The Survey, Volume 30, Number 9, May 31, 1913
THE COMMON WELFARE
CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION FIGHT IN PENNSYLVANIA
More children are employed in factories and mills under sixteen years of
age in Pennsylvania than in any other state. For years efforts have been
made to get better legislation to protect child workers, but every step
has been won only after a determined fight.
This year the Pennsylvania Child Labor Association and the National
Child Labor Committee have worked together to get a law that would
put Pennsylvania on a par with the more advanced industrial states.
The Walnut child labor bill drafted by the Pennsylvania Child Labor
Association and sponsored by the Republican State Committee is based upon
the uniform law adopted by the American Bar Association. The principal
new features of this act are that no child under sixteen is permitted
to work more than eight hours a day; all night work is prohibited for
children under sixteen, whereas at present glass factories are exempt;
provision is made for the regulation of street trading; and the age limit
for night messenger service is put at twenty-one years. The age at which
children may go to work still remains fourteen, but certain dangerous
occupations are prohibited for children under sixteen.
So powerful has been the pressure to eliminate important features of
the proposed law, that the Pennsylvania Child Labor Association has
felt compelled to appeal for popular support. Herschel H. Jones of the
National Child Labor Committee has spent most of the last two months
traveling throughout the state, holding public meetings and interesting
individually the influential people of the larger cities. With few
exceptions the newspapers have taken up the campaign enthusiastically.
The opposition has come chiefly from two industries. The textile
manufacturers complain that eight hours a day for children will
disorganize their plants and compel the discharge of those under sixteen.
This they assert would put them at a disadvantage with Massachusetts. In
the Legislature in Massachusetts they are saying the same thing about
Pennsylvania. The experience of New York, the largest manufacturing
state and the third in textile production where no child under sixteen
has been permitted to work before eight in the morning or after five
in the evening since 1907, does not bear out this claim. In both Ohio
and Illinois children are being used in certain industries in groups or
shifts so as to keep the maximum amount of machinery in operation the
full working time. The eight-hour provision in Illinois has been in force
since 1903; in Ohio since 1908.
In the textile industry alone in Pennsylvania there are over 15,000
children under sixteen. Of this number, two-thirds are girls.
Pennsylvania permits girls of fourteen and fifteen to work fifty-eight
hours a week, or longer than most states permit adult women to labor.
The glass manufacturers assert that they must have boys on the night
shifts else the men can not work. Advocates of the proposed law point out
that in Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey and every other glass manufacturing
state except West Virginia older boys and men are employed for the night
work.
In an investigation of glass factories in western Pennsylvania made by
Mr. Jones for the National Child Labor Committee in 1912 it was found
that in many towns large numbers of boys between sixteen and eighteen
were loafing until they grew big enough to work in the mines or coke
ovens. At the same time the glass factories were taking boys of fourteen
and using them on both night and day shifts.
Effort is being exerted to weaken the bill before it gets out of the
Judiciary Special Committee of the Senate. This committee held a public
hearing on May 14 on three important labor bills: the Bigger minimum wage
bill which establishes a board to determine on a minimum wage for women;
the Walnut woman’s bill drafted by the Consumers’ League and restricting
employment of women to nine hours a day and fifty hours a week; and the
Walnut child labor bill. Over 2,000 manufacturers came to Harrisburg for
this hearing. The State Federation of Labor came to Harrisburg in a body
to urge the passage of these bills.
In addition to the efforts to get better laws a step toward better
enforcement has been taken by the passage of the law which establishes a
new department of labor and industry. It resembles closely the law passed
by the New York Legislature this year. The Bureau of Factory Inspection
comes under the department. An industrial board is established to make
rules and regulations and the inspectors are graded and required to have
special qualifications.
NEW YORK CHARITIES IN CONFERENCE
Once more the May meetings of the New York City Conference of Charities
were divided between Manhattan, Brooklyn and the country. The Colored
Orphan Asylum at Riverdale was chosen this time for the final session.
Municipal needs was the first topic of discussion, and the speakers were
O. F. Lewis and Frederick C. Howe, chairman of the committee appointed
to study this subject. The latter dwelt particularly on the use of the
school as a center for leisure. Edward M. Bassett and George B. Ford,
lecturer on city planning at Columbia University, spoke on subways as a
factor in distributing the population of a city. Mr. Ford suggested as
a substitute for subways on some thoroughfares the noiseless elevated
railroads found in Paris and Berlin. These, he said, should be placed
only in the center of streets from 130 to 180 feet wide. Trees could be
planted on either side to screen the structures.
