many families. Even Santa Claus is delegated to visit these desolate homes and carry good cheer by substantial gifts that are accompanied with a Merry Christmas from the "Little Mother," a term of endearment bestowed upon the author by the prisoners.

The simplicity with which the author deals with the prison reform idea, characterises the works of some of our criminologists as possessing a spirit of impartiality. The work of most of these penologists savours of the laboratory and clinic, based upon heredity calculations. Mrs. Booth's remedy consists of the simple methods of better sanitation, kind treatment, more work, better educational facilities, and the parole system. She very emphatically crystallises the whole subject by pleading for the eradication of politics from the management and care of the prisons.

The closing chapter of this excellent volume, entitled "Does It Pay?" is an appropriate query, and a perusal of the book gives an affirmative answer. The question the writer asks is answered by

the thousands of men and women who have been reclaimed, and daily make themselves known to Mrs. Booth in her travels through the country. She frankly confesses that she has had disappointments, but the success that has attended the honest purposes of the large number of her graduates more than counterbalances the failures. The reader is readily impressed with the fact that her work has left the experimental stage, and the book forcibly sets forth that the greatest measure of tribute which is paid her endeavours comes from the great minds of representative men; men who handle State and municipal affairs; men who by virtue of superior qualifications to judge as to cause and effect, hold eminent positions; mayors of cities, judges, lawyers, clergymen, and prison officials, and those having large interests to conserve.

From the first to the last page Mrs. Booth holds the reader's honest interest, and her plain, forcible, and earnest language and excellent literary style makes the book one of value for the home and the public library.

Number 1500.

V.

JACK LONDON'S “PEOPLE OF THE

S

ABYSS."*

LUMMING, once an eccentricity, then a fad, threatens to become a disease. In increasing numbers the sons of our petted aristocracy go down to live temporarily in the most evil smelling municipal bogs and give a boosting hand to the permanent dweller therein in his supposed effort to climb higher. The little sisters of the rich take lessons in settlement work and put interested but embarrassing questions to the people who live in crowded tenements. Sociologists go to the slum for statistics; novelists for "local colour"; painters for pictorial types; and the Higher Journalist for "copy."

Perhaps in time all of this somewhat chaotic and undisciplined interest may result in some good. It can scarcely be too great, so long as it tends in the right direction. But it may easily be misguided. As the sign of an awakening humanity, a broader sympathy for all men, it is a hopeful, inspiring phenomenon. As a sign of a recent tendency toward indiscriminate, fruitless sentimentalising and complacent condescension to the "lower classes," it is not so flattering to our sense or our philanthropy. So much of the printed matter that comes out of the slums bears the mark of this patronising snobbishness that thoughtful people must sometimes in desperation consign the whole of this. abundant "literature" to the rubbish heap. This is of course unfair. Josiah Flynt is not to blame because Smith, Brown, and Jones happen to be snobs

with a taste for mild adventure and an itch for publicity. But Josiah Flynt's years of patient investigation are to an uncertain extent discredited by the halfbaked lucubrations of Smith, Brown and London, who imagine they are making contributions to the literature of sociol

kind. Probably Jack London does. He is not. Jack is not a dull boy. On the contrary, he is decidedly precocious. But he is a healthy, vigorous, young nomad, with all a healthy boy's love of adventure. When he descended among the People of the Abyss in the English capital last year the zest of adventure was one of his motives. But the biggest motive of all, if the result of his adventure may be taken as evidence, was his desire for material to make into a book. Of course Mr. London is a very young man. If he were not he would not have revealed himself so frankly. According to the documentary evidence, he may have spent six weeks in his researches, possibly two months; scarcely more. In this time he set himself not merely to gather statistics regarding the people of London's East End, but to get at the very heart of their lives-to learn how they work, sleep, eat, drink, think, love, hate, struggle, and die. To do this, he lived, he says, their own life and endured all the hardships that fall to their lot. If Mr. London imagines that he really did this, then his idea of how "the other half" lives is vastly amusing. He confesses that he was never without sufficient money for an emergency, and that he kept within reach of a comfortable room to which he could always retire to rest, bathe, receive his mail, and, most important of all, write up his notes. Mr. London can scarcely believe that the typical East Ender goes about with sovereigns sewed up in his clothes; and that he has a comfortable haven of refuge open to receive him when the tooth of poverty gnaws too keenly. I prefer to believe that his remark about living the life of the slum inhabitant was a mere by-product of his too exuberant imagination, not intended to be taken literally.

