hundred-dollar bond would only buy him ten soda-water tickets, and the heirs of members of life-insurance companies, who would find that a year's interest on their policies, instead of keeping them from want, would not buy a barrel of flour.

Under our present system we not only have no guaranty against this state of things happening, but several causes conspire to bring it about. In the first place, all that class who have to pay the dollars have a direct interest in bringing it about, and that class includes nearly all the influential financial managers. For instance, if the men who build a railroad on borrowed money can get the dollar reduced to one half its absolute value, they are thus relieved from half their debt. The men who employ the money of others in this and other ways, though not the most numerous class, are generally those able to wield most political power, including as they do the greater part of the business ability of the country. The class of investors, though far more numerous, and hence able to crush their creditors if they only knew how to do it, are prevented both by apathy and lack of business ability from organizing any efficient plan of resistance. Indeed, the policy of depreciation will be for the most part a popular one, because there is a corresponding nominal rise in the value of every kind of property, except bonds or other forms of indebtedness; and as there is no nominal depreciation in these, nobody is dissatisfied unless he has the acuteness to see through the cheat which is practised. The policy is destructive to national wealth for the same reason that it is popular. The imaginary increase of wealth which is so fascinating and the enormous sums to be made by speculation discourage further production and encourage extravagance, until the inevitable bursting of the bubble shows the true state of affairs. Then men mourn the loss of their imaginary wealth, which they believe to have been suddenly swept away by a financial cataclysm; while the fact is, that the real wealth of the country was going to waste during the whole period of depreciating paper money, its loss being concealed by the constantly diminishing value of the dollar by which all was measured.

Such is the danger which continually threatens us so long as the present state of things continues, and against which it is

the bounden duty of all to call on Congress for protection. No measure can be too radical for the situation. The absolute repeal of the legal-tender law, with a withdrawal by the government of all pretence of making its irredeemable notes money, would be far better than following, as we now are, in the track of Russia, Austria, revolutionary France, and revolutionary America. At the same time, the danger may be greatly diminished without adopting any radical measure. If the government will not allow the issue of any more bank-notes, except on the condition that they shall be payable in coin on demand, and will, at the same time, make provision for honoring its own notes, the financial situation will be greatly strengthened, To do this in a way which, though imperfect, will answer the purpose, is very easy. Assuming that five-per-cent bonds, principal and interest payable in gold, will continue to be worth nearly par in gold, it is only necessary to provide that all holders of legal tender shall be entitled to exchange them for five-per-cent gold bonds after a date to be fixed. As the bonds may bear a premium, even in coin, it may be advisable to adopt that feature of Mr. Sherman's bill which leaves it optional with the Treasurer to redeem in bonds or coin. To allay the fears of those who think the notes may be wanted for the purpose of currency, it may be provided that all the notes thus received shall be kept in the Treasury as a reserve fund, to be paid out again in exchange for the bonds, whenever holders of the latter shall desire to part with them at a small discount, say one or two per cent.

We simply indicate this course as a perfectly safe first step, against which no sound objection can be urged. It is not worth while to enter into a detailed discussion of any plan at present, because the great want is not a plan but a determination to reach the end sought. Indifference to the latter is at the bottom of all the difficulty in deciding on any mode of reaching it. Let Congress and the public once waken to a sense of the national dishonor involved in allowing the promissory notes of the government to stand year after year without any provision at all being made to honor them, and to the danger of the system under which nearly all the bond-holders and life-insurance companies of the country will be compelled to accept these or

any other notes which any future Congress may see fit to authorize in payment of their claims, and the work of providing a remedy will prove very easy. And until a sense of the exigency of the case is reached, no arrangement of plans for restoring specie payment can be expected to receive any effective support.

ART. VII.-CRITICAL NOTICES.

1.- Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE. Edited, with a Biographical Notice, by HELEN TAYLOR. In Three Volumes. London: Longmans, Green, & Co. 8vo. 1872.

BUCKLE'S History of Philosophy, unfinished as it is, certainly marks an epoch in historical literature. It was the first attempt, on a considerable scale, to apply to the concrete treatment of historical phenomena the laws that govern these phenomena, and by this means to bring history into the category of the exact sciences. Perhaps there is no one of these laws of which Buckle can be called, in any true sense of the word, the discoverer; although his demonstration of many of them is acute and exhaustive. His peculiar merit is that he brought them over, so to speak, from the domain of abstract philosophy into that of literature, and that he did this with a remarkable breadth and boldness of thought, and in so agreeable and lucid a style as to attract and hold attention. He was fortunate, too, in the time of bringing his book before the public, when the community, having become accustomed to the scientific treatment of phenomena, and in a certain degree imbued with the scientific spirit, was ready to see this treatment applied to the facts of human experience. It only needed something for its opinions to crystallize about. The extraordinary sensation created by this book is therefore fully justified by the effects which we may fairly ascribe to it. Those views of the uniformity of law, the irresistible tendency of general causes, and the importance of physical geography in human development, which had before been confined to a few advanced thinkers, now passed into the public mind, and powerfully influenced even those who refused to believe in a science of history. As accepted principles of historical investigation, they may be said to date from the appearance of this work.