Families, public institutions and the sick were the subjects on the
following day. The chairman of the committee on families, Mrs. William
Grant Brown, recommended the removing of one great cause of family
pauperism by “following in the path already blazed by some of our western
states, and legally restraining the marriage of those mentally deficient,
delinquent or tainted by hereditary disease or crime.” One of the other
speakers, Porter R. Lee, gave a good illustration of overlapping in
relief work in a story of a poor woman in Chicago, who after receiving
her fourth consecutive visitor in one afternoon went to the nearest
settlement to express her gratitude because no one had called from there,
remarking: “There doesn’t seem to be anything for the poor to do but to
have office hours!”
On the live subject of widows’ pensions there was no discussion this year
beyond the statement in Mrs. Florence Kelley’s address, which was read in
her absence:
“Private charity having cut off public outdoor relief has never
been able to accomplish the task which it rashly undertook.
We have a monument to its failure—38,000 children in New York
state institutions paid for out of taxes because their natural
guardians have, through death or disability, failed to meet the
requirements which the law establishes for children in this
city. Few of these institutions are schools in the true sense.
They are in the main free municipal boarding-houses. They are
communist institutions in which the city attempts, chiefly
through the intervention of various religious sects, the task
of bringing up children away from their mothers, by wholesale,
out of the public funds.”
The discussion of public institutions centered around those for the sick.
Sidney E. Goldstein, chairman of the committee on this subject, dwelt
especially on the fact that while government, church and school are more
and more affected by the social movement, the hospital and dispensary are
as yet but dimly aware of the larger work that society can rightfully
expect of them. Mr. Goldstein questioned whether the dispensary is
organized and administered with the needs of the community foremost in
mind, and stated that the time is not distant when neither hospital nor
dispensary will be reception houses for the sick, experiment stations in
medicine or apprentice shops for medical students.
After care and the prevention of insanity were treated in a paper by
Everett S. Ellwood of the State Charities Aid Association. Fred M. Stein
of the Montefiore Home showed by statistics that the large percentage
of “graduates” of tuberculosis sanatoria die or become worse, and urged
after care of patients in their homes by social workers connected with
sanatoria as an essential part of the work of such institutions.
The session on the sick carried on the same themes. Louis C. Ager, chief
of the medical staff of the Brooklyn Home for Consumptives, showed
the inadequacy of present hospital facilities, especially those for
contagious diseases. Richard C. Cabot discussed the “efficiency and
deficiencies” of the hospitals and dispensaries, and Isabel Stewart of
Teachers College spoke of the social service work in the homes done by
these institutions, as a logical and necessary supplement to their indoor
work. She recommended courses on the “sociology” of disease as part of a
nurse’s training.
In her report for the Committee on Children Carolena M. Wood, president
of the Colored Orphan Asylum of Riverdale, called attention to the fact
that of the 25,000 city children in institutions, many are kept there
for years so as to be near their parents when often their parents show
no interest or are unsuitable because of health or morals to exercise
any influence over them. The committee advised that such children be
given a fresh start by being placed with families that can train them
to be worthy members of the future state, even though this involves the
dissolving of the family tie. Charles D. Hilles, president of the Board
of Managers of the New fork Juvenile Asylum, and Robert W. Hebberd spoke
on various aspects of education as a preparation for life. The report of
the Committee on Delinquency, read by Patrick A. Whitney, commissioner of
corrections, was an appeal for more and better institutions.
Throughout the sessions the subject of recreation came up, as when,
for instance, Mrs. Brown supplemented the usual recommendation for
recreational use of the school house by the suggestion that the armories
could be used as music centers. Ernest A. Coulter, formerly clerk of the
Children’s Court, held that the failure to provide opportunities for
play was largely the cause of juvenile delinquency.
One method of treatment of adult delinquency, the farm colony, was the
subject of a paper by Franklin H. Briggs, superintendent of the New York
Training School for Boys at Yorktown. Said Professor Briggs:
“The farm colony treatment substitutes an appeal to the best
that is in a delinquent. It seeks to develop self control in
the individual. It endeavors to build up, not break down, the
delinquent’s self respect. In large masses delinquents must do
the things which they are ordered to do, while in the small
group of the farm colony, the individuals are encouraged to do
things upon their own initiative. One most important feature of
farm colony life is the almost numberless healthful interests
with which it surrounds those for whom it cares.”
PROF. HENDERSON NOW HEADS CHICAGO’S UNITED CHARITIES
The United Charities of Chicago has made a strong rejoinder to the
persistent attacks of the “investigating” committee of the Illinois
Legislature which have included other philanthropic agencies and
institutions as well as prominent individuals. In an editorial, How Not
to Investigate, the Chicago _Evening Post_ describes the methods pursued
by this committee:
“A new standard of efficiency in judicial investigation has
been set by the Curran legislative committee now sitting in
judgment upon certain of Chicago’s charitable agencies which
have been selected as the object of its displeasure.
