T Fancy's Flight. O-NIGHT, when far from thee away, And swifter than the eagle's flight, 'Tis winter time, the trees are bare, And all without is cold and chill; A stranger with an alien race, I only hear thy loving voice, Which makes my heart of hearts rejoice, I sit within our cosy room, Where never enters ought of gloom, But sweet content and comfort reign ; Thy hand is closely clasped in mine, And all my joy beams in my face, I seem the happiest in the place, The kindly folk are pleased to see; Now some one sings, the song I know, And thine is still the voice I hear; And mean them for thy ear. Still flows the talk, a rippling stream, By talk and song alike unmoved; We parted with a warm good night, Surprised the midnight chimes to hear; But I alone knew why to me The minutes flew so speedily, And brought such blessed cheer. And now alone, as in the crowd, With darkness round me like a shroud, In rapture and delight. J. A. L. To my Wife. Y own beloved one, my wife; Through whom, from heaven, each joy of life And-shared by thee Is thus more sweetly blest! How can I better prove By what new interest— My still increasing love? For sure I am, if I can find some way To show thee this, and show it day by day, And with it, health; that e'en prolongèd life May well be thine! Then, tell me how, my wife ! X. Progress and Poverty. THIS is the title of a book upon what has been called the "dismal " science of "Political Economy "-a science involving, dismally or not, a consideration of some of the most important questions affecting the well-being of the human race; a science, the study of which may not prove attractive to the persistent reader of light literature, but which is full of the profoundest interest to all who can think seriously, and who feel that life and the conditions of human society present a problem which is worth solving. 100,000 copies of this book have been sold in America where it was first published. In England a sixpenny edition has been published, and at the end of last year 20,000 copies had been disposed of. Since that time the work has attracted considerable attention; reviews of it have appeared in several of our magazines, lectures have been given, and public discussions have taken place upon it, and notices have appeared in many of the daily papers. One potent sign of the times is shown in the interest it has attracted from members of the artizan class, in London at least, as exhibited at the lectures which Professor Toynbee* has been delivering upon the subject. The author, Mr. Henry George, (this new Cobden, as one writer calls him) is an American, and was formerly an artizan. He is a man of comprehensive and original mind, possessing critical and analytical faculties of the highest order. He does his own thinking, takes nothing for granted, however great the authority; submits everything to the test of reason and logic and fact; and in the process does not hesitate to call in question, often to dispute, and sometimes to completely upset the most cherished convictions of the great High Priests of Political Economy who have preceded him--Adam Smith, Stuart Mill, Malthus, McCulloch, and others. Progress and Poverty is an epoch book. It is the sign and the beginning of a new departure; it is the accentuation and the emphasis of thought which is stirring, and which it has caused to move and will cause to move with greater force and acceleration. There is much that is old in this book, in fact if not in form-it may contain errors—some of its reasoning may be controvertable, the correctness of its conclusions may be questioned, the justice, the attainableness, the good effect of the remedy it suggests may be doubted-still it is the pregnant outcome of the deep thought of a great mind-and it is a great work, closely reasoned, eminently readable, full of graphic illustration and telling anecdote, abounding in eloquence, replete with pungent criticism, startling in its disclosures and propositions. Of Political Economy it is a camera-he wastes not time who reads it. The works of Adam Smith, Stuart Mill, and others are heavy reading, brain racking in the effort to understand, presenting to the ordinary mind a solution * We learn with deep regret that, since this article was written, this talented gentleman has died from over-exertion in lecturing on Mr. George's work. as difficult of comprehension as the problem they have written their books to solve. But Progress and Poverty is clear, concise, and for the most part easily comprehensible. A short review of the work may not be uninteresting. The purpose for which it has been written cannot be better or more tersely described than in the words of the dedication with which the book opens: "To those who seeing the vice and misery that springs from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment.” The first chapter is a statement of the problem which Mr. George has set himself to solve. "The present century," he says, "has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealth-producing power," and he proceeds to describe what this increase has been, and what its results-" Out of these bounteous material conditions—a man of the last century would have seen arising, as necessary sequences, moral conditions realizing the golden age of which mankind has always dreamed. Youth no longer stunted and starved; age no longer harried by avarice; the man with the muck-rake drinking in the glory of the stars! Foul things fled, fierce things tame, discord turned to harmony! How could the vice, the crime, the ignorance, the brutality, that spring from poverty, and the fear of poverty, exist where poverty had vanished? More or less vague or clear these have been the hopes, these the dreams born of the improvements which give this wonderful century its pre-eminence. Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts there can be no mistaking. From all parts of the civilised world come complaints of industrial depression; of labour condemned to involuntary idleness; of capital massed and wasting; of pecuniary distress among business men; of want and suffering and anxiety among the workingclasses." He goes on to show that there is distress everywhere, and under all conditions, and says "evidently beneath all such things as these, we must infer a common cause. It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share. The new forces, elevating in their nature, though they be, do not act on the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down. This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain." This is the problem-matter enough for consideration. Facts undeniable. Evils which we see and feel. It is clear there is something wrong that the wrong universally prevails; that the rulers of the earth have failed to reach the evil; that the evil calls for a remedy, and the problem for a solution. Mr. George proceeds to consider the whole question of our present social conditions in a logical way, taking up and testing, as he proceeds, the ideas and dicta of other writers on the subject. First, he considers the question of capital and labour, disputing, and I think disproving, Adam Smith's dictum that labour is drawn from capital, a dictum accepted by others of our great writers on the subject. Mr. George asserts that the reverse is the truth-that labour creates capital, and pays itself from what it produces. Capital, he says, aids labour, and wages are but the convenient exchange of the results of labour. This is an interesting question, and Mr. George has brought a great wealth of illustration to its consideration, but it is not necessary for our present purpose to discuss it in greater detail here. Then follows a chapter on "Population and Subsistence," in which the author disputes the conclusions of the Rev. Mr. Malthus, which have obtained such world-wide acceptance, and which may be briefly stated to lie in the proposition that "population tends to increase in a greater ratio than subsistence." If this proposition were probable, one of the greatest problems of Political Economy would be solved, or at any rate we should know how alone it could be solved—namely, by preventing an increase of population. But Mr. George questions whether the total population of the world has increased in anything like the proportion Mr. Malthus states it does; in fact, he doubts whether it has very materially increased at all since the Christian era. But even if population has increased and does increase in this ratio (viz., doubling itself every twenty-five years), he maintains that, under proper social conditions, subsistence would increase in as great or in a greater ratio, seeing that the world affords opportunity, or should and could afford it, to every man to produce by his labour sufficient for his wants and those of his family. That he does not produce it is not his fault, but the fault of the improper social conditions under which he exists, and which hamper and thwart him. Graduating towards a consideration of these social conditions, Mr. George gives us a chapter upon the "Laws of Distribution," which he opens by stating that "with material progress wages fail to increase, but rather tend to decrease." "This," he says, "cannot be explained by the theory that the increase of labourers constantly tends to divide into smaller portions the capital sum from which wages are paid. For, as we have seen, wages do not come from capital, but are the direct produce of labour. Each productive labourer, as he works, creates his wages; and with every additional labourer there is an addition to the true wages fund, which, generally speaking, is considerably greater than the amount he draws in wages." He then goes on to show that all produce distributes itself, or is distributed into three channels: (1) Wages; (2) Interest (or payment for use of capital); and (3) Rent (or payment for use of land). And he asserts that when wages and interest are high, or show a tendency to |