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extremes are 11,000 and 106,000; in Philadelphia, about 7,000 and 65,000. In Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio additional members are elected from the city at large. Where there is a bicameral council the smaller body is frequently elected by the whole city instead of by wards.

Minority representation.— Under a general ticket system of voting one party is almost certain to elect all of the members chosen at one election, and a large minority of voters or even a majority, if the election is decided by a plurality may have no representation in the council. To obviate such a result, various schemes of voting have been devised; and several of them have been put into operation, but only in a few places, and usually to be abandoned after a few years.

Compensation.- Most American cities pay their council member a salary. This is true of nearly all the large cities; in New York $2,000 a year is paid, in Chicago $1,500. Philadelphia is the only city of the first rank which pays no salary. In the smaller cities the amount is usually between $200 and $400, or from $2 to $5 per meeting.

Social standing of councilors.- Few attempts have been made to study this point in detail, but in Boston it has been noted that since 1822 there has been a steady decline in the amount of the property interests of members of the city council.

Control over administration.— In general, municipal councils in most states have very limited powers in the creation of administrative offices. Their charters usually provide rather definitely for the city officers, and others may be appointed only to perform duties derived naturally and reasonably from the provisions of the charter. The control, however, which investigation of departments by council committees gives, is further strengthened by the power which the council possesses in the matter of appropriations.

Ordinance power. It has been fixed by judicial decision that city ordinances must be reasonable and fair, and consistent with the laws and public policy of the state.- JOHN A. FAIRLIE, in Political Science Quarterly, June, 1904.

E. B. W.

Factory Education: A Statement of the Case.- - The American community has not yet discovered a practicable means of equipping sons of workingmen for broad, serviceable lives as workingmen. Even in the case of the seeming exception of the agricultural college, the training given is directed rather toward the improvement of the technique and the resources of agriculture in America, than toward the enrichment of the lives of American farmers.

In our elementary schools, education is carried on from the cultural point of view. It does not seek to cultivate particular aptitudes in the child, but to supply a certain minimum of knowledge and training with which the child may be able to enter the competitive life of a modern society. On attaining the statutory age the child is theoretically prepared to earn his living, and in the majority of cases the struggle for a livelihood must commence at this point. With the limited information derived from attendance on a grammar or parochial school, the boy finds himself submerged in the detail of a manufacturing plant. The work he does is simply work, non-developing at best, and at worst stultifying. His position does not give him the opportunity to cultivate special skill, and with it a stronger economic position and the chance for mental growth.

The limit of society's concern seems to be reached when the boy has been furnished with the traditionally necessary equipment on the one hand, and the supposed antitoxin to bad citizenship on the other. But the problem arises: Can society afford to look on the probable waste of capacity, that results from the year-long performance of meaningless and repetitious tasks, thus indifferently? There is involved not only the waste of productive energy, which is a matter of industrial and commercial expediency, but there is also involved the restriction of moral development.

In the long run the performance of the work of machine-tending by automatic machines, and the increase of leisure among the working class, and its use for purposes of self-education, may be expected to aid in the solution of the problem. But for the present and the matter is an immediate and pressing one- - help must

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be sought principally from within the factory. Manufacturers are coming to feel their responsibility in this matter, and to appreciate the advantage of educating the men upon whom they must in a large measure depend for commercial success.HENRY BRUÈRE, in The Commons, June, 1904. E. B. W.

Intervention under the Old and the New Régimes.- Interventionism, which is the application of the principles of social economy, is chronologically antecedent to the formation of that science, but not logically so. A certain measure of provisional theory must always precede practice.

In ancient times the citizen belonged altogether to his city, and the mass of producers belonged to the richest citizens. In the Middle Ages production was carried on by the domestic and craft systems, with very narrow markets and restricted trade between different parts of the country. The public powers first intervened to regulate the conditions of production, or to sanction the rules established by the corporations, for up to the time of Louis XI. these had enjoyed almost complete independence.

