founded upon private enterprise. Private capital is subscribed for them, and interest is demanded. Private enterprise alone gave us the inventions upon which these municipal utilities depend-cheap steel for tram rails, for instance. Again, the success of these utilities, such as it is, depends mainly upon monopoly. If municipal trams had to construct the roads they use, what sort of balance sheets would they show? Municipal gasworks have had to be built at the public cost. Yet in one city, where we have private enterprise gas (Sheffield), the works have cost the public nothing, besides which the public gets cheaper gas than in cities where the municipality supplies it.

Yet again, the success of public utilities is largely due to the knowledge of the practical business men who serve on the councils. Give us democratic control-place the gasworks under committees of gas-stokers, the trams under the tram-men, and so on, giving these committees, or workers, the power to fix their own wages and hours, and the price of the services-and see where we would be! It would be Russia over againstagnation.

Now turn to the measures offered by Socialists as remedies for our current troubles. The coal trade is depressed. The Socialists offer a Mines Nationalisation Bill. The owners of collieries are to receive State Mines Stock in return for their present holdings. The amount would be just about 121,000,000l. Interest is to be paid on that. In other words, the owners are to be pensioned off, at the public cost. They will draw just about as much when relieved of all responsibility as they get now. The State is to pay for all valuations, for the process of nationalisation, pay interest on the new Stock, pay all the administration expenses, and for all fresh development work. The capitalists are not to be permitted to put any of their money back into industry. The public is to pay for everything.

There is to be a new Mines Department, fully staffed; there are to be pit committees, area and county committees, national commissioners, etc., etc.-all paid by the taxpayers. This one Socialist Bill means the appointment-and payment-of 50,000 fresh officials and committeemen, whilst the dispossessed practical owners draw

their interest for doing nothing. Again, the various committees, elected by the miners-the men who promised the most would get the most votes-these bodies are to have almost unlimited power to run into any expense they choose; even the supreme Mining Council is to be subject to the dictates of the Miners' Federation; and finally, whilst the public, through the State, is to stand all the cost, it is to have no effective voice against the Federation Executive, and the miners are to be free to strike as and when they like. If Russia cannot make a success of mines nationalisation without compensation-with the properties as free gifts, debt and interest free-and not subjected to foreign competition as we are, it is daylight clear that in our case nationalisation with compensation would spell bankruptcy and the ruin of our vital export business. The Socialists, having seriously injured our trade by strikes, by 'ca' canny,' by short hours and limited shifts, would kill it completely by their mad nationalisation schemes.

As Sir Henry Maine pointed out, Demos-a mob' has no volition.' It cannot originate a policy; make an invention or a scientific discovery; work out a problem, or organise a business. These are the things which in all ages have advanced the welfare, prosperity, happiness, and amusements of the people; they have all come from individual minds, and the incentive to them has been a personal motive-wealth or self-preservation. If this incentive is removed, as it would be under the Communistic ideal, Society would stagnate, and progress would cease. Under such a regime 'the threshingmachine, the power-loom, the spinning-jenny, and possibly the steam engine would have been prohibited,' and, if there were any doubt on this point, the Russian Soviet would prove the truth of it.

E. T. GOOD.

* Sir H. Maine, 'Popular Government,' p. 98.

Art. 18.-SOME RECENT BOOKS.

A Hindu Mystic and a Royal Reformer-Savage Life in Central Australia and the South Seas-Principles of the Constitution-The Human Christ-Lyrics of the Eighteenth Century-The History of Art-Fiction by Mr Walpole and the Countess Russell-Fables in Verse.

THE happiness of the multitudinous races of India is so necessary a condition of the success of the British Commonwealth of Nations, justifying the ideals of our unique imperial system in bringing a sense of joint citizenship and ordered liberty to its many diverse peoples, that two books which have come to us from India are unusually welcome; for literature is the golden high-road to understanding, and it is only through a sympathetic exchange of thought and the appreciation of each other's ideals that the almost unbridgeable differences between the East and the West can be overcome.

