Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/299

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 285

their unskilled and poorer comrades, and in a class of their own to engage in a fierce competitive struggle with the latter ; and secondly, the leaders sooner or later sever their connection with their own class in order to join the ranks of the bourgeois group.

The lesson of history seems to be that no popular movement, however forceful and energetic, can produce lasting and organic changes in the social structure of civilized mankind, because the most prominent elements of that popular movement itself, the men who once led and inspired it, ever gradually desert the masses only to be absorbed by the "political class," to which they contribute their youthful energy and practical intelligence, thus preserving it in a continually renewed process of rejuvenation. — Robert Michels, "Die oligarchischen Tendenzen der Gesellschaft." Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, July, 1908. P. W.

The Problem of the Whole and the Part. — Excluding from the whole range of possible complexes those which are produced by the action of the syn- thetic judgment, i. e., are conceptual and" not real complexes, there still remain two kinds of objectively given real combinations. These are, first, agglomerations or homogeneous accumulations in which the properties of the whole are derivable from those of the component parts ; and, secondly, systematic aggregations proper, self-coherent collectivities or organisms, which contain within themselves their unifying causes. Sociological interest centers in the latter category. While the old question of priority between part and whole is shown to be abortive by their con- sideration as correlative concepts, the problem of their relative growth and decay resolves into three possibilities, viz. integration, dissolution, or simultaneous inte- gration and dissolution. Every step in the integration or formation of new syste- matic combinations is an act in the creation of new qualities ; by producing new form and quantity relations integration brings into being new qualities. Quantity and form are the two fundamental properties of all things, and in their variation quality operates as a function. New properties arise in substances as a conse- quence of accumulation, e. g., increased intensity of sense stimulation changes pleasure into pain sensations. The dependence of quality on form and arrangement is quite as definite as the effect of quantity, e. g., the production of a work of art from a shapeless lump of potter's clay. Integration is change of quantity and mag- nitude relations as well as of the grouping, arrangement, form of substances, i. e., of the true bearers of all quality. The whole and the part are relative concepts. Logically, therefore, the whole cannot change but through the changes of the parts, and vice versa. No part of the social whole, moreover, can sustain change, in any sense whatever, without a corresponding transformation in all the other parts, and conversely, any part may become indirectly the initial point for the transformation of the whole. Changes in the parts of society, its constituent elements (race), are at once changes in society itself. Improvement of race is ipso facto societary improvement. — A. Nordenholz, "Das Problem vom Gauzen und vom Teil," Archiv fiir Rassen- und Gesellschafts Biologic, April, 1908.

P. W.

A National Children's Bureau. — The National Child Labor Committee has issued the following bulletin :

A bill to establish a National Children's Bureau was introduced in the United States Senate in the winter of 1905-6 at the request of the National Child Labor Committee. The bill did not come to vote although it received the hearty indorsement of President Roosevelt and Secretary Hitchcock of the Department of the Interior as well as of many members of both Houses of Congress.

More recent reports from various government departments emphasize the need for a bureau devoted specifically to the interests of the child. Such a bureau should investigate and report upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child-life and would especially investigate questions of infant mortality, the birth-rate, physical degeneracy, orphanage, juvenile delinquency and juvenile courts, desertion and illegitimacy, employment, dangerous occupa- tions, accidents and diseases of children of the industrial classes, legislation