neously, and depends on its utility. In short, it is simply error and confusion to term such laws economic. They are expressions of human nature; and, like all expressions of human nature, are subject to being curbed by law. Their absolute authority is out of the question.

The police element in any law of compulsory arbitration, involving, as such arbitration does, the enforced inspection, by official bodies, of private business affairs, is a fair enough objection to such a law. But it could be, to some extent, avoided, by limiting the application of the law to cases of a proposed reduction of wages, and to cases where large bodies of employees are concerned, that is, to quasi-public kinds of busi ness. Moreover, under the law, an employer would probably not attempt a reduction of wages which could not pretty clearly be justified, so that likely enough proper cases for a reduction might not, in the main, provoke any official inquisition. The law would probably, to a considerable degree, prevent even attempts at an unfair reduction of wages. It is a fair con sideration, too, that such a law would not produce a greater degree of interference, than insurance companies and savings banks are already subject to, to say nothing of the annual reports required to be filed by railroad corporations.

It may be objected, however, that any law, going to the compulsory apportionment of loss between employer and employee, is in its nature a socialistic law. It is legislation in the direction of forcible equalization of property. But there is a radical difference between this law and socialistic laws. Socialistic laws can not avoid being unjust. They take half of my property from me and give it to a man, for his own private convenience, whom I never saw, with whom I have had no relations whatever, and to whom I have done no wrong. If I have harmed no one in accumulating my property, and use it to no one's harm, there is no just cause for taking it from me to give to another. It may be unfortunate for the poor man that he is not so rich as I am; but what justice is there in compelling me, a stranger, to answer to him for it? But the law for compulsory arbitration is intended to remedy a palpable unfairness directly perpetrated by me upon my servant. To be sure, if it be believed that there is no unfairness in a master's shifting a diminution of receipts upon his workmen to the

immunity of his own pocket, then the law for compulsory arbitration might be viewed as going in the direction of socialism. It may be a question, too, whether the unfairness is so gross as properly to call for a law. But those are questions. outside of the premises. If the master's conduct be determined to be grossly unfair, and to approximate to injustice, then a law to prevent it is not very far, if at all, out of the line of ordinary legislation.

There are some considerations, too, which positively favor this sort of legislation. It may be that danger calls for the enactment of a law of compulsory arbitration. There are two ways of dealing with proletarian discontent. One way is that of repression, the other is that of the removal of the cause of discontent. The former method lets matters go, in time of peace, and when a rupture comes, uses force to restore order. The latter method, equally with the former, uses artillery to quell the actual revolt of the poor against the rich, but maintains the utility of striving, at other times, to eradicate just causes of complaint. If it is true, that the views, dispositions and aspirations of the working classes are such that they know no stopping point between the present form of society and socialism, that is, the equal division of goods, then the sternly repressive method is the only one to use toward them. If, on the contrary, workmen, as a class, are not uncompromisingly in favor of socialism as an end, but are only dissatisfied with their condition so far as it makes them the object of obviously unfair treatment, and a prey to the rapacity of those who are superior to them in power, and if they will be satisfied if those. conditions of their existence are removed, then, certainly, the method of removing causes is the true method of treating their case. There are undoubtedly some, whose ideas do not stop short of socialism. These are, in part, idle fanatics, who are not truly representative of the laboring class; and, in part, deluded believers in the doctrines of the fanatics; but they are believers, not so much because they are convinced, as because they are ready to lay hold of any theory which will procure exemption from certain present, felt ills. If the screws are loosened to the extent of relieving them from grossly unfair treatment, it is doubtful whether socialistic aims would long continue to be cherished. Moreover, it is very questionable,

whether the use of force does not operate to aggravate the poor man's sense of wrong. Each time it is employed, wrong, to his mind, is piled upon wrong, and each time, he is apt to be more and more convinced that he is not dealt fairly by. Of course, if there is absolutely no wrong, the only way to do is to go on putting him down, until either he or the rest of society is annihilated. But if there is anything in his condition which is a proper subject of complaint, the policy of mere repression will very likely prove ineffectual; and he will some day make horrible work in trying to enforce fair treatment. There is something, it seems, to be said for compulsory arbitration as a means of escape for society from possible danger.

But beside the possibility of convulsion and disorder, may not inattention to the real grievances of workingmen produce a more insidious danger in weaning their affections from the State? Will they be likely, in course of time, to have much attachment to a society which refuses to modify conditions of their existence, which are, in their eyes, wrong? May their patriotism, in short, not wane? And is only a half patriotic proletariat a very desirable thing to have in a State?

