doubt, however, marriage and the home will undergo modifications which will tend to make these ancient institutions a little more flexible and to permit a greater degree of variation to meet special circumstances." The book is thought-provoking, especially for the sociologists, who will be most concerned with the social implications of this fruitage of a lifetime of study of social hygiene.

Galloway's Biology of Sex is a clear, concise presentation of the need, method, and material of wholesome sex instruction, based upon the belief that the mental, social, and moral control of the sex impulses is at present one of the most important of society's tasks.

BOSTON UNIVERSITY

ERNEST R. GROVES

The Russian Bolshevik Revolution. By EDWARD ALSWORTH Ross. New York: The Century Co., 1921. Pp. 302. $3.00.

The Revival of Marxism. By J. SHIELD NICHOLSON. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1921. Pp. 145. $2.25.

The New Policies of Soviet Russia. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co. Pp. 127.

The Principles of Revolution. By C. DELISLE BURNS. New York: Oxford University Press, 1921. Pp. 155. $1.75.

In his volume Mr. Ross has produced an immensely readable, if somewhat journalistic, study of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution. The book, being dedicated to "intelligent Americans who are tired of being victims of propaganda about Russia," represents an honest but often ineffectual effort to reach the truth, and is happily free from the customary ritual of exorcisms which has become so necessary a feature of books on Russia. The materials of the book are taken from newspapers, memoirs, private letters, and occasionally public documents, just the sort of material which is available to most newspaper correspondents. The book, therefore, does not mark any radical departure from the ways of the correspondent. Of indubitable value at the time of its publication, four years ago, it is largely antiquated today. The book gives the impression of hasty composition; newspaper reports seem hurriedly plastered together. There is no nice and accurate measure of the decisive, moving forces that are at work during the Revolution. Mr. Ross gives the impression of a spontaneous, almost leaderless revolution, yet Bruce Lockhart's excellent study has revealed that in no modern revolution is leadership so clearly demonstrable as in the Russian Revolution.

The volume by Nicholson on The Revival of Marxism is the work of an excited octogenarian professor of the University of Edinburgh who wishes to answer the post-war revival of Marxism with a fresh refutation. With the air of giving the reader carmina prius non audita, he rams in open doors and repeats all the arguments which orthodox economists have ever made against the Marxian dogma. A singularly futile book.

The New Policies of Soviet Russia is an invaluable source book on the second phase of the Bolshevik Revolution. It is a reprint of pamphlets by Lenin, Bukharin, and Rutgers. The most important of the three is the pamphlet by Lenin on The Meaning of the Agricultural Tax, in which he unfolds his argument in favor of state-capitalism. It is one of the most characteristic productions of Lenin's masterly revolutionary logic.

Burns' The Principles of Revolution is a remarkably stimulating book, written with a multiple purpose. It is in part a study in the history of revolutionary social philosophy, in part a study in the revolutionary process, and lastly it is written with the unexpressed but still unmistakable desire to prepare the way for the ideal revolution of the future. Proceeding on the supposition that "only dead men know the tunes the live world dances to," he singles out the great revolutionary prophets of modern times (Rousseau, Karl Marx, Mazzini, William Morris, Leo Tolstoy) for an admirably objective analysis of the type of ideals which promote revolution. In the second part of the book he endeavors to define revolution. He calls it a sudden and radical change in social habits and social organization. He contributes nothing new to the theory of the objective revolutionary process, for he is primarily interested in revolutions as in part the effects of social idealism.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

WALTER L. DORN

Unemployment Relief in Great Britain. A Study in State Socialism. Hart Schaffner & Marx Prize Essay XXXVIII. By FELIX MORLEY. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924. Pp. i+203. $2.00.

Students of unemployment relief are indebted to Mr. Morley for a clear and concise presentation of the British plans. It is to be regretted that Mr. Morley did not stop at this point. His conclusions are not sound; they do not follow upon the facts.

The conclusions reached are twofold: state insurance against unem

ployment is a failure, and will continue to be a failure; insurance by industry is the ultimate remedy.

The indictments against the experiment are (1) the insolvency of the fund held to have been inevitable because post-war unemployment was unprecedented and the state did not adequately prepare for the depression during the preceding years of prosperity; (2) the failure of the fund to prevent recourse to local relief; (3) the degeneration of the scheme into what "closely resembled a centralized system of outdoor relief," but without supplanting local relief; and (4) the slowing down and choking of the unemployment exchanges.

Passing from these indictments Mr. Morley proceeds to prescribe four tests for the justification of state-operated unemployment insurance: It must either diminish unemployment, or render consumption more steady than income, or centralize all responsibility for unemployment relief in a single organization, or provide relief at less expense to the taxpayer than could be given by the device of regulated doles.

There is no challenging the indictments: The fund became insolvent; makeshift arrangements were resorted to; local relief was not supplanted; employment exchanges were excessively burdened with insurance detail. The cyclical depression was forecasted, doubtless, by many, including sponsors of the state-insurance plan.

