the various schemes proposed. It is certain that, at the present time, exaggerated hopes are built upon coöperation, and projects which are radically unsound and mischievous win confidence because they are, in name and appearance, coöperative.

in contracts which ruined them. We believe that every scheme of this sort which involves any element of association will prove delusive, and will ultimately be found to be a cloak for inequitable money-getting. The English plan of joint-stock companies for real estate improvement, which sell houses for a monthly rent which is reckoned to cover the purchase money within a period, which plans are avowedly for making profit on capital and call for nothing but free contract, will be found far more sound, just, and sat

It opens with a description of building societies of a type which has been especially developed in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is, in the first place, obviously fitted to be the arena of such an experiment. It is not a metropolis, but an enormous manufacturing town. Each new group of factories with its attendant dwellings is a town by itself. There is no high organization of the whole toward and around a center. The city has room to spread indefinitely on three sides. The often vaunted roominess of the city is a very simple consequence. The financial elements of the building-society scheme, however, are not quite clear on the surface. It is only when we note, on page 28, in the statement there quoted, that one-seventh of all the loans are forfeited, and when we learn, on page 52, that this means total loss by the forfeiters of all they have paid in, that we get a glimpse of the facts which it is essential to know. We then see that the extraordinary gains of some come from the extraordinary losses of others. There is a great readiness in the public mind to believe that some financial "scheme" is possible by which one dollar can be made equal to one dollar and ten cents, or by which double the current rate per cent. can be made without extra risk, or by which a man who has no capital can be made to be like unto the man who has capital in respect to the burdens and hardships of life. These are delusions, and what we want to know about any financial scheme is: by what economy of energy or of loss does it win a gain over older systems? The building associations group together a number of persons who are willing to work and save. Some of them lend to others. They have discovered the secret of credit. The scheme assumes entire freedom from accident, illness, dull times, or other drawbacks. Those who have such luck that the assumption proves true for them, gain. Those who have any drawback to contend with, lose and throw all their savings into the hands of the lucky ones. The average is not above that of the general market, or what might be won by depositing in a savings-bank, and borrowing of a savings-bank, under competition, freedom, and individuality. But it is made up of wide extremes. We had knowledge some thirty years ago of a building association on the plan which is described in this book. It was there proved that mechanics and laborers, being eager, hopeful, but unused to investment, would bid far higher premiums than the transaction would justify, and would thus engage themselves

towns, savings-banks take savings and make loans, and are thus accomplishing all the time, on simple business principles, all there is which is sound and desirable in building societies, and they do it under freedom and independence as between all the parties. The building associations have no advantage save the attraction of newness. In England, savings-banks are far less developed than here, and they invest in consols. There is a field for building associations there which does not exist in this country.

When we come to other forms of coöperation, it is necessary to distinguish very carefully between three different things: (1) Industrial Copartnership; (2) Coöperative Store-keeping; (3) Coöperative Industry. Mr. Barnard describes cases of each of these, but without discrimination. In this he follows all the writers on the subject, for, if the different names are used by some, the proper distinctions are not drawn by any. In economic value the three differ greatly. An industrial copartnership is an industrial monarchy. There is no assumption in it that one man is as likely to make a good "boss" as another. The capitalist employer retains unlimited control (so far as his employés are concerned) of the business. He offers to his work-people contract wages and a share in all profits beyond an established rate. That is to say, he invites his men to coöperate with him, by zeal, painstaking, and care to prevent waste to make the establishment especially successful, and as an inducement he makes them participators in the extra profit which can be thus obtained. Here we see economic forces brought into play by a genuine stimulus, but we see also the reason for the gain and the limit of it. The gain of an industrial copartnership, as such, comes from the fact that the men are raised by it to a grade of diligence and economy above the existing average in the trade. Hence the rates of allowance for loss and waste prove, in the industrial copartnership, to be too high. Also the current calculations as to the product which will be produced in proportion to wages paid prove too small in the industrial copartnership. Here is where the gain comes from. Furthermore, it is evident that, if industrial copartnerships became the rule, the standards of product expected for wages paid would be raised, the allowances for waste, loss, and negligence would be lowered throughout the industry, the standards of diligence and care among the men would be raised, and the net gain would, by competition, be given over to the public. Hence the final result would be simply an elevation in the standards of industrial virtue, and consequent increase of wealth and general well

being. The system of industrial copartnerships would thus be a practical means of bringing about that moral elevation which we preach about and hope for, as the only real spring of higher social well-being, but which it is so hard to bring about as a practical fact. This is enough to expect from any sound and genuine scheme of improvement. It is the most that we ever have any right to expect. If any one thinks that industrial copartnership is more than this-say, for instance, a permanent solution of the discords of employers and employés by the elimination of the struggle of interests-he is preparing for himself and those whom he leads a very great disappointment.

