Chapter I: Part 1

The Survey, Volume 30, Number 9, May 31, 1913

THE COMMON WELFARE

CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION FIGHT IN PENNSYLVANIA

More children are employed in factories and mills under sixteen years of age in Pennsylvania than in any other state. For years efforts have been made to get better legislation to protect child workers, but every step has been won only after a determined fight.

This year the Pennsylvania Child Labor Association and the National Child Labor Committee have worked together to get a law that would put Pennsylvania on a par with the more advanced industrial states. The Walnut child labor bill drafted by the Pennsylvania Child Labor Association and sponsored by the Republican State Committee is based upon the uniform law adopted by the American Bar Association. The principal new features of this act are that no child under sixteen is permitted to work more than eight hours a day; all night work is prohibited for children under sixteen, whereas at present glass factories are exempt; provision is made for the regulation of street trading; and the age limit for night messenger service is put at twenty-one years. The age at which children may go to work still remains fourteen, but certain dangerous occupations are prohibited for children under sixteen.

So powerful has been the pressure to eliminate important features of the proposed law, that the Pennsylvania Child Labor Association has felt compelled to appeal for popular support. Herschel H. Jones of the National Child Labor Committee has spent most of the last two months traveling throughout the state, holding public meetings and interesting individually the influential people of the larger cities. With few exceptions the newspapers have taken up the campaign enthusiastically.

The opposition has come chiefly from two industries. The textile manufacturers complain that eight hours a day for children will disorganize their plants and compel the discharge of those under sixteen. This they assert would put them at a disadvantage with Massachusetts. In the Legislature in Massachusetts they are saying the same thing about Pennsylvania. The experience of New York, the largest manufacturing state and the third in textile production where no child under sixteen has been permitted to work before eight in the morning or after five in the evening since 1907, does not bear out this claim. In both Ohio and Illinois children are being used in certain industries in groups or shifts so as to keep the maximum amount of machinery in operation the full working time. The eight-hour provision in Illinois has been in force since 1903; in Ohio since 1908.

In the textile industry alone in Pennsylvania there are over 15,000 children under sixteen. Of this number, two-thirds are girls. Pennsylvania permits girls of fourteen and fifteen to work fifty-eight hours a week, or longer than most states permit adult women to labor.

The glass manufacturers assert that they must have boys on the night shifts else the men can not work. Advocates of the proposed law point out that in Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey and every other glass manufacturing state except West Virginia older boys and men are employed for the night work.

In an investigation of glass factories in western Pennsylvania made by Mr. Jones for the National Child Labor Committee in 1912 it was found that in many towns large numbers of boys between sixteen and eighteen were loafing until they grew big enough to work in the mines or coke ovens. At the same time the glass factories were taking boys of fourteen and using them on both night and day shifts.

Effort is being exerted to weaken the bill before it gets out of the Judiciary Special Committee of the Senate. This committee held a public hearing on May 14 on three important labor bills: the Bigger minimum wage bill which establishes a board to determine on a minimum wage for women; the Walnut woman’s bill drafted by the Consumers’ League and restricting employment of women to nine hours a day and fifty hours a week; and the Walnut child labor bill. Over 2,000 manufacturers came to Harrisburg for this hearing. The State Federation of Labor came to Harrisburg in a body to urge the passage of these bills.

In addition to the efforts to get better laws a step toward better enforcement has been taken by the passage of the law which establishes a new department of labor and industry. It resembles closely the law passed by the New York Legislature this year. The Bureau of Factory Inspection comes under the department. An industrial board is established to make rules and regulations and the inspectors are graded and required to have special qualifications.

NEW YORK CHARITIES IN CONFERENCE

Once more the May meetings of the New York City Conference of Charities were divided between Manhattan, Brooklyn and the country. The Colored Orphan Asylum at Riverdale was chosen this time for the final session.

Municipal needs was the first topic of discussion, and the speakers were O. F. Lewis and Frederick C. Howe, chairman of the committee appointed to study this subject. The latter dwelt particularly on the use of the school as a center for leisure. Edward M. Bassett and George B. Ford, lecturer on city planning at Columbia University, spoke on subways as a factor in distributing the population of a city. Mr. Ford suggested as a substitute for subways on some thoroughfares the noiseless elevated railroads found in Paris and Berlin. These, he said, should be placed only in the center of streets from 130 to 180 feet wide. Trees could be planted on either side to screen the structures.

Families, public institutions and the sick were the subjects on the following day. The chairman of the committee on families, Mrs. William Grant Brown, recommended the removing of one great cause of family pauperism by “following in the path already blazed by some of our western states, and legally restraining the marriage of those mentally deficient, delinquent or tainted by hereditary disease or crime.” One of the other speakers, Porter R. Lee, gave a good illustration of overlapping in relief work in a story of a poor woman in Chicago, who after receiving her fourth consecutive visitor in one afternoon went to the nearest settlement to express her gratitude because no one had called from there, remarking: “There doesn’t seem to be anything for the poor to do but to have office hours!”