Of the tests proposed by Mr. Morley one is incapable of application: It is impossible to prove whether the plan diminished unemployment. Mr. Morley admits that the second test-the steadying of individual consumption cannot be applied scientifically. The third test-centralizing all responsibility for unemployment relief—is not proof of failure if the plan fails to meet it, unless it can be shown that other proposed forms of insurance would meet the test, which has not been shown. The fourth test is unfair unless at the same time the social and economic effects of doles as against insurance may be evaluated accurately. A horizontal increase in wages would have been even more economical than a system of regulated doles.

In final analysis the only proof that the plan has failed is that the funds became insolvent. The only valid indictment is that of being unprepared. The author of this review can cite equally convincing proofs that insurance by industry is a failure. But it seems illogical to condemn a scheme because of shortsightedness or of actuarial shortcomings.

The outstanding weakness of the book is what seems to be an attempt to interpret the facts so as to make out a case against state insurance. The facts invite criticism at many points, but they do not prove the case. B. M. SQUIRES

The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind. BY JOHN MOFFATT MECKLIN, PH.D. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1924. Pp. 244. $1.75.

Darker Phases of the South. BY FRANK TANNENBAUM. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1924. Pp. 203. $2.00.

In The Ku Klux Klan and Darker Phases of the South an attempt is made to study the Klan in the environment in which it had its origin. The Klan is only one of his "darker phases" of southern life and if he emphasizes it, it is only to use it as a pointer to the more general problem of southern psychology. Mecklin's very much broader study, dealing as it does with a phenomenon which is as notable in Oregon as it is in Georgia, affords him a much deeper insight into the latter-day Klan and its difference from its predecessor. Both studies, however, are remarkable for their sympathy with the Klan point of view, and their appreciation of the psychological factors which have brought it into being.

The great difficulty of the subject is that of giving a right emphasis to the cases for and against the Klan. Both writers are agreed on the immense harm which comes from the secrecy of its methods when attached to a claim to supervise conduct. "It builds up a mood of expectancy, a terror that something will happen ... it creates an atmosphere of restraint and antagonism." With the emotional fixation which it causes, it helps to generate those very crimes which it sets out to prevent; or again, it invades the rights of citizens and violates the safeguards of constitutional government.

It is, however, scarcely sufficient to sum up an analysis of the Klan with the statement: "It has flourished by creating false issues, by magnifying hates and prejudices, and by exploiting misguided loyalties." It may have done all these things, but it has also given small-town psychology "something like an Aristotelian katharsis of the starved emotions." Its very secrecy "makes friendships more genuine, wit more spontaneous, laughter more contagious." Indeed, if the analysis is to have any scientific value, it must take full account of the positive factors back of the Klan, the need of the small-town mind for some relief from the monotony of its existence. The Invisible Empire may be harmful, but it has a hold on ritual and invisibility which at least crosses the borders of religion.

The true emphasis seems to be that while the Klan is in many respects dangerous and undesirable, it has been able to attain its present power only because it has satisfied a real need. That need for a life of greater intimacies, of greater importance, of rhetorical attachment to a

noble cause-might be satisfied much more safely and much more fully by a more intelligent idealism and a more gracious ritual, but the success of the Klan means only that there has been no better alternative available.

Mr. Tannenbaum's account of the matter is simple and sympathetic. In so far as it concerns the South it is almost entirely a question of emotional fixation on the negro. It can be relieved and solved, he thinks, "by making the South afraid of other things as well as the negro . by giving it a greater variety of hate, a greater opportunity for a diversification of emotional exasperation."

CHICAGO

JOHN GRIERSON

The South Sea Bubble. By LEWIS MELVILLE. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1923. Pp. 257. $4.00.

"The story of the South Sea Company is simply the old, old story of Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon." This eighteenth-century "bubble" has its conventional use as conclusive evidence of the utter gullibility of the public. The present account, however, is not the usual sermon, but an interesting account by a biographer who includes quantities of contemporary letters, brochures, speeches in Parliament, the satire of Pope and Swift, farce, comedy, poetry, and cartoons which represent the phases of the craze as seen and felt both by those caught in it and those who stood wisely aloof.

The author is not a sociologist, but he has put into this book just the material which the student of collective behavior can use: the situation of unrest, provoked by myths of fabulous wealth in America; the process of centering attention upon the wild South Sea project to the exclusion of all inhibiting considerations, by a circular reaction in which deliberately circulated rumors led to still wilder spontaneous ones; the period of "mania" when every one was highly suggestible to the slightest move of the crowd, but each was keenly intent on his own interest; the panic, when the "bubble" burst, and the angry prosecution of the directors of the company as "scapegoats."

From the account may be abstracted the essential process of this psychological "mass movement" which one may compare to that abstracted from other cases of high-tempo social interaction to find distinctions and points in common by which to define the nature of those types of collective behavior thought of as crowd phenomena. EVERETT C. HUGHES