ufacturing industry, standing with port erect, may well point with honest pride to the products valued at $5,400,000,000 as the result of their efforts in 1880; and as a pertinent answer to the complaint of the message, and await with no misgiving the verdict of the people. Or they may well make answer, that not they, but the people of the United States as a whole, are the party benefited by the tariff money paid largely by the wealthier classes on imported luxuries, and mostly to be paid by the people through their agents, if properly applied, as wages to the working classes employed on coast defenses, navy, and other objects, all of them necessary to the security and continued welfare of the country.

The message seems not to recognize one of the most important elements involved in the tariff problem. It fails to note, in the industries of the world, the power and influ ence which progress has conferred upon machinery. Machinery constitutes a giant labor force; and labor is at the foundation, yes, and in the frame and minutiae of the superstructure of all industry. Whatever wants of life are supplied, are necessarily supplied by labor.

Now, as deduced from data furnished by Mulhall, the energy, or labor force, human and machine, -in 1880, was, of the

United States, 260,000,000 man power, and of Europe, 730,000,000 man power. The energy of the remainder of the world may be put with no considerable error at 310,000,000 man power. Thus it is seen that the foreign labor force of the world is approximately four times that of the United States.

The cost of maintenance per man power of the machine portion, 530,000,000, in Europe, has been estimated at two cents a day.

Mulhall puts the European wages at $5.00, and the cost of living $2.75 per week; and American wages at $12.00 a week, and cost of living $4.00 a week. Europe, able to supply most of her wants from her own soil, requires but a comparatively small amount of our products. Thus it is, if no bar is raised, that Europe alone with her immense labor force, human and machine, both cheap, can and will flood the United States with her manufactures, drain off our gold and silver, force down the wages of the working classes to the level of European wages, beyond the power of employee or employer to prevent; and in fine, bankrupt the country and hold us vassals at her mercy.

For the foregoing reasons we can but conclude that the present revenue laws ought not to be amended or repealed, as recommended by the message.

Irving M. Scott.

THE fortunes in English of Señor Valdés's "The Marquis of Peñalta," have given abundant encouragement to the translator to venture on another of the same novelist's works; and experience with the former translation gives the reader abundant encouragement to open Maximina1 with pleasant expectation. It does not prove to be nearly as ingenious nor as strong a book as "The Marquis of Peñalta," but it was well worth translating. It has a charming sincerity and simplicity, which yet is not naïveté, for the author writes as a scholar and a man of the world. As before, he shows a delicate comprehension and penetration of the heart of an innocent young girl, unusual in the novels of men. The story is a study of the character and influence of a very pure, simple, and affectionate child-wife. Maximina's childlike innocence, her intense personal modesty, the sheer unresponsiveness of her character to evil, are accepted by the author and by all the other people in the book as almost phenomenal, only made credible by her youth (she is sixteen years old) and her convent breeding and humble, provincial origin; and indeed, judging from the picture of the Madrid society that surrounds the little wife, this is not strange. Señor Valdés, however, would probably be surprised to find under the American system, and in women who have all their lives studied and worked and played with men, under no restrictions as to their reading or conversation except such as their own instinctive preference has set, an innocence as child-like, a modesty as intense, an unresponsiveness to evil as complete, and this preserved through a life-time. Mr. James's Miranda Hope and Mr. Howell's Lydia Blood could tell him this. He would not find in either of them Maximina's total dependence and timidity, her contented igno

1 Maximina. By Don Armando Palacio Valdés. Translated from the Spanish by Nathan Haskell Dole. New York T. Y. Crowell & Co.

rance and dog-like submissiveness; these things do not easily grow in an atmosphere of freedom, though they cling in woman's nature under a surface manner of self-dependence more than is easily realized, and such women are to be found under the most free conditions of free America. Whether or not in the end an intellectual husband would have always been satisfied, as Miguel was, with this gentle, adoring, and uncomprehending companionship, it certainly makes a sweet and touching picture; and as Maximina fades away like a flower in early youth, leaving her husband to deathless mourning and an undimmed sacred memory, which becomes the religion of his life, the question does not need to arise. The few pages at the end in which Miguel's life after the loss of his wife is sketched, are to our mind the most powerful and touching in the book. There is strong writing in Miguel's closing soliloquy in the carriage with Mendoza :

