tions and thus altering that national type of excellence which is the expression of national institutions and circumstances." Stoicism and Epicureanism may be regarded as typical expressions of the remnants of older sentiment in the midst of just such periods of decay before the later reconstruction has had time to be effected. These philosophies were efforts to get an orientation in the midst of disintegrating primitive morals. In the emotional turmoil that accompanied the loss of old beliefs, the Stoic endeavored to turn in on himself and there find the moral stability that was lacking in the external world. The Epicurean tried to ignore the wants implied in these primitive religious forms, seeking happiness in what came to hand, worrying not over ultimate values. In short, we have in these two philosophies two characteristic points of view for a period of disintegrating morals. They did not attempt to reconstruct, but to state the kind of comfort the wise man might get out of what was left. The barren casuistry that they fostered was the natural expression of an age that had lost its old standards and had not as yet worked out new ones. Whether or not we regard Christianity as simply another expression of this period of disintegration in a further stage of its development, we must at any rate admit that its tremendous progress was due to the state of mind of the people among whom it was propagated. It was essentially a reconstructing force, while the philosophies of the time were merely statements of the way the individual could, in the midst of the present ruin, retain his sense of moral values or dispense with them. The Christianity of that time did not seek simply to retain in the individual the sense of values lost to the community as a whole. It attempted rather a statement of the best elements of the old worships on a new basis. It offered the charm of sympathetic worship, the joyous fellowship of the primitive religions, adding to it the subjective evaluations that had in the earlier period been held of only minor importance. In no wise is the changed temper of the people more clearly to be seen than in the growth of the subjective as over against the objective emotions. Benevolence and sympathy were set up as the ideal virtues rather than love of country. In the early Christian centuries, Lecky tells us, the civic virtues were on the whole greatly diminished and sometimes almost extinct. "The quarrels between the factions of the chariot races for a long period eclipsed all political and intellectual differences, filled streets with blood, and determined revolutions of the state." Christianity, by laying emphasis upon the value of the subjective attitudes of the individual, tended to underrate the worth of the civic and intellectual virtues. The whole power of the doctrine of the other world, the New Jerusalem, lay in the fact that the present world, with its institutions, had disintegrated, and it was easier to construct an ideal world than to reconstruct the ruins of the real world. The treachery toward every department of government, the cowardice of the army, the frivolity of character that demanded violent emotional excitement even in the midst of great material disaster, the subtle controversies of the Pelagians, the frequent willingness of the religionist to betray his country, all these things are evidences of the loss of the power of the objective order upon men's minds and the substitution of more or less personal interests. The multiplication of illegitimate organizations and communities outside the state were but the further expression of the deep disintegrating movement. The members of these organizations boasted that they had no interests more indifferent to them than those of their own country. This is the natural confession of the subjectivist. Patriotism was the expression of the solidarity of the primitive state. Hence, when the state gave way the objective emotion of patriotism gave way with it. The broader life into which the ancients were irresistibly led rendered it impossible for the primitive solidarity to endure. Thus the decay of the state and the changed attitude toward it were co-ordinate results of a single process. These facts, familiar to all, are offered in support of the proposition that the emotional characteristics of a people are largely dependent on the form of their social evolution. There can be no doubt but that the period just considered was a time when, under the stress of growth, the old order was disintegrat ing. It has been shown that under such conditions subjective standards tend to be set up and emotional states emphasized. If, then, it is true that these centuries were abnormally emotional, the fact can be explained in terms of the social situation of the time. It was because the transition from the old to the new was long and difficult that the emotions lost their hold on the objective world and gained a validity of their own. If the mental life of a people is so closely related to its institutions and traditions, it is questionable whether it is ever right for a so-called higher race to bring strong pressure to bear upon a lower one, even in the name of civilization or religion. It is much easier to destroy the hold of the old than it is to force an adjustment to the new. Hence it is that the natural races upon contact with civilization seem to be affected, in the main, by its vices rather than its virtues. The movement away from the old must have its chief motive from within, if that movement is to result in a more adequate social system. A people should never be forced to break with their past except as this past appeals to them as