Principles of Relief Edward T. Devine Dr. Devine, the secretary of the Charity Organization Society of New York, is of the new type of charity director. He early taught. He is college bred, University of Pennsylvania, and has a German training. He has had a full and exacting New York experience. He is a master in his field. He has here written a manual for the charity worker. No one connected with charity work as a director should fail to read this lucid exposition of the new view. Social environment is first discussed in the relation to the maintenance of an efficient, well-housed worker, keeping on the average level of a fair standard of life. Next the claims of persons who need relief, children, adults, families, etc., are described. Clinical records of 72 relief cases are described. The history of public relief is sketched here and in England. The book scarcely sufficiently recognizes the absence of relief on the continent of Europe. Lastly relief for disasters has its summary of principles. The book is new in its field and will long hold its place. British Economics in 1904 W. R. Lawson Mr. Lawson is an active minded Englishman, who believes that his country is in grave danger between the superior industrial organization of Germany and the superior industrial resources of the United States. This view has truth, if not all the truth. Mr. Lawson enforces it in a volume divided between English due to a failure to maintain a balance of internal production (as in letting the home food supply dwindle) and a balance of eign tariffs and the effect of the more skilexternal relations, as in disregarding forfully conducted credit marts, money markets, of Berlin and Paris. These two phases are expounded here in newspaper polemic of much vigor and an ingenious. statistic. United States Elroy McKendree Avery Subscription methods have widened the book market by selling costlier books than History of the in a past when the line was sharply drawn between store and subscription books. The profits of the new method launch books on a larger scale and better made. Of such is this imposing 12-volume history, of which the first now appears, dealing with the period of discovery. It is rich in fac similes of the early charts. The maps let into the text are poor and below modern standards. The usual sources have been followed. Previous historians are quoted. No attempt is made to weave the work into a continuous web of well-knit history in the elevated style a great subject demands. This volume divides itself between the pre-Columbian Russo- Conflict K. Asakawa This is the best and only adequate account of the diplomatic causes and conditions which preceded the Russo-Japanese war. It is the one war-book, thus far, of a permanent value. Every library will want it. It is too technical for mere general reading, but every man called to the discussion or consideration of the subject will find indispensable this summary. by a Japanese lecturing in Dartmouth College. A preface by the leading American authority in the field, Professor F. W. Williams, of Yale, introduces the work. * * * A new type of novel is in the field and faring fast to favor. It deals in pure emo man of mingled English and Spanish birth who tries for better things and fails. But the telling is more than the told, for Mr. Conrad has the gift of tongues and leaks style by the bucketful. The haunting reality is like a nightmare and the pages of torture make one cringe. No man of the English folk will read this book and not feel that it is time these things were ended by an honest iron rule out of the North. Oriental Mary * A well planned book. The subject itself is not yet one on which exact utterance is possible. But this is almost the first of the "rugbooks" to grasp the ethnological side, to group symbols and to venture on some explanation both of the meaning and distribution of the figures and signs in rug patterns. Here and there is a dubious statement. Where a page of Koranic extracts is quoted it might have. been well to indicate them. The color pictures are sometimes blurred. Dealers' statements are too implicitly accepted. But the book has exactly the descriptions of rugs which the learner needs to carry on farther his inquiry and observation. What is called the "Rhodian lily" is in truth a design from Mesopotamia originally. Daumier & Gavarni knows the sea and its touch on alien shores. He has taken Central America and found there a republic Costa Rica?