Old-Fashioned Stories. By Thomas Cooper. (Hodder and Stoughton). The best
and most characteristic of these stories are those which, as the author says in his preface, describe the "old Lincolnshire" of forty or fifty years ago. The tale of "The Fisherman and the Fiddler," two dwellers by the Trent, is an instance. The Trent is not to be men- tioned, for beauty of scenery, with the Thames, but one who knows it and loves it can make it interesting, and it has the advantage of being wilder and less civilised than its great compeer of the South. "The Beggared Gentleman and his Crooked Stick" is a very pathetic story, and the miseries of the Leicester stocking-makers, miseries now happily passed away, are described with much power. The author gladly acknow- ledges in a posteriptum that things are much changed for the better since these tales were written, and he seems to attribute the change to free-trade. Does he still adhere to the great economic fallacy whioh, as it seems to us, lies beneath the words, "Go to Leicester, or any other of the suffering towns of depressed manufacture, where men compete with each other in Machinery till human hands are of little use"? Should it not have been owned that, while much suffering was caused by the transition from hand-labour to the labour of machines, this "competition in machinery" has had the ultimate effect of making "human bands" of much more use than they ever were before ?
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