CURRENT LITERATURE.
Endowed Charities. By Courtney Stanhope Kenny-, LL.M. (Reeves and Turner.)—This adds another to the already considerable list of valuable contributions to literature which have been called forth by University and other prizes. The fact is in itself no inconsiderable argument in favour of endowments. Mr. Kenny ham collected with the greatest industry a large mass of facts, some of them very curious facts, and draws his inferences from them in a reasonable and sober fashion. He is not a revolutionist in this matter of endow- ments. To some forms of them he, indeed, states objections which do not admit of an answer. These he would abolish. Doles, which sometimes assume a strange form, as one at Hampstead, which pro- vided for the annual distribution to every inhabitant of the parish of a halfpenny loaf, and marriage portions, which seent to have little other effect than that of insuring bad husbands for a certain member of young women, would be among those abolished. Apprentice fees have, to a great extent, become obsolete. Of educational endowments he thinks favourably. His great principle—and ho sup- ports it by a powerful array of arguments—is that of the right and duty of perpetual revision of the conditions under which endowments are administered and employed. It is surprising to see how soon the most carefully-arranged scheme becomes more or less obsolete, and begins to gall at one point or another. Mr. Kenny's is an admirable aud withal a very readable book.
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