THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGIST OF THE TWEN=

TIETH CENTURY.

BY MICHAEL A. LANE.

[Michael A. Lane was born at St. Louis in 1867; educated in the classics at the University of St. Louis; studied theoretical biology privately; studied practical anatomy and physiology at the University of Illinois, and, later, practical histology and neurology at the University of Chicago; worked for eight years to identify the facts of social evolution in man and lower animals with the law of natural selection; published his theory in a work entitled "The Level of Social Motion" in 1902; contributor to American magazines, 1893 to 1905.]

Madame de Staël, in her criticism of the manners and morals of the Germans, shrewdly observed the causes underlying the very rapid progress of science in Germany, by noting that the Prussian state, while discouraging political liberty, had always been forward in encouraging intellectual liberty. Free speech, indeed, has been ever the prerogative of the German man of science, and wherever free speech has flourished intellectual progress has been rapid.

There is, however, in the peculiarly rapid development of science in Germany, something more than this German tradition of free speech, and it is upon this significant fact that I wish to touch before speaking of the American scholar.

In Germany there is found a state of affairs not altogether unlike that of ancient Athens, when the philosopher was the most honored of all men. I will venture the assertion that in Germany, during the past century and more, not even royalty itself has been more honored than the eminent scholar. Scholarship is the ideal of the German family, as the ministry is the ideal of the Scotch family. To the idealistic mind of Fichte scholarship was something above merely human, worldly things, and the life of the scholar was a high manifestation of the divine idea. In a people, which, more than a century ago, could produce a man with notions as inflamed as this, there is something that is quite beyond the comprehension of utility-a something that is very difficult for the popular mind in America to understand.

We are often moved to ask the question, Why is it that America has not produced a scholar of world wide renown, whose name is known to everybody that reads the newspapers; a Huxley, a Darwin, a Helmholtz, a Humboldt? Why is it that the United States has not been able to give birth to a man of science from whose work a new period of knowledge is dated, with whose discoveries a new vista of nature has been opened up to the human eye?

I think an answer to the question will be found if we turn to the achievements of American genius in that line which is peculiarly America's own. We are an industrial people; hence we have produced the greatest masters of industry in the history of the world. We are a busy people; hence we have produced men who, by their ingenious inventions, have doubled the productivity of industry and reduced the working time by one half. We are a wealth loving people; hence our ideal has been that of commercial supremacy for the nation and of fortune for the individual man.

In these circumstances it could hardly have been expected that we had been competent successfully to cultivate in our intellectual garden such rare plants as the great men whose names are mentioned above; nor is it any derogation of our dignity that such is the fact.

And yet, within comparatively recent years, there has grown up in America a cult-if I may so call it-which promises, with time, to produce a scholar who will take his place beside the fathers of supreme generalizations, and who will probably be the first American man of science of that kind.

If we strike out of our considerations a very few of the more widely known American astronomers, the original scientific work thus far done in America will be found to have been done by investigators who have devoted their attention almost wholly to the science of economics and to the broader science that is growing out of economics. I mean that young and vigorous science that is now called sociology. If the United States is to produce a master mind in scholarship, I fancy that it will be in this line, or rather that the first of the great American scholars of the future will be a sociologist. There are many excellent arguments to support this view,

the principal one of which lies in the fact that sociology is, in a way, a science which finds its richest fields and its most numerous cultivators here in America. The richest and strongest growths in art or in science are always found upon the soils in which the seed first sprouted. For science cannot be learned out of books any more than art can be mastered in the same way. This truth finds its vindication in the fact that our physicists, physiologists, anatomists, pathologists and chemists, go abroad for their finishing touches. The sciences named have been born and have grown up in Europe. All the new methods of research-or virtually all-have been originated in Europe, and in Europe alone can the student find the masters, or the men who have had the advantage of working with the masters, and in this way have perpetuated the methods of the masters or improved upon them. Art and science are thus handed down from generation to generation, and with every new generation new and better methods originate, and wider knowledge and capacity ensue.

