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 renumerated? Then it may be necessary for the State to promote by such means as it has in its power the growth of manufactures." It will be seen that these views, however opposed to the general drift of the English school of economists, are strikingly supported in some particulars by the theories of Mr. Cliffe Leslie, of Professor Sidgwick, and of Mr. Jevons. In America, where Mr. Syme's book has been extensively circulated, they challenge comparison chiefly with Mr. Carey. Distinctly less popular than Mr. Carey in his treatment of a difficult subject matter, Mr. Syme is also distinctly more nervous in style and systematic in thought. Carey apologised for a Protectionist tariff in a commercial community; Mr. Syme indicates the Australian tendency to the organisation of labour in the interests of the whole community. Mr. Syme's second book on "Representative Government in England" is mainly an attack on government by party, and develops the doctrine that members should be more immediately responsible than they are to their constituencies, and Ministers to Parliament. Mr. Syme regards the body politic as a living organism, which is continually undergoing renewal, not as a piece of dead mechanism that must be set going from time to time, and he would therefore give the constituency the right of demanding its member's resignation at any moment, would have Ministers nominated in Parliament, and would let the Houses dismiss an offending Minister without disturbing his colleagues. Parties would still subsist, because such divisions as Liberal and Conservative are inherent in human nature; but when the power to obstruct useful measures was taken away, and Ministers stood or fell by their individual merits, "we should get rid of the bitterness of party feeling, the dishonesty of party tactics, and the evils inherent in the system of party government." One of the most suggestive and original parts of this book is the thesis that the stronger the Government under our present system, the less real work does it do. Mr. Syme's last book, "On the Modification of Organisms," is mainly a criticism of the Darwinian theory, and as such has provoked warm opposition and attracted great attention. To the general critic much of its interest lies in the fact that it is a curious direction of Mr. Syme's leading principle to an entirely new domain of thought. Having rejected Free Trade, the mechanical competition of blind forces like greed and want, as an adequate motive for the development of human society; having condemned the competition of selfish interests in the machinery of government, he proceeds in this volume to combat the theory of natural selection, the extermination of the unfit, the selection of the appropriate, as sufficient to explain the origin of species, and contends that all modifications of organisms originate in the cell, which is the psychological as well as the physiological unit. Mr. Syme has a great deal to say, which he says with effect, on all the leading views of Darwinism. Altogether the book is a very suggestive one. Mr. Syme is an evolutionist without being a Darwinian. Mr. Syme was married in 1859 to Miss Annabella Johnson, of Melbourne, and has a family of five sons and two daughters.

Syme, Ebenezer, M.L.A., brother of, was born at North Berwick, Scotland, in 1826; received his early education at the school of his native parish, of which his father was master; and when about fourteen years of age entered the University of St. Andrews, where he obtained a bursary for excellence in Latin composition, and won the marked approval of his professors for diligence and proficiency in learning. From early youth he had strong theological tendencies, and a corresponding inclination towards the clerical profession in connection with the National church, or with one or other of the Presbyterian churches. But in the course of preparing for the realisation of his purpose he encountered a difficulty which eventually proved insurmountable, and thus occasioned a divergence from the regular clerical course. The difficulty was with the creeds. He could accept neither the full-blown Calvinism of the Westminster Confession, nor the new and more liberal doctrine known as the Evangelical Union or Morrisonian system then coming to the front. In fact, he could not accept any creed, if acceptance meant a pledge of absolute conformity. To him, with his highly idealistic way of looking at 453