“It used to be that an inquiry the purpose of which was to
decide upon the social value of an institution or individual
was carried on by an impartial group to which the pros and cons
of evidence were submitted for its careful and conscientious
sifting. Due allowance had to be made for personal bias or
selfish motive of the witness, and care had to be used to make
a just decision. But we are learning that this is an outgrown
custom. The examiner of the future will know from the fullness
of his own personal knowledge the agency that is ineffective or
the individual that is guilty. This settled in advance, he will
summon before him whosoever is known to be at odds with the
condemned, and his vilifications will be solemnly taken down as
the findings of the examiner. The condemned, under this system,
stripped of counsel, will be brought in only to receive the
gibes of his inquisitor.
“This method may insure a remarkable number of convictions, but
are its results of any value?...
“Anyone who has followed the rise of social work as a
profession looks in vain for the introduction into the
examination of that sort of trained and expert testimony which
would lend to it some claim to the consideration of thoughtful
people.”
Accompanying the announcement of Prof. Charles R. Henderson’s election as
president of the United Charities of Chicago the directors in a signed
statement gave their answer to this method of attack. This defense
applies also to other institutions and individuals now under fire. The
value of the personal and social service rendered by modern philanthropy
and the economy of present methods are summarized in this statement:
“First as to money matters: It cost the United Charities last
year less than 2 per cent to collect $271,000.
“We employ no solicitors and pay no commissions.
“A summary of the divisions of our expenditures for the year is
as follows: 76 per cent for direct assistance, 10 per cent for
administration salaries, 14 per cent for provision of relief
centers and equipment plus $1,000 payment on land at Algonquin.
“Of the 76 per cent for direct assistance in the various
departments 62 per cent went for material aid in cash,
groceries, etc. This does not include approximately $20,000
worth of such aid which it is estimated our visitors secured
from relatives, friends, etc., and which does not show on our
books.
“The remainder of the expenditures for relief was for such
personal services (to mention only a few) as led to the
securing of employment, to the reconciliation with relatives,
to the keeping of families together, to the saving of lives
through instructions in the care of babies and procuring
of expert medical and nursing aid, to the developing of
competency, ambition, and a sense of responsibility in people
who showed tendencies toward pauperism and crime. If the
economic value of restoring all the poor to self-support, who
were restored through the ministrations of our employes, could
be computed, it would mount into hundreds of thousands of
dollars.
“We have included under administration also the salaries of
the general superintendent, the general district secretary,
and the nine district superintendents—persons of the highest
qualifications and of long practical experience, who train and
direct the daily work of many younger agents, labor constantly
to secure prompt and harmonious charitable action throughout
the city, and encourage and guide the benevolent impulses of
hundreds of kind volunteers.
“Strictly speaking the cost of such service is no more
‘administration expense’ than the salaries of superintendents
and assistant superintendents of school who do not teach, but
who improve the efficiency of all teachers under them.
“The average salary of our workers is $684 per year (123 out
of 156 receiving less than $900), while the average salary of
the county relief department is $1,332 per year. Every one of
our employes is carefully selected and most of them specially
trained for their duties....
“The United Charities is putting at the disposal of the
community the services of 750 volunteers, in many different
capacities, in addition to its paid staff.”
Professor Henderson’s acceptance of the presidency and the removal of
the central office from the old outgrown building, to an entire floor
in the advantageously located new Federal Life Insurance Building, 163
N. Michigan Avenue, is expected to effect a new era of progress in the
Chicago United Charities under the superintendency of Eugene T. Lies.
THE STRIKE OF THE JERSEY SILK WEAVERS
The strike of silk workers in Paterson, N. J., which was chronicled in
THE SURVEY of April 19, is still in progress. There has been very little
breaking away on the part of the strikers, nor have the manufacturers on
the other hand made any serious attempt to bring in strike breakers. The
entire industry in this city of silk manufacturers has been practically
at a standstill for three months.
Recently there have been some indications on both sides of a willingness
to compromise. A number of the important mills have made direct
overtures to their employes, and one small mill has actually effected
a settlement and is in operation. In some of the outlying New Jersey
towns where the Paterson strike has been duplicated on a smaller scale,
temporary settlements, pending an agreement in Paterson, have been made
including an eight-hour day, an increase in wages and non-recognition of
the Industrial Workers of the World. In Paterson efforts to bring the
manufacturers and the strike committee together have continued without
avail. The most recent move was the appointment by Mayor Andrew McBride
of a committee of twenty-five citizens with John W. Griggs, formerly
attorney general of the United States, as chairman.
