bones. When women have begun to figure primarily as chattels, they must be buried with the dead as are his other belongings. Under these circumstances wives may be clubbed to death with great ceremony, buried alive, or set adrift bound to a boat. When there is a change in ideas about destroying property in general at death, the widow's fate is milder. Now she becomes the widow of service rather than of immolation. Widow chastity and service were more widespread customs than widow immolation, for the latter is a luxury of the great. Chastity has a sort of magical potency and medicine-women often observe chastity. Anthropomorphic gods need female service, and special classes of women are god-devoted: old widows, and again "vowed virgins." It appears that the amorously adventuresome deities of mythology are sun-gods, and since sun-gods are gods of fertility, the god's powers of reproduction are multiplied on earth by the representation of them by mortals. Hence the fertility cults believe that the human bride of the god husband imparts his potencies to her community. Thus concepts of sympathetic magic appear to explain the wife-priestess and the priestess-wife. But this divine type of sexual hospitality was uncertain because it interfered with domesticity. When the phallic character of the god is insignificant and the woman's promiscuity is no longer thought of as a means of magical communication between him and his worshiper, chastity is required of god-given women; this is strongly emphasized when the proprietary rights in women are strict. Unchastity becomes a grievous offense. To preserve the purity of god-dedicated women there is an ever-increasing tendency to seclude her. She may become a nun. Although the drift toward chastity for magic or worship is in early culture periods held in check by the powerful tendency to give exceptional privileges to the medicine-man and the king-god, experience showed that chastity became an entertainable and tolerable idea for other than religious ends. The work abounds in a great variety of ethnological illustration which serves to show the primitive mind's undeveloped powers of differentiating separate modes of human activity as well as to exemplify its subordination to the principle of association of ideas. The reader is often conscious of repetition and is impelled to wish that more care had been taken in classifying the material after some definite generalization in order that light might be thrown upon its truth or falsity. There is a common fault in much modern ethnological writing of avoiding generalizations of any sort. The inevitable consequence of this is seen in absence of purpose and loss of coherence. The work would have been given greater clarity and definiteness if the relation of the material presented to the principle of association of ideas or to the principle enunciated in the preface had been more consistently pointed out. The tone of the work is judicial. A most complete bibliography is appended. F. STUART CHAPIN SMITH COLLEGE NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS The Color Line in Ohio. A History of Race Prejudice in a Typical Northern State. By FRANK U. QUILLIN, PH.D. "University of Michigan Historical Studies," III. Ann Arbor: The Ann Arbor Press, 1913. Pp. xvi+178. This monograph is of a type that is needed to gain more local and more exact knowledge of the Negro problem. It is a study, from source material and personal interview, of the historical development and present-day conditions of race antagonism in Ohio, “a typical northern state." The chief conclusion of the research is that prejudice against the Negro has never been absent from Ohio and that it has waxed rather than waned in the past hundred years in accordance with the principle of increasing numerical proportion. In the introduction the writer states that working independently he has arrived at the same general conclusion of Alfred H. Stone in his book Studies of the American Race Problem. The first part of the book, treating of the historical development of the Negro problem, discusses the rise and persistence of the feeling against the Negro. In the first constitutional convention in 1802 a motion embodying the 1787 ordinance prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory carried by but one vote. The Black Laws which indicated the real attitude of the majority of the people to slavery were repealed, not by a revulsion of public opinion, but by a political trade of the Free Soil party, which held the balance of power in the state legislature. Since the Civil War the writer shows that "equal rights in Ohio for blacks and whites is a myth," and he believes that the feeling against the Negro is "increasing rapidly, especially during the last twenty years." The second part of the book, which deals with present-day conditions in the largest cities and certain selected towns, is less valuable as a study, though of greater general interest. It is a somewhat impressionistic account derived from personal interviews with persons of both races of the existing state of race antagonism. Even if the author has here presented a qualitative rather than a quantitative statement of northern feeling against the Negro, he has abundantly indicated that discrimination against the Negro is not southern alone but national. ERNEST W. BURGESS UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS The Government of American Cities. By WILLIAM B. MUNRO. New York: Macmillan. Pp. viii+401. $2.25. The author of The Government of European Cities here presents a companion volume dealing with the government of American cities. The first book discussed both the structure and the function of European municipal organization and administration; the present work is confined to a description of the forms, past, present, and proposed, of city government in America. A second complementary volume is promised which will treat of the administration and actual functioning of municipal government. Throughout the book the author emphasizes the importance of a knowledge of historical development as prerequisite for the understanding of the present forms of city government. A central idea running through many chapters is that federal and state forms of government and the national system of political parties have exerted an influence out of all proportion to reason upon the structure and activities of city government. The present protests against the "federal analogy" with its principle of divided powers, against political parties in municipal elections, and against state interference in city affairs are signs of a reaction toward a functional form of organization. The author gives a cautious approval to city government by commission and to direct legislation and the recall after a decidedly fair consideration of the arguments for and against. To the sociologist the chapters entitled "American Municipal Development," "The Social Structure of the City," and "Municipal Reform and Reformers" should prove especially helpful. The particular value of the book to social workers and reformers is thus succinctly stated by the author: "In an age when men appear far too ready to proceed with a diagnosis and to prescribe remedies without much pre liminary study of the anatomy and physiology of city government, too much stress upon the importance of the latter branches of the subject can scarcely be laid." UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS ERNEST W. BURGESS Housing Problems in America. Conference on Housing. 1913. Proceedings of the Second National The second volume on the subject of housing problems in this country, while presenting the most recent consensus of expert opinion upon the general housing situation, is designed to be of especial help to the medium-sized cities. Particularly valuable for practical use is the fact that the papers with their statement of general principles given by our leading experts in housing and municipal problems were supplemented by discussions and round-table talks which threw light upon the concrete conditions and actual methods in use. The live interest shown in the questions of the desirable type of working-men's houses, the adoption of the zone system in city-planning, and the promotion of associations for co-operating with the wage-earner in financing the small home manifest the strong tendency to emphasize the preventive as well as the remedial methods in meeting housing problems. UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS ERNEST W. BURGESS Ehe und Ehereform. By voN ROMUNDT CHASTÉ. Berlin, 1913. The first forty-two of his eighty-two pages the writer devotes to telling you how down he is on certain types prominent in modern life, principally on the greedy and brutal capitalist, exploiter of art and science, patron of prostitution, corrupter of all he meets, and on the women of his harîmlik, wives pampered, "spoiled," unwilling to bear children, daughters educated merely to catch suitors, sensationalists, immoderate "sports." For such unpleasant characters the traditional attitude toward marriage, the writer claims, is responsible. Marriage is celebrated today with meaningless forms. It is a mere purchase, negotiated by those of unlike tastes and interests, bent on fooling each other beforehand, and afterward, at best content in getting used to each other and growing fat and soulless together. Now as all social and physiological problems culminate in marriage, according to the writer, as marriage is the fundamental calling of man, to reform society, marriage must obviously be reformed. Therefore let us organize a marriage Society. This society will be open to all independent and high-minded souls, anxious to marry for only the noblest reasons, for no ulterior considerations, male candidates not to be under twentyeight, female, under twenty-two, each to declare himself or herself fit physically and psychically for reproduction. If after due probation the marriage is a failure, let it be dissolved, the children, of course, if there are children, to be properly provided for. "I know that generalization is often a mistake" writes the author of this program. Of its being still more often a bore, he is, however, apparently unaware, just as he is unaware that panaceas are convincing only to their makers. NEW YORK, N.Y. ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS |