An amendment to the Cleveland charter was adopted in November, establishing the eight-hour day for all positions in the classified service.

Municipal Activities. Municipal ownership has made substantial progress in Texas during 1917. Among newer municipal undertakings which were initiated during the year are municipal slaughter-houses, municipal farms and municipal piers.

A recent statute of Iowa authorizes cities operating under the commission form and having a population of 50,000 or over to establish, in connection with parks, "swimming pools, bathing beaches, bath houses, ice rinks, dance pavilions, shelterhouses, wading pools and river walls and to pave, macadamize or otherwise improve the roadways, drives, avenues and walks in and through such parks." The cities are authorized to levy a half-mill tax for the recreative activities and another half-mill for the paving.

Another important Iowa statute, applying to cities of first class rank in population, provides that, upon the petition of 60 per cent of the resident owners of the real estate in the district sought to be affected, the council is required to designate and establish, by appropriate proceedings, restricted residence districts. Under the provisions of this act, reasonable rules and regulations may be made concerning the erection, reconstruction, altering, or repairing of all kinds of buildings within the district, as well as the use and occupancy of such buildings. The council may also provide by ordinance that no building or other structure except residences, school houses, churches, and other similar structures can be erected, altered, repaired, or occupied without a permit from the city council. Any building erected or repaired in violation of such an ordinance is declared to be a nuisance, and the council is authorized to provide for its abatement.

The successful passage recently, by a vote of 6214 against 4667, of an initiated city ordinance terminating the right of saloons to exist in San Jose, Cal., has created a revenue problem for City-manager Thomas H. Reed (formerly professor of political science in the University of California). The estimated revenues from saloon licenses had been placed in the budget at $60,000. This is entirely cut off. However, the ordinance has left 16 restaurants and 17 wholesale places undisturbed in their privilege of dispensing liquors. The fees from the licenses of these places, as fixed in the new ordinance, are estimated to produce about $25,000, making a net loss to the city of

$35,000. It is planned partly to make up for this by adding $5,000 from new business licenses. The remainder will be cared for by a cash balance of about $25,000, which has accumulated during the last year and a half through the economy of the city-manager administration.

Since the beginning of 1917, Minneapolis has had a Socialist mayorMayor Van Lear-who was elected on a nonpartisan ticket. Anticipations of a vigorous and progressive administration, particularly in the enforcement of liquor and vice laws and in handling the streetrailway-franchise question, have not been fully realized. Two important obstacles to a successful administration appeared: (1) the mayor has from the first lacked support by the council, which has extensive control over the administration outside of the police department, and of which only four of the twenty-six members are Socialists; (2) the support of public opinion was greatly weakened by the mayor's pacifism and especially by his speeches for Mr. Hillquit in the New York mayoralty campaign.

The street-railway question in Minneapolis, an important issue in the 1916 campaign, has not yet come to a head. The franchise does not expire until 1923, but the question of its extension has been before the people for several years. In 1915 the state legislature authorized the city to grant a new franchise. Among other things this law provides that the company receiving the franchise shall be a domestic corporation, that the franchise shall be granted for not over thirty years in the first instance, and that the city shall retain the right of purchase at every five or ten year period. If any clauses are inserted. with reference to purchase price or the division of surplus earnings, they are to be based upon a physical valuation of the property. This valuation "may include a fair going-concern value but shall not include any franchise or good-will value." The franchise shall not take effect until passed by the city council, accepted by the company, and ratified by vote of the people. The ground for a settlement along these lines is being carefully prepared. The central franchise committee of the federated improvement leagues has been long at work under the leadership of Mr. Stiles P. Jones, who played an important part in the gas franchise settlement some years ago. In cooperation with the city attorney, he is preparing a cost of service franchise, with profit-sharing features. The question of valuation is presenting the greatest difficulty. The company has valued its plant at $35,323,376. The city engineer has put the figure at $25,914,308. Another engineer specially

employed by the city council reported a valuation of $24,300,000. Recently the mayor has brought in an appraiser from Milwaukee who has fixed the value at a still lower sum. In the meantime the mayor has vetoed a local franchise for several new lines of track. No extensions of importance are being made. The street car employees have been organized and have staged a strike which evoked the interference of the state public safety commission, and which is not, at time of writing, fully settled. Numerous jitney busses of ever larger and better types are materially reducing the street railway's net earnings.

