The pupils of this novel school are to have amusement as well as work.

The third floor has been planned to meet many more requirements than are

usually considered in a theatre. Across the front runs a large rehearsal

room, large enough to make a fine dance hall when occasion demands.

Here, too, is a kitchenette which will be used to serve refreshments

when social gatherings are in progress or when an over-long rehearsal

tires out the cast. In warm weather the flat-tiled roof will be used as

a playground. It will be the scene, too, of many open air performances.

The Neighborhood Playhouse has been open only a few weeks. Already it is

in full swing. On the nights when the regular players do not appear the

programme consists of motion pictures and music. There is a charming

informality and ease about these entertainments; there is also genuine

art, and a whole-hearted appreciation on the part of the neighborhood's

people.

* * * * *

(_New York Evening Post_)

THE SINGULAR STORY OF THE MOSQUITO MAN

BY HELEN BULLITT LOWRY

"Now you just hold up a minute"--the bungalow-owner waved an indignant

hand at the man in the little car chug-chugging over the bumpy road.

"Now I just want to tell you," he protested, "that a mosquito got into

my room last night and bit me, and I want you to know that this has

happened three times this week. I want it to stop."

The man in the car had jumped out, and was turning an animated, and

aggressive, but not at all provoked, face on the complainer.

"Are you certain your drains are not stopped up?" he asked.

"Oh, those drains are all right. It's that damp hollow over in Miss K's

woods that's making the trouble."

"I'll go there immediately," said the aggressive one. "She promised me

she would fill that place this week."

"All right, then," answered the placated bungalow-owner, "I thought

you'd fix it up if you found out about it. I certainly wouldn't have

bought around Darien if you had not cleared this place of mosquitoes."

The aggressive one plunged into the Connecticut woods and began his

search for possible mosquito-breeding spots. He was the "Mosquito Man,"

the self-appointed guardian of the Connecticut coast from Stamford to

Westport.

He was not born a Mosquito Man at all--in fact, he did not become one

until he was forty years old and had retired from business because he

had made enough money to rest and "enjoy life." But he did not rest, and

did not get enjoyment, for the mosquitoes had likewise leased his place

on the Sound and were making good their title.

Came then big fat mosquitoes from the swamp. Came mosquitoes from the

salt marshes. Some lighted on the owner's nose and some looked for his

ankles, and found them. Three days of this sort of rest made him decide

to move away. Then, because he was aggressive, he became the Mosquito

Man. The idea occurred to him when he had gone over to a distant island

and was watching the building of houses.

"This place," he said to the head carpenter, "is going to be a little

heaven."

"More like a little other place," growled the head carpenter. "Here

they've dug out the centre of the island and carted it to the beach to

make hills for the houses to be built on. One good rain will fill their

little heaven with mosquitoes. Why don't the people around here drain

their country?"

That night the Mosquito Man telephoned to a drainage expert in New York

and demanded that he come out the next day.

"I don't like to work on Sunday," the expert objected.

"It is absolutely essential that you come at once," he was told. "Can

you take the first train?"

The first train and the expert arrived in Darien at 5:51. Before the day

was over a contract had been drawn up to the purport that the expert

would drain the salt marshes between Stamford and South Norwalk for

$4,000.

The Mosquito Man now began to talk mosquitoes to every one who would

listen and to many who did not want to listen. "That bug," the old

settlers called him at the time--for old settlers are very settled in

their ways. The young women at the Country Club, whenever they saw him

coming, made bets as to whether he would talk mosquitoes--and he always

did. Every property-owner in the township was asked for a subscription,

and some gave generously and some gave niggardly and some did not give

at all. The subscriptions were voluntary, for no one could be forced to

remove a mosquito-breeding nuisance from his property. This was in 1911,

and only in 1915 has a mosquito law been passed in Connecticut. The

Mosquito Man was forced to use "indirect influence," which does not

expedite matters.

A subscription of $1,000 came from the big land corporation of the

neighborhood, after the "indirect influence" had rather forcibly

expressed itself.

"I want $1,000 from you," said the Mosquito Man to the representative of

the president--the president was in South America. The representative

laughed, so the Mosquito Man spent several days explaining to him why

property is more valuable when it is not infested with pests. But every

time that the $1,000 was mentioned, the representative could not

restrain the smile.

"Well," the Mosquito Man said, at last, "I will make the drainage on

your property anyway, and it will cost me $2,000. If you want it left

you will have to pay me every cent of the $2,000, not just the $1,000

that I am asking now. Otherwise I shall fill up my ditches and let you

enjoy your mosquitoes."

The representative did not laugh at this, but cabled the president in

South America. As the president had just been at Panama, and had seen

the mosquito extermination work, the $1,000 subscription came back by

return cable.

The Darien Board of Health also was a spot against which in direct

influence was knocking, for it was a rich Board of Health with $150 at

its disposal--and the Mosquito Man wanted that appropriation to flaunt

in the faces of the old settlers.

"God sent mosquitoes," objected one member of the Board of Health, "and

it is going in the face of Providence to try to get rid of them."

All in all, the money was raised. Some whom he asked for $100 gave $25,

and some whom he asked for $25 gave $100, and some millionaires did not

give at all--but a sail-maker is still telling proudly of how he gave

$5, and "I haven't regretted a cent of it since."

