ratio of the offspring to the biologically selected adults decreases proportionately in the more complex forms of life, the individual seems to exist only for the purpose of his contribution to the species. However, there can never be a stage in this development of the species when there will be anything but individuals to represent and profit by it. There are then two fundamental questions to be asked. First, what is the goal-the perfect type or the perfect individuals representing that type? Second, what is the significance per se of the individuals representing the successive and temporary stages in the evolution up to that perfect type or those perfect individuals? Metaphysical speculation here takes the place of scientific surety, and such questions would be omitted this evening were they not essential to a consideration of educational theory based on the theory of evolution. They suggest a problem involved in every effort to improve the human individual and society and are therefore vital and comprehensive in their educational implication. I ask them, but I cannot answer. We must each meet them face to face and grapple with them as we will.

However, both biology and sociology teach us that there is no hopeless dilemma here as to whether we shall consider the individual or society as the supreme object in education. The individual must be adjusted to its environment in order to live, and the environment also gains in proportion to the efficiency of this adjustment; the individual must assert itself in distinction from and in union with the other members of its species, and the species is benefited by this individuality; the individual develops through contact with, adjustment to, and service of the other members of its species, and the species can be developed in no other way than by this levelopment of the individual. In society it is the most highly individualized and socialized person that is the most efficient. The better the individual, the better is the society which he demands and makes; the better the society, the better is the individual which it demands and makes. In education there is no need to seek an antagonism between a fetich worship of the individual, anarchistically asserting himself in contradis

tinction to society, and a suppression of individuality either down or up to the dead level of a mediocre mean. Society, the social experience, is the means of educating the individual; individuality, the individual experience, is the means of educating society. Enrich the individual life through the social life and you will thereby enrich the social life through the individual life. Both society and the individual must serve to be educated and be educated to serve.

BOOK REVIEWS

COTTON: ITS CULTIVATION, MARKETING, MANUFACTURE, AND THE PROBLEMS OF THE Cotton WORLD. By Charles William Burkett and Clarence Hamilton Poe. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1906,-xii., 331 pp.

FROM THE COTTON FIELD TO THE COTTON MILL, A STUDY OF THE INDUSTRIAL TRANSITION IN NORTH CAROLINA. By Holland Thompson. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906,-x., 284 pp.

It is significant that the quickened industrial life of the South has during the present year found literary expression in the almost simultaneous publication by writers of the same State of two books so noteworthy as Burkett and Poe's "Cotton" and Holland Thompson's "From the Cotton Field to the Cotton Mill," one devoted in the main to cotton growing and the other to cotton manufacture. Dr. Albert Shaw points out in the leading article of this QUARTERLY that the pressing economic problems of the South are those of production rather than of distribution. Relatively to the other sections of the country, the South has been poor. Her agriculture has been antiquated and wasteful, and it is only recently that her fuel and mineral resources have been largely developed and her great water powers harnessed to the wheels of manufacture. Much as has been done, her first economic problem is not yet that of the just distribution of wealth between men and classes, but rather that of the bringing of men into better organized and more efficient and productive relations with nature so that there may be more wealth to distribute. From greater, more valuable and more varied crops, from more extensive manufactures and trade the South must draw nourishment for the desired progress of her people, whether in comfort, education, civil government, literature or the fine arts.

Burkett and Poe's "Cotton" is a contribution to the cause of scientific methods of production in agriculture, and to that of more economical methods of marketing the crop. Money spent for this book is one of the best investments a

cotton planter could make. It is popular, readable in every page, beautifully illustrated, and an exponent of the best methods of cotton growing. It is full of information about the cotton plant, its varieties, seed selection, methods of cultivation, restoration of exhausted soils, fertilization, choice and use of tools, diseases of the cotton plant, insect enemies, ginning, marketing, storing of cotton, government reports on cotton, prices, manufactures, by-products and what not.

An academic writer could hardly allow the historical side of this work to pass without criticism. Suspicion is aroused by the first sentence of Chapter I in which Mr. Poe disclaims the intention of inflicting upon the reader "any exhaustive review of the uninteresting remarks on cotton which pedantic scholars have picked up here and there in ancient literature." He has not done so, and seems to have suffered "agony" from the "enforced reading of several chapters of such matter." Hence the historical account of cotton is meager. One notes that several strikingly interesting as well as uninteresting facts have been omitted; for instance the account of the introduction of sea-island cotton into the United States as given in the first chapter of Hammond's "Cotton Industry." The account of Whitney's invention of the cotton gin seems inadequate. It is misleading in stating that Holmes of Georgia, obtained in 1796 a patent on a "gin which represented some useful features not possessed by the Whitney patent," without also stating that the Holmes patent was set aside by the courts in November, 1802, as an infringement on the Whitney patent. However, Messrs. Burkett and Poe are not writing for an academic audience, but for the Southern cotton planter, and, if they help him to more productive agricultural methods, one can readily overlook a reluctance to delve deeply into the uninteresting remarks of "pedantic scholars" in either ancient or modern literature.

Mr. Holland Thompson's "From the Cotton Field to the Cotton Mill" is a careful and well balanced study of the development of manufacturing industry in an agricultural State. As a contribution to the social and economic history of North Carolina, it is worthy of great praise. It is not,

like the work previously reviewed, calculated to aid in the technical processes of production, but it is rather a description of the recent advance of a people into new branches of production and of the social problems connected with the transition. The responsible leaders of this advance have much to gain from a thoughtful consideration of Mr. Thompson's book.

The enterprise and initiative of the cotton mill builders has been rewarded with large returns. Mr. D. A. Tompkins, of Charlotte, is quoted as estimating that the average net profits for a period of twenty years up to 1900 were about 15 per cent. Instances of 40 to 60 per cent dividends were not unknown. In such mills the plant had been enlarged from profits without proportionately increasing the capitalization. On the other hand wages have been low and hours long. Taking everything into consideration, however, Mr. Thompson thinks that "the operatives are not wretchedly paid." He speaks of signs of the development of such a class consciousness among the operatives as will lead them to organize in the future to secure a larger share of the product of the industry in which they are engaged. Already the rate of wages is rising and hours are being shortened.

Current effort to secure legal restrictions upon the use of child labor lends special interest to the chapter on "The Child in the Mill." The existence of child labor is explained by the fact that it is prevalent in all agricultural societies, and that it is consequently a natural characteristic of an agricultural society suddenly engaged in manufacturing. Without placing any reliance upon the pitiful stories told by professional sensation mongers, Mr. Thompson finds that "speaking broadly, the physical effect of the work is undoubtedly bad, though not all are affected unfavorably." Night work is especially harmful. One manufacturer writes to Mr. Thompson, "Neither evil (child labor nor illiteracy) nor both together, is half so great as night work for women and children." Another says, "Night work hurts worse morally than it does physically, and every sane man knows what a strain on the system night work is." Children are extensively employed in the departments commonly operated at