The Survey, Volume XXX, No. 3, Apr 19, 1913

THE STRIKE OF THE
JERSEY SILK WORKERS

For seven weeks the 27,000 workers in the silk mills and dye houses of Paterson, N. J., have been on strike for improved conditions and against a proposed change in method that will, they declare, alter the character of the industry.

The strike began with the broad silk weavers as a protest against the introduction of the three and four loom system. They were soon joined by the ribbon weavers and the dye house men, whose demands are for an eight-hour day and a minimum wage of $12 a week. The dye house men have been laboring in two shifts of twelve hours each. Their work is often carried on under unhealthful conditions of dampness, high temperature and poor ventilation.

All the strikers joined the branch of the Industrial Workers of the World which conducted the Lawrence strike. This is one factor which has caused tension in a situation, in which statutes dating back to colonial days have been brought to bear on a modern industrial struggle till a Supreme Court judge denounced the lengths to which the police have gone.

Back of the police incidents and the spreading of the revolutionary doctrines of the Industrial Socialists is a profound economic change involved in the introduction of the four loom system. This is not merely the substitution of machines for skilled men due to invention, but the supplanting of high-grade textile manufacture by low-grade output because of the greater profits in the cheap goods. It is as if a vineyard were giving way to a hay farm—a change which seriously affects the working population of Paterson.

In order to make the situation clear it is necessary to take a brief look at the history of the silk industry in this country. Twenty years or so ago the competition between Pennsylvania and New Jersey for the manufacture of cheap silks was keen, but within a few years the battle was over. Induced, it is said, by real estate companies, the manufacture of cheap silk on a large scale migrated to Pennsylvania. Great factories were built and leased on easy terms, and these were equipped with automatic looms, four of which could be operated by one girl or boy. There the wives and children of the coal miners furnished a cheap labor supply.

Since this migration the best grade of silk has been made in Paterson, and there has been no competition to speak of that the Paterson manufacturers needed to fear. Yet they have been making only moderate profits while the Pennsylvania manufacturers of cheap silk have been making fortunes. Under the system of multiple looms, the business of Pennsylvania, has expanded 97 per cent in the last six years; under the one and two loom systems of Paterson its business has expanded only 22 per cent in the same time. Therefore the Paterson manufacturers propose to compete in the manufacture of cheaper silks and consequently decided to introduce the multiple loom system. To them this is only a natural economic development, and the opposition of the workers they feel is irrational, as opposed to progress. This view is made apparent in a statement issued by the silk manufacturers’ association:

“As regards the three and four loom system, it is applicable only in the case of the very simplest grade of broad silks and as a matter of fact has for a long time been worked successfully and on a very large scale in other localities. Paterson cannot be excluded from this same privilege. No fight against improved machinery has ever been successful.”

The beginning of the change came in one of the big Paterson mills about a year ago and the strike of last spring^[1] was at first against the four loom system. The strike became general, however, and this demand was completely lost sight of before the strike came to an end. Since then nine or ten other mills have installed the four loom system and a score have begun to require the weavers to tend three looms instead of two.

The strikers claim that the new system will cause unemployment, as did the installation of the two loom system together with other improvements in the mechanical equipment of the loom some years ago, and that the logical consequence will be the employment of unskilled women and children in place of the skilled weaver, and a forcing down of the level of wages until the Paterson average of $11.69, as given in the federal report for the year 1908, becomes as low as the Pennsylvania average of $6.56. As the percentage of women employed in Paterson 82mills has increased in the last few years and as the average of wages given out by the manufacturers this year is under $10, there is basis for these fears. Nor do the manufacturers deny these possibilities; they claim that the loss of skill is an inevitable accompaniment of improved processes, and the replacing of men by women and children is only in line with the development in all the textile trades.

Some of the claims of the strikers are thus summarized by the Paterson Evening News:

“The best information obtainable appears to show that the alleged mechanical advantages of the new system have not proved themselves sufficient to offset the additional strain to which the care of three or four looms subjects the weavers; that the premium wages first paid as an inducement to users of the system have been pared down; that at present a day’s work under the system is proportionately less well paid than a day’s work at two looms; and, finally, that the wages of two loom workers have been depressed with the scaling down of the piece-rate paid to the three and four loom workers.”

In spite of the fact that it is only the large manufacturers who propose to install the new system, the strike is general. The multiple looms, which are large and equipped with automatic devices, can only be installed in large mills. By this system cheap silks alone can be made; the smaller mills must use the Jacquard or other small looms fitted to the making of the fancy grades of silk for which Paterson is famous. The small manufacturer, therefore, does not fear the installation of the new system in the large mills; but he does feel strongly that he has a grievance toward the workers in his mills who struck sympathetically for a wrong not their own.

But it is a very real fear that the entire industry will be undermined that has made the workers stand together, regardless of individual grievances.

While the desire to keep up with industrial progress and to realize large profits is the reason for the importing of the four loom system into Paterson; the desire to save their present standard of living and prevent their industry from coming into the hands of women and children like the other textile trades is the reason for the workers’ opposition. Today Pennsylvania and New Jersey present different phases of the industry, and New Jersey has had a higher wage standard; tomorrow with the triumph of the four loom system they may tend to an equalization of conditions.

The outstanding features in the strike now in its seventh week are lack of violence and disorder, the refusal of the employers to meet or confer with the strikers, aggressive repression by the police and the city government and the efforts of citizens to bring about a settlement. Although practically all the workers in the major industry of the city are on strike, there has been little disorderly conduct attributable to the strikers. There have been reports of the breaking of a window by a stone in a house occupied by a boss dyer and at least one attempt was made to damage a house by means of a bomb, but responsibility for these acts has not been fixed.

CITY OFFICIALS ADOPT
REPRESSIVE MEASURES

In striking contrast to the order maintained by the rank and file of the strikers, there have been actions on the part of the city officials that leading newspapers outside of the strike district have not hesitated to characterize as anarchical. Soon after the strike began and it became known that it was to be conducted under the auspices of the I. W. W., the police began to arrest strike leaders and others who addressed meetings of strikers, regardless of whether they had yet been guilty of any illegal act. Several of them were held in jail for a time and then so great was the outcry raised that for a period of two or three weeks these tactics were abandoned.

On Sunday, March 30, however, the police resumed their former tactics. William D. Haywood, the leader of the strike, had announced that he would speak at an open air meeting, and a large crowd gathered to hear him. As Haywood was going to the meeting place to speak he was approached by members of the police force. They told him that the chief of police had issued an order forbidding any out-door meeting. According to all reports, including testimony given by the police authorities themselves, Haywood acquiesced at once and passed the word to the assemblage that the meeting would take place in Haledon, an independent borough just outside the city limits of Paterson. Accordingly, Haywood started to walk down the street in the direction of Haledon and he was followed by the crowd. Just before he reached the city limits, a patrol wagon bore down upon him. Together with Lessig, another strike leader, he was arrested, taken before the Recorder’s Court, charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful assemblage under the English act of 1635. After being held in jail in lieu of $5,000 bail, both were found guilty of unlawful assemblage and were sentenced by the recorder to six months’ imprisonment.

A writ of certiorari was immediately sought by Haywood’s attorneys and a hearing on this appeal was held by Supreme Court Justice Minturn. When the evidence, most of it furnished by the police department, was in, Justice Minturn 83ordered the release of Haywood and Lessig. He was unable to find that there had been any unlawful assemblage. The evidence tended rather to show that Haywood was co-operating with the authorities in an endeavor to carry out their orders. At the time of this resumption of their activity the police began also to arrest pickets. From twenty to one hundred a day were taken to headquarters. After Judge Minturn’s decision, all those held in jail were discharged. Since then, while the arrest of pickets has gone steadily on, Recorder Carroll has refused to hold them.

Throughout the strike to date the manufacturers have consistently refused to meet with a committee of strikers or to discuss terms with them in any way. At one time a delegation of clergymen endeavored to get them to meet a committee of strikers in order to discuss grievances. This suggestion was instantly voted down. Last week, when a public meeting of citizens was held to consider whether or not the strike could be brought to an end, the manufacturers, through their representative, stated their position in just two propositions: First, the employers will refuse to meet any committee of strikers “dominated as they are by the I. W. W.”; second, they will meet any of their individual employes “who are not dominated by the I. W. W.”

All along there has been a lively public interest in the strike. Ministers and public-spirited citizens have at different times endeavored to ascertain the underlying causes and to co-operate in restoring harmonious relations. These efforts reached their most formal stage when last week at the call of the president of the Board of Aldermen a public meeting was held in the high school auditorium on Wednesday evening to which employers, strikers, church organizations, the board of trade, organizations of bankers and professional men, and the general public were invited. Representatives of the strikers explained their grievances, a single representative of the employers stated their position as just quoted, and the ministerial association came forward with a proposal for a legislative investigation. Finally, a committee of the Board of Aldermen proposed in a series of resolutions that a committee of fifteen be appointed to discuss a basis upon which the strike could be settled, the committee to consist of five representatives of the strikers, five representatives of employers and five men to be appointed from the membership of the Board of Aldermen. The resolution was passed by the unanimous vote of an audience two-thirds of which were strikers. The strikers appointed their committee. But the employers, in line with their official policy which has been against any meeting with any body of men even to discuss a settlement, refused to do so.

“A MAN’S
FRIENDS”

“I don’t believe there is a man in the country who will not put himself or some one he loves above the whole nation if he is put to a hard enough test.”

These words, spoken by one of the principal characters, contain the essence of a new play, A Man’s Friends, written by Ernest Poole and recently presented in New York. Without moralizing on the need for a wider social consciousness, Mr. Poole seeks to show the limits of the average man’s circle of human loyalty and how far his loyalty to the whole people’s welfare is inhibited by his devotion to his own “crowd.” The play aims to point out that, however much our attention has been focused on graft in its great anti-social consequences, a larger factor in thwarting social progress is our restricted loyalty to groups which are less than the whole people.

A district attorney fights a political machine which, through bribery, has defeated a new building code. He convicts the bribed alderman but cannot obtain from him any information as to the “men higher up.” At last he discovers that his own son-in-law was the go-between in the matter of the bribe. The intense loyalty of wife to husband is shown by his daughter who says to her father: “Your life and principles are nothing now—promise me you’ll keep Hal out of jail,” and by the wife of the guilty alderman who declares “it is not a question of right and wrong—it’s what I think of Nick.”

The play brings out the loyalty to one’s circle of intimates, shown in the refusal of the convicted alderman to divulge incriminating information; and the loyalty to a political coterie whose watchword is “You might as well be dead as a squealer,” and concerning whom the district attorney says: “It is the unwritten law of your system to perjure yourself to save a friend.” He further remarks to the boss, “You won’t help those not in your crowd—and your crowd is too small, even though you can call a hundred thousand people in New York by their first names.”

One element in the play is the definite human appraisal of just what graft and disloyalty to public welfare involve. It flashes out when the boss after telling how he had given a few dollars to a “down and outer” is silenced by the district attorney’s daughter who points out that he owns the gambling place in which the derelict lost his money. It is again emphasized when the district attorney says to those who appeal for leniency toward the men responsible for the defeat of the building code, “All right let’s be human,” and then refers to the 149 factory girls who lost their lives in a factory fire which 84the building code would have prevented. “People vote,” he says at another time, “with the man who laughs, but the laugh is too expensive.”

How the district attorney shows his own human qualities in the end by saving his son-in-law from prison, but in a way to render important service to the 9,000,000 people of the state, is the climax of the piece.

The play is intended to show how the absorption of the average man in his own affairs and in the interests of his small group of friends is responsible for popular indifference which often makes the conscientious public servant lonely and disheartened. The district attorney, as candidate for governor, has returned from a campaign trip. “There are one million men out for the graft and nine million who don’t care,” he says. His daughter replies: “That does not seem like you, father.” “Well,” he adds, “you ought to have seen them all along the line of my trip; big meetings, cheering, too, plenty of enthusiasm. But the minute I left each town I felt it all suddenly die right out. Every man jack of them back to his business, his job and his friends—the things he really cares about—and I felt as though I had carried on the cheers of each town. Each town throwing it all at my head and shouting ‘Go on, be a hero, save the country—only for God’s sake leave us alone, we have not time, we are busy.’”

BRIEUX’S “DAMAGED
GOODS” PRESENTED

“I didn’t know” bids fair to become an obsolete phrase in connection with the nature of the social evil, if the ripples started by the production of Brieux’s Damaged Goods in New York this spring extend as far as its sponsors intend. The Committee of the Sociological Fund of the Medical Review of Reviews believe that syphilis should no longer be regarded as a mysterious disease, whose ravages are to be shunned but its causes ignored.

Bernard Shaw’s preface to the Brieux play, with its warning against the usual treatment of the subject as taboo and its appeal for publicity and legal assistance in coping with the evil, was read by a clergyman well known for his human contact with every-day social conditions. The drama itself was simply staged and given a sympathetic reading by a strong cast. Almost every bearing of the menace on family and social life is brought out in a way well calculated to meet prejudice due to indifference, ignorance or tradition, and to create a conviction that here is a scourge to be conquered by publicity.

Those who saw the play had come with various mental attitudes. Some were even vaguely questioning whether they had come to see a play or hear a sermon. Not a few of the theatrical critics have dubbed it the latter, but to many parents this very quality made it seem peculiarly profitable for young men who are breaking loose from home life. By some it was even felt that the educational value of the piece would justify its being given a special performance at some holiday season, and that prevention through knowledge would thus be promoted.

NEW YORK CHARITIES
AND THE LAW MAKERS

Convinced that the state charitable and correctional institutions are facing a serious crisis, New York social workers are protesting against certain of the recommendations of Governor Sulzer’s Committee of Inquiry which they fear the Legislature may act upon. This committee, which was appointed by the governor to examine into the administration of the state’s departments in the furtherance of economy, has made recommendations, relative to state charities and corrections, ranging from the repeal of the act establishing the state industrial farm colony for tramps to the refusal of large part of the sums asked for repairs on state institutions. The Prison Farm for Women, Letchworth Village and the State Training School for Boys are among the institutions that would be most seriously affected. The Committee of inquiry also recommended that the State Probation Commission, a non-salaried body, be merged with the Prison Commission.

All told, there are fourteen state hospitals for the insane and sixteen state charitable institutions with a total of 42,000 patients and inmates. The Committee of Inquiry, partly on the alleged ground that the state has little control over the expenditures of these institutions, has made sweeping recommendations for retrenchment on projects to which the state has already committed itself by legislation. Social workers who dispute the findings of the commission point out that it had but a few weeks in which to gain an understanding of the workings and relations of the state institutions to various supervisory and administrative state bodies and that its statements as to excessive cost of housing the inmates are apparently made without a comparison of the situation in other states.

The Committee of Inquiry recommends that the state charitable institutions in some way ought to be consolidated, This, social workers urge, could not be done except by putting together state wards of entirely different types since the only institutions having a capacity of less than 300 are the State Women’s Relief Home, an institution for aged veterans and their wives; the Thomas Indian School; the State School for Blind: the State Hospital for Crippled Children, and Letchworth Village for the Feeble-minded.

For many years the state has been gradually 85building up a group of institutions for the care of the insane and feeble-minded, the epileptic, and delinquent cases requiring reformatory treatment. The insane are increasing at the rate of about one thousand a year. There is an accumulation at the present time of 5,000 patients in excess of the certified capacity of the fourteen state hospitals. To delay appropriations for new state hospitals already started, it is claimed, is only to put off what must be eventually done.

For the feeble-minded and epileptic New York has provided four institutions in the central and western part of the state which care altogether for about 4,000 inmates and one, Letchworth Village in the southeastern part of the state, which as yet has less than 100 inmates. This, when completed, will serve New York city and vicinity where more than half the population of the state centers.

The next largest group of institutions is the reformatories of which there are two for women, one at Bedford and one at Albion; one for girls at Hudson; and two for boys, of which the State Agricultural and Industrial School at Industry is known the country over as a model of its kind. This institution for caring for boys outside the metropolitan district, social Workers urge, should be paralleled without further delay as suggested by the Committee of Inquiry by one in Westchester County for the boys of New York City and its vicinity.

The state has also undertaken to round out its reformatory and penal system by providing a state farm for women over thirty years of age, the age up to which they may be received in reformatories, and the state industrial farm colony for tramps. These institutions are planned to care for offenders who now cause much expense to localities. Both of these institutions were established after long study of the subject by organizations and individuals expert in dealing with dependents and delinquents but the committee recommends the abandonment of the second and further investigation as to the desirability of the first.

After discussing the situation at a meeting held in New York on April 3, a committee consisting of Henry Morgenthau; Homer Folks, secretary of the State Charities Aid Association; John A. Kingsbury, general agent of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor; the Right Rev. N. G. R. McMahon, supervisor of Catholic Charities, and Mrs. John M. Glenn, was appointed to confer with the governor who has given the committee assurance that he is considering the situation as a whole and will not make separate judgments on each institution by itself.

A similar meeting was held in Buffalo. At this delegates were also selected who have interviewed the governor in behalf of the important humanitarian projects undertaken by the state in the last ten years which are now threatened.

SLEEPING IN THE LAVATORY AT BEDFORD

BEDFORD REFORMATORY
NOW FACING A CRISIS

It was not much more than a year ago that, in connection with the founding of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, the New York magistrates began to make extensive use of Bedford Reformatory for women as a means of saving the young prostitute. And yet the reformatory is already facing a crisis through overcrowding.

The Committee on Criminal Courts of the New York Charity Organization Society has appealed to the public to write, urging an appropriation of $700,000 for this institution, to the leaders of the Legislature: James J. Frawley, chairman Finance Committee of the Senate; Alfred E. Smith, speaker of the Assembly; Robert F. Wagner, majority leader of the Senate; Aaron J. Levy, majority leader of the Assembly. This the committee believes to be a conservative and economical estimate of what will be needed to put up new cottages and other buildings to accommodate present inmates, and to provide for reasonable growth in the next few years.

The letter sent out by the committee reads in part as follows:

“Twelve years ago the state authorities established Bedford Reformatory to care for women 86between the ages of sixteen and thirty, to try and save some, at least, of the young girls who were otherwise destined to a life of shame and degradation. What Bedford means to the community, the extraordinary work it is doing and has done is set forth in the enclosed article by Ida M. Tarbell.^[2] That article is a challenge and a call to every man and woman in the state.

“Bedford Reformatory now faces a crisis.”

“Today there are 178 more girls there than the place will hold. They are sleeping on cots in the hallways, in parlors, in the gymnasium, in the lavatories, in the linen room, everywhere they can put a bed. Two girls in a room is the rule instead of the exception, notwithstanding the moral dangers of this.”

“Chief Magistrate McAdoo and Chief Magistrate Kempner and their associates in New York and Brooklyn have been asked not to commit any more girls to the institution and the stream has stopped for a moment. But the magistrates are now at their wits’ ends. What are they to do with first offenders? The young girl who is just embarking on this kind of career—shall they fine her and force her to work all the harder at her unlawful calling to earn the money with which to pay the fine? All are agreed that this is objectionable. Fines neither deter nor reform. Shall they send her then to the work-house to mingle in close confinement with the hardened offender, there to become embittered and to have a prostitute’s life fastened more firmly than ever upon her? They must do this or discharge her to walk the streets again.”

THE BATTLE LINES OF CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION

A majority of the twenty-nine state Legislatures which have been considering child labor laws this winter are still in session, so that many of the most important bills are still pending.

The campaign that is being waged against the most outspoken opposition is on in Pennsylvania, one of the two strongholds of glass manufacturers who employ boys under sixteen at night. With the single exception of West Virginia, where a bill based on the uniform child labor law was defeated this winter, night work for youths under sixteen is no longer allowed in the important glass-producing states. The uniform law was introduced in the present Pennsylvania Legislature by Representative Walnut and referred to the Committee on Labor and Industry. The committee reported it to the House with several amendments. The House rejected all but two of these. Now the uniform law, with the street-trading age limit reduced from twelve years to ten, and the age limit for breaker boys reduced from sixteen to fourteen, has reached its third reading in the House. If its friends can still protect it from the mutilations desired by the glass interests, the telegraph companies, the textile manufacturers and other opponents, Pennsylvania will be in a fair way to protect the 29,170 children employed in manufactories in that state.

The uniform law is also pending in Massachusetts, where it met no opposition in the hearing before the Committee on Social Welfare. Massachusetts has now a ten-hour day and the uniform law would bring her into line with Ohio, New York, Illinois, Mississippi and twelve other states that have the eight-hour day for all under sixteen.

But Massachusetts would lead the country in one respect if another bill that is likewise before the Committee on Social Welfare should pass. This provides for a five-hour day and compulsory school attendance for all workers under sixteen. If this is put into effect it will set a new standard for the Uniform Child Labor Law, which has been drafted by the National Child Labor Committee and endorsed by the American Bar Association. It is based on the best provisions of the best statutes now in force in the several states. Yet the National Child Labor Committee, fearing that two five-hour shifts for certain minors might tend to fasten on industry the ten-hour day for adults, would suggest that Massachusetts go one step further and fix a four-hour day for all under sixteen.

