Mr. Adams’s study of the rise of the usurer in India and the ruin of the martial races is very interesting; but it has not the slightest bearing upon anything which is now happening in Western civilization. The debtor, in America at least, is amply able to take care of his own interests. Our experience shows conclusively that the creditors only prosper when the debtors prosper, and the danger lies less in the accumulation of debts, than in their repudiation. Among us the communities which repudiate their debts, which inveigh loudest against their creditors, and which offer the poorest field for the operations of the honest banker (whom they likewise always call “money-lender,”) are precisely those which are least prosperous and least self-respecting. There are, of course, individuals here and there who are unable to cope with the money-lender, and even sections of the country where this is true; but this only means that a weak or thriftless man can be robbed by a sharp money-lender just as he can be robbed by the sharp producer from whom he buys or to whom he sells. There is, in certain points, a very evident incompatibility of interest between the farmer who wishes to sell his product at a high rate, and the working-man who wishes to buy that product at a low rate; but the success of the capitalist, and especially of the banker, is conditioned upon the prosperity of both working-man and farmer. When Mr. Adams speaks of the change in the relations of women and men he touches on the vital weakness of our present civilization. If we are, in truth, tending toward a point where the race will cease to be able to perpetuate itself, our civilization is of course a failure. No quality in a race atones for the failure to produce an abundance of healthy children. The problem upon which Mr. Adams here touches is the most serious of all problems, for it lies at the root of, and indeed itself is, national life. But it is hard to accept seriously Mr. Adams’s plea that “martial” men loved their wives more than “economic” men do, and showed their love by buying them. Of course the only reason why a woman was bought in early times was because she was looked upon like any other chattel; she was “loved” more than she is now only as a negro was “loved” more by the negro-trader in 1860 than at present. The worship of women during the Middle Ages was, in its practical effects, worship of a very queer kind. The “economic man” of the present day is beyond comparison gentler and more tender and more loving to women than the “emotional man” of the Middle Ages.