ing whatever off of it in that time, besides having had the expense of planting, care, and taxes. Not one purchaser in a hundred would want to allow us a dollar more an acre for the timber land than for the land quite clear." There is much force in this, and, as I have found, it is the chief reason why land owners do not plant trees. No one doubts the ultimate profit, but will he own the land?

It seems to me that the best way to meet the prospective timber question is by joint-stock associations. A large tract of land-five or ten thousand acres-should be secured, not too far away from a populous centre, because there are many incidentals which could be turned into cash and made to cover the expenses as the work went along, and which could only be so turned into cash when near where there is a demand for these articles. It should be large enough to make it worth while to engage a first-class superintendent, for there is as much art and skill required to bring out all the best features of timber culture, as in mining and railroading, or in managing a bank. A badly managed plantation would be no further advanced in twenty years than a good one would in ten, and then there is the tact required to know how to make all things pay as the work went along. In a year or two there would be saplings for nail kegs; then follow young trees as straps for packing boxes, poles for hops or beans, material for rails or charcoal, up to posts and timber. Various barks used in the arts, seeds of trees and bushes used in commerce, even material used in festival decorations, might all be a part of the incidental profits of an immense tract like this if intelligently directed. As the trees come into bearing, the nuts or mast could be rendered of account in connection with hog feeding. The trimmings would make fencing for the whole tract, and thus the animals suffered to roam at large over the whole course without the slightest care. How far deer or other "game" might be introduced, and sporting rights made to yield a revenue, is a question I cannot answer, but it is worth study.

Even under the most careless management the property would increase in value. The land is growing, the trees are growing, the şettled country is growing and nearing the plantation, and any one wishing to sell out his stock could always get the full value of it. There is indeed nothing that I can think of that would be so safe as an investment in such a joint-stock forest association.

The only chance of loss that occurs to me is from forest fires. As these now are, sparks from locomotives are the chief causes.

A forestry association would have no loss from this source, as they would have no plantations near enough to the railroads to take fire in this way; and there only remain the chances from hunters or or idle boys-chances which so far have been very remote as compared with those from railroad fires, which could probably be easily covered by insurances.

It seems to me that forest companies could be made to meet all our wants, if there is any profit at all in timber culture; and if there be no profit, it is too soon to talk of forest planting at all, for I am materialist enough to believe that cash returns in most cases make the true measure of great public enterprises.

THOMAS MEEHAN.

COMMERCIAL ETHICS.1

E have before us two works on this subject which have the same laudable purpose in view, and which are distinguished from the ordinary literature of the subject by devoting attention to particulars, instead of confining it to the broad generalities of moral exhortation. No one can read either of them without learning. something, or without seeing that its author has taken pains that may speak intelligently, and put his case forcibly.

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Mr. Newton's little book on The Morals of Trade covers the more ground of the two. In his first lecture he points out the importance of industry and commerce, especially in this industrial age, and thence infers the importance of the morality which they foster to the general morality of society. He agrees with Lecky and Maine that commerce has promoted veracity, especially in the article of contract-keeping, and alleges in proof of this the conduct of New York brokers during the Panic. But as regards other transactions, which are guarded by no contract, and in which the

THE MORALS OF TRADE. Two Lectures: I. An Inquiry into the Actual Morality of Trade; II. An inquiry into the Causes of the Existing Demoralization and the Remedies therefor. Given in the Anthon Memorial Church, New York, by R. Heber Newton. Pp. 110: 8vo. New York T. Whittaker.

BUSINESS VERSUS SPECULATION.

A Lecture delivered before the Students of the University of California, Sept. 1st, 1876, and dedicated to the Youth of San Francisco, by C. T. Hopkins. Pp. 28: 8vo. San Francisco: Bacon and Co.