The grand jury, some weeks ago, returned indictments against the strike
leaders, William D. Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca and
Patrick Quinlan, charging Haywood with unlawful assemblage and the
others with inciting to riot. On May 7 the trials began, and, it having
been agreed that the defendants should be tried separately, the case of
Patrick Quinlan was the first to go before the jury. Quinlan was charged
with having urged the strikers on the first day of the strike to go to
the mills and get the remaining workers out and with using physical
violence to accomplish that end. The jury reported on May 10 that they
were unable to agree and were dismissed. Two days later, a new jury was
secured and Quinlan’s second trial followed. Before the week was out, he
was found guilty by this second jury on a charge of inciting to riot. It
has been announced that sentence will not be pronounced upon him until
after the trials of the other leaders. The maximum sentence which could
be pronounced in this case is said to be seven years in the penitentiary.
The conviction of Quinlan has stirred up bitterness among the strikers.
Their feeling against the police, upon whose testimony alone Quinlan was
convicted, has run especially high. The week following the trial, some
plain-clothes detectives and a court stenographer attending a meeting of
the strikers in Turn Hall were threatened with summary violence if they
did not leave. That evening the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners
of the city of Paterson decided to close Turn and Helvetia Halls, the
two meeting places of the strikers. Information received from the city
authorities of Paterson is to the effect that the strikers will not be
permitted to hold meetings in any hall in Paterson, but that they may
hold out-of-door meetings on private property if they can secure the
consent of the owners. Strike meetings, meanwhile, are being held in
Haledon, a borough adjoining Paterson, where the Socialist mayor stands
for “free speech.”
The trials of the other strike leaders have been delayed pending an
appeal on the part of the strikers’ counsel to have a jury selected
from outside Passaic county, because of the present feeling against
the Industrial Workers of the World. On May 22 this appeal was granted
by Justice Minturn, who decided that at the present time it would be
impossible to secure a fair trial from a jury made up of citizens of the
community.
Many arrests have been made by the police recently on account of the
picketing of the Price mill, where a settlement has been made. Although
the strikers on the picket line were not guilty of any violence
eighty-five of them were arrested on Monday, May 19, and fifty-seven on
the following day. Some of them were charged with disorderly conduct and
were sentenced by Recorder Carroll to a fine of $5 or ten days in jail.
Others were charged with unlawful assemblage and were held for action by
the grand jury.
CITY PLANNING AS A CIVIC ASSET
GRAHAM ROMEYN TAYLOR
That the city planning idea has gotten beyond the experts and has
“arrived” in the mind of the average citizen became evident at the Fifth
National Conference on City Planning, held in Chicago May 5-7. The
delegates, representing seventy or eighty cities and towns and a score of
different states, included not only students and experts but real estate
operators and business men. City planning as a civic asset was shown to
have gained recognition when twelve important cities made earnest appeals
for the conference next May.
It is significant that this new grip of the idea on the country
accompanied an important shift of emphasis—from spectacular and elaborate
schemes for reconstructing the heart of the city to practical details
of city building. As Dr. Werner Hegemann of Berlin, whose stimulating
contribution from European city planning proved a distinct feature of the
conference, put it: “City planning should not be primarily for attracting
the traveler, but for the people who live in the city. The spectacular
captured our imaginations; we must turn the resultant impulse into the
work of planning the every day living conditions of city dwellers.”
“Psychologically it is quite justifiable,” said George B. Ford, “that
American city planning began with the ‘City Beautiful.’ The ‘City
Scientific’ would never have aroused such enthusiasm. However, after
floundering around for a number of years we have now got our perspective
and a sense of the proportion of things, and we know that considerations
of health, convenience and efficiency are of fundamental importance.”
The emphasis on guiding the normal growth of cities was shown
particularly in the report of the committee which has been at work a
year on plans for the development of a typical tract on the outskirts of
a growing city, and also in the discussion of transportation problems.
The committee started with certain “given conditions.” The tract was
assumed to be four miles from the center of a city having a population of
500,000; land cost was put at $2,500 an acre; costs of sewers and other
fundamental improvements were fixed on the basis of business experience;
and the topography, country roads, railroads and rapid transit lines were
mapped. The development was assumed to be for a factory population. The
committee presented nine plans prepared by nine groups of participants
and these were accompanied by detailed figures covering all costs,
interest on capital, profits and selling prices. In this careful
attention to costs and financing of the development, the work of the
committee has an especial value beyond the city planning competition
of the Chicago City Club which also concerned the development of a
residential tract in an outlying portion of the city. The prize plans in
this competition were shown to the conference when it visited the Chicago
City Club.
“No city can afford to build subways”—this was the bomb thrown into the
discussion of transportation. And there was a surprising consensus of
opinion that American cities have gone subway-mad. This point of view
came out at a discussion at which the leading paper, written by Milo R.
Maltbie of the New York Public Service Commission, was read and commented
on by E. P. Goodrich, consulting engineer of the Borough of Manhattan.