Coöperative store-keeping is an arrangement for the distribution of products which eliminates credit and bad debts. Strange as it may sound to the sentimental admirers of the Rochdale Pioneers, co

öperative store-keeping is aristocratic. In a community where the usages of trade were all bad, and where the honest and prompt payers could get no advantage of their higher virtue because they were lost in the mass of dishonest and bad payers, the good and strong separated themselves from the bad and weak, and by as much as the former profited by the new system, the latter were worse off for it. The grocers and other shop-keepers who have lost all their good customers are obliged to raise the insurance rate against long credit and bad debts for the customers whom they retain. Instead of smoothing the competition of life, the coöperative stores have intensified it. They have taught all those who could understand the instruction to accumulate capital. They have freed the industrious and economical from part of the burden they used to bear when they paid the store-bills of the idle and wasteful. Hence the gulf between the two classes grows wider all the time, and the coöperative stores are operating toward the survival of the fittest.

Our author gives us the latest and best account of the Rochdale Pioneers and some of the other cooperative stores in England. The history of coöperative stores in England is a romantic and pathetic story. It is not strange that every one who reads it should ask, Why do we not have such stores in America? Very many attempts have been made since 1850, when the Rochdale Pioneers first began to attract world-wide notice, to establish such stores here. They have all failed, because the field for them does not exist here. Retail trade in England has been, and yet is, subject to very many abuses. There is too much capital in it. It has to support too many people. Credit is employed in it to a most extravagant degree-bills running for indefinite periods. The result is that the profits exacted are great, the goods are adulterated, and the shop-keepers have tacit combinations. Here was offered, undoubtedly, a grand arena for coöperation. Those who could pay and would pay cash, by uniting, and separating themselves from those who wanted long credit or did not pay at all, could cut off the margin of payment for interest and bad debts. This is the gain of coöperative store-keeping, added to which, however, it does away with adulteration and raises

the quality of supplies. In America, competition is generally active over retail trade. It is so in and near large cities. In country towns, at a distance from large cities, there might be a chance for coöperation, but then it would have to contend with the trouble and expense of management on a small scale. Credit, with us, is not excessive. The fluctuations of the war currency brought about a great reform in that respect, and now, as the currency gets better, competition will work more and more freely on retail trade. There is great reason to believe that coöperative stores in England will bring about a great reform in the modes of retail trade, but that, when the reform is accomplished, the private trader, using his own capital under individual risk and with individual energy, will beat the coöperative store.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, many experiments in coöperative stores were made in this country. It is not known that any of them were successful. From time to time since then, other attempts have been made. Some are in progress

now, and the experiment is by no means closed. It is to be noticed, first, that, especially in our large cities, retail trade is conducted on very active competition, and is assimilated to wholesale trade, so that the margin of profit is very narrow; and, second, that coöperative stores have one constant difficulty to surmount, viz.: the difficulty of finding, at a moderate salary, the requisite skill, zeal, and integrity in management.

Coöperation in production is republicanism or democracy applied to industry. It is a question which some will answer one way and some another, whether a democratic-republic is a good organization for industry or not. Experience, up to this time, bears with a heavy preponderance in favor of the negative. The economic elements of gain in coöperative workshops have never been defined by anybody, and are not apparent. There are even great difficulties in the definition, so soon as anything more is intended than a joint-stock company, in which the capital is largely held by the workmen employed by it. If one hundred men want to start a workshop, there is some suitable amount of capital, say ten thousand dollars, which one hundred men at that business need to keep them employed. These one hundred men can, only in the single and most exceptional case, have just that amount. If they have more, they must hire some men, who may not be coöperators, to work up that capital. If they have less than that amount of capital, they must sell shares to some who are not workmen. Therefore, in all but the most exceptional cases, the establishment is simply like one of our Eastern cotton mills, in which the élite of the workpeople are often stockholders-i. e., simply a jointstock company. The constant difficulty of coöperative production arises, of course, from the need of very complete concord and accord among a large number of persons, and that is the hardest thing on earth to bring about.

We must give a paragraph also to a warning against the delusions of coöperative insurance. This

has become very popular in this country, and exists far more widely than any other application of coöperation. Some of the States have recently been legislating about it. Why is it believed that the great insurance companies keep large reserves? Why is it supposed that stringent laws have been passed and close inspection has been established for those companies? Obviously it is because life insurance is not true or sound except under strict conditions which are capable of mathematical computation. The coöperative-insurance societies are cheaper, because they are outside of legal restraint, and are violating all the necessary limitations and burdens of sound business. There is heavy loss and bitter disappointment in store for many people who are putting their savings and their faith into these schemes.