With the growth of the market, and the greater distance and interval between producers and consumers, the producer tended to become more impersonal and his wares possessed less and less individuality. Thus economic relations ceased to be private affairs and became matters of public concern; a third factor, the state, entered the economic arena. But in the guaranteeing of rights, the state overlooked the journeymen and apprentices. They were destined to wait through long centuries for the protection of our modern legislation. The spirit of the modern movement of organized labor is not at all based on memories of the régime of the medieval corporation which reactionary politicians wish to restore. The intervention of the state was not for, but against, the workers, so long as this régime lasted, as witness the ferocious laws of Henry VIII. against apprentices and journeymen who escaped from their masters. Under Elizabeth an increase in wages above a certain maximum was a criminal offense, punishable for both master and workman. The difference between the economy of the Middle Ages and of our own day is clearly visible when we consider that today it is the establishment of a minimum wage rather than a maximum which is the vital question.

During the second epoch of the old régime, a period of expanding trade and widened markets, intervention was still unmindful of the working class. In 1787 the workmen of Lyons were still held to their day of eighteen hours; and about the same time a statute of Louis XVI. fixed at fourteen hours the day's work of the tool-makers and farriers of Versailles.

The French Revolution with its verbal abstractions and its generalizations invoked the individualistic principle, and by the law of 1791 proclaimed that to be free, contracts ought to be individual. Between the individual patron and the individual workman the state alone could step, the state born of the will of all, theoretically organized and ruled by all, offering in the name of all its sanction to free contracts. It was thus that the principle of negative liberty, of nonintervention of the state, was established.

In France public opinion at length forced the adherents of this verbal liberalism to promulgate the law of 1841 regarding the work of women and children. The facts of industrial life did not seem to correspond to the economic theory. As Sismondi says, in spite of the implicit faith which the students of political economy accorded their masters, they were nevertheless forced to demand new explanations for phenomena which were becoming farther and farther removed from the rules established by the masters. It was John Stuart Mill who first pointed out the illuminating fact that the distribution of wealth is subordinated to the prevailing state of civilization, a thing which changes constantly, and thus the laws of economic distribution can never be fixed and unmodifiable.

The founders of economic interventionism both in France and Germany perceived the fact that economic science is a social science, and in Germany especially, socialist criticism, both through fear and persuasion, was a powerful stimulus to the interventionist movement, which found ardent support in the so-called socialists of the chair, and was finally realized in the program of

Bismarck. But in spite of appearances more brilliant than substantial, there is little real interventionism in France today.- EUGÈNE FOURNIÈRE, "L'Interventionisme de l'ancien régime et du régime moderne," in Revue socialiste, May, E. B. W.

1904.

Results of Negro Education. - The people of the South and of the North who have been contributing liberally toward the education of the black man have a right to know what the influence of education upon us is. I believe that you will have to agree with me that whatever kind of education the negro has received, so far, has paid. The difference between the five million natives of South Africa who will labor one or two days in the week and the seven or eight millions of my people in the southern part of our country who labor as a rule six days in the week, is that the former have never come into close enough touch with white civilization to have wants awakened for whose satisfaction they will work, while the southern negro has ambitions which it takes six days' work to realize.

I do not believe that in all history there has been a parallel to the progress made by the American black man. After only forty years of freedom he is vastly less illiterate than the Spaniard, the Italian, or the South American. The negro is also making progress in contributing toward his own education, the expense of which in some districts is largely met by the direct and indirect taxes which he pays. Between 1877 and 1901 the amount per capita spent upon negro education in the South rose from $1.09 to about $2.21, or over 100 per cent.

From a moral point of view, it has paid to educate the black man. The well-educated negro is almost never a criminal. Of the colored people in the penitentiaries of the South 90 per cent. are entirely without trades of any character; and 61 per cent. of them are wholly ignorant. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, who knew the negro in slavery, and who has followed his career since, states that from his own observation in the state of Georgia, the negro industrially, morally, mentally, from every point of view, is making progress at a tremendous rate; and he asserts further that there is no reason why any American citizen should be discouraged by reason of the progress of the negro people. We must be judged more and more by the best, and not by the worst, that can be known of us.

The South, all things considered, is the most encouraging, the most satisfactory, habitat for the black man, and it naturally follows that we should seek in a straightforward and manly way to gain the friendship and the confidence of the people by whose side we are to live. The negro problem is to be solved finally by sympathetic co-operation between the two races; and nowhere more than in the South, in spite of wrongs and discouragements, are opportunities of an economic character to be found.

