Confessions of a Railroad Signalman. By J. O. FAGAN. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1908. Pp. 181.

All the world knows the unenviable reputation of American railroads as killers and mutilators of men. Most citizens have given considerable attention to protective devices, patent couplers, block signals and short-hour laws. Commissions have been appointed to regulate rates and report slaughter. Mr. Fagan says the public is off the scent; that commissions do not understand the technique of railroading and that managers are in secret agreement with trade unions in the interest of "harmony" to permit shameful negligence to go unpunished. The remedy is expert control by the government, public punishment of the guilty party, and rigid enforcement of discipline. The trade unions, the railroad managers and the State and federal commissioners will be heard in defense. In the meantime they are put on the defensive by a fearless man who has won a right to be heard by mastery of his field and by the devotion of a trained and philosophic mind to a problem of vital significance.

C. R. HENDERSON

The Principles of Anthropology and Sociology in Their Relations to Criminal Procedure. By MAURICE PARMELEE. York: Macmillan, 1908. Pp. 410.

New

Mr. Parmelee's book comes at a very opportune moment, for it will be a distinct aid to the movement to secure the study of anthropology and sociology by lawyers and judges. The argument is too clear and convincing to be ignored and it will make its appeal to all lawyers who have any insight whatever into the modern requirements in respect to the treatment of criminals. The suggestion in regard to a judicial board for the periodical revision of the sentences of convicts is well supported, and had already been proposed by the Amercan Prison Association in 1902.

The philosophic basis of the argument is found in the familiar ideas of Lombroso, Garofalo, and Ferri. Justice is not done to such American authors as E. C. and F. H. Wines, Z. R. Brockway and many others whose ideas are found in this book. The discussion of the jury is very impressive and convincing and his suggestions for a new criminal procedure, based upon modern social science, must win friends for these studies.

C. R. HENDERSON

The Speaking Voice. By KATHERINE JEWELL EVERTS. New York: Harper & Bros., 1908. Pp. x+218. $1.00.

Miss Everts says in her introduction:

Next to that primary instinct, the instinct for self-preservation, the strongest instinct of the human heart is for self-expression. The failure of society to provide simple and natural means of self-preservation has led to the American anarchist. The failure of education to provide for the training of the simple and natural means of self-expression has led to the American voice. We cram the student's mind with a knowledge of beauty and truth, but do not free the channels of communication and expression through which, in the act of sharing the knowledge he has acquired, the student assimilates and recreates that beauty and truth and finds it a vital force in his soul life and a vital index of his culture. . . . . Our first step then is to tune the instrument; to put the voice in proper condition for use; to learn to support, free, and re-enforce the tone which is to be converted later, not into slovenly, careless gossip, but into beautiful and effective speech.

Evidently a book undertaken in this spirit, by one who is herself a most accomplished actress and a master of the art of speaking which she here undertakes to present, has something of interest for the sociologist. The ultimate practical object of sociology is control, and speech is perhaps the most important medium through which control is secured. Words represent the whole of our cultural and mental life, and through the spoken word or the printed page we transfer to the child and to society all that life is and all that we wish it to become. The use of speech is in a real sense our method of creating the mind, for certainly the human mind in its actual condition would not exist without this aid. And certainly we have to value every effort to make speech a more effective instrument of social control.

This volume of Miss Everts is to be commended from every standpoint. It is not a technical treatment of the anatomy and physiology of the voice and has none of the tediousness and impracticability of such treatises. The whole presentation is made in admirable literary style, and this, together with the excellent judgment shown in the selection (in Part III) of the materials to be used in practice, makes a volume of interest even to those not primarily interested in the cultivation of the voice.

W. I. THOMAS

First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and a Rule of Life. By H. G. WELLS. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1908. Pp. vi+307. $1.75 net.

