BOOK REVIEWS

THE LOWER SOUTH IN AMERICAN HISTORY. By William Garrott Brown. Cloth, 271 pp. $1.50. The Macmillan Company, New York and London.

The author of the fugitive pieces which constitute this volume is a southerner by birth, if not by education, and is now lecturer in history at Harvard University. We are, therefore, treated to a study of southern conditions, traditions and institutions by a native of that section. It is not too much to say that the book is very readable, and is more philosophical and less prejudiced than is generally the case when a southerner attempts to review the doings of his people, social or political.

In speaking of the "lower South" the author refers to geographical rather than moral location. The section treated may be consulted on the map by considering the following territory: "South Carolina and Georgia on the East, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas on the West, part of Tennessee on the North, and Florida." This is the region of cotton growing, the center of oldtime slave territory, and the land where ante-bellum statesmen were grown and educated who nursed the secession theory until it grew into armed rebellion.

While aiming to be fair and in the main judicial, our author takes pains to impress the reader with the idea that it was not slavery alone which caused the rebellion. He declares that it was the presence of large numbers of Africans in the South which caused all of the trouble. That would seem to be begging the question. Manifestly, but for slavery there would never have been present in Dixie or on the continent any considerable number of negroes. From the time the little Dutch slaver discharged its cargo on the banks of the

James river down to the breaking out of the war and later, slavery was the inspiring cause of our sectional difficulties. The social and industrial system of the South rested on slavery, and the "peculiar institution" was the only thing for which the chivalry of the section was willing to fight to the last ditch.

The second chapter in the book treats of "The Orator of Secession." That orator was William L. Yancey. Born in South Carolina in 1814, he died in 1863, and did not live to see the rebellion he did so much to hatch become the terribly lost cause. Yancey's own life history is a standing proof of the dominating evil influence of slavery in accomplishing the undoing of the South. He was the editor of a strong unionist newspaper when a young man, but he married a rich wife, endowed with a plantation plentifully stocked with slaves, and his better nature was dried up in the atmosphere of the overseer's whip and the human auction block. We are told that he was the prince of agitators and a man of marvelous eloquence. Just how a man can grow eloquent defending an institution grounded in the enslavement of a race only becomes understandable when we consider that eloquence depends principally upon a gift of language, a vivid imagination and earnestness, and men may be and have been earnest and serious in their allegiance to monstrous error.

Without doubt, northern men generally fail to understand the type of mind and political philosophy which existed in the South. The southerners deified the letter of the constitution and their peculiar interpretation of it, and ignored the claims of humanity outside the white They failed utterly to understand that wrong and injustice can never be made right by the vote of a Lowell embodied the

race.

majority even of white men.

whole truth when he declared that "man is more than constitutions."

In discussing the perplexities and problems, sectional and national in character, which have been inherited as a legacy from slavery and the war, it is only an occasional man who fully understands the moral law which underlies national as well as personal conduct, and we are not sure that our author is one of the number. National wrong and injustice rest heavily upon the national conscience and involve national responsibility. The moral order of the universe requires that great wrongs long permitted must be expiated in the bloody sweat of all those who tolerated the iniquities, and sometimes by their children's children down to the third and fourth generation. When we were in the midst of the carnage of the rebellion, Whittier, writing as a true prophet, said:

"What though the cast-out spirit tear

"The nation in his going?

"We who have shared the guilt must share

"The pangs of his o'erthrowing!"

This is why North and South are vexed even to this day with the disfigurements and perplexing problems of which this book in a measure treats.

In the chapter "Shifting the White Man's Burden " there is a sign of that careless use of language which characterizes innate race prejudice. We are led to infer that our author fancies that there is a peculiar type of badness which characterizes black men; in other words, that they are bad because they are black and white men are better because of the color of their skin. But there are white men, whole blocks of them, as low and mean and depraved as black men can possibly be, and in exactly the same way. To solve our social and political problems, condition and character, and not race, are the vital things to be considered.

"The Lower South," however, is full of admirable things, and is written in such excellent spirit, in the

main, that it can be read with pleasure and profit by thoughtful people on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line.

THE ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, WITH SOME APPLICATIONS TO QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. By J. Laurence Laughlin, Ph. D. Cloth, 386 pages. American Book Company, New York, Cincinnati and Chicago.

This is an excellently prepared text book on political economy. It is made attractive by a variety of illustrations, by diagrams and maps usually well suited to the purpose. The strong points of Mr. Laughlin's book are his money chapters. These are clear, succinct and for the most part convincing. On this subject Mr. Laughlin is eminently sound.

On matters of foreign trade, however, and free trade and protection, he has the greatest difficulty to be even fair. The bias of his mind on this subject makes his reasoning narrow, and his illustrations all point one way. He retains in this book most of the errors of Mill of half a century ago. He says on the point of reciprocal demand (page 157): "The value of an imported commodity depends on the cost of acquisition— that is, on the value of the thing exported in exchange for it. If we export one hundred gallons of petroleum in payment for an imported French clock, the clock should exchange approximately for what the one hundred gallons of petroleum will exchange for in the United States."

It would be difficult to construct a more misleading statement of foreign values than this. The first clause of his statement: "the value of an imported commodity depends on the cost of acquisition," is entirely correct, but to say that the cost of acquisition abroad depends on the "value of the things exported in exchange for it" at least needs verifying.

The illustration about the French clock and the one hundred gallons of petroleum is not an illustration at all, for such a thing never took place. Nobody exports petroleum in exchange for French clocks or in exchange for any other foreign product. Petroleum is sold for money and if French clocks or English woolens are bought, they are bought for money wholly independent of American petroleum, wheat, steel rails or anything else. The foreign exchange does not take place in any such way; it is buying and selling just as literally as if both transactions took place in this country. The value of French clocks is determined by the cost of manufacturing French clocks in France, and not by the cost of producing petroleum in the United States. Nor is the value of petroleum in this country governed by the cost of producing clocks in France, woolens in England or rubber sponges in Russia. How much petroleum an American would have to sell in or der to buy a French clock would, of course, depend on the cost of producing and exporting the petroleum on the one hand and the cost of manufacturing the French clock on the other.

This is a phase of the value fallacy of Cairnes, in which he sought to establish as a part of the theory of supply and demand that all demand is supply and all supply is demand, which is not true in fact, or at any rate it is not primarily true. When it happens to be true, it is an incident to rather than a cause of the situation.

On the question of free trade and protection, Mr. Laughlin gives many evidences of having retained the old point of view which prevailed in the forties. For instance, among other things he says "protection is dangerously socialistic." He seems on this point not to have risen above the commonplace assumption that protection is always paternalism. For an economist