surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of this high privilege, is a gentle, painless death; and this should be administered not as a punishment, but as an expression of enlightened pity for the victims-too defective by nature to find true happiness in life—and as a duty toward the community and toward our own offspring." Administer a little carbonic gas, and the thing is done (p. 193). Let each case be thoroughly and judicially examined before sentence of extinction is pronounced. Governments have the same right to proceed against the idiot, in this way, that they have to execute a murderer. It is the right of self-preservation. It is the law of utility (p. 218). "More and more, thinking men are coming to the conclusion that all our knowledge and all our principles of action are derived, directly or indirectly, from the external world, that all the matter for the construction of our most ethereal thought and deepest feeling has been gotten, primarily, through the senses" (p. 210). Life is a mere phase of existence. No intuition teaches us that it has any special sacredness or value. "The divine method, plainly revealed in nature," of dealing with a feeble or pernicious life is to destroy it (p. 213).

Such is the general line of the author's argument. He writes with the earnestness of deep personal conviction, and from the standpoint of a scientific physician. If, he argues, it is every day's practice to take the life of an unborn infant to save that of the mother, and the general voice of the Protestant church, at least, approves it, what difference in principle is to be found in killing it after birth, if evidently unfit to live, in order to preserve society from useless loss? If an idiot falls sick and dies in infancy, all speak of it as a blessing to the family. Is it any less a blessing, if he die without the pain of sickness? But pathology, he declares, shows that there is a moral idiocy, that may co-exist with full mental power (p. 22). Is this not the most dangerous kind? A wolf with the intelligence of a man would be terrible, indeed. Such is the habitual criminal, born with no moral sense. To kill the child, who has become a public charge and is found to be of this description, is a mercy to him and to the world (p. 58). The same is true if he be feeble-minded. Educate him as best you can, and hardly more than one in ten can ever support himself (p. 131).

Dr. McKim evidently leans toward the theory of Weismann that "death is but an adaptation, a habit acquired by all organisms but

the very lowest, for the better adjustment of the species to the environment, whereby higher types might evolve and secure continuance" (p. 204), while "the lowest of animals, the protozoa, are potentially immortal" (p. 4). If man has then learned to die for the good of man, it is but a short step to the position that particular men may be made to die for the good of all.

This remedy, in principle, appears applicable in the case of any who are useless members of society or are in a condition favorable to the propagation of such as would be. The author frankly admits this (p. 246). To send an executioner into every household, however, would be too unpopular a measure to begin with (p. 247). He is content to limit his services at present to the inmates of our public institutions (p. 189), and he points out that it is full time to begin, for one out of every seven hundred and fifty-five of the total population of the United States is now in jail, while fifty years ago they held (if we are to trust to the somewhat apocryphal census of 1850) only one out of every 3,422 (p. xxx, 176).

Such books as this serve a useful purpose. They start thought in new directions, or rather they give public voice to thoughts that have been kept for esoteric uses. Dr. McKim has thrown out something to float into the twentieth century, which may seem less strange in its closing than in its opening years.

Yale University.

SIMEON E. BALDWIN.

The Distribution of Income. By William Smart, M.A., Phil.D., LL.D., Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy in the University of Glasgow. London and New York, MacMillan, 1899. 8vo, xv, 341 pp.

This book will be of great interest both to economists and business men. The author himself belongs to each of these two classes, having, as he says, served a "considerable apprenticeship to practical business life" as a large employer of labor, before he accepted the Adam Smith Professorship of Political Economy at Glasgow. The author's business experience accounts for the general tone of the book and for its point of view, which is that of the capitalistemployer. The difficulties and risks of the entrepreneur's position and the unjust criticism to which he is subjected by the workman are vividly set forth. Less is said about the misunderstandings on the other side. A great deal of attention is devoted to the factory system, which is taken as the type of industrial organiza

tion. The closing chapters, however, are devoted to the study of professional income and form perhaps the earliest attempt to discuss the special causes which regulate the charges of physicians and lawyers. He notes the peculiarity that professional fees are graduated according to the ability of patients or clients to pay.

The volume is divided into two parts; the first, Book I, is devoted to the analysis of income, the second, Book II, to distribution. Though there is little in either which is strikingly new or original, the work abounds with sound and temperate observations and well-chosen illustrations such as only a practical business man finds readily at his command. In Book I the relation of money income to real income is discussed. Real income is expressed as the sum of services of goods and persons. The total stock of goods is capital. These ideas of income and capital are consonant with modern writing on the subject. The author could have rendered his summation of services clearer if he had explicitly included dis-services, or negative services, as repairs and replace

ments.

