Book II. opens with an account of the family and its place and function

in the structure of economic society. The discussion proceeds along the beaten paths of ethnographic research, with repeated and well-directed recourse to the psychological knowledge that Professor Schmoller always has well in hand. Coming down into recent times, the discussion still proceeds to show how the large economic changes of late mediaeval and early modern times acted to break down the patriarchal regime of the earlier culture; but at the same time there comes into sight (pp. 245-249) a bias in favor of the recent as against the earlier form of the household. The author is no longer content to show the exigencies which set the earlier patriarchal household aside in favor of the modified patriarchal household of more recent times. He also offers reasons why the later, modified form is intrinsically the more desirable; reasons, it should perhaps be said, which may be well taken, but which are beside the point so far as regards a scientific explanation of the changes under discussion.

The closing paragraphs of the section (91) dwell with a kindly insistence on the many elements of strength and beauty possessed by the form of household organisation handed down from the past generation to the present. The facts herewith recited by the author are, no doubt, of weight, and must be duly taken account of by any economist who ventures on a genetic discussion of the present situation and the changing fortunes of the received household. But Professor Schmoller has failed even to point out in what manner these elements of strength and beauty have in the recent past or may in the present and immediate future causally affect the fortunes of the institution. The failure to turn the material in question to scientific account becomes almost culpable in Professor Schmoller, since there are few, if any, who are in so favorable a position to outline the argument which a theoretical account of the situation at this point must take. Plainly, as shown by Professor Schmoller's argument, economic exigencies are working an incessant cumulative change in the form of organisation of the modern household; but he has done little towards pointing out in what manner and with what effect these exigencies come into play. Neither has he gone at all into the converse question, equally grave as a question of economic theory, of how the persistence, even though qualified, of the patriarchal family has modified and is modifying economic structure and function at other points and qualifying or accentuating the very exigencies themselves to which the changes wrought in the institution are to be traced. Plainly, too, the strength and beauty of the traditionally received form of the household--that is to say, the habits of life and of complacency which are bound up with this household--are elements of importance in the modern situation as affects the degree of persistence and the direction of change which this institution shows under modern circumstances. They are psychological facts, facts of habit and propensity and spiritual fitness, the efficiency of which as live forces making for survival or variation is in this connection probably second to that of no other factors that could be named. We had, therefore, almost a right to expect that Professor Schmoller's profound and comprehensive erudition in the fields of psychology and cultural growth should turn these facts to better ends than a preachment concerning an intrinsically desirable consummation.

Regarding the present visible disintegration of the family, and the closely related "woman question," Professor Schmoller's observations are of much the same texture. He notes the growing disinclination to the old-fashioned family life on the part of the working population, and shows that there are certain economic causes for this growth or deterioration of sentiment. What he has to offer is made up of the commonplaces of latter-day social-economic discussion, and is charged with a strong undertone of deprecation. What the trend of the causes at work to alter or fortify this body of sentiment may be, counts for very little in what he says on the present movement or on the immediate future of the institution. The best he has to offer on the "woman question" is an off-hand reference of the ground of sentiment on which it rests to a recrudescence of the eighteenth century spirit of _egalite_. This notion of the equality of the sexes he refutes in graceful and affecting terms, and he pleads for the unbroken preservation of woman's sphere and man's primacy; as if the matter of superiority or inferiority between the sexes could conceivably be anything more than a conventional outcome of the habits of life imposed upon the community by the circumstances under which they live. How it has come to pass that under the economic exigencies of the past the physical and temperamental diversity between the sexes has been conventionally construed into a superiority of the man and an inferiority of the woman,--on this head he has no more to say or to suggest than on the correlate question of why this conventional interpretation of the facts has latterly not been holding its ancient ground. The discussion of the family and of the relation of the sexes, in modern culture, is marked throughout by unwillingness or inability to penetrate behind the barrier of conventional finality.

The discussion of the family just cited occupies the opening chapter of