882 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
as industrial workers. The liability for accidents is borne solely by the employer, but as he also has the administration of this insurance, it has suffered from one-sidedness. Its most valuable result has been in furnishing employers an efficacious material motive for humane actions preventive of accidents. III. Old Age and Invalid Insurance is administered exclusively by the government. It embraces 1 1 millions of persons, including two more classes than the preceding, namely, home workers and domestic servants. Employer and employe" make equal weekly deposits to this fund through the purchase of stamps. This insurance attempts to provide only a substantial addi- tion to the means of support in old age. The Old Age pension is intended for every member over seventy years old. The Invalid pension is to be granted to every mem- ber who, during the period of one year, is disabled from earning more than one-third of his or her average wages. Imperfect as the German insurance legislation is, in the short time of its operation it has already had a far-reaching beneficial influence on the domestic, social, moral and intellectual conditions of the working population. It is deeply connected with the great labor movement in Germany. It has decreased pauperism and is developing a spirit and system of cooperation. HENRIETTE JAS- TROW, Fortnightly Review, March 1897. Fr.
Juvenile Criminals the School and the Press. ( i ) Criminality in France has tripled in fifty years, with but slight increase in population. Criminality among the young between six and twenty-one years quadrupled from 1826 to 1880, while that of adults tripled. Since 1880 the former has increased even more rapidly proportionally, increasing by one-fourth in ten years to an adult increase of one-ninth. A similar growth has taken place in the number of juvenile prostitutes and suicides. (2) The more societies are raised in civilization, the more are they subject to the law of varia- tion. Civilization produces more numerous human varieties, and, with more occasions for wrongdoing, it provokes an increasing number of certain delinquents. But variability does not necessarily imply immorality. The normal laws of evolution for criminality do not sufficiently explain the actual state, especially juvenile criminality. (3) In the case of 80 per cent, of young criminals the moral condition on the side of the parents is deplorable. Vice, debauchery, drunkenness, in parents, becomes criminality in the child. Obligatory instruction is not directly responsible for increasing juvenile crim- inality. But it has failed to prevent this, owing to defective organization of the school. The general defect of our system of instruction has been the predominance of the rationalistic conception, which attributes to knowledge, especially scientific, an exaggerated role in moral conduct. It is not general enough in its great principles, not practical enough in its details. Education is a moral and social mission. (4) With ability to read almost universal among the young, the press becomes the great primary school. Its role, in our democracy, is the moral and political education of a people. It has not filled this role. The complete political, scientific, and religious liberty of the press has degenerated into defamation, excitation to crime, and obscene publications. A portion of the press having become the principal agent of demoral- ization and one of the sources of juvenile criminality, it is time to suppress it with severe punishment under the common laws of justice. (5) Criminal sociology should reach the social causes of crime and insist on preventive more than on curative measures. Thus the principal points to be attacked are : drunkenness in parents, leading to crime in offspring ; lack of assistance for the young in securing oppor- tunity for normal activity, leading to professional criminality ; diminution of marriage, leading to license and illegitimate births. As for criminals from passion, besides better education and indefatigable repression of the provocative press, nothing is more efficacious than the sanction of rigorous laws, unweakened by exaggerated indulgence of judges or the public. ALFRED FOUILLEE, Revue des Deux Mondes, January 15, 1897.
Fr.
An Economic and Social Programme. (i) Moral reform and change of heart must be put in the first rank of influences toward a social state conformable to the will of God. (2) Faithful to protestantism, liberty is the basis of the solution of the social question. But individual initiative alone cannot be counted upon to secure the
