became honorary members of the American Association. The problems presented in 1865, following the close of the Civil War and the first assassination of an American President, were more numerous, novel, and difficult than any existing here since the first great reorganization of order and liberty under Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, from 1776 to 1789, when Washington became our first and most distinguished President, with Jefferson to assist him in the settlement of our difficult foreign affairs and Hamilton to do the same in the restoration of finances. All three were promoters of what we now call Social Science, and their Republic has been well called the chief practitioner of that science since the Christian era began. The death of Lincoln, greatest of Washington's successors, at the time when his sagacity would have been our guide in meeting the difficulties of 1865, complicated the dangers inherent in our situation. A grand political and social revolution had been more than half accomplished by the overthrow of negro slavery and the heresy of Secession; but it was still to be maintained in practice, under civil authority. All minor questions of suffrage, finance, jurisprudence, social economy, and social order came then before the people and before our Association, to be debated and, if possible, settled peaceably, under new institutions built on Freedom's ancient foundations, for State and Church, as laid down by Washington and his contemporaries. A new enthusiasm to do this, springing from the accomplished revolution and the restoration of the Union, was general in the Northern States, and prevailed to some extent in the South. In the comment made by me as Secretary of the Massachusetts Board which invited the Boston meeting of Oct. 4, 1865, it was said: “On the second of August your Board directed me to issue a circular in your name, inviting a conference concerning those questions which, in Europe, have long been classed under the head of 'Social Science.' Accordingly, I sent such circulars to all parts of the Union where it was supposed any interest would be felt in the subject. Many answers were received, all expressing deep interest, from gentlemen in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia. Gentlemen from many of these States,

and in addition from Michigan and New Brunswick, met at the State House in response to your invitation; and there organized the American Association for the Promotion of Social Science, a society from which we have reason to expect much service to science and humanity."

This expectation has been by no means disappointed during the forty-four years it has since been in active existence. The president of the Boston meeting that created it was the illustrious War Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, who had during the Civil War promoted social reorganization by inaugurating our Board of Charities, and putting at its head Dr. Howe, the renowned philhellenist and philanthropist. (See the Second Annual Report of the Board of State Charities, Public Document No. 19, Boston, 1866, p. 6.) Those who signed the circular were Samuel G. Howe, Nathan Allen, Edward Earle, H. B. Wheelwright, F. B. Sanborn, etc. The first President of the Association was Professor William B. Rogers, a Virginian, and the son of one of Jefferson's English professors at the University of Virginia, where he had been educated; but then engaged in founding the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, since so distinguished. Its two General Secretaries were Dr. Samuel Eliot, once president of Trinity College in Hartford, and the undersigned, then secretary and afterwards chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Charities. Among the early members between 1865 and 1872 were Charles F. Adams, Edward Atkinson, Louis Agassiz, James M. Barnard, Dr. Henry Barnard, Francis W. Bird, Francis C. Barlow, George S. Boutwell, Phillips Brooks, W. C. Bryant, Charles L. Brace, Charles Butler, Salmon P. Chase, Joseph H. Choate, Edward Cooper, J. Elliot Cabot, Mellen Doane, William Endicott, H. Sidney Everett, William M. Evarts, W. P. Fessenden, James W. Grimes, U. S. Grant, James A. Garfield, John Stanton Gould, E. L. Godkin, Horace Greeley, Joseph Henry, John and William Jay, A. A. Low, Theodore Lyman, William Lloyd Garrison, Oliver Johnson, H. C. Lea, Henry Lee of Boston, Robert Paine, John Sherman, A. H. Rice, Charles Sumner, Francis S. Walker, David A. Wells, Emory Washburn, E. C. Wines, Robert C. Winthrop, and many more,— names of great importance then, most of whose bearers are now dead. With so many nursing fathers our Association nat

urally was the mother of many children. Our first-born was the National Prison Association, founded in 1870 by a few of our early members,-Z. R. Brockway, the great prison reformer, Dr. E. C. Wines, the unwearied missionary of penal reform, Emory Washburn, Dr. Howe, and others. In 1874 we initiated at a session in New York City, when George William Curtis was our President, the National Conference of Charities and the American Health Association. Civil Service Reform, in which Mr. Curtis was long prominent, had been set on foot by our Association between 1865 and 1872, and during the administration of President Grant, one of our early members, it went forward to a degree of success. We revived the National Prison Association in 1882, which had fallen asleep after the death of Dr. Wines in 1879; and soon after the American Historical Association asked our society to assist at its birth in Saratoga, where for many years our annual meetings were held. Several other important societies have lighted their candles at our small vestal lamp, which was kept alive all these years, although sometimes the flame was low, and the oil hardly filled the bowl,-which, Dr. Watts says, is needful:

"To keep the lamp alive,

With oil we fill the bowl,

'Tis water makes the willow thrive," etc.

