Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/438

 4l8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

than one hundred out of the present 397 members elected. The center (the Catholic party) counts 102 of the 397 members of the Parliament; the two conservative parties have 74 ; the national liberals 50 ; and 56 belong to the social democrats ; the remainder belong to the small parties.

The existing wide discrepancy between the popular strength of the social democracy and its representation in Parliament is in great part due to the fact that no redistribution of representatives has taken place since the foundation of the empire. Along with the rapid industrial development of Germany, the urban population, especially of the large cities, has increased out of all proportion to the rural popula- tion, and consequently the parliamentary representation of the urban population has constantly lost ground as compared with that of the rural districts. The bourgeois parties also combined against the social democrats in the by-elections, in more than 100 of which the party was interested. The watchword of the social democrats dur- ing the last campaign was dictated by the actions of the government and of the agrarian conservative parties. The social democrats made their strongest fight in defense of the electoral franchise, which was attacked more openly and ruthlessly than ever before during the last Parliament by the conservatives and national liberals. Another, more threatening, danger the social democratic platform calls attention to. The government is devising ways and means still further to abridge the right of com- bination, already hemmed in by all sorts of governmental and legal ordinances. The platform then turns against the colonial and naval policy.and finally defines the position of the party in regard to the commercial treaties. Nothing is included in this plat- form which could have been omitted from the platform of any middle class democratic party. Social democracy stands at the head of every serious opposition to the feudal squirearchy, to absolutism, militarism, and to the rule of the police in Germany. Thus it shows, without prejudice to its proletarian socialistic aims, the tendency to develop into a universal people's party in Germany, which will be joined by all those liberal elements that are disgusted with the weakness and barrenness of middle-class liberalism. What stamps this party more properly as a social democratic party is its critical attitude toward the entire capitalistic order of society. An excellent arid comprehensive picture of the whole past development of the socialistic party in Germany is offered in the now completed History of the German Social Democracy, by Dr. Franz Mehring. — Conrad Schmidt, Journal of Political Economy^Scpiemher, 1898.

Labor Crises and their Periods in the United States.— The quantitative study of the labor problem is a comparatively new department of economic science. It would be desirable to extend our investigation to other countries besides the United States, but a brief survey of what has been done abroad shows at once the insufficiency of our data. Labor disturbances occasion a very serious loss even compared with commercial failures. The employer agrees to pay a certain wage on the expectation that after selling his goods he will have left a profit. If he is disappointed he must either stop producing or reduce expenses by introducing new methods, increasing hours, cutting wages, or finding some other expedient. This process almost always involves injury to the wage receivers. If they refuse to accept his efforts, they strike. If strikes become general, we have a condition of things similar to commercial crises, viz., a group of people anxious to render services in return for wages and another group anxious to obtain those services and pay for them, but a failure to make the exchange on account of the difficulty of agreeing upon the terms. The immediate cause of strikes is not as a rule the break-down of credit, though it is often a remote cause. The best way to estimate the severity of strikes would be by the number of days' labor lost. The reports do not give this,' so it is necessary to estimate it by multiplying the num- ber of men striking by the average duration of strikes for the year. The labor crisis is not the result of a single cause, but depends for its recurrence and its character upon three main forces, two of which may be considered to be cyclical and the third con- stant. The two former are the commercial crisis and the labor movement. The con- stant force is the general economic condition of the country. Of these three the commercial crisis is probably the most important.— Henry W.Farnam, Yale Review, August, 1898.