be complete or adequate without vigorous and comprehensive measures for arresting the forces which tend to poison the germ, the very source of life and inheritance. The aim of eugenics is not limited to selection of parents; it includes all the measures which promise to improve the quality of the parents or to prevent their degradation.

It is slow and uncertain work to persuade the capable to attempt to outpopulate the defective and abnormal; society in self-defense must seek to diminish the causes of degeneration.

Several able writers on eugenics have declared that we cannot look to improvement of conditions for improvement of the human race. Granting that better food and housing will not enable tuberculous and paralytic parents to produce healthy offspring, it remains true that impaired wages, nutrition, and wholesome conditions would prevent the beginning of a new series of degraded and exhausted persons.

It seems to be established and admitted by Weismann, that the germ cells in their most intimate structure can be so affected by poisons and even by malnutrition as to transmit certain evil effects to offspring. Therefore it is not necessary to enter upon a discussion of the controverted topic of the inheritance of acquired characters. The sperm cells or the ovum or both may be so damaged in the parent or parents that the offspring will show the consequences. Forel writes:

By blastophthory (Ke'mverderbnis) I understand. the effects of all directly abnormal and disturbing influences which affect the protoplasm of the germ cells, whose inherited determinants in this way are injuriously altered. Blastophthory works in this way on germs not yet united by means of their bearers (Träger) and in that way effects a beginning of what we call inherited degeneration, of whatever kind it may be.

These evil results then pass on from this beginning to subsequent generations. Among the poisons which have the power to damage the germ cells Forel mentions especially alcohol. Idiots, insane, epileptics, dwarfs, psychopathic persons are the issue of alcholized parents, parents who themselves may have been vigorous and sound in every part.

Blastophthory (Keimverderbnis); cf. Aug. Forel, Die sexuelle Frage, p. 33.

This brings into consideration the facts relating to other poisons; as the toxic results of tuberculosis and other diseases, of lead poisoning, phosphorus poisoning, and nicotine in strong doses. The so-called industrial or professional diseases gain a new interest in this connection.

The contest with venereal diseases, both gonorrhea and syphilis, becomes significant for eugenics. It is well known that syphilis acquired by a parent sometimes destroys or cripples the offspring. Gonorrhea is a common cause of blindness; the inherited effects upon the constitution of the children require serious investigation. Dr. E. Kraepelin says:

We know some of the important and widespread causes of insanity, the combating of which lies not only within the realm of the duties, but also of the powers of the state. The first of these is the abuse of alcohol. . . . . About one-third of the surviving children of dipsomaniac parents will become epileptics. According to Bourneville more than one-half of the idiotic children proved to have alcoholized parents.

This author, with many others, emphasizes the frequent connection between even slight intoxication and the occasion of venereal diseases with all their sad retinue of suffering, especially

to women.

Some educational advantage may be gained by laws requiring a medical certificate of health from a public physician as a condition of receiving a license to marry. This measure would cause many a young man to reflect before he brought upon himself a loathsome and highly infectious disease. But such a law would have little influence on unscrupulous persons who satisfy their appetites without regard to marriage laws. They must be reached by other means.

Competition with the inferior and the unfit is one of the influences which cause thoughtful and provident persons to limit their offspring. This was the conclusion of one of our greatest economists, President Francis A. Walker:

Whatever were the causes which checked the growth of the native population, they were neither physiological nor climatic. They were mainly social and economic; and chief among them was the access of vast

'Die psychiatrischen Aufgaben des Staates, p. 2.

hordes of foreign immigrants, bringing with them a standard of living at which our own people revolted.1o

Now, the excessive increase of any undesirable class will "give a shock to the principle of population" among persons of higher standards of life. Thousands of persons of the Society of Friends and others who would not or could not own slaves emigrated from the South before the Civil War to escape competi tion with slave labor and from the sense of social inferiority which went with manual labor. But now there is no way of escape; therefore the families of superior ability and higher standards grow smaller. To encourage persons of normal life and civilized standards to have more children some better guaranties must be given them by government that these children will not be driven to the wall by immigrants of a lower order. This is not an argument against immigration, but only against the immigration of persons who can never be induced to demand a civilized scale of life. A great deal is justly said of a “simple life;" but that should not mean a return to savage life.

