ployment is a failure, and will continue to be a failure; insurance by industry is the ultimate remedy.

The indictments against the experiment are (1) the insolvency of the fund held to have been inevitable because post-war unemployment was unprecedented and the state did not adequately prepare for the depression during the preceding years of prosperity; (2) the failure of the fund to prevent recourse to local relief; (3) the degeneration of the scheme into what "closely resembled a centralized system of outdoor relief," but without supplanting local relief; and (4), the slowing down and choking of the unemployment exchanges.

Passing from these indictments Mr. Morley proceeds to prescribe four tests for the justification of state-operated unemployment insurance: It must either diminish unemployment, or render consumption more steady than income, or centralize all responsibility for unemployment relief in a single organization, or provide relief at less expense to the taxpayer than could be given by the device of regulated doles.

There is no challenging the indictments: The fund became insolvent; makeshift arrangements were resorted to; local relief was not supplanted; employment exchanges were excessively burdened with insurance detail. The cyclical depression was forecasted, doubtless, by many, including sponsors of the state-insurance plan.

Of the tests proposed by Mr. Morley one is incapable of application: It is impossible to prove whether the plan diminished unemployment. Mr. Morley admits that the second test-the steadying of individual consumption cannot be applied scientifically. The third test-centralizing all responsibility for unemployment relief-is not proof of failure if the plan fails to meet it, unless it can be shown that other proposed forms of insurance would meet the test, which has not been shown. The fourth test is unfair unless at the same time the social and economic effects of doles as against insurance may be evaluated accurately. A horizontal increase in wages would have been even more economical than a system of regulated doles.

In final analysis the only proof that the plan has failed is that the funds became insolvent. The only valid indictment is that of being unprepared. The author of this review can cite equally convincing proofs that insurance by industry is a failure. But it seems illogical to condemn a scheme because of shortsightedness or of actuarial shortcomings.

The outstanding weakness of the book is what seems to be an attempt to interpret the facts so as to make out a case against state insurance. The facts invite criticism at many points, but they do not prove the case. B. M. SQUIRES

The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind. BY JOHN MOFFATT MECKLIN, PH.D. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1924. Pp. 244. $1.75.

Darker Phases of the South. BY FRANK TANNENBAUM. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1924. Pp. 203. $2.00.

In The Ku Klux Klan and Darker Phases of the South an attempt is made to study the Klan in the environment in which it had its origin. The Klan is only one of his "darker phases" of southern life and if he emphasizes it, it is only to use it as a pointer to the more general problem of southern psychology. Mecklin's very much broader study, dealing as it does with a phenomenon which is as notable in Oregon as it is in Georgia, affords him a much deeper insight into the latter-day Klan and its difference from its predecessor. Both studies, however, are remarkable for their sympathy with the Klan point of view, and their appreciation of the psychological factors which have brought it into being.

The great difficulty of the subject is that of giving a right emphasis to the cases for and against the Klan. Both writers are agreed on the immense harm which comes from the secrecy of its methods when attached to a claim to supervise conduct. "It builds up a mood of expectancy, a terror that something will happen . . . . it creates an atmosphere of restraint and antagonism." With the emotional fixation which it causes, it helps to generate those very crimes which it sets out to prevent; or again, it invades the rights of citizens and violates the safeguards of constitutional government.

It is, however, scarcely sufficient to sum up an analysis of the Klan with the statement: "It has flourished by creating false issues, by magnifying hates and prejudices, and by exploiting misguided loyalties." It may have done all these things, but it has also given small-town psychology "something like an Aristotelian katharsis of the starved emotions." Its very secrecy "makes friendships more genuine, wit more spontaneous, laughter more contagious." Indeed, if the analysis is to have any scientific value, it must take full account of the positive factors back of the Klan, the need of the small-town mind for some relief from the monotony of its existence. The Invisible Empire may be harmful, but it has a hold on ritual and invisibility which at least crosses the borders of religion.

The true emphasis seems to be that while the Klan is in many respects dangerous and undesirable, it has been able to attain its present power only because it has satisfied a real need. That need-for a life of greater intimacies, of greater importance, of rhetorical attachment to a

noble cause-might be satisfied much more safely and much more fully by a more intelligent idealism and a more gracious ritual, but the success of the Klan means only that there has been no better alternative available.

Mr. Tannenbaum's account of the matter is simple and sympathetic. In so far as it concerns the South it is almost entirely a question of emotional fixation on the negro. It can be relieved and solved, he thinks, "by making the South afraid of other things as well as the negro giving it a greater variety of hate, a greater opportunity for a diversification of emotional exasperation."

CHICAGO

JOHN GRIERSON

by

The South Sea Bubble. BY LEWIS MELVILLE. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1923. Pp. 257. $4.00.

"The story of the South Sea Company is simply the old, old story of Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon." This eighteenth-century "bubble" has its conventional use as conclusive evidence of the utter gullibility of the public. The present account, however, is not the usual sermon, but an interesting account by a biographer who includes quantities of contemporary letters, brochures, speeches in Parliament, the satire of Pope and Swift, farce, comedy, poetry, and cartoons which represent the phases of the craze as seen and felt both by those caught in it and those who stood wisely aloof.

