COLORADO STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE

Dr. Ira Woods Howerth, formerly professor of education and director of university extension in the University of California, has been appointed professor of sociology and economics and head of the department of social sciences in the Colorado State Teachers College, Greeley, Colorado.

The first meeting of the Sociology Club was held December 7, 1921. From seventy-five to one hundred people were present and an organization was effected. The following officers were elected: president, Harold Blue; vice-president, Margaret Ringle; secretary-treasurer, Meryl Harper. Mr. Albright was appointed chairman of a committee to draw up a constitution and Mrs. Weibking was selected as chairman of a program committee.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

Professor E. C. Branson, head of the department of rural social science, was busy during the summer in the University of California summer school at Ontario, California, lecturing on rural social institutions and agencies, country community organization, surveys, and projects. He returned to Chapel Hill in time to take charge of the County Administration discussion in the national regional conference held there September 17-19.

The North Carolina Club at the University of North Carolina in its sixteen club researches, reports, and discussions will sweep the field of the "Social-Economics of Land Tenure"- a subject that concerns (1) home and farm ownership, (2) the landless, homeless multitudes in North Carolina and the country-at-large, (3) their economic, social, and civic status, in the light of causes and consequences, (4) the remedies— personal, economic, social, and civic; the story of helping men to own farms in Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, California, and North Carolina, (5) the remedies proposed in the public prints of the state, with debates thereon, and (6) a proposed land settlement law for North Carolina.

Professor Harold D. Meyer, formerly professor of sociology and Economics in the State Normal School, Athens, Georgia, comes to the School of Public Welfare at the university as director of field work and associate professor of sociology with his special subject, that of recreation and juvenile delinquency.

Dr. H. W. Crane, formerly of Ohio State University, comes to the university and to the State Department of Public Welfare jointly as associate professor of psychology and psychopathologist for the state.

The State Board of Charities and Public Welfare of North Carolina has elected Dr. Howard W. Odum, director of the School of Public Welfare, consulting expert for the state board. The School of Public Welfare will co-operate with Mrs. Clarence A. Johnson, Commissioner of Public Welfare, in holding district conferences and in other ways to promote the North Carolina plan of public welfare.

The First National Conference on Town and County Administration was held at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, September 19 to 21, under the auspices of the School of Public Welfare and the departnemt of rural social science. The League co-operated with the University of North Carolina in arranging the meetings. Municipal finance, the city-manager plan, zoning, town planning, the county as a governmental unit and a social agent were the principal subjects of the session.

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

Professor Jerome Dowd is nearing completion of his fourth and last volume on the Negro races. This volume deals with the Negro in the United States from the Revolution to the present.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Professor Clarence E. Rainwater received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Chicago in September. Professor Rainwater's new book entitled The Play Movement in the United States is being published by the University of Chicago Press.

The Sociological Society has inaugurated this year a Speakers Bureau. According to the plan, students who are majoring in sociology and in public speaking are being scheduled to give talks on social problems before the social science classes in the fifty leading high schools in southern California.

The new Journal of Applied Sociology, which represents the sixth year of the publishing history of the Sociological Society, is meeting with an unusual degree of success and is developing friends throughout the United States.

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Methuen & Co., London, announce the publication of The Elements of Social Science by Professor R. M. Maciver, well known for his book on the Community published four years ago. Dr. Maciver has recently been promoted to a full professorship in the university.

REVIEWS

The Mind in the Making: The Relations of Intelligence to Social Reform. By JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921. Pp. 235. $2.50.

In this his latest book Professor Robinson has done a service to the world. The novelty is not in the matter but in the manner. The substance of the message is that the world needs as hard and candid thinking about human affairs as the pioneers of real thinking have been doing about physical nature. This is no news to those sociologists who have tried to move with one or all of the currents of curiosity about life since Comte traced the outstanding evils of the world to "the anarchy of fundamental ideas." Often as it has been repeated, it has scarcely been rendered in a version more likely than the one before us to arrest attention.

