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most interesting chapter in a very interesting book is that on Family Budgets," in which Mr. Rowntree gives the detailed household expenditure and the daily bills of fare of numerous families belonging to each of his four classes, together with an account of their respective circumstances. The budgets were kept for many consecutive weeks and tested by the most careful investigation of facts. He compares the actual diet of the poor with the diet given in workhouses and prisons; and, what is more important, he shows, in tables of analysed food how, for the same money, the poor might live on more nutritious rations-lentils, pease-pudding and other wholesome food-stuffs. The need of good cooking and a choice of utensils to make such diet digestible is, however, he tells us, a great initial difficulty.

Mr. Rowntree is not a pessimist; he sees improvement before us, but he thinks it will come gradually. He believes it will be obtained through stricter application of existing laws, especially those for public health; through the increase of efficient education and the bettering of social and economic conditions.

The object of the writer [he says] has been to state facts rather than to suggest remedies. He desires, nevertheless, to express his belief that, however difficult the path of social progress may be, a way of advance will open out before patient and penetrating thought if inspired by a true human sympathy.

Owen Glyndwr and the Last Struggle for Welsh Independence. With a brief sketch of Welsh History. By Arthur Granville Bradley. (G. P. Putnam's Sons. 5s.) The author labours under the disadvantage, frankly acknowledged, of extremely scanty materials for a personal history of his hero. We have the record of his deeds and can draw our inferences, but the man himself must always remain a shadowy figure. Still he is par excellence the national Welsh hero, and nobody will dispute that there is room for much fuller knowledge of his career and place in the history of the Principality than is

commonly possessed-in England at all events-so that the publication of this volume in the Heroes of the Nations series is justified.

Mr. Bradley has carefully examined the authorities and legends, and his narrative is clear and accurate, if somewhat lacking in force. Born of good lineage, with a claim to royal descent, there was nothing in Owen Glendower's early life to turn him into a foe of the English, but rather the contrary. He studied at the Inns of Court and became squire to Henry Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV., and his life-long enemy. He would probably have lived a loyal subject if he had not been driven into rebellion at the age of forty-one by the tyranny of his neighbour, Lord Grey of Ruthyn, Lord of the Marches, who misappropriated a slice of his land and tried to arrest him unjustly on a plea of evading military service. Failing to get redress in the King's Council, from that time to the end of his life Glendower stands out as the leader of a patriotic rising of the Welsh against the English. The ostensible pretext was their attachment to Richard II. and dislike of the usurping Lancastrian. Expedition after expedition is despatched against him without success; at the height of his power he assumes royal state; he sends ambassadors to France and makes a treaty with the French king; he offers to take Wales over to the allegiance of the Avignon Pope. After ten years continuous ruthless fighting his forces are crushed and his people subdued; but he continues to carry on guerilla warfare to the end of his days, and dies an outlaw, with his family under detention by the English Court. His personality must have been a statesmanlike and truly masterful one-witness his influence over Hotspur and Mortimer, to whom he married his daughter. It is unfortunate that the materials for a complete picture of such a man are wanting.

A brief summary of Welsh History before and after Glendower's times is a useful complement to the narrative.

Justice is done to the conciliatory policy of Henry VIII. under whose rule complete fusion with England took place. Mr. Bradley knows the country well and is able to throw in much local colour. The interest of his book is decidedly increased by the topographical descriptions, which will specially be appreciated by residents and tourists.

No, 18. VI. 3.-MARCH 1902

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AN UNCONSIDERED PARTY

IN

QUESTION

N the January number of this REVIEW England's finance was discussed as a system founded in the middle of the last century upon theories and expectations long since overthrown, and serviceable only in conditions which, however stable they may have seemed then, are now supplanted by their opposites. The whole scheme being raised on a presumption of peace, or, to speak a little more exactly, on an opinion of war as a remote and ever-dwindling likelihood, it is theoretically what it proves to be: inadequate and unfit when we have to build upon presumptions of war. As financier, the lesson which Mr. Gladstone drew from his view of the future appears to have been this: that indirect taxation should give place largely to direct taxation on economic grounds, and that it should do so further on moral grounds. Many trivial sources of indirect taxation should be closed altogether in any circumstances, and there he was undoubtedly right; others might be safely closed because of the small and dwindling need of them as a provision for the extraordinary expense of war; and others yet because it is one thing to enlarge taxation from a source which the people are accustomed to, and another to reopen any source when once closed. At that the people rebel, and rebellion, or the fear of it, is useful in checking the impetuous and immoral adventure of Tory Governments. Under such persuasions the Gladstonian system was framed, and very well

it worked as long as the conditions it was founded on held together. But they have all given way. The peace presumption is reversed, and with it the fiscal policy that was based upon the presumption. Actual war, the palpable necessity for unabating defensive preparation, and the everrising cost of the Civil Service, have brought us to a point where the supply from indirect taxation is unwisely and unfairly small, the demand upon direct taxation excessively partial as an impost and politically injudicious. For it is not only that the two are out of balance and unjust. Together they bedevil the first purpose of all wise taxation in time of stress, which is to draw the fullest possible supply with the least consciousness of being yielded, and therefore at the lowest cost of discontent.

In brief, such was the argument against England's antiquated finance, as viewed from her entirely changed position in a world astir in every quarter with conflict and the causes of conflict. It has since been supported (the argument, I mean) by the high and independent authority of Sir Robert Giffen, who enforces the same conclusions from the same grounds. As to that, however, it would be aspersion to doubt that most competent minds discovered for themselves, long ago, that we are involved at last in such complications as have turned the whole continent of Europe into an armed camp, and that defence against them cannot be maintained upon our narrowed financial position. But recognition of the facts is naturally followed by contemplation of the remedy, which by good fortune is equally obvious. But what happens then? Why, then these discerning minds turn to another matter of consideration infinitely inferior, by which, however, the right conduct of affairs is often retarded, deflected, or even ruined altogether. There can be no mistake about what is meant: the Party consideration.

For reasons that will presently appear, the Party consideration is in this case unusually weighty and unusually complicate. It would be so on account of three things alone, all of