goods consumed in different classes and countries, as shown by recent statistics.

The last brief division, on the relation of production and consumption, is a discussion of the question of overproduction and crises. The conclusion is that though various measures suggested cannot be expected to do more than gradually to mitigate the evils, the radical remedy of socialism involves unbearable consequences, and "there is no good reason to break with the existing order of society." This conclusion is typical of the tone pervading the entire volume. Containing no new contribution to economic science or to social philosophy, and without any special novelty in the manner of presentation, the book nevertheless has value as representing the prevalent views on these subjects in German academic circles. The position taken on all questions is that of those professorial economists in Germany who reject the socialism of Marx, but concede a large and even increasing field to state activity. One approaching the book with this idea of its character will find its discussions judicial in tone and harmonious in the treatment of details. It may therefore be for many readers both interesting and helpful.

UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA.

FRANK FEtter.

The Problem of the Aged Poor. By GEOFFREY DRAGE. London, Adam and Charles Black; New York, Macmillan & Co., 1895. –xvii, 375 PP.

This volume is a blue book put into decent form and dress for the library. Early in January, 1893, an English royal commission was appointed to consider whether any alterations in the system of poor laws is desirable in the case of persons whose destitution is occasioned by incapacity for work resulting from old age. A report was made by this commission two years later, February 26, 1895, after an examination of about seventy witnesses, including poor-law officials, representatives of friendly societies, workingmen, and experts who had given special attention to the subject of relief, such as Rev. Canon Blackley, Miss Octavia Hill and Professor Marshall. This evidence, with the report, appeared in the usual bulky form of the English blue book, although the report itself is fairly well digested in a little over a hundred pages. Like most of the blue books dealing with social questions, the report does not put forth any novel or striking conclusions. It received the signatures of all the members, though nearly every one of them deemed it necessary to offer an explanatory

memorandum of his own particular point of view. An examination was made of the various schemes of pensions for the aged, but the commission was unable to recommend any of them, "in view of the financial and economic difficulties involved." The commissioners were, however, careful to state that they did not wish the report to be interpreted as a final statement of opinion, or to preclude the consideration of plans of a somewhat similar character if free from certain objections.

Mr. Drage has now taken the material thus collected by the commission, together with that gathered independently by Mr. Charles Booth and published in his work, The Aged Poor in England and Wales, and has endeavored to arrange it as far as possible according to a systematic scheme. He has also made an independent summary of the conclusions which might be drawn from the testimony before the commission. To this is added an account of the poor-law and old-age-pension systems of Germany and Denmark. The scheme of arrangement is an orderly one. It embraces the consideration of the extent of pauperism of the aged; its causes, moral and economic ; the present means of meeting it by the poor law, by charity and by thrift; Booth's inquiry; and various pension schemes. Mr. Drage's particular conclusions differ in only a few points from those of the commission. When he does not agree with the inductions made by the commissioners, it is difficult, without constant reference to the report, to discover where the real points of difference are. The form of the précis has been maintained so rigidly that it is almost impossible to discover the boundary lines between the views of Mr. Drage and those of the commission. In regard to state pensions, he appears to agree with the commissioners in their objections. He does not, however, appear to have carried his investigations later than 1892; while, as the experiment in such pensions is so recent, it is hardly desirable to express an opinion without an inclusion of the very latest data.

This volume offers a wealth of suggestion to all interested in practical administration of charity, whether official or private. It also shows that a blue book can be worked over into a convenient form.

A propos of this latter point, Mr. Drage might well have gone further with topical headings. Nor should he so studiously avoid paragraph headings, or so frequently allow paragraphs to run on their even tenor for four or five pages without a break. It is to be hoped, however, that he will continue his good offices, and give us further popular editions of now buried official documents. DAVIS R. DEWEY.

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.

Hull House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, together with Comments and Essays on Problems growing out of the Social Conditions. By Residents of Hull House, a Social Settlement. New York and Boston, T. Y. Crowell & Co., 1895.- viii, 230 pp.

Miss Addams's prefatory note tells us that these maps and papers are offered to the public, "not as exhaustive treatises, but as recorded observations which may possibly be of value because they are immediate and the result of long acquaintance." The papers are: "Map Notes and Comments," by Agnes S. Holbrook; "The Sweating System," by Florence Kelley; "Wage-Earning Children," by Florence Kelley and Alzina P. Stevens; "Receipts and Expenditures of Cloakmakers in Chicago compared with those of that trade in New York," by Isabel Eaton; "The Chicago Ghetto," by Charles Zeublin; "The Bohemian People in Chicago," by Josefa Humpal Zeman; "Remarks upon the Italian Colony in Chicago," by Alessandro Mastro-Valerio; "The Cook County Charities," by Julia C. Lathrop ; "Art and Labor," by Ellen G. Starr; and "The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement," by Jane Addams. There is also an illustrated appendix, which gives a brief description of the settlement itself and mentions its principal activities.

