A ROMAN CATHOLIC ECONOMIST.*

RECALLING various thick volumes, which represent as many schools of quackery in economics, we confess to having felt a sense of dis-

couragement as we opened this solid treatise, paragraphed with inexorable method, and bristling with quotations from authors ranging from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to the latest utterance of Mr. Blackley. However, though treating of the Dismal Science, the book is readable, stuffed with authentic fact, and not too profuse in figures. Apart from its literary and scientific merits, it is valuable as an expression of the re- markable religions effort now making itself felt in France and Germany towards the solution of economic problems in a sense chiefly favourable to working-men, though with careful re- serves of individual freedom and, in the highest sense, of the rights of man. Mr. Devas does not discuss all the economic incidents of our modern life, as, for instance, public debt and taxation, yet he insists on a survey of wider horizons than those of writers who do not travel outside the evolution of the last hundred years, and as champion of what we may call revealed economies, he deals well-directed blows full on the shield of veteran sociologists. A David without any credentials of special learning has come down from the Seven Hills of Rome, sling in hand, to do battle with an army of Goliahs. His sling is faith in the divine government of the world, and the stone with which it is weighted is fact. He• opposes what ought to be in theory, by careful observation of what is and has been, the experience of men and nations. His method is that of Le Play, who probably of all economists, collected personally the largest store of knowledge touching working-men. His conclusions are in the main those

of Ketteler, the Bishop of Mayence, and it appears to be a strength, rather than an impediment, to Catholic reformers, that the premisses from which they argue are fixed at their base. Mr. Devas assumes that,— "In the difficult task of selection and interpretation of social facts, relation to moral action is the measure of importance; and our guide is human reason, not in its natural weakness, much less when dis- torted and darkened, but when disciplined by a good will and en- lightened by revelation."

Politics and economics are, of course, treated by the author as branches of ethics, which implies at starting wide disagreement

between his conclusions and those of men not so persuaded as he is of human dignity and free-will. We observe, however,

that Mr. Devas takes "for granted the results of physical science relating to man and the external world." He desires also to profit by the Catholic stores of wisdom and tradition, even though they have been collected by medimval saints, and to marshal his array of facts under the banner of revealed Evolution, intelligent, through all its straggles, of a Final Cause.

Mr. Devas appears to have read everything accessible on his subject, and his criticism of economic schools, foreign and English, is excellent reading. He does his best to give

due sequence to his observations, so that, considering the ground they cover, the reader carries away many vivid im- pressions; for instance, of Adam Smith's place in the twilight of the Manchester gods; or, though there is cer- tainly no sequence in our examples, of the science of enjoy- ment when our wealth has been accumulated; or again, of the much contested uses of rich people. It is probably well to examine and test the attacks of foreign Socialists along the whole line of property. Mr. Devas has made himself acquainted not only with noisy revolutionists, but with the quiet reaction which is going on in France and Austria towards the reforms of mischiefs that are incident to the mercantile and industrial " intensity " of the last hundred years. The

• Groundwoil: of Economies. By O. S. DeVas. London: Longman& NM.

author is careful not to measure men exclusively by the English standard of one century. He insists that we are moral and sensitive, and not mere dollar-hunting animals, and though he recognises the increase of wealth and confesses the majesty of Mammon, he maintains that production is for man, and not man for production. He would heretically question the adequacy of Mr. Giffen's answer to Mr. George, and would reply to the figures which establish our working-men's prosperity by the fall in the price of food and the rise of wages, somewhat in the words of Haggai, on which the Bishop of Lichfield preached to the Lords last Ash Wednesday :—

"Ye eat, but ye have not enough ; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink ; ye clothe you, but there is none warm ; and he that earneth wages, earneth wages to pat it into a bag with holes."

To follow Mr. Devas in his attempt to sum up the vast variety of man's relations with his environment, to examine the mass of observations he has accumulated critically, would require a volume. Much of what he says might, we suspect, be con- troverted by persons interested to contradict him, and Irish landlords would find many of his paragraphs unpleasant, and would think them unjust. For the school which may be said to act on the principle, Laissez faire la misere, 'aims passer la mart, he has very hard words indeed ; but most of his chapters on our domestic errors, our dwellings in great cities, our breath- less fight for money, and ignorance of how to spend it, contain wise and shrewd sayings. In the "preparation,!' as he defines it, of wealth we have succeeded, though at terrible cost ; but in the " enjoyment " of our accumulations we shamefully err. As the rich have most to do in controlling this" enjoyment," we cannot wonder that the " preparers " of wealth, the working- classes, should be discontented, even to revolt. In short, it is not poverty that we suffer from, but ignorant and immoral mis- management, which the increase of wealth cannot remedy.

