compete with politicians and capitalists who regarded politics as a money making business. The former failed to realize the importance

reform can find in this

essential as good men.

of organization and vigilance. Those who in the future may strive for history that proper mechanisms are quite as Progress toward honest municipal administration would seem to depend upon minimizing the power of the politician to make pecuniary donations at the expense of the public. WILLIAM H. ALLEN.

The New Harmony Communities. By GEORGE BROWNING LOCKWOOD. Marion, Ind.: The Chronicle Co., 1902. 8vo, pp. 282. The Last Days of the Ruskin Co-operative Association. By ISAAC BROOME. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1902. 16mo, pp. 183.

THE book on The New Harmony Communities appeals especially to students of the community experiments in the United States, but its appeal is hardly less strong to those interested in educational methods, women's suffrage, and the social history of the Mississippi valley. Readers with less serious purpose will be attracted and held by the variety and reality of the life that crowds the pages, and by the biographical sketches of the men and women of romantic ideals and original, independent and unconventional lives who gathered at New Harmony in the early days of the nineteenth century.

Making his one central subject the socialistic community founded by Robert Owen at New Harmony, the author gives it proper perspective by describing a number of other interesting social movements which bore some relation to this one. First, in order of time are the Rappites, a religious sect which arose at a time when a wave of reform was felt among the peasantry of Württemberg, and whose leader, Rapp, founded a community in southern Indiana on the very site where later the New Harmony experiment was tried. The German Society had a remarkable material success and attracted the attention of the reformers that were dreaming of a new society based on communistic principles.

The next step in the chain of events was Robert Owen's reform among his factory operatives in Scotland. This incident is well known to students of socialism. As a result of his success in paternal government Robert Owen's social plans became more wide-reaching. His judgment evidently was unbalanced by the attention his experiment

had attracted and by the success it had attained. He did not recognize the difference between the paternalistic reforms he had accomplished in his own factory and the democratic experiment he proposed in his scheme of community life.

He attempted to realize this ideal in his community founded at New Harmony on lands purchased from the Rappite Society. The material conditions were most favorable, but the social and human factors of the problem were, as our author most convincingly shows, such as to make success not even remotely possible. Nothing is more striking in the history of social movements than the contrast between Robert Owen the business man, practical and successful, the shrewd judge of human nature, and Robert Owen the social dreamer, shutting his eyes to realities that almost any humble intellect could apprehend. Long after every one else had recognized the inevitable failure of his experiment, he refused to admit it.

Not alone the communistic experiment, but the striking social and educational ideals of Owen, attracted a number of men and women of advanced and somewhat erratic views. The little village of New Harmony in southern Indiana was for a few years the center of the educational and scientific activity of the western states. The presence and activity of these able men had, as the author clearly shows, an influence on the intellectual life not only of the West, but of the whole nation. Not least interesting among these characters is Josiah Warren, "a remarkable American," as John Stuart Mill called him. His ideas of extreme individualism, his labor-note stores, and his remarkable intellectual activity, are the subjects of an interesting chapter contributed by another writer.

The subject of this volume is perhaps the most important social experiment ever tried in this country. Its history is full of instruction to the thoughtful. The moral lessons are, however, not thrust by the author upon his readers. He tells his story in a remarkable clear, judicial and entertaining way. He writes with a facile and skilful pen. An Indiana man, writing on one of the epoch-making events in the history of his native state, he finds interest and joy in the subject, and makes his readers share the same feelings. The book represents much careful research and the use of all available sources of information. It is an admirable contribution to a subject that will grow, rather than diminish, in interest as time goes on.

The other book above mentioned has little in common with the merits just enumerated, although the Ruskin Co-operative Association,

whose downfall it recounts, is curiously like a belated echo-mayhap the transmigrated spirit of the New Harmony community. The same high hopes, the same unpractical purposes, the same incompetent. membership, incapable management, jealousy, meanness and failure. Feature by feature the one recalls the other. The world's experience in communistic experiments had taught these new experimenters nothing; they knew little and cared less for history. Reason could not convince them that their plan was unsound for it all looked so plain ; and so, with many heart-burnings and much recrimination, this latest community experiment went the way of all communal flesh-its obituary written in no flattering phrases by one of the disenchanted, "Prof. Isaac Broome," as he calls himself on the title page.

It is not safe to say that this is the last of the small community experiments, for the idea is so attractive to the uninstructed mind, fired by the reformer's zeal. But it is safe to predict that there will be little of that ideal community reform attempted in the future. A far more fascinating kind is found in speculative socialism which has the advantage of not being so discouragingly easy to put to the test. The publisher of the Ruskin book, himself a socialist, shows in the preface what moral the modern socialist draws from these failures of community experiments. If the incapable can not make the capable work for them in a small community, it proves, according to the logic of speculative socialism, that they could do it in a large community. If a little perpetual motion machine will not run, it proves conclusively to some minds that the reason it will not go is that it is not bigger.

FRANK A. FETTER.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. By H. G. WELLS. London, 1902. 8vo, pp. 343.

