The Economic Policy of Colbert. By A. J. Sargent, BA.
(Long- mans and Co.)—This short but brightly written study forms one of a series edited by the Director of the London School of Economics, and English readers , will be grateful for an account of the man who founded French financial and commercial policy on lines so consistent with the character and circumstances of the French people that they have endured from his own day to the present time. In one aspect he was simply a first-rate man of business, who waged war on rapacity, extravagance, and malad- ministration. He was successful for a time only against the inherent vices of the French monarchical system, and his work had to be repeated with less =mess by Turgot and Necker, and even now finance is the rock on which his country threatens to make ship- wreck. But he is still more remarkable as the statesman who first formulated the theory that France ought to be and can be self- sufficient economically, as the founder of the school of extreme Protection which has survived through the efforts of the Free-trade Emperor Napoleon III. to the present day.
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