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in public sentiment inclines many who formerly opposed such a policy to favor even more radical methods than he is prepared to advocate.
The reviewer has already expressed his belief that Monopolies and Trusts is a highly valuable contribution to an important subject, and he believes that the general verdict will be that the book is the best piece of work that Professor Ely has yet done. In any case, all readers will be impressed by the perfect candor and scientific reserve which characterize the book. We need, not intemperate and wholesale denunciation, but impartial and searching discussion ; and this is what the author has given us. Finally, the book should lead the advocates of industrial consolidation to weigh carefully the distinction between con- solidation and monopoly, and to see the logical outcome of the admission that monopolized production is superior to competition in
all important parts of the industrial field.
CHARLES J. BULLOCK. WILLIAMS COLLEGE.
Rural Wealth and Welfare, Economic Principles Illustrated and Applied in Farm Life. By GEORGE T. FAIRCHILD, LL.D. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1900.
MANY works on economics are written by persons who have chiefly before their minds the phenomena of urban life, manufactures, and commerce. Naturally such discussions borrow their illustrations from fields not familiar to farmers. The author of the elementary book here under notice was for three decades a teacher in the agricultural colleges of Michigan and Kansas, and his memory is full of those pic- tures of social relations familiar to farmers. These facts account for certain important advantages of the treatise.
The three parts of the book deal with productive industry, distribu- tion of wealth, and consumption. Exchange is considered under pro- duction. Perhaps the most important and original portions of the volume are those in which free use is made of illustrative charts which present in a very clear and interesting form statistics of farm stock and crops, the yields of grain, the fluctuations in prices of agricultural products, manufactured goods, and silver in recent times.
The author's definition of "welfare" includes health, wealth, wis- dom, and virtue, and he believes that economic science should deal with only one of these factors, wealth ; the other elements being treated in public hygiene, the science of education, and the science of
