The concept of social insurance has been given a remarkable reception since 1882. Social insurance was introduced as a means of pacifying labor and of making it contented under the rule of capitalism. It was admitted into governmental economy by Bismarck as an agency of forestalling socialism. It spread rapidly. It has met with two setbacks. (1) In the first place it has acquired such momentum that capitalism sees it as the entering wedge of a genuine socialism. (2) In the second place social insurance is guaranteeing so much security to the workingman that he is constrained at times to sacrifice his initiative and even to become shiftless, saying in effect to himself, “I’ll be taken care of anyway.” It is this second type of antagonistic thought that indicates the real weakness in social insurance. It would be better to have a society in which the workingmen as a class would have an ample opportunity of caring for, and be stimulated to care for, their old age and for periods of disability. For the individual exceptions, special provisions could be made. The unemployment problem has produced many reform theories. Unemployment insurance, now being made the subject of experiment, is probably not reaching the main causes. The causal factors are many and deep-seated; they range from individual shiftlessness and mental defectiveness on one hand, to economic injustice and social callousness on the other.[XXIV-12] The prevailing thought urges a more efficient training of the individual; the increasing of the workman’s opportunity to enlarge his personality through each day’s work; the development of industrial democracy and justice; and a complete socialization program. Another set of problems concerning which applied sociology is endeavoring to find solutions relates to the family, feminism, marriage, divorce, and housing. Professor George Elliott Howard[XXIV-13] and Dr. Edward Westermarck[XXIV-14] have traced the development of the family and marriage throughout human history. The primitive relationships between sexes have been described by many anthropological writers. A history of the American family has been written by A. W. Calhoun.[XXIV-15] Single volume treatments of the family as a social institution have been made by Bosanquet[XXIV-16] and Goodsell.[XXIV-17] These works essentially agree that the family is an evolutionary product, that the primitive family centered about the mother and child, that patriarchalism introduced a high degree of masculine arbitrariness, and that the family is at present undergoing marked changes whereby the spirit of democracy is gaining ground.