is justified. Although on the whole the fortunes of children are knit up with, and must follow, those of the adult community, yet childhood has its special needs and dangers and difficulties. The object of the book before us is " to give its readers a general view of the principal social child problems of the day," and the writer has brought together in a brief and suggestive form a large amount of information. Students of the many questions raised will need to supplement what they find here by the work of specialists, and in this they will be assisted by the bibliography appended. In some important respects the problems of America differ from those of England; the immigrant and the negro add greatly to her difficulties. When, e.g. we read that the mortality of negro infants is more than twice as high as that of whites, and remember what we have read elsewhere about the rapid growth of the negro population as compared with that of the native American, we cannot help wondering what will be the ultimate effect of reducing infant mortality all round. The fact, again, of great variations in the legislation of different States adds greatly to the difficulty of promoting general reforms in industrial and sanitary legislation. "A serious handicap to adequate legislation in the United States is the right of each State to enact its own child labour laws. A great variety of laws has been the natural consequence. This enables the employers affected by proposed legislation to threaten to abandon the States in which their establishments are located and to continue business elsewhere. State selfishness and the desire to build up local interests are forces of such magnitude that the State hesitates to enact legislation which may drive capital from within its borders." HELEN BOSANQUET The Child Labor Policy of New Jersey. By Arthur Sargent Field, Ph.D. Pp. iv + 229. The American Economic Association. Price $1.25. THIS is an elaborate study of one section of the movement sketched in the preceding book. It covers so short a time in the State of New Jersey that it has been possible for the author to trace its growth from the beginning; and to estimate with some. degree of certainty how far the policy has been a success. For the purposes of social experiment the independence of State legislation is so far an advantage; it is easier to watch results, and to make comparisons. The description given of the illiteracy of the child employees of New Jersey in 1883, carries us back nearly a hundred No. 82.-VOL. XXI years in English history. "The number able to read and write, in a distinguishable way, was shockingly small, and very many could neither read nor write even their own names. . . . At least 60 per cent. had never heard of the United States or Europe. At least 30 per cent. could not name the city in which they lived, and quite a number only knew the name of the street in which they were housed." Since then much progress has been made; at first slowly and against much opposition, and then under the influence of enlightened public opinion at an accelerating pace. One of the most instructive lessons to be learned from this study is the comparative uselessness of industrial legislation which is not supported on the one hand by a sympathetic public opinion, on the other hand by an independent and efficient inspectorate. In this latter point the American system of making appointments dependent upon party politics is a serious obstacle to good administration. In England a good inspector can count upon retaining his office, and accumulates experience and influence. In New Jersey, between 1887 and 1904, the average term of office was only 4:57 years, and at every change there is the danger that the new official will be not only inexperienced, but indifferent or even corrupt.. Women and Labour. By Olive Schreiner. Unwin. Pp. 283. Price 8s. 6d.) HELEN BOSANQUET (London: Fisher I HAVE read this book with deep sympathy and respect. It is the outcome of a much larger work, upon which the author had laboured for ten years, and which was destroyed during the South African War. The courage required after such a disaster to begin the work over again, even on a smaller scale, is great and deserving of all recognition. And though much, no doubt, has been lost, something has probably been gained in the way of concentration. There are many good books which would be both better, and better known, if their authors had been forced to condense them. When gold has been tried in the fire it may come out less in quantity, but the purer gold. I do not know how the book may affect men. It is, I should think, impossible for a woman to read it without being profoundly stirred. Primarily it is an appeal to men, or to "society" in general, to accord to women their right to work in all ways in which they can prove their ability. But, indirectly, it is a no less forcible appeal to women themselves to be worthy of their high calling and to take their share in the real work of the world. The author sees in the desire to confine women to the one function of child-bearing (and, latterly, to not too much of that) the danger that they will become increasingly parasitic, and in the parasitism of women she reads the downfall of the race. Where women are strong and capable, the race flourishes. "In ancient Greece, in its superb and virile youth, its womanhood was richly and even heavily endowed with duties and occupations. . . . In Rome, in the days of her virtue and vigour, the Roman matron laboured mightily and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden, though her sphere of labour and influence was ever somewhat smaller than that of the Teutonic sisterhood whose descendants were finally to supersede her own." Decay of the race came when wealth and slave labour had robbed the women of their duties and reduced them to the position of luxurious parasites. The theory is irrefutable. Women who live idle lives are not only miserable themselves, they are a standing danger to the community. How far, we may ask, however, is the danger imminent to-day? Mrs. Schreiner points out many significant facts. The home is no longer a manufactory where bread is baked, and ale is brewed, and garments spun and woven as well as made. The rich woman hands over her children to the care of experts from the