As a guide-book, The Fishing Tourist is not without value, for a work on this plan was needed. An unfortunate spirit of exaggeration seems, however, to pervade the narrative. What remarkable good luck a man must have who kills a four-pound trout at Bartlett's! How fortunate is he who can make an average of two-pound trout in a New Hampshire river! Our experience teaches us that it is dangerous to guarantee that no trout under ten ounces will be found in the Tabasintoc, though one might say that of the Novelle, another New Brunswick river. When Mr. Hallock states that the trout in the "Big Woods" of Wisconsin are lamentably ignorant of the angler's wiles, he must be referring to a remote period: we find them now very wide awake, and meet almost as many anglers on Rush River as on the Raquette.
Mr. Prime's book is a very pleasant one. Evidently the work of a scholar, it indulges in none of those spasmodic efforts of eloquence which are the joy of the newspaper correspondent. Perhaps there is something too much of the Iskander Effendi and the Sea of Galilee to be congruous with the St. Regis and Franconia Notch, but the dialogue is natural, the fishing adventures are painted with a modest brush, the trout are not incredibly large or numerous, and the whole tone of the book is well suited to summer reading, when, on your return from a long tramp by the river-side, you wish to take your ease in the society of a sympathizing author. Mr. Prime treats of well-known resorts, the much-whipped St. Regis lakes and the depleted streams of Connecticut and New Hampshire, but even among these familiar scenes he is able to find something new, or at least they are described in a fresh and lively way. The book is worthy to rest on the same shelf with Walton, Davy, Wilson, and the other classics of the angler's library. There are some sketches of fly-fishing in European waters which will be interesting to American anglers, and there is much pleasant talk about old books.
Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. By Walter Bagehot. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.
In England, as in America, notes are a legal tender, the Bank of England notes corresponding in that respect to our greenbacks. An American banker is safe if he have enough greenbacks to pay all probable demands, though the value of these changes as our government chooses to enlarge or contract the issue. The number of attainable bank-notes is not so elastic, however, in England as with us: the issue department of the Bank of England is limited, by an act of Parliament passed in 1844, to fifteen millions of pounds. For the last few years that bank, in addition to its fifteen millions in notes, has retained something like twenty millions in coin. It has not uniformly, though, been so rich: three times since 1847 its banking department has been reduced to a figure of three million pounds or under. On these occasions "Peel's Act" has been suspended to tide over the affairs of the embarrassed bank, and its business could not have survived if the law had not been broken. The bank which has thus three times practically given out in a quarter of a century is, however, so thoroughly protected by prestige, by national and international confidence, that it is the custodian of the reserves belonging to all Lombard street and to all the country banks of England, as well as those of Scotch and Irish bankers. And "since the Franco-German war," says Mr. Bagehot, "we may be said to keep the European reserve also." All great communities have at times to pay large sums in cash, and of that cash a great store must be kept somewhere. Formerly, there were two such stores in Europe: one was the Bank of France, and the other the Bank of England. But since the suspension of specie payments by the Bank of France its use as a reservoir of specie is at an end: no one can draw a cheque on it and be sure of getting gold for it. Accordingly, the whole liability for such international payments in cash is thrown on the Bank of England. The accumulations secured ultimately by this bank represent a remarkable share of the national wealth. England is the only European country where small savers commit their money to custody: France has never recovered from the timidity consequent on Law's failure, and still hoards its petty sums in stockings; Holland and Germany have never felt secure from invasion. England alone trusts its whole gain to a bank, and demands interest for it. The vast amount of idle gold distributed through the homes of France and Germany is not tangible, is not money "of the money market." The hoards of France can only be tempted from their torpor by a vast national misfortune and by a great loan in French securities. But the English money is borrowable money. The British are bold lenders, and even if they were not so, the mere fact that their money lies in a bank makes it far more obtainable. Millions in the hand of a banker are a power, whereas distributed through a nation they cannot be asked for, and are no power at all. It is thus that Lombard street stands ready to lend to all civilized or partly civilized governments at different rates, and builds railways in indigent states all over the world. For, though "English bankers are not themselves very great lenders to foreign countries, they are great lenders to those who lend." Rude and poor countries and undeveloped! colonies find in Lombard street a fund into which they may dip at a suitable premium, and thus possess a chance of material felicity which was never the privilege of any previous epoch. This vast machine, however, the legacy of unnumbered years, is not an ideally perfect custodian of the wealth entrusted to it. The reforms called for by a long experience are what the most important part of Mr. Bagehot's volume is devoted to. Some permanent and skilled authority to rule the bank is the principal novelty suggested; but the French plan will not do for England. The direct appointment of a governor by the Crown would not lessen the difficulty. The American law, saying that each national bank shall have a fixed proportion of cash to its liabilities, Mr. Bagehot considers one of many reforms which the English could not adopt if they would: "in a sensitive state of the British money-market the near approach to the legal limit of reserve would be a sure incentive to panic." The difficulties of remodeling such an institution as the Bank of England are the most curiously developed portion of Mr. Bagehot's treatise, where all is curiously and intelligently handled. The book is interesting to outsiders as well as to professionals.
Wau-Ban: The Early Day in the North-west. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
This is a reprint, in a condensed and convenient form, of a work written some twenty years ago by Mrs. John H. Kinzie of Chicago. It is a real contribution to the early history of the North-west, and contains enough of romantic adventure to form the basis of half a dozen novels. The story of the massacre of Chicago in 1812 is one of the most thrilling in American history, and it is here told by an eye-witness. Still, it is difficult to realize that sixty years ago a wagon-load of children were tomahawked by Indians in what is now the heart of the great City of the Lakes.
The family of Kinzie had certainly a remarkable history, beginning with the female ancestor who was captured by savages in the early history of the country, through that generation who were the founders of Chicago, down to the living representative of the family, who in 1830 entered one hundred and sixty acres of the present town at the government price, one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, and only paid for one hundred, thinking, as he said, that that quantity of land would be all he should ever want or could find a use for. The rejected portion is now worth from two to three millions of dollars. A hundred years hence, when Chicago will perhaps contain a million or two of inhabitants, the name of this family of pioneers will be as memorable as that of Winthrop in Boston or Stuyvesant in New York.
Books Received.
De Witt's Acting Plays: No. 142. Dollars and Cents: A Comedy. By L. J. Hollenius.—No. 145. First Love: A Comedy. From the French of Eugene Scribe. By L. J. Hollenius. New York: R. M. De Witt.