contrary to all Socialist precedent, for a large navy and a citizen army
to handle a possible German attack on England. His defense of this stand,
based largely on conditions existing at the time of the Franco-Prussian
war, is not entirely convincing, especially in view of the aggressive
action that the German Social Democracy has taken recently in preventing
warlike preparations on the part of Germany. In this connection his
appreciation of the leader of the German Social Democracy, who is the
subject of the German autobiography just reviewed, is well worth quoting.
“I have rarely met,” he says of Bebel, “any one who had done so much to
be proud of who was so simple and modest in his private conversation,
or who took so little upon himself in his every-day intercourse with
his fellows. His influence over his own party was obviously quite
unbounded. The voluntary respect paid to Bebel was in fact a tribute paid
through him to their own organization and themselves, of whom he was the
acknowledged representative.”
* * * * *
For the second time William English Walling has made a notable
contribution to the literature of Socialism. In his earlier book,
Socialism as It Is, he discussed the various and often contradictory
lines of thought and policy which have crept in and divided the Socialist
movement as organized in the political and economic fields. His
contention there was that the struggle of Socialism today is not against
capitalism but against bureaucratic State Socialism. Not the least
important thing he attempts in the present volume, The Larger Aspects of
Socialism, is to differentiate the philosophies underlying revolutionary
Socialism and State Socialism.
This volume, like the earlier books, is not based so much on Mr.
Walling’s own interpretation of “all the great modern forces, thought,
science, art, religion and humanity’s conquest of the universe,” as on
quotations from recognized authorities on these subjects. Mr. Walling
shows how all modern thought is tending toward a new philosophy of
civilization, without which political and economic Socialism could never
be attained. Socialism: a New Civilization is his subject. Throughout
all aspects of this subject he identifies the pragmatic philosophy with
Socialism. This identification he supports by quotations not only from
pragmatic but from the writings of the fathers of Socialism. Briefly
stated, this philosophy holds man to be, for human purposes, not for
purposes of abstract thought, the centre of the universe. Society in
its view is meant for the protection of man, so that each individual
shall be enabled not to “serve the state”—this is the State Socialist
philosophy—but to be free and to reach his own fullest development. The
various aspects of this idea Mr. Walling considers under the headings
science, evolution, biology, morality and various aspects of sex. What he
regards as the chief reactionary influences of the present civilization
he considers in chapters on religion, education and the abuse of history,
and he brings out strongly the charge that the class education of the
present day is the greatest of impediments to the new civilization, and
that the invasion of education—that is, the invasion of the minds of the
mass of the people—by the new ideas is necessary before Socialism can
prevail.
With the dominance of this new philosophy in all lines of human thought
Mr. Walling believes that for the first time human society, bent upon the
perfection of the individual, will be guided by other than involuntary
forces. It will be determined not by natural forces or by the brute force
of class rule, but by the creative intelligence of humanity exercised on
environment purposefully for the good of its members. “With socialism,”
he quotes Marx as saying, “real history begins.” For its contribution
of a new social philosophy he holds Socialism, not as it is generally
regarded, constructive of the future on the foundation of the past, but
rather creative of a future society which has nothing in common with the
past.
MARY BROWN SUMNER.
A SUNNY LIFE: THE BIOGRAPHY OF SAMUEL JUNE BARROWS
By ISABEL C. BARROWS. Little, Brown & Co. 323 pp. Price $1.50;
by mail of THE SURVEY $1.62.
This is the story of a rarely beautiful and many-sided life. It shows
us the little boy becoming a wage-earner at eight to help his widowed
mother; joining the church at fifteen and doing volunteer religious work
among the sailors on the docks, who mounted the boy on a barrel to talk
to them, and loved “the little barrel preacher”; becoming one of New
York’s best short-hand reporters; at twenty-one taking the city editor’s
place on the _Tribune_ during the regular editor’s vacation; marrying
at twenty-two; coming in close touch with great issues at the national
capital as private secretary to William H. Seward, secretary of state;
earning his way through the Harvard theological school by adventurous
trips with General Custer and others as correspondent for the New York
_Tribune_; pastor for four years of the historic First Congregational
(Unitarian) Church of Dorchester, Mass.; editor for sixteen years of the
_Christian Register_; congressman for one term, full of manifold service;
finally secretary, for ten years, of the New York Prison Association,
a leading penologist, securing important improvements in the laws, and
doing more than any other one man toward changing American prisons from
brutalizing dungeons to great reformatories.
