Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/713

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or the absence of it that was necessary for his task. What a nice, genteel, ladylike affair human liberty is, to be sure ! The book belongs rather less than the letters of Howells' "Utopian" in the world of capitalistic combinations, and party bosses, and wars of union vs. non-union labor. It is a distinct addition to our conceptions of things that are not so. A. W. S.

Le malaise de la dtfnwcratie. Par Gaston Deschamps. Paris : Armand Colin et Cie., 1899. Pp. 359.

The French literature of morbid national self-consciousness grows apace. It tends to convince disinterested onlookers that it is not as well with France as it should be, whether the writers affirm or deny exceptional evils in their society. Americans who are anxious to avoid premature and superficial judgments cannot repress suspicion that so much introspection and self-accusation is not a sign of superior national austerity, but of national uneasiness for which there must be peculiar reasons. The book before us is typical of a considerable class. It finds very little to praise in present French society. It begins with the creation, for modern French philosophers ; " the begin- ning of the democratic regime." In successive chapters it describes, both historically and in their present form, the politician, Caesarism and "mediocracy," pornocracy and scandals, the almoners of democ- racy, German pedagogy, the Anglo-Saxon mania, the unrest of the university, the unrest of the rising generation, the army, and the democracy.

We have had treatises on the psychology of crime, of democracy, of socialism, and there»will soon be material enough for a psychology of current French self-defamation. Without this setting it will be impossible to appraise writers of this class at their proper valuation ; but, on the other hand, an estimate of the personal equation in each of these cases is necessary in order to construct such a general view. Just now we are at the mercy of miscellaneous impressionists. Whether the anonymous newspaper essayists, or the popular feuilletonistes, or Zola, or .\natole France, or sociologists like Demolin, or editorial writers in book form like the present author, their evidence is scrappy, inco- herent, without perspective. Even foreigners who have had but casual opportunities for first-hand observation detect the partial and partisan character of these exhibits, but no way appears to make the one frag- mentary report complement the others. The general effect, however.