Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/876

 8 $6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

with negro skilled labor. The employment of negro skilled labor is slowly increasing. The negro evinces considerable mechanical ingenuity.

The present situation is as follows :

The southern laborer and the employer have united to disfranchise the negro and to make a color caste ; the northern laborer is striving to make the whites unite with the negroes and maintain wages ; the employer threatens that if they do raise labor troubles he will employ negroes. The northern laborer sees here the danger of a disfranchised, degraded, and yet skilled compe- tition, and raises the note of warning.

MONROE N. WORK.

CHICAGO.

Religious Life in America: A Record of Personal Observation. By ERNEST HAMLIN ABBOTT. New York : The Outlook Co., 1902. Pp. 370.

THIS volume records the results of a long tour of observation in the southern, middle, and western states, whose purpose it was to study the phenomena of religious life. The method of securing facts is that of the interviewer, not that of the statistician, and it yields very readable results, starting problems which the statistical method may treat with more fulness and accuracy, if with less vividness.

The author thinks that the South is undergoing a quiet and almost insensible change in the direction of a more liberal theology, and that the negroes give evidence of progress. The West will become politi- cally supreme. Its religious influence is not felt so much in theologi- cal conceptions as in practical life and experiments in church methods. " The middle West is no more enterprising in business affairs than it is in religious schemes. Indeed, nowhere else has Christianity been so diversely garbed or so variously vulgarized. At the same time, religion in the middle West is essentially conventional. Its standards are, generally speaking, external rather than intrinsic." The middle West insists on the social bearing of religion. "The pio- neer West .... may be godless, wicked, sordid though I do not say that it is but above all things it is genuine What influ- ence it exerts in religion must be in creating and intensifying the hatred of sham and the love of reality and candor."

Everywhere the church is an ethical power, but nowhere lives up to its ideals. Intellectually the ministers who have been educated are frequently held back by laymen " whose mental attitude has been unaffected by modern knowledge, except to be made more obstinately traditional." In the same way the efforts of sympathetic ministers to