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to limit the funds for negro education to the taxes raised from that race, but the policy of separate schools will, of course, be maintained, as coeducation of the races, as the most intelligent negroes are coming to admit, would militate against the best interests of both races.
The third stage which negro education is reaching, under the wise leadership of Booker Washington, is an adaptation to industrial and agricultural needs. Eighty-five per cent, of those engaged in gainful occupations in the South are tillers of the soil, and while training in " the three R's " is essential, education must be made strongly tributary to interest and efficiency in agriculture. DR. WALTER B. HILL, in Annals of the American Academy, September, 1903.
E. B. W.
Assistance for the Aged, Infirm, and Incurable. In the course of the last session there passed the Chamber of Deputies an important bill relative to compulsory assistance for the aged, the infirm, and the incurable. The principle of the right to this assistance is laid down in the following words : " All French- men without resources, who are seventy years of age and infirm, or afflicted with an incurable disease which renders them incapable of self-support, have the right, under the conditions and reservations below, of the public responsibility for support which is instituted under the form of compulsory assistance according to the present law." This assitance is given by the commune in its own institution for the purpose, or, in the absence of such an institution, by the department, or in the last resort by the state. The bureau of charities of each commune prepares every year a list of those claiming public assistance, and sends it to the municipal council, with which rests the decision. An appeal may, however, be made to a special commission and from it to the minister of the interior, who, with a central commission of public aid, constitutes a final determining body. The assistance offered varies from the payment of a certain sum monthly to persons in their own homes, to admission to a public hospital, or, with the consent of the persons concerned, to a private hospital or the home of a private individual. The expense is proportioned between the commune, the department, and the nation, according to a method outlined in the law. Bulletin de I'Office du Travail, October, 1903.
E. B. W.
Education not the Cause of Race Decline. Resume: " The data now available indicate that the highly educated male element does more toward repro- ducing itself than any other large group of our native population. The marriage rate is the same, and the number of the surviving children to the family is greater than it is for the native population at large, so that we can no longer accuse the college graduate, or, if I may say, ' the highly educated male portion of our population,' of having an exceptionally small family, and of doing less than any other groups toward reproducing the population ; nor must we lay the blame for the low fecundity of the native American family on higher education. Shortening the term of college study will effect no change. Wealth, luxury, and social am- bition are cause of the diminishing size of the family and of race-decline
The assumption of a false social position, the struggle for the attainment of luxury more than its possession, leads to the limitation of the family, by ' the increased amount of restraint exercised,' as one author delicately expresses it, but, to speak without circumlocution, by often ruinous measures for the prevention of conception, and by criminal means for the destruction of the product of such conception if it does accidentally occur. Such, in plain words, are the causes which lead to the small size of the American family of all classes." GEORGE J. ENGLEMAN, in Popular Science Monthly, June, 1903. T. J. R.