The story of his life is vividly and lovingly told by the gifted wife
who was the close associate of his labors for forty-three years. The
book includes also extracts from his writings and letters; hymns that
he composed, words and music; and a number of memorial tributes. It is
enriched with sixteen photographs. This intimate narrative will have deep
interest for all who knew and loved Mr. Barrows.
Mr. Barrows fought many good fights, but kept his sweetness and serenity
through all. As Rabbi Wise said of him: “He was no man’s foe, but always
the foe of wrong.” His legislative successes were won by hard, clean work.
“An acquaintance said to him, ‘Mr. Barrows, if you want to
get that [probation] bill made into a law, you will have to
put your temperance scruples into your pocket and give the
newspaper men a champagne supper.’... That was not the method
of this hard-working total abstainer. Instead, he made eleven
trips to the capital that winter, interviewed personally
every member of the committees having the bill in charge,
convinced each one individually of its importance, converted
the governor, wrote editorials week after week for the leading
papers in New York, and so directed public intelligence and
sympathy that the bill was passed without a dissenting vote.”
He was wise enough to see that “the forces which develop
virtue are more potent in reducing crime than the forces which
suppress vice.”
He had a singular catholicity. As national prison commissioner, as
representative of the United States at the International Prison Congress
and the Interparliamentary Union for Arbitration, as a student of foreign
prisons and an attendant at many national and international gatherings,
he traveled widely and met all sorts and conditions of men, and he met
them all on the same simple human footing, from a king or president down
to the street gamins to whom he taught new games of jackstones while
waiting for a belated car. He had friends of all nationalities, and
carried a brotherly heart toward all races and colors. He knew a dozen
languages, and kept on learning fresh ones after he was sixty.
He was many-sided, not only in his accomplishments, but in his devotion
to good causes—peace, equal suffrage, temperance, social purity, kindness
to animals, and justice for the Indian, the Negro, the persecuted
Armenian, the Russian struggling for freedom. Full of talent, he “never
had time to make money”; and he was fortunate in having a wife as
variously gifted and unconventional as himself—one who could aid him in
every way, from making a complete suit of clothes for him when he was a
poor theological student, or carpentering a drawer to hold his music, to
taking his place at the editorial desk in his absence, and going, after
his death, to Paris as the representative of the United States government
to explain his plans for the great International Prison Congress of which
he was the president-elect. Never a rich man, he always led a rich life;
and this record of it will go on helping humanity long after he has
passed away from earth.
ALICE STONE BLACKWELL.
COMMUNICATIONS
WHO?
TO THE EDITOR:
(_On seeing the White Slave by Abastenia St. Leger Eberle._)
This is the man that sells women’s souls into hell fire. Who is the buyer?
LOUISE W. KNEELAND.
THE WHITE SLAVE
[_Concerning the reproduction, on the cover of the May magazine number of
THE SURVEY, of Miss Eberle’s sculpture of that name._]
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
I have to ask that you will remove my name and cancel my subscription to
your publication, THE SURVEY.
I was educated as an artist; have studied from the nude under Bonnat in
Paris, and am by no means “squeamish;” but I am altogether unwilling to
expose myself to the risk of having any such picture as appears upon the
cover of THE SURVEY for the week of May 3 sent into my home at the risk
of its being seen by my four sons, the eldest of whom is a Methodist
clergyman, and the three others of whom are under age.
I saw the statue of “a Gorilla carrying off a woman,” when it was first
exhibited and much criticized, even at the time, in Paris—when it was
first exhibited in the Paris salon.
The “idea” of this cover is, evidently, taken from that statue, but for
offensiveness this goes it 500 per cent better.
