Commercial Education Cheesman Business education to most still stands for training in the technical appliances of traffic-book-keeping which is the languages of business, forms, correspondence and the Abiah Herrick mechanism of banking insurance, etc. Principally from German example, there has grown up a new business education which seeks to impart knowledge of the underlying causes which create and govern production, manufacture and trade, to develop the habits of accuracy, caution and enquiry needed in business and to give also the technical training just named. Professor Herrick after training in the Wharton school of the University of Pennsylvania organized the School of Commerce in the Central High School of Philadelphia. He has summed some twelve years' experience in "Commercial Education," a manual of the present condition of the work to which he has given his life and in which he has had an unusual success. The first third of the book discusses the need of this kind of broad education, saying what all say but with the accuracy of the expert and the force of the enthusiast. The middle third describes this kind of education in Germany and France. It might have been well at this point to make clear that the German "continuation school" is a necessity of a system which at the start, after a year or so, deprives the poor boy of the chance of going higher than a night school, by separating him in schooling from the son of the wellto-do. Both these parts while well put are not new. The third part reviews the work done in this country from the business college of half a century ago to the present time, including high school and college work. This is fresh, most valuable and complete. No one can discuss this sub Thirty-eight years of attendance on the trotting-track for the "Turf, Field and Trotting and Farm" are summed in this volPacing Horses in America ume, just good enough to make one wish it were better. ThorHamilton Busbey oughly systematic records and minute care in sifting facts are lacking in the history of the trotter. For three centuries the thoroughbred has been raised by the few. He runs back to the best kept pedigrees known-the Arab. For a century, the trotter has been bred by small farms. The racer is the product of a steady evolution. The trotter is a series of happy sports, supplemented by racing blood of late. Mr. Busbey has therefore, perhaps wisely, written a series of gossippy chapters, full of anecdote, not too carefully sifted and pedigree of the "is said" order. The old stories are all here, as Morgan's Arab ancestry, a little proved and verified. A fair picture of the progress of the trotter is presented, useful, careful and written by a man of wide experience and acquaintance; but in pedigrees of the trotting habit of mind-one rather irritating to the man Wall Street and the Country Charles A. * * * He is a a Mr. Conant was a journalist. banker. He knows banking and currency. He is familiar as a Washington correspondent with the path to public attention. He has shared in practical legislation in adjusting the Philippine currency. Having begun active life as critic of the Wall street machine and been converted to its lucrative service, he is desirous of persuading the public of its value. He has collected in this short volume six magazine articles, all but one apologetic for the Wall street situation. Wealth grows, product swells, savings mount, all this tends towards greater corporations of a larger capitalization. Mr. Conant, however, who is an acute observer rather than an astute thinker, misses the point of current criticism. It is not merely because corporations are big, that the public balks at them; but because their management is secret, irresponsible, reckless and swayed in fiduciary posts by pull and profit. So in his apologia for trust companies, Mr. Conant makes no reference to the loosening of their safeguards by the legislation which began in New York about fifteen years ago. Mr. Conant's articles are interesting for their brisk summary of the current financial era; but they are one-sided. One, an essay on the gold standard in China, is sound but limited in its view. It does not discriminate between local and international currency in the empire, an important matter in the East. * * Colonel Hawkins is in his 73d year. He fought in the Civil War. By marriage Our Political he is connected with one of the Degradation wealthiest of Providence famRuch ilies. Active in New York Christopher Hawkins local affairs, he has been more conspicuous for the praiseworthy character of his purposes, than effective in results. He has for years been known as a man who wrote letters to the papers, a distinct variety of citizen of much use. He has collected in a single volume articles written over 20 years, presenting under various titles a summary of the various conspicuous charges of corruption, inefficiency and dishonesty in the American system of government. By accepting the worst said by partisans of each other, by putting the worst construction on acts open to more than one construction and by giving indubitable public crimes, with no mention of the good accomplished, an appalling record is gathered. Pacific railroad land grants are narrated but not the repayment with interest of all the loans made to them. The evils of river and harbor improvement but not the good done. If Mr. Hawkins's black record were all American history, the present position of the United States would be inexplicable. By seeing nothing in its relation, Mr. Hawkins, many of whose statements are individually accurate, though many are exaggerated, has compiled a most misleading book. The Shame of the Cities Lincoln Steffens * * This blistering indictment, as it appeared in "McClure's" for a year past, has been of great public service. These articles on the corruption of city government in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburg, Philadelphia and Minneapolis have done more to awaken the civic conscience than any one publication that has ever been made in this country. Mr. Steffens has had a long experience as a journalist, chiefly as a city editor in New York. His articles are the fruit of nearly two years of persistent labor. He has the gift of cogent state ment and all the force of personal enthusiasm. His articles are one-sided. They present only shortcomings. They are strictly pathological. They no more record all, than does the criminal record of a daily newspaper. As far as they go, they present facts and they are themselves part of the moral awakening in American life which is in all fields bringing a continuous improvement. Nor, in the work of convicting of civic sin, has any one man done more in current years than Mr. Lincoln Steffens. His one peril is that of the detective who ceases to be able to see anything but evil. * * This study of the American city is colored by the twin assumptions that a city The American City Delos F. Wilcox should own its public utilities and that a city population loses by the free grant of public franchises. English cities which insist on pay have to do without the rapid transit of American cities and endure, as in Germany, great crowding as the real price of city revenue from utilities. Throughout, Mr. Wilcox is full always of the lacks of American cities and not of their advantages. He does not notice that they are the only cities. to curb debt or to refuse to legalize prostitution or that their area adds to comfort and expense in a similar ratio. With these limitations, this volume is a fair summary of American municipal practice. Utilities, education, protection, civic life, local responsibility are each discussed. Mr. Wilcox is graphic, he knows his subject, he has the cooperative view always before him and he is somewhat touched by the "socialism of the chair." His book is comprehensive, without being penetrating and illuminating without having much that is instructive. dents of life, the State, private charity and the thrift of the individual, Mr. Loch has been led by his experience to concentrate effort on the last, undoubtedly one of the most important and the foundation of the other two. His brief essay on the various methods for improving thrift by social pressure, opens a volume of short papers divided between proposals for improving physical well-being of State action and pleas both for increased pressure to make people work and save for instruction in the use of food, and for expenditure as well as improvements in housing, land-holdings and care for consumptives. The papers are short. They deal with English conditions. They are full of the new view of charitable work that it is more important to brace up society than merely to aid the individual. The Fourth Dimension C. Howard Hinton * * Since Lobatchewsky and Bolyai laid bare non-euclidean geometry, it has been set for the rising and falling of many. Literally nothing in thought is the same since this discovery. All thinking men. by it are sharply divided into two classes: those who look on n-dimensional space as a mere form of thought, artificially projected and those who look on it as a new norm of thought, essentially necessary, revealing the real structure of matter and the conditions of the existence of space. Since a great English mathematician, W. Kingdon Clifford, laid bare the possibilities of space of four dimensions every thoughtful man who |