628 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
empowered to defray the cost of its proceedings and make reports to Parliament. Thus any strike or dispute may come before Parliament, whereas that body has heretofore taken cognizance only of those on railways and steamships holding mail contracts or receiving subsidies from the admiralty. A new Truck Act was passed defining explic- itly the contracts under which fines could be exacted of workingmen by employers. Retail stores are grouped with factories. Fines must be fair and reasonable, or they may be recovered by legal proceedings. It was found in the investigation that the rel- ative amount of fines was infinitesimal, but that they were of essential value in main- taining discipline as an alternative to dismissal. The new Mines Regulation Act is intended solely to set up new rules for the personal protection of laborers. The Agri- cultural Rates Act is to be in operation for five years. Under it, farm hands are to pay only one-half what they have hitherto paid to local taxation. The Light Railways Act provides for the encouragement of railway communication with great tracts of countiy still remote from existing lines. Regular railways can be built only by special charter and must meet certain requirements as to road and equipment. Light railways maybe authorized by a commission, wheie they are proved to be necessary, and may be more cheaply built. The treasury may also make an advance of one-quarter the amount needed for construction. EDWARD PORRITT, Yale Review, November 1896. F.
Ethics from the Point of View of Sociology (continued). B. Ethics before Kant, (a) Character of Greek ethics. The fundamental trait of Greek life was individualism. It found itself the sufficient principle and final end of active life and speculation. The people in their theory reflected the equilibrium which they realized between social and individual life, but were not able to fix the principle they found. (6) Christian ethics. The value of man as man, which was lacking in ancient Greece, is the basis of the new ideas which bring about a social revolution. But a break with nature, the source of corruption, was introduced. The first effort to eliminate this dual- ism was marked by an apparent return to the past, by the resurrection of ancient nat- uralism of the epoch of the Renaissance, (c) Immediate antecedents of the Kantian ethics ; social changes were closely connected with the transformation of ethical ideas. The most characteristic idea of this transformation was that of separation of theory and practice, found in Locke and the English moralists of the eighteenth century, in a measure in Leibnitz, in Diderot and Rousseau, but not explicitly until Kant. This dualism was not unconscious, as in Socrates, where it resulted from traditionalism in morals ; nor as in early Christianity, where it was caused by the identification of mor- als and religion. It was the first effort to humanize the moral problem. C. The French Revolution and Kantian ethics, (a) Individualistic interpretation of the revolu- tionary movement and the ethics of Kant, (i) The Revolution proclaimed the rights of man the inviolable will of the individual. (2) Kant's ethics founds its law upon a reciprocity of the action of free wills. The will is an end in itself, a principle of universal legislation. Morality is reduced to intention. (3) The struggle against individualism in the Revolution and in Kant's ethics, (i) On one side the Revolu- tion was purely negative. It was a struggle to dissolve the bonds of traditional soli- darity. But its point of departure was a reciprocity of rights, /. e., it affirmed a soli- darity based upon nature and common human aspirations. (2) The work of Kant was also destructive. He attacked speculative dogmatism. But no ethics could be founded upon such a negative work, (b) The deficiency in the revolutionary idea and the thought of Kant. Both were absorbed in the strife against institutions and doc- trines of the time. Conclusion. Primitive ethics was constant in relation to social life, but was unconscious. Greek ethics was insufficient, because it isolated the indi- vidual, and by its opposition to traditional morality prevented a readjustment to the new social conditions. The triumph of subjectivism takes place in Kant. This leads to the disappearance of exclusive individualism and the reconciliation of society and the individual. Immediately after the Revolution and Kant, the idea of solidarity arose. In this sense, the ethics of Kant is antecedent to sociology. We are now in an epoch of transition. A remedy for its evils should be found in the search for the advent of a new organic period. MARCEL BERNES, " Programme d'un cours de sociol- ogie ge'ne'rale : la morale au point de vu sociologique (fin)" Revue Internationale de Sociologie, November 1896. F.
