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"You Must Have Spent
Years on Shorthand"

"NO; I Learned it in 6 WEEKS!"

IER employer laughed aloud. "Six weeks! You're joking, Miss Baker. No one could learn shorthand

six weeks."

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"You're fooling, of course, Miss Baker. You have en with us not more than a month and you are by far e most competent secretary I ever had. Surely you n't expect me to believe that you gained your present eed and accuracy in only six weeks! Why, a great any young ladies who have been here with us had died shorthand for ten months or a year or more and Il they made a great many errors."

*That wasn't their fault, Mr. Chapman. Old hioned shorthand requires months of hard study and actice and even when it is mastered it is difficult to Ad. But Speedwriting is very easy. I-" "Speedwriting? What's that?"

own home, took court testimony at the rate of 106 words a minute after only 15 hours of study."

"Miss Baker, where can I get some literature on Speedwriting?"

"I'll send a coupon for you."

Two months later Mr. Chapman and every stenographer in his employ were Speedwriters!

Speedwriting

The NATURAL SHORTHAND

Tens of thousands have been freed from the drudgery of the old fashioned methods of learning and writing shorthand by this marvelous new system. Speedwriting may be written on a typewriter or with a pencil; it can be learned in a third the time needed to master any other system; it is more accurate, and it can be written with amazing rapidity.

Put this coupon in the mail tonight. It will bring you an illustrated book full of examples and stories of successful Speedwriters all over the world. No matter what your need for shorthand may be, you can fill that need better with Speedwriting.

Never mind looking for the scissors, just lear the coupon off and mail it to

Brief English
Systems, Inc.
200 Madison
Avenue,

For answer the girl handed the big business man her te book.

"Why, this is remarkable, Miss Baker. It's in
aple A. B. C.'s!"

"Yes, surely. That's how I learned it so quickly.
tyone can learn Speedwriting. There are only a few
sy rules. There are no hooks or curves; every charac-
you use is a letter you already know, one that
ur hand needs no special training to make."
"Well, that's the most remarkable thing I ever heard
I could use that myself at board meetings and a
zen other places.
You can write it rapidly too!"
'One boy I know who studied Speedwriting in his

. ..

Dept. 574,
New York
City

BRIEF ENGLISH

SYSTEMS, INC.

Dept. 574

200 Madison Avenue New York City

I do want to know more about Speedwriting. You may send me the free book without obligation on my part.

Name.

Address

City

State

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Main Street and Wall Street, by W. Z. Ripley. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1927. Large 12mo. xiii+351 pp. $2.50. An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.

SEVENTEEN years ago Woodrow Wilson wrote an address on the theme that we have witnessed in modern business the submergence of the individual within the organization, and yet the increase, to an extraordinary degree, of the power of the individual who happens to control the organization. Now, Professor Ripley has written a book on the same subject, and has included the Wilson paper as its first chapter. When that paper was presented in 1910 it caught the momentary attention of a restricted group of earnest listeners, and then promptly became lost in the files of the printed proceedings of the meeting.

The Ripley book is certainly no better written than the Wilson paper, nor is its author more distinguished, nor is the theme more timely now than it was then, but the book will not soon drop out of sight or be forgotten. It is eminently readable. The author names names and gives dates. He vigorously denounces well-known corporations. His style ranges from lively to lurid, and from vivid to vicious.

Professor Ripley is a successful moral crusader, and he has all the keen insight into the mental processes of the normal man which that implies. There are probably at the present time some three million persons in this country who own corporate securities, and hence sometimes buy and sell them. Broadly speaking, no one of them ever bought or sold as advantageously as he might have done, and most of them have more than once felt aggrieved because of losses sustained or of failure to realize possible profits. Such disappointments are major or minor calamities, and where human agency is involved the causes of calamity are delusively obvious. Professor Ripley brings comfort by pointing out the culprits and vigorously scourging them with harsh adjectives, and a considerable number of the three million will buy his book to enjoy watching him do it.

Five major campaigns are waged in the volume. One is against nonvoting stock which may result in disfranchising the stockholders and vesting all real control in the hands of a few insiders. Another is against the issuance of non-par stock which may be the cause of misleading inferences as to the true value of the assets of the company. A rather less militant attack is made against the growth and financial structure of public utility holding companies. The fourth campaign is a mighty one directed against the charter-mongering practices of state

governments which grant progressively excessive power and privilege to corporations. Finally attack is made against the inadequate and sometimes misleading reporting to the public of the facts about the assets, operations, and profits of business concerns.

Much attention is given to suggested remedies, including pitiless publicity in corporation reporting, supervised perhaps by the Federal Trade Commission, the general stiffening of corporation laws through Federal action, and the creation of a system of checks and balances in corporate management by instituting new groups of outsiders to keep a continuing check on the administration of the insiders.

The suggested remedies will be much criticized, as such suggestions always are. In the very nature of the case, they constitute the most vulnerable features of this stimulating book. It is perhaps fair to make the comment that the constructive and remedial suggestions do not appear to have much relation to the long history of impressive improvement that has taken place in the management of corporations in America. This book is in reality only a new and different installment in the continuous stream of complaint against corporation management that has been going on in this country for more than a century.

A hundred years ago corporations were under attack as being inherently vicious. At the time of the Civil War it was commonly believed that most corporations were frauds, and the business records of that time go far to substantiate the belief. As recently as thirty years ago responsible business periodicals were still printing editorials deploring the admission to trading on the stock exchange of the shares of industrial companies, because it was argued that such securities were merely snares to trap the unwary. Such conditions are no longer general. A great and continuous improvement in corporate responsibility and morality has taken place. One might wish that Professor Ripley had told us why it has taken place, and whether or not presently applicable lessons can be learned from studying the process.

