all these Money and Banking exhibits. The book has, therefore, the fundamentals of excellence. So much must be said the more emphatically because so very briefly.

But, on the other hand, the book has one, or perhaps it would be better to say several very grave faults. It contains very many instances of inaccuracy and carelessness such as are simply inexcusable in any work of scientific pretensions. At least four times (20, 75, 76, 86) the 2-cent piece is included among the coins of the United States. Professor Scott says that since 1890 China "has minted some small silver coins and a mass of minor brass coins called cash" (97), thus ignoring the continued coinage of the new Chinese dollars. The standard of the British gold coinage is put at 916.002-3 fine (87). There is attributed to Walker a book on Money and Bimetallism (312). It is stated that from the beginning the silver dollar has been invested with full legal-tender power (84). The Italian unit is at least three times given as the lire (73, 91). And so on through perhaps some scores of trivial inaccuracies. But there are some inaccuracies which are in themselves not trivial. So it is of the statement that "England, Germany, France, Italy, and in fact most of the other nations of the world, likewise have government and bank paper of various sorts" (20). It is perhaps quite as serious a mistake to affirm that the unit of Russia is a silver ruble of 308.571 grains (95), or that the Japanese unit is a yen "weighing 25.72 grains of standard gold ninetenths fine, and thus being very nearly the equivalent of the dollar of the United States" (98).

The natural explanation of these last two errors would, of course, be the suggestion that the manuscript was prepared some years ago, and that it has now been thrown hurriedly into book form. Otherwise it is scarcely possible to account for the complete ignoring of the monetary reforms of Russia and Japan. And there are, perhaps, some other evidences of the same preparation of the book. The discussion of the Indian exchanges, on pages 256-257, is based in the text upon the assumption of the old silver standard for India; and only in a note is brief reference made to the closing of the mints in 1893. The statements as to the operations and conditions of the great banks of Germany and France (202, 204) rest on no data. later than 1899; and, similarly, the tables in the statistical appendix in no case include figures later than for the same year, 1899. Yet nothing would be easier than to get data to within a few months of any time of writing. Of some significance, too, in this connection.

are certain repetitions, as the accounts of the seasonable variations of the New York exchange market on pages 244 and 267, and the statements about the American National Banking system in chapters 9 and 10.

There are to be found, too, a considerable number of statements which, if they may not be said unconditionally to be incorrect, are at least very careless and likely to mislead. Any reader who did not know in advance, would infer from page 88 that there are Canadian gold coins. The unmodified assertion that paper money "costs only the value of the paper and the labor of printing" (23) is dangerous. It is not well to follow an account of the French assignats with this assertion: "In 1862 the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States by authority of Congress adopted this same expedient in order to meet the extraordinary expenditures occasioned by the war" (100-101). It will not do to perform a simple addition of the National Bank notes of the United States and the deposits of the National Banks and call the sum the "bank currency" of the country (197-198).

A similar carelessness appears, less often, in even more serious form in the theoretic or speculative discussions. It might almost be said that the supremely important term value is used with habitual carelessness. So, for example, it is stated that a properly made coin is always so marked that we may know its value at sight (70), and that to know the purchasing power of the monetary unit "renders little, if any, assistance in the determination of changes in the actual value of commodities or in the actual value of gold" (51). The discussion of the quantity theory of the value of money (ch. 4) is, in its detailed form, directed against quantity as the ultimate determinant of the value of the money. Yet, as all the best expositions of the theory show, and as Professor Scott himself briefly recognizes (54), the quantity theory undertakes to explain only the immediate determination of the value of money, being, as the late General Walker used to put it, only a special case of supply and demand. The historical argument against bimetallism assumes (323-324) that even the slightest departure of the commercial ratio. from the nominal mint ratio shows that the former is not held by the latter.

The bibliographical aids have often this great merit that they are specific, to page or section of the work quoted, and are thus made really useful to readers. But it cannot be said that the references are conspicuously well selected. Of course, a writer must be allowed some little play for his own individual preferences in such matters;

but not a few of Professor Scott's selections and omissions are by no means easy to understand. It is, for example, not easy to see why an author who uses Italian authorities, as Professor Scott does (116), and who goes so far afield as to cite Launhardt's weak little pamphlet on the quantity theory, should omit some of the most important special treatises, as Loria's Studi sul valore della moneta, De Viti De Marco's Moneta e prezzi, ossia il principio quantitativo, and Bailey's Money and its Vicissitudes in Value. While very simlar criticisms might be passed upon the special bibliographies at the ends of many of the chapters, the general bibliographical appendix is perhaps still more faulty. Some of the references here found are far too vague to have any place in a work which deals with a special subject. Such are Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Cairnes, John Elliott; Essays in Political Economy, theoretical and applied, Giffen, Sir Robert; Essays in Finance, 2d series, Palgrave, R. H. Inglis; Dictionary of Political Economy, and several other quite general economic treatises and hand-books. And again in the general bibliography, as before in the special ones, the principle for the selections and the omissions is not easy to understand. The Annals of the American Academy should no doubt be listed among the sources of valuable economic information; but, quite apart from the question of citing it by general title among references on the subject of money, few would say that no other economic journal, American or foreign, deserves to be listed with it. It is not well to include the Aldrich Report on retail prices and omit the much more useful report on wholesale prices. Few of the publications of our own government less deserve to have been omitted than the Monthly Summary of Commerce and Finance.

