tions from a relatively constant total; or, if the heads of business enterprise can be said to abstract them from the national output in any sense, they are merely abstracting a part of what they have themselves added to it. A great inventor and organizer, who makes a colossal fortune by providing, by offering, cheap motors to multitudes who otherwise could not possess themselves of any motors at all, is very different from a Baron of the Rhine who robbed travelers of horses which they possessed already, or the French Fermier General, who grew rich by abstracting from peasants' stockings something more than the taxes which he engaged to hand over to the King. To whatever extent the accumulation of personal riches may have been identifiable in the past with some process of plunder by the enriched persons of others, the process which results in personal enrichment to-day is of a precisely opposite kind. The typical rich man of to-day is not a sort of harpy, as represented in Mr. Crane's ludicrous picture, who snatches from the sleeping laborer the results of his long day's work. He is a man who shows the laborers how the products of their labor may be trebled, and who, taking from each but a fraction of the resulting increment, sends them home to their wives better rewarded than they ever had been before.

Such, let it be said again, was not always the case. Individual riches may for the most part have been the result of abstractions in the past. Indeed, we may say that enrichment, as the result of additions, is on the whole peculiar to the modern world; and with this latter fact is connected another so curious and paradoxical that it well merits attention. So long as individual riches were, at least in an economic sense, for the most part abstractions, they were, even if morally denounced, accepted and tolerated as inevitable. No scien

tific indictment was ever drawn up against them till their economic character began to be fundamentally altered, and instead of being abstractions from a limited common store, they became no more than a fraction of what the rich had themselves added to it. This same fact exhibits itself under a somewhat different aspect in connection with the formal doctrine that wealth is produced by manual labor only. So long as manual labor was really the main agent, and the intellect and knowledge of the brain worker pure and simple played so small a part in production as hardly to demand notice, this doctrine was never asserted with any such emphasis and precision as to make it the basic principle of a militant school of thought. In other words, it was, so long as it was true, neglected; and it only began to be thus asserted by the school of which Marx was the leader at the very time when it was ceasing to be true any longer, and brains were acquiring the primacy which had previously pertained to hands. A further case may be noted of oddly similar character. The famous crusade of Henry George against private property in land was based by him on the doctrine that, in every progressive country the rent value of crude land increases more rapidly than the increasing national income, and that thus if private landlords are left to retain their possessions, they are bound in time to appropriate nearly everything. In the early "eighties,' after having preached this doctrine in America, George brought his gospel to England - the country in which his truth was, according to him, exhibited on the vastest scale. Year by year the owners of the soil of England were, he said, appropriating, in the form of what he called 'prairie rent,' a larger and larger fraction of the income of the Eng. lish people. Now, it so happened that

only a year or two before he began to vociferate this message on English platforms, a certain event had happened. The gross agricultural land rent of the country, which in the year 1879 had risen to £69,000,000, had in the year following exhibited an appreciable diminution. In the year of George's campaign the diminution was still continuing, and from that time never ceased till the total had sunk from 69,000,000 to 52,000,000— a decrease of 26 per cent and has never since

then recovered itself.

With regard to the sagacity of modern revolutionary reformers, such curious facts as the above may suggest many conclusions, a consideration of which must be reserved for some future occasion.

The Outlook

PRESENT STATE OF FRENCH COAL MINES

THE industrial system of France is governed by its coal mines. In the main they lie close together, in the Pasde-Calais, in the Bas-Boulonnais, and in the Department of the North

aking before the war a rich and flourishing group of towns and villages, connected by a wonderful system of canals, railways, and stone-paved roads with the chief centres of consumption. Compared with the German coal fields, those of Northern France were small, yet so well were they organized that the mining companies of the Pas de Calais competed successfully with the mines of the Ruhr and the Sarre. In the twenty years before the war the production of the Pas-de-Calais had more than doubled; in 1911 it amounted to 19,500,000 and in 1912 to 21,000,000 tons, an increase of 7 per cent in a single year; and it supported a sturdy population of 94,000 workers, of whom 72,000 were miners

and 22,000 worked above ground. The neighboring coal field of the North was smaller: in 1912 it produced 7,000,000 tons and employed 33,000 workers, of whom 24,000 were miners.

This industry had its centre at Lens, a considerable town of between 30,000 and 40,000 inhabitants - not grimy and ugly as our mining towns are apt to be in England, but pleasantly situated in its valley and handsomely built and famous for its gardens, in which the miners took a pride. It was known in Northern France as the garden city of the miners.