inadequate. Otherwise the result can only be the destruction of their own systems of control, and with them the virtues connected therewith. If changes are not motivated by elements having organic connection with the past life, a people finds itself deprived of those regulative conditions essential to all morality, whether among civilized or savage. There being no movement from within that calls for the change, there is no basis for a new system of control and hence for a new morality. The virtues of the culture races. which have caused them to break with their past, are dependent upon their complicated social structure and are therefore incapable of being assimilated by the barbarian. The superficial character of the religious awakening occurring in the Hawaiian Islands during the early days of the missionary propagandism there is a remarkable instance of the futility of a natural race attempting to adopt the morals of a culture people. It amounts, with the masses of the people, to little more than the loss of their own systems of control. The last state of such a people is apt to be worse than the first. OSHKOSH STATE NORMAL SCHOOL. IRVING KING. REVIEWS. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. By W. E. B. DuBois, Professor of Economics and History in Atlanta University, Atlanta, Ga. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. Pp. viii+265. $1.20, net. In this volume of essays and sketches Professor DuBois approaches the many-sided negro question with the confidence and conviction of a master, and with the grace and beauty of a poet. The crux of the problem, as he views it, is the adequate training of the black man in the higher industrial and intellectual education. To him the allimportant product of this education "must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man ;" and in this particular the efforts of the southern universities for the training of negroes are of great and far-reaching importance. The author is at his best in an unbiased consideration of the negro's emotional nature. In the chapter "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" he outlines the struggles in which this emotionalism involves the black man. That there can be no doubt of the preponderance of misdirected emotionalism is evidenced in the rapidity with which the negro swings from love to hate, from laughter to tears. But Professor DuBois most clearly comprehends that peculiar phase of interracial strivings which brings about the control of a man by the possession of those agents and forces which furnish him the means of subsistence. It appears that, through ignorance of conditions and lack of business foresight, the negro farmer is a ready victim for the white trader and cotton buyer. Being generally restricted by his landlord to the raising of cotton, he makes the crop either on shares or under a crop or chattel mortgage for provisions advanced during the period of cultivation. The chances of freedom from debt are thus the slightest, being dependent upon the success of a crop planted in an already over-worked soil and upon the price offered by the buyer. The relation which the white "furnisher" sustains to the black farmer thus becomes practically that of slaver and enslaved. The struggles and the unhopefulness of the negro under this industrial bondage are thoughtfully discussed in the two chapters which deal with the "Black Belt." Under the caption "Of Booker T. Washington and Others" he gradually delineates the origin and evolution of negro leadership and the conditions incident to each cycle of change and progress. His attitude toward Mr. Washington is one dictated by radical difference of opinion. While tolerant of Mr. Washington's views and deeply grateful for his assistance in the efforts for racial uplift, he does not fail to emphasize the possible interpretation that Mr. Washington, by his silence in regard to the political activity of the negro, lends influence and confirmation to the advocates of negro disfranchisement. The chapters "Of the Faith of Our Fathers" and "The Sorrow Songs" give a vivid picture of the credulity of the negro and the power of his soul to express in plaintive melody his soul-sorrows and strivings. As a practical solution of the color-line problem, which is assuredly assuming national importance, Professor Du Bois's book cannot be said to do more than offer the rich hints from a vast store of sympathy and knowledge. Yet it is, indeed, the best statement of the factors that greatly complicated the negro's life and destiny in America and which tend largely to segregate him as a "group within a group." The author feels intensely and expresses beautifully the soul-sighs and the spirit of unhopefulness, which are the heir-looms of slavery and oppression, of those "who dwell within the Veil," shut out from the greater and freer life by ignorance, oppression, ostracism, and infant strength of purpose and ambition. Although conscious of the fact that the negro is hardly self-effectual and that the future's sky is over-dark, he has shown a depth of sympathetic investigation and a seriousness of purposeful expression which everywhere strive with the reader and influence him to the thought that now we are coming to a systematic discussion and an intelligent striving from which shall ultimately be born that time, long written of and striven for, when all men shall enjoy the inalienable rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." THEOPHILUS BOLDEN STEWARD. L'origine degli Indo-Europei. By E. DE MICHELIS. Torino: THIS bulky volume is No. 12 in the Biblioteca di Scienze Moderne, which includes, among works of native authors, Italian translations of |