Mr. Edward W. Townsend has more than indicated the corruptions of the municipal government of New York City, while his story mainly depends upon the transformation of a shopgirl into an aristocrat through the medium of great good sense and adaptability on her part, coupled with the inheritance of enormous wealth. In "The Autocrats" Mr. Charles K. Lush has drawn the picture of a political campaign in which selfish capital is seeking to obtain a franchise for street railways wholly at odds with the interests of the people. In "The Kidnaped Millionaires," Mr. Frederick Upham Adams has contrived to run away with the six richest men in America for stock-jobbing purposes, and, having sequestered them near the Gulf of Mexico for a time, compels them to listen to lectures on the evils of existing cilivization. All these books exhibit a growing tendency on the part of newspaper men to set before the public in book form the abuses with which their journalistic duties have acquainted them. In most cases the exigencies of modern daily papers do not permit the publication of facts reflecting so severely on American life, and this is the only form in which the citizen anxious for information of the sort can obtain it. It is significant that more novels of the sort are announced for speedy publication, indicating the rise of a distinct journalistic school in contemporaneous American fiction.

Also the work of a journalist, but a study of manners and morals in our social life, is Mr. Will Payne's "The Story of Eva." The scene is laid in Chicago, and the narrative is concerned with the life of a country girl who contrives to make her way in the world in spite of much discouragement, preserving her womanliness through marital experiences which are in the nature of moral ordeals. Mr. Payne has made a useful distinction between real and technical virtue, and his book shows unusual art from which even greater things are to be predicted. An international novel has been

written by Mr. Hamlin Garland, with the title, "Her Mountain Lover." The western miner, his hero, spends a few weeks in London to his profound dissatisfaction, though he accomplishes all that he set out to do. The book is only partially true to life, and hardly up to the standard of Mr. Garland's other writings.

Short stories have gone sadly out of fashion throughout the English-speaking world, and Mrs. Edith Wharton's "Crucial Instances" will serve as a solitary example of that useful and interesting literary form. Though an American both in her birth and her art, the stories are for the most part drawn from Italian life, the rest dealing with that artistic and intellectual society which is common to both England and America, and, therefore, without pronounced local flavor. But they are uniformly graceful and of high literary merit.

England has suffered quite as much as the United States in the matter of novels. Mme. Sarah Grand has drawn another preposterous female child in "Babs the Impossible," a story of incident rather than a novel, with one or two characters likely to stick in the memory, a "new woman" and a self-made Englishman among them. Of a better sort is "The Column" of Mr. Charles Marriott, a novel remarkable in coming from a hand hitherto unknown, not only for what it tells, but for what it suggests. It has a man of poetic feeling for its author, and is graceful and beautiful in conception and style. Almost repulsive is Mrs. E. L. Voynich's "Jack Raymond," a study in sexual psychopathy, wherein an English clergyman gives play to the basest of passions, his boy ward suffering the consequences. The book is one of unrelieved gloom, and in that field, hardly one to be consecrated by art, Mrs. Voynich reigns without a living equal. A rattling good historical romance has been written by Mr. Frederic W. Hayes as a sequel to "A Kent Squire," with the title of "Gwynett of Thornhaugh." It is a tale of the regency,

laid in France for the most part, and of sterling interest and merit. In this connection must be mentioned Mr. Basil Marnan's "A Daughter of the Veldt," a South African romance in which British and burghers play leading parts, but wholly without reference to the existing war; and "The Wisdom of Esau," by Messrs. C. H. Chumley and R. H. Outhwaite, an Australian bush story of considerable worth.

One Irish novel, of the Neo-Celtic school already noted in the discussion of poetry, is the Rev. Dr. (Father) Barry's "The Wizard Knot." The high distinction of style and treatment manifest in all Dr. Barry's works is in full evidence here, while in reproducing the glamor and mystery of his native land he introduces a new note. This book, like all the others from this skillful pen, deserves to be better known.

