SOCIOLOGICAL INSTRUCTION AT PARIS.
THE American student who intends to undertake advanced work in political economy will find little to attract him in the curricula of the French universities, especially if he happens to be familiar with the varied and enticing lists of lectures and seminaries contained in the catalogues of almost any of the German universities. Interested chiefly in economic theory, or in economic institutions, or in that variety of state intervention commonly called social legislation, he will naturally turn his eyes toward the country which has contributed so largely to the rehabilitation of economic science, and which has realized to so considerable an extent the idea of the public regulation of industrial life in the interest of social peace. The preponder- ance of Germany over France in this respect is all the more evident when we actually compare the numerous courses offered by the University of Berlin with the lamentable paucity of the curricula of the College de France and the University of Paris.
The latest Berlin catalogues accessible to me those for the scholastic year 1895-6 give the following results. The num- ber of hours assigned per week to lectures on political economy and finance was, for the winter semester twenty, and for the summer semester twenty-four. To these figures there should be added seven hours of seminary work in. the winter, and five and one-half hours in the summer ; and it should further be borne in mind that they include only time devoted exclusively to the treatment of questions of economic and financial theory and practice, neither taking any account whatever of lectures and seminaries specially concerned with economic history, nor of courses on the systems of agricultural exploitation, nor, finally, of eight hours in the winter semester, and seven in the summer semester occupied with statistics and questions of method. The attractiveness of this list, moreover, is heightened by its variety.
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