A Remarkable Study of Social Life in America. DIFFERENCES BY HERVEY WHITE.
12mo, cloth, decorative, 320 pages. $1.50
"It is treating the poor as a class and employing any method ofhandling them that I object to.... Why can't they be treated asindividuals, the same as other people? What would the rich think ofmy impertinence if I went about the world treating them in a peculiarmanner,--as if they were not real people, at all, but only 'the rich,'in my knowledge? "--Hester Carr, in _Differences_.
"_Difference_ is an extraordinary book.... The labor question is its primary concern, and the caste barrier which modern conditions have erected between the man who works and the man who merely lives. This is no new theme, yet _Differences_ is new, and its place in thoughtful literature awaits it. The only argument presented by Mr. White is contained in the picture he spreads before us. It is real, and set out with bold, firm strokes, and there is no attempt to be merely artistic. Genevieve Radcliffe, the rich society girl, who goes to work charity with the poor, and John Wade, the workman, whose situation involves all the tragedy of metropolitan poverty, are human, if they be not typical. They embody the 'differences', and, if they do not point the way to equality, it is because American civilization is not yet ripe for them. Withal, the book is not a tract. It is worth a thousand such. Informed throughout with a tender simplicity, a sense of the beauty of common things, and a sincerity that brooks no question, it carries equal appeal to the student of economics and to the lover of human feeling."--_Philadelphia North American._
"There is no end of philosophy in books about the poor and how to reach them and send rays of sunshine into their world; but few books get at the real 'Differences' that exist between the wealthy classes and the poor as does Mr. Hervey White.... _Difference_ is vitally interesting, both as a story and as a moral lesson.... It is written with wholesome enthusiasm and an intelligent survey of real facts."--_Boston Herald._
"The method employed by Mr. Hervey White in _Differences_ is not like that of any author I have ever read in the English language. It resembles strongly the work of the best Russian novelists, it seems to me, and particularly that of Dostolevsky, and yet it is in no sense an imitation of those writers: it is apparently like them merely because the author's motives and ways of thought and observation are like them.... I have never before read any such treatment in the English language of the life and thought of laboring people."--Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, in _Boston Transcript_.