property none of the brothers has any right to it. In each group a man is chosen to have charge of the clothes and shoes of the whole group, and a woman to see to the quality of the bread and other food, and to superintend its distribution in sufficient quantities. The commune is governed by certain elected members, such as the judge, the master, the preacher, &c. All field work and housework is done in turn by the groups, under the direction of head men chosen beforehand. Each commune has a school, which all the children are obliged to attend.

Such were the fundamental principles of the social organization of the sect of Communists. Its founder, Popoff, a rich man, gave up all his property to the commune, and by that attracted a number of disciples to his side. But the police, alarmed by the communistic tendencies of this sect, soon arrested Popoff, kept him some time in prison, and then exiled him to one of the most distant provinces of Siberia, whence he never returned. The disciples endeavoured to organize themselves. They elected twelve apostles, at whose feet they offered up all their goods, and made a common purse. But this communistic enthusiasm did not last long; the brethren had not reached the level of Communist principles in the broad sense of the word, and they split up into small groups bound by common interests, spiritual and material, and by the duty of mutual help.

Several villages now exist in the Caucasus, the inhabitants of which belong to this sect, and keep more or less to the Communist organization. Their fanatical enthusiasm, on the one hand, and their material well-being and prosperity, on the other, act as a contagion on the surrounding populations; and the Government takes severe measures to put an end to their dangerous propaganda, and entirely forbids their migration from one place to another, exiles them to distant provinces. But all this only widens the spread of the sect, the fanatical agents of which go from village to village haranguing the people, predicting the end of the world, declaring that every one ought to prepare for it and to repent, and during their fits of excitement they jump, sing strange hymns, tear their clothes, and finish by falling senseless.

There are in Russia a great variety of other sects, which are not less curious and strange, but this is a brief description of some religious sects taken haphazard. The facts here marshalled would seem to prove, to a certain degree, that an unhealthy mental fermentation is at work among the Russian people, which, at this critical moment, may reach proportions menacing to the State and to existing civilization, and, by its noxious influence on the civilized classes, may give a quite novel turn to the social and intellectual movement which is taking place in Russian society.

N. TSAKNI.

VOL. LIII.

EE

RECENT ECONOMIC LITERATURE.

PROFES

*

ROFESSOR THOROLD ROGERS gives us another instalment of his great work on the history of English agriculture and prices, and having now arrived within sight of the completion of that vast investigation, on which he has been engaged singlehanded for a quarter of a century, he frankly confesses that had he foreseen the labour, cost, and anxiety it has involved he would never have undertaken it. The labour has indeed been immense, but the results are of enduring importance. Few works have been able to throw more light on social history or economic truth, and the present two volumes are especially instructive because the period they deal with (1583-1702) is one of exceptional interest in the economic and social history of this country, and yet one whose economic and social circumstances were up to the time of Mr. Rogers' researches virtually terra incognita. It was in this period, as Mr. Rogers remarks, that the economic history of England really began; for it saw the first beginnings of our maritime enterprise, of our jointstock undertakings, of our banking system. It witnessed the Fire of London, the Plague, and several important famines which Mr. Rogers has been the first to bring to light. It witnessed the introduction of the Corn Laws, and the Parochial Settlements Act, the first effects of the discoveries of the precious metals, and of that legal assessment of wages by the justices of the peace of which Mr. Rogers supplies some fresh evidence, and to which he traces, not altogether unjustly, most of the poverty of the modern labourer and the origin of the social problem of our day. In elucidating this interesting period, Mr. Rogers has, as before, drawn his materials mainly from

"A History of Agriculture and Prices in England." By James E. Thorold Rogers. Vols. V. and VI. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

In

the accounts of certain Oxford and Cambridge colleges, from those of Eton and Winchester, from manuscript authorities in the British Museum and the Bodleian, from the private archives of certain old families, all of which he interprets with much care and sagacity. There is of course no space here to give any adequate summary of the results of an investigation that may be said to impart some fresh knowledge on all the social habits as well as the industrial life of the time. The effect of the gold and silver discoveries in raising prices is traced over a very ample list of commodities. Wool is one of the few exceptions. Mr. Rogers is disposed to think its price remained stationary during the seventeenth century in consequence of the export of it being stopped by wars, but, curiously enough, no very perfect record of its price is at present known. exhibiting the movement of prices, Mr. Rogers divides his period into two parts, the one embracing the years 1583-1642, and the other the years 1643-1702, and there is this marked difference between the two periods, that, while the rise in the price of commodities and in rents occurred mostly in the first period, wages, always slow to move, only began to make a noticeable advance in the second. Mr. Rogers is probably right in thinking that it was in the first of these two periods, while wages still continued low although the prices of provisions were high, that the English labouring classes were first driven from their old fare of wheaten bread; and, if his conclusion is correct (for there is admittedly some difficulty in arriving with precision at the rents of the time) that in the first quarter of the seventeenth century rents rose sixfold while corn products only rose 132 per cent., it is manifest that the labourers' loss was entirely the landlords' gain. The rise in wages occurred mainly at two epochs, first in the decade 1643-52, when a succession of the dearest years in the century forced the justices to own the inadequacy of the current rate for the labourers' maintenance, and second in the decade 1663-72, when the supply of labour had been diminished by the Plague. But even at their highest the wages of the time were never sufficient for the necessities of life; during the whole 120 years from 1583 to 1702 they rose only 106 per cent., although wheat rose 209 per cent.; and Mr. Rogers, after a careful estimate of the labourers' budget, arrives at the same conclusion as Gregory King expressed in 1688, that almost the entire working class of the time were regularly every year recipients of parochial relief. There can be no doubt that this was largely the result of the system of fixing wages by the justices, on which the present work throws a good deal of light. Although the system was meant to adjust the price of labour with the price of food, Mr. Rogers' tables prove that wages seldom or never rose in a dear year-why should they, when they could always be supplemented, if necessary, out of the

