FAILURE TO UTILIZE IMMIGRANTS IN CITY GOVERNMENT
We do much loose talking in regard to American immigration; we use
the phrase, “the scum of Europe,” and other unwarranted words without
realizing that the unsuccessful man, the undeveloped peasant, may be
much more valuable to us here than the more highly developed, but
also more highly specialized, town dweller, who may much less readily
acquire the characteristics which the new environment demands.
If successful struggle ends in the survival of the few, in blatant and
tangible success for the few only, government will have to reckon most
largely with the men who have been beaten in the struggle, with the
effect upon them of the contest and the defeat; for, after all, the
unsuccessful will always represent the majority of the citizens, and it
is with the large majority that self-government must eventually deal
whatever course of action other governments may legitimately determine
for themselves.
To demand to be protected from the many unsuccessful among us, who are
supposed to issue forth from the shallows of our city life and seize
upon the treasure of the citizens as the barbarians of old came from
outside the city walls, is of course not to have read the first lesson
of self-government in the light of evolutionary science. It is to
forget that a revival in self-government, an awakening of its original
motive power and _raison d’être_, can come only from a genuine desire
to increase its scope, and to adapt it to new and strenuous conditions.
In this way science revived and leaped forward under the pressure of
the enlarged demand of manufacture and commerce put upon it during the
industrial decades just passed.
We would ask the moralists and statesmen of this dawning century,
equipped as they are, with the historic method, to save our
contemporaries from skepticism in regard to self-government by
revealing to them its adaptability to the needs of the humblest man
who is so sorely pressed in this industrial age. The statesman who
would fill his countrymen with enthusiasm for democratic government
must not only possess a genuine understanding of the needs of the
simplest citizens, but he must know how to reveal their capacities
and powers. He must needs go man-hunting into those curious groups
we call newly arrived immigrants, and do for them what the scholar
has done in pointing out to us the sweetness and charm which inhere
in primitive domestic customs and in showing us the curious pivot
these customs make for religious and tribal beliefs. The scholar who
has surrounded the simplest action of women grinding millet or corn
with a penetrating reminiscence, sweeter than the chant they sing,
may reveal something of the same reminiscence and charm among many
of the immigrants. In the midst of crowded city streets one stumbles
upon an old Italian peasant with her distaff against her withered face
and her pathetic hands patiently “holding the thread,” as has been
done by myriads of women since children needed to be clad; or one
sees an old German potter, misshapen by years, his sensitive hands
nevertheless fairly alive with skill and delicacy, and his life at
least illumined with the artist’s prerogative of direct creation.
Could we take these primitive habits as they are to be found every day
in American cities and give them their significance and place, they
would be a wonderful factor for poetry in cities frankly given over
to industrialism and absorbed in its activities. As a McAndrews’ hymn
expresses the frantic rush of the industrial river, so these primitive
customs could give us something of the mysticism and charm of the
industrial springs, a suggestion of source, a touch of the refinement
which adheres to simple things. This study of origins, of survivals,
of paths of least resistance--refining an industrial age through the
people and experiences which really belong to it and do not need to
be brought in from the outside--would surely result in a revived
enthusiasm for human life and its possibilities which would in turn
react upon the ideals of government. The present lack of understanding
of simple people and the dearth of the illumination which knowledge of
them would give, can be traced not only in the social and political
maladjustment of the immigrant in municipal centres, but is felt in
so-called “practical affairs” of national magnitude. Regret is many
times expressed that, notwithstanding the fact that nine out of every
ten immigrants are of rural birth and are fitted to undertake that
painstaking method of cultivating the soil which American farmers
despise, they nevertheless all tend to congregate in cities where
their inherited and elaborate knowledge of agricultural processes is
unutilized. But it is characteristic of American complacency when any
assisted removal to agricultural regions is contemplated, that we
utterly ignore the past experiences of the immigrant and always assume
that each family will be content to live in the middle of its own piece
of ground, although there are few peoples on the face of the earth who
have ever tried isolating a family on one hundred and sixty acres or on
eighty, or even on forty. But this is the American way--a survival of
our pioneer days--and we refuse to modify it, even in regard to South
Italians, although from the day of mediaeval incursions they have lived
in compact villages with an intense and elaborated social life, so
much of it out of doors and interdependent that it has affected almost
every domestic habit. Italian women knead their own bread, but depend
on the village oven for its baking, and the men would rather walk for
miles to their fields each day than to face an evening of companionship
limited to the family. Nothing could afford a better check to the
constant removal to the cities of the farming population all over the
United States than the possibility of combining community life with
agricultural occupation. This combination would afford that development
of civilization which, curiously enough, density alone brings and
for which even a free system of rural delivery is not an adequate
substitute. Much of the significance and charm of rural life in South
Italy lies in its village companionship, quite as the dreariness of the
American farm life inheres in its unnecessary solitude. But we totally
disregard the solution which the old agricultural community offers,
and our utter lack of adaptability has something to do with the fact
that the South Italian remains in the city where he soon forgets his
cunning in regard to silk worms and olive trees, but continues his old
social habits to the extent of filling an entire tenement house with
the people from one village.