The draining now commenced, and the expert and the Mosquito Man were of

the same stripe. The work was completed in six weeks. Just about this

time people stopped calling the Mosquito Man "a bug," and the members of

the Country Club even tried to make him talk mosquitoes to them, while

the sail-maker felt sure that his $5 had done the whole job. Hammocks

were swung out in the yards--and a hammock hung outside of the screens

is the barometer of the mosquito condition.

The Mosquito Man was feeling very satisfied the night he went to a dance

at the Country Club. But the east wind blew in the mosquitoes from the

Norwalk marshes.

"It was the most embarrassing experience I have ever had," said the

Mosquito Man. "I sat right behind a big fat lady whose dress was very

low and I watched the mosquitoes bite her; her whole back was covered

with red lumps. That night I telegraphed to the man who had done the

draining and he telegraphed back that all of Norwalk township must be

drained."

Norwalk proved to be a much severer task than Darien. In Darien the

Mosquito Man had found only indifference and prejudice; in Norwalk he

met active opposition. Property owners and city councils seem to be

afraid that the value of property will be brought down if any sanitation

scandal is advertised. It really appeared to be simpler and better

business to ignore the fact.

To do away with this opposition, the Mosquito Man handled his campaign

in a popular manner. The cooperation of the newspapers was gained and

every day he published articles on the mosquito question; some of the

articles were educational and others were facetious--while one came out

that brought the property owners crying "murder" about his ears. This

was the article in which he gave the statistics of Norwalk's health rate

in comparison with other Connecticut towns. The smallest subscriptions

were encouraged, for, after a man has given a dollar to a cause, that

cause is his. Many a child was received with a welcoming smile when he

brought to the campaign offices a ten-cent donation.

True, ten-cent donations were not suggested to adult contributors, and

the Mosquito Man did much to induce the well-to-do citizens to subscribe

according to their means. He still tells with relish of the club of

women which took up a collection, after his talk, and presented him with

two dollars, in small change.

"The women, though, were my greatest help," he adds; "I found that the

women are as a rule better citizens than the men and are glad to be

organized to fight the mosquito and fly menace. Of course, I found some

uneducated ones that owned a piece of property a foot square, and were

afraid that I would walk off with it in my pocket if I came to look it

over--but, as for the educated women, I could not have managed my

campaign without them."

A large contributor to the fund was the monastery at Kaiser Island. For

years this had been a summer resort for the monks, who filled the

dormitories in the old days before the mosquitoes took the island. Only

one priest was there when the Mosquito Man visited the place to ask for

a subscription.

"Very few come any more," said the priest. "It is because of the

mosquitoes."

"Will you contribute $500 to get rid of them?" asked the Mosquito Man.

Briefly, the Mosquito Man offered to repay the $500 himself if he did

not exterminate the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes went; the monks came back

to Kaiser Island.

Yet, in spite of the occasional generous giver, the $7,500 was never

quite raised, and the Mosquito Man himself had to make up the deficit.

The citizens of Norwalk, for instance, contributed only $150.

This all happened three years ago, and now not a child in the twelve

miles but can tell you all about mosquitoes and how a community can

avoid having them. The Mosquito Man is appreciated now, and the

community understands what he has done for them and what he is still

doing--for the contract merely drained the salt marshes, doing away with

the salt-water mosquitoes. There were still the fresh-water mosquitoes,

and there was still much work for some one to do. That some one has

been the Mosquito Man.

During the three years, he has made it his business to drain every

inland marsh within his territory, to turn over every tub which may

collect water, to let the plug out of every old boat which is breeding

mosquitoes, and to convince every ancestor-encumbered autocrat that his

inherited woods can breed mosquitoes just as disastrously as do the tin

cans of the Hungarian immigrant down the road. The Mosquito Man has an

assistant, paid by the towns of Darien and Norwalk--and together they

traverse the country.

"It was difficult finding a man who would go into mud to the waist when

need was," said the Mosquito Man, "but I finally found a good man with

the proper scorn of public opinion on the clothes question, and with a

properly trained wife who cleaned without scolding."

You can find traces of the two men any place you go in the woods of

Darien or Norwalk. In a ferned dell where you are quite sure that yours

is the first human presence, you come upon a ditch, as clean and smooth

as a knife--or you find new grass in a place which you remember as a

swamp. Perhaps you may even be lucky enough to come on the two workers

themselves, digging with their pick and spade--for all summer long the

Mosquito Man is working eight hours a day at his self-appointed task.

You might even find him in New York some off-day--and you will know him,

for surely he will be telling some rebellious apartment-house owner that

the tank on his roof is unscreened. For they do say that he carries his

activities into any part of the world where he may chance to be; they do

say that, when he was in Italy not so very long ago, he went out to

investigate the mosquitoes which had disturbed his rest the night

before.

"Now you must oil your swamp," said he to the innkeeper.

That night there was no salad for dinner, for the innkeeper had obeyed

the order to the best of his ability. He had poured all of his best

olive oil on the mosquito marsh.

* * * * *

_(Country Gentleman)_

Five half-tone illustrations, with the following captions:

1. "A Traction Ditcher at Work Digging Trench for Tile."

2. "Ditch Dug With Dynamite Through Woods."

3. "Apple Packing House and Cold Storage at Ransomville."

4. "Nelson R. Peet, County Agent and Manager of the Niagara

County Farm Bureau, New York."

5. "Part of the Crowd Listening to the Speakers."

