the war more than ever before during the period of the last forty years. In England the excess of males is due chiefly to migration and slightly to a more persistent vitality of females. A plan of colonization to equalize the sexes, as it was proposed in England, could be applicable only in case of Canada. A real remedy would be a greater preservation of male lives between the ages of fifteen and sixty.-S. de Jastrzebski, Eugenics Review, July, 1918.

J. H.

The Religion of the Russian Revolution.-Russian revolution can achieve no other object than to bring Russia up to the level of the Western nations. Being essentially religious it is permeated with the pure spirit of martyrdom. It takes up the tragedy of universal freedom where the French Revolution left it off. The ideal of the Russian Revolution is a new religious realization: socialism without a state. The nonparticipation of the Russians in the state was a spiritual gain for them. While they have retained real Christianity, which the Westerners have corrupted by their materialism and individualism, they have become "the only instinctive universal people of the world." Their faith is that the last word in human freedom will come from religion. Russia did not follow Western culture and scientific advancement, because it was accompanied by relentless struggle of individual against individual. According to Merezhkovsky "socialism without state is a new religious realization and activity, new religious unity of individual and society, limitless freedom and limitless love. We believe that sooner or later we will reach the masses, and that this immense voice of the Russian Revolution will send over European cemeteries the trumpet of the archangel announcing terrible judgment and resurrection of the dead."-Lancelot Lawton, English Review, June, 1918. J. H.

The Effect of the War on Religion in College. The war has brought the fighting man face to face with religion-not traditional religion but real religion. The soldier has experienced God as companion. This changed condition will necessitate a change in the place and function of religion in colleges: (1) religion and philosophy will belong together; (2) the college chapel service should take on an air of reality and reasonableness and of personal sympathy free from formalism and touched by variety; (3) a higher place should be given to the social sciences; (4) every teacher should be a religious man; (5) the steadying power of religion in a democratic movement, academic or communal, should be recognized; (6) the doctrine of forgiveness should be sought.— Charles Franklin Thwing, Religious Education, August, 1918. F. O. D.

Labor Questions in the Peace Settlement.-Agreements of secure international standards of industrial law should not form part of the peace settlement, because such matters are, on the whole, too complex to be dealt with satisfactorily by present diplomatic means. With possibly a few exceptions questions concerning the position of persons working in foreign countries would be also best left alone by the peace conference. However, it would be of immense value if, in settling the terms of peace, the conference could agree to refer all questions of industrial regulation and the protection of immigrants to a permanent international council, which could be really representative of the interests concerned, which would really understand the questions at issue and have time to discuss them thoroughly, and which could deal, not only with any immediately required labor treaties, but also with amendments and developments found to be necessary in the future. By this means a reasonably elastic system of international industrial regulations could be devised and enforced, and the danger of too low an industrial standard acting as a drag in more progressive states would be removed to the advantage of the workers and society in general in all industrial countries. Sophy Sanger, Contemporary Review, October, 1918. F. O. D.

The Problem of the Returning Soldier.-The first market to feel the shock of peace is the labor market. The direction of the soldiers in their return to civilian life must proceed in two lines: (1) the qualifications of the men and (2) the conditions of industry. The machinery of reconstruction will have four classes of men to deal with: (1) the able-bodied man without position, or seeking a change; (2) slightly wounded men able to work without special training; (3) disabled men dependent on re-education for a livelihood; (4) permanently disabled men incapable of training.

The foundation for all work should be the centralized control of the complex functions to be performed. France, England, and Canada have met the problem of centralization through special departments. The development in Italy has been similar to that in France with emphasis on the disabled soldier. Australia has a Department of Repatriation and is emphasizing a land scheme to put all returning soldiers, wounded or otherwise, on farms. In the United States the tendency has been to charge separate bodies with different functions of reconstruction. The ideal plan would be to create a Department of Administration of Return for the period of reconstruction. Actually this cannot be. In June, 1918, a Vocational Rehabilitation Bill was passed with reference to disabled soldiers only. Even for it to be effective expert social investigation and a joint commission to co-ordinate the work of different branches are necessary. Just now no phase of reconstruction is so important as the plan of the whole.-Barbara Spofford Morgan, North American Review, October, 1918. F. O. D.

