have been sold for $40,000, but within a few days the alleged purchaser offered them for $3500. This is a sample of an immense number of swindling private corporations, got up merely to sell worthless stock to the public.

Recently the treasurer of the city and county of Philadelphia was sentenced to twelve years and six months' imprisonment in the penitentiary. It was his duty to collect the money due to the state from taxation levied in his community, and transfer it to the state treasury. The state auditor-general keeps the accounts and receives the moneys. The law provides that should the whole amount due from a city or county, or any part of it, not be paid by the second Monday of November, the auditor-general shall "settle an account' against the delinquent, which means that he shall make a formal presentation and showing of the amount due to the state, and why and how it is due. An appeal against this showing can be made within sixty days, and if no appeal is taken within ten days after the lapse of the sixty days, the auditor-general is enjoined to turn the account over to the attorney-general, who must thereupon begin suit against the delinquent to collect the accounts. No discretion is given to the auditor general how to act. In this case the amount of property tax, as fixed by the State Revenue Board, payable by Philadelphia in 1889, was about $750,000. This sum was duly collected and paid into the hands of the city treasurer, but $170,895.48 of it was not remitted to the state auditor-general, who neither settled an account against the city nor communicated with the attorney-general. Meantime the 1890 tax had been levied, the amount apportioned for Philadelphia being $779,811.20. A good part of this 1890 tax had come in by March 7, 1890, at which date an account had been made by the auditor-general, and sent to the city treasurer, who at once took enough of the new collections to settle up the old account. By August 1st almost all the 1890 tax must have been in the city treasurer's hands, but he remitted no part of it until 30th December, when he sent $150,000 to the state auditor general, who had not "settled an account" in terms of the law, or made a move. By the 16th section of the law relating to personal property taxes, one-third of the net

amount of the tax collected and paid into the state treasury shall be returned by the state treasurer in payment of the expenses incurred in the assessment and collection of the tax. Although only $150,000 of the $779,811.20 had been paid over as stated, the state auditor at once returned the whole $150,000 as a payment on account of said third part of the whole sum to be collected and paid over. Early in January 1891 the state auditor-general made an account against Philadelphia, whereupon the city treasurer responded with $150,000. Thereafter the attorneygeneral's services were called upon, and resulted in the city treasurer confessing, and being sentenced as stated. But the Keystone National Bank meantime failed, and a very complicated state of affairs developed, involving the president of the bank, who absconded, the city treasurer, a first-class boss politician, United States Cabinet Minister, and others. This complication has not yet been solved, but it would appear that the city treasurer did not personally appropriate much if any of the moneys he failed to pay over to the state auditor-general, and there is a belief that it is an outgrowth of politics. This case illustrates how the highest municipal state and federal officers may neglect their duty and abuse their position, all on account of politics it may be. There have been great frauds in the Federal Pension Bureau, in the Federal Land Office, and, it may be said, in every federal, state, municipal, county, village, and township department.

Not in the Keystone, but in another National Bank case, the United States Supreme Court decided that a director of a National Bank is not bound to perform any duties, and cannot be made personally responsible; also that the president can by himself alone legally run the bank, and if he wrecks it or plunders it, the passive directors are not legally responsible for his blunders or criminality. But four of the justices dissented, and stated that

upon this theory of duty the only need for directors of a National Bank is to meet, take the required oath to administer its business diligently and honestly, turn over all its affairs to the control of some one or more of its officers, and never go near the bank again unless they are notified to come there, or until they are informed that there is something wrong.

