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to pass furs and frocks to bring about such colossal frauds as those now revealed. Last May the United States recovered from the Sugar Trust $2,000,000 for duties on imported sugar of which it had been defrauded during a series of years by employees of one of the refineries on the Long Island shore of the city of New York. By an ingenious mechanical device, which prevented the platform scale from descending properly, the bags of raw sugar placed on it were returned as under weight; and there is no reasonable doubt that the Customs officers connived at, if they did not actively assist, the fraud. Something had been known of it since 1903, but the officers who reported it seem to have been kept out of the way of verifying their suspicions; and the prosecuting counsel in the trial of the Trust employees now in progress declares that the Government has been defrauded by this refinery almost since the sugar duties were first imposed. The Custom House is being purged drastically of the guilty or inefficient officers, but the conditions which make for such frauds remain. The Sugar Trust is making large sums out of the people, regarded as consumers; there is a great temptation to not too well-paid Customs officers, who feel the burden as consumers, to take their share of the plunder by defrauding the people through its Government. And the temptation will exist so long as a high tariff facilitates the control of trade by trusts. We trust the moral will not be missed in our own General Election.

No less interest to readers on this side of the Atlantic is afforded by the portions of the Messages of the President and the Secretary of the Treasury which deal with currency and finance. Times are changed since the Federal Government, not knowing what to do with its vast surpluses, put on pensions to veterans as a means

of dissipating them and giving an excuse for maintaining a high tariff. For the current year the deficit, counting the payments on account of the Panama Canal and the public debt, is $73,075,620, or about £15,000,000; for next year, counting the same payments, the deficit will be $12,132,197, or nearly £2,500,000. These deficits must be met by the issue of bonds or certificates of indebtedness; but the Secretary of the Treasury points out that it is high time to retrench. The constitutional separation of the Executive from the Legislature prevents the authoritative proposal of a Budget by the former; and the nearest approach to the possibility of framing such a scheme is afforded by the existence of two Committees of the House. For raising the money there is the Committee of Ways and Means; for spending it there is the new committee, first introduced under the present Administration, containing the chairmen of all the Appropriation Committees, and so introducing some order into the work. Further developments are indicated by the Report as impending, but, meantime, the deficit must be met by borrowing, and, as the Secretary indicates (for the benefit, surely, only of the world outside finance), the rate of interest on the bonds issued is illusory. Bonds can be issued at a low rate because they are ingeniously linked with note circulation; but the amount and the need of that circulation varies, for reasons unnecessary to particularize, more in the United States than anywhere else. The possibility of meeting the demands depends on the power of issuing bonds; the issue of bonds depends largely on the demand for notes. But for the expenditure on the Panama Canal relief from the monetary crisis of 1907 would have been more difficult and longer delayed; and that expenditure is piling up deficits which will only be met indirectly by the effects of the comple

tion of the canal. The linking of American nation, however, has solved bonds to currency was a necessity of far more difficult problems; and we finance in the straits of the War of await with confidence the Report of Secession. Now it is an inconvenience the Monetary Commission. amounting at times to a danger. The

The Economist.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

In Richard Watson Gilder's "Lincoln the Leader,"-Mr. Gilder's last bit of published writing-we have two suggestive and interesting studies of Lincoln, one as a leader of men,-one of the greatest leaders of the nineteenth century, the other as the master of a direct and unstudied mode of expression, which gave his utterances, wheu his emotions were aroused, a power and an appeal which the greatest orators and writers might envy. Both essays are just and well-considered. Houghton Mifflin Co.

In his latest book, Mr. Charles Major has somewhat glorified that Margravine of Bayreuth whose memoirs so vividly picture the strange court of the father of Frederick the Great that even Carlyle could not heighten a tint or improve a line, but he has made a pretty story of Princess Wilhelmina and her lover, and has given it the title of "A Gentle Knight of Old Brandenburg." In some other respects he adorns the truth and he invents a chivalrous Margrave, greatly wronged by his ugly face and body, but in the main he adheres to the truth of history and the book is quite equal to his English romances. The Macmillan Company.

The author of the Atlantic paper, "The Confessions of a Best Seller," Mr. Meredith Nicholson, calls his latest book "The Lords of High Decision," but one suspects that he would have preferred its closing words, "The City of the

Heart of Gold," to the actual phrase plucked from the heart of the book, and really less significant. The personages are indeed to a certain extent the sport of the fates, the lords of high decision, but Pittsburg is at least half the story and shapes the personages by its demands upon them. The hero is of the half worthless type just now fancied by female novelists. The heroine, although an apparently blameless, hardworking artist really has a divorced husband in the background, and the only agreeable figures in the tale are two unpretentious business men, the wife of one of them and a society man growing too old to be an usher. The reader's attention is maintained by the unexpected things done by the personages, not by their characteristics. Doubleday Page & Co.

