BOOKS.

LALOR'S MONEY AND MORALS.* THIS work is distinguished by vigorous and vivid literary power, by a high and generous spirit engaged on matters of vital concern to the British public, and by a political economy searching and striking, though frequently questionable. Its general object, as might be inferred from the title, is to consider the economical ques- tion of the "money" or capital of England, in connexion with the far higher subject of our public morals. A more precisely avowed purpose of the writer is to endeavour to trace the action of the gold from the diggings of California and Australia upon our cur- rency and industry. In reality, however, the work has a much wider range of subjects, without a very close connexion between them beyond the fact that they refer to the present condition of England either as regards money or morals.

Mr. Lalor begins with the question already mentioned: what effect will the increased supplies of gold have upon our currency and in- dustry P and the first part concludes with the very probable affirm- ation that its tendency will be to keep the money-market easy, to increase the amount of surplus capital seeking emphqment, and to stimulate speculations that shall end even more disastrously than the mania of 1845 for the fortunes of individuals and our commercial morality. Between the statement of the proposition and its deter- mination a variety of economical questions are discussed, in con- nexion with currency, credit, capital, and income, and some power- lid picturespictures of the monied interest and its modes of conducting business presented. Much of the political economy seems to us doubtful, to say the least ; but it is needless to go into those mat- ters, since nothing in Mr. Lalor's large conclusions really depends upon them. If the whole of the first part were expunged, many striking sketches would be lost, as well as many economical dis- cussions, useful as compelling the reader to reconsider the subjects; but the logical conclusion—that we are threatened with a plethora of unemployed capital, which is very likely to end in a ruinous tern of speculation, as the first result of "the diggings "—is quite independent of many of Mr. Lalor's propositions, and could be reached by a more direct process.

Formally, the book is in three parts : the first, already described, is called "Dangers"; the second, " Precautions " ; the third, "Path to the Remedy." The same defect of logical structure prevails in the second division as in the first. As many dangers to the country are pointed out in the " Precautions " as there were in "Dangers" express, and some precautions take the form of remedy as much as the propositions in the "Path to the Remedy." This Path is mainly a more liberal and charitable Christianity. The precautions chiefly resolve themselves into expenditure of money for public objects under the form of public guarantee, in order to direct the unemployed capital of the country into useful channels, which will otherwise turn into mischievous channels. Some of these are unobjectionable—as the encouragement of emi- gration and the formation of parks ; though it is a grave question, whether such national expenditure as the last should not be from a surplus of revenue, rather than by loan. Hygienic propositions— as drainage, water supply, and model lodging-houses—are also among those public works that may rightfully be helped in a rich nation ; though there are still graver objections to the State's un- dertaking the whole speculation with borrowed money, first from the exceeding difficulty of directing its proper application, and next from the fact that water-supply and drainage could be carried out by those portions of the public which would reap the benefit, if they had tangible plans, and if legal facilities were given to them and to the lenders. A third proposition is not only opposed to all sound political economy, but to all experience : it is neither more nor less than to furnish capital to those farmers who have not the means to improve their mode of farming. If it be true, as Mr. Lau, a thorough Free-trader, states, that the farmers have suf- fered by the change in the Corn-laws, and that the nation at large has profited at their expense, this points to an error in the mode of the alteration six years ago, (though it is nothing more than other classes suffer from acts of Parliament): but the State would undertake the task of Sisyphus if it once undertook to supply needy producers or dealers with the capital in which they are defi- cient to properly carry on their business.

Mr. Lalor is not a "practical man," who enters upon the dis- eussion of economical subjects without having studied political economy : he is well and widely read in the writers upon the science ; but political economy is not his forte. The morals of his "book for the times" are far better than the "money," unless where the money is connected with the morals. Be shines less in the exposition of principles than in the denunciation of errors, es- pecially- where some selfish or sordid or cold-blooded motive is mingled with the error. Apparently Irish by blood, he has a tinge of the better kind of Irish rhetoric in his style, which leads him to a full-charged statement; but with the Irish disposition to warmth of colouring he combines the higher qualities of the higher class of Irish minds : a lofty and generous scorn for all that is narrow, mean, or self-seeking ; an admiration of high qualities wherever they exist ; a wide and genial sympathy with all that is manly, tender, and generous in our nature ; with an indifference to con- sequences in a great cause, and probably his nation's disposition to rush at the end without a careful reckoning of the means. These qualities have been improved by scholarship and study ; probably

• Money and Morals: a Book or the Times. By John Lalor. Publlahed by Ohapraan.

tempered by the restraints of Saxon journalship ; though this last may have contributed to give his book its disjointed form. It is less a treatise or series of treatises than a number of papers, of great power, warmth, vitality, and eloquence, on many of the glaring moral deficiencies of the day in public men and the public mind. To these are added many vigorous sketches of our monied and commercial system, the result of observation and re- flection, animated by rhetorical if not poetical genius ; sonic lifelike pictures of the errors of the abstract school of economists ; and many expositions of more abstruse subjects, which are worth reading for the arguments, or for the manner in which they are presented.