Among the translated works to be welcomed into English are Herr Peter Rosegger's "The Forest Schoolmaster," giving a first introduction to one of the most popular authors of Austria; Dr. Maurice Jokai's "Manasseh," a story of the '48 in Hungary among the Unitarians there; Miss Selma Lagerloef's "From a Swedish Homestead," containing a number of saga tales, some after the manner of her "Gosta Berling" and some drawn from the transition period between heathendom and Christianity in the far North; and M. Emile Zola's "Labor," a powerful bit of realism in the earlier chapters dealing with ironworkers, and, later, giving a lovely picture of the redemption of the world through the application of the principles of Fourierism. It is too emphatically "the novel with a purpose" to be considered as art, and is in some respects the least meritorious of all M. Zola's recent works. (See Page 150.)

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY.-This has been a period of unusual quiet so far as works of real scientific importance are concerned, pointing to a time of investigation and seeding rather than of fructification. The most important works have been those discussing questions of polit

JOHN B. CLARK.

J. W. JENKS.

ical economy, political science and the science of government, and first among these may be enumerated Mr. John A. Hobson's "The Economics of Distribution." This clearly conceived and logically presented treatise occupies much the same ground as the first volume of Professor John Bates Clark's "The Economics of Distribution." But Mr. Hobson deals with dynamic and Professor Clark with static conditions in society, and their comparatively unimportant differences lie in this variant point of view. Both start with the price of commodities, the English writer with market prices and the American with normal price. Mr. Hobson therefore reaches the conclusion that competition does not settle the compensation of the vendor, but only the limits above and below which neither party to the transaction may go, leaving the element of forced gain to the shrewdest bargainer. This last is eliminated from Professor Clark's consideration, but differential gain, shared in by all, remains common to both inquirers. Mr. Hobson applies his method of reasoning to rent as well, denying a margin of employment to land as to capital and labor. By another process Professor Clark reaches a similar conclusion. Both works are of importance and likely to hold a permanent place in the economic library.

One of the crying questions of the day is discussed by Professor Jeremiah Whipple Jenks in "The Trust Problem" and by Mr. William Miller Collier in "The Trusts." Here, too, practical agreement will be found. Competition violent enough to result in wastefulness is advanced as the prime factor in the formation of trusts, reinforced by special privileges in the form of tariffs, patents and railway discriminations. Mr. Collier believes, however, that with the revocation of these privileges such consolidations of interests would disappear, though he does not go to the extent of conBoth sidering land monopoly with the rest. look with favor upon publicity as a cure for abuses, and both regard the trust as a perma

nent form of economic activity. Professor Jenks, after the careful study given the subject when preparing his report to the United States Industrial Commission, concludes that, though prices may have fallen in trust-made wares since the establishment of such consolidations, they are still higher than they would have been under less restricted competition. It is to the investor in trust stocks, rather than to the consumer, that both Mr. Collier and Professor Jenks believe the greatest harm will

come.

A careful monograph has been prepared by Professor Edward D. Jones on "Economic Crises," the first attempt at a systematic treatment of the subject in English. Abuse of credit is one of the prime moving causes of such periodic misfortunes, speculation and unreasoning optimism regarding the economic situation making to that end. Professor Jones finds a remedy in increased intelligence to be gained by commercial education, and in a subordination

E. D. JONES.

of economic to other and higher interests. But he finds no permanent cure except through the slow process of evolution.

Professor William Graham has made a valuable contribution to an important topic in his "English Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Maine." It is almost elementary in its plan, and of possible popular interest. Not so well considered is Mr. John M. Robertson's "An Introduction to English Politics," a book going back to Greece and Rome for its origins and controversial throughout. It is informing in a certain degree and certain of provoking thought. The second volume of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace's "Studies Scientific and Social" is cerned with similar matters, the concluding essays setting forth that eminent scientist's remedies for existing evils.

con

Another book by Mr. John A. Hobson, "The Social Problem," is an inquiry into remedial agents, and he takes a middle course between individualism and unrestrained competition and the state socialism of Marx. Monopolistic in

dustries he would turn over to collective ownership, in order to secure the unearned income now in private hands for proper diffusion, the safeguard against growing centralization of power to be found in the individual industries which would spring into being at the demand of widely diffused and steadily increasing wealth. The increase in the birth rate likely to follow and result in overpopulation would then become a subject for restrictive legislation. This book should be in the hands of every thoughtful man, and particularly in the hands of the class which the Hon. Wayne MacVeagh had occasion to warn at the last Harvard Commencement. Reading along similar lines can be found in Mr. John Coleman Kenworthy's "The Anatomy' of Misery," and Dr. Havelock Ellis' "The Nineteenth Century: An Utopian Retrospect."

