MORALS IN MODERN BUSINESS.
Morals in Modern Business. (Yale University Press. 5s. not.) —In this volume we have six addresses delivered at Yale before the Senior Class of the Sheffield Scientific School. Mr. E. D• Page, who founded the course, gave the first address, taking for his subject "The Morals of Trade in the Making." Tho other subjects are " Production," "Competition," " Credit and Banking," "Public Service," "Corporate and other Trusts." The whole book is excellent, and we would gladly give it a more extended notice than the pressure on our space permits. Here are some specimens from Mr. Henry Holt's "Competition." Mr. Holt thinks that competition is keener in the States than anywhere else. Elsewhere there are other ideals, but " wealth and its results are the only good yet conspicuous on the average American horizon." And to secure these every man at once decries and exalts competition. The employer sells goods and wants no com- petition in the market ; he buys labour and in his opinion competi- tion is most desirable ; the working man, buying commodities and selling labour, has the exactly opposite view. Mr. Holt illustrates his contentions from his own business of publishing ; and we have read his experiences with no little interest. There was a golden age, it seems, some forty years or so ago, when if " a publisher made the first announcement of an intention to print an English book no other American publisher of standing would compote with him." Happy days indeed when the conqueror, lot us call him, enjoyed his spoils in peace,—for it must be understood that, for the most part, the English author got nothing. Then some "enterprising printer in the West awoke to the fact that there was no law to prevent his printing the book or to compel him to pay royalty to the author,"—which his Eastern brother seldom did. And so came about the Copyright Law of 1891 and the "golden age" was at an end. But the English author found the iron age suit him better. What a curious comment all this is on "morale in modern business "!
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