Effects of the War on Southern Labor.-Nowhere in the world have the conditions brought about by the Great War more affected labor than in the South. In 1914 the cotton price demoralization and later the boll-weevil ravages and the flood devastations made labor restless. Then entered the following new elements further complicating the situation: (1) the change from a one-crop system to a diversification of crops and the handling of livestock in order that the South might feed herself; (2) the increase in the number of money crops; (3) the demand for labor that had arisen in the South in connection with the erection of cantonments, aviation fields, the construction of ships, etc.; (4) the increase in wages and abundance of surplus money; (5) the migration of negroes to the North. In connection with this migration movement the negro labor has assumed a new attitude toward the South. The white and black people have held meetings to discuss candidly the causes which have brought about the migration and the remedies proposed for bettering conditions.-Monroe N. Work, The Southern Workman, August, 1918. C. N.

A Negro Exodus. Although no definite census has been taken it is generally estimated that about 300,000 negroes went north during the year 1916-17. There were two causes for this: (1) in the South the immediate reason was the depression following the crop failures together with bad housing, low wages, high rentals, and racial discrimination in courts, in education, and in franchise; (2) in the North the cessation of immigration during the war made necessary the recruiting of negro labor. White employers of the South endeavored to meet the emergency by stopping migration instead of removing its causes. The influx brought to the North the social problems of insufficient clothing, inadequate housing, and the evils of the saloon. In Detroit the National Urban League is endeavoring to meet the situation by establishing a vocational bureau to assist the negro in finding employment, taking practical steps to meet deficient housing, providing wholesome recreation, persuading the police commissioner to appoint a special officer to look after the welfare of the newcomers, and enlisting the co-operation of local religious and public-welfare agencies. The problem now to be solved is: (1) to remove the disabilities that have driven the negro from the South, and (2) to curb the general spirit of lawlessness throughout the country.— Herbert W. Horwill, Contemporary Review, September, 1918. F. O. D.

Social Science and Culture. Social science may take its place with art and religion as a part of our daily consciousness. It in its way can no more afford to scrap into the discard all form in presentation than can religion or art, both of which have used every device and resource to carry their matter into men's very blood itself. Social science must manage a synthesis that will hold fast in it the quality of humanism, which is a citizenship in the world of human spirit. Humanistic culture works toward the understanding from which kindness is bred. It works to find out what any form already established and loved among men really means and how far it can be practicable or built on before the destruction begins. The perfection of the quality of men's living is the end of the social sciences, and their final success is measured by this attainment. They have the power to deepen the meaning of humanism itself, they may be among the first of those agencies that induce that just relation of the single human spirit to the universe which we think of as culture. Culture is the light reflected

by all things upon one another. Social sciences become humanistic through remembering their birth and end in human living.-Stark Young, The New Republic, August, 1918. C. N.

Feeblemindedness and Social Environment.-Social ethics should be built up by the inductive methods of social psychology with biology as a basis. This subject should receive more attention, especially, as the duties of citizens are concerned alike with the duty of conservation of energies, with a view to transmitting to the coming generation the physical, mental, and moral traditions. Degeneracy is appearing among the old American stock. Mimetism is one of its symptoms. It is aping and imitating someone else's manners, and reminds us of feeblemindedness. There is a marked absence of determining and discriminating conscious mind, a weakness of will, which makes impossible the control of obsessions, impulses, and concentration of thoughts. Epilepsy, feeblemindedness, and insanity are results of the urban malenvironment. Anatomical basis is the inherited instability, defective metabolism, and tendency to premature degeneration of the nerve cell. The actual exciting cause of the disease is supplied by toxins and stress incident to the modern life, the degenerative influence of the urban environment. Our problem is how to check this process.Peter H. Bryce, American Journal of Public Health, September, 1918. J. H.

