Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/731

 REVIEWS

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familiar fashion raises in my mind more doubts than it settles, not merely about the combination, but about the components. I fear that Professor Patten is not even, as he hopes, on the main line to truth via the route recommended by Huxley: (p. vi). "If you can't be right, be dead wrong." To be incomprehensible is neither.

A. W. S.

The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls. By MRS. JOHN VAN VORST AND MARIE VAN VORST. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. Pp. 303.

THIS is the book which called out the now famous letter of Presi- dent Roosevelt on the subject of parenthood. The letter is printed as a preface. It does not appear, by the way, that either of the authors is a mother, but they seem to have willingly posed to point the presi- dent's moral, in exchange for his advertising. As records of adven- ture the chapters are readable, in spite of a tinge of caddishness in keeping the reader reminded that the adventurer was a " lady," able at any moment by a " presto " to spirit herself into another world. One is unable to decide how much of a lark, and how much of serious investigation, was in the enterprise that collected these first-hand observations. It is equally impossible to decide whether this indeter- minable state of mind was competent to receive correct impressions of the subjective conditions encountered. The sketches will have to count, therefore, as specimens of amateur social photography. As studies of the view-point of the woman who toils their value is dubious.

A. W. S.