“The hints are such as may be followed, as a rule, by people of ordinary means, and it is to the credit of the work that it always prefers the sensible and practical thing to that which is a fad of the day or which leans toward ostentation.”
+ + Outlook. 83: 139. My. 19, ’06. 120w.
Shadwell, Arthur. Industrial efficiency: a comparative study of industrial life in England, Germany and America. 2 v. *$7. Longmans.
Dr. Shadwell’s investigations are the result “of laborious inquiries to which the authors of comparisons between the industrial conditions of different countries rarely condescend—inquiries conducted in England, Germany and the United States, and with ‘the help of hundreds of people, from the British ambassadors in Berlin and Washington to ordinary workmen,’ inquiries not merely in books and documents, but in many factories and workshops.... Rarely do chief conclusions emerge in such distinctness and due proportion from a crowd of individual facts. Some of the chapters ... are models of economical investigation.”
“The style is excellent for its subject: even lucid, simple, carrying the reader insensibly forward through nearly a thousand pages without any sense of fatigue.”
+ Ath. 1906, 1: 660. Je. 2. 1450w.
“Two volumes of clear, interesting, forcible writing that are worthy to stand on our shelves alongside the classical works of Bryce and De Tocqueville.”
+ + Ind. 61: 751. S. 27, ’06. 1180w.
“To have written an original book upon a somewhat trite subject; to have set in a new light many facts which have been treated recently by a score of writers, some of them of no mean ability; to have made a narrative of dry facts readable as well as instructive, is a considerable achievement. It is not too much to say that Dr. Shadwell has accomplished all this.”