right to decision by public opinion. Under the rights of leisure are classed the right to comfort, the right to leisure, the right to recreation, the right to cleanliness, and the right to scenery. As exceptional rights are classed the right to relief and the right of women to income. This whole discussion is most sane and clear, and deserves the attention of every thinker on social subjects.
WASHINGTON, D. C.
The main concept of this book is that we are at the present time passing into a stage of social evolution in which the interests of the present will be consciously subordinated to the demands of a greater future. In the historical philosophy of the author, the ancient world is taken as the characteristic age of the ascendency of the present, as in it all thought and effort were concentrated upon immediate efficiency. The doctrines of early Christianity, on the other hand, heralded the reign of the future, which has, however, not as yet established itself, because the militarism and other absolutistic tendencies of the earlier era have not been completely superseded. The liberalism of the Manchestrian type is described as a particularly marked recrudescence of the reign of the present a philosophy in which the welfare of existing individuals alone determines the content of the ethical system. A truer liberalism has, however, dawned: one in which free competition, carried on with the greatest intensity, will continue to reign; where truth will be conceived of as the resultant of conflicting forces; and where the interests of the future are to be clearly recognized as the cardinal element in the ethical system, as the sole factor by which the meaning of present existence can be determined.
The author's cause for action is the same as in his earlier work; namely, the narrowness of the ideals of classical liberalism, and the evident impulse of the thinking and working world to conceive ideals of wider reach and deeper meaning. But the solution which is here attempted invites at the outset the criticism that it is altogether too vague, and has not been reduced to that exactness which even an idealistic philosophy demands. The author confuses the universal, the ethical, and the future; and he assumes that whatever transcends the narrow interests of the individual may be classed as belonging to the system of the ascendency of the future. The assumption that the uni-