We also exhibit all the Anglo-Saxon distrust of any experiment with
land tenure or method of taxation, although our single-tax advocates do
not fail to tell us daily of the stupidity of the present arrangement.
It might, indeed, be well to make a few experiments upon an historic
basis before their enthusiasm converts us all. For centuries in
Russia the Slavic village, the mir system of land occupation, has
been in successful operation, training men within its narrow limits
to community administration. Yet when a persecuted sect from Russia
wishes to find refuge in America, we insist that seven thousand
people shall give up all at once a system of land ownership in which
they are experts. Americans declare the system to be impracticable,
although it is singularly like that in vogue in Palestine during the
period of its highest prosperity. We cannot receive them in the United
States, because our laws have no way of dealing with such cases.
And in Canada, where they are finally settled, the unimaginative
Dominion officials are driven to the verge of distraction concerning
registration of deeds and the collection of taxes from men who do not
claim acres in their own names, but in the name of the village. The
official distraction is reflected and intensified among the people
themselves, to the point of driving them into the mediaeval “marching
mania,” in the hope of finding a land in the south where they may carry
out their inoffensive “mir” system. The entire situation might prove
that an unbending theory of individualism may become as fixed as status
itself, although there are certainly other factors in the Doukhobor
situation--religious bigotry, and the self-seeking of leadership.
In spite of the fact that the Canadian officials have in other
matters exhibited much of the adaptability which distinguishes the
British colonial policy, they are completely stranded on the rock of
Anglo-Saxon individualistic ownership, and assume that any other system
of land tenure is subversive of government, forgetting that Russia
manages to exert a fair amount of governmental control over thousands
of acres held under the system which they so detest.
In our eagerness to reproach the immigrants for not going upon the
land we almost overlook the contributions to city life which those
of them, who were adapted to it in Europe, are making to our cities
here. From dingy little eating-houses in lower New York, performing a
function somewhat between the eighteenth-century coffee-house and the
Parisian café, is issuing at the present moment perhaps the sturdiest
realistic drama that is being produced on American soil. Late into the
night speculation is carried forward--not on the nice questions of
the Talmud and on quibbles of logic; but minds long trained on these
seriously discuss the need of a readjustment of the industrial machine
in order that the primitive sense of justice and righteousness may
secure larger play in our social organization. And yet a Russian in
Chicago who used to believe that Americans cared first and foremost
for political liberty and that they would certainly admire those who
had suffered in its cause, finds no one interested in his story of six
years’ banishment beyond the Antarctic circle. He is really listened to
only when he tells the tale to a sportsman of the fish he had caught
during the six weeks of summer when the rivers were open. “Lively work
then, but plenty of time to eat them dried or frozen through the rest
of the year,” is the most sympathetic comment he has yet received upon
an experience which, at least to him, held the bittersweet of martyrdom.
Among the colonies of the most recently immigrated Jews, who still
carry out their orthodox customs and a ritual preserved through
centuries in the Ghetto, one constantly feels during a season of
religious observance, a refreshing insistence upon the reality of the
inner life, and upon the dignity of its expression in inherited form.
Perhaps the most striking reproach to the materialism of Chicago is the
sight on a solemn Jewish holiday of a Chicago River bridge lined with
men and women oblivious of the noisy traffic and sordid surroundings,
casting their sins upon the waters that they may be carried far away.