One large impression Mr. London certainly contrived to bring back from his little jaunt. He is profoundly conscious of the gulf fixed between the poor denizen of the Abyss and the favoured class of which he is the proud representative. When he dons the ragged clothes and struggles with the unappetising food of the unwashed, he must needs assure the

reader that in his own home he is accustomed to his carefully prepared food and good clothes and daily tub-a fact that he might safely have left to be taken for granted. When he sees the hardships instead of making even a picture of sharundergone by the hop-pickers in Kent, ing their lot, as he had started out to do, he and his companion "joyfully thanked God that we were not as other men, especially hoppers, and went down the road to Maidstone jingling in our pockets the half-crowns and florins we had brought from London." All this is the manifestation of a rather amusing form of snobbishness, quite harmless in its place; but its place is emphatically not in a book that pretends to a semi-scientific char

acter.

It is not a trivial matter, if we are to take Mr. London seriously, that he dodged the real issues involved in his project. He returned, with his notes written up, ready to tell us just how the people of the abyss feel and think. But what, in heaven's name, can a man know of poverty so long as he has a sovereign about him? What does he know of hunger, with a good meal close at hand? What does he know of homelessness, if after a night on the streets he can go to his room and sleep fifteen hours? Mr. London's stories may be both entertaining and true, but the pretence that their authenticity is due to his having lived the life of the slum is more amusing than convincing.

Entertaining enough they are. They are the work of a born story-teller, a man with a gift for stretching a situation quickly and trenchantly, for bringing a character sharply before our eyes. Such a man, however many mistakes he may make, does not write dull books. If he had only written stories of the East End with no other purpose than entertainment, and left himself and his sociology out, I am sure they would be well worth reading. It is the pretence of Mr. London's book to a character which it does not possess that is exasperating, and that induces a doubt whether nine-tenths of all the slumming books are not sheer rot. Edward Clark Marsh.

VI.

sympathy with them, and Mr. White

W

VAN."*

HAT is most traceable about the novels of Mr. Whiteing is the trend of his own mental development, not as a writer, but as a sociologist. From vague impulses he is beginning to fasten on concrete facts, and although not seeing these facts as yet in their full relationship one to another, he has seen them clearly enough to find inspiration for another book. No. 5 John Street was the book impelled by awakening conscience, without realisation of cause or remedy. The Yellow Van moves onward a step to the discovery of a single cause although with but a vague sense of remedy. Meanwhile, being gifted with a not inconsiderable literary talent, Mr. Whiteing has made of his impulses two books which can not be classed with ordinary hackwork.

It is not likely that this second book will have the immediate and popular vogue enjoyed by No. 5 John Street because it lacks certain sensational elements of the earlier work, and also because the general public can be more easily made to take an interest in a startling picture of poverty, with dynamite to enliven it, than in a quieter portrayal which fixes the blame on a recognised system and an admired class.

The slight plot around which Mr. Whiteing weaves his stories and their lessons, concerns itself here with the life of an American girl, a school teacher in a Western town, as the wife of one of the few great feudal lords of England. We grow quite interested in Augusta Gooding in the opening chapters of the duke's courtship of her, but as Duchess of Allonby she wanders through the pages a beautiful, lifeless puppet, cold and distant. The duke himself is scarcely less vague, and although all their friends are doubtless portraits from well known. originals, they do not approach us sufficiently to win our sympathy. The author needed them, but is not himself in

*The Yellow Van. By Richard Whiteing. New York: The Century Company.

ture. The midnight bridge gambling of a party of young women of high lineage. in the ducal house party is the only dramatic sensation of this part of the book. The duchess has a young brother who visits her in England, but he is a sad example of mistaken politeness on the part of Mr. Whiteing. The young gentleman was doubtless intended as a delicate compliment to American men, but in comparison with this impossible little prig, the heroes of Richard Harding Davis are nature and simplicity itself.

