first, in its legal and economic aspect, secondly, from the financial point of view. In particular the conditions under which the sale of public property is admissible are examined at some length. The last section discusses the interesting problem of the method of valuing State property. C. F. BASTABLE Libero Scambio. By ARNALDO AGNELLI. 1897.) (Milan Hoepli. PRIZE essays are not in general valuable additions to literature, but such exceptions as Bryce's Holy Roman Empire and Prof. Nicholson's Effects of Machinery on Wages warn us against altogether neglecting works of this class. Signor Agnelli has not, indeed, found any new arguments of importance on either side of the hackneyed free trade question, but he has brought together all or nearly all the old ones, placed them in their logical order and estimated their relative weight. To the student who wanted to get in concise form a critical account of the state of the controversy, the book would be decidedly useful. main fault-perhaps one cause of its success in the contest for the Cossa prize is its undue reliance on authority. A good many of the references in the notes might have been omitted on the revision of the book for press and their place taken by an index. C. F. BASTABLE La Costituzione Economica Odierna. ACHILLE LORIA. (Turin: Bocca. 1899. Pp. 822.) WE have here a continuation of Professor Loria's Analisi della Proprietà Capitalista (1889). In the Analisi he had dealt with the historical genesis, and organic development of the present economical constitution of society. He now deals with its present structure and tendencies. His method (as we are told in his Preface, p. viii) is the rigorous method of the Classical School, applied by him to Distribution, while they confined it to "Redistribution and Exchange." Distribution, he insists, is not a mere question of exchange there are deeper causes (174, &c.). This is true, but in applying the old method he runs the old risk, the risk of positing as a historical fact what was only assumed as an abstract result of logical analysis and the first step in the subsequent logical synthesis. For we are asked to begin by supposing that land is free to all, and all the land equal in quality, and each man cultivating a unit quantity; then there will be dispersive extensive cultivation. Then as the productiveness of the land becomes less, the men will help each other, still dispersedly and independently (in extensive association); next they will help each other by devoting one half their unit to capital and the other half to labour (in intensive association); in the third place they will be driven to mixed association, one man devoting his unit to labour only, another to capital only, the division of product still remaining equal (ch. i, 1—4). Of all these stages, and the further in which the growth of population plays a decisive and revolutionary part, we must say that they do not, any of them, cease to be a priori by being arranged in a series, easily mistaken for a historical series. The first is less abstract than in the famous hypothesis, "Suppose yourself poised on a pivot in free space"; but it is still an abstraction. Professor Loria's sketch of the growth of modern capital and property out of the suppression of free land has been given in a former number of this Journal (March, 1894, pp. 77-78). It may be enough to say that the modifications here of the statements in the Analisi and in Les Bases économiques de la Constitution Sociale are inconsiderable.1 We are spared, however, the sensational extravagances of the earlier book in the ascription of all events sacred and profane to economical causes. The course of development is thus summed up: "If in that economical system, in which the product is assigned in its entirety to the labourer, capital and labour are so employed as to give the maximum product-if under bipartition between wages and profits capital gets the maximum profits with means which may make the product less than the maximum-given the tripartition between wages, profits, and rent, the land obtains [for its holder] the maximum rent with means which may make both product and profit less than the maximum" (95-96). It does not follow that wages are at the minimum; in fact the complete appropriation of the soil tends to raise wages, for thus greater production is secured. "The capitalists act like the Arab who gets his camel to start by first overloading him and then taking part of the load off; the creature feels the relief, rises, and moves on. So the capitalists, as long as there are lands to dispose of, load down the workers with the leaden hood of minimum wages, and, as soon as the lands are all gone and the hood is not absolutely necessary to them, lighten the burden a little and get better work" (123). This is true both in agriculture and in manufacture at the present day; wages are everywhere higher than the minimum (219-223); and Liebknecht, at the Socialist Congress at Halle in 1890, procured the omission of the "brazen law" from the official programme of the German Socialists (224). Unions may have raised wages a little, but could not of themselves have determined the upward movement (225). Neither under the "compulsory constitution" of slavery (226) nor under the "systematic constitution" of law and ordinance (235) was it so; but under the present "automatic constitution" of laissez faire, the compatibility of high wages with the persistence of "capitalism" is a characteristic feature (ibid.). But the high wages are counteracted by the over-valuation of the land. In modern times the fluctuations in rent lead to the frequent sale of land, which, to the horror and wonder of Conservatives in all 1 See, e.g., the present book, p. 191, note, 646 n. nations, has become a normal feature of present economic conditions (249, 253, &c.). 'Unconsciousness, imperceptibility, is the essential mark of all that is great and powerful in the world, of the force that raises up, as well as the force that strikes down; and the passing from hand to hand (circolazione) of property in land, this impalpable process which eludes general observation, is revealed to scientific investigation both as the destructive microbe of the present social system and as the fertilising germ of a new and fairer humanity" (264). The exclusive appropriation of land puts in motion the forces that tend to take away the land from the monopolisers and make it again accessible to the labourers, thus restoring to the latter their "option" and their liberty; for high wages should make it possible for the labourers to buy back their "unit of land" (265, 266, 276). But it becomes then a matter of life and death for "capitalism" to forbid the land to the labourers ; and this is done by various devices (e.g., 279, 280), but especially by the Over-valuation of Land (289). We had heard something of this in the Analisi (p. 274); but it is the chief subject of three-fourths of this new book (ch. iii, seq.). The phenomenon is familiar to us in this country. Land fetches, as a rule, a somewhat greater price than seems warranted by the actual profits the buyer can make out of it year by year, as compared with the profits of other investments (cf. 291). Professor Loria sees in this phenomenon a defensive action of Capital against Labour. To keep off the purchasing