On the live subject of widows’ pensions there was no discussion this year beyond the statement in Mrs. Florence Kelley’s address, which was read in her absence:

“Private charity having cut off public outdoor relief has never
been able to accomplish the task which it rashly undertook.
We have a monument to its failure—38,000 children in New York
state institutions paid for out of taxes because their natural
guardians have, through death or disability, failed to meet the
requirements which the law establishes for children in this
city. Few of these institutions are schools in the true sense.
They are in the main free municipal boarding-houses. They are
communist institutions in which the city attempts, chiefly
through the intervention of various religious sects, the task
of bringing up children away from their mothers, by wholesale,
out of the public funds.”

The discussion of public institutions centered around those for the sick. Sidney E. Goldstein, chairman of the committee on this subject, dwelt especially on the fact that while government, church and school are more and more affected by the social movement, the hospital and dispensary are as yet but dimly aware of the larger work that society can rightfully expect of them. Mr. Goldstein questioned whether the dispensary is organized and administered with the needs of the community foremost in mind, and stated that the time is not distant when neither hospital nor dispensary will be reception houses for the sick, experiment stations in medicine or apprentice shops for medical students.

After care and the prevention of insanity were treated in a paper by Everett S. Ellwood of the State Charities Aid Association. Fred M. Stein of the Montefiore Home showed by statistics that the large percentage of “graduates” of tuberculosis sanatoria die or become worse, and urged after care of patients in their homes by social workers connected with sanatoria as an essential part of the work of such institutions.

The session on the sick carried on the same themes. Louis C. Ager, chief of the medical staff of the Brooklyn Home for Consumptives, showed the inadequacy of present hospital facilities, especially those for contagious diseases. Richard C. Cabot discussed the “efficiency and deficiencies” of the hospitals and dispensaries, and Isabel Stewart of Teachers College spoke of the social service work in the homes done by these institutions, as a logical and necessary supplement to their indoor work. She recommended courses on the “sociology” of disease as part of a nurse’s training.

In her report for the Committee on Children Carolena M. Wood, president of the Colored Orphan Asylum of Riverdale, called attention to the fact that of the 25,000 city children in institutions, many are kept there for years so as to be near their parents when often their parents show no interest or are unsuitable because of health or morals to exercise any influence over them. The committee advised that such children be given a fresh start by being placed with families that can train them to be worthy members of the future state, even though this involves the dissolving of the family tie. Charles D. Hilles, president of the Board of Managers of the New fork Juvenile Asylum, and Robert W. Hebberd spoke on various aspects of education as a preparation for life. The report of the Committee on Delinquency, read by Patrick A. Whitney, commissioner of corrections, was an appeal for more and better institutions.

Throughout the sessions the subject of recreation came up, as when, for instance, Mrs. Brown supplemented the usual recommendation for recreational use of the school house by the suggestion that the armories could be used as music centers. Ernest A. Coulter, formerly clerk of the Children’s Court, held that the failure to provide opportunities for play was largely the cause of juvenile delinquency.

One method of treatment of adult delinquency, the farm colony, was the subject of a paper by Franklin H. Briggs, superintendent of the New York Training School for Boys at Yorktown. Said Professor Briggs:

“The farm colony treatment substitutes an appeal to the best
that is in a delinquent. It seeks to develop self control in
the individual. It endeavors to build up, not break down, the
delinquent’s self respect. In large masses delinquents must do
the things which they are ordered to do, while in the small
group of the farm colony, the individuals are encouraged to do
things upon their own initiative. One most important feature of
farm colony life is the almost numberless healthful interests
with which it surrounds those for whom it cares.”

PROF. HENDERSON NOW HEADS CHICAGO’S UNITED CHARITIES

The United Charities of Chicago has made a strong rejoinder to the persistent attacks of the “investigating” committee of the Illinois Legislature which have included other philanthropic agencies and institutions as well as prominent individuals. In an editorial, How Not to Investigate, the Chicago _Evening Post_ describes the methods pursued by this committee:

“A new standard of efficiency in judicial investigation has
been set by the Curran legislative committee now sitting in
judgment upon certain of Chicago’s charitable agencies which
have been selected as the object of its displeasure.

“It used to be that an inquiry the purpose of which was to
decide upon the social value of an institution or individual
was carried on by an impartial group to which the pros and cons
of evidence were submitted for its careful and conscientious
sifting. Due allowance had to be made for personal bias or
selfish motive of the witness, and care had to be used to make
a just decision. But we are learning that this is an outgrown
custom. The examiner of the future will know from the fullness
of his own personal knowledge the agency that is ineffective or
the individual that is guilty. This settled in advance, he will
summon before him whosoever is known to be at odds with the
condemned, and his vilifications will be solemnly taken down as
the findings of the examiner. The condemned, under this system,
stripped of counsel, will be brought in only to receive the
gibes of his inquisitor.

“This method may insure a remarkable number of convictions, but
are its results of any value?...

“Anyone who has followed the rise of social work as a
profession looks in vain for the introduction into the
examination of that sort of trained and expert testimony which
would lend to it some claim to the consideration of thoughtful
people.”

