How different, how inferior, such a work as this, for instance, of Dr. Young’s—comprehensive and well digested as it truly is—to any one of his great namesake’s in the last century, Arthur Young, who, more justly than M. Adolphe Quetelet, deserves the title of the “father of modern statistics.” One is like the Turkey carpet that Macaulay speaks of in his criticism on Montgomery, which contains indeed all the colors that are to be found in a masterpiece of painting, but is fit only for its own uses; the other is a picture instinct with life. The old method of personal, detailed, and necessarily limited observation, while it excelled in picturesqueness, gave at the same time solid, accurate, special information which the hasty generalizations of the present day too often miss. The latter confuse the mind by their immense array of figures. Again, Dr. Young has given, we think, a disproportionate share of attention to Europe, Asia, and even Africa—occupying in all over seven hundred pages with his account of labor in those countries, while he handles the subject in the United States and Canada in just one hundred pages. His explanation is that his work is intended chiefly for circulation in the United States, but this explanation is unsatisfactory. His long introductory history of labor from the remotest times, compiled, as it plainly is, from the works of European scholars within everybody’s reach, and his view, chiefly at second hand, from the reports of American consuls, of the state of labor in Europe, are manifestly inferior, both in interest and authority, to the copious original works of the statisticians of particular foreign countries; while his history of American labor and presentation of its existing conditions, which ought to have given its real value to his work, are extremely meagre and superficial. His own tour through the manufacturing centres of England and the Continent appears from his statements to have been of too flying a nature to yield any very authoritative results. But we wish it to be distinctly understood that while the plan of Dr. Young’s work, and, in some respects, its execution, appear to us defective, we are by no means disposed to undervalue the great utility of what he has accomplished in thus presenting to the American reader in compact form a survey of the history of labor down to our own times. It is only from a study of the subject in its widest aspects that an intelligent comprehension of the factors of the problems before us in America can be arrived at.