interest with which he invests his volume. And, while his book was written primarily for his own countrymen, it has not suffered in translation, which is high praise, and ought to obtain a wide reading in this country.

Hardly a year has passed of late without the appearance of a new economic systematizer. This year it is Professor Seligman who figures in this rôle. It was not necessary for him to publish this volume1 to substantiate his title to be considered the most erudite of American economists. There are others more original, more sharp-sighted, and better equipped with intimate expert knowledge of particular provinces. There is probably no other comparable to our author in the range of his reading and in bibliographical lore. But erudition has its perils, no less than its advantages, and the volume under discussion will abundantly attest this. The generic adverse criticism to be passed on the book is that the author has not succeeded in dominating the almost perplexing variety and richness of the material on which he has drawn. In an introductory text it is preeminently necessary to subordinate the details to an organizing central conception. Here this volume is defective. For the beginner in economics downright error is less dangerous in the long run than a weltering distraction of ideas. It is a cruel paradox that the inexpert reader, with this treatise in hand, runs the aforesaid risk because of the author's very wealth of information.

The significance of this volume lies mainly in its indicating the trend of thinking in the matter of distribution. The older traditional theory insisted on the intrinsic difference between land and other productive material agents. Land was a gift of God, capital the product of labor. Capital could be increased, land could not. Land must be measured by

1 Principles of Economics, with special reference to American conditions. By EDWIN R. A. SELIGMAN. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. 1905.

area, capital by dollars. Land rent was a lump sum, the hire of capital was always a percentage. Rent did not enter into price, interest did. price, interest did. Between them was an impassable gulf fixed. It was in large part against this central conception that Professor Fetter a few years since flung his shining spear, and the old school today are visibly on the defensive. Professor Seligman all but renounces them. Analyzing the three essential theses of the time-honored doctrine of rent, he remarks: "So far as these statements are true, they are not peculiar to land rent." But, either weighed down by the traditional view, or essaying an ill-judged attempt at mediation, he wavers, and holds that "because of the social significance of such relative changes (namely, alleged differences in changes of land values and the values of other things), it is legitimate to put land into a separate category."

Thoroughly to canvass the author's attitude toward even the more important theoretical questions is here impossible. But too often he seeks to synthesize the irreconcilable. Thus he tells us that in one sense capital involves the roundabout method of production; in another sense capital synchronizes labor and consumption. The older individualistic doctrine of marginal utility is introduced, and then fused into the newer, the more mysterious doctrine of "social marginal utility.” The book is eminently unfinal. Its premature synthesis is not going to issue in agreement, but in disruption. Instead of allaying strife among economists, it is going to breed misunderstandings. It is certain to be a mine of endless casuistry, an inexhaustible source of economic litigation. A singular fancy possesses me when I try to symbolize the contents of this volume and its probable effects. I picture it an inviting pâté de foie gras en Bellevue. Through the quivering transparency of the gelatinous aspic envelope I can see no end of toothsome morsels, chicken-livers, mostly from Professor Fetter's "novel and suggestive" incuba

tor, sweetbreads that hail from Chicago, Austrian truffles, Marxian mushrooms, and nameless tidbits that savor of "pure capital," the whole garnished with a gay bibliographical bouquet. But this mélange is held together by the most tenuous and fragile of films, and only the most intrepid of gormandizers may attempt to digest and assimilate its varied contents.

American economists have of late become accustomed to an annual treatise on money. Kinley, Scott, Laughlin, and Aldrich have each produced within the last five years a notable contribution to the field of monetary science. Mr. Charles A. Conant is the last to "take up the wondrous tale," in two substantial volumes of almost four hundred and fifty pages each. To his task Mr. Conant brings some very unusual qualifications. He has had practical experience as a banker. He has labored at the arduous task of monetary reform at home and abroad. He has read widely and discriminatingly in the history of the subject. He has not taken the ill-considered position that financial experience renders the abstract study of money and banking superfluous. He has struggled with the terminology of the academic economists, and has even caught the infection of the phrase, "marginal utility." It would be strange if, with all this in his favor, he had not produced a work which supplements certain lacunae in our knowledge of the subject. In particular, his account of the adoption of the gold standard in southern and Oriental countries is of importance, because Mr. Conant himself, in the case of currency reform in Mexico and the Philippines, may properly boast quorum pars magna fui. Moreover, his views on the technique of banking, and in particular on note issue, carry unusual weight, coming, as they do, from one who knows the business both on paper and in practice. It is small disparagement to add

1 The Principles of Money and Banking. Two vols. By CHARLES A. CONANT. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1905.