Connecticut, Ohio and Michigan will also advance beyond the standard of the uniform law if bills now pending are enacted. Michigan, it is true, is not trying to reduce the working day below nine hours, but merely to extend it to include canneries and four other occupations hitherto exempt. But Michigan and Ohio propose to raise the general age limit for employment from fourteen to fifteen, while Connecticut is considering sixteen years. Ohio intends also to increase the compulsory school attendance age from fourteen to fifteen for boys and sixteen for girls, and to require that boys of fifteen may not go to work unless they have completed the sixth instead of the fifth grade, the requirement of the present Ohio law and of the uniform law.^[3]

The Ohio bill includes, also, the street trading provisions of the uniform law. Special street trading bills are pending in Iowa, Nebraska, New York and also, we understand, in Michigan and Minnesota. Their outcome is doubtful because the average legislator seems to be blind to the bad results of street trading 87and cheerfully reflects the popular view that these “sturdy, little merchants” are all supporting widowed mothers and headed straight for the White House.

Many states are coming to recognize the needs of children over fourteen. This is evidenced not only by the wide discussion of vocational schools and the bills before the Legislatures of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York and other states, but also by the extension of child labor laws. Thus California, having proved the advantage of the eight-hour day for women and boys under sixteen, is considering the eight-hour limit for all under eighteen. Wisconsin is proposing to enlarge the list of hazardous occupations forbidden under eighteen and to provide for continued revision in the future by the Industrial Commission. The prohibition of night messenger service for those under twenty-one is included in the uniform law, as pending in Pennsylvania and passed in Delaware, but not in Massachusetts and Utah, where it has already been enacted. In Connecticut, a dangerous trades bill is pending and the bill for a general sixteen year limit includes an age restriction of twenty-one years for night messenger service. The same night messenger prohibition was included also in the bills based on the uniform law that went down to defeat this year in Utah, Idaho, Arkansas, Texas and West Virginia. Iowa, the only other state in which a night messenger law has been introduced this year, proposes an eighteen year limit.

Regulation of hours for all under sixteen was proposed in Nevada. In Tennessee, there is a bill now before the House Committee on Labor, providing for an eight-hour day under sixteen instead of the present sixty-hour week. A second measure adds mercantile establishments and the stage to the occupations prohibited to children under fourteen. Still another bill has passed in Tennessee, enlarging the Factory Inspection Department by adding a clerk and two deputy inspectors. The matter of enforcement has not received as wide consideration as it deserved. Industrial commissions are under discussion in many states, notably California and Ohio. In Iowa it is proposed to create within the Labor Department a bureau of women and children. Montana’s educational bill would provide for truant officers to enforce the child labor law. In Wisconsin a bill is pending covering some details of the issuing of employment certificates and in Utah it was proposed to increase the number of inspectors. Most important in this connection is the bill in Missouri to extend the jurisdiction of the Factory Inspection Department over the entire state (it is now confined to cities of 10,000 or more inhabitants) and to abolish the present fee system.

Two of the bills recommended by the New York Factory Investigating Commission and directly affecting child labor are still pending: one to prohibit work in cannery sheds by children under fourteen, and the other to prohibit the manufacture in tenement houses of dolls or dolls’ clothing and articles of food or of children’s or infants’ wearing apparel. Other bills recommended by the commission and already passed and signed standardize the issuing of employment certificates throughout the state; give the commissioner of labor power to inquire into the thoroughness of this work as carried on by local health officers; provide for physical examination in factories of children fourteen to sixteen. This last provision promises to be better than the present Massachusetts law because it permits the cancelling of employment certificates of children whom the examination reveals to be physically unfit for factory employment. Following the recommendation of the commission the present Legislature has also reorganized the Labor Department, established an industrial board, increased the number of inspectors and extended the jurisdiction of the Labor Department to cover the enforcement of the labor law concerning women and children in mercantile establishments in second class cities.

In a few states there is a fair record of progress in the legislation already enacted this year. New Jersey and Indiana have brought their educational requirements and provisions for working certificates up to the standard of the uniform law. Vermont has established a nine-hour day and Rhode Island a ten-hour day. The Vermont law also does away with the twelve year limit in certain occupations and substitutes the provision that

“A child under sixteen years of age, who has not completed the course of study prepared for the elementary schools shall not be employed in work connected with railroading, mining, manufacturing or quarrying, or be employed in a hotel or bowling alley, or in delivering messages, except during vacation and before and after school.”

Along with this the law has an absolute fourteen-year limit in “mill, factory, quarry or workshop, wherein are employed more than ten persons.” In North Carolina a bill was introduced with a fourteen-year age limit and a prohibition of night work, but the age limit was immediately amended back to the old thirteen (twelve for apprentices), the increased appropriation for inspectors was cut out, and only the night work prohibition was passed. The Child Labor Commission in Delaware drafted a bill based on the uniform law, which, in a much mutilated form, was finally passed and signed.

Only a few backward states show no progress whatever. Georgia defeated a child labor bill last summer. Alabama has no legislative session 88until January, 1915. The Florida Legislature has just convened and a bill based on the uniform law will be introduced. No child labor bill was introduced in South Carolina but a compulsory school attendance law was passed by the Legislature, only to be vetoed by the governor. The House passed it again over the governor’s veto, but it failed in the Senate by two votes. In New Hampshire, the only northern state with a general twelve-year age limit, a bill providing for a fourteen-year limit has been unanimously reported to the House and there seems to be a good chance of passing it.

The National Child Labor Committee is watching the situation and helping where it can in these campaigns. It hopes to report many more victories when the legislative season closes. Meanwhile it appeals to the citizens in every state to aid in the enactment and the enforcement of these laws.

ETERNITY AND A PENNY PILL^[4]

There are some things (chocolate, for instance, or tracts, or paper drinking-cups) that can be shot out of a slot at you and hit their mark. You can apply them to their uses at once. It is the same with the facts fired at you through the window of his booth by the railroad information man. Such facts set you on your track or your train at once.

But when people ask for clear directions about the train to proficiency in violin playing, belief in immortality, or understanding of sex, they always miss their train. Sometimes they complain of the officials.

After a course of lectures on sex last year some workers of my acquaintance handed in written questions beginning “What should I say to a young girl who,” etc., and were disappointed when no definite answer was forthcoming. To illustrate the difficulties of an answer let us ask a few parallel questions:

What paint shall I use for a Madonna?

What are the best words to use in a love sonnet?

What is the best book on being a millionaire?

What kind of bread makes you popular and handsome?

What liniment makes one’s sympathies most supple?

People rush to lectures on “sex hygiene,” sometimes for good reasons, sometimes to satisfy morbid curiosity, but often with a pathetic hunger for the bread of life. In the hope of forestalling such disappointments the lecturer should hang up before them a sign reading:

“This lecture will not solve fundamental problems. Seek ye the Lord.”

THE SCHOOL CENTER

Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar: “Thou, O king, sawest and beheld a great image. His head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms were of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, and his feet part of iron and part of clay; and a stone smote the image upon the feet that were of iron and clay and brake them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken in pieces together.”

This image might represent America nearly as well as the empire of “the great king.” In the original democracies of Greece, the freemen met together in the market place to elect from their friends and acquaintances the officers who determined the policy of the state. The weakness of American democracy is that we have not organized this primitive element or demos on which it is supposed to stand.

Politics in our cities have been corrupt, because there have been no meetings of the community to discuss community affairs. The individual has often been reckless in conduct, because he was not acquainted in the section in which he lived and consequently had no social accountability to public opinion. Foreigners have come among us and drifted in and out of the city slum, bearing with them their racial antipathies to each other, and casting no anchor in the locality because at no time have they become a real part of a community. We have had no real city communities or neighborhoods but mere districts of people in no way organized or related to each other. The feet of the image are of miry clay.

In the country sections the situation is little better. In the days of the pioneer the early settlers were drawn together by common dangers and necessities into a brotherhood of the wilderness. They assisted in erecting the cabin of the newcomer. The women had their quiltings and their sewing circles. The whole community met together to marry the lovers and bury the dead. The school house was the common center, where Sabbath service, debate, music school, and “spell down” were held.

These conditions have undergone an almost complete change. The specializing of industry and new machinery have made farmers independent of their neighbors. The community uses of the public school have fallen away.

The last few years have seen a rapid advance in the principles of Democracy through the initiative, referendum and recall, the presidential primaries and other measures; but the fundamental unit is still unorganized. The feet are still of miry clay. To secure the democratic control of the community or district is the greatest problem of our democracy. This result demands that some agora, forum, or neighborhood center shall be restored to the people.

If a neighborhood center is to be created, the facilities which the neighborhood wishes to use must be brought together in a single place. Thus each facility offered will bring patrons, not to itself alone, but to all the others as well, as each department in a department store brings customers to all the others.

A comparatively few years have seen the cities take up as municipal undertakings the public playground, the municipal gymnasium and bath, the branch library, and a few scattered beginnings in the way of municipal camps. While the undertakings have been carried on by the city and maintained by public funds, they have not been really furnished to all the people of the city, as a rule, because they have not been accessible. They have not been placed in communities, they have no definite clientele. They cut across the lines of the existing organizations of the people. The individual has no direct touch with the community that brings him into relationship with them. All of these facilities are at least as much for the children as adults, but they lie off the beaten paths of child travel, and hence secure a minimum rather than a maximum use.

The only public institution that is central to each community is the school. If this can be made the nucleus around which the other institutions can be gathered, it may be possible to create again a modern forum or market place, that will serve the same purpose as did the old. The large undertakings already under way for the improvement of the school itself can not be carried to full success without certain radical improvements in the school equipment. The playground activity demands larger playgrounds. New York is now paying more than a thousand teachers every summer to direct the play in its school playgrounds; but there are very few schools that have an out-door playground fifty feet square. It is not the same thing to play in a school basement that it is to play in the open air. The school basement is always sunless, and the air is not the same as it is in the open. The French requirement for the lighting of school buildings is that there shall be no other building within a distance equal to the height of the school. The gymnastic work, to secure the best results, must be done in the open air, and not in a dusty gymnasium. In London, all the longer exercises are always taken out of doors in pleasant weather. Some foreign cities now require a certain minimum playground space for every child. In Munich this is twenty-five square feet. 90In London it is thirty square feet. This would mean an acre of playground to 1,452 children, not a large amount surely, and much less than should be taken in the smaller cities. Throughout the middle states and the West, now generally a block for all new schools is given. In some cases the usefulness of the ground is being nearly destroyed by placing the school building in the center, but where the building is placed at the side or end, as it should be, this ground becomes available for many school and community uses.

This block should be shaded by trees. It should have grass plots, if they have to be renewed every year, as Jacob Riis says; and running around the outside should be a narrow space for children’s gardens where all the nature work material of the school could be grown. In one corner should be a school menagerie and benches should be placed under the trees.

During the school hours, the school park should belong to the nurses and mothers with baby carriages. From three to ten p. m. every school day, and all through the summer, it should be the playground of the children and the social center of the adults. In the winter it should be flooded for skating.

Each of the new public schools of New York contains a gymnasium, but most of these are on the top floor, and they have to equip another in the basement for the play center. Each of the new public schools of Cincinnati contains a gymnasium and a swimming pool, and they are generally on the ground floor or near it. Most of the new high schools all over the country contain a gymnasium at least and many of them swimming pools as well. Wherever these facilities are furnished, they are generally used by the school during the day and by the public at night. A number of cities are now building municipal gymnasiums and baths also, but the children want to use the gymnasium and swimming pool during the day, the adults want to use them at night, it is not evident that two sets of gymnasiums and two sets of swimming pools are necessary.

Berlin has an interesting solution of this problem. They house the gymnasium in a separate building in the yard. In this way the noise and dust which is incident to exercise is removed from the school, and it is possible to give more freedom to the work. In most cases there is a swimming pool in the basement where the pupils are taught to swim. But the chief advantage of the gymnasium’s being in a separate building is that it is thus more accessible to the general public as a free gymnasium and bath at night.

Our public schools and especially our summer schools are greatly hampered by the lack of library facilities. The school in order to be successful must create a love of reading. It cannot do this without books. At present only a small proportion of the children have access to a library, and this is often so distant that little use is made of it. The reason is simple, the library is a strange place and its methods are unknown. If the child, despite this, manifests his desire to draw out books, he must often first get some one to be his security for their return, and this is not always easy for a child of laboring or foreign parentage. But the school may safely trust the child because he is a member of the school and known and responsible, when it would not be at all safe for the public library to give out a book to him.

Parents often have little time or inclination to go to libraries for books, but depend on their children to provide them with reading. If the library were a separate building in the school yard or a part of the school, it would be no task for the children to take out and return as many books as might be desired in the home. The growing use of the school as a social center makes it increasingly important that the branch libraries should be connected with it.

The theaters of Greece and Rome were public institutions. Many of the best theaters of Europe are subsidized. The dramatic form of representation is the one that is nearest to having the experience itself. The socialized theater might undoubtedly be one of the greatest agencies for good that could come into any community.

In the past the expense of the public theater has been almost prohibitive; but to the credit of Thomas A. Edison be it said, that he has brought the theater to every man’s door. Most of our new schools contain auditoriums, and the state and city departments of public instruction will soon be required by public sentiment to furnish educational moving-picture films to every school in the state. With the addition of the theater the success of the school social center and the organization of community life is assured.

Besides these activities which should be connected directly with the school itself, the school is the best dispenser of much of the social betterment work for children. If each school had a camp in the country, it could make a much wiser selection of children to be sent there than any fresh air agency can do. No one child would be sent out successively by half a dozen different societies to the exclusion of the needy but timid child. Judging from a very limited experience it has seemed to me that the children are not at their best in the fresh air camps. Often away from all their friends and acquaintances they are homesick and feel that this trip and this camp have no connection with anything else in their lives.

Besides these great disadvantages under which the present system works, there are corresponding advantages that are lost to the school. With such a camp, there would be an opportunity for nature study and gardening of a most approved kind. Athletics might be so carried on as to supply many of the deficiencies of the school year, and boy scout patrols might be organized for all the older boys. But, best of all, the children would then learn to meet their teachers on a common footing and the tone of the school would be improved.

This extension of the school would not mean 91for the most part a large increase in expense. Already we are getting the larger playgrounds, the auditoriums, the gymnasiums, and the swimming pools in our new school buildings, but the cities are also building municipal baths and gymnasiums, small playgrounds and public libraries in places that have no relationship to any definite community. It is mostly a question of locating without duplication the facilities that all need in places where they will be accessible to all.

We may well ask ourselves if the school is competent to take these new responsibilities. The answer must be that at present the average school principal is certainly not competent to take charge of these new phases, but that men usually rise soon to new responsibilities or new men appear to take their places. These new relations would bring the school and the home together, would make the school a part of life, would give the pupil a new set of associations with his teachers and with study, and in every way would redound to the good of the school and the community.

MUNICIPAL MUSIC IN NEW YORK

When the sailing list of each trans-Atlantic liner reads like the program of an all-star gala performance, and conductors, managers and husbands also sail, the small number of the cultured rich who maintain music in New York go likewise; but the city is not left empty. Then the Metropolitan assumes a perpetually “morning after” appearance; so, too, Carnegie Hall; and the new piano emporium will serve as a sounding board for band concerts across the way. It is to these band concerts—not only in Bryant Park but in almost every park and pier in the city—that the reader’s attention is called.

The vastness of New York is one of the greatest problems confronting any public spirited enterprise which aims to reach that vague, elusive faction—the people. The problem has been met and fairly solved musically by the three men who are responsible for the invasion by band and orchestra of the city’s parks and piers during the past three years. It is refreshing to meet with a movement which aims toward no tangible education, moral rescue or poor relief, and to find a department of city government frankly idealistic enough to organize a force whose only aim is the presentation of pure beauty. And it is curiously paradoxical that this movement should have found its opportunity in New York. It is, nevertheless, true that New York supports more entirely free summer concerts than any city in the world.

At the beginning of the current municipal administration the park and pier music in its present form had its birth in the constitution of a committee consisting of the commissioner of docks and ferries, the commissioner of parks and a new official designated as the supervisor of municipal concerts in parks and recreation piers. To the latter is due the lion’s share of credit for the ideals, the organization and the practical working of the system. To the commissioners New York owes a debt for their hearty co-operation, and in some cases, acute personal interest in the problems of the undertaking.

Not only has the size of the music loving population been considered in the multiplication of concerts, but the varieties of appreciation and the national tastes of different neighborhoods have been sympathetically studied by Arthur Farwell, the supervisor. The $100,000 annual municipal appropriation is divided between the piers and parks, and provides for a force of about seventy bands and conductors. Extraordinarily interesting is the study of neighborhoods in connection with the make-up of programs. This is especially so among the docks. The long pier at 129th Street, with an orchestra attracts what the directors are pleased to designate as the “high-brow” crowd. The call there is for the best in operatic and symphonic music—two and three movements of symphonies are often given. Selections from Italian opera flourish at East 112th Street, and at East 3d Street, all sorts of Jewish religious music is featured. The only crowd which has given any trouble assembles at West 50th Street, and the largest of the pier audiences is found at East 34th Street. Probably the most generally representative gathering is in the Mall in Central Park, where seven concerts a week are given in summer.

In thus cursorily reviewing the facts of the condition of municipal music in New York, only the smaller part of the situation is discussed. The movement, under its present impetus, is new, and to a large number of people, unknown. Although it is beyond the scope of the present article to consider, in any detail, the ethical aspect of the situation, it is, nevertheless, appropriate, in view of the comparative untriedness of the idea, to answer a few questions which are constantly brought up by those who are interested in the conditions. Even so, it seems that the time has come when the movement may fairly be said to have passed the experimental stage, if success may be measured by popular approval.

It merely remains to count the numbers in attendance. And here we find the answer to the most frequent query as to whether there is sufficient popular demand to warrant all this effort. The question has been submitted to a practical referendum. Do the people want it? Although no formal count of the audiences has been made it has been estimated that they ranged during the summer of 1912 from 5,000 to 15,000, in the various localities. In Central Park, every seat in the Mall and on the terrace was filled by 92eight o’clock, and stragglers wandered about the outskirts or stood packed between the benches all the evening. Every spot within hearing was filled, and it was with some difficulty that aisles and passages were kept clear. Nor is this audience a casual one. Any number of habitues are noticeable, night after night, in the same seats—jealous of their places—and night after night, the same tired mothers are there, with the same baby carriages. And way off, along the driveways, or here and there in a street near the docks, a policeman, a laborer, a little street urchin, may sometimes be seen to stop, and, “lifting his head in the stillness,” listen—and pass on.

This attention is, with few exceptions, so marked, that it, of itself, answers another question: Isn’t all this stuff way above the heads of the people? Again, the size of the audiences furnishes the most convincing answer. Theoretically, of course, the best, being the most human, is above no one’s head. But even practically, no genuine heterogeneous crowd of “street-bred people” trails from the dark places on a hot night—carrying or wheeling babies, with small children tugging at the skirts or clamoring to be carried—to hear such things as are above its head.

The aim of the movement is distinctly not educational in the instructive sense, nevertheless, the popular interest in the programs has been taken into consideration by Mr. Farwell in his brief and readable program notes. These give simple, important facts relating to composers and compositions, and do not attempt any detailed analyzation such as is familiar to the average concert goer. That these find a place, would seem to be proved by the knots of people who gather, program in hand, under the lights.

Underlying the entire discussion of this, or any purely artistic movement in this country, there is often the question: What’s the use? Be the reason what it may—personal gratification, civic pride, or any other cause—it is almost safe to say that no citizen grudges New York its parks, its buildings, or its Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why, then, its public music, which gives innocent pleasure, rest, perhaps inspiration to thousands? I do not think that this is grudged to the people. Its neglect is simply a matter of ignorance, rather than indifference, on the part of many men who regularly pay their opera and symphony subscriptions, and who have watched with interest the efforts of several organizations to bring the price of concert tickets down to a low figure. But this philanthropic effort does not strike at the root of the matter. Ideally, music should not have to be offered to the people as a commodity, nor as a charity, nor, primarily, as an education. It should stand, rather, as a temple, to which they may come gladly and freely, and from which they may go full hearted, carrying its best with them.

And this has been accomplished in the piers and parks in the last three years. But the winter contrast is striking. Fed up all summer, it seems hardly fair that men should be starved all winter. The daily papers printed, during September, 1912, a number of letters, asking why these concerts could not be continued through the winter months. There is but one solution of the problem—the municipal orchestra—and in this connection I cannot do better than quote a letter, written by Mr. Farwell to the New York Times, in response to the various suggestions and inquiries:

“The Central Park concerts have shown once for all that the greatest in music appeals directly and powerfully to the people when it is given to them under the right conditions. This is one of the mysteries of music—its power to short circuit an intellectual by a spiritual process. To wait until some hypothetical time in the future for the high gift of music to be given to the people is to be both dilatory and blind. The time for national initiative is at hand. What the people of New York really need is a permanent municipal symphony orchestra.”

Popular response to good music is no longer an open question. The people have answered it conclusively, and popular demand has become a live issue.

THE HOUSING PROBLEM AS IT AFFECTS GIRLS

In a factory town, at the lunch hour, have you ever consciously watched the girls and women thronging down the steps and filling the streets surrounding the workshop? Have you listened to their noisy laughter and scraps of conversation and tried to understand their meaning? In 1910, when the last Census of Manufactures was taken, there were over 1,500,000 of these girls and women—factory workers in the United States.

In a large city at nightfall, when the lamps are lighted, have you ever observed the streams of girls flowing into the streets from the offices and great department stores? Again at night, have you seen the girls, waiting at the entrances of tenement houses or on the street corners for their “gentleman friends” who are to emancipate them for a few hours from their cramped and dingy environment? And have you asked yourself where and how do these girls live?