As an example of Mr. Lalor's mode of exhibiting a system and its classes of men, part of his description of the money-market may be taken.

"The money-market, like the greater portion of the commodity from which it derives its name, is invisible. It exists only as a creation of the mind. Sometimes the imagination pictures it as floating between the Bank of England and the Mansionhouse, as a man according to his temperament, vaguely conceives his soul to hover about his head or his stomach. But, in truth, the money-market, like the principle of life, is everywhere. It is the nervous system of the whole material organization of society ; its go- verning masses being in London, but filaments through which, with electric speed, sensations are received and impulses transmitted are spread out through all parts of the kingdom. Of course it happens that, like M.

• Jourdain speaking prose, many worthy persons belong to the money-market without knowing it. From the Bank of England, at one end, to the thrifty maid of all work who deposits her savings, at the other, it includes all who are lenders or borrowers of money. In the centre of the whole grand and gigantic, stands the Bank of England, like Jupiter among the Olympians, able at times to hold all the rest suspended by a chain. Next in order come the private bankers of the City, the aristocracy of the profession, who with their clearing-house, form, in the way already explained, one united institution. Outside these, and by an illiberal and absurd regulation excluded from the clearing-house, stand the various joint-stock banks, from the London and Westminster, operating with three millions of deposits, to the youngest member of the family, which starts with a modest capital of fifty thousand pounds. In appearance, humbly beneath all these, but in truth familiarly amongst them, glide about the brokers, an altogether pecu- liar class of men, like Oliver Le Dein, Barber Premier of Louis XI., caring more for the substance than the show of power. It is their business to know, and they do know, everybody, and everything which can have the remotest practical relation to money. They have the mesmeric faculty of thought-reading. The exact figures of a merchant's balance-sheet, though a profound secret between bins and his head clerk, they know how to de- cipher in the quiver of his lip or the wrinkles of his eye. They can tell a bad bill by the feel, and if there be a taint of bankruptcy within miles they snuff it in the air. These are the architects who build the most lofty and delicate portion of the edifice of credit, and under their skilful hands its fairy pinnacles shoot far into the clouds. Ever on those dizzy heights, where their work of doing and undoing is incessant, they tread the edge of preci- pices like Alpine goats, and though it be but a hair between them and de- struction, that hair is almost always sufficient.

"Not distant in space, but in a wholly different atmosphere, are the bankers of the West-end, some of them with a history going back to the time when Charles H. plundered the goldsmiths. These are the bankers of the peerage and the country gentlemen, sharing somewhat in their calmness and easy strength. The pulse does not beat here with the quick stroke of Lom- bard Street, nor are they the men foremost in a crisis to go up with whits lips to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Humbler, and yet akin to these, are the provincial bankers of the rural districts; excellent men in their way ; pleasant in stories of hairbreadth 'scapes in panics and convulsions ; not too strict to lend now and then upon a mortgage, and think it a good bank- ing security, knowing every tree and hedgerow in the acres which it pledges, but thoroughly useful withal, from thew local knowledge and connexions, and who would be ill replaced by the stipendiaries of a central and distant board."

The exposition of the error of the abstract school of economists in taking no account of time or human nature in their speculations on the transfer of capital and labour to new employments, is ano- ther piece of powerful writing, animated by human feeling. The truth is that for a man to change his vocation after the early part of manhood, is a very difficult thing to do in the case of great abilities, and constitutes an exception to the rule. Even then, it is only accomplished in obedience to circumstances and opportunity. This is Mr. Lalor's exposition of the error as regards "the transfer of capitaL" "The regular flow of capital from the less to the more profitable employ- ments, is one of the familiar postulates of political economy, so frequently mistimed in its reasonings as to cause most of those who use it to forget ha- bitually that it is only a postulate, admissible as applied to long periods, but utterly contradicting experience when it is assumed as taking place either rapidly or without the most calamitous reverses of individual fortune. I know the self-rectifying principle in the social organization which draws new capital to the most profitable employments, and also borrowed capital even from active but less profitable exercise ; but our concern here is with a wait mass of capital, neither new nor borrowed, upon which profits are low, which therefore ought to have its condition mended by transfer, but for which the word transfer can have no possible meaning but that of destruc- tion.

