WOLFF. A Plea for the Study of Economic History. Rev. W. CUNNINGHAM. The Church Reform Manifesto. Rev. H. RASHDALL. From the Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue for 1897-8 Mr. Cannan extracts statistics throwing light on the distribution of wealth in the United Kingdom. The Nineteenth Century. December, 1898. Neglecting our Customers. AGNES LAMBERT. Based on the recent report on British Trade Methods. Is the Lavish Expenditure of Wealth Justifiable? BRADLEY MARTIN, junior. Fortnightly Review. December, 1898. Some Economic Aspects of the Imperial Idea. ETHEL R. FARADAY. February, 1899. The Commercial Future. I. The New Struggle for Life among Nations. BROOK ADAMS. II. The Commercial Sovereignty of the Seas. BENJAMIN TAYLOR. Contemporary Review. Does Trade Follow the Flag? Lord FARRER. The "value received" from our African Empire is (Board of Trade Journal, September and October 1898) trifling in the present, uncertain in the future. The statistics of the past fifty years [C. 8211] show that the percentage value of our trade with foreign countries and with British possessions have remained almost constant, viz., 73·5; 26.5 nearly, "in spite of the gigantic extension of our Indian and Colonial empire. in spite of wars, conquest, and change of territory." Our trade with India, notwithstanding its political dependency and free trade, has not grown faster than our trade with the rest of the world. Our trade with Egypt has hardly increased at all since she has been under our management. While trade with the United Kingdom was 52 per cent. of the whole trade of Egypt in 1886, it was only 44 per cent. in 1896. Jealousy of the extension of other civilised nations into the waste places of the earth is unreasonable. Trade follows the price-list, not the flag. February, 1899. Does Trade Follow the Flag? A reply [to Lord Farrer]. Lord MASHAM. The increase of our exports with decrease of our imports is a proof of decline due to fighting hostile tariffs with free imports. The Indian Currency. Sir JOHN LUBBOCK. The writer recommends the imposition of an import duty of say 6d. an ounce on silver, looking forward to the possibility of some day, with the assistance of a seignorage, reopening the mints. The Quarterly Journal of Economics (Boston). January, 1899. The Preconceptions of Economic Science. THORSTEIN WEBLEN. A Collectivist Philosophy of Trade Unionism. EDWARD CUMMINGS. Reflections, not altogether favourable, on Mr. and Mrs. Webb's books. |