During the last few years we have heard so much about the discontent of the labor classes, the “restlessness of the present age,” that the phrases fall upon unheeding ears. But it takes no Socialist to understand that, if a family man’s expenses are $900 a year, and that working to the best of his ability he can earn only $700 to $800, and that if it costs a girl $8 a week to live, and she cannot earn that much, there must be discontent. It is time for the community to regulate such conditions.

The question of wages is so closely allied to the question of housing that a study of the latter involves some knowledge of the former. Cost of living and standard of living must be approached from a fact basis. Studies by Robert Chapin, Scott Nearing and the commission appointed by Congress, indicate that a man, his 93wife and three children under fourteen, cannot live and maintain efficiency under $900 a year on the Island of Manhattan. This is not excessive for Boston, Buffalo and Chicago. It is low for Pittsburgh, a little high for Philadelphia and Baltimore but a fair average for the great cities east of the Mississippi and north of Virginia.

Investigations prove that there is no great wage variation in different sections of the country. In the West wages run slightly higher than in the East, and in the larger cities than in the smaller towns. From a study of 1,391 New York girls working in department stores, the average earnings were reported as $4.69 a week during the first year and $5.28 the second. They increased in ten years, to $9.81, during which period many fall out of the ranks. Buyers and expert saleswomen remain. Their average earnings mount up to $13.33. In factories the average earnings of 3,421 girls showed $4.62 a week for the first year and $5.34 for the second year. After ten years’ experience $8.48 was reached.

The majority of girls at work live at home and, in many cases, have to a certain extent the protection of their family. But an ever-increasing number of girls are entering the towns and cities, quite alone and friendless, to earn their way. These girls either keep house, live in families, in boarding and lodging houses or in the organized boarding house.

The girl who lives at home usually gives all her earnings to her parents—over 84 per cent working in shops, and 88 per cent in factories in New York city, and a similar number in Chicago and St. Louis. The parents rely upon their daughters for an exact amount of income, so that these girls are in no sense “pin money workers.” The girl at home in New York city usually lives in a three to five-room flat in a tenement house, for which her father pays from $10 to $35 a month; and into these cramped quarters, one, two or more boarders are frequently taken.

In New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Minneapolis and St. Paul, it has been estimated that about 65,000 girls, exclusive of stenographers, office girls, nurses and teachers, are without homes, and entirely dependent upon themselves for support. Girls with a low standard of living can live more cheaply by keeping house than in any other manner. This means that several girls may join together and rent a two or three room flat. After their daily work of eight to twelve hours in factory, shop or office, is over, they have the housework to do—cleaning, cooking, washing and sewing. A girl keeping house or living in lodgings may save on food. She may go without breakfast or lunch, or have bread and coffee for breakfast, bread for lunch, and bread and soup or meat for dinner. She may spend part of her evenings making clothes, the material for which has been bought with money saved from food. “Oh, my, where would we get our clothes, if we bought meat every day?” asked one girl. How long do these girls remain economically efficient?

Fortunate is the girl who can find a home with some respectable tenement house family. Here she frequently underpays. Anna Friedman earns $7 a week as cashier; she lives with Mrs. McCoy in a $27 a month five-room flat. Anna pays $3 a week for her accommodation, but considers herself entirely self-supporting, as Mrs. McCoy’s husband is absent part of the time, and Anna’s companionship is of some value. She therefore has a margin of $4 for clothes, laundry, amusements, sickness and incidentals, and is well off. Girls living in this way usually associate with the family, using all rooms in common.

The most dangerous way in which a girl can live is in a lodging, or as they are called “a furnished-room house.” Investigations of forty-three boarding and lodging houses in one city showed that five were known to be houses where fast women lived. “Not only were good and bad houses on the same block, but good and bad people were living in the same house.”

Freda Lippeg earned $3 a week, and paid $1.50 for her room; her food, which she cooked in her room, cost her $1.46. Seeing how easy it is for them to get plenty to eat, pretty clothes to wear, and to have “good times,” what temptations are placed in the way of such girls living in houses with immoral women!

While a landlady may prove to be a girl’s best friend, giving her advice, trusting her when she is unable to pay, even lending her money, in the majority of cases the girl has no supervision at all. With the exception of houses in Philadelphia, where the wage earner’s standard of respectability demands a sitting room, few houses can afford to have one. As a lodging house is now conducted, the landlady’s net profits, are usually free rent of her room and $150 a year. As the parlor is the best paying room, the requirement of its use for lodgers would mean a readjustment of rents, either of house or rooms or both. So the girls receive their “gentlemen friends” in their bed rooms.

For the young girl in a strange city, earning moderate wages, no manner of life is so capable of approaching that of the home as the organized boarding house. Scattered throughout the United States are a number of these houses, but the supply can in no way approach the demand. In many cases they are too expensive for the poorer girl to afford. Few of these houses aim to be self-supporting, which fact also deters many self-respecting girls. The girl rightfully wishes to be a customer at the boarding house, and not an object of charity. The rules in some of the houses are stringent; sometimes a closing hour is enforced, and girls returning later may be locked out. Nearly all have an age and a wage limit. But they all have a drawing room which is usually furnished with a piano, books and magazines. Here girls may receive their friends, and have the companionship of other girls. Often warm friendships are formed.

The welfare of the house depends upon the “housemother,” whose opportunities and responsibilities are unbounded. To be able to keep a clean, well ordered, full house; to supply an ample amount of nourishing food; to receive 94enough board money from the girls to cover all expenses without dunning them is no easy matter. But in addition to this to be sympathetic without being partial or sentimental; to be able to care for the tired and sick; to be patient and firm with the hysterical; to understand and direct youth, gayety and extravagance; and to help the girls who are in danger of losing their “woman’s heritage,” a woman must give the best that is in her. The Eleanor Clubs in Chicago; the Ladies’ Christian Union Houses, the Chelsea House Association and the Virginia in New York; and the Girl’s Friendly Society Lodges in New York, Providence and Louisville are helping to solve the housing problem for girls. But why have we not hundreds, instead of tens of these houses? Can we not see the relationship between unsanitary, overcrowded homes, the loneliness and often vicious environment of many lodging houses, and human waste and immorality?

“If, because of our privileges, because of our warm, comfortable clean homes, we can not say to these girls ‘My sister come home,’ surely it rests upon us to do it in some community way. And if we can not get the housing of girls taken up as a community duty, then all the more must we struggle by private enterprise to find out the way. We must say there shall be no town throughout the length and breadth of our land where the girl can not find safe shelter, a place which if her need is great, she may call home.”

JERSEY HOUSING ASSOCIATION FORMED

One hundred and seventy-four delegates attended the first state housing conference and participated in the organization of the New Jersey State Housing Association, in the City Hall, Newark, last month. The conference and the formal organization of the association had its inception at the National Housing Conference in Philadelphia in December, 1912, when William L. Kinkead of Paterson and Captain Charles J. Allen, secretary of the New Jersey Tenement House Department, gathered the New Jersey delegates and took the preliminary steps which led to the recent action.

Among the speakers were John A. Campbell, president of the State Board of Tenement House Supervision; former Governor Franklin Murphy, James Ford of Harvard University and his brother George B. Ford of Columbia University, who had just completed an exhaustive survey of Newark, for the City Plan Commission; Judge Harry V. Osborne, of the Essex County Court of Common Pleas; Richard Stevens, Miles W. Beemer and others.

The dominant note in the conference was the proposed amendment to the present Tenement House Law of New Jersey which Professor George B. Ford referred to as “the best law of its kind in America when enacted in 1901 and not far behind the best laws of its kind at this time.” The delegates were agreed that the present law should be amended to include two family houses, many of which it was agreed are in worse condition than the tenement houses.

Another proposed amendment which practically all the delegates favored was to require that all tenement houses three stories high be equipped with fire escapes. The law at present reads that outside iron fire escapes be provided on all non-fireproof tenement homes more than three stories in height. It was stated that the enactment of the proposed amendments would necessitate a considerable increase in the staff of the Tenement House Department and the delegates pledged themselves to use every effort to secure a larger appropriation for additional inspectors and clerks.

In his address Col. Franklin J. Murphy, Jr., called attention to the fact that the city of New York, with 104,000 tenement houses, spends $800,000 annually for the tenement house department, or $7.69 per house per year, while in the last fiscal year New Jersey allowed $51,000 for the tenement department, with 71,000 houses, or seventy-one cents per house per year.

The purposes of the association as set forth in the constitution adopted by the conference are as follows:

1. To improve housing conditions in every practical way.

2. To bring to the attention of each community the importance of right housing conditions and the consequence of bad conditions.

3. To study in various cities and towns the causes of congestion of population and bad housing conditions and the methods by which such conditions may best be remedied.

4. To aid all local housing committees by advice and direction and to encourage the formation of such committees where they do not at present exist.

5. To act as a clearing house of information for such agencies and committees and to furnish advice and suggestions to those interested in housing reform and generally to promote popular interest in the subject.

6. To aid in the enactment and enforcement of laws that will

a—Encourage the erection of proper types of dwellings;

b—Secure their proper maintenance and management;

c—Prevent the erection of unfit buildings;

d—Bring about a reasonable and practical improvement of the older buildings;

e—Secure reasonable, scientific and economical building laws.

7. To aid in defending such laws when enacted and in correcting and amending them from time to time to suit changing conditions.

IOWA’S REMOVAL LAW

Iowa claims to have in her “removal law” the best recall of all. This law makes it the duty of the attorney general, or, if he fails, of the governor or any six citizens, to take steps in the courts for the summary removal of any officer of a town, city or county who neglects to enforce any law.

THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW SCIENCE

If a man about town should drop into the Harvard psychological laboratory and see an operator in rough clothes slowly turning a small crank and calling off disconnected letters of the alphabet while a changing panorama of squares and digits passed by beneath a glass plate, he might think that this was the university’s day off and that here was a new game for the amusement of the employes. But if he should ask “What’s the ante?” and want to sit in, he would soon discover his mistake. He would learn that he was looking at one of the few experiments yet contrived for picking the right man for the right job. He might even be told that this was one of the wee beginnings of a new science which, by systematically placing the psychological experiment at the service of education and industry, may some day prevent the tragic waste of misfit starts in life and go far toward solving the problem of vocational guidance for the schools. The observer would probably be warned, however, against construing what he saw as any endorsement of the social desirability of guiding children into this vocation or that.

The device of the changing panorama is designed to test a man’s fitness to be a motorman on an electric street car. Worked out under the direction of Prof. Hugo Munsterberg,^[5] it is calculated to discover powers of attention, discrimination and adjustment with respect to rapidly moving objects, some going at different rates of speed parallel to the line of vision, others crossing it from side to side. While Professor Munsterberg undertook to transplant the activity of the motorman into laboratory processes, he did not try to reproduce a miniature of the exact conditions under which the motorman works. As the crank is turned, a series of cards slips by under a glass plate, each card having two heavy lines down its center to represent a street car track. Along the sides of this track, between it and the curbstone at the edge of the card, are scattered various digits which have arbitrarily fixed movements, like the pieces on a chess board, though not so complex. The job of the person being tested is to pick out, as the cards slip by, the precise points on the track which are threatened by the moveable digits in the street. Some of these numbers represent pedestrians, some horses and some automobiles.

Tried motormen, says Professor Munsterberg, agree that they really pass through this experiment with the feeling they have on the car. Though the test is not regarded as yet perfected, its results are thought to be fairly satisfactory when compared with actual efficiency in service. Efficiency, in this connection, means chiefly ability to avoid accidents. Some electric railroad companies have as many as 50,000 accident indemnity cases per year which involve an expense amounting in some instances to 13 per cent of the annual gross earnings. Professor Munsterberg believes that it may be quite advantageous later on to subject applicants for the position of motorman to tests based on the principle involved in the one here described. Even in this inadequate form, he thinks, the test would be sufficient to exclude perhaps one-fourth of those who are nowadays accepted for service.

In a public address recently Leonard P. Ayres, director of the Division of Education of the Russell Sage Foundation, brought together all the psychological tests in vocational guidance which, so far as he has been able to discover, are being used in any completed form. Besides the simpler tests for vision, hearing and color discrimination to which pilots, ship officers and railroad employes are usually subjected, there are only three, he said, which have for their object the more difficult task of selecting from among all the applicants those best fitted to perform the work. One of these is Professor Munsterberg’s test for motormen.

Another is a test used in a bicycle ball factory, where girls inspect the small polished steel balls for flaws by rolling them over and over on one hand with the fingers of the other and examining them under a strong light. S. E. Thompson, the employer, soon recognized that the quality most necessary in the girls, besides endurance and industry, was a quick power of perception accompanied by quick responsive action. He therefore subjected his girls to the laboratory test which measures in thousandths of a second the time needed to react on an impression with the quickest possible movement. The final outcome was that thirty-five girls did the work formerly done by 120; the accuracy of the work was increased by 66 per cent; the wages of the girls were doubled; the working day decreased from 10½ to 8½ hours; and the profits of the factory were increased.

The third example which Mr. Ayres found of the application of psychological tests to the selection of employes in industry is a series of tests 96for telephone operators. These also were conducted by Professor Munsterberg at Harvard. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company employs 23,000 operators. Applicants for positions are given a preliminary training of three months in the company’s schools. During this time they receive salaries. So many eventually prove unfitted for the work that more than a third leave within six months. Not only does this involve financial loss to the company but it is a heavy handicap to young girls who are trying to fit successfully into the industrial life of the day.

The object of the tests was to develop methods whereby the unfit girls could be eliminated before instead of after entering the service. The girls were examined with reference to memory, attention, general intelligence, space perception, rapidity of movement, accuracy of movement, and association. The results showed in general that those who came out best in the tests were most efficient in practical service, while those who stood at the foot of the list failed later and left the company’s employ.

“It seems fair to conclude,” says Mr. Ayres, “that when such tests are perfected, short examinations of a few minutes each will prevent thousands of applicants from wasting months of study and training in preparing for a vocation in which they cannot succeed.”

While these three tests have been used only on actual applicants for positions, a fourth test has been applied to beginning students in stenography and typewriting to determine which ones possess the abilities likely to bring success. This has been worked out under the direction of Prof. James E. Lough of New York University and consists chiefly of putting the subject through slight movements with a view to measuring his ability in habit formation.

In addition to actual tests Mr. Ayres found that experimentation is going on with regard to other occupations. Munsterberg is experimenting on tests for marine officers. Ricker of Harvard has constructed apparatus for testing chauffeurs. Whipple of Cornell has done some work with tests for motormen. Seashore of Iowa has published a careful study of tests of the ability of a singer. So far as is known, no work in this field is being done in Europe.

By the extension and amplification of such means as these Professor Munsterberg deems it not at all unlikely that we may some day have a real science of vocational guidance. That there is need for a far more adequate way of linking up young people to their work in life he has no doubt. “Society relies instinctively,” he says, “on the hope that the natural wishes and interests will push every one to the place for which his dispositions, talents and psychophysical gifts prepare him.” But this confidence he regards as unfounded. To quote further:

“In the first place, young people know very little about themselves and their abilities. When the day comes on which they discover their real strong points and their weaknesses, it is often too late. They have usually been drawn into the current of a particular vocation, and have given too much energy to the preparation for a specific achievement to change the whole life-plan once more. The entire scheme of education gives to the individual little chance to find himself. A mere interest for one or another subject is influenced by many accidental circumstances, by the personality of the teacher or the methods of instruction, by suggestions of the surroundings and by home traditions, and accordingly even such a preference gives rather a slight final indication of the individual qualities.”

On the other hand, Professor Munsterberg recognizes that a valuable start toward enabling young people to make wiser selection of their work has been made by the agencies for vocational guidance already existing in Boston and elsewhere. But he says that most counselors engaged in studying the qualities of boys and girls about to enter industry seem to “feel instinctively that the core of the whole matter lies in the psychological examination,” and that for this they must wait until the laboratories can furnish them with really reliable means and schemes. They may then, he thinks, become the appropriate agencies for applying the methods of psychology. He instances the long list of questions which the late Professor Parsons, usually referred to as the father of vocational guidance, employed with the idea of finding out something definite about the mental traits of young people. Replies to questions of this kind says Professor Munsterberg,

“can be of psychological value only when the questioner knows beforehand the mind of the youth, and can accordingly judge with what degree of understanding, sincerity, and ability the circular blanks have been filled out. But as the questions are put for the very purpose of revealing the personality, the entire effort tends to move in a circle.”

Of course Professor Munsterberg does not undertake to pass judgment on the social desirability of vocational guidance of any sort. That, he declares, is not the business of the psychologist. His concern is with means solely, not with ends. If the laboratory develops a way of telling who are fit for stenography and who are not, that does not mean that all the fit should be urged to become stenographers. The vocation may be overcrowded. Again, if a test be devised for discovering what qualities are essential to the successful operative in a particular industry, it does not follow that all who want to enter that industry and have the needed qualities should be advised to do so. Conditions as to health, wages, hours, and a score of other things may suggest that another trade ought to be chosen. So that vocational guidance, if it shall ever be a closed and perfected system, will yet demand the supplementary services of the labor investigator, the sanitary expert, the industrial technician and whoever else can contribute to any phase of the problem of why this calling should be followed instead of that.

The past winter has been perhaps the stormiest season which the incipient movement for vocational education has had to weather in this country. Before state legislatures and national Congress the battle has been fought. In Washington, D. C. the Page and Lever bills granting federal aid to industrial education in the states inflicted mutual slaughter on each other and died in conference. In Illinois a fight has waged over two measures, one providing for the “dual” system of administration and the other for the “unit,” and the probability is that neither will pass at this session.

But in spite of these casualties the war has not been without its fruits. Indiana enacted practically without opposition what is perhaps the most comprehensive statute on this subject yet passed. The Indiana Commission on Industrial and Agricultural Education, appointed in 1911, published during the closing days of 1912 a vigorous report on the whole subject of vocational training for youth. The reasons why boys and girls need such training were put by the commission as follows:

“The larger part of the boys and girls leave school before the completion of the elementary course, unprepared in anything which will aid them in their immediate problem of earning a living with their hands. From statistics available in other states it is safe to estimate that there are fully 25,000 boys and girls in this state between fourteen and sixteen who have not secured adequate preparation for life work in the schools and who are now working in “dead end” or “blind alley” jobs, or in other words, jobs which hold no promise of future competence or advancement. The investigations in Massachusetts and New York city show that not more than one out of five of the pupils leaving school at fourteen do so because it is necessary to help make a living. The conditions are doubtless even better in Indiana. The remainder, four out of five, leave school for a variety of reasons, chief among which is the feeling among pupils and parents that the schools do not offer the kind of instruction which they need for the work they expect to do and which would justify them in foregoing wage earning for a time in order to get it.”

The commission found no organized effort in Indiana to put pupils in touch with the opportunities for life work. The pupils are in the main, it declares, left to their own resources in choosing a vocation except where enterprising teachers have been able to give personal advice. It believes that every city and town should survey the vocational opportunities within its borders and place the information, together with all information available on vocational work, within reach of the pupil at the proper age.

Contrary to the claims of some of those who are administering industrial education in other states the commission found that the largest problem in carrying out such training is the lack of teachers competent to do the work. “If the vocational subjects are to find and hold the place that is due them in the common schools of the state,” says the commission, “the teachers must be educated to handle them more effectively than they have been able to handle such subjects in the past.”

The Indiana statute, which was signed by the governor in March, established a state system of vocational education and gave state aid for training in industries, agriculture and domestic science, through all-day, part-time, continuation and evening schools. This work is to be carried on either in separate schools or in special departments of regular high schools. In every case, the local control is vested in the regular board of education for the community and the laws are to be administered as a whole by the State Board of Education. The state board has been reorganized so that seven of its members must be professional educators. The remaining five may be laymen. Two of the laymen must be citizens of prominence and three of them shall be actively interested in vocational education. One of these last three shall be a representative of employes and one of employers. Attendance upon day or part-time classes is restricted to persons over fourteen and under twenty-five years of age; and upon evening classes to persons over seventeen years of age. The state superintendent of public instruction is made the executive officer and a deputy superintendent is to be placed under him in charge of industrial and domestic science education. The agricultural work is carried on by another deputy.

Local communities are required to supply the plant and equipment for carrying on the work. When this has been approved by the State Board of Education, the community is to be reimbursed out of the state treasury to the amount of two-thirds the salary of each teacher giving instruction either in vocational or technical subjects.

In order to secure the benefit of the knowledge and co-operation of the layman, local school authorities are required to appoint, subject to the approval of the State Board of Education, advisory committees composed of members representing local trades and industries, whose duty it shall be to counsel with the board and other officials in the conduct of the affairs of the school.

In both Pennsylvania and New Jersey bills creating state systems of vocational education are likely to pass soon. The Pennsylvania measure has already gone through the House by a vote of 182 to 2. This latter bill is very similar to the Indiana act. The State Board of Education administers the act, with the state superintendent of public instruction as the executive officer.

The regular board of education is in charge of the local schools. They are required to appoint advisory committees composed of members 98representing local trades, industries and occupations, to aid them in making the work practical and effective.

In general the New Jersey measure is similar to those of Indiana and Pennsylvania. There also the work is to be administered by the State Board of Education and local boards of education, and may be carried on either in approved schools or departments; these departments must consist of separate courses, pupils and teachers. Advisory committees are not provided for in the act, but it is expected that these will be required by the board of education under authority conferred by previous legislation.

