THE SURVEY, Volume 30, Number 2, Apr 12, 1913

IN THE WAKE OF THE FLOOD

By the end of last week, according to reports from the Red Cross representatives in the flood district, the relief situation was being satisfactorily handled: and out of the chaos a careful survey was revealing more definitely the extent of the rehabilitation problem. This unfortunately does not shrink in magnitude, on the basis of later reports, as does the list of dead. It is clear that large sums will be needed. Every message from Red Cross agents emphasizes the urgent necessity for continuing and redoubling the efforts to secure funds.

The New York office of the Red Cross received a despatch at the end of the week from Ernest P. Bicknell, national director of the Red Cross at Columbus, which gives the most comprehensive, summary of the situation thus far received. He says:

“Have just returned from tour of flooded towns with Governor Cox and Flood Relief Commission. Governor and Commission have requested Red Cross to take charge of relief operations in Ohio and all money contributed through governor will be expended under direction of the Red Cross. This assures absolute freedom from conflict of authority or confusion in expenditure in Ohio.

“The emergency relief situation in each flooded district in Ohio is well covered. Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati, Piqua, Troy, Ottawa, Sidney, Hamilton, Miamisburg, Middleton, Zanesville and Tiffin are covered by Red Cross representatives. Information is being rapidly accumulated on which to base rehabilitation. Am pushing men into other flooded towns as fast as water subsides and we can get the men. It has been most difficult to get reliable information; wires are still down and transportation extremely difficult. Further rains are impeding progress.

“The best information we can get indicates the following conditions throughout state. Four hundred sixty dead in Ohio. 4,200 homes destroyed, estimated 40,500 people temporarily homeless and 9,000 families, outside of Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati, will need rehabilitation.

“Col. Miller, chief quartermaster, reports need of underwear of all sorts, as well as bedding and blankets. Some Ohio towns are just being heard from. At least thirty cities and towns are inundated in Ohio, twenty in Indiana and many in Illinois, Kentucky and West Virginia. Boundary line surrounding flooded territory more than two thousand miles long. Situation very serious in a number of Indiana cities. I am going to Indianapolis tomorrow at urgent request of Governor Ralston.

“Following report from Adjutant General F. S. Dickson of Illinois indicates gravity of situation in that state: ‘We have a flooded territory on the eastern side of the state along the Wabash River and its tributaries, and another through the heart of the middle western part of the state along the Illinois River and its tributaries, but the most serious situation confronting us is along the Ohio and Mississippi, particularly the Ohio. The entire territory from above Mount Carmel on the Wabash down past Cairo is either submerged or in grave danger of being submerged. Shawneetown has been abandoned and is now under water to the extent of approximately twenty-five or thirty feet.

“‘On duty there are two companies of national guard and a division of naval militia. People driven from their homes numbering approximately eight hundred to one thousand are in the hills back of the city and are appealing for shelter and food. Mounds City is making a desperate fight and there are four companies of national guard working on the levees. The saving of the people is in doubt because there is no high ground in their rear to which it is possible for them to go, they are entirely shut off in the rear by from fifteen to twenty-five feet of water. Cairo is practically an island and the water from the Ohio has driven people along the territory I have indicated, away from their homes and back into the hills to distances of ten to fifteen miles. This distance is entirely covered by water. The state is furnishing all the tentage at its command and food supplies to every possible point within our power. From the reliable reports from my officers who have personally visited these places, I would say that in the present flooded area in southern Illinois there are from eighteen to twenty thousand people homeless and in dire need of food.’”

When Governor Donaghey of Arkansas just before Christmas turned loose 360 convicts as one step in his effort to break up the system of hiring out prisoners to private contractors, nearly every editor in the country found space for the story. But when, last month, T. J. Robinson, the new governor, signed a bill which finally abolished the lease system and established in its place a state farm where prisoners are henceforth to be worked, the news was not so picturesque and only a few papers outside of the state of Arkansas thought it important enough to even publish the fact.

The new law brings to an end one of the most spectacular campaigns ever waged against the lease system. ^[1] “The penitentiary was not designed for a revengeful hell,” ex-Governor Donaghey said the day he pardoned 360 of the state’s convicts. This extreme measure was taken as the last means, before his retirement, of rousing the people of Arkansas to immediate action. By hiring out to contractors persons whom it is the state’s duty to protect and reform, declared the former executive, the state was in a way giving its sanction to cruelty and exploitation.

The new law replaces the former Board of Penitentiary Commissioners, which consisted of a number of state officials who had heavy duties in other directions, with a new Board of Penitentiary and Reform School Commissioners. This board has only three members and the law stipulates that two of these shall be experienced farmers. They are to give their entire time to their new duties.

The law declares that this commission “shall not hire out or lease or permit any person to hire out or lease any of the convicts of this state to any person or persons whomsoever.” Instead, it shall “use and work” all convicts on a state farm, which it is authorized to purchase. A farm of 8,000 acres is now being used for the purpose, and it is said that all of the prison population can be profitably employed there the year round.

Several reasons led to the selection of farm work for prisoners. One was that there is less competition with free labor in farm work than in other lines of production. Another was that it gives the men a great deal of healthful outdoor exercise. A third was that it will enable many of the men after release to take up work from which there is less chance that their prison records will exclude them than would be the case in many of the trades ordinarily followed in prison factories.

GOV. FOSS URGES THREE PRISON REFORM BILLS

Three messages on prison reform in as many weeks were recently sent to the Massachusetts Legislature by Governor Foss. This is an unusual record even in these days when a growing list of state executives are trying to rouse their people to prison reforms. Attention has heretofore been centered mainly on Governor West of Oregon, whose use of the honor system among the prisoners of that state has been stamped by many as one of the two most notable advances during 1912 in the treatment of the criminal; Governor Hooper of Tennessee who spent one night in prison to experience some of the conditions of cell life; Governor Donaghey of Arkansas whose sensational pardoning of 360 convicts has just resulted in the legal abolition of the lease system in that state; and Governor Blease of South Carolina, known as the “pardoning governor,” who complained that Governor Donaghey’s release of 360 prisoners in one day had “lain him in the shade.”

Governor Foss’s last message was accompanied by three bills. One provides for new buildings for defective delinquents; another calls for the appointment of an expert alienist to assist in the proper treatment of female defective delinquents, and the third directs the prison commission to report upon the best method of providing institutional accommodations for those now in prison and state care for all convicted felons.

The first measure is designed to change the present policy of trying to reform feeble-minded people by the methods employed for normal persons. It has been established in recent years that large percentages of those convicted for law-breaking are irresponsible mentally. The following table showing the percentage of mentally deficient persons in seven correctional institutions has been published by the Russell Sage Foundation:

Governor Foss believes, as do more and more people, that these persons, if left at large in the community, constitute one of our gravest social dangers. “But neither the prison nor the asylum,” he adds, “is adapted to their incarceration, and they are rarely capable of reform.” He therefore recommends that two special cottage buildings for male patients of this type be erected at the state farm. In these they can be under the medical direction of the hospital for the criminal insane. For female defectives he 55 urges the erection of two or more cottages near the present reformatory for women at Sherborn.

Declaring that “the county prison has no place in a model prison system and no logical reason for continued existence,” Governor Foss suggests that all such jails be taken over by the state, “with complete disregard of the personal interests and protests of county officials, who depend largely for their political power and patronage on retaining the county system intact.” While recognizing that this perhaps can not be done at once, the governor sees no reason why there should not be an immediate reclassification of prisoners, so that long-term men can be located in one kind of institution, instead of in three as now. Likewise those amenable to instruction and remedial treatment he thinks should be confined by themselves. The present system, he says, was constructed mainly at a time when no attempt was made at such a classification. For these reasons he thinks new prison accommodations must be provided.

Until the county jails are taken over by the state, Governor Foss thinks they ought to be improved. Accordingly he is in favor of a bill now before the legislature providing for prison schools. This measure permits the prison commissioners to maintain, in not more than five houses of correction, schools for the mental and manual instruction of prisoners. The state board of education is directed to devise plans for the organization and administration of these schools and to maintain supervision over them. The teachers and instructors are to be appointed by the prison commissioners from civil service lists.

It is declared by many persons engaged in prison administration that this apparent division of responsibility between the State Board of Education and the prison commissioners is disadvantageous to the best administration of prison schools. It is said that while there ought to be close co-operation between the educational and prison authorities the actual supervision of the schools should be in the hands of the latter.

NEW ENGLAND CONFERENCES TO PROMOTE RURAL PROGRESS

Conferences devoted to various aspects of rural community life were held in Boston during the first week in March. Perhaps the most important was that which drew together professors from the state colleges, representatives from the state boards of agriculture, directors of the experiment stations and men in charge of extension work, delegates of the state granges, and scores of farmers throughout New England interested in the promotion of agriculture.

This was the fifth annual New England Conference on Rural Progress. As an earnest of its purpose to do actual constructive work along some of the lines of rural betterment it has heretofore talked about, it changed its name to the New England Federation for Rural Progress. To further this purpose, the association enlarged its executive committee and created a working advisory council to include representatives from each of the New England states. The new constitution also provides for three classes of membership: first, state federations and state organizations; second, local, district and county organizations; third, individuals.

Some of the more important discussions were by H. W. Tinkham of the Rhode Island State Grange, urging the establishment of municipal markets; C. E. Embree, general manager of the Farmers’ Union of Maine, describing its plan to establish consumers’ stores in New York and other large cities; Leonard G. Robinson of the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society, telling of credit to the sum of $1,500,000 given by the society to over 2,500 farmers in twenty-eight states; and Kenyon L. Butterfield, president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, setting forth the program to which the organization should hold:

“To secure an adequate inventory of New England agricultural resources; to carry out educational campaigns for the best use of every acre of New England soil; to improve vastly our methods of marketing farm products; to gain a better system of rural schools and to inaugurate a comprehensive system of public agricultural education; to try to solve the problem of farm labor; and to maintain upon New England soil a class of people representing the best of American traditions—people who have sufficient means of wholesome recreation, who maintain strong churches, who develop a satisfying home life and who are content with the work and the life of the farm.”

This emphasis on the human side of the problem characterized the entire conference. For instance, Mr. Twitchell, after an exhaustive discussion of the financial aspects of marketing, proposed as the final word of his report:

“Success in agriculture must be measured not by the magnitude of the crops grown but by the quality of the men and women developed on the farm. The sucking power of the town has become a serious menace to our civilization, and only live organized effort can effect that readjustment of industrial conditions necessary for the stimulating of desire for mastery over rural conditions on the part of a steadily increasing number.... If you would make your cities safe, strong, secure and enduring, look well to the development of your only source of supply of fresh blood, the country boy and girl.”

The officers elected were: President, J. R. Hills, director Vermont Agricultural Experiment Station; vice-president, R. N. Bowen, treasurer Rhode Island Horticultural Society; secretary and treasurer, James A. McKebben, Secretary Boston Chamber of Commerce.

56 The part the church plays in country life, particularly in recreation, in public health, and in community advancement, was under consideration in another conference. Ministers and teachers told what individual churches and schools were doing, and the general discussion indicated a growing realization of the whole problem as well as notable efforts to grapple with it.

The various sections of the School Garden Club met in Horticultural Hall, while at the Twentieth Century Club, under the joint auspices of the Massachusetts Federation of Women’s Clubs and the New England Home Economics Association, a mass meeting for home makers was held. The economic and hygienic aspects of markets were discussed by Mrs. Julian Health of New York, president of the Housewives’ League; Sarah Louise Arnold, dean of Simmons College; George C. Burington, manager of the Charles River Co-operative Society, and others.

ST. LOUIS WINS NEW TENEMENT HOUSE LAW

St. Louis has just won an unremitting fight of five years for a tenement house law. Though there has during these years been much newspaper publicity, even an “extra” once when a public hearing ended in a riot, the final passage has been scarcely mentioned.

This law, social workers feel, marks a great advance for St. Louis. It requires running water on every floor of every tenement house, and a light from sunset to sunrise in every common hallway. Further provisions are that all halls of every tenement house must be kept by the owner in good repair and free from dirt, filth, ashes, or refuse, and that the rooms must be so maintained by the tenant. Fruit, vegetables, rags, junk, etc., may not be stored in a tenement house. For every tenement dwelling containing more than eight families there must be a caretaker or janitor.

Other provisions of importance are that cellars may never be used for living purposes and basements only under certain restricted conditions. Finally, no apartment nor any room of a tenement-house shall be occupied by more persons than will allow for each adult 500 cubic feet of air space, and for children 350 cubic feet each. This does not apply where the occupants make up a single family. It is designed especially to reduce the number of lodgers, whose presence results in so much overcrowding and immorality.

Those who have won this battle look back over as varied a struggle as social workers have ever encountered. In 1905 Charlotte Rumbold prepared for the Housing Committee of the Civic League a report on tenement-house conditions, so vividly written and illustrated that not only St. Louis but many other localities were stirred and eventually framed reform legislation. The St. Louis bill as first drawn was changed only in a few small details during its long career before passage. At the beginning it was fiercely fought by real estate men, who at one public hearing packed the house with pleaders, mostly tenement-house tenants, against the bill. Its defenders encountered hissing and hooting. All the lights were suddenly turned out, and half a riot followed. After this the crowd surged to the mayor’s office before it quieted down. The bill was defeated.

