Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/809

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 793

stock or cooperative enterprise in which every citizen is a shareholder, and of which the dividends are receivable in the improved health and the increase in the comfort and happiness of the community." Joseph Chamberlain, "A Character Sketch," Review of -Reviews (American), February.

Political Party Machinery in the United States. — Party organization is a necessity, and party organization, by putting men into a position of power furnishes a continual temptation for them to abuse the power. The only effectual remedy consists in developing within the voters themselves the true spirit of patriotism, which keeps always in view the welfare of the country as of more consequence than the success of the party. Then an attempt at corruption on the part of the leader will result rather in his downfall than in his success. Most men, even among our party leaders, employ cor- ruption only as a hated means. If within each party the upright voters who are willing to secure success only by fair means should also organize themselves and announce that their support could be secured for no leader who would in any case employ unfair means, it might well be that in the majority of instances our party machmes would become what they ought to be, efficiently working organizations, devoted not to selfish ends but to the furtherance of the public good. The majority in every party is opposed to corruption ; but it lacks the leadership of those who are clear-sighted enough to see that the interests of country are paramount to those of party, and that purity in politics is of more vital consequence than any merely economic issue on which the people naturally divide into hostile parties. Professor Jeremiah W. Je.nks, in The Chau- tauquan for April.

The Protection of Italian Emigrants in America. — What the financial condition of our emigrants is has been shown by individual testimony gathered by the American commission. In the questioning to which the newly arrived are submitted it is asked, among other things, how much money they bring with them, and they are even asked to show the money they have on them. In 1895 our 33,902 emigrants dis- embarking at Ellis Island had with them 8362,000, that is, a little more than gio apiece, including those who where rejected as "paupers" and "undesirable immigrants." In the year preceding, the average to each individual was practically the same. Our minister of foreign affairs concerned himself particularly about the protection of our emigrants to America, and endeavored to disarm so far as possible the hostile views prevailing there against our fellow-countrj-men. In June 1894, an American bureau was opened at Ellis Island for the dissemination of information regarding the different states and their inducements to immigrants, the railways, corporations, and individuals who might offer work. The secretary of the treasury conferred on our ambassador the privilege of nominating to that bureau one or two Italian agents to instruct our emi- grants and offer useful suggestions as to their future location. We now hope that the royal government may furnish the bureau with the means to fulfill the most important part of its duties, that of giving information to emigrants by which they may find work and be assisted in the acquisition of land. LuiGl BoDio, in The Chautauquan for April.

IndiTidual Determination and Social Science. — It would be most arbitrary to admit at the present time the identity of biological and psychological phenomena. The manifestations of individual human conduct are too vague to infer from them that psychological laws are identical with those of biology. Those who deny free-will place individual determination outside of the individual himself. They do not leave any part to the individual. Individual determination, however, instead of being due to external mechanical action, as is commonly supposed, is due to the mechanical formation of the human mind, and to the successive phenomena of action and reaction, which are always mechanically developed in iL The determinism of the human being is not as it were external to the individual, as the so-called positivists have affirmed, but it dwells in the individual himself. If individual consciousness is free, how does it happen that the regularity of its action is repeated in all social manifestations ? Individual character is the result of the conditions of social and natural environment, and of hereditary phenomena, and yet under new conditions of environment it reacts in