WOODBURY G. LANGDON.
Morristown, N. J.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
As a subscriber and one who highly appreciates the work of THE SURVEY,
permit me to express my surprise and criticism on the lack of good
judgment and good taste that permitted the design on the cover of the
number just out, May 3. In my opinion, the aims and purposes of such a
magazine as THE SURVEY in endeavoring to meet and counteract the evils
of the day are not furthered by such sensational eye pictures as this,
and moreover, it has the characteristics of brutality and indecency, I
am sure, from the point of view of a large number of your readers, and
might have the result of lessening their opinion of your good judgment
and taste in your manner of approaching this subject and others you are
dealing with. I will offer no excuse for thus expressing my opinion
sincerely, as I will assume that you desire to have such from your
subscribers and readers.
J. B. NOEL WYATT.
Baltimore.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
In addition to an unusually valuable list of articles, permit me to
thank you for the cover of the issue of May 3. The picture is profoundly
educational, and those who have had some dealing at close quarters see in
this picture of the White Slave a finished sermon on the subject.
RUDOLPH I. COFFEE.
[Member Pittsburgh Morals Commission and Rabbi.]
Pittsburgh.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
For the enclosed, please send me a copy of your issue of May 3, with the
White Slave picture on cover.
Allow me to congratulate you for giving that group just the prominent
place you did.
[REV.] ELIOT WHITE.
Rahway, N. J.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
As a regular subscriber, reader and admirer of your magazine and its
valued work, I must earnestly protest against the outside cover of your
May 3 issue. With several boys in my family, the only way I could lay
the issue on my library table was _after_ tearing off the cover, which
is certainly glaringly offensive. We oppose (or should do so) indecent
bill-board, newspaper advertising, etc., and therefore should not offend
ourselves, _no matter what the motive_. Trust thee will be guarded for
the future.
WILLIAM HAGER.
Lancaster, Pa.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
As friends of THE SURVEY and of what it stands for, allow us to write our
protest against placing such a subject as the White Slave on the outside
cover of your issue of May 3, Vol. XXX, No. 5.
The publication of such a subject, treated in a sensational way with
a conspicuous background, on the cover of any magazine seems to us
ill-advised, and especially so on one which finds its way into private
houses where decency and modesty are inculcated.
As your paper is to a certain degree technical, intended to be read
chiefly by social workers who are cognizant of these conditions, the
_inside_ of its covers is excusable, but its _outside_, open to the
observation of all, young and old, should to our minds be severely
censured.
Please bring up this matter before your board of Survey Associates.
L. E. OPDYCKE and
EDITH OPDYCKE.
New York.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
Thank you for the frontispiece on THE SURVEY of May 3. The beast carrying
the woman did effective service in the Atlanta campaign, but this
picture of a low human brute hawking into slavery a poor little immature
girl will, I believe, be yet more effective in rousing the sluggish
consciences of our American people. If it is art to use the pencil or the
graver’s tool to portray sin in such a manner as to apply the lash to
conscience, then I prefer this, under the existing dreadful conditions
of tolerance of vice, to the Venus de Milo, and I thank the courageous
artist who so consecrates her talents to the highest possible service of
humanity.
A picture of this kind will do more to instruct my daughters and my sons
as to the dangers which surround them and their obligations to help the
down-trodden daughters of the poor than many arguments. Thank God we have
brought these reptiles out into the open where we can handle them with
due violence, and we can now place the responsibility where it belongs—on
our churches.
Can you loan me the original to make a lantern slide to use in my public
talks on vice?
HOWARD A. KELLY, M. D.
Baltimore.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
I cannot forbear making a protest against the horrible and suggestive
picture, which you have printed on the cover of your issue of May 3,
Vol. XXX, No. 5. It is a picture calculated to suggest ideas which the
whole country nowadays is trying to suppress. Teaching young people the
facts of life is one thing—doubtless necessary. Making public the fact
that there are people wicked enough to pander to vicious men is also, I
am sure, necessary for efforts to suppress this traffic; but it is very
demoralizing to send out broadcast and publicly such pictures as this.