When the Germans invaded this region they either occupied or brought under fire the richest of these mines, and stopped at a blow the production of 20,000,000 tons a year, which is to say half the total coal production of France.

The directors and miners of the pits that remained in French hands worked like heroes, often under shell-fire, to make good the loss: the working day was lengthened from eight to nine hours; in the space of two years they increased their production by 50 per cent, and some of them even doubled their pre-war records.

As for the greater part of the coal fields, which remained in German hands, they have been systematically and deliberately destroyed.

The destruction it is important to remember was not only the destruction of the battlefield. It was also the destruction of the economic war waged by the Germans upon French industry. I went through the coal fields from Bethune to Douai, and so much was plain even to my cursory inspection. For example, at one pithead all the main supports of the superstructure had been separately broken at the same height from the ground. It was quite evidently done not by shell-fire but by an expert wrecker. Outside the range

of severe fire I saw pitheads where the boilers, pumps, lifts, caldrons, power houses, and engines were reduced to a mass of inextricable ruin and confusion.

The Germans have also been at pains to drown the mines, and to fill up the shafts. Near Lens they turned the little river Souchez into the pits; for part of its course the river has disappeared and flows through the shafts and galleries of the mines.

At Courrières, according to the French official report, all the superstructure, buildings, and machinery have been destroyed by deliberate explosions. And, again, the report says: 'Dans le groupe du Pas-de-Calais, à Lens, a Liévin, ils ont détruit sans aucune nécessité militaire toutes les installations extérieures, chevalements, ateliers, machines, que l'action de l'artillerie avait éparqués. Les chaudières sont crevées ou emportées, les cités ouvrières anéanties, les mines elles-mêmes sont entièrement noyées.'

And so also in the eastern part of the coal fields, the region between Valenciennes and Douai, which for four years was in German occupation. There, at all events, the destruction was not by the accident of battle. It is true that there has not yet been time to make a complete report on the subject, but so far as the examination has gone it shows that there, as elsewhere, the Germans did all in their power to destroy the industry. They could not take away the coal; but they could and did either take away or destroy the mechanism of the industry.

In the opinion of experts it will take two years before even the less damaged mines can begin to produce, and it will take five years to bring most of the pits into anything like working order. The work of sixty years has been destroyed in four and cannot be restored without infinite labor and enormous expense.

Such is the state to which the Germans have reduced the French coal industry. They have done it deliberately as part of their economic war, so that German coal might have a market in France.

Consider the crime! The Germans deliberately destroyed the industry which gave to France its heat, and light, and power. They decreed that the hearths of a million homes should have no fire; they designed that factories should go idle for want of steam. It was within their purpose that a hundred thousand miners should be robbed of their living and that Northern France should for a period of years be without the coal which is the life of her industry.

Lens was once a happy and prosperous town. Now to go down into the valley of Lens is like a descent into hell. It is such destruction as none can imagine who has not seen it. In its outer fringes there are still the semblances of houses, roofless and shattered, but still recognizable as such. As you go down the hill chaos encroaches more and more upon order until at last not even walls remain nor the semblance even of streets nothing, nothing at all, but broken rubble and splintered timber in a welter of confusion and ruin.

At the bottom of the hill there is a small open oval, clear of rubbish. It is what was the Grande Place of Lens, but it now looks like a piece of level ground at the bottom of a quarry. A piece of the wall of the Mairie - a massive, jagged tooth of masonry, fifteen feet or so in height is the only recognizable thing in sight.

Here in this centre of ruin we came upon a group at once odd and tragic. It consisted of two horses and a cart, drawn up near a deep and narrow hole, like a shaft leading into a mine. A stout old French lady, all muffled up in

woolen wraps, was kneeling beside the hole and taking various articles of wreckage out of the hands of some worker below. Sometimes a charred piece of furniture would be pushed up, sometimes an old illustrated magazine, and again the fragments of a handsome ormolu and alabaster clock. The lady I discovered to be the wife of a banker, whose bank had been on the Grande Place of Lens; the hole led down into what were the cellars of the bank, where she had left her papers and worldly gear; she and her daughter had come in the cart to recover what remained, and at the moment of our passing the daughter was down in the hole scraping out the miserable remnants of their household goods.

Not even the cellars of Lens are left to the people of Lens. Not even the shafts and galleries of their mines are left to the miners of the Pas-de-Calais.