Books on Mexico have increased in interest since 1898, and their value grows as the completion of the Panama canal approaches. Mr. W. E. Carson's "Mexico, the Wonderland of the South" will not be neglected, although it is entirely unpretentious and is addressed to no especial class of readers. The author is fully aware of the well diffused ignorance of his subject in the United States, and does not neglect the picturesque aspects of daily life as they appear to all travellers, and he is also cognizant of the changes which have taken place within the last twenty-five years, and still continue to occur. The noteworthy points of his work are his

careful notes as to the different qualities conspicuous in the population of various sections, a matter at least as important as in the United States: his statements in regard to the Tehuantepec route, and the opportunities which it offers to traders and to travellers; and his excellent photographs. A good index makes the volume useful as a guide book. Macmillan Company.

AS

Both amateur and professional conjurers and showmen will find a multitude of hints and suggestions in Will Goldstein's "Tricks and Illusions," which E. P. Dutton & Co. publish in a profusely illustrated volume. for persons who are neither conjurers nor showmen, they may well be led to resolve never to trust their unaided senses again, as they learn from these bewildering pages how many ways there are of tricking them. From the same publishers comes an attractive little book, "Things Seen in Holland," by Charles E. Roche, which describes briefly and agreeably some of the things best worth seeing upon a trip to Holland, and illustrates them with fifty full-page pictures from photographs.

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Mr. James O. Fagan's "Labor and the Railroads" will probably be read by those already acquainted with its substance and its conclusions, and neglected by those whom it most concerns, that is to say by the railway passengers, and the men and women obliged to use grade crossings, the persons who must furnish the thousands killed every year by the progress of civilization, a phrase meaning the establishment of a condition of things requiring a person employed by a railway to do nothing for which he is not definitely hired, and to work only at a time definitely appointed. "Loyalty to the union" is another contributing agent to slaughter, forbidding a man to

report a comrade's negligence, inattention, or any other fault, thus leaving carelessness and incompetence to work their will; but loyalty is a pretty word, almost as pretty as progress, and the honest fellows who use it never suspect themselves of wantonly destroying human life. These are the matters considered by Mr. Fagan and in time the knowledge of those who read his books may be slowly disseminated. Houghton Mifflin Co.

The heroine of Mr. William Hereford's "Demagog" breaks her engagement when she discovers that her betrothed has been guilty of breaking one commandment. The Kentuckian heroine of Miss Marie Van Vorst's "In Ambush," after a suitor for her hand has shown her that he has left no commandment without fracture cries, "You're not going without me now! I'm going too," and she goes. Such is the distance that separates one heroine of this holiday season from the other, and it is a New York girl and not the Kentuckian who is most fastidious in her standard of morality. For the rest the book is very unevenly written, containing some excellently described episodes and some scenes which are simply absurd to anyone with the smallest sense of humor. One virtue the hero has; he is brave, but only poetry can bestow even a tolerable aspect upon virtue linked with a thousand crimes; to describe a well-bred, well educated, sane woman of respectable family as insisting upon eloping with such a person is to bring a severe accusation against her ancestry and her environment. J. B. Lippincott Company.

The late Jeremiah Curtin's "A Journey in Southern Siberia" is much more than the mere traveller's tale indicated by its title, being not only an account of an extraordinary journey touching many points not before visited by any

English speaking traveller; but Я study of more than one unfamiliar tribe; and in particular of the Buriats, whose language Curtin learned without books from a Russian speaking Buriat during the journey, in the casual way in which he learned anything which it pleased him to acquire; also the volume includes a valuable group of Mongol myths and folk-tales, and many curious photographs of subjects accessible only to one speaking Buriat. Small wonder that Dr. Charles W. Eliot is enthusiastic in praise of its author and that his Prefatory Note virtually bids the reader not to neglect the work, which is really essential to those who desire the best possible understanding of Curtin's monumental "The Mongols" and "The Mongols in Russia." To the last Mr. Curtin retained his power of swift study and his death robbed his fellow men of a mind enriched by sixty literatures. The race of intellectual giants persisted in him. Little, Brown & Co.

