upon with no friendly eyes by French and English competitors, but still they come and prosper. They lend money to the farmers at thirty per cent; they keep gambling houses, in which prostitutes meet their victims, servants waste their wages, and officials squander the funds in their charge; they sell goods cheaper than their rivals, and they exhibit that combination of energy, shrewdness and viciousness for which they are pre-eminent wherever they find a footing in Europe, Asia or America.

The chief evil in the French administrators, according to our author, is that they seek to intrude the customs and the laws of their own country with too little attention to the habits, the prejudices and the superstitions of those under their rule. Like the French philosophers of the last century, they refuse to recognize the infinite differences in manners and morals among different classes and races of men. They wish the natives to become civilized Parisians, while these prefer to remain ignorant Annamites. The missionaries desire to make the inhabitants Christians, and they have a strong preference for remaining heathen. Hence the feelings and prejudices of the natives are wounded; and the Frenchman, who might be regarded as a benefactor if he would confine himself to improving roads and enlarging trade, is regarded as an oppressor when he snubs a mandarin and lights his pipe in a pagoda. Such evils always attend the meeting of a higher and lower civilization, and time alone can determine whether the French occupation of these populous countries will result in the mutual advantage of the invaders and the invaded.

JAMES BRECK PERKINS.

La France provinciale: vie sociale, mœurs administratives. Par RENÉ MILLET. Paris, Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1888.-x, 330 pp.

At a time when the political future of France is viewed with distrust by almost every observer; when her last experiment in government seems about to succumb to the same untoward fate that has overtaken all her experiments for a hundred years, it is, to say the least, extremely refreshing to meet any one especially a Frenchman - who has faith in his country's political capacity, and a strong belief that, under all the apparent disturbance and disorder of the present, there is a powerful current in France in the direction of peaceful government and orderly administration. This belief is held by M. Millet, and he has written La France provinciale to express it. The text of the entire work is that "Paris n'est pas la France," and that in French provincial life are to be found the reserves of strength which will ultimately save the country from the excesses of the capital. M. Millet examines one by one the elements which go to make up "la vie provinciale" and, by an analysis

which seems as just as it is artistic, shows that under the rude and, to the Parisian, unattractive exterior of the "gens de province" there are truer hearts and more loyal instincts, greater political capacity and stronger faith in the future of France than can be found in the more polished citizens of the metropolis. M. Millet calls attention to one fact of the first importance which is often ignored: that the whole course of administrative legislation, not merely since the establishment of the present republic but from an earlier date, has been towards decentralization. The powers of the various local authorities have been greatly increased; and (to say nothing of the municipalities) there have arisen, in each of the eighty-odd departments into which France is divided, a local legislature and popular administrative authorities, which are not only assuming more and more powers, but are year by year turning out a large number of citizens accustomed to the exercise of public power and endowed with that moderation and those more practical ideas which are so apt to result from the discharge of public functions.

Of course much remains to be done before France can possess any system of local government like our own or even like that of Germany. As M. Millet points out, the financial relations of the central and local authorities are much too close and the central control over the acts of the localities is much too strict to permit local spirit to develop as it should. But much has been accomplished which must tell on the near future.

M. Millet's hopeful view of the French political situation must infuse itself, to some degree, into the minds of his readers. Some of them may think his view too optimistic, but no one can lay his book down without feeling that there is more hope for France than is commonly assumed; that the saving "remnant" is larger and more powerful than is commonly believed.

It is almost praise enough for a book to say that it must influence the reader's opinion; but one thing more must be said of M. Millet's work : it thoroughly gratifies the reader's taste. The style has that charm of finish which is commoner in French work than in that of any other people, but far from common even in France.

To the student of politics, the book will be useful as a description of French political habits. There is nothing in a nation's civilization of which it is so difficult for a foreigner to gain a correct conception as its habits; and it is particularly difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to understand the ways of the French. In this respect, La France provinciale is invaluable. One might read volumes of laws and of legal treatises and not carry off so true an idea of the way the French do things as can be obtained from this little book.

F. J. G.

Le Corporazioni d'Arti e Mestieri e la liberta del commercio interno negli antichi economisti Italiani. Studio del Dott. GUISEPPE ALBERTI. Milano, Hoepli, 1888. 8vo, 458 pp.

In this elaborate treatise we have the work of a young pupil of Professor Cossa, who has evidently been inspired by the cyclopædic accomplishments of his preceptor. It is an attempt to give a comprehensive review of the opinions of all the Italian economists down to the end of the last century on the question of restriction or freedom of internal trade and industry. Doctor Alberti has not only patiently waded through the fifty volumes of Custodi's collection of the Economisti Italiani, but has collected all the economic writers in Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, Tuscany, the Papal States, Naples and Sicily, and has given us excerpts from and explanation of their views on the guild and restrictive system. He has also made plentiful extracts from the English, French, German, Dutch and Spanish writers, but has taken these mostly at second hand from the general histories. The consequence is that we have a hodge-podge of good and bad; for where so many writers are mentioned the majority are sure to be of little importance. The author practically admits that all the Italian reformers followed the lead of de la Court, Cliquot de Blervâche, Turgot and Adam Smith, and his work will be interesting only to those who desire to pursue more minutely the progress of economic thought in the restless states that made Italy a "geographical expression." Dr. Alberti finds that the development of theory away from the system of medieval restriction was due to four causes. These were the current of free trade, by which is meant the freedom of exportation; the current of mercantilism, which desired national expansion, and broke down internal barriers while setting up external restrictions; the current of agrarian protection, which desired free internal trade in corn; and finally the physiocratic current, which desired freedom in all commodities, in commerce as well as industry. This is all true so far as it goes, and Dr. Alberti does well to emphasize the point (so frequently overlooked by English writers) that mercantilism was in reality a movement of progress from mediæval restriction to modern liberty. But Dr. Alberti does not by any means exhaust the catalogue of influences that brought about modern freedom of trade and industry. He does not dig deep enough, and we must not expect to find in his book a true philosophy of the free industry argument.

