ments in ordnance, projectiles, naval architecture, and the other appliances of warfare. Such a record and reference book is indispensable to every one who would know something of the rapid advances which science is making at the present day, yet has neither opportunity nor leisure to consult the numerous volumes and periodicals among which the facts lie scattered. A single illustrative cut is given under gunnery. A sprinkling of such illustrations throughout the volume would add greatly to its value. Fronting the title-page is a fine portrait of John A. Dahlgren, Commandant of the U. S. Navy Yard, at Washington.

PHYSICAL TECHNICS.*-Many a teacher of Physical Science has felt the want of just such a manual as this. His institution is poor. It has no apparatus, or but little. He himself is zealous and enterprising-perhaps can handle tools-or at least, has artisans at hand, whom he can call to his aid; but he lacks a knowledge of simpler and cheaper forms of apparatus than the usual articles of the shops, and it may be, has neither time nor ingenuity to devise substitutes. Dr. Frick's book is exactly what he needs. It tells him how to construct in the simplest forms and of the cheapest materials, and how to use in experimenting, a great variety of apparatus adapted to illustrate the leading principles of Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Acoustics, Optics, Magnetism, Electricity, and Heat. It is thus a guide-book, not only in the construction of apparatus, but in the methods of successful experimentation, and will be appreciated, not only by the lecturer and teacher but also by the amateur and the self-taught student.

The work is a translation from the German edition of 1856, is clear in style, up to the times in science, illustrated by nearly 800 engravings, and has that indispensable appendage of any book worth owning, an index.

* Physical Technics; or Practical Instructions for making Experiments in Physics, and the construction of Physical Apparatus with the most limited means. By Dr. J. FRICK, Director of the High School in Freiburg, and Professor of Physics in the Lyceum. Translated by JOHN D. EASTER, Ph. D., Professor of Natural Philosophy and Chemistry in the University of Georgia. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1862. pp. 467.

THE

NEW ENGLANDER.

No. LXXXI.

OCTOBER, 1862.

ARTICLE I. THE LAWS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, IN THEIR MORAL RELATIONS.

A HASTY observation of natural laws seems to reveal a partial conflict. Vigorous thought is excluded by vigorous digestion: the fabric which life has built up is rapidly dissolved under the free chemical action of its constituents; and gravity is ever ready to dash into fragments the organic structure which falls into its power. Yet the laws of mechanical, chemical, vital, and nervous action are the parts of one plan. In the harmon, of purpose, they run parallel with each other, and resign and resume their power at the beck of an overruling thought. They may be said to lie below each other as distinct platforms of law, and to suffer no absolute chaos. Material, which is not under the action of the higher series of coördinate forces, is not thereby unruled, but only sinks to an inferior stratum of law. We may readily conceive the same particles of matter falling through all gradations from the highest to the lowest range of law, yet never able to escape the last phase of government. The brain of man, the subject of the most subtle and recondite of physical laws, may become the food of an ani

mal, and sink to the platform of muscular life. It may, in farther transformation, serve as nourishment to a plant, and, subject for a period to vegetative action; may afterward, through decay, the province of chemical forces, fall to its fifth and last resting place, the primitive frame-work of order, mechanical rule. These several phases of law, though often involving partial suspension each of each, are never in true conflict when judged by the harmony of a final cause. Like the separate rollers that stamp our prints, all are different, all correlated, all harmonized by the result.

A similar gradation of laws can be found in the moral government of man. In his rejection of direct obedience, he does not escape the hand of God, but only sinks to a lower and less perfect system of impulses; yet impulses, nevertheless, established of God, and productive of a certain order. It would naturally be thought that implicit obedience to the law of selflove would secure results wholly in conflict with those arising under Christian love, under equal-love. Yet each of these two impulses, self love and equal-love, is productive of a distinet harmony, and stands as a governing force in its own grade of action. Though man may cease to be religious, and fall below equal-love, he is yet caught by the lower law of self-love, and brought back to a partial good and a limited government. The feeling postulated in man by Political Economy is a discriminating self-love-a self-love that desires physical good, and is able to plan broadly for it. Its simple assumption is, that man desires immediate good with the least expenditure of labor, and this is undisguised self-love. This self-love must not, indeed, be suffered a form of action which is self-destructive. Theft and robbery provoke theft and robbery, and these destroy the general conditions, and ultimately the individual conditions, under which alone self-love can prosperously develop itself. It is thus shut up to honesty, and must be so far discriminating as to recognize this, and all further conditions of its full success. With no more wisdom than is sufficient to determine the greatest physical good, or freedom than is requisite to select the largest gain and the least exertion, self-love may be left to work on, and from this action there shall arise great

