has yet but here and there brought its students to see the economic value of the home; while the measure of it as an industrial factor is, so far as I know, yet wholly unattempted.

In connection with the celebration of the seventieth birthday of Mommsen, it has been said, in explanation of his success as a Roman historian, that Mommsen has had the insight and comprehensiveness to conceive of the history as the outgrowth of institutions. It is just this insight into the place and work of the elementary social institutions that the American mind needs in order to understand our great perils and their reforms. For I suppose that if there is any one moral lesson taught by Roman history, and indeed, by the history of all the great Aryan peoples, it is that religion is the source and the soul of all social power, and the family is its first great place of development, and remains its stronghold so long as national vigor continues. It may almost be held as the fundamental law of civilization. All disregard of it is especially dangerous when political power is lodged in the hands of the people.

The family has not been studied as other institutions have been, particularly in a way to reach the teachers of the people. When we think of the great mass of literature on the nature and work of the church, the Sunday-school, the common school and higher education, on political and economic problems, and compare this with what we have on the family, we shall readily see that we are in peril for want of both elementary and thorough means of study. We have no treatise on the family like that of Mulford on the Nation, and the class of books which it represents. Whoever studies the family will find very few books bearing very directly on this subject. I have found it difficult to point pastors and others to many good books within their means, out of which they could get more than a chapter here and there; and still more in speaking on the family, because the larger portion, even of the graduates of our colleges and seminaries, are almost wholly ignorant of the chief elements in the science of the family and social institutions. The universities, among which Johns Hopkins deserves pre-eminent notice, and some of the law schools, are far in advance of those institutions which train most of our ministers.

May I say, in conclusion, that it seems to me there is an important work for the Alliance in co-operation with other agencies in meeting these perils of the family. The facts, as they appear in

the records of our courts, in social and criminal statistics generally, and in the state of our laws, can be brought before the people. These can be made clear and forcible in a better popular knowledge of the place and work of the family in society. And the results of a broader study and wider range of reading in the historical and comparative lines of scientific sociology can be made intelligible and even popular. The National Divorce Reform League has aimed to open these sources of knowledge, and most gratifying results have attended the work. But there is a very great work for the Alliance also. It has the ear of the churches, and will have it within its own far-reaching plans.

I venture to urge a greater intimacy between those who are known distinctively as Christian teachers and the scholars in the great social sciences. I think those who have had a considerable familiarity, both with ecclesiastical meetings and the papers read before them, and with the kind of work they see done by scientific men in the departments of social science, or whose personal acquaintance has let them into the thinking and work of the two classes of minds, cannot but have been struck with one or two things. The two classes of men are at work more and more upon what are ultimately the same problems, and are moved more and more by a common spirit. Another impression is, that the two are not in close enough relations to each other. And a third is that the methods and ways of getting at things are too different. The study of social institutions, the uses of the historical and comparative methods, and the movement towards more scientific statistics, have wrought great changes in the last fifteen or twenty years in material, methods and results, which no clergyman who deals with the family or any other social problem can ignore, without constant exposure to mistakes he cannot afford to risk making.

If this Alliance can become the means of bringing about these closer relations between the great rank and file of the Christian ministry and laymen on the one hand, and our scholars and special students, who are mostly earnest Christians, on the other hand, it will do a great work for the people. The pastor-whose work and years take him away from institutions of learning, and from those intimacies with scholars and business men of great affairs which do so much for those who can live among them-needs something which the periodical press, even though he get at the more helpful reviews which have sprung up so plentifully within a half-dozen

years, cannot do for him. A medium of communication for the circulation of tracts, essays, reports of work and investigation, references to literature on the family and the home, not to speak of other important matters, will soon find itself well used. For one, I want to see this special problem of the family, with its perils, its needs, and its great possibilities, brought before the Christians and citizens of the whole country as only combined and systematic effort can do it.

The Chairman: The subject of the next paper is "The Social Vice." This subject may not in some of its aspects be a very agreeable one, but as what will be said will affect or bear upon the very existence of our social organizations, it would be well to consider thoughtfully what Colonel Greene may have to say upon this subject.

THE SOCIAL VICE.

BY COL. J. L. GREENE, OF HARTFORD, CONN.

The preliminary step in every form of intellectual activity is the search for the unit of the subject-matter on which it is to be exercised. The more evidently is this the case as the subjectmatter rises in the scale of complexity and importance. Every workable theory of its development, every fruitful body of thought concerning it, every proposed scheme of treatment or of action involving it, originates in and takes its direction from some knowledge or some conception of that ultimate, irreducible, microcosmic. form of the matter in question, of which its total bulk is but the multiple and aggregate. Such knowledge or such conception is the material of which we build; it is the guide to our processes; it is the test of success, and it is itself tested by the degree in which all the problems into which it is supposed to enter can be resolved into its formula of elements.

Man's dealing with himself is no exception to the rule. Every study of his own abilities and capacities, and every theory of his relations, rest upon some simple and elemental view of himself in which all these are potentially present if not yet in action. Owing, perhaps, to the individual pressure of our wants, to that unsearchable mystery and certainty of individual free will, and to its inseparable consequent, individual responsibility, and, in general, to that which constitutes personality, that view is usually the individual one. Our theories of the political and social and economic state, and even of the kingdom of heaven, usually refer to the individual man, his powers, his rights, his wants, his capacities. Humanity in any of its possible estates is apt to be viewed but as the aggregate of his isolated, sterilized individuality.

Without stopping to deny anything that has been or may be propounded from that point of view, it concerns us now to say

man.

that, so far as we know and are charged with the solution of the problems of humanity with its capacities and aspirations, its hopes and fears, its vast and disheartening failures, its slow and painful successes, its gradual, struggling uplift, and in the light that shines before it, the ultimate human element in them is not the individual He never stands, he never will stand, from his earthly cradle to the full fruition of his powers in the endless life, nor even in the blight of darkness and loss, in abstract solitude. He is always and indissolubly associated more or less closely with others of his kind. As a mere verbal proposition he can be posited as an individual, the primitive, single, savage, unmeaning human atom of the cabinet philosopher. But as a matter of fact, for any human purpose, the moment he passes from figuring as an intellectual abstraction into any state of activity, the moment he ceases to be used as a physical or metaphysical manikin and becomes alive, he is inconceivable as absolutely individual and distinct.

Man is set in community. He never escapes it.

Out of it he is a creature we never see and cannot know. He is a thread in its texture, and signifies nothing apart from it. He is in community, he is of community. His life is the product of other lives; it produces other lives, but not by itself, and only through community. He lives, and is significant only as he touches and is touched by other lives. Strictly alone he is as the dead. Physically, mentally, spiritually, he is vital and fruitful only as he is in community with other life. To isolate him in conception can therefore lead only to barren thought and moral error.

Hence, we must discard the cadaver of the demonstrators of spiritual, moral and social anatomies, and take for our human unit the simplest, complete form of living mankind; that form in which we find man in the complete and fruitful exercise of all his powers, in the potential fulfillment of every function. Only so can we know him and combine him. Our unit, our microcosm, must be that simple form of community which is irreducible, yet containing the possibility of the display of every human power; that form which makes complete mankind. That form is the family. The simplicity of its structure is absolute; it is irreducible, indivisible; it is only, perhaps, destructible; the bond of its strength is the last that can be broken; the conditions which it meets make it the only necessarily permanent form of community, and they also determine its own changeless form; it is the lowest sufficing form; simple as

THE UNIVERSITY UP MICHIGAN LIBRARIES