and the needs of the Commonwealth; and he urged that both should be considered in a conscientious spirit by the lawmakers. The stimulus of his earnest purpose and of his assured sympathy was felt in the legislature all through the session. The members knew exactly what the governor wanted, and that he did actually represent the wishes of an overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Commonwealth, and as the legislators themselves were in close touch with the people, the bills went through with velocity."

From the personal side he is an affable, genial, informing companion. Deeply learned in local and certain phases of general history, he is a charming conversationalist. He has a keen appreciation of the humorous side of life. He is a philosopher, who is willing to let posterity decide the mooted questions that arose during his administration.

While he has established a new standard of public faithfulness and honesty, manifested not only in the directions already mentioned, but in his rigorous insistence upon paying his own railroad fare wherever he goes; while he has exhibited an almost unparalleled conscientiousness in the discharge of his duties, both as regards his executive acts and in his examination of legislation submitted to him for approval, he is likely to go down to history as the governor who sought to curtail the liberty of the press.

The governor's attitude toward and connection with the State Capitol scandal constitutes another chapter to the paradox. He likes the building. He thinks it is a creditable product. He believes that the great State of Pennsylvania should have an appropriate capitol building. He has pointed out that it has cost less than the Congressional library or the Albany capitol or any similar building erected within the past generation. And yet each day is bringing to light some further extraordinary development of loose and unbusiness-like methods, some palpable fraud or deception, and he himself has said on the witness stand before the legislative investigating committee: "If we did not get good work, we were all deceived and the State has been defrauded and it is an especially wicked thing. It is, in my judgment, not only a fraud, but it is a species of treason."

So far there has been no hint or suggestion of dishonesty on the ex-governor's part, and he is generally believed to have had no part in the extraordinary proceedings which have characterized the completion of the buildings. At the same time, there was a rational desire to hear his side, as the public was most anxious to learn how a man of his sterling character and strong sense of honesty could have permitted such proceedings as have been disclosed to go on unchecked and unrebuked, if known, or to have failed to discover them, if he was ignorant of their existence. His testimony before the investigating commission only partly satisfies this anxiety. One observer thus describes his appearance before that tribunal:

"With almost childish naïveté, he told of his boundless faith. in architect Huston, of his confused ideas of cost derived from knowledge of the outlay on certain great hotels and public buildings, of his belief that any extravagance occurring must be due to miscalculation, of his reverence for Sanderson, the 'great furniture man' of Philadelphia, whose reputation prohibited the possibility of his doing wrong, and finally of his conviction, when the work was done and he looked around the finished building, that 'the State had secured its money's worth.' So firmly were these ideas rooted in the mind of the ex-governor that it is a question if even now they have been wholly removed. While he cannot deny the evidence of his senses, it is clear that he still clings to the hope that thefts may turn out to have been mere miscalculations and that the thieves may be shown to be merely misguided, though well-meaning men."

The same authority, the Pittsburg Commercial Gazette of June 22, 1907, declares:

"Ex-Gov. Pennypacker's testimony before the capitol investigating commission yesterday was practically superfluous, inasmuch as it shed no new light on the details of the jobbery whereby the men who furnished and equipped the capitol cheated the State out of millions of dollars. It was of interest, however, and in a sense serviceable in so far as it confirmed the judgment already generally formed with reference to the part played by the former governor as a member of the capitol commission. From the first, public opinion acquitted Mr. Pennypacker of any guilty knowledge of the dishonesty which was practiced. It is true that no part of the capitol contracts were carried out without his sanction. It is true that he was a party to the granting

of unlimited powers to an architect who grossly abused them and to the bunching of contracts in the hands of a contractor who made everyone of them an instrument of spoliation. And still Mr. Pennypacker's own honesty of purpose has never been doubted. Knowing the life and character of the man, knowing his stern regard for the moral code, knowing his obstinate devotion to the right as he saw it, the public without hesitation acquitted him of evil intent and convicted him only of colossal stupidity."

Philadelphia.