physical prosperity and high social development. The lower impulse will, indeed, need everywhere to be supplemented and often to be displaced by the higher, but it will also show its own regulative and beneficent power, and that it lies in all human society, a consistent and effective substratum of law. Lacking the perfection of equal-love, it yet catches and holds in its strong meshes fallen and sinful man.

Self-love defines the limits of justice from which true benevolence starts, and to which it returns. Without first knowing what men can rightly claim, we know not what remains to be given. An accurate notion of justice is the best preparation of benevolence, and commercial justice is defined by the law of commercial action.

Self-love controls the laws of trade through competition. Each strives to anticipate the other in the gains of the hour. No man is left to gather his harvest of profits in quiet. There are keen eyes everywhere prying into the means of acquisition; men sure to strike in with a lower price or higher proffer, where gains are largest. The market value of every article is pressed down by the greed of buyers who can never purchase too cheap, and the fear of sellers who may hold their wares too dear.

Self-love is constantly put to the rack with the question, how much must I surrender that I may retain the more? Price thus settles, or rather perpetually vacillates under an intense, unremitted conflict of forces; the seller urged by his fellow-tradesmen more than by the buyer; the buyer made doubly anxious to purchase cheaply in the market, that this gain may avail him in future competition.

Commerce thus shapes its laws of value and of exchange under the most avowed and universal self-love, a self-love perfectly equivalent to selfishness, yet this not only does not prevent, it actually secures, stern order and high prosperity.

A first result to the community is a general diffusion of advantages an equalization of gains. Self-love is forced by its own necessities to a work of benevolence, and to scatter the profits which it cannot secure for itself. This finds illustration in invention. When an article, hitherto the product of hand

labor, can be manufactured by machinery, there is usually, for those possessed of the requisite means, an opportunity for rapid gains. These gains, however, cannot be fully secured without such a reduction of price as shall open the market for the commodity by an enlarged demand. The first step, therefore, by which profits are realized is attended by a fall in value accruing to the benefit of the community; something must be given that anything may be gained. There still remains, however, to the holder of the machinery, profits much beyond the ordinary rates, and he is now reaping the harvest of the invention. But this unusual prosperity stimulates rival effort to the utmost, and competitors begin to appear on every side, first sharing, and at length utterly consuming, these unusual returns. The first manufacturers have made a stolen march under the invention, perchance, achieved a fortune, but all is now at an end, and the perpetual gain, the solid advantage, rests with the community. Point by point, everything has been surrendered, for only on condition of a cheerful and rapid surrender could any remainder of advantage be retained. Under free competition, a favored branch of craft or trade is made the eider-duck of society, and is compelled to pluck the down from its own bosom till all is gone. Self-love thus furnishes its own correction, and we can in no way so thoroughly divide advantages, and make them common property, in no way so thoroughly equalize opportunities, as by giving it free action.

But competition goes further than this, and becomes an occasion of gain to the community wholly beyond the physical good which it distributes. As men grow eager and skillful in acquisition, and competition becomes intense, knowledge is found to be the indispensable condition of success. Intelligence has an additional and immediate reward, and must be assiduously sought after as alone furnishing safety to the design, and skill to the execution. Success, which is to be either certain or permanent, must be thoroughly prepared for, and its foundation broadly laid in training and knowledge. Competition is, therefore, not only itself a school, it establishes schools, encourages education, and assiduously arms self-love with the means of success. Invention, discovery, enterprise, sagacity, are on