Criminals are too often made heroes, and are often not only treated with too great consideration, but made the heroes whose doings, and everything concerning them, are daily recorded in the newspapers. The American newspapers having no royal family doings to record, record the doings of the people's pets, the criminals in and out of prison. The devil's subjects are magnetic, and there is a fellow-feeling toward them which finds expression in every possible way, until the envy, hatred, and malice of the lynchers are excited. The State and Federal constitutions provide that "the privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended unless when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require its suspension." A few years ago the New York legislature passed a law that capital punishment should be inflicted, not by hanging as heretofore, but by means of electricity. The different electric companies did not like such advertising of electricity, and, as believed, they assisted convicted murderers to make appeal after appeal to get the convictions set aside, or delay indefinitely their execution. By the trick of getting an indefinite number of stays of execution on an indefinite number of Habeas Corpus appeals to the United States Supreme Court, the capital punishment laws of any state can be made a dead letter. This trick was a Texan discovery. It rests

upon the right of the citizen to demand a writ of Habeas Corpus in a United States court on some alleged constitutional ground, and on his right to carry an appeal, upon a negative ruling in a court below, to the Supreme Court of the United States. Recently the New York Court of Appeals stated in a decision as follows:

"In December 1889 the defendant was con. victed of murder in the first degree. He ap pealed to this Court, and the case was argued in June 1890, a few days before the summer recess. The judgment was here affirmed. behalf of the defendant have been discreditaThe subsequent proceedings in the case on ble to the administration of justice. The case has been twice to the Supreme Court of the

United States, and is here now for the third time, and the Court have been needlessly vexed for no possible purpose except delay. It ought to be a subject of inquiry, therefore, whether they [the attorneys and counsellors admitted to practice] can thus become the allies of the criminal classes, and the foes of organized society, without exposing themselves to the disciplinary powers of the Supreme Court.''

The remarks of the New York Court of Appeals did good.

We are thus forced to the conclusion that a just and impartial administration of the laws-always the true note of a truly free state-cannot be credited to American republicanism as one of its essential characteristics. Nor is the elevation of humanity in the moral scale a distinguishing mark of its legislation, as may be inferred from what we have already instanced. We in England are too apt to think of the Americans of the present day as the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, of the high-minded and patriotic companions of Washington; but the partisans and wire pullers of the Byzantine decadence called themselves Romans as well as the companions and colleagues of Lucius Junius Brutus.-Blackwood's Magazine.

within the right of every one to hesitate, to doubt, to question, to deny, all that may follow. And they may feel that they are not only intellectually right, but are morally justified in this attitude of scepticism. They may probably rely on no scant measure of popular support. For it must be admitted that these shady truths are shady in something more than the obscurity that interferes with their ready recognition. Besides not looking sound, they often don't look nice. They are in conflict with popular sentiment. But still if they are true they are true, and it be comes all the more necessary to insist upon them because they may be disliked. Take, for instance, the first of these shady truths I want to insist upon. It is

Saving, not spending, makes work for the workman. What nonsense! It is opposed to common sense. The experience of every man shows it is false. It is only necessary to look around to get rid of this absurdity. We see a man given to spending-even, it may be, runuing through his fortune. He may not be doing much good to himself or to his family, and on that ground we may have to condemn his conduct, but as he sets his money flying so he sets workmen at work. All his extravagances involve the employment of others, sometimes perhaps on unworthy objects, sometimes on worthy, but that is neither here nor there, and is beside the argument. Giving work is what we are talking about, and that the spender gives work is as clear as noonday. Look at the other side, at the fellow who spends nothing, and saves as much as he can from year's end to year's end. No servants, no laborers, no tradesmen bless him. He lives without benefiting anybody, and if every one were like him, the workmen would have to go to the workhouse. This first truth is shady, for it is untrue, and it is shady, for it teaches men to be selfish instead of being generous, to be niggardly where they should be liberal, to be grasping where they should partake with their fellows.

Here is a coil to deal with, and how shall we begin? I fancy my opponent a little flustered with astonishment and indignation at the crude fallacy I have put for ward as a truth, with no more apology than is admitted in calling it a shady one; and perhaps the best thing to do is to ask him to put aside for a few moments the NEW SERIES.-VOL. LVI., No. 1.

