The recent and unfortunate death of Sir David Low (1891–1963), the eminent British political caricaturist, provides social researchers with another opportunity to inquire into the sociological relevance of political caricature. Political caricature is an effective way to create images and to inform the public of political figures and the meaning of events. Political caricature also tends to be universal and repetitive in Western society for about the last 400 years. Caricature for decades has also become for many newspapers and campaigns an important item. For the man in a rush or the reader of only the headlines or lead paragraphs the caricature is a way of catching at a glance the meaning of an event, a person in the news, or a pictorial summary of a current power constellation.

“You have given India,” Secretary of State Sir Samuel Hoare once told his officers, “justice such as the East has never known before.” For most Englishmen, having established therule of law” on the Indian subcontinent was probably the proudest achievement of the British raj. They believed that they had substituted legal security for disorder, predictability for uncertainty, and impartiality for whim and nepotism.

Indonesian law and judicial institutions raise almost every conceivable theoretical and practical problem. Professor Jaspan certainly conveys admirably the bewildering confusion of diversity of custom, judicial practices, arguments about theory and policy, and political pressures, describing dilemmas which, on sociological first principles, seem in the short (or even middle) run to be insoluble.

I. Attitudes towards Usury

In many ancient societies the very idea of taking interest was considered to be reprehensible and immoral. The term usury, which comes to be applied to lending at rates above the legal rates, has a tinge of something socially and religiously undesirable about it. In early and mediaeval Indian society it is not always possible to draw a precise line between usury and interest, and hence the subject can be best studied by examining the data on interest and money-lending.

The particular rebellion in the Congo with which we are concerned in this article is the one that began in the Kwilu Province in January 1964 and, as such, was the first in a chain of rebellions that have erupted in the Congo in the course of the past year.

In this age of rapid urbanization, with all that that term connotes, it is revealing to view the familiar and ofttimes troublesome attributes of city life from the perspectives of the sophisticated urbanites of an earlier era. Our aim, then, has been to glean from the writings of the ancient Romans their personal images of, impressions of, and attitudes toward life in a metropolitan environment. The period covered extends from the time of Cato through the end of the First Century A.D. If the satirists seem overly represented in this distribution of authors, the explanation is simply that the satirists chose to comment upon the conditions of city life more frequently and more intensely than did other writers. Horace even suggests that satire is the literary form most appropriate for commentary upon the urban scene (Satire II. 6).

Summary of Argument

It has long been recognized that upper class Romans in their desire for small families practised abortion on a large scale. What is not well known is the extent to which these same upper class Romans were concerned with contraception. Some of the methods advocated by Greek and Roman doctors could have been very effective, and aspects of ancient contraceptive theory were as advanced as any modern theory before the middle of the 19th century. Such contraceptive theory was part of a lively literary medical tradition, appearing first in Aristotle and in the Hippocratic Corpus; its repeated appearance in our fragmentary sources, when considered together with the organization of doctors’ training, argues for its significance in medical practice, at least among the upper class. Nonetheless, the total effect of contraception upon fertility in Rome cannot be seen only in these terms.