Henry C. Wright of New York showed graphically that subways are
predicated upon extreme congestion. The high cost of construction as
compared with other methods of rapid transit does not warrant investment
unless heavy traffic is assured by crowded tenements of three to four
stories or more in height throughout the region served by the subway. He
strongly recommended elevated structures or rapid transit lines running
in open cuts, except in the most crowded down town sections of large
cities. This point of view was reinforced by Dr. Hegemann who cited the
experience with subways in English and continental as well as American
cities.
Cheap land values and the consequent possibility of low rents were shown
to depend upon cheap, though rapid and good and ramifying transportation.
Without this factor it is impossible to secure a wholesome spread of city
population.
How to pay the costs of the local improvements which city planning
suggests received special attention in a paper by George E. Kessler, upon
the development of parks in Kansas City. The system of local assessments
was shown to secure practically all the results which could be obtained
through the use of “excess condemnation,” with less trouble and with
better co-operation on the part of all citizens, including real estate
men who so often object to excess condemnation. The success of the Kansas
City method was attested by a leading real estate man of that city, J. C.
Nichols, who said that despite the fact that park boulevards and similar
local improvements are almost entirely paid by local assessments, the
property owners who have to foot the bills are now the first to demand
these improvements.
Whether through modification of systems of local assessment or
through the direct application of excess condemnation, the principle
of financing improvements through the increase in value of the areas
benefiting was felt by all to be an essential in accomplishing the
realization of city plans. Two points in this connection were much
discussed—first, the distance to which local assessment should go back
from the improvements and the proportion in which it should diminish;
and second, the question of paying locally for improvements in outlying
unimproved land. The conference seemed to feel in regard to the first
point that it is impossible to make any hard and fast rule and that each
case could be decided on its own merits. With regard to the second point,
opinion seemed to be that the local assessment should be paid in small
installments over a long period and that a much larger portion should be
assessed on the city as a whole than in the case of improvements in the
built-up sections.
An important paper by Edward M. Bassett of New York discussed the legal
powers which a city should have to enable it to carry out city planning
successfully. He particularly sought to show the necessity for removing
the legal wrappings which retard a city from applying the principle of
“excess condemnation.” Some of his illustrations of the way a real estate
speculator can secure the values which ought to accrue to the whole city
were most striking. In the Bronx, he said, a speculator obtained an award
for a house lying in the way of a newly opened street, whereupon he
moved it to the center of another street soon to be opened. He obtained
another award, and so far as the law is concerned he may continue the
process with each new street opened. The exercise of the police power was
also shown by Mr. Bassett to be of the utmost importance in establishing
regulations for public health and safety, and in dealing with such
matters as the limitation of the height of buildings.
The National City Planning Conference, as its name implies, is not so
much a convention for propaganda as a gathering of students. Each session
was devoted to but one or two papers, of which advance copies were in the
hands of delegates. There was thus opportunity for careful discussion.
The papers were characterized not so much by inspirational flights as by
a hard-headed, common-sense attention to every-day facts and conditions,
and the “humdrum human mechanism,” to quote Chairman Frederick Law
Olmsted, “by which city plan visions are to be realized.” Mr. Olmsted’s
address on A City Planning Program dealt with such prosaic things as the
system of records whereby a city should know all the essential facts
about its sewers, conduits and sub-surface pipes, its poles and wires,
gutters, pavement, car lines, and character of buildings. He emphasized
the importance of topographical, social, economic and legal surveys, and
showed how a municipality’s future city planning “office” should have an
equipment of such information and a co-operative relation with all the
agencies, public and private, whose activities affect the problems and
efforts of city planning.
A similar point of view was displayed in the paper by George B. Ford on
The City Scientific. He discussed the various types of surveys which
should be undertaken and showed how a body of data can be secured,
so as to reduce such matters as street widening and extension and
transportation almost to an exact science. He advocated a program survey
which would lay out in order of urgency the matters which the local
commission should undertake. Especially he urged that it is futile
to attempt to get planning results from one expert but that at least
three—representing the engineering and economic side, the aesthetic
side and the social side—should work together harmoniously, calling in
specialists along particular lines.
The organization and functions of a city planning commission was a
subject on which there was much discussion, following a paper by Mayor
William A. Magee of Pittsburgh.
The Chicago plan appropriately came in for consideration, and at the
banquet a toast was drunk to the memory of Daniel H. Burnham, a fine
portrait of whom appeared back of the speakers’ table. Charles H. Wacker,
chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission, told of the efforts, methods
and experience in rallying the whole citizenship of Chicago, even to
the education of the school children through a manual on the plan. He
referred to the wonderful civic spirit which reached a high tide when the
western metropolis gave to the nation the glorious beauty of the World’s
Fair “White City”; and he expressed the firm faith that around the vision
of the Chicago plan the people would again rise to a practical idealism
expressed in a nobler conception of what their city might become. At a
previous session Edward H. Bennett, who was associated with Mr. Burnham
in the designing of the Chicago plan, discussed various aspects of a
newer interest in the scientific study of such elements as transportation
and housing.