A COUNTY SERVICE STATION

WHERE NEW YORK FARMERS GET HELP IN THEIR FRUIT GROWING AND MARKETING

PROBLEMS

BY D. H. WILLIAMS

You've got to look into the family closet of a county and study its

skeletons before you can decide whether that county's farming business

is mostly on paper or on concrete. You've got to know whether it

standardizes production and marketing, or just markets by as many

methods as there are producers.

As a living example of the possibility of tightening up and retiming the

gears of a county's economic machinery to the end of cutting out power

losses, Niagara County, New York, stands in a distinct class by itself.

Here is an area of 558 square miles, with Lake Ontario spraying its

northern line. A network of electric and steam railways and hundreds of

miles of splendid state highways make up a system of economic arteries

through which the industrial life-blood of the county circulates.

Forty-eight hours to Chicago's markets, the same distance to New York's;

three wealthy industrial and agricultural cities within the county

itself--Lockport, Niagara Falls and North Tonawanda--operating with a

wealth of cheap electric power generated at Niagara Falls--these are

some of the advantages within and without the county, the value of which

is self-evident.

Beginning with the southern plain section, Niagara's agriculture changes

in type from general hay and grain farming to a more intense

fruit-growing industry as the northern plain section is approached,

until within the zone of Lake Ontario's tempering influence the fruit

industry almost excludes all other types of farming.

There is hardly a more favored fruit section in the country than the

northern half of Niagara County. Apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes,

cherries, quinces make up the county's horticultural catalogue. The

latest available figures rank Niagara County first among the counties of

New York in the number of fruit trees; second in the total number of

bushels of fruit produced; first in the quantity of peaches, pears,

plums and prunes, quinces and cherries; third in the number of bushels

of apples.

Yet there are things about the county which no statistics will ever

show, such things, for instance, as the condition of the orchards, the

market value of the fruit, the earning capacity of the land as a

whole--in other words, the bedrock rating of the county. You have to get

at these things by a different avenue of approach.

A rather close auditing during 1914 of the accounts of some eighty-seven

typical good farms in perhaps the best section of Niagara County brought

out the fact that labor incomes from these farms, on the whole, could

not be classed as strictly giltedge. One diagnosis made by a Niagara

County investigator is recorded in these words:

"Though Niagara County has many of the best fruit farms in New York

State, there are numbers of orchards that have been abandoned to the

ravages of insects and disease. There is also a tendency toward

extensive rather than intensive fruit growing, which has resulted in

many large plantings being made.

"Niagara County does not need more orchards, but rather cultivation and

spraying of the present orchards; it does not need to produce more

fruit, but rather to insure better grading and marketing of the present

production."

This observation is dated 1914, one year after leading farmers and

business men of the county, convinced that all was not so well with them

as the lifeless census figures would have one believe, made the move to

set up and operate for the county a farm bureau. New York is the

national hotbed of farm-bureau enthusiasm and propaganda.

Almost six years to the day after the inauguration of this bureau, I

went into Niagara County. And before I left I was able to sketch a

rather vivid mental picture of what a farm bureau really can do for a

county, be the raw material with which it must work good, bad or

indifferent.

Up in the office of the Niagara County Farm Bureau at Lockport I waited

some two hours for an interview with its manager, Nelson R. Peet. That

wait was an eye-opener.

Three women clerks and stenographers and the assistant manager occupied

this room. The clerks were trying to typewrite, answer the continuous

ringing of the phone, respond to buzzer summons from Manager Peet's

private office and talk with a stream of visitors, all at the same time.

I spent two whole days and half a night in these offices and not once

save at night was there a let-up in this sort of thing. It was business

all the time; the business of service! Niagara County farmers are using

the bureau.

Nelson Peet, manager, is a spectacled human magneto. His speech and his

movements fairly crackle with energy; his enthusiasm is as communicable

as a jump spark. A young man in years, yet mature in the knowledge of

men and the psychology of service, he never wastes a minute dilating

upon the philosophy of farm management; but he has worked twenty hours a

day to see that Niagara County farmers got all the labor they needed

during rush seasons.

This man has been with the bureau three years. When he came to it the

bureau had a paid-up membership of 325. In March this year, when I was

in Niagara County, the membership stood at 2185, and was increasing

daily. It led by a good margin, I was told, the fifty-five New York

county farm bureaus. These, in 1918, had a total membership of 60,000.

More than half the farmers in Niagara County are members of the Niagara

Bureau.

When Peet first took charge there were two broad courses open to him. He

might have planned a program of paternalistic propaganda in behalf of

the farmers of the county. Such a program calls for a tremendous amount

of talking and writing about coöperation and community interests, better

economics and better social conditions, but too often results in the

propagandist doing the "coing," while the "operating" is left to

somebody else.

The other course was to find out what the farms and farmers in the

county needed most and then set to work with little ado to get those

things. Peet chose the latter course. And in so doing he has staged one

of the best demonstrations in rural America. He has shown that a farm

bureau can be made into a county service station and actually become the

hub of the county's agricultural activities.

With the aid of state-college men, one of Peet's foremost lines of

bureau work has been that of taking inventories of the farming business

of Niagara County. For four years these records have been taken on some

100 typical farms. Group meetings are regularly held at the homes of the

bureau's community committeemen. Here, with the records they have been

keeping, the farmers assemble. Here they work out their own labor

incomes and compare notes with their neighbors. The farm bureau helps

the men make these business analyses--it does not do the work for them.