"Poor man! he thinks that he is on the pinnacle of glory because he has the disposal for a few months of a few dozen offices, and to this he has consecrated his whole life, all the powers that God has given him. Tomorrow this man will die, and he will not have

known the love of a tender and innocent wife, nor the enthusiasm awakened in the soul by a heroic action, nor the deep emotion caused by the study of nature, nor the pure delight in contemplating a work of art; he will never have thought, never felt, never loved! Nevertheless, he thinks in good faith that it the Ministerio when he comes in, and a few unhappy is his right to swell with pride because a bell rings at

wretches take off their hats before him! How much energy and fawning meanness this ant has had to exercise, in order that other ants may greet him respectfully!'

"Religion, art, love, heroism, these signs in which

I think that I can see the expression of a more elevated nature—may they not also be illusions, like those which this poor devil has, of his own importance? May not the far-off country to which I aspire be a false reflection of my own desires?'

"If all vanishes at the end like smoke, like a shadow, if the purest emotions of my soul, if my wife's love, if my boy's innocent smile, have the same worth in nature as the hate of the miscreant and the

To mature readers the most interesting part of the book will be the account of the free school for the peasant children on his own estate; and the picture of himself walking through the forest in the dark, with the three little peasant boys, one of them cling ing with his whole hand to two fingers of the Count, while he talked with them of art and nature, lingers long and deeply in the mind. His respect for their minds and tastes is striking, and though he carries it to such an extreme as to absolutely exclude discipline from his school, we are disposed to think he he is more in the right than in the wrong about it. Two of his brightest peasant lads collaborated with him in writing a couple of stories, and his admiration for their genius is rather pathetic. It need not be taken without allowance as evidence of Fedka's and Semka's literary gifts, for the mind of a devoted teacher with Tolstoi's intense, credulous, and excitable nature, is in much the same condition toward his pupils' achievements as a mother's toward her child's. In any story composed by a bright child or peasant must appear something of the quality that makes the virtue of the folk-tale, even as some literary virtues crop out in the stories about the Western hunters' camp-fire that trained writers can catch only by sheer imitation. It was perhaps their age and their station that expressed themselves through Fedka and Semka, rather than individual genius. It is no new discovery that as either society or the man leaves childhood, though

"There are gains for all our losses, There are joys for all our pains,

Yet we know that something sweet Followed youth with flying feet, And can never be regained"

in literature no less than in life.

A new Russian is introduced to us by Mrs. Aline Delano's translation of selected stories from Vladimir Korolénko. Mrs. Delano is, we learn from the publishers' note, a lady of Russian birth, now living in Boston. Korolénko is still a young man, under thirty-five,

ence, and has for a dozen years been more or less under surveillance and arrest, which have broken up the possibility of regular employment and made him largely dependent upon his literary work. He was not at first successful in this, and it is only within three years that he has become a popular writer in his own country. Five stories, or perhaps we should say two sketches and three stories, are translated as fair specimens of his work; four or five more are mentioned in a prefatory biographical sketch. The two long stories in the present volume, "A Saghalinien" and "Sketches of a Siberian Tourist " are of Siberia; "The Forest Soughs" is a romantic forest tale of Little Russia; and "The Old Bell-Ringer," and "Easter Night' are slight but pathetic sketches of no especial local color. These stories are for some reason, not altogether clear, brought together under the title The Vagrant. A "vagrant is an escaped Siberian convict tramping his way back to Russia, a character that appears several times in these stories, and constitutes the principal subject in the one called "A Saghalinien "-that is, a fugitive from the convict colony on the Saghalien Islands. Korolénko's work seems to us decidedly artistic, and of a pleasant directness and simplicity. It is quite objective, and though it deals with sad and tragic situations, handles them without the gloom, and restlessness, and intense questioning of human life that we find in Tolstoï and Dostoyevsky and in some portions of Turgénieff's and Gogol's work. The stories are not of very different quality from those that appear in American magazines- those of Southern life, for instance, such as Mr. Harris's, in his graver vein. Yet they are written with more spontaneity and power than these-less as if to meet a well understood demand. There is a charming reality and freshness in description and a simple vigor and sympathy in narrative that are rare. It is not possible to praise the dear, direct, and vivid style intelligently, since we

1The Vagrant, and other Tales. By Vladimir Korolénko. Translated by Mrs. Aline Delano. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.