Faith in the civic idealism of the average man and woman, as expressed
by Mr. Wacker, was a note which well followed a noteworthy address by
Lawson Purdy. Rarely does the economic and the spiritual blend as it did
when he showed that so material a thing as land value becomes, when we
try to distribute it equitably and for the community welfare, the vehicle
for a larger brotherhood of neighbors and citizens. And in discussing
the relation of the public rights to the liberty of the individual, he
brought it all to the test of the law of love, so well expressed—and the
reference went straight to the hearts of those who treasure the memories
of personal friendship with one of the most lovable “people’s men” of our
generation—by Sam Jones, the “Golden Rule” mayor of Toledo.
EDITORIAL GRIST
THE GUARANTEE OF SECURITY
JOHN HAYNES HOLMES
Church of the Messiah, New York
Amid such a confusion of “chance and change” as seems to be
characteristic of our age in the various phases of its social life, it
is not surprising perhaps to find that many persons, not over—given to
timidity on ordinary occasions, are genuinely disturbed at the course
which events are taking; and are asking of the agitators and reformers of
the time, in terms more and more insistent, what guarantee they have to
offer that their words and works do not spell destruction for the whole
existing fabric of civilization.
Those of us who feel the thrill of the new movement of social
transformation, and hail the advent of the new day with an exultation
which leaves little place in our hearts for any regrets for the passing
of the old, do not always realize, I imagine, how numerous are the
revolutions of ancient custom which are involved in the demands which
are being pressed upon every hand, and therefore fail to recognize the
fears for the security of the nation, which are latent in many noble
and devoted hearts. What with the indefinite extension of the machinery
of our democracy by such devices as the initiative, the referendum
and the recall, which may well seem subversive of that whole form of
representative government which is at the bottom of our constitutional
system; the multiplying assaults upon the integrity and authority of
our courts, which have so long been regarded as the very bulwark of our
institutions; the call for the active interference of the state with the
administration of industry in such matters as workmen’s compensation,
the eight-hour day for women and children, the minimum wage, etc.; the
rapidly growing sentiment of our people in favor of the socialization of
the resources of nature and of the public; regulation, if not ownership,
of all means of production and distribution—the whole great movement, in
a word, for an unfettered democracy upon the one hand and an unlimited
social control upon the other—what with all these startling innovations
sweeping down upon us at once, it is not surprising that many an earnest
soul is wondering as to what the outcome of it all is to be and is
seeking rather vainly for any evidence that these cures, which are being
offered for our ills, do not mean the dissolution rather than the healing
of the patient.
What guarantee can you give us, amid the utter chaos in which we are
involved, that there is any real security for the future?
What assurance can you offer that this flood of reform, which is
certainly destined to “bear [us] far,” will not break its bonds and thus
sweep us to destruction?
What reasons can you present for believing that we may safely try these
untested schemes of political and industrial revolution, and still have
anything left of this great republic, which was founded in the blood and
tears of the fathers, and was strengthened and extended by the undaunted
labors of four generations of valiant sons? Is there anything which may
even partially persuade us that this new movement really involves “the
strength and stability of the times?”
These are the questions which are being asked today by many a restless
heart, and they are questions which challenge a respectful answer.
There are some of us (of whom I beg to be counted one!) who find our all
sufficient reply to these inquiries in our abounding faith in humanity.
We believe that in a country where illiteracy is at a minimum, general
education on the increase, caste barriers unknown, freedom of speech,
press and assembly granted and practiced, religious liberty everywhere
enjoyed, the people can be trusted to control their own affairs. This
does not mean that the voice of the people is necessarily the voice of
God in all places and under all conditions. But it does mean that the
people, if given the privilege of responsibility and a due opportunity
for self-knowledge and self-instruction, will quite as often decide for
the right as for the wrong; and that in the latter case will learn from
their experience of error the certain way of avoiding similar blunders
in the future. Thus, by the very practice of their freedom do the people
grow in wisdom and virtue. Thus, by the very fact of its operation does
democracy perfect itself, as water purifies itself. Thus does the voice
of the people become in course of time as if it were the voice of God.
Which is all we mean by the ancient maxim that the cure for the ills of
democracy is more democracy! It is such a faith in the people that gives
to many of us, amid the political and industrial transformations of the
time, the guarantee of security which must be had, and for any guarantee
beyond this pledge of faith, we see no need.