In the second part the chief attention is devoted to wages. The competition of employers tends to level up wages, though the effort of the individual employer is to keep them down. The author defends this effort as simply one case of keeping down cost. Cost may be kept down by substituting one factor of production for another machinery for laborers, laborers for machinery, or one sort of laborers for another. Often the employer substitutes unskilled labor for skilled labor, and the displaced workmen think that he has reduced wages, when in reality his action tends to raise wages, except for a limited class. The action of the trade union in effecting a greater solidarity among workmen is thoroughly discussed, the Webbs' book on Industrial Democracy being used as a basis. Little is said about the corresponding combinations among employers, nor is much attention given to the various devices for harmonizing the immediate interests of workman and employer through profit sharing, etc.

The older theories of wages are discarded after a more or less searching examination. Wages are regarded by the author as simply a share of the aggregate income, the amount of this share being determined by the relative supply and demand of the various claimants to that income. New machinery, methods of production and industrial organization, by shifting the demand for labor and by altering the total income or national dividend, will have a varying

resultant effect upon the laborers' share. Some sensible observations are made on the prejudice against rich men's children entering the labor market in competition with poorer rivals. It is pointed out that as long as this action increases the national dividend, some one must enjoy this increase, though its enjoyment may or may not be shared by the other laborers. These laborers must always be regarded as consumers as well as workers, and anything which makes their subsistence more plentiful tends prima facie towards their benefit. The author is conservative in treating the labor problem and distrustful of all grand schemes for a radical improvement in the laborer's lot. One curious effect of trade unionism is noted; the establishment of a standard rate tends to eliminate not only the incompetent workmen, but the superannuated, for the employer who is obliged to pay the same price for all labor in a specified union, will naturally reject the less efficient laborer.

Dr. Smart suggests that the tendency of machinery is to reduce the necessary skill of the laborer; as machines become more automatic, the laborer becomes simply a tender. Some fear is expressed that during the transition to more perfect machinery, there will be an over-supply of labor with consequent low wages and distress.

Although the author nominally refuses to discuss the ethics of distribution, he cannot altogether escape the fascination of that problem. He concludes on the whole that the existing distribution is roughly according to merit, and that at any rate it is "not an arbitrary distribution," left to the caprice of the employer. He says little, however, of inheritance. This is a most important factor of distribution, if by distribution we mean the apportionment of income among human beings. The truth is that two distinct problems are confusedly included under "distribution," not only by Dr. Smart, but by almost every writer on the subject. Distribution among persons is not the same thing as distribution among the factors of production; the former is the great problem of the rich and the poor; the latter is the problem of interest, rent and earnings. To connect the two we must discover the distribution of the factors of production among persons, and to this end must study the causes which determine the bequest, accumulation and dissipation of fortunes. The confusion arose because the early writers conceived society to be divided into the mutually exclusive groups of laborers, landlords, capitalists and employers, and believed that they had solved the problem of distribution when they had shown the causes which determined wages, rent, interest and profits; but

the four classes, thus arbitrarily separated, do, in the actual world, overlap and are constantly changing. The same person is often land-owner, capitalist and employer; even wage-earners are often small capitalists. To understand the personal distribution of income we must study, first and chiefly, the personal distribution of capital.

I. F.

Le crime; causes et remèdes. Par Cesare Lombroso. Avec un appendice sur les progrès de l'anthropologie criminelle pendant les anneés, 1895-98. Paris: Librairie G. Reinwald, Schleicher Frères, editeurs, 1899-8vo, pp. vii, 583.

The Criminal; his Personnel and Environment.

A Scientific

Study. By August Drähms. With an Introduction by Cesare Lombroso, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900-12m0, pp. xiv, 389.

These two volumes are a fresh token of the enthusiasm, the industry and the fecundity of the "school of criminal anthropologists." The former, written by the leader of this fervent group, and incorporated in Professor Hamon's Bibliothèque internationale des sciences sociologiques, will be welcomed as the latest and fullest statement of the Turin professor's views; while the latter, by the chaplain of the San Quentin prison, in California, is vouched for by Lombroso himself in his Introduction as being substantially orthodox, as well as lucid in exposition and profound and original in thought.

The first of these works is dedicated to Max Nordau, and is addressed especially to those who accuse the "criminal anthropologists" ("my school," as Lombroso calls them) of having ignored the economic and social causes of crime while over-emphasizing its biological and physiological aspects, and of having proposed no practical remedy for it. Lombroso insists that it is precisely he and his disciples who have not merely suggested but actually initiated new and more effective tactics in dealing with crime, based on a study of its etiology, and directed specially towards its prevention. In the first part of the volume, he deals with the causes of crime, meteorological, geological, orographical, racial, and such as are connected with civilization itself; with density and movements of population; with urban and rural conditions; with wages and price of food-stuffs; with the alcoholic, tobacco and morphine habits; and with illiteracy, religion, age, sex, occupation, etc. These chapters contain a multitude of facts, more or less thoroughly authenti