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




                           THE COMMON WELFARE


IN THE WAKE OF THE FLOOD

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


SMASHING THE LEASE SYSTEM IN ARKANSAS

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

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

Footnote 1:

  See THE SURVEY for Dec. 28, 1912, page 383; also Jan. 4, 1913, page
  410.

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

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

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


GOV. FOSS URGES THREE PRISON REFORM BILLS

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

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

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

                                                          Per cent.
     New York State reformatory, Elmira                          37
     New Jersey State reformatory, Rahway                        33
     New York reformatory for women, Redford                     37
     Massachusetts industrial school for girls, Lancaster        50
     Maryland industrial school for girls, Baltimore             60
     New Jersey state home for girls, Trenton                    33
     Illinois state school for boys, St. Charles                 20

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

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

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

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


NEW ENGLAND CONFERENCES TO PROMOTE RURAL PROGRESS

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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


ST. LOUIS WINS NEW TENEMENT HOUSE LAW

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

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

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

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

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


THE SEATTLE CONFERENCE OF CHARITIES AND CORRECTION

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

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

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

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

These three committees are given below:

 ╔════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
 ║   THE NEW COMMITTEES OF THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF CHARITIES AND   ║
 ║                             CORRECTION                             ║
 ║                                                                    ║
 ║                                                                    ║
 ║                     COMMITTEE ON ORGANIZATION                      ║
 ║                                                                    ║
 ║Kingsbury, John A.,    New York               Assn. for Improving   ║
 ║  Chmn.                                         Condition of Poor   ║
 ║Weir, L. H. (Capt.)    San Francisco          Playground Association║
 ║Field, Parker B.       Boston                 Children’s Mission    ║
 ║Hubbard, C. M.         St. Louis              Provident Association ║
 ║Magruder, J. W.        Baltimore              Federated Charities   ║
 ║McLean, Francis H.     New York               Assn. of Soc. for     ║
 ║                                                Organizing Charity  ║
 ║Miner, Maud E.         New York               New York Probation and║
 ║                                                Protective Assn.    ║
 ║Montgomery, J. B.      Coldwater, Mich.       State School,         ║
 ║                                                Children’s Inst.    ║
 ║Bowman, H. C.          Topeka                 State Board of Control║
 ║Tilley, David F.       Boston                 State Board of        ║
 ║                                                Charities           ║
 ║Deacon, J. Byron       Pittsburgh             Associated Charities  ║
 ║Abbott, Grace          Chicago                Immigrants Protective ║
 ║                                                League              ║
 ║Amigh, Ophelia L.      Birmingham             Ala. Home of Refuge.  ║
 ║                                                                    ║
 ║                                                                    ║
 ║                      COMMITTEE ON NOMINATIONS                      ║
 ║                                                                    ║
 ║Wilson, George S.      Washington             Bd. Public Charities  ║
 ║  Chmn.                                                             ║
 ║Persons, W. Frank      New York               Charity Organization  ║
 ║                                                Society             ║
 ║Baldwin, Roger N.      St. Louis              Civic League          ║
 ║Krans, James R.        Memphis                Associated Charities  ║
 ║Murphy, J. Prentice    Boston                 Children’s Aid Society║
 ║Ryan, Rev. John A.     St. Paul               St. Paul Seminary     ║
 ║Lovejoy, Owen R.       New York               Natl. Child Labor     ║
 ║                                                Committee           ║
 ║Little, R. M.          Philadelphia           Soc. for Organizing   ║
 ║                                                Charity             ║
 ║Taylor, Graham         Chicago                Chicago Commons       ║
 ║                                                                    ║
 ║                                                                    ║
 ║                    COMMITTEE ON TIME AND PLACE                     ║
 ║                                                                    ║
 ║Bowen, A. L., Chmn.    Springfield, Ill.      State Charities       ║
 ║                                                Commission          ║
 ║Gates, W. Almont       San Francisco          State Bd. Char. &     ║
 ║                                                Correction          ║
 ║Almy, Frederic         Buffalo                Charity Organization  ║
 ║                                                Society             ║
 ║Fox, Dr. George        Fort Worth             Charities Commission  ║
 ║Wing, Frank E.         Chicago                Muncie Tuberculosis   ║
 ║                                                Sanatorium          ║
 ║Riley, Thomas J.       Brooklyn               Bureau of Charities   ║
 ║Glenn, Mary Willcox    New York                                     ║
 ║Darnall, O. E.         Washington             Natl. Training School ║
 ║                                                for Boys            ║
 ║Logan, Joseph C.       Atlanta                Associated Charities  ║
 ╚════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝


FAMILY DESERTER BROUGHT TO BOOK

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

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

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

[Illustration:

  CHECK WHICH BROUGHT ONE DESERTER TO BOOK
]

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

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

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


THE ITALIAN AND THE SETTLEMENT

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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




                            EDITORIAL GRIST


IN PROGRESSIVE KANSAS!

                                                       ISABEL C. BARROWS

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

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

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

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

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


CHILD LABOR AND POVERTY

                                                          A. J. McKELWAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


                  MORALS COMMISSION AND POLICE MORALS

                                                           GRAHAM TAYLOR

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

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


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

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


The Chicago Vice Commission came to a similar conclusion:


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


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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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


                              WOMEN POLICE

                                                   LOUISE de KOVEN BOWEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


                     DEMOCRATIZE THE PEACE MOVEMENT

                                       JOHN HAYNES HOLMES
                                         Church of the Messiah, New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




                                 BOOKS


MODERN PROBLEMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                            JOHN MARTIN.


THE BURDEN OF POVERTY

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


THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND AMERICAN LIFE

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


THE MINISTER AND THE BOY

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


BOY LIFE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT

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


THAT BOY OF YOURS

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


THE FAMILY

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

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

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

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

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

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                                                          GRAHAM TAYLOR.


THE TEACHER’S HEALTH

  By LEWIS M. TERMAN. Houghton, Mifflin Co. 136 pp. Price $.60; by mail
  of THE SURVEY $.66.

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

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

                                                       WINTHROP D. LANE.


EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF MENTAL DEFECTIVES

  By J. E. WALLACE WALLIN, Ph. D. Warwick and York, Inc., Baltimore. 155
  pp. Price $1.25; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.32.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                      ALEXANDER JOHNSON.


PATHFINDERS IN MEDICINE

  By VICTOR ROBINSON. Medical Review of Reviews. 317 pp. Price $2.50; by
  mail of THE SURVEY $2.67.

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

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

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

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

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

                                                    ALICE HAMILTON, M.D.


CIVICS FOR FOREIGNERS

  By ANNA A. PLASS, Teacher of English to Foreigners. Rochester, N. Y.
  D. C. Heath & Company. 186 pp. Price $.50; by mail of THE SURVEY $.57.

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

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

                                                        JAMES P. HEATON.


ANNUAL REPORT ENGLISH PRISON COMMISSION

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

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

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

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

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

                                                            O. F. LEWIS.


ADMISSION TO AMERICAN TRADE UNIONS

  By F. WOLFE, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins Press. 181 pp. $1.00 paper, $1.25
  cloth; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.08 and $1.33.


SOCIAL PROGRESS IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE

  By FREDERICK A. OGG. The Macmillan Company. 384 pp. Price $1.50; by
  mail of THE SURVEY $1.61.

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                                                      MARY BROWN SUMNER.


BOOKS RECEIVED IN MARCH

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  THE MORAL EDUCATION OF SCHOOL CHILDREN. By Charles Keen Taylor, M.A.
    Charles K. Taylor, Publ. 77 pp. Price by mail of THE SURVEY $.75.