Now the farmers ask for the blank forms and are themselves as

enthusiastic over farm-management records as the men who specialize in

such.

These figures serve the bureau as an index to the county's progress.

More than once Peet has referred to them and discovered where leaks

could be plugged. For example, these records showed an average labor

income of $182 a farm for the four years ending 1916.

"This fact," Mr. Peet explained, "we put to work as the reason for doing

something to benefit the fruit industry. What could be done? The answer

in other highly specialized fruit sections seems to have been central

packing houses. We held a meeting, inviting one very influential fruit

grower from each loading station in the county. We showed charts of the

farm-management records. It didn't take long for the meeting to go on

record as favoring the central-packing-house plan.

"Later meetings were held in each community, the farm-management charts

were again shown, and at every loading station the meetings went on

record as favoring central packing houses. To make a long story short,

sites and methods of financing these houses were worked out. There were

already two old central packing houses in operation. They took on new

life. Five new ones have been formed. All were incorporated and

federated into a central parent association, which owns the brand

adopted and makes the rules and regulations under which the fruit is

packed.

"From the very beginning the proposition has been pushed not as a means

of beating the selling game by selling coöperatively, but as a means of

securing the confidence of the consuming public, which must ultimately

result in a wider distribution and better prices. In fact, the matter of

selling has not been fostered from the farm-bureau office. We have

concerned ourselves solely with uniform grading and central packing. We

believed from the start that the selling of properly graded and packed

fruit will take care of itself, and this stand has been justified.

"Each association makes its own arrangements for selling, and in every

case has secured better prices than the growers who sold under the old

system. The most satisfactory feature of this work centers round the

fact that the best and most influential growers are heart and soul

behind the proposition. The personnel of coöperative movements, I

believe, is the main feature."

When I visited Niagara County the seven central packing associations

were doing a splendid business, handling about $1,000,000 worth of

apples between them. Only two of the associations were more than one

year old. Many of the associations were dickering for additional space

for packing and for extensions for their refrigerator service. Other

communities in Niagara and in other counties were writing in for details

of the plan, to the end of getting the same thing started in their

sections. And inquiries were coming in from states outside of New York.

Even with the best of selling methods, no commodity will bring a profit

to the producer unless the greater portion of it is eligible to the A-1

class. Too many seconds or culls will throw any orchard venture on the

rocks of bankruptcy. It came to Manager Peet's attention early in 1917

that the farm bureau had a golden opportunity to put on another service,

which alone, if it worked out in practice as well as it did on paper,

would justify the existence of the bureau.

He noticed that though orchardists were following spraying

schedules--the best they could find--some had splendid results in

controlling apple scab and other pests, but others got results ranging

between indifferent and poor. This seemed paradoxical, in view of the

fact that one man who followed the same spraying schedule as his

neighbor would have more scabby apples than the other.

At that time L.F. Strickland, orchard inspector for the state department

of agriculture, had paid particular attention to a limited number of

apple orchards in Niagara County with a view to controlling scab by

spraying. He discovered that, though the average spraying calendar is

all right, climatic conditions in different parts of the same county

often upset these standard calculations, so that a difference of one day

or even a few hours in time of spraying often meant the difference

between success and failure. In other words, it was necessary to study

all contributing factors, watch the orchards unremittingly and then

decide on the exact day or even hour when conditions were right for a

successful spray treatment. He found that one must strike the _times

between times_ to get the optimum of results.

So Mr. Strickland, in conjunction with his regular work, kept an eagle

eye on a few orchards and would notify the owners when it seemed the

moment for spraying had come. It worked out that those favored

orchardists had magnificent yields of A-1 fruit; others in the same

sections, following the rather flexible spraying calendars, didn't do

nearly so well.

All this set Manager Peet to thinking. "Strickland hasn't got an

automobile and has lots of other work to do," he reasoned; "but why, if

he had a car and could give all the time necessary to such work,

couldn't the same results be had in orchards all over the county? Why

can't this farm bureau put on a spraying service?"

He put the idea up to the executive committee of the bureau. The idea

was good, they agreed, but it would cost at least $500 to try it out the

first year. The bureau didn't have the available funds.

"Tell you what," they finally said: "If you want to get out and rustle

up 500 new members at one dollar each to pay for this thing, we'll

authorize it."

Peet was telling me about it. "Here the bureau had been working for four

years with a paid-up membership of about 375," he said, "and if I

believed in my idea I had to get 500 more by spring. It was February

eighth when the committee gave me this decision. Well, I did it in time

to start the ball that spring!"

He got the new members because he had a service to sell them.

Arrangements were made whereby the county was divided into six zones,

varying in soil and topographic conditions. Criterion orchards were

selected in each zone. The inspector, with the aid of daily telegraphic

weather reports and through constant inspection of the criterion

orchards, decided when the hour struck for the most effective spraying

of these orchards.

In the meantime Manager Peet and the inspector had worked out a code

system for spraying instructions and put this into the hands of the

growers in the six zones. When it came time to spray, the telephones

from headquarters in Lockport were put to work and the code message sent

to certain orchardists; these in turn repeated the instructions to a

number of other orchardists agreed upon, until every member had received

the message.

The scheme has worked. The first year there were 800 members who took

this service; the second year--1918--there were 900; this year there are

1500. It is paying for itself many times over. One central packing

house with nine grower members reports that eight of the members used

the spraying service and that none of these had more than five per cent

of their fruit to cull out. The ninth member sprayed, but not through

the service. He culled forty-five per cent of his crop. There are scores

of similar instances.

