Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/134

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I20 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tific work in the painstaking carefulness of its investigations and in its accurate presentation of facts ; and in the value of its interpre- tations it often indeed surpasses, in the opinion of the reviewer, many professedly scientific treatises.

The book covers the whole field of the relations between the races, both North and South. It takes up nearly every aspect of the problem, from negro crime to negro industry, and from racial inter- mixture to racial isolation and conflict. It describes conditions with a fulness and frankness which are remarkable, and, so far as I can discover, without bias or exaggeration. Of course, the book lacks statistics on many points where they might have been fur- nished, but as the chapters were written for a series of popular magazine articles, this defect, if it be one, has good excuse. The purpose of the book is to reproduce, mainly by a series of word pictures, the concrete social situations in which racial friction arises ; and this it succeeds in doing to a wonderful degree, so that a careful reading of the book may, for a northerner, unfamiliar with the negro, be as useful as a residence in the South for several years. One wonders, indeed, how Mr. Baker caught the "atmos- phere" of his problem so well, and got such insight into the psycho- logical elements involved in race friction, without having lived for years in the social situations which he describes. If this book is a fair sample of what Mr. Baker can do in the way of objective, psychological analysis of social situations, it is certainly to be hoped that he will speedily turn his attention to other of our current social problems.

Charles A. Ellwood University of Missouri

Misery and Its Causes. "American Social Progress Series." By Edward T. Devine, Shiff Professor of Social Econ- omy, Columbia University. New York: Macmillan, 1909, Pp. xi-f 274. $1.25.

Fourth in the "American Social Progress Series" is Professor Edward T. Devine's Misery and Its Causes. As the editor of the series states, this attempts to articulate a new social philosophy, pragmatic, economic, and socially adaptable to the existing conditions of American life. The volume consists of six essays and is in substance the author's lectures on the Ken-