confronted with a whole Sociology which presents the present generation as existing for the sake of the next, and demands an unlimited sacrifice of the parent for the well-being of the child.

In

Chiming in as they do with the general humanitarianism of our time, these ideas, in themselves a sound reaction against the old patriarchy, have contributed no little to the impasse which confronts us. At the outset of our inquiry we emphasized the element of liberty tending to license. But we are not sure that the children, who in this new order are allowed to "bring themselves up," come out worst. dealing with "enlightened parents," we must not forget that whatever else enlightenment implies, it implies nerves. Now, the nervous parent, a professed believer in the new doctrine of child liberty, seldom has the courage of his convictions. He feels a constant itching to intervene, not, of course, in the old, unenlightened way of peaceful discipline, but in a new and more insinuating manner. For authority he will substitute what he calls exerting moral influence. This influence, compact as it is of reason, experience, and affection, he feels must and ought to be ef'fective. And perhaps it might be, wielded with tact, and kept for rare occasions. But as an atmosphere in child-life, it is usually a mistake. The indirectness and insinuation of the process arouse suspicion and repel. Most children probably prefer an exercise of plain authority to the "sweet reasonableness" of the enlightened parent. No doubt it will be replied that "it all depends on how it is done." Our point, however, is that it usually fails, and that not from mere mishandling, but because the position which the "enlightened parent" seeks to establish in dealing with his children is itself radically faulty.

sought in the natural, impossibility of such full, free sympathy between two generations as is necessary for the efficacy of these modes of moral influence. Between parent and child, Nature has fixed a great gulf, and for parents to pretend to meet their children on a basis of free equality is to fly in the face of Nature. The mother cannot be a sister to her daughter, nor the father an equal comrade to his son, the natural situation and the difference of years co-operate to form an impenetrable barrier to the community of feelings and ideas of the two generations. This will doubtless be obstinately denied, for it offends the pride of many educated people who actually delude themselves into believing that their children are on the same free terms with them as with the friends of their own age. It is the most cherished and the proudest notion of many middleaged fathers and mothers that, by cultivating an interest in all the tastes and activities of their children, they will be able to stretch a guiding hand over the chasm of years. In our fastmoving times when a new generation revolutionizes the whole external order and puts on new habits and new outlooks, the sight of panting parents toiling to keep pace becomes really ludicrous. In his brilliant satire "Now!" Mr. Charles Marriott exhibits the inevitable failure of the enlightened parent to keep up. Surely it would be better not to try an experiment in false equality foredoomed to failure. In the more mature and reasonable application of equalitarian doctrine to the structure of the State, or the industrial business, it has been found necessary to cultivate new organic forms of authority and discipline consonant with the more humane spirit of the age.

For the unqualified tendency of mechanical equality is everywhere to

and industrial world is equally applicable to the structure of a human family. The present situation is one of utter instability and fumbling compromises. Much of the trouble is due to the conspiracy of solemn sentimentalism into which educationalists, eugenists, and humanitarians have entered to persuade us that self-sacrifice is the true function of the parent whose thoughts and aspirations should be concentrated wholly on the good of the next generation. There is something rather pre

The Nation.

posterous in this conception of an infinitude of effort directed to an abstract improvement of the race, no part of which is to be harvested in the enjoyment of the current generation. May it not be proper to remind ourselves that the twentieth century is not wholly "for the child," and that parents also, being God's creatures, have rights as well as duties? Past defects in the nurture and education of children are ill-compensated by present ex

cesses.

Dr. Kaethe Schirmacher's historical survey of "The Modern Woman's Rights Movement" which has recently appeared in Germany in a second and revised edition, has been translated by Dr. Carl Conrad Eckhardt of the University of Colorado and is published by the Macmillan Company. The book is frankly partisan in its presentation of the subject, but is comprehensive and painstaking in its collection of data; and the information which it contains relating both to the political and the industrial position of women in different countries will interest even readers who are not in sympathy with the more aggressive manifestations of the present suffrage agitation. The translator has added notes to the chapters relating to the United States, which bring the information up to date.

A pleasant trip with a group of Unitarians from Canada and the United States to the "Congress of Religious Liberals" and, afterwards, to the Passion Play, carried Miss Georgina Pflaum to England, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy. The result is a book, in which the usual round of sightseeing in the usual round of places is painstakingly described and,

at the conclusion, a little love romance is slipped in by way of allurement. The love-affair is personally conducted to a happy ending and the trip seems to have been profitable to all concerned. The love is fiction: the travel fact. The volume is named "Tour Two" after the title of that half of the party which slipped over the Alps into Italy. Sherman, French & Company.

Professor Frederic L. Paxson's brief history of "The Civil War," one of the latest volumes in the "Home University Library" (Henry Holt & Co.)covers the period from the election of President Lincoln to the issuance of the amnesty proclamation by President Johnson in May, 1865. It is a succinct and rapid narrative of the chief events of those momentous years, impartial in its attitude and just in its conclusions. The author, who is Professor of American History in the University of Wisconsin, has been as painstaking in his researches as if he were engaged upon a far more voluminous work. He has a happy gift of selection which enables him to disregard the trivial and to decline to be led astray upon by-paths. It is through this elimination of the unim

portant that he is able to make his sketch of both the political and the military history of the time so graphic and so satisfactory.

