Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/596

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576 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

taken we shall make professional criminals as rare as wolves. It will be many a long day, no matter what measures are devised, before this happy stage of progress is reached. No delusion can be greater than to suppose that it can be reached by resort- ing once more to the rusty, barbarous, and obsolete weapons of our ancestors. But I do believe, if we put our penal law, as Lord Roseberry would say, on an efficient and business-like footing in the matter of juvenile offenders and in the matter of prison treatment, that we can largely reduce the proportions of professional crime. WIL- LIAM DOUGLAS MORRISON, in International Journal of Ethics, October, 1902.

T. J. R.

Language and its Words: Their Sociological Factors. Man is the product of an automatic evolution. But articulate language does not owe its marvel- ous development to any such unconscious principle. Its development has been very complex : the word and the gesture naturally going together enforce each other, but they also at the same time oppose each other. Their association is in reality a struggle for their individual existences. In this contest the word has the advan- tage, due no doubt partly to its intrinsic superiority for language is above all things vocal ; the gesture exists, it is true, but merely as an accompaniment of the word but due also, and especially, to the pressure of "social" necessities. That is to say, articulate language is, no doubt, partly the work of nature, but the work of man much more. This laborious birth and development has been neither mechanical nor deliberate, neither conscious nor unconscious, because it has been neither bio- logical nor psychological ; but it has been at once both the one and the other, because it has been sociological. In the social process man makes the instruments of prog- ress, yet he himself is an instrument ; he passes from the pursuit of ends immediate and perceived to the pursuit of ends remote and unperceived. Thus it is with all social development ; thus it is with language ; it becomes both means and end, makes and is made, and passes from the stage of immediate, unreflective use to the removed, mediated, deliberative character.

If we study all the different kinds of language we shall find unmistakable evidences of this " social " character or origin of language. The words of a lan- guage fall into three groups that name social facts or relations, viz.: (i) those of intercourse, from primitive group organization, group-contests, to modern commerce and thought transmission; (2) those of labor, from immediate food-getting by the primitive man to the highly-organized industry of our present century, from the labor of war to the occupations of peace ; and (3) those of ceremony from the early wor- ship of all "moving " things to the worship of the one Hebrew God ; from the earliest instinct of dependence to the Jewish sacrifice and the present memorials. Inti- mate connections bind these three into groups together, and bind them into a lan- guage. L. GERARD- VARET, "Le langage et la parole : leurs facteurs sociologiques," in Revue philosophique, October, 1902.

T. J. R.