Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/724

708 what they like and as they like, and only be manacled when they come to dispose of their productions. He has a great deal to say about "liberty of production" and "industrial freedom." He must therefore think that men, if "let alone," and left free to exercise the largest option in the choice and pursuit of vocations, will create more property than if hampered and meddled with by government.

But why the same principle would not apply to the exchange of property, and why wealth would not be further augmented by the liberty of citizens to sell and buy the products of labor when and where they will, without let or hindrance, he does not explain. His concession of "the liberty of production" is, however, illusory. Commerce and industry are so bound up together that you can not fetter the former without restricting the latter. Indeed, one of the avowed purposes of repressing commerce is the coercion of production. As trade is not free if hindered or paralyzed by legislative action, so production is not free if forced by government into artificial channels, and regulated by politicians rather than left to the open competitions of private enterprise.

the midst of the deluge of books on social questions—labor, wages, land, co-operation and what not—most of them mere wild and worthless speculations, we turn with a sense of refreshing relief to this solid contribution to the subject from the point of view of simple historic facts. Professor Rogers is known as a political economist of wide acquirements and independent opinions, but he is so far imbued with the scientific method as to recognize that our first need is to get command of the facts of experience in a form available for the derivation of safe conclusions. Some eighteen years ago he published the first two volumes of a comprehensive "History of Agriculture and Prices," and the present volume is but a continuation of his line of studies in this general direction. The work is nothing less than a contribution to the social history of England, treated with reference to the conditions of the laboring-classes at various periods, their opportunities of labor, their rates of wages, their social privations and comforts, and all with reference to the influence of government and legislation, and the constitution of English society.

The theme is a noble one, and it is handled with great instructiveness, and with a sustained interest from the beginning to the end of the volume. It should have a place in every library, and is one of the books that must be carefully consulted by all students of social economics. The following passage, from the review of the London "Academy," exemplifies the character of the questions dealt with in Professor Rogers's work:

splendid and profusely illustrated book contains, to quote from its full title, a concise account of every species of living and fossil bird at present known from the continent north of the Mexican and United States boundary, inclusive of Greenland. The account is preceded by a general ornithology, or outline of the structure and classification of birds, and a field ornithology, or manual of collecting, preparing, and preserving birds. The whole is preceded by an "Historical Preface," in which the progress