Shortly after the Civic League and the Real Estate Exchange held a conference and, to every one’s amazement, found that after all they disagreed only in certain minor matters. The same bill was re-introduced in 1911, but failed, owing to contention at the eleventh hour concerning certain legal aspects. When a new Board of Health was organized in 1912, its program included the passage of this bill. It was again introduced in September, 1912, and, in spite of repeated efforts of several legislative members to let it sleep to death, the constant prodding by other members brought the bill to final passage.

THE SEATTLE CONFERENCE OF CHARITIES AND CORRECTION

The committee on organization has been in many respects the keystone of the National Conference of Charities and Correction. The executive committee is, of course, the year-round authority, and has as its core the former presidents of the national body. The committee on organization has usually been appointed after the conference delegates are on the ground, but to it has been entrusted a two-fold responsibility to be mastered in a single week.

The proceedings of the conference are divided into six or seven main sections. Each section has a committee. Several of these sections have been more or less permanent, appearing again and again in the make-up of succeeding conferences. The trend, however, has been away from such a stereotyped organization. Each year new sections and committees have been devised to discuss new needs—committees on public health, on occupational standards, on probation and the like.

In other words, the temporary committee on organization has had practically to open the channels through which the conference of the succeeding year was to run, an exacting and fundamental piece of work. In addition, it has had the nomination of officers for the new year on its hands and all the turmoil of convention politics has descended on this committee. The result has been that usually a dozen of the most active and valuable members of the conference 57 have been busy from early morning until midnight throughout the entire conference week, some of them scarcely taking part in the real proceedings at all.

At Cleveland last year a change was made and a by-law was passed providing that the work of the old committee on organization be handled by two committees, one on organization and one on nominations, and requiring that the first should be named by the president at least three months in advance of meetings. Frank Tucker of New York, president of the conference which meets in Seattle in June, has carried the reform a stage farther. The committee on nominations this year will not only have to choose a president and a slate of committee chairmen, but must find a successor to Alexander Johnson, who for eight years has been general secretary of the National Conference, and has resigned to become director of the new extension department of the Training School for Feeble-Minded at Vineland, N. J. Mr. Tucker has, therefore, named committees on organization, nominations, and time and place, in order that all three shall have ample time for their deliberations.

These three committees are given below:

FAMILY DESERTER BROUGHT TO BOOK

Probably the first check of its kind ever received by a charitable organization is for $755.43 reimbursed to the United Hebrew Charities from the bank account of a deserter who was brought to book through the action of the National Desertion Bureau.

Six years ago Elias Zepnick deserted his wife Yetta and their eight minor children in New York city, leaving them penniless. Their condition was so serious that the United Hebrew Charities gave rent, clothing and living expenses to the unfortunate family. For two years Zepnick kept under cover but in the latter part of 1910 he was located at St. Louis. He was defiant and the Legal Aid Bureau, in whose hands the case was at that time, brought proceedings under the Child Abandonment Law. The arrest of the offender and his extradition to New York quickly followed.

He was convicted and the court was about to pronounce sentence when it was discovered that the prisoner had a considerable sum of money upon deposit in a St. Louis bank. The judge pleaded with him to provide for his wife and his eight 58 little ones and held out the hope of a suspended sentence. His refusal aroused the court and the maximum punishment, two years at hard labor in Sing Sing and a fine of $1,000, was meted out to him.

CHECK WHICH BROUGHT ONE DESERTER TO BOOK

This did not seem to unnerve him. He made repeated requests for release and the remission of the fine, but when reminded that he had money in the bank and should evidence his good will by applying part of the funds to his family, he became sullen and would not yield.

There was one point that Zepnick apparently overlooked. A husband and father is responsible for the necessaries furnished to the wife and children if he neglects to provide for them. Any stranger may make the necessary provision and hold the parent to account. In this case it was the United Hebrew Charities. After consultation with the National Desertion Bureau it was decided to institute a civil action and attach the money that Zepnick had in the St. Louis bank. The necessary papers were drawn by the desertion bureau. Then, through Bernard Greensfelder, a St. Louis attorney, a writ of garnishment was served upon the Commonwealth Trust Company and the money, amounting to $790, was attached.

Notice was served by the bureau’s representative upon Zepnick at Sing Sing Prison, and what a change! For once he became meek and tractable. Realizing the futility of opposition, he defaulted and confessed judgment. On February 11, of this year final judgment was entered against him in the sum of $790 which less court costs left a balance of $755.43. The United States Circuit Court of St. Louis sent a check for the money, which was at once turned over by the Desertion Bureau to the United Hebrew Charities. Although the struggle lasted for five years, some little redress has been secured and now the Zepnick family will be able to enjoy a legitimate gratuity. Zepnick himself, however, is still obdurate and is believed to be in London and thus beyond the jurisdiction of our courts.

THE ITALIAN AND THE SETTLEMENT

Said an American afterward: “It was not a man who spoke but a bewildered people.” The speaker was Vittoria Racca, professor of political economy at the University of Rome, and his audience was a gathering of settlement workers in New York to whom he endeavored to interpret the protests of the Italian immigrant usually heard only as a grumbling in dialect. Professor Racca has a two years’ leave of absence in which to study the opportunities for his fellow country men and women in America and the efforts that are being made in their behalf. He purposes to write a book on the subject when he returns.

The speaker described the Italian parent in this country calling his children to his knee and crying in tragic amazement: “These are not like the children we had in Italy.” Whence, he asked, came this strange brood and how was it hatched out under the parents’ wings? With his explanation was bound up sane advice for many of his listeners.

More stress, said Professor Racca, should be laid on the building up of human personality by settlements. The buildings should not be so fine that the Italians do not feel at home. He went on:—

“The settlements should try to learn something about Italian customs, habits, employments, amusements, traditions—they should feel the spirit of the Italians and see things from the 59 Italian’s point of view. For example, one headworker was discouraged because she had introduced basketry into a club of Italians and they did not like the work. It would be a good thing for a headworker in such a case to find out what parents do in Italy, and in that way she might easily find some handwork which Italians would like to do. The Italian mother should be enlightened as to what the settlement is doing, so that she may understand why her daughter is out after dark, which is quite against Italian custom. If these suggestions were followed, the settlement would be the center for the whole neighborhood, and not only for the boys and girls.”

Turning to what the Italian might gain from the land of his adoption, Professor Racca said:

“It would be a good thing if the young Italian could acquire something of the strong will of the American and could retain something of the geniality and taste of his Italian parents. As it is, fathers of boys who go to settlements make most extraordinary comments showing that they do not at all understand what is being done at the settlements. For instance, one says he is so sorry that the boys spend their evenings with those bad women there.

“The new life of the immigrant is sometimes a tragedy. They must adjust themselves to a totally different kind of economic life. Wages are seemingly high, but the cost of living is high also. It would be much easier for the immigrants if, on their arrival, they had to fight Indians than for them as now to combat the complexed social and economic conditions of a strange land. Amusements here are different. In Italy after work all meet in ‘the coffee house of misery,’ where there is little to eat or to drink, but where there is a flow of geniality and conversation. Here everybody stays by himself, and all wear beautiful hats and dresses, which hide the poverty of their lives. They are here ashamed to show their lack of success. They are exploited by employers, by employment agencies, by neighbors, by the Black Hand, by the police—by everybody with whom they have to do. They always get the worst of the law. If it is enforced, it is enforced against them. If it is for their protection, it is not enforced. The immigrant Italians feel that they are despised, which they often are, and so they congregate in villages, which makes matters worse, and they learn American conditions more slowly.

“Here the children learn much in the schools and in the settlements, but much more in the streets. In the schools they learn that the United Stales is the greatest nation in the world, and on the streets they learn that Italy is a despicable nation. So they think that everything Italian is to be thrown away. There is no family life, so the children acquire awful habits.”

Not in the school or settlement, but at home, said Professor Racca, we learn not to steal and lie. In Italy and Russia the home, he said, is the center of the intellectual and moral life. Therefore the responsibility is America’s if in America these homes crumble and the morals of the children crumble with them. To prevent family disruption the adults as well as the children must be adjusted to the new environment. This adjustment is to be made, he declared, through the right kind of settlement. And this is what a social settlement should be:

“It should be a small institution for all the poor, not merely for the children. At its head should be one boss—a man. He should be married or a widower, and have varied experience. He should not be a minister, for if he is of the same religion as the people he would duplicate the work of their minister, and if he proselytizes, the people will run away. He should not be a professor, because he sees through narrow academic spectacles, and he should not be an amateur who goes into the work for a few years. He ought to be a practical sociologist, not necessarily acquainted with the theories, but he should know the facts. He should be a psychologist. He should know America thoroughly. If he is working for Italians he should have lived at least two years in Italy in the very provinces from which immigrants come. He should know dialect. He should not think that he can learn to know the Italian and his traditions by “doing Italy”—by visiting museums, art collections and churches. He should work in a narrow field and should take the place of the priests in Italy.

“He should visit every person every day, and in this way really be their friend, father and brother. He should be connected with all their organizations, so that the settlement could be the bridge between the organizations and the workers. If he thus knows everybody, the bad elements would dread this headworker. He would know that certain men were not working, and he would know that if they were nevertheless getting a living they are probably blackmailing. He must know individuals so well that he can handle each in his own way; one through an appeal to pride, another through a command, and so on.”

Some headworkers, he said, are out of town several days a week. Social workers should not be “out” so much at lectures and parties. They should be at the disposal of the people of the neighborhood at every moment of the day and night. Educational work can be done better through chats than through lectures. “No one’s system of life is ever changed because he has heard a lecture,” he said. A headworker once made an appointment with him, he said, to explain to him what her settlement did and to take him around. Her telephone called her away every few minutes, and he had to content himself with reading a folder on the settlement’s work.

Another mistake, said Professor Racca, was to let Italians speak at the settlement. “Southern Italians speak marvelously before they are born,” 60 he said; “though what they say may mean nothing. They always speak against America and praise the old country. And when poor people hear these hollow words they think this speaker worthy to be their leader.”

Professor Racca in his address expressed the opinion that volunteer workers should be avoided because they usually have little preparation and the settlements cannot command them as well as if they were paid. Not many girls, he thought, should do social work for young men, because young men, of southern races especially, although they have respect for women, “do not have enough respect to accept a woman as their leader as confidentially as they would a man.” For work with women and children he was of opinion there should be a woman as headworker. “She should be married and of mature age, so that she may have had varied experience. If possible, she should also be a nurse.”

IN PROGRESSIVE KANSAS!

How hard it is for a man who has at heart the principles of prison reform to carry them out in an old institution that should be leveled to the ground! J. K. Codding, warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary, writing in his eighteenth biennial report, expresses a wish to repair broken men and remake defective ones by plenty of productive labor, wise and firmly administered discipline, proper bodily care, and such mental and spiritual training as is possible under the limited opportunities afforded by a penitentiary. Prison recreations he advocates “not solely for the purpose of giving pleasure to the prisoners, nor as a prison fad, but for the same reason that we give them work, discipline and wholesome food.”

But what can he do to carry out such a program in a prison where the cells are “little dingy, dark holes in the wall, damp, musty and disease breeding—an absolute disgrace to Kansas”? The prison physician echoes this complaint:

“If the institution hopes to make its inmates strive for better things in life it will have to set a better example. Compelling a man, after a day’s work to go into one of the little cells now provided, and sleep on a bag of straw only half wide enough, and almost as unyielding as the floor, will certainly never do it.”

Yet the power of personality is felt in spite of this. The officers are all under civil service and selected only for fitness. The warden says “a more courteous, prompt and efficient lot of prison officials cannot be found in any other penitentiary in the United States.” The prisoners themselves respond to the wise treatment they receive and show it “in their willingness and ability to do the work assigned them; in their almost uniformly kind and courteous treatment of the officers; in the absence of any destruction of prison property; in the few punishments and in their general cheerfulness and obedience.”

Kansas ought to give a good warden a good prison with plenty of land about it.

CHILD LABOR AND POVERTY

Child labor is even more a cause than an effect of poverty. This was the point emphasized at the ninth annual conference of the National Child Labor Committee, which was recently held at Jacksonville, Fla. The meeting Was characterized by fearless and frank descriptions of conditions in the different states and especially in the South. Apology and defence, based on a comparison of child labor conditions from the sectional point of view, found no place at the conference. Delegates from the North and from the South vied in acknowledging the shame of a common sin.

The other distinctive note was that co-operation among all classes of social workers is needed to gain this reform. This note was sounded in a strong resolution which called upon many national organizations to supply not only the active sympathy of their membership but special investigations of child labor conditions from the different points of view which these organizations have taken in their respective spheres of work. Mention was particularly made of the National Education Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Medicine, the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, the American Red Cross, the American Bar Association, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Social Service Commission of the Federation of Churches, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Conference of Catholic Charities, the National Conference of Charities and Correction, the American Association for Labor Legislation, and the American Federation of Labor. Finally, since the child-employing industries, while forming only a small percentage of industrial establishments, have brought the reproach of child labor upon American industry itself, the National Manufacturers’ Association was also mentioned.