Accompanying the announcement of Prof. Charles R. Henderson’s election as president of the United Charities of Chicago the directors in a signed statement gave their answer to this method of attack. This defense applies also to other institutions and individuals now under fire. The value of the personal and social service rendered by modern philanthropy and the economy of present methods are summarized in this statement:

“First as to money matters: It cost the United Charities last
year less than 2 per cent to collect $271,000.

“We employ no solicitors and pay no commissions.

“A summary of the divisions of our expenditures for the year is
as follows: 76 per cent for direct assistance, 10 per cent for
administration salaries, 14 per cent for provision of relief
centers and equipment plus $1,000 payment on land at Algonquin.

“Of the 76 per cent for direct assistance in the various
departments 62 per cent went for material aid in cash,
groceries, etc. This does not include approximately $20,000
worth of such aid which it is estimated our visitors secured
from relatives, friends, etc., and which does not show on our
books.

“The remainder of the expenditures for relief was for such
personal services (to mention only a few) as led to the
securing of employment, to the reconciliation with relatives,
to the keeping of families together, to the saving of lives
through instructions in the care of babies and procuring
of expert medical and nursing aid, to the developing of
competency, ambition, and a sense of responsibility in people
who showed tendencies toward pauperism and crime. If the
economic value of restoring all the poor to self-support, who
were restored through the ministrations of our employes, could
be computed, it would mount into hundreds of thousands of
dollars.

“We have included under administration also the salaries of
the general superintendent, the general district secretary,
and the nine district superintendents—persons of the highest
qualifications and of long practical experience, who train and
direct the daily work of many younger agents, labor constantly
to secure prompt and harmonious charitable action throughout
the city, and encourage and guide the benevolent impulses of
hundreds of kind volunteers.

“Strictly speaking the cost of such service is no more
‘administration expense’ than the salaries of superintendents
and assistant superintendents of school who do not teach, but
who improve the efficiency of all teachers under them.

“The average salary of our workers is $684 per year (123 out
of 156 receiving less than $900), while the average salary of
the county relief department is $1,332 per year. Every one of
our employes is carefully selected and most of them specially
trained for their duties....

“The United Charities is putting at the disposal of the
community the services of 750 volunteers, in many different
capacities, in addition to its paid staff.”

Professor Henderson’s acceptance of the presidency and the removal of the central office from the old outgrown building, to an entire floor in the advantageously located new Federal Life Insurance Building, 163 N. Michigan Avenue, is expected to effect a new era of progress in the Chicago United Charities under the superintendency of Eugene T. Lies.

THE STRIKE OF THE JERSEY SILK WEAVERS

The strike of silk workers in Paterson, N. J., which was chronicled in THE SURVEY of April 19, is still in progress. There has been very little breaking away on the part of the strikers, nor have the manufacturers on the other hand made any serious attempt to bring in strike breakers. The entire industry in this city of silk manufacturers has been practically at a standstill for three months.

Recently there have been some indications on both sides of a willingness to compromise. A number of the important mills have made direct overtures to their employes, and one small mill has actually effected a settlement and is in operation. In some of the outlying New Jersey towns where the Paterson strike has been duplicated on a smaller scale, temporary settlements, pending an agreement in Paterson, have been made including an eight-hour day, an increase in wages and non-recognition of the Industrial Workers of the World. In Paterson efforts to bring the manufacturers and the strike committee together have continued without avail. The most recent move was the appointment by Mayor Andrew McBride of a committee of twenty-five citizens with John W. Griggs, formerly attorney general of the United States, as chairman.

The grand jury, some weeks ago, returned indictments against the strike leaders, William D. Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca and Patrick Quinlan, charging Haywood with unlawful assemblage and the others with inciting to riot. On May 7 the trials began, and, it having been agreed that the defendants should be tried separately, the case of Patrick Quinlan was the first to go before the jury. Quinlan was charged with having urged the strikers on the first day of the strike to go to the mills and get the remaining workers out and with using physical violence to accomplish that end. The jury reported on May 10 that they were unable to agree and were dismissed. Two days later, a new jury was secured and Quinlan’s second trial followed. Before the week was out, he was found guilty by this second jury on a charge of inciting to riot. It has been announced that sentence will not be pronounced upon him until after the trials of the other leaders. The maximum sentence which could be pronounced in this case is said to be seven years in the penitentiary.

The conviction of Quinlan has stirred up bitterness among the strikers. Their feeling against the police, upon whose testimony alone Quinlan was convicted, has run especially high. The week following the trial, some plain-clothes detectives and a court stenographer attending a meeting of the strikers in Turn Hall were threatened with summary violence if they did not leave. That evening the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners of the city of Paterson decided to close Turn and Helvetia Halls, the two meeting places of the strikers. Information received from the city authorities of Paterson is to the effect that the strikers will not be permitted to hold meetings in any hall in Paterson, but that they may hold out-of-door meetings on private property if they can secure the consent of the owners. Strike meetings, meanwhile, are being held in Haledon, a borough adjoining Paterson, where the Socialist mayor stands for “free speech.”

The trials of the other strike leaders have been delayed pending an appeal on the part of the strikers’ counsel to have a jury selected from outside Passaic county, because of the present feeling against the Industrial Workers of the World. On May 22 this appeal was granted by Justice Minturn, who decided that at the present time it would be impossible to secure a fair trial from a jury made up of citizens of the community.