It is obvious, however, that, to many minds, moral faith of any kind
can give no guarantee of things material. Blind trust in human nature
means nothing when we are talking about such matters as governments and
economic systems. We must have something more tangible than this is the
cry, if we are to believe that the new social movements of the age are
anything more than so many heedless attacks upon the integrity of our
civilization.
To this demand I am confident that a satisfactory answer can be given;
and I find this answer, not in the field of ideals, but in the field
of method. The guarantee of security, amid the chaos about us, is to
be found in the method of action characteristic of the true social
reformer of the times, which is nothing less than the method of exact
science. Visionaries, dreamers, agitators, blind propagandists, there
are a-plenty in the social field today, and many are they who follow
whithersoever they lead. But the reformer who really counts as an
influence at this moment, and therefore may be regarded as typical of
effective social progress, is nothing more, and certainly is nothing
less, than a scientist who makes society his laboratory and who follows
therein the expert’s well-approved methods of observation and experiment.
The social leader of this new age is primarily an investigator, and only
secondarily a reformer. His first demand is for facts; and only when
these are gathered in sufficient numbers, are classified and tabulated
and compared, and then at last made to tell their tale, does he draw his
inferences, formulate his doctrines and lay down his program of reform.
There is much of the prophet in the true sociologist—much of the poet,
much of the humanitarian and lover of mankind. These qualities must never
disappear, if the social movement is to remain wholesome, idealistic and
thus genuinely beneficent. But at bottom, at least for the present, must
be the scientist as the perpetual guarantee of sanity and safety.
What Darwin did with his barnacles and earth-worms; what De Vries did
with his evening-primroses; what Professor Loeb is doing with his
sea-urchins, and Dr. Carrel with his transplanted organs and revivified
tissues; all this is the true social worker doing more and more with his
tenement dwellers, child laborers, factory women, tuberculosis victims,
immigrants, white slaves, and so on indefinitely through the social
groups. More and more we have work which is primarily scientific, and
which may fittingly be ranked, from the standpoint of scientific method,
with any of the researches of the biologists, zoologists or astronomers
of modern times. Well does a recent writer declare, “In recent years,
this [altruistic] spirit, which began in a humanistic sentiment and
hardly developed beyond the limits of kindliness, has become so infused
with exact knowledge of social conditions ... that it has assumed the
dignity of a scientific pursuit.”
Here now is the guarantee of security for which so many cautious persons
of our time are vainly seeking. So long as we look upon the new moral
and political movements, which are so characteristic of our age, as mere
agitations, we may feel alarm for the future. It is when we look closer,
and see that, behind the agitation for change, there is the accuracy,
precision, and certainty of the scientific method, that we may feel that
“all is well.”
TEACHING SOCIOLOGY IN NORTH DAKOTA
ALEXANDER JOHNSON
The _Quarterly Journal_ of the University of North Dakota has recently
published a reprint of an article by Professor Gillette of the Department
of Sociology which is an extremely useful and interesting document.
The state has a board of control which administers its state
institutions, but like most such boards, pays little or no attention to
the county and municipal charities and correction nor to the voluntary
philanthropic agencies. To remedy this defect of the state government,
the Department of Sociology of the university compiled a most valuable
report on Poor Relief and Jails, and that report was spread broadcast in
the form of a reprint.
Professor Gillette describes his experience on beginning as follows:
“The first endeavors to obtain information in a new state
relative to such subjects as this paper treats are likely to
prove far from satisfactory because of the non-existence of
published information. Two years ago, after vainly endeavoring
to obtain information on the state as a whole relative to the
general subjects of poor-relief and conditions of jails, I
began a personal investigation into those matters.
“Whenever I found myself in a county seat, I collected such
facts as the county offices held, inspected the jails, visited
the poor farms where they were accessible, and inquired into
the workings of the poor-relief system. In this manner,
seventeen counties were investigated. Eight counties were
visited in connection with the occasional lectures I was
called on to give in the state. Information from the other
nine counties was obtained by means of field work which very
meager departmental funds enabled me to make. It is one of the
traditional conditions, which still persists in educational
institutions that are supposed to foster research, that
departments which use mechanical instruments to carry on
experiment are given thousands of dollars, while departments
whose field of research lies in the world outside are denied
any investigative funds or given a mere pittance. I expected,
therefore, to be able to report on conditions in those
seventeen counties only.
“As an illustration of the inchoate conditions which may
obtain in a civilized society it may be well to recount that
while investigating the sixteenth county I fairly stumbled
into evidence that, filed in the archives of the statehouse
at Bismarck, lay unpublished data on the cost of poor-relief
and to a less extent the cost of supporting the state insane
and feeble-minded for all the counties of the state. For it
appeared that county auditors and treasurers are required to
file what is called Auditor and Treasurer’s Annual Report to
the State Examiner of North Dakota. Correspondence with the
state examiner’s office caused the compilation of such data
as existed relative to the other thirty-one counties of the
state. I give this experience to illustrate the need there
is for gathering and publishing state-wide information on
matters pertaining to the backward classes we know as paupers,
criminals, and defectives.”