At the opening meeting four questions were discussed: Is the immature child a proper object of charitable relief? Shall the state pension 61 widows? Shall the school support the child? Shall charitable societies relieve family distress by finding work for children? The last question, so far as it was referred to at all, was emphatically answered in the negative, as the first was in the affirmative. The discussion turned chiefly upon the question of mothers’ pensions and the respective value of public relief and private philanthropy. The sentiment of the conference was plainly for a carefully guarded form of mothers’ pension by the state. This, it was felt, should be considered in relation to other remedies such as the minimum wage, workmen’s compensation, and the prevention of those industrial accidents which so often deprive the family of the chief breadwinner. It was also felt that such pensions should be regarded from the standpoint of justice rather than of charity, the mother to be looked upon as rendering service to the state as the bearer and rearer of children.

A thorough acquaintance with the recent discussions of the problem in The Survey was displayed and there was some apprehension expressed of the many failures through ill-considered legislation probable before success would be finally reached. The majority apparently believed that pensioning mothers was not simply a problem of relief but one comprising other elements, as the word “pension” rightly indicates. While it was recognized that hungry children make poor pupils, it was felt that any further weakening of parental responsibility for the child by the school would be unfortunate. The discussion along these lines included talks by Sherman C. Kingsley of Chicago; Jean Gordon of New Orleans; Mrs. Florence Kelley of New York; Grace Strachan of New York; Mrs. W. L. Murdoch of Birmingham; A. T. Jamieson of Greenwood, S. C., president of the South Carolina Conference of Charities; R. T. Solensten of the Associated Charities, Jacksonville, Fla.; Leon Schwartz of the B’nai B’rith, Mobile, Ala.; Mary H. Newell of the Associated Charities, Columbus, Ga., and others.

Rabbi David Marx of Atlanta added a touch of scholarly research to one session in his paper on Ancient Standards of Child Protection. Economic factors were discussed by Miss Gordon, who spoke on the eight-hour day and by Richard K. Conant, secretary of the Massachusetts Child Labor Committee, who dealt convincingly with the fact that the textile industry in Massachusetts no longer depends upon child labor in spite of the numerous plaints concerning the ruin of the industry of the sort which Dickens satirized in Hard Times.

W. H. Swift, secretary of the North Carolina Child Labor Committee, who had just come from a struggle with the Legislature, vigorously attacked the contention that mill work is better for children than the squalor of some of the mountain towns. He described his own childhood in an “average mountain home” in the South as the oldest of ten children, all of whom, he said incidentally are now doing pretty well in life. He told of the sacrifices by his father for their education and said that any time within the past twenty years, his father might have moved to a cotton mill town and lived on the labor of his children if he had been willing to do so. In all probability in that case the children would have been doomed to the common fate of cotton factory workers, with the low wages and hopeless outlook of an unskilled trade. Then he said that he was the father of three children and had lived for years next door to the best cotton mill in North Carolina. But if he should lose his means of livelihood and be forced to labor with his hands, rather than put his three young children in a cotton mill, he would “take them back to the mountains, build a shack by the side of a spring and plow with a brindled steer on the barren, ivy-covered plains of the Pick-Breeches.” His reference was to a well-known area in North Carolina where no one has ever been known to make a living. Mr. Swift’s partial defeat in the legislative fight—the abolition of night work for children under sixteen only was secured—has made him all the more determined to continue the war until his state shall adequately protect its working children from exploitation.

One especially significant address was by Rev. C. E. Weltner of Columbia, S. C. After many years’ experience in charge of the “betterment work” of one of the noted mills of Columbia, Mr. Weltner said he had come to the conclusion that a better way to spend any surplus earnings is in adding to the pay envelope so that the people may do a few things for themselves. The message of the conference was carried to many sections of the city through a series of parlor conferences, eleven in all, held on one of the afternoons.

The principal speakers at one of the evening meetings were John A. Kingsbury, of New York, who spoke on the poverty caused by child labor, and Julia C. Lathrop of the Federal Children’s Bureau, who gave an admirable outline of the functions of the new bureau and of its first effort to secure birth registration laws and to learn the causes of infant mortality. Lewis W. Hine, social photographer, threw upon the screen pictures of child labor conditions among the canneries of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, showing children of tender ages engaged in shucking oysters and shelling shrimp. Child Labor and Health occupied a morning session. Dr. W. H. Oates, state factory inspector for Alabama, made a forcible protest as a physician against conditions which tend to cause diseases 62 of the throat and lungs in the children of the cotton mills. Mr. Brown spoke of the evils of the night-messenger service and Dr. Lindsay discussed improvement in child labor legislation.

A successful new feature of the conference was a meeting for children held at the Imperial Theater. It developed into two meetings, for the thousand children expected were doubled in number. Children themselves gave the stories of different child-employing industries, with the help of the stereopticon.

At the final meeting Senator Hudson, of Florida, presided. The writer made his annual protest against cotton mill conditions in the South, the subject this time being Our Modern Feudalism. Jerome Jones of Atlanta, prominent in southern labor circles, spoke of the connection between child labor and low wages. Mrs. Kelley gave one of her vigorous talks on the child breadwinner and the dependent parent. Owen R. Lovejoy appealed for more effective support of the cause of child labor reform by showing how widespread the evil is, how fearful the abuses are in many instances, and explained that the resources at the command of the committee, in the face of the enemies and obstacles to be overcome, are very meager.

Florida conditions and legislative problems were discussed at an informal gathering and this culminated in the organization of the Florida Child Labor Committee, with Dr. John W. Stagg of Orlando, as chairman and Marcus C. Fagg of the Children’s Home Society, Jacksonville, as secretary. The Florida Legislature is now in session.

MORALS COMMISSION AND POLICE MORALS

It is as obvious in New York and Chicago as it has been in some other cities that the effort to secure a morals commission for city governments is intended not only to repress and prevent the social evil but also quite as much to protect and improve the morals of the police, which are corrupted under the present conditions.

Indeed, this is directly stated in the Report of the Citizens’ Committee appointed at the Cooper Union meeting held in New York last August, after a commanding officer of the police force had been implicated in the murder of Rosenthal by the “gun men”:

“The corruption is so ingrained that the man of ordinary decent character entering the force and not possessed of extraordinary moral fiber may easily succumb.... Such a system makes for too many of the police an organized school of crime.... We know that the connection between members of the police force and crime, or commercialized vice, is continuous, profitable and so much a matter of course that explicit bargains do not have to be made, both the keeping and breaking of faith being determined by these policemen for their own profit.

“Our recommendations on the excise and prostitution problems are intended to benefit the police situation.... While improvement in the police department will incalculably improve the tone of the city’s morals without any change in the statutory standards, nevertheless we have throughout hewn to the line of police reform and not of vice suppression.”

The Chicago Vice Commission came to a similar conclusion:

“In certain restricted districts the laws and ordinances of the state and city are practically inoperative in suppressing houses of prostitution. Because of this condition certain public officials have given a certain discretion to the police department and have allowed police rules and regulations to take the place of the laws and ordinances of these districts. As a result of this discretion certain members of the police force have become corrupt, and not only failed to strictly obey the rules and regulations in the restricted districts themselves, but have failed adequately to enforce the law and ordinances outside the restricted districts.”

The diagnoses are alike, but the treatments proposed in New York and Chicago differ materially. This should be pointed out, not only to avoid the confusion incident to designating different measures by the same or similar terms, but also to correct the injustice of applying objections which are only pertinent to one measure to defeat the other.

The board of social welfare proposed for New York and the morals commission recommended for Chicago resemble each other in organization, but are radically different in scope and in the means suggested for carrying out their functions. The members of both are to be appointed by the mayor. In New York it is proposed that the members shall serve seven years; in Chicago the term recommended is but two years: and the appointments are to be approved by the city council. No salaries are provided in either city, but the commissioner of health in Chicago is to be one of the members of the commission.

The function of both bodies is to deal with vice, but the jurisdiction of the New York board is broader and corresponds to the statutes relating to prostitution, gambling, and liquor selling. In Chicago the function of the commission is restricted to the social evil. It is “to take all legal steps necessary toward the effective suppression of bawdy and disorderly houses, houses of ill-fame and assignation, to protect, indict and prosecute keepers, inmates and patrons of the same.” This commission and a morals court are 63 both aimed, by the Chicago Vice Commission, at the “constant and persistent repression of prostitution as the immediate method, and absolute annihilation as the ultimate ideal.”

While the morals commission is to be limited to six clerks, attorneys and medical inspectors, together with their helpers, and must depend upon the courts and the regular police force to fulfil its duties, the New York board of social welfare would have under its direct command secret service vice squads. These, it is provided, are to be distinct from the constabulary forces of the police, “so that the regular police shall no longer be responsible for the control of the vices and shall be left to their original function of preserving peace and order.” The suggested bill in New York, creating a department of public morals, provides for a large staff of “public morals” police, including captains, lieutenants, sergeants, doormen, surgeons and policemen. The number would probably be between two and three hundred, all to be exempted from civil service restrictions.

It is against this separation of the control of vice from the regular police force, which the citizens’ committee felt “driven to recommend,” that the committee of the Board of Aldermen in the Curran report present the following objections:

“The morals policemen would lose the information which the regular police could furnish; the contact of the regular force with vice cannot thus be removed, as they must still enter vicious resorts for the detection and arrest of other criminals; friction and collusion between the two police forces would be inevitable and the collection of graft would not be eliminated; the restriction of the morals police to dealing only with vices would tend to low standards of character among the men enlisting in this service only; the exemption from civil service restrictions would still further contribute to lax discipline and demoralization; the division of responsibility between two commissioners of police would lessen the accountability and efficiency of both.”

In Chicago the responsibility has already been divided by the recent ordinance reorganizing the police force. Under this a second deputy superintendent of police has been appointed, on the basis of a competitive civil service examination, which was thrown open to applicants from other states. His qualifications and duties are thus specified:

“He shall not be a member of the active bureau of the department, but shall have supervision of the clerical, mechanical and inspection bureau; and shall be charged with the care and custody of departmental property and the distribution of the same; the supervision of departmental records; the inspection of the personnel of the department and of stations, equipment and departmental properties; the instruction of officers and members of the department; the ascertaining and recording of departmental efficiency, individual and group; the receipt and investigation of all complaints of citizens regarding members of the police force; the supervision of the strict enforcement of all laws and ordinances pertaining to all matters affecting public morals; and the censoring of moving pictures and public performances of all kinds; the furnishing of a card index system to all district commanders in their respective stations, which they shall keep to show, at all times, up to date, the name, description, character, haunts, habits, associates and relatives of every known person of bad character residing in or frequenting such district, including pick-pockets, hold-up men, safe blowers, confidence men, vagrants, pimps, prostitutes and people who are operating or have operated gambling houses. All these functions shall be performed under the direction of the general superintendent of police.”

This second bureau with its second deputy superintendent well discriminates and divides the clerical, inspectional and disciplinary functions of the police department from those of the active force. But to superimpose upon all these well co-ordinated duties the entire responsibility for “supervising the strict enforcement of all laws and ordinances pertaining to all matters affecting public morals” threatens to make impossible either the efficient fulfilment of those routine functions or the effective repression of vice. Yet this measure was evidently preferred by the city administration to the morals commission and was substituted for it, because the ordinance recommended by the Vice Commission to the mayor has never been introduced in the city council.

Against the precedents and preferences of the regular police force for the segregation and regulation of vice, backed by the mayor’s preference for the same policy, what can this lone “second deputy” do to secure “the strict enforcement of these laws and ordinances”? His appointment and helplessness are new arguments for a morals commission to support him both in the enforcement of the law and in publicly placing responsibility for its non-enforcement.

The substitution of this subterfuge in lieu of the morals commission can be explained in the same way that Chief Justice Harry Olson, of the Municipal Court of Chicago, accounts for the unexpected closing of the segregated districts. He traced the sudden change in the attitude of county and city officials toward segregated vice to the decision of the Circuit Court which granted a permanent injunction restraining the use of certain property in the segregated district for immoral purposes. “This order of the Chancery Court was,” he said, “the Appomattox of the war upon openly tolerated vice in Chicago.” For this decision served notice that any citizen, 64 by invoking the aid of the courts, could restrain vice, if the public officials were unable or unwilling to do so. “It was thus the beginning of the end,” he declared.

The morals court, he said, would further act as a check upon the second deputy superintendent of police, because “the records and the statistics of the court will show the names of the owners of such houses, together with their proprietors, inmates and frequenters, and will disclose the business of the promoters of the traffic and others who may profit therefrom.” So if this feature of the reorganized police department was intended by the city administration to effect its escape from the morals commission as one horn of the dilemma presented by the Vice Commission, Justice Olson clearly shows that the morals courts is the other horn. Neither the police of the city administration, nor the state’s attorney of the county, can escape if citizens seek warrants from the morals court or injunctions from the Circuit Court.

The inquiry into the relation of low wages to the demoralization of young girls and women, and the propaganda to correct this tendency by minimum wage laws will bear close watching. It may not only injure the broader movement to secure minimum wage laws based upon just and safe economic grounds, but it may also divert attention from the enactment and enforcement of laws against commercialized vice. For the ensnaring of victims is accomplished through many more devious ways than can be charged up to low wages.