The scene is a clear statement that, after all, life does not consist
in wealth, in learning, in enterprise, in energy, in success, not even
in that modern fetich, culture, but in an inner equilibrium, in “the
agreement of soul.” It is a relief to see even this exaggerated and
grotesque presentation of spiritual values.
But the statesman shuts himself away from the possibility of using
these great reservoirs of human ability and motive power because he
considers it patriotic to hold to governmental lines and ideals laid
down a century and a quarter ago. Because of a military inheritance,
we as a nation stoutly contend that all this varied and suggestive
life has nothing to do with government nor patriotism, and that we
perform the full duty of American citizens when the provisions of the
statutes on naturalization are carried out. In the meantime, in the
interests of our theory that commercial and governmental powers should
have no connection with each other, we carefully ignore the one million
false naturalization papers in the United States issued and concealed
by commercialized politics. Although we have an uneasy knowledge that
these powers are curiously allied, we profess that the latter has no
connection with the former and no control over it. We steadily refuse
to recognize the fact that our age is swayed by industrial forces.
Fortunately, life is much bigger and finer than our theories about
it, and, among all the immigrants in the great cities, there is
slowly developing the beginnings of self-government on the lines of
their daily experiences. The man who really knows immigrants and
undertakes to naturalize them, makes no pretense of the lack of
connection between their desire to earn their daily bread and their
citizenship. The petty and often corrupt politician who is first kind
to immigrants, realizes perfectly well that the force pushing them to
this country has been industrial need and that recognition of this
need is legitimate. He follows the natural course of events when he
promises to get the immigrant “a job,” for that is undoubtedly what
the immigrant most needs in all the world. If the politician nearest
to him were really interested in the immigrant and were to work out
a scheme of naturalization fitted to the situation, the immigrant
would proceed from the street-cleaning and sewer-digging in which he
first engages, to an understanding of the relation of these simple
offices to city government. Through them he would understand the
obligation of his alderman to secure cleanliness for the streets
in which his children play and for the tenement in which he lives.
The notion of representative government could be made quite clear
and concrete to him. He could demand his rights and use his vote in
order to secure them. His very naïve demands might easily become a
restraint, a purifying check upon the alderman, instead of a source of
constant corruption and exploitation. But when the politician attempts
to naturalize the bewildered immigrant, he must perforce accept
the doctrinaire standard imposed by men who held a theory totally
unattached to experience, and he must, therefore, begin with the remote
Constitution of the United States. At the Cook County Court-House only
a short time ago a candidate for naturalization, who was asked the
usual question as to what the Constitution of the United States was,
replied: “The Illinois Central.” His mind naturally turned to his
work, to the one bit of contribution he had genuinely made to the new
country, and his reply might well offer a valuable suggestion to the
student of educational method. Some of our most advanced schools are
even now making industrial construction and evolution a natural basis
for all future acquisition of knowledge, and they claim that anything
less vital and creative is inadequate.
It is surprising how a simple experience, if it be but genuine, gives
an opening into citizenship altogether lacking to the more grandiose
attempts. A Greek-American, slaughtering sheep in a tenement-house
yard, reminiscent of the Homeric tradition, can be made to see the
effect of the improvised shambles on his neighbor’s health and the
right of the city to prohibit the slaughtering, only as he perceives
the development of city government upon its most modern basis.
The enforcement of adequate child labor laws offers unending
opportunity to better citizenship founded, not upon theory but on
action, as does the compulsory education law, which makes clear that
education is a matter of vital importance to the American city and to
the State which has enacted definite, well-considered legislation in
regard to it. Some of the most enthusiastic supporters of child-labor
legislation and of compulsory education laws are those parents who
sacrifice old-world tradition, as well as the much-needed earnings of
their young children, because of loyalty to the laws of their adopted
country. Certainly genuine sacrifice for the nation’s law is a good
foundation for patriotism, and as this again is not a doctrinaire
question, women are not debarred, and mothers who wash and scrub for
the meagre support of their children say, sturdily, sometimes: “It will
be a year before he can go to work without breaking the law, but we
came to this country to give the young ones a chance, and we are not
going to begin by having them do what’s not right.”
Upon some such basis as this the Hebrew Alliance and the Charity
Organization of New York, which are putting forth desperate energy in
the enormous task of ministering to the suffering which immigration
entails, are developing understanding and respect for the alien through
their mutual efforts to secure more adequate tenement-house regulation
and to control the spread of tuberculosis; both these undertakings
being perfectly hopeless without the intelligent co-operation of
the immigrants themselves. Through such humble doors, perchance,
the immigrant will at last enter into his heritage in a new nation.