The report shows many facts that needed airing, especially as to the
conditions of the jails, and the rapid increase (for such a young and
progressive state) of the amount of pauper relief.
“The cost of poor-relief in the state almost doubled in
the five-year period, increasing from $128,917.15 in 1907
to $240,469.80 in 1911. The total population of the state
in 1905 was 437,070; in 1910 it was 557,056. These figures
approximately represent the years ending June 30, 1906 and
1911. That is, while the population was gaining 32 per cent the
cost of maintaining the poor in the state enlarged 86.5 per
cent. _In that time the expenditure for that purpose grew 2.7
times as fast as the population._”
This it must be remembered is in a prohibition state, one in which
probably one-half of the prisoners in the jail are “piggers,” which
is the picturesque vernacular for people convicted of violating the
prohibition law, or “running a blind pig.” In one jail, of twenty-four
prisoners nineteen were “piggers.”
Most of the poor relief is “outdoor.” Only a few counties have poor
farms, some of these being far from satisfactory. The county aids all
poor and indigent who are in need according to laws of settlement, and
the county commissioners levy a tax to this end. The overseers “allow and
pay relief to needy persons of sound mind; also to poor parents of idiots
and helpless children an amount common in such cases.”
The provision to pay relief to parents of idiots and helpless children
reminds one of the celebrated relief by the state to the parents of
idiots in Kentucky, which has been described as an act “to promote the
propagation of idiots and imbeciles.” Since the report was issued, the
Legislature of North Dakota has been in session. Among the new laws is
one creating a state supervisory board to regulate the public relief of
the poor. This is based on Professor Gillette’s findings and is a copy of
the Indiana law on the subject, which Professor Gillette recommended as
being the best code of the kind in this country.
Next year the Department of Sociology will present a similar report on
the insane and feeble-minded. The University of North Dakota is only one
of several—Wisconsin, Minnesota and Texas might be mentioned—in which the
department of sociology is becoming an extremely practical and useful
thing for the state.
CRIMINAL TRAFFIC IN COCAINE
LOUIS C. AGER, M. D.
Brooklyn, N. Y.
We always have with us a considerable number of inhuman beings who
are willing to make capital out of the weaknesses and sins of their
neighbors. The illicit sale of cocaine is only one example of this fact.
Similar conditions have always existed in the abuse of opium products,
and the sale of alcohol to irresponsible persons has become so much a
part of our vaunted civilization that we find it difficult to realize
that this drug abuse dwarfs into insignificance all others combined.
We hear periodically of the “ether jag,” the “cologne drunk” and the
“coke fiend.” It is the novelty of these habits that makes them good
newspaper copy. The actual number of individuals addicted to these habits
is exceedingly small, and their economic value to the community is
practically nil. Normal, well balanced people do not acquire drug habits
of any kind and it is only those of extreme mental instability who take
to the more unusual practices.
Cocaine is at present receiving a large amount of advertising and its
sale is therefore being boosted. Unfortunately there are always a number
of people whose mental instability takes the form of having ready at
a moment’s notice a sure remedy for any social evil that may be under
discussion. Such people are fully as harmful to the community as the drug
users, and sooner or later a society will learn to ignore them.
What are the facts about the abuse of cocaine in this country, and what
ought to be done to eradicate the evil? Users of this drug are not
perhaps numerous, but the number has undoubtedly increased during the
past five years. It is generally accepted as a fact that the proportion
of mental deficients in our population is also on the increase and the
two naturally go hand in hand. It is also true that debased individuals
have lately made efforts to encourage the use of this drug habit for
their own financial benefit, and as a result cocaine has become more
widely known than ever before.
All this ought to be corrected, but legislation alone will not accomplish
it. Numerous bills were introduced into the recent New York Legislature
and at one time it looked as though the Walker bill would become a law—in
spite of the opposition of all reputable physicians and the fact that its
complicated provisions violated professional privilege.
The proposed federal law is a simple, sane regulation based upon the
internal revenue system. It provides graded licenses for the sale of the
habit-forming drugs, with a complete supervision of their distribution.
The purchase of a large amount by one individual would at once be
noticed and his disposal of it followed up. If his explanation were
not satisfactory his license could be revoked. It is to be hoped that
Congress will enact this law.
[Illustration] FINGER PRINTS [Illustration]
A BIT OF EVIDENCE
SCOTT NEARING
James Rawley had come to a parting of the ways. Time after time the court
had overlooked his truancy and misdoings, but James had taken the pitcher
once too often to the well, and the open doors of the state reform school
stared him grimly in the face.