WOMEN POLICE

In all our large cities thousands of young people, weary from their monotonous work in shop or factory, seek the streets in the evening imperiously asserting their right to pleasure. Business enterprise has taken advantage of this natural desire for recreation, and commercialized amusements have sprung up on all sides ready to cater to every taste of this childish multitude. Penny arcades, slot machines, moving picture shows, cheap theaters, amusements parks and dance halls are all attempting to lure children with every device known to modern advertising. Young people are thus without protection and exposed to temptation at the very moment when they are least able to withstand it.

Many students of municipal affairs believe that every large city should have morals police, of whom a certain number should be women, if it would properly protect young girls for whose unwary feet so many pitfalls are spread, and if it would deal adequately with prostitution—that grave menace to health and morals.

We need women police in the theaters of every city to watch the girls who attend these entertainments and accept the invitations of young men offered with disreputable intentions. In the majority of cheap theaters the moving pictures are shown in a dim light and the danger to young people has been shifted from the stage to the auditorium. The darkened room affords opportunity for familiarity, and there should be women police to see that conventionalities and decencies are observed.

There should be women police in our dance halls—the happy hunting ground of the white slave trader—to watch the girls and also the boys, to warn the girls when they are seen taking too much liquor and to watch that if intoxicated they are not accompanied from the hall by young men who have plied them with liquor for illicit purposes. They should also see that young unsophisticated boys are not victimized by professional prostitutes who take advantage of inexperienced youths who come to the city for the first time and visit the dance halls to “see the sights.”

Women police should be stationed on pleasure boats and at bathing beaches and should ever be on the alert for conditions which demoralize children. We need women police in our amusement parks to mingle with the crowds at the gates and to save young girls from accepting invitations from men who hope to be repaid later in the evening. We need women police in such places to follow girls who are seen going to lonely parts of the parks accompanied by young men. In fact, we need women police to “mother” the girls in all public places where the danger to young people is great.

In our station houses we should have women police in whose charge girls should be placed. Women police could accompany the girls to trial and be with them when they are subjected to harassing questions so often put to them by attorneys, and women police should accompany girls to the institutions to which they are committed by the court. The work of the woman police officer would not be very different from that of the woman probation officer. The Juvenile Court officers investigate homes and neighborhoods, watch their wards to see that they attend school or are at work, and take charge of children after they have become delinquent. It would be only one more step, but one urgently needed, to have women police who would lessen the work of the probation officers by carefully watching for those causes which lead children into the courts, by reporting these conditions to the proper authorities and by carefully supervising all places of amusement.

Women truant officers attached to the compulsory education department, the women adult probation officers connected with the municipal courts, the women factory inspectors, the women 65 sanitary inspectors of the health department, the women school nurses, the women supplied by the Travelers’ Aid Association, the officers of the Juvenile Protective Association and all other officers paid by private organizations are doing valiant work for the young people of our cities. But we especially need the police power which the city might vest in women trained for the work and which would give them the necessary authority to cope with certain dangerous situations with which private organizations have tried in vain to deal.

Women police are not needed to handle crowds, to regulate street traffic, to arrest drunkards and criminals, but they are sorely needed in order that they may adequately protect the thousands of children and young people who every day are exposed to the dangers of unsupervised and disreputable places of amusement and for whose safety and welfare the city is responsible.

DEMOCRATIZE THE PEACE MOVEMENT

“How long, O Lord, how long!” is the cry one is moved to utter when considering the war mania of our time and the ever-growing burden of armaments which this delirium is forcing upon the world. The Balkans swept from end to end with the scourge of “fire and sword,” Italy fattening upon the unholy spoils wrested from effete Turkey, Russia recreating the armies and navies annihilated by Japan, Germany increasing her military forces to hitherto unheard of proportions, France answering her neighbor’s challenge by raising her enlistment period for citizens from two to three years, England insisting on a five-Dreadnoughts-a-year basis, and her colonies building ships for the imperial navy! What a spectacle! And Jesus Christ dead two thousand years ago!

Here in America, there is a cheering sign in the refusal of the Democratic Congress, through two successive terms, to provide for the construction of more than a single battleship. But this was more than counterbalanced by the defeat of ex-President Taft’s arbitration treaties, the fortification of the Panama Canal, and the movement to place the militia of the various states in the pay of the federal government!

In the face of these facts, one is tempted to ask if there is not something the matter with the organized peace movement, that it makes so little headway against the onsweeping flood of frenzied militarism. The movement has ample brains and sufficient money: it is active, intelligent, resourceful. But has it the passion of a great ideal—does it really mean business—has it got “guts,” to use the fine old Anglo-Saxon phrase, as well as “gray-matter?”

It is on this point, the most essential of all, that one begins to have doubts and fears. Why are there so many vice-presidents of peace societies who are supporters of the big navy policy—why so many advocates of peace who are enthusiastic preparers for war—why so many disciples of good will who believe in peace in the abstract but in battleships in the concrete? Above all, if the peace societies are really in earnest, why are they so slow in joining hands and hearts with the vast hosts of labor throughout the world—the unionists, Socialists, syndicalists, and all the rest, who constitute at this moment the one really serious menace to the supremacy of the war lords?

It is here, to my mind, in this last query, that we find the real weakness of the organized peace movement. This movement is too academic, too aristocratic, too exclusive. It is too much confined to earnest scholars who deal in theories, and amiable social leaders who deal in fads. It holds too many dinners at $10 a plate, conducts too many meetings in luxurious parlors and salons, and puts its privileges of membership and co-operation at too high a price of refinement, culture and material wealth. There is too much “function” and not enough “crusade!” Too much library dust, midnight oil, pink tea, after-dinner speaking, and not enough sweat and tears and blood. Bankers, lawyers, clergymen, college professors, club women—these are all right and we need them every one. But they can never in the world accomplish their aim alone.

It is the common people—peasants, artisans, factory workers—who pay the price of war and it is only through the organized revolt of these people that the curse of militarism can be destroyed. Here, in “the multitudes,” whom Jesus sought out with so true an instinct, do we find the hope of future peace upon earth. No movement which ignores this factor in the situation can be regarded either as efficient or genuinely in earnest. Sincere it may be, I grant you, but sincere in that narrow, unsympathetic, petty way which has blasted many a precious hope and destroyed many a noble cause! It is time for the peace movement to democratize itself, to work from the bottom up and not from the top down, to organize, inspire, co-operate with the workers in their rebellion against militarism. This done, something will happen in the world of armies and navies, and happen quick! But not before!

And is it not here that the social worker may count for much? No one hates or should hate war more bitterly. No one sympathizes with the organized peace societies more deeply. No one understands the common people more truly. Is it not time for him to act?

MODERN PROBLEMS

By Sir Oliver Lodge. George H. Doran Co. 348 pp. Price $2.00; by mail of The Survey $2.13.

Sir Oliver Lodge is a scientist with a worldwide reputation, whose opinions on the structure of atoms, on X-rays or on Hertzian waves command instant attention. But when he expounds such remote and multifarious subjects as “free will and determinism,” “Bergson’s philosophy,” “universal arbitration,” “the production and sale of drink,” “the functions of money,” “charity organization” and a score of others, he rouses the suspicions of the wary. “Nobody could possibly be as wise as Daniel Webster looked,” and nobody could possibly be as wise as an authoritative knowledge of these topics implies.

Yet the learned knight has acquitted himself creditably. The essays are random papers, addresses at commencement exercises and the like, as good as such occasions warranted, though hardly, in some cases, worth the dignity of permanent print.

Sir Oliver Lodge, despite his rise to the presidency of Birmingham University, has escaped the commonest of British diseases—snobbery. His eyes are not blinded, by fatty layers of prosperity, to the misery that stalks about the country. He is not elated at the sight of those piles of iron and slag, those miles of furnaces and factories, those leagues of rabbit-hutch cottages, which stretch, northwest of Birmingham, a “Black Country” that even Satan might disown, the heart of manufacturing England, a blasted region where no blade of grass is green and no life can be clean and elevated.

The author is saturated with the feeling and teaching of Ruskin, in whom these blighted acres, and other fair districts which Mammom had despoiled, raised such righteous tempests of wrath. It is refreshing to find in high places the gospel of Ruskin, that half-forgotten prophet of social righteousness, re-stated with conviction and re-applied to fresh problems.

Sir Oliver is grateful to the organized charity workers who “immerse themselves in this mass of misery and incipient or threatening degradation, in hope that they may raise individuals out of it”; but, with more pleasure, he pleads for that statesmanship which will root out the causes of wretchedness. He must be a whole-hearted supporter of Lloyd-George’s schemes of social insurance, old-age pensions, taxation of land values and better education. With tax-payers’ associations he is surely unpopular, for he actually denounces thrift in government and advocates spending more and ever more on public undertakings. He laments that a surplus in the national revenue is made the excuse for lowering taxes, while there are a thousand good objects on which the surplus could be spent. Perhaps that argument is the easier because, like the great majority, he owns not a foot of soil in what is euphemistically styled “his” country. Were he in America he would appear before boards of estimate and the like and plead for more money for schools, playgrounds, hospitals, and health work.

Sometimes his economics are disputable, as when he asserts that “human labor is the ultimate standard of value, and coins might instructively be inscribed in terms of labor.” Even the Marxian Socialists are shy today about defending their prophet’s theory of labor value. But slips like that are inevitable where so wide a range of topics is attacked. Altogether the volume can be recommended to those numerous casual readers who like a little of everything and not much of anything.

THE BURDEN OF POVERTY

By Charles F. Dole. B. W. Huebsch. 124 pp. Price $.50; by mail of The Survey $.55.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND AMERICAN LIFE

By Chauncey B. Brewster. Thomas Whittaker, Inc. 143 pp. Price $.80; by mail of The Survey $.87.

THE MINISTER AND THE BOY

By Allen Hoben. University of Chicago Press. 171 pp. Price $1.00; by mail of The Survey $1.10.

BOY LIFE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT

By George Walter Fiske. Young Men’s Christian Association Press. 310 pp. Price $1.00; by mail of The Survey $1.06.

THAT BOY OF YOURS

By J. S. Kirtley. Geo. H. Doran Co. 256 pp. Price $1.00; by mail of The Survey $1.10.

THE FAMILY

By Charles Franklin Thwing and Carrie F. Thwing. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Co. 258 pp. Price $1.60; by mail of The Survey $1.75.

The distinctive notes in Dr. Charles F. Dole’s The Burden of Poverty are two—the new consciousness of the spiritual nature of man whereby poverty becomes a problem and the spiritual urgency to meet it due to the mighty idealism of religion. Whether conscious of a religious motive or not, or even in conscious reaction from something repellent in some religious concept, all to whom poverty is a problem and who are urged thereby to sacrifice for others are said to be moved at both points by a religious motive.

The extent and causes of poverty are accounted for in largest part by industrial conditions, the economic burdens of land, rent and interest, immigration, drink and war. But to whatever factors the problem is due it can be met only as man becomes more religious, which the author makes equivalent to being more human and more civilized. Socialism rises above its “difficulties”, if at all, only as it becomes so human as to be “a form of the religion of pity and sympathy.” It fails most “in not understanding the spiritual implication of democracy, because a materialistic democracy is impossible.”

Keeping well “this side of socialism” and claiming something better than it, Dr. Dole presents a platform for social progress which he thinks 67 appeals to a larger consensus of judgment and synthesis of action. It summons all to end war, intemperance, tuberculosis, and occupational and vice diseases; to educate for responsibility and efficiency; to redress industrial injury and injustice; to abolish special privileges, double standards and discriminations against sex or class.

Aside from general dependence upon moral and religious forces to bring these things about, the specific means of so doing are suggested under the title, The Control of the Land—A Dream. By the public possession or control of the land and by taxing out of existence all inheritance above $500,000, the way is open for the dream of the endowment of every one at the age of majority with inalienable possession free from tax and rent, the assurance of employment and provision for old age. But all depends, at last as at first, upon our anchor to the “new” question, “Can you convert brains to go in the way of religion?” This is said to be the biggest problem of religion, as it is the newest, for “it is only lately that man has been able even to formulate the true significance of religion in terms at once rational for the intellect and practical for the conduct of the daily life.”

“People will be happy as fast as they learn to face these questions and to say yes to them. Only men of good will really know what they want in this world; can meet and make and control conditions in life; can handle successfully the new and tremendous powers of nature and science. Only they can establish thorough democracy. Only their ideas can preserve the nations from the worst of all poverty—starvation of the soul, from the worst of all tyranny—the fear of man.”

In his Kingdom of God and American Life Bishop Brewster seeks to adjust the Christian ideal and ethic with the earlier idealism and standards of American democracy. He identifies them at the very points at which both are at a crisis—liberty, justice, opportunity, loyalty, law, civic courage, the value of human life and the sanctity of the family. Differentiating between “the kingdom of God” which consists in part of such values, and the church whose witness to these ideals is needed alike by religion and democracy, he denies that Christianity is either individualistic or socialistic. “The social character it is impossible to overestimate, because there the social never gets away from the personal.” From this vantage he repudiates individualism since “Christianity while never individualistic is always personal”; and he disputes socialism since “in nature and purpose that scheme is economic” and “the church is spiritual and personal”, socialism “aims at the economic transformation of environment” and “the church’s aim is the spiritual transformation of the persons that make up society”, “socialism aims at reconstruction through revolution” and “the church at progressive reform through evolution.”