As is usual with Mr. Whiteing, the nearer he comes to the soil, the warmer grows the life of his characters. The villagers in Slocum are alive, types and yet individuals, pathetic or amusing, but all real. Mr. Whiteing indulges again in his little laugh at the expense of those who preach to the working class virtues and self-denial they would never think of practising themselves. "Holy Joe" in John Street was a pathetic example of the utter futility of piety, sobriety and all other good qualities, to make the lives of the submerged a whit more hopeful. Holy Joe has a more humorous successor in the person of Mr. Grimber, the retired tallow-chandler who makes Slocum his home and who is a model of all the Philistine virtues, a very pattern of negative qualities. Once in a while, however, Mr. Grimber has misgivings when he sees that "people behindhand with their rent, and actually without hope of mercy for unpaid taxes, seemed somehow to get so much more out of life." Mr. Grimber indulges in one little spree with Job Gurt, the village Incorrigible, whom he was trying to save, and the story of this spree is one of the most delicious bits of writing in the book.

The Yellow Van, which gives the title to the book, is the campaign wagon of a little band of ardent reformers who believe the cause of unbearable economic conditions to rest largely in the question of land ownership. The reformers of the Van are long on cause, but hazy as to remedy, which appears to be Mr. Whiteing's attitude of mind as well. The Van comes and goes, but in very episodic fashion. Were it not for the title of the book, the reader, unless exceptionally in

terested in the land question, would hardly realise the relation the Van bears to the other incidents in the tale.

There is a noticeable peculiarity about Mr. Whiteing's style in the writing of this book. In the opening chapters, for quite a little way on into the story, and again in the closing scene, his language is brilliant, but somewhat forced. It is full of mannerisms and sparklets of the modern electric, prearranged kind. It is not uninteresting, but it is not spontaneous; we can see the wheels go round. But once in the swing of the story, the style clears itself of all useless ballast. The language becomes simple, unaffected, plain and direct, with a power that carries conviction. The author's power falters near the close, and where the definite moral lesson should come in, if he has had one to give, we find a return to the laboured style of the first chapters. And a return also to the same sort of

melodramatic philosophy with which the hero of John Street takes leave of us. Mr. Whiteing seems to want to sum up the matter for his readers, instead of adopting the simpler method of letting the facts he has portrayed speak for themselves.

Grace Isabel Colbron.

VII.

MR. HILL'S "THE WEB."*

F the two classes of criminals, those who make use of the weaknesses and technicalities of the law are more significant, as they are more interesting than those who defy it. Not only because they represent a higher order of intelligence and deal with larger figures, but also because they often raise by their actions those subtle distinctions between what is and is not justified by so-called business enterprise. Their game is comparable in a way to that of the chess player, like him they strive to attain their ends by careful study of every factor in the calculation at every stage, and take instant advantage of every mistake by their opponents. When men of equal intelligence and address are pitted against them the fight

*The Web. By Frederick Trevor Hill. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company.

which results is not only exciting but well worth study for its exposure of conditions and tendencies which must largely determine the future of our civilisation. When a participant in such legal battles undertakes in the guise of fiction to tell of them his story inevitably partakes of the nature of a document, and Mr. Hill's new book would be entitled to consideration on this account, though as a romantic fabrication it possessed less novel features of entertainment than others. It is in fact the "inside story" of one of those great commercial conspiracies into which law, politics and even the agencies of acknowledged criminal practice enter, and of which the newspapers commonly give only the superficial aspects. It may be added that those who read The Web and like it may turn with assurance to that capital story The Minority and to those revelations in fiction of the intricacies and contradictions of the law, The Case and Exceptions, which have appeared in the past few years from the same hand.

