of the corporation which have been provided and which are intended for continuing productive use." From this standpoint capital assets and liabilities are considered, the different classes of securities are examined and the subject of capitalization discussed. The concluding chapter of the volume on over-capitalization is written with the same definition in mind. The volume shows a great amount of careful and extensive research and is a valuable addition to the existing works in this field.

Dr. Dewing's volume, issued as one of the Harvard Economic Studies, is very different in character from the work of Messrs. Cleveland and Powell, in that it is an intensive study along lines similar to those followed by Professor Stuart Daggett some years ago in his Railroad Reorganization, which also appeared as one of the Harvard studies. Dr. Dewing's work deals solely with that class of enterprises commonly known as industrials. The use of the word "industrial" rather than "corporate" in the title of the volume would have been more accurate. A further point in regard to the volume, which is in no sense conveyed by its title, is that the organizations studied are practically without exception consolidations.

As indicated, the book consists of a series of intensive studies of the promotion of a number of organizations (formed principally in that heyday of consolidation, 1897-1903) and an account of their subsequent history, including reorganizations. There is little that can be said about the work except that it deserves a high degree of praise. The materials are drawn largely from sources. Each is detailed and complete and has involved an enormous amount of research as well as personal interviews with persons either familiar with or personally concerned in the operations chronicled. The author's conclusions, based upon these studies, are to be found in the three concluding chapters of the volume entitled "The Promotion of Consolidations That Have Undergone Reorganization", "The Conditions and Causes Leading to Reorganization," and "Reorganization Expedients." These conclusions are at once interesting and valuable, though it is quite possible to quarrel with several of the statements in chapter xx dealing with the stages in the formation of an industrial consolidation. To do this, however, would be to quibble over a very trivial point. In conclusion, the reviewer is of the opinion that Dewing's Corporate Promotions and Reorganizations will become as much of a standard work in corporation finance as Professor Daggett's work on Railroad Reorganization already is.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

W. H. S. STEVENS.

Women Workers in Seven Professions. Edited by EDITH J. MORLEY. London, George Routledge and Sons, Limited, 1914.xvi, 318 pp.

Thirty years ago teaching was practically the only professional work done by women. Today women are numbered in the hundreds and, in some instances, thousands, in almost every profession. Women lawyers, for example, increased in number from seventy-five to over five hundred between 1880 and 1910; doctors from two thousand to fourteen thousand; clergymen from one hundred and sixty-five to over nine thousand. Facts such as these eliminate the question whether women should or should not enter all professional fields. They are there.

The women, however, who elect professional careers are confronted with many obstacles. Frequently there is the unwillingness, or the inability, of their parents to pay for the expense of a training that may never be commercially justified if daughters marry, as of course they should. Coupled with this situation is the scarcity of fellowships and post-graduate scholarships for women. If there is no financial difficulty, there is the fact that the professional and technical schools are not as generally open to women as to men, and their opportunities for training are therefore much more limited. Social prejudice against employing women, inequality in the money returns for similar service, the slowness of promotion in many lines of work coupled with duties of a routine or monotonous character-one or the other of these discouragements professional women must face over and over again. The traditional domestic obligations of woman further complicate the situation. If she is single, she may have to feel the wear and tear of living in a home where there is little sympathy with her ambitions, and where many demands are made upon the time and strength that are equal only to her professional work. If, on the other hand, she is married, there is likely to be the more serious question of combining the responsibility of home-making and child-bearing with her "career." A committee of women members of the Fabian Society has made an examination of these difficulties that make up the problem of women's economic independence, and the results are put forth in Women Workers in Seven Professions. The book is a survey of the economic position of women as teachers, doctors and dentists, nurses, sanitary inspectors and health visitors, civil service employees, clerks and secretaries, and actresses. By means of lectures by women representatives of the respective professions followed by discussions conducted exclusively

by women, the committee sought to obtain a frank expression of opinion from the women themselves on their physical disabilities as workers, and on the social conditions affecting their economic activity. The results include abundant specific data concerning the necessary qualifications for the work of the several professions, the opportunities for training and its cost, the remuneration that may be expected etc. In addition to these questions, the economic disabilities of English women (which might also read American women) are stated clearly, frankly, and exhaustively.

The solution of the various problems is much less definitely indicated, and those who are looking for ready-made remedies will probably be disappointed. For example, in the question of discrimination against women in university appointments, the committee says: "It seems, as far as can be judged, that future opportunities are likely to occur when the right candidates for posts are there in sufficient numbers to make their exclusion on the ground of sex, already seldom explicitly stated, impossible or inexpedient." And again: "University women teachers can best help to secure equality of opportunity by rendering themselves indispensable members of the body corporate-they must remember that it is the business of a university to make contributions to learning as well as to teach." This "putting it up," so to speak, to the women themselves is characteristic of the general comment of the committee and the contributors.