We have used our space for the briefest possible statement of the principles which serve for the criticism of Mr. Barnard's book. The reader will find in it a great deal of the specific information which most people want when they ask what coöperation is. We can recommend it as offering this information in simple form, but we desire to point out to the reader that he must think for himself, and yield nothing to unfounded enthusiasm in reading up this subject. It seems a great deal more important that people should learn to discriminate between what is sound and what is unsound, than that they

should be stimulated to an unformed enthusiasm and an impossible hope.

Dr. Schliemann's "Ilios."*

SINCE the publication, in "Troy and its Remains," of the diary of his explorations at Hissarlik in 1871 and the two following years, with the full description of the remarkable discoveries then made, Dr. Schliemann has spent parts of two summers in further excavations of the site and of mounds in its vicinity. The direct results of these supplementary researches have not been of great importance, but the opportunity they afford to the explorer of revising his first impressions and of casting his mature conclusions into a systematic form has been eagerly improved. He has also called to his aid a number of eminent scholars, who have contributed, each in his own department, something to the value of the work. Thus the present account of Dr. Schliemann's discoveries must be accepted by students of archæology as presenting the author's final views, and as offering a more consistent and bolder front to criticism than the earlier book. But the gossipy candor, the garrulous unreserve, the impetuous enthusiasm for every new and romantic guess, reckless

66

*Ilios: The City and Country of the Trojans. The results of researches and discoveries on the site of Troy and throughout the Troad in the years 1871-72-73-78-79, including an autobiography of the author. By Dr. Henry Schliemann, F. S. A., author of "Troy and its Remains,' Mycena," etc. With a preface, appendices, and notes, by Professors Rudolph Virchow, Max Müller, A. H. Sayce, J. P. Mahaffy, H. Brugsch-Bey, P. Ascherson, M. A. Postolaccas, M. E. Burnouf, Mr. F. Calvert, and Mr. A. J. Duffield. With maps, plans, and about eighteen hundred illustrations. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1881.

of logic or consistency, which characterized the investigator's former writings, had their own charm; and we miss them here all the more that, in imitating the caution of a scientific observer, he seems all the time to be laboring under an unnatural constraint. There is little of his old exultation in identifying his buried treasures with those of the Homeric heroes; but he seems well content with Professor Virchow's plea, that, though Troy, Priam, and Achilles may have existed only in the imagination of the bards, yet, for the sake of romantic animation, and in order to make vivid the impressions of the Homeric poetry, we may well connect these names with the wonderful objects unearthed at the traditional site of Ilium. On this ground, the scholars who have most seriously resisted Dr. Schliemann's efforts to find history in Homer will gladly meet him, provided that poetical fancies be not intruded upon historical truth and made to pervert our views of the early steps in civilization.

Dr. Schliemann now finds at Hissarlik seven layers or strata of débris, each of them containing remains characteristic of a distinct age or community. The seventh or latest of these layers contains pottery, coins, and inscriptions, which seem to have accumulated during a period of several hundred years, beginning, perhaps, as early as the time of Herodo

tus.

This layer may safely be referred to the city of " Ilium," celebrated in antiquity for the visit of Alexander the Great and the favor shown it by Julius Cæsar, and for the belief that it occupied the site of ancient Troy. Next below this layer is a stratum containing pottery, which Dr. Schliemann ascribes to a Lydian settlement, perhaps of the seventh or eighth century B. C. The next two of the layers, referred by him to a "fifth" and a "fourth prehistoric city on the site of Troy," contain a variety of interesting objects, made of stone, lead, bronze, bone, and ivory, as well as numerous products of the potter's wheel; but his reasons for regarding them as distinct cities are not given clearly enough to be convincing. The same remark may be made as to the division between the relics of "the first" and "the second prehistoric cities," to which the two layers of remains which lie the lowest of the seven are ascribed. But it is "the third, the burnt city," in which Dr. Schliemann's interest is deepest, for this it is which he identifies with the city of Priam, the Homeric Troy. Undaunted by the fact that the entire site covered by this village must have been less than an acre of ground, he sees no difficulty in believing that it is the great Troy sung by Homer, for and around which the forces of many nations contended for ten years. 66 My excavations," he says, "have reduced the Homeric Ilium to its real proportions"! But the reduction is too great; it is impossible to conceive the Iliad as the story of a predatory band striving to sack a petty hamlet. As in his " Mycenae," so in his "Ilios," Dr. Schliemann gives the reader every opportunity to study the objects recovered by an accurate and beautiful cut of every one which can gratify curiosity or excite it. These illustrations are, indeed, by far the most valuable part of the book, and not only explain

hicles, although his most approved productions win no better than the meager immortality of the poetrylover's scrap-book.

Though Arnold's poems were in advance of the "fugitive verse" of the period, the man who judges them in cold blood must own that the weekly papers to-day overflow with material as good, or better. He had, after all, not the genius that rises over all influence of circumstance,-only the talent that develops itself according to the taste and knowledge of its generation. Were he writing to-day, he would write a little better than his colleagues,-not so well as poets of the same class will twenty-five years hence.