This appendix and the last essay will do much to explain to the uninitiated the meaning of the social-settlement idea, as it has found expression in and through the personality of a woman of rare executive ability, and of a sympathy so true and wide that it enables her to be just to the prosperous and well-to-do classes at the same time that she is working with and for the unprosperous. I cannot agree with all that Miss Addams implies with reference to trades-unionism (see p. 188,- Is the trades-union at bottom more altruistic than the trust?), but her statement of the attitude of the settlement toward it seems to me excellent. Of the work of the settlement in general, she tells us that it

is pledged to insist upon the unity of life, to gather to itself the sense of righteousness to be found in the neighborhood and, as far as possible, in its city; to work toward the betterment not of one kind of people or class of people, but for the common good. The settlement believes that just as men deprived of comradeship by circumstances or law go back to the brutality from which they came, so any class or set of men deprived of the companionship of the whole become correspondingly decivilized and crippled. No part of society can afford to get along without the others.

So much for the settlement, the existence of which has made possible the book under review. The immediate purpose of this book is to elaborate, by means of colored maps and auxiliary comments and essays, the national labor bureau's Slum Investigation, which in Chicago was entrusted to Mrs. Kelley as special agent. The plan followed is in general that of Mr. Charles Booth in his London studies. As a faithful picture of what is, and of what unquestionably is evil, this work should certainly help students of social science, statesmen and economists to find the way to something better. One thing seems to have impressed very deeply both Mrs. Kelley and Prof. Zeublin (see pp. 41 and 111), to wit, that

the condition of the sweater's victim is a conclusive refutation of the ubiquitous argument that poverty is the result of crime, vice, intemperance, sloth and unthrift; for the Jewish sweater's victims are probably more temperate, hard-working and avaricious than any equally large body of wage-earners in America.

Prof. Zeublin's study of the Chicago Ghetto deserves high praise for its eminently judicial, yet unfailingly sympathetic tone; and also for a comprehensiveness that is especially remarkable in view of its brevity. This gentile's study of the Jews is the best study of a particular people in the book. Madam Humpal Zeman's essay on her people is a shade too apologetic, and the same thing may be said of the article about the Italians. The latter, however, contains a suggestion which, although not new, is too valuable to be passed over in silence - the suggestion that our Italian immigrants should be colonized in regions where they could engage in the work of farming, fruit and vine growing and stock-breeding, for which they are so well fitted. Signor Mastro-Valerio has himself done something in this direction for his countrymen, but he has exhausted his private resources in so doing. Turning to Miss Lathrop's essay, we find plainly portrayed, but without a shadow of sensationalism, the grave evils of the spoils system in the administration of public charities. Miss Starr speaks eloquently of the relation of art to freedom. Miss Eaton's paper is a supplement to Mrs. Kelley's exposition of the sweating system.

The paper on "Wage-Earning Children," by the inspector and the assistant inspector of factories in Illinois, is the most radical in utterance of any in the book, and when read in connection with the inspector's paper on the sweating system makes a terrible picture of the evils of child-labor. In view of these evils to the health

and happiness of the child and its future earning capacity; to the economic status of the adults who are compelled to compete with these children; and to the community itself, which must support the broken-down victims of premature labor and perhaps also their illnourished progeny, and must also, if its government be democratic, face the dangers of an uneducated, discontented and inflammable body of citizens-in view of these evils it would seem that the remedy proposed by Mrs. Kelley and her associate is entitled to respectful consideration, although to very many readers it will seem to savor far too much of paternalism. They say:

The legislation needed is of the simplest but most comprehensive description. We need to have: (1) The minimum age for work fixed at sixteen ; (2) School attendance made compulsory to the same age; (3) Factory inspectors and truant officers, both men and women, equipped with adequate salaries and traveling expenses, charged with the duty of removing children from mill and workshop, mine and store, and placing them at school; (4) Ample provision for school accommodations; money supplied by the state through the school authorities for the support of such orphans, half-orphans and children of the unemployed as are now kept out of school by destitution. They ask if such provision would not

be vastly cheaper in the end than the care of the consumptive young grinders? or than the provision which will be inevitably required for the support of the cripples turned out by the stamping works? or than the maintenance of the families of those who will be superannuated at thirty-five because they are now allowed to do in the clothing shops the work of men, in the years when they ought to be laying up a store of energy to last a normal lifetime?

This is a hard question; and it is in raising such questions as this, which the facts brought to light make very practical and urgent, that the value of these essays lies. FREDERIC W. SANDERS.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

Zur Frage der Arbeitslosen-Versicherung.

By Dr. GEORGE

SCHANZ. Bamberg, C. C. Buchner, 1895.x, 384 pp.

Dr. Schanz, editor of the Finanz-Archiv and author of numerous monographs on industrial and commercial history, among which is Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende des Mittelalters, has recently made a thorough-going inquiry in regard to the conditions of non-employment. Of late years insurance has been turned to in Germany as a remedy for many of the evils affecting the