customary effect of reducing the number of those dollars. It might almost be said that in America the worker is his own best customer. I am inclined to think that the demand for luxuries may have been carried too far, especially in view of the facilities afforded by purchase on installment. It may even be true that a large part of our people are living on next year's income. Certainly they are extending their ideas of saving far beyond the simple methods of a generation ago, and this influence is undoubtedly felt in the great stock market which has, on numberless occasions, been to so important an extent a barometer of business.

What is still more significant, as affecting our national life, is that in this widely extended public confidence in the country's financial centre the political influence of Wall Street, for good or evil, has steadily declined. I can remember a day when Wall Street maintained something suspiciously like a lobby in Washington. In the earlier stages of the railroad recovery which culminated in 1907 such a machine seemed, if not indispensable, at least serviceable. Of course politicians regarded such activities with dislike and distrust, and I am glad to think that I have always condemned them. It is true that at Albany in the nineties the introduction of strike legislation, aimed at public utility companies and the railroads, was a regular business, amounting virtually to thinly disguised blackmail. It was the inevitable reprisal for privileges which a certain kind of capital had sought and bought almost openly from the leaders of the great political machines. Practically no state was free from it and Wall Street was always on the defensive, the good suffering with the bad.

There is no Wall Street lobby at Albany, Harrisburg, Trenton, or Washington now. Wall Street asks to be let alone, and vindicates its right to be let alone by the fullest publicity for

everything in which it deals. The strength of the security market, the breadth of legitimate interest in it, may be largely ascribed to the confidence which has been established. Crooked finance, and there was plenty of it thirty years ago, in traction franchises and the like, is an easy mark for the crooked politician. He has no such opportunity where the fullest reports of the management of all corporations are forthcoming. It is true that regulatory legislation for the railroads has not always been well advised, or even sincerely directed to the consideration of all interests in the production of transportation. But it can no longer be said that the railroads have no friends, even if there are still plenty of politicians willing enough to impose impossible restrictions on earnings to conciliate the farmer vote.

I am convinced that this is a matter which is mending itself, and one of the greatest safeguards is the wide distribution of ownership. In cities and states where the gas, electric, traction, and other companies are locally owned the politician finds corporation-baiting poor politics.

There is a corollary to this investment by the small capitalist at high prices. It is that when stocks become widely distributed after a long advance, in the present instance extending over three and a half years, the market becomes vulnerable, not to say top-heavy. A great deal of the buying has been speculative, although if the brokers' loans are set against the total stock ownership of the country there is no alarming comparison. But no tree grows to the sky, and when deflation is forced in one part of the national business something has to be turned into cash to protect the position. People sell what they can secure a market for at some price, in order to protect commitments they cannot liq uidate at any price. The condition now is one which seems to call for more than ordinary caution.

Main Street and Wall Street, by W. Z. Ripley.

Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1927. Large 12mo. xiii+351 pp. $2.50. An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.

SEVENTEEN years ago Woodrow Wilson wrote an address on the theme that we have witnessed in modern business the submergence of the individual within the organization, and yet the increase, to an extraordinary degree, of the power of the individual who happens to control the organization. Now, Professor Ripley has written a book on the same subject, and has included the Wilson paper as its first chapter. When that paper was presented in 1910 it caught the momentary attention of a restricted group of earnest listeners, and then promptly became lost in the files of the printed proceedings of the meeting.

The Ripley book is certainly no better written than the Wilson paper, nor is its author more distinguished, nor is the theme more timely now than it was then, but the book will not soon drop out of sight or be forgotten. It is eminently readable. The author names names and gives dates. He vigorously denounces well-known corporations. His style ranges from lively to lurid, and from vivid to vicious.

Professor Ripley is a successful moral crusader, and he has all the keen insight into the mental processes of the normal man which that implies. There are probably at the present time some three million persons in this country who own corporate securities, and hence sometimes buy and sell them. Broadly speaking, no one of them ever bought or sold as advantageously as he might have done, and most of them have more than once felt aggrieved because of losses sustained or of failure to realize possible profits. Such disappointments are major or minor calamities, and where human agency is involved the causes of calamity are delusively obvious. Professor Ripley brings comfort by pointing out the culprits and vigorously scourging them with harsh adjectives, and a considerable number of the three million will buy his book to enjoy watching him do it.

Five major campaigns are waged in the volume. One is against nonvoting stock which may result in disfranchising the stockholders and vesting all real control in the hands of a few insiders. Another is against the issuance of non-par stock which may be the cause of misleading inferences as to the true value of the assets of the company. A rather less militant attack is made against the growth and financial structure of public utility holding companies. The fourth campaign is a mighty one directed against the charter-mongering practices of state

governments which grant progressively excessive power and privilege to corporations. Finally attack is made against the inadequate and sometimes misleading reporting to the public of the facts about the assets, operations, and profits of business concerns.

Much attention is given to suggested remedies, including pitiless publicity in corporation reporting, supervised perhaps by the Federal Trade Commission, the general stiffening of corporation laws through Federal action, and the creation of a system of checks and balances in corporate management by instituting new groups of outsiders to keep a continuing check on the administration of the insiders.

The suggested remedies will be much criticized, as such suggestions always are. In the very nature of the case, they constitute the most vulnerable features of this stimulating book. It is perhaps fair to make the comment that the constructive and remedial suggestions do not appear to have much relation to the long history of impressive improvement that has taken place in the management of corporations in America. This book is in reality only a new and different installment in the continuous stream of complaint against corporation management that has been going on in this country for more than a century. A hundred years ago corporations were under attack as being inherently vicious. At the time of the Civil War it was commonly believed that most corporations were frauds, and the business records of that time go far to substantiate the belief. As recently as thirty years ago responsible business periodicals were still printing editorials deploring the admission to trading on the stock exchange of the shares of industrial companies, because it was argued that such securities were merely snares to trap the unwary. Such conditions are no longer general. A great and continuous improvement in corporate responsibility and morality has taken place. One might wish that Professor Ripley had told us why it has taken place, and whether or not presently applicable lessons can be learned from studying the process.

LEONARD P. AYRES

The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1926. 12mo. viii+256 pp. $2.00.

IN writing this I am thinking not of confirmed fiction readers but of the great company of men like myself who are bored by current fiction, who find other people's love affairs uninteresting, and the shadowy characters of novels much