Seeing how quickly he could get the support of the Niagara farmers for

any move which had practice and not theory to recommend it, Manager Peet

next began to agitate for an improvement in city-marketing conditions in

Lockport. Up to August, 1915, the system--if system it might be

called--of distributing farm produce for Lockport's consumption

consisted of sporadic visits by producers to the city with produce to be

sold at prices largely controlled by the local grocerymen. Likewise

retail prices to consumers were chiefly regulated by the same standard.

A grower might drive into Lockport with 100 quarts of strawberries. He

would stop at a grocery and offer them.

"No," the grocer would say, "I don't want any. Say, how much do you want

for them anyhow?"

"Ten cents a quart."

"Too high; I'll give you six."

Whereupon the man would drive on to see the next grocer. But the man who

offered six cents might go straight to his phone, call up the rest of

the trade and inform it that there were 100 quarts of strawberries on

the streets for which he had offered six cents against ten asked. The

result would be that the farmer would get no better offer than six

cents.

So Manager Peet joined hands with the Lockport Board of Commerce and

went at the job of righting this condition. He proposed a city market

for farmers. The nearest approach to a market was a shelter for teams

which the local food dealers had rented.

To 700 farmers in the vicinity of Lockport Manager Peet wrote letters,

calling their attention to these conditions and offering the city-market

idea as a remedy. And he used publicity among Lockport's population of

consumers, showing them the economy of such a move. The farmers held a

get-together meeting, decided on a location for a market in Lockport,

decided on market days and market hours. After this the farm bureau got

the city's common council to pass an ordinance prohibiting the

huckstering of farm produce on the streets during market hours; also an

ordinance setting the market hours, marking off a street section which

should be used as a market stand, and putting the superintendent of

streets in charge.

That was all. Not a cent of appropriation asked for. The market opened

August 10, 1917, with fifty farm wagons in place. Before the summer was

over it was common to find more than 100 at their stands. The local

war-garden supervisor acted as inspector. He looked over the produce,

advised the farmers how to pack and display it, and used every energy in

the direction of popularizing the market among producers and consumers

alike.

Between Manager Peet and the inspector a scheme was worked out whereby

every Thursday was bargain day in market. They would get a certain

number of farmers to agree to pack and offer for sale on those days a

limited number of baskets of their finest tomatoes, say. Or it might be

corn. In the case of tomatoes the bargain price would be ten cents for

baskets which that day were selling regularly for eighteen to

twenty-five cents. To each of these baskets--no farmer was asked to

sacrifice more than ten--was attached a green tag noting that it was a

bargain.

Each bargain day was advertised in advance among Lockport consumers.

Thursday mornings would see an early rush to the market. The bargains

would be cleaned out and then business at normal prices would continue

at a brisker rate than usual.

The first year of its operation this market was held on fifty-one days.

During this period 1300 rigs sold out their produce for a total of

$13,000. This simple move has resulted in stabilizing prices in Lockport

and has encouraged the bringing in of farm produce. Prices automatically

regulate themselves. If they begin to get too low in Lockport, the

supply in sight is immediately reduced through action by the producers

in shipping the stuff to Niagara Falls or Buffalo by motor trucks.

The distribution of Lockport's milk supply, as happens in hundreds of

cities, has been attended by considerable waste and expense as a result

of duplication of delivery routes, breakage of bottles and uneconomic

schedules.

The first night I was in Lockport, Manager Peet was holding a meeting of

the milk producers supplying the city for the purpose of settling this

inequity once and for all. A little agitation had been carried on ahead

of this meeting, but only a little. Peet had a plan.

"It's all wrong to plan for a municipally owned central distributing

system," he was explaining to me the next morning; "these are too likely

to get mixed up in politics. So last night we just about clinched our

arrangement for having our city distributing system owned by the

producers themselves. In the past we have had eight distributors with

fifteen wagons handling the milk supplied from fifty dairy farms. There

has been a big loss in time and money as a result of this competition.

"The farm bureau got the producers together on the plan of securing

options on these distributors' interests, and last night we just about

wound up all the preliminaries. We already have our limited liability

corporation papers. We're incorporating under the Membership Corporation

Law. Our organization comes under the amendment to the Sherman Antitrust

Law, you know, following closely the California law under which the

California fruit growers' associations operate.

"We figure that we will need between $20,000 and $30,000 for the

purchase of buildings, wagons, equipment and good-will now in the hands

of the distributors. At first we thought it would be a good plan to have

every member of the association subscribe to the amount proportioned by

the number of cows he keeps or the amount of milk he has for sale. But

for several reasons this wouldn't work. So we hit on the scheme of

having each man subscribe to the amount he personally is able to

finance.

"We already have $24,000 subscribed in sums between set limits of $100

and $1000. We're issuing five-year certificates of indebtedness bearing

six per cent interest. Our producers will have about $9000 worth of milk

a month to distribute. We plan to deduct five per cent every month from

these milk checks to pay off the certificates. Then later we'll create a

new set of certificates and redistribute these in proportion to the

amounts of milk produced on the members' farms."

Manager Peet and the producers are making it perfectly plain to Lockport

consumers that this is no move contemplating price control. In fact,

they expect to sell milk for a cent a quart under the old price.

The farm-labor shortage which antedated our entrance into the war became

a national menace about the time our selective draft began to operate.