Democratic government has ever been the result of spiritual travail
and moral effort. Apparently, even here, the immigrant must pay the
old cost, and he seems to represent the group and type which is making
the most genuine contribution to the present growth in governmental
functions, with its constant demand for increasing adaptations.
In the induction of the adult immigrant into practical citizenship,
we constantly ignore his daily experience. We also assume in our
formal attempts to teach patriotism to him and to his children, that
experience and traditions have no value, and that a new sentiment
must be put into aliens by some external process. Some years ago, a
public-spirited organization engaged a number of speakers to go to
the various city schools in order to instruct the children in the
significance of Decoration Day and to foster patriotism among the
foreign born, by descriptions of the Civil War. In one of the schools,
filled with Italian children, an old soldier, a veteran in years and
experience, gave a description of a battle in Tennessee, and of his
personal adventures in using a pile of brush as an ambuscade and a
fortification. Coming from the schoolhouse, an eager young Italian
broke out, with characteristic vividness, into a description of his
father’s campaigning under the leadership of Garibaldi, possibly
from some obscure notion that that, too, was a civil war fought from
principle, but more likely because the description of one battle
had roused in his mind the memory of another such description. The
lecturer, whose sympathies happened to be on the other side of the
Garibaldian conflict, somewhat sharply told him that he must forget
all that; that he was no longer an Italian, but an American. The
natural growth of patriotism based upon respect for the achievements
of one’s fathers, the bringing together of the past with the present,
the significance of the almost world-wide effort at a higher standard
of political freedom which swept over all Europe and America between
1848 and 1872 could, of course, have no place in the boy’s mind because
it had none in the mind of the instructor whose patriotism apparently
tried to purify itself by the American process of elimination.
How far a certain cosmopolitan humanitarianism ignoring national
differences, is either possible or desirable, it is difficult to
state; but certain it is that the old type of patriotism, founded
upon a common national history and land occupation, becomes to many
of the immigrants who bring it with them a veritable stumbling-block
and impediment. Many Greeks whom I know are fairly besotted with a
consciousness of their national importance, and the achievements
of their glorious past. Among them the usual effort to found a new
patriotism upon American history is often an absurd undertaking; for
instance, on the night of one Thanksgiving Day, I spent some time and
zeal in a description of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the motives which
had driven them across the sea, while the experiences of the Plymouth
colony were illustrated by stereopticon slides and little dramatic
scenes. The audience of Greeks listened respectfully, although I
was uneasily conscious of the somewhat feeble attempt to boast of
Anglo-Saxon achievement in hardihood and privation, to men whose powers
of admiration were absorbed in their Greek background of philosophy and
beauty. At any rate, after the lecture was over, one of the Greeks said
to me, quite simply, “I wish I could describe my ancestors to you; they
were very different from yours.” His further remarks were translated
by a little Irish boy of eleven, who speaks modern Greek with facility
and turns many an honest penny by translating, into the somewhat pert
statement: “He says if _that_ is what your ancestors are like, that his
could beat them out.” It is a good illustration of our faculty for
ignoring the past, and of our failure to understand the immigrant’s
estimation of ourselves. This lack of a more cosmopolitan standard, of
a consciousness of kind founded upon creative imagination and historic
knowledge is apparent in many directions, and cruelly widens the gulf
between immigrant fathers and their children who are “Americans in
process.”
A hideous story comes from New York of a young Russian Jewess who was
employed as a stenographer in a down-town office, where she became
engaged to be married to a young man of Jewish-American parentage.
She felt keenly the difference between him and her newly immigrated
parents, and on the night when he was to be presented to them she
went home early to make every possible preparation for his coming.
Her efforts to make the _ménage_ presentable were so discouraging,
the whole situation filled her with such chagrin, that an hour before
his expected arrival, she ended her life. Although the father was a
Talmud scholar of standing in his native Russian town, and the lover
was a clerk of very superficial attainments, she possessed no standard
by which to judge the two men. This lack of standard must be charged
to the entire community; for why should we expect an untrained girl
to be able to do for herself what the community so pitifully fails to
accomplish?