In addition to political grounds, it may be, that there is also positive civil ground for the enactment of a law for compulsory arbitration. A master's taking advantage of his superior power, derived from a reserved means of subsistence, to reduce wages in order to maintain his rate of profit, is a case which is not within the jurisdiction of any court, because no property of the employees is in question. But it is matter of legal history that, where cases have got into court through a question of property or personal status being involved, a court of equity has intervened, in cases where there has been less provocation than there is in this case, to settle the controversy upon equitable principles. To enact a law of compulsory arbitration would, in point of fact, be doing nothing more than creating a court of equity which could take cognizance of certain equitable matters between masters and workmen which no court of equity at present has the right to hear, on account of there being no property, but only unearned wages, at stake. Such legislation, therefore, while it would, in some respects, be in the nature of innovation, would, in other respects, be in the line of consis tency and equal justice,

ARTICLE VIII.-NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

TYLER'S HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. *-Literature is apt to be interesting; the history of it is far more apt to be dreary and dull. In the work whose title is here given, we have a reversal of the usual state of things. In spite of what patient investigation and trained literary taste have here done for it, in spite of what enthusiasm can say for it, the literature of the American Colonial period cannot be pronounced either valuable or entertaining; yet the account of it, as told in these volumes, reads with almost the interest of romance. There is little doubt that hereafter men will be far more familiar, at least in a general way, with the early works produced in or relating to America than they have ever been before; but this fact will not be so much due to the virtues of the literature as it will to the virtues of its historian. The work extends, so far as written, down to the year 1765. The first volume is taken up with the writers of the Colonial period from 1607 to 1676. Of these nearly all were born and educated in England, and it is quite noticeable how many were graduates of the English Universities, and especially of Emanuel College, Cambridge. The second volume, extending as it does from 1676 to 1765, represents far more legitimately the natural outgrowth of the soil; for the men who then wrote were neither temporary residents of the country, or strangers who had sought a permabent asylum in it, but those who had been born and brought up in it, and were the direct representatives of all that it could then do in the shape of intellectual development.

In the preface to the work Professor Tyler has laid down fully and clearly the principles which have guided him in the treatment of his subject. There are certainly various methods of writing literary history. But we doubt if anywhere can be found a more satisfactory statement, than in this preface, of the methods which ought to be pursued by one who has deliberately set out to compose a work in this manner. The execution has been carried out in full accordance with the design. It intentionally excludes men

*A History of American Literature. Vol. I, 1607-1676; Vol. II, 1675-1765. By MOSES COIT TYLER, Professor of English Literature in the University of Michigan. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1878. 8vo. Vol. I, 292 pp. Vol. II, 330 pp.

of no importance either in the life they lived or in the works they produced. The attention is throughout centered upon the most prominent; and the two volumes present us, in consequence, a succession of brilliant pictures of the men who founded, or sustained, or adorned the various original commonwealths-pictures which bear in every line that stamp of truthful representation which can only be given by him who has studied the originals earnestly and completely in the works in which they have revealed themselves.

If there is anything in these volumes to which a severe critic could object, it would be the occasional tendency to rhetorical exaggeration, in speaking of the merits of the men with whom the author has so long lived and moved, that toward many them he has learned almost to feel sentiments of personal friendship. This is perhaps the necessary concomitant of intense interest in and devotion to one's subject. But the question is always sure to present itself. If the men had been so great, how could they have failed to make themselves far better known to the world than they did? Certainly to us the poetry quoted does not seem to justify the adjectives that are sometimes applied to it in praise, however apt those may be that are used in denunciation. The writing of prose is often a necessity; but the writing of poetry is something in itself so unnecessary that he who does it is bound to show by what he writes that he has received a commission to put it in that form instead of prose. Still this occa sional exaggeration, begot of profound love of the subject and of individual men who are included in it, is at worst only a slight blemish, and does not in the least impair the great merit and permanent value of the work.

The volumes which are to follow, will bring the history down to our own time; and here certainly the ground becomes alike more interesting to the reader and more dangerous to the writer. They will naturally be looked for with keen interest. If Bancroft in writing the political and military history of the country found trouble from the grandsons, he will need coolness, charity, judg ment, and in fact all the virtues, who can deal with the men themselves without hurting the self-love of many, or offending the critical taste of more.

In closing our imperfect notice of this most valuable and interesting work, special praise should be given likewise to what has been performed by the publisher. All that excellence of paper, print, and binding can do to add to the attractiveness of the con