well to consider the results carefully before attempting to fix prices by limiting margins to any certain percentage either on cost or on sales value. And the Food Administration probably did well in fixing a flat margin per barrel on flour. Nevertheless, the 25 cents per barrel allowed in this case was too large and the actual margins earned were much greater than those probably anticipated.'

A point which caused much misunderstanding and ill feeling was the relation of previous lean years to the margin of profit to be allowed by the price-fixing agency. Ordinarily, under competition, lean years and fat years offset one another, and the losses of the one are borne for the sake of the gains of the other. Not unnaturally, therefore, the representatives of the lumber and other industries urged that inasmuch as they suffered as a result of the European War, they should be treated liberally in the price fixing. To such arguments, however, the Price-Fixing Committee turned a deaf ear, their reply being that this government was not responsible for the war and could not undertake to insure industry against loss. The committee attached considerable weight to the rate of profits made during the years prior to the war. Clearly this stand was wise. No proof could be furnished that 1917 or 1918 were ordained to be fat years. Rather it would seem that our entrance into the war, like the proverbial "act of God", brought about an interruption in the normal course of events and postponed for a season the coming of the usual fat years.

7. The Problem of more than One Price for the same Product; and Pooling

One of the practical difficulties with which the government price fixers had to deal was the problem of buying from individual companies at individually determined prices. The Railway Administration would undoubtedly have been able to effect great economies by purchasing coal from companies whose low costs would enable them to sell more cheaply than the price

As a matter of fact, on account of taxes and penalties, neither the anticipated nor the actual margins could be known.

fixed for the public. There is evidence that it desired to do so but was restrained by the Fuel Administration's anxiety to maintain the market,-and with it, wages.

If prices were fixed merely on goods purchased for government account, and if the government purchase was a relatively small part of the total output of the industry, it was common to fix a different individual price on the output of each company. Under commandeer orders, and in a few other cases, the prices were fixed on the basis of individual costs or of fixing different costs for small groups of producers. This was the case with common brick, and later, at least, with sulphuric acid.

When, however, the purchases for the government were the dominant factor in the market, as in the case of copper, the tendency was to fix a single price on the basis of marginal cost. Here practically the entire business of the companies was concerned, and, accordingly, the total profit arising from superior efficiency was at stake. Various schemes were proposed for granting special prices to high-cost copper producers or for pooling the production but were not adopted.

When a price to the public was involved, the problem was somewhat like that which confronted the government as the sole buyer, and sound price-fixing policy seemed to be to approximate what would take place in a competitive market. This meant a single price with differential profits to supramarginal producers. Indeed, the possibility of making separate prices for the same kind of product, coming from different concerns, was limited by competitive and market conditions, as in the case of Michigan cement and Virginia-Carolina lumber.

A pooling system was strongly urged in the case of steel rails, coal, and-in a modified form-of copper. It was not adopted, because pooling would have involved the organization of considerable machinery for administration as well as considerable risk through the accumulation of stocks. In any case, too, the plan would have necessitated not only the careful ascertainment of the cost and the investment of each producer but the fixing of a separate price for each, which would have multiplied the work of price fixing. The trouble experienced

by the Food Administration in attempting to regulate flour prices on a cost-plus-profit basis illustrates this difficulty.

Pooling, however, was undertaken in several cases in which the object was not so much to equalize profits as to ration or to control the distribution of the product. This was true of raw sugar, wool and tin; and the guarantee of a minimum price for wheat constituted a potential pooling arrangement. In these cases, the producers were paid the same price and allowed to retain any differential profits resulting therefrom, the government merely undertaking to supply the needs of the country at reasonable prices. Nevertheless, while in these cases the price fixing was not complicated by dealing separately with each producer, the administration was difficult, and above all the government was financially involved in an unfortunate mistake, e. g., in wheat, tin and wool.

[To be concluded]

JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA.

LEWIS H. HANEY.

