of the accounts of school and town clerks is also carried on, looking to the establishment of uniform and accurate systems of school accounts and reports.

A great part of the work of the Board is naturally based upon the financial affairs of the State. Expert accountants are employed under the immediate supervision of Dr. Rastall. One group is auditing the accounts of the University of Wisconsin, the Board of Control, and Stout Institute, the school for manual training, located at Menomonie, while another group is engaged upon a study of the books of the Secretary of State, which will be made the basis for the establishment of an improved and uniform system of accounting for all the State departments.

In connection with the work upon the finances of the State, Mr. S. Gale Lowrie is studying the methods and amounts of appropriations made by the State Legislature, and making a comparison of these with other states and foreign countries. This study is calculated to determine whether, under the present form of government, the budget system may be profitably adopted by the State.

Under the direction of Dr. Charles McCarthy, librarian of the Legislative Reference Department, Mr. William M. Duffus is investigating questions pertaining to immigration and settlement, some of them general, as the protection of settlers, especially foreigners, from unscrupulous real estate dealers; and others peculiar to Wisconsin, such as the efficiency of "the stump bond law," enacted by the Legislature of 1911, and providing state aid for those settlers taking up land from which the timber has been cut.

Mr. John F. Sinclair, also under the supervision of Dr. McCarthy, is making a study of the problems of co-operation, municipal markets and the marketing of certain agricultural products. In this last investigation the Board is working in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin, Prof. H. C. Taylor and several students being engaged in the work.

Mr. G. L. Sprague, formerly efficiency expert for the Allis-Chalmers Company of Milwaukee, is employed by the Board to make a survey of the various departments of the State government, for the purpose of securing the best possible service for the State, such efficiency, in fact, as would be demanded of employees in private establishments. In this work Mr. Sprague has the assistance of Mr. F. E. Doty, secretary of the State Civil Service Commission.

LORIAN P. JEFFERSON.

BOOK REVIEWS.

The Changing Chinese. By EDWARD ALSWORTH Ross. (New York: The Century Company, 1911. Pp. xvi, 356.)

Intellectual and Political Currents in the Far East. By PAUL S. REINSCH. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1911. Pp. vii, 396.)

During the last decade a flood of books have poured forth upon China and the Chinese and two of the most recent are those of Professor Reinsch and Professor Ross, colleagues in the University of Wisconsin, from which has proceeded so much that is novel and helpful upon modern government. Their books, however, are written from different standpoints and reach somewhat different results.

Professor Reinsch has prepared his volume from the contemporary sources-periodicals, books, private letters, statements from the Asiatic point of view. Though dealing with the Far East as a whole only about one-eighth part of the book is devoted to India, which of course is very complex but lacks the national spirit of the other great areas. The chapter on "Asiatic Unity" is striking, for there is no doubt that all the Asiatic races come nearer each other than they do to any Western people. Acute also is the observation that "whatever has been thought has, at some time or other, been thought in Asia." Nevertheless the three great peoples of modern Asia, while having some interests and aims in common, cannot be expected to build up an Asiatic system by joint agreements, to counterbalance the European system. From an intellectual and international point of view, there is no United Asia corresponding to the sense of common destiny held by the people of Europe.

Reinsch sagaciously lays hold of the most significant fact with regard to China, that is that it is essentially a democratic country, which is true neither of Japan nor India. The chapter on "Intellectual Leadership" is one of the most helpful because it deals with conditions which are revealed by the literature of the period. The author has

studiously read and analyzed the various phases of intellectual life in China and Japan, in general with much insight. The book is in the manner of Gibbon a carefully wrought attempt to reconstruct the spirit of the people from their own words and acts.

Professor Ross's book in its significant title, The Changing Chinese, confines itself to one country, in which he has himself recently spent six active months. The value of such a book depends not upon an analysis of a large amount of material, but upon the impressions gained from the eye, the ear, and (being in China), from the nose. The traveler can select his cities and his provinces as the analytic writer may select his books; but he sees and hears merely what is upon the line of his march. On the other hand, the visitor has the opportunity of putting things to the test: his materials speak, answer questions, remonstrate and explain. Somehow experiences at first hand make a stronger impression on the mind than anything that comes from the printed page. Every traveler entering China, within twenty-four hours sees things that he has either read about, or which glanced over his mind without impinging upon it.

