Despite two volumes of narration and quotation, the figure of Stephen Girard is not so clear as the reader could desire. There is naturally some curiosity as to the great merchant and first private banker of America. Undeniably he was a grasping trader. His brother, acting as his agent, writes in 1784: "It is amusing to have you ask me how you can make some more money. You will always be the same-never content." And not long after, this agent left his brother's employment, complaining bitterly of having been overreached. Girard knew well and practiced many ways of sliding through the law (volume i, pages 52-54, 58-60, 63, 69, 70, 72, 79, 406). Yet his fortune came from unremitting application; he spoke fondly of "my love of work, the only pleasure I have on this globe." He was burdened with an insane wife—" I assure you I am very tired of the daily entertainments with which my better half provides me"—and, sadly disappointed in his hope of children, he seems a lonely and pathetic figure.

Six times during his long residence in Philadelphia the city was. visited by the plague ", yellow fever, and each time Girard showed the quality of a hero, throwing aside his business to minister to his stricken fellow-citizens. With one associate he set in order the dilapidated Bush Hill Hospital and managed it effectively for many weeks, confounding Dr. Physick, Dr. Leib and others with his methods. Henceforward he found savage joy in scourging with the scorpions of his satire the whole medical fraternity of Philadelphia. He, himself, found little need for medicine, but by hard work and frugal diet lived to the age of eighty-one.

The reader will be disappointed that no more light is cast on Girard's religion. The considerations which drove him into deism do not appear. Indeed, the biographer shows but little interest in this important phase of his influence. There is no mention of the legends of the reconversion on his deathbed, the clash between the Masons and the priests upon the funeral day, the great legal battle over the will, which was claimed to be offensive to Christianity by its provision for an infidel school. Though there is some mention of philanthropies, the reader would welcome some authoritative comment on the anecdotes which enliven the pages of Simpson, Rupp and Ingham, Girard's previous biographers. In fact, many of the letters serve to stimulate curiosity rather than allay it. By the publication of this work the material available for economic history has been enlarged, but the art of biography has not been advanced.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

DIXON RYAN FOX.

Richard Cobden: The International Man.

By J. A. HOBSON.

New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1919.—416 pp.

This is not a vie intime. It dispenses with material of a personal and private character of which biographies of that type make use. Nor is it a "life and times". The name of Cobden is associated with important movements and outstanding events in the history of England, but Mr. Hobson has not undertaken to describe or interpret them; for the historical setting of Cobden's career one must still go to Lord Morley's standard Life. The present volume owes its existence to the author's conviction that "Cobdenism" has distorted Cobden, that the non-interventionist, the internationalist, the friend of humanity, has been swallowed up in the free-trader. Since all estimate of human motive depends upon relative emphasis, it has been possible to picture Cobden as a pushing business man, inspired by no loftier purpose than a sordid commercialism and working throughout solely in the interest of English capitalism, and also as a visionary and dangerous cosmopolitan, without grasp of the brute actualities of life. Both views, in Mr. Hobson's opinion, are erroneous. He believes that Cobden was first and foremost an internationalist, with whom free trade was incidental to internationalism and not the reverse, but that his knowledge of affairs was unusually broad and his statesmanship of a very practical

cast.

Mr. Hobson's method is to let Cobden speak for himself. By far the larger part of the volume is made up of extracts from Cobden's letters and writings. Some of this material was already accessible in Lord Morley's Life and elsewhere, but much of it is printed here for the first time. In Cobden's correspondence with the Reverend Henry Richard, who was for many years secretary of the Peace Society and an editorial writer on the Morning Star, a voluminous correspondence running from 1849 to 1865, Mr. Hobson has tapped an invaluable source for Cobden's thought on international affairs, and by printing generous extracts from it he makes public a remarkably significant commentary on British foreign policy in the Palmerstonian era.

Interpreting Cobden's career as he does, Mr. Hobson is not compelled to renarrate the story of the Anti-Corn-Law League and the repeal of the corn laws in 1846. After preliminary and brief chapters on "Cobden's Preparation for Politics" and "Cobden as a Pamphleteer", he begins with the continental tour which Cobden undertook in 1846-7 in the interest of commercial liberty and international friendship. The Crimean War, the China War of 1856-1860, the

Indian Mutiny, the commercial treaty of 1860 with France and the American Civil War are among the more important subjects upon which the volume throws light. The chapter entitled "The Civil War and the Sumner Letters" should prove of particular interest to Americans. It consists principally of letters written by Cobden to Sumner during the Civil War, the manuscripts of which are in the Library of Harvard. Most of them have already been printed in the American Historical Review, but they are presented here for the first time in continuous form. They show vividly the impressions made upon an exceptionally well-informed and broad-minded foreigner and a sincere friend of the American people withal, by secession, the blockade of the Confederacy, the protectionism of the Republican Party, the Trent affair, the activities of the British-built Confederate commerce distroyers, and emancipation. They constitute, furthermore, an illuminating commentary on English public opinion respecting the Civil War.