Like so many continental works, the book is wofully in need of an index.

E. R. A. S.

Profit Sharing between Employer and Employee: A Study in the Evolution of the Wages System. By NICHOLAS PAINE GILMAN. Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1889.-12mo, 460 pp.

A Treatise on Co-operative Savings and Loan Associations. By SEYMOUR DEXTER. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1889.-16m0, 299 pp.

Five years ago a student of the labor question would have looked in vain for an American account of American or European experiments in profit sharing, and he would not have found riches had he sought for American writings on the more familiar subjects of co-operative production, distribution and saving. But a considerable interest in these phases. of the industrial problem has been awakened, and within a very short time several important books and monographs dealing with them have come into existence. The comprehensive History of Co-operation in the United States, by Johns Hopkins University men, was reviewed in the POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, for September, 1888. Now we have an elaborate, scholarly treatise on profit sharing, that in a good degree will supersede all previous works on the subject, and a full, trustworthy manual of co-operative savings and loan associations.

Mr. Gilman's book has been written as one would wish to have such books written always, without hurry and with a due regard to literary art as well as to scientific thoroughness. A mass of material that in the hands of an unskilful writer would have made a very dry and very bulky volume has been compressed within readable limits and made interesting. The sketch of Leclaire's personality and achievements, the most complete that has appeared in English, is a bit of biographical writing as charming as it is unpretentious. Merely as a work of reference Mr. Gilman's book will be invaluable to students. Every source of information has been explored for facts. The author has been in direct correspondence with all the more important profit-sharing houses on both sides of the Atlantic. He has had the cordial assistance of the best qualified students of the subject, and he has drawn freely, not only from the writings of Dr. Böhmert, Dr. Frommer and Mr. Sedley Taylor, and from the Bulletins of the French society for the Study of Participation, but also from the minor literature of profit sharing, as the numerous references and the exhaustive bibliography prove. Not only is much of the matter entirely new, but much new light is thrown on the more familiar cases. This is true especially of the famous Whitwood colliery case in England and the Brewster case in New York. The mere narrative of actual experiences and description of plans occupies 295 pages. There are three chapters of accounts of profit sharing on the continent,

one each on English and American experiences, and a separate chapter on profit-sharing attempts that have failed or have been discontinued. A full index makes every fact available.

Mr. Gilman rightly describes his book as a study in the evolution of the wages system. The reasons for believing that the wages system satisfies in the main the conditions of modern industrial life are clearly stated. But profoundly convinced as he is that the wages system cannot be displaced by anything radically different, Mr. Gilman is no less certain that it must undergo a further evolution. The payment of money wages as a method of rewarding labor itself grew out of a more primitive product sharing, the evolution of which our author has traced with considerable care and detail. The regularity and certainty of the laborer's reward, which the wages system guarantees, is at the expense of that variability which was characteristic of product sharing, and Mr. Gilman makes a good point by insisting on the neglected fact that mere variability, apart from any other consideration, affords gratification to the common human nature of both employers and employed. The familiar modifications of simple time wages, such as piece wages, premiums for quantity or quality of work, or for economy, the sliding scale, etc., are all attempts to combine the variability of product sharing with the regularity of money wages. Mr. Gilman judiciously estimates all these plans and finds them all imperfect. They are really more defective than he shows, for he fails to note the radical defect of piece wages in the temptation that they offer to the employer to put the rate so low that the best workmen can make by their utmost exertions only the prevailing wages paid for time work. Turning then to profit sharing, the impartial reader must admit that the results of a long and varied experience fully bear out all that Mr. Gilman claims for it. In a chapter of summary and analysis he has tabulated the entire record of profit-sharing experience. It is a convincing showing; demonstrating that profit sharing is in fact a natural and beneficial development of the wages system, admitting of wide, perhaps of general, though no one would affirm of universal, extension. In a few conspicuous cases circumstances have conspired to make failure inevitable in spite of honest intentions and good management, but for the most part the failures which Mr. Gilman conscientiously records serve simply to show how not to do it.

In presenting the argument for profit sharing, Mr. Gilman eschews deduction from a priori premises and confines himself strictly to induction from the facts. His conclusions are: that the division of realized profits between the capitalist, the employer and the employee in addition to regular interest, salary and wages, is the most equitable and generally satisfactory method of rewarding the three industrial agents, and that it advances the prosperity of an establishment by increasing the quantity