The Amateur Spirit It is odd what an intellectual Switzerland New England has become. Everybody finds there a mental playground. Part of these essays were written when Mr. Perry, Bliss Perry like that earlier New England moralist, Jonathan Edwards, had left New England hills for Princeton; but they all breathe a Yankee detachment and the sense of moral responsibility for the use of his time and opportunities which comes over every man in the garish marbles of the Grand Central Depot when he buys his ticket on the New York, New Haven & Hartford. Instantly your mood changes and instead of regretting that you are not a millionaire in an automobile, you begin inwardly debating whether you can work and play at the same time. In the end, on his last page, Mr. Perry decides that it makes no difference which you do as long as you catch your fish. Fly or worm are as one, if the trout lands in the basket. But before he reaches this sound conclusion, the editor of the Atlantic has discussed the Boer war, talked over the difference between an amateur and professional, told you about the college professor and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and always kept the Ten Commandments carefully pasted in the top of his hat. It is fine talk. One loves to hear it-light, pointed, elevated, stimulating-though now then you catch a whiff of that leaking steam radiator which stands in every college lecture room. cer escapes him and to face the worst, Mr. Royce's elenchic process is not the best fitted for combat with a dogmatic logician. The result is a curiously ineffective study by a man schooled in the subtleties of idealism. Mr. Royce has no great difficulty in showing that Spencer's "evolution" was a description of a method of thought and an intellectual attitude and not an explanation of the universe. He has as little in showing that Spencer in his theory of education accepted the order in which studies are useful to society as the order in which they would be most useful for individual development. The practical result was to eliminate the humanities whose "one great purpose is to open our eyes to truths which cannot be expressed in abstract form, but which can only be appreciated through a direct enjoyment of human life as it gets. portrayed in history, in literature and in art." A better defense of the value of the studies Spencer decried has not recently been made than in Mr. Royce's distinctive criticism of Spencer's theory of education. Gossippy reminiscences by James Collier close the book with a row of anecdotes. the Higher Life Wm. Rainey * President Harper, of Chicago University, is a great administrator, a good Religion and teacher, a fair scholar and a moderate speaker. He has gathered into a single small Harper volume his religious utterances before the students of the University which he has created. They touch on religion and fellowship, personal ethics, Bible study and various phases of knowledge, experience, the Bible and belief. Their one limitation is that they are vague. The book neither cuts loose from creed and relies absolutely and wholly on the inner light and the outer spiritual life, nor as serts, expounds and defines in definite shape, a clearly conceived and firmly held system. The result is an inevitable inconsistency. Old phrases are employed without accepting all that they imply. New stand for less than their meaning. But there remains the steady, consistent and sustained plea for "The religion of Jesus Christ." The solution of intellectual difficulties not by categorical argument but by spiritual experience, and the reliance upon the ethical life, as the one path to spiritual comprehension, run through all these papers, and make of them a consistent teaching. Principles * aid in great disasters from Chicago to the "Slocum" wreck. Throughout, the book has the touch of the expert. It should insist more strongly on the necessity of industrial duress to maintain the standard of work as well as of life. The Prodigal Hall Caine * Mr. Caine has combined his earlier and later method by planning his last story part in Ireland and part in London. Some pages are full of "the great lone home of nature,' "calm and white and silent," and some of the city. There are all the old creeps and some of the new ones. There is the life of a simple people and the complete existence of the musical artist. The work is serious. There is still the old capacity for flinging on the screen shadowy shapes which affect one as do No one else now writ ing can quite make you feel the old Icelandic governor who is the real hero of the book as Mr. Caine does. You may not like the art. You must admit its effective force. With London and the life there of the artist, Mr. Caine, as always, with a crowd, is less successful. The plot is simplicity itself. The solitary fresh page, as to Mr. Caine's work, is his picture of the drug-habit and here again the picture is complete. If the vogue of the past novels by him has not gone to this book it is in no small share because it is better, and no page is without its tint of interest. Dr. Edward Thomas Devine, secretary of the New York Charity Organization Society, is a leader, teacher and authority in the "new charity." elemental forces. An Iowa man graduated at that Western Oberlin, a Methodist College, Cornell, in 1887, he has studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Halle, and has been nearly 10 years in the highly specialized New York whirlpool, where you must swim well or drown. He thinks while he works. Most charityworkers, work and work hard when they think. He has written a broad general manual of charity work. It is not like Warner's "American Charities," a natural history account of various agencies of relief and classes of the relieved; but a discussion of general principles. It is a "first book" that will for many years be put into every beginner's hands in relief work. No one book will so steady the thinking of the man or woman acting on a charity society board. Its twin principles are the wisdom and social necessity of maintaining a "standard of life" and the duty of seeing to it that relief is so extended as to enable the bread-winner of a family to maintain this standard on his own earnings. Investigation is the necessary basis of such a policy. Mr. Devine reviews each phase of the application of this principle to the family, adults, children and other classes, gives 75 illustrative cases, narrates the history of relief and describes The Golden Henry * * * It is a sad moment in every aging novelist's career when his novel comes first in book-form to the reviewer, without a previous avatar in the magazines. It is never for lack of desire for periodical royalties and periodical publication. It means that the man, his style and his work