The publication of Mr. Buckle's lesser writings, most of which have never seen the light before, and of the materials that he had

been collecting for the purposes of his great undertaking, will be welcome, not only to his special admirers, but to all who are interested in historical study. The complete papers here given are in Mr. Buckle's most finished style, and contain discussions of permanent value. All of these three thick volumes, however, except a part of the first, are taken up with the miscellaneous materials fragments and commonplace books — which he had been many years accumulating, and which will be found useful by all who desire to make a special study of any topic which came within Mr. Buckle's scope. We will especially instance the history of medieval literature. But this publication has a further value in illustrating his methods of work, and enabling us to form a better judgment, both of what he actually accomplished and of what he probably would have accomplished if he had lived. In reading his history, the first impression is of an erudition at once so wide and so minute as to show that there was nothing contracted in his sympathies or the range of his inquiries. In these fragments and notes we are brought directly face to face with his materials, and are in a condition to judge fairly whether there were any such limitations.

In the first place, it will be noticed that Mr. Buckle was a great reader, but not a scholar. It ought not to be expected that a book which deals with the philosophy of results rather than with the investigation of details should exhibit special scholarship in every field, or perhaps even in any one. The peculiar requisite for such a task as this is the power of judging accurately of the special labors of others; one need not himself perform these special labors. Still it is probable that no person can judge accurately of the special labors of others, unless he has himself done similar work in some one department; to deal satisfactorily with general results, one must know from one's own experience how such results are reached. Now here, we imagine, is where a University education would have stood Mr. Buckle in stead. He appears never to have engaged in the special investigation of details, but to have reserved himself for the higher work of reasoning from these details. Consequently, the first and most fatal defect in his reasoning is the inadequacy of his materials; not in amount, of course, but in character. It has been pointed out, we believe, by adepts in the natural sciences, that the treatment of these subjects is often unsatisfactory from lack of special knowledge. This is no less true of special historical erudition, in which at least it might be expected that he would be strong. Nothing is so striking, on glancing over these pages, as the very second-rate character of many of the books read and cited. We do not forget that these commonplace books were made fifteen or twenty years ago, and that many books which were authority then are so no

longer; but this does not account for the whole deficiency. For example: in 1856 a paper appeared in England which has completely revolutionized the science of mythology. Mr. Buckle died in 1862; but, although there are several extracts here upon mythological subjects, Max Müller is not even mentioned; Mr. Prichard is the principal authority upon this head, and the profound treatises of K. O. Müller, Gerhard, Preller, Hartung, and others appear never to have attracted Mr. Buckle's attention. In like manner Prichard is his authority for ancient Egypt; genuine Egyptologists, like Lepsius and Brugsch, he takes no notice of. Now nothing is more certain than that if a person is not himself a special student and authority upon the subjects of which he writes, he must at any rate know how to find and use those who are authorities.

Real scholarship-a Cambridge or Oxford training would have saved Mr. Buckle from the wasted labor of copying out pages of worthless matter into these note-books, either facts that every scholar ought to be supposed to know, as the derivation of Ostracism (No. 220), or puerile derivations, such as that of Paris (No. 81). It is incredible that an historical student should take pains to note down the absurd derivation "from the son of Priam, king of Troy," when the transformation of the name of an ancient tribe into a modern city is so common and well-understood an occurrence as to be almost a rule: Treveri into Treves, Turones into Tours, Remi into Rheims, Parisii into Paris. It is, by the way, remarkable how very little use Mr. Buckle makes of any but English and French writers; he read, we are told, half a dozen languages, but we find very few traces of them in these "Commonplace Books."

So much for the character of the materials. As regards their scope, there are two or three wide fields of inquiry directly connected with his subject, in which he appears to have taken no interest. Institutions, for instance, he hardly notices; nor that wide class of subjects which Mr. Maine's and Mr. Tylor's books have made familiar to English readers. To be sure, both of these have written since Mr. Buckle; but the subject of primitive thought and customs, it would seem, could not fail to engage the attention of a philosophic student of civilization more than we find traces of here. We have already spoken of mythology,—a branch of this subject which was well developed in his lifetime, but on which we find only a very few notes of very little value.

This leads us to the limits to which Mr. Buckle, unconsciously, no doubt, confined himself, and within which he did excellent service. By. a history of civilization he meant a history of modern society. He VOL. CXVII. NO. 240.

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