53 o SCIENCE PROGRESS 



number of addresses— to a woman's club, to a Chelsea association, to working- 

 men students, and so on ; and deals with some Illustrations of Sociology, the 

 Sociologist, the Citizen as Sociologist, the Citizen as Psychologist, the Sociologist 

 at the Theatre, the Mediaeval Citizen, the Present as a Transition, Town and 

 Gown in America, and Conclusion. Some of the sub-headings are : The Science 

 of Looking Around and the Art of Creating Eutopias, Matriarchs, Old and New, 

 the Eugenic Theatre, the People and their Rulers, the University Militant and 

 the City Resurgent, Eugenics and Civics. The reader will be able to gather the 

 general trend of the book from this catalogue ; and it contains many good things. 

 The list of " Guildsmen Performers " of an old medical play and the remarks 

 thereon, and the observations made by the shade of Dante when he visits a modern 

 American city, are good. But the addresses are really lay-sermons on various 

 sociological themes, and have the frequent quality of sermons in that the talking is 

 not confined to a single small section of the subject but rather deviates through all 

 the speaker's views on things in general. Thus, whatever the heading may be, we 

 are sure to find much the same themes dealt with, such as civics, eugenics, citizen- 

 ship, and so on. The style is excellent modern English style, and each sentence 

 is clear and well balanced ; but it has the defects of that style, in that it is wanting 

 in antithesis. Now without antithesis, which is the salt of style, language becomes 

 insipid. In another sense, antithesis is the chiaroscuro of literature, serving to 

 define outline and concentrate light. A book like this ought to be compared with 

 the older English style of Locke and Hume or the modern French style of, let us 

 say, Taine. At the end of our readings of Mr. Branford's book (and it is impossible 

 to take the whole of it at a gulp) we find that our memory of it has already become 

 nebulous. He does not possess the art of putting his matter into compartments ; 

 and, in fact, it is necessary to use his excellent index in order to ascertain his views 

 on any given point or person. 



Sociology is not popular, because the man in the street connects it with the 

 unpractical. We all hope for Utopias, and believe in civics and eugenics and 

 Cities Beautiful. There is little use in preaching to us on these matters, just as it 

 is possibly unnecessary to advise those who have been overtaken by a flood to save 

 themselves from drowning. What is of real service is to show us exactly how the 

 various desiderata can be obtained ; and here we cannot help pointing to English 

 cities, which are really fortuitous collections of slums, though all of them are 

 governed by free municipalities, and many of them contain universities as well. If 

 then we British, with our scheme of government supposed to be so perfect, fail to 

 reach the City Beautiful, who can succeed ? It is true that, as Ruskin so convinc- 

 ingly showed and the author has so well illustrated, the mediaeval cities may have 

 approached this ideal ; but then we forget that assassination lurked round those 

 carved corners and under those magnificent groins ; while the death-rate due to 

 disease was probably sixty per mille or more. The interest of social art lies not in 

 the principles (which Mr. Branford deals with) but in the method. 



At this moment, the reader will remark that the author has failed to make at 

 least one "forecast." He gives many hits at militarism, and, if we take that word 

 in the evil sense of warlike aggression, he is quite right. But since his book was 

 published the present war has broken out — in spite of his warning. This shows 

 the salient defect of our sociologists. In his own words applied to others, " they 

 are wanting in that relation to the common stock of human experience that can 

 give them an abiding reality for the race." He talks of Cities Beautiful ; but in a 

 few months numbers of Cities Beautiful have melted away to nothing in that 

 terrible solvent of prosperity which nature imposes upon man — war. We all 