If there be any truth in the theory that ugliness is not a subject for art, Mr. Robert Hichens could hardly find a defence for his "Bella Donna," for his subject is an entirely mercenary evil woman at the moment when the toilet arts of the East and West combined cannot conceal the irremediable ugliness brought to her by the remorseless years. Not a spark of love, not an atom of tenderness, not a ray of charity, illumines her character from the moment when the husband who bought her divorces her and leaves her to obtain by her own unaided efforts the luxuries and beautiful things which she covets. She obtains them, and in the opening chapter of the book she is seen twenty years later, in pursuit of Nigel Armine, her junior by years, and a man of extraordinary purity of character and delicacy of sentiment, whom she promptly begins

to poison as soon as she discovers that he will not inherit his brother's title and lands, and that a rich Mohammedan Egyptian seems ready to lavish his wealth upon her. The Mohammedan treats her entirely according to her deserts and she is left utterly overwhelmed by misfortunes both great and petty. The four men in the story, the shallow little American doctor, the high-minded husband, the wise and noble Hebrew physician, even the brutally selfish Turco-Egyptian are very well done. J. B. Lippincott Company.

The subject of the late Signore Cesare Lombroso's "After Death-What?" was not seriously considered by him for the press, or for any form of publication, until a short time before his death, and the book was undertaken amid the protestations of his friends, who warned him that its publication might ruin the reputation earned by a life-time of scientific work and study, "But all this talk," he wrote in his preface, "did not make me hesitate for a single moment. I thought it my predestined end and way and my duty to crown a life passed in the struggle for great ideas by entering the lists for this desperate cause, the most hotly contested and perhaps most persistently mocked at idea of the times." In the light of these words and this eagerness the book seems indeed to crown his life. Hypnotic phenomena, the history of the Eusapia Palladino case and the experiments made with scientific instruments with her assistance open the book; mediums in general, and among savage tribes; limitations of the medium; ancient beliefs in regard to spirits; identity; doubles; haunted houses, spirit photographs, and lastly the biology of the spirits, are among the topics of the chapters. Signore Lombroso's own experiments and observations, conducted with infinite care and pains, are valuable, but some phenomena reported

to him as occurring in the United States and repeated by him are proved impostures, and the persecutions of which he thinks that certain mediums have been the subject are merely the natural man's manifestations of anger when he discovers that he has been cheated. Good fortune protected the Italian from an encounter even by report with the most notorious of all American mediums, but he accepts the Fox sisters at their own valuation and takes the closed double slate trick as evidence.

But the defects of the book are of little consequence. Here it is, a great

man's last effort to serve the truth for which he lived; not a conclusive book, but a book aiming at a conclusion on a subject of infinite interest; a book as important as any yet published on the subject of psychical research. lustrated with many Small, Maynard & Co.

It is ilphotographs.

Two faults and two only are appar ent in Mr. Ralph D. Paine's "Ships and Sailors of Old Salem"; first, it is barbarously heavy in hand; second, its index, although tolerably full, is hardly as minute as should be the index of a volume sure to be interesting to men of many minds, and of all ages. These objections are written first, in the certainty that they would not be written at all after contemplating the merits of the book long enough to enumerate a few of them. Salem is one of the American homes of romance, not because of the witchcraft legend, or of the many strong-hearted, bold theologians who have ruled her churches, but because of the harbor which has made her a nursery and home of seamen adventurers, of men whose existence is an unbroken romance from the very early moment in which they leave their homes to their reluctant last voyage thither from far off seas and havens. In the days of her glory there was no

foreign desirable thing not to be found in the deep holds unloaded upon her wharves, and even to this day her ancient houses abound in costly finishing, furniture and other spoil of Ormuz and of Ind. Mr. Paine is an enthusiast, and warmly sets forth the doings of the old shipmasters and supercargoes; the shrewd and daring owners, and the hardly less shrewd and clever common seamen who performed their bidding. The Derby vessels, equally swift to outstrip the carriers of the official despatches notifying England of the day of Concord and Lexington, and to bring the news of peace when the long war was ended; the Crowninshield Cleopatra, the home of the former merchant captain, passing from port to port making her presence everywhere a holiday because of her quaint beauty and luxury, and her swiftness and other seaworthy quali ties; the tragedy of the Friendship, her crew murdered by Malays and the avenging attack of Downes in the Potomac; the story of the Amity, English schooner taken off the Spanish Main, by mutineers who sailed her into Salem Harbor to meet the gaze of her astonished captain, guest of Elias Hasket Derby, whose Grand Turk had picked up the open boat into which the mutineers had thrown their officer. Of course her recapture followed, as much of course as that all the crew to whom Bowditch taught navigation for their pleasure and his should become captains; that sort of thing was always happening in Salem, and Mr. Paine covers close on 700 royal octavo pages with them, writing of all with infectious enjoyment and pride in the behavior of such Americans. He writes for the elders, but the economical parent or librarian will do well to substitute his book for the entire collection of juvenile nautical literature for the season: it contains more stories and better stories. The Outing Company.

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