nomena of heredity and variability. The mutual interaction of these two factors gives the development in inorganic nature from the simple to the complicated. During the forty years since Darwin wrote the Origin of Species physiologists have, by experimental work, shown that heredity can be traced to the minute particles of matter.

On the variability side, it has remained for Hugo de Vries to point out — in Die Mutationstheorie, Leipzig, 1901-3, just completed — that Darwin has not spun out the thread of comparative experimentation. For twenty years de Vries has been making experiments on a large scale, concerning variability in plants. His book turns a new leaf in the history of evolution.

1. The chief result which marks de Vries's work as a step in advance is the conclusion that, while by means of fluctuating variability certain local and improved races may be bred, in nature new species never arise through this agency, but owe their origin exclusively to mutation, to discontinuous variability. Darwin recognized two kinds of variability — fluctuating and discontinuous. By the Galton curve fluctuating variability has been shown to oscillate within limits. De Vries experimented with the " sports," saults," the chance, single or discontinuous variations used commercially by nursery gardeners, accepting mutation as the name for the phenomenon so described. Wallace, who simultaneously with Darwin discovered natural selection, insists that fluctuating variability is the only source of new species. Thus de Vries and Wallace differ essentially.

2. With Darwin de Vries is less at variance. He quotes Darwin as saying: "The formation of a species I look at as almost wholly due to the selection of chance variations." Darwin also undoubtedly suspected the existence of a certain periodicity. I insist on this because of statements by those who bear a grudge, for other than scientific reasons, against Darwinism. The merit of de Vries is that his extensive experiments have provided a reliable basis concerning a subject about which Darwin had not fully made up his mind.

3. Let us try to picture what de Vries, with his conclusions on mutation, has taught us on the question: How have species originated? De Vries started with one hundred species of plants. In one, and one only, he actually managed to detect the act of mutation on certain fields of Graveland. This one has continued to do so with perfect distinctness during many years in the Amsterdam Botanical Garden. Thus de Vries has been able actually to witness the very process of the origin of species in nature. For later investigators will be the task to make out how far the laws which de Vries has made out for one genus of plant apply to other plants and animals.

These laws are: (1) New elementary species arise suddenly, without transitions. (2) New elementary species are generally perfectly stable from the very first. (3) Most of the new types have all the qualities of elementary species, not of varieties. (4) The elementary species usually appear in a considerable number of individuals simultaneously, or at least within the same period. (5) No important relation whatever exists between individual variability and the new qualities of the elementary species. (6) The mutations which give rise to new elementary species take place in the most various and divergent directions. The modifications concern all the organs and are of the most varied descriptions. Part of the new types perish without descendants. Among the others natural selection must wholly decide. (7) The phenomenon of mutability appears periodically.-A. A. W HUBRECHT, in Popular Science Monthly, July, 1904. H. E. F.

THE AMERICAN

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

VOLUME X

JANUARY, 1905

NUMBER 4

1

PROBLEMS OF MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 1 We are accustomed to say that the machinery of government incorporated in the charters of the early American cities, as in the federal and state constitutions, was worked out by men who were strongly under the influence of the historians and doctrinaires of the eighteenth century. The most significant representative of these men is Thomas Jefferson, whose foresight and genius we are here to commemorate, and their most telling phrase is the familiar opening that "all men are created free and equal."

We are only now, however, beginning to suspect that the present admitted failure in municipal administration, the so-called shame of American cities," may be largely due to the inadequacy of those eighteenth-century ideals, with the breakdown of the machinery which they provided, and further, to the weakness inherent in the historic and doctrinaire method when it attempts to deal with growing and human institutions.

These men were the legitimate successors of the seventeenthcentury Puritans in their devotion to pure principle, but they had read poets and philosophers unknown to the Pilgrim fathers, and represented that first type of humanitarian who loves the people without really knowing them, which is by no means an impossible achievement. "The love of those whom a man does not know is quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man does know," but with this difference that he expects the people 1 An address delivered at the International Congress of Arts and Science, Department of Politics, September, 1904.

whom he does not know to forswear altogether the right of going their own way, and to be convinced of the beauty and value of his way.

Because their idealism was of the type that is afraid of experience, these founders of our American cities refused to look at the difficulties and blunders which a self-governing people was sure to encounter, and insisted that the people would walk only in the paths of justice and righteousness. It was inevitable, therefore, that they should have remained quite untouched by that worldly wisdom which counsels us to know life as it is, and by that very modern belief that, if the world is ever right at all, it must go right in its own way.

