the profits, and have a right to examine the books and accounts, be present at inventories, and exercise other prerogatives of a partner. Public companies could formerly only be constituted by a direct authorisation of the government. A first step was made towards liberty of association for commercial affairs by a law of 1863 which permitted their formation without authorisation, provided that their capital did not exceed 20,000,000 francs. That law was followed by one of the 24th July 1867, in sixty-seven articles, which forms the substance of the present legislation on public companies, with some modifications introduced by a law of 1893. As in the English law, a minimum number of seven founders is necessary for the formation of a company. The statutes must be deposited at the tribunal of commerce, or, where none exists, at the mairie of the locality, and be published with the documents annexed in one of the journals appointed for the insertion of legal notices. Under the law of 1867 shares could not be of a less nominal value than 100 francs (£4) when the capital did not exceed 200,000 francs (£8000); nor less than 500 francs (£20) if above 200,000 francs. The whole of the capital had to be subscribed and one-fourth be paid up before the company was constituted. By the law of 1893 shares may be of as small a value as 25 francs (£1) if the capital is not above 200,000 francs, but in that case the whole must be paid. With a capital exceeding 200,000 francs shares must not be of a lesser nominal value than 100 francs, but payment of one-fourth on allotment is sufficient. The law of 1893 modified that

Or

of 1867 on some other important points. Previously, shares might be converted by a vote of a general meeting from registered shares to shares to bearer, and the original holders only remained liable for the uncalled part of the capital for two years from the date of the meeting. By the law of 1893 shares must remain nominative until fully paid up. dinary shares given in part or whole payment for a business converted into a company cannot be negotiated for two years from the date of the constitution of the company. That provision was not contained in the law of 1867, and by an omission, probably not intended, the prohibition in the law of 1893 does not apply to founders' shares. The statutes of a company fix the number of shares to be held, rarely less than twenty-five, to give the holder a right to attend and vote in meetings of proprietors. Holders of a lesser number were not represented, but a clause in the new law permits them to put their shares together to make up the required number and appoint one of themselves to act as their delegate. Foreign companies whose shares are dealt in on the French market, or which have an agency in France, must appoint an approved representative, a French

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SOCIOLOGY. See SOCIAL SCIENCE. SOCMEN. Manorial tenants who were free in status, though their land was not held by charter like that of a freeholder, but was secured to them by custom. They paid a fixed rent for the virgate, or part of a virgate, which they generally held, and, taking the Peterborough socmen as samples, they were bound to render farm produce, such as fowls and eggs, at stated seasons; to lend their plough teams thrice in winter and spring; to mow and carry hay; to thresh, harrow, and do other farm work for one day; and to help at harvest for one or two days. These services, contrasted with the WEEK-WORK of a VILLEIN, were little more than nominal, and are comparable to those of the RADMANNI (q.v.). The Peterborough socmen reappear under the Descriptio Militum of the abbey, where it is said that they served cum militibus; but this appears to be exceptional. Socmen were, like libere tenentes, frequently liable to MERCHET, HERIOT, and TALLAGE.

Their tenure was the origin of the free socage, common in the 13th century, and now the prevailing tenure of land in England; for socmen held by a fixed money payment and by a fixed, though trivial, amount of base services which would ultimately disappear by commutation.

All socmen, as customary tenants, required the intervention of the steward of the manor in transfers or sales of their rights.

About 23,000 socmen appear in Domesday, of whom one-half were in Lincolnshire and the remainder mainly in the other Danish counties; but later records show them all over England living under the soke or jurisdiction of lords, paying rent and taking a nominal share in the cultivation of their manors. Some tenants in capite held of the king by free socage, but were scarcely socnen, while a few true socmen appear to have held considerable estates with villeins upon them. A few socmen, on the other hand, could not leave the manors in which they were settled, that is, could not sell their holdings.

An inquisition of the time of Edward I., now in the public record office, distinguishes the three classes of manorial tenants above the villeins as freeholders per cartam; freeholders who are called freesokemen; and socmen who are called MOLMEN (q.v.).

Two other varieties of socmen are found. Bond socmen, who appear to have differed from freesokemen only in the fact that they gave labour in lieu of rent; and villein socmen

[Vinogradoff, Villainage in England; Chronicon Petroburgense, Camden Soc., app. p. 159.]

