Workmen's advocate., 1890-11-01
LITERARY NOTES.
rRNru'Ll.- oF ECONOMICS

ChH'I lII7 HlA', TO NUItV Mar shall of the University of Cambridgr England, has iu9t given lo the public a pretentou4 treatise intended 10 coodonsc the wisdom of the world n this depart ment of science, perhaps also to improve upon Maurice Blocks recent work LcS Ir0JrtS dn It Science EcouomiJafd dcjnus Adam Imth, which is mainly compi, lation. Mephisto in one of his happicst sallleS referred to medicine as an art in which the high and the low are equally found dabbling, 1t the author of Faust had lived in these days when the Macleods, MarshaIls. Moodeys, Walk CTS, SeIigmans Bowkers, and finally even such an indisputabIe ignoramus as Guntou, are found perpetrati' their "bOoks' on economics, he would have applied the sentiment to the economic rather than to the medical science. Prof. Marshall IS bourgeois, and his science, if such a thing as he produces can be called scientific, bears the characteristics of that class--lack of phiosophic breadth. Like the rest of his class, history seems to him to have come to a sudden halt when it produced the bourgeois poitico- economic system, it seems to have put down the breaks for good, and labelled that stage of civilization: ESt0 PsrDetpu. Accordingly, we have passages and chap ter8 on the laws or theories of Consump tion, of Supply, and, incredible as it would seem, of Supply and Demand.
 It is not surprising, in view of such an exhibition, that our author hates what it plea5es him to call "the hard and fast lines of scientific definitions and that he end2avors to justify his intellectual deficiency with arguments intended to show the continuity of things and their imperCeptible shading one into the other; arguments, every one of which is applicable as well to natural history, and that would wipe out the necessary definitions that separate the animal from the vegetable kingdom, because, for sooth, "of their imperceptible shading one into the other' till we come to substances whose classification under either head is well nigh impossible to- day.
 Another feature of the bourgeois, or vulgar, political economy displayed by this work is its flat, often mludlin, sometimes pharisac display of philan- thropy. The question of improving the condition of the toiIing poor is here taken up with that typical Poccocuran tlsm that would not mind. might pos. sibly even prefer, to see the laboring classes happy, but that would not in commode itself in the least to alter their conditiOn-is in fact satisfied to utter wish, but is not vigorous enough to suggest deed.
 As to style and method of treatment. Prof. Marshall has unfortunately stuck so close to his avOwed model, Herbert Spencer, as to incur the fault of close imtators generally, viz. to appropriate the bad in larger quantity than the good of their original. The taste for glittering generaities and the seduction of a cleverly rounded sentence, even though it be at the expense of facts. which in more than one instance have caused that great man to trip, have caused the lesser. Prof. Marshall. to fall flat upon his face
 Vulgar, bourgeois political economy reached its zenith with John Stuart Mill All the contributions to the domain of economic thought, coming from our present social system, have come from him, Yet, even his stature as Karl Marx remarks, is magnitied by the sur rounding low plane of capitalist intel feet. The others are but mole hills; among these Prof. Marshall is not even the least low.
 DIE DREI BEvoELKERUNGssTU 1.-THE THREE GRADES OF POPULATION.)
 Dr. Georg Hansen. the author of this work. elaborates therein a rather odd sociologic theory. Population he claims, is naturally divided into three social grades, or classes, The first is the land l lord ploss. thA second thu middle oIass is made uP of the capitalists, the trades, the brain-working class generally; final ly, the third class is that of the mechan ics, laborers, bench and wage-workers generally. The first alone is stationary and k the source of all the others, its overflow builds up the second; and in its