The author is not a sociologist, but he has put into this book just the material which the student of collective behavior can use: the situation of unrest, provoked by myths of fabulous wealth in America; the process of centering attention upon the wild South Sea project to the exclusion of all inhibiting considerations, by a circular reaction in which deliberately circulated rumors led to still wilder spontaneous ones; the period of "mania" when every one was highly suggestible to the slightest move of the crowd, but each was keenly intent on his own interest; the panic, when the "bubble" burst, and the angry prosecution of the directors of the company as "scapegoats."

From the account may be abstracted the essential process of this psychological "mass movement" which one may compare to that abstracted from other cases of high-tempo social interaction to find distinctions and points in common by which to define the nature of those types of collective behavior thought of as crowd phenomena.

EVERETT C. HUGHES

Salvaging of American Girlhood. BY ISABEL DAVENPORT, PH.D. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924. Pp. ix+302. $3.00. An Experimental Study of Psychopathic Delinquent Women. By EDITH R. SPAULDING, M.D. Published for the Bureau of Social Hygiene. New York: Rand McNally & Co., 1923. Pp. xvi+368 and charts. $2.50.

Not every author shares Dr. Davenport's ability or willingness to set down accurately the steps occurring in an observation of social phenomena. The first part of Salvaging of American Girlhood, describing the evolution of an induction, constitutes its greatest contribution to method. The author set the stage so that one hundred and sixty girls, between seventeen and twenty-three years of age, in good standing in a teachertraining school, on their own initiative sought answers to questions on sex matters. Chapter III, "The Initial Surprise," describes candidly the investigator's attempt and failure to fit the resulting 880 questions into a preconceived outline. In the sorting and shuffling that followed, a new classification, this time genuinely inductive, developed. The findings show a lack of the expected professional attitude due to unsatisfied personal questions, ignorance of simple biological and physiological facts, confusion of sex with biology, and such superstition as denotes "a fairly incredible lack of penetration of the viewpoint of modern science into the thought of girls relative to their own bodily functions . . . and . . the whole subject of sex" (p. 183).

After such a scientifically cautious description of an unimpeachable experiment, the writer turns rabid reformer. Parents, she says, are more responsible than their daughters for these daughters' ignorance and harmful training; the Freudian approach is unwholesome and out of balance; the content of sex instruction should be determined with reference to its function in preparing for marriage and parenthood, etc. One is aware of immaturity and inconsistency as indicated by loose terminology throughout the book. For example, "faith" is used for "hypothesis"; "psychology" for a body of classified knowledge in one place and for a practical attitude in the next. But these inconsistencies do not obscure the contribution of the writer to scientific method and information regarding the state of sex knowledge among girls.

In An Experimental Study of Psychopathic Delinquent Women Dr. Spaulding uses "psychopathy" in the sociological sense-that is, as a social maladjustment traceable to emotional instability, lack of training, poor environment, and failure to develop adult inhibitions and techniques for overcoming obstacles. She does not forget, however, the part played

by poor heredity, physical defects, and infection interfering with nutrition and energy. Part I describes an experiment at the Bedford Reformatory, New York, in which those delinquent women who were psychopathic were transferred to a hospital. Part II consists of forty-four brief life-histories.

The experiment, beginning in October, 1916, involved therapeutic treatment without force, unlocked doors, and measures designed to stimulate initiative and group loyalty. After seven months of chaos, it terminated with the introduction of mild discipline, when order was restored. The conclusions follow that, in the first place, psychopaths cannot be treated like the insane, because where the latter lead a "normal" life, except for abnormal episodes, the former are always abnormal, with lifelong reactions governed by infantile mechanisms which refuse to meet difficult situations; second, psychopaths are gregarious, while the insane are isolated individuals; furthermore, certain limitations of the institution prevented success.

The difference between psychopath and "insane" (since the author uses this term) sounds like one of degree rather than of quality. Perhaps the insane have been psychopaths previously, but at advanced stages of maladjustment developed worlds of their own, so that to act in accordance with their imaginings shut them in, and so set them apart, as in dementia praecox.

While the description of the forces at work in the careers of these women is characteristically sociological, it is superficially so. Environment is crudely measured in terms of good and bad, and so on. The lifehistories are inadequate in this respect. Yet we must recognize that the author's problem was originally an immediate practical one, and that the materials on which this report is based, having been put together after the experiment closed, are more complete than is usually the case when people both administer an institution and keep records.

EVELYN BUCHAN

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Elements of Land Economics. BY RICHARD T. ELY and EDWARD W. MOREHOUSE. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1924. Pp. 334 and bibliography. $3.50.

This is one of a series of works edited by Professor Ely, dealing with (1) land as an economic factor, and (2) land as a commodity. This series is the result of a movement in real-estate education sponsored by the In