accordance with it, protects him from molestation until he has worked under its protection two years, when, that being his authoritative age record, he would be sixteen years of age, and free to work without it. If discharged, it must be returned to him, to use in securing work elsewhere. His mother had been labored with by women who loved the boy, and they failed to move her. The age record in school was not correct, she had sworn. The best protection for that boy was a man who could appreciate his mental ability; who needed the boy on the commercial side of the business he controlled. That man was secured; the child labor law does not cover office labor.

The investigation was resumed, and revealed hundreds of little girls and boys, so childish in appearance, in the expression of their faces, that it was possible only by the strongest self-control to conceal the evidence of the emotions their presence under such conditions aroused. The little girls were carrying spools, empty and filled, to the spindles. In one room dozens of them were in their bare feet running through water on the floor to the depth of about half an inch. The material at this point of manufacture had to be kept moist. Such tiny-looking things, with bodies that looked as if they might be crushed between one's hands! Nothing could be done. The every letter of the law was obeyed in employing them. There was not the slightest pretense on the part of any one in authority that he believed the certificate or affidavits under which these children were working represented the truth. The keynote was, “ The law is obeyed to the very letter. We are no better than the law." As with the boys, only a very small percentage of the girls could answer in English; only a very small percentage could write their names even in the language they spoke. They were numbered on the pay-rolls; this they understood, and responded to their numbers. The service of an interpreter served to identify certificates, affidavits, and holders of them.

A walk through one room revealed a little girl, evidently an Italian, who had not appeared with the other children at the foreman's desk. She was perhaps three feet six in height, very slight, with a pathetic baby face. Her feet were

bare; a dark cloth skirt, with belt folded over many times, was held about her waist by a safety-pin. The waist was made of a pair of football trousers. It was cut a little low at the neck, which was encircled by a string of coral beads. The shoulders were formed by the folding over of the material, which made a sleeve over the upper arm. The waist was sewed fast up the back with coarse black thread. It could only be removed by bing ripped with scissors. This child had filed at the desk the notary public affidavit of her father that she was sixteen. No one believed, or pretended to believe, that she was sixteen, but the law says the parent's word or oath is the standard of age.

In this factory young men and women, seventeen, eighteen, twenty, who had lived in this country since they were four and five,' were found who could neither understand nor speak English. Scores are working who came here when over sixteen, who, of course, do not speak English. These are the people who make the race "political boss," the greatest menace to our political body, municipal, State, or National.

At five o'clock we left that manufacturing establishment, which was "up-to-date" in construction and management, having seen the evils, injustice, and dangers of child labor fully protected by the present factory laws of the State of New York, in the most progressive, philanthropic, and greatest city in the United States of America.

Last February there was promoted from a primary to a grammar school on the East Side a Russian Jew boy who, according to the school record, was just thirteen at the time of promotion. It was conceded that the boy had the brightest mind in the school; he stood first in everything; he could, between three in the afternoon and nine the next morning, commit a long poem to memory, enjoy doing it, and recite it without an error. "I hated to promote him, he was such an incentive to the others," was the principal's comment when telling the boy's story. In April the father of the boy appeared with the blank from the Department of Health for her signature as to school attendance. The principal refused to sign it. The boy had passed from her jurisdiction two

months before. "Well, he never went to that school; I wanted him to work."

"You will never put him to work with my assistance. The boy, according to the school record, is but thirteen years and two months old. You are not poor; you are well off. The boy has a brilliant mind, and should be given every possible opportunity to study; he loves it."

The man left after violently abusing the principal, a woman, for refusing to sign the certificate as to school attendance.

In September the father and boy returned. The father wished to enter the boy as a pupil. Let the principal tell her story. "I looked at them. The boy who had left me a rosy, rollicking, happy, brilliant school-boy, stood before me a cowed, broken boy, looking like a sneak. The father, who had been one of the handsomest of men, about thirty-five, I thought, was a gray-haired, broken man. 'What has happened?' I gasped. The father, in a tone vindictive and cruel, responded: He is a thief. The boy shrank within his clothes. I put my arm across his shoulders; he shook it off. 'Yes,' repeated the father, 'a thief.' The boy secured work with a jeweler in April without a work certificate. In August he was arrested for stealing-evidently beginning to steal almost as soon as he was employed. The payment by the father of the full amount of the loss claimed by the employer saved the boy from prosecution, but not from imprisonment. spent two nights in jail. The father used all his ready money and mortgaged a tenement to save the boy, he claimed. Whether the shock of arrest and imprisonment, or the father's evident brutality, or both, are responsible, it was necessary last December, when the boy returned to school, to put him three grades below the grade from which he was promoted; he cannot keep up with the work of that grade." Sorrowfully the principal adds, "I think his mind is destroyed."

