Sophisms of Free Trade and Popular Political Economy Examined. By
Sir John Barnard Byles. A New Edition. With Introduction and Notes by W. S. Lilly, LL.M., and Ch. Stanton Devas, M.A. (John Lane. 3s. 6d. net.)--Byles's editors claim for him the rank of one of the precursors of the historical school which had its rise in Germany. His works strike us as a series of disjointed notes of a clever, caustic, but ill-informed writer on the economic development of the day, a development with which he had no sympathy, but which he criticised in a spirit and with a temper very far removed from that of an historian or a philosopher. His criticisms—sometimes acute, always carping—are unsup- ported by facts, and devoid of any connecting thread of argu- ment which enables a reader to study him with profit. The editors have done their best to turn the work to present con- troversial uses, but their unrestrained eulogy of Bylea's sallies will hardly raise them to serious scientific rank. Take the following as a specimen of his "pregnant and prophetic" utter- ances about Free-trade :—"At this moment the anxious and vigilant attention of the theoretical and practical men is invited to vast experiments now in progress. It were to be wished that some other community, and not the noble British Empire, had been selected as the corpus vile of experiment. We shall stiffer much, and what is worse, the innocent will be the sufferers 1 We shall probably lose a large portion of our possessions."
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