Not that Arnold did nothing that deserves to live. He is best known as the author of "Beer "-partly because the poem has a pathetic personal significance, partly because it has also a quaint individuality that gives it a firm hold on the reader's remembrance. But this is not all that is creditable out of his one hundred and seventeen poems. Shallow and artificial as are "Introspection" and "Recrimination," there are fine lines in them here and there, and touches of genuine sentiment. In his many songs of autumn days, there is a faint and melancholy sweetness, and a notable truth to nature in general tone, as well as in occasional passages of effective description. "The Jolly Old Pedagogue" has something of the spirit of Praed, something of the "lyric gush" of Moore, and a tenderness that is Arnold's own:

"Then the jolly old pedagogue's wrinkled face
Melted all over in sunshiny smiles;
He stirred his glass with an old-school grace,
Chuckled, and sipped, and prattled apace,
Till the house grew merry from cellar to tiles:
"I'm a pretty old man,' he gently said;

'I have lingered a long while, here below;
But my heart is fresh, if my youth is fled!'
Said the jolly old pedagogue, long ago.'

A score of years ago, vers de société had scarcely assumed the distinct form it has since taken at the hands of Mr. Dobson, Mr. Locker, and others of their school, and its strain of subdued, often semi-cynical, feeling too often sought expression in measures that better served a more serious and candid thought. It is for this reason that Arnold's society-verse has a certain air of consciousness and affectation. de Poëte" is an instance of this:

"Farceur

I am a mere farceur, you know!"

The verses written on his twenty-fifth birthday are thoroughly characteristic of Arnold's more serious vein. They are gentle, graceful, and sad. They may be slightly suggestive of Hood's "I Remember, I Remember "--but Arnold is nowhere strikingly original; and few will quarrel with him if there is an echo of an older song in his closing lines: "But, looking back, I fear my soul Is more than twenty-five."

The humorous performances included in the volume are only poor to middling specimens of comic rhyming. "Facilis Descensus Avenue," a wail over the advent of the first shop-keeper in

Fifth Avenue, then a via sacra, has a careless cleverness about it; but "The Drinking of the AppleJack" is the one piece in the collection that is of real and enduring humor. It is, besides, an ingenious parody on Bryant's famous poem.

It is a book, altogether, that one may take up for a pensive moment, as a man, passing along the street, stops to hear a faintly tinkling old piano stir the air with "Il Bacio" or "La Mandolinata ”stops and smiles, perhaps, at the hackneyed tunes, and wonders vaguely and half-pitying about the player, and the player's past, and what memories may move the hands on the unseen key-board-what memories of the days when those airs were new and catching, and life danced on merrily to their measure, or found a voice for its pain and passion in their sympathetic melody. These are not of the poems that have eternal youth; the children of poor George Arnold's dreams have had time to grow old in the years between 1865 and 1881.

In that Bohemia, which was also an Alsatia, where Mr. Winter left his dead friend, sixteen years ago, he left much of his own strength of inspiration. There was a time when he wrote with his compeers. Mr. Aldrich's dainty love-songs caught the popular ear before the sadder sighing of Mr. Winter's muse; Mr. Stedman's "Ballad of Lager Beer " was a better piece of work than Arnold's "Beer"; but the world expected as much of one poet as it did of the others. Now, George Arnold has retired forever from the contest, Mr. Stedman and Mr. Aldrich have made their running, and Mr. Winter is little further on the road to Parnassus than when he set out. He has certainly written nothing of late years so good as the sketch of George Arnold and preface to his poems, in 1866 and 1867. They express a manly sympathy in clear and simple language.

Mr. Winter's talent has always been for melodies in a minor key, and he has never gained enough mastery of his art to hide a lack of invention. He says that, with him, poetry “has been experienced as a feeling, and not pursued as a design"-which is not so good as Poe's remark about making poetry a passión, not a purpose. This is a bad motto for a poet; Poe's work was none the better for it while he took this attitude; and he soon found it out.

Most of the poems in Mr. Winter's book consist of neatly turned stanzas, setting forth a gloomy view of life. Their tone is occasionally reckless and skeptical, in a mild way. None of them have the ring of real grief or passion about them. They are dismal; they are such verses as a man might write in the early morning, on waking up to the unpleasant realities of life; but it is hard to associate a more dignified emotion with such lines as these :

or:

"And I think, as I sit alone,

While the night is falling around, Of a cold, white, gleaming stone, And a long, lone, grassy mound'

"But for me there is no morrow,
Crown of love nor crown of fame:
I must tread a mighty sorrow
In the mire of sensual shame.
Down I grovel on the earth,
Wasting toward a brutish birth."