JEVONS'S FRAGMENTS.
The Principles of Economics : a Fragment of a Treatise on the Industrial Mechanism of Society ; and ether Papers. By the late W. Stanley Jevons, LL.D., F.R.S. With a Preface by Henry Higgs. (Macmillan and Co. 10s. net.)—The deep regret caused in 1882 among all persons interested in economic science by the accidental death of Stanley Jevons at the early age of forty- six, in the prime of his powers, cannot fail to have been revived by the publication in the present volume of fragments of what he had meant to be "the work of his life." There is some- thing very pathetic in the table of contents, in which the "missing portions "—those which Jevons never reached, or on which he only left notes too disjointed for publication—" are indicated by italics." They number fifty-two chapters out of seventy-two contained in the author's scheme. But in the chapters which are here printed—though not all, if any, in the complete form which Jevons would ultimately have given them— we have his treatment, at least in outline, of topics so essential as Utility, Wealth, Consumption, Multiplication of Utility, Luxury, Value, Supply and Demand, Labour, and Efficiency and Division of Labour ; Production—in Time, in Place, and in Manner ; Science, Classification of Trades, Negative Value, Insurance, and Variation of Prices. Even these bare headings afford some indication of the freshness of Jevons's point of view, and the entire independence with which he looked at the problems of the science of which he was so distinguished an exponent. At his feet not the dullest of students could have echoed the old gibe that political economy was the "dismal science." Not, indeed, that ho would ever pass lightly over diffi- culties. On the contrary—as, for example, the chapters on Value and Supply and Demand here given abundantly show—he shirked no pains to clear up ambiguities of definition. "It may seem superfluous and tedious," he says (p. 52), "to dwell upon such niceties of expression, but whether or not tedious it is certainly not superfluous. We must leave no confusion behind us." As to Value, Adam Smith had slipped, and most others had uninquiringly stumbled after him. "Nothing," he says in the "Wealth of Nations," "is more useful than water, but it will. purchase scarce anything." "Does he mean," asks Jevons, "the water which we actually need to drink, or that which we do not need." Had the cup of water Sir Philip Sidney gave up for the common soldier on Zutphen field "no value " ? The true word was spoken, in the opinion of Jevons, who had probably read every- thing on the subject, by Le Trosne. As he "correctly remarked" long since—in "Do l'Ordro Social," 1777—" it is a rapport d'echange, a ratio of exchange, which is at the bottom of the matter, or is rather the whole matter." Careful thus to "leave no confusion," Jevons, at the same time, is thoroughly human in the line of observation by which he works towards, and enforces, clearness of thought. On "Luxury" he is very pointed. "The servant girl is reprobated because she apes her betters and appears at church in bright ribbons and silks Let the mistress who condemns the vanity of her servant-maid begin by herself putting vanity aside and bestowing her expenditure on higher objects." But between these observations (pp. 43-47) are intro- duced commendatory remarks on the elevating influence of missionaries in Jamaica in "making the negroes delight in wearing a black coat on Sundays." And he discusses, with, we think, destructive acuteness, J. S. Mill's well-known comparison of the rich man who spends money on employing bricklayers to build a house with him who buys velvet,—to the disadvantage of the latter. Altogether, these fragments are good to read, for their vigour, their justice, their sanity, and their humour. Thu "other Papers" in the volume include a very interesting and hopeful address on the Future of Political Economy, delivered in 1876, and a memorandum on the Pressure of Taxation, which, as Mr. Higgs explains in his sympathetic preface, strongly in- fluenced the late Lord Sherbrooke in taking off the shilling "registration duty" on corn.
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