L'Argentine au XXe Siecle. by Albert B. Martinez; Maurice LewandowskiReview by: P. G. C.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Jun., 1907), pp. 363-364Published by: Wiley for the Royal Statistical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2339685 .

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1907.] NYotes on Ecconomaic and Statistical WVorks. 363

19.-L'Argentine (tit XXe Si(cle. Par Albert B. Martinez et Maurice Lewandowski. 2nd Edition. 429 pp., 8vo. Palris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1907. Price 5 fr.

Yet another publication respecting the character and induistries of a State, prepared and issued by writers recently holding office, makes a claim to be noticed as offering a more or less auithoritative exposition of the national position and outlook. This time it is the Argentine Republic which is the suibject of a treatise thllus vouched for as at least semi-official, for not only is the first of the two authors above named himself a former Under-Secretary, but the volumYne is prefaced by an introduction from the pen of a late President of this South American State, M.- Charles Pellegrini. The position which Argentina has come to occupy and the growing, volume of the business which its citizens transact with the Old World makes the pacific development of this country well deserving of attention, both as a field towards which a considerable stream of European emigration has been directed, and as one in which European, and more especially English, capital has been largely and successfully invested. Indeed, it is here suggested that the successful invasion of Argentina by English capitalists was something in the nature of a pacific revenge for the failure of some military efforts to place our flag on Argentine soil early in the nineteenth century. The writers of the present work are anxious that statisticians, economists, and commercial men here should learn mnore clearly the conditions which mark off the Argentine from the less stable neighbouring republics, such as Paraguay and Uruguay. The satisfactory settlement of the dispute with Chili, by the arbitrationi which our own monarch undertook, has left the country free to develop its productive soil without the drawbacks and alarms which for fifty years threatened the riepublic. After a preliminary chapter dealing with the country from the geographical and economic poinit of view, its railway system and mode of colonisation, the second part of the work treats of the agricultural conditions, the third of the commerce, and the last of the financial aspect in the Argentine. To the numerous and interesting statements regarding the growth of the country in recent years the reader must be referred, and he will have no hesitation in agreeing with the writers that to secure a career of such development Argentina needs only to make more secure order and peace within its own borders and to improve its political administration. The authors claim for their country that its territories cover an area as large as all Europe, omitting Russia, but with a population of just over s,ooo,ooo persons. Whether they have quite sufficient evidence for the assertion that its vast pampas afford room enough for ioo,ooo,ooo residents may of course be open to discussion, but the mere suggestion affords reason for thought as to its future. Be this as it mav, the wealth of Argentina rests, as the authors point out, on its agriculture, with its extending growth of cereals, and its breeding of live stock, and increasing exportation of their products. The maps attached to the volume give indication of the widely varying density of the agricultural productioil of wheat, of maize, of flax, and so on, and suggest that the extreme

VOL. LXX. PART II. 2 c

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364 Nrotes on Economnic and AStatistical WForks. [June,

variety of physical and climatic conditions existing on Argentine territory must not be overlooked in any estimate of the ultimate development of the future of the country. P.G.C.

20.-The IndumsIrial Organisation of an Indian Province. By Theodore Morison. vi + 327 pp., 8vo. London: John Murray, 1906. Price iOs. 6d. net.

Mlr. Morison's interesting study was, he tells us in his Preface, "intended primarily for Indian students." His main object was to "review the principal economic facts in the society with which Indiaii students are familiar, and to show the relations of those facts to the abstract economics which they read in their text-books." He thus sought to substitute for illustrations of economic theoiies drawn from European industry examples less remote from actual Indianl experience. But, in the pursuit of this aim, which was directly prac- tical, and specially appropriate to a teacher instructing pupils, he has contrived to produce a book which, we have no doubt, will fulfil the additional hope to which he has simultaneously given expression in his Preface. It will, we are confident, also prove "interesting" to European readers, who " desire to study the industrial organisation of India for the purpose of comparative economics." It is likely to be specially useful for this second object, with which the readers of the Journal of thte Royal Statistical Society are more immediately concerned, because the author has taken great pains to show that the competitive forces, which are characteristic of modern European business, can be detected by careful scrutiny exerting an appreciable and persistent, if gradual, influence in the direction of charnge beneath a customary order of society which apparently remains oin the surface unchanged. He admits indeed a marked difference of environment, modifying the pace and affecting the results of the movement; but his mode of treatment of the particular subject he has chosen for close investigation tends to lessen and not to accentuate the sharp contrast often drawn between the Oriental and the Western world in economic affairs. In this respect at any rate his book is unques- tionably written from a standpoint which possesses the great interest of being new.

He himself, with justice, claims special novelty for the attempt here made to "consider the economic pheniomena of an Indian province as one whole." Studies of " particular industrial problems " are, he says, "scattered through the official literature" of the Government of India, and many experts have dealt previously in. exhaustive fulness with technical subjects " like settlement, irriga- tion," and "famine relief." He considers these last matters " only so far as is necessary to show their economic bearing "; and they thus take their fitting place in a detailed review of the whole industrial organisation of the province which he describes. Not a few important considerations, however, connected with them arise in the natural course of his narrative, and they will, we suspect, be fresh to many of his readers. The success in fact of his book, which, we believe, will be generally acknowledged, is largely due to the admirable skill with which he contrives to mingle suggestive

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