Indian, from birth until death, surrounded by barbarian Indians. They are herded upon the reservations, without any individual property in the soil, like cattle and sheep in fenced pastures; thus insuring the transmission of the savage ideas and superstitions of the parents to their children from generation to generation.

Though Indians are all native inhabitants of the country, they are regarded and treated by the government as "domestic aliens." We have naturalization laws by which immigrants from any foreign nation may become naturalized citizens of our government; but there is no law by which an Indian can dissolve his tribal relations and become a citizen of the United States, whatever may be his progress in civilization. Thus he is cut off from one of the greatest inducements to progress.

Every Indian reservation within the boundaries of our government is now (I believe) within the limits of an organized county, yet the jurisdiction of law is not extended over Indian reservations. Hence, violence and crime may be committed: by Indians against each other, within the limits of a reservation, with legal impunity.

No marriage relation among Indians is legally binding. Divorce or separation of man and wife is optional. Polygamy is not prohibited among them, and hence is no legal offense. Schools are maintained by the government a large portion of each year on many of the reservations; but from the fact, that the Indian school children are allowed to visit their savage parents frequently, and to reside with them a portion of each year, when the schools are not in session, they natnrally acquire from their parents superstitions and habits of barbarism to such an extent as to neutralize and counteract largely the training and civilization acquired from their teachers. Furthermore, being allowed to return and permanently reside with their parents and friends after quitting school, they sink down into their savage habits, and whatever education they may have received seems, as a general rule, only to make them more receptive of the vices of the white man, and a curse rather than a blessing to their people.

The grosser vices of the white race are learned by the uncivilized and unchristianized Indians, when they are brought into contact therewith, as naturally and as certainly as miasm

is taken into the human body when brought in contact with it. Thus almost every Indian reservation, under the present inefficient and erroneous policy of our government, is like a great sponge for the absorption of the grosser vices of our imperfect civilization, which have already destroyed two-thirds of the Indian race, and are rapidly exterminating the remainder. Our Indian policy is, therefore, really a policy of extermination, and if not speedily changed for something better, the whole Indian race of our country will become extinct within the next half century.

Art. IV.-ORGANIZATION THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE of SOCIAL SCIENCE.

By J. H. McILVAINE, D.D., Newark, N. J.

There is not a little prejudice in the minds of many sensible and well-informed people against what is called sociology-that is, the science of human society. This prejudice is due to a variety of causes, of which one is, that this whole department of knowledge has commonly been identified with political economy, though, in fact, this latter is properly only one of, at least, six co-ordinate branches of social science. The influence of this cause has been all the greater from the fact, that the methods and conclusions of political economy, in the hands of its different authors, have hitherto proved anything but harmonious or satisfactory. Besides this, the social forces are so numerous and so complicated with each other, that a complete. analysis of them seems to be impossible. But probably the most influential of all these causes is, that the subject has had a peculiar attraction for, and has been most copiously treated by infidel authors, such as Comte, Buckle, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer, In this article, therefore, we shall endeavor to remove this prejudice, by showing that the science is a possible one, and that it has as strong claims as any other upon the thinkers of our time, inasmuch as it involves a vast

number of most interesting problems, the solution of which may affect the welfare of mankind as deeply and permanently as any which have been agitated since the rise of the Protestant Reformation.

We begin, then, with the observation, that there are two allsufficient reasons for undertaking a critical examination of the nature and complex structure of human society, of which one is general and the other specific. The first is, that man is essentially rational, and hence, under a necessity of striving to render to himself a rational account of the phenomena of his own life, in which attempt he is immediately struck with the predominance of the social element in all these phenomena. In the interest, therefore, of his own well-being he is constrained to undertake a description and classification of the facts of social life, in order to determine the laws by which they are governed. The other reason is, that such a rational comprehension of these facts is the condition upon which the social instincts come under the government of reason and free. will, apart from which they are like an untrained and unpruned vine, which runs wild, wastes its redundant energies, and frustrates its own ends. For whatsoever is distinctively human is such from its connection with reason and free-will. Everything else in man is either animal or vegetable.

