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562 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
lightning stroke. Confining himself to states of health or of definite disease, he declines to frame a theory for such catastro- phes. Likewise, the sociologist who explains the growth and principal variations of the social-equilibrating apparatus does not thereby bind himself to account for all the moral phenomena in history. Actual societies, and with them their systems of control, have been so shattered, mutilated, and deformed by war, famine, depopulation, immigration, race degeneration, and class conflict that no laws can be framed for them that shall hold true of all cases and situations.
EDWARD ALSWORTH Ross. STANFORD UNIVERSITY, California.