"Suppose, for a moment, which I do not believe, that free trade were really to inflict permanent injury on the shipping interest. I do not believe it, though doubtless the personnel of our mercantile marine will require some improvement before it can hold its own with the intelligent superoargoes and captains of North America. But suppose the case of a Shipowner having really to transfer his capital, what is the meaning of the process ? It means and can mean nothing but total ruin a simple abandonment of the ships which are the capital to rot in the decks or at the river-side. Of course a sale of the ships, though a transfer for the individual seller, is none in the sense of the argument, as it would still leave the same amount of capital in the unprofitable employment. "So of agricultural capital; what is the meaning of its transfer ? It is true that crops, live stock, and draught cattle are always saleable ; but what is to be done with the expensive manures or the drainage ? How would Mr. Meehi transform his costly and admirable apparatus into something which could be applied to the extended manufacture of calico, or to the pro- duction of that which is now most of all in demand at the gold-mines, namely, bitter ale and bottled porter ? But we may suppose, in an ordinary case, that a farmer can extricate most part of his capital from his holding. When the fields are swept bare, and the auction of the old ancestral furm- ture is at an end—when he has taken his last look at those bare walla which rang with the joy of his bridal and witnessed the birth of his children, and after the mournful equipage has lingered by the gate of the old familiar churchyard where the bones of the elders repose—where is he to go for his new investment ? To the cotton-mills! To join in that fierce race of com- petition, in which the keenest man in England without a Lancashire edu- cation or Lancashire blood in him has not the remotest chance of holding his ground. In such a contest, the farmer's prospect of improving his. pro- fits would be slender indeed. For a man bred to agriculture there is no transfer possible, but a transfer out of England. That may, in many cases, be a desirable measure ; but when such is the meaning of the word, there should be no mistake about it."

Perhaps Mr. Lalor's strength is less shown on economical ques- tions, even where morals and feeling are mixed up with them, than in those more general subjects whose apprehension is from long intellectual habit and the experience of life readily understood by all. Such are his remarks upon the popular and Parliamentary ideas of economy.

"It concerns us deeply, however, to take care that this jealousy of taxa- tion, which in past times played so noble a part, should not, with ourselves, be stripped of its historical character, and degenerate into a mean and wran- gling anxiety for economy, which is deaf to the most peremptory calls of hon- our. Let it not be said that such an apprehension is chimerical. The evil is very possible ; nay, it is imminent, if not present. That it is possible we have too painful prooL I am sorry to be obliged to say it, in the States of

North America. • "Our present danger, however, is different., and perhaps harder to be guarded against, because it does not at once arouse all our nobler feelings to resist it, as they would be roused by the rise and growth of an open and fla- grant dishonesty. That danger is the gradual prevalence and ascendancy of a sordid and miserly spirit in all matters of finance, which will shut its eyes and close its ears to the most urgent wants, if, referring to anything beyond the indispensable machinery of police, they threaten to involve the least addition to the national expenditure. This temper is growing in the public mind, and its influence is every year more perceptible in the House of Com- mons. That a tendency to sordid economy in public matters is becoming more and more prevalent in the nation is likewise often shown in the con- duct of a more numerous class of popular representatives, namely, those who constitute the various boards of Poor-law Guardians. * • •

"But it would be unjust to attribute this reproach exclusively to boards of Guardians, for the spirit which animates them is in a great measure also the spirit of the House of Commons. The Members of that assembly show no superiority in their regard for those whose claims to education are far stronger than the claims of the children of paupers. Why is the education vote for the country at large still so paltry ? It is the fault of Ministers, it may be said ; but Ministers are never slow to propose increased votes when they expect them to be carried. No, Cabinets are but instruments. It is that men in office are scared, and not in reference to this alone but in refer- ence to every object of public utility, by that economical bugliear which the House of Commons constantly holds up before their eyes. The consequence is, that a low hindering spirit is becoming increasingly prevalent in the Par- liamentary debates. The debates form the chief intellectual food of man', thousands of readers ; and where no other mental stimulants will operate, it is a great good to have the mind of the people developed even by such mat- ter as those wearisome reports supply ; but, beyond all doubt, it will happen, that wranglings about cheese-parings and candle-ends, such as we have had so much of, if further continued, will deteriorate the whole moral tone of the nation, and dry up all the sources of those nobler emotions which give strength and elevation to the current of the national life."