The social instincts, which we have just mentioned, are the primary cause of all association among living creatures. In the lower, as well as in the higher, elements of his complex nature, man is a social being. As birds by nature fly in the air, as fish by nature swim in the water, so man, by that which is common to him with birds and fish, lives in society. As mere animals, human beings would associate together for the same reason that bees live in hives or swarms, and beavers in tribes. Also, the higher elements of human nature are equally social. As rational beings, we have an inborn consciousness, an intuitive perception, of our dependence upon society, whilst the moral nature in man is pre-eminently social, and incapable of being otherwise comprehended or developed and perfected. In fact, man is not man otherwise than in and through association with his kind. Human life is essentially a communion. The idea or perfect type of humanity can never be realized apart from that great principle which is enunciated in the words of

the Apostles' Creed: "I believe in the communion of saints." Accordingly, in all ages and countries, whether in that undeveloped or degraded condition in which the animal predominates over the rational and moral nature, or in the highest degrees of civilization and enlightenment, in which the spiritual gives the supreme law to human life-men have lived, and must ever live, in society. Solitude is naturally hateful, and an adequate punishment for the worst of crimes. Hence the peculiar form in which the death penalty was prescribed by Moses: "That soul shall be cut off from his people."

The principle of association, however, in all living creatures, is limited by the boundaries of their several species, by specific unity of life. For among animals, except under artificial conditions, diverse species do not flock, or herd, or swarm together. Even the most closely-allied forms of animal life, such as the dog and the wolf, the bison and the cow, although their faculties, habits, and wants are almost identical, are naturally the bitterest enemies. They seem to be incapable of understanding or sympathizing with each other, and hence of associating together. It is the same with man. We can form hardly any conception of the consciousness or experience of a mere animal, or of an angel, or, indeed, of any creature of a different species from our own. If there were not this unity of life in mankind, if we were not properly all of one species, there could be no mutual understanding or sympathy among us; we could not associate with each other any more than the fox with the dog, or the bee with the beaver.

Notwithstanding, there is a fundamental distinction between man and the lower creatures in this respect, that animal association is inorganic, whilst the most essential characteristic of human society is that of organization. The reason why gregariousness, in default of a better word, is thus inorganic is, that among animals of the same species, which alone can associate together, there is none of that diversity of faculty and function, of special characteristics and adaptations, upon which organization is founded. The individuals of a grex, whether a flock or tribe or swarm, are substantially all alike, being little more than mere numerical repetitions of each other. This statement, however, requires to be qualified by the distinction. of sex, with which organization in society begins. But the

uniformity among the individuals of a grex is so striking that it is marked, in the most widely separated languages, by the use of the singular for the plural, as where we say, a flock of sheep, not sheeps, a herd of deer, a tribe of beaver, a school of fish, not deers, nor beavers, nor fishes.

It is true, however, that in some species of insects we find a striking semblance of organization. In a beehive, e. g., there are several distinct classes of individuals included within the specific unity, each of which is charged with a different set of operations. Here we have, first, the mother or queen bee, and the males or drones; secondly, the nurses; next, the workers in wax; and lastly, the workers in honey. But even in this case, the individuals of each class are mere repetitions of each other, and are engaged in the same operations, to which they are confined by a distinct and peculiar physical constitution. We can discover nothing here of the nature of voluntary division or organization of labor. One bee does not gather wax, and pass it to another, to be worked into a cell; neither does one gather honey, and pass it to another to be stored. Even here, the grex offers us nothing beyond that semblance of organization in which, as in so many other cases, the operations of instinct counterfeit those of reason. in general there is not even this semblance same species are all confined to means and operations which are precisely or nearly the same. Birds of the same species build their nests in the same manner, and there is no part in the work of a beaver-dam which one beaver cannot perform as well as another. Mere animals are incapable of specializing their employments, incapable of voluntary division and organization of their labor, and hence their association is properly inorganic.

Among animals
Those of the

But whilst the grex is thus incapable of organized association, the individuals of which it is composed are abundantly capable of coöperating together for common ends, and thus of increasing their force by massing their numbers. And in this way the principle of animal association enters into human society most largely, as we should anticipate, in its lowest forms, that is, where man is least developed, or most degraded, and his condition approaches most nearly to that of the brute. For it is in such communities that we find the fewest and