REVIEWS 51 



"Conservation and Economic Theory." In the preface we are told: 

 "It occurred to the editor that these four papers supplemented each 

 other and, if properly expanded, would make a harmonious whole." 

 The expansion, however, though moderate, is more in evidence than 

 the harmony. It is chiefly because of the bookbinder's art that the)' 

 form a volume. 



The first three papers, it is true, do treat, though with uneven merit, 

 of what constituted the conservation movement. In the fourth paper 

 Professor Carver takes for his title the "'Conservation of Human Re- 

 sources." As always, he is delightfully lucid, entertaining, and at his 

 ease. He writes with obvious enjoyment, not to say joyousness; had 

 economics always been dealt with in this manner, it could never have 

 been called the dismal science. He writes also with a sort of careless 

 freedom from the trammels which a conventional treatment of his 

 subject-matter would naturally have imposed. It is the unexpected 

 and the overlooked which particularly attract him. He is like a good 

 dinner guest, giving us table talk that is keen, discriminating, humor- 

 ous, and challenging. Not that he trifles with his subject; he is amply 

 grounded in it, though he bears his learning lightly ; but he handles it 

 with a zest akin to playfulness and with a cultivated casualness of 

 method that leaves no suspicion of an attempt at systematic presenta- 

 tion of his thought. Hence the reader can count on much entertain- 

 ment as he turns the pages in which Professor Carver expounds essen- 

 tially orthodox economic dogma, though sugar-coated, in discoursing 

 of wastes of human energ}-; of idleness, ignorance, dishonesty, and 

 vice ; of wise and unwise investors and our urgent social need of wise 

 ones; of "rational consumption"; and so to his "conclusion," which is 

 perhaps as appropriate here as it would be anywhere else. It is a 

 chapter of two paragraphs, characteristically summarized by the author 

 under the headings "Why it is better to tell the truth than to tell lies" 

 (though the paragraph concerns mainly the social desirability of having 

 private property secure and the pros and cons of inherited wealth) and 

 "\'arious types of nation-builders." 



Thus the real issues of conservation — the social causes of poverty, 

 disease, crime, and the means available for their amelioration — are 

 passed over. We need not quarrel with Professor Carver for having 

 done this, especially since he gave us fair warning, in the third sen- 

 tence of his introduction, that it was his purpose "to present some 

 phases of the problem which are commonly overlooked in current trea- 

 tises rather than to cover the whole field." None the less, such a treat- 