"Dramatists of To-day," by Edward Everett Hale, Jr., is not entirely a new book. In its first form it appeared in 1905, and discussed the work of Rostand, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Pinero, Bernard Shaw, Stephen Phillips, and Maeterlinck, with two chapters on Standards of Criticism, and Our Idea of Tragedy. The author calls his book an "informal discussion of the significant work of these dramatists." It is this and more. Time has proven it a reference book of value, an expression of a view-point sound and well worth considering. The present volume brings up to date the work of the dramatists concerned, adding the plays which have appeared in the last five years. Not bound too closely to dramatic and literary standards of the past, nor impelled by the necessity of seeming startlingly original in every utterance, Mr. Hale steers a middle course, and comprehends clearly the attitude of the average drama lover. Not too academic, and never commonplace, he presents standards of criticism which are ideal, but easily understood and applied. Henry Holt & Co.

"In Desert and Wilderness," by Henryk Sienkiewicz, is an adventure story, with an interest that does not flag from start to finish. The author's extraordinary descriptive powers are at their best, and the reader seems actually to live the scenes which are so skilfully depicted. Stas Tarkowski, a lad of fourteen, and Nell Rawlinson a girl of eight, children of an engineer and a director of the Suez Canal Company, were abducted by the dervishes at the time when Khartum fell. Their adventures in desert and wilderness, from captivity to freedom, com

prise the entire story. Stas is a remarkable hero for these times; to the keenness of a modern youth is added the spirit of medieval chivalry, and an unusual modesty. In the hands of any other author, Stas might seem a prig, but here his character is an integral part of situations strange as an old romance, yet made to seem probable and real. The characters of the story are indeed young people, but the appeal of the book is not limited to any age or condition. It is fascinating and stimulating. Little, Brown & Co.

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Professor Thomas Nixon Carver's "The Religion Worth Having" (Houghton Mifflin Co.) is written from the point of view of a political economist rather than a theologian; and it regards religion less as a spiritual or supernatural force than as a motive which impels to useful effort and tends to increase productivity. The author defines reverence as an appreciation of the righteousness and beneficence of the universe of law, a recognition of natural law as divine law. The only kind of faith which ever removed mountains, he holds, is faith in the calculability of God's laws, and a willingness to venture out in obedience to them. conception of the church militant to which his conclusions lead is "the Fellowship of the Productive Life"; and he preaches as a new crusade the task of rescuing the farms, the shops, the business affairs, and the governments of the world from the hands of the unproductive, which means the immoral, the un-Christian. He does not deny spiritual forces or relations, the communion of the human with the Divine, or the reality of the present and prevailing sense of the power of the endless life but the consideration of these does not fall within the scope of his brief discussion. His view is that righteousness and productiveness are synonymous, and it is the more prac

tical, not to say more material aspect of what he presents as the religion worth having with which he chooses to deal. He writes freshly and pungently; and some of his illustrations and analogies are the more arresting for being drawn from every-day experience.

A drama found among the effects of Tolstoy after his death and called "The Light that Shines in Darkness" has been edited by Hagberg Wright for English-speaking readers. (Dodd, Mead & Co.) It is a piteous, tragic, beautiful thing, the fruit of those last despairing years of the famous Russian and largely autobiographical. The incidents not in Tolstoy's life are easily eliminated. Under the name of Nicholas Ivanovich Sarintsev and his wife, the author tells of his life-long struggle against an unsympathetic wife and sons. He wished to reserve a farm and about two hundred and fifty dollars a year, then give all else to the poor, obeying his own very literal, yet exceedingly modern from a theological point of view, interpretation of the Gospels. Nicholas converts the lover of his daughter to it-the young man is sent to an insane asylum; his priestthe poor fellow is imprisoned in a monastery and recants; his own son-the boy enters society and dances it out of his head. As a finale the mother of the first poor lad, driven mad by his woes and her own sorrowful life to which this is the culminating anguish, kills Nicholas; and he, dying, declares the murder an accident. The book is a closet drama. There is no movement to fit it for the stage; but it will remain the sorrowful confession of a great man in his disillusioned age.

A well-nigh incredible book is "An Open Letter to Society" from Convict 1776. The author declares that he has been sent to jail eight times and is

He

"not yet thirty-five," then goes on, leaving out the rest of his history, to address to "Madame Society" a plea for a change of the whole theory of punishment. The brilliantly-written book shows erudition, the mastery of both dead and living images, a wide acquaintance with literature dealing with penal institutions. The reader stops and gasps-one term is dreamable for such a man-even two; but eight! The book, though written in bitterness, is fair and candid. It first attacks Lombroso and his "criminal classes" theory. Says the writer, "The fact is: all men are possible criminals, all criminals possible men"-a statement needing modification but certainly nearer sanity than Lombroso's work. proceeds to attack the theory that a Judge can "guess" the relative lengths appropriate for the sentences of prisoners, giving striking instances of enormous differences of punishments for the same crime. He does not believe in indeterminate sentences, for he thinks that any variable sentence introduces politics into justice and that a "well-behaved" prisoner is merely a clever "boot-licker." He describes the ordinary prison wardens as a low, savage, brutalized, illiterate class; he calls on every prison visitor to justify his claim. The jail, he finally adds, is "a breeding place for crime" and the Reform School a source of immorality and soul-rotting influence. It is impossible to fill the minor positions in such schools with moral men. The remedies proposed are first sympathy (while the man is in jail and when he is trying to step back into his place in life), parole for specified periods, payment by the prisoner, while on parole, of the sum he has stolen and the money he has cost the state, education in nobler things, and elimination of graded punishments for second, third, and habitual offenders. Fleming H. Revell Company.