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This article examines why Charles Booth undertake his survey of life and labor in London, England. Mary Booth has written a memoir about her husband Charles which was published in 1918, where she attributed Charles' interest in poverty to what the Fabians were fond of referring to as the zeitgeist of the 1880s, the spirit of new age that have abandoned laissez-faire dogmas and look upon collectivism in a favorable sense. Among the contributing factors mentioned by Mary were the work of Ruskin and Octavia Hill, the experience of the Charity Organisation Society, Toynbee Hall and the Barnetts. But H. M. Hyndman did not assert that Charles began his work solely to counteract the socialists' claims, but the clear implication was that the Social Democratic Federation were primarily responsible. Hyndman discussed in is book The Record of an Adventurous Life, a more specific explanation of the beginning of Charles' work. Hyndman's story if a good one and has been retold by a number of writers. It is taught that Hyndman's story is untrue but the had an important indirect influence on Charles. To know more about Charles' work, the Social Democratic Federation journals, Justice and the Pall Mall Gazette have featured interesting information about Charles and his works.

The article focuses on the history of the School Meals Service. During the latter part of the nineteenth century reformers had become increasingly aware of the poor home conditions of many children, and their weak physical state. Many people during the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries had feared that such a service as feeding school children might destroy family responsibility and the values of family life. Supporters of school feeding and the school medical service had not only to fight apathy and ignorance, but the criticism of those who strongly believed in the importance of maintaining the unity and independence of the family. Very few authorities had organized a School Meals Service by the First World War, but during this War and the subsequent depressions of the 1920s the numbers increased. During the 1930s the numbers fell. The necessity of feeding large numbers of children during the Second World War, however, animated the demands for a better service, and the 1944 Education Act made it obligatory for local education authorities to provide a School Meals Service.

The article presents information on the Education Act of 1870 in Great Britain. The superintendent of schools in Philadelphia, Pennslyvania reinforced the case made by Follett Osler, Fellow of the Royal Society on October 13, 1869 for a comprehensive Education Act by the British government. In its original form the government bill proposed that the Committee of Council be given powers to ascertain existing deficiencies in schooling by dividing the country up into school districts based on boroughs and parishes. Existing denominations were to have a year's grace to make up these deficiencies. They were also to lose their own inspectors. If they failed, School Boards were to be elected by Town Council or select vestries. These boards were to be themselves endowed with powers to rate, remit fees, assist existing schools and, if they wished, frame byelaws compelling children between the ages of five and twelve to attend schools and offer religious instruction subject to a conscience clause.

This article focuses on the influence of religion on the educational policy in Great Britain. Religion is a source of norms and values, but on the other hand its rites may continue to be practiced because they retain social significance without religious meaning. There are also religious institutions, and these are interrelated with secular institutions in such a way that a considerable amount of religious influence may be discovered at the institutional level in an apparently secular society. The aim of this article is to stress one aspect of this relationship, by showing how the influence of religion on education has been maintained, and in some ways increased, during the twentieth century, in a period of steady decline in popular support for the churches. But this dichotomy in itself is too simple, for the decline in religious support has not been a unified one. Some forms of religious behavior have become minimally practiced while others are still widespread; also, measures of religious behavior must not necessarily be taken as measures of religious beliefs, which are much less susceptible to sociological analysis. Similarly, the relationship between religion and education is of several kinds. First, there is the policy making relationship, involving analysis of the religious pressures behind legislative action; second, there is the existence of both religious and secular educational institutions; and third, there is the influence of religion in the schools themselves.

Presents a comment in reply to the article "Residential Structure and Housing Quality," by Barry S. Wellar. Reluctance to recognize emerging urban patterns; Failure to understand that studies at varying scales show different results; Notion that employment and retailing activity are becoming more uniformly distributed throughout the city.