A most important work for parents and educators is "The Child, A Study in the Evolution of Man," by Mr. Alexander Francis Chamberlain, M. A., the distinguished, anthropologist. Encyclopædic in its content, it presents in organized form all the recent thought respecting the human being of tender age. It is too full of substance to permit brief treatment, but it is indispensable to the thoughtful and those seeking information. Covering a part of the same ground in Dr. Karl Groos' "The Play of Man," a sequel to his informing work on "The Play of Animals."

"Fact and Fable in Psychology" is a timely presentation of the claims of true science in such matters as "Christian science," the conclusions of the Society for Psychical Research, and other similar popular movements. It is by Professor Joseph Jastrow, and is to be studied with profit by all able to conceive the meaning of Huxley's "organized common sense" as a definition of the aims of scientific investigators to-day.

The translation of Professor Michael Bréal's "Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning" leads to the conclusion that the philologer and etymologist has not yet reached the posi tion asserted by the author as existing. and that the time is not ripe, if it ever become so, for such a treatise.

An interesting and important work on natural history is Mr. F. A. Beddard's "The Book of Whales," the first attempt to bring the entire order of the Cetacea into comprehensible compass.

In this connection may be mentioned Mr. Russell Sturgis' "Dictionary of Architecture," of which two of the three volumes have been published, and the "Cyclopædia of American Horticulture," now in its third volume out of the five promised.

CONTEMPORANEOUS

HISTORY.-Other books dealing with China are rather historical than merely descriptive, and of these by far the most important, as it is the most important work of contemporaneous history of any sort, is Mr. Arthur Henry Savage Landor's "China and the Allies." This valuable contribution to an understanding of the events of our own day is in two heavy volumes, embellished with numerous reproduced photographs and original drawings by the author. It gives, in the first volume, a detailed account of the march from the Taku Forts to Peking, including the capture and sack

of Tientsin; and, in the second, a day-by-day history of the sufferings of the beleaguered legations in the Chinese capital. Mr. Landor was with the advancing column of Europeans, Americans, and Japanese, and draws his picture of the advance upon and capture of Peking from his own experiences. For the rest he is obliged to rely upon the statements of others, but he appears to have neglected no possible source of information and correction, and his entire history carries an authenticity which is most unusual. At no time during the march was Mr. Landor far from the front, and in many cases he was actually on the firing line, unarmed except with his indefatigable camera and interested to a degree in the effect which the crash and boom of the cannon had upon his photographic plates. Numerous photographs of the dead and wounded on the battlefields which marked the progress of the allies into the interior of the country attest, the grim horrors of war, and bring them home to the reader in a manner quite unprecedented in books of the kind. Mr. Landor bears witness to the looting of the allies and holds none of them blameless, though the Japanese were all under better discipline in this regard than any of the companion nations. Here his testimony is the more valuable because he believes the plundering along the line of march and, more particularly, in Tientsin, to be fully justified by the usages of war in general and the exigencies of this particular case. Being the first Englishspeaking person to set foot in the Forbidden City which constituted the precincts sacred to royalty in Peking, he is able to give a vivid and picturesque account of the formal entries of the allied armies upon that once mysterious enclosure. His book also contains an account of a journey through China ten years before, and with this a history of the Ming dynasty. Mr. Landor's work is marred by the prejudices with which several of the actors in the great drama are viewed, but the very transparency of his likes and dislikes affords its own corrective. Among the Europeans who thus fall under the ban of his displeasure are the American general, Chaffee, and the British minister, Sir Claude Macdonald; while the Chinese Buddhist priests, called "Lamas" by him, are held accountable for the native uprising and all its terrible details. This appears to be a carrying over of the hatred born of Mr. Landor's sufferings in Thibet, as recounted in his former work, "In a Forbidden Land." Taken as a whole, with all the imperfections noted, and with the innumerable minor inaccuracies which characterize all human work, "China and the Allies" is a most valuable contribution to contemporaneous history and one which all future historians will have to reckon with.

