To gain the sympathetic and accurate knowledge of children shown in his book, Mr. Coulter stood on the reviewing stand for ten years. His was the eye to see and the heart to feel from the first, but as clerk of the Children’s Court in Manhattan for ten years he had the unique opportunity of looking into the faces of a procession of 100,000 dependent, neglected and delinquent children as they filed by the judge and told their stories.
These stories he often verified in alley, street, tenement, station house, reformatory and prison. He shows how crowded streets, lack of play space, poverty, sickness, insanitary houses, criminal companions and parental neglect provide a fruitful soil in which to breed neglected and delinquent boys and girls. These conditions he charges to the greed of individuals and to the careless, neglectful indifference of society.
As a means of helping individual boys who need the personal touch of a friend right now, Mr. Coulter started the Big Brother Movement, which is spreading all over the country. His permanent remedy for the woes of children, however, requires not only the love of Big Brothers, parents and friends, but also sanitary houses, good food, playgrounds, fresh air and sky. Mr. Coulter’s pen pictures of Children in the Shadow challenge us all not to rest until all such children are brought out into the sunlight.
Miss McCracken’s book is a reprint of articles which originally appeared in the Outlook, and deals with actual children and parents of rather exceptional intelligence in both city and country. What these exceptional American parents do for their children in home, play, school, library and church is told in such a way as to appeal to and educate parents who are not exceptional.
What children do for their parents is also set forth. The real message of the book is that the reciprocal relation of children and parents can be and should be one of the most beautiful and helpful that this old world knows. The title might have been True Stories of Parents Who Knew How to Live with Their Children.
Henry W. Thurston.
CO-OPERATION IN NEW ENGLAND
By James Ford. Introduction by Francis G. Peabody.
Russell Sage Foundation Publication, Survey Associates,
Inc. 300 pp. Price $1.50, postpaid.
Individualism is generally assigned as the primary cause of the failure of co-operation to gain a more extensive foothold on American soil. But to the student of the subject this off-hand explanation is far from conclusive. For not only have Americans been the leading exponents of political, social and religious co-operation, but they have likewise shown marked aptitude for economic co-operation. Our very national life is purely co-operative. Our big business is, though not in a strict sense, in a large sense co-operative. Furthermore, were the traditional American individualism the sole or even the main cause, why has co-operation in this country met with no wider acceptance or greater success among the immigrants coming from countries where co-operation is practiced to a very high degree? We must therefore look for other reasons to account for the bankruptcy of co-operative effort in this country. These are set forth by Dr. James Ford in his book Co-operation in New England.