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too exciting proposition that has been launched, and to contemplate two lives spent side by side in the north of England a century or so ago. The illustration is not new, though I know not with whom it originated: but the argument involved in it seems relegated to the shade as soon as it is appreciated, and apparently it cannot be cited too often. The two were men of the highest rank, and the one had all the virtues and faults of his class and generation. He kept a large house, with open-handed hospitality. A huge retinue of servants ministered to his pleasures. Ilis horses were famous, but more than his horses he loved his fighting cocks, the breed, pluck and combative tenacity of which excited his utmost enthusiasm. How he would have wondered could he have been persuaded that from some capricious ground of cruelty another century would forbid to men the rapture of a cock-fight ! His cellars were worthy of his magnificence, and though his greatgrandson to-day may lament an income reduced by the interest of his mortgages, no one in his own time hesitated to hail him the friend as he was the prince of the whole country-side, who kept the great social machine going by his munificence. Now tuin to the other noble. He kept no house at all. A maid, or a couple of maids, sufficed to attend upon him. Neither pleasures of the field nor of the table attracted him, and there was a good deal of grumbling at the loss of enjoyment, as well as of employment, which his own self-denial cost his neighbors. People said he had a craze. He set himself to work, with his chosen friend and adviser, to construct a canal, which should be a great highway of trade in the northwest, and he saved every penny of his income to fulfil this project. The feat was accomplished, and remains an enduring monument of his energy, and an equally enduring spring of profit and utility in the working of the industrial world. saving of this duke created an enormous endowment for his family, but it provided also an ever recurrent means of employment for successive generations of workmen. Comparing, therefore, the two lives what have we to say ? Each commanded the means of support of many lives, and each-such is the first superficial viewused them, we may say expended them, as remuneration for services desired by

The

him. But the services rendered to the one expired as they were rendered; the services desired by and rendered to the other left as their product the means, and something more than the means, of employment, an implement making work more productive and so inviting and repaying, even necessitating, the employment of workmen through an aftertime. What the one had he spent and it was gone. What the other had he employed, and saved by employment, and the result has again been a source of continuous employment. He added, he created, and made, and may almost be said to have since maintained, a new line of work for workmen. As for the other, we have talked of his mortgages, and these represent an absolute destruction of what might have been abiding means of employment -something very like the reverse of the making of work for the workman, a loss and a permanent loss to the industrial community.

If these two lives can be taken as examples of saving and spending, there would seem after all to be some ground for submitting the shady truth that saving not spending makes work for the workman. Not a bit of it, says the objector. The Duke of Bridgewater's case was not a fair case of saving; it is an illustration of the results of judicious expenditure. It proves nothing--not indeed that we need go so far to find an example of the same virtue. Haven't we had something like it in our own Cornwall, though, it may be said, on a smaller scale ? Haven't we heard of a man in this county who gave himself up fifty or sixty years ago, not to make a canal but to construct a railway, running from sea to sea with a harbor at each end for the trade he planned to develop? His faith and energy were akin to the Duke's, and his memory deserves equal honor. But these are exceptional cases. If their saving has been the constant means of making work for the workman, you cannot deduce from such instances support for the general proposition that saving as a rule must be credited with this result. Well, what is saving as we understand it, and as it is practised by those who save to-day? The miser who secretes his gold in a stocking cannot indeed be credited with much result from the action. He is no better than the spendthrift, he is indeed on all

fours with him in that what he does is exhausted in the first stroke; and the only difference between them is that some one may find the miser's gold after he has departed and attempt new uses with it. But this hoarding miser is not the saving man of to-day. It is not with such that we are concerned. When a man saves now

adays, he turns his saving to account. He uses it. He makes it grow. He wants a return-it may be of profit, it may be of interest. If the former, he is obviously working in the same spirit as the Duke of Bridgewater or Mr. Treffry. He may not construct a canal or make a railway, he may not open a mine or build a harbor; no new enterprise may illustrate his large-mindedness, but in the pursuit of profit he is developing or conducting some labor-sustaining industry, he means to keep it up, to turn it over again and again, to make it productive and reproductive, and though he may fail-for he may make mistakes in design, or his powers of performance may not be equal to his ambition-yet it is plain that in his method of saving what is at his disposal he is giving work to the workman which would not happen if he spent and exhausted the store he is saving and utilizing.