Many arrests have been made by the police recently on account of the picketing of the Price mill, where a settlement has been made. Although the strikers on the picket line were not guilty of any violence eighty-five of them were arrested on Monday, May 19, and fifty-seven on the following day. Some of them were charged with disorderly conduct and were sentenced by Recorder Carroll to a fine of $5 or ten days in jail. Others were charged with unlawful assemblage and were held for action by the grand jury.

CITY PLANNING AS A CIVIC ASSET

GRAHAM ROMEYN TAYLOR

That the city planning idea has gotten beyond the experts and has “arrived” in the mind of the average citizen became evident at the Fifth National Conference on City Planning, held in Chicago May 5-7. The delegates, representing seventy or eighty cities and towns and a score of different states, included not only students and experts but real estate operators and business men. City planning as a civic asset was shown to have gained recognition when twelve important cities made earnest appeals for the conference next May.

It is significant that this new grip of the idea on the country accompanied an important shift of emphasis—from spectacular and elaborate schemes for reconstructing the heart of the city to practical details of city building. As Dr. Werner Hegemann of Berlin, whose stimulating contribution from European city planning proved a distinct feature of the conference, put it: “City planning should not be primarily for attracting the traveler, but for the people who live in the city. The spectacular captured our imaginations; we must turn the resultant impulse into the work of planning the every day living conditions of city dwellers.” “Psychologically it is quite justifiable,” said George B. Ford, “that American city planning began with the ‘City Beautiful.’ The ‘City Scientific’ would never have aroused such enthusiasm. However, after floundering around for a number of years we have now got our perspective and a sense of the proportion of things, and we know that considerations of health, convenience and efficiency are of fundamental importance.”

The emphasis on guiding the normal growth of cities was shown particularly in the report of the committee which has been at work a year on plans for the development of a typical tract on the outskirts of a growing city, and also in the discussion of transportation problems. The committee started with certain “given conditions.” The tract was assumed to be four miles from the center of a city having a population of 500,000; land cost was put at $2,500 an acre; costs of sewers and other fundamental improvements were fixed on the basis of business experience; and the topography, country roads, railroads and rapid transit lines were mapped. The development was assumed to be for a factory population. The committee presented nine plans prepared by nine groups of participants and these were accompanied by detailed figures covering all costs, interest on capital, profits and selling prices. In this careful attention to costs and financing of the development, the work of the committee has an especial value beyond the city planning competition of the Chicago City Club which also concerned the development of a residential tract in an outlying portion of the city. The prize plans in this competition were shown to the conference when it visited the Chicago City Club.

“No city can afford to build subways”—this was the bomb thrown into the discussion of transportation. And there was a surprising consensus of opinion that American cities have gone subway-mad. This point of view came out at a discussion at which the leading paper, written by Milo R. Maltbie of the New York Public Service Commission, was read and commented on by E. P. Goodrich, consulting engineer of the Borough of Manhattan.

Henry C. Wright of New York showed graphically that subways are predicated upon extreme congestion. The high cost of construction as compared with other methods of rapid transit does not warrant investment unless heavy traffic is assured by crowded tenements of three to four stories or more in height throughout the region served by the subway. He strongly recommended elevated structures or rapid transit lines running in open cuts, except in the most crowded down town sections of large cities. This point of view was reinforced by Dr. Hegemann who cited the experience with subways in English and continental as well as American cities.

Cheap land values and the consequent possibility of low rents were shown to depend upon cheap, though rapid and good and ramifying transportation. Without this factor it is impossible to secure a wholesome spread of city population.

How to pay the costs of the local improvements which city planning suggests received special attention in a paper by George E. Kessler, upon the development of parks in Kansas City. The system of local assessments was shown to secure practically all the results which could be obtained through the use of “excess condemnation,” with less trouble and with better co-operation on the part of all citizens, including real estate men who so often object to excess condemnation. The success of the Kansas City method was attested by a leading real estate man of that city, J. C. Nichols, who said that despite the fact that park boulevards and similar local improvements are almost entirely paid by local assessments, the property owners who have to foot the bills are now the first to demand these improvements.

Whether through modification of systems of local assessment or through the direct application of excess condemnation, the principle of financing improvements through the increase in value of the areas benefiting was felt by all to be an essential in accomplishing the realization of city plans. Two points in this connection were much discussed—first, the distance to which local assessment should go back from the improvements and the proportion in which it should diminish; and second, the question of paying locally for improvements in outlying unimproved land. The conference seemed to feel in regard to the first point that it is impossible to make any hard and fast rule and that each case could be decided on its own merits. With regard to the second point, opinion seemed to be that the local assessment should be paid in small installments over a long period and that a much larger portion should be assessed on the city as a whole than in the case of improvements in the built-up sections.