beginning, and delivers her house into the hands of housekeepers and servants. But in facts such as these I do not find such deep-seated nor wide-spread danger as does the author. I will quote her own summary of her position from the beginning of Chapter IV. :-"But it may also be said, 'Granting fully that you are right, that, as woman's old fields of labour slip from her, she must grasp the new, or must become wholly dependent on her sexual function alone, all the other elements of human nature becoming atrophied and arrested through lack of exercise; and, granting that her evolution being arrested, the evolution of the whole race will be also arrested in her person; granting all this to the full, and allowing that the bulk of human labour tends to become more and more intellectual and less and less purely mechanical, as perfected machinery takes the place of crude human exertion; and that, therefore, if woman is to be saved from degeneration and parasitism, and the body of humanity from arrest, she must receive a training which will cultivate all the intellectual and all the physical faculties with which she is endowed, and be allowed fully to employ them; nevertheless, would it not be possible, and perhaps be well, that a dividing line of some kind should be drawn between the occupations of men and of women?'" To this question Mrs. Schreiner replies in effect that even if there should ultimately come to be such a dividing line it is too soon to draw it until women have had a chance of trying what they can do in all kinds of work. There is no fear that they will persist where they prove to be incompetent. "Allowing all to start from the one point in the world of intellectual culture and labour, with our ancient Mother Nature sitting as umpire, distributing the prizes and scratching from the lists the incompetent, is all we demand, but we demand it determinedly. . . . Acting in us, and through us, Nature, we know, will mercilessly expose to us the deficiencies in the field of human toil, and reveal to us our powers. And, for to-day, we take all labour for our province !" From the economic point of view, as indeed from any other point of view, I find no flaw in Mrs. Schreiner's argument. No true economist will urge that more work for women will ultimately mean less work for men; the presence of a multitude of unproductive women in a community is as destructive of wealth as is a standing army, or a large pauper class. And the incapacity of women has further economic consequences of a cumulative nature: "If the woman could justifiably be looked to, in case of the man's disablement or death, to take his place as an earner, thousands of valuable marriages which cannot now be contracted could be entered on; and the serious social evil, which arises from the fact that while the self-indulgent and selfish freely marry and produce large families, the restrained and conscientious are often unable to do so, would be removed." Of course, it often happens, even now, that women are forced to take the burden of the family upon themselves; but they do it, for the most part, under cruel disadvantages, and seldom emerge from conditions of great privation. Not the least interesting passage in the book is that in which side by side with the New Woman is depicted for us the New Man-the man who desires to find in woman active companionship and co-operation rather than passive submission; the man whose ideal of life differs as much from that of Tom Jones and Squire Western as that of the New Woman does from "an always fainting, weeping and terrified Emilia or Sophia of a bygone epoch"; the man towards whom our feelings are well expressed in the following: "It is a gracious fact, to which every woman who has achieved success or accomplished good work in any of the fields generally apportioned to men will bear witness, whether that work be in the field of literature, of science, or the organised professions, that the hands which have been most eagerly stretched out to welcome her have been those of men; that the voices which have most generously acclaimed her success have been those of male fellow-workers in the fields into which she has entered. There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admission into a new field of toil but there have been found on the other side the hands of strong and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost before she knocks." I have suggested that the situation is not so critical as Mrs. Schreiner feels it to be, and that for two reasons. In the first place, the class of parasitic women, in England at any rate, is a comparatively small one. For the great mass of working and middle-class mothers the banishment of manufactures from the home means freedom to make it a home instead of a workshop. The wife of a professional man may send her sons and daughters to day-school and boarding school, and yet be so busy for them and for her husband as to be far removed from the risk of degeneration. Many even of the wealthy take upon themselves real and sober duties. The healthy forces far outweigh those which in a comparatively small section of society are making for decay. But that is no reason why the forces of decay should not be combated, with all the splendid energy which women such as Mrs. Schreiner devote to the cause. Does not, however, that energy blind her somewhat to my second point, i.e., the extent to which that cause is already won? I think of the difficulty and hesitation with which we of the older generation groped our way, where now the younger lives push on with confidence and strength; I look around and see bright young girls and capable women eagerly taking up their work in almost all departments, and I feel that what remains to be achieved is not indeed a small matter, but an easy one compared with what has been achieved in the past. "In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, HELEN BOSANQUET Junior Labour Exchanges. (A Plea for Closer Co-operation between Labour Exchanges and Education Authorities.) By G. W. KNOWLES, M.A., B.Sc., with a preface by Professor S. J. CHAPMAN, M.A., M.Com. (London and Manchester: Sherratt and Hughes, 1910. Pp. 32. Price 6d. net.) THIS little pamphlet is one of the sort which every institution that is very much in the wind produces in great numbers, and |