spite of their antipathy to abstractions, many of the Socialists of the Chair indulge considerably in barren generalities, which could serve them nothing in practice, even if they did not make it a point to square their practice by the historical conditions of the hour. Brentano strikes on the whole the most practical keynote, both in his conception of what the social question is and of how it is to be met. What is needed, he thinks, very much is to give to modern industry an organization as suitable to it as the old guilds were to the industry of earlier times, and this is to be done in great part by adaptations of that model. He makes comparatively little demand on the power of the State, while of course agreeing with the rest of his school in the latitude they give to the lawfulness of its intervention in industrial matters. He would ask it to bestow a legal status on trade unions and friendly societies, to appoint courts of conciliation, to regulate the hours of labour, to institute factory inspection, and to take action of some sort on the daily more urgent subject of labourers' dwellings. But the elevation of the labouring classes must be wrought mainly by their own well-guided and long-continued efforts, and the first step is gained when they have resolved earnestly to begin. The pith of the problem turns on the matter of wages, and, so far at any rate, it has already been solved almost as well as is practicable by the English trade unions, which have proved to the world that they are always able to convert the question of wages from the question how little the labourer can afford to take, into the question how much the employer is able to give--_i.e._, from the minimum to the maximum which the state of the market allows. That is, of course, a very important change, and it is interesting to know that F. A. Lange, the able and distinguished historian of Materialism, who had written on the labour question with strong socialist sympathies, stated to Brentano that his account of the English trade unions had converted him entirely from his belief that a socialistic experiment was necessary. Brentano admits that the effect of trade unions is partial only; that they really divide the labouring class into two different strata--those who belong to the trade unions being raised to a higher platform, and those who do not being left as they were in the gall of bitterness. But then, he observes, great gain has been made when at least a large section of the working class has been brought more securely within the pale of advancing culture, and it is only in this gradual way--section by section--that the elevation of the whole body can be eventually accomplished. The trade union has imported into the life of the working man something of the element of hope which it wanted, and a systematic scheme of working-class insurance is now needed to introduce the element of security. Brentano has