By way of preparation for the whole oriental subject, an excellent translation of M. Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu's book, published in English under the title of "The Awakening of the East," will repay careful study. It discusses China, Siberia and Japan after an extended journey through those lands, and draws a comparison between the civilizations of China and Japan, displaying unusual insight. Japan, the author says, has a profound national life of her own. Before the introduction of western ideas the civilization of the country had been derived

from China. To lay this off and take on a European civilization was hardly to touch the real life of the nation at all, and the spirit of the Japanese people stands the same under one as the other. But in China's case the civilization is in no way derivative, but is itself the national life of the people and one in which their very existence is bound up. Buddhism is only accepted after profound modifications, and the inference is that Christianity can only make itself acceptable by making a similar compromise. Further, Japan took on her European veneer at her own instance and without the slightest external pressure. China is surrounded by a multitude of advisers, not one of whom seems to have the good of the Chinese nation primarily at heart. M. Leroy-Beaulieu displays more than ordinary disinterestedness in praising the United States, Great Britain, and Japan as the only nations which really wish an "open door" policy in China.

Though a book of travel in which the author expressly disclaims any intention of discussing political questions, Mr. Clive Bigham's "A Year in China, 1899-1900" is the work of an experienced diplomatist and sheds some light on the situation during his residence in Peking and his extended tour through the country of which it is the capital. Mr. Bigham bears witness that the "Boxer" outbreak was a national uprising against European aggression, and warns the white race that their own standards and ideas are not those of the Chinaman, who has a system of his own, a thorough understanding of which is essential to further intelligent action.

Americans view the Chinese with more dispassion than any of the nations of Europe, if certain missionaries of the incendiary sort be excepted, and the most informing book yet written is from the pen of Mr. Chester Holcombe, an American who has lived for thirty years in China, half of that time in official connection with the American Legation at Peking. This prolonged acquaintance with the yellow race has left Mr. Holcombe an admirer of the Chinese character. In his "The Real Chinese Question" he endorses the views of Sir Robert Hart to the full, holding that the first consideration is to preserve the integrity of the Chinese autonomy. But he sees the urgent necessity for certain reforms, and these are set forth with a plainness and practicality which leave little to be desired. They are noteworthy, also, in not requiring the Chinaman to be made over on Caucasian models as a preliminary. First of all, Mr. Holcombe would have an imperial system of weights and measures adopted and enforced by the Chinese themselves. This is not an easy task, but the Latin Union of southern Europe has proved its feasibility. This done, it will become possible to pay Chinese officials a salary sufficient to live on which shall be uniform throughout the empire, and to inhibit all the various forms of extortion which are now practised upon the people from dire necessity no less than greed. Finally, Mr. Holcombe's long experience has taught him that the use of opium destroys a man's sense of morality and he would therefore refuse official position of any sort to the user of this vicious drug. Mr. Holcombe's book is also valuable in detailing a number of the

infamies which Christian governments have inflicted upon China.

Of another sort, but still based on intimate and extended knowledge of the concrete Chinaman, is the work of the Rev. Ira A. Condit, D. D., "The Chinaman as We See Him." Dr. Condit has been working among the Chinese of San Francisco for a generation, and he is able to bear witness to the moral degradation which follows the opium habit from his own experience among the immigrants. For this he holds Great Britain responsible through the Opium War, and his contention is given point by bringing forward the little known fact that British importations of opium into China to-day yield the Indian Government an annual income of forty million dollars. Dr. Condit takes pains to demonstrate the common humanity of these yellow brethren of ours, and in setting forth their faults does not hesitate to set beside them faults no less apparent which have been committed by the American citizen and his Government. No book could be more informing within its limits than this.

