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enlarge the sphere of productive successes; while they facilitate the transference of skill and capital to the localities where most beneficial.

In page 410 Mr. Jones raises, rather than solves, the interesting question of the compensating relations between wealth and poverty in regard to virtue and vice; a question which the economist must assume to be settled eventually in favour of wealth and virtue.

In Lecture V., p. 415, Mr. Jones discusses the labour fund of the world, and lays deserved stress on the great share which, in the earlier ages, self-produced wages have in the sustentation of mankind: a condition of things which always closely borders in practice on that in which the chief labour-fund of a region consists, of revenue expended in labour; for where, from any cause, the stimulus and efficiency of labour is not strong enough to produce capitalists, or men possessed of such an amount of savings as makes them insist on their civil rights, they are always apt to be enslaved to a despot who concedes to them the bare means of living, receiving the revenue himself. This is the state of a large and most fertile portion of the earth. In India the stimulus to labour is weak, in consequence of a soil and climate so prolific as never to induce those habits of toil and exertion which the hardy northerns attain, and which they owe to the niggardliness of nature, which imposes on them, from the necessities of diet, a struggle with the most subtle and ferocious animals. In easy circumstances, the self-producing class has a tendency to become absorbed in a mass of population, mere tributaries to the state; or, which seems the first step to the creation of capitalists, to attach themselves to men who, while their power, rank, and knowledge enable them to wrest from the tillers of the ground the greater part of the profits, occupy something of the position. of capitalists towards those who, whether serfs, metayers, cottiers, or hereditary occupiers, are more immediately connected with the soil.

Wherever Mr. Jones enters upon the practice of political economy, as distinguished from its philosophy, or when he catches a glimpse of the latter by his quick insight into the wants, pas

own.

sions, and minds of his fellow-men, he seems to breathe a more congenial air. No longer trammelled by words or definitions, his quick sympathies enable him now to place before his audience the concrete man, warm with his hopes and impulses; while his own knowledge of the pressure and form of outward circumstance, surrounding us like an atmosphere, and his quick perception of the useful and the adaptive, enable him to forecast the bonds and restrictions within which free agency must be limited. This power of realizing in colour and form the very life of the labourers, gives Mr. Jones unusual scope for observing the many agencies which determine their social condition; in truth, he seems to place them by his side while giving them sound practical advice, which he depicts in language whose vital energy never fails to touch the broad experiences which, by a quick intuition of the moving pulses of others' thoughts, he seems to make his For instance, Mr. Jones in his last Haileybury lecture is full of suggestions for raising the condition of the people, and thus to stop the mere animal growth of population by introducing the human refinements which check it. It is clear that all the inducements by which Mr. Jones would increase to the utmost the standard of refined comfort, and of intellectual and moral wants, act suggestively, and upon the associations. And we would add to Mr. Jones's remarks, that the more healthfully fastidious our notions of comfort in the married state become, the more also shall we be select in the choice of a partner of life. The accomplished scholar feels far more resignation in the absence of matrimony than the boor-to whom, if he can but stock his farm, the question as to who shall become his wife is comparatively insignificant. In reference to the purchase of comforts and the laying by of rent, such matters as the form and time in which it is paid become important; much, too, depends upon dearness or cheapness of comforts; and much, too, upon the abolition of those notions of protection and interference, which, while checking its true scope and activity, seek to encourage labour by such bonuses as those of the French government to their potteries at Sèvres, whose expensive luxuries remain

unsold because beyond the reach of the masses

-a great contrast with our Staffordshire potteries, whose cheap and graceful wares every labourer can purchase.

The value of a gradation of ranks in facilitating the rise of the labourer into more elevated notions of comfort and refinement, by the examples of those next above him, is remarked on by the professor. But the value of this principle, as one of far higher scope and importance than any of the others to which he alludes, is missed when it is not remembered how great the stimulus thus given to the intellect itself, by the diffusing over all ranks of common ideas and sympathies.