Detroit Conference. The twenty-fifth National Conference for Good Government, held at Detroit, Mich., from November 19 to 23, 1917, embraced a series of meetings and conferences of the National Municipal League, the City Managers' Association, governmental research agencies, civic secretaries and secretaries of state municipal leagues.

At the sessions of the City Managers' Association special attention was given to practical problems of municipal administration.

The National Municipal League gave attention to food supply and other war problems, nonpartisan city government, the consolidation of city and county government, state budget methods and training for the public service.

Provision was made for organizing on a continuing basis a conference on governmental research, as a central agency for coördinating and correlating the work of the various bureaus of municipal and government research in the United States. Mr. Otto Kirchner of Detroit has been selected as president of this conference, and Mr. Levy E. Snyder of Rochester as secretary and treasurer; and an executive committee has been formed to work out definite plans of action.

The secretaries of state municipal leagues also formed an organization, with Homer Talbot of the Kansas League as chairman.

BOOK REVIEWS

EDITED BY W. B. MUNRO

Harvard University

The Philippines. By CHARLES B. ELLIOTT. Two volumes, I, To the End of the Military Régime; II, To the End of the Commission Government. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company. 1916-1917. Pp. 541, 541.)

Judge Elliott has rendered a service to the American public and to the Philippine people by presenting the first adequate picture of the Philippines after nearly twenty years of American rule. The author's period of activity and residence in the islands, as judge of the supreme court (1909-1910) and as secretary of commerce and police (19101913), has given him excellent preparation for a study of the policies and accomplishments of our rule in the Philippines. The first volume is prefaced by a terse and appropriate introduction by Hon. Elihu Root in which the fact is emphasized that all discussion of the morals of our occupation of the Philippines is academic; we are confronted with a situation and a problem the solution of which is impossible without intelligence and information on the part of the American people. That is what Judge Elliott aims to give.

Approximately one half of the first volume is devoted to pre-American conditions to serve as a background for an understanding of the present. An effort is made to fit our experiment in the Philippines into the general field of colonization by comparing it with efforts made along the same lines by the Dutch, Germans and British. Our avowed intention there is to fit an uncivilized and tropical people for selfgovernment, and to govern the colony in accordance with its best interests and not primarily our own. This was a departure from accepted theories, inviting criticism and ridicule, but Judge Elliott feels that we have succeeded, through a happy combination of "England's sense of justice" and our own natural "political magnanimity." The chapters on geologic, climatic and racial conditions are instructive and readable. While the general sense of the historical sections of this first volume may be regarded as adequate, since they show the results so

well of three hundred years of Spanish training, the author falls into the rut formed by the unappreciative and uninstructed British and American "snap-judgment" historians of Spanish colonization by terming this "a period of stagnation." The difference between the Christian Filipino in religion, morals and civilization, and his Malay brother to the south is due only to Spanish influence exerted through these "centuries of stagnation." The author himself points out that the Filipinos are really Latin in their civilization and modes of thought, and that with our twenty years of vigorous and efficient rule we have only scratched the surface.

A large number of inaccuracies occur in the author's treatment of the Spanish period. The Council of the Indies (not Indias) was founded in 1511 and not in 1514. Governors of the Philippines were not always compelled to remain for residencia. The Obras Pias were not founded by "the contribution of an enterprising governor-general (Arandía, 1759) who had managed, out of a small salary during a fiveyear term of office, to save a quarter of a million pesos," which he turned over to the priests. The first Obra Pia, that of the Santa Miseracordia, was brought to the Philippines in 1596, and another, San Juan de Díos, was established there twenty-one years later. Again, our author credits Governor Enrile with the foundation of the Philippine Economic Society in about 1830, when, as a matter of fact, Enrile merely revived the association, which had been established by Governor Basco y Vargas in 1780. It is regrettable that the author placed reliance in the historical portion of his book on the notoriously inaccurate Foreman, who knew no history.

In the remaining part of this volume the author deals adequately with the historical events surrounding the American conquest, the Philippine insurrection and the establishment of American rule, adding nothing to the accounts already published by Leroy and Worcester. Mr. Bryan and the so-called anti-imperialist forces of 1900 are charged with responsibility for the undue prolongation of the PhilippineAmerican war. Their encouragement is said to have led Filipino politicians and "generals" to form an entirely wrong conception of their own importance and of the attitude of the people of the United States on the Philippine question. This leads to the comment that the American people have never had any attitude on this subject, other than that of almost universal ignorance, which is not appropriate for the citizens of a democracy, although it be also mistress of an empire. The second volume brings the history of the Philippines down to