An important paper by Edward M. Bassett of New York discussed the legal powers which a city should have to enable it to carry out city planning successfully. He particularly sought to show the necessity for removing the legal wrappings which retard a city from applying the principle of “excess condemnation.” Some of his illustrations of the way a real estate speculator can secure the values which ought to accrue to the whole city were most striking. In the Bronx, he said, a speculator obtained an award for a house lying in the way of a newly opened street, whereupon he moved it to the center of another street soon to be opened. He obtained another award, and so far as the law is concerned he may continue the process with each new street opened. The exercise of the police power was also shown by Mr. Bassett to be of the utmost importance in establishing regulations for public health and safety, and in dealing with such matters as the limitation of the height of buildings.

The National City Planning Conference, as its name implies, is not so much a convention for propaganda as a gathering of students. Each session was devoted to but one or two papers, of which advance copies were in the hands of delegates. There was thus opportunity for careful discussion.

The papers were characterized not so much by inspirational flights as by a hard-headed, common-sense attention to every-day facts and conditions, and the “humdrum human mechanism,” to quote Chairman Frederick Law Olmsted, “by which city plan visions are to be realized.” Mr. Olmsted’s address on A City Planning Program dealt with such prosaic things as the system of records whereby a city should know all the essential facts about its sewers, conduits and sub-surface pipes, its poles and wires, gutters, pavement, car lines, and character of buildings. He emphasized the importance of topographical, social, economic and legal surveys, and showed how a municipality’s future city planning “office” should have an equipment of such information and a co-operative relation with all the agencies, public and private, whose activities affect the problems and efforts of city planning.

A similar point of view was displayed in the paper by George B. Ford on The City Scientific. He discussed the various types of surveys which should be undertaken and showed how a body of data can be secured, so as to reduce such matters as street widening and extension and transportation almost to an exact science. He advocated a program survey which would lay out in order of urgency the matters which the local commission should undertake. Especially he urged that it is futile to attempt to get planning results from one expert but that at least three—representing the engineering and economic side, the aesthetic side and the social side—should work together harmoniously, calling in specialists along particular lines.

The organization and functions of a city planning commission was a subject on which there was much discussion, following a paper by Mayor William A. Magee of Pittsburgh.

The Chicago plan appropriately came in for consideration, and at the banquet a toast was drunk to the memory of Daniel H. Burnham, a fine portrait of whom appeared back of the speakers’ table. Charles H. Wacker, chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission, told of the efforts, methods and experience in rallying the whole citizenship of Chicago, even to the education of the school children through a manual on the plan. He referred to the wonderful civic spirit which reached a high tide when the western metropolis gave to the nation the glorious beauty of the World’s Fair “White City”; and he expressed the firm faith that around the vision of the Chicago plan the people would again rise to a practical idealism expressed in a nobler conception of what their city might become. At a previous session Edward H. Bennett, who was associated with Mr. Burnham in the designing of the Chicago plan, discussed various aspects of a newer interest in the scientific study of such elements as transportation and housing.

Faith in the civic idealism of the average man and woman, as expressed by Mr. Wacker, was a note which well followed a noteworthy address by Lawson Purdy. Rarely does the economic and the spiritual blend as it did when he showed that so material a thing as land value becomes, when we try to distribute it equitably and for the community welfare, the vehicle for a larger brotherhood of neighbors and citizens. And in discussing the relation of the public rights to the liberty of the individual, he brought it all to the test of the law of love, so well expressed—and the reference went straight to the hearts of those who treasure the memories of personal friendship with one of the most lovable “people’s men” of our generation—by Sam Jones, the “Golden Rule” mayor of Toledo.

EDITORIAL GRIST

THE GUARANTEE OF SECURITY

JOHN HAYNES HOLMES
Church of the Messiah, New York

Amid such a confusion of “chance and change” as seems to be characteristic of our age in the various phases of its social life, it is not surprising perhaps to find that many persons, not over—given to timidity on ordinary occasions, are genuinely disturbed at the course which events are taking; and are asking of the agitators and reformers of the time, in terms more and more insistent, what guarantee they have to offer that their words and works do not spell destruction for the whole existing fabric of civilization.

Those of us who feel the thrill of the new movement of social transformation, and hail the advent of the new day with an exultation which leaves little place in our hearts for any regrets for the passing of the old, do not always realize, I imagine, how numerous are the revolutions of ancient custom which are involved in the demands which are being pressed upon every hand, and therefore fail to recognize the fears for the security of the nation, which are latent in many noble and devoted hearts. What with the indefinite extension of the machinery of our democracy by such devices as the initiative, the referendum and the recall, which may well seem subversive of that whole form of representative government which is at the bottom of our constitutional system; the multiplying assaults upon the integrity and authority of our courts, which have so long been regarded as the very bulwark of our institutions; the call for the active interference of the state with the administration of industry in such matters as workmen’s compensation, the eight-hour day for women and children, the minimum wage, etc.; the rapidly growing sentiment of our people in favor of the socialization of the resources of nature and of the public; regulation, if not ownership, of all means of production and distribution—the whole great movement, in a word, for an unfettered democracy upon the one hand and an unlimited social control upon the other—what with all these startling innovations sweeping down upon us at once, it is not surprising that many an earnest soul is wondering as to what the outcome of it all is to be and is seeking rather vainly for any evidence that these cures, which are being offered for our ills, do not mean the dissolution rather than the healing of the patient.

