850 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
of humanity urges the exhaustion of every deterrent influence and the most thor- ough asylum treatment before turning to the last resort of prolonged imprisonment. For the great majority of this group, including the " rounders " and incorrigibles who infest our public institutions, permanent detention under an indeterminate sentence, and under conditions which protect them and society from further degradation, is the only logical treatment.
However reluctant public opinion may be to sanction such heroic treatment, it must not be forgotten that there is in every great community a residual group of incur- ables and incorrigibles calling for special and systematic treatment, in their own inter- est no less than in the interest of society. Individual and social welfare, individual and social justice, unite in demanding that the unfortunate who has lost the power of self- control shall be protected against his own degrading weakness, and that society shall be relieved in part of the danger and the contagion of his example, and the hereditary transmission of weakness to pauperized and degenerate children. Such ends a monastic regime of wholesome discipline, labor, recreation, and improvement can alone accom- plish.
Finally, it must be fully admitted that such a comparatively simple classification cannot pretend to be exhaustive. It is one of the complexities of the situation, calling for the largest exercise of wisdom by the courts, that in all these groups cases, of drunkenness are not infrequently complicated with criminal conduct, so that they can- not be disposed of as simple cases of intoxication. Doubtless such complications in some measure account for seeming anomalies in the punishment of persons nominally under arrest for drunkenness. Moreover, in practice these groups overlap, and not a few cases are so complicated and obscure as to defy accurate diagnosis and classifica- tion. — Edward Cum.mings, Report of the Advisory Committee appointed by the Mayor of Boston, " The Penal Aspects of Drunkenness," in Charities Review, January, IQOO.
The Crisis in the Growth of French Socialism. — A propos of the Dreyfus affair there has arisen a crisis in the growth of socialism in France which affords opportunity for a general clearing up and restatement of the fundamental positions of socialism and its consequent attitude toward various allied reforms and types of social phenomena. The action of the socialists has been spontaneously and almost unani- mously in favor of Dreyfus and against his persecutors. Certain of the socialists, however, are inclined to criticise this action on the ground that socialism has to do solely with the realm of politics and economics, and that to turn aside from this is to dissipate the energies of the socialist army and to endanger the ultimate success of the socialist cause.
In the opinion of the writer this is a false position, justified neither by the logic of fact nor by that of the theory of socialism. The aim of socialism is not simply the emancipation of the individual from economic inequality, but from all inequality of evervsort — intellectual, ecclesiastical, and moral, as well as economic. The socializa- tion of property being the fundamental condition of this complete emancipation, it is natural that considerable emphasis should have been laid upon it ; but the socialization of property is not the only condition of complete emancipation of the individual, and to make it such is to forget that the individual demands more for his welfare than that which material goods can provide. The process of economic emancipation will be very greatly affected bv the kind of intellectual training the man has, as well as by the religious tenets he is taught to believe and the form of government by which he is controlled. No one of these influences can be ignored. It is of the very essence of socialism that it is not a party among parties, but a movement permeating all parties. A party is an organization for action, not for deliberation ; for party action principles must be transformed into fixed dogmatic rules of thumb. The whole of socialism, however, cannot be cast into dogma. Its essence is in reality a principle which is to be made effective in a thousand different ways and in as many different combinations of circumstances, and yet is always to remain one and the same principle. A socialist may be a collectivist, a communist, a republican, or a democrat, as circumstances may war- rant, and yet never stultify himself as a socialist. It is always the simple question as to where he can best labor for the attainment of the great aim of the socialist — the complete emancipation of the individual from all forms oi servitude.