While the author’s readiness to stand for the consequences of democracy leads him to claim that “this diversity in aim and operation does not necessitate antagonism in spirit”, yet his work would have been more positively and practically effective if it had been less of an argumentative special pleading against socialism and more constructively aimed to build up American democratic institutions. Pointing his emphasis upon the essential value of democracy with the most concrete arguments from our industrial and civic life, his reasoning rings true to this fundamental keynote of Christianity all the way through from preface to conclusion.

“If it be true that Christianity in principle means not individualism but solidarity; if Christianity, while not ignoring personality, yet has, as its ideal, personality fulfilled in social relations; then, in a time like this, of transition, from individualistic principles and ideals, the church of Christ has plainly before it a task in the world. It is no time to yield to that old besetting temptation to hold aloof from contact with the world. The sociological trend of thought and life today is a realization of essential characteristics of Christianity and makes rightful demands upon Christians. Certainly the church is to refrain from seeking to allay the restlessness and fever of social discontent by administering any anodynes that superinduce social lethargy. Its plain task is to heal, tone up and invigorate the social system, to quicken and guide those social promptings and aspirations, and make men know assuredly that Democracy means the wider opportunity and the larger obligation with respect to social service. It should be evident beyond question that the church is bringing the spirit of Jesus Christ to the ferment of social discontent and strife. That would require that it be itself thoroughly possessed by that spirit. The problem that immediately confronts the church is not to Christianize socialism, but first to socialize Christians, until their ideal principles shall be real and ruling principles, until they obey the rule of principle and not contentedly rest in sentiment.”

What the boy does for the minister is as well emphasized in Professor Hoben’s suggestive little volume The Minister and the Boy, as what the minister may do for the boy. Basing his whole discussion upon a frank acceptance of the biological order and psychological development of boy life, Professor Hoben in a scholarly, yet very practical way, turns our newest knowledge and experience in dealing with boys to the right and feasible use of the ministers and church workers. Not the least valuable parts of the book are those which account for some of the defects and defaults of the boy, characteristic of certain periods of his development, on grounds which reasonably explain them and suggest ways of counteracting and correcting them. Self-knowledge and control are shown as failing to keep pace with the sense impressions and unorganized experiences of adolescence. The psychological analogy between play and worship is another interesting and original point developed. 68 The instincts rooted in the sense of solidarity are treated as the basis of training for the family and communal relationships and responsibilities.

“Self-centering the experience of the boy short-circuits the religious life.” “Sex instruction should anticipate sex consciousness.” “The normal boy will not deliberately choose to sponge upon the world. He intends to do the fair thing and to amount to something. He dreams of making his life an actual contribution to the welfare and glory of humanity. When it is put before him rightly he will scorn a selfish misappropriation of his life and will enter the crusade for the city that hath foundations whose builder and maker is God.”

These sentences indicate the author’s abiding faith in boyhood and his epigrammatic, suggestive style. At the end of each chapter that deals with the more fundamental principles their most practical applications are given. Whole chapters are devoted to practical suggestions on such topics as The Boy in Village and Country; The Modern City and the Normal Boy; The Ethical Value of Organized Play; The Boy’s Choice of a Vocation; Training for Citizenship; The Church Boys’ Club. References to readily accessible books also add to the value of the volume.

The best supplement to Professor Hoben’s book is the interesting and useful handbook entitled Boy Life and Self-Government, which Professor George Walter Fiske of Oberlin Theological Seminary prepared for the International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, for the use of those in charge of their boys’ departments and other boys’ club workers. With these two small volumes in hand and in use, the work of every church and minister for the boys of their parish and community cannot fail to be more effective.

As a fresh, original and well-balanced study of the boy, inspired by unusual insight and large experience, Kirtley’s That Boy of Yours is valuable for teachers, social workers, and above all for parents, to whom by its title it is addressed.

Thwing’s The Family has been for a generation so exclusively the one book combining for the general reader historical and social data, scholarly and practical purpose, that this revised and enlarged edition renders a public service. Unlike the more technical manuals on the family it takes for granted no special acquaintanceship with the history and literature of the subject, though it is introductory to and interpretative of both. The additional material includes the statistical and bibliographical data appearing since the first edition was published, and a new concluding chapter, significantly bearing the title, The Family Under a Socialized Society.

THE TEACHER’S HEALTH

By Lewis M. Terman . Houghton, Mifflin Co. 136 pp. Price $.60; by mail of The Survey $.66.

“Teaching as a Dangerous Trade” might have been the title of this book. Eighty-four per cent of 159 teachers in Springfield, Mass., testified that in their opinion the teacher of average physical constitution suffers distinct impairment of health within five to ten years after beginning service. Between 1906 and 1909 over a quarter of the elementary teachers of Sweden were absent one year or more on account of illness.

But it is not as a matter of mere personal concern to the profession that the teacher’s health is here considered; rather as a factor in school efficiency. Medical inspection of schools is partial so long as it takes no notice of teachers, for “the health of the child is intricately related to that of its teacher.” There is a subtler way in which weak lungs and neurasthenia among the half million teachers who are molding the intellect and character of twenty million children in this country may affect the development of those children. As the editor’s introduction puts it: “If the teacher’s conscious pedagogical method transmits truth, it is the unconscious influence of his personality that gives it that bias of meaning which the fact will forever after have for the pupil.” And nowadays we are coming to know how much personality is shaped by physical and mental health.

EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF MENTAL DEFECTIVES

By J. E. Wallace Wallin , Ph. D. Warwick and York, Inc., Baltimore. 155 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of The Survey $1.32.

This is one of the educational psychology monographs edited by Guy Montrose Whipple. The book consists of the results of a series of tests made upon the epileptics at Skillman Village, N. J., by the Binet-Simon scale and by some other tests which are designed to supplement the Binet.

The Binet-Simon test is the nearest approach to a scientific and accurate scale for measuring intelligence that has yet been devised. It is now being used extensively in many parts of the world, particularly in the United States. The work of Dr. Wallin with the epileptics at Skillman is of value in several directions, not the least being its value in testing the Binet scale itself, which has been used repeatedly, at intervals of a year, upon the inmates of the Vineland school, with results which show remarkable accuracy.

It will be readily seen that an accurate test of feeble-mindedness which can be applied by a careful and intelligent observer who has not been specially trained in psychology would be of the greatest possible value. Realizing as we do the absolute necessity of segregating, or in some way controlling, the feeble-minded of every class, the question of how to tell who is feeble-minded is one that is continually recurring.

The scale has been tested quite widely both on normal and defective children, the most important test on normals being that of Goddard 69 who tried it on nearly 2,000 public school children.

Dr. Wallin found at Skillman that either the Binet scale was not accurate or else that the conditions surrounding epilepsy make the scale less applicable to that class than to normals or feeble-minded. This observation confirms similar facts disclosed at Vineland and elsewhere in connection with epilepsy and insanity; that is to say, both of these conditions produce eccentricities which the scale does not exactly meet.

While the Binet scale is an extremely useful device and one which will be more used, it is only reasonable to suppose that it will be modified, in the future, as it has been in the past, by Goddard and others. But no matter how carefully modified, it is not claimed to be, and will not be claimed to be, an all-sufficient test on such questions as sterilization, final segregation and other very important things. Physical tests of various kinds will also be used.

Dr. Wallin’s book concludes with a copy of the Binet scale with directions for its use, all of which are very valuable. On the whole the book is a distinct contribution to the literature of the subject and it is to be hoped that the author’s example in testing out large numbers of abnormals of different kinds and then publishing the results will be followed. We know qualitatively a great deal about the feeble-minded and epileptic, but our quantitative knowledge is still far from complete.

PATHFINDERS IN MEDICINE

By Victor Robinson . Medical Review of Reviews. 317 pp. Price $2.50; by mail of The Survey $2.67.

This book contains a series of papers most of which have already appeared in the Medical Review of Reviews , the Medical Record , and other magazines. It is dedicated to Ernst Haeckel. Dr. Abraham Jacobi wrote the preface.

The Pathfinders include famous men whose names are familiar to every one, such as Galen, Paracelsus, Servetus, Paré, Hunter, Jenner and Darwin, and also some who are only vaguely known to most of us. Among these are Aretaeus, Scheele, Laennec, Semmelweiss. We are not told what prompted the selection of these particular Pathfinders, or why such names as Boerhaave, Sydenham, Pasteur and Virchow were omitted, but one cannot demand that such a book be all-inclusive.

Mr. Robinson has lived with the characters of whom he writes until he has formed a vivid picture of the personality of each, a picture he manages to convey to his audience with great success. Naturally it is the earlier Pathfinders who are most interesting to the ordinary reader and the chapter on Galen holds many surprises for those who have been accustomed to think of the medical skill of the ancients very much as we think of Chinese medicine of today. Galen knew that consumption was communicable, and his disquisitions on dietetics and hygiene are almost incredibly modern.

The chapter on Paracelsus is especially vivid and delightful, while the description of Aretaeus, “the forgotten physician” gives us a picture of a man full of insight and sympathy. Of the later chapters the most interesting are the one on the many-sided Hunter and that which tells of the heroic and tragic struggle of Semmelweiss against the blind conservatism of his own profession.

In the course of one chapter Mr. Robinson remarks that “all writing is autobiographical” and that “prejudices ... will become apparent, ... where you least expect.” This is true of his own book. No one can read a chapter without discovering the author’s antipathy to the Christian religion, and the monarchical system of government. This prejudice against what he regards as superstition and sycophancy, leads him into some extreme statements and mars to a certain extent what would otherwise be delightful reading. If Calvin had been nothing more than the man Mr. Robinson describes, he could hardly have held sway over the minds of several generations as he did. Mr. Robinson will also find that the Bretons opposed the French Revolution not from blind devotion to monarchical tyrants, but because it meant the breakdown of a system of local self-government and common lands to which their Celtic natures clung.

CIVICS FOR FOREIGNERS

By Anna A. Plass , Teacher of English to Foreigners. Rochester, N. Y. D. C. Heath & Company. 186 pp. Price $.50; by mail of The Survey $.57.

To meet the demand for a book of simple lessons for foreigners which, while aiding them to learn English, should at the same time give information concerning the principles of our government, has been the aim of the author. A very limited vocabulary has been used in presenting the subject. Topics have been limited for the most part to a single page, so that each subject may be treated in as concise a manner as possible. This also makes the book more adaptable for pupils whose attendance is likely to be irregular. The volume, which is well illustrated, gives the elementary facts about the different city departments and officials, about the state government and state law makers, the courts and the national government. Occasionally realistic and practical lessons are included such as a telephone call for the doctor and a petition for naturalization.

At the close of the book is a vocabulary in Italian, German, Swedish, Polish, French, Greek and Yiddish.

ANNUAL REPORT ENGLISH PRISON COMMISSION

For the year ending March 31, 1912. Wyman & Sons, 32 Abingdon St., S. W., London. Price 8d.

Partly because English prison and crime statistics are better and more centralized than ours the annual reports of the English Prison Commission are always well worth reading. In the year ending March 31, 1912, the proportion of persons committed to prisons in England was the lowest within statistical record, 439.2 per 100,000 of the population of England and Wales. The commitments for serious crimes particularly show a decrease. The bane of the English prison 70 system is still the short sentence for misdemeanants, 81 per cent of all prisoners having been sentenced for one month or less. Over 50 per cent of those committed to prison are sent in default of paying a fine. This is considered by the Prison Commission one of the most urgent social problems demanding the attention of Parliament.

The commission still regrets that the committing magistrates do not take advantage of the chance to classify prisoners when sentencing them. The Borstal Institution (the English Elmira) continues to satisfy; it has now a population of over 400. The Borstal Association, a released prisoner’s aid society for Borstal, has placed 250 out of 270 lads received. Of these about seventy-five out of one hundred cases turn out well. The “Borstal girl” from the girl’s reformatory has proved satisfactory in conduct after prison in twenty-nine out of fifty-four cases.

An interesting feature is the development of a modified Borstal (or reformatory) system in the local prisons for the younger prisoners, just as though in New York state we introduced into the county jails and penitentiaries a modified Elmira system. The problem of payment to prisoners is engaging the commission.

The Preventive Detention Prison on the Isle of Wight had been running but a few months when the report was prepared. Little can be said about it as yet. The idea is not novel, but “advanced.” Following the serving of a sentence for a specific crime, the more professional or habitual criminal may be sentenced to from five to ten years of subsequent preventive detention in a prison with privileges of limited association with other prisoners: in short, a custodial treatment of the criminal who is dangerous to society because of his profession or his nature. Many other interesting features are dealt with in this report of Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise and his colleagues; much that our American prison boards and wardens cannot afford to miss.

ADMISSION TO AMERICAN TRADE UNIONS

By F. Wolfe , Ph.D. Johns Hopkins Press. 181 pp. $1.00 paper, $1.25 cloth; by mail of The Survey $1.08 and $1.33.

SOCIAL PROGRESS IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE

By Frederick A. Ogg . The Macmillan Company. 384 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of The Survey $1.61.

Admission to American Trade Unions is a retrospective study brought up to the present of the methods by which American trade unions control the number and quality of their membership, through their regulations in regard to apprenticeship, competency, admission of women, aliens and Negroes, and the expulsion of members. The conclusions which the writer draws from his study are colorless, but the book presents a wealth of facts, particularly in the footnote references and quotations from primary sources.

