Northern Companies being allowed to go into the hands of a receiver is also rejected. The Commission recommends that these three companies be transferred to a new body. Having come to the conclusion that direct ownership and operation by the Government is to be avoided, and that ownership and operation by a commercial company is not possible, the Commission recommends that a new Public Authority, a Board of Trustees, be incorporated by Act of Parliament as the "Dominion Railway Company"; and that the Canadian Northern, Grand Trunk, and Grank Trunk Pacific be transferred to this body.

Under the scheme worked out by the Commission the Government would assume responsibility to the Dominion Railway Company for the interest on the existing securities of the transferred companies. The Governmentowned Intercolonial and National Transcontinental Railways, stretching from Halifax to Winnipeg, would also be transferred to the Dominion Railway Company. There would then be a nationally-owned railway system covering the whole of Canada-from Halifax on the Atlantic coast to Vancouver and Prince Rupert on the Pacific coast. The Dominion's railway would be operated by the trustees as one united system, on a commercial basis, "under their own politically undisturbed management, on account of, and for the benefit of, the people of Canada."

Thereupon follows the clause relating to the trustees:

We recommend that there be five trustees, three railway members, one member selected on the ground of business and financial experience, and one as especially possessing the confidence of the railway employees; that the original trustees be named in the Act constituting the Board; and that their tenure of office be sub

stantially the same as that of judges of the Supreme Court.

It is further recommended that the original trustees retire after three, four, five, six, and seven years respectively, according to а prescribed scheme; and that they be eligible for reappointment; and that all appointments subsequent to the original statutory appointments be by the Governor-General in Council on the nomination of the trustees themselves. The Commissioners lay stress on the importance of the Board being nonpolitical, permanent, and self-perpetuating; and in this connection point to the experience of the Australian State Railways.

The Dominion's Railway idea is big, and the Commissioners reflect courage and breadth of vision in their recommendations. The proposal to give the railway workers a direct share of control in the management is a practical expression of an idea which is coming to be much discussed in democratic countries. In Canada the Labor movement has practically no representation politically. On the assumption that economic power must precede political power, if the status of Labor is to be raised, the recommendation of the Railway Inquiry Commission might be regarded as a great step forward.

The New Statesman.

LABOR IN AMERICAN SHIPYARDS.

During the last two years the output and equipment of American shipbuilding yards have been multiplied by three; if the Shipping Board's new program is to be carried out in time to have a decisive influence on the war there will need to be another multiplication by three. So great an expansion in industry involves grave labor difficulties, and we are glad to have particulars from that well-known

authority, Mr. Edward Porritt (the Glasgow Herald, October 2d), of the steps being taken by the Government departments to anticipate their difficulties before they become acute. On August 25th a joint agreement was signed by the representatives of all the labor unions concerned, and by the Navy Department, the Shipping Board, and the Emergency Fleet Corporation (an offshoot of the Shipping Board). The agreement provides that all disputes which arise concerning wages, hours, or conditions in shipyards and shipbuilding plants shall be determined by a Committee of Three-one representing the Emergency Fleet Corporation, one the public (nominated by Mr. Wilson), and the third Labor, nominated by Mr. Samuel Gompers, the all-powerful president of the American Federation of Labor. Here we have a very small committee of arbitration, with full powers to settle disputes arising out of all Government shipbuilding work except the purely Navy work. The Navy yards enjoy the distinction of. never having had any strikes, so that they are quite capable of looking after their own labor. At the time when the agreement was signed disputes were delaying work in the shipyards, and it is confidently hoped, now that

The Economist.

organized labor has been fully recognized and joined in the responsibility of the Committee of Three, that there will be fewer disputes "in these times," to use Mr. Porritt's words, "of un

precedented pressure on American shipyards, and of almost bewildering activity in the organization of new shipbuilding companies, and the installation of new shipbuilding plants." The agreement is accepted by Mr. Gompers and his associates in the American Federation of Labor as a full and complete recognition of the labor unions, and of standard of wages and of conditions which are in accord with fair dealing. This war will be won in the shipyards of Great Britain and America. The United States has now a shipbuilding capacity of over 1,500,000 gross tons a year-as compared with about 500,000 tons two years ago but it will need to get rapidly up to a rate of four million gross tons a year if the American Army is to have sufficient means of transport. The Americans can do this if they realize to the full that the war is now one of shipbuilding against U-boats, and bend all their energies to the task. The Government's agreement with Labor, if it be fairly worked on both sides, should be of the greatest help.

The Page Company adds "Our Little Frankish Cousin of Long Ago," by Evaleen Stein, to its Little Cousins of Long Ago series; and "Our Little Roumanian Cousin," by Clara Vosstrovsky Winlow to its Little Cousins series. Both are attractively illustrated, and, like their predecessors in the series, serve a useful purpose in bringing before young readers the conditions of child life in far off countries and times.

The reader who is attracted by the title of Cosmo Hamilton's "Scandal" will find what he is looking for. The heroine is the superlatively fascinating daughter of a New York millionaire, who disarms her parents' criticism of her conduct in visiting at midnight, uncompanioned, the studio of a notorious artist, by professing herself, on the spur of the moment, secretly married to the man of their choice, and calling on him, as "a good sport,"

to back her up. The plot is sustained at the same sordid and suggestive level for nearly four hundred pages. Little, Brown & Co.

