dedicated, and completed with the financial aid of the Bavarian Academy of Science. It is the most recent study in the European background of American Baptism. As a study of a rural-group type, which has attained a perfect synthesis between its two aspects: (1) as an ideal group with a religious and ethical purpose and (2) an economic community, it would seem to be the case study which the practical sociologist in that field has been looking for. As a matter of fact, every type of sociology, pure, historical, and applied, will find here something of interest. For the modern problems for which this venerable group sought and found an original solution range all the way from salvation, parenthood, matrimony, divorce (see the article "Ehe" in the Mennonitisches Konversationslexicon), the relation of the family to the community, the Christian and his station, to the organization of rural productive credit, soil-conservation, intensive commercial farming, pacifism (see ibid., same author, under "Friedensbewegung”), and animal husbandry.

The Mennonite group under discussion, prototype of the revolutionary Protestantism proper, originated in Zürich. Its individualism integrated, in opposition to the conservative reformation of Zwingli, in a radical determination of conduct in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount. Zwingli, like Luther, would reform both medieval spheres of the social order from within, and thus keep some of the connections between the two intact. At the intersection of the two social circles stood for him the institution of infant baptism, for the individual was still understood to be born into both, and membership was in neither sphere a matter of free will. The demand for adult baptism therefore makes its appearance as a direct challenge to the authoritative principle of inclusiveness prevailing in both. So it was to the Swiss Baptists as well as to their persecutors. In infant baptism the older terms of accommodation between the two spheres had become objectified. With adult baptism, therefore, these radicals would not only "put on the new man" but would become noncooperators, conscientious objectors repudiating quietly-more or lessand deliberately the whole existing social order.

The logic of this revolutionary attitude is simple enough. Determined as they were to obey the divine norm of the Sermon on the Mount, that "higher law" nullified henceforth the whole positive order which religion had hitherto sanctioned in its name. Adult baptism thus presents itself as a challenge to the medieval, the ancient and territorial principle of inclusiveness in both church and state. Allegiance to either would henceforth be a conscious act of free choice, a profoundly personal thing.

Symbolizing also the principle of group formation through the voluntary assumption of the implications of a bond, the new concept of baptism became the totem pole of a revolutionary society. We know from Troeltsch, Weber, Jellinek, and others that as a new social objective it came to have immense significance: to a new individualism it has given an adequate social meaning. It revived what Gierke called the Rechtssubjectivitaet of the Germanic individual and corporation. It made both again, as the late Lord Bryce put it, a dynamic principle of law. Nothing could better illustrate the revolutionary meaning of Acts 5: 29 than the glorious stubbornness of these nonco-operators in the presence of protestant gaols and headsmen's axes.

Less dramatic but even more significant is the connection traced by Mr. Correll between the Anabaptist conception of natural law as rationalized from the Sermon on the Mount, and their new social order. Here, for once, a Christian commonwealth is no utopia; no easy accommodation to a theory of original sin and a "natural" order of might. These Baptists meant business, and their discipline began, with their charity, at home. With the aid of an elaborate technique of communal guidance, correction, and mutual aid they developed within their group a consistent usufructuary asceticism and communism. So effectively did they rationalize the use of economic goods in accordance with the Christian principles of fellowship and faithful stewardship that they anticipated, for the benefits of the Christian man, most of the accomplishments of the economic man. In their technique of intensive farming, animal husbandry, summer and winter stable-feeding, fodder cultivation (clover), use of artificial fertilizer as well as manure, rational and commercial rotation of crops, industrial utilization of by-products, they were early recognized as the pioneers of modern efficiency. The new rationalism of enterprise for profit, as Mr. Correll has shown, owes much to their industrial technique. Before it engulfs them completely it might also learn from their social technique, their telism, their integral concept of society, their mutualism of credit, their system of social control, their genuine Christian socialism.

The sociologist concerned with the regeneration of the American rural community will read with interest pages 140 ff. It is here shown how mutual aid, practiced in conformity with a religious norm, leads to brotherhood credit, which in turn makes of the religious congregation a credit corporation. Having thus perfected co-operatively the system of personal credit long before any system of rural credits became known elsewhere, the Mennonites benefited greatly from this rational technique

of credit integration and credit-distribution. An integral rural group develops here, conjointly, mores and technique adequate for an effective rural credit mutualism. This, the reviewer would suggest, is due to the fact that the theory of the "general priesthood," as understood in this group, led to the development of a functionally adequate type of rural intelligentsia and leadership. The Mennonites had a remarkable affluence of leaders whose telism remained functionally related to the economic as well as the moral life of the group. Thus the rural community as a Lebensgemeinschaft, unlike that community elsewhere in the United States, did not break up into an ideal and an interest group, because both aspects thereof found a synthesis, an adequate organ in a leader who stood at the intersection of both. Unlike the leaders of the group in the United States, that leader did not become identified with a theological special-interest group or dissipate his energies in the interest of an abstract larger whole. The local ideal community remained adequately related to its counterpart, the local economic group; both preserved a remarkable vitality in activities characterized elsewhere by an equally remarkable futility and non-arrival.