-Costaguana and he has put on the pages of a book, whose scenes change like the shimmer of a cineometograph and are as vivid, the lewd and frightful figures of the pit which spoil the Spanish American State. The wandering Italian is there of the early Garibaldi day and the later bustle, the English steamship agent, the revolutionary commandante, the helpless hereditary owners of haciendas and the solitary figure of the Octave If any man desire to know why these two Frenchmen of a not dissimilar type held their audience to the end, while Nast lost his, they may Henri Frantz-learn from this roomy quarto Uzanne volume, in which a supplement to the "Studio" makes the work of these two great draughtsmen accessible to the American, reader or artist. Both worked all their lives. One turned out 3958 plates and the other 8000. Not one but shows the trained hand. Complete technical training in youth kept them fresh in old age. Their careers covered the years of the French Fontainebleau school, the great landscapists. It would be easy to show that these men respond to the same impulse of individual impression and uncompromising expression. Unknown here, this volume has made them known. Thomas Nast This thoroughly adequate life of the most effective of the masters of caricature in this country carries his life in detail through all its 62 years (1840-1902). For 20 years, from 1860 to 1880, Nast was the most effective draughtsman in the United States. He never learned to draw. Albert Bigelow Paine He had no adequate technical training. His vogue ceased as public perception grew. The story in detail Mr. Paine has told with sedulous care, blinking nothing. The reproductions of caricatures are selected with accurate knowledge. The volume will become as necessary to the historical student as to the student of caricature. T Baccarat* HERE are things of which one does not speak in polite conversation. There are things, too, that do not look well in print. If authors would test their work by reading it aloud in the family circle or in a coterie of friends of both sexes, we should be saved some of the obnoxious fiction which the world is now a prey to. We might, for instance, have been saved "Baccarat," the most recent study in obnoxiousness. We wish to accord Mrs. Frankau her full due, we wish to acknowledge, yes, even to commend her mastery of the novelistic art; her creative faculty in characterization; but the very fact that she possesses so many good qualities makes it the more regrettable that she is wasting her powers in channels that can lead to no good and that may lead to much evil. "Baccarat" bares ruthlessly the possibilities of men and women for degrading *BACCARAT. By Frank Danby (Mrs. Frankau). J. B. Lippincott Co. we action, deed and thought. It forgets nothing, and every point is treated with the utmost detail, even to the most nauseating. It is not enough to view the woman frenzied with the lust of money-winning, must see her in all the shame of her infidelity, we must wade through the mud and the filth with her until we, too, feel contaminated. No salvation that Mrs. Frankau could offer, and she offers the most unpleasant one conceivable, would serve to purge and palliate. With the aid of religion something more plausible might have been accomplished, but Mrs. Fraukau has made religious force conspicuous by its absence, even taking pains to say of Julie "that she and her husband were not of those who pray." In short, "Baccarat" is a novel decidedly unsavory, quite beyond the bounds of good taste, and one, moreover, the circulation of which should be guided by the utmost discretion and by the exercise of a very careful judgment. THE QUEST OF JOHN CHAPMAN. Newell Dwight Hillis, pastor of Plymouth Church, turns from the writing of sermons and works on religion and theology, to produce a novel. The hero is an historical and picturesque character, the "patron saint of the American Orchard," and one of the most striking, though little known, figures of the Republic. With a foresight supernatural he marched in the advance rank of the immigration across the Alleghenies, planting the seeds of apples, pears and peaches in the wilderness. Settlers found bearing orchards when they followed a few years later. Around this unique figure, by name John Chapman, the better part of whose life was spent on this remarkable mission, the story is woven. THE TRUANTS. A. E. W. Mason, author of "The Four Feathers," has written this novel of a commonplace Englishman, whose wife has great contempt for him on account of his delinquencies. He goes to America to make his mark and she is saved by friends from a liaison with another man. WANTED, A COOK. Alan Dale has made much fun out of the tribulations of a young married couple, very innocent of housekeeping, and their cooks. The wife enjoys Ovid in Latin, as light reading. THE SIN OF DAVID. A new drama by Stephen Phillips, but not one of King David of Israel. The incident of Bath-sheba's entrance into the life of David is paralleled in a tale of the Civil War in England. The diction is beautiful and the verse noticeable. THE ROAD IN TUSCANY. These two finely made volumes contain an account of a carriage tour through Tuscany by Mr. Maurice Hewlett. He goes to the heart of the simple life of the people of the mountains, and considers also the pictures, the architecture and the history of the land. There are many illustrations by Joseph Pennell. HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. The author of another voluminous general history, Elroy McKendree Avery, tries to justify his work by dwelling upon the fact that he has spent twenty years in preparation. The first volume. deals with the period of discovery. Later volumes, in which the author will have had opportunities to develop his style. and purpose, will decide the work's per manency. |