A man of this generation easily discerns the crudeness of that eighteenth-century conception of essentially unprogressive human nature, in all the empty dignity of its "inborn rights of man,” because he has grown familiar with a more passionate human creed, with the modern evolutionary conception of the slowly advancing race whose rights are not "inalienable," but are hardwon in the tragic processes of civilization. Were self-government to be inaugurated by the advanced men of the present moment, as the founders were doubtless the advanced men of their time, they would make the most careful research into those early organizations of village communities, folkmotes, and mirs, those primary cells of both social and political organization where the people knew no difference between the two, but quite simply met to consider in common discussion all that concerned their common life. They would investigate the craft guilds and artels, which combined government with daily occupation, as did the self-governing university and free town. They would seek for the connection between the liberty-loving medieval city and its free creative architecture, that most social of all the arts.

But our eighteenth-century idealists, unconscious of the compulsions of origins and of the fact that self-government had an origin of its own, timidly took the English law as their prototype, "whose very root is in the relation between sovereign and subject, between lawmaker and those whom the law restrains," and which has traditionally concerned itself more with the guarding

of prerogative and with the rights of property than with the spontaneous life of the people. They serenely incorporated laws and survivals which registered the successful struggle of the barons against the aggression of the sovereign, although the new country lacked both nobles and kings. Misled by the name of government, they founded their new cities by an involuntary reference to a lower social state than that which they actually saw about them. They depended upon penalties, coercion, compulsion, and remnants of military codes to hold the community together; and it may be possible to trace much of the maladministration of our cities to these survivals, to the fact that our early democracy was a moral romanticism, rather than a well-grounded belief in social capacity and in the efficiency of the popular will.

It has further happened that, as the machinery, groaning under the pressure of the new social demand put upon it, has broken down from time to time, we have mended it by giving more power to administrative officers, distrusting still further the will of the people. We are willing to cut off the dislocated part, or tighten the gearing, but we are afraid to substitute a machine of newer invention and greater capacity.

A little examination will easily show that, in spite of the fine phrases of the founders, the government became an entity by itself away from the daily life of the people; not meant to be set off against them with power to oppress, as in the case of the traditional European governments, but simply because its machinery was so largely copied from the historic governments, which did distrust the people, that it failed to provide the vehicle for a vital and genuinely organized expression of the popular will. founders carefully defined what was germane to government and that which was quite outside its realm; whereas the very crux of local self-government, as has been well said, is involved in the right locally to determine the scope of the local government," in response to the local needs as they arise.

The

They were anxious to keep the strings in the hands of the good and professedly public-spirited, because, having staked so much upon the people, whom they really knew so little, they became eager that they should appear well, and should not be

given enough power to enable them to betray their weaknesses; as a kind lady may permit herself to give a tramp five cents, believing that, although he may spend it for drink, he cannot get very drunk upon so small a sum.

All might have gone well upon this doctrinaire plan, as it still does in many country places, if there had not been a phenomenally rapid growth in cities upon an entirely changed basis. Multitudes of men were suddenly brought together in response to the nineteenth-century concentration of industry and commerce-a purely impersonal tie; whereas the eighteenth-century city attracted the country people in response to the more normal and slowly formed ties of domestic service, family affection, and apprenticeship. Added to this unprecedented growth from industrial causes, we have in American cities multitudes of immigrants, coming in successive migrations, often breaking social ties which are as old as the human family, and renouncing customs which may be traced to the habits of primitive man. Both the countrybred and immigrant city-dwellers would be ready to adapt themselves to a new and vigorous civic life founded upon a synthesis of their social needs, but framers of our carefully prepared city charters did not provide for this expanding demand at the points of congestion. They did not foresee that after the universal franchise has once been granted, social needs and ideals are bound to enter in as legitimate objects of political action; while, on the other hand, the only people in a democracy who can legitimately become the objects of repressive government are those who are too underdeveloped to use the franchise, or those who have forfeited their right to full citizenship. We have, therefore, a municipal administration in America which is largely reduced to the administration of restrictive measures. The people who come most directly in contact with its executive officials, who are the legitimate objects of its control, are the vicious, who need to be repressed; the poor and semidependent, who appeal to it in their dire need; or, from quite the reverse reason, those who are trying to avoid an undue taxation, resenting the fact that they should be made to support that which, from the nature of the case, is too barren to excite their real enthusiasm.