In Connecticut and New York, which have already made some provision for vocational education, laws are pending which considerably extend the scope of the systems. In Washington a measure establishing a “dual” system of vocational schools is regarded as unlikely of passage. In Massachusetts a pending amendment to a former act authorizes school committees, with the approval of the State Board of Education, to require every child between fourteen and sixteen years of age who is regularly employed not less than six hours a day, to attend school at the rate of not less than four hours per week, during the school year. Another measure which will probably become a law raises the compulsory school age from fourteen to fifteen, for all children, and for illiterates from sixteen to seventeen. Attendance on a vocational school of children fourteen years of age is accepted as school attendance.

FROM SCHOOL TO JOB IN PHILADELPHIA

A twentieth century verification of the scriptural truth that “to him who hath shall be given” is put forward by the Public Education Association of Philadelphia, which recently completed a study of the children in that city who leave school at fourteen or fifteen to go to work.

There are in the Philadelphia public high schools, says a pamphlet issued by James S. Hiatt, secretary of the association, 13,039 boys and girls. At the same time there is a like number, 13,740, who have been allowed to drop out of school at fourteen and to fight their industrial battle alone. For the former group, who are really more able to take care of themselves, the city pays $1,532,000 a year for further training in citizenship and preparation for life. For the latter group it pays nothing.

“Is this a square deal?” asks the association. “Is it economy on the part of the city to permit these child workers to go out untrained into industry, to give their lives before they are mature and then to become a burden upon the community?”

With regard to these 13,740 between the ages of fourteen and sixteen whom the school census of June, 1912, found to be at work, the study undertook to answer two questions: first, are the occupations in which the boys and girls are employed of such a nature that they will train for a competence in later life? Second, is the immediate wage received of sufficient importance to counterbalance the tremendous loss of power in those who face mature life unprepared? As a continuation of this investigation the Compulsory Education Bureau has followed up since September of last year and will continue to do so, every child who leaves school to go to work. The kind of job taken, the exact nature of the work done, and the wage received will be learned. About 1,700 labor certificates are issued in Philadelphia every month.

At the outset it was discovered that the problem is not one of the immigrant child chiefly. The percentage of American parentage was 50.2; of foreign parentage, 48.1; of Negro parentage, 1.7 Nor is it a problem of boys chiefly, for 6,849, or 49.85 per cent of the total, were girls.

The Survey has already told how the Vocational Guidance Survey of New York followed a group of boys and girls from the day they received their labor certificates through all the different jobs which they held during the next four or five months. The study emphasized the hit-or-miss jumping from one line of work to another which untrained youths are sure to resort to, acquiring no training and achieving no advance. The Philadelphia study furnishes a cross section of the positions held by this much larger group at a given moment. Forty-three per cent of both boys and girls were in the factory, where, says the report,

“the positions are largely mechanical and require but short time in learning, little responsibility, and great specialization of processes. These positions offer an initial wage which is alluringly high, but hold out little incentive for growth and but slightly advanced wages for the experienced operative.”

Twenty-nine per cent were in the store and the office, “where a few may advance to higher places, but it is evident that a majority must hold low-grade positions which require little preparation or skill.”

A comparison of the employments of both sexes showed that there is no kind of work which both boys and girls will not do. While boys predominate in the store, the office, in messenger service, street trades and skilled trades, girls have the largest number in the factory, in service and in house work. Yet twenty-five girls were exposed to the dangers of street trades and 118 boys were taken out of school to do house work in their own homes without pay. The diagram on the next page shows the percentages and numbers of the total engaged in the various lines of work, and the relative proportion of boys and girls in each.

When it came to tabulating wages the surprising discovery was made that with respect to 35.3 per cent of the total either no wage was received or the amount of it was entirely unknown 99to the family. Twenty-two per cent received between $2 and $4 a week, and 37 per cent between $4 and $6. Smaller wage divisions are shown here:

Split up by sexes these figures show that 42.2 per cent of the girls were found in the group whose wages were unknown or zero, while only 28.4 per cent of the boys were in that group. For both boys and girls the largest number of those whose wages is known is found in the group which receive $4.00 to $4.50. The detailed comparison is here given:

The average wage for all boys who receive between $2 and $6 is $4.26; that for girls $4.19, the large number of girls who receive a comparatively high wage in factories bringing their average up.

The average increase, between fourteen and fifteen years of age, of the workers noted is thirty-seven cents. It is much less in some of the industries. “Does such a slight return and such a meager raise,” asks the report, “pay for all the loss of mature power, as well as for that efficiency which might be gained by longer continuing in the proper kind of training?”

WHERE THE YOUNGSTERS WORK IN PHILADELPHIA

The figures and percentages refer to parts of the whole 13,740 boys and girls found in the lines of work named. The drawings show roughly the ratio of boys to girls in each line. “Housework” means housework in own home.

100The following conclusions are drawn by the association as a result of its study:

“1. That the problem of the working child is not an immigrant problem, since over 50 per cent of those reported as at work are of the second generation of American birth.

“2. That this is not the problem of the boy alone, since over 49 per cent of the workers are girls.

“3. That the vast majority of children who leave school at fourteen to enter industry go into those kinds of employment which offer a large initial wage for simple mechanical processes, but which hold out little or no opportunity for improvement and no competence at maturity.

“4. That wages received are so low as to force a parasitic life.

“5. That but slight advancement is offered the fifteen-year-old over the fourteen-year-old child worker.”

ILLITERACY AND THE RURAL SCHOOL

Hardly are we given time to grasp the Census Bureau’s new facts about illiteracy in the United States before the Bureau of Education gives us its own interpretation of some of them. Illiteracy, as viewed by the Census Bureau, means inability to write on the part of those ten years old and over. As a nation the number of illiterates among us decreased from 10.7 per cent of the population in 1900 to 7.7 per cent in 1910. In spite of this decrease a bulletin by A. C. Monahan of the Bureau of Education refers to the “relatively high rate of illiteracy” in the country and says that this rate is due not to immigration but to the lack of educational opportunities in rural districts. The percentage of rural illiteracy is twice that of urban, although approximately three-fourths of the immigrants are in the cities. Still more significant is a comparison between children born in this country of foreign parents with those born of native parents. Illiteracy among the latter is more than three times as great as that among the former, “largely,” says Mr. Monahan, “on account of the lack of opportunities for education in rural America.”

The decrease in national illiteracy during the decade 1900–1910 was not only relative but absolute, despite the growth of the population. In 1900 the figure was 6,180,069. In 1910 it was 5,516,163. But while illiteracy among the total population was decreasing, that among the foreign born whites remained almost stationary. In 1900 the percentage was 12.9, in 1910 12.7. Among the whites born in this country the decrease during the decade was from 4.6 to 3 per cent. Illiteracy among the Negroes showed a decrease of almost one-third. In 1900 44.5 of the whole Negro population could not write; in 1910 the percentage was 30.4.

The distribution of illiteracy between the sexes was very even. Among males it amounted 7.6 of the total, among females to 7.8. There was less of it among white females, however, than among white males, the percentage for the former being 4.9, for the latter 5. White girls and women born outside of this country show more illiteracy than men and boys of the same class, but those born in the United States show less than native males, as follows:

The New England and the Middle Atlantic groups of states changed places in the illiteracy column between 1900 and 1910. At the former period New England was fifth and the Middle Atlantic states, comprising New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, fourth, but by 1910 New England had displaced the latter group. In both years the West North Central, comprising Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, showed the least illiteracy of any of the geographical divisions, while the East South Central, comprising Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, had the worst record,

The section known as the West almost caught up with the North during the decade, the respective percentages being 4.4 and 4.3.

Mr. Monahan’s bulletin goes briefly into the whole rural school problem. The author found 226,000 one-teacher schoolhouses in the United States, of which 5,000 are log buildings still in active use. Although more than 60 per cent of the children in the United States are enrolled in country schools, the rural aggregate attendance is only 51 per cent.

With the help of recent appropriations made by Congress the Bureau of Education has undertaken to make a careful study of the needs of the rural schools, and the bulletin just issued is one of the first definite results of the work.

WOMEN IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

How women have advanced from the educational ranks to the highest administrative positions in the public schools is revealed in figures just compiled by the United States Bureau of Education. Four states, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming, have women at the head of their state school systems, and there are now 495 women county superintendents in the United States, nearly double the number of ten years ago.

In some states women appear to have almost a monopoly of the higher positions in the public-school system. In Wyoming, besides a woman state superintendent and deputy superintendent, all but one of the fourteen counties are directed educationally by women. In Montana, where there are thirty counties, only one man is reported as holding the position of county superintendent.

The increase in the number of women county superintendents is most conspicuous in the West, but is not confined to that section. New York reports forty-two women “district superintendents,” as against twelve “school commissioners” in 1900.

Motherhood and teaching collided in New York three weeks ago when the Board of Education refused to grant a year’s leave of absence without pay to Katherine C. Edgell, a high school teacher, who wanted to bear and rear a child. The board recorded its opposition by a vote of thirty-two to five. By a vote of twenty-eight to nine it shut off discussion because “too much had been published about this affair already.”

Mrs. Edgell is still on the payroll of the schools, although she has not been in attendance since February first. Inasmuch as it is the custom of the board to punish unexcused absence by dismissal for neglect of duty, it seems to have no alternative but to proceed to that extremity against Mrs. Edgell. This is just what was done recently in the case of Lily R. Weeks, who was absent some time on account of the birth of a child, though the board did not know the nature of her illness. Mrs. Weeks appealed her case to the state commissioner of education, before whom it is now pending.

This demand of Mrs. Edgell that she be allowed to continue in her profession though a mother is, of course, only a symptom of the world-wide movement of women into the gainful occupations of life. It reveals how acute has grown the feeling on this subject among some of the women teachers of New York. Heretofore any married woman teacher who wanted leave of absence to bear a child carefully concealed the nature of her illness from the Board of Education. At length, one woman stood out and asked that, as a matter of right, her position be kept open for her while she brought a new life into the world. Instantly scores of her colleagues came to her defense. Women lawyers passed resolutions in sympathy with her and physicians publicly approved her stand.

The case of Mrs. Edgell is not the first time that the New York Board of Education has expressed its opinion with regard to married women teachers. Until 1904 a by-law of the board provided that the marriage of a woman teacher should automatically cause her instant dismissal without further action. But the Court of Appeals decided in 1903 that a teacher could not be dismissed for marrying and the by-law was changed. Since then the board has apparently not been altogether friendly toward the married women in its employ. During the discussion that has attended the Edgell case it has been repeatedly asserted by principals and teachers that there are hundreds of women in the schools who have kept their marriages secret because of the well-known policy of the board to make it almost impossible for married women to secure promotion or increase in salary.

A physician who is a member of the school board and a member of the board of superintendents are authorities for the sweeping statement, that if this ruling is adhered to the board of education is quite likely to be responsible for 300 cases of deliberate abortion among the public school teachers of New York every year.

When the board, by its vote of twenty-eight to nine, shut off discussion because “too much has been published about this affair already,” it did what was destined to provoke hotter and longer discussion than ever. But underlying that there is a very general feeling that this subject presents many phases which should be given profound consideration, not a snap verdict. Would the distraction of a baby interfere with class room work, or the absence of the mother and teacher handicap her own children; or would having children of her own add something to a woman’s educative powers? What effect would the widespread continuance of married women in the schools have on men’s salaries? What is there in the practice and experience of other cities to help New York in deciding so big a question as the interaction of motherhood and teaching?

What protection should be thrown around the prospective mother is a question that is only beginning to be raised among professional and salaried classes. Up to the present nearly all women in these groups have resigned their positions, if not at marriage then at childbirth. No general policy of dealing with them seems to have been adopted either by public or private employers.

With women in the wage-earning class the case is different. In at least twenty countries or parts of countries in Europe legal protection is thrown around the working woman who bears a child. In Berne, Switzerland, all women “employed for purposes of gain” are prohibited from working for from four to eight weeks after confinement. In Ticino, Italy, no woman can work for six months after confinement. The conception underlying this legislation is not that mothers are not efficient workers, but that earning a livelihood must be made easier for those who want also to fulfill the other functions of womanhood. In England the period of prohibition is four weeks after, and in Germany six weeks. In Servia no woman can work for six weeks before nor six weeks after. In several of these places the position must be kept open for the woman while she is bearing her child.

Examples of such protection nearer at home are not lacking. Both Massachusetts and New York have laws declaring that specified periods of absence shall be allowed to women in industrial establishments at time of confinement.

A notable exception to the rule that no such policy has been adopted toward salaried or professional women is to be had in France. There boards of education are not permitted to refuse leave of absence to teachers who want to bear children. Three years ago the government made imperative the granting of at least two months’ vacation, together with full treatment, to teachers expecting confinement. And in the following year this protection was extended to the female staff of the department of posts, telegraphs and telephones.

NATION WIDE MOVEMENT FOR INDUSTRIAL SAFETY

There was a time when most employers and employes thought that they were the only factors to be considered in the adjustment of industrial conditions. Enlightened employers and employes long ago learned that in the final analysis the public is the arbiter as to whether conditions are just or unjust, right or wrong.

The National Association of Manufacturers, in its work for compensation and prevention of industrial accidents, started out with the theory that the first essential requirement to the furtherance of equitable conditions is a knowledge of the facts—all the facts, for half knowledge leads to wrong conclusions. To meet this requirement we made a thorough study of foreign compensation systems. The next requirement, it was felt, was prompt action in line with sound conclusions.

Voluntary systems of prevention and relief have been established by numerous American employers which compare favorably with European conditions, but on the whole the United States is far behind other civilized nations in these matters. Employers are not more nor less to blame for this condition than employes, legislators or the public. We each and all need education; we need to get in tune with the times.

For many years much time and attention at the board meetings of the National Association of Manufacturers have been given to the consideration of accident prevention and relief plans. In common with other humane agencies, the association has felt that the economic loss due to accidents, enormous as it is, is as nothing compared with humane considerations. It has taken the stand further that prevention is even more important than compensation.

Three years ago the conclusion was reached that the time had passed when attention to these problems in the abstract was to any extent effective, and that results could be secured only by practical campaign methods. Macaulay’s truism, “The only knowledge that a man has is the knowledge he can use,” has been the basis for the efforts which the committee, formed at that time and entrusted with this work, has carried on during these three years.

The spirit in which the committee’s recommendations have been received and acted upon by members of the association reminds me of Emerson’s statement: “Every good and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm.” We have found enthusiastic support everywhere. Our misgivings at the outset that the campaign would result in the loss of the more conservative members of the association proved to be groundless.

Our interrogation blanks, mailed to 20,000 American manufacturers early in the committee’s work, brought forth the largest reply in the association’s history. Ninety-nine per cent of the members answering expressed themselves emphatically in favor of an extended progressive campaign for accident prevention and compensation for injured workers. At the last three annual conventions of the association, the greatest attendance was during the reading of the report of the Committee on Accident Prevention and Workmen’s Compensation. Many meetings in various parts of the country dealing especially with the committee’s work have been so well attended that no doubt exists today in the mind of a single official as to the need for keeping the committee’s work well at the head of the association’s activities. The wonderful increase in membership of the association during the last three years is another proof that the members desire to maintain an aggressive and constructive part in settling the social and industrial problems with which the United States of America and other industrial nations are confronted.

Progressive employers know that social legislation is not only desirable from a humanitarian viewpoint, but necessary from an economic standpoint. Thinking business men realize that sound social legislation is both a human duty and the best safeguard against militant Socialism. Sound social legislation will bring us the efficient, organized, co-ordinated industrial peace of the bee-hive. Militant Socialism will bring us the industrial peace of the grave.

The three years’ campaign of the National Association of Manufacturers has been along the following lines:

1. A strenuous campaign has been carried on in all the states for laws providing automatic compensation for injured workers or their dependents and support has been given to all reasonable bills, as the association realized that a perfect and uniform workmen’s compensation system for the whole United States can be secured only step by step.

2. Members have been urged to support state compensation laws wherever these are optional, regardless of the fact that this means in many 103cases an increase of 300 to 1,000 per cent in insurance rates.

3. Special efforts have been made to have manufacturers organise their own relief association, preferably in co-operation with their workers, for the reason that such systems have most effectively reduced accident rates as well as industrial unrest.

4. Model workman’s compensation bills have been prepared and widely distributed. These bills are at present before the legislatures of six states. While they cover the whole subject, the committee urged an especially strong educational campaign for the recognition of three essential principles in compensation legislation, viz.: that a good workmen’s compensation law must encourage accident prevention; assure compensation, preferably by compulsory insurance, and cover all wage-workers. It also attempts to provide that doctors’ and lawyers’ fees shall not rob the injured.

Correspondence in connection with the campaign with legislators, lawyers, insurance men, employers and workmen amounted to an average of twenty-eight letters a day for the last year.

On the association’s suggestion, enlightened insurance officials have adopted resolutions providing for a limitation of business-getting expense in workmen’s compensation laws.

So much for compensation work. Toward a practical accident prevention campaign we have, however, devoted our greatest energies. Two experienced safety engineers have been placed at the service of members and so great has been the demand for their services that there are engagements for more than six months ahead at this time. As this service is charged for at a rate which makes it self-sustaining, this means something more than interest—it means enthusiasm on the part of employers in our accident prevention campaign.

The work of the safety engineers consists of inspection of factories and making special reports for improving existing conditions which manufacturers have almost uniformly acted upon; advice regarding safety devices, shop safety organization and other means of preventing work accidents; practical instructions to superintendents, foremen, engineers and workmen in regard to safety devices; and illustrated talks with lantern slides and motion pictures to workers, as well as employers, especially to local organizations of both. An important part of the campaign is the establishment of local safety organizations with the work in every plant inspected placed in the hands of some one person.

Numerous employers and business men have, as a result of our advice and practical work, engaged safety engineers for their factories. The campaign has so increased the demand for experts that the supply is inadequate and open letters have been written to engineering colleges urging them to establish a special course of training leading to the degree of “safety engineer.”

Local “safety revivals” have been conducted in many parts of the country, with some member of the committee present as the principal speaker. James Emery, my associate in this work, and I have spoken on the subject of accident prevention or workmen’s compensation on an average of once a week for the last three years. We have constantly agitated for safety museums.^[6] A special effort has been made to get in touch with factory inspectors and to urge the keeping of statistics bearing upon accidents.

The co-operation we have established with insurance companies, both stock and mutual, promises to be a most effective means of establishing a system for rating risks which, in the same manner as fire schedule rating, shall provide subtractions and additions of insurance rates contingent upon the accident prevention activities of each insurer. Many insurance companies are endeavoring to arrange for central inspection bureaus for rating good and bad risks.

A colored “safety” supplement has been established for American Industries, the official monthly magazine of the association. The interest of the members in this safety supplement is shown by the fact that 5,000 extra copies were ordered after the supplement’s first appearance. Another effective means of educating for safety is the use of motion pictures which have been prepared partly at the expense of the National Association of Manufacturers. These are distributed through regular motion picture channels all over the United States. Several thousand lantern slides are being used for educational lectures before the general public, interested organizations and college classes.

The safety campaign was one of the factors that led to the organization of the National Council for Industrial Safety, which had its first enthusiastic meeting four months ago. This new organization plans an annual gathering to take the form of a national “safety revival” and an international safety convention during the San Francisco exposition.

Every phase of the association’s work is being supervised by members of the committee who are divided into sub-committees. Although the committee’s efforts are a work of love, the members receiving no compensation whatever, the association’s activity for workmen’s compensation and accident prevention has cost approximately $50,000 during the last three years. The board of directors consider this money well spent and, judging by present sentiment, will not only continue, but increase their efforts in future. Our safety campaign is too young and too widely spread as yet to give accurate figures for results. Perhaps the best sign of its success is the mass of enthusiastic testimonials from association 104members to the value of our experts’ inspections and advice. The following partial figures will, however, at least give some idea of concrete results:

Two hundred and seventy-six members of the association have placed a special man in charge of their shop safety organization during the last year and a half.

Several dozen manufacturers claim to have reduced their accidents in a campaign of from one to two years from 10 per cent to 50 per cent.

In more than fifty cases the safety campaign has brought about a better appreciation of general efforts in the direction of sanitation and welfare work.

Twenty or more establishments have established sickness insurance in co-operation with their employes, as part of their safety campaign.

Old age and invalidity relief is being considered by several dozen large manufacturers now as part of the safety campaign.

A dozen or more mutual insurance and relief associations have been established among certain classes of manufacturers, such for instance, as laundries, millers, etc., and accident prevention is invariably one of the most important, permanent features of such mutual organizations.

In another year the association hopes to make a thorough survey of the 20,000 members originally addressed in the safety campaign. This will make it possible to show in figures the results of the association’s efforts along these lines.

My experience of many years with associations of manufacturers and business men convinces me that, regardless of popular impressions, the large majority of captains of industry believe that “the gauge of their success is the assistance they give others to succeed.” Unfortunately, the every-day grind of their work does not permit many well-intentioned business men to know much about social legislation and about the advantages of co-operation and good will. I have found them exceedingly anxious to secure information about these matters and to act in accordance with sound advice.

The following extract from one of the committee’s communications to the members indicates our sentiments:

“Remember that the most important factor in this endeavor is the right spirit. Without a spirit of progressiveness, without co-operation between the officers and members of organizations, without harmony and co-operation between yourself and your superintendents, foremen and workers, it is useless to attempt a campaign for safety. We manufacturers of the United States of America have a reputation for ability, energy and initiative all over the world, and we cannot, we must not, fail to make good.”

