Books

THE National Home Library Foundation, publishers of the Jacket Library, has brought our anew, in book form, under the title of “Other People Money,” the series of arricles which appeared in 1913 in Harper’s Weekly by Louis D. Brandeis, now Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Some of the particular financial statistics which were valid in 1913 may now be outdated, but in the light of the events that have occurred in American ifnance and industry between 1913 and 1914, “Other People’s Money” shows an almost prophetic insight.

“Other People’s Money” is a calm and judicial, but none the less eloquent, indictment of what the banking oligarchs of the United States do with, literally, other people’s money. Many have called Justice Brandies, before and after his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court bench, a radical, but as a matter of fact the spirit manifested in his book is that of a conservative, in the sense of one wishing to conserve. It is the backers who are represented as the radicals, in the sense that they are the wreckers. In his next to last chapter. The Failure of Banker-Management, we see revealed the whole error of bankers managing business, through the data revealing the manner in which the New Haven was wrecked by its bankers. in his last chapter, The Ineffciency of the Oligarchs, he points out why the big bankers who sit on the bords of industries and determine policies are unfitted to operate these industries because they are more frequently thinking of the stock market effects on their action, or decision, than of any other effect. Bankers managing indusry more often than not abuse their inside control for private profit, as bankers. The chapter on Interlocking Directorates gives us examples, calm but graphic, of what bankers may and can do to use their power in industry for private gain and public dis-service. Indeed, the whole burden of the book is a plea for freedom for American business.

Much of the book was composed after the Pujo Committee, of which Mr. Samuel Untermyer was attorney, had brought to light many details of the manner in which American business was ander the control of investment bankers working with other people’s money. Much of the quoted statistics is derived from its published evidence and conclusions. The chapter entitled How the Combiners Combine tells us how bankers proced to get their supple fingers about the throats of businesses which they wish to control.

Many of the persons data about whose directorships, fortues and sums and corporations controlled make up the basis of this book are now dead-the elder Baker the elder Morgan, the elder Stillman-but the principles on which their sons are operating are the same. Recent events have reduced somewhat the power of the o’erweeningly proud financial institutions which played ducks and drakes with American business.

“The devil was sick, the devil a monk would be.” The National City Bank, for example, recently cleaned house because the public revelations about some of its deals were injuring its good name; while the Chase National Bank voted to divorce itself from its investment affiliate. In fact the boom years, conservative bankers who watched the banks and business riding for the fall which this book, if they read it aright, predicted.

“Other People’s Money” is easily worth its price if only for the introduction by Norman Hapgood on Louis D. Brandois, “Prophet and Statesman.”

WHO EDITED THE TALMUD?

It is a commonplace among Orthodox Jews well versed inthe Talmud that there is nothing new under the sun but can be found mentioned in this “great Rabbinical thesaurus,” to quote the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, “which grew up during the first four or six centuries of the Christian Era, and, with the Old Testament. became the ‘Bible’ of the Jews and the chief subject of their subequent literary activity.” Dr. Julius Kaplan, in his “The Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud” (Bloch Publishing Company) contends that even the informantion about the redaction or editing of this great work is to be found in the Talmud itself. Says the author in Chapter I of the book:

“The material of the Talmud has been accumulated in the course of centuries and in centers of learning distant from one another. How, and by whom, was that material collected and arranged? What were the editorial principles that determined the incorporation of some parts and the elimination of others? These and many others are problems that still remain to be solved.”

Dr. Kaplan takes up, one by one, the conclusions arrived at by such scholars as H. Graetz, the great Jewish historian; Z. Franke, S. J. Rapoport, N. Bruell, I. H. Weiss, I. Halevi and W. Jawitz-and picks out flaws and inconsistencies in all of them. He then proceeds to quote numerous passages from the Talmud in support of his theory that it contains sufficient clews as to who its editors were. Thus, for instance, he points out R. Ashi as the autor of the framework of the Talmud, substantiating his proof by a number of quotaions from the work under analysis. It is to be regratted, from the point of view of the lay reader, that all passages of the Talmud, so that one not acquainted with it is not in a position of judge of the validity of the author’s arguments. There is no doubt therefore that the work is intended for the Talmudical scholar, Jewish as well as non-Jewish, but that it is a book of great merit is clearly evident from thedignified, expert and exhaustive manner in which Dr. Kapian marshals his proofs and the painstaking care with the book has been planned and brought out. A word of praise for the publishers will also not be out of place, for the technical perfection of this book the manufacturing of which must have been rendered doubly difficult by having a goodly third of it set up in Hebrew characters.