Professor Ogg’s review of the movements, which almost within the memory of men now living have transformed the social aspect of Europe, is not profound nor original and does not undertake to interpret these movements. It is, however, a useful reference book of facts, the more so since the author supplements his short accounts of the various movements by bibliographies of the matter covered in each chapter. The subject matter, which is carried practically up-to-date, covers political and industrial changes, the condition of the agricultural population and of the wage-earner, labor organization and politics, and the efforts of governments to improve the condition of the lower classes.

BOOKS RECEIVED IN MARCH

Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. By Hugo Munsterberg. Houghton Mifflin Co. 320 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of The Survey $1.62.

Comrade Yetta. By Albert Edwards. The Macmillan Co. 448 pp. Price $1.35; by mail of The Survey $1.47.

The Moral Education of School Children. By Charles Keen Taylor, M.A. Charles K. Taylor, Publ. 77 pp. Price by mail of The Survey $.75.

The Old Law and the New Order. By George W. Alger. Houghton Mifflin Co. 295 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of The Survey $1.35.

The Economic Utilization of History. By Henry W. Farnum, M.A., R.P.D. Yale University Press. 220 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of The Survey $1.35.

The Children in the Shadow. By Ernest K. Coulter. McBride, Nast & Co. 277 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of The Survey $1.62.

A Catechism of Life. By Alice Mary Buckton. E. P. Dutton & Co. 67 pp. Price $.50; by mail of The Survey $.54.

The Making of Modern England. By Gilbert Slater. Houghton Mifflin Co. 308 pp. Price $2.50; by mail of The Survey $2.64.

Bedrock: Education and Employment, the Foundation of the Republic. By Annie L. Diggs. The Social Center Publishing Co. 70 pp. Price $.25; by mail of The Survey $.30.

Smith and the Church. By Rev. Harry H. Beattys. Frederick A. Stokes. 118 pp. Price $.60; by mail of The Survey $.66.

The Eternal Maiden. By T. Everett Harré. Mitchell Kennerley. 279 pp. Price $1.20; by mail of The Survey $1.28.

A Guide to the Montessori Method. By Ellen Yale Stevens. Frederick A. Stokes. 240 pp. Price $1.00; by mail of The Survey $1.08.

The Upholstered Cage. By Josephine P. Knowles. Hodder and Stoughton. 420 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of The Survey $1.60.

The American Child. By Elizabeth McCracken. Houghton Mifflin Co. 191 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of The Survey $1.35.

Syndicalism and the General Strike. By Arthur D. Lewis. Small, Maynard & Co. 291 pp. Price $2.50; by mail of The Survey $2.70.

The Immigrant Invasion. By Frank Julian Warne, Ph.D. Dodd, Mead & Co. 336 pp. Price $2.50; by mail of The Survey $2.70.

American Syndicalism. The I. W. W. By John Graham Brooks. The Macmillan Co. 264 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of The Survey $1.60.

Swedish Song Games. By Valborg Kastman and Greta Köhler. Ginn and Co. 95 pp. Price $.75; by mail of The Survey $.83.

School Feeding—Its History and Practice at Home and Abroad. By Louise Stevens Bryant. J. B. Lippincott Co. 345 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of The Survey $1.62.

The Case of Oscar Slater. By A. Conan Doyle. Geo. H. Doran Co. 103 pp. Price $.50; by mail of The Survey $.57.

The Nature of Woman. By J. Lionel Taylor. E. P. Dutton & Co. 186 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of The Survey $1.32.

Essays in Taxation. By Edwin Seligman. Macmillan Co. 707 pp. Price $4.00; by mail of The Survey $4.23.

The Social Center. By Edw. J. Ward. D. Appleton & Co. 359 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of The Survey $1.64.

Handbook of Municipal Accounting. By Bureau of Municipal Research. D. Appleton & Co. 318 pp. Price $2.00; by mail of The Survey $2.14.

A New Logic. By Charles Mercier. Open Court Publishing Co. 422 pp. Price $3.00; by mail of The Survey $3.17.

WAGES FIXED BY LAW

Your San Pedro correspondent ^[2] has got his figures on wages wrong and he leaves the expenses of business out of account. The 1910 Census bulletin of manufactures gives the figures thus, stated in thousands of dollars:

This balance is 10¹⁶⁄₂₀ per cent of the value of the product. Out of this interest on capital and wear and tear have to be met. The employees, in wages and salaries, get 21²⁄₂₀ per cent—just about twice what the manufacturers get. If 13 per cent were to be added to wages, as Mr. Deegan proposes, there would be a loss and business would not be done.

He may say charge more for the goods. But he complains of the high cost of living now. To increase it would be an injury—not a benefit.

My advice to all my labor friends would be to reduce the cost of production by making labor more efficient. Avoid strikes, settle differences by arbitration. If existing arbitration tribunals are inadequate, provide better, and remember that the real interests of labor and capital are identical. Labor would be fruitless, without factories and machinery. The men who invent or provide these are entitled to their share.

PLAY CENTERS FOR THE POOR

Henry De Peyster’s article on Play Centers for the Poor in The Survey for March 22 is interesting and illuminating. Evidently he has made a profound study of the question. But with regard to France I should like to add a few words to correct a false impression which Mr. De Peyster surely had no intention of giving.

As he says, the problem is different in France and Germany from that in other countries; but he does not mention (except tacitly by the picture on page 856) the admirable provision made by the Mission Populaire (the McAll Mission) to meet the actual condition.

In all the larger stations of that mission both in Paris and in the provinces (Rouen, Nantes, Lille, etc.) the daily Ecole de Garde (supervised study and play hours) is an important feature. The children leave school at four—their parents reach home from work not much before half past six. Therefore the boys and girls within walking distance hasten to the McAll station. After a light lunch they are turned into the play-ground for an hour on the parallel bars and the other apparatus. At five they are collected in the mission rooms, where their preparation for the next day is supervised by volunteer teachers.

Mr. De Peyster evidently uses the word “religious proselytism” in the French, not the English, sense. The French word “proselyte” is nearly equivalent to the English “convert.” That the Ecoles de Garde of the McAll Mission do have a religious motive goes without saying. About ten minutes of religious instruction are given daily, but absolutely without proselyting intent. Most of the parents of these children are free thinkers or violently opposed to religion, a few are Roman Catholics, but never a word is said which could mar the influence of any religiously disposed parent. As for the others, the widely established fact that more children from the McAll Ecoles de Garde pass their examinations than any others makes even anti-religious parents eager to have their children attend them. For in France the whole future of every child depends upon his school examinations.

THE NEW PUBLICITY

To the Editor :

In a recent book review of a modern novel, the writer speaks of “episodes which violate the reserve that is bred in the bone of the English-speaking peoples.”

It is a serious matter, to my mind, that that reserve is being deliberately violated by a number of well-meaning people at this time in the campaign that is being carried on against certain diseases.

“It is necessary,” these people say, “to speak plainly. Great harm has been wrought by ignorance. The innocence of the child has been its weakness. Under plea of modesty fathers and mothers have been foolish and cowardly,” and so on. You hear and see it everywhere, and lectures are being delivered, to mixed audiences, on things which, the apostle said, it was a shame even to speak of.

Now I believe that the necessary information can, and should be, given to children from twelve to fifteen; but it is my positive belief that it should be done by the parents, or else by the use of carefully prepared printed matter. A short, modestly written pamphlet can tell all that is necessary. It can be placed in the hands of the child with instruction that it should be read and destroyed ; also that the parent will give any further information required. I believe that oral instruction on these matters, to more than one child present at a time , is bad and harmful.

I feel deeply in the matter, for I feel that harm is being done when a strong, fine, racial 72 trait is being violated, in attempting a good work that can be better done, in my opinion, when it is done in harmony with our best traditions.

Attempts at allegory, comparisons with plant life, and so on, are all best left aside. The child should be told what is right and what is wrong, and why. But it should not be told in company with others, and especially not in mixed audiences. The inbred reserve spoken of is too precious a possession to be thrown away, even in a good cause.

Something of the same purport may be said of the social evil now so freely discussed in the press and forming so large a part of the subjects written about in your issue of March 8. “Frankness” and “freedom” are excellent, but some things are too fine to be tarnished by careless use, and modesty is one of them.

Where we are getting to in this new movement to tear away the veil that has screened the family life of America can be seen in some of the new fiction. For instance, in Arnold Bennett’s Carlotta the hectic heroine thinks that truth demands that one should follow the dictates of animal instinct!

The logical result will be that morality, either ethical or religious, will be sent to the waste basket.

WORKMEN’S COMPENSATION

To the Editor :

In the March 8 issue of The Survey there appeared an article by Paul Kennaday, entitled Big Business and Workmen’s Compensation. This article is full of inaccurate statements and should never, in justice to your readers, have been printed.

On page 809, in the first column, it is stated: “Seized upon with alacrity by reformers, fought at first at every step by the casualty insurance companies and employers, ‘elective’ acts are now cherished like a prodigal son,” etc. This statement is unqualifiedly untrue. Employers generally have been notoriously in favor of elective compensation laws. Of course, they have been far from unanimous, and their expert advisers have generally been in favor of compulsory laws, but anyone familiar with the attitude of employers in the movement for compensation can bear witness to the fact that the majority of employers have throughout entertained a preference for elective laws. On the other hand, the casualty insurance companies have not fought such laws, nor have they generally specifically favored them. There has been as much difference of opinion among the insurance men on this question as there has been among all other classes of people. But in general the representatives of the casualty insurance companies have favored any kind of a law which would substitute the liability for compensation in place of the liability for negligence.

Of course, the casualty insurance companies have objected to such elective compensation laws as the Ohio Act of 1911, for the reason that that act gave the state insurance office a monopoly of the compensation insurance. That left the casualty companies to deal with the old negligence liability with all its abuses and consequent unpopularity, while it gave them no opportunity to demonstrate their ability to administer compensation insurance better than the State Office and without the abuses incident to negligence insurance.

The statement on page 809 at the bottom of the first column and the top of the second, that the “club” features of the elective compensation law has a peculiar advantage from the casualty companies’ standpoint is also diametrically the opposite of the truth. What the casualty insurance companies most desire is that the compensation law shall be so framed as to induce all employers, or all large employers, pretty unanimously to adopt one course or the other; that is, en masse to elect the compensation features of the law, or, en masse to reject them. Otherwise the casualty companies have to do business under two different laws, providing for two different kinds of insurance, the consequent of which is to duplicate the work and a large part of the expenses of the insurance companies. They naturally do not want a law which will cause employers to jump back and forth from the compensation features to the negligence features and vice versa, and experiment, but rather one which will induce all to come permanently under the compensation features or to stay out permanently.

On page 809, in the second column, it is stated, referring to casualty companies: “With equal determination they stop, where they can, laws which give the employer no election, but compel him to insure.” That is a purely gratuitous misstatement of the facts. The casualty companies have not—whatever some few exceptional representatives of some companies may have done—tried to stop the enactment of compulsory compensation laws. They have, on the other hand, opposed the enactment of so-called compensation laws which would give a monopoly of the insurance business to political boards. In so doing they have adopted the natural attitude of protecting their own business; and have done no more than would the persons engaged in any other business if it were proposed to transfer their business to politicians.

On page 809 in the same column, it is stated: “Prospective annual profits in enormous amounts are at stake for the casualty insurance companies in this fight.” That statement is a pure figment of the imagination. The writer cannot point out anywhere on this earth where casualty insurance companies have made profits in enormous amounts. What is at stake for the casualty insurance companies is the total value of the machinery and good will of their business, which ill-advised enthusiasts, under the secret guidance of Socialist agitators, are trying to destroy. But more important, the employes of such companies have their bread and butter at stake; it being proposed to transfer their jobs to political appointees and to leave them out in the cold.

73 Lower down in the column it is stated that “casualty insurance companies are to be found advising, wherever workmen’s compensation is under discussion.” As a matter of fact, the casualty insurance companies have been very reluctant about advising except when called upon; but their actuaries have been in constant demand, and naturally should be, since they are about the only persons except the officials of the state insurance departments, who know anything about the business and the subject matter involved. The further statement that “At meetings of bar associations their attorneys have resolutions passed deprecating state insurance” is a gratuitous insult. No attorney for an insurance company would offer a resolution at a meeting of any bar association affecting the interests of his clients without stating that fact; and thereupon the resolution would be considered on its merits and would express the opinions of the members of the bar unaffected by the interests of the casualty insurance companies.

On page 810, in the first column, it is argued that no doubt big business and the insurance companies would be glad to see the pending constitutional amendment defeated. That is a pure assumption. Inasmuch as said amendment goes infinitely farther than authorizing a compensation law, and generally repeals the Bill of Rights in application to the relation of employer and employe, there may be many conservative opinions opposed to its enactment. But big business, the casualty insurance companies and a host of conservative people have been most active in the movement for an amendment permitting the enactment of a compensation law in this state in such form as the judgment of the legislature might decide, without any restrictions in the interests of any party.

On the same page, near the top of the second column, it is objected to the insurance committee’s compensation bill now pending in the Legislature that it leaves the function of fixing rates in the State Insurance Department. Why not! Is the objection to that provision that the Insurance Department, being already constituted and being composed of officials expert in the subject of insurance, will fix rates properly and not use state-administered insurance as a political weapon? Why create a new body to deal with the technical subjects with which the Insurance Department is qualified to deal?

