RrV?SWS 761 The brightly written dissertation upon the nature, method, and utility of family monographs is particularly noticeable and should find many readers in this country, which, M?. Cheysson can hardly be gain- said, is practically the last to seriously attack the subject. The biblie- graphic essay appended to this publication, though now twelve months old, abundantly proves the activity of Germany, France, and the United States in this direction .an activity which shows no sign of slackening and must inevitably before long spread to the United Kingdom. The Board of Trade Return of 1889 (Expenditure of Working Men, C 58?1) was a first step. Is it not time for a second ? HENRY H?GGS Free Exchange: Papers on Political and Eco.omical subjects, i, cludb?g chapters on the Lau' of Value and Unearned Increment, by the late RIOHT HON. SIR Louts MALLET, C.B. Edited by Br, RNAR?) MAr,nr?T. (Kegan Paul) 1891. THis is a remarkably full and logical exposition of the doctrines of the Manchester School. No member of the Cobden Club was more thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Cobden than Mallet. It is true ?hat he sometimes goes beyond his master. In the chapter (I) which deals with Cobrich'S Political Opinions and which had appeared in 1878 as Preface to an edition of Cobden's' Political Writings,' he sees in Basfiat the necessary complement of Cobden (see e.g.p. 23, and cf. later p. 230, &c.). He thereby gains for the doctrines a certain theoretical completeness, though the School is not bound to follow him here. Our author has the common feature of all true followers of the founder; he has an intense faith in the necessary connection of politics with economics and of both with the moral law. ' A man who meddles in public affairs without having satisfied himself as to the relation in which the two phenomena of poverty and wealth stand to each other is a charlatan, and not entitled to have any share in the work of statesmanship ? (Letter quoted p. w?.) He tells us he himself passed through every form of social heresy till he found 'peace in the free trade creed, and with it the necessary belief in the gradual emancipation of the millions both material and moral, and therefore political.' (ibid, cf. p. 13). He believed (in 1869) that it was not the Manchester policy but a neglect of it and areb, ction against it that ' left us with increased wealth indeed, but with a distribu- tion of it more unequal and more unnatural than before, and with a large population, whose chronic wretchedness and degradation is a standing reproach to our civilisation and a sullen protest against our laws' (p. 5). ' Whatever progress has been made in the national prosperity has been principally due to the steps which have been taken in fulfilment of his [Cobden's] principles' (p. 10). A secure society rests upon' the law of labour,' ' in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat