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  THE CHILDREN IN THE SHADOW. By Ernest K. Coulter. McBride, Nast & Co.
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  A CATECHISM OF LIFE. By Alice Mary Buckton. E. P. Dutton & Co. 67 pp.
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    Appleton & Co. 318 pp. Price $2.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $2.14.

  A NEW LOGIC. By Charles Mercier. Open Court Publishing Co. 422 pp.
    Price $3.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $3.17.




                             COMMUNICATIONS


WAGES FIXED BY LAW

  TO THE EDITOR:

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

Footnote 2:

  See THE SURVEY of February 8, 1913, p. 653.

          Value of Product                          20,767,546
         Wages (16¹¹⁄₂₀%)                 3,434,734
         Salaries (4¹¹⁄₂₀%)                 940,900
         Cost of Material (58¹⁴⁄₂₀%)     12,194,019
         Miscellaneous expenses (9⁸⁄₂₀%)  1,955,773
                                         —————————— 18,525,426
                                                    ——————————
          Balance for manufacturers                  2,242,120

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

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

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

                                                     EVERETT P. WHEELER.

  New York.


PLAY CENTERS FOR THE POOR

  TO THE EDITOR:

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

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

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

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

                                                LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON.

  Washington, D. C.


THE NEW PUBLICITY

TO THE EDITOR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                       JOSEPH D. HOLMES.

  New York.


WORKMEN’S COMPENSATION

TO THE EDITOR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                     F. ROBERTSON JONES.

  [Secretary-Treasurer Workmen’s Compensation Publicity Bureau.]
    New York.


MOTHERHOOD AND PENSIONS

  TO THE EDITOR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                      CLARA CAHILL PARK.

  [Secretary of the Commission to Study the Question of Support of
     Dependent Minor Children of Widowed Mothers.]

    Wollaston, Mass.




                               PERSONALS


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

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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

[Illustration:

  PROF. SAMUEL A. LATTIMORE
]

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

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

Footnote 3:

  The Common Good of Civic and Social Rochester. March, 1913. p. 171.

                                                     PAUL MOORE STRAYER.

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                            E. L. KEYES.

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

                                                                G. R. T.

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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




                                 TREND


                    LEADERS IN THE MONTH’S MAGAZINES

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

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

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

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

  A UNIVERSITY THAT RUNS A STATE, by Frank Parker Stockbridge, and

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

  CONSUMERS’ CO-OPERATION, by Albert Sonnichsen, and CO-OPERATION IN
    WISCONSIN, by Robert A. Campbell. Both in the _Review of Reviews_. A
    résumé by the secretary of the co-operative league of the progress
    of the co-operative movement in Europe and America, supplemented by
    the intensive study of one state by an official of the State Board
    of Public Affairs, created last year with instruction, to make a
    special study of the state experience in this field.

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

                  *       *       *       *       *


                                THE FOOL

               Mary Eleanor Roberts in the _Independent_

      There’s a fool runs the mission, that place on the pike,
      For darkies, and dagoes, and bums, and the like,
      And if I had his job, why I’d go on a strike.

      With coal at eight dollars, and working alone,
      All smiling, and eager, and thin as a bone,
      “For the Lord,” so he says, “will take care of His own!”

      And the ghost of a coat, and a stitch in his side,
      And his eyes bright and starved, and his boots gaping wide—
      I got tired of waiting for Thee to provide.

      So I sent him a check; just to shame, it might be
      Such a God by an out and out sinner like me;
      But he fell on his knees and gave thanks unto Thee!




         HOW THE FACTORY GIRL IS BETTER OFF THAN THE STORE GIRL


A GRAPHIC PRESENTATION IN THE REPORT ON WORKING GIRLS AND WOMEN OF
ROCHESTER OF THE RELATIVE POSITIONS UNDER THE LAW OF TWO GROUPS OF GIRL
WORKERS.

               FACTORY                           MERCANTILE

 Law requires one seat to each girl. Law requires only one seat to every
                                       three girls.

 60 minutes for meals.               45 minutes for meals.

 Indifferent appearance.             Must dress well.