Professor Ross has set himself with fervor to understand the Chinese as he actually saw them, and had advantages of contact with mandarins of high intelligence and power, as well as with the European residents. He goes at the whole thing with the effort to comprehend; and no man whose stay in China is so brief has better seized upon the things that count in China. The outward physical aspect of the land teaches him lessons of deforestation and possibilities of river traffic. Such chapter titles as "Race Fiber of the Chinese," and "The Struggle for Existence in China" show how the trained economic mind goes straight at the industrial elements in a nation's life. His chapter on "Christianity in China" illuminates the whole subject; and he agrees with Lord Cecil that the English missionaries have ignored the intellectual development of the Chinese; while the American missionaries "with their democratic faith in men, aspire to help the Chinese upward along all lines." He likes the new "Student Volunteers," is deeply interested in the manifold civilizing duties of the missionary in the field, and sees the immense force of applied Christianity in the development of high ideals. He foresees the ultimate effect of Christianity, both directly and indirectly, on the status of women, and on the future administration of the country. Much to the point is his quotation from a British consul who did not like the missionaries and was asked how they were able to stick

to their work when the traders after a few years wanted to be transferred elsewhere, "Well, the climate doesn't seem to hurt them; you see they are so interested in their work." Ross foresees one of the great influences of Christianity in "that it is bound to raise continually the religious claim of the Chinese by forcing the native faiths to assume higher and higher forms in order to survive."

Professor Ross pays particular attention to the attempt of the Chinese to set up schools of their own which shall take the place of the old classical education and give the same kind of western training as the mission schools. He is one of the most recent and trustworthy witnesses to the fact that, down to the founding of the republic, those schools had made little headway. They are subject to student strikes and disorders; they have not a sufficient number of teachers who are really acquainted with things western; and one of the first tasks of the new government, if it is going to succeed, is to put those schools on a footing where they can begin the work of educating the whole people.

Professor Ross has written perhaps the best recent book upon China, for it takes up in a sympathetic spirit, but with keen insight, and a facility for seizing upon the essentials of the question, those phases of Chinese life and character which will count most in the reconstruction of the country.

ALBERT BUSHNELL HART.

Social Reform and the Constitution. By FRANK J. GOODNOW, LL.D., Eaton Professor of Administrative Law at Columbia University. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911. Pp. 365.)

In his now famous address of December 12, 1906, before the Pennsylvania Society, Mr. Root, then Secretary of State, promised that "sooner or later" certain "constructions of the Constitution" would be "found": what Professor Goodnow does in this work is to show that they exist. His purpose he states in his preface thus: "The attempt has been to ascertain, from an examination of the decisions particularly . . of the United States Supreme Court, to what extent the Constitution of the United States in its present form is a bar to the adoption of the most important social reform measures which have been made parts of the reform program of the

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most progressive peoples of the present day." Setting out with this end in view, the author effects a piece-meal reconstruction of the Constitution which establishes for Congress, the power to regulate intrastate commerce so far as is necessary for the effective regulation of interstate commerce (p. 53); the power, through its right "to prohibit the interstate and foreign transportation of articles made contrary to the provisions of its legislation," to "exercise an enormous influence in securing uniform regulation of all the conditions of manufacturing in this country" (p. 92); the "power to create a system of interstate commerce under complete federal control, to include within that system the manufacture or other production of goods to be passed in such commerce, and to protect this system, in all its details from any species of State interference" (p. 145); its power to provide a general system of private law which the United States courts shall administer in controversies between citizens of different States" (ch. IV); the power within undefined limits to regulate the distribution of property by progressive taxation of inheritances (p. 281); the probable power to provide by taxation a system of old age and sickness pensions, "particularly if confined to indigent persons" (p. 317); and so forth. Finally the limits set for the power of the States by the Fourteenth Amendment in social legislation are discussed, in which connection it is pointed out that the State courts are apt to be more zealous defenders of the rights of property supposed to be secured by the Fourteenth Amendment than is the Supreme Court of the United States. It is hardly strange that this should be so. For the truth of the matter is that the modern concept of due process of law is not a legal concept at all; it comprises nothing more or less than a roving commission to judges to sink whatever legislative craft may appear to them to be, from the standpoint of vested interests, of a piratical tendency.

It is in this connection that I have to make a very serious criticism of the work under review: namely, of the author's treatment of the Fifth Amendment as if it were controlling upon the power of Congress in the same broad sense that the Fourteenth Amendment is upon the power of the State Legislatures (pp. 88, 144, 265). But can this be the case? The doctrine of due process of law in the recent loose sense of "reasonable law" (that is, what the court finds to be reasonable law) is merely the old doctrine of vested rights somewhat diluted by the doctrine of the police power. The doctrine of vested rights, however, rested upon the hypothesis of the recognition by the common