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Yes, yes, that may be the case with him, " is the answer, 66 but how about the ordinary man who simply leaves his money to fructify at interest with his bankers ?" Let us then pursue his conduct, which may be taken as a type of all ordinary in-. vestors. He looks to get interest; and those who take his money, and allow him interest, must look to making the interest they pay him and something more may be. But metal of itself does not grow bigger. "When did friendship take a breed of barren metal of a friend?' says Antonio; and the disdainful question of the Venetian is an echo of the judgment of one of the wisest of men. But, in spite of the authority of Aristotle, it is the fallacy of an incomplete analysis. As we go on and on, we come at last upon the man whose conduct is an explanation of the puzzle how interest comes to be paid. The money is found at the last employed in obtaining some materials-implements, merchandise, commodities, what may perhaps be shortly called usable thingswhich are used in co operation with labor in the production or reproduction of some. thing replacing the things used up, with a

surplus. Saving by a mere investor presumes interest, and interest is at last traced to the reproductive use of usable things obtained through saving. It is true that, while saving generally operates as an actual addition to the stock of the world, sometimes it only rescues from destruction what would otherwise be destroyed without an equivalent; as, when it passes into the hands of a spendthrift, who gives in exchange some implements of production he cannot so readily eat up; but whether it keeps the store undiminished or adds to it, it is saving which provides, maintains, and establishes work for the workman; and the man who simply deposits his money in a bank at interest does as really and truly set the machine in motion as he who at first-hand devotes his savings to some enterprise of his own choice, conducted under his own superintendence and inspiration. So I revert to my shady truth, which I hold to be established. I would not have every one of the same opinion at least all at once. Let it be turned over and over. It may be tested by the facts of life as they surround us. If in the end the doctrine is accepted, well; if not, why the truth is shady, and I won't complain. But in working up the proposition we have stumbled upon another shady truth, and here it is:

Whatever seems to be laid by, what is really saved by those who save, is not money, but usable things. But, before entering upon this, there are two observations which ought to be made by way of caution with respect to the proposition we have been investigating. In the first place, I have not been dealing at all with the moral question how far a man is at liberty to spend, and how far he is under. an obligation to save. I have been tracing only the consequential operations of saving, which must, indeed, have a considerable bearing on the definition of moral duty in relation to it; but I have abstained from any such application of the proposition sought to be established. Whether a particular man ought to save, and how much he ought to save, must be answered according to circumstances in each case. For my own part, I think it may reasonably be held that, within certain limits, a man may spend for himself; and the practical question turns upon the ascertainment of these limits. I have not tried this task, and I must repeat the cau

tion against its being supposed that I have. My second observation is akin to my first. The man who discovers that by saving he makes work for the workman is not entitled to plume himself on his virtue when he makes the discovery. It is the intent in the mind of the actor which determines the moral character of his action, and when a thing done produces consequences neither foreseen nor intended, the doer may felicitate himself on his luck, but not on his virtue. Saving may sometimes be a vice, however happy the results. I leave it to casuists to work out the inquiry thus suggested.

Now for the proposition that, whatever seems to be saved, it is not money but usable things (a very large phrase) that are really accumulated. There is one rough and ready way in which this may be tested. The inhabitants of this United Kingdom make enormous additions to their wealth every year. Mr. Giffen has attempted an estimate of the average addition-a task of enormous difficulty because prices go up and down, and the thing that may be worth a certain sum today inay be worth more or worth less this day twelvemonth though absolutely unchanged in itself. It is as completely the same thing as is possible with human creations, but the selling price changes. However, Mr. Giffen has made out that in the course of ten years, 1875 to 1885, the wealth of the nation increased from £8,500,000,000 to £10,000,000,000, or let us say at least £150,000,000 a year. But what has been the increase in the money within our borders? Substantially there has been no increase at all, it is even possible that it may have diminished. The estimates which bankers and statisticians put forward nowadays of the coin we possess are certainly less than they used to be. Great additions have been made to the stock of things, none to the stock of money. Even he who has never consciously changed the character of his savings, whose surplus income has been surplus money and has been deposited as such with his banker, has unconsciously helped to send his savings back into the use of the community, and his accumulations are ultimately represented by the things which the customers of the banker have got together and are using in the enlargement, development, and maintenance of the great workshop of the world.