Let me say in conclusion that I do not share the prevailing pessimism as to the industrial outlook in the United States. I repeat that there has been an awakening in recent years. Social legislation has made rapid progress. We need to maintain and increase our attention to these matters. Employer, employe and the public need to get closer together and this can be best brought about by a thorough knowledge of industrial conditions and publicity without fear or favor to any class. If we each and every one strive to that end, then is being fulfilled Tennyson’s worthy charge to

“Ring out the slowly dying cause And ancient forms of party strife, Ring in the nobler modes of life With sweeter manners, purer laws.

“Ring in the valiant men and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand, Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the light that is to be.”

INDUSTRIAL SERVICE MOVEMENT OF THE Y. M. C. A.

Six years ago at Yale was started the industrial service movement of the Young Men’s Christian Association. There are at present 3,500 students from 150 colleges throughout the country engaged in this service under the direction of city and student association branches. Engineering students particularly are enlisted in this volunteer service for industrial workers which presents an effective laboratory for practical work, backed by the training, encouragement and supervision of association officials whose co-operation is extended to the larger efforts for industrial and social betterment which students engage in after graduation.

Among the forty different lines of service are: teaching English, history, and citizenship to foreigners; teaching drawing, electricity, manual training, music and other subjects; conducting men’s and boys’ clubs and boy scout and big brothers work; giving noon shop talks in factories; giving instruction in hygiene and first aid, athletics, etc.; holding educational classes in labor unions; conducting socials, entertainments, observation trips and week-end camps; doing charity organization work; investigating working, living and recreative conditions, etc.

The idea is permeating the leading colleges and universities. The old Yale boat house is being used as a school for teaching English, civics, and hygiene to foreigners. Students at the University of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ames are holding classes for foreign men and boys in railroad box-cars. Men from Columbia, Harvard, Williams, Brown, Pennsylvania, and other colleges are conducting educational classes in labor unions, talking in shop meetings, and leading 105clubs of working boys. University of Wisconsin engineering students are instructing American mechanics and boiler makers in the round house, and convicts in the jail. Undergraduates of Amherst, Massachusetts Agricultural College, Princeton, Penn State and other institutions are doing deputation work in rural industrial communities. Men from Cornell, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, McGill University, California and the University of Puget Sound are visiting the homes of immigrants and are teaching groups in boarding houses. Students of South Carolina, Furman, and other southern colleges, are doing extension work in cotton mill villages.

CLASS OF RUSSIAN AND ROUMANIAN JEWS

Students have made possible unusual community meetings. In New York city sixty classes in English and civics for foreigners have been taught by students, and on several occasions the members of these classes, representatives of sixteen nationalities, came together under their respective flags to hear a lecture on American citizenship, to tell what the work was doing for them, to sing their national songs and to unite in learning “America.” The Working boys’ clubs came together on one occasion to hear addresses by Ernest Thompson Seton and Dr. George J. Fisher. In Pittsburgh, a foreign singing contest was attended by several thousand people, and a huge American flag of silk was awarded to the winning group. In San Francisco a mass meeting and entertainment was attended by men of twenty-five nationalities.

In Tacoma last spring, the notable immigration conference, attended by several hundred delegates, including five state governors, a Canadian premier and representatives of capital and labor, was planned and promoted by the Y. M. C. A. immigration secretary and his student workers. The conference resulted in the formation of the Coast-wide Immigration League, to cope with the problems of Pacific immigration which will be aggravated on the opening of the Panama Canal. In April of this year a similar conference was held in San Francisco. The man who conceived and is promoting these conferences acquired his first experience in teaching foreigners English as a graduate student at college. It was this effort that determined his life work.

The interest that college men have in this service which brings no financial compensation is due to the natural sympathy that most students have for those less fortunate than themselves. To awaken that sympathy they need only to be shown a real and definite job to do and how to do it. They can also be shown that industrial service is not only an altruistic privilege and patriotic duty but also “blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” This service affords an experience which students need, for it enlarges a man’s vision, increases his sympathy with “the other half” and gives a knowledge of how to deal with men.

Enlisting Students the Service

The methods of enlisting students are interesting. Lectures on industrial conditions and needs and the college man’s responsibility are given before students by carefully selected employers, labor leaders, and social workers. Especially prepared literature is distributed, articles are written for student periodicals, and an industrial library installed in the college Y. M. C. A. building. Interested students meet weekly, often under expert leadership, for a discussion of industrial subjects. The student and city branches of the Y. M. C. A. join hands in the movement, and, in co-operation with churches, missions, social 106settlements, boys’ clubs, libraries, civic associations, factories, labor unions, foreign societies, etc., discover definite opportunities for industrial service where students can be useful. Experience has proved beyond a doubt that volunteer service can be conscientious and efficient. A settlement worker writes: “I don’t see how we could have done without the splendid work of those college men.” After a few men are put to work, others become interested through observation, and the movement naturally spreads.

A NOON CLASS CONDUCTED IN POLISH

In a three-day-campaign in New York, the industrial service movement was presented to selected classes of students at Columbia, New York University, and the College of the City of New York, with the result that 280 students signified their hearty interest and 125 were willing to undertake immediate work. In a single year 165 undergraduates engaged in industrial service in New York city, and the movement has become of such importance that a secretary gives all his time to it. This man was captain of his university football team two years ago and became interested at college. It is noticeable that generally the strongest and most popular students volunteer for service. A list of those at work from Yale includes varsity football, basketball, baseball, and track men, intercollegiate debaters, class and fraternity officers, and honor men. In many places the matter has been presented to the various fraternities and has met a most cordial response.

Recently at the University of Michigan the movement was presented to 1,200 students in two days, to employers of the city at a luncheon, to labor leaders at a dinner in the city Y. M. C. A., and to a special meeting of engineering professors. At Cornell University over 1,600 students were addressed, and 525 signed up as interested and willing to promote the ideas and ideals of the movement. One hundred and thirty men volunteered for definite service, and many are already teaching in the homes of foreigners, leading boys’ clubs, and doing other similar work. Others will teach this summer where they live and work. The movement was presented also at meetings of engineering professors and at a gathering of the Business Men’s Association. The city and student branches of the Y. M. C. A. are financing the scheme, and a strong student committee is heading the work in the university.

In practically every college the faculty heartily supports the scheme, and the sentiment of many professors was expressed when one said, “I hope every one of my students will make a place in his program for some volunteer altruistic service. They will have opportunity to do a great deal of good, but will gain far more than they can give.” Recently at the University of Iowa the movement was presented to a faculty meeting which had not been addressed by any outsider for nineteen years. A number of college faculties have met to discuss the movement, and to consider the re-adaptation of engineering courses to give more attention to the “human side of the engineering profession.” Already many engineering schools have courses in “management,” but professors feel increasingly that even these courses have too much of the “material” and not enough of the “human” element. Such instruction supplemented by personal friendly contact in service for industrial workers will do much to remove prejudices and promote mutual understanding between college men and workingmen.

Some quotations from letters written by working men show better than any other testimony how they feel about this work:

“I have not found words to thank the best friend I ever had on earth for all he has done for me. I am a better man.”

“I have learn some English, got better job, will be good American citizen. I am grateful forever.”

A foreign convict writes: “Now I got good chance to learn English to read and write because I got long time to do in this prison, and if I learn, that will help me when I get out from here. I no like to work all my life with pick and shovel.”

In the West a lumber company has provided a room where its foreign employes can learn English under student leadership. A newspaper clipping tells the story in these headlines: “Slavonians eager to acquire knowledge of English after back-breaking work in mill.”

That American working men are also open to friendliness of this kind is splendidly illustrated by an experience with a large labor union. When the students first spoke to the members of the union, the men naturally wondered and were suspicious of an ulterior motive. But when they went down to the union rooms two nights a week, often at considerable sacrifice, and taught mathematics, mechanics, and electricity, the men warmed up. As the students proved that they were not “snobs” but good fellows, the men unhesitatingly showed their appreciation. The work was so successful that it has been carried on for several years. The president of the union testifies that the wages of some of his men have been raised from $18 to $28 a week, as a result of the instruction given. A series of lectures has been given before 500 men in the union and the men have now asked the students to plan the entertainments for their social meetings. This latter request is particularly significant, as the class of entertainment formerly enjoyed was of very low grade. The work is spreading to unions in many other cities, and the students are getting an entirely different view of the rights of the workingman. In a number of instances the labor union, sometimes the Central Labor Union, has invited selected students to act as fraternal delegates, with full power to discuss and to introduce motions. This is a remarkable development, and in no case have the unions had cause to regret the step.

In one city the students discovered a Syrian who spoke six languages fluently, had been a school superintendent in his own country, but because he knew no English, was sweeping out a market for one dollar a day. The man was befriended, educated and has become a power for good among his countrymen.

An Italian lad lived in America four years before an American treated him as a friend. By that time he was so discouraged that he had several times attempted suicide. A college student met him on a street corner, invited him to an English class in one of the settlements, helped him, trained him for leadership, and he is now a social worker of remarkable ability among his people.

Engineering Students Especially Interested

Social workers in our colleges have in many instances found engineering students “too busy,” and as a rule not so open to the altruistic appeal as those in other departments of the universities. Yet, it is a fact that 70 per cent of the 3,000 men engaged in industrial service are engineers. The reason is obvious: A football captain (an engineer) said the other day:

“This industrial work is the livest thing that’s struck college since I’ve been here. It’s a real job and it’s practical. Everyone of us who goes into it is bound to acquire an experience in dealing with men, which the curriculum can’t give, and we need it!”

Indeed a prominent general manager, himself a college graduate, recently said to the writer:

“The college graduates in my employ are frequently a confounded nuisance. They come to us with a splendid knowledge of books, but when as foremen or superintendents, they get out into the shop, and deal with working men, they make a mess of it. A good part of my time is spent in straightening out difficulties and restoring harmony. They haven’t any real sympathy with men and don’t know how to handle them.”

Here then is a great need in the training of an engineer, which the industrial service movement is designed to meet. Engineering students are quick to see the point. As they teach English to foreigners or lead a club of working men they come to understand these men, not as a “class,” but as individuals. They get a friendly insight into their working and living conditions and a first-hand knowledge of how to deal with them intelligently and sympathetically. Thus one student writes:

“My class of Italians is the finest bunch of men I’ve ever come into contact with—bright, keen, appreciative to an embarrassing extent. They have done me more good than I can ever do them.”

Another says:

“My club of working men was the big thing needed to complete my college education. It taught me things I could have learned in no other way, and as an engineer, I am already deriving great benefit.”

It is also true that many a college man has been kept straight and acquired higher ideals because of the responsibility of some group of men or boys who were looking up to him. One such man, an engineer of promise, says:

“Before I undertook any of this work, my one ideal in life was to make all the money I could, 108regardless of anyone under me. Since I gave some of my time in volunteer service my ideals have all changed. Now I don’t care where I go or what my salary, so long as it is some place where I can help my fellow men.”

AN ENGLISH CLASS FOR RUSSIANS AND POLES

This naturally raises the great question of what these students will do with their experience after they graduate from college.

Larger Significance of the Movement

As already indicated, after students have had a real service experience, their changed attitude toward the world’s needs and their sense of responsibility is bound to lead to greater activity in their larger spheres of influence after graduation. Thus, it is not surprising that we have in our central office a mailing list of 3000 graduates, most of them engineers who were interested as undergraduates, and many of whom are now in the forefront of movements for social and industrial betterment. Here is what some of them write from various parts of the country:

“It is surely satisfactory to feel one is doing something for the betterment of the human race. You can count on me to co-operate in the work wherever I go.”

“As a student I got interested in industrial service and resolved that any men whom I might later control should get a square deal. I’ve just investigated the living conditions of the men in this lumber camp, and found them sleeping on old vermin-producing wooden bunks, that hadn’t been changed in six years. I’ve had the whole outfit burned up and an iron cot put in for every man in camp.”

“I am sending you my personal check to cover cost of equipment for English classes in my steel mill.”

“We have put in a fine welfare club for our men, with reading, writing and smoking rooms. No gambling or liquor allowed. It certainly pays and I am delighted with my share in it.”

“As foreman in the steel mill, I see that my men get a square deal on the job, a better job if they deserve it, and I have taken pains to render personal service to many. We must get rid of the seven-day, twelve-hour labor schedule before we can have real men with real homes.”

“I have signed up eight hundred working men for a Y. M. C. A. membership in our mining town. After a thorough investigation, we feel that the Association will meet the needs of the men better than any other agency.”

“I am superintendent of schools here and am putting in evening classes for the first time in this city, and an using Roberts’ method of English for foreigners.”

“Have just been elected president of the Social Hygiene Society in this community.”

“I have been traveling all over the country and have noticed that the heart has almost been educated 109out of some of my friends with degrees. I am convinced that every undergraduate enlisted in this volunteer work will have the broad field of humanity opened before him. It’s great business.”

One of America’s greatest football captains, a few months after graduation, wrote from a construction camp in Colorado:

“Remembering what I learned in this movement at Yale, when I became foreman I treated my gang of Italians as men and not as dogs, and it was really pitiful to see the way they returned the little kindness I showed them. Each day I was met with cheery words of greeting. When the job was complete the men came to me in a bunch, thanked me for the fair way I had treated them, and said they would like to work for me always.”

What greater satisfaction could an engineer ask? And what may it not mean to the industrial world of tomorrow, as hundreds and hundreds of engineering and other students graduate from college with a new vision of their service opportunities, and a knowledge of how to help. In one college town through the entire winter, the son of a railway magnate, who has 25,000 men under him, taught a group of foreign laborers in one of the worst districts of the city. Who can judge of that man’s influence a few years hence?

This in brief is the story of the industrial service movement, which heads up in the Industrial Department of the Y. M. C. A. International Committee, in which state committees and nearly 300 student and city associations co-operate, and for which thousands of college men are conscientiously working. From the central office of the secretary a letter of news, suggestion and inspiration, and quantities of helpful literature go each month to the local secretaries who are co-operating.

Thus, quietly but rapidly, without undue advertising has been advancing a great movement, broad in scope, submerging creed and class in altruistic service; deep in influence, reaching to the very heart of many vital industrial problems of the day. At a conservative estimate 3,500 undergraduates are reaching over 60,000 working men and boys each week in definite constructive service, which will make for better understanding, the improvement of industrial and social conditions and the transforming of individual lives. No one can measure the helpful service of the 3,000 graduates who also are promoting the ideals of the movement. As hundreds of men continue to graduate with a new vision of their service opportunities and responsibilities, who can foresee their influence in maintaining industrial righteousness and industrial peace?

MAKING INCOME EQUAL OUTGO^[7]
WHAT THE STRUGGLE MEANS TO COTTON MILL WORKERS

Hidden in monotonous uniformity there is to be found in the volumes of the federal report on the Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States a most illuminating analysis of the budgets of cotton mill families. It is notable for simplicity rather than for comprehensiveness. Budgets of twenty-one families employed in southern cotton mills and of fourteen in the cotton mills of Fall River, Mass., have been secured and the conditions of the families studied. Because the number is so small no attempt is made to use the figures as a basis for generalizations, but the full statement of the circumstances as well as the expenditures of each family gives the study a compensating vividness.

The study of the fourteen families in Fall River is not as satisfactory as the southern investigation because the standards of English, Italian, French Canadian, Portuguese and Polish operatives are so different. Also it was not possible, as it often was in the South, to get an almost complete record both of family income and expenditure through the books of the companies where the families worked. For these reasons the analysis of the southern families’ budgets is more deserving of attention.

Special interest attaches to the study of the twenty-one southern families as it was the first budget study of southern families, I believe. As a background we may quote from the report a brief description of life in a southern cotton mill town:

“Certain conditions of the new industrial life foster this isolation. The whole family—men, women, and children—are engaged in the same industry in which every other family in their community is engaged. They have their own churches and their own schools, in many cases furnished by the mill owners. They live, with few exceptions, in houses owned by the mill company. They buy their provisions, in many cases, from the company store. The cotton mill is the center of their lives. Their present and their future are bounded by it. In less isolated industrial communities there is always the prospect of working into some other and higher industrial 110group. The vision of the southern cotton operative, however, is so limited by his surroundings that this possibility rarely occurs to him. In other industries the father may feel that he can never hope for anything more for himself, but he can at least plan and struggle for a better life for his children. Here the mill demands the children as well as the fathers.”

This dependence on the mills serves to make the study more accurate than is usually possible. The rent of company houses was, of course, known and through the courtesy of the mill owners the investigators were allowed to copy from the books of the company not only the detailed expenditures for food, clothing, etc., but what was of more importance, the actual wage of the various members of the family from week to week for an entire year. The total income, in some cases practically every item of expenditure, is therefore known.

The families chosen for study are considered typical, though probably on the whole having somewhat better than average conditions. This necessity for making an arbitrary choice is, of course, the one uncertain point in the study. As the investigators, however, had taken part in the larger investigation of the cotton mill industry made by the Federal Bureau of Labor, reliance can probably be placed upon their judgment as to what families were representative. Moreover the report states that the names of the families working in one of the three mills were furnished by a mill official as representative families, and in another they were frankly avowed by the mill officials to be among the best. It may therefore be assumed that while there is really no “typical family” and while there are wide variations in circumstances, the stories of these twenty-one families give an accurate picture of the home life of cotton mill employes.

In view of the discussion of the effects of the work of young children in cotton mills it is interesting to note that of the twenty-one families studied not one was wholly dependent on the wages of the man. The average number of wage earners in these families was 3.6 and the average number of individuals 8.5.

Practically all the families live in company houses for which they pay a low rent, usually $.75 to $1 a room per month. A typical house is “a one-story frame, built upon brick piers instead of a solid foundation. It is rectangular in form and divided into four rooms. The rooms are about fourteen by sixteen or sixteen by sixteen feet, and they are ceiled instead of plastered. Two rooms have fireplaces or grates, a third is arranged for a cooking stove, and the fourth has no means of heating. The flooring is of a single thickness and, as it is seldom carpeted, furnishes little protection against the cold.” Most of the homes are but meagerly furnished and only partly heated.

In the discussion of food, the menus and daily expenditures of many families are given and repay careful study. As a standard for judging the adequacy of the food supply, the dietary for the federal prison in Georgia is used (20.5 cents per man per day). Eleven of the twenty-one families fell below even this meagre diet. “Corn bread, biscuit, pork and coffee form a large part of the diet of all families.”

In the matter of clothing the study is detailed and brings out some interesting points as to the different standards of dress for various members of the same family. The daughter who works in the mills spends many times as much on clothes as does the mother who works at home. In some cases, at least, the mother wears the cast-off clothing of the daughter. One such mother spent $1.98 for clothing in an entire year, while her daughter of twenty-one who was married that year spent $113.84; another daughter of nineteen spent $77, and a third girl of sixteen spent $86.

After giving the budgets of these twenty-one families in full, the investigators attempt to formulate a “minimum standard” and a “fair standard” of living. For the former the food cost is based on the prison dietary; the housing standard on the rent of a mill house; and the other items—clothing, furniture, fuel, light, and sundries—on the least amount spent by any family for each item, excluding those that were manifestly impossibly low. On this basis the “minimum standard” for a family consisting of a man, his wife, and three children under twelve was reckoned as possible at an expenditure of $408.26 a year. This amount, the authors state, is “so low that one would expect few families to live on it.” Frankly, from the description of what is included, I should be inclined to say that no family could:

“If the family live upon this sum without suffering, wisdom to properly apportion the income is necessary. There can be no amusements or recreations that involve any expense. No tobacco can be used. No newspapers can be purchased. The children cannot go to school, because there will be no money to buy their books. Household articles that are worn out or destroyed cannot be replaced. The above sum provides for neither birth nor death nor any illness that demands a doctor’s attention or calls for medicine. Even though all these things are eliminated, if the family is not to suffer, the mother must be a woman of rare ability. She must know how to make her own and her children’s clothing; she must be physically able to do all of the household work, including the washing. And she must know enough to purchase with her allowance food that has the proper nutritive value.”

Such a “standard of living” cannot be considered adequate, falls far short of being scientific and it seems to me doubtful wisdom to consider as a “standard” at all a program so bankrupt of actual family needs.

The “fair standard” is worked out on a similar scheme. It includes somewhat more generous provision of food and allowance for certain other factors which “these people have come to regard ... as essential to their every-day 111life.” This “fair standard” is estimated at $600.74 for the average family.

CHART OF THE WEEKLY EARNINGS OF ONE OF THE TWENTY-ONE SOUTHERN FAMILIES

A series of novel diagrams is presented showing, for each family, their earnings from week to week, their average earnings for the year and a comparison of this with the minimum and fair standards.

An additional study was made of the wages of seventy-five families for a year, the figures being secured from the mill pay roll. The income of fifteen families fell below even the minimum; twenty-two had more than the fair standard, and thirty-eight between the two. Of the seventy-five families, fifty had fathers working in the mill and only two of these fifty fathers, both overseers, earned enough to support a wife and three young children according to the fair standard, and four according to the minimum. A decent home life for the families of these men would be impossible were it not for the wages of the children or the income from boarders. The great variations in incomes from week to week would increase the difficulty of planning household expenditures even when the average indicates a living wage.