THE economist, the sociologist, and the student of ethics will each find in this work many fruitful suggestions, amid a rather vast expanse of unnecessary prolixity. Though in the form of prophecy, the treatment deals with tendencies already evident, or at least discernible, and it has the merit of laying stress on objective conditions rather than on mere psychological analysis, the author having a healthy appetite for plain facts in preference to the made dishes of philosophic interpre

tation.

The main points of the argument are as follows: The shareholding class, with increasing freedom of travel and residence, and consequent weakening of local ties and responsibilities, is likely to become even more frivolous than at present. With the submerged class of incompetents and unemployables at the other end of the social scale it will tend to die out from generation to generation, and will be kept up mainly by recruitment. The rest of society will fall into two groups: first, the scientific and technical producers of every class, from inventors and captains of industry to citizens of ordinary capacity; and, second, the manipulators of and speculators in stocks, shares, goods, and human. nature, including the lawyers, politicians, promoters, market-cornerers, etc. It is interesting to note that this distinction between the industrial producers and the manipulators is virtually the same as that recently developed and emphasized in economic theory by Dr. Veblen. Evidently the distinction cannot always be drawn with exactness, since many business careers involve a mixture of the two classes of activities. But, although the two groups overlap in some degree, the distinction is a vital one, and its neglect by the prevailing schools of economics can have been due only to the tendency to consider only the market value of goods or services to the neglect of their vital value.

Of the above four groups- to return to Wells the last two will keep up the population and will control business and politics. In ordinary times the manipulators are likely to be the element more largely in control. But a serious war will inevitably bring the industrial producers, or the engineer class in the broadest sense, into control in the states concerned. For warfare is becoming essentially an engineering operation, in the largest sense of engineering; it is coming to depend no longer upon bravery, numbers, or dash, but upon skill in the utilization of machinery of transportation, in the handling of complicated weapons, large and small, from the warship to the modern rifle, and in organization and direction along lines of the greatest efficiency. The efficient directors of industry will furnish the plans and the industrial efficients will execute them.

The country or federation with the largest body of trained efficients of the scientific-industrial class will be victorious in war and will control world-politics. Wells regards this position as assured to a confederation of English-speaking peoples, headed by the United States. There are, however, as I have hitherto pointed out in these pages, strong reasons for believing that these lines of federation will follow racial as well as linguistic lines, and that the Scandinavians, Hollanders, and

Germans' will join with the Anglo-American peoples in a union of the nationalities composed of, or dominated by, the Nordic race and its ideals of freedom and progress. On the other hand, certain Englishspeaking populations, such as those of India, will take only a passive part in this federation of the Nordic, or larger Anglo-Saxon race.2

An interesting corollary of the view that mechanical or scientific aptitude will be the most important requisite of efficiency in the warfare of the future is the less impressive rôle forshadowed for such vast, but unprogressive aggregates of population as those represented by the Russian and the Chinese empires.

Russia. ... stagnates, relatively to the western states, under the rule of reactionary intelligencies; it does not develop, and does not seem likely to develop, the merest beginnings of that great, educated middle class with which the future so enormously rests. The Russia of today is indeed very little more than a vast breeding ground for an illiterate peasantry, and the forecasts of its future greatness entirely ignore that dwindling significance of mere numbers in warfare, which is the clear and necessary consequence of mechanical advance. To a large extent, I believe, the western Slavs will follow the Prussians and Lithuanians, and be incorporated in the urbanization of western Europe, and the remoter portions of Russia seem destined to become — are indeed becoming—an abyss, a wretched and disorderly abyss, that will not even be formidable to the armed and disciplined peoples of the new civilization (p. 271).

'Primarily the North Germans, who, however, are likely to swing the South Germans with them. The South Germans, although leaning to the Alpine race type physically, are permeated, from long association, with the Nordic spirit.

'Mr. Wells is, it may be said incidentally, unfamiliar with modern anthropology, and like Mr. Hanna, whose work on the Scotch-Irish is criticised elsewhere, he runs afoul of the prevailing confusion between the linguistic and the anthropological use of such terms as "Teutonic" and "Celtic." Thus he complains (p. 237) that the Norwegian and the Bavarian are both "generalized about as Teutonic." So they are by the philologist, for they both speak Teutonic languages. Again he complains that "the tall and generous Highlander" and the "square-headed Breton " "are Kelts within the meaning of this oil-lamp anthropology." If there is any anthropology extant which teaches this it is certainly oil-lamp, but such an anthropology is a dream conjured up by Mr. Wells's well lubricated imagination. The lumping of the Highland Scotch and the Britons as Celts is a purely linguistic classification. The anthropologists have long been insisting, apparently, however, without effect on the general writer, that language is no test of race. As regards the particular groups referred to the Norwegian is prevailingly Teutonic, or better, Nordic; the Highlander is Nordic with an intermixture of darker race, probably allied to the Mediterranean, certainly not Celtic; the Breton is mainly Celtic, or better, Alpine of race; and the Bavarian is a combination of Celtic and Teutonic.