Further down it is stated, sneeringly, that “three constitutional objections to one bill is good measure.” The objections are then stated. Now as a matter of fact three constitutional objections to one bill don’t amount to much unless these objections are valid. All the objections recited in this paragraph have been carefully considered and the overwhelming weight of opinion is that they are not valid.

It is then stated that a certain change in this bill from its earlier form has “in effect, turned the whole rich New York field over to the casualty companies.” And the reason for that conclusion is stated to be that the employers will do nothing until the casualty companies’ agents come to them, and will then do what the casualty insurance agents advise. That is nonsense. When the casualty insurance agents go to the employers under a law such as is proposed in this bill, they will go with a proposition involving an extremely large increase in rates. Employers throughout this state have been aroused over the subject of compensation and have studied the question of insurance sufficiently to turn out en masse against a proposition to give a state office the monopoly of insurance. Does it seem probable that when they are approached by the casualty insurance companies’ agents they will suddenly turn into fools and in effect submit to a monopoly by those companies? On the contrary, they will study the problem of mutual insurance very hard, and there will undoubtedly result many experiments in that line. Large establishments also will study out the problem of carrying their own insurance. It is also probable that a few employers may venture to experiment with state insurance. But the fact is, as the writer of this article knows, that no well informed and substantial employer will have anything to do with state insurance except as a last resource, or unless he is compelled.

Finally it is stated that no spokesman for the casualty insurance companies appears upon the field in New York. That is rather ridiculous. Officially, the two best informed persons upon casualty insurance in this state should be Mr. Hotchkiss, the former, and Mr. Emmet, the present, state insurance commissioner; and they both have spoken for, although not as the representatives of, the casualty companies of New York. At the same time, Frank E. Law, of the Fidelity and Casualty Company, and Edson S. Lott, of the United States Casualty Company, have made many addresses and published a considerable amount of literature on this subject. Naturally, the insurance companies have sought to avoid anything that would cause the false impression that any bill was in their particular interest. They have therefore rather confined themselves to opposing thoroughly bad measures than to advocating anything that they particularly desire or recommend.

The whole animus of this article is clearly betrayed in the opening words of the last paragraph, where the writer says, “while men are deliberately and openly planning the utter rout of the casualty companies....” Who are these men that are deliberately and openly planning the utter rout of the casualty companies? The writer is among them. They are those who seek to destroy private business in all its forms and to substitute state management and control in its place. Their activities in the present campaign have nothing to do with the particular merits or demerits of the compensation measures in question. Their whole attitude is false, in that they do not admit their motives, and besides wantonly misstate facts as to their adversaries.

After all, the discussion of State Funds to Mothers has not left us breathless. Even after the clear statements of two opposing social points of view in The Survey of March 1, and the summing up by Dr. Devine it seems to me that there still remains another point of view—that of the mother.

Speeches in a Mother’s Congress do not always give the right idea of the mother’s point of view. One must make allowance for fervour. A speaker of charm and imagination will be quoted, but the great body of mothers are as calm and collected in thinking on this subject as on any other domestic problem which comes to them for solution. For there is no doubt that the women, and above all, the mothers, will have something to do and say about the solution of this problem.

I belong to the class of mothers who would not usually speak in public except for an accident. The accident was that I discovered a woman trying to do the impossible and found that society seemed organized to ignore her. She was not very good, but she was not bad. No one tried to help her to be better. They said they had been observing her, and that they were not satisfied. She was a widow of thirty-five with eight children under the working age. The conditions under which that woman was struggling were absolutely impossible and I broke the boycott. Since then I have been interested in mothers with minor dependent children.

It seems to me that taking away the children from a mother, is like taking away her life, for the connection is so close and subtle. Many a mother would prefer a quick and sudden death to that slow and living one. It is like giving capital punishment for a trivial offense. Sometimes the offense is unintentional. It may be poverty.

There is a certain temporary relief gained, when children have been entirely dependent on the mother, and she has had no bread to give them. At first, when the relieving officer takes the children and she knows that at night they will be snug and warm and in the morning dressed and fed, there is a great wave of thankfulness and relief. But soon the mother asks herself, “why could not I have warmed and fed and dressed them, since I could have done it for less?” Even the simplest mothers have heard the whisper now. In their desperate loneliness they are gathering, by tens and by thousands, to ask for the custody of their own children.

This social revolution may be like the French revolution, but it is surely not like the burning of witches, unless the witches are the ones that stand by the cradles of neglected childhood.

How carefully Miss Richmond, appealing to our judgment and sound sense, figures out the seemingly fabulous sums that might have been saved to fight tuberculosis and feeble-mindedness, from the sums wasted in soldiers pensions. But why, I ask, is the whole country spell-bound, helpless and hopeless at the prospect of the mounting pension ladder? If we admit that the granting of pensions to disabled soldiers was right, why attack the principle instead of the abuse of the practise? Surely that could be helped. If a thing can be proven to be wrong and illogical by mathematics, as Miss Richmond has proved it to be, then it can be solved by mathematics. There is a leak somewhere.

In the same way, if there are more children with their mothers, after a certain law has been passed, and at the same time more in the institutions, it shows, surely, that the attention of the community has been called to a lot of children unknown before or that someone has blundered in counting them. A new law does not produce a spontaneous crop of children, under the Juvenile Court limit. Where were those children? These are the things that a mother naturally asks. They say that the soldiers are dying out. But unless the risks and dangers and lack of independence of the life deter women in the future, there will always be mothers.

But will there always be poor mothers? Have we not begun a war on poverty?

Why is not the prevention and cure of poverty as wide and noble a field as the cure of tuberculosis? Are we not studying to eliminate it in the same way by destroying its breeding places, by rescuing the child, by no longer considering poverty as “the curse of God?” Poverty and tuberculosis and other dark shapes go hand in hand. Why is not the prevention of needless poverty also a constructive health measure?

And why, if we are to be so very careful and scientific about it, is the question of non-support always confused with that of the death of the wage-earner? The man cannot take his responsibilities with him into the next life, whatever we say, and the poor cannot carry adequate insurance till we copy England or Germany.

Let us have “more individualized, more skillful, more thorough treatment of the widely diversified causes of dependence” by all means. But let us not forget that the fact of bearing and rearing a child in itself creates a certain, if variable, state of dependence for a woman. No amount of learned reasoning can change the fundamental fact that while the child is coming into the world and is young the mother must forfeit a certain amount of her independence to care for the child. What I do not have patience with is the preaching of that good old-fashioned dogma “the mother’s best place is in the home.” Nothing can be more valuable to the state than the mother’s contribution, but the home has no safeguards other than those which the man, with his willing or unwilling hands can give her.

It is the preachers and the social workers, I have thought to myself many times who have waked our sleeping “social conscience.” It may be a good genie that is waked but it wants something to do, and will not be put off with promises.

Wilfred S. Reynolds, executive secretary of the Cook County Board of Visitors during its first year has succeeded Prof. Henry W. Thurston and Dr. Hastings H. Hart as secretary and superintendent of the Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society. A graduate of Earlham College, Indiana, Mr. Reynolds was for six years superintendent of schools and assistant superintendent of the School for Delinquent Boys at Plainfield, Ind. Under Amos W. Butler, he was for four years in charge of the department of the Indiana Board of State Charities for the supervision of dependent and neglected children.

The Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society is devoted to home-finding and the supervision of children in foster homes, the aid and helpful oversight of dependent parents with children, and to the administration of the four institutions conducted by the society in different parts of the state of Illinois. A careful survey of Chicago and of the state at large will soon be undertaken by Mr. Reynolds and his staff to determine anew the specific demands for the society’s work and the scale upon which it can now be undertaken. Its expenditures last year, as reported by the subscriptions investigating committee of the Chicago Association of Commerce, were $62,616.

The death of Samuel Allan Lattimore, Ph.D., LL.D., emeritus professor of chemistry of the University of Rochester, at the age of eighty-five, marks the passing of a notable educator and social worker. Though born in the central West of southern ancestry, he spent most of his professional life in the East. He combined in character the courtesy of the South, the vigor of the West and the conservatism of the East. He was a real aristocrat, the kind that makes a true democrat. As a teacher, and even as a friend, he gave the impression one has in the Alps of distance without remoteness, of aloofness without coldness.

Dr. Lattimore’s reputation as a scientist was such that in the face of bitter political opposition, his report recommending the present source of Rochester’s water supply was accepted. This secured to the citizens an ideal water system. He was one of the organizers of the Western New York Institution for Deaf Mutes, of the Mechanics Institute and of the Reynolds Library, three of the most useful institutions of the city. For several years he was a member of the city Board of Health, of the Monroe County committee of mental hygiene of the State Charities Aid Association, and of the board of visitors for that organization to the state hospital for the insane. He was a pioneer advocate of cremation on the ground of its sanitary value, and his body was one of the first to be reduced to its elements in the crematory just completed by his city.

PROF. SAMUEL A. LATTIMORE

The scholar and the gentleman blended in him so perfectly that we think of him first as a citizen. The community is as much his debtor as the university. He had unusual opportunities to make large sums of money as an expert chemist, but never would lower his professional standards for commercial gain. One of his most conspicuous early services was a course of free public lectures on science given to large audiences of working men for several successive years in Buffalo, Cleveland and Rochester.

Professor Lattimore’s mind was keenly alert to the very end of his career and kept in touch with all of the movements for social welfare. Only a few days before his death he was deeply interested in the article in a recent Survey by Samuel Fels on The Policeman. He suggested that it be reprinted in The Common Good and a copy be sent to every policeman in the city. His wish has been carried out. ^[3] He was a fine type of the new citizen-scholar, with a large and keen sense of the duty which scholarship owes to the community.

Recently the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company elected Lee K. Frankel sixth vice-president. As assistant secretary and manager of the Industrial Department, Dr. Frankel has brought his knowledge of social work and conditions into the industrial insurance field.

76 At the summit of his usefulness Prince A. Morrow has been gathered to his fathers. Worn out by labor for a cause that possessed him mind, body and estate, he was cut down in the glory of what must almost be considered martyrdom. His zeal for his endeavor engulfed him, rendered him oblivious to all minor concerns. He was happy in death because it occurred when the tidal wave that he had started on its onward course was sweeping a mighty current throughout the length and breadth of the land.

Dr. Morrow was born December 19, 1846, and therefore had not reached the allotted threescore and ten years when death claimed him. He was of gentle birth, and his mental equipment and capacity entitled him to work as a peer among intellectual men. His honesty of purpose, strength of character, and mental courage rendered him a fit champion for the cause he finally espoused. At the age of eighteen, he won his academic degree at Princeton College, Ky. He took his professional degree from the Medical Department of the University of New York in 1874.

His activity in professional work soon brought him into prominence as a surgeon, lecturer, professor, and author. He was an indefatigable worker from the first, and a voluminous writer, contributing essays freely to medical periodicals, translating important works from the French; he stood out as an authority on dermatology and syphilology. Along these lines he gained distinction and emolument.

But this goal did not satisfy the cravings of his moral nature. He had in him the sturdy courage and the indomitable will of a reformer. In his late manhood he set about the herculean task of cleansing the moral atmosphere of the community. He opened the door of publicity and let in the light of knowledge upon the slimy and festering course of the venereal diseases in their ravaging march among the ignorant and innocent.

This led to a broadening of the lines of his endeavor and the inclusion of the sex problem in his crusade. More and more he recognized the necessity of imparting correct information upon sex matters to the budding curiosity of youth and of giving honest food to clean young minds, rather than the distorted nourishment they had been wont to receive. His studies, his writings, his teachings, and his special line of practice and hospital work, all had served to fit him peculiarly for his chosen task. The final outcome of it all was the crowning glory of his life, the formation of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, of which he was the life and the soul and which above all else is worthy of record among his achievements.

After months of thought and much counsel and consultation among his friends, who furnished him scant support and at best only lukewarm approval, he finally called a meeting on February 8, 1905, at the New York Academy of Medicine. A handful of men, twenty-five in all—timid, half-hearted associates—gathered around him to discuss the propriety of organizing a society for “the study and prevention of the spread of diseases which have their origin in the social evil.”

A movement of this nature was already under way abroad, notably in France, Belgium, and Germany, but England was nearly silent on the subject and not a ripple of the current had started on this side of the Atlantic. The medical profession of New York was indifferent, if not passively hostile, to the new movement, while the country at large was apathetic. But Dr. Morrow struggled in season and out of season against indifference, opposition, and ridicule. From this small beginning he pushed ahead, until death snatched his tired body from the arena. Yet his accomplishment lives and is his monument—and practically his alone—for he was its life and its spirit.

Today the society in numbers approaches 2,000 and embraces in its membership individuals in every quarter of the globe—Canada, England, Scotland, Mexico, Asia, Africa, New Zealand. Largely from the seed sown by the pioneer society, there have sprung up in the United States over twenty kindred bodies, most of which were helped in organization by the literature of the New York society and the kindly counsel and encouragement of Dr. Morrow. The laity even more than the profession, and notably women, have put their shoulders to the wheel and assisted. The press is no longer timidly hostile, but opens its columns and lends its editorials to spreading the idea which is now slowly sweeping over the land.