The observations on town life are worthy of great attention, not only for the facts upon which Mr. Lalor touches, but for the pro- bability that drain' build, and ventilate as we may, the denizens of towns shut out from the "open air," will detenorate in consti- tution and robustness. Do what we will, this evil cannot be al- together remedied : but nothing is now done except by accident. Guilds commercial or religious, gifts or bequests to charitable uses, were all more or less bad things; yet they produced good in their own times and left some good behind them. By means of public halls with courts or gardens, from Gray's Inn, Lincoln's Inn, and the Temples, down to the smallest Livery company, as well as by the courts of hospitals and the gardens of almshouses, open spaces were preserved by our Plantagenet and Tudor ancestors in and round the metropolis; though the city was then scarcely half a mile in breadth by less than a mile and a half in length, the country came up to the Southern shore of the Thames, and the uncontaminated Thames had only to ventilate from the Tower to Temple Bar and Northward to Holborn. With Stuarts and Nassau commenced the iera of the Parks, and the mo- dern nobleman's mansion. With the house of Brunswick began the fashion of squares; and continued till the days of George the Fourth, whose taste or vanity, or whatever it might be, most for- tunately secured for the public the Regent's Park and its striking approaches. Within the last twenty-five or thirty years, land has become too valuable to spare for many squares, or even for gardens in suburban streets. Official routine, the principle of "Laissez- faire," and the "sacred rights of property" even when exercised in producing wrong, have permitted what will soon be if it is not al- ready an addition or belt of five miles to the North and South of London, with openings at haphazard, and the smaller streets more confined than in some places in old London. Francis Newman, in one of his economical essays' touched upon this abuse of landed property ; but could find no better remedy than the control of a municipal body. Mr. Lalor avoids the topic, though well worth his attention and confines himself to the more general features, or to hygiene, after touching upon the broad features of the case. "One of the governing facts in our social condition is, that all the increase of the population flows into the towns. For many years the rural popula- tion has not increased ; and whatever may be done to favour the direction of labour to the land, it is not likely permanently to employ a greater number than at present. The great majonty of the people of Great Britain already live in towns, and in towns it seems to be the destiny of succeeding multi- tudes to spend their existence. A town life then is already, for the most fearrl and t well future more the life of the people of Eng- ll thtat we should how far they are or can be made consistenty the iwt eilil,efe reantdletranliel

man exists.

"The general characteristic of a town life is crowding, or the collection of men in masses ; and the first conspicuous effect of such aggregation is the peculiar stimulus which it gives to all the powers of the mind. Whether it be for good or for evil, our whole life is rendered deeper and more intense by social intercourse. As 'iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the coun- tenance of his friend.' Indeed, so far as we know, society is a condition in- dispensable for the deliverance of man from the most torpid brutality, and therefore in its highest forms of development must approach nearest to that

natural state' which imaginative writers like Rousseau suppose to have been left behind us in the primitive forests."

After condensing some views of Dr. Vaughan in his Age of Great Cities, Mr. Lalor continues.

"But 1,1 is not to be denied that the evils are enormous. If towns give us the highest view of man's range of moral attainment, so do they open up the deepest abysses of human degradation. There is no reason to suppose that the intensity of moral evil in cities is less than it ever was, although the limits and influence of practical Christianity may be continually widen- ing. Evil can and does acquire concentrated strength, as well as good. In modern times there have been very great external changes ; the work of the scavenger, the painter, and the policeman, by which evil has been not 80 much removed as placed out of sight. We have not only whitened the se- pulchre, but encrusted it with marble, and not a few ostentatious inscrip. tions ; but it still contains the rottenness and the dead men's bones. "Two sets of circumstances produce the evils of towns ; those which may be called moral, and those which are physical. Crowding develops not only the intellect but the passions, so as to render vice, where it exists, early, contagious, and malignant, and therefore to demand moral correctives of proportionate force. But into this all-important subject the purpose in hand does not lead Us. It requires only a reference to certain physical causes, which are continually operating upon the health, and through the health upon the morals, of all who live in towns. The majority of those persons who subsist, whether as artisans or as labourers, by the receipt of wages, are in many respects more favourably placed for the highest ends of life than that uneasy, struggling, shopkeeping class, which seems so much above them. They are free to live far less in show and more in reality. They are in constant contact with those rough stubborn facts of nature which under their hands are continually becoming smooth and orderly and beautiful. The work which they produce, or the services which they render, may be for a class too languidly luxurious to appreciate their worth; but the honest toil is not the less moral and bracing. The poor weaver, in the midst of his privations, sees the rich velvet spread out beneath his hands, not without a feeling of pride. The mason, the bricklayer, the carpenter, must have simi- lar thoughts, when on the one leisure evening they stroll through those long lines of sumptuous palaces which are the creations of their industry. These and all other obscure workers, whose lives are not spent in the receipt and computation of money, but in tough obstinate conflict with difficulties, can never be forsaken by that sense of dignity and self-respect which are part of Nature's wages for all real toil. The existence of such men in all cases might, and in some case does, exemplify that ideal of plain living and high thinking' which the poet could only see in the past. We have it amongst us, though the cases are few ; science and poetry and thought making noble and beautiful this common working life."