Deserving mention in this connection is a reprint of "The Attaché at Peking," written and published almost thirty-five years ago, and containing a luminous preface newly written in which recent events are reviewed in the light of older knowledge. It is quite evident that Christiandom has learned nothing in the interval between the editions of this book, and that the Chinese problem has still to be dealt with from the point of view of enlightened statesmanship.

Another book from American hands from which information concerning the Chinaman before contamination by Western civilization may be had is Mr. William Barclay's Parson's "An American Engineer in China." The author made a survey for a railway from Hankow to Canton, nine hundred miles long, four hundred miles of which were through the closed province of Hu-nan, where white men are practically unknown. Mr. Parsons observes that the United States have the confidence of the Chinese to an extent denied the nations of Europe because of our supposed freedom from land hunger.

Numerous and extensive as the books dealing with the Chinese question have been during the first six months of the current year, those on the situation in South Africa are still more numerous and extensive. Most of them are from British hands and devoted to bolstering up the British cause, and in this work a number of American war correspondents attached to the British armies in the field have also been engaged. What little has been written from the standpoint of the burghers is from American hands, however, but there is still room for a history of the war and the events leading up to it which shall be wholly dispassionate.

The most ambitious of all the books dealing with the subject is "The Times History of the War in South Africa, 1899-1901." issued by the London Times, under the editorship of Mr. L. S. Amery. This is to be in five large octavo volumes, of which the last four are devoted to an account of the actual fighting, the first taking up the story with the confirmation of England's title to the Cape in 1815 and coming

down to the beginning of hostilities in October, 1890. As might have been expected in a work published under the auspices of the chief organ of the Conservative party, the treatment throughout proceeds on the theory that "the essential right and justice of the controversy have been" with Great Britain, as the editor frankly proclaims in his Introductory. In holding as he does that sympathy with the Boers can only proceed from ignorance, Mr. Amery makes it impossible to present the side of his opponents with either justice or candor, and his prejudice is made the more evident by the list of the authorities he has called in to assist him in his work. Without exception, these, when given, are men known in America to have been chiefly concerned with the provocation of the war and, consequently, those most interested in withholding information which might reflect upon themselves. The work by no means sustains the former reputation of the London Times for dispassion or anxiety to give the facts.

That an impartial history will have to await an American hand receives fresh confirmation from Dr. A. Conan Doyle's "The Great Boer War." With the best intentions in the world, Dr. Doyle finds himself everywhere coloring his statements with national prepossessions, and he himself uses the phrase which describes his large book as being "compiled with as much accuracy as is attainable at this date." The very title of the work is proof of these things, for the adjective "great" was never used with less precision than in describing such a conflict as this has been and still is. That the author intends to be fair is as unquestionable as its impossibility, and the book has the advantage of being written by one who has been on the ground.

The difficulties under which all Britons labor is shown by the accusations of treason brought against Mr. A. G. Hales, an Australian journalist attached to the Australian contingent under General Methuen, for the strictures made upon certain abuses on the part of the British. These are set forth in his book, "Campaign Pictures," made the more valuable because it embodies the experiences of the writer between the battle of Rensburg, when he was taken prisoner by the Boers, and the battle of Thaba Nehu, soon after which he was returned to his own lines as a non-combatant. Mr. Hales bears willing testimony to the humanity and disinterestedness of his captors, and his book is the most impartial of any written by a British subject.

Similar accusations were also brought against Mr. W. L. Ashmead Bartlett-Burdett-Coutts. M. P., for his inquiry into the condition of the Army Medical system during the war, embodied in his book, "The Sick and Wounded in South Africa." Red tape and officialism were to blame for great human distress and heavy loss of life. The book would be valuable to the observant if there were any anxiety on the part of officials anywhere to profit by the mistakes of others.

Several violently partisan works have been written by Americans or addressed to them. like Mr. Julian Ralph's "An American with Lord Roberts,” and Captain George Clarke Musgrave's "In South Africa with Buller," both