When the water got low and our willows did not exactly thrive, we neither hung our harps thereon nor did we weep, remembering the more flourishing days, but we chose a new Secretary, and went several years in the strength thereof. Our most energetic Secretary-would that we could have retained him longer was the late Henry Villard, who increased our membership, got out our Handbook of Immigration, and drew to these shores several hundred thousand, not to say millions, of those thriving citizens who now govern us in finance, industry, economics, history, and fiction, especially in the last named. I believe I succeeded him,--nobody could replace him, and continued to sit in that seat of the scribes for some twenty years, usually holding also the secretaryship or chairmanship of my own special Department,-that of Social Economy; which a few of us, headed by Charles Brace and Mrs. Parkman of Boston, instituted in 1873, and first showed

what we could do at the New Year Meeting of 1874. It was out of this Department Committee that the Conference of Charities emerged, full grown, like Minerva from the head of Jove, and has been extending her sphere and covering myriads with her shield, now for five-and-thirty years. This work and much more-too numerous in kind even to mention-went on under illustrious Presidents,-Eliot, Curtis, Gilman, Benjamin Peirce, General Eaton, David Wells, Andrew White, Francis Wayland, Dr. Kingsbury (who still instructs Connecticut and the world in the Hartford Courant), and others whom I need not name. Dr. William T. Harris, who lately died at Providence, after Herculean labors for many years in the twin causes of Education and Philosophy, declined the office of President, but gave us much of his strenuous aid in other ways. Hardly a subject in our whole encyclopedic round that he was not able to discuss; and the same was true of most of our Presidents,—not excepting, possibly, the honorary president, whose office, like that of Dukes, now so much out of favor, terminates only with life.

Amidst our toils and debates, at which no conclusion was ever reached that I can remember, there were rare pleasures to be shared, the chief of which, as I now review the past, was to get round a dinner-table, or sit in a group at a Saratoga caravansary, and hear from Frank Wayland, Captain Patterson, Eugene Schuyler, and members of the New York bar stories of peace and war, of jurymen and alibis. All which was a chapter in Social Science.

CONCORD, Dec. 24, 1909.

LABOR LEGISLATION AND ECONOMIC

PROGRESS.

BY PROF. HENRY W. FARNUM.

The natural world, if left to itself, is generally in a state of more or less perfect equilibrium. Those plants and those animals survive which are best adapted to their environment: the others perish. Each species has its enemies which prevent any one of them from monopolizing the earth and which, in turn, are held in check by their own enemies. As soon as civilized man steps upon the stage, however, this harmony of nature is disturbed, and the intruder may be positively destructive of those forms of life which are not able to adapt themselves to him or to minister directly to his wants. A good illustration of this is given by Theodore Roosevelt in his "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman" with regard to the buffalo.

"The most striking characteristics of the buffalo," he says, "and those which had been found most useful in maintaining the species, until the white man entered upon the scene, were its phenomenal gregariousness, . . . its massive bulk and unwieldy strength. . . . Its toughness and hardy endurance fitted it to contend with purely natural forces: to resist cold and the winter blasts or the heat of a thirsty summer, to wander away to new pastures when the feed on the old was exhausted, to plunge over broken ground, and to plough its way through snow drifts or quagmires. . .

"But the introduction of the horse, and shortly afterwards the incoming of white hunters carrying long-range rifles, changed all this. The buffaloes' gregarious habits simply rendered them certain to be seen, their speed was not such as to enable them to flee from a horseman; and their size and strength merely made them too clumsy either to escape from or to contend with their foes." *

...

This is the first effect of civilized man, but not the last. The book in question was written nearly twenty-five years ago, when the buffalo seemed to be on the point of extermination. Fortunately, as man becomes more enlightened, he begins to realize that in his struggle for the supremacy over nature he * Theodore Roosevelt, "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,” pp. 244, 245.