Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/317

Rh the ascendency over an increasing proportion of the habitable world. France, on the other hand, though more highly developed in intellectual attainments, is defective in those moral factors which make for social efificiency, and under the impulse of reformation has decreased in population, losing the degree of ascendency she once had among the nations.

Similarly taking a wider scope of comparison, Mr. Kidd finds the Celtic races at large superior to the Teutonic in intellectual power, but inferior in "social efificiency" (strangely ignoring the large growth of Celtic population and power in the United States of America, Canada and the Australian colonies).

Into the elaborate historical illustrations which Mr. Kidd adduces, I cannot enter here, but I may remark that his modern instances all assume that social efificiency and racial success are to be measured by counting heads, a quantitative view of progress to which I shall return presently.

Mr. Kidd thinks a reasonable limitation of the population, whatever methods are adopted, to be a wrong and selfish policy, because it "exploits in the interest of the existing generation of individuals that humanitarian movement which is providing a developmental force operating largely m the interest of future generations."

But leaving this point for the present let us look more closely at the nature of the work religion is said to do in modern social progress. Religion, which Kidd, when convenient, chooses to identify with altruistic feeling and with humanitarianism in general, is the one important force in modern progressive movements. Under the influence of this growing altruism, the power-holding classes, those who are in possession of government, of land, and of capital, have made concession after concession to the masses. Mr. Kidd explains that the growing pity and generosity of the classes, and not the power of the masses, is the force which has brought about these changes, and he has the hardihood to illustrate from the French Revolution and the English reform movement. This grotesque contention is forced upon him. For if the growing demand of the subject masses