428 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
illustrations. Here and there sources of information were not the latest accessible, and descriptions which would have been true a number of years ago were not accurate at the time they were written. Illustrations are not always representative or typical. Small experi- ments of unproved value, in a few instances, are set down as though they bore the seal of general acceptance.
It is worth noting that, at best, such a publication as this cannot remain accurate as an up-to-date statement of facts. It is no sooner off the press than it begins to fall behind the times. New laws are enacted, new ideas put into practice and old discarded. The entire body of charitable effort throughout the world is in a state of flux, and a picture of it at any moment must be a "snap- shot," differing in countless details from any preceding or subsequent picture. This obvious fact is mentioned because it tends to minimize the importance of most of the errors which have found place in the book. That all the information in its 715 pages is not brought down to precisely the same date line will seem a smaller mistake with each succeeding year. When we cease trying to make the descriptions in the book fit minutely the comparatively unimportant details of the institutions about us, and come to regard the publication as a com- prehensive picture of the charitable activities of the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, we shall appreciate better than now how faithfully, in all important aspects, the great task has been accomplished.
ERNEST P. BICKNELL.
CHICAGO BUREAU OF CHARITIES.
Our Own Times: A Continuous History of the Twentieth Cen- tury. Edited by HAZLITT ALVA CUPPY, and a Board of Special Editors. Vol. I, by BONNISTER MERWIN. New York : J. A. Hill & Co. Pp. xv + 453.
The central idea of the enterprise of which this volume is the first fruit may be described as a design to do year by year what Dr. Albert Shaw does month by month in his comments upon current events in the Review of Reviews. As the publishers' announcement suggests, the perspective of a single year may turn out to be different from that of a century ; and it is equally true that a year will change the assortment of things worth remarking from month to month. Accordingly a volume made by binding together the most sagacious