The Morning Post

JAPANESE COMMERCE AND FINANCE

THOUGH the foreign trade of Japan has shown a decline during recent months, the country has been able to maintain a favorable balance of 158,214,000 yen on the total for the first nine months of the year, exports amounting in value to 1,384,547,000 yen, and imports equaling 1,226,333,000 yen. Decreases have been chiefly in exports of raw silk, tea, and copper, and imports of raw cotton, iron, and machinery. Owing to the high price of rice there is naturally a marked increase in imports of that staple, and also in Chilian saltpetre and petroleum, especially naphtha. In spite of Government efforts to the contrary, speculators are still cornering the food markets, particularly in flour, though some relief is had in imports of wheat from China. The enormous expansion of

leather industries, under the impetus of demand for military supplies, has led to a greatly increased import of raw skins, mostly from Korea, China, and Formosa. Japan's output of chlorate of potash has increased to some 10,000 tons a year, which has lent further impetus to the match industry, production of the latter now amounting to over 53,000,000 gross annually. Exports of matches are on the increase. The demand for iron and steel in Japan does not cease with curtailment of supply, and the manufacture thereof is being pushed to the utmost limit of domestic capacity. The fact that the total value of imports of iron and steel from the United States during the first half of this year amounted in value to 201,450,000 yen, or 92,210,000 yen above the same period of last year, shows that Japan has been able to get considerable help from abroad in spite of embargoes. It must be remembered, however, that the increase was greater in cost than in quantity. During the past four years the demand for steel in Japan has more than doubled, and imports have actually increased by 50 per cent. The increase in self-supply, on the other hand, has been about 170 per cent. The quantity of steel produced in Japan last year was 529,000 tons, while 675,000 tons were imported. The annual consumption of steel in Japan is now over 1,200,000 tons, and the output for next year promises to meet this demand. Of course, the price of steel is unprecedented, cast steel now running at 1,200 yen a ton, as compared with 220 yen a ton before the war. Some of the steel works are paying dividends of 120 per cent, and most of them 50 per cent. Shipbuilding is, of course, also among the more prominent and prosperous industries developed by the war, due to orders from abroad. During the first half of the year Japanese yards launched 65

steamers of over 1,000 tons each, and having an aggregate tonnage of 193,417. This is 74,079 tons more than in the same period last year. The figures for the present half of this year will probably reach a tonnage of 200,000, or 400,000 in round numbers for the year. If small boats are included, the annual production will total 500,000 tons, which is very remarkable when compared with the annual tonnage of 50,000 launched before the war. Cotton spinning and weaving still prospers abnormally, prices being double those ruling before the war; and the 2,000 power looms and 300 hand looms of the country are now turning out some 20,000,000 yards a year, going mostly to China, India, and the South Sea Islands. The promotion of new industrial and other companies goes on a pace, investments totaling nearly 300,000,000 yen a month.

Financially Japan continues to prosper quite on a par with trade and industry. The national revenue for the present fiscal year is larger than in any previous year, totaling up to the end of August last 763,674,716 yen for ordinary revenue and 321,197,877 yen for extraordinary, or a total of 1,084,872,593 yen for the fiscal year ending in October, an increase of 353,943,121 yen over last year's revenue. Receipts from taxes amounted to 430,604,092 yen, an increase of 81,931,252 yen over last year. Among the more interesting items of extraordinary revenue is one of 12,733,444 yen from foreign investments and one of nearly 10,000,000

yen from marine insurance. As the rice forecast estimates a crop of some 265,000,000 bushels for the year, the year promises to open well for the

masses.

Japan's gold holdings, also continue to grow, the total amount to the country's credit now being 1,402,000,000 yen, of which 455,000,000 yen is at home and 947,000,000 kept overseas, mostly in London and New York. Of this amount the Bank of Japan owns 740,000,000 yen and the Imperial Treasury 662,000,000 yen. While bullion at home showed a decrease of 1,000,000 yen during the last few weeks, the amount abroad showed an increase of 82,000,000 yen, due probably to the government's purchase of bullion from the Yokohama Specie Bank There is a steady outcry against the inflation of paper currency and consequent enhancement of prices. At the beginning of October the issue of the Bank of Japan notes reached 837,689,000 yen, while the gold reserve was 653,389,000 yen, the situation showing an excess of 64,300,000 yen above the untaxable limit of the note issue. At the same time last year the note issue stood at 644,580,000 yen. The amount of subsidiary paper money issued to facilitate small change in 10-sen, 20-sen, and 50sen pieces now totals over 60,000,000 yen. But change is still so scarce that often railway stations and post offices cannot find change for a 50-sen piece or bill to enable the purchase of a ticket or a postage stamp.

The Economist