It shows that the familiar speaking and writing of this white slave—so
called—traffic has blunted the judgment as to fitness and decency that
this picture is displayed in this public way.
Miss Robins’ book, My Little Sister, is a true picture doubtless. She
seems to affirm so with great confidence, but it will do more harm than
good I fear in arousing evil thoughts and an unwholesome curiosity in
the minds of young people in whose hands it falls. Published first in a
reputable magazine, and then hawked about in trains, etc., recommended in
your magazine, which claims to be devoted to the improvement of morals,
it will do a great deal of harm. At the rate you are going on in freedom
of speech and discussion of filth which should not even be named when
young and inexperienced people can hear, you will soon be advising a
moving picture of what goes on in the dens of vice in order to teach
young people what they should _not_ do.... This artist must have allowed
her imagination to go deep into the haunts of vice before she made this
statue.
—— ——
Newport, R. I.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
I do wish to express my extreme regret that you should have made public
such a picture as appears on the cover of your issue of May 3. It ought
never in my opinion to have been allowed to pass through the mail.
The readers of THE SURVEY do not need any such reminder of the horrors of
the white slave traffic, and to others, especially to young people and
indifferent persons who are likely to pick up the magazine at random,
such a picture with its unmistakable suggestions cannot fail to be
demoralizing.
I find that other readers of THE SURVEY here hold the same opinion.
—— ——
Newport, R. I.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
As a subscriber to THE SURVEY and as one who has always tried to further
its influence and increase its circulation, I beg to gravely remonstrate
against your cover design of the issue of May 3.
Had you seen fit to place this most loathsome picture within the pages of
your magazine, it would possibly have served a sufficient purpose, but to
place it where it cannot fail to be seen by innocent children makes this
issue unfit to appear in any home and appears to be, therefore, not only
an instance of bad taste, but of bad morals.
Such lurid and outrageous efforts to excite the hysterical side of public
opinion, pitifully defeat their aims and appear to be most unworthy of
THE SURVEY’s standards.
LUCIA H. K. SHERMAN.
San Francisco.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR:
Kindly send to us C. O. D., twenty-five copies of THE SURVEY, cover page
of which contains the cut of a figure portraying the white slave traffic.
The date and number cannot be furnished as the magazine has been loaned
and we do not know to whom it was given.
We hope to secure, from the distribution of this issue among the ladies
who are interested in social service, quite a number of subscriptions.
JOHN L. GREEN.
[Superintendent Mississippi Children’s Home Society.]
Jackson, Miss.
* * * * *
One or two of these protests are so unrestrained that the temptation is
strong to reply without mincing matters. Others are so moderate that they
must provoke the respect of people who hold different opinions. In the
same way we trust that those who break with the editor of THE SURVEY on
the reproduction of Miss Eberle’s statue, or on its use as a cover, will
regard that use as a considered act.
Unquestionably there is a cleavage of judgment in the matter of public
education as to the social evil and its prevention. It is not THE
SURVEY’S purpose to overemphasize the vice situation. But it is a part of
our regular service in the field of preventive social measures to keep
our readers thoroughly alive to the movements to protect girls and boys
from ruin and disease, for that, as we see it, is of the very essence of
the present discussion of commercialized prostitution.
In Miss Eberle’s statuette, the White Slave, and in Elizabeth Robins’
book, My Little Sister, art and literature have this spring added fire
and conviction to the abolition movement against prostitution—that
“twin of slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itself and even more
persistent,” to use Miss Addams’ phrase.
So we printed a photograph of the White Slave on our cover as a challenge
to public conscience searching. And we printed a review of My Little
Sister, in which Mrs. Laidlaw brought out the American aspects of the
story of the sheltered little English girl who was kidnapped.
In the same issue was a ringing report of how the newly enfranchised
women of San Francisco forced a reluctant Legislature to pass a bill
which will close the notorious “red light district.” More than that,
these women of the California Civic League and the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union are caring for the helpless girls thrown out of the
segregated district, befriending them and putting them on their feet
again. It was the kind of story that led a subscriber to write the other
day: “Every time I read an issue of THE SURVEY I feel like getting right
up and _doing_ something worth while for somebody.”