Comments on issues related to residential structure and housing quality in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Discussion of changes in home design and its quality; Criticism on the proposed one single, central employment area; Insight into the behavioral processes modeling the residential structure.

The article presents figures show that the size of the domestic group in England and Wales did begin to fall sharply in 1891 and has not ceased to fall since that time. It is true to say that the whole period 1891-1961 elapsed before the decline reached the full one-third mentioned in the original article. Nevertheless the level reached in 1911 was only very slightly lower than that of 1861, and the rate of fall was markedly greater after that date than before it, the descent in the fifty years 1911-1961 was only 4% less than in the seventy years 1891-1961. Some of the variation between count and count was undoubtedly due to changes in the definition of the domestic group used by the census takers, the rise to a peak in 1851 took place when occupier replaced family, and the sharp fall in 1861 when lodgers were first officially counted as occupiers. The changes which went on between the second and the fourth decades of the twentieth century are much more likely to have been wholly due to alterations in the actual composition of the domestic group, and they appear to represent its final and definitive transformation.

Presents an obituary for Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, director of the London School of Economics, England.

It is informed that in view of the widespread post-war interest in problems of marriage breakdown, it is surprising that so little is known of the demographic and sociological aspects of divorce in England and Wales. Since there had appeared for some time to be a need for mote information, the members of the Population Investigation Committee decided to initiate a statistical inquiry into marriage and marital breakdown. This study, now in progress, includes an analysis of the published statistics on divorce and also an examination of statistical material extracted from samples of divorce petitions filed in the two census years, 1871 and 1951. Before the middle of the nineteenth century divorce was an extremely expensive and complicated judicial, ecclesiastical and legislative process. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which first made civil divorce available, was not a great legal innovation, its main purpose being merely to simplify, and incidentally to cheapen, procedure so that it might become accessible at need to the rising middle classes. Under the Act a petitioner, who previously had to go first to a civil court, next to the ecclesiastical court and finally to Parliament for a private Act, was able to sue at all stages of divorce in one specially established section of the High Court. The grounds on which the new court could grant decrees were exactly the same as under the former ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Comments on the views of Stuart Samuel about the establishment of the Marx House in 1933 in honor of socialist Karl Marx. Social conditions that led to the establishment of socialism; Periodicals that tackled Marxism between 1932 and 1933; Indications of social interest on Marx-related information.

This article focuses on the French working class anti-militarism as revealed in the “Carnet B.” The opening of public records including a number of files of the "Carnet B" provide new material for an analysis of the nature of French working class anti-militarism. The Carnet B was the list of anarchists, trade unionists, and socialists, whom the Ministry of the Interior considered liable to interfere with military mobilization, that is presumably the most active anti-militarists. They permit us not only to discover the strength of these elements e.g. in particular localities, but also their social and other characteristics and functions in the labor movement. Not to mention the political danger they actually represented. The function of Carnet B is that it was originally designed to keep a record of possible spies, Carnet B had by 1914 become a device for preventing the possible sabotage of mobilization by the labor movement. These files clearly contained more than casual or improvised information, nor were men likely to be put on the list for some irrelevant activity that had brought them to the attention of the authorities.

The article discusses British working class's attitudes to the extension of state powers 1885-1914. The extension of the powers of the State in the Great Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, which one now regard as the beginning of the welfare state' was no means welcome in the first instance to the working class, who were indeed suspicious of the direction of legislation. As evidence for this, one may note the working-class hostility to compulsory vaccination which led to the adoption of the principle of conscientious objection in 1898. To explain this attitude on the part of the workers, it is not practicable to fall back on the theory of the labor aristocracy. In many of the principal industries of this period, there was no labor aristocracy which was not open to direct recruitment from the less well paid. But in any case, it was the poorer workers who were less politically active, or who were swayed by the passions of xenophobia. The Irish immigrants, reacting against this xenophobia, reacted into a conservative nationalism.

Pays tribute to H. P. Smith, a devotee of adult education and research.