The results of this low standard of living on physical vitality are shown by the fact that each of the twenty-one families studied spent some money for medicine or doctor. As illustrating the amount of sickness in these families, with its resulting loss of income and added expense we may quote from the description of one family which has suffered extensively: “The father was injured in the mill twice during the year and lost six weeks. The mother is ill with lung trouble. The boy has tuberculosis, and the fourteen-year-old girl is very frail and is constantly taking patent medicines. During the year they spent $108.25 on medicines and doctor’s bills. The year before the fourteen-year-old girl, whose earnings were a large share of the family income, lost twenty-four weeks because of sickness.” Another family, though in good general health, suffered as a result of bad sanitary conditions: “The members of the family appear to be in good health. The daughter, aged eighteen, had typhoid fever during the year and was unable to work for eight weeks. The son, aged sixteen, had malaria and lost from one to two weeks at different times.”

This is the picture of southern cotton mill life—a family living in a four-room mill-owned house without running water and indoor toilets, with but one room heated; a meager diet of pork and beans, biscuit, coffee and syrup; an irregular income, not allowing on an average enough for a fair standard of living for most of the families, yet tempting often to extravagance in those weeks when it is high; a twelve-year limit permitted by the child labor law, and adult wages that necessitate the children’s going to work as soon as that law allows; the father rarely earning much more, and sometimes even less, than the younger members of the family; scant amusement, usually only the moving picture show, possible on the meager income; poor health with the doctor often an impossible luxury.

JOTTINGS

DETROIT BOOSTING FOR SAFETY

The campaign for safety is taking firm root in Detroit. The Detroit Manufacturers’ Association has in its employ two safety inspectors who are at the call of members for work in their plants at any time. They are constantly hunting for danger points and suggesting methods of eliminating them.

More recently, following the enactment of the Workmen’s Compensation Law, there has been organized the Detroit Accident Prevention Conference. There have been three meetings so far, with such men as John Calder of the Cadillac Motor Car Company and W. H. Bradshaw, safety director of the New York Central lines as speakers and papers by those members who were equipped by reason of experience to give instructive information. The meetings are held in the evening in a down town hotel where a moderate 112priced dinner is served, the addresses and discussions following. The average attendance has been about one hundred. As no membership fee is charged and as great enthusiasm is displayed it is hoped that shortly the attendance will be double this number.

TRADE SCHOOL FOR PRINTERS

In Printing Trade News the recently established School for Printers’ Apprentices in New York is described by A. L. Blue, director of the school. The school is co-operative in the extreme; it is managed by a joint committee of employers (The Printers’ League), workmen (the New York Typographical Union) and the public (the Hudson Guild). Its headquarters are at the guild. The courses, which are for working apprentices, are so planned as to develop individuality. Afternoon classes are held for boys employed on the morning papers, evening classes for others. The present enrolment is ninety-six.

SICKNESS INSURANCE IN WISCONSIN

A bill marking the initial step towards the establishment of state accident and sick benefit insurance is pending in the Legislature of Wisconsin. This is one of the first proposals of the kind submitted in any state. Its insurance features are modelled after the English act. The bill applies solely to vocational diseases. Both employer and employe are to contribute toward the premiums. Single employes earning less than $600 a year, who have someone dependent upon them, are eligible to protection under the provisions of the bill; no person may come under its terms who earns over $900. Persons earning $800 a year must have two dependent upon them, and those earning $900 annually must have four persons dependent upon them in order to come within the proposed statute.

Employers are to be allowed to deduct 1 per cent of the wages of employes and they must add to this sum one-half of 1 per cent of the pay roll, the entire sum to be paid into a state insurance fund. When ill, the employe is to receive 65 per cent of his wages during the period of his illness, but for not more than twenty-six consecutive weeks nor more than thirty-nine weeks in a single year. If the employe is sent to a hospital, his regular wages are to be paid to him weekly. The State Industrial Commission is empowered to enforce the provisions of the act in the event of its passage.

MUNICIPAL MINIMUM WAGE

A minimum wage of 25s. ($6.08) a week for all able-bodied men will henceforth rule, says Life and Labor, in the municipal service in Glasgow. It is now many years since the corporation of Glasgow acknowledged the principle of a minimum wage, the rate then introduced being 21s. ($5.11). Since that time improvements have brought the wages up to an average minimum of about 23s. ($5.60). so that the proposal for a minimum of 25s., which was carried in the town council, means an advance of about 2s. ($0.48 2–3) weekly to many of the lower-paid workmen. To give effect to the proposal an additional expenditure of $41,365 will, it is estimated, be involved.

The position in Manchester is better, from the workers’ point of view, than it will be in Glasgow even when the minimum weekly wage is raised to 25s. ($6.08). Seven years ago the Manchester city council raised the minimum wage to 25s. Early in the present year there was an agitation for an increase of 2s. ($0.48 2–3) a week in view of the increased cost of living. A special committee reported in favor of an advance to 26s. ($6.33) a week, and this the council agreed to. This sum is paid to all the laborers (as distinct from skilled workers in the several departments) throughout the city.

FULL CREW BILLS

An unusual publicity campaign on the part of railroads has resulted from the passage by the state Legislatures of the so-called Full Crew Bills in New Jersey and New York, regulating the number of employes on trains. In the New York newspapers for several days in succession the railroads used three-quarter page advertisements for a joint statement of their opposition. In this space they urged the governor to veto the bill, and the public to protest against its enactment. It is claimed by the railroads that the law will cost them $2,000,000 annually in the state of New York without bringing any increase in efficiency or safety. They point out that Governors Hughes and Dix both refused to approve similar measures on the ground that such questions should logically be decided by the Public Service Commission.

In their advertisements the railroads urged that the matter be left to the state Public Service Commissions, and promised to abide by their decisions.

The Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, which is urging such legislation all over the country, insists that it is necessary to promote safety. The Railroad Trainman, organ of the brotherhood says:

“Today our men are asking for legislation that is no more of a departure from the beaten path than the safety device legislation of twenty years ago was. They have tried to regulate the car limit of trains and the number of men to be employed on them through their contracts. They have failed in the first instance altogether and for the most part in the other. They realize that, operated as trains are, freight train service is often performed under unsafe conditions. Two men for an unlimited number of cars is the rule for the most part. Because of it there are freight trains running today averaging between fifty and one hundred and thirty-five cars and two men are in charge with the conductor.

“There will be trains, perhaps, on which the extra man will not be needed, but if the companies had been forehanded enough to put men where they were needed they could have saved the ones not needed, but they did not and legislation does not find a way to discriminate as readily as the exercise of common sense does.”

The bills have been signed and have become laws in both New Jersey and New York.

TERRE HAUTE’S LABOR PARLIAMENT

Failure on the part of the churches of Terre Haute, Ind., to grasp the problems of its 11,000 workingmen led to the holding of a “labor parliament.” This parliament, convened last May, was directed by Harry F. Ward of the Methodist Federation for Social Service. There were three meetings in different churches, where the problems of industry and Christianity were discussed in an open and frank manner.

But the prime movers realized, early in April, that to make this parliament a success much local work would have to be done. As a stepping-stone, the ministers adopted an industrial creed, which was floated over the city, with the result that the laboring man discovered that he and the church had common ideals toward which to aim.

The local work in the churches was adapted to the particular condition of the locality, all efforts, however, being focused on the labor parliament to be held in May. Shop meetings were held, lantern slides of existing conditions were shown, and mass meetings for working men and girls conducted. Besides these features, the newspapers helped this most interesting scheme along, so that by the time set for the labor parliament, all Terre Haute was prepared for the co-operative discussion, which was to prove so beneficial to the church and organized labor. The Central Labor Union co-operated well with the movement and appointed a committee of three prominent labor men to help the ministerial committee.

The labor parliament was, indeed, a success. Dr. Ward chose as his subjects, Industry and Social Waste, Democracy in Industry, and the Industrial Problem of Christianity. In all his talks Dr. Ward opened the eyes of labor world and church. One, he showed, could not be of full benefit in its community without the co-operation of the other. And now, nearly a year after this industrial revival, what are the results? Are any permanent effects apparent from these efforts, or did the movement, swelling into the three days’ parliament, gradually fade away and become forgotten by the laboring man? A few pointed statements of those nearest the problem of both the church and laboring man will show the result.

A. M. Powers, president of the Central Labor Union, has this to say of its success. “The movement has been beneficial, as far as I can see, to both sides. When the church can show that the laboring man is not an insect to be placed upon a sociological dissecting table for amused speculations of theologians, but a man to be helped and to help advance the cause of the brotherhood of man through the church, then the antagonism will be replaced by a hearty co-operation because this spirit of brotherhood is the basis of the organized labor movement.

“I believe the churches of Terre Haute have shown that this is the spirit of their activity in their last year’s efforts, and as an individual I endorse the movement and think that as long as the same spirit is shown the labor unions will be willing to work hand in hand with the church.”

George W. Greenleaf, secretary-treasurer of District Lodge No. 72, International Association of Machinists, and city councilman, says:

“The labor parliament and the preceding church services held in Terre Haute last winter were beyond the question of a doubt a benefit to organized labor. The chief benefit derived, in my estimation, consisted in the dispelling of the popular prejudice against our organizations and the placing of our cause on a higher plane in the minds of the public.”

114The ministers of the city feel much the same way about the effects of the parliament.

Rev. A. E. Monger, pastor of the largest Methodist church in the city and one of the promoters of the movement, says:

“Since the campaign there has been crystalized in the churches a sentiment of responsibility for the welfare of the laboring man. The laboring men have found that the gospel does have a message against the great sins under which they are struggling.”

As a further evidence of the parliament’s lasting effect, Rev. John G. Benson, another of its promoters, may be quoted:

“We are getting requests from every quarter for a repetition of the parliament.”

NEW RECOGNITION OF SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY

In religious periodical literature two high notes of social significance have recently been struck. The Constructive Quarterly has appeared from the press of the George H. Doran Company in America and Hodder & Stoughton in England. It is planned to be a free forum where all the churches of Christendom may frankly and fully state their “operative beliefs” and their distinctive work, “including and not avoiding differences,” but making “no attack with polemical animus on others.”

The purpose of this undertaking is to afford opportunity for the churches, without compromise, “to re-introduce themselves to one another through the things they themselves positively hold to be vital to Christianity,” “so that all may know what the differences are and what they stand for, and that all may respect them, in order to cherish and preserve whatever is true and helpful and to discover and grow out of whatever is harmful and false.”

As it has no editorial pronouncements and no scheme for the unity of Christendom to promote, the Quarterly will depend upon the catholicity and representative influence of its editorial board, selected from all countries and communions, to promote a fellowship of work and spirit. The middle term of the Quarterly’s subtitle—a journal of the Faith, Work and Thought of Christendom—is likely to prove the basis for the correlation of the other two. For long before the faith and the thought of Christendom may be correlated, the churches will surely co-operate in their common work.

The Hibbert Journal, which for ten years has been the ablest technical quarterly review of theology and philosophy, announces a department of social service. This policy was foreshadowed by the editor as early as October, 1906, in a notably direct and able protest against the church standing aloof from “the world.” He stoutly maintained that

“the alienation from church life of so much that is good in modern culture, and so much that is earnest in every class, is the natural sequel to the traditional attitude of the church to the world.”

How false and unintelligible, as well as untenable, this attitude is appears in these categorical imperatives:

“If by ‘the world’ we mean such things as parliamentary or municipal government, the great industries of the nation, the professions of medicine, law, and arms, the fine arts, the courts of justice, the hospitals, the enterprises of education, the pursuit of physical science and its application to the arts of life, the domestic economy of millions of homes, the daily work of all the toilers—if, in short, we include that huge complex of secular activities which keeps the world up from hour to hour, and society as a going concern—then the churches which stand apart and describe all this as morally bankrupt are simply advertising themselves as the occupiers of a position as mischievous as it is false.

“If, on the other hand, we exclude these things from our definition, what, in reason, do we mean by ‘the world?’ Or shall we so frame the definition as to ensure beforehand that all the bad elements belong to the world, and all the good to the church? Or, again, shall we take refuge in the customary remark that whatever is best in these secular activities is the product of Christian influence and teaching in the past? This course, attractive though it seems, is the most fatal of all. For if the world has already absorbed so much of the best the churches have to offer, how can these persist in declaring that the former is morally bankrupt?

“Extremists have not yet perceived how disastrously this dualistic theory thus recoils upon the cause they would defend. The church in her theory has stood aloof from the world. And now the world takes deadly revenge by maintaining the position assigned her and standing aloof from the church.”

No better prospectus for the social work of either of these great quarterlies could be framed than the intention to demonstrate and bear home to the intelligence, conscience and heart of the churches these very affirmations. For, while enough of church leaders and followers thus face forward to warrant Professor Rauschenbusch in declaring that it has at last become orthodox to demand the social application of Christianity, yet there is a sharp reaction within every denomination, which threatens to retard this hopeful movement of the churches to serve their communities and thereby save themselves.

But the ultimate issue between those who are thus fearlessly facing the present and those who 115persist in backing up into the future cannot be doubtful. Social Christianity is not only demonstrably orthodox, but has won its recognition and its own place in any theological, philosophical, historical or experiential conception of Christianity that claims to be comprehensive, not to say intelligent. Without a much larger emphasis upon the social aims and efforts of Christianity in the thought, belief and work of the church, the need that is finding expression in every parish and community cannot be met—that which the Constructive Quarterly well states to be “the need of the impact of the whole of Christianity on the race.”

THE FIRST ORPHAN ASYLUM IN THE UNITED STATES^[8]
THAT OF THE URSULINE NUNS AT NEW ORLEANS

At the outset of the colonization of Louisiana by the French, ten Ursuline nuns of France, with noble generosity and self-sacrifice, volunteered to go to New Orleans, there to instruct the children of the colonists. They left Rouen in January, 1727.

After great difficulties and countless perils, they reached the mouth of the Mississippi whose waters they ascended in pirogues. They finally landed in the Crescent City on the morning of August 7, 1727, after a sea voyage of nearly six months. They had set sail from the port of Havre on February 23, 1727 after a month spent in Paris.

Arriving in New Orleans, they were met by Bienville, governor of the province of Louisiana. As there were no proper accommodations yet provided, the governor vacated his own residence and placed it at their disposal for a convent and school. Immediately was begun the erection of a new building which was completed in 1734.

The Ursuline nuns upon its completion took possession and occupied it till 1824 when they removed to their present home below the city. This structure, which is now the Archbishopric, or official place for the transaction of the business of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, is the oldest building in Louisiana and also in the vast extent of what was known as the Louisiana Purchase.

The Ursulines began their self-sacrificing work immediately upon their arrival on August 8, 1727 and opened a free school to which were added a select boarding school and then a little later a hospital. Moreover, in order to inculcate principles of civilization and, especially, of religion in the hearts of the wives and daughters of the Negroes and Indians, the nuns devoted one hour each day to their instruction.

Shortly after their arrival a new field of labor was open to their zeal in the shape of a poor orphan whom Father de Beaubois, had withdrawn from a family of dissolute morals. Although their lodgings at the time were insufficient, the nuns being still in Bienville’s house (their new convent, the present old Archbishopric, was not ready for occupancy until July 17, 1734), they adopted the child. This was the tiny mustard-seed from which sprang the flourishing orphanage which exists to the present day. It proved a real providence for the country, especially in colonial times, as may be gleaned from history’s record of the Natchez massacre, which took place on November 28, 1729.

After this frightful tragedy, so pathetically described by Chateaubriand, the Indians, who had spared only the young wives and daughters of their French victims, were forced to give up their hostages or to be massacred in turn. The generous Ursulines then opened their home to these unfortunate little ones and mothered them.

This act of disinterestedness and charity was truly heroic, considering the great difficulties usually attendant on the founding of a colony and was highly commended by Rev. Father le Petit, Jesuit, in a letter addressed, July 12, 1730, to Rev. Father d’ Avaugour, procurator of the American missions. Having given an account of the appalling massacre of the French at Fort Rosalie by the Natchez Indians, Rev. Father le Petit adds:

“The little girls, whom none of the inhabitants wished to adopt, have greatly enlarged the interesting company of orphans whom the religieuses [Ursulines] are bringing up. The great number of these children serves but to increase the charity and the delicate attentions of the good nuns. They have been formed into a separate class of which two teachers have charge.

“There is not one of this holy community that would not be delighted at having crossed the ocean, were she to do no other good save that of preserving these children in their innocence, and of giving a polite and Christian education to young French girls who were in danger of being little better raised than slaves. The hope is held out to these holy religieuses that, ere the end of the year, they will occupy the new house which is destined for them, and for which they have long been sighing. When they shall be settled there, to the instruction of the boarders, the orphans, the day scholars, and the Negresses, they will add also the care of the sick in the hospital, and of a house of refuge for women of questionable character. Perhaps later on they will even be able to aid in affording regularly, each year, the retreat to a large number of ladies, according to the taste with which we have inspired them.

“So many works of charity would, in France, suffice to occupy several communities and different institutions. But what cannot a great zeal 116effect? These various labors do not at all startle seven Ursulines; and they rely upon being able, with the help of God’s grace, to sustain them without detriment to the religious observance of their rules. As for me, I fear that, if some assistance does not arrive, they will sink under the weight of so much fatigue. Those who, before knowing them, used to say they were coming too soon and in too great a number, have entirely changed their views and their language; witnesses of their edifying conduct and great services which they render to the colony, they find that they have arrived soon enough, and that there could not be too many of the same virtue and the same merit.”

After giving details relative to the visit of the Illinois chiefs, who had come to condole with the French and to offer help against the Natchez, Father Le Petit adds:

“The first day that the Illinois saw the religieuses, Mamantouenza, perceiving near them a group of little girls, remarked: ‘I see, indeed, that you are not religieuses without an object.’ He meant to say that they were not solitaries, laboring only for their own perfection. ‘You are,’ he added, ‘like the black robes, our fathers; you labor for others. Ah! if we had above there two or three of your number, our wives and daughters would have more sense.’ ‘Choose those whom you wish.’ ‘It is not for me to choose,’ said Mamantouenza. ‘It is for you who know them. The choice ought to fall on those who are most attached to God, and who love him most....’”

The records make mention of Therese Lardas, daughter of a Mobile surgeon. After her father’s death, her mother brought her to the Ursuline orphanage, where she intended leaving her just long enough to make her first communion; but, when she came to take her home, so earnestly did the child plead to remain, that the mother could not resist her entreaties. At the age of sixteen, she entered the novitiate. She led the life of an exemplary lay sister, and died at the age of twenty-nine on November 22, 1786.

In testimony of the good education given to all classes by the Ursulines, the Rt. Rev. Luis Penalvery Cardemas said in a dispatch forwarded to the Spanish court, November 1, 1795:

“Since my arrival in this town, on July 17, I have been studying with the keenest attention the character of its inhabitants, in order to regulate my ecclesiastical government in accordance with the information which I may obtain on this important subject.... Excellent results are obtained from the Convent of the Ursulines, in which a good many young girls are educated. This is the nursery of those future matrons who will inculcate in their children the principles which they here imbibe. The education which they receive in this institution is the cause of their being less vicious than the other sex....”

Up to 1824, that is, for well nigh a century, the Ursulines maintained their orphanage in what is now the old Archbishopric. At this period, New Orleans having spread considerably and become too densely populated to afford the advantages and charms of the country so necessary to a large boarding school, the institution was removed three miles lower down, to the magnificent place which the Ursulines hold to the present day. Owing to the encroachments of the great Father of Waters, they are to transfer again, within a year, to another site.

After 1824, several asylums having been founded for orphans of both sexes, the Ursulines received but thirty or forty poor children. In keeping with their sphere of life and future career, these children are taught English, French, geography, arithmetic, elementary history, and some housekeeping, sewing and laundry work. The nuns endeavor, above all, by religions instruction and careful training, to inculcate in the hearts and minds of their youthful charges principles of duty, so as to form for the future women of confidence, courage, self-sacrifice and devotion.

SOCIAL SERVICE OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN CANADA

The Presbyterian church in Canada does social service work through its Department of Social Service and Evangelism. Efforts are directed along several lines.

Social surveys of both urban and rural communities are conducted, considering not only religious and moral, but also social and economic conditions. An expert is employed who gives all his time to the work. He secures the co-operation of a large number of volunteer helpers, many of whom are proficient in various phases of social service work.

The problems of the city are studied and practical solutions sought. This is attempted in the following ways:

By evangelical social settlements, of which there are one in Montreal, one in Toronto and one in Winnipeg. Eight or ten others in the not distant future are planned for various other growing cities in the Dominion, especially where non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants are numerous. Our organizer and supervisor of this work is Sara Libby Carson, founder of Christodora House and various other settlements in New York, St. Christopher House, Toronto, and Chalmers House, Montreal. We also have established a training school for settlement workers, in connection with St. Christopher House, Toronto.

By securing the co-operation of churches and sympathetic organizations in every variety of general social betterment effort.

By establishing special redemptive and social missions on the crowded thoroughfares. The first of these was Evangel Hall, Toronto, in which evangelistic work, as well as various sorts of social work, is carried on.

117The department has taken up in a large way redemptive and preventive work in the interest of girls, and associated with that educational work along the line of sex teaching among boys and men. There are five homes which are called social service houses, in which girls and women requiring special help are taken care of. Fifteen trained Christian women give their time to this phase of the department’s endeavor, and there is also a large army of volunteer helpers. In connection with this work an educational campaign through pulpit and platform and the distribution of literature throughout the Dominion is carried on. From time to time legislation, federal or provincial, for the more adequate protection of girls and women is sought.

In co-operation with other interested bodies the department keeps up a steady campaign for the suppression of gambling, intemperance, sale of immoral literature, unclean theatricals, the social vice, and the promotion of the positive virtues, the opposite of these.

Special attention is being directed to positive effort and constructive work along all lines aiming at social uplift, and a good deal of legislation toward this end has been successfully put through.

The department has established a lantern slide and film service, and is endeavoring to supply through illustrated means elevating entertainment as well as information and inspiration.

All the evangelistic work of the Presbyterian church is done through this department, so that evangelism and social service are kept in close association in all effort undertaken.

SYNAGOGUE AND COMMUNITY

The changing relation of the synagogue and the community is proving the truth of the hoary platitude that history repeats itself. During the Middle Ages the synagogue was the heart of the secular as well as of the religious life of the community; it was a social center as well as a house of prayer. There the poor man found succor, the stranger acquaintances, the children their teachers, and the young people “their fates.” It would be almost impossible to list all the private and public interests which, clustering about the synagogue, bore witness to the vital part this institution played in medieval Jewish life.

This prominent role was due to the enforced isolation of the Jewish community; thanks to the Ghetto walls the Jewish group constituted a city within a city. Once the Jewish population was concentrated into separate quarters, the synagogue became to the segregated community what the home was to the individual family; it was not only a place of meeting, but also a clearing house for individual and communal joys and sorrows.

But the intimacy was broken down by the political emancipation that came to Jewry at the end of the eighteenth century. Slowly, as the old functions of the synagogue were taken over by special institutions housed in their own buildings, the synagogue began to be used purely as a house of worship; aside from this, its sole concern seemed to be the Sunday school. Applicants for charity were referred to the charity office across the street; social functions took place at the clubs; legal disputes were no longer decided by a rabbinical court. True, there were few large cities in this country in which the Jewish community did not point with pride to its magnificent house of worship; but in the majority of cases these gorgeous buildings (I am writing throughout of the synagogues of the reform wing) were dark six days and nights a week. In this respect, they differed little from the churches about them.

But the last decade, which has seen the rise of the institutional church, is witnessing the return of the synagogue to its former close relationship to communal Jewish life. The change is due to the same causes that made for the broadening of the work of city churches. The popular criterion of a social institution’s value, it was seen, is its working efficiency. Men who judged by concrete and tangible standards, and their number is legion, were becoming indifferent to religion because it appeared divorced from life. The leaders of American Judaism began to appreciate that it was insufficient to proclaim from the pulpit that religion included charity, social amelioration, good citizenship, as well as morality and reverence; they began to insist that the synagogue should “monument its claims.” It was urged that the synagogue should not only strive to touch the religious nature of the people with the conventional methods of prayer and praise and preachment, but should also bring to bear a system of institutional activities, social, educational and philanthropic which would bring it into contact with its members’ physical, mental and social nature as well.

As a result of this awakening there is hardly a synagogue in the United States which has not some form of institutionalism—be it only a sewing circle. A questionnaire sent out by the Committee on Social and Religious Union of the Central Conference of American Rabbis to its various members elicited ninety-seven replies. In these answers seventy-one report the existence of congregational libraries; eleven congregations conduct classes for the teaching of the English language and instruction in citizenship; six maintain settlements; two have labor bureaus; fifty list philanthropic activities, glee and choral societies, athletic clubs, kindergartens, industrial schools and dancing classes.

The committee in summarizing its report says: “The majority [of our colleagues] feel that all these institutional creations have helped to deepen the interest of the members in the synagogue and in each other; that they have helped to make the temple a center for Jewish communal life; ... that they religionize social functions; that they stimulate the Jewish consciousness; that they prevent disintegration....”

Once again the synagogue is playing a splendid role in Jewish communal life. Men are beginning 118to perceive that the ideal synagogue will be in use at practically all hours every day in the week, will never be dark and deserted. The impressive appearing edifice that was tenanted by silence and gloom on every day except the Sabbath is becoming an anachronism. Our hope is that the synagogues that continue to slumber may awaken before it is too late, and take their proper share in the work of communal uplift.

DR. HOWARD KELLY’S APPEAL FOR CHURCH CIVIC SERVICE

The demands for a better trained ministry and membership in the churches are being strongly emphasized by such statements of what the community expects of them as Dr. Howard A. Kelly of the Johns Hopkins University medical faculty recently made in an address at the annual meeting of the New York Probation and Protective Association. In giving his consent to print some of his remarks, he writes, with special reference to his efforts against the social evil:

“I feel as though my own work in this field were to bring the churches together for neighborhood social interests. If we do not get the churches actively to work, I believe all the social developments of the last thirty years are destined to failure. I fully believe that a few strong men, say five or six in a city like Baltimore, can effectively put persistent effort into the work of amalgamating our churches for the expression of the Christian life in the active service of their fellow men.”

In his address in New York, after stoutly combating, from his professional and public points of view, the policy of segregating vice, he declared that the social work of the church is indispensable to progress, and that it is the duty and the opportunity of the church to fulfil the need in this direction. He spoke substantially as follows:

“The most effective of all agencies in breaking down the strongholds of vice and in building up the national character is the church. For some reason unknown and unfathomable, some of my associates in this beneficent work who don’t go to church fight shy of discussing any enlistment of the churches everywhere. Not a few who have never had any personal interests in the church even stand ready to declare, with a distinguished head of our public libraries, that the church represents the largest outlay of capital for the smallest return in interest the world has ever seen.

“The utility of the church in the social field is best defended perhaps by citing an investigation of over 1000 social workers of all kinds showing that over 90 per cent are church people, and I venture confidently to affirm that if the inspiration of the church direct and indirect is taken away from our various social movements, they will die outright in short order. I can furthermore now aver what I could not have said twenty years ago, of a group of splendid humanitarian workers who have no church affiliations, that this indefatigable but weary band has at last come to realize that unless the church comes to the front and does her duty this great purifying work will never be done.

“The difficulty has been that our churches have been too much afflicted with myopia, seeing little beyond the confines of their own four walls. They have also one and all slipped into the easy ways of formalism, and worse still, the laity have thrust the burden of their religious obligations onto the shoulders of a groaning, overladen clergy, trusting to discharge their own personal responsibilities on a cash basis by check. I am sure that the clergy are well aware that there is much to be desired in the social relations of the church to the community and I believe no set of men will show themselves more ready to advance on new lines if they can see that the movement is really a spiritual one and that a large service can thus be inaugurated.

“There are many reasons why the churches must be depended upon as the backbone of any morals movement:

They are ideally distributed among the people.

They have the intelligence and the means.

They have a source of continuous inspiration needed in dealing with chronic distressing problems.

They alone can guarantee perpetuity of effort.

“In utilizing the church, the minister must be the organizer and leader of his people. A new relationship between pastor and layman will ensue, and laymen, once drawn into a local work, will soon branch out into all forms of civic work for the weal of the community. Again, the churches possess the community buildings so much needed. The only other similar institution capable of a similar co-operation on a large scale is the public school which, while valuable and necessary in this movement, has not the independence and lacks the great inspiration.

“What, then, is the specific program for the church? First, of all, she must not abate but rather increase her dependence upon God. She must never yield to temptation to abandon the one really valuable quality she possesses by relegating to the background the living fountains of inspiration she holds in God’s word, for a mere mundane horizontal social Gospel which makes a religion of the human activities which are but its appropriate outward expression. First a glance upward, then outward to God for the life, and to the human arena for the sphere in which the life must be manifested. This does not hinder but quickens the impulse to effective service.

“The profounder my faith, the more am I able to work in affectionate association and harmony with the many who do not see eye to eye with me here on earth; I cannot, however, continue to work with any who demand as the price of their help that I shall stifle all outward expression of my faith. He who walks in the light must sing of the light lest the light he has shall fade into darkness, and he too shall be left to flounder along the dead level of merely human self-guided impulses.

“The church must be a great, perennial fountain of spiritual and moral energy to the whole people in all the avenues of human interests. She must realize her obligation to champion the cause of the oppressed, whatever the cause and whoever the oppressor, whether in her fold or out of it. She must watch to prevent the rich from grinding the faces of the poor. She must when necessary provide for every legitimate desire of the people. If politics are corrupt, then she must enter aggressively into the field of politics, only for purity and not for party. She must fight all saloons and organize neighborhood opposition to their continuance, but provide too for some form of social life to replace them.

“The rich churches most be big sisters to the poor, providing means and sending talented workers wherever they are needed. If the church needs money for neighborhood enterprise, let her lop off her choirs and stained glass windows and bells, expensive altars, and put the money saved into human lives. She must discourage all extravagances which give the poor just cause for bitterness and arouse envy and set up unworthy standards. Let the church make a map of neighborhood conditions. This will serve as an object lesson and as a basis for action. In weekly classes she should then study such social problems as:

120

ONE OF DAYTON’S MENACES

A heap of dead horses awaiting skinning and rendering at the fertilizer plant

SANITATION AT DAYTON

[The widespread flood disaster in Ohio during the last week of March led members of the Pittsburgh Flood Commission to study the situation. Morris Knowles, a member of the Engineering Committee of this commission, has had two assistants in the field for this purpose. One of these, M. R. Scharff, who had previously been employed by Mr. Knowles in making a sanitary survey of the coal-mining camps in Alabama, paid particular attention to the sanitary conditions resulting from the flood. The present article embodies observations made on this trip.—Ed.]

Following in the wake of great disasters which descend from time to time upon our cities, paralyzing the public services that make crowded city conditions possible, is the outcropping of disease that may, if unchecked, prove more disastrous even than the catastrophe itself. This tendency was discernible in the first reports of the floods that have recently devastated Ohio, Indiana and adjoining states, due to the heavy rains of March 24–28. Nearly every flooded city reported that its water works plant had been put out of commission, or the water supply polluted, which with the increased chance of infection, and the general lowering of vitality presented a situation of unusual menace and one demanding complete and immediate handling.

The most serious situation is Dayton, for here every sanitary problem presented at any other point was involved. The complete, immediate and effective organization to handle the situation which was formed there was typical of the effective work now done at such emergency periods.

At Dayton the water works plant was incapacitated by water that reached ten feet above the boiler grates; there was unknown damage to water distribution and sanitary sewerage and drainage systems; storm sewers and catch basins were clogged with filth and debris; dead animals were strewn on every side; the population was at high nervous tension, their vitality lowered by shock, exposure, cold, and lack of food and drink; hundreds of people were crowded for days in single buildings or dwellings; thousands, probably, had been exposed to intestinal infection by drinking the dirty flood water as it swirled through the streets; hundreds had only wet cellars and rooms to return to, if their homes were not altogether destroyed; and everywhere on everything—walls, ceilings, floors, furniture, streets and sidewalks—was a thick coating of the black, sticky, slimy mud left by the retreating waters. This in a measure pictures the situation at Dayton as the flood waters receded. And Dayton knew at once that the toll of the flood would be as nothing compared to the pestilence, unless attention and energy were directed to these problems.

This appreciation of the paramount importance of sanitation was a striking revelation of the success of the campaign of sanitary education that has characterized the last century. In every phase of the work of recovery, in the warning signs and directions on almost every post, in the placards on the automobiles of the sanitary department stating that “This car must not be stopped or delayed day or night,” in the daily exhortations in the free newspapers distributed throughout the city, in a thousand ways, Dayton declared again and again:

“Sanitation first and foremost. Then everything else.”

Such was the spirit of the members of the Dayton Bicycle Club, when they met as the waters receded from their club-house to consider what service they could best render to their stricken city, and volunteered to remove 121the dead animals strewn it the streets. Such also was the message reiterated by the Ohio State Board of Health, the city health officials, the representatives of the national government, the Red Cross, the Relief Committee, the Ohio National Guard, and every one of the splendid organizations that are working shoulder to shoulder to clean up Dayton and to prevent conditions more costly in toll of life than the deluge itself.

One of the remarkable features of the handling of the relief work at Dayton was the entire absence of red tape, the lack of conflict, and the universal evidence of harmonious co-operation between the various organizations at work, notwithstanding that there was no complete centralization of direction and that some of the organizations were proceeding practically independent of the others. “Results, not credit,” was the watchword, and the results were such as to reflect the most lasting credit upon all engaged in the work.

The Dayton Bicycle Club showed wisdom in volunteering to remove the dead animals from the street. Nearly every horse in the more than seven square miles of the city that was under water—and this area contained all the important livery stables—was drowned, and quick action was needed to remove the bodies to prevent serious results. A sanitary department was organized, and as rapidly as automobile trucks and wagons were volunteered, they were pressed into service. Over 100 vehicles and about 600 men were engaged on this work. A rendering company, which handles all the garbage collected in the city, agreed to take care of the horses and did so as fast as they came for a time. When the carcasses came so rapidly that it was necessary to heap them up on the grounds of the plant, and then on a vacant field nearby, the plant was a grewsome place indeed. Up to the night of March 31, 1,002 had been received. A number were picked up the next two days, so that the final total was probably in the neighborhood of 1,100.

At about the time this work was started, a reconstruction department was organized, under the Citizens Relief Committee, with divisions, each under an engineer, assigned to street cleaning, sewers and drains, streets, and levees. By March 31, the removal of dead animals had been practically completed, and the organization and equipment of the sanitary department were merged with those of the street cleaning division of the reconstruction department. Sanitary notices directed that all mud and rubbish be deposited at the curb, the city was divided into districts and collection progressed rapidly, considering the wagons and trucks available. More wagons could have been put into service, but horses were lacking. All mud and rubbish was hauled to one of the half-dozen city rubbish dumps located in low outlying sections, or was dumped off bridges into the river. The employes of the city water works department were able to get into the pumping station on March 28 and the following day pumping was resumed. Dayton’s water supply comes from a number of deep drilled wells along the Mad River. It is pumped direct into the mains without storage, by means of a Holly vertical, triple-expansion, crank and fly-wheel engine. This pump has given rise to the local name of “Hollywater” applied to the city supply. It was feared at first that the distribution system had been badly damaged, but investigation showed that only three small mains had been broken. Water, at reduced pressure, was therefore possible, except in one or two small sections.

AN IMPROVISED COMFORT STATION

Dayton water is exceptionally pure, but it was feared that there might have been leakage of flood water into the pipes while the pressure was cut off and so notices to “boil all water, even the Hollywater” were posted. Samples were promptly taken for analysis from various portions of the distribution system by the chemist of the National Cash Register Company, the bacteriologist of the city Board of Health, and by the State Board of Health, but the injunction to boil water was continued, even though the first analysis was favorable.

The catch basins and storm sewers throughout the city were badly clogged with wreckage and filth, and early cleaning was imperative. The city was divided into seven drainage districts, and gangs of men and wagons assigned to shoveling out catch basins and hauling the rubbish to the dumps. At the same time systematic inspection of the sanitary sewerage system was begun. It had been expected that the sewers would be clogged, like the storm drains, and the early sanitary notices issued contained these warnings:

“Do not use water closets. Contents will reach cellars. Use vessels, disinfect, and bury in back-yards. Disinfectants: carbolic acid, chloride of lime, bichloride of mercury, and creolin.”

“Do not use sanitary sewers and closets until notified by the Board of Health. Even if the “Hollywater” system is on, the sewers are full of mud and will clog. Burn or bury all excreta, garbage and filth. Add lime and bury deep. Use disinfectant in out-door trenches also.”

Inspection showed a much better condition than was anticipated. In all but three districts, the sanitary sewers were running freely and the warnings were replaced by new notices:

“Sewers are open and ready for use. If the water supply is not sufficient for flushing, fill the tank of the closet with a bucketful of water, and flush as usual.”

Wooden public convenience stations were also established over sewer manholes in the business sections and in residential sections without sewer connections.

The three sewer districts that were out of commission were the St. Francis, the North Dayton, and the Riverdale low line. The St. Francis sewer is a gravity line, and a manhole at the lower end was completely choked up. It was necessary finally to dynamite this manhole in order to open the line. The two latter lines are both low, and sewage has to be pumped into the river by pneumatic ejectors. The air lines from the compressor plant in the water works pumping station were laid in the levees which were washed out and at one point about 200 feet of pipe was lost. This was difficult to repair, and these districts had to be left without sewerage until April 2, when a by-pass on each line into the storm drains was opened, and the backed-up sewage lowered sufficiently to clear most of the cellars and to permit the use of water closets.

While this work was proceeding the organizations devoting their energies to control of infectious disease, inspection, and administration had been far from idle. The State Board of Health had three sanitary engineers and two physicians, trained in public health work, in the city before the waters receded. The city Board of Health was one of the first in the field, and the medical corps of the Ohio National Guard promptly took up the work. Co-operating with one another, under the direction of Major L. T. Rhoades of the United States medical corps, who was appointed chief sanitary officer, and with the assistance of local doctors and nurses and those furnished by the Red Cross, these organizations soon established control of the entire city in a comprehensive and effective manner.

The Ohio State Board of Health engineers were assigned to assist in the water works, sewerage, and general cleaning up. Then, in co-operation with the city board and Major Rhoades, the city was divided into sixteen sanitary districts, with a physician in charge of each. These physicians inspected their districts, reported to headquarters, conditions requiring particular attention, instructed people in sanitation and followed up all reported cases of illness to guard against contagion.

The city bacteriologist reestablished his laboratory, which had been inundated, and took up diagnostic and analytical work. The state plumbing inspector and the state inspector of workshops and factories established offices, and joined with the city inspectors in pushing inspection work rapidly. Men were sent out to trace all contagious cases that were on the books at the time of the floods, and the reporting of infectious diseases and deaths were resumed as rapidly as possible.

Four contagious disease wards were established in addition to the tuberculosis and small-pox hospitals, two in the St. Elizabeth and Miami Valley Hospitals in the city and one each in North Dayton and Riverdale. As fast as infectious cases were reported or discovered, they were removed to one of these wards, and the houses placarded and disinfected.

A food inspection office was also opened, and all food arriving on relief cars was inspected before distribution to relief stations, that which had already been distributed being inspected at the stations.

123The medical corps of the Ohio National Guard established a base field hospital in the new courthouse, and a supply depot in the probate court room of the old courthouse. In addition, seven relief hospitals were established in Dayton View, Miami City, Edgemont, South Park, the Davis Sewing Machine Company’s plant, North Dayton, and Riverdale, with a surgeon of the medical corps of the National Guard and a corps of civilian physicians and Red Cross nurses in charge of each. These stations had maternity, general, and infectious wards. Hospital and proved infectious cases were promptly forwarded to St. Elizabeth’s or the Miami Valley Hospital. The base hospital received all cases among the companies of the National Guard on duty; those which would obviously not recover in time for useful service were returned to their homes. The supply depot of the field hospital not only furnished the base hospital and the seven field stations, but supplies were also furnished to the sixteen stations of the sanitary committee, at the request of Major Rhoades.

An efficiently manned hospital doing all classes of work was established by the National Cash Register Company and the American Red Cross in the administration building at the National Cash Register Company’s plant, and other medical relief stations were maintained in the city by the Red Cross.

Up to the close of the first week following the flood no unusual prevalence of infectious disease had developed. Some cases of diphtheria, pneumonia, and measles were reported, but the number was not substantially larger than that previous to the flood. When the conditions that prevailed during the first three days after the disaster are considered, with the strain on the entire population during the first days of reconstruction, it seems impossible that Dayton will escape without a considerable number of cases of intestinal and exposure diseases, such as typhoid and pneumonia. But the complete, efficient, and harmonious system of public health organization that has been established gives promise that no epidemic will follow and that the first cases, due to infection before control was established, will be the last.

THE FRIEDMANN CURE

As the interest in Dr. Friedrich Franz Friedmann and his tuberculin increases and a large part of the world is anxiously waiting to have its hopes confirmed that at last a real cure for tuberculosis has been discovered, it will be interesting to state what is positively known about this treatment, to what extent it is a new discovery and why the medical profession has shown such hostility to its originator.

In the first place Friedmann’s remedy is not a “serum.” Anti-toxins, such as those used against diphtheria and lock-jaw are sera. An antitoxin is the serum of an animal which has been treated with toxin-forming germs till his blood serum is full of defensive substances against that toxin. An antitoxin, as its name indicates, is an antidote to a poison.

Friedmann’s tuberculin belongs to the class which we have of late begun to call vaccines, a term formerly applied only to the virus of cowpox but now made to cover all forms of virus which are used to stimulate the production of defensive substances. The real difference between an antitoxin and a vaccine is that the first contains an antidote and is an emergency remedy for an acute disease, while the second is a weak form of virus which causes the body of the patient to manufacture its own antidote.

What Friedmann claims as novel in his tuberculin is that it consists of living tubercle bacilli, while those in general use consist of dead bacilli or their extractives. It has long been known that living bacilli would call forth a more rapid production of defensive substances than dead. Dr. Trudeau of Saranac Lake demonstrated this twenty years ago, experimenting on rabbits with bacilli of bird tuberculosis. Later several Americans confirmed his results, using non-virulent strains of human tubercle bacilli. Von Behring’s famous experiments on immunizing calves were made with living bacilli. So far therefore as is yet known, there is nothing new in the principle Friedmann is following. As to the details of his cure, we are in ignorance.

It will be long before any dependable word can be given out as to the results of Friedmann’s work in New York city. Every physician knows that optimism, eagerness to grasp at every hopeful sign, are characteristics of a fair majority of consumptives. We shall need a much longer period of observation before we can be sure that this tuberculin has any superiority to the many previously tested, almost all of which have had initial success followed by more or less disillusionment.

