Belford's Magazine, Vol II, No. 10, March 1889

To turn to English masterpieces, there are parts of Fielding's "Amelia," which for tenderness, sweetness, and rendering of character and of home life I think finer than anything more modern; but other parts of the book are so unpleasant that I cannot place it first. I think I must plead guilty to four equal favorites: "Amelia," "Esmond," "The Mill on the Floss," and "Villette;" but perhaps I might tell you to-morrow that I place "Vanity Fair" above "Esmond," and prefer "Middlemarch" to "The Mill on the Floss." Still I think to-day's choice is best, so I will stick to it.

It is impossible to know all one's reasons for preferring some books to others – the style, the diction, the subtle way in which the writer makes you feel many things he has left unsaid elude description; and one's own frame of mind when the book first became known may have a great deal to do with it. Unconsciously association has much to do with one's preferences. It is for the character of Amelia, and the charm of her relations with her husband, that I like this novel. Some of the scenes and dialogues between these two are to my mind perfect, absolutely true and beautiful and satisfying. "Esmond" is certainly very inferior to "Amelia" in point of illusion; one always is conscious that one is reading, and the characters are like people we have heard of, or who are at least absent from us; but Harry Esmond is, to my mind, the finest gentleman in English fiction, none the less noble for his little self-conscious air. I have always wondered why he is less popular than Col. Newcome. Except perhaps Warrington he is Thackeray's noblest male character; and "Esmond" is, I take it, the best constructed of Thackeray's novels, and exquisitely written. It is only because there is no woman worthy of the name of heroine that I cannot like this novel best of all. For the reverse reason, that there is no hero, I cannot place "The Mill on the Floss" quite first. Maggie is a beautiful creation, and the picture of English country-life inimitable; the Dodsen family in all its branches is truly masterly. But for deep insight into the heart and soul and mind of a woman where will you find Charlotte Brontë's equal? Her descriptive power and her style are unsurpassable, and Lucy Snowe can teach you more about the thoughts and griefs and unaccountable nervous miseries and heart-aches of the average young woman than any other heroine in fiction that I know of. There is no episode that I am aware of, of such heartfelt truth as that wretched summer holiday she passed alone at Madame Beck's. And every character in the book is excellent; and as for the manner of it, it seems wrung from the very heart of the writer.

    F. Mabel Robinson.

From Mr. W. Clark Russell

Dear Sir: I hardly know what to say in response to your question as to my favorite work of fiction. I am afraid I must go so far back as Defoe, of whose "Colonel Jack" and "Moll Flanders" I never weary. Amongst modern writers I greatly admire Blackmore, Hardy, and Besant. There is great genius and originality, too, in Christie Murray. But with Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mrs. Gaskell, and the Brontë's on my shelves, the indication of any one work of fiction as my favorite since the days of "Roxana," "Pamela," "Joseph Andrews," and "Humphrey Clinker," would prove an undertaking which I fear I have not the courage to adventure.

    W. Clark Russell.

From Mr. J. Henry Shorthouse

Sir: Your question seems to me to be a difficult, or I might almost say, an impossible one to answer. I do not see how a man of any carefulness of thought or decision can have one favorite work of fiction. To answer your question as simply as possible, I should say that of foreign books my favorites are "Don Quixote" and the novels of Goethe and Jean Paul Richter.

As regards English fiction, I should, I think, place George Eliot's "Silas Marner" first, both as a work of art and as fulfilling, to me, all the needs and requirements of a work of fiction; but I could not say this unless I may be allowed to bracket with this book Nathaniel Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables," Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford," Jane Austen's "Persuasion," Mrs. Ritchie's "Story of Elizabeth," and William Black's "Daughter of Heth" – all of which books seem to me to stand in the very first rank, and not only to fulfil the requirements of the human spirit, but to stand the much more difficult test of being, each of them, perfect as a whole.

