A study of frontier life and government is to be found in “Mining Camps.”[D] As one reads the book the old saying “One half of the world does not know how the other half lives,” recurs again and again to the mind. That such great organizations should have been in existence, governed by local laws devised by themselves to suit the necessities of their condition, and carried up to a high state of development, while other parts of the country were almost in ignorance concerning these commonwealths, seems hard to understand. The book is not designed as a technical history of mining. Ancient and mediæval mining systems are examined, and the development of their institutions carefully traced. The greater part of the book is devoted to the study of camps in the remote West.
The “Historical Reference Book”[E] at once takes its place among those works which cause one to wonder how he ever did without them. It comprises a chronological table of universal history, a chronological dictionary of universal history, a biographical dictionary, and geographical notes. Great care has been taken in the biographical dictionary to select all the names of those men who have a strong claim to distinction, and from the list, which is necessarily limited, those have been omitted whose renown is fleeting. For those who can not provide themselves with cyclopædias, large dictionaries, and books of reference, we know of no work better calculated to meet their needs, and those who have these other helps at hand will find this the most convenient for brief notices. It is especially adapted to the use of students.
In “Workday Christianity”[F] the names of tradesmen, as “The Carpenter,” “The Potter,” etc., have been used as the subjects of chapters, and the history of each calling is briefly given, from the earliest Bible times down to the present. They are then used as figures, and around them are draped moral lessons from which may be gathered many useful suggestions. There is, however, a gloomy outlook spread before the Christian; his life is made to seem only as “a life of work, of trial, of tears and fears, of conflicts fierce and long.” In the author’s denunciations of hypocrisy, style, cant and caste in the churches, he inconsistently pays them the high honor of allowing them to overshadow all else. He never sees the true, the beautiful and the good existing there also. Such sentences as the following have a wrong tendency and do harm: “It was not considered a disgrace in those days to ply a trade.” “How many rich young ladies would scorn to associate with the sons and daughters of our workmen.” For some strange cause there is a large class of laboring people who are always debasing themselves by supposing other people feel above them. They are constantly snubbing themselves, in the fear that somebody is going to do so. This feeling should never be fed by a religious book. The author stands on the wrong side of many questions he attempts to handle.