416 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
" indeterminate sentence " seem never to have attracted our author's notice, would probably find this fine-spun theory of categories of con- victs as impossible to apply in practice as the "classical" theory of expiatory sentences and equivalents decreed upon the basis of abso- lute distributive justice.
The result of the author's learned and clairvoyant discussion is summed up in this idea : In order to resolve the problem of penal responsibility, it is necessary to divide men into a certain number of kinds ; each of these kinds will receive a definite treatment. In applying penalties a utilitarian estimate will be made of the balance of advantages and evils. Intimidation will be sought, so far as the individual can be affected by the penalty, and deterrent influence will be sought by considering the effect of the penalty on the group.
C. R. H.
The Government of Maine: Its History and Administration. By WILLIAM MACDONALD, LL.D., Professor of History in Brown University; sometime Professor of History and Political Science in Bowdoin College. New York : The Macmillan Co. Pp. ix + 263.
ALTHOUGH this volume has primarily none but local interest, the conception of the book, and of the series to which it belongs, marks a salutary change in ideas of what is worth studying. Until yesterday instructors in Maine colleges did not call the attention of students to the institutions of their own state. Probably they were no more delinquent than college officers in other states. College graduates have known more about the British constitution than about the struc- ture of their own local government. Or, rather, they have had com- mand of more formulas about the former than about the latter, but from long-distance survey of all governmental machinery, they have had very hazy notions beneath their formulas. The present book will enable students in Maine to become acquainted with their own legal and political machinery, and by means of this real knowledge they will be in the way of acquiring more and better knowledge of larger systems. A glance at the appendix of this book, containing the con- stitution of Maine, and other documents which should constitute the primer of political education for every resident of the state, causes one who had his schooling in Maine to protest in spirit against his instruct- ors' sins of omission. The college instructor of today is not ashamed
