Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/573

 REVIEWS 557

ward Signs of Morality ; " " On the Foundations of Morals ; " " Rational Character of the Religious Feeling." In short, the aim of the book is to prove the superiority of the religious doctrine as the foundation of morals, and the necessity for France to be religious if she will live and progress. This demonstration is made with the usual commonplace topics, and the arguments are so weak that it would be a loss of time to try to refute them. The social phenomena are observed and analyzed in quite a superficial way. The deductions often make us smile, and the few just ones which we meet scattered through the book are marred by commonplace repetitions. To think that the author is a member of Parliament and means to rule France ! M. Ripert declares as an axiom : " The loss of the family spirit is the result of the dissolution of the marriages " (p. 32), forgetting to prove the existence of this loss, and, in case it should be admitted, that divorce is really the cause. Elsewhere (p. 61) we read this extraordinary assertion : " Nothing could induce the beggar to give up his lucrative profession " ! The proof is still more extraordinary than the assertion. Here it is in all its ingenuity : " In spite of the foundation of works of assistance through labor, in spite of the bureau de bienfaisance and the public aid of which the beggar does not forget to make the most, mendicity is ever increasing." We must confess that such demonstrations disarm the critic by their puerility. The book is full of assertions imperturbably expressed as axiomatic truths, when they really need to be proved and fully demonstrated. In short, Politique et religion is an insignificant book which the stu- dent of sociology should not read if he values his time.

A. AND H. H.

Methods of Industrial Peace. By N. P. OILMAN. Boston and

New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904. Pp. 436. The student of social movements has a doubly difficult task ; not only is there a rapid growth of knowledge through critical investiga- tions, but the facts themselves change while we are looking at the stream. Therefore we must have new books on the " labor question." It was desirable, for example, to place the results of the studies of the Industrial Commission in intelligible form for the public to consider. Within the last ten years experiments have been tried on a vast scale. The " sliding scale," once so generally accepted as a panacea, has fallen into disrepute.