The text is an undraped outline of structure, mechanism and process; a skeleton whose vital functioning and animating spirit the reader is left to imagine or learn from other sources.

How the structure came

The book, however, is

to be or how well it serves are not discussed. accurate, comprehensive and copious in reference to sources and authorities from which the reader can fill in the bald outline which it contains. "The present work," says the author in the preface, "is too condensed to be interesting. It must suffice for the present if it is found to be useful." It will be found exceedingly useful by students of British public finance, particularly by American students who are interested in financial administration and budgetary procedure.

THOMAS S. Adams.

MADISON, WISCONSIN.

Working Girls in Evening Schools. A Statistical Study. By MARY VAN KLEECK. Russell Sage Foundation Publications. New York, Survey Associates, 1914.—xi, 252 pp.

This little volume is a well-illustrated, well-written picture of the industrial life of working women in New York city, painted from sketches obtained through the evening schools. During the winter of 1910-11 there were enrolled in the evening schools of New York city 39,242 women, with an average attendance of 15,665. Of this number 13,141 responded to queries made during the investigation. The presentation claims to be typical of women in industry and on this basis occupations, hours of labor, exploitations, schooling, and age of beginning work are described. The object is avowedly to "afford a foundation for further intensive study" and to offer facts "as a basis for planning new types of industrial courses."

But the study does not seem to fulfil its aim. We are not given any analysis which suggests the line or lays the "foundation for further intensive study," and we are given no resulting program for "new types of industrial courses." Curiously, about fifty-eight per cent of the women reported as being employed in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits are in trades for which day and evening vocational training is afforded to a limited degree. Here, as so frequently, the truth is not discovered. The fault is not in the type of training which has been established, but in the small extent of that training. When this winter the Manhattan Trade School was forced to shut its doors in the face of 500 little girls who were seeking vocational training in day classes, why do we demand new types of schools instead of more schools?

Two chapters deal directly with evening school problems, showing

clearly the irregularity of attendance and the failure to meet vocational demands, except in the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, which is apparently responding effectively to a real need. The study disclaims any intent to report on the schools; but the reviewer is of opinion that the value of the book is to be found in these two chapters, and regrets that greater emphasis is not placed upon the constructive suggestions herein contained.

It is to be questioned whether the girls who spelled the word " operator" in sixteen new and original ways, each worthy of note, are to be trusted to fill in a card, even so "simple in form" as the one used in this investigation. We fear this originality would militate against accuracy. It is stated that the members of the staff "visited each school and fully explained the plan to the principal." The cards were then distributed to the women in each class-room, to be answered "under the direction of the teachers." But schedule-making requires the careful immediate supervision of an investigator, who has been prepared for the specific task.

It is also to be questioned whether this picture of occupations, hours of labor and schooling of working women may be accepted as typical. According to the figures here presented the proportion studied in trade and transportation is too large to be representative. A similar question arises when nationality is considered. The reviewer does not deem the conclusion on page 36 sound and believes that the figures show that the evening schools should be prepared to meet the needs of a nonwage-earning group as well as of a wage-earning group. The form of tabular presentation is open to criticism. For example, Appendix i, Table F, would be better if drawn in the same form as Table G. Table J makes for economy, but it does not make for clearness and it is contrary to the standard for which we have so long been struggling. Brevity in captions throughout the text where one-half the table is devoted to the headings, as in Tables 9, 11 and 19, would release space and cost for the needed increase of space and cost in the appendix, and would at the same time result in clearness and force in each place.

The suggestions presented in Appendix ii are excellent. If our evening schools will recognize the value of acquiring such data, will carefully keep such records, and will then analyze them and apply the results, we may hope for effective accomplishment in relation to the industrial as well as to the social and physical activity of our youthful and of our adult workers.

SIMMONS COLLEGE.

SUSAN M. KINGSBURY.

517

The Public Schools and Women in Office Service. Edited by MAY ALLISON. Boston, Women's Educational and Industrial Union, 1915.-xv, 187 pp.

This book is the latest contribution to the Studies of the Economic Relations of Women which have been made during the last few years by students in the research department of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union. It is a study in vocational education. It aims to present the business, economic, and social conditions which confront the public commercial high school and which should determine the formulation of its curriculum.

Nine of the eleven Boston high schools have commercial courses including classes in phonography, typewriting, and bookkeeping. In 1912-1913, nearly two-thirds of the girls enrolled elected one or more of these technical subjects. In sections of the city where economic pressure is greatest, as many as four-fifths of the girls were in the commercial classes. Almost as large a number are enrolled in the evening commercial high schools. From the standpoint of the high school, therefore, it is evident that the program for the commercial class is an especially important one if the needs of the pupils are to be adequately met. It must also be directed, as the report points out, towards a preconceived end of efficiency in useful employment.