The Unit Plan of Health Administration.-The experiment is one branch of the work of a unique community organization called "The Social Unit" which has as its basic ideas the mobilization of all available social skill into groups to diagnose the needs of the community and formulate a program for these needs. This experiment is operating in an area of Cincinnati comprising a population of 15,000. The medical administration is under the control of thirty local physicians who elect from their group a council of nine with an executive responsible to them. This council with the council of nurses formulates a health program for the district consisting of specific services such as general nursing service, home care of sick patients, a pre-natal service for expectant mothers, a maternity service, a tuberculosis service, and an infant welfare and pre-school service. The noteworthy points of this administration are: (1) the democratic form of the organization. Programs for socializing medicine have, in the past, been formulated by social workers and reformers; in this community they are planned and carried out by the physicians and nurses with the approval of the occupational and citizens' councils; (2) the intensiveness with which detail of the program can be carried out. Through the block workers every person can be approached; (3) the educative effect on the medical profession; (4) the greater responsibility in the nursing service; (5) the possibility of extending the unit organization throughout the city until it covers the total population supplying an effective mechanism for the administration of health work of the city.-Dorothy Thompson, The National Municipal Review, November, 1918. C. N.

Wages and the Cost of Living.-Including the ever-increasing cost of food, fuel, clothes, rentals, amusements, and sundries under the general term "cost of living," labor has conducted 3,000 war-time strikes and on July 20 had in process over 350 strikes in important machine shops in New Jersey alone; all this time labor leaders have sturdily maintained the patriotism of labor despite the fact that in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the 61.4 per cent increase in cost of living for the past three years is offset with an 81 per cent wage increase, that the State of New York's Bureau of Statistics finds there has not been a month since June, 1914, in the State of New York when the increase in wages did not exceed the increase in the cost of living, that in Chicago a 66 per cent increase in living cost-which is the average for the countryhas been met by a 109 per cent wage increase in the great meat-packing industry. Adding the statement of Dr. Sprague of Harvard that "the laboring class is better off in a financial way now than a year ago, while the middle class or those receiving salaries are worse off than a year ago by reason of salaries not having been increased by leaps, as has been the case with wages," with the declarations of the Labor War Board that "in fixing wages, hours, and conditions of labor, regard should always be had to the labor standards," also, "there should be no strikes or lockouts during the war," to the telegram of President Wilson that "the war can be lost in America as well as on the

fields of France, and ill-considered or unjustified interruptions of the essential labor of the country may make it impossible to win it" places labor in a position requiring vindication.-L. A. Brown, Forum, September, 1918. C. W. C.

The Housing Question: with Special Reference to the Country. The proper housing of many farms in several counties of England is of vital importance. At conferences plans are exhibited on the screen and recommendations which accompany them embody most of the mistakes which would paralyze any scheme of housing whatever. Among the points the neglect or miscalculation of which would be disastrous are: (1) many of the plans have been based on the idea of one common room for the meals of a pair of cottages or even four cottages. The meal time in the cottage is the meeting time of the family. It loses all its force if the meal is to be taken with one or three other entire families; (2) the plans provide a common washhouse and the like for groups of cottages as an economy of space and saving of cost; (3) the family bath or tub is sunk in front of the kitchen fire to be covered with floor-boards when not in use; (4) architects omit parlor or sitting-room, saying that cottagers have their meals in the kitchen and that any other sitting-room is a senseless worship of respectability; (5) every cottage should have a reasonable space of garden ground; (6) the cottage should be attractive; (7) the standardization of cottages is unattainable or should not be attained because price cannot be standardized. Whatever we do, let us have homes for our people whose memory will go pleasantly along with them through life.-Gerald S. Davies, The Nineteenth Century and After, November, 1918. C. N.

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