Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/158

 144 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The Alternative to Socialism. — A Single Tax system by which all land- values would be taxed, by which the economic value of the land would be taken for all, while the possession and use of it would be left the people, in short, the nationalization of rent instead of the nationalization of land which the socialists advocate, would have the beneficial result of removing the restrictions that land monopoly now imposes on labor and enterprise on every hand. — Arthur H. Weller, Westminster Review, November, 1908. F. F.

Le problfime de la population dans [I'^conomie nationale. — The devel- opment of civilization in a nation is directly influenced by its population, among other things. The aim should be to have not the greatest possible number of births, but the greatest number of births of children capable of surviving. This vital force of a people presupposes the existence of a vigorous rural population to bring new strength into the middle classes who possess the means of success. Therefore a public policy of intervention in favor of the proletariat and of the middle classes is a reasonable one. — Eugene Schwiedland, La reforme sociale, September, 1908. F. F.

Some Reflections on the Failure of the Modern City to Provide Recreation for Young Girls. — Only in the modern industrial city have men concluded that it is no longer necessary for the municipality to provide for the insatiable desire for play, and they have therefore entered upon a most dangerous and difficult experiment. The modern city sees in young girls only two possibilities, both commercial : first, a chance to utilize by day their labor power ; second, to extract from them in the evening their petty wages, by pandering to their love of pleasure. — Jane Addams, Charities and The Commons, December 5, 1908.

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The Advance of Civilization in Fiction. — One sign of advance in fiction is that the muck-raking novelist is passing, that the popular novelist is showing fewer honorable thieves and noble murderers, and not so many heroes and heroines that ought to be in the penitentiary. We have been paying more attention to the art of the performance in fiction, than to the moral of it. The average reader has not yet put his morals and his mind together in reading, nor learned to articulate what he wants ; he buys it on hearsay, does not select. — Mrs. L. H. Harris, Independent, November 19, 1908. F. F.

Have You Paid Your Board? — We may ask of different classes of society whether they have produced as much as they have consumed. The common laborer and the specialized worker can answer "yes." Perhaps the artist and scientist can. There are many forms of "business," however, which give no social value to the community ; the same is true of women who consume more than the housekeeper's wages and produce no more, of the woman who spends enormously. It is time to awake to the social consciousness that we must produce more than we consume. — Charlotte Perkins Oilman, Independent, Novem- ber 26, 1908.

The Psychology of Women's Dress. — The occupation of woman is to charm, and when man gave up personal display for specialized skill in occupation, woman took up and began to specialize in personal display to charm man. Man's activities are largely a means of supplying woman with those accessories which she uses to charm him. Yet she is only a pawn in the industrial game played by man. Her individual possessor uses her as a symbol of his wealth, and she wears not what she wants, but what the manufacturers want her to want. The effect of this on the character of woman is wholly bad, for her attention is so bound up with the expression of her own charm, that it stops there. If the economic value of the superfluity of women's dress, and the energy and attention they waste on following the fashions were devoted to humanistic enterprises, we should be in a fair way to add the elements lacking to make our machine system a civilization. — W. I. Thomas, American Magazine, November, 1908. F. F.