Still greater caution must be used in estimating the immunizing properties of Friedmann’s tuberculin. Friedmann treated over 300 children eighteen months ago and states that during this interval none of them have developed tuberculosis. It will be at least fifteen years before positive statements can be made concerning these children and then only by comparing them with a similar group of non-treated children living in conditions as nearly as possible identical with those of the treated children.

As to the attitude of American physicians to Dr. Friedmann one can hardly accuse them of unfairness and of narrow-minded professional jealousy if one realizes that he has violated three of the fundamental laws of medical ethics and, however impatient the non-medical world may be of much that comes under this head, no one can think that secrecy, exclusiveness 124or self-advertisement are in accordance with the best traditions of medicine.

A significant contrast could be drawn between the methods pursued by Dr. Friedmann and those pursued by Paul Ehrlich when he announced his new cure for syphilis. No charge of charlatanism or commercialism could ever be brought against Ehrlich. From the first, the medical world knew all about salvarsan, and knew that it would be put into everyone’s hands as soon as Ehrlich thought it safe to give it out for general use. He insisted that it first must be carefully tested, not by himself alone but by approved clinicians, who would agree to use it only on patients that could be kept under constant supervision in hospitals, and who also would agree to make detailed reports of these cases. After this thorough trying out of the new cure, it was given unreservedly to the medical profession the world over. Undoubtedly Ehrlich could have come to America and reaped golden profits by keeping the cure in his own hands, for thousands of cases were eager to have it administered.

The Friedmann tuberculin may be what its discoverer claims it is, but the confidence felt in its promoter can never be the same as that which Ehrlich has won.

COURSES ON SEX HYGIENE

Last spring I attended in Boston a course of lectures on sex hygiene given expressly for social workers. The course was given at the request of a number who had been meeting for some time previously to discuss “what women social workers can do now to promote a better knowledge of the meaning of sex in life.”

The course was planned by approaching the subject from various aspects, physiological, psychological, neurological, ideal and simply human. Talks were given by people whose interest in the subject was vastly different—physicians, social workers and mothers, and all showed a spirit of earnestness and willingness to help.

The first few lectures were crowded—overcrowded, in fact—which showed the great need people feel in being aided and enlightened on a subject which touches all to some extent.

When the course was over, there was a feeling of disappointment among some who had attended throughout. Many others had dropped out because they “could not give the time as they were not getting out of it what they hoped for.” What did they hope for? The best answer is that when the opportunity for written questions came, nearly all the inquiries were “What shall I say to so and so when she asks so and so?” “What should be said to a young man under such and such circumstances?” and similar definite demands.

That was the point! People so often want absolute information on subjects in which “circumstances alter cases!” No human being can tell any other human being what he or she “should say” to a third person on any subject at any given time. Each of us has to give of his knowledge which is fed by his experience and modified by his temperament. We give this knowledge (if we are wise) to whomsoever happens to need it in such language as shall appeal to his knowledge, apply to his experience and adapt itself to his temperament. We can not learn how to do that at any lecture or set of lectures, and just as long as we expect it on this or any other subject, we are sure to be disappointed.

The great importance of a right knowledge of sex is borne in upon social workers daily, often hourly, on account of the many people they meet whose lives are exposed to dangers which with either wrong or incomplete knowledge they are not fitted to meet safely. It is frequently the duty of the social worker either to supply the knowledge or help in the situation brought about by lack of it. Often they feel unequal to the task and become morbid over the sorrows brought about by ignorance and their own inability to help matters. Lectures or books on sex hygiene are advertised; to them they turn for assistance. All too often are they disappointed, gaining no concrete knowledge of how to give an answer to problems on their minds at the time. Likewise some people go to a lecture or course given by some one who has been successful in connecting his or her knowledge and experience and giving it out. Afterward they come away thrilled and inspired and proceed to repeat like parrots the words they have heard.

Bitter disappointment at the lack of interest on the part of the audience is the result. I knew of some mothers who attended Laura B. Garrett’s talks in Philadelphia, and came away eager to instruct their children. In each case the result was wholly unsatisfactory. They tried to reproduce Miss Garrett’s words, instead of simply getting knowledge and suggestion from her talks. What they were imparting was not a part of themselves, not their own, therefore not theirs to give.

Miss Garrett has worked out her talks from years of patient, earnest work and hours of thought. She can tell us of her methods and can illustrate, but if we are going to use her methods we have to make them our own first. We must adapt them to our own experience and apply them to the experience of those to whom we are giving them.

The same is true of any other speaker on this subject. There is no fixed method by which a right knowledge of sex in life can be universally taught. We may learn how to teach biology or physiology, or how to adapt the law of life and 125of coming to life in plants or animals to human laws, but that does not necessarily qualify us to meet the problems of sex in life or to teach others to meet them. There are a few essentials to the proper teaching of the meaning of sex in life and if we possess these we ought to be able to deal with our problems as they come, if we are capable of using our possessions.

First, a real living belief that our bodies are the “temples of the Holy Spirit,” a belief which applies to all parts and functions of the body and makes it a sacred duty to keep them healthy and clean and strong.

Second, an intelligent knowledge of the body as a machine so that we may use it and not abuse it.

Third, a calm, moderate knowledge of the more common perversions of sex and their relations to other forms of nervous troubles, and a belief in human ability to overcome weakness and sin as well as to cure disease.

These things we can learn and keep on learning at lectures, but how to give them out from our personality to other personalities is for each person his or her own individual problem. It must be solved by bringing his or her own experience of life, plus specific knowledge, plus sympathy, plus common sense, to bear on each problem and so to adapt it to the understanding of the person in question that it will help the existing need.

When the Wise Men of Bethlehem presented gifts, each brought his own gifts, not another’s. They were wise men. If we social workers are wise, we shall cease to try to gain from others words in which to express the knowledge of the meaning of sex in life and will bend our energies to gaining high ideals, simple workable knowledge of the use of the body and the evils of its abuse and an understanding heart and common sense.

Then we shall be able to bring our gifts to this subject and present it to those who need it in such forms as to be practical and effective.

A PLEA FOR COMFORT STATIONS

Travelers from almost all foreign countries describe the public convenience stations of foreign cities. In London there are many places where crooked streets converge, leaving perhaps an irregular open space or plaza. These are not all occupied by statues, as the city has attempted to provide comfort for the living as well as honor to the dead. Two modest iron stairways with suitable signs lead to two rooms below ground, one for women, the other for men, where toilets and urinals are found.

On the continent the provisions are usually less complete and in many instances in the eyes of Anglo-Saxon observers seem much too public. For instance in Paris urinals for men are located at convenient points, but some of them only cover the user from the breast to the knees. In Antwerp and Brussels urinals are attached to posts at the edge of the narrow sidewalk, and some of them have no screen at all. In Rotterdam at frequent intervals scrolls of sheet iron shaped somewhat like a letter C are located in the gutters of the sidewalks; the open side of the scroll facing the street. They reach from a point above the head to about a foot from the ground. In Italy there are places, notably Naples, where two slabs of slate set in a wall at an angle serve the purpose of a urinal. They are usually at the entrance to a small street or alley, and are not screened. The custom of ages causes the natives to pass by these without a glance, but to use them is embarrassing to the tourist.

It is not the intention to advocate such crude contrivances, but to present a plea for the establishment at frequent intervals of convenience stations designed for the use of both men and women, and with such surroundings that one may enter and leave without feeling the blush of shame.

Many American cities have provided a few such places, for instance in parks, and some of these are admirable in conception and in structure; but one cannot always remain near a park, and in winter when the kidneys are most active, these stations are often closed. One of the most practical stations of this kind that I have seen is in the Boston Common. It is underground in a small hill, with a wide stairway leading to it.

As one approaches it he sees that the room is lighted and is lined with white tiling. There are urinals, closets, washstands, and a shoe-blacking establishment. It has the appearance of a toilet room in a hotel, and the place is well ventilated and kept clean. I do not recall how it is heated, but such places could be heated with steam from adjacent buildings or by stoves.

Cities must of course consider the economic side of any new enterprise. I believe that such stations, outside of the cost of original construction, could be made almost if not quite self-supporting, in the following way. Lease the shoe-blacking privilege to an individual for a good round fee, said individual to be subject to certain rigid rules and regulations, and the place to be subject to periodical inspections. The lessee should be required to keep the place in perfect sanitary condition. In addition to his income from blacking shoes the lessee might be allowed to rent a few closets, ordinarily kept locked, and charge a small prescribed fee. If the patronage of the station in Boston Common is a criterion it would seem to me that the city could demand a fee from the lessee that would cover all ordinary running expenses.

A woman attendant in the ladies’ station could be allowed the privilege of renting closets, and could also be provided with pins, buttons, and other necessaries such as are kept in the ladies’ waiting rooms at department stores.

As a public health measure the subject must be considered from two standpoints, the health of the individual, and the health of the community.

Physiology teaches us that the normal adult 126bladder, when fully distended, holds twenty ounces, but that a discomfort begins when it contains more than four ounces. As one advances in years prolonged retention of urine causes ammoniacal decomposition, with consequent irritation of the bladder. If the retention is frequent, disease of the kidneys must follow.

At present in most American cities there are few convenience stations available to the public outside of hotels and saloons. In nearly all hotels one finds a sign stating that the toilet facilities are for the exclusive use of the guests. This makes a stranger feel unwelcome.

Saloons are open to the public, but one dislikes to make use of the sanitary privileges offered without purchasing something. To a man of mature age, who is perhaps in the habit of taking an occasional drink, this phase of the subject has little importance; but for a young man in a strange city, driven for lack of comfort stations into a saloon the question assumes a moral side. The only way to avoid the saloon is to make use of an alley or other dark place, thereby breaking a city ordinance and creating a nuisance which gives the offence a public health aspect. The frequency with which this is done is evidenced by the familiar sign “Commit No Nuisance.” In London I saw a sign that to my mind was much less objectionable and equally effective; it read simply “Decency Forbids.”

The establishment of comfort stations at convenient points would I think contribute greatly to public health.

JOTTINGS

INFANT MORTALITY RATE IN N. Y.

The January Bulletin of the Department of Health in New York city shows that the downward curve of the death rate during 1910 and 1911 was continued in 1912 and that the lowest point ever recorded in the city has been reached. In 1911 the death rate was 15.13 for 1,000, while in 1912 it was 14.11. The difference of 1.02 between the two years means that 5,276 lives were saved in 1912, for, if the rate of 1911 had prevailed last year, New York’s death roll would have been larger by just that number. In analyzing the returns it is found that the decrease has affected those diseases which the Department of Health seeks to control; namely, the acute infectious diseases, tuberculosis of the lungs, and the diarrhoea of children. On the other hand, there is a decided increase in the mortality from those diseases which seem to be peculiar to our modern society and which are not under public health control, organic heart disease and Bright’s disease.

The infant mortality rate is low. Calculated on the basis of reported births the deaths of children under one year number only 105 per thousand born, and in all probability this is a little too high, for New York city does not claim to have more than from 90 to 95 per cent birth registration. The record is encouraging when compared with the figures for Great Britain and Germany. The rate for England and Wales in 1911 was 130; that for Berlin in 1910 was 157.

HEALTH OF LONDON SCHOOL CHILDREN

Only in the last few years has the law required every child attending an elementary school to be physically examined on entering and leaving and, therefore, statistics on the health of school children in England are only now available. About a million and a half children are now examined annually. The report of Sir George Newman, chief medical officer of the Board of Education for 1911, has just been issued. It shows the condition of 186,652 children in thirteen counties and sixteen urban areas and is far from satisfactory. Only in one urban area did the percentage of “good” nutrition reach 45, and from this figure it ranged down as low as 3.8. Of 200,000 children examined in London more than half were found to be defective and over 78,000 were recommended for treatment. According to this report the malnutrition is due in the great majority of cases to ignorance of the relative value of foodstuffs and the means of using them economically, and only in the minority to poverty. About .5 per cent of the children are feeble-minded and of these about one-seventh are of such low grade as to be uneducable.

INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON SCHOOL HYGIENE

The preliminary bulletin of the Fourth International Congress for School Hygiene announces a meeting, which is to be held in Buffalo, N. Y., August 23 to 30 next. The three preceding congresses were held in 1904 in Nuremberg; in 1907 in London, and in 1910 in Paris. The president of the congress is Charles W. Eliot, president emeritus of Harvard University; the vice-presidents are: Dr. W. H, Welch, professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Henry P. Walcott, chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Health. The lists of vice-presidents and members of the international committee includes the names of some of the foremost men of science in Europe and Asia. Buffalo has raised $40,000 to meet the expenses of the Congress and to entertain the delegates.

3 TO 1 FOR TUBERCULOSIS HOSPITAL

That the people are coming to favor taxing themselves for public measures to control tuberculosis is indicated by a referendum vote on the establishment of a county tuberculosis hospital in eight towns of St. Lawrence county, New York. The public health committee of the board of supervisors failed to draw up a question to be voted upon in all the towns of the county as instructed by the board. But eight town supervisors took an informal vote on the question. The question carried in all eight towns. The ballots stood more than three to one in the affirmative. This is the first time that this question has been submitted to a vote of the people in New York state. Three of the towns are distinctly rural and only one of the eight communities is a city.

CONFERENCES

April and May Conferences

Alabama Sociological Congress, Birmingham, Ala. April 22–24, 1913. William M. McGrath, Pres., Associated Charities, Birmingham.

Baptist Convention, Northern, Detroit, Mich., May 13–20, 1913. Con. Sec’y. Rev. W. C. Bitting, St. Louis.

Boys, General Assembly of Workers with. Culver, Ind., May 17–30, 1913. Information may be secured from the Boys’ Work Dept., Y. M. C. A., 124 E. 28th Street, New York.

Charities and Correction, New York City Conference on. May 14–15, 1913. Sec’y, John B. Prest, 287 Fourth Avenue, New York.

Charities and Correction, Semi-annual Conference, Colorado State Board of. Denver. May 13, 1913. Sec’y, William Thomas, Capitol Building, Denver.

Charities and Corrections, Arkansas Conference of, Little Rock, Ark., May 13–15, 1913. Sec’y, Murray A. Auerbach, Little Rock.

City Planning, National Conference On. Chicago, May 5–7, 1913. Sec’y, Flavel Shurtlett, 19 Congress Street, Boston.

Conservation of Human Life, Conference on. Portland, Ore., May 9–11, 1913. Information can be secured by addressing Reed College, Portland.

Colored People, Fifth Annual Conference of National Association for Advancement of. Philadelphia, Pa., April 23–25, 1913. Sec’y, May Childs Nerney, 26 Vesey St., New York City.

Jewish Social Workers, Third Informal Conference, National Association of. Atlantic City, N. J. May 29–30, 1913.

Mothers, National Congress of. Boston, May 15–20, 1913. Sec’y, Mrs. A. A. Birney, 806 Loan and Trust Bldg., Washington, D. C.

Peace Conference, Fourth American. St. Louis, Mo., May 1–4, 1913. James E. Smith, Chairman. St. Louis.

Playground and Recreation Association of America. Richmond, Va., May 6–10, 1913. Sec’y, H. S. Braucher, 1 Madison Avenue, New York.

Southern Sociological Congress, Atlanta, Ga., April 25–29, 1913. Gen. Sec’y, J. E. McCulloch, Nashville, Tenn.

Women’s Clubs, New Jersey Federation of Atlantic City, May 2 and 3, 1913. Sec’y, Mrs. Joseph M. Middleton, 46 Prospect St., Trenton.

Young Men’s Christian Association, International Conference of. Cincinnati, May 15–18, 1913.

LATER MEETINGS

International

Blind, Fourth Triennial International Conference on the London, England, 1914; probably July 20. Sec’y, Henry Stainsby, 206 Great Portland St., London, W.

Children’s Welfare, International Congress for. Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1914. President, Dr. Treub, Huygenstraat 106, Amsterdam.

Christian Citizenship Conference, World’s. Portland, Ore., June 29–July 6, 1913. Chairman, Rev. James S. Martin, 209 9th St., Pittsburgh, Pa.

Farm Women, International Congress of. Tulsa, Okla., October 22–November 1, 1913. Sec’y, Mrs. John T. Burns, Tulsa, Okla.

Housing, International Congress on. The Hague, Holland, September 8–13, 1913. Sec’y, M. O. Veighe, director general Ministry of Agriculture, Brussels. Executive secretary section for United States, William H. Tolman, 29 West 39th Street, New York.

Infant Mortality, English-speaking conference on. London, England. August 4 and 5, 1913. Under auspices of the British National Association for the Prevention of Infant Mortality and for the Welfare of Infancy, London.

Prison Congress, Quinquennial. London, Eng., 1915. Sec’y, F. Simon Van der Aa, Groningen, Holland.

School Hygiene, Fourth International Congress on. Buffalo, N. Y., Aug. 25–30, 1913. Sec’y Gen., Dr. Thomas A. Storey, College of the City of New York.

Student Christian Federation, World’s, Lake Mohawk, N. Y., June 2–8, 1913. Gen. Sec’y, John R. Mott, 124 East 28th Street, New York.

Students (“Corda Fratres”), Eighth International Congress of. Ithaca, N. Y., August 20–September 13, 1913. Information can be secured by addressing the Cornell Cosmopolitan Club, Ithaca, N. Y.

Town Planning and Organisation of Municipal Life, First International Congress on Art of. Ghent, Belgium, Summer 1913. General Sec’y, Paul Saintenoy, Brussels.

Unemployment, International Association on. Ghent, Belgium, September 3–6, 1913. American Section secretary, John B. Andrews, 121 East 23rd St., New York City.

National

Charities and Correction, National Conference of. Seattle, Wash., July 5–12, 1913. Sec’y, Alexander Johnson, Angola, Ind.

Home Economics, American Association of. Ithaca, N. Y., June 27–July 4, 1913. Information may be secured from Marguerite B. Lake, Forest Hill, Md.

Infant Mortality, American Association for Study and Prevention of. Fourth annual meeting. Kansas City, Mo., Oct. 23–25, 1913. Exec. Sec’y, Gertrude B. Knipp, 1211 Cathedral St., Baltimore.

Medicine, American Academy of. Thirty-eighth Annual Meeting. Minneapolis, Minn., June 13, 14, 1913.

Officials of Charities and Correction, American Association of. Fourth Annual Meeting. Springfield, Ill., June 24–26, 1913. Sec’y, W. T. Cross, Columbia, Mo.

Prison Association, American, Indianapolis, Ind., Oct. 11–16, 1913. Sec’y, Joseph P. Byers, Trenton, N. J.

Social Insurance, First American Conference on. Chicago, Ill., June 6–7, 1913. Sec’y, John B. Andrews, 131 East 23rd St., New York City.

State and Local

Charities and Correction, Ohio State Conference of. Akron, O., October, 1913. Sec’y, H. H. Shirer, 1010 Hartman Bldg, Columbus, O.

EXHIBITIONS

International

Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, Cal., Feb. 20–Dec. 4, 1915. Social Economy Department—Frank A. Wolff, Washington, D. C.

Panama-California Exposition, San Diego, Cal., Jan. 1–Dec. 31, 1915. Director of Exhibits, E. L. Hewett, San Diego.

Student Christian Federation World’s, Lake Mohawk, N. Y., June 2–8, 1913. Exhibits including “social study and service.” Gen. Sec’y, John R. Mort, 124 East 28th St., New York.

School Hygiene, Fourth International Congress on. Buffalo, N. Y., Aug. 25–30, 1913. Chairman. Committee on Scientific Exhibit, Dr. Fletcher B. Dressler, Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C.

National

Conservation Exposition, National, Knoxville, Tenn., Sept.-Oct., 1913.

Local

Child Welfare Exhibit, New Britain, Conn., April 25–May 2. Sec’y, E. W. Pelton.

Taxation in New Jersey. Charts prepared by the Bureau of Municipal Research will be shown at the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs. Atlantic City, May 2 and 3. Sec’y, Mrs. Joseph M. Middleton, 46 Prospect St., Trenton, N. J.

KENTUCKY SCHOOL LAW

A newly enacted state-wide compulsory school attendance law brings Tennessee into line with its neighbor Kentucky. Attendance at school is required of all between the ages of eight and fourteen and of all between fourteen and sixteen who are not “actively and regularly and lawfully” employed or who are unable to read and write. This new law takes from the map printed in The Survey of February 15 one of the five gray southern states that have had compulsory attendance only in certain counties.

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THAT home-making should be regarded as a profession.

THAT right living should be the fourth “R” in education.

THAT health is the duty and business of the individual, illness of the physician.

THAT the spending of money is as important as the earning of the money.

THAT the upbringing of the children demands more study than the raising of chickens.

THAT the home-maker should be as alert to make progress in her life work as the business or professional man.—American School of Home Economics.

NOTE—Send for 100–page handbook. “The Profession of Home-making,” which gives details of home-study, domestic science courses, etc. It’s FREE. Bulletins: “Freehand Cooking,” 10 cts.; “Food Values,” 10 cts.; “The Up-To-Date Home,” 15 cts.

SAVE CONFUSION—File Manuscripts, Sermons, Clippings, Correspondence. Splendid system. 20 Vol. and Record Book. Free booklet. The Encyclopoedic File, Cleveland, Ohio.

MAN—45—Single,—protestant—twenty years executive in correctional, probation and boy’s work—now engaged—distance not considered. Address 1105 Survey.

WANTED a trained a nurse to do visiting nursing and work in the Settlement House. Must have experience in both lines of work. Address 1106 Survey.