New York farmers were as hard hit as any other farmers, particularly in

the fruit sections, where a tremendous labor supply falls suddenly due

at harvest time. Niagara County came in for its full share of this

trouble and the Niagara County Farm Bureau went its length to meet the

emergency.

In 1917 Western New York produced the biggest crop of peaches in its

history, and in the face of the greatest labor famine. There were nearly

8000 cars of the fruit in danger of spoiling on the trees and on the

ground. Peet anticipated the crisis by converting the farm bureau into a

veritable county labor department. He was promised a good number of

high-school boys who were to help in the peach harvest and who were to

be cleared through a central office in Buffalo.

Manager Peet worked out arrangements for the care of these boys in

forty-two camps strategically located. The camps were to accommodate

thirty boys each. The farmers had asked Peet for 4500 hands. He applied

for 1500 boys and had every reason to expect these. But at the critical

moment something went wrong in Buffalo headquarters and of the 1500

asked for he got only 200!

"I was in Buffalo at the time the news was broken," Manager Peet was

saying to me, "and my first impulse was to jump off one of the docks!"

Here was a nice kettle of fish! The fruit was ripening on the trees, and

the phones in the bureau offices were ringing their plating off with

calls from frantic farmers. Peet didn't jump off a Buffalo dock; he

jumped out of his coat and into the fray. He got a Federal Department of

Labor man to help him. They plastered appeals for help all over Western

New York--on the walls of post offices, railroad stations, on boarding

houses. They worked on long-distance phones, the telegraph, the mails.

They hired trucks and brought city men and boys and women and girls from

cities to work in the orchards over week-ends. Labor, attracted by the

flaring posters, drifted into the bureau's offices in Lockport and

immediately was assigned to farms; and hundreds of laborers whom Peet

never saw also came.

By working seven days a week and often without meals and with cat naps

for sleep the bureau cleared 1200 laborers through its office, to say

nothing of the loads brought overland by motor truck and which never

came near the office. Business houses in the towns closed down and sent

their help to the orchards. Lockport's organization of "live

wires"--lawyers, doctors, bankers--went out and worked in the orchards.

"Well," was Peet's comment, "we saved the crop, that's all!"

Last year the bureau placed 1095 men and four women on farms in Niagara

County. In addition, 1527 soldiers were secured on two-day furloughs

from Fort Niagara to help harvest the fruit crops. "We did this," said

Manager Peet, "mainly by starting early and keeping persistently at it

with the War Department, in order to cut the red tape."

This fall there will go into effect in New York State an amendment to

its drainage law which is going to do more properly to drain the state

than all the steam diggers that could have been crowded on its acres

under former conditions. This action came out of Niagara County, through

the farm bureau.

To realize the importance of drainage in this county one must remember

that it lies in two levels broken by the ridge which forms the locks at

Lockport, the falls at Niagara Falls, and which extends across the

county from east to west. In each plateau the land is very level, there

being but few places in the county having a difference in elevation of

twenty feet within a radius of a mile. Good drainage is very necessary

and in the past has been very hard to secure.

"Practically no man can secure adequate drainage without being concerned

in the drainage of his neighbor's land," said Mr. Peet. "If the neighbor

objects the situation is complicated. And our drainage laws have been

woefully inadequate to handle these problems."

But recently the farm bureau put it up to a conference of county agents

of New York to get the "state leader" to appoint a state committee to

work this thing out and persuade the state legislature to make the

necessary amendments to the drainage law. The plan went through, and one

of the laws passed compels an objecting property owner to open drains

which are necessary for the relief of his neighbors. This law goes into

effect next fall.

Farmers are looking to the farm bureau for help in the cleaning and

repairing of some sixty drainage ditches constructed in the past under

the county-commissioner plan. But the records on file in the county

clerk's office are in bad shape. The farm bureau has taken it upon

itself to arrange all this material so that it is available on a

minute's notice, and as a result has drawn up petitions to the

supervisors for the cleaning out of three of these ditches.

Cooperating with the New York State Food Commission, the farm bureau had

a power-tractor ditcher placed in the county last summer. Peet placed

his assistant in full charge, and the machine never lost a single day as

a result of lack of supervision. It has dug over 4000 rods of ditch for

tile on twenty-eight farms.

For four years Niagara County farmers had not made expenses in growing

tomatoes for the canneries. The farm bureau called a meeting of some

fourteen growers and together they figured the cost of production. The

average cost for 1917 was found to be $85 an acre; the estimated cost

for 1918 was $108 an acre. The average crop was set at six tons to the

acre. A joint committee went out of the conference and laid these facts

before the canners. The result was that the growers got $20 a ton for

their crops in 1918.

These are some outstanding features of the service rendered its farmers

by the Niagara bureau. Here are some of its "lesser" activities:

Taking an agricultural census by school districts of each farm in the

county and completing the job in one week.

Effecting an interchange of livestock and seed.

Distributing 1000 bushels of seed corn among 383 farmers, twenty-two

tons of nitrate of soda at cost among sixty-two farmers, and securing

and distributing six tons of sugar to fifty beekeepers for wintering

bees.

Indorsing 200 applications for military furloughs.

Assisting in organizing Liberty Loan campaigns, especially the third.

Assisting in the delivery of twenty carloads of feed, fertilizer, farm

machinery and barrels, which had been delayed.

Holding twelve demonstration meetings, attended by 602 farmers.

