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 712 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

show us men in groups ; these groups varying, multiplying, struggling with each other, coalescing, or melting away. Sociologists should study the action of these groups upon each other. Besides, in the rudimentary knowledge of biology and psychology of his time Comte could not form a clear idea of adaptation. (5) Bastian maintains more decidedly than Comtc that social evolution is determined only by intellectual evolu- tion, and in his researches lu- was not guided by the law of adaptation. (6) Lilien- feld, Novicow, and others have carried the analogico-organic theory to fantastic lengths. Lilienfeld declared that sociology cannot be a positive science unless it con- siders society as "a real living organism composed of cells as are individual organisms in nature." Novicow does not hesitate to say that " as societies are organisms, one can deduce a priori that they will conform to all the laws of biology." Whether the individual or the family is the social cell, whether government is the brain of the social organism, etc., they cannot agree, thus showing that the analogy is not real. (7) Durkheim's idea of the division of labor I accept, but only as a secondary factor in adaptation. (8) Tarde overestimates the extent and importance of the laws of imita- tion. (9) Gumplowicz says that mankind came originally from various stocks, and that the social process is due to the eternal sympathy between like stocks and the eternal hatred between unlike ones. But it remains to be proved that men descend from various stocks. How does he know that like stocks are always sympathetic ? He maintains not only absolute fixity of species, but even of men's faculties and feel- ings. Then there could never be progress. As all present human races are amalga- mations, how does Gumplowicz know what were the original tendencies of primitive ethnic elements ? Again, if there be this instinctive repulsion, why should nations amalgamate ? He says, " because the council of the gods has so decided," "because nature wills it." How does he know? (10) My theory is incompatible with his. I maintain transformation, by adaptation, of faculties and sentiments ; that the struggle between men depends on insufficiency of means to support life and on other social cir- cumstances ; that this struggle is lessening ; that between victor and vanquished rises a parasitic relation, governed by certain laws ; that this relation tends to cease ; that with the accumulation of experience and goods men improve their condition ; that in this amelioration groups of men advance by tortuous ways, now receding, now stand- ing still ; and that political power rises independently of the superposition of one peo- ple on another. M. A. VACCARO, Rivista Ilaliana di Sociologia, November, 1897.

The State Adoption of Street Arabs. The paupers and criminals of the future are to be seen in the children of the slums today, in process of training by the influence of vice and squalor around them. The state has done much of a remedial nature, almost nothing of a preventive sort. Private philanthropy has done what has been done. But private organization is pitifully inadequate ; the law now protects the child from cruelty, but not from the vice of its surroundings. The state should place children who are in reality homeless in country industrial schools, fitting the girls for domestic servants and trades, and the boys for trades and the army and navy. It will not injure the liberty of the individual any more than is already done by the prisons and workhouses which are found necessary for the same children after they have matured in their lives of vice and pauperism. If the children are taken in hand and thus reared when quite small, it will, as the results of the private industrial schools have shown, result in saving the vast majority from useless and sinful lives to be useful and honest men and women. Even financially there will be a great saving after a few years in the cost of paupers and criminals ; and the nation will be strengthened especially in the case of domestic servants and in supplying men for the army and navy, in all of which the dearth is at present a serious problem. MRS. A. SAMUELS, Fortnightly Review, January, 1898.