workman, "Capitalism" raises the price of land ever and again a little higher; the cup reaches the lips, but the draught is not drained. There is difficulty in seeing how far the action of the capitalists is conceived by the author as deliberate or as instinctive. In some places (e.g., 283 n., 595) it is described as instinctive. But the language of other passages implies what might be called a "quasi-consciousness" (411, 416, 421, 593). If the capitalists do not know what they are doing, and do not know how wicked they are, it seems strange to accuse them of duplicity. The French Government after the Revolution dealt treacherously, we are told, with the Church lands. "The revolutionary leaders, in the name of whom the new dictators had arisen, did not allow them to proclaim aloud the aristocratic meaning of their agrarian policy, and compelled them to resort to lying promises and shameful fictions" (422). This is surely more than an unconscious drifting towards an end not understood. Our comfort is that after all the end is not gained; agriculture and industry are brought to ruin in their present form (622, 623). "Although at their first beginning the capitalistic forms of industry, by substituting compulsory association for isolated production, represent a powerful factor of productive and social progress, afterwards under the implacable influence of their inherent antagonisms they come step by step to lose their primitive superiority over isolated. economy, till at last they become inferior thereto. Such inferiority, becoming more and more accentuated, results finally in destroying the flourishing system of compulsory association, to replace it, first with isolated economy, and then with a more efficacious form of associated production. An equally sad fate awaits the automatic economy of hired service, which by an organic deterioration is gradually dethroned from its primitive superiority over isolated production, and then becomes positively inferior to it, and is one day compelled to yield the sceptre of production to the isolated labourers, who, in their turn, will establish a definitive and fruitful form of associated labour" (639). It is not easy to gather what the new form will be; every existing form of co-partnership is weighed in the balances and found wanting (670, 675). To Professor Loria, the appropriation of the land is the cause of all the phenomena of what he and others call "Capitalism." To Marx the cause was the appropriation of the means of production, land included. We are in presence of two questions that social reformers have been asking and answering for themselves for the last twenty years in this country. The first is: If private property is the cause of our evils, can we rightfully limit its mischief to the case of land, or must we not attribute mischief to the private ownership of the other means of production also? The second is: Can we rightfully ascribe our evils to private property at all? In this country, at least, progress in the healing of evils seems more likely to be secured in manufacturing industry, where the strongest heads and wills are at work, than in agriculture. But in any case we decline to admit that we are blindly following a benevolent or malevolent instinct. Not only in technical invention, but even in the organisation of industry, deliberate will and conscious reasoning are of some avail. May not the contrary view have sunk into the mind of .the learned author from the political depression of his native country? If so, with the altered prospects which we all hope and expect for Italy, we may look for a brighter mood in its professors. J. BONAR The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour; the Origin and Development of the Theory of Labour's Claim to the Whole Product of Industry. By Dr. ANTON MENGER, Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of Vienna. Translated by M. E. TANNER, with an Introduction and Bibliography by H. S. FOXWELL, M.A., Professor of Economics at University College, London, &c. (London: Macmillan. 1899. Pp. 267, 8vo. Price 6s. net.) DR. MENGER'S book is an old friend and helper of such students of modern economic history as read the German language. In our times, when the circle of economic students seems on the whole to be widening, it is well that so good a book should be made accessible to all who can read English. It is a fragment of a larger work, which we may hope the author will one day complete, on the general subject of Socialism from the lawyer's point of view,-Socialism as modifying the present laws, espe cially of property. Socialism may no doubt modify the marriage laws, but the unanimity of Socialists of all groups is far more decided in regard to its effects on the laws of property, and it is with their views on property that Professor Menger is concerned in the book before us. Unable to deal at present with the whole problem, the Professor deals with a part of it, the assertion by Socialists of the workman's right: (1) to the whole product of his labour; (2) to existence and subsistence; (3) to employment. These three rights, especially the two former, had formed an important and it was alleged an original feature of the doctrines of Rodbertus and Marx, the leaders of German scientific Socialism. Dr. Menger has no difficulty in showing that, long before the Germans took them up, they had been taught by the English Anarchists and Socialists, Godwin, Hall, Thompson, and by the French Socialists and St. Simonians. He shows too that Marx, whose studies included the English writers no less than the French, was disingenuous in professing to make for himself what he really found ready to his hand. He gives a brief sketch of the later phases of Socialism in England, France, and Germany, and he concludes with two chapters of criticism. He is always trenchant, and he is sufficiently sympathetic to be a useful critic. The translation is well done. In places it might be said that the emphasis has been shifted or lost. Thus, to go no farther than page 6, the meaning of the last sentence but one is, probably, that the right to employment, although only a form of the right to subsistence, has become. of greater historical importance than the latter because it was more obviously a step to Socialism. So on page 7, "A commodity should belong only to the individual by whose labour it was produced," seems to give the sense less exactly than when the original is rendered more literally as follows:-" When an article is produced by the labour of one single person, then the article should belong to this single person alone,”—for the next sentence proceeds to speak of the joint work of several persons and the allocation of the product in that much more difficult case. On page 32 it seems better to talk of the "absurdity" than of the "bad taste" of Wolff's mathematical demonstrations. But, after all, translators may differ, as well as original authors. There is no doubt that the present translation deserves the high praise of being more compact than its original. Professor Foxwell has added greatly to the value of the book. He has prefixed a discourse, to which the only objection is that it bears with Dr. Menger's preliminary remarks the same name of " Introduction." It contains a more detailed account of the English Socialists than |