Yet the book leaves an important something to be desired. While we are in full accord with the author's principles, we are from beginning to end provoked to question the implied or suggested applications. The inference seems to be indicated at every step that the sort of people who are capable of weighing the argument intelligently are subjected to a degree of muffling by different sorts of social authorities which inhibits creative thought. One who has passed his professional life in an atmosphere in which he has been constantly stimulated to search, and to conclude and to utter to the extent of his ability, may be pardoned for the opinion that in the United States today the chief hindrance to creative social science is not external interference but our own limitations. Of course it is easy to give chapter and verse for cases of intolerance, political, economic, academic, ecclesiastical. On the other hand, it is quite as easy to document careers of permitted and encouraged emancipation from the fetters of institutional precedent. We are inclined to maintain the thesis that there is more room in the United States today for creative thinkers than there are creative thinkers to occupy it.

Then, incidental to the treatment which leaves this reaction, there runs through the book the insinuation that the old is always false and bad, the new always true and good. The writer probably means that traditionalism, conventionality, smugness, considered in and of themselves, simply as attitudes, are always false and bad. It is to be regretted

that one of his judicial temper and historical spirit should seem to forget that specific judgments maintained at a given time and place by the traditionally minded may, for the occasion, be among the most worthful assets of the group. The author probably means that open-mindedness, scientific curiosity, the courage of objectivity considered in and of themselves, simply as attitudes, are always true and good. Unfortunately he does not guard himself with the correlative truth that conscientious innovators have often retarded more than they have promoted the progress of their society.

One who is prompted by the book to these reflections will have felt that between the lines there is special pleading against certain unnamed adversaries and in favor of certain unspecified clients. Who these may be one can only surmise. If the surmises are half correct, the reviewer would risk the conjecture that, even if the presumed culprits were convicted, the vindication of the innovators whom the author had in mind would not necessarily be involved. Condemnation of czarism does not justify Leninism. The trustees of a certain university may have been arbitrary, but professors who suffered from them may have been unduly provocative. Judge Gary may be wrong, but it does not follow that the I.W.W. is right. It may have been unjust, impolitic, and unenlightened to exclude the socialist members from the New York legislature; but Debs may nevertheless have deserved his imprisonment, and all the agitators who were convicted by due process of law may have deserved deportation. In a word, while authoritarianism is always deplorable, innovationism is often intolerable.

The book, then, is a welcome addition to the literature of critical impulse. It is not an automatic separator of the sheep from the goats. ALBION W. SMALL

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group. By WILLIAM I. THOMAS and FLORIAN ZNANIECKI. In five volumes. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1918-20. $25.00.

Two or three years ago a brief note of the first two volumes of this work by the present reviewer appeared in the Journal of Sociology. The entire study is now at hand, and a much more extended treatment is called for.

In discussing a monumental production of this kind the reviewer is faced with the impossiblity of giving even a passing comment to all the

noteworthy features of the work. The most he can do is to indicate the general scope of the undertaking, and then devote whatever space is available to a more detailed consideration of whatever points impress him as particularly significant. In this case, these are two in numberthe tendency to moral disintegration on the part of Polish immigrants in America and the development of a Polish-American society in the United States which is neither genuinely Polish nor American.

This study is emphatically based on first-hand material. And what is particularly remarkable, the authors have supplied the reader with an enormous mass of this material itself, enabling him to check up their conclusions and generalizations to whatever extent his time permits.

The first of the five large volumes opens with a methodological note, outlining the nature of the investigation. This is followed by a general résumé of the social situation in Poland, serving as a background to the consideration of the changes induced by modern historical events, and specifically by the migration of individuals and families to the United States. The picture is that of an ancient society, deeply imbued with the principles of family solidarity, tradition, and status, undergoing the upheaval necessitated by the introduction of modern ideas and ways. Then comes the first instalment of the great mass of peasant correspondence which constitute part of the first-hand material referred to, introduced by a note on the form and function of the peasant letter.

Volume II is occupied entirely with further correspondence. Volume III is given over to the autobiography of a Polish immigrant, sordid, mediocre, and yet interesting, as every authentic record of a human life, however humble, must always be. And this document bears every internal evidence of authenticity and veracity, though one is amazed at the wealth of detail running throughout the entire record. It is almost incredible that a commonplace man of mature years, even though enjoying something of the gift of narration, as this man does, should recall all the minutiae of the events of his previous life. Fortunately, for the purpose for which it is presented, it makes no particular difference whether the record is true as a history or not. Even though some of the details are supplied by the imagination they are just as valuable in portraying social facts as if they had actually occurred. For in such a case, the imagination would suggest only such things as might have happened, that is, as did commonly happen in the environments which the writer knew.

Volume IV presents a review of the social disorganization and reorganization in Poland resulting from the introduction of modern