7 NOVEMBER 1885, Page 21

A Nineteenth-Century Hero. By Laura M. Lane. (S.P.C.K ) —It

is interesting to see how these stories are beginning more and more to turn upon socio-political questions. Miss Lane begins by express. ing her obligations to two well-known writers on political economy, and her "nineteenth-century hero" is an enthusiast for co-operation. Unhappily, he is in love with the daughter of a " distributor," to use the appropriate language of the science; and the father, who sees his own interests seriously threatened, pats his veto on the marriage. What he suffers from this private grief, and what from opposition among his fellows, how he sticks to his principles, and how his work prospers, is told in a capital story, which is not the lees interesting because it has a "purpose."