REVIEWS 601 economic rent. Economic interest is to be defined as the amount of produce over and above economic wages, which is obtained through the use of capital upon land at the margin of cultivation by the skill of the worst worker employed. We doubt whether this conception has either the scientific or the practical value ascribed to it by Mr. Webb, and we seem to detect in the process by which it is reached, notably in what is said about the law of diminishing returns, some strange confusions of thought. . Mr. Milnes contributes a paper on the Report of the Gold and Silver Commission, in which he aims at showing that monometallism is not responsible for the bad ,consequences charged upon it. So far as England is concerned, he thinks that changes in the relative value of gold and silver have affected rather the distribution than the amount of wealth, and have done no real harm to the community. Mr. Levy criticises Mill's position that the distribution of wealth is more subject to human control than the production of wealth. F. C. MONTAGUE Notions Fondamentales d'Economie Politiqe Economique. Par G. MOLSARI. Paris: Cie. 1891. et Programme Guillaumin et IN an interesting and able contribution to one of the last numbers of the Political Science Quarterly, a distinguished French economist, M. Charles Gide, gives as one of the reasons why the contemporary French economic school is undervalued outside France that ' French economists are ill prepared to accept the scientific method of the day, that of evolution.' Now, this remark, though bitter, may be true, but it surely does not apply to M. de Molinari, who although a defender of laissez-faire his first ?Jtud?s i?conomiques having been published almost half a century ago has thoroughly accepted the theory of evolution and the preponderating influence of dynamical agencies in social and economical development. In the book under review he constantly and consistently takes this view of his subject. Taking the law of economy of force, and the law of the results of free competition as the basis of the early development of civilization, M. de Molinari shows how, at a later stage, in proportion as mankind has settled down to industry and commerce and offered the products of its labour for exchange, the inequality of the pressure of competition has called into action a third law, the law of the progression of value, of which he has given an elegant formula: Whenever the relations between the quantities of two commodities or two services offered in ex- change varies according to an arithmetical progression, the relation between the values of these two commodities or serfices varies according to a geometrical progression. M. de Molinari proceeds to demonstrate that these three natural laws lead to the progress of production, and to the useful distribution of
