592 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
societies sitting as her council. But today I am concerned only that you shall be grateful for the glorious achievement of her child-bearing years. I had engagement to be in Denver this week, and when I found that I could not have release I asked the honorable President, Frank B. Sanborn, to present in my stead the record which I desired to have brought to your memories. He consented to prepare this record though he could not in his own striking figure be present. Providence intervened yesterday in behalf of Denver to prevent my going there and so I am here to enjoy with you this brief chronicle of the "Mother of Associations" which will be read by Mr. Russell, the Secretary.
History of the American Social Science Association in a Letter to Its Present Secretary^ I. F. Russell, New York, by F. B. Sanborn, OF Concord, Mass., a Founder
Dear Mr. Secretary Russell:
As the only person who has held office continuously in the American Social Science Association since its first organization, October 4, 1865, I may perhaps be considered a good witness as to its aims and achievements. I was also cognizant of the movement preceding that organization, and, as secretary of the Board of State Charities of Massachusetts (the earliest of many such boards in other states) signed the call in August, 1865, which brought together at the State House in Boston the three hundred persons, chiefly from New England, who in the following October established the Social Science Association on a national basis. A small body, the Boston Social Science Association, had preceded us by a few months in the use of the European name which we adopted, and of that Boston society I believe the only survivor is now Mrs. Caroline Healy Dall, then of Boston, but now of Washington, D. C. She and Col. T. W. Higginson, with myself, are now the only survivors, so far as I know, of the original members of the American Social Science Association, who joined in October, 1865, and indeed took an active part in the State House meeting. Both are now invalids, at a great age, and yet occasionally writing for publication in books and newspapers.
The year 1865 was a marked era in the revival and prosecution of those studies, and the promotion of those practical interests which constitute the theory and the practice or application of what it has been agreed to style Social Science. The phrase is French, I believe, but was adopted in England by Lord Brougham and his associates in 1856, when they founded the British Social Science Association, which had a brilliant career for a quarter- century, but has long been extinct. We followed at first the general plan of Brougham and his colleagues in their organization, and several of them became honorary members of the American Association. The problems pre-