T

THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF JAMES I1

I

HE study of political ideas has been unduly neglected in English-speaking countries. We have no such history as Gierke's

magistral survey of German associations, though our grouplife is even more prodigal of riches than that which he recounted. No English monograph exists comparable with his study of Althusius, though the thought of Locke, to take only a single example, provides the materials for a not less magnificent analysis. Two brilliant volumes of Figgis, a classic preface of Maitland, some penetrating criticism of Leslie Stephen, a solid essay by Gooch-these represent almost the whole of what may be rated as of first importance. The kind of work so admirably done in France by Henri Michel and DreyfusBrissac has so far found no imitators either in England or America. It is a curious negligence, for the history of political ideas is so closely related to that history of political structure in which Anglo-Saxon writers excel as to make explanation or excuse at least doubly difficult. Nor should an America that is plethoric in political experiment be backward in tracing its affiliations; Harrington and Locke and Montesquieu thought to the purpose of a later generation.

Professor McIlwain's volume is in the right tradition. It is, he tells us, the first of a series in which he and his colleagues propose to reprint those volumes that most of us have hoped to see one day in a bookseller's catalogue. Nothing is so greatly needed as to make accessible the classic texts of the Renaissance and Reformation. The existing copies of Althusius' book cannot exceed a score in number; only one copy, at least, has found its way into an American public library. The De Concordantia Catholica of the great Cardinal of Cusa, the Vindiciae of Duplessis-Mornay, the De Justa Potestate of Rossaeus,— these and books like these we must have at our elbow if we are to understand the foundations of the modern state. After three centuries we ought, at least, to make vaunt that we have outstripped the massive compilations of Melchior Goldast, yet Professor McIlwain tells us that later volumes must depend upon the success of his own. And if we are to be honest, we must admit that this postpones indefinitely the likeli

'The Political Works of James I. Edited by Charles Howard McIlwain. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1918-cxi, 354 pp.

hood of their appearance, for we lack that gelehrtes publicum to whom such a volume is an event. Yet it is books like these we must have if historical science is to attain its ripest fruits.

Professor McIlwain merely reprints the works of James from the standard edition of 1616, but he adds thereto a preface of some hundred quarto pages. An Englishman may be allowed the remark that

it is the most admirable contribution to its subject that has been made by an American scholar. It is at every point learned and exact, and it is rarely indeed that it is not convincing. Its main value lies not so much in the appraisal of James' ideas, to which little attention is given, as in the attempt to set them in their historic perspective. Something of this, indeed, Dr. Figgis had accomplished in his Divine Right of Kings; but to him the theories of James were a relatively unimportant incident, where to Professor McIlwain they serve to demonstrate that England was plunged into the midstream of European political thought. His narrative is, in fact, a full demonstration of the reason why, in the great counter-movement to reform, England, together with Holland, was alone able to avoid the primrose path of bureaucratic absolutism. Little of what Professor McIlwain has to say is actually new, and he rarely attempts its evaluation. But his insistence upon More and Campanella as masters of the controversial art is particularly arresting, and it forms a welcome antithesis to the conventional picture of two dreamy idealists weaving the vision of a fabulous empire. Nor must we miss the illuminating appendix upon the political literature of the Tudors. No one acquainted with that literature can doubt that Professor McIlwain is right when he argues that political theory in England begins with William Tyndale. Fortescue is concerned with Politik; it is Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man which lays the foundation of an English staatslehre. That is a valuable note to strike, for it rightly emphasizes at once the roots from which the modern English state has sprung and the main political problem which it is the business of each age to answer.

II

That problem is the ground of obedience. The spectacle of the voluntary submission of vast numbers to a small portion of themselves is an arresting one, for, as Hume remarked, ultimate force is always on the side of the governed. The problem of securing unity in the state is always typical of an age of crisis; and it was to solve it that the thinkers of the Counter-Reformation above all struggled. Luther had broken into pieces the Christian Commonwealth of the medieval per