He had

There has been formed within a comparatively recent period an industrial trust, or, to use the euphemism of one of the managers of one of the plants, "a combine," which individually employed large numbers of children, and has been in its corporate capacity a much larger employer of children. The effect of "the combine" has been to increase the size

of the plants. The children do work that requires the least amount of mental or muscular power. It was impossible not to resent the thought of children spending one or two years at such employment; it was just a degree above idleness. In one of these plants a system of stealing metals had been evolved that revealed itself only through loss. Even detectives could not discover the system by which the metals were taken from this building. One day a small boy, evidently believing that he could escape undiscovered at the noon hour, was arrested for stealing, and confessed. He was paroled in the care of his father, who swore he was twelve years old. The boy had been working eleven months. His father claimed that the boy had a work certificate, though the claim meant that he could have been prosecuted for perjury and would have been if the certificate, or record of it, could have been found. The manager claimed that the boy had a work certificate when he was employed, but he returned it. There is a boy of twelve branded as a thief, with a police record, because of the present factory laws in the State of New York. Nor is this all. Four blocks from that factory is a dealer in old metals. He has been arrested four times for receiving stolen goods, and discharged each time because the law says that the person buying the stolen property must know it has been stolen at the time he buys it.

In one plant of this "combine ten boys were found working without certificates, as were also four girls. The sanitary conditions were deplorably crude and indecent in their arrangement, especially those for the girls. There were no dressingrooms, nor the slightest provision for the comfort of the people employed, numbering four hundred and seventy. "The combine "refused all responsibility for the employment of children without work certificates. The foremen hired the people working under them; if they disobeyed the law, they must accept the consequences. This rule was found in operation in each of the plants of this corporation. One boy who held a work certificate was so small and emaciated that he was questioned. An examination of the record of the school he last attended gave the boy's age as thirteen next March. The father swore he was fourteen last September. His affidavit secured the work certificate.

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experiments described-such as those of Mr. Robert Treat Paine in lending money to be repaid in installments, and building homes to be purchased by tenants as they pay their rent—are encouraging in the highest degree. But the limits of this review do not permit us to begin to particularize the generous social activities described in this volume. It is a remarkable record of American achievement along the line of helping men not to need help. The few scholastic pages can be easily skipped by the unscholastic reader. The body of the volume is full of human interest.

The second of the books in the field of philanthropy is the outcome of the social work done by the residents of the South End House of Boston. It is entitled "Americans in Process," and is practically a continuation of that quickening study, "The Social Wilderness," which Mr. Woods and his associates published four years ago. This book, while dealing with philanthropic work of the constructive and preventive type urged by Mr. Lee, also discusses social reform work of a type essentially political, and contains one or two brilliant chapters on politics pure and simple. It is Boston politics that is described-indeed, the whole book is almost narrowly Bostonian in its perspective-but the account of the resources and methods of the Boston ward bosses throws a penetrating light upon the problem of boss rule in every city in the country. Nothing so good has appeared since Miss Addams's chapter on aldermanic ways and means in Chicago. So true to life are the characterizations of the ward leaders in Boston that one or two of them have attempted to institute proceedings for libel-though they were unnamed. These proceedings simply intensified the public conviction that the shoes fitted the wear. ers. The narrative itself. however, carries its own corroboration. The book is a thoroughly calm, unexaggerated account of conditions among the poorer half, written from the standpoint of sympathy, and forcing home in unnumbered ways the essential unity of human life regardless of class lines.

The third of these noteworthy books, Mr. W. J. Ghent's social satire, “Our Benevolent Feudalism," deals, not with the efforts to better social conditions, but with the tendencies at work to make them

worse.

