Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/733

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 717

City and Country in the Life-Process of the Race. To gain an insight into the measure and degree of the conditions and dependencies of the dying off, propagation, displacement, and changes in quality of peoples, it is necessary to study a network of factors. In separating the environmental factor, city, the investigation of different countries and regions has made an inevitable coefficient of mistakes. Yet there remains a final impression as the result of this sketch. It is the fact that only few persons get the full benefit of the culture of which the upper urban strata must be considered as the bearers.

As intellectual activity diminishes the assimilation of food with the upper strata of the city population, which are especially active intellectually, the rhythm of life is retarded. And while in these upper classes culture renders the life of the individual more splendid, yet the blossoms of culture, being poor in seed, seem to devour themselves. The lower strata, growing up neglected, spread out more and more, and with them physical and psychical evils. Although the economic impor- tance of a city population in the intensive life for gain shows itself with all its power in comparison with that of the country life, one sees that with gradually growing prosperity the number of children diminishes. At the same time, a general qualitative improvement is by no means to be expected, both on account of the change of strata and the elimination, as they take place in the city in con- trast with the country. But cities procure the sifting of those who attain to the leading positions in all branches of cultural activity. The faster the process of citification drags population with itself, the more quickly the alleged changes must appear. There is no backward course in the current of this development. If with us the signs of a moving downward from the culmination point of the curve appear only in embryo, yet the thousandfold experiences from history teach that the most splendid culture perishes when the men who created it, or were able to propagate it, lose their energy. A fatal role seems to have been given to the life of cities from olden times.

However, one will have to ask how far the consequences of city life are infallibly connected with cultural development, and how far our time succeeds in making advantageous use of the knowledge of holding together by virtue of our superior domination over nature. The measure for the full flower of a community is in the coincidence of the maxima of its (i) economico-political, (2) cultural, and (3) highest race (i. e., long life, favorable percentage of propagation, and quality) developments. Usually, with the curves showing race-history, the first line to incline downward is that for race-development ; later the economico- political line falls, and last also the cultural line runs down. The longer a family, clan, tribe, or nation with a common culture (that is, a psycho-physical group) is able to preserve in a harmonious manner, on the best possible level, the three mentioned maxima, the higher will be the cultural, vital power, and the more excellent the human type that its members represent. Every time and every nation, when it has arrived at its apex, must ask anew how far it is able to do something with its means of power against this race-destroying factor of cultural develop- ment which becomes most evident in the contrast between city and country ; to what extent, by virtue of its social organization and by virtue of its recognition of the connection between the factors, it can influence that process of sifting on which the cultural future depends. DR. RICHARD THURNWALD, in Archiv fur Rassen- vnd Gesellschafts-Biologie, November-December, 1904. H. E. F.

Documents on Charity and Conditions. Especially worthy of notice are certain public documents which have come to hand. The Report of the Reforma- tory Commission of Connecticut A. Garvin, president January, 1905, is valuable as an argument for a reformatory for young men. A Prison Commission Report (Indiana) is an able and convincing plea for the abolition of the county jail as a place of punishment, for a system of state district workhouses, and for rational employment of youth in the reformatory. Criminal Statistics, appendix to the report of the minister of agriculture for the year 1903, shows the recent facts of crime in Canada.

"Report on the Growth of Industry in New York" (Albany: The Argus Co., 1904; State Department of Labor). This is another valuable pre- sentation of the present condition of industry of a great state with its historical background. The various industries are analyzed and their development traced during the nineteenth century.