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 556 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ness ought to view them with a tolerant eye as their equals, per- haps even their superiors, in elementary humanness.

The man who rises in the system may well acknowledge that his obedience to superiors, clocklike regularity, and facility of inhi- bition are costing him something precious. Emotionally he is being deadened. The world is turning gray. He reacts to fewer things and with less intensity. The middle-aged "safe" banker, teacher, pastor, with his staid cab-horse gait, the "faithful" bookkeeper, foreman, yardmaster, bored by himself and his ilk, sometimes avenges himself by a secret fling for the ennui of his respectability. He may then learn to be grateful to the sentimental Bohemians and rebel artists who have not lost their capacity for pity and indignation, to the Shelleys, Whitmans, and Swinburnes, who can revive in him the old thrills and restore to the simple experi- ences of life their pristine tang.

Edward Alsworth Ross

The University of Wisconsin

Problems of City Government. By L. S. Rowe, Professor of Political Science in the University of Pennsylvania. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1908, Pp. 358.

This publication attempts to cover the field of municipal gov- ernment in America in a brief but comprehensive work. The avowed purpose is to include in the study not only the structural and legal aspects of the problem, but to analyze all social, economic, and political forces and to trace their progress and development in the evolution of the American city. This purpose has been admira- bly achieved* for a treatise of such limited proportions. The rela- tive emphasis upon the legal, structural, and social phases of the problem and the discussion and exposition of the interplay of these forces, indicate a broad and scholarly attitude toward the questions in hand.

The problem of municipal government is stated as the task of securing a close adjustment between three great actors — political ideas, political forms, and political problems. The evolution of each of these factors and their interrelation is carefully traced, dis- closing their real significance in the solution of present-day ques- tions. In the proper adjustment of these factors the emphasis must