no longer catch the general reader. It may be better than ever, but it is not that. A Roman prince of English experience married an American heiress, and she finds him unfaithful to discover that she has gone through a subtle change which makes her not forgiving alone; but first tolerant. and then forgiving. This takes two volumes and 789 pages. It is done perfectly. The Italian prince is a lesson in international comprehension. No one but Mr. James could give this gravity, this mentality, this command of the situation, this sobriety and the absence of all foolish and rather crude people connote with "Italian." The American girl, if less successful, has the like verisimilitude. Moreover nothing is told. All grows. The American father, too, is there and he marries and there is scene after scene, as of buying bric-a-brac, like a Dutch interior, full of room-light. But after all of this sort has been noted and appreciated, it still remains true that style was made for the novel and not the novel for style. State ownership and control are better than worse things, but only to be accepted as a necessary evil. Regulation, Mr. McVey accepts as necessary and as intended to "be preventive and not prohibitory." To the laws and administration which endeavor to prevent combinations on price, Mr. McVey is opposed. He has written one of those rapid summaries which for from five to ten years to come will be useful to the college student, and at the end of that time will be out-dated. * * ** The Rev. Claude Hermann Walter Johns is not a great scholar, nor able; but Babylonian he is rector of a comfortable and Assyrian university living in Cambridge, Laws, Con tracts and Letters England, and he has shared in C.H.W. Johns the English system of prizes for scholars since he was in his teens. He is assiduous and painstaking. The thousands of cuneiform inscriptions copied and translated are scattered through a great welter of transactions. Even scholars find it hard to cover all this tide of material. Mr. Johns has compiled and codified it in a large, full, fat volume. It is hard reading-not meant for the general reader-but certain to interest the serious inquirer, even if not a scholar. The raw materials of history are spread here over 4000 years. And cuneiform was in use for writing twice as long as our own alphabet has been. Things are mixed. Mr. Johns jostles dates as far apart as a Senatus Consultum of the Senate of Cicero and an Act of Congress of the Washington of Roosevelt. He talks in general terms on laws and customs which may have been only special and temporary. But a great mass of scattered data are in his pages given coherence and collocation for the first time for the English reader. Mr. Atkinson has put campaign documents in a volume and called it "The Basis of Economic Science." This is The Basis of not merely "begging the ques Facts and Economic Science Atkinson tion." It is taking the question by the throat and making it say just what you please, with or without "Basis." Figures can be made to do anything on Mr. Atkinson's methods. But he is useful-though a poor prophetas "The Tendency to Individualism" proves, because he has the gift of seeing the tendency as well as the aggregate of certain returns. Few realize that the small shop and a greater personal independence has begun. So in "A True Policy of Protection" Mr. Atkinson makes visible the extent to which Protection has done its appointed work and calls for modification. If you know statistics, have a keen eye for the difference between a fact and an inference, and an unbroken command of your statistical temper, Mr. Atkinson will be to you one of the most useful men accessible. In the "cost of war" where his sympathies warp him, he confuses two different things, the results of a new national policy and of normal national growth, lumping them indiscriminately. Empire in Italy * * * Out of Work This constitutes the first thorough investigation made in this country of the conditions under which young women obtain employment in all grades, from the unskilled common labor of domestic service up to the trained, intelligent and expert work of the stenographer. The inquiry was conducted as a part of college settlement work by Miss Kellor, and eight assistants in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. It reveals serious evils in all grades of classes and is a convincing argument for a closer police regulation of employment agencies, and the provision of such agencies by the State. No one can read it and not see that both these steps are indispensable. It fails in a sufficient appreciation of a situation due to the extent to which women who in these things, owing to a domestic environment, have lagged in the rear of men and still live in an age of caste and social stratification. The real difficulty with domestic service is that it is an attempt to maintain a regimen of status during an age of contract, and all the various remedies Miss Kellor proposes in her most interesting and instructive volume are but palliatives. An Autumn * * * Lady Durand, in company with her husband, Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, now British Ambassador at WashTour in West- ington, made a long circuit in Southwestern Persia in SepE. R. Durand tember, 1899. The trip of nearly 1500 miles carried the party, a large one, down the plateau from Teheran to Ispahan, and then along three sides of a great square in the mountains which make Western Persia. The region, while accessible enough, is not often visited, and Lady Durand saw the best of it. book is a surface account, but it is intelligent, as when she notes the resemblance of the Lurs, Kurds of South Persia, to the faces on Assyrian bas-reliefs. When all the truth is known, it will be seen that the "Assyrian" is in race more Kurd than Semite, and in tongue Semite and not Kurd. There are photographs, but these are those always for sale at Teheran, and Mr. Johnston has found a new period. and a new man. The man is Murat and Napoleonic the period is the passage of Naples under the Napoleonic ern Persia regime from mediæval to modR.M. Johnston ern conditions. Modern Italian history is incomprehensible without a knowledge of this change. Mr. Johnston's two absorbing, careful, painstaking volumes cannot have many readers; but to those who need them this history of Southern Italy from 1805 to 1820 will be indispensable. If you chance as a boy to have known with wondering eyes men who had been "Carbonari," you will appreciate the difficulty and understand the success of Mr. Johnston in telling for the first time in English what the Carbonari and other secret societies were. Maps, portraits and a carefully arranged method illuminate as solid a contribution to history as has recently been made. Her |