 Many sit to work.                   On legs most all the time.


               MINORS                              MINORS

 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. Not   9 hours a day, 54 hours a week. Not
   before 8 a. m. or after 5 p. m.     before 8 a. m. or after 7 p. m.


                WOMEN                               WOMEN

 9 hours a day, except when making   Over 21, no limit to hours she may
   up for a holiday.                   work. Up to 21, 10 hours a day,
                                       60 hours a week.

 54 hours a week.                    (Law does not apply between Dec.
                                       18th and 24th)

 Not before 6 a. m. or after 9 p. m. Not before 7 a. m. or after 10 p.
                                       m., if under 21.

                                                —_From the Common Good._

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “They don’t call ye a Dago.”

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

  “You can go to the nickel show.”

  “Yer folks don’t hit ye so much.”

  “You can buy shoes for the baby.”

  “You can give your mother yer pay envelope.”

  “Our boss he never went to school.”

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


                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

    I will listen to the dictates of my conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration:

  _Courtesy Rochester Common Good._

  WORKING AFTER HOURS

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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




                                JOTTINGS


ST. LOUIS SCHOOL OF PHILANTHROPY

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

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


“THE UNAFRAID”

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

              Resolved to a life full of service
                To those who must suffer to breathe,
              You added your strength to God’s purpose,
                The finest to mankind bequeathed.

              The indentured years now are finished,
                Though scarred, bravely forth do you go,
              To relieve and restore wounded brothers,
                Driving out from their lives pain and woe.


                          MOTHERS AND INFANTS.

Primary object to aid a mother to keep her infant in her personal care
when without such help, usually temporary, she might be obliged to give
it up for adoption or to place it in an institution.

An unmarried mother is not refused if she loves her infant, and desires
to lead an upright life.

No institution connected with this work. Each applicant regarded as an
individual and assisted according to her needs.

We have been especially successful in caring for the unmarried.

Reports of our methods sent gratis. Requests for these from directors of
maternity hospitals welcomed.

Address: MISS L. FREEMAN CLARKE, 91 Mt. Vernon St., Boston, Mass.


                         AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

                   Organized 1825.—Incorporated 1841.

Its work is interdenominational and international in scope, and is
commended by all evangelical denominations. It has published the Gospel
message to 174 languages, dialects and characters. It has been the
pioneer for work among the foreign-speaking people in our country, and
its missionary colporters are distributing Christian literature in
thirty-three languages among the immigrants, and making a home-to-home
visitation among the spiritually destitute, both in the cities and rural
districts, leaving Christian literature, also the Bible or portions of
the Scriptures. Its publications of leaflets, volumes and periodicals
from the Home Office totals 777,702,649 copies with 5,459 distinct
publications in the foreign field. The gratuitous distribution for the
past year is $21,300.81, being equivalent to 31,951,215 pages of tracts.
Its work is ever widening, is dependent upon donations and legacies, and
greatly needs increased offerings.

                 WILLIAM PHILLIPS HALL, President.
                 JUDSON SWIFT, D.D., General Secretary.

Remittances should be sent to Louis Tag, Asst. Treasurer, 150 Nassau
street, New York City.


                            Two Social Tours

                               IN EUROPE

  The pioneer party went last year. Its success will be increased this
                                 year.

                               SAILINGS

                         June 26 to Copenhagen
                         June 28 to Hamburg

            Several have already enrolled. Full information

                            DR. E. E. PRATT
                       225 Fifth Avenue, New York


              Take the Best of Europe Tour and other tours
                 with the University Travel-Study Club
                High Grade—SYRACUSE, N. Y.—Medium price




                       Classified Advertisements


                           SITUATIONS WANTED

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

                             WORKERS WANTED

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

                                                            Apr 12, 1913

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. P. 53, Added the title “THE SURVEY, Volume 30, Number 2, Apr 12,
      1913.”
 2. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
      spelling.
 3. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
 4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.