rule caveat emptor is the only customary canon of business ethics, he finds all branches of business, both retail and wholesale, to be honeycombed by frauds which shelter themselves under the customs of trade. The honesty and veracity of the business classes are chiefly confined to their transactions by contract with one another, and find their parallel (or, shall we say, explanation) in the proverb of " honor among thieves;" while every trade seems to regard the public at large as fair game, to be taken by any sort of pretence. Adulterations, fraudulent substitutes, lying advertisements, cheating the Custom House, shortness of weight and measure, he shows with some detail, are more or less common to all branches of business, both wholesale and retail, and no merchant or dealer would forfeit his standing with his own class for being detected in them, provided he has kept within the bounds of a bare, legal honesty. For law, not honor, furnishes the standard of business ethics in this regard; and by consequence a system of advantage-taking has spread through all lines of industry. The mechanic overreaches you by "forgetting" his tools, and charging you for the time he consumes in going to bring them. The contractor runs up flimsy edifices, which will perish so soon that our generation will leave few or no architectural memorials of its existence; or he guards the lives of his customers so slightly that the children. are poisoned with the effluvia of the sewers. Dishonest speculation is not then an isolated fact, but the supreme outcome of a bad industrial system. Mr. Newton is careful not to condemn speculation in any wholesale way. Honest speculation, i. e. where the risk is calculable, the funds used are one's own, and the public will be benefited by its success, he justly regards as one of the means by which our industrial world must be built up. But all the conditions we have specified, especially the second, are violated by the current speculations of our time, and a still deeper moral depth is reached by such fraudulent speculations as the Emma Mine, where the honor of scientific experts and of men in public life was put in pawn, that the unwary might be induced to pay large sums for property which every manager knew to be worthless. The whole system seems to differ only in form from the wholesale plundering of peaceful citizens by noble robbers in the feudal period. Yet Mr. Newton is not so despondent as might be supposed from this summary of his view of the evils of trade. He believes that the evils he complains of are not things of yesterday; that our age

differs from those which went before it chiefly in the loudness of its complaint of the evil, and, therefore, in the greater likelihood of effecting some reform.

His second lecture is taken up with the methods of reform. First of all, he emphasizes the position that the reform to be lasting must be effected by an appeal to the individual conscience. But he believes that there are sundry conditions of trade unfavorable to any reform. Such are the derangement of the currency, the bad example of the corruption of political life, the eagerness of society for cheapness and for extravagant display, and the slackness of the Church to do her duty as a witness for practical righteousness. But before taking up any of these, he urges the need of a proper organization of each branch of trade for the suppresion of fraud and the establishment of a higher code of recognized morals for that trade. We confess that we do not hope to see any permanent reform effected by gathering our trades into guilds. That method has been tested abundantly; the trade-guilds of the middle ages, and their exemplars, the trades-corporations of Athens and Rome, are very beautiful things to look back upon through the haze of a good number of centuries; but they were very ugly realities, and the greatest obstacles conceivable to the general development of European industry. They constituted themselves monopolies of the worst sort, oppressing the laboring classes and extorting unjust profits from the public. And on general principles we may say that such organization for the purposes of moral reform is like extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers. You can get something like sunbeams out of cucumbers, but their timid. phosphorescence when left in the dark is a poor return for the volume of light that went to their constitution. And similarly the moral force that can be got out of an artificial organization is, both in kind and in amount, far from equal to the expenditure of moral force needed to bring it into existence.

Our own view is that in all cases where an evil cannot be reached by the law, it must be reached by public opinion. This statement covers nearly all of Mr. Newton's separate heads. To begin where he leaves off, the Church must teach a higher practical morality by declaring that money-making is not the chief end of man nor of any honest human occupation; and that the man who runs a store or a hotel, with no higher end in view, is degrading an honest calling as really as the minister who waits on the

altar with no higher end in view. She must teach men that their lines of business or industry are glorified by being parts of the great system of God's order for the world; and that each separate place in that system is a vocation to which God calls men. When such teaching takes the place of the present, "save your soul" theories, and has had time to permeate society, there will be some chance of a reconciliation of capital and labor, and of avoiding that deadly conflict between the two from which we are now saved by the disorganized and jealous condition of the representatives of the former,-a conflict which Mr. Newton's new organizations would precipitate. Then, too, there will be a chance of political reform; for the offices of the government will never be regarded by most of those who hold them as anything better than a chance to make money, until the other professions are regarded as something better. Our office holders at their worst are simply accepting the present morality of the business community. And lastly the rage for cheapness and for display will be brought under control, and the higher, simpler ideals of life will become those of at least all educated people.

No bill, so

We have analyzed Mr. Newton's book with some care, with the desire to attract attention to its merits—to its originality, its excellence of tone, its fairness of judgment, and the vast importance of its theme. We should be glad to see it obtain a very wide circulation, and especially in this his native city. Nevertheless, we have somewhat against him. He has not always avoided doubtful positions, where his case would have been made much stronger by a little reserve. For instance he stigmatizes the failure of the United States to protect the rights of foreign authors by an International Copyright Law as a dishonesty. First of all, we believe the United States were never asked to do so. far as we know, was ever brought forward in Congress for the protection of the rights of foreign authors. We have had several such bills proposed for the protection of foreign publishers, and they have deserved their fate. Any bill which should protect an author in a bonâ fide bargain with an American publisher for the reprint of his book, would probably be passed. But up to date the question has been contested chiefly between foreign and American publishers. Secondly, the moral obligation to pass any bill is by no means so clear as Mr. Newton and some others assume. No country treats or regards a book as property in the