Dedicated to Eden Phillpotts, at whose suggestion its author has turned aside from history for an experiment in fiction, "The Pope's Favorite," by Joseph McCabe, is a brilliant piece of work. It is a story of the Borgia period, with Alexander VI its leading figure, and its opening chapters describe his election. The plot follows the familiar ecclesiastical and political intrigues of the time, but the episodes added by imagination are artistically fitted in, and the historical and fictitious characters meet on more equal terms than is usually the case. That the story should be full of vivid color and startling incident was to have been expected, but there is a live human interest not often achieved in novels of this sort. Dodd, Mead & Co.

The

A well-known French compilation by Jean Henri Fabre, "The Story Book of Science," has been translated by Florence Constable Bicknell. The. rendering into English is well done; but the aroma of the French remains, whether intentionally or not, and the talk of the Uncle, with his nieces and nephews, on Science remains the talk of a Parisian, not an American. usual sugar-coat is bountifully applied and the mass of information disguised, as usual, under the form of a story. Perhaps children are deceived by this sort of thing-perhaps not! At any rate, being French, the author does his trick with grace and cleverness. The subjects flow out of the natural ongoing of country life; cows; sheep; poisonous insects, serpents, and plants; fleece, flax, hemp; so on through the list. The scientific information is accurate, and great care has been given to making it useful for the health and

habits of the young. The Century

Co.

Lovers of incorrigible optimism count "Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley" in the same class with "Polyanna" and "Mrs. Wiggs," and they will give a hearty welcome to the "further joyous record" in which Belle K. Maniates tells the experiences of "Amarilly in Love." The Jenkinses, large and small, are now established in a big, tumbledown house in the country, where "Ma" has developed "an acute case of telephonitis." Amarilly-her college days over-stays at home just long enough to be pronounced "folksey, jest the way she uster be," and then strikes out for herself in the near-by city, where she first becomes typewriter to a playwright, and then writes a play of her own. The artist who paid for her education in the earlier volume, and a mysterious recluse who buys an abandoned farm just beyond “Ma's" are rival lovers, and Amarilly's decision is not reached till the last chapter. The episode in the show-window of the Belgrade Bazaar is uncommonly ingenious and readable. Little, Brown & Co.

Large business enterprises-mines, manufactures, railroads and the like -often figure in current fiction, represented both by employers and employees. But intimate studies of individuals halfway up the business ladder, such as Stacy Aumonier has made in the little volume of short stories called "The Friends," are not common. Mapleson, manager of the brass-bed department at Taunton's, the largest Furnishing Emporium in Bloomsbury; White, agent for a firm of wire-mattress manufacturers in the city; Bultishaw, manager of the linoleum department at Cotterway's, and Ticknett, in charge of the "soft goods" for the same firm; Thomas Pinwell, salesman for Dollbone's in trimmings,

gimp, embroidery, buttons, etc.-Mr. Aumonier writes of their rivalries, ambitions and anxieties, of their extravagances and excesses, of the swagger put on for business and the pitiful shabbiness at home, all with extraordinary sympathy, penetration and power of portraiture. Thoroughly modern in style, these melancholy stories point their morals as plainly as any old time "tract." The Century Co.

Theodore Roosevelt's "The Foes of Our Own Household" (George H. Doran Co.) is not, strictly speaking, a "war book," but it is a book well suited to war times, enforcing, as it does, with characteristic strength and pungency, the vital lessons of the present national and international crisis. The keynote is found in this Foreword: "The man who still asks 'why we are at war' or apologizes in any way for Germany, should look to his own soul; he is neither a patriot nor a true American, nor a lover of mankind; and the foes of his own household are the folly and the cowardice and the cold selfishness of his own heart. We should hold Germany in horror for what she has done. But we should regard with contempt and loathing the Americans who directly or indirectly give her aid and comfort; whether they do so by downright attack on our own country, by upholding Germany, by assailing any of our allies, by trying to discourage our people from vigorous, resolute, unyielding prosecution of the war, or by crying on behalf of peace, peace, when there ought not to be peace." It is in the spirit thus indicated, and with vehemence and clearness that Col. Roosevelt discusses The Instant Need and the Ultimate Need; Must We Be Brayed in a Mortar before Our Folly Depart from Us?; The Children of the Crucible; A Square Deal in Law Enforcement; Industrial Justice; Social Jus

tice; Socialism versus Social Reform and kindred subjects.

Under the title "Woodrow Wilson and the World's Peace" (Mitchell Kennerley) George D. Herron, author of the striking and timely volume on "The Menace of Peace," recently noticed in these pages, has grouped six papers upon subjects connected with the war and the entrance of the United States which he has previously published in various foreign reviews. The opening paper, which gives the book its title, was published in the New Age of London, as an interpretation of President Wilson's address to the Senate; the second in order, "The Man and the President" was first published under the title of "President Woodrow Wilson" in La Semaine Littéraire of Geneva, in December, 1916; the third, "His Initial Effort" was published in the Journal de Genève of December 31, 1916, under the title of "The Note of President Wilson"; the fourth, "The Pro-German Morality of the Pacifist" was originally published in two parts, the first in Il Giornale d'Italia of Rome, last March, and the second in the April number of La Revue Mensuelle, Geneva, in reply to pacifist perversions of President Wilson's unfortunate phrase "peace without victory"; the fifth, "Pro-America" was published in La Semaine Littéraire of Geneva, last May, upon the occasion of President Wilson's address in declaration of war; and the sixth, "An Apologia" was published in La Tribune de Genève of July 1, 1917, and in a previous number of Il Giornale d'Italia of Rome, as a defense against the attacks of the pacifists. They are all vigorous and trenchant expositions of American ideals and policy, and, grouped in the present volume, they will be the more interesting to American readers by reason of their previous publication in influential foreign reviews.