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This article discusses the ideologies and the phase of the French revolution in which various national, political and patriotic songs played an important role. This Revolution produced an abundance of such songs, or "hymns." To a remarkable extent, as the Revolution progressed, songs were used by community and club leaders as an instrument of enlightenment, and from 1793 they were exploited by the national government as a primary agency of propaganda. But, in the beginning the vogue was spontaneous. The revolutionists took to singing political songs for pleasure, as they had previously sung folk songs or other popular airs. Early in the Revolution, actors adopted the practice of singing one or more political songs in the course of a performance. It was usually intended that only the performer should sing, but the audience could not resist taking part. For some time the favorite song of the French Revolutionists was Ç ira. The vogue of ç ira-consisting of catchy lyrics to an irresistible dance tune commenced on the occasion of the first anniversary of the fall of Bastille.

The article comments on the article "Savings in a State With a Stationary Population," published in the November 1946 issue of "The Quarterly Journal of Economics." There has been much discussion in recent years of the effects of population trends on the marginal efficiency of capital and the rate of investment. The Keynes-Hansen hypothesis that the decline in the rate of population growth in the Western countries in recent decades has curtailed investment outlets and has thus aggravated the problem of chronic underemployment has found widespread acceptance. The title of the article aroused expectations of a different and perhaps illuminating approach to this problem. It suggested that the article proposes to consider the effects of population trends on the rate of saving rather than on the rate of investment. The author of the article might, for instance, have been expected to consider the question whether the adverse effect of declining population growth on employment through its effect on the rate of investment might not be partially or wholly offset by the fact that the decline in population growth would also tend to reduce the rate of saving. If such a thesis could be supported it might help to explain why some countries, and especially France during the period discussed in the article, suffered a decline in population growth without meeting with a serious unemployment problem.

The article describes and evaluates electoral studies in France. The electoral studies in France are influenced by geographers. André Siegfried is best-known writers in electoral sociology in France. He avoided the apparent instability of the French political scene by positing basic, underlying, static situations or tendencies while the political parties become mere superficial and perpetually changing classifications. Siegfried noted only two tendencies, Right and Left. Many critics questioned whether two tendencies are sufficiently wide to include most of the population and additionally whether they make for sufficient specification in the data. Siegfried himself was so uncomfortable with the Communist positions that he refused to consider them a party of the Left and kept them in a separate niche by themselves. At present there are two general introductory monographs in the field of electoral sociology authored by M. Goguel. His book "Initiation aux Rechzerches de Géographie Électorale" is valuable for its synoptic account of the theory and practice of the discipline.