that Mr. Conant lacks a fine sense of verbal felicities, and alternately adopts and condemns the same phraseology. Thus he quotes Jevons with approval as to the abhorrent usage which leads careless thinkers "to speak of such a nonentity as intrinsic value," and yet Mr. Conant himself uses the very phrase in his formal definition of money. Sometimes this carelessness verges on something worse than contradictory usage, and approaches contradiction in terms. The "vital factor in the choice of the metals as the material for money" is "that they represent an article the demand for which is insatiable." The phrase, obiter, reminds one of "Coin" Harvey's "infinite demand" for silver. But if the demand for the precious metals is "insatiable," discussion as to whether there is any danger of an excessive supply of gold would seem, to put it mildly, superfluous. So far as Mr. Conant's discussion of the so-called quantity theory of money is important, it is simply because it discloses the moderate view of a practical, well-read, judiciallyminded, and experienced banker. If Mr. Conant's citations were not so apt, he might be justly accused of loading down his book with a potpourri of authorities. Certainly not less than two hundred pages are wholesale transfers from works on money; but he has so fortified his own discussion with appropriate quotations, whose origin is always indicated, that in some respects his work gains by thus becoming a ready source-book of information. Mr. Conant has read so widely in this field that it is surprising to find, neither in the text nor in the extensive bibliography, any mention of that most important piece of work in the monetary field, Fisher's Appreciation and Interest. It seems not at all unlikely that we may soon perforce be compelled again to canvass the currency problem. The seemingly persistent disorder in the loan market can be explained only on the theory that the banks are not curbing wild speculation as they ought in their rôle of trustees for the commercial community, or

else on the hypothesis that our system of note issue requires to be made more elastic. It is well that we have in Mr. Conant's work, especially in the second volume, so admirable a guide. The business world, so distrustful of the theorist, will absorb sound theory from a banker like Mr. Conant, sans le savoir.

A review of last year's literature of social philosophy would be incomplete without mention of two works on sociology, Professor Blackmar's Elements of Sociology, and Professor Small's General Sociology. It is difficult for students of the special social sciences to be quite just to the sociologist. The point of view of the economist, the historian, and the student of politics is perceptibly different from what it would have been, had the study of sociology never attained something of its present vogue. On fair consideration there is much to be said in justification of one of Professor Small's chance utterances, that "Sociology. . . must remain more a determining point of view than a finished body of knowledge." The very existence of this somewhat inchoate science has at least served as a useful reminder to other workers in the more delimited social provinces that their task is in some respects a provincial one, that they must not mistake their conclusions for the whole truth, that there are other considerations to be reckoned with besides those which they assess in their own bailiwick, and that human society is an infinitely complex thing, and not fully to be appreciated from a single standpoint. In short, we are indebted to the sociologist for some of our humility, and we ought to be free to express our obligation. Moreover, the student of the more delimited portions of the social domain ought by this time to recognize that there

2 The Elements of Sociology. By FRANK W. BLACKMAR. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1905.

General Sociology. By ALBION W. SMALL. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1905.

are particular branches of inquiry, such, for instance, as the origin and development of family relations, which fall outside of the recognized boundaries of the special sciences of society. We have no right to excommunicate the social investigator from our fellowship because he refuses to be called by one of our familiar names, economist, historian, anthropologist, or the like. But when all this is said, it must be confessed that the sociologists have too often invited the merited reproach of quackery. Nor do the two volumes under review altogether escape this charge.

Professor Blackmar's Elements is a singularly ineffective and eminently mediocre book. It affords no real penetrating insight into the nature of society. It has no intrinsic coherence. Empty it of what is essentially law, politics, and economics, and it becomes a stringy set of observations on social evolution, social pathology, and social ideals. It lacks character in its definitions. To define "culture" from the standpoint of sociology as "giving up old habits of thought and action for new ones with higher ideals" is an instance of confusion. What Professor Blackmar has defined as culture is in reality conversion. His account of the law of survival through selective struggle drips with treacle fit for a Sabbath-school periodical. To describe the principal methods of sociological investigation as "the statical, dynamic, and statistical methods, respectively" is about as logical as to divide animals into quadrupeds, insects, and blue-bottle flies. Moreover, even the Elements of Sociology ought to allow, out of four hundred and fortyfive pages, more than a bare fourteen to the discussion of "Social Laws." This little nest of "laws" is a rare jumble, whose character is not unfairly conveyed by the half-page discussion devoted to each law. As sociology. this will never do.

Professor Small's portentous volume of seven hundred and twenty-nine pages he calls a "conspectus" or a "syllabus." In reality, it is a titanic compendium. Its

thesis is that "the central line in the path of methodological progress, from Spencer to Ratzenhofer, is marked by gradual shifting of effort from analogical representation of social structures to real analysis of social processes." It would have been impossible, in the absence of the author's italics in the Preface, to disinter this thesis from the mass of débris under which the thesis lies buried. It does not require seven hundred and twenty-nine pages of exposition to show that Spencer's sociology involved an extended analogy between society and living organisms, while latter sociology insists more on the struggle for existence. And the truth is that, besides the extended criticism of Spencer, Schaeffle, and Ratzenhofer, which constitutes the core of this work, there are in it hundreds, literally hundreds, of voluble detours into other fields of social speculation. For this very reason no review of the volume can be at all adequate which does not traverse an almost endless sociological tract. No one can read the volume through without feeling a sort of hopeless dejection.