Conducting two tractor schools, attended by 125 farmers.

Arranging eight farmers' institutes, attended by 900 farmers.

Organizing a Federal Farm Loan Association which has loaned $125,000 to

nineteen farmers.

The bureau keeps its members posted on what is going on in the county

and what the bureau is doing through the medium of a well-edited monthly

"News" of eight pages. The best feature of the handling of this

publication is that it costs neither bureau nor members a cent. The

advertisements from local supply dealers pay for it, and two pages of

ads in each issue settles the bill.

The bureau's books show that last year it spent five dollars in serving

each member. The membership fee is only one dollar. The difference comes

from Federal, state and county appropriations.

The success of this bureau comes from having at the head of it the right

man with the right view of what a farm bureau should do. Manager Peet

sees to it that the organization works with the local chamber of

commerce--the one in Lockport has 700 members--which antedates the farm

bureau and which always has supported the bureau. Peet's policy has been

to keep the bureau not only before the farmers but before the city

people as well.

The "live-wire" committee of the Lockport chamber, composed of lawyers,

doctors, bankers, merchants, and the like, has made Manager Peet an

_ex-officio_ member. The Niagara Falls and Tonawanda Chambers of

Commerce get together with the Lockport chamber and the farm bureau and

talk over problems of inter-county importance. These conferences have

worked out a unified plan for road development, for instance. The

Niagara Farm Bureau helped the Niagara Falls city administration to

secure the services of a Federal market inspector. In this way all

rivalry between different sections and towns in Niagara County is freed

of friction.

About the only criticism I heard against the farm bureau of Niagara

County was that Peet was the wrong man. The farmers want a man who will

_stay_ manager. But some of the best members hinted that Peet will not

stay because he's just a bit too efficient. They seem to fear that some

business corporation is going to get him away. And when you look over

the record of his work as organizer and executive, you must admit

there's something in this.

* * * * *

_(Detroit News)_

Four half-tone illustrations:

1. The Settling Basin at the Water Works.

2. Interior of the Tunnel Through which the Water is Pumped.

3. Where Detroit's Water Comes From.

4. Water Rushing into the Settling Basin.

GUARDING A CITY'S WATER SUPPLY

HOW THE CITY CHEMIST WATCHES FOR THE APPEARANCE OF DEADLY BACILLI; WATER

MADE PURE BY CHEMICALS

BY HENRY J. RICHMOND

"COLON." The city chemist spoke the one significant word as he set down

the test tube into which he had been gazing intently. The next morning

the front page of all the city papers displayed the warning, "Citizens

should boil the drinking water."

Every morning, as the first task of the day, the city chemist uncorks a

curious little crooked tube containing a few spoonsful of very ordinary

bouillon, akin to that which you might grab at the quick lunch, but

which has been treated by the admixture of a chemical. This tube begins

in a bulb which holds the fluid and terminates in an upturned crook

sealed at the end. Into this interesting little piece of apparatus, the

chemist pours a small quantity of the city drinking water, and he then

puts the whole into an incubator where it is kept at a temperature

favorable to the reactions which are expected if the water is

contaminated.

After a sufficient time the tube is inspected. To the untrained eye

nothing appears. The bouillon still remains in the little bulb

apparently unchanged. Its color and clearness have not been affected.

But the chemist notices that it does not stand so high in the closed end

of the tube as it did when placed in the incubator. The observation

seems trivial, but to the man of science it is significant.

What has happened? The water contained some minute organisms which when

acted upon by the chemical in the tube have set up a fermentation.

Gradually, one by one in the little bulb, bubbles of gas have formed and

risen to the surface of the liquid in the closed upper end of the tube.

As this gas was liberated, it took the place of the liquid in the tube,

and the liquid was forced downward until there was quite a large space,

apparently vacant but really filled with gas.

It was this phenomenon that had attracted the attention of the chemist.

What did it mean? It was the evidence that the water which was being

furnished to the city for half a million people to drink contained some

living organism.

Now that, in itself, was enough to make an official of the health

department begin to take an interest. It was not, however, in itself a

danger signal.

Not all bacterial life is a menace to health, the chemist will tell you.

Indeed, humanity has come to live on very peaceable terms with several

thousand varieties of bacteria and to be really at enmity with but a

score or more. Without the beneficent work of a certain class of

bacteria the world would not be habitable. This comes about through a

very interesting, though rather repulsive condition--the necessity of

getting rid of the dead to make room for the living.

What would be the result if no provision had been made for the

disintegration of the bodies of all the men and animals that have

inhabited the earth since the beginning? Such a situation is

inconceivable. But very wisely providence has provided that myriads and

myriads of tiny creatures are ever at work breaking up worn-out and dead

animal matter and reducing it to its original elements. These elements

are taken up by plant life, elaborated into living vegetable growth and

made fit again for the nourishment of animal life, thus completing the

marvelous cycle. And so we must not get the notion that all bacteria are

our mortal foes. We could not live without them, and our earth, without

their humble services, would no longer be habitable.

Neither need we fear the presence of bacterial life in our drinking

water. Drinking water always contains bacteria. We, ourselves, even when

in the best of health, are the hosts of millions upon millions of them,

and it is fair to suppose that they serve some useful purpose. At any

rate, it has never been demonstrated that they do us any harm under

normal conditions.

