the outcome. A side issue that is giving Mr. Baer and his fellow plutocrats much satisfaction was the recent United States Court decision that the Hepburn law, which sought to prevent railway corporations from owning mines, was unconstitutional. It is significant that Judge Gray, the immaculate Democratic jurist, who, as before mentioned, forced the open shop upon the miners and wanted to be the nominee for President and could have secured second place by a nod, rendered the decision in this case which killed the law that was designed to break up the anthracite monopoly. The railroads claimed "confiscation" and insisted that the Hepburn act deprived them of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or words to that effect, and won their point, as usual. So instead of being weakened by the enforcement of the law the anthracite barons are stronger than ever, and soon the country probably will be treated to the extraordinary spectacle of an industry closed down and production at a standstill, and yet the corporation stocks mountaing skyward and, with the prices of the stored commodities, enormously enriching the coal barons and impoverishing and starving the working class.

Of course capitalism is a splendid system-for the capitalists. And one cannot help but feel, with such illustrations constantly before us, that the fool-killer is neglecting his duty in an unpardonable

manner.

Another national strike has been lost. Mention was made in the REVIEW recently that the papermakers had gone on strike at a number of points in New England, New York and the West to resist a reduction in wages. After pitting their stomachs against the millions of the trust for several months the men were compelled to surrender and return to work at the terms dictated by the combine. The trust could not very well lose. It controls the principal mills of the country and had thousands of tons of paper stored to meet just such an emergency as a strike. Indeed, while the paper mill employes were out starving for principle, the trust magnates sat back and took things easy. They dictated a reduction of wages on the one hand and advanced the price of paper on the other hand, and all between the low cost of production and the high cost of consumption is velvet for those gents. It's heads they win and tails the suckers lose.

One would think that the "labor leaders" would begoin to appreciate the helplessness of the workers when opposed in contests with trustified capital. But no such luck. Ths great leaders are merely throwing dust in the eyes of their followers by fidding away on the trifling question of injunctions-the right to strike freely in certain cases where such strikes are hampered, to bump their heads against the stone wall of monopolized capital, where the magnates can pack their trunks and take a vacation in Europe, and before boarding ship can say, "Strike and starve to your heart's content and when you get tired of it return to work at our terms."

It's almost a crime nowadays to call a strike and the pity is that these self-same "great leaders," who strut and boast of their power, are not thrown upon the street along with the rest and have their salaries choked off. Perhaps then they would admit that the Socialists' analysis of capitalism is correct and would favor making some real political progress. There hasn't been a great national strike won during the past decade with the possible single exception of the printers' eight-hour contest, which cost the Typographical Union about $4,500,000. All the others were lost or at best compromised. And yet Gompers, the loudest boaster and greatest of all great

leaders the little Napoleon, mind you-writes Debs down as "the Apostle of Failure!" Where in blazes has Gompers ever won a strike! It has come to be regarded as tantamount to preparing for a funeral when Gompers is called in for assistance. Go down the line for only a year or two and view the failures. Besides the papermakers, the packing house employes, the teamsters, the shipbuilders on the lakes, the lithographers, the telegraphers and others have been worsted, not because the injunction was the most powerful weapon in the hands of the plutocrats, but because labor lacked funds to feed the hungry and political power to enforce its sense of justice. Apostle of failure, indeed! The great leader in Washington ought to inform us where and when victories were won that can be credited to his superior wisdom and extraordinary ability.

LITERATURE
ART

JOHN

SPARGO

Professor Edward Alsworth Ross, of the University of Wisconsin, is very modest and almost apologetic in offering us his stimulating and helpful volume, Social Psychology, published by the Macmillan Company. "In spite of infinite pains and thirteen years of experience in university teaching of the subject, I feel sure this book is strewn with errors. The ground is new, and among the hundreds of interpretations, inferences, and generalizations I have ventured on, no doubt scores will turn out to be wrong. Of course I would strike them out if I knew which they are. I would hold back the book could I hope by longer scrutiny to detect them. But I have brought social psychology as far as I can unaided, and nothing is to be gained by delay. The time has come to hand over the results of my reflection to my fellow-workers, in the hope of provoking discussions which will part the wheat from the chaff and set it to producing an hundred fold." With such an introduction one opens the book assured at least of candor and freedom from bigotry.

Professor Ross has a very useful and tangible definition of social psychology. He points to the great planes of uniformity into which human beings are gathered. Judging from their heredity we should expect people to be far more dissimilar and individual than they actually are. As a consequence of association, the individuality with which Nature endows us is largely modified. It is with these uniformities which are produced by mental contact and interaction that social psychology deals. It does not deal with uniformities arising out of physical environments, racial traits or historical conditions, but only with those planes and currents of uniformity which can be traced to psychic factors.

It is, therefore, a study of the relation of society to the individual and vice versa. We can distinguish very sharply between social psychology and sociology if we bear in mind that the province of sociology is to study social conditions and structures, social groupings, while the province of social psychology is to study the planes and currents of feeling, belief and purpose which have motived the groupings. In a word, Professor Ross writes of mental contagion expressing itself in a thousand ways-in lynchings, religious_frenzy, "booms," fads, panics, and so on. The influence of Gabriel Tarde is strongly marked throughout, and, let me add, gratefully acknowledged by the charmingly candid author.