On the question of "equal pay for equal work" one speaker suggested that" next to the parliamentary vote, the most powerful lever in raising the condition of women will be the entrance into the labor market of a considerable number of women so trained that they will always' play the game,' and at the same time sufficiently remote from want to be able to resist the sweating employer." Every speaker exhorts women to uphold this principle of payment.

On what many consider the most baffling problem of all, viz., how women can combine professional work and the care of children, the present study sheds no light. The committee, however, is unanimous in repudiating celibacy for the professional woman and they promise another publication which shall consider the "practical steps toward such modification of social conditions as will enable women freely to use and develop their physical and mental capacities in productive work, while remaining free and fully able to exercise their special function of child-bearing."

There are those who will challenge the assumption of the desirability and the necessity of economic independence for women which under

lies the whole study. The committee is content to let this assumption stand with but scant defense. But granted the point of view, the book should realize the authors' hope of arousing "deeper interest in the vigor and energy with which professional women are now striving to make good their economic position." The discussion throughout is on a high plane, and sanity and judgment prevail in its counsel.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

EMILIE J. HUTCHINSON.

New

Interpretations and Forecasts. A Study of Survivals and Tendencies in Contemporary Society. By VICTOR BRANFORD. York, Mitchell Kennerly, 1914.-424 PP.

Mr. Branford is of that English school of sociologists who consider their subject as a fine art as well as a science. His master is that amazing personage, Professor Patrick Geddes of Edinburgh, botanist, zoologist, art-critic, town-planner, writer of pageants, and founder of the "Outlook Tower," the world's first sociological laboratory. It is he who has carried on the Ruskin and Morris tradition, broadening its scope to meet the demands of city development and the claims of the eugenics movement of today. And, like Professor Geddes, Mr. Branford is interested in sociology as applied science, as a body of knowledge for groups and institutions and folkways from which practical implications can be made for the conscious and resolute shaping of the future. He writes of "sociological science beginning to function as spiritual power."

The present book is a collection of addresses delivered before women's clubs, workingmen's educational associations, and societies for local betterment. It discusses current tendencies in education, drama, city development, from the point of view of the Good Race and the City Beautiful. Necessarily somewhat general and soaring in his treatment, Mr. Branford is extremely good reading for political scientists with imagination, who let their minds play not only upon how our social institutions have developed and what we can analyze them into, but also what we can do with them to serve the higher artistic and lifeenhancing social purposes which, now that supernatural ends have been generally abandoned, have become for most men of good-will the ideals into which they interpret their world. In this light the work of the sociologist will be to guide with expert and accurate hand the growing good-will of the groups and organizations which are tackling the probems of social disorder and maladjustment.

To give dignity and beauty to the life and labor of woman in the home,

of man in the factory and field; to subordinate the economics of the market to the ethics of the church; to replace the limitations or exaggerations of sects and the pedantries of academies by the realities of a living culture; to clean up the débris and confusion of the industrial cities and enrich their civic life with order and beauty-to achieve these ends is the purpose of innumerable organizations concerned with the task of betterment and uplift. These are concentrating around a double focus. The Town-planning endeavor is one focus, and the culture of Child-life is the other. Round these two complementary centers of interest are developing new social situations, and of high coördinating power. The care of the living child and the planning of the city-here surely are the natural, definite and concrete objectives which tend spontaneously to concentrate the emotion of women and artists, the knowledge of scientists and philosophers, the thought and care of educationists, the energies of labor, the power of statesmen.

Poetical as this may sound to many minds, it does actually grip something very like reality in the tendencies of the day. In this country the numerous social surveys of cities, the town-planning reports and schemes, the sociological studies of typical communities conducted by universities and churches, all speak of a new sense of the community as a living whole, of a determination that our sociological knowledge shall issue forth in applied civic art. It speaks of a new communal self-consciousness. Similarly, the newer tendencies in education, the wide interest in more democratic, more genuinely "public" forms of the public school, the application in schools in various parts of the country of philosophies like Dewey's "instrumentalism," all suggest the reality of this other focus of which Mr. Branford speaks. He has given us the very valuable clue to our Zeitgeist.

To those of us who take our sociology more or less emotionally this clue is not only valuable but prophetic. Before I had read Mr. Branford I had decided that the most significant sociological institutions I had seen during the past year were the small town-planned German municipality such as Rothenburg, and the public school system of William Wirt's in Gary, Indiana. The one develops the social and communal resources; the other the capacities of the individual, cultivating his powers and giving him the opportunities for a rounded and expressive and efficient life in his community. Mr. Branford's book confirms this intuition of mine. I should like to see these categories and these "focusses" of his generally accepted, strongly believed and worked for.

NEW YORK CITY.

RANDOLPH S. BOURNE.