All the members of the community are equally stupid in throwing away
the immigrant revelation of social customs and inherited energy.
We continually allow this valuable human experience to go to waste
although we have reached the stage of humanitarianism when no infant
may be wantonly allowed to die, no man be permitted to freeze or
starve, if the State can prevent it. We may truthfully boast that the
primitive, wasteful struggle of physical existence is practically over,
but no such statement can be made in regard to spiritual life. Students
of social conditions recognize the fact that modern charity constantly
grows more democratic and constructive, and daily more concerned for
preventive measures, but to admit frankly similar aims as matters for
municipal government as yet seems impossible.
In this country it seems to be only the politician at the bottom,
the man nearest the people, who understands that there is a growing
disinterestedness taking hold of men’s hopes and imaginations in every
direction. He often plays upon it and betrays it; but he at least knows
it is there.
The two points at which government is developing most rapidly at the
present moment are naturally the two where it of necessity exercises
functions of nurture and protection: first, in relation to the young
criminal, second, in relation to the poor and dependent. One of the
latest developments is the Juvenile Courts which the large cities are
inaugurating. Only fifteen years ago when I first went to live in an
industrial district of Chicago, if a boy was arrested on some trifling
charge--and dozens of them were thus arrested each month--the only
possible way to secure another chance for him by restoring him to his
home with an opportunity to become a law-abiding citizen, was through
the alderman of the ward. Upon the request of a distracted relative
or the precinct captain, the alderman would “speak to the judge”
and secure the release of the boy. The kindness of the alderman was
genuine, as was the gratitude of all concerned; but the inevitable
impression remained that government was harsh, and naturally dealt out
policemen and prisons, and that the political friend alone stood for
kindness. That this kindness was in a measure illicit and mysterious in
its workings made it all the more impressive.
But so much advance has been made in so short a time as fifteen years,
toward incorporating kindly concern for the young and a desire to keep
them in the path of rectitude within the process of government itself,
that in Chicago alone twenty-four probation officers, as they are
called, are paid from the public funds. The wayward boy is committed
to one of these for another chance as a part of the procedure of the
court. He is not merely released by an act of clemency so magnificent
and irrelevant as to dazzle him with a sense of the aldermanic power,
but he is put under the actual care of a probation officer that he may
do better. He is assisted to keep permanently away from the police
courts and their allied penal institutions.
In one of the most successful of these courts, that of Denver, the
Judge who can point to a remarkable record with the bad boys of the
city, plays a veritable game with them against the police force, he
and the boys undertaking to be good without the help of repression,
and in spite of the machinations of the police. For instance, if the
boys who have been sentenced to the State Reform School at Golden,
deliver themselves without the aid of the Sheriff whose duty it is to
take them there, they not only vindicate their manliness and readiness
“to take their medicine,” but they beat the sheriff who belongs to the
penal machinery out of his five-dollar fee. Over this fact they openly
triumph--a simple example, perhaps, but significant of the attitude of
the well-intentioned toward repressive government.
The Juvenile Courts are beginning to take a really parental attitude
towards all dependent children, although for years only those orphans
who had inherited at least a meagre property were handed over to a
public guardian. Those whose parents had left them absolutely nothing
were allowed to care for themselves--as if the whole body of doctrine
contained in the phrase, “there is no wealth but life,” had never
entered into the mind of man. Because these courts are dealing with
the children in their social and everyday relations they have made the
astounding discovery that even a penniless child needs the care and
defense of the State.
The schools for Reform are those which are inaugurating the most
advanced education in agriculture and manual arts. A bewildered foreign
parent comes from time to time to Hull-House, asking that his boy be
sent to a school to learn farming, basing his request upon the fact
that his neighbor’s boy has been sent to “a nice green, country-place.”
It is carefully explained that the neighbor’s boy was bad, and was
arrested and sent away because of his badness. After much conversation,
the disappointed parent sometimes understands, but he often goes away
shaking his head, and some such words as these issue: “I have been
in this country for five years, and have never gotten anything yet.”
