The Citizen, a Study of the Individual and the Government

Abstract

PROF. SHALER, who is professor of geology at Harvard, has set before himself the practical and unambitious task of instructing the youth of the United States in the first principles of citizenship. In this he has succeeded; his work is interesting, suggestive, and extremely sensible. Not being written for the specialist, it is hardly to be called profound; and the theoretical considerations which are brought forward are of the simplest. But the author's sound common sense generally carries the reader with it. A favourable specimen of his mode of argument may be found in the discussion of woman's suffrage. There is no reference to the various views held by thinkers from Plato downwards; but probably Prof. Shaler's one-page argument is quite sufficient, that women, owing to their usually secluded lives, are not fitted in the same way as men to form judgments on political questions, but that, after all, if a majority of women should desire to vote, it would probably be best to give them the franchise, for the reason that it is most undesirable to have any considerable body of the people in a discontented state.

The Citizen, a Study of the Individual and the Government.

By Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. Pp. viii + 339. (London: A. Constable and Co., Ltd., 1905.) Price 5s. net.