"The analytical table is divided into fourteen classes; also new books and new editions.

Newspaper Statistics.-The following is taken from the News

paper Press Directory for 1892:

There are now published in the United Kingdom 2,255 newspapers, distributed as follows:

On reference to the first edition of this useful directory for the year 1846, we find the following interesting facts-viz., that in that year there were published in the United Kingdom 551 journals; of these 14 were issued daily-viz., 12 in England and 2 in Ireland; but in 1892 there are now established and circulated

2,255 papers, of which no less than 185 are issued daily, showing that the press of the country has more than quadrupled during the last forty-six years. The increase in daily papers has been still more remarkable; the daily issues standing 185 against 14 in 1846. The magazines now in course of publication, including the quarterly reviews, number 1,901, of which more than 473 are of a decidedly religious character, representing the Church of England, Wesleyans, Methodists, Baptists, Independents, Roman Catholics, and other Christian communities."

XII.-Notes on Economical and Statistical Works.

The Industrial and Commercial Supremacy of England. By the late James E. Thorold Rogers. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892. This volume has a melancholy interest; for its publication, we are told in the preface, is the fulfilment of an intention which had been formed in the lifetime of the author, and was so far frustrated by his death that the lectures, of which this work is composed, were still in their original shape and had not been corrected for commission to print. It was the practice of his father, Mr. Arthur Rogers writes, to repeat a course of lectures before they were published, and in this instance the repetition had been prevented by death. The lectures are, accordingly, printed substantially as they were delivered in the University of Oxford, although some allusions of a local or personal nature have been omitted. The order of delivery has been followed throughout; but the editor observes that there is no “ special connection " between some of the lectures. They seem, he states, to have "aimed rather at expounding the methods" employed by his father in his historical studies than at "announcing new facts or enunciating new theories." They contain "almost all the hitherto unpublished comments the economic history of England delivered in public" by the Professor They go some way towards completing the work of a laborious life; for we believe that material for the final accomplishment of the monumental task undertaken in Professor Rogers' History of Prices has been happily left behind, and his other writings-his Six Centuries of Work and Wages, his First Nine Years of the Bank of England, and his Economic Interpretation of History-form, together with the volume now before us, a more popular statement of the chief results of the elaborate researches set forth in detail in the larger work. Taken together, these additions to our economic literature constitute a whole of which any single writer might well be proud. They represent an immense mass of most painstaking inquiries undertaken in a department of research which was comparatively unknown or neglected before Professor Rogers commenced his studies. In no limited or superficial sense he

may be regarded as the pioneer of such historical investigations in England; and it would be difficult to measure the extent of the influence which, directly or indirectly, he has exercised on the general course of economic thought.

In the volume before us we have the opinions and comments of a bold and original mind on many topics of importance, accompanied in every instance by an application of the historical records of the past to the illumination of the present. The characteristic qualities of the Professor are manifest in every lecture; and readers, who may be inclined to resent what may be regarded as his defects, will remember that they are the defects of his virtues, which it would need much to outweigh. Width of erudition may atone for frequent discursiveness, and the positive and sweeping character of some of his utterances may be attributed to the influence of a strong personality, which could certainly not be reproached with any unwillingness to seek for, or examine, evidence. Landlords, for example, are condemned in no measured terms for raising rents before the Franco-German war, and their subsequent losses are freely ascribed to their previous imprudence; but the works of improvement carried ont, and the development of agricultural science and practice fostered, by some members of their class are frankly acknowledged, and Professor Rogers is far from regarding with favour the proposals of Mr. Henry George for confiscating rent.

The discursiveness of many of the lectures, and the vast quantity and varied character of the material which they contain, render it a task of extreme difficulty to furnish a summary or analysis of the volume before us. It comprises two courses of lectures: the first consisting of eight, and the second of twelve lectures. The first may perhaps be distinguished from the second as dealing more largely with the past than the present; but, where the author traces the history of the past, he generally mingles with it his comments on the present; and, where he is concerned mainly with the present, he views it in the light of the knowledge he has gained of the past. The question of bimetallism, for instance, is tested partly by reference to the currency agitations of 1825; and the advantages of trades unions are shown by tracing the joint-stock principle in labour to its early origin. However, in the first course of lectures the author appears to he dealing more closely with the various ways in which the industrial and commercial supremacy of England has been slowly built up-and to this part the title on the cover, which differs from that on the title page, would more fittingly apply. In the second course he discusses various topics of present interest. In the opening lecture of the first course he traces the development of industrial skill in England; and here, as in a later lecture on immigration, he shows how largely it was due to the influence of foreign settlers. In the second lecture he deals with the conditions of economic progress; and in the third with "the progress of English population and the causes thereof." In this lecture he reviews the evidence which had led him to hold that the population of England and Wales was "almost stationary" during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth

centuries, and "amounted to between two and a quarter and two and a half millions." The evidence is derived from four sources :-(1) The average product of agriculture; (2) a return in 1377 of the number of persons liable to a poll tax then imposed; (3) an actual census of some hundreds in Kent taken in the reign of Henry VIII; (4) the houses contained in various surveys made of a college estate towards the end of the sixteenth century. At the end of the seventeenth century population had more than doubled, and this process was repeated in the eighteenth, although Malthus was, Professor Rogers holds, influenced by special and passing circumstances of his times. In the next lecture he traces the development of credit agencies; and here, as in his account of the early years of the Bank of England, he draws some instructive inferences from the fluctuations in the prices of stocks. In the following lecture the development of transit is considered; in the sixth the history is traced of chartered trading companies, such as the East India Company, the Bank of England, and the South Sea Company; and in two concluding lectures the "joint stock principle" in capital and labour is examined. The arguments for and against limited liability are forcibly stated in the former, and the history, action, and aims of trades unions are set forth in the latter.

In the second course of lectures contained in the volume Professor Rogers deals first with some points of economic theory, which he criticises throughout in a trenchant manner. The economic doctrine of waste, and the economic theory of rent, are subjected to a severe scrutiny, which may, however, be said to be more unfavourable to the latter than to the former. The ambiguity of the term "unproductive labour" is shown, and the history of its successive use by the Physiocrats, by Adam Smith, and by Mill, is traced. The Ricardian theory of rent is pronounced erroneous because it misplaces the emphasis on prices instead of on profits. In this lecture Mr. Rogers gives some striking figures of the comparative rise in the rents of pasture, arable, and building sites. Contrasted with the fourteenth century, the rent of arable land has increased eighty-eight times as compared with a rise in pasture of nine times, and the rise in urban rent has of course been far greater. The two following lectures deal with the same subject of land, the first treating of contracts for the use of land, and the second of the comparative advantages of large and small holdings. Professor Rogers doubts the wisdom of the policy of consolidating farms. He then proceeds to discuss movements of labour under two heads of emigration and immigration, and in the following lecture the topic of bimetallism is handled under the title movements of currency. In the eighth lecture he returns to the subject of land under the title of peasant agriculture and manufactures, and gives an historical account of the different forms of tenure. In the following two lectures the relations of home trade to domestic and international competition are considered, and in the last two lectures of the course a sketch is furnished of the economic legislation passed during the century, from 1815 to 1841, and thence forward to 1885.

Methods of Industrial Remuneration. By David F. Schloss. London: Williams and Norgate, 1892.

In this book Mr. Schloss has performed a work which will be of very great service to economic students. In his own words he has "attempted to present a faithful delineation of the wage-system in all its forms, and of the several modifications introduced with a view to the improvement of that system." We venture to think that he has been singularly successful in this attempt, and that no such careful and minute analysis of the varieties of industrial remuneration has ever been presented to the public before. From a failure to discriminate clearly between these different methods of payment, and to attend to small distinctions, however unimportant they may at first sight seem, a considerable amount of confusion has infected the reasonings of many writers, and led them to form untenable judgments on insecure evidence. This has perhaps been especially the case with regard to profit sharing and co-operative production, and, accordingly, Mr. Schloss's critical examination. of the promise and performance of these projected reforms on the established wages system is not the least valuable part of his book. He devotes to it about half of the volume. He supplies some cogent reasons, which deserve the most careful examination, to show why the adoption of profit-sharing has found so little favour with employers and employed, and has been emphatically condemned by perhaps the shrewdest body of working men in the country-the members of the co-operative societies. They have, as he aptly points out, engaged in the work of production as well as of distribution with no little saccess, and the difficulty in the former case of superseding the employer, on which great stress has been laid by eminent economists, has, he thinks, perhaps been exaggerated. The failure of co-operative production-in the common, though limited, sense of the term-has been rather due to a faulty system of industrial remuneration, and this faulty system is the very basis of that system of profit-sharing which economists, who have disapproved of co-operative production have commended as exhibiting the merits without the failings of the larger scheme. Mr. Schloss shows by a statistical examination of the actual instances of profit-sharing how small and, in many cases, how illusory is the share of profits obtained by the workmen who, according to the theory of the matter, have themselves, by dint of the stimulus to increased exertion or avoidance of waste, produced the increase of profit in which they only partially share. He argues that by some modification of the established wages system, without any sharing in profits as such, the same desirable result of an increase of output might be secured, and the workmen might obtain a larger proportion of the increase, without any of the fettering conditions, which often make the receipt of their share in the profits earned in the past conditional on their remaining in the service of the same business firm for the future. A bonus or premium may be given, he points out, for qualitative as well as for quantitative excellence of work, in the shape of what he calls progressive wages, paid either to individuals or collectively to a body of workmen. In the first part of his book Mr. Schloss