No small measure of the misunderstandings which have occurred between Asia and Europe is due to the peculiar diversities of their religions, culture, and thought, as well as to the difficulty of apprehending fairly points of view so opposite. The Life of Sri Ramakrishna' (Advarta Ashrama, Calcutta) introduces the reader to an unique spiritual personage. Many of the actions of this Hindu reformer bring to mind Francis of Assisi and the late General Booth; for besides an easy-going habit of brotherliness, he had a sense of humour and fun unusual to successful leaders in religion, and frequently was applying the test of a mirthful common sense to the assertions or affectations of his followers. Born in 1836miraculously, of course, for every outstanding Indian religious light must have divine parentage on the paternal side, and generally be the offspring of a dream -Ramakrishna, whose name at that time was Gadadhar, was soon displaying those extraordinary manifestations of trance and adoration which denote the most absolute and influential of the mystics of the East, and won for him an immediate attention. He had something of the precocity of genius, and throughout his life used song, dance, and the drama as expressions of worship. To Western minds, who see in a spirit of service the

sublimest indication of the divine wisdom and love, the Hindu doctrine of renunciation, in which the devotee withdraws into himself and rejects the world, seems but a partial ideal, a broken light; but it is not fitting in this summary manner to judge the good purposes of people whose conditions of life and thought are so far removed from our own. Whether or not his methods were the best for Ramakrishna to adopt, there is no question of the success of his mission. He sweetened life for many.

The book has been written with an unbridled devotion and more slips of English slang than should have been permitted, as they disturb the appeal; but yet, out of these many words the figure of Ramakrishna emerges as, with all his unaffected saintliness, helpfully human. His love of sweetstuffs, his simplicity and naïve humour, his extraordinary faculty for losing himself, almost accidentally at any odd moment, in the ecstasies of trance, combine to make him a living person, a true man, with the becoming weaknesses of normal humanity; but that is not all, for in spite of his eager Hinduism and passion for Kali, the divine Mother, a goddess with characteristics not beautiful to beautiful to our Western notions, he had the gift of an exalted charity and an unusual breadth of mind. Brahmin as he was, he studied Islam sympathetically, and followed the teachings of Christ. 'The Lord is one,' said he, 'but he is called by a thousand names'; and through a parable he showed how water, though known to Hindus as Jal, to Mahomedans as Pani, and to the English as water, is one and the same thing, the difference being in name only. 'Some call Him Allah, some God, and others designate Him as Brahman, Kali, Rama, Hari, Jesus, or Durga.' Such a large-hearted ideal, coming from the simple mind of an Indian priest, is remarkable, and shows that with all the extravagances of his creed, as they seem to us, Sri Ramakrishna belonged to the salt of the earth and the company of saints.

We pass from a leader of Indian mystics to one of practical social service. It is a pity that Prof. Latthe in his Memoirs of H.H. Shri Shahu Chhatrapati, Maharajah of Kolhapur (Times Press, Bombay) did not mend his volumes with a vigorous blue pencil before

publishing them, for their interest-and the work has much interest-would have been vastly improved if many pages of dreary detail and insufferable quotations from formal documents had been cut out or aptly summarised. Shahu Chhatrapati was a reformer who set himself to break down the intolerant caste system, which, exploited by a priestly clique, was a tyranny, strangling the people. As with Akhnaton of Egypt, who ages before had endeavoured to do much the same thing, the enemy was promptly roused and entirely unscrupulous and vicious. The Maharajah had to fight a long and bitter battle; but, more fortunate than the idealist Pharaoh, he was not beaten. He countered prejudice with enlightenment; instituted compulsory education, established colleges, founded industries, and took care to give opportunities for social usefulness to the so-called 'untouchable classes,' appointing men of all grades of caste to positions of responsibility in the State and in his private household. Before his premature death, he had been able to defeat the Brahmin obscurantists; but it remains to be seen whether his departure will enable them to recover their earlier powers. The story at Prof. Latthe's disposal is so admirable an illustration of princely great-heartedness that it might be well, even now, for these volumes to be reduced by half and the residue treated with an inspiring pen. At present, the work is rather a dusty tumulus than a vital monument to one whose humanity and devotion to duty were of striking worth.

Too many of the books which deal with the racial characteristics and tribal customs of primitive peoples are addressed to specialists; and, therefore, not acceptable to the general reader. For that reason, the two volumes which follow prove unusually welcome. The first on 'Savage Life in Central Australia' (Macmillan) by Dr G. Horne and Mr G. Aiston, gives at first-hand information on the condition and habits of the Australian aborigines. Although comparatively brief, the work is a luminous study of a race of mankind in the crude beginnings, as is the more interesting because Sir Arthur Keith has declared that, of all the races of mankind now alive, the aboriginal race of Australia is the only one which, in my opinion, could serve as a common