What guarantee can you give us, amid the utter chaos in which we are involved, that there is any real security for the future?

What assurance can you offer that this flood of reform, which is certainly destined to “bear [us] far,” will not break its bonds and thus sweep us to destruction?

What reasons can you present for believing that we may safely try these untested schemes of political and industrial revolution, and still have anything left of this great republic, which was founded in the blood and tears of the fathers, and was strengthened and extended by the undaunted labors of four generations of valiant sons? Is there anything which may even partially persuade us that this new movement really involves “the strength and stability of the times?”

These are the questions which are being asked today by many a restless heart, and they are questions which challenge a respectful answer.

There are some of us (of whom I beg to be counted one!) who find our all sufficient reply to these inquiries in our abounding faith in humanity. We believe that in a country where illiteracy is at a minimum, general education on the increase, caste barriers unknown, freedom of speech, press and assembly granted and practiced, religious liberty everywhere enjoyed, the people can be trusted to control their own affairs. This does not mean that the voice of the people is necessarily the voice of God in all places and under all conditions. But it does mean that the people, if given the privilege of responsibility and a due opportunity for self-knowledge and self-instruction, will quite as often decide for the right as for the wrong; and that in the latter case will learn from their experience of error the certain way of avoiding similar blunders in the future. Thus, by the very practice of their freedom do the people grow in wisdom and virtue. Thus, by the very fact of its operation does democracy perfect itself, as water purifies itself. Thus does the voice of the people become in course of time as if it were the voice of God. Which is all we mean by the ancient maxim that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy! It is such a faith in the people that gives to many of us, amid the political and industrial transformations of the time, the guarantee of security which must be had, and for any guarantee beyond this pledge of faith, we see no need.

It is obvious, however, that, to many minds, moral faith of any kind can give no guarantee of things material. Blind trust in human nature means nothing when we are talking about such matters as governments and economic systems. We must have something more tangible than this is the cry, if we are to believe that the new social movements of the age are anything more than so many heedless attacks upon the integrity of our civilization.

To this demand I am confident that a satisfactory answer can be given; and I find this answer, not in the field of ideals, but in the field of method. The guarantee of security, amid the chaos about us, is to be found in the method of action characteristic of the true social reformer of the times, which is nothing less than the method of exact science. Visionaries, dreamers, agitators, blind propagandists, there are a-plenty in the social field today, and many are they who follow whithersoever they lead. But the reformer who really counts as an influence at this moment, and therefore may be regarded as typical of effective social progress, is nothing more, and certainly is nothing less, than a scientist who makes society his laboratory and who follows therein the expert’s well-approved methods of observation and experiment. The social leader of this new age is primarily an investigator, and only secondarily a reformer. His first demand is for facts; and only when these are gathered in sufficient numbers, are classified and tabulated and compared, and then at last made to tell their tale, does he draw his inferences, formulate his doctrines and lay down his program of reform. There is much of the prophet in the true sociologist—much of the poet, much of the humanitarian and lover of mankind. These qualities must never disappear, if the social movement is to remain wholesome, idealistic and thus genuinely beneficent. But at bottom, at least for the present, must be the scientist as the perpetual guarantee of sanity and safety.

What Darwin did with his barnacles and earth-worms; what De Vries did with his evening-primroses; what Professor Loeb is doing with his sea-urchins, and Dr. Carrel with his transplanted organs and revivified tissues; all this is the true social worker doing more and more with his tenement dwellers, child laborers, factory women, tuberculosis victims, immigrants, white slaves, and so on indefinitely through the social groups. More and more we have work which is primarily scientific, and which may fittingly be ranked, from the standpoint of scientific method, with any of the researches of the biologists, zoologists or astronomers of modern times. Well does a recent writer declare, “In recent years, this [altruistic] spirit, which began in a humanistic sentiment and hardly developed beyond the limits of kindliness, has become so infused with exact knowledge of social conditions ... that it has assumed the dignity of a scientific pursuit.”

Here now is the guarantee of security for which so many cautious persons of our time are vainly seeking. So long as we look upon the new moral and political movements, which are so characteristic of our age, as mere agitations, we may feel alarm for the future. It is when we look closer, and see that, behind the agitation for change, there is the accuracy, precision, and certainty of the scientific method, that we may feel that “all is well.”

TEACHING SOCIOLOGY IN NORTH DAKOTA

ALEXANDER JOHNSON

The _Quarterly Journal_ of the University of North Dakota has recently published a reprint of an article by Professor Gillette of the Department of Sociology which is an extremely useful and interesting document.

The state has a board of control which administers its state institutions, but like most such boards, pays little or no attention to the county and municipal charities and correction nor to the voluntary philanthropic agencies. To remedy this defect of the state government, the Department of Sociology of the university compiled a most valuable report on Poor Relief and Jails, and that report was spread broadcast in the form of a reprint.

Professor Gillette describes his experience on beginning as follows:

“The first endeavors to obtain information in a new state
relative to such subjects as this paper treats are likely to
prove far from satisfactory because of the non-existence of
published information. Two years ago, after vainly endeavoring
to obtain information on the state as a whole relative to the
general subjects of poor-relief and conditions of jails, I
began a personal investigation into those matters.

