in the light of recently discovered economic principles. How may the modern theory that derives the value of labor from its product be reconciled with the older theory that derives the value of the product from labor? Can the recent demand for a "living wage as "the everlasting right of man" be interpreted and tested by economic principles? How does the plan of the sliding scale survive a similar test? What influence is most available for securing a living wage for women? Is the fall of prices a necessary and permanent fact? What possibilities of good lie in the socializing of consumption? What policy is practicable that shall abandon laisser faire, and yet stop short of socialism? Such are some of the questions that are discussed in this volume in a way that readers will find illuminating, whether they accept all of the conclusions or not.

Five of Dr. Smart's chapters are reprinted, with revision, from the Glasgow Herald, the Fortnightly Review, the POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, the Annals of the American Academy, and the International Journal of Ethics.

J. B. CLARK.

Die Entstehung des Deutschen Handelsgerichts. Nach archivalischen Quellen dargestellt. Von Dr. jur. et rer. polit. W. SILBERSCHMIDT, Königl. Amtsrichter. Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot, 1894. — 8vo., x, 181 pp.

Dr. Silberschmidt's theme was suggested to him by Professor Goldschmidt, the leading German authority on matters of commercial law; and to Professor Goldschmidt Dr. Silberschmidt dedicates his book. It constitutes a valuable supplement to Professor Goldschmidt's Geschichte des Handelsrechts. It is a model of minute historical research and of clear and compressed statement. The first thirty-two pages give a résumé of the development of special commercial courts in Italy, Spain, France, England, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and a sketch of the legal protection accorded to traders and the immunities granted to trade in Germany from the Carolingian times down to the period with which the investigation is chiefly concerned - the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The development of the German commercial court is studied primarily in nine representative German cities, all inland towns, the greatest space being given to Nuremburg. Then follows a brief examination. of the maritime courts of Hamburg, Lübeck and Danzig, and a study of the impulse given by the mercantilist movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the establishment of boards of trade, of

public banks, and of special jurisdictions exercised by merchants or bankers over commercial cases generally, or over disputes regarding commercial paper (Wechselgerichte). As the expediency of maintaining separate commercial courts, and the desirability of manning these courts, in part at least, with laymen, are at present matters of debate in Germany, the author briefly indicates the conclusions to which his studies have led him. He finds that the chief incentive to the establishment of separate commercial courts has always been a desire for rapid procedure and summary justice; that the idea that merchants are the best judges of matters commercial has played only a secondary part; that the prejudice against ordinary lawyers was never universal, since they were frequently associated with the merchants in the commercial courts, and that where such a prejudice has revealed itself it has been chiefly due to the fact that the lawyers have been held responsible for the law's delays. With a proper system of procedure in the ordinary courts he sees no reason for the existence of separate commercial courts.

The book (which is based in large measure on unpublished municipal documents) will be found quite as valuable to students of history and economics as to the lawyer. The close relation of separate commercial jurisdiction to the development of guilds merchant, and to the whole framework of mediaval city government, is everywhere emphasized, and much light is thrown upon these connected themes. The history of the commercial courts in Nuremburg and in Bozen (Austrian Tyrol), to which half of the book is devoted, is so full that it almost amounts to a history of the commercial life of these cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An appendix contains some interesting German and Italian documents. There is, unfortunately, no index.

MUNROE SMITH.

BOOK NOTES.

FOR over a century those interested in the life of Adam Smith have had to depend on the memoir by Dugald Stewart. Later biographers have made very few fresh contributions to the subject. It was a happy thought on the part of Mr. John Rae to utilize the many letters to and from Smith that have recently appeared in the biographies of others, and to consult the unpublished letters in the Hume and Carlyle correspondence, as well as other material, such as the records of the University of Glasgow. The result is that his Life of Adam Smith, now issued by Macmillan (1895) in a portly and sumptuous volume, fulfils all the hopes of the author's friends, and is destined without much doubt to be regarded henceforth as the authoritative work on the subject. Of especial interest to the student of economics is the chapter on the relations between Smith and the Physiocrats, in which all the little details of his stay in Paris are carefully collected, and in which the reciprocal influence of Smith and the French thinkers is pointed out. New, too, or at all events very much fuller than in any work hitherto published, are the accounts of Smith's views on the Irish and the American questions. The style and literary skill displayed in the volume are of a piece with its accuracy and thoroughness, and go to make up a work which no admirer of Adam Smith can afford to neglect.