"Yet now despair itself is mild,”. for the Gargantuan energy that does not hesitate to print, as chapter ten, nine consecutive pages of disjointed titles, which comprise the table of contents to Schaeffles's Bau und Leben, is beyond the reach of any reproach that bases itself on literary grounds. Walt Whitman's "catalogue method" is simply nowhere, in comparison with Professor Small's unwearied printing of lists of titles as essential chapters in his text. Chapters twenty-nine and fifty are awful examples of this form of typographical crime. But the dejected feeling that Professor Small's book produces is mainly because of one's inability to convince one's self that the author believes there is any real truth or

importance in this wordy farrago. would be unfair to suggest that he regards the whole thing as a hideous logomachy, but at least one reader found in the whole treatise nothing that fell quite so like balm on the wounded spirit as Small's momentary lapse into skepticism when he says, "It" (the quest of sociology) "flies so uncontrollably from one aspect of humanity to another, we not only waver in our faith that the problem may be solved, but, if all the truth must be told, we sometimes wonder whether, after all, a real problem exists."

The truth is, I believe, that no such real problem as the author proposes does exist; and if it did, no finite mind could grasp it. For Professor Small insists that we must attempt to comprehend at one and the same time the length and the breadth, the height and the depth, of the entire essence of the process of human association. "A maturer stage of knowledge must approach nearer to comprehension of the whole as a whole." It is his "demand for the universal" that so discourages us, this striving "toward a final stage," and this conceiving the object as it "would look to an omniscient mind." Moreover, as if to pile Pelion on Ossa, he will not encourage approach to this ecstatic vision by intensive study of special fields. The part of the sociologist is "to counteract the tendency of specialists to follow centrifugal impulses." For example, he disparages the study of primitive man, and remarks thereof,-"the best that we can get from accounts of primitive men are hints about what to look for in our acquaintances" ! The primary task of the sociologist, apparently, is to stand on the housetop, and to discourse of methodology. I believe this to be the consummation of folly.

ON PHONETIC SPELLING

REGARDING the efforts of the gentlemen of letters and dollar-marks who propose a reform of English spelling, Serena and I have decided that nothing will come of it. Serena points out to me that I have never been able to spell correctly in the old, incorrect way, and that it would be utterly impossible for me to spell correctly in the new, correct way; and she rightly considers me a typical American literary gentleman, with one hand holding the bridle of Pegasus and the rest of my body reclining in supreme faith against the proofreaders, editors, and compositors, whose duty it is to look after the spelling business.

My own opinion of the spelling profession is that it has nothing to do with genius, except to kill it. I know that Shakespeare was a promiscuous sort of speller, even as to his own name, and no one can deny that the immortal Avonite was a greater genius than Noah Webster. I think, and Serena agrees with me, that the reason America so long lagged behind Europe in the production of genius is that America, for many decades, was the slave of the spelling-book and the spelling school. No man who devotes the fiery days of his youth to learning to spell. has time to be a genius. The period of Noah Webster's spelling-book was the period of dwarfed literature in our country, and now, just when we have mastered the spelling so that it is second nature to us to spell though with an ugh, there comes this group of anarchistic spellers who would "chop off the tails with their carving knives" and turn us brilliant writers into groping, plodding spellers of stupid lines.

Serena says, and I agree with her, that it is the jealousy of a few college professors who are trying to undermine the

younger writers. They know that it is excusable to spell incorrectly now, but they want this new phonetic spelling brought into use so that there shall be no excuse for bad spelling, and that then, Serena says, self-made authors like me, who never could and never can spell, but who simply blaze with genius, will be academically laughed at and hooted out of the magazines to make room for a stupid, Dr. Johnson sort of literature that is spelled correctly. Serena looks upon the whole thing as a direct, personal stab at me. I look at it more philosophically.

To me it seems that the spelling-reformers are entirely on the wrong track. Their proposed changes are almost a revolution, and we Americans (Serena's father was a German, but she can forget her ie and ei all the better for that) do not like sudden changes. We like our revolutions to come about gradually. Automobiles, for example. Think how gradually the sixty-horse-power snorters have come to pass. If, in our horse age, the streets had suddenly been covered with "Red Satans" and "White Ghosts," going thirty miles an hour and smelling like an eighteenth-century literary debate, and killing people right and left, we Americans would have arisen and destroyed every vestige of automobile. But the automobile came gradually. First the bicycle, then the motor cycle, then the electric cab, growling and clanking like a sawmill in chains; then the light automobile, and so, by stages, to the present monsters. So slowly and progressively did the automobile increase in size and number that it seemed a matter of course. We take to being killed by the automobile quite naturally now, and I can imagine our ghosts bragging one to another of the size and power of the machines that unsphered us.

A people that will not revolt at auto