    J. Henry Shorthouse.

From Mr. W. Westall

Dear Sir: You ask for the title of my favorite work of fiction. I answer that I have no one favorite work of fiction. Among the myriad novels which I have read there is none of excellence so supreme that I prefer it before all others. On the other hand, I have favorite novels – a dozen or so; I have never reckoned them up. These I will enumerate as they occur to me: "Don Quixote," "Tom Jones," "Ivanhoe," "The Heart of Midlothian," "Jane Eyre," "David Copperfield," "Tale of Two Cities," "Esmond," "Vanity Fair," "Adam Bede," "Lorna Doone," "Crime and Punishment" (Dostoieffsky), "Monte Cristo," and "Froment Jeune et Risler Ainé."

I do not suggest that these novels are of equal literary merit. I merely say that they are my favorites, that I have read them all with equal pleasure more than once, and that, as time goes on, I hope to read them again.

    W. Westall.
    J. A. Stewart.

A QUEEN'S EPITAPH

[IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]

"And her chief charm was bashfulness of face."

There lay the others: some whose names were writ
In dust – and, lo! the worm hath scattered it.

There lay the others: some whose names were cut
Deep in the stone below which Death is shut.

The plumèd courtier, with his wit and grace,
So flattered one that scarce she knew her face!

And the sad after-poet (dreaming through
The shadow of the world, as poets do)

Stops, like an angel that has lost his wings,
And leans against the tomb of one and sings

The old, old song (we hear it with a smile)
From towers of Ilium and from vales of Nile.

But she, the loveliest of them all, lies deep,
With just a rude rhyme over her fair sleep.

(Why is the abbey dark about her prest?
Her grave should wear a daisy on its breast.

Nor could an age of minster music be
Worth half a skylark's hymn for such as she.)

With one rude rhyme, I said; but that can hold
The sweetest story that was ever told.

For, though, if my Lord Christ account it meet
For us to wash, sometimes, a pilgrim's feet,

Or slip from purple raiment and sit low
In sackcloth for a while, I do not know;

Yet this I know: when sweet Queen Maud lay down,
With her bright head shorn of its charm of crown

(A hollow charm at best, aye, and a brief —
The rust can waste it, as the frost the leaf),

She left a charm that shall outwear, indeed,
All years and tears – in this one rhyme I read.

    Sarah M. B. Piatt.

THE COST OF THINGS

"Papa, why does bread cost so much money?" asks a child, of its father. Perhaps if the father is indifferent, indolent, or ignorant, he may dodge the question and reply, "Because flour is so scarce." But if he is a thinking and observant man, willing to instruct an ignorant child asking a very natural question, he will not content himself with such a reply, for he must have observed that bread is sometimes high when wheat and flour are very plentiful.

By drawing on his experience he will not fail to recall the fact that, in a season when any particular article is in much demand, the price of that article will rise and will continue to rise until the demand for the article induces a supply of it from outside sources.

Let him recall Christmas and Thanksgiving times, when, for instance, turkeys are in demand. If the supply is light, up goes the price of turkeys; and, if the demand increases, the price will continue to rise unless some means are found of supplying the demand. If turkeys flow into the market of a city from the surrounding country, the rise in price is first checked, and then, as the supply increases, the price falls, and the demand being less than the supply, the price goes to its lowest figure. This is in accordance with the recognized law of supply and demand, the relation between the two always establishing the price.

If the demand is greater than the supply, the price will go up; if the supply is greater than the demand, the price will go down. But this state of things can exist only where the inflow of supply and the outflow of demand are free and unrestricted; for if, from any cause, restriction is placed on the inflow, the outflow will be restricted just in the same way. We may liken the operation of the law to what happens when a bent tube with the ends up is filled with water. If, now, more water is poured in at one end, that same amount will flow out at the other. If the whole capacity of the tube at one end is used to supply water, just that amount will run out at the other; but if one-half the tube at the supply end is plugged up, then only one-half the capacity of the tube will run out at the other.