From an economic point of view I claim that the education of the black man has been a valuable investment. We find evidence throughout the South that is tangible, that is indisputable, that shows that the negro has got upon his feet. But in measuring our progress, you must not think so much of “ the heights to which we have risen, as of the depths from which we have come."

Much remains to be done before the race as a whole will be making progress; the records show that in Louisiana last year only one-fourth of the black children attended any kind of a school, and those who did attend were in school for only about four months during the year. More encouraging is the noble work done by young men and women who have gone out from Tuskegee and other schools, and have planted themselves in the most degraded and illiterate communities which they have gradually revolutionized intellectually and economically, by their patient, heroic endeavors.

Usefulness will constitute, in my opinion, the greatest protection that the negro can have. In proportion as our people are taught to do a common thing in an uncommon manner, to do it better than anybody else, in the same proportion will the race problem be solved, and that is my ambition for the black man salvation through his economic, industrial, and moral training.- BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, in Ethical Record, May, 1904. E. B. W.

THE AMERICAN

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

VOLUME X

NOVEMBER, 1904

NUMBER

THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY.

THE proposition to be developed in this paper is that the subject-matter of sociology is the process of human association.1

Ever since Comte proposed the name "sociology," and parallel with all subsequent attempts to give the term a definite content, one mode of attack upon the proposed science has been denial that it could have a subject-matter not already pre-empted by other sciences. This sort of attack has been encouraged by the seemingly hopeless disagreement among sociologists about the scientific task that they were trying to perform. If sociology has had anything to say about primitive peoples, for instance, it has been accused of violating the territory of anthropology and ethnology. If it has dealt with evidence recorded by civilized races, it has been charged with invading the province of the historian. If it has touched upon the relations of social classes in modern times, the political scientist or the economist has warned it to cease infringing upon his monopoly. Thus sociology has seemed to workers in other sciences either a pseudo-science, attempting to get prestige in their own fields by exploiting quack methods, or a mere collector of the waste thrown aside by the more important sciences. At the same time, sociologists themselves have unintentionally done not a little to confirm this impression. As has been hinted above, their failure to agree upon a definition of their

1 Professor Ross implies precisely this view, though he does not directly declare it (AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. IX, pp. 201 ff.).

science, or upon precise description of their task, has seemed to afford ocular proof that their alleged science was merely a name with no corresponding content.2

Has sociology a material of its own? Jealous friends of the older sciences promptly answer "No!" Friends of the new science as confidently answer "Yes," but they have not always been able to justify the answer to each other or even to themselves. The formula adopted above is not an individual variation of the many alternatives already proposed as a fair field for a science of sociology. It is rather an interpretation of all the efforts, both within and without the older sciences, which have been prompted by a more or less distinct feeling that there are important reaches of knowledge about human conditions not provided for in the programs of the older sciences. Instead of leading to the conclusion that there is nothing to do which the older sciences do not properly attempt, if the heterogeneous labors of the sociologists are reviewed with a little care they furnish abundant evidence, both that there is unoccupied territory, and that these unsystematized surveys have each actually been doing some of the necessary work of plotting the ground. The proposition which we are now supporting is not that the sociologists ought to fix upon a new material as the subject-matter of their science. In fact, the sociologists have long ago instinctively fixed upon their material, and its distinctive character is gradually beginning to appear. The subject-matter upon which the sociologists are engaged is the social process as a whole. This is to be sharply distinguished, on the one hand, from mere knowledge of isolated phenomena, or classes of phenomena, that take place among men ;` and it is also to be distinguished from mere knowledge of immediate relations, that may be abstracted from the whole complex of relations which make up the entire fabric of human life. The

The most recent betrayal of this judgment may be seen in a discussion of two papers by Mr. Victor Branford and Professor Durkheim on "The Relation of Sociology to the Social Sciences and to Philosophy" (vide AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. X, pp. 134 ff. and 256 ff.). The differences of opinion and vagueness of view betrayed in the discussion fairly reflect the prevailing state of mind as to the subject-matter of sociology, even among persons who have given more than casual attention to recent sociological literature.

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