Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/868

 852 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

3. The great city (virtually the product of the last half-century) also exerts many directly inciting impulses to evil in the youth needing especially strong counter-incite- ments to virtue.

4. The intense, sometimes unscrupulous, and generally narrow commercial spirit of the age, which makes wealth so universally the chief standard of respectability, is causing many youths to fall before the temptation to dishonesty.

5. The church, some time a most powerful helper to youthful virtue among all classes, is losing its influence among those cowed and hard-driven classes which need its help most.

The methods of prevention and reform of youthful criminals have heretofore been very poor and inadequate, especially with respect to the custom of locking up young offenders with hardened criminals, and then setting them adrift again upon a harsh and disdainful world after such a schooling in vice. The remedies must lie (l) in the movement, already encouraging in some parts, to strengthen the familv life physically and morally by improved housing, and cultural and religious advantages; (2) in reducing the congestion of the great cities ; and (3) especially in improved methods of systematic education, such, for instance, as are being rapidly advanced in parts of England and the United States through reform schools, truant schools, and industrial schools. — WiLHELM Rein, " Jugend lichens Verbrechertum und seine Bekampfung," in Zeitschrift fiir Socialwissenschaft, January, 1900.'

Advantages of Proportional Representation. — Among the objections which have been raised against proportional representation are: (i) that it works toward the disintegration of parties, and the formation of a new kind of political grouping ;

(2) that it increases electoral dissensions, and does not conserve the political spirit ;

(3) that it seeks the formation of governmental majorities, and does not perpetuate the domination of the party in power. These objections are evidently contradictory and inconsistent enough to refute themselves. Moreover, the evils which are thus enumerated are not peculiar to any particular mode of representation, but are an inevitable consequence of any representative method ; the question is whether pro- portional representation would increase or whether it would diminish those evils.

An important fact to be considered in deciding this question is that the present tendency of the political parties is to develop on exclusively economic issues, and to make of politics a war between hostile industrial classes; thus giving an exaggerated and undue representation of but a part of the interests of the whole social life. One of our most important duties at this point in the development of modern democratic institutions is to protect democracy against itself, and to favor all those forms of government which promise to guarantee the rights and interests of the minority. Proportional representation, we believe, offers an effective check to the despotism of mere numbers.

Proportional representation, however, is not to be offered as a political panacea, for there is no panacea in politics any more than in medicine ; but there are certain definite and considerable advantages of the system which may be enumerated as follows :

It will make more truly efficient the machinery of parliamentary government, by assuring to each group having a certain number of voters a political power in pro- portion to the numbers and influence of its constituency, and by doing away with the illusory method of representation at present in vogue, which often renders vain the commands and wishes of the majority, as well as of the minority. It would not at once introduce an idyllic social order, but it would certainly introduce an element of quiet and unostentatious honesty. It would permit the parties to be represented by their best candidates, and the candidates to conduct themselves with greater freedom. It would relieve the political struggle of the appearance — and largely the reality — of a mere game played for the sake of the spoils. It would guarantee the rights of the majority against any triumph of a minority favored by election frauds. It would give more certainty in the possession of seats ; and while it would possibly cause fre- quent redistributions of parties in the assemblies, such redistributions would be in accord with the real movements of public opinion. If it would multiply the number of political groups, it would also weaken the merely partisan spirit, and tend to make the methods of business predominate in politics over the methods of war ; thus