“Whenever I found myself in a county seat, I collected such
facts as the county offices held, inspected the jails, visited
the poor farms where they were accessible, and inquired into
the workings of the poor-relief system. In this manner,
seventeen counties were investigated. Eight counties were
visited in connection with the occasional lectures I was
called on to give in the state. Information from the other
nine counties was obtained by means of field work which very
meager departmental funds enabled me to make. It is one of the
traditional conditions, which still persists in educational
institutions that are supposed to foster research, that
departments which use mechanical instruments to carry on
experiment are given thousands of dollars, while departments
whose field of research lies in the world outside are denied
any investigative funds or given a mere pittance. I expected,
therefore, to be able to report on conditions in those
seventeen counties only.

“As an illustration of the inchoate conditions which may
obtain in a civilized society it may be well to recount that
while investigating the sixteenth county I fairly stumbled
into evidence that, filed in the archives of the statehouse
at Bismarck, lay unpublished data on the cost of poor-relief
and to a less extent the cost of supporting the state insane
and feeble-minded for all the counties of the state. For it
appeared that county auditors and treasurers are required to
file what is called Auditor and Treasurer’s Annual Report to
the State Examiner of North Dakota. Correspondence with the
state examiner’s office caused the compilation of such data
as existed relative to the other thirty-one counties of the
state. I give this experience to illustrate the need there
is for gathering and publishing state-wide information on
matters pertaining to the backward classes we know as paupers,
criminals, and defectives.”

The report shows many facts that needed airing, especially as to the conditions of the jails, and the rapid increase (for such a young and progressive state) of the amount of pauper relief.

“The cost of poor-relief in the state almost doubled in
the five-year period, increasing from $128,917.15 in 1907
to $240,469.80 in 1911. The total population of the state
in 1905 was 437,070; in 1910 it was 557,056. These figures
approximately represent the years ending June 30, 1906 and
1911. That is, while the population was gaining 32 per cent the
cost of maintaining the poor in the state enlarged 86.5 per
cent. _In that time the expenditure for that purpose grew 2.7
times as fast as the population._”

This it must be remembered is in a prohibition state, one in which probably one-half of the prisoners in the jail are “piggers,” which is the picturesque vernacular for people convicted of violating the prohibition law, or “running a blind pig.” In one jail, of twenty-four prisoners nineteen were “piggers.”

Most of the poor relief is “outdoor.” Only a few counties have poor farms, some of these being far from satisfactory. The county aids all poor and indigent who are in need according to laws of settlement, and the county commissioners levy a tax to this end. The overseers “allow and pay relief to needy persons of sound mind; also to poor parents of idiots and helpless children an amount common in such cases.”

The provision to pay relief to parents of idiots and helpless children reminds one of the celebrated relief by the state to the parents of idiots in Kentucky, which has been described as an act “to promote the propagation of idiots and imbeciles.” Since the report was issued, the Legislature of North Dakota has been in session. Among the new laws is one creating a state supervisory board to regulate the public relief of the poor. This is based on Professor Gillette’s findings and is a copy of the Indiana law on the subject, which Professor Gillette recommended as being the best code of the kind in this country.

Next year the Department of Sociology will present a similar report on the insane and feeble-minded. The University of North Dakota is only one of several—Wisconsin, Minnesota and Texas might be mentioned—in which the department of sociology is becoming an extremely practical and useful thing for the state.

CRIMINAL TRAFFIC IN COCAINE

LOUIS C. AGER, M. D.
Brooklyn, N. Y.

We always have with us a considerable number of inhuman beings who are willing to make capital out of the weaknesses and sins of their neighbors. The illicit sale of cocaine is only one example of this fact. Similar conditions have always existed in the abuse of opium products, and the sale of alcohol to irresponsible persons has become so much a part of our vaunted civilization that we find it difficult to realize that this drug abuse dwarfs into insignificance all others combined.

We hear periodically of the “ether jag,” the “cologne drunk” and the “coke fiend.” It is the novelty of these habits that makes them good newspaper copy. The actual number of individuals addicted to these habits is exceedingly small, and their economic value to the community is practically nil. Normal, well balanced people do not acquire drug habits of any kind and it is only those of extreme mental instability who take to the more unusual practices.

Cocaine is at present receiving a large amount of advertising and its sale is therefore being boosted. Unfortunately there are always a number of people whose mental instability takes the form of having ready at a moment’s notice a sure remedy for any social evil that may be under discussion. Such people are fully as harmful to the community as the drug users, and sooner or later a society will learn to ignore them.

What are the facts about the abuse of cocaine in this country, and what ought to be done to eradicate the evil? Users of this drug are not perhaps numerous, but the number has undoubtedly increased during the past five years. It is generally accepted as a fact that the proportion of mental deficients in our population is also on the increase and the two naturally go hand in hand. It is also true that debased individuals have lately made efforts to encourage the use of this drug habit for their own financial benefit, and as a result cocaine has become more widely known than ever before.