CLINTON ROGERS WOODRUFF.

NOTES.

Nature and Nurture. In a preceding number of this REVIEW,1 some attention was given, in a note, to the ideas and projects of Francis Galton, relative to "Eugenics." There now appears a

strong advocate of views not at all in consonance with Galton's, in the person of Professor Lester F. Ward. It is perhaps unfair to single out of his excellent volume2 simply those parts which come into conflict with the Galtonian doctrines; yet in all probability such a proceeding would not incur even the author's displeasure, for his demonstration along these lines must be considered peculiarly vital to his sociological theories.

It may be said preliminarily that if Dr. Ward's views are correct the problem of social betterment becomes simpler and clearer than upon any other rational theory now before us; for it rests on something in which we have already made some progress, namely, the extension of educational advantages. In general, while Ward, with Galton, believes that the race is to be uplifted by its great men or geniuses, the two writers differ widely in their theories as to the way in which to develop these agents of civilization. Put briefly, Galton emphasizes nature or heredity, whereas Ward lays stress upon environment or nurture. The former wants to breed great men; the latter to discover latent genius, conceived to be in existence in a constant quantity-or, rather, to enable it to discover itself. The former would breed from the select and accumulate hereditary high qualities, and is, of a consequence, "oligocentric" in his attitude. The latter is "egalitarian" and asserts that potential genius is limited to no special class; and that if it appears in one social stratum rather than another, this is due to favoring environmental influences which conspire to assure to potential genius that education which makes it full-fledged. Hence while the concrete Galtonian scheme is to control human mating, that of Ward is to secure equality of opportunity to all classes in the "universal distribution of extant knowledge." Corollaries of

1 Vol. XIV, No. 1, p. 78. Another note upon The Theory of Descent and the Social Sciences, dealing chiefly with Schallmayer's Vererbung und Auslese, is to be found in Vol. XII, No. 4, p. 429.

Applied Sociology. A treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society. Boston, Ginn & Co., 1906-pp. xviii, 384.

these divergent theories are many; one of the most interesting, in view of the popular persuasion, is the repudiation by Ward of the doctrine of the "irrepressibility of genius."

All this, Ward says, was largely a matter of opinion or intuition until the publication of the remarkable statistics of M. Odin,1 upon whom he relies so implicitly. The case as presented is certainly a strong one and the book before us is the more effective because of its cool and self-possessed style and of the ripeness of the author's thought as it ranges over the varied experience of a long and well-filled life. Certainly no one who has ever been brought into contact with the situation will deny the extreme difficulty-the almost impossibility of the ablest man raising himself from an humble source; there is a tremendous inertia to encounter, and often a resentment or a freezing indifference. Even in this country, where the barefoot boy may become President and where edifying treatises in Sunday-school libraries set forth to the aspiring youth the directness of the road from the log cabin to the White House, the winning of nurture that has been denied is hard enough. Again, no one will dispute-at least no one who has heard Professor Sumner discourse on the "aleatory element"-as to the importance of luck, or opportunity, to the life of individual or group. It is also true, as Ward says, that genius is seldom self-assertive in seizing what chances there are. Many other of Ward's contentions must be at once admitted.

But there are others, and these most vital, which demand far more buttressing, or at least prolonged reflection, before being accepted. Fortunately for the scientifically-minded there is in this work, as in Galton's, no jugglery of abstract terms, no labor-saving attempts to get new facts by running old ones through the mill of formal logic. Criticism amounts to a judgment upon the sufficiency of data and of the interpretation placed thereon. Despite the excellence of Odin's work, Professor Ward himself admits that it is but a beginning and a model; as such its significance should. certainly stimulate research along similar lines. What is given here. is nevertheless enough to force a renewed scrutiny of orthodox views, and this is saying much. As to the matter of interpretation, the warning against personal impressions as being often the result of few and selected experiences is conscientiously taken to heart; yet there is such a thing as a composite of half-forgotten experi1 Alfred Odin, Genèse des Grands Hommes. 2 vols. Paris, 1895.