rates? that they were 10 per cent. higher at Cambridge than at Oxford, though prices were 10 per cent. lower; and, what is striking, that the wages actually paid by employers were often-perhaps even generally-considerably above the maximum fixed by the justices. "The employers," says Mr. Rogers, "were more merciful than the magistrates, notwithstanding the penalties which those 'little tyrants' pronounced against all who infringed the scale." One doubts, however, whether this is the whole explanation.

ance.

The "Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas R. Malthus, 18101823,"* which have been edited with excellent care and judgment by Mr. James Bonar, possess more biographical than scientific importThey are the record of an interesting friendship, beginning, as they do, soon after Ricardo's letters in the Chronicle led Malthus to seek his acquaintance, and ending only with the death of the former; and they show the two rival economists, if one may call them so, in a very favourable light, ripening their friendship by constant disputation, never ashamed to confess their difficulties or their mistakes, and caring only to arrive, by any means, at the truth. They dispute as inquirers, not as scholastics, being entirely free from that dogmatic · attitude with which they are commonly credited; and though Ricardo in one place speaks of his particular view as being" the true faith," he immediately disclaims the arrogance of anything like the assumption of an orthodoxy. It is a pity the corresponding letters of Malthus have been lost, for in these Ricardo generally appears to have the advantage; but then, besides being certainly the more acute mind of the two, he is also generally the defender, and the subject is in most cases of that abstract sort in which he was at home. In fact, one of the chief differences of mental habit between the economists that comes out in the correspondence is Malthus' tendency to go into the facts and Ricardo's contempt for them. To Ricardo's mind the science of political economy was something quite independent of the facts, and would be just as true if the facts were different. "It would be no answer to me," he writes, " say that men were ignorant of the best and cheapest mode of conducting their business and paying their debts, because that is a question of fact, not of science," and he says it is enough for him to know men's interest; he is not solicitous about their practice. The chief subjects of debate between them were the Corn Laws, which Malthus favoured; the possibility of gluts, which Malthus asserted; the cause of high and low profits, which Malthus ascribed to the competition of capital with capital, and Ricardo erroneously to the fertility of the land, because fertile land meant cheap food, cheap food meant low wages, and low wages high profits; and the determination of value, which Malthus referred vaguely to supply and demand, and Ricardo to supply alone, to the competition of sellers, who were forced to guide

* Oxford: Clarendon Press.

"to

their charges by the cost of production, by the labour worked up in the commodity. Ricardo, of course, always admitted that there were articles whose value was settled by the competition of buyers, and did not depend on labour, and he admits to Malthus that the price of corn in America depended on the demand of foreign countries, and not on the quantity of labour spent on its production; but he maintains that this arises from inability to produce the article in sufficient quantity to satisfy the demand of foreign countries, and that there is really no effective competition between the sellers in the case. Ricardo has really two theories of value, one based simply on the competition of sellers, and another based on demand, or the competition of buyers, and in one of these letters to Malthus (p. 222) he hesitates to accept an ingenious proposal for reconciling them which had been suggested by McCulloch. Why does wine laid down to improve increase in value, though no labour has been expended on it? Ricardo would assert (p. 204), on account of rarity; but McCulloch suggested that it was because the capital represented in the wine might have employed labour during that time and made the same value in profit.

The new edition of Professor Sidgwick's "Principles of Political Economy," needs little more than a word of acknowledgment. In the four years since the first edition was published the author's opinions have undergone no modification of any consequence, and though he makes numerous changes in the present edition, they are merely in the nature of more effective or more complete statement. The most important, perhaps, occur in the discussion on the currency, where he introduces a new passage, pronouncing unfavourably on the practicability of the tabular or multiple standard, and where he considerably enlarges his exposition of bimetallism, declaring, with more decision than before, that international bimetallism with a fixed ratio is desirable if it could be maintained, and that it can, in his opinion, be maintained in one particular situation, but one only-i.e., "if the monetary demand of the bimetallic union be large relatively to the whole demand for the precious metals." But this point, on which the whole question turns, Mr. Sidgwick leaves undetermined, because, as he explains, his business is with principles, and not with facts; and indeed, he might have added, the point is incapable of being determined in the present state of our knowledge. Still, Mr. Sidgwick's analyses are always so acute and his spirit so judicial that he never fails to be most instructive. In another new passage of some length he ventures on a forecast-of course an avowedly very conjectural one— of the future. Among other things, the industrial world is to consist more and more of rings of employers, on the one hand, and combinations of workmen on the other, and we are to have less employment for capital-first, because wars are to some extent to cease; and,

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