This time it

Mr. Wells has written another delightful book. covers everything from metaphysics to practical life. It is his personal beliefs about God, nature, and man. Taken as a whole, it may be characterized as a system of philosophical individualism. Yet Mr. Wells calls himself a socialist. It may seem paradoxical that one should base a socialistic programme upon a system of individualism in morals and metaphysics; yet in this respect Mr. Wells is at one with the radical socialists, with whom, in most other respects, he disagrees. He finds that individuality, uniqueness, is the great fact which characterizes all things, from atoms to men. The individual is the only reality. Every species is vague, every general term "goes cloudy at its edges." From this it follows that logic is a clumsy, yes, a faulty, instrument for getting at truth. "Relentless logic is only another name for stupidity." Therefore, the only test of truth is what will work for me. Truth and rightness are essentially like beauty; they are conceptions resting upon indefinable individual preferences. Thus Mr. Wells accepts a sort of individualistic pragmatism. Truth and right are not what will work in the long run, in the history of the race, but essentially what will work for me.

How this philosophy works out in practice is well shown in Mr. Wells' chapters on the family. He would have divorce by mutual consent, and he regards it as an absurdity that society should insist upon monogamy as the only permissible form of sexual relation. Still he believes in the family as "the normal group of fathers and mothers and children." From the plural, "fathers," one would infer that Mr. Wells would indorse variations of the family toward polyandry as well as toward polygyny. One wonders whether Mr. Wells is judging these questions merely from a "personal point of view," as he accuses people in general of doing, or from the point of view of the race. He certainly offers no arguments from the history of the race in support of his views.

Quite inconsistent with all this are other chapters in which Mr. Wells discusses the organization, or rather, the reorganization of human society. But a man who has thrown logic away needs not to trouble himself about consistency, and Mr. Wells would probably

agree with Emerson that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. The chapter on "Individuality an Interlude" supplies in part the needed corrective for Mr. Wells' philosophical premises; but he nowhere attempts to reconcile the two. "The race flows through us," he tells us, and individuality, so far from being the only reality, is only an incident in a greater reality. Likewise he personally conceives of duty, he tells us, as the "contributing to the development of the collective being of man," while the socialism he advocates is merely "the awakening of a collective consciousness in humanity, a collective will and a collective mind." How such social unity is consistent with such individualism in family relations and in intellectual beliefs as we noted above, Mr. Wells does not explain. It is difficult to estimate such a book from a scientific point of view. Primarily it is a literary rather than a scientific production; and it is no unkindness to say that Mr. Wells is a literary rather than a scientific man. The aesthetic element always dominates in him, even in his philosophy of society. This book, like all his writings, abounds in suggestive and elevated passages, but it is also filled with inconsistencies and with premises that would not bear searching criticism.

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

CHARLES A. ELLWOOD

Chicago City Manual. Compiled by FRANCIS A. EASTMAN, City Statistician, Bureau of Statistics, Municipal Library, 1908. The municipal statistician of Chicago has offered in this volume a list of the city officers, giving all their duties and some other facts relating to the county and state government.

C. R. HENDERSON

American Charities. By Aмos G. WARNER, PH.D., revised by MARY ROBERTS COOLIDGE, PH.D., with a biographical preface by GEO. E. HOWARD, PH.D. New York: T. Y. Crowell & Co., 1908.

It is exceedingly fortunate for the students of public and private charity that Professor Warner's noble treatise has been revised and the facts brought up to date by a very competent and sympathetic editor. Every practical worker and teacher in this field owes a debt of profound gratitude to the distinguished pioneer, and now to the

patient student who has given the work a new lease of life and a new career of usefulness as far as the English language is read. It is unnecessary, in the case of a book so well known, to repeat the table of contents. The work is recognized as indispensable for every teacher and administrator. The bibliography is a valuable feature. C. R. HENDERSON

The State and the Farmer. By L. H. BAILEY. New York: Macmillan, 1908. Pp. 177

The veteran leader of American agricultural education has discussed in clear, popular style topics of supreme interest in connection with the social life of farmers in this country. No one of the topics is very fully treated, but every chapter contains valuable suggestions from a man of ripe experience. The main details are the shift in agricultural methods and institutions, the social problems relating to rural life and the various agencies and methods for improving the situation. The fact is emphasized that the more urgent task now, is not to improve the economic condition of the farmer, but to give him a share in the larger life of the world.

C. R. HENDERSON