Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/782

 760 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL This volume is a reminder that the works of Le Play do follow him. His .treatise of 1855, Les Ovricrs Europen, contained thirty-six minute studies of fairly typical workmen's families in different parts of Europe. Tke Interntioal Society for the practical study of Social Eo,wmy, founded in 1856 to continue this work in the Old World and the New, has since published further monographs at intervals of about six months apiece, under the title Les Otvriers des De Monks. The series, including Les Ovriers Erope,s, has now passed its hundredth monograph; and the Society is to be congratulated upon the quiet perseverance by means of which this result has been achieved. M. Cheysson, favourably knom on the Continent as a distinguished statistician and man of action in social science, has marked his term of office as president of the society above referred to, by extracting from each study its central statistical feature, the budget of receipts and expenses, and collating these under their several subheads. The hundred families are thus distributed: fifty-one in France; six in England; thirty-three in eleven other countries of Europe; six in Africa; two in Asia; one in Canada; and one in the United States. The analyses of sources of income and items of expense of each family are set out first in ' absolute numbers' (francs) and then in relative numbers (percentages of total). The comparative importance on the one hand of wages, common rights, allotments, bye-industries, house- wifery, benefit allowances, and perquisites of all sorts, -and on the other of food stuffs inter se or with reference to lodging, furniture, clothing, fuel, light, heat, taxes, &c., is thus exhibited. A doubt may be expressed whether, on the whole, this part of M. Cheysson's labour is justified by its result. The budgets of Le Play and his school are generally regarded as depending much upon their setting for the value which they possess. The monographs are in fact Meissonier-like pictures, and do not lend themselves to being cut up without injury into snippets. The tout ensemble is true: to generalise from any single part of it would be unsafe and unsound, having regard to the few cases brought under observation. M. Cheysson, it need hardly be said, attempts no such generalisation himself. ' Each monograph,' he says, ' is a complete though isolated family portrait. It may be of great interest to set these portraits side by side, just as in an ethnographic collection we arrange the principal racial types together and compare them trait for trait.' Further question arises as to the policy of the slight modifications of the original budget arrangement. Thus, instead of the division of drinks into 'aromatic' and 'fermented,' we find tea and coffee lumped with mustard and other articles under the head of condi,nts et stimulants ! Surely this gives little opportunity of comparing the incidence of indirect taxation through articles of drink or even of food. For does not M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu defend the repeal of the sugar duty here and its retention in France on. the ground that sugared tea is a necessary of life on the west of the Channel only ?