Mr. Hill's title is singularly apt. The Web is of double spinning, and it is spun for the same purpose as its prototype of the neglected corner-to secure plunder for its builder. Less tangible even than the spider's filaments, but strong and tenacious and cunningly crossed are the legal threads with which Myrick and Nugent and Rutledge, the attorneys for Searing, the capitalist, weave the meshes that are to capture the unwary Placento Mining Company and hold it fast while

the Coast and Gulf Railroad fattens itself thereon. And, like the unsuspecting fly, the mining company enters the trap, and then begins the struggle. For the fly in this instance has an ally-two allies in fact-one a fiery, determined old gentleman named Frayer, possessed of means and orthodox ideas of right and wrong, the other a resolute and resourceful young lawyer, Dave Maddox; and the elimination of Maddox becomes essential to the success of the conspirators' plan. The story of the plot and counterplot are instructive as an illustration of the tremendous negative assistance which the law lends to those who seek to postpone a trial in court until the opposition shall yield from sheer exhaustion; but the interest of the story centres upon the two women and Maddox, whose fortunes so strangely are welded and made the pivot

upon which turns the great corporation battle. Mr. Hill has here taken advantage of his knowledge of the laws of States respecting divorce to expose an almost inconceivable iniquity-nothing less than the opportunity which the difference between these laws affords to prove a woman who has been legally divorced in one State from her first husband guilty of adultery with her second husband in another State. It is a threat to institute a suit based upon this charge against the wife of Maddox's life-long friend, unless he cease to press the case against the conspirators which brings Maddox face to face with a choice between what is demanded by his duty to his employer, who is the father of the woman he loves, and his duty to Mrs. Evans, the woman whose happiness lies in his hand. This crisis, complicated with the mystery of a murder which almost makes him doubt the woman he protects, is triumphantly met by Maddox; and Mr. Hill has given the closing chapters of his story that excellent quality of cumulative and dramatic in

terest.

Indeed it is not until the story begins to near its end that the reader realises that more might have been done with the middle and larger portion of the book to fulfill the promise in the first chapter of acute perceptions and picturesque traits. in the person of Maddox. Nugent is capitally done, not less so are Myrick, Frayer, and Ainslee; but of Harmony, who plays such a sweet and winning part in court, less is seen than one wishes, and Maddox disappoints again and again. Availing itself of all the chances offered by its chief figure and employing a more leisurely manner in the development of its characters which well deserve itThe Web would have been a more even piece of work, and as a story have furnished even better entertainment than it does. Churchill Williams.

apt to be written entirely from the undergraduate point of view or practically without reference to it. When the latter method is used the result often is a little plot with a great network of professors' theories. The former method usually produces a worthless book of "college stories," which modern young-very young women are fond of collecting. What interest it has it gets from descriptions of scenes and places and happenings like those the reader knew when he-or she!-got tinglings of the blood from the mere mention of the words "Alma Mater."

Of both these kinds there have been a number in the last five years. Professor Hopkins's book is neither. He steers midway. He gives us a real university, with regents and faculty and football players; a Governor of a State, his hostility appeased by a degree; a regent whose $500,000 elects a president; an eccentric possessor of wealth whose

favour the executive wheedles himself into. Borrowing here a little and a little there, Argos is typical of the State universities of this country. It reflects the "largeness and enthusiasm of the West," to use one of the book's phrases, though finally its president comes to call it a "big, overgrown, plebeian high school." It is young, and above all, present day.

And on no less plebeian and present day questions than repression of the trusts and public ownership of public utilities and academic freedom of speech does much of the action hinge. A blacksmith's son, who was the president's chum at an Eastern institution, professor at Argos and highly popular, talks socialism. Relations between these two commanding figures become strained and more strained, and their conflict alone holds close attention.

This is complicated by the fact that the two, with another especially striking professor, love, or think they love, clever, tactful, pretty Mrs. Van Sant. One of them wins her, which is to be expected, but aside from that the author lets a remarkable piece of material good fortune come to each of the three within a few days, thus proving, what has been proved often before, that fiction is stranger than truth.

*The Torch. By Herbert M. Hopkins. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.