on economical subjects that we have ever read, but some may think that is not saying much, after all; and so we will add that it is a work hard to lay down when once begun.
The author is a man of marked intellectual power, of independent convictions, and of strong human sympathies, lie lives in San Francisco, where he has been for thirty years, watching the growth of society in a forming State. He has observed the working of the forces by which a modern community has grown up from a rough and formless to a settled, organized, and advanced condition.
The outcome of all this immediate observation and of the extensive study of the conditions of other communities is the conviction that the imminent problem of the age is the intimate association of progress and poverty. The persistence of poverty amid rapidly advancing wealth is a widely recognized and deplorable fact, which has impressed itself more and more strongly upon thoughtful people. This century has been characterized by an enormous increase of productive power and an immense multiplication of riches. But this increasing wealth has neither been equalized throughout the population, nor has there been any tendency to equalization. The gulf between rich and poor has been widening, and neither the rapid strides of invention nor the enormous development of the labor-saving and the wealth-creating arts has been able to arrest this widening.
Mr. George says: "The association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and can not be permanent. The reaction must come."
Again he says: "I propose in the following pages to attempt to solve by the methods of political economy the great problem I have outlined. I propose to seek the law which associates poverty with progress, and increasing want with advancing wealth; and I believe that in the explanation of this paradox we shall find the explanation of those recurring seasons of industrial and commercial paralysis which, viewed independently of their relations to more general phenomena, seem so inexplicable. Properly commenced and carefully pursued, such an investigation must yield a conclusion that will stand every test, and, as truth, will correlate with all other truth. For in the sequence of phenomena there is no accident. Every effect has a cause, and every fact implies a preceding fact."
Now, in a brief notice like this we can neither give, nor attempt to give, Mr. George's solution of his problem. But we may say he finds it in the land question, and its remedy in a very radical and thorough reforming of our land policy. We do not here endorse Mr. George's work, but we very strongly recommend it to those who take interest in the living questions of the time. We hope soon to give a sketch of his argument, but no outline can do it justice. We may add that, aside from his special discussion, the book abounds in information on economical principles and facts admirably put, and which will well repay perusal.
Lectures and Essays. By the late William Kingdon Clifford, F. R. S. Edited by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock, With an Introduction by F. Pollock. In Two Volumes. With Two Portraits. New York: Macmillan & Co. Pp. 661. Price, $7.50.
Clifford has been so thoroughly sifted, and his position as a thinker is so well known, that little needs here to be said upon this point in introducing his essays to the reader's attention. But the massing together of his intellectual work will heighten his fame. For only when his brilliant and powerful disquisitions are brought together, so that we can compare them and discern their variety and scope, is it possible to do justice to his genius. That he was a transcendent mathematician most readers can only recognize by what others say, but the
