Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/599

This page needs to be proofread.

577 small percentage of crime, and that its disappearance cannot therefore be reckoned upon as the result of diffused material comfort or educa- tion. He then investigates the relation of crime to the sex and the age of the offender; and he examines into the validity of the conclusions of the Italian school of criminal anthropology. It cannot, he considers, be proved that the criminal has any' distinct physical configuration,' or that there is any ' inevitable alliance between anomalies of physical structure and a criminal mode of life,' or between that mode of life and insanity. But on the other hand it can be shown that' criminals as a whole exhibit a higher proportion of physical anomalies,' and a 'higher percentage of physical degeneracy,' than the rest of the community, and that they are ' of a humbly developed mental organisation.' In a concluding chapter Mr. Morrison considers the objects of punish- ment, and the improvements which may be effected in its methods and results. L. L. PRICE An Introduction to Social 2Ohilosoph?j (being the Edinburgh Shaw Fellowship Lectures, 1889). By Joa? S. M.?cx?zm. Glasgow: Maclehose, 1890. THIS volume is of course only in part within the province of the Economic Journal; but of the three branches into which social philosophy is here divided, viz. politics, education, and economics, the last of the three has a great share of attention; and economists owe thanks to Mr. Mackenzie for presentir?g their subject in a com- paratively new light. Social philosophy deals with 'the general conditions of social well-being' (9), or more particularly 'with the relations of men to each other, their relations to the material world, and the development of individual character, in so far as that is affected by these relations' (62). One of its most obvious tasks will be to deal with the questions that border on ethics and economics, and are taken up by neither. Mr. Mackenzie re, produces the common complaint that the economist thinks he has done all that can be reasonably expected of him ' if he has dealt with the means of material production and with the general laws of distribution in society as he finds it, and has at the same time indicated generally the points at which his subject touches ethics' (8). But surely, if Mr. Mackenzie considers social philosophy to be a necessary supplement, he should not expect political economy to furnish the supplement for itself. What he really means is si?nply that ' the conquest of nature' and ' the relations of man to the material world' shall not be relegated solely to economics, but shall be under the care of social philosophy as well (cf. 52). He fully recognises that there is an abstract economic? (though he curiously identifies it with mathematical economics, p. 58), and also a historical economics. Political economy (he thinks) means these ' two sciences and at least five arts' (53, 6). The reader may be surprised to find that No 3.--VOL. I P P