R. H.

SODEN, FRIEDRICH JULIUS HEINRICH REICHSGRAF VON (1754-1831) was born at Ansbach. He studied law at Erlangen and afterwards at Jena and Altdorf. He was employed in the department of justice in his native state until it, with Bayreuth, was given over to Prussia in 1792. Before this, in 1790, in consideration of his services, he had been made a count of the empire. He was a Prussian official till 1796, when from a divergence between his views and those of the government on German politics, he retired to his estates, and devoted himself for the rest of his life chiefly to dramatic authorship, to the patronage of the theatre and the creation or support of other public institutions, and to the study of political economy, which he took up by desire of Karl Friedrich of Baden. In 1825-27 he represented the circle of the Upper Main in the second chamber of the Bavarian diet.

Soden was a very prolific, as well as versatile, writer; his works fill eighty vols., dealing with a great variety of subjects. His principal work is his National-Oekonomie, 9 vols. 1805-24, which arose out of a review of Garve's translation of the Wealth of Nations which he had been requested to undertake. He is one of those who, when the principles of Adam Smith had been made known in Germany, adopting them in the main, sought either to present them in a more systematic form or by a critical revision to fix more exactly the fundamental conceptions of the science. Soden stands essentially on the basis of Smith's doctrine, which, however, he does not always represent correctly; he rejects the mercantilist views, and condemns prohibitions and high duties on imports or exports, but is not an unconditional advocate of the free trade principle. He depreciates unduly the Wealth of Nations in regard to its form and style, speaking of it as utterly wanting in orderly arrangement, so as to be only a series of "precious fragments," and as marred by obscurity and ambiguity. He also censures Smith as not possessing a grasp of the whole subject, and as too narrowly English in his ideas. COSSA avenges Smith by describing Soden himself as "obscure, prolix, and inclined to merely verbal disputes.

It

Born in Hamburg, 23rd November 1814, the son of a prosperous merchant of that city, he studied at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen, taking his doctor's (Ph.D.) degree at Göttingen in 1837, having given special attention to philosophy and history. After his return to his native city he began studying the Hamburg customs' regulations, Hamburg being at that time a free Hanseatic city. was the published results of this work that started Soetbeer in his career as an economist and brought him successively the offices of librarian (1840) and secretary (1843) of the Hamburg chamber of commerce. In these important positions he rendered great and well-recognised service to the cause of good statistics by his methods in the editorship of the statistical publications on Hamburg commerce. After the Frankfurt parliament in 1848, in which he took part, he was for a time connected with the Magdeburg chamber of commerce as "Kammerkonsulant" and later again in Hamburg. In 1872 he returned to Göttingen, where he lived quietly as honorary professor of the university, restricting his work and lectures to his special studies on monetary topics.

Undoubtedly Prof. Soetbeer was well versed in general economic literature, as may be inferred from the fact that he made a very satisfactory translation of John Stuart MILL'S Political Economy with critical notes; but since 1846, when he published his Denkschrift über Hamburgs Münzverhältnisse (published in Hamburg 1846, but reprinted in numbers 13, 14, and 15 of the weekly supplements to the stock exchange list, Hamburg, 1850), he showed a decided and ever increasing interest for monetary studies, and it is in this line that he rendered the greatest service to the economic literature of his time.

He was always a gold monometallist. Where he lived and worked he saw most plainly the evils caused by the current silver coins, which lacked uniformity, throughout the various German states before their unification, and he knew well Germany's loss in the commercial world, due to her unfavourable position in foreign exchanges. He believed that Germany could compete with England in foreign commerce if she had as stable and sure a monetary system, and because England's coinage was on a gold basis Germany's must be also. To accomplish this was Soetbeer's dream long before the German coinage acts of 1871-78 became a possibility. Almost alone in the early battles, he fought for gold coinage when he had nearly all the powerful commercial and political forces against him, and he well deserved the name that was later given him,

"father of the German gold coinage." The success of his project once assured, after so many long and hard battles to obtain it, and later to maintain it, it is not to be expected that he would agree to any proposal to destroy the work he had done, even if changed conditions made its expediency doubtful. He therefore was among the first to call in question the results of the researches of the celebrated Vienna geologist, Eduard Suess, whose Zukunft des Goldes in 1877, with its gloomy predictions for the future of the production of gold, spread general alarm in economic circles. Yet Soetbeer knew better than many of his less liberal followers the evil effects of the continued fall in the value of silver. He gave every plan for attaining to a qualified restitution of its former purchasing power careful consideration, always, however, with the determination that no change should receive his approval which would disturb the single gold standard as a monetary basis. Shortly before his death he made suggestions to various conferences proposing plans by which silver should be given as large a place in the world's coinage as would be, according to his opinion, consistent with the maintenance of the single gold basis. He and Prof. Suess discussed, on the most friendly terms, all possible proposals to prevent the continued fall in the gold price of silver, though Soetbeer would never have agreed to Suess's suggestion of a single silver standard, nor did he have any faith in the soundness or possibility of the

bimetallic solution.

