Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/594

 578 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the business of the islands, which has additional burdens to bear in the form of industrial taxes." Valuable bibliographies are appended to the various chapters.

EDWIN E. SPARKS.

The Liquor Problem: A Summary of Investigations Conducted by the Committee of Fifty, 1893-1903. Prepared for the Committee by JOHN S. BILLINGS, CHARLES W. ELIOT, HENRY W. FARNAM, JACOB L. GREENE AND FRANCIS G. PEABODY. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1905. Pp. 182.

This investigation was confined almost exclusively to conditions in the United States, and so the lessons of European experience are not fully brought to attention. In the last chapter a positive recom- mendation is made in the description of the Norwegian or "company" system, "which may be said to contain the essence of scientific modern liquor legislation."

For educators the chapter by Dr. Billings has great interest ; for he shows with the quiet confidence of an expert that much of the instruction given on the physiological effects of alcohol in public schools is misleading and false. It is a pity that zealous and earnest people will insist on compelling teachers to isolate a subject from all its natural connections and then drill young children to believe errors. When these pupils become adult, they will discover the facts, and must lose respect for those who deceived them in hope of serving a good cause by unfair means. The actual facts, as Dr. Billings summarizes them, without any exaggerations to destroy the moral influence of teachers, are all that is needed for a temperance argu- ment.

The committee, by publishing the results of their study in a sin- gle volume, will gain access to a far wider audience, and will thus induce many more persons to go more deeply into the evidence by turning back to the earlier special reports for more prolonged study. No more sane, balanced, and convincing statement of the problem has been made, and the influence of the investigation will widen and deepen as men discover, through disappointment and defeat, that steady progress by rational means is both more rapid and more se- cure than spasmodic bursts of mob rule. If a great part of the money