Dr. Morrow has been recognized as the general at the head of the advancing army, a recognition which may be epitomized by quoting the words of a resolution passed by the International Congress of Hygiene and Demography at Washington, September 27, 1912:

Be it resolved: That the participants of this section on sex hygiene of the Fifteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, consider it a privilege to make public record of their sense of obligation to Dr. Morrow for his courageous and unflinching attitude in the fact of difficulties that would have discomfited an ordinary man, and of admiration for the achievement that has culminated in the prominent position that education in sex hygiene has commanded in the deliberation of this congress.

“Be it also resolved: That the delegates here assembled join with rare pleasure in the attempt, inadequate though it be, to express to Dr. Morrow the gratitude not only of the American people, but of the world of nations.”

Dr. Morrow’s gracious manner and courtly dignity, the balanced charm of his cultured and deliberate diction, a combination that quite justifies the seeming pretension of his praenomen—these things, and many others, will long be remembered by those who have the honor to believe that they may be classed among the number of his friends.

Prof. Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago was again elected alderman of his ward on April 1. The circumstances of the victory give it unusual significance. All Chicago watched the struggle so closely as almost to forget the aldermanic battles in other wards. The way in which he took up the cudgels shows again Professor Merriam’s high degree of civic courage. For scarcely a man who had served with distinction as an alderman and then as the leader in a mayoralty campaign that attracted the nation’s attention, would have entered an aldermanic fight again with the odds against him. His ward, the boundaries of which were recently changed, no longer includes the university as it did when he was previously elected alderman. It now stretches far to the south, and takes in some industrial sections. Professor Merriam not only had an able opponent but, in making non-partisanship a main issue, he decided to run solely as an independent candidate nominated by petition.

His opponents all ran on party tickets. There was even a candidate under the Progressive Party designation despite Professor Merriam’s prominent identification with that party during the last presidential campaign. The progressives in Chicago tried hard to arrange an agreement between all the parties to abandon party names and leave the field throughout the city clear for nominations solely by petition. When this failed they nominated their own candidates. The candidacy of a “progressive” against Professor Merriam is said by some to have been part of a scheme to beat him.

Professor Merriam has aggressively worked for public rights and welfare and the newer methods of bringing the control of government back to the people. His election is a triumph for this type of public service as distinguished from the “business administration” type which his chief opponent personified.

Karl DE Schweinitz, for nearly two years secretary of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, will shortly become head of the Bureau of Advice and Information of the New York Charity Organization Society. This bureau undertakes to investigate, at request, agencies and institutions accepting donations from private individuals.

Mr. de Schweinitz brings to his new task experience in investigation, publicity and social work. He has been a reporter on both the Philadelphia Public Ledger and Press , and has served in the circulation department of the Curtis Publishing Company. For a year he engaged in publicity work at the University of Pennsylvania.

Olive Crosby has been appointed office secretary of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis. Miss Crosby was formerly secretary of the New York Diet Kitchen Association, and earlier, head of the investigating department of the New York Charity Organization Society.

LEADERS IN THE MONTH’S MAGAZINES

Why Children Work. By Helen M. Todd. McClure’s. The answers of eight hundred of the little workers who were questioned by Miss Todd as factory inspector in Chicago. A little less than half the Chicago children gave their father’s illness or death by industrial accident or disease as the reason. An almost equal number said they liked work better than school, and their reasons, as given by Miss Todd, constitute a pretty serious criticism of our educational system.

Safety by Sanction. By John Anson Ford. Technical World Magazine. Tells of the “safety first” campaign set on foot by R. C. Richards, claim agent of the Chicago and North Western Railroad, which, in less than two years, has resulted in saving the life of one trainman out of every two who under former conditions would have been killed under the cars; saving similarly one out of every three of the trackmen formerly doomed to death in the performance of duty; reducing the accident toll among passengers by 152 more passengers saved from death and almost 5,000 more spared from injury than the year before.

This novel and enlightened effort to reduce claims by preventing accidents has now spread to forty-six railroads operating 60 per cent of the railroad mileage in the United States.

The Fire Insurance Trap. By William B. Ellison. Pearson’s. As the expert chosen by Governor Sulzer to frame a new form of the insurance policy for New York, Mr. Ellison tells of the sixteen “teeth” by which policy-holders can be caught at the present time. These teeth are clauses in the policy by which the companies can escape from their liability.

A University That Runs a State , by Frank Parker Stockbridge, and

What I am Trying To Do , by Adolph O. Eberhardt. Both in the World’s Work . In Wisconsin, the university “writes many of its laws, directs much of its public service, increases its crops, makes better farmers and housekeepers, conducts correspondence schools, and carries a college education to the door of every citizen who wants it.” In Minnesota a governor who writes of his own plans, is trying to keep farmers on their farms, by using a generous state educational fund, with further grants by the Legislature, to make the country school houses centers for social intercourse for recreation and for practical instruction in agriculture and household economics.

Consumers’ Co-operation , by Albert Sonnichsen, and Co-operation in Wisconsin , by Robert A. Campbell. Both in the Review of Reviews . A résumé by the secretary of the co-operative league of the progress of the co-operative movement in Europe and America, supplemented by the intensive study of one state by an official of the State Board of Public Affairs, created last year with instruction, to make a special study of the state experience in this field.

Industrial Peace and War. By Everett P. Wheeler. Atlantic Monthly. A plea for a compulsory arbitral tribunal, which would substitute continual peace for recurrent warfare in the relations of labor and capital. Mr. Wheeler does not believe such a method of settling labor disputes would be impracticable or unsuited to American conditions or that the compulsory powers of such a tribunal should be any more repugnant to our ideas of liberty than is the power of our courts to decide disputes between individuals.

THE FOOL

The Common Good , a civic and social periodical of Rochester, devotes its February issue to a compilation by its editor, Edwin A. Rumball, in collaboration with Catherine Rumball, of the facts in regard to the working girls and women of that city who numbered at the 1900 census about 19,000, or over 31 per cent of all the women of Rochester. The facts are for the most part taken from the last census or from the Federal Report on Women and Child Wage-Earners and other authoritative sources, and are handled so as to show Rochester people just how high up or low down in the scale of cities, Rochester stands in its treatment of its women workers. The report is also issued as an “equal pay” document by the woman suffrage organization.

Among the answers to the question why they quit school which Helen M. Todd put to Chicago factory children are the following from Why Children Work in McClure’s :

“Because you get paid for what you do in a factory.”

“Because it’s easier to work in a factory than ’tis to learn in school.”

“You never understands what they tells you in school, and you can learn right off to do things in a factory.”

“They ain’t always pickin’ on you because you don’t know things in a factory.”

“You can’t never do t’ings right in school.”

“The boss he never hits yer, er slaps yer face, er pulls yer ears, er makes yer stay in at recess.”

“The children don’t holler at ye and call ye a Christ-killer in a factory.”

“They don’t call ye a Dago.”

“They’re good to you at home when you earn money.”

“You can go to the nickel show.”

“Yer folks don’t hit ye so much.”

“You can buy shoes for the baby.”

“You can give your mother yer pay envelope.”

“Our boss he never went to school.”

“School ain’t no good. The Holy Father he can send ye to hell, and the boss he can take away yer job er raise yer pay. The teacher she can’t do nothing.”

Running the Home, by Martha Bensley Bruère in Good Housekeeping , is an argument for the use of public utilities in place of certain old-fashioned forms of “elbow grease,” on the ground not merely of the saving of labor but of expense. Mrs. Bruère’s conclusion is that the city, with its superior facilities for using centralized facilities for heating, lighting, etc., co-operatively, comes out far ahead of the country. In the budgets she studied the percentage of income spent for the “operation of the household—heat, light, repairs, services, etc.”—in the city was only half what it is in the country.

In Parenthood and the Social Conscience, Seth K. Humphrey ( Forum ) recommends the lifting of the burden of the hereditary defective from society by “parenthood laws” which would not force sterilization on defectives but would give them the choice of sterilization or segregation. The much controverted Indiana institutional experience is the basis of Mr. Humphrey’s conclusion that many defectives will accept the former method of “ending their miseries with themselves.”

Following up Burton J. Hendrick’s narrative last month of the Jewish invasion of America, Abraham Cahan, “editor, author, and general counselor of the Jewish East Side of New York,” this month begins in McClure’s the material and spiritual history of David Levinsky, a Russian Jew who became an American millionaire.

79 Frank Barclay Copley in an article in the American Magazine , which receives the commendation of Frederick W. Taylor in an introductory note, thus defines the position of the new science of management toward trade unionism:

“The only way the workers, herded into gangs and treated as machines for grinding out dividends, can defend themselves is through organization. Ordinary unionism, therefore, finds its justification as a war-measure. Scientific management, however, by establishing that community of interest between capital and labor which has so long been obscured by ignorance, creates industrial peace, and the only persons who have reason to oppose it are those who have a personal interest in the continuance of warfare. Under scientific management the workers are not subordinates, but coordinates, and each individual is free to earn, learn, and rise as the Almighty has given him the power. No form of collective bargaining would seem to be called for, because tasks are set and wages fixed, not by arbitrary action, but by knowledge. The only real boss, in fact, is knowledge; and if anyone can speak with knowledge, he will be listened to, and he will have his reward. On the other hand, the tongue of ignorance must be still; and so it follows that to the extent that unionism means the placing of ignorant men in the saddle, or to the extent that it involves high labor costs, to that extent must scientific management always be against it.”

As an indication of those interferences with shop administration which, with the growth of scientific management, the unions will be called upon to abandon, the passage is significant. But progressive labor men will fail to find in it any glimmer of understanding on the part of the scientific managers of the larger democratic safeguards of unionism. Who, for example, is to set the base rates from which the wages of any given line of craftsmen are to be scientifically built up and calculated?

Character (Boston) publishes the following resolutions adopted by W. E. Wroe and Company, a Chicago paper house. They are written in the first person, thus making them apply to the man who runs and reads as well as the man who formulated them:

I will be square, fair, and just towards all my fellow-men, and by fellow-men I mean, not only those I meet in a social way, but my associates and employes in business.

I will keep myself clean and decent, and my desires worthy of a true man.

I will listen to the dictates of my conscience.

I will do my best in everything I undertake, and will undertake nothing unless I can give it the best there is in me.

I will speak only optimistic, uplifting words—nothing which can possibly bring pain to my fellow-men merely to give gratification to my own fancies.

I will remember that life embodies giving as well as taking and that what I receive depends entirely upon what I give.

I will be thankful for life because it gives me a chance to work and accomplish.

I will despise nothing but meanness. I will fear nothing but cowardice.

Courtesy Rochester Common Good.

WORKING AFTER HOURS

A Rochester woman collecting fire wood. This is a regular part of the daily housekeeping of poor families.

The beginning of a homesteading policy for Egypt is thus described in a Consular Report:

“Lord Kitchener laid the foundation stone of an agricultural school in the Egyptian Delta on November 6 and initiated a scheme for the distribution of land which has become available for cultivation through drainage. As an experiment, 610 feddans (or acres) were distributed in five-feddan lots to the landless fellaheen (peasants), the idea being to help the poor fellaheen and at the same time to increase the number of small landholders and to create family homesteads. During the first three years, when they must do work of reclamation, the fellaheen will receive the land practically free, and in the following ten years they will pay a moderate rental, after which the holding becomes theirs for life. Afterward the land descends in the families if the government approves. Alienation is forbidden, except with the consent of the State.”

ST. LOUIS SCHOOL OF PHILANTHROPY

A plan contemplated for over a year to make the St. Louis School of Social Economy a department of Washington University has just been consummated. The university now assumes full direction and control of the school, but the relationship which has always existed between the school and the Russell Sage Foundation remains unchanged.

The staff, consisting of George B. Mangold, associate director, T. W. Clocker, assistant director, and Ora A. Kelly, assistant, has been increased. Charles E. Persons was recently appointed assistant director and immediately entered upon his duties. Mr. Persons is a native of Iowa, a graduate of Cornell, and received his Ph.D. at Harvard University. He has taught at Wellesley and at Princeton. From Princeton he went to Northwestern University. Mr. Persons’ brother, W. Frank Persons, is superintendent of the New York Charity Organization Society. Mr. Persons has courses on public health and immigration and will assist in research Work.

“THE UNAFRAID”

The Whitehaven Tuberculosis Sanatorium has a training school made up for the most part of young men and women who have been cured of tuberculosis, and who thus fit themselves to become workers against the scourge. Under the title The Unafraid, William Warren Keller, former secretary of the Child Labor Committee for western Pennsylvania, and himself a man who, during the past year, has downed an incipient case of tuberculosis, wrote some verses in congratulation of the last graduating class. To quote two stanzas:

SUPERINTENDENT of Industrial School open for engagement May 1st. First class references given as to ability &c. Would accept position, either prison, reformatory or probation work. Address 1100 Survey .

JEWESS, with previous experience as Supt of Vacation Home, desires similar position this summer. New York references. Address 1102 Survey .

TRAINED and experienced woman desires position in Chicago as social worker among young women, or investigator in connection with court work. References. Address 1103 Survey .

YOUNG man (26), University graduate, possessing initiative, judgment, energy and ideals, experienced in business and social work, desires connection with socially minded business or professional man. Salary no object. Address 1104 Survey .

NURSE for social service work. Must speak German. Jewish Aid Society West Side Dispensary, 1012 Maxwell Street, Chicago, Illinois.