In order to accomplish this end, the school must have information on the kinds of office work open to women; the requirements of education, maturity, technique and personality requisite for the different occupations; the opportunities and conditions determining advancement; and the openings for and requisites of the beginner. This information the report furnishes in a chapter on the character of office service.

The economic importance of adequate preparation for office work is convincingly set forth in the chapter on wages. In the tables that are given to show the relation between wages and schooling, almost without exception wages rise with educational equipment. Experience is important, of course, but emphasis is laid upon the necessity of a wellbalanced education to supplement good technical training if success in office service is to be assured. "Those without the opportunities for obtaining these requisites," the report goes on to say, "would better be directed into some occupation where they would have greater opportunity for success."

A chapter on home life and responsibilities furnishes data on the economic and social background of the girls who attend commercial

classes. On a basis of such information, schools may modify their program to meet the needs of special localities. It must be flexible enough to adapt itself on the one hand to a district where large numbers of the pupils are of foreign-born parents, and on the other to a neighborhood where the girls come from native-born families representing greater knowledge of American social and business customs. The study points out that the economic condition of most of the girls is such as to make it practicable for the schools to advise both parents and daughters of the vital importance of prolonged education as a training for stenography and bookkeeping. This is especially necessary in view of the fact that many of the pupils in the evening schools have had only a grammar-school education.

The book closes with a series of concrete recommendations to the educator and placement agency; to parent and child; and to the business man. The substantial principles of the report have been embodied already in the new Clerical School of Boston opened last September. The method of study and the general principles formulated will be of interest and suggestive value to many educators elsewhere who are trying to meet the needs of the large numbers who come to their commercial classes.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

EMILIE J. HUTCHINSON.

Livelihood and Poverty. By A. L. BOWLEY and A. R. BURNETTHURST. With an Introduction by R. H. TAWNEY. The Ratan Tata Foundation. London, G. Bell and Sons, 1915.—222 pp.

The object of the Ratan Tata Foundation, of which the headquarters are at the School of Economics, Clare Market, Kingsway, London, W. C., is to promote the study of methods of preventing and relieving poverty and destitution. The Foundation makes inquiries into wages and cost of living, methods of preventing and diminishing unemployment and measures affecting the health and well-being of the wage-earning classes. The results are published in pamphlet or book form. In addition to disseminating information, the officers of the Foundation "will, as far as is in their power, send replies in individual inquiries relating to questions of poverty and destitution, their causes, prevention, and relief, whether at home or abroad." Livelihood and Poverty is the sixth in the series of the publications of the Foundation, and it is an admirable example of the work which the Foundation is undertaking.

Northampton with its shoe industry, Warrington with its iron and steel, its chemical and its brewing industries, Stanley, as a center of the

coal trade in the great mining county of Durham, and Reading, a large center in the biscuit trade, are typical English industrial towns. Only Stanley, however, can be described as a labor camp; for Northampton, Reading and Warrington are old market towns, with the usual markettown trades and commercial activities, and each was a place of some commercial and social importance centuries before the industrial era and the days of labor camps, of which England has now its full quota. In each of these large towns-at least three of them would be called cities in this country-the method of investigation has been to take a certain proportion of the working-class homes and make house-to-house inquiries in accordance with a uniform schedule of queries; in the case of Northampton the number thus investigated was 743. Householders generally were surprisingly ready to submit to unofficial investigation; and on the whole their replies as to wages and rent were correct, and these replies stood the test of further investigation. Most of the large employers of labor were equally accommodating in checking or supplementing wage figures. The result of an enormous amount of careful scientific investigation, on lines much like those adopted in the Rowntree investigation at York, is a volume of data—all skilfully marshaled in text or tabular form-of great value in determining workingclass conditions in England.

The war, with its disturbance of financial, commercial, industrial and social conditions, was not in sight when the investigations at Northampton, Reading, Warrington and Stanley were made. Trade conditions were then normal. With the outbreak of the war the BowleyBurnett-Hurst study of economic and social conditions in these four towns has a value that its authors could not have contemplated when they were engaged on their field research; for at the end of the war a new epoch in English history-political, economic and social-will begin which must outrank in importance the epochs that began with the Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, the end of the Napoleonic wars and the Reform Act of 1832.

Some of the surprises of Livelihood and Poverty are the bad housing conditions that still survive in these English towns, and the fact that the old domestic method of shoe manufacturing has still some survivals in Northampton. It is cheering to note that machinery is displacing hand labor-mostly the labor of women and girls-in the monotonous and exhausting work of fustian-cutting in Warrington, one of the largest centers of the velveteen industry in England. Moreover, as was to a great extent the case when nearly thirty years ago machine composition began to take the place of the method that was as old as letter-press.