The army and navy are the greatest drain on the resources of the people. They cost one fourth more of the national income than do the armies and navies of France and Germany. Eighty million dollars a year for military expenditures in Italy is over 5 per cent of the income of the people, whereas $194,000,000 for the same purpose in the United States is less than 2 per cent of our incomes. In the triple alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy, the latter country crushes its peasants in order to make a showing by the side of its wealthier partners. The army takes every able bodied peasant from industry into barracks and drills for two years of his best vigor. But the long line of exposed coast and the general military situation in Europe make it unlikely that Italy for many years can shake off this incubus.

There is, indeed, in recent years a movement of reform and public spirit in Italy. The socialist party has become the party of constitutional government, purity and idealism in public life, against the corruption and militarism which has dominated other parties. It includes many of the greatest leaders of Italian thought.

In addition to all these economic and political causes of pressure, there is another cause of a more profound nature, the rapid growth of population. Strange as it may seem, the very poverty of Italy increases the tendency to a high birth rate, and the rate is highest in the very districts where illiteracy and poverty are greatest. The birth rate is nearly the highest in Europe, and only the great number of deaths produced by poverty and unsanitation prevents the increase of population from exceeding that of the more rapidly growing countries of Germany, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. It is not among those classes and nations, like the middle classes and the thrifty people of France, that the largest number of children are born, but it is among those ignorant and low standard peoples to whom the future offers no better prospect for their children than for themselves. Early marriages and large families are both a result and a cause of poverty. Parts of Lombardy and Venetia have a thicker population than any other European country except Belgium, which is really not a country but a manufacturing center of Europe. In general,

the density of population in Italy is far in excess of that of Germany or Austria or France. Emigration is the only immediate relief from this congestion. All other remedies, which operate through raising the intelligence and the standards of living, require years for appreciable results, but meanwhile the persistent birth rate crowds new competitors into the new openings and multiplies the need of economic and political reforms before they can be put into effect.

Emigration is a relief at hand, and for Italy it is more than a lessening of population-it is also a means of revenue for the mother country. For it is estimated that the peasants in foreign countries send back to their families and relatives $30,000,000 to $80,000,000 each year, and many of them return with what to them is a fortune, and with new ideas of industry and progress, to purchase and improve a farm and cottage for their declining years. It is said that already there are several small country towns in southern Italy which have risen from squalor to something of prosperity through the money and influence of those who have come home.

Besides this temporary emigration, there is an equally large permanent emigration. This is of two kinds, almost as entirely distinct from each other as the emigration from two separate nations. The north Italian is an educated, skilled artisan, coming from a manufacturing section and largely from the cities. The south Italian is an illiterate peasant from the great landed estates, with wages less than one third his northern compatriot. Unhappily for us, the north Italians do not come to the United States in considerable numbers, but they betake themselves to Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in about the same numbers as the south Italians come to us. It is estimated that in those three countries there are 3,000,000 Italians in a total population of 23,000,000, and they are mainly derived from the north of Italy. Surrounded by the unenterprising Spanish and Potuguese, they have shown themselves to be the industrial leaders of the country. Some of the chief buildings, banks, flour mills, textile mills, and a majority of the wheat farms of Argentina belong to Italians. They are one third of the population of Buenos Ayres and own one half of the commercial capital of that city. They become

members of parliament, lawyers, and engineers, and an Italian has been president of the republic of Argentina, while other Italians have been ministers of war and education. While these north Italians, with their enterprise, intelligence, and varied capacities, go to South America, we receive the south Italians who are nearly the most illiterate of all immigrants at the present time, the most subservient to superiors, the lowest in their standards of living, and at the same time the most industrious and thrifty of all common laborers

THE CAUSES OF RACE SUPERIORITY.

BY EDWARD A. ROSS.

[Edward Alsworth Ross, professor of sociology in the University of Nebraska; born Dec. 12, 1866, in Virden, Illinois; was educated at Coe college, Iowa, University of Berlin and Johns Hopkins; in 1891 he became professor of economics in Indiana university, in 1892, associate professor of political economy and finance at Cornell, and from 1893 to 1900 he was professor of sociology at the Leland Stanford university, California; he has been secretary of the American Economic association and advisory editor of the American Journal of Sociology, and associate of the Institute International de Sociologie; he is the author of Honest Dollars, Social Control and many articles in economic and sociological journals.]

The superiorities that, at a given time, one people may display over other peoples, are not necessarily racial. Physical inferiorities that disappear as the peoples are equalized in diet and dwelling; mental inferiorities that disappear when the peoples are levelled up in respect to culture and means of education, are due not to race but to condition, not to blood but to surroundings. In accounting for disparities among peoples there are, in fact, two opposite errors into which we may fall. There is the equality fallacy inherited from the earlier thought of the last century, which belittles race differences and has a robust faith in the power of intercourse and school instruction to lift up a backward folk to the level of the best. Then there is the counter fallacy, grown up since Darwin, which exaggerates the race factor and regards the actual differences of peoples as hereditary and fixed.

Just now the latter error is, perhaps, the more besetting. At a time when race is the watchword of the vulgar and when sciolists are pinning their faith to breed, we of all men ought to beware of it. We Americans who have so often seen the children of underfed, stunted, scrub immigrants match the native American in brain and brawn, in wit and grit, ought to realize how much the superior effectiveness of the latter is due to social conditions. Keleti, from his investigations in Hungary, has come to the conclusion that in most of the communes there the people have less to eat than is necessary to live and work, the result being alcohol