Soetbeer's literary activity was really astonishing. His independent and noteworthy publica

tions number over one hundred. Besides these

he published much in newspapers and periodicals. A fairly complete list of his works is to be found with some biographical references in Schmidt's article on Soetbeer in Conrad's Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (bd. 5, p. 692, Jena, 1893). The most important are as follows:

1. Materialien zur Erläuterung und Beurteilung der wirtschaftlichen Edelmetallverhältnisse und der Währungsfrage, Berlin, 1885. Second and enlarged edition, Berlin, 1886. The second edition is translated into English and published in the appendix to the final report of the gold and silver commission, London, 1888, price 2s. 6d. Another English translation, made by Prof. Taussig of Harvard University, is to be found in the United States consular reports, special report, entitled Bimetallism in Europe, Washington, Dec. 1887. There is a French translation by Ringeisen, Nancy, 1889. 2. "Edelmetallgewinnung und Verwendung in den Jahren 1881-90."

Con

rad's Jahrbücher, folio 3, band 1, Jena, 1891. 3. Edelmetallproduktion und Wertverhältniss zwischen Gold und Silber seit der Entdeckung Amerikas bis zur Gegenwart. Gotha, 1879. 4. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Geld- und Münzwesens in Deutschland, 1-3 Abschnitt (Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, 1 und 2 bd.) Göttingen, 1861 and 1862, 4 Absch. same collection, vols.

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3 and 4, Göttingen, 1864. 5. Denkschrift betreffend die Einführung der Goldwährung in Deutschland mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Hamburger Bankvaluta, Hamburg, 1856. 6. Andeutung in Bezug auf die vermehrte Goldproduktion_und ihren Einfluss, Hamburg, 1852. 7. Zur Frage der deutschen Münzeinheit, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die abweichenden Währungen in Hamburg und Bremen. Heidelberg Handelstag, 1861. Printed as manuscript for the 8. "Bericht über die bevorstehende Münzreform; gegen die vorgeschlagene Doppelwährung. Der Uebergang zur Goldwährung" (Aufsätze in Bremer Handelsblatt, No. 899, 924-927), Bremen, 1869. See also a paper with similar title in proceedings of the twelfth congress of German economists held at Lübeck in 1871. Proceedings published, Berlin 1872. 9. "Die Wirkung der Silberentwerthung,' Conrad's Jahrbücher, 1884, Jena. 10. Deutsche Münzverfassung. Mit Erläuterungen versehen von Soetbeer. This important collection of German monetary laws with Soetbeer's interesting notes and explanations, and an introduction of thirtyfour pages, bears no date nor mark of place of publication (Erlangen, 1874-76) 11. Litteraturnachweis über Geld- und Münzwesen, Berlin, 1892. The most complete bibliography of monetary literature extant but less complete on the side of the English literature than on that of the German.

[See articles on INDEX NUMBERS; PRICES, HISTORY OF, 1850-1896; SILVER, DISCOVERIES OF; SOETBEER'S TABLE OF PRICES; TABULAR STANDARD.] S. M'C. L.

SOETBEER'S TABLE OF PRICES. In the able work entitled Materials toward the Eluciseventh part of Dr. Adolph SOETBEER's remarkdation of the Economic Conditions affecting the Precious Metals and the Question of Standards,1 he has devoted a quarter of his book to a discussion of variations in general prices and in the purchasing power of gold. The work was prepared at the request of the Society for Preserving the Economic Interests of Trade and Manufactures, and is an impartial collection of statistical data rather than an argument for any particular view of the money question. Dr. Soetbeer's previous publications on the precious metals, dealing more particularly with the disputed statistics of the production of gold and silver, were characterised by such painstaking methods that his price statistics were accepted at once as authoritative guides in all subsequent discussions.

1 Materialien zur Erläuterung und Beurteilung der wirtschaftlichen Edelmetallverhältnisse und der Währungsfrage. Herausgeg. vom Vorstande des Vereins zur Wahrung der wirtschaftlichen Interessen v. Handel und Gewerbe. Berlin, 1885, 4mo. "Zweite vervollständigte Ausgabe," Berlin, 1886. Graphische Darstellungen in Bezug auf die Silberfrage. Ausgearbeitet von H. Soetbeer, Berlin, 1886. An English translation of the second edition, together with the charts prepared by the son of Dr. Adolph Soetbeer, was made by Prof. F. W. Taussig, and published in the United States Consular Report, No. 87, for December 1887. Another translation into English has been published in the appendix to the final report of the royal commission appointed to inquire into the recent changes in the relative values of the precious metals, London, 1888. This translation does not include the charts.

large number of articles on the ground that it involves the assigning of too great importance to articles of which only small quantities, if any at all, enter into average consumption.

