532 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tics, Dudley Baxter and Leone Levi with taxation. Le Play may fairly 

 be called the father of the scientific family budget. His studies of four 

 English families* are the most complete economic pictures of English 

 popular life to be found in literature. With the aid of some local au- 

 thority he chose what was thought a fairly typical family, and then, 

 frankly explaining his scientific object and securing confidence, he set 

 himself to study it. Nothing of economic interest is too unimportant 

 for him to record. A minute inventory and valuation of clothes, fur- 

 niture and household goods; a detailed account, item by item, of in- 

 come from all sources and of expenditure upon all objects for a year, 

 with the quantities and prices of foods, &c; a description of the family, 

 member by member, their past history, their environment, how they 

 came to be where they are and to earn their living as they do; their re- 

 sources in the present, their provision for the future; their meals, 

 hygiene and recreations; their social, moral, political and religious 

 observances — nothing escapes him. And the whole is organized, classi- 

 fied, fitted into a framework identical for all cases, with the painstak- 

 ing and methodical industry of the naturalist. Contrasted with this 

 the realism of novelists, the occasional excursions of journalists, the 

 observations of professed economists, are pitiably incomplete. As early 

 as 1857 Le Play found one ardent admirer in England, Mr. W. L. Sar- 

 gant, whose ''Economy of the Laboring Classes," avowedly inspired by 

 Le Play, is a valuable and interesting piece of work. Since then, how- 

 ever, with the magnificent exception of Mr. Charles Booth, little has 

 been done to throw light upon the mode of life of the wage-earners of 

 England. The Board of Trade heralded the formation of its Labor 

 Department by issuing a blue book — unhappily without sequel — en- 

 titled "Returns of Expenditure by Working Men," in 1889, and the 

 Economic Club has published a useful collection of studies in 'Family 

 Budgets/ 1896. But we shall probably still depend very much upon 

 foreign observers for fuller knowledge of the subject. M. Rene La- 

 vollee, an adherent who may almost be called a colleague of Le Play, 

 has devoted to England a whole volume of his important work 'Les 

 Classes Ouvrieres en Europe: etudes sur leur situation materielle et 

 morale.' t M. Urbain Guerin, another member of the Societe 

 d'Economie Sociale, founded by Le Play to carry on his work, has re- 

 cently added a study of a tanner's family in Nottingham to Le Play's 

 gallery of portraits; and some of the young members of the Musee 

 Social and the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques have come among 

 us animated with the same scientific curiosity. A vivid (and, so far as 

 Newcastle is concerned, a trustworthy) sketch by a German miner, 

 "How the English Workman Lives," just translated into English, is our 



*Les Ouvriers Europeens, Paris, folio, 1855. 

 fParis, 1896, torn, iii., 656 pp., large 8vo. 



