between East-end conditions and the "attraction of population" from the rural districts. Mr. Smith shows that the percentage of the population of East London and Hackney born outside of London is actually less than the percentage for the whole of London; for while in London as a whole only 629 out of every 1000 are natives of the metropolis, in East London the numbers are 720 out of 1000. It must be observed, however, that these figures do not give an entirely adequate representation of the migration from outside; they have to be compared with this further fact, mentioned by Mr. Smith, that among adult male inhabitants only some 46 or 47 out of 100 were born in London itself. Mr. Smith however reassures us with regard to one field of employment, at any rate, in which country labor was supposed to play an important part,— the docks. He shows good reason to believe that there is now but little movement in that direction: thus, out of 514 of the more regularly employed casuals in the West India dock, 361 were born in London; and of the 153 outsiders, only 17 had resided in London less than ten years (3 less than 5, and 1 less than 1). It is to be regretted, I think, that with these very important conclusions to present, Mr. Smith, and still more Mr. Booth, should have weakened the force of their argument by a too evident desire to take a cheerful view of the situation. This has led to some very inconclusive statistical reasoning. Mr. Smith (p. 505), and Mr. Booth, following him (p. 555), estimate the gain in population due to immigration by (1) taking the excess of births over deaths during the decennial period, 1871-1881, (2) treating that as "the natural growth" of the population at the beginning of the period, (3) adding "the natural growth" to the population in 1871, and then (4) subtracting this total from the population of 1881. The result is called the "net-influx"; and by this process it is brought down to some 10,000 a year. But this includes, as part of the natural growth of the population of 1871, the children born to the immigrants to London during the next ten years; and, as the great majority of immigrants are adult, in many cases young men who marry within three or four years of their arrival, this is a not unimportant consideration. But, not content with minimizing the inflow, in more than one place our authors seem inclined to maintain that it is actually balanced by an outflow! Thus, after mentioning the figures before cited as to the number of persons born outside of London, Mr. Smith continues:

The facts would seem at first to be conclusive evidence of a considerable inflow of population from other parts [surely it proves at least as much as that]. But a very large part of this admixture of population merely results from the ordinary ebb and flow of labor, set up by numberless industrial causes in all parts of the kingdom alike [p. 504].

Mr. Booth goes still further:

Influx cannot be completely studied apart from efflux. Population flows out of, as well as into, the great cities, so that the movement looked at rationally is a circulation [Mr. Booth's italics], which is not only healthy in itself, but essential to national health. . . . Influx in each case is balanced in large measure by efflux of some kind [pp. 554, 555].

The chief arguments adduced by Mr. Smith are that in the whole of England and Wales only 720 persons out of 1000 were living in the county of their birth, and that in the seven greatest Scotch towns only 524 out of 1000 were natives of the town. But the Scotch case only proves that what is true of London is also true of all great cities; and the other fact is perfectly consistent with an influx to the cities. There is evidently much truth in the proposition that there is an efflux as well as an influx; but stated as it is by our authors, it tends to obscure the significance of one of the most marked of modern tendencies, dency which shows itself in America almost as much as in England, that towards the increase of the urban at the expense of the rural population.

a ten

The concluding paper in the volume is again from the pen of Miss Potter and describes "The Jewish Community." This community numbers in all from 60,000 to 70,000 persons, of whom perhaps 30,000 were actually born abroad and have come to England since 1881. For the present the flood is at an end, though it will probably set in again with any renewal of the Judenhetze on the continent of Europe. The newcomers are willing to work as "greeners" for some small labor-contractor in the coat or boot trade; but in most cases they seem to succeed after a time in pulling themselves up into a better position and starting in as small masters themselves. How they manage to do it Miss Potter thus describes :

It is by competition and by competition alone that the Jew seeks success. But in the case of the foreign Jews, it is a competition unrestricted by the personal dignity of a definite standard of life, and unchecked by the social feelings of class loyalty and trade integrity. The small manufacturer injures the trade through which he rises to the rank of a capitalist by bad and dishonest production. The petty dealer, or small money-lender, . . . suits his wares and his terms to the weakness, the ignorance and the vice of his customers; the mechanic, indifferent to the interest of the class to which he temporarily belongs, and intent only on becoming a small master, acknowledges no limit to the process of underbidding fellow-workers. In short, the foreign Jew totally ignores all social obligations, other than keeping the law of the land, the maintenance of his own family, and the charitable relief of co-religionists [p. 589].

These evil tendencies are unfortunately strengthened by the policy of the Jewish Board of Guardians, the dispensers of the charity of wealthy English Jews towards their miserable fellow-believers.

of some £13,000 to £14,000 expended annually in relief, about onehalf seems to be lent or given in the form of business capital, enabling the workman to rise into the position of a small master. The recipients are not pauperized; but the class through whom they make their way upward are still further degraded (pp. 573, 574).

I have reserved until last the consideration of Mr. Booth's practical conclusions, based on the evidence thus collected. They will be found in his chapter on "Class Relations" at the end of Part I, as well as in the chapter on "Sweating," before referred to, and in his concluding remarks. I am afraid it must be said that Mr. Booth is more convincing when he sets forth the results of his investigations, than when he comments upon them. An example is furnished in what he says of sweating. He points out, what is abundantly manifest from the sections on the tailoring, bootmaking and furniture trades, that the sweater of the popular imagination the grinding middleman fattening on the profits he sweats out of wages — has no existence; the true sweater, as the name is employed in the trades themselves, usually without any particularly bad connotation, is the small, struggling master. He tells us that it is "the multiplication of small masters" which really leads to the sweating evils of long hours, low pay and unsanitary conditions" (p. 488); and again, that "the trades of East London present a clear case of economic disease, and the multiplication of small masters is the tap-root of this disease." He offers the very practical suggestion that the work of the factory inspector should be facilitated by obliging every owner of premises used for manufacturing purposes and also the employer, when any labor other than that of the wife is employed, to take a license. Thus, when Mr. Booth has the facts in his mind, he recognizes distinctly that certain forms of industrial organization have evil results.