A due consideration of the faults which have been cited and of the much larger number, of the same and other sorts, which might have been added, must result in a provisional condemnation of the book. While it has, beyond any question, most of the fundamental merits necessary to make a good book, it abounds in inaccuracies and instances of carelessness. A well informed teacher might use the book in class, provided he would attend in advance to the correction of its errors; but the general reader cannot use it in its present form with safety. Some-not all-of the errors are rather trivial; but there is no good reason why a book in economics should not be as minutely accurate as, for example, a book in physics. It is very much to be wished that the book may soon be subjected to a close revision and correction; for then it might well rank among the most useful of recent American works in economics.

iddletown, Conn.

WILLARD FISHER.

Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties.

By M. Ostrogorski. Translated from the French by Frederick Clarke, M.A., with a preface by James Bryce, M.P. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1902-Two vols., pp. lviii, 627; xliii, 793.

In his preface to this notable work, Mr. Bryce recalls the difficulties that beset his study of American institutions some twenty years ago, owing to the lack of any adequate account of party organizations; and yet the American party system had then been in full swing for nearly fifty years. This treatise by M. Ostrogorski is the first to fill the void. It should be noticed, however, that the work has a somewhat wider range; in the words of the author, it is "under the form of a scientific investigation alike historical and critical, in reality an investigation of the working of government in democracy and of the vital problems which it puts before existing society."

It is noteworthy that this study of democracy comes from the pen of a Russian jurist, who for some years occupied an important post in the Ministry of Justice. If it must be said that M. Ostrogorski has not altogether emerged from the somewhat gloomy atmosphere of Russian bureaucracy, it should at once be added that he has approached his subject in a scholarly and scientific spirit. His methods of work are thoroughly sane and sound. In the absence of any extensive documentary material, he has had to depend largely upon the testimony of contemporary observers, but he is fully aware of the captious nature of such information and has endeavored to correct his data by personal observation in England and America. The first of these volumes deals historically and critically with the organization of parties in England. When the old unity of English society was shattered by the advent of democracy, the individual was left emancipated and enfranchised, but isolated among his fellows. In the effort to consolidate these electoral elements for political ends, recourse was had to political association and party organization, which were already familiar in England. The endeavors of the radical democracy of Birmingham to protect the rights of the numerical majority against the minority clause in the Reform Bill of 1867, led to the establishment of the "caucus," which eventually fastened its hold upon both the liberal and conservative parties. This, outline of the growth of the caucus is then followed by a painstaking analysis of its component parts, of their coördination, and of their functioning. These chapters are the

most original and valuable in the volume.

Following the same historical and critical method, M. Ostrogorski traces the rise and development of American party organization, and subjects to a careful analysis the various parts of this extraconstitutional machinery, from the primaries and the local conventions to the national convention. Chapters on the "Election Campaign" and on the "Politicians and the Machine" lay bare the practical working of American democracy under the party régime. The author follows with sympathetic interest the various "struggles for emancipation" in the history of American politics, and in the light of this experience, puts forward in his "summary" and "conclusion" an elaborate critique of the tendencies of democratic government.

The author's attitude toward the American party system is distinctly hostile. From a historical point of view he condemns the party system as "artificial, as irrational, and out of date," as a "framework of political action created before the advent of democracy.' "The system could only produce effects which were the negation of democracy." Party formalism has solved the problems of democracy in the wrong way. "It has repressed the individual and lowered the standard of political society; it has deadened individual responsibility, put a premium on cowardice in public life, obstructed the free course of opinion while leaving the individual defenceless against it, debased the ideal, degraded public morality, and reduced the citizen to a helpless instrument, which all those who exploit the public interest may manipulate as they please." The observations that M. Ostrogorski has recorded in the earlier portions of this volume hardly warrant this sweeping indictment of American party government. In the descriptive and analytical chapters, he has been careful, for the most part, to qualify statements of fact by necessary reservations; but once launched upon a critique of the whole system, he seems to throw qualifications and reservations to the winds. In England, also, where the worst evils of the party régime have not yet appeared, M. Ostrogorski is inclined to regard the tyranny of party over the elector and the candidate as absolute, even after he has been at pains to point out notable lapses in the discipline imposed by party.

The remedy which the author proposes for these ills of democracy is interesting. Regarding party government as no longer necessary to realize the objects of free government, he would discard "the use of permanent parties with power as their end" and restore to party "its essential character of a combination of citizens formed