To meet the revolt of sceptical but intelligent working-men, who claim equality of enjoyment in the wealth they have pro- duced, Mr. Devas considers there is, "on the hypothesis of rationalism," no "solid argument from justice or expediency. We must fall back on the gallows." But, admitting the precepts of the Christian religion to be binding and its sanctions authori- tative, the rich are under an obligation to fulfil their respon- sibilities and to take by the highest right their place in the vanguard of progress. No doubt, many prudent and kindly Agnostics assume the virtues which can alone vindicate the reputation of the rich, but the "enthusiasm. of humanity" is not binding on many, and it has not yet proved itself potent historically, as has the Christian faith,. which has proclaimed the sanctities of labour for all, which has secured to women respect, and strengthened the family ties on which European society may be said to depend.

While he apologises for the rich, Mr. Devas claims for all who labour, as a first charge on the product of their labour, not only the necessities of bare existence, but a share in the due enjoyment of the surplusage of their production. Here, of course, begin the difficulties of that continuous reform which alone can meet the continuous developments of society. We have been careful to give the key-note of Mr. Devas's Economies, because it controls all the detailed suggestions he offers, and gives harmony to what otherwise would seem those unmanageable discords of man's relations with the world and with his fellow-men, with which any sincere book on economics must deal. Who cannot perceive how cautious and tentative legislative interference with natural laws must be, when we observe the illimitable social mischief caused by well- meant meddling, or the damage done to mother earth by our waste of her gifts, and destruction of her economies of forest and river, of food and fuel? How far Governments may adjust the relation of things and persons, how far they may supplement by Act of Parliament the wisdom and virtue want- ing to the rich, admits of much question. Religion based on the Decalogue, as Mr. Devas believes, will best secure that service and labour of the rich which are due to the clients who work for them. Unhappily, he does not suggest any plan for curing that impiety which he believes to be disorganising society, far more than can any excess of population or mistake in produc- tion can disorganise it. By impiety, be means not only the failure of our respect for God, but our neglect of duty towards our parents and our kin ; and in his conclusions he is supported by the mass of evidence collected by Le Play, who, basing his opinion not on revelation, but on observation, concludes that the pieties of strongly constituted family life are the best safe- guards against social error of every kind. Men are, indeed, blinded by passion if they do not see what national, not less than private virtues are nursed by the hearth and in the home, virtues without which man's life is but a tragic struggle for survival of the fittest,—not indeed of those who are fittest for the higher, but only of those fittest for the more animal life, as leaders of which we should find not a Gladstone or a Gordon, but Rousseau's very questionable homme de la nature.

As is to be expected, Mr. Devaa's chapter on man's dwelling-houses is specially interesting and full of Bug; gestive facts, which we will not dwell on, because the necessity of better lodging for our working-men and of lessening the congestion of our cities is uppermost in men's minds ; nevertheless, those who are busy with plans to attain these ends may with advantage read what our author says. He makes sensible remarks on the extravagance of over-cheapness in clothes and furniture, and on the waste of our migratory habits, and the uses of permanent homes, and even permanent arm-chairs. Mr. Devas desires to attract men to the country on strictly economic grounds, by preserving its charms, and in his survey of the agricultural use as distinct from the manufacturing use of our world, he reminds us not unprofit- ably that we are dependent on the earth, and must not play -tricks with the "fullness thereof," lest it diminish, to our con- fusion. The paragraphs on "the law of diminishing returns," and on the checks that control us in every direction, sober any .dreams of that potential illimitableness which we sometimes attribute to invention and "intensity" of labour. Farmers sadly confess that only a limited return can be got from their fields, since even electric light cannot alter the seasons, and when division of labour is pushed to the stultification of the labourer, it has passed its proper limits, as, again, when intensity of labour interferes with the store of power latent in home leisure.