At other times it is successfully explained to the man that the city
assumes that he is looking out for himself and taking care of his own
boy, but it ought to be possible to make him to see that if he feels
that his son needs the education of a farm school, that it lies with
him to agitate the subject and to vote for the man who will secure such
schools. He might well look amazed, were this advice tendered him, for
these questions have never been presented to him to vote upon. Because
he does not eagerly discuss the tariff or other remote subjects which
the political parties present to him from time to time we assume that
he is not to be trusted to vote on the education of his child, although
there is no doubt that the one thing his ancestors decided upon, from
the days of bows and arrows, was the sort of training each one should
give his son.
The fine education that is given to a juvenile offender may indicate
a certain compunction on the part of the State. Quite as men formerly
gloried in warfare and now apologize for it, as they formerly went
out to spoil their enemies and now go to civilize them, so civil
governments, while continuing to maintain prisons, have become more
or less ashamed of them, and are already experimenting in better
ways to elevate and reform criminals than by the way of violence and
imprisonment. We have already said in America that neither a gallows
nor an unmitigated prison shall ever exist for a child.
In the matter of public charities, also, we are not timid as to
extending the function of the government. We build enormous city
hospitals and almhouses; we care with tenderness for the defective and
the dependent; but for that great mass of people just beyond the line,
from whom they are constantly recruited, we do practically nothing.
It has been said that if a workingman in New York falls a victim to
pneumonia, he is taken to a hospital and given skilled treatment; if it
leaves him tubercular the city will have a care over him, and valiantly
will stand by, putting him into a public sanatorium, providing him
with nutritious food and fresh air until his recovery. But if he is
turned away from the hospital without tuberculosis, merely too depleted
and wretched to go back to his regular employment, then the city can
do nothing for him unless he be ready to call himself an out-and-out
pauper. We are afraid of the notion of governmental function which
would minister to the primitive needs of the mass of the people,
although we are quite ready to care for him whom misfortune or disease
has made the exception. It is really the rank and file, the average
citizen, who is ignored by the government, while he works out his real
problems through other agencies, although he is scolded for staying at
home on election day, and for refusing to be interested in issues which
really do not concern him.
It is comparatively easy to understand the punitive point of view which
seeks to suppress, or the philanthropic which seeks to palliate; but
it is much more difficult to formulate that city government which is
adapted to our present normal living. As over against the survivals
of the first two, excellent and necessary as they are, we have but
the few public parks and baths, the few band concerts and recreation
piers--always excepting, of course, the public schools and the social
activities slowly centering around them; for public education has long
been a passion in America, and we seem to have been willing to make
that an exception to our general theory of government.
While governmental functions have shown this remarkable adaptation
and growth in relation to the youth, whether he be in the public
schools, in the Juvenile Court or in the reformatory, we hesitate
to assume toward the adult this temper of the educator who humbly
follows and at the same confidently leads the little child. While the
State spends millions of dollars and employs thousands of servants to
nurture and heal the sick and defective, it steadfastly refuses to
extend its kindliness to the normal working man. The Socialists alone
constantly appeal for this extension. They refuse, however, to deal
with the present State and constantly take refuge in the formulae of
a new scholasticism. Their orators are busily engaged in establishing
two substitutes for human nature which they call “proletarian” and
“capitalist.” They ignore the fact that varying, imperfect human nature
is incalculable, and that to eliminate its varied and constantly
changing elements is to face all the mistakes and miscalculations which
gathered around the “fallen man,” or the “economic man,” or any other
of the fixed norms which have from time to time been substituted for
expanding and developing human life. In time “the proletarian” and “the
capitalist” will become the impedimenta which it will be necessary to
clear away in order to make room for the mass of living and breathing
citizens with whom self-government must eventually deal.
There is no doubt that the existence of the mass, the mere size of the
modern city, increases the difficulty of the situation. Charles Booth’s
maps portraying the standard of living for the people of London afford
almost the only attempt at a general social survey of a modern city, at
least so far as it may be predetermined from the standard of income.
From his accompanying twelve volumes may be deduced the occupations of
the people with their real wages, their family budget and their culture
level, and, to a certain extent, their recreations and spiritual life.
If one gives one’s self over to a moment of musing on this mass of
information, so huge and so accurate, one is almost instinctively aware
that any radical changes, so much needed in the blackest districts,
must largely come from forces outside the life of the people. An
enlarged mental life must come from the educationalist, increased
wages from the business interests, alleviation of suffering from the
philanthropists. What vehicle of correction is provided for the people
themselves, what device has been invented for loosing that kindliness
and mutual aid which is the marvel of all charity visitors? What broad
basis has been laid down for a modification of their most genuine and
pressing needs through their own initiative? The traditional Government
expresses its activity in keeping the streets clean and the district
lighted and policed. It is only during the last quarter of a century
that the London County Council has erected decent houses, public
baths, and many other devices for the purer social life of the people.
