of the other political speculators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, consisted in assuming that primitive man was impelled by the same motives, and acted in the same manner and with the same deliberate design, as the men of his own generation. As in morals and psychology, so in politics, the historical and comparative methods, so familiar to recent investigators, were as yet hardly known. * * * * * I ought not to dismiss this book without noticing Locke's remarks on the necessity of Parliamentary Reform. "To what gross absurdities the following of custom, when reason has left it, may lead, we may be satisfied when we see the bare name of a town, of which there remains not so much as the ruins, where scarce so much housing as a sheepcote or more inhabitants than a shepherd is to be found, sends as many representatives to the grand assembly of law-makers as a whole county numerous in people and powerful in riches." * * * * * The writings of Locke on Trade and Finance are chiefly interesting to us on account of the place which they occupy in the History of Political Economy. They consist of three tracts, the occasions and consequences of which have already been described. The main positions which he endeavours to establish are three. First, interest, or the price of the hire of money, cannot, ordinarily speaking, be regulated by law, and, if it could so be regulated, its reduction below the natural or market rate would be injurious to the interests of the public. Secondly, as silver and gold are commodities not differing intrinsically in their nature from other commodities, it is impossible by arbitrary acts of the Government to raise the value of silver and gold coins. You may, indeed, enjoin by Act of Parliament that sixpence shall henceforth be called a shilling, but, all the same, it will only continue to purchase six-penny-worth of goods. You will soon find that the new shilling is only as effective in the market as the old sixpence, and hence, if the Government has taken the difference, it has simply robbed its subjects to that amount. The third position, which he only maintains incidentally in discussing the other two, is that the commercial prosperity of a country is to be measured by the excess of its exports over its imports, or, as the phrase then went, by the balance of trade. The two former of these propositions are simple, but long-disputed, economical truths. The latter is an obstinate and specious economical fallacy.