And so, the chemist was not alarmed when he discovered that the

formation of gas in his crooked tube gave indication of bacteria in the

drinking water. He must ascertain what type of bacteria he had

entrapped. To this end, he analyzed the gas, and when he determined that

the fermentation was due to the presence of colon bacilli in the water,

he sent out his warning. Not that the colon bacilli are a menace to

health. The body of every human being in the world is infested with

millions of them. But the presence of colon bacilli in drinking water is

an indication of the presence of a really dangerous thing--sewage.

Thus, when the city chemist turned from his test tube with the

exclamation, "Colon!" he did not fear the thing that he saw, but the

thing that he knew might accompany it.

There has been much discussion of late of the possibility that the great

lakes cities may suffer a water famine. The rapid increase of population

along the borders of these great seas, it has been said, might render

the water unfit for use. This fear is based upon the assumption that we

shall always continue the present very foolish practice of dumping our

sewage into the source of our water supply. The time may come when we

shall know better how to protect the public health and at the same time

husband the public resources. But even at that, the city chemist says

that he hardly expects to see the time when the present intake for

water near the head of Belle Isle will not be both safe and adequate.

No doubt he makes this statement because he has confidence that the

purification of water is both simple and safe. There are two principal

methods. The first, and most expensive, is nature's own--the filter. The

application of this method is comparatively simple though it involves

considerable expense. The trick was learned from the hillside spring

which, welling up through strata of sand and gravel, comes out pure and

clear and sparkling. To make spring water out of lake water, therefore,

it is merely necessary to excavate a considerable area to the desired

depth and lead into it the pipes connected with the wells from which

water is to be pumped. Then the pit is filled with successive layers of

crushed stone graduated in fineness to the size of gravel and then

covered with a deep layer of fine sand. This area is then flooded with

the water to be filtered, which slowly percolates and comes out clear

and pure. The best results in purification of contaminated water

supplies have probably been attained in this way; that is, as measured

by the improvement of health and the general reduction of the death rate

from those diseases caused by the use of contaminated water.

But when the alarm was given this spring by the city chemist there was

no time to excavate and build an extensive filtering plant. The dreaded

typhoid was already making its appearance and babies were dying.

Something had to be done at once.

If some afternoon you take a stroll through Gladwin park your attention

may be attracted to a little white building at the lower end of the

settling basin. It is merely a temporary structure yet it is serving a

very important purpose. Approach the open door and your nostrils will be

greeted by a pungent odor that may make you catch your breath. The

workmen, too, you will notice, do not stay long within doors, but take

refuge in a little shelter booth outside. Strewn about here and there

are traces of a white, powdery substance which seems to have been

tracked down from a platform erected on the roof. This is hypochlorite

of lime, the substance used for sterilizing the city drinking water.

This is so powerful a disinfectant that it destroys all bacteria in

water even in an extremely dilute solution. The method of applying it is

interesting. The city water comes in from the river through a great

tunnel about 10 feet in diameter. The little chlorinating plant is

situated on the line of this tunnel so that the solution is readily

introduced into the water before it reaches the pool called a settling

basin.

The hypochlorite reaches the plant in iron cylinders containing 100

pounds. These are carried up to the roof and poured into the first

mixing tank through a hopper fixed for the purpose. There are within the

building four of these mixing tanks. In the first, up near the roof, a

very strong solution is first made. This is drawn off into a second tank

with a greater admixture of water and thence passes into the third and

fourth. From the last it is forced out into the main tunnel by a pipe

and mingles with the great flood that is pouring constantly into the

wells beneath pumping engines. And this is the strength of the chemical:

five pounds of it mingled with one million gallons of water is

sufficient to render the water fit for drinking purposes. Nearly 98 per

cent of the bacteria in the water is destroyed by this weak solution.

The water is tasteless and odorless. Indeed, probably very few of the

citizens of Detroit who are using the city water all the time, know that

the treatment is being applied.

But the chemist continues his tests every morning. Every morning the

little crooked tubes are brought out and filled and carefully watched to

ascertain if the telltale gas develops which is an index of "death in

the cup." Thus is the city's water supply guarded.

No more important work can devolve on the board of health. Before

science had learned to recognize the tiny enemies which infest drinking

water, typhoid and kindred diseases were regarded as a visitation of

divine providence for the sins of a people. We now know that a rise in

the death rate from these diseases is to be laid rather to the sins of

omission on the part of the board of health and the public works

department.

* * * * *

_(The Outlook)_

THE OCCUPATION AND EXERCISE CURE

BY FRANK MARSHALL WHITE

The nerve specialist leaned back in his chair behind the great mahogany

desk in his consulting-room and studied the features of the capitalist

as that important factor in commerce and industry explained the symptoms

that had become alarming enough to drive him, against his will, to seek

medical assistance. The patient was under fifty years of age, though

the deep lines in his face, with his whitening hair--consequences of the

assiduity with which he had devoted himself to the accumulation of his

millions and his position in the Directory of Directors--made him appear

ten years older. An examination had shown that he had no organic disease

of any kind, but he told the physician that he was suffering from what

he called "inward trembling," with palpitation of the heart, poor sleep,

occasional dizziness, pain in the back of the neck, difficulty in

concentrating his attention, and, most of all, from various

apprehensions, such as that of being about to fall, of losing his mind,

of sudden death--he was afraid to be alone, and was continually tired,

worried, and harassed.

"You present merely the ordinary signs of neurasthenia," said the

specialist. "These symptoms are distressing, but not at all serious or

dangerous. You have been thinking a great