American cities have gone no further, although they presumably started
at workingmen’s representation a hundred years ago, so completely were
the founders misled by the name of government, and the temptation to
substitute the form of political democracy for real self-government
dealing with advancing social ideals. Even now London has twenty-eight
Borough Councils, in addition to the London County Council itself,
fifteen hundred direct representatives of the people, as over against
seventy in Chicago although the latter city has a population one-half
as large. Paris has twenty Mayors, with corresponding machinery for
local government, as over against the New York concentration in one
huge City Hall, too often corrupt.
In Germany, perhaps more than anywhere else, the government has
come to concern itself with the primitive essential needs of its
working-people. In their behalf, the Government has forced industry,
in the person of the large manufacturers, to make an alliance with
it. The manufacturers are taxed for accident insurance of workingmen,
for old-age pensions and sick benefits; and a project is being formed
in which they shall bear the large share of insurance against
non-employment when it has been made clear that non-employment
is the result of an economic crisis brought about through the
maladministration of finance.
Germany proposes to regulate the maximum amount of rent which
landlords of certain types of houses may be permitted to require,
quite as the usury laws limit the maximum amount of interest which
may be demanded. And yet industry in Germany has flourished, and
this control on behalf of the normal workingman as he faces life in
his daily vocation has apparently not checked its systematic growth,
nor limited its place in the world’s market. As a result of this
constant supervision of industry, the German police although a part of
a military government, are constantly employed in the regulation of
social affairs; and in these branches of government it is remarked that
they are dropping their military tone and assuming toward the people
the attitude of helpers and protectors. The police force in Germany is
the lowest executive organ of the interior government and there are,
therefore, as many kinds of police departments as there are different
departments in this interior government. They follow the Government
inspectors of the forest, the railways, the fields and roads, to see
that their instructions are obeyed. In the Department of Public
Health it is the police officers who finally enforce instructions in
regard to vaccination, meat inspection, sale of food-stuffs, and the
transportation of animals; in the department of factory inspection
the police not only enforce the provisions of the factory laws, but
they are responsible for the books in which the wages paid to minors
are recorded; and it is from the police stations that the cards of
the Government insurance for working-people are issued. Any special
investigation ordered by the legislature is, as a matter of course,
undertaken by the police. These varied activities, of course, require
men of education and ability, and the very extension of function has
broken down the military ideal in the country where that ideal is most
firmly intrenched. But in a Republic founded upon a revulsion from
oppressive government we still keep the police close to their negative
rôle of preserving order and arresting the criminal. The varied
functions they perform in Germany would be impossible in America,
because it would be hotly resented by the American business man who
will not brook any governmental interference in industrial affairs.
The inherited instinct that government is naturally oppressive, and
that its inroads must be checked, has made it a matter of principle and
patriotism to keep the functions of government more restricted and
more military than has become true in military countries.
Almost every Sunday in the Italian quarter in which I live various
mutual benefit societies march with fife and drum and with a brave
showing of banners, celebrating their achievement in having surrounded
themselves by at least a thin wall of protection against disaster,
upon having set up their mutual good will against the day of
misfortune. These parades have all the emblems of patriotism; indeed,
the associations present the primitive core of patriotism, brothers
standing by each other against hostile forces from without. I assure
you that no Fourth of July celebration, no rejoicing over the birth
of an heir to the Italian throne, equals in heartiness and sincerity
these simple celebrations. Again one longs to pour into the government
of their adopted country all this affection and zeal, this real
patriotism. A system of State insurance would be a very simple device
and secure a large return.
Are we in America retaining eighteenth-century traditions, while
Germany is gradually evolving into a Government logically fitted to
cope with the industrial situation of the twentieth century? Do we
so fail to apprehend what democracy is, that we are really afraid to
extend the functions of municipal administration? Have we lost that
most conservative of all beliefs--the belief in the average man, and
thereby forfeited Aristotle’s ideal of a city “where men live a common
life for noble ends”?