All this ought to be corrected, but legislation alone will not accomplish it. Numerous bills were introduced into the recent New York Legislature and at one time it looked as though the Walker bill would become a law—in spite of the opposition of all reputable physicians and the fact that its complicated provisions violated professional privilege.

The proposed federal law is a simple, sane regulation based upon the internal revenue system. It provides graded licenses for the sale of the habit-forming drugs, with a complete supervision of their distribution. The purchase of a large amount by one individual would at once be noticed and his disposal of it followed up. If his explanation were not satisfactory his license could be revoked. It is to be hoped that Congress will enact this law.

FINGER PRINTS

A BIT OF EVIDENCE

SCOTT NEARING

James Rawley had come to a parting of the ways. Time after time the court had overlooked his truancy and misdoings, but James had taken the pitcher once too often to the well, and the open doors of the state reform school stared him grimly in the face.

“It will be best for him in the long run,” commented the judge. “Each month of this wild life makes him a little less fit to keep his place in the community. He has had his last chance.”

Yet there was one ray of hope, for James lived in and out of Boston, which is fortunate in having the Newton Technical High School. Here let me say, by way of explanation, that the Newton Technical High School is a part of the school system presided over by F. E. Spaulding,[1] a veritable wizard in the organization and direction of educational work. Among his many “queer” ideas, Mr. Spaulding believes that children of high school age should be in the high school, whether they have passed their eight years of grade work or not. An absurd theory? Well, perhaps; but the first year he put this theory into practice, Mr. Spaulding transferred seventy fifteen-year-old boys and girls from the seventh and eighth grades, where they had learned the art of failing, to the high school building, where they were to be taught success.

Grouped in special classes, these “grade-floaters” devoted more than half their time to technical work—cooking, sewing, shopwork and machine work—and the remainder to academic subjects. So prepared more than two-thirds of the youngsters entered the high school on probation in the same class with their former seventh and eighth grade school-fellows, who had spent all their time the previous year at academic work. Here was the test—could these children who had been devoting three-fifths of their time to technical activities keep pace with children from the regular grades?

At the end of the first quarter, when the marks of all the pupils in the school were analyzed, it was found that the 800 scholars had an average of .54 of one failure for each pupil. The twenty-seven girls who were promoted on probation had .17 of one failure each, only a third as many as the school at large. Of the seventeen boys promoted on trial, only one failed and in but one subject. The probationers had therefore made records which were, as a whole, far superior to the records made by the average pupils in the high school.

These facts, pretty generally known in educational circles in and around Boston, led James’ custodians to propose to the judge that he give James one more trial, this time in the Newton Technical High School. The judge agreed to the suggestion, and James, a dismal eighth-grade failure, entered the Newton Technical High School in one of the special transfer classes.

James began life badly. His mother died when he was young, and his father, a rather indifferent man, boarded the boy out during his early years with an aunt. She first spoiled him through indulgence, and then, inconsistently enough, hated him because he was spoiled. Growing up in this uncongenial atmosphere, James became entirely uncontrollable. He was disagreeable in the extreme, wild and unmanageable.

The people with whom James was boarding grew tired of his continued truancy, and he was placed on a farm near Boston. There, too, he was discontented, dissatisfied and disobedient. Time after time he ran away to Boston. He went from bad to worse, falling in with vagrants, learning their talk and their ways, acquiring a love for wandering, and a distaste for regularity and direction. Taken into custody by the juvenile court and placed on probation with a family outside of Boston, James again ran away, mingling with a crowd of his old associates in Boston. It was at this point that the court decided to send him to the reform school. Then it was that an understanding friend took him in charge, found him a home in Newton, and started his life anew in the Technical High School.

That was how the record stood a while ago. How does it stand now? Promoted to the regular freshman class on trial, James has renewed his interest in education and shows an entirely new trait. He does not exactly dote on all his work, but he is doing it and doing it well. He hated school before. The new deal is different, he even likes it at times.

He has found something to interest him. The boy was just bursting with the need of expressing his self, his personality. The street gave his worst half its chance. Now the better stuff that is in him is getting its opportunity and he is taking it.

Good and evil are always contending for the boy as for the man, and the function of education is to give the good the better chance. If there be stale pedagogues who do not understand, let them take notice, for after all the boy is the one to be considered.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See One Dollar in the Educational Market, THE SURVEY for May 24, 1913.

BOOKS

THE NECESSARY EVIL

By Charles Rann Kennedy Harper and Brothers. 110 pp. Price
$1.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.08.

THE BLINDNESS OF VIRTUE

By Cosmo Hamilton. George H. Doran Co. 127 pp. Price $1.00; by
mail of THE SURVEY $1.07.

Charles Rann Kennedy has again in The Necessary Evil given us a strong though unpleasant play. It is an appeal to the young girl growing into womanhood to consider what the desecration of that womanhood means, and a demand that she refuse to allow herself to be sold either into the prostitution of the street or that of a moneyed, loveless marriage.

John Heron, a composer, living in his music, his daughter and in the memory of his wife, is a man apart from the problems of the day. His daughter, just entering womanhood, has been for years an invalid, living in her father’s music and her books.