Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/480

 466 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and the benefits of unregulated banks of issue conducted on the plan of the Scottish banks. The reviewer's acquaintance with the literature of banking is so limited that he speaks with hesitation, but he feels bound to say for the authors that he has never come across a better exposition of certain advantages of the unregulated bank of issue than is here given, although he is under the necessity of adding that the body of the chapter in which this exposition occurs contains almost as much confused thinking and unsound argument as does the rest of the book.

Like their great countryman, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and like the thousands of other individualists of the generation that has now almost passed away, the authors of this book have certain theories as to the philosophy of the state, and certain traditional prejudices as to the actual conduct of the affairs of life, and they try, vainly, to com- bine them. They fail to see that the only logical principle which is absolutely inconsistent with a certain degree of state regulation of industry is one which requires anarchy, pure and simple, and that unless they are willing to subscribe to this (and they are not) they have no a priori bulwark against a greater socialization of industry. They may be entirely right in their opposition to any particular proposal of the collectivists ; but in all such cases the issue is one of fact, it is a question of expediency, to be determined by an examination of the circumstances of the individual case, not by a dogmatic appeal to some one a priori principle. Many socialists profess (and with some show of reason) to believe in individualism as much as Messrs. Spencer, Hake and company do, they simply differ from the latter as to how individualism is to be best attained. And there are others not socialists, but men who believe that industry should be somewhat more largely socialized than it is at present who have no quarrel with the individualist's formulation of his fundamental principle, but who feel that it is too mu9h like the Delphic oracle to be all-sufficient for practical guidance, and who object to that arbitrary, dogmatic use of it which distinguishes its professed votaries, and which brings to mind a certain popular definition of orthodoxy to wit, "my doxy." When in the volume before us Mr. Fletcher-Vane presents his own idea of what a municipal programme should be, he makes a contribution to the solution of one of the problems of the day which is entitled to be judged upon its merits, and which, in fact, seems to the reviewer to be neither better nor worse than many another : but it is absurd to claim