Mr. Devas is a Free-trader, with one or two reserves, but there is little new in his appreciations of our commercial relations, and his strength is, indeed, as we before remarked, rather in his application of morality to the use of wealth than to its "pre- paration," for what he says of over-intense "preparation "at the cost of morality is applicable rather to the results than the methods of production. It may be said that in suggesting as he does the religions panacea, be but adds another to the list of one-ideaed reformers ; but he is modest enough in the way he would apply that panacea, and he would proceed, English fashion, by practical and piecemeal reforms, based on the widest possible observation, and this is surely safer than large changes -that have but theories of an imaginary best, based on dreams of immutable statistics and necessary progress, to justify them. He leads us skilfully towards the conclusion that man is at least as unknowable, in the intricacy of his being and his functions, as is God, without some external means of jadgment,—in other words, reve!ation. Observation of fact is no hampered by our imperfection, that while it is our best safe- guard in reform, it is well to use the strongest light with which we can illumine the object we examine, and that light Mr. Devas finds in the teaching of his Church. Whatever we may think of this view of his, we recognise in this volume, not- withstanding certain crudities and flippancies of rebuke, that the value of accumulated Christian experience and tradition is great, and we concede in our present diffi- culties that its larger estimates of man's individual dignity, and those of its doctrines by which the rich and poor may be reconciled, are useful contributions to economic science, though Mr. Devas does not solve many of the enigmas of life. The best means towards true progress must ever be debateable ground, but it is prudent to recognise that progress will not take place without intelligent and unceasing effort. And avoiding what the author calls historical gnosticism, not less than historical agnosticism, we must collect patiently our materials it we are to understand the rise and fall of nations, as well as how to remedy the evils at our doors.

Towards the end of the volume there is occasionally unneces-w sary zeal, in denying, for instance, that there can be excess of population, though we agree that congestion rather than excess is the evil to be feared. We do not know whether Mr. Devas be Irish, but there is some Irish feeling traceable in his dislike of emigration, and his occasional -jibes at Irish landlords, as if they had no claim on the consideration shown to other rural mag- nates. There is a tendency to sermonise on texts that we allow are tempting, as, for instance, in relation to Mal- thnsian doctrines, and in relation to the ignorance of many writers, who know little, and misuse the little they know, of the commercial and social methods that obtained in the middle ages. For all his elaborate subdivisions, Mr. Devas has not mastered the relations of the subjects with which he deals to one another sufficiently to make his conclusions clear; but' he stirs in his readers a desire for reform, and he points out many dangers that can be avoided by private effort. His attempt to restore correctness of terms is more important than he seems himself awareof, for phrases may be more fatal to a nation than in- vasions, and as England has been the cradle of modern economy, she has much to answer for in her use of such words, in speaking of workers, as" hands "or "masses," or in the contrasts drawn be- tween "civilisation and barbarism." Mr. Devas teaches us very effectively, not to separate our moral from our physical being,while he maintains that there is "an ordered body of truth concerning right and wrong which can be known as well as the truth concern- ing the planets or the stars." If there be this exact science of morals, he is right in the zealous assertions of his concluding pages that the "protection of a strong religion" will best help the workers to healthful and happy life, and even joyful labour. But how shall be convince them that "the social evils of the world are not the result of a mistake, or to be cured by a contrivance, but have arisen because human nature is fallen and man is prone to evil from his youth?" Who shall believe his report that "all labour that has not a supernatural end is vanity and misses the mark, and busies itself about trifles?" We desire that Mr. Devas should gain a hearing for his methods of reform, bat it is certain that if he does, a formidable line of political, statistical, and mathe- matical economists will open fire on his projects for securing social peace. Yet if, as he asserts, and we believe, ethics and economics are indissolubly connected, it is quite possible that by study of economic phenomena we may be led back to heartier trust in the Decalogne and its sanctions. Mr. Devas's premisses may be put beyond attack, and aids to faith may be found in discussions on labour and wealth. However, that is a millennium at which we have not yet arrived, though it is suggested as conceivable in an eloquent passage of Mr. George's Social Problems, where he .declares that the formula, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his wants," can indeed be realised where men are controlled by "a deep, definite, intense, religious faith, so clear, so burning, as to utterly melt away the thought of self." If Mr. Doves can clear the way ever so partially for such a moral revolution as these words imply, he will have done some- thing to avert the social war that seems only too likely, if religions ties be still further loosened.