Now here in America sciences, for the most part, are only transplanted. Our work has been more in the way of imitation than of origination, and such origination as we have been able to make has been largely of an utilitarian kind. Scientific research-with a few notable exceptions, such as in astronomy-has the stamp of utility upon its forehead. It is essentially Baconian. It is founded upon the practical bearings of society rather than upon pure intellectualism. And even in the case of astronomy and physics our work has been of a corollary nature rather than of a kind comparable with the great achievements of European scholars in times past and present. And the immediate outlook for the development of really prime research is not particularly bright.

In sociology, however, we have a very different story to tell. A noted European sociologist, not very long ago, remarked to me that in America alone there existed an intimately associated body of thinkers who were capable of receiving and appreciating any considerable theory of social life and laws; that here alone was the soil from which would grow up a scientific method whereby man would be led to know himself socially as in Europe he had been led to know

himself individually. And as America is the true cradle of sociology, so we may rationally expect that here the baby will grow up into the matured and strong science.

In his great work, Political Science and Constitutional Law, Prof. John W. Burgess of Columbia university, modestly calls attention to the interesting fact that he had been compelled to originate a new terminology in order clearly to set forth the ideas he had elaborated concerning the natural causes that underlie the evolution of government. The work in question has been variously criticized, but so far as I know there is no single work that could take its place were it once eliminated from our American libraries. Professor Burgess writes as a lawyer, and perhaps there are those who will look askance at our classification of him here with American sociologists, but I fancy there is no American sociologist but will agree that Political Science and Constitutional Law is par excellence a sociological work which can be separated from the science of sociology no more than the work of Harvey or of Boyle can be separated from physiology or chemistry.

I doubt gravely whether any British or continental authority can wholly appreciate the long step forward which Professor Burgess has taken, and what I say here of Burgess may be repeated of a few well known American scholars in political economy. We all know that Plato could not imagine a state of society without slaves; and this broad fact will doubtless assist us in understanding the more modern fact that the European economist, historian, and sociologist are unquestionably the product of their environment, quite as much as Plato was of his own.

In surveying the broad stream of political progress in America, Burgess was deeply impressed with a succession of singular facts which were taken into account nowhere in the previously written literature of his subject. Here was a mass of facts, or more properly speaking, a continuous movement or procession of social facts, unclassified, unnamed, and in a word, wholly unrecognized as yet, in any methodical or scientific way. And why? Simply because the facts which Burgess saw were new. Now, facts, or new perceptions of familiar facts, require a new terminology the very moment

we try to correlate them or trace out their causal nexi. And in doing this work Dr. Burgess has made for himself a niche rather high up in the temple of early American scholarship.

If political science in Europe cannot understand, in its full meaning, the highly original work Professor Burgess has done, so may we say that political economy in Europe cannot fully comprehend the work that has been done by American economists. Jenks of Cornell, whose name is associated rather closely with examination of this phase of modern industrial life, has made many suggestions of preparatory value, and Clark of Columbia has made a noteworthy attempt to trace down all processes of labor and capital to their roots in primitive conditions; and this contribution of Clark's is perhaps the broadest contribution as yet made to the philosophy of economics. If we now make due note of the fact that Dr. Ely of Wisconsin has suggested the possibility of competition in a state of society closely bordering upon socialism itself, we have taken a glance, I believe, at the most conspicious original work that has been done by American scholars in political science and political economy. Before leaving these topics, however, perhaps it would be well to say a few words in reversion to the bearing of freedom of speech upon intellectual progress.

Speech from the chairs of political economy in America has been anything but free. That important fact is due, oddly enough, to the more remote fact that in America we live under a democratic rule. So far as legal freedom goes, why, of course, the teacher can say whatever he likes. But in a democratic community the real rulers are the people and not the central mechanism called government. No government in America could guarantee a chair to that professor who would teach or publish views conflicting with the personal opinions of the men who pay the bills for the school. We all remember how, a few years ago, Dr. Andrews was disciplined for advocating free silver. And it is natural that the rich men who are supporting an university should feel that they ought to be given something to say about the doctrines taught in the school. Had we a king, or an emperor, here, who could overrule such a state of affairs, perhaps many of our economists would be more outspoken.