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 142 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

vital principle of the boss system is that it furnishes this connection between the executive and legislative departments. A closer union of these departments of municipal government will dispense with the boss and the machine as the basis of administrative connection. By abolishing their office, its emoluments will be turned into the public treasury.

A practical program of municipal government would include a considerable extension of the powers of the executive, so as to give to the mayor the right of complete legislative initiative, even to the point of fixing the time at which a vote shall be taken : the administrative officers of the city would participate in the deliberations of the legislative body ; while the latter could no longer dictate appointments to the executive as the price of legislative co-operation. It should be observed that the introduction of these principles of organization will work no sudden cure, although they will cause immediate improvement.

There are limitations upon municipal efficiency which rest upon conditions not affected by the principles outlined. So long as municipal suffrage rests upon the same -basis as political suffrage, instead of upon a basis appropriate to the management of a business undertaking, there will be elements of corruption present. Another limitation upon the beneficial results of improved organization is found in the tendency of municipal elections to involve, in addition to the question, " How shall your municipal business be conducted ? " the further question, "How much enforcement of law do you want?" In such cases the election is apt to resolve itself into a struggle to reach and use the police power for some special purpose, a condition of things full of incitement to fanaticism on the one hand, and vice on the other. HENRY JONES FORD, in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, March, 1904. E. B. W.

Sociology and the Social Sciences (II). "Relation of Sociology to His- tory," Lecture by M. Ch. Seignobos. Let us commence with a definition of terms. By " sociology " we must understand the whole of that precise knowledge which has for its object men living in society. Like biology it consists of two successive series of operations: (T) empirical knowledge, descriptive of the objects of research, analogous to zoology and botany ; (2) an abstract science of general laws of social phenomena, analogous to biology. History is concerned with all past social facts which we may no longer observe directly. It is only a method of investigation employed in the absence of the normal method direct observation. The word " history " has a double meaning : the method of study by the aid of documents, and the empirical knowledge of past social phenomena.

What need has sociology of the knowledge of the past? In order that it may complete its inventory of the social world, whether it be in order to study the evolution of societies or of present, actual social phenomena, it must rely upon the results of historical research. The method, too, of history the indirect, documentary method it must also make use of, with all the canons of historical criticism, in the scrutiny of the materials which the study even of present social phenomena causes to accumulate. In short, history plays the same role for soci- ology that paleontology does for biology.

What services, on the other hand, does the direct study of present human phenomena render to history ? In the other descriptive sciences there is present a material reality which serves as the framework of the science, but in the case of history there is no such concrete point of departure. The historian must present to himself in imagination the facts with which his science deals, and often unconsciously he interrogates his facts in the light of the present, the only society which he knows directly a practice which is unfortunately very often without either reflection or method. Now, it is of sociology that he must demand the framework upon which the facts of history may group themselves. And one may say that historians, without knowing it, follow the sociological conceptions of their time ; they give to the different sorts of phenomena a different proportional importance which varies with their age. Thus sociology is necessary to history in order to furnish it a working conception by the aid of which a complete and intelligent exhibit may be made of the data at hand regarding each past society,