But our author is a statistical economist only by grace; by nature he would appear to belong to that larger body of "common-sense " persons according to whom the one explanation of every difficulty is that all cannot be equal, and that the "fittest" come to the top. And sometimes nature is too powerful for grace: as where, speaking of the evils which exist in the sweated industries, Mr. Booth tells us that "many or perhaps most of them are not due in any way to the manner of employment. Their roots lie deep in human nature." And again, with more emphasis : "Such troubles have not, on the whole, much to do with any system of employment: they are part of the general inequalities of life" (p. 487). It is not that there is no truth at all in this view of the matter; but it

are.

is surely stated too broadly here, and it is precisely passages of this kind that are so eagerly seized upon by the apologist for things as they Moreover, such undue emphasis on one side of the problem seems to prevent the writer from taking a concrete view of the situation when he comes to make his final suggestion. With class A, he tells us, nothing is feasible except its destruction; it must be "harried out of existence" by the enforcement of sanitary, police and school regulations. But with class B the case is different: they are the incapables, who cost more to the community than they produce, and who pull down, by their competition, classes C and D. If only B could be removed from the scene, C and D would get on well enough. Let the state, then, take charge of them, they are but 100,000, - and remove them from the sphere of competition. The practicability of this plan for saving individualism by a large dose of socialism, as Mr. Booth himself describes it, I need not here consider. But the point I would ask Mr. Booth's attention to is this: Granting that such a disappearance of class B for a time would be in many ways a relief, is not the present organization of industry of such a kind that it would at once begin to grind out another class B? Mr. Booth has examined (pp. 147, 148) into 1600 families belonging to classes A and B. Of these, 60 were loafers, and there were 231 "whose poverty was the result of drink or obvious want of thrift." But 441 "had been impoverished by illness or the large number of those who had to be supported out of the earnings"; and if you abolished class B to-day, men of class C, from sickness or from having large families, would begin to renew it to-morrow. It is still more significant that there were 878 "whose poverty was due to the casual or irregular character of their employment, combined, more or less, with low pay." Even if these are now not fit for anything better, still, as we have seen in the case of the dockers, their very shiftlessness or laziness is itself in some measure the result of irregular employment. It is in economics as in philosophy: free will and necessity are both true; circumstances are as men make them, and men are as circumstances make them.

If I have dwelt unduly on what seem defects, it is because the book is packed so full of useful matter that it is impossible to furnish an abstract of it. In spite of all its limitations, it gives us a foundation such as we never had before both for practical action and for economic speculation. I trust Mr. Booth will have strength and perseverance to go on with his task. I must not omit to add that the book is accompanied with a wonderful map of East London, wherein each street is marked according to the class of its inhabitants. many a similar chart in our great cities, service in the practical work of charity.

This should be the model for which would be of no little

W. J. ASHLEY.

REVIEWS.

The Theory of Credit. By HENRY DUNNING MACLEOD, M. A. In two volumes. Vol. I. London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1889.

Mr. Macleod's latest work, of which the first volume is before us, is a restatement, with amplification, of the first volume of his Elements of Economics, published nine years ago, which was itself a restatement, with amplification, of an earlier work, The Elements of Banking. His aim in all three of the works named is to show that credit is capital. This conception has been in the growing or progressive stage in his mind. In the Elements of Banking (page 143) we find it stated in these words: "Hence it is seen how mercantile credit is mercantile capital," the identity of credit and capital being here limited to mercantile affairs. In the Elements of Economics (I, 178, 179) it is shown that an order for, or a promise of, or a right to, goods is of the same value as the money with which the goods might be bought, and hence

This order or promise or right is what is usually called credit, and it is clearly seen that, although it is of a lower and inferior form, yet it is of the same general nature as money. And as we are in no way concerned with the materials of things; and since these rights, or orders, may be exchanged or bought and sold equally as well as any material chattels, they are called pecunia, res, bona, merx in Roman law; χρήματα, ἀγαθά, πράγματα, οἶκος in Greek law; goods, chattels and vendible commodities in English law; and therefore wealth in economics.

This phrase, with its Greek and Latin terms (and sundry additions thereto), re-appears so frequently in The Theory of Credit that it becomes a burden or a laughing-stock according to the mood of the reader.

In the work under review, the identity of credit and capital as to their general nature is maintained without qualification. At page 308 et seq. the author makes an attack on J. S. Mill in the same terms as at pages 86 and 101 in the Elements of Economics, but with some amplification. It is important to examine Mr. Macleod's argument here, because it helps us to measure his eccentricities. He says:

We have first to show that Mill admits that personal credit is wealth. In accordance with the unanimous doctrine of ancient writers for 1300 years, Mill says (Preliminary Remarks, page 4): "Everything, therefore, forms a part of wealth which has purchasing power."

Then he says (Book III, ch. xi, sec. 3):

For credit though it is not pro