Dr. Soetbeer's figures can be continued from the same sources down to 1888, but in that year Hamburg joined the German customs union, and entry was made henceforth only of articles coming into Hamburg by sea. Therefore the figures for years since 1888 are not strictly comparable with those in the Soetbeer tables. Dr. Heinz, director of the Hamburg chamber of commerce, has estimated the corrections necessary to be made in order to use this material up to the year 1891; (see U. S. Senate Report on Wholesale Prices, 1893, vol. i. p. 258 ff.); but such estimates are necessarily unsatisfactory. Dr. Heinz has also revised the data for the years 1851-1888, so as to give the prices of about 180 articles based on the sea importations. This constitutes, however, a new series of prices for those years, because several of the articles included in the Soetbeer tables are not given in Dr. Heinz's list. His list is continued down to 1895 in the last report of Hamburg's Handel und Schiffart (1895), and will doubtless be given in subsequent reports (Dr. Heinz's tables are also given in Exhibit A, vol. i. of U. S. Senate Report, 1893).

In an article entitled "Veränderung im Niveau der allgemeinen Waarenpreise in den Jahren 1881-1889" (Conrad's Jahrbücher, neue folge, bd. 21, 1890), Dr. Soetbeer spoke less confidently of index numbers, and maintained that the number of articles is always too small. As the basis of this discussion he took the latest statistics of the German empire, giving the export and import value of goods for the whole German customs union since 1881 (published by Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt). The values are not those given in the invoices, nor those estimated at the time of entry as at Hamburg, but are calculated by a commission of experts in the leading lines of trade which is called together periodically to make reports to the bureau.

Values were

assigned to 933 articles by 39 experts (Sachverständiger) (see Band LX. der Statistik der deutschen Reiches). Soetbeer took the total value of the imports and exports for the year 1881, and deducted all duties paid on imports and bounties on exports, and compared the result with the total value of imports and exports similarly calculated for 1882 by placing the 1881 prices for the 1882 quantities. He found that the value of imports fell off 6.5 million marks or about 2 per cent, and that exports increased 23.2 million marks or about 7 per cent.

443

Combining exports and imports, there was a net increase of 0.3 per cent, which amount, according to Soetbeer, is a fair measure of the change in the purchasing power of the standard of value. Adhering to the same method for the several years up to 1889, he got the results given above. Dr. Soetbeer in all his statistical work was extremely painstaking and eminently fair. Many students in all countries looked to him for reliable data concerning the production and consumption of the precious metals and the course of general prices, and still regret that no one has continued his work along the same lines, in the same comprehensive and thorough manner.

S. M'C. L.

The place of Soetbeer's tables in England is practically taken by those of the Economist and of Mr. Sauerbeck, who by communicating his calculations to the public press every month. has done a great service to statistical enquiry.

See also A. Sauerbeck's Course of Average Prices of General Commodities in England. P. S. King and Son, 1908.

SOFT MONEY.

A term occasionally given

to notes (paper money), whether used by government or otherwise, especially applied to the green-back" circulation of the United States. This was "first issued in 1862, in the amount of $150,000,000 (£30,000,000), as a measure of resource, the recognised alternative being the selling of government bonds below par in gold " (Prof. F. A. Walker, Money, 1878, p. 369). One issue followed another with great rapidity owing to the civil war. In July 1864 the green-back currency was worth but 35 cents. to the dollar, "but at least it maintained its currency as the general medium of exchange unimpaired from the moment when it was first issued, whether wisely or mistakenly, under the stress of war down to the moment when it was made equal in value to gold by the patience of the American people, and the courage and constancy of the present secretary of the treasury" (John Sherman, 1878).

[F. A. Walker, Money, Trade, and Industry, 1880.]

...

SOKE. In the custumary of the manor and soke of Rothley (Archæologia, xlvii. 128), a soke is defined as secta ad homagium in curia secundum consuetudines regni; and it is seen that free socmen, whose holdings were scattered all over the country, owed suit to the manorial court of Rothley. The same is apparent from the lists of suitors at the courts of the abbey of Ramsey given in full in the cartulary (i. 41-43). A soke was thus a jurisdiction over free tenants without as well as within a manor. It was derived in many cases from a royal grant, as for instance that of the soka Fraunchewyl mentioned in the Rot. Hundred., ii. 180; but in others the origin cannot be traced (see SOKEMANEMOT). R. H.

SOKEMANEMOT. A manorial court attended by free sokemen mentioned in the Rotuli