Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/715

 REVIEWS 699

light. That this might be true if the white is allowed to remain uneducated, may be readily admitted (p. 301).

There are only two ways to solve the negro problem in the South. One is to remove him; the other is to elevate him. The former is apparently out of the question. The only method, then, is to improve him (p. 305).

This education should be of the kind best adapted to the great body of

those for whom it is provided The true principle should be elementary

education for all, including in the term " industrial education," and special, that is, higher education of a proper kind for the special individuals who may give proof of their fitness to receive and profit by it (p. 309).

Finally, and as the only sound foundation for the. whole system of education, the negro must be taught the great elementary truths of morality and duty. Until he is so established in these that he claims to be on this ground the equal of the white, he can never be his equal on any other ground. When he is the equal of the white, it will make itself known. Until then, he is fighting, not the white race, but a law of nature, universal and inexorable that races rise or fall according to their character (p. 310).

If Mr. Page truly represents the mass of intelligent southern whites in these ideas, it is safe to say that the negro problem will soon be in a fair way to solution.

CHARLES A. ELLWOOD. UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI.

Democracy in the South before the Civil War. By G. W. DYER.

Nashville: Publishing House, M. E. Church, South. Mr. Dyer, who is instructor in economics and sociology in Vanderbilt University, has prepared a syllabus of a proposed larger work on the condition of democracy in the South before the Civil War. It is a strong protest against the theory usually advocated by our historians, that affairs in the South in ante-bellum times were largely controlled by an oligarchy of slaveholders, who kept down the average white man, who made labor disdained, who kept the South agricultural, while the great mass of the people were idle, illiterate, and lazy. By reference to census reports and similar material Mr. Dyer quite effectively disproves statements of his- torians, which he quotes as texts for his argument, and by some comparisons between certain of the southern and northern states before 1860 he draws conclusions by no means unfavorable to the former. The syllabus suggests a most interesting line of work, which, if carried out without prejudice or passion, of which unfor- tunately there are traces, ought to yield results of great value to the student of American social and economic history.

J. W. SHEPARDSON.