Mr. Collens’ work, _The Eden of Labor_, is the fruit of much thought upon the subject, a powerful imagination, and a feeling heart for those who labor. The author pictures Adam as founding a patriarchal empire after the fall, in which, under wise and equitable laws, labor was universally rewarded by competency and happiness. In the description of this antediluvian Utopia—of its system of government and society, of its condition and rewards of labor, of its land tenure, its trade, foreign and domestic, and its currency—the author gives himself the opportunity of promulgating his conception of the true doctrines of political economy. In this he takes issue with the liberal school of political economists which recognizes Adam Smith as its founder. He denounces its teachings as framed solely in the interest of the selfish and tyrannical employer of labor, and as leading irresistibly to the robbery and enslavement of the over-matched laborer. While admitting the truth of Adam Smith’s law that “labor is the true measure of exchangeable values,” the author strenuously argues that he (Smith) and his disciples nullify the just results of that axiom by defending the specious but unchristian doctrine of “supply and demand,” which results in the supremacy of might over starvation, and by losing sight of their original affirmation of the common right of all to the use of “natural values,” which the liberal economists in the end surrender absolutely to the capitalist. As a foil to his picture of the “Eden of Labor,” Mr. Collens gives, in his description of Nodland, or the empire of Cain, a history of the enslavement and misery of labor, and the corruption and tyranny of the “money lords,” consequent upon the surrender of society to purely selfish instincts, and its abandonment of laws which Adam had derived from his original intercourse with God. This second part may be regarded as a satire upon our modern civilization. An ingenious monogram representing Labor, half-starved, drawing a miserable subsistence from the reservoir of “Natural Values,” which at the same time feeds the plethora of Capital, is prefixed to the work and fully explained by the author in the appendix.