Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/564

 REVIEWS

The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. By Jane Addams. New York: Macmillan, 1909. $1.25.

One lays down The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets with the feeling that sociology has published a classic. So exquisitely and poetically has Miss Addams revealed the precious stuff of which young hearts are made, persisting fresh and elemental through all the carelessness and disregard of modern city life, that we gladly give her book a place beside Wordsworth's great Ode and those poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, upon which, as we approach middle life, we come to depend more and more for our reminders of the fugitive and invisible things of youth.

The chapters of this book are like a series of strong genre pic- tures, in which one sees the crude and habitual become all at once suggestive of strange potentialities and ideals; pictures in which life and fact are shown with such rare understanding and simple truthfulness as to compel instant recognition ; but pictures in which the true artist has used realism to arouse rather than to overwhelm lis.

In selecting and organizing this material out of her singularly comprehensive experience Miss Addams has rendered a notable service to society, which is just now coming into full consciousness of its long-neglected obligation to childhood. She does not re- proach us for losing sight of the radical changes that have come about in the home and social life of working people through the organization and centralization of modern industries, nor with our failure to comprehend immediately the profound effect upon young life and energies caused by the abstraction from the home of those activities in which children were producers along with their parents. She even comforts us a little by admitting our right to some confusion, and our inability to have kept up in our social reconstructions with the mad pace set by industrial and commer- cial progress. But she points out very clearly "the stupid and dangerous experiment we have entered upon in organizing work and failing to organize play," in concluding that the municipality

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