Dr. George M. Kober, Chairman of the Committee on Social Betterment of the President's Homes Commission, of Washington, D. C., has written and published for that organization a very interest

ing and valuable monograph entitled Industrial and Personal Hygiene, in which the Socialist student will find many important and interesting facts set forth. The committee, of which Dr. Kober is chairman, seems to have been charged with the task of elaborating plans for the improvement of the standards of living among the "least resourceful" part of the population. At a very early stage of its investigations, the committee found that it had to face the fact that the question of health is intimately connected with the physical and moral welfare, and that the prosperity of countless numbers of the workers, whose only income is the product of their daily labor, is destroyed by sickness and accidents. The illness and disability of the wage-earner is now universally regarded as a fundamental cause of poverty and distress and no solution of the poverty problem will be found which does not aim at the preservation of health and the prevention of disease and accident.

This aspect of the problem is receiving tardy recognition in this country. Germany, France and England have done very much more to conserve the health and strength of the workers than the United States has yet attempted. Dr. Kober's volume of 170 pages is chiefly remarkable as the beginning of an important literature. The material with which the author deals is largely familiar to most students and concerns the relation of mortality to occupation, occupational diseases, physical effects of the employment of women and children, infant mortality and low wages. The practical measures of reform sketched are in the main such as have already been tested elsewhere and found to be successful in practice. The report is one of the most intelligent and useful publications of its kind which I have seen in a long time. It is published by the President's Homes Commission, Washington, D. C.

In a little group of Socialists and other radical thinkers recently the work of Professor Charles Zueblin was being discussed when one of the number defined the position of the subject of the discussion as that of "A near-Socialist living under a benevolent feudalism." Of the correctness of the first part of this definition-of Professor Zueblin's nearness to Socialism-no one will doubt after reading his little volume, The Religion of a Democrat, which B. W. Huebsch, of New York, has published with rare taste and artistic feeling. His nearness to Socialism is at once encouraging and disappointing. One feels that, despite his title, he has not yet a religion of his own; that the very hesitancy and uncertainty of his attitude toward Socialism indicate an absence of that deep-rooted and vital conviction without which religion cannot live. It is a religion without soul, without passion or fire, which he holds up to our gaze; discreet, cautious, refined, admirably adapted ot the drawing room or the fashionable lecture platform, but without the courage and passion which all religions have depended upon. One thinks of Taine's description of Tennyson's carefully decorous mourning, of the care with which he uses his fine cambric handkerchief: Professor Zueblin's religion is very decorous, studiously proper in all things.

His definition of religion is one that is becoming common now that the old theological concepts of religion are bein so largely abandoned. It is primal and cosmic. "Religion is the expression of man's relation to the universal, ultimate, and infinite," he says. The definition is at once definite and vague, according to one's own attitude. Attempt to build a creed upon it, a creed of positive tenets, and you will surely fail, but then no creed has ever given a true

expression of the religion it pretended to express. Religion is thus a personal thing. Its essence is personality. It is my relation to the universal, ultimate, and infinite, and your relation. This does not mean that religion is individualistic. It is social: it ties, it binds together. Personality is not lost in social life but found there. "The richest of human experience come through sharing the common life." Each individual may have a religion of his own, stamped indelibly with his personality, but still a social religion seeking the good of all as the sure road to individual good.

The constraint of orthodoxy handicaps thought, makes moral cowards, and emphasizes non-essentials. This is true of all kinds of orthodoxy, religious, political, economic, social. One may be heterodox in religion and despise the orthodox while being orthodox in political or economic beliefs and despising those who are heterodox. Christians were offended by Ingersoll's denunciations of "the mistakes of Moses," and he would have been just as much offended as they if some one else had written a book on the mistakes of McKinley. Professor Zueblin gives free rein to his fancy and declares that "economic orthodoxy is represented by the familiar term 'class consciousness." The reader rubs his eyes and goes back over the page to see that he has not made a mistake. "Class-consciousness" may be a familiar term to Professor Zueblin, as a near-Socialist, but surely it is not so to the great mass of people! It is new and unfamiliar to most of them. Only recently have we found it used outside of Socialist circles in presidential messages. And surely it has never yet represented orthodoxy to any except Socialists.

Socialism, on account of the tremendous moral zeal of its advocates, its philosophy of life, and its ideal, is a religious movement, "both a prophetic and an evangelizing force." Many of us will agree with our author that the tendency to orthodoxy and the authority of the letter of Marx may become a very serious limitation upon the movement. The conservatism of Socialists is well-known; it is hard for many of our comrades to recognize that Marx did not close the books of wisdom and that they are most truly Marxist when they face new facts and change their position accordingly. On this critiIcal side there is much that is valuable and stimulating in Professor Zueblin's little volume. That is its chief claim to our attention.

Professor Charles Sprague Smith, of the People's Institute, New York City, has issued, through the A. Wessels Company, a slim volume of verse with the simple title, Poems. His claim to attention is very modestly and unostentatiously set forth:

"My muse, thou art a simple thing,

Thy home is in the silent wood,

Where brooklets laugh or sparrow's wing
Alone disturbs the solitude."

Most of the poems are such as this modest verse suggests, contemplations of nature's wonders and beauties. At the end of the volume, however, are a number of songs of freedom, written to be sung by the vast audiences at Cooper Union on Sunday evenings, of which a "Marching Song," sung to the tune of the Marseillaise, is perhaps the most successful.