Not so satisfactory is The Life and Writings of Turgot, "edited for English readers" by W. Walker Stephens (Longmans, 1895). The first half, about 150 pages, is devoted to the life; the remainder to a translation of some selected essays. As regards the life, it is difficult to see the need of it. English readers have for some years enjoyed the masterly sketch by Léon Say, which was reviewed in the POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, vol. iv, p. 176. Mr. Stephens excuses himself by saying that in Say's volume too much "prominence is given to economical questions." Yet on an attentive reading of his own pages it will be found that five-sixths are devoted to "economical questions," but unfortunately without the firm hand or the knowledge derived from economic training. There are slips and mistakes innumerable, which could not have been made by an economist. The work rests professedly on secondary authorities; Mr. Stephens himself tells us that his object is to condense into one volume, from the many volumes on the subject, simply the matters of

interest to the general reader. It is to the general reader, not to the economist, that the work is addressed. This may explain why, of the writings selected for translation, only three of the ten treat of economics. Turgot was indeed more than an economist; but that he was only three-tenths economist, as seems to be implied, is a manifest exaggeration. No one not himself familiar with economics should venture to deal with so eminent an economist.

La Politique de l'Allemagne, by Professor Émile Worms, is a continuation of his History of the German Zollverein, published in 1872. In this later volume he traces the development of the protective policy inaugurated by Prince Bismarck in the seventies. The book evinces careful study; but it loses much of its value for the American student through the absence of all references and footnotes. The original studies upon this modern period will be found in the publications of the Verein für Socialpolitik in 1892-93 (reviewed in the POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, vol. viii, p. 553). The present volume will, however, serve a useful purpose in bringing these results before the French public. For the American student it will be of interest merely as indicating the opinion of the French economists with respect to the curious development of the German policy in the last five years.

The American Commercial Policy, by Professor Ugo Rabbeno (Macmillan, 1895), is a translation and enlarged edition of the work already reviewed in these columns (POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, vol. ix, p. 159). This book is therefore praiseworthy in the same degree and open to the same criticism. It is conscientiously done, but it is far too long, especially on the colonial period; and there is too much insistence upon the assumed novelty of the method. The American student will not find it of especial use except in those excellent chapters in which the economic theories of the protective economists Hamilton, List, Carey and Patten are outlined. In the Italian the book served a useful purpose in making our history accessible to those not familiar with English; but the standard work of Professor Taussig and the monographs of other American scholars will still be the resource of the American student.

In a little book entitled Popular Control of the Liquor Traffic (The Friedenwald Co., Baltimore, 1895) Professor E. R. L. Gould has put into simple and eminently readable form the results of his researches into the Scandinavian company system. He was sent over by the United States Department of Labor to investigate the problem. "I went there," he says, "absolutely without prejudice of any sort;

I came away a convert to the system." The author contrasts the Scandinavian methods with those prevalent at home, and points with hopefulness to the movement already inaugurated in New England which looks to the adoption of the company system.

The report on Gain-Sharing, made by Mr. D. S. Schloss to the Labor Department of the Board of Trade (London, 1895), draws attention to certain systems of industrial remuneration which bear a superficial resemblance to "profit-sharing," but are really divergent from the latter. While in profit-sharing the employee receives by way of bonus, in addition to his wages, a share in the profits of the business, in gain-sharing he receives a bonus due to increased efficiency, measured by the reduction effected in the cost of production as compared with certain standard costs. Six schemes are described in detail, and some general observations are appended.

The first number of the Bulletin de l'Institut International de Statistique for 1895 consists of a monograph by Dr. Ernst Engel on Die Lebenskosten Belgischer Arbeiter-Familien, früher und jetzt. The veteran statistician returns to the subject which made his fame almost forty years ago. He then laid down the law that the smaller the income of a family, the larger the proportion necessarily spent for bare subsistence. He now proposes to review the whole series of efforts that have been made in Europe and America to determine the cost of living for the working classes. This monograph forms the first section of the work, and it will be invaluable to economists and statisticians, because it explains fully Engel's method (workmen's budgets) and contains a minute analysis of two attempts in Belgium (1853 and 1891) to attain the desired result. It is accompanied by

a reprint of Engel's original contribution, Die Productions- und Consumptions-Verhältnisse des Königreichs Sachsen (1857), long out of print. We shall return to the subject when the further sections of the work appear.

The International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy, held at Chicago in 1893, has succeeded (by private enterprise) in publishing the mass of interesting and valuable material submitted to it. The volumes on Charity Organization, Public Pauperism, Hospitals, The Insane and Criminal, are now supplemented by a fifth and final volume containing the report of Section II on "Care of Dependent, Neglected and Wayward Children," and of Section VII on "Sociology in Institutions of Learning." papers are rather miscellaneous, but many are suggestive and instructive. Those by Professors Warner, Wilson and Taylor show in a