LEONARD P. AYRES

The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1926. 12mo. viii+256 pp. $2.00.

In writing this I am thinking not of confirmed fiction readers but of the great company of men like myself who are bored by current fiction, who find other people's love affairs uninteresting, and the shadowy characters of novels much

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THE SUN ALSO RISES

"It is full of humor, humor without an eye to effect, humor as a dimension of the human scene. It is a fine, keen book." -Chicago Evening Post.

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less exciting than the real figures of business life. Such men are hereby informed that a new thing has happened in the world. A writer named Hemingway has arisen, who writes as if he had never read anybody's writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself.

When I first heard about him I was prejudiced. A reviewer gave the impression that he was just another of the bad little boys who think it is so brave to run around chalking smutty words on the back fences of literature. I dislike those bad little boys, not because they are bad, but because they are dull. Just as I rebel at the theatrical managers when they promise jokes which require brains and then fulfill their promise by taking the clothes off the chorus - which requires no brains. I thought Hemingway was just another of these smarties. I apologize to him for that thought.

It is true that his book deals with people who have no morals. They drink too much. They are wafted about by their passions as easily and with as little concern as feathers are carried on the wind. They have no religion, and no ideals in the accepted sense of the word. But they have courage and friendship, and mental honestness. And they are alive. Amazingly real and alive.

They are not described. Nothing is much described. The book starts; people enter and talk. They travel, and you travel with them. They go to a town in Spain to see a series of bullfights, and for several nights they hardly sleep at all-tense at the fight all day, drinking and dancing all night. It is all very reprehensible. But so real that when you are finished with it you actually feel tired, as though you had been through it all and lost all that sleep.

To me, Hemingway seems the freshest new voice since Frank Norris, excepting only Lardner and Lewis. I hope nothing will happen to him. I hope that he will not go around with other writers, or talk at women's clubs, or get a good opinion of himself. I should like to have him some day write a book about more respectable people. It is the fashion of current writers to look down on respectable people. Some day a great writer will discover that they too can be interesting, can have adventures, and humor, and all the rest. Maybe Hemingway will find that out. But meantime I ask him please to take care of his health. The world has plenty of almost everything - doctors, lawyers, bankers, merchants. But what a shortage of comedians! And of men who can tell a story that is even half as interesting as a day at the office or a game of golf.

BRUCE BARTON

Soldiers and Statesmen, 1914-1918, by Field Marshal Sir William Robertson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1926. 8vo. xvi+333 +304 pp. Illus. $5.00.

Soldiers and Statesmen is by far the most important work on the conduct of the war that has come forth from either side in the struggle. As

concerns works by Allied leaders, even this rather sweeping claim is an understatement: the book is really in a class by itself, the only one of its type. We have had many personal narratives, and a few collections of documents, but nothing embracing the general political-military problem.

Even in Lord Grey's masterly contribution, with all its candor and fairness, the field is carefully narrowed down to certain selected aspects and to what comes comfortably within the personal angle. Nearly all the memoirs of outstanding Allied leaders fall within these same limitations: they are both fragmentary and personal - and tend toward a mixture of apologia and special pleading. Lord Asquith, after merely a distant glance at his proper subject, stands transfixed and dumb, like Lot's wife, quite unable to approach the war itself. Winston Churchill develops into an imposing symphony of booming egotism that old and simple theme, 'Alone in Cubia' - and his adroit revelations have the curious effect of concealing the truth about everything except the author. Hindenburg's deft and sagacious touch produced merely an engaging romance, while Ludendorff's memoirs were no more than a crude German rendering of the Churchill model.

Falkenhayn's narrative offers the nearest approach to Soldiers and Statesmen. He surveys the conduct of the war as a whole; brings out the inconceivably baffling, maddening difficulties of framing an Interallied policy (anti-Allied would be the proper term); and sets forth not an external narrative of events but the full range of factors to be dealt with in so vast and complex a problem. Above all, he meets the test raised by Sir William Robertson's complaint of the ordinary war book: 'We are told what was done, but not always why it was done, or who was responsible for causing it to be done.'

As a first-hand contribution to history, Soldiers and Statesmen is remarkable first of all for the sense of proportion it reveals, and the clear, stubborn grasp of essentials. In writing as in doing, having once seized his main point Sir William holds to it with a grim bulldog grip. Difficulties and obstacles, mischance and disappointments; argument, persuasion, opposition, and even the roughest measures applied to his own person, all serve to make him fix his jaws the more firmly rather than let go. Throughout the long struggle here recorded, one feels Lloyd George not so much fighting an antagonist as wriggling vainly out of the grip of the inescapable facts Sir William held up before him. 'More than once Mr. Lloyd George said to me his chief complaint was that I would persist in always supporting what Haig did.' The author may fairly take it as the finest citation in his record.

From this sense of proportion and this interest in the points which matter, personalities and personal issues are reduced to an insignificant scale. The pages bristle with starting points for such digressions; the author names the person and states the fact with unsparing precision, but

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MIRRORS OF THE YEAR

Edited by GRANT OVERTON

A review of significant high-lights of American life in the year just ended - literature, art,
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among them Mark Sullivan,
An impressive group of the best-known writers in America
Kathleen Norris, Herbert Asbury and Grantland Rice discuss this many-faceted period,
its outstanding figures, trends and events. The first volume of its kind, - the publishers plan
to continue it in an annual series. Octavo in size, stamped in gold, bound in blue library
buckram. With cartoons by Charles Dana Gibson, Rollin Kirby, John Held, John Cassel,
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THE WAR DIARY OF
EMPEROR FREDERICK III

Translated by A. R. ALLINSON

The diary of the ex-Kaiser's father, written during the Franco-Prussian War and hidden
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FUNERAL CUSTOMS

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