Thus the monograph of Professor Correll is nothing less than a case study in the functional co-ordination of a religious ideal and an economic interest group into an adequate ecological whole, and the author, who is now studying the American branch of Baptists (for Mennonites in America, see Mennonit. Lexikon Art. Amerika), will be welcomed by sociologists who are still interested in the possibilities of the Sermon on the Mount.

LEWIS INSTITUTE

HEINRICH H. MAURER

The Moral Standards of Democracy. BY HENRY WILKES WRIGHT, Professor of Philosophy and Social Ethics in the University of Manitoba. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1925. Pp. ix+ 309. $2.00.

The title of this book does not convey to students of sociology a clear idea of its content. A better title would perhaps have been "The Social Psychology and Social Ethics of Democracy."

The social theory of the book is in the main a development of the theory of Professor Cooley and Professor Dewey. The two fundamental social facts, according to the author, are, first, the essential community of human intelligence and will, and second, the fact that intelligence always expresses itself in bodily movements, especially in articulate speech,

which become effective in controlling physical forces and determining social relations. Personal intercommunication is accordingly the basis of human social life. Professor Wright defines personal intercommunication in a very broad way, and finds that it has three principal forms: (1) discussion, (2) co-operation, (3) imaginative sympathy. He takes up each of these in turn and shows how they function in a democratic society and why we must believe that democracy, when realized, marks the fullest and freest development of human society.

Among the side-lights which make this volume valuable is Professor Wright's discussion of psychological and sociological objectivism. He is quite willing to acknowledge our indebtedness to the extreme objectivists in psychology and sociology, but he vigorously contends that they are dealing with only a part, and that the most superficial part, of social reality. He says: "The student of social and ethical problems should acknowledge with gratitude his ever growing debt to behavioristic psychology. But in so doing he incurs no obligation to follow behaviorism to the extreme of dispensing with consciousness or of refusing to profit by the light which its immediate testimony throws upon his subject. It is not that objective explanations are necessarily untrue in these fields; they are inadequate and, beyond a certain point, unilluminating." Again he says: "In truly social intercourse, not goods nor commodities, but conscious experiences, are exchanged." In other words, Professor Wright finds that the intercommunication of experiences and the rise of collective opinions, beliefs, standards, values, and attitudes are quite as objective processes from the standpoint of social science as tangible physical behavior.

There are at least two criticisms of the book which must be made that will undoubtedly impair its standing with sociological thinkers. In the first place, Professor Wright does not seem to know many of the latest developments in sociology, especially the use of the concept of "culture." It is difficult to understand why he fails to mention the epochmaking work of Professor Hobhouse along the very line upon which he is writing. Again, he seems unacquainted with the recent criticisms of McDougall's position on the rôle of instincts in the social process.

These criticisms, however, do not detract from the general worth of the book, and no sociologist who wishes to keep abreast of developments in social psychology can afford to fail to read Professor Wright's valuable treatise.

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

CHARLES A. ELLWOOD

Common Wealth: A Study in Social Philosophy. By C. G. CAMPBELL. New York: The Century Co., 1925. Pp. 472. $3.00.

The author is hardly correct in saying that his book treats economic relations from a new point of view. It is true that very few Englishspeaking economists have adopted his point of view as decisively and advertised it as plainly as he presents it. His outlook reminds one of the neglected parts of Adam Smith's social philosophy, rather than of Ricardo. Germans whose economic training began in 1893 or later were to the manner born. To Englishmen and Americans it is still more or less untried. Many suspect it of opening the way to some or all of the radical "isms." Many of the younger folk still get thrills out of it for its supposed openings to emancipating adventure. In fact, it is essentially no more novel than any of the time-honored refusals to believe that the world of human behavior is a purely physical mechanism. It is reassertion of at least the Emersonian, if not the complete Platonic, doctrine, "Ideas rule the world." The prefatory quotation from Huxley is a rarely revealing epitome of the temper and trend of the whole argument:

This world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas. It is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things, and even of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error.

Book I, with the title, The Natural Economy, uses 122 pages in "casting" an anchor to windward to hold against any and all drives of mysticism toward the assumption that something can come of nothing, that two and two may be induced to become five. It surveys the inexorable conditions underlying the production of wealth, the inevitable dependence of human economy upon the requirements of natural law. There is no hesitation nor evasion here. The discussion leaves no reasonable ground for a charge of sentimentalizing. On the other hand, our old friends, "land, labor, capital" appear in forms that are much less like lay figures than the conventionalizings of them in classical economic theory.

Book II has the caption, The Artificial Economy. It is not precisely the distinction which a number of nineteenth-century writers, especially among the Germans, tried to observe between "national economy" and "political economy"; but both titles and discussions are reminders of it. The import of this part of the argument is well indicated by a few sentences near the close (p. 295):