Mr. Ghent's half-mocking, halfserious thesis is that the lords of industry are re-establishing feudal relationships in our modern society, with a hierarchy of retainers and serfs as dependent upon them as were the subjects of mediaval lords. The introductory statistical chapters upon the concentration of wealth, and particularly the narrowing percentage of families owning their homes and farms, do not exaggerate the disturbing disclosures of the recent census. But as he proceeds with his task Mr. Ghent more and more gives evidence of selecting the facts which support his contention, while ignoring those which run counter to it. When, for example, he satirizes our educators as the indefatigable spokesmen of the moneyed interests, and satirizes the courts for serving as the defenders of these same interests by annulling or devitalizing laws enacted to restrain them, Mr. Ghent quotes the editor of The Outlook as a hostile critic of trades-unions, without intimating that he has defended unionism at more points than he has attacked it, and quotes a decision of a subordinate Federal court that only “unreasonable" restraints of trade can be constitutionally prohibited by law, ignoring the decision of the Supreme Court that Congress has constitutionally prohibited all contracts in restraint of trade, "whether reasonable or unreasonable." But while all this selection of evidence gives the book the effect of a shrewd attorney's plea, the evidence is none the less so artistically woven together that the reader follows it with admiration, though not with concurring judgment. Furthermore, the tendencies which Mr. Ghent represents as already victorious are unquestionably showing such power that Mr. Ghent's impressive summary of their manifestations may help in the work of arousing public resistance. Mr. Ghent himself doubtless believes that this resistance will be aroused, or else the gayety of his pessimism would be inconsistent with seriousness in the man. His point of view is unquestionably that of a socialist who believes that the temporary control of industry by a few simply paves the way for its permanent control by the whole body politic. While, therefore, his book is ostensibly the wail of an individualist over the destruction of the old

order, it is in reality the chuckle of a socialist over the introduction of the

new.

The last of the books before us, Mr. John Graham Brooks's "Social Unrest," has all the literary attractiveness of Mr. Ghent's, and has besides a depth of conviction, an earnestness of purpose, and a love of truth which make it one of the most convincing and converting books of recent years. Mr. Brooks has given the better part of his life to the study of the "social unrest" which is perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of the serious thought of our time, and in this book he has given to us the very quintessence of this better part of his life. His investigations have not merely or chiefly been made in libraries. These, too, he has made, and made thoroughly, but they serve merely as the background for the facts he has learned from men in high circles and lowthe facts which are molding the thought of to-day, and had only begun to be observed in the books of a decade ago. Nowhere else, so far as we are aware, can the reader gain so quickly a comprehen sion of the ideas and aspirations of the struggling classes, for Mr. Brooks has studied their ideas and aspirations with a sympathy rare among the privileged classes, and has interpreted them to the reading public with a skill still more rare among the wage-earners.

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parts of the faith of the working classes, such as the right to get back "their" jobs after a strike, have not yet been formulated into a creed by the workingclass leaders themselves, but Mr. Brooks presents the instinctive thoughts and feelings of workingmen toward the loss of places they have held for years, so that the reader puts himself in their place and sees the situation as they see it.

Only less valuable is the supplementary work done by Mr. Brooks in interpreting the thoughts and feelings of the captains of industry toward the current of events by which, they are being swept along, and in which they often falsely appear to stand as guiders of the current. Mr. Brooks knows many men of this class personally and intimately, and the misgivings they express to him give evidence that in the class struggles ahead of us, as in those back of us, Anglo-Saxon society will not be divided sharply by class lines, because too many men of conscience and insight among the possessing will side with the struggling upon the definite reform measures which the great body of the latter are able to agree upon. Mr. Brooks rarely gives the names of the captains of industry whom he quotes either in approval or in criticism, for they would rarely wish to be quoted by name; but the volume contains an unusual amount of the "news too good to print," which those holding industrial power as well as political power possess in plenty, but for many reasons only give to the public in posthumous memoirs.

Mr. Brooks's social studies, while chiefly American, are by no means exclusively so. Two of the most brilliant chapters in his work relate to the changes which the Social Democratic parties of Europe have undergone as they have obtained political power and been compelled to give to their ideals practical efficiency. These changes have been most marked in Belgium, and we hope to give to our readers in the near future a portion of Mr. Brooks's account of what Socialism has taught and what it has learned in that country. Meanwhile we commend the book to all readers concerned with the deepest social problems of our times.