Any discussion of the unfavorable effects of urban life on the family must give large room for these forces which tend directly or indirectly to enfeeble or prevent offspring. The vices which destroy, the unwholesome physical conditions, and the excessive competition in cities of the North with immigrants are all amenable to action by concerted volition; they are not results of inevitable forces outside the range of human choices.

10 Discussions in Economics and Statistics, Vol. II, p. 426.

REVIEWS

Social Psychology. An Outline and Source-Book. By EDWARD ALSWORTH Ross, Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin. New York: Macmillan, 1908.. Pp. xvi+ 372.

The title-page and preface of this book offer "an outline," "a source-book," "the pioneer treatise in any language professing to deal systematically with the subject of social psychology," which the author has brought as far as he can "unaided," although he finds it impossible to express the "full measure of my indebtedness to that profound and original thinker," Gabriel Tarde. Criticism is solicited as the only means by which error can be eliminated and the science advanced. The author admits that "among the hundreds of interpretations, inferences, and generalizations I have ventured upon, scores will turn out to be wrong." The book is to be regarded, therefore, in all fairness as an essay, a preliminary survey rather than an elaborate and complete treatise.

It is significant that almost simultaneously with this volume another book, appeared in England under the same title, and that the two have almost nothing in common save the name. The one

is the work of a sociologist, the other that of a psychologist. To the latter social psychology means primarily a subjective analysis, to the former an objective description based upon an assumed knowledge of the inner processes. Professor Ross would place social psychology between psychology on the one hand, and group psychology or psychological sociology on the other. Social psychology, thus conceived, "seeks to understand and account for those uniformities in feeling belief and volition-and hence in action-which are due to the interaction of human beings, i. e., to social causes" (p. 1). The utility of the proposed division of labor is the sole test which need be applied. There are certain problems to be solved. These merge almost imperceptibly one into another. Obviously no abstract methodology can hold its own against men eager in pursuit of solutions. James, Baldwin, Cooley, Dewey, McDougall will follow their interests from psychology 1 1 McDougall, Social Psychology, London, 1908.

"proper" or "individual" over into a study of the social self, an analysis of the social process, and an explanation of conscience as a social product. On the other hand, sociologists like Simmel, Sumner, Giddings, Gumplowicz are not to be deterred from trespassing in the field of psychology when their studies of group phenomena lead naturally to subjective interpretation. It is a question whether such phenomena as mob behavior, fashion, custom, leadership, conflict, etc., can best be treated apart from their functional value in the life process of the group. In this book which attempts such isolation there are allusions to standards of judgment which imply this functional point of view. Thus the statement that "the social scepter passes from type to type" (p. 173) gets its real meaning from a process of group selection. "Universally valid standards of human achievement and worth" (p. 115) must be tested by some functional criterion. Certain beliefs as to the degrading character of manual labor, the pre-eminent position of pecuniary success, etc. (pp. III-17), are declared to be of "illegitimate origin" (p. 111) when they might be interpreted as, at worst, survivals of types of valuation once of functional service to the group. Professor Ross recognizes this, e. g., in explaining the reasons for substituting slavery for slaughter (p. 286), and in his explicit reference to the "laws of group survival" (p. 293). Experience will show whether social psychology can hold its own in the field which is assigned to it in this book, or whether it will be partitioned and annexed by psychology from the one side and group psychology from the other. The problems are so much more important than the methodology that the discussion of the division of labor is hardly likely to absorb much time or energy.

After an opening chapter which defines social psychology and the "social planes" of uniformity due to interacting of minds, Professor Ross deals with mob mind, fashion, conventionality, custom, rational imitation, conflict, discussion, compromise, public opinion, and "disequiliberation." In calling his book a pioneer treatise, and in the suggestion "unaided" already mentioned, the author obviously has in mind not the underlying ideas of the book so much as the interpretation and organization of these. Thus Professor Ross would doubtless be the first to insist that Le Bon, Boris Sidis, Tarde, Giddings, and Sighele have covered the essential facts of mob-mind, just as Spencer, Biggs, Shaler, and Veblen