The discerning reader will not fail to note Cobden's indebtedness to various and sundry reformers who have flourished since his day! Whence but from the luminous pages of Mr. Norman Angell's Great Illusion could Cobden have derived such an opinion as is expressed in this sentence? "I often wish I had the leisure to do justice to the argument which is always uppermost in my mind, that the modern application of the principles of political economy has destroyed the motive of self-interest which formerly tempted us to wars of conquest" (page 89). Could a man not familiar with the urgings of Dr. David Starr Jordan against preparedness have written these words? "In fact, all this preparation and menace on the part of other countries will make it the more difficult for the French Emperor to put up with an affront from any quarter. It is easy to bear hard words from an unarmed man, but even a look may convey an intolerable insult from one who is threatening you with a loaded pistol" (page 265). Is it probable that any one not imbued with the spirit of the "Bryan treaties" would have confessed a "paramount abhorrence of war as a means of settling disputes, whether between nations or citizens of one country" (page 380)? (page 380)? And what is this but "6 victory"?

peace without

Let John Bull have a great military triumph, and we shall all have to take our hats off as we pass the Horse Guards for the rest of our lives. On the other hand, let the Czar's swollen pride be gratified and inflamed with victory, it will foster that spirit of military insolence which pervades everything in Russia. But if neither could claim a decisive triumph, and both

were thoroughly discouraged and disgusted with their sacrifices, they might all in future be equally disposed to be more peaceable [pages 108-109].

In 1859, Lord Palmerston wrote to Cobden in these words, offering him a seat in the Cabinet:

diplomacy, and that wars are Now it is in the Cabinet alone We never consult Parliament

You and your friends complain of secret entered into without consulting the people, that questions of foreign policy are settled. till after they are settled. If, therefore, you wish to have a voice in these questions, you can only do so in the Cabinet [page 234].

It is not recorded that Cobden had been calling, in so many words, for

66

open covenants of peace openly arrived at ", but what he wanted is clear enough and it explains why he declined the premier's offer. He would not compromise with a system which he regarded as fundamentally evil. Many other examples of the influence of latter-day radicalism upon Cobden the discerning reader will detect for himself!

In all seriousness, Cobden perceived that war strikes its roots deep in the institutional and cultural environment of the peoples of modern Christendom and that it can not be abolished and all else left as it is. Among the more important of its causes or conditions, in his belief, were protectionism, aristocratic statesmanship and secret diplomacy, the jingo press, the cult of the military and "war psychology". He put his faith for a better future in popular internationalism, not official intergovernmentalism, for to Cobden government was tainted with tyranny and chicane. It was this attitude toward government, according to Mr. Hobson, rather than any supposed personal or class interest, that explains Cobden's domestic and foreign policies, laissez-faire and nonintervention. He looked to a growing commercial and cultural intercourse between peoples as the only possible basis of permanent peace. His hope that free trade would become world-wide-the great delusion of the Manchester School-was not to be realized; and even his own country, it seems, is about to restore, in some degree, that commercial policy which he held to be a prime cause of war. But Cobden, at all events, did not underrate the strength of the forces that make for war. "In all probability", he wrote to Sumner in 1849, "Europe must suffer convulsions and revolutions, of which those of last year were but the feeble skirmishings, before the present system passes away" (page 338). Nor did he make the crude error of assuming that political democracy alone would insure peace on earth.

R. L. SCHUYLER.

What is Fair? A Study of Some Problems of Public Utility Regulation. By WILLIAM G. RAYMOND. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1918.-xiii, 172 pp.

The author of this little book is a civil engineer of eminence and Dean of the College of Applied Science in the State University of Iowa. From his experience as an engineer he makes a contribution to our understanding of some of the more fundamental of the problems of utility regulation, problems which call for the combined wisdom of engineer, business man, lawyer and economist. Some of the phraseology suggests too much reliance on the author's "intuitive sense of fairness and justice" (preface, page viii), but most of his concrete conclusions are supported by objective rather than subjective reasoning.

The problems of utility regulation fall under two main heads: first, the proportions in which the various classes of patrons shall contribute to the company's total revenue; and secondly, the size of that total revenue. Under the first head, according to the author, "a fundamental principle would seem to be that the basis of charge must be the cost of service" (page 58). Charges for gas, water or electric power, he tells us, may be divided into four elements: (1) peak load costs, (2) consumer costs, (3) output costs and (4) fixed charges, less the part of this item included in peak load costs (page 71). The first three of these elements seem to constitute the separable or additional costs of rendering service to each customer-the costs which the company would save if that customer did not have to be served. The fourth element, on the other hand, is a cost incurred by the company on behalf of all the customers, but a cost no specific portion of which can be said to be caused by any one customer or class of customers. It would appear to the reviewer that once the first three elements are ascertained, the "fundamental principle" of the cost-of-service basis is incapable of further application. When each customer has paid as much of these three elements of cost as has been incurred in his behalf, it is impossible to determine what share of the remaining costs has been incurred for him. The apportionment of the fixed charges (other than the peak load costs) becomes a matter of policy rather than of analysis. Professor Raymond thinks that they "should probably vary with the sum of the other three costs", unless a simpler division may be rendered desirable" in the interest of simple publicity and bookkeeping." He is not under the illusion that this is a division on the cost basis, for he supports it for a different reason-namely, "on the theory that those who cause the greatest expense receive the