On another page, A. Leo Weil, the militant president of the Pittsburgh
Voters League, entered a plea for a special body of men in every city to
deal with vice. And a physician in a New York village told how the local
doctors, aghast at the amount of social disease among the young people of
their little community—their own sons among the rest—banded together to
wipe it out.
Up to the time of going to press it had been expected that Mr. Kneeland’s
incisive analysis of commercialized prostitution in New York, made for
the Bureau of Social Hygiene, would have been released by the Century
Company by May 3, so that his findings could be added to this group of
articles.[2] All this was in THE SURVEY’S spirit of facing hard facts
for the sake of the future, and in line with its editorial policy with
respect to this special subject: i.e. of banking up material rather than
stringing it along.
Here, then, in a field to which THE SURVEY bears special obligation,
at a time when we were handling a group of articles interpretative of
that obligation, was a piece of sculpture with the same message—with a
thought-compelling quality which “linked it as a social force,” as Miss
Merriman rightly pointed out, “with, say, the dispassionate but terrible
report of the Chicago Vice Commission.”
Of course, the strength in such a challenge to public
conscience-searching lies in its exceptionalness—repetition would dull
its edge. There is no prospect of another such cover in the months ahead;
we know of no “sermon in stone” of like calibre. For the same reason,
when such an exceptional work does appear, our course is clear: we should
bring it out.
Those moralists who feel that the work was suggestive read into it
something which is not there. It is not unclean.
Those artists who have criticised the group on the ground that the
woman’s figure alone should have been done—that, in other words, the
sculptor should have abstracted all the pathos and beauty possible from
the situation, but not the horror—miss its social message.
Those parents who protest against it as opening a dark world to sheltered
members of their households must make the same protest against the
sermon which would do more than skim the surface of the moral needs of a
community; against the general periodical which would broach these things
in ways specific enough to be helpful; against the play like Damaged
Goods, which puts the consequences of evil living in human terms; for
in all these audiences are there likely to be young people. And after
all, in all these fields, we are not at this stage faced with the choice
between home education and public education, but of rousing the home.
While the leaders in sex hygiene are bound to have a difficult task on
their hands in restraining unscientific and slap-dash agencies who assume
to give public instruction, the fact remains that the larger and most
difficult task of those leaders is still that of arousing the public, a
general and wide-spread process of education both as to the things that
should be known and as to the need for knowing them. The reason for this
is that the old policies of reticence have failed—failed so far that
not only has America contributed nothing to the solution of a world-old
problem, but has imported new commercialized phases of it and let them
become rampant, to bring destruction and disease to thousands.
At such a juncture THE SURVEY must give respectful hearing to those
whose outlook is personal, but must draw its counsels rather from those
who bring larger measure of social experience to the question—from
superintendents of orphanages,[3] who know what the old policies of
ignorance have cost in the lives of boys and girls; from neurologists,
who see the after consequences of that same ignorance; from reformatory
heads; from educators; from physicians.
Without the fact of commercialized vice such a searching piece of work
as Miss Eberle’s would lack truth; without the added fact that such vice
exists, not merely because of the greed and lust of men, but because
of the inertia, the reticence, the acceptance of things as they are by
people who, if they aroused themselves, could put an end to it, it would
lack occasion.
If such conditions exist, then it has blazing truth and insistent
occasion and like Nast’s cartoons it may well be looked back upon as
a crashing social force breaking through the crusts of toleration and
neglect.
If such conditions exist—if they exist because the public does not
know, or knowing, does not act; if the public’s ignorance or inaction
is due in whole or in part to the benumbing effects of these same
policies on journalism, on the church, and on the other channels of
enlightenment—then it is the part of THE SURVEY of all journals, standing
as it does midway between the doctor, the social investigator, the
criminologist and the general public, to bring out the truth and to bring
it out in ways that will strike fire.