Reverting to the question of the supply of turkeys in a market, let us suppose that a despot, ungoverned by anything but his own will, is in charge of the city when the turkey market is held, and of the surrounding country, and, wishing to have a plentiful supply of turkeys, he issues his ukase that every turkey within ten miles of the town shall, under severe penalties, be sent into market for sale. Is it not plain that the price of turkeys will at once fall, since the supply will at once become greater than the demand? But suppose this despot has turkeys of his own to sell, and hence desires to make his poor people pay the highest price for their turkeys, so that his coffers may be filled with gold. Now, instead of requiring all turkeys to come in under severe penalties, he does everything he can to keep them out, and issues his ukase that none shall come in, under penalty of death to the importer of turkeys. Is it not as plain as it was in the other case, that the price of turkeys will go up, up, up, until the vast majority of men cannot buy at all?

Suppose that, instead of placing an absolute prohibition upon the importation of turkeys, the despot, convinced that people must have turkeys, and having already arranged to buy all he wants himself, makes a law that every turkey coming into the market shall be taxed one dollar for the privilege of bringing it to market. Now, turkeys will come in if there is still a demand for them, but every one that comes in must pay a tax of a dollar; and, if there are any turkeys already in market, a dollar will be added to their price, as well as to the price of those coming in. For no importer proposes to lose the amount of the tax himself, and is bound to make the consumer pay that much additional for his turkey; and a resident turkey-dealer, seeing that imported turkeys are selling for a dollar above the market price, will at once add that to the price of his turkeys, since it is expecting too much of human nature to suppose any man is going to sell his property for less than he can get for it. The result of the despot's tax, therefore, is to raise the local price of turkeys by just the amount of that tax; and, the higher the tax, the higher the price of turkeys will be to the consumer.

In this way the price of any article in a market is established by the relation between the supply and the demand; and this law is inexorable. If the supply is restricted by taxing imports, the price, whilst higher, will still be fixed by the demand made for the article; and this applies to all articles which are salable – flesh and blood, muscle, labor, as well as to bread, meat, etc. In slavery times, when a great demand existed in the cotton-States for slave labor, slaves were imported from the more northern States, where labor was not so valuable, to the more southern ones, where it was more so; and this gave the border States the name of being the "slave-breeding States" of the Union. The increased demand for slaves threatened at one time to reopen the slave trade with Africa; and it is said that some negroes were, in fact, brought into the country. Under these circumstances, had the States (Mississippi, Louisiana, and others) where a demand for slaves existed possessed the power to lay a tax on slaves imported into them, the price of slaves in those States would have been very considerably increased.

The work of hands – labor – is a salable article, just as much as bread or meat, and its price is determined in the same way; not only as regards common labor, but also special kinds of labor. Reverting to the question at the head of this paper, – the price of bread, – let us suppose a community where all the elements of bread-making (flour, yeast, potatoes, etc.) exist in abundance, but where there is but one baker. If the demand for bread is so great that one baker will have to run his bakery night and day to supply the demand, and he can fix his own price, limited only by the number of his customers and their ability to pay (the "demand"), although he can buy his flour and other ingredients cheap, he must pay high wages to his assistants and work hard himself. As the demand for bread increases, its prices will rise until the attention of other bakers is attracted, other bakeries will be established, the supply will more nearly equal the demand, and the price of bread will fall, in accordance with the same law as governed in the case of turkeys; whilst bakers' wages, from the very fact of there being more bakers on the ground, will fall. If, notwithstanding the establishment of more bakeries, the demand still remains greater than the supply, the price of bread will still remain up, and an attempt may be made to import bread from without. If the bakers have influence enough with the law-making power, or with our supposed despot, they will have an import tax placed upon bread to keep up their prices, under the plea of "sustaining domestic industry;" but the amount of this import tax will go into the pockets of the owners of the bakeries, although the wages of their workmen will not be increased, for their wages depend, as has been shown, not on the price of bread, but upon the number of bread-making laborers available. If such laborers increase in number, the wages of the bread-makers may even go very low, though the price of bread (thanks to the import tax) may remain very high. These points are dwelt upon at length for the purpose of exposing the fallacy of a popular delusion – that…