We see, too, how the arrestation of the direful consequences of a fall in wages takes place in nations, which, becoming acquainted with comforts, are actuated by prudential motives, and thus diminish their marriages. Yet does the professor fully admit the value of an increasing population with increasing means; and we would add that, wherever we place the pressure of population on the means of subsistence, some such incentive is required to fire the activity of the national mind, and to vary its protean resources. On the whole, this lecture is a rare specimen

of genial and exuberant thought and information.

Upon Mr. Jones's remarks on the theory of Ricardo, p. 583, we would answer that, if, before discussing any of the elemental questions of political economy, it were required that the concrete phenomena should be universally the same, there could be no such a thing at all as the science of political economy. Now, in the same way as it is assumed that the action of Ricardo's law (not the law itself) must vary with all the causes which intercept men's capacity to deal in the best way for their own interests, so too the law of profits, and the laws upon which the law of profit itself depends, become more or less dominant in action, as the freedom of action, of intercourse, and of trade, is more extended. Surely there is as much a tendency all over the globe in profits to equalize themselves, as there is a tendency in water not intercepted to fill up a vacuum. If only we can shew that there is a normal tendency of profits to an equality (the

consequence of the competition of labour and capital), in the smallest degree, the principle of Ricardo is fully avenged. Equality of profits only means, in this argument, that there should be some standard on which our expectations of profit must be based; without it, we need not say that the most matter of fact economist would be utterly distanced by his weekly bills.

Upon Mr. Jones's assertion that rents form an addition to the national wealth, it is clear that there is an ambiguity. The rent itself expresses part of the produce of the country, that balance which is paid to the owner of the land, after the claims of the cultivator are satisfied; it is not therefore wealth itself, but a form of distribution. The wealth would equally consist if the owner, cultivating his own land, should, beside retaining all that would otherwise have to be paid to him, keep also what would have been claimed by the cultivator.

This morbid distaste of generalization is, we think, the defect of Mr. Jones's work. Mr. Jones's practice is better than his precept; and we often find him, by a fortunate impulse, gliding towards a general truth. We regret, too, that Mr. Jones's antideductive views should have been so hastily endorsed by a name so illustrious as that of the Master of Trinity. Despite such errors, Mr. Jones's works are valuable, and as a master builder rather than as an architect of the science, political economists will long pay a deserved tribute to the memory of Richard Jones.

ART. VIII-A Manual of the Roman Civil Law, arranged after the Analysis of Dr. Hallifax. By GEORGE LEAPINGWELL, LL.D., Barrister-at-Law. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, & Co. London: Bell & Daldy. 1859.

AMANUAL of the Roman law is a natural result of that

increased attention which has been given of late years to the scientific study of jurisprudence, both at the Universities and by the Inns of Court. Farther, of this movement, which at the

Universities and the Inns has proceeded without concert, or even mutual recognition, a work published at Cambridge by a barrister resident there, and holding office in the academic body, naturally suggests to us the University side; and we may therefore suitably commence our notice by some general remarks on the functions of the old universities in reference to the study of law.

The ancient English theory of superior education, so far as our national practice in this matter rested on theory at all, would appear to have been that up to the age of the student taking his B.A. degree, commonly now about twenty-two, though two generations ago it may have averaged a year earlier, the general culture of the mind was all that needed to be attended to. The classical languages and authors, a larger or smaller portion of mathematics or logic, and, more important than either for the multitude of students, the give and take, and refined commonsense of a gentlemanly world, acquired in a society of equalsthese were the armament with which, at twenty-one or twentytwo, the youth was equipped, and expected to cut his way through the thick forest of difficulties which besets the entrance to any special occupation. The sentence which we have just penned would have startled any one who lived when these things were not only so, but were unquestioned. "What!" he would have said, "do you throw together in one general description the senior wrangler and the wooden spoon? The man who has profited most by the studies of the university, and him who, if he has profited by them at all, has only done so indirectly, so far as something of their influence must make itself felt in the daily intercourse of the place?" Yes, for our present purpose we throw them together, because the studies had nothing professional in them, and would only serve to train for a profession through the effect which they might have on the mind and character. Then came the special preparation, to be picked up as the individual pleased, or as hazard directed. If he was to be ordained, he read for his orders such books as were required by the particular examining chaplain of the particular bishop. If he chose the bar, he learned his law, or failed or omitted to learn it,

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