CURRENT LITERAT (IRE.
TILL EDINBURGH REVIEW.
The new number of the Edinburgh Review opens with an admirable article on "Protection and the Working Classes." It deals patiently and dispassionately with the arguments on the opposite aide, and does not make the mistake, too common with Free-trade controversialists, of undervaluing and misunderstand- ing the case of the other party. The writer points out the fallacy of Mr. Chamberlain's statistical arguments, and of his handling of popular economic dogmas. We have no space to follow the elaborate and often subtle reasoning with which he presses his contentions home, but we would quote his much-needed caution to defenders of Free-trade :—" No general abstract argument can suffice to rebut a plea for protective duties. The character of the duties suggested, and, above all, the industrial circumstances of the country whose tariff is under review, need to be carefully examined before a final judgment can be pronounced." We may also quote his conclusions :—"A general tariff such as Mr. Chamberlain proposes would almost inevitably lessen the aggregate national dividend; secondly, it would not increase the proportion of that dividend that goes to the labouring classes in any way that could save them from absolute loss ; thirdly, so far from yielding an incidental compensation to the poor by lessening the numbers out of work or the fluctuations of employment, it would tend to make both these evils worse than they are at present." We trust that the writer's hope may be fulfilled, and that Mr. Chamberlain's propaganda, for all its faults, may have "roused enthusiasm in the cause of social improvement."—The closing paper deals with "The Fall of Mr. Balfour's Government" in a spirit of detached and melancholy contemplation. With the analysis of the futility and wrongheadedness of the late Prime Minister's tactics we wholly agree. Home-rule, the writer admits, as the Duke of Devonshire said in 1887, is a greater danger than Protection, in the sense that it would produce more direful results ; but it is a less threatening danger. The Election has been fought on Free-trade, Englishmen of both parties having united to ensure its safety, and the new Ministry will make a fatal mistake if they imagine that their majority is due to any great wave of abstract Radicalism. On the whole, however, the writer is confident about the wisdom of the Liberal Government, but he fears that the Opposition, when reconstructed, may be reconstructed on a basis of Protection. In that case, Conservatism will lose the confidence of the country as com- pletely as did Liberalism in Mr. Gladstone's closing years. The whole article is marked by statesmanlike moderation and good sense.— Of the other papers in an excellent number, we may notice especially a scholarly article on "Religion under the French Revolution," in which the intricate and subterranean currents of religious belief at that difficult epoch are described with much clearness ; and a paper on "The Growth of American Foreign Policy," which traces the history of the Monroe doctrine from its inception to its present position. The number is very strong on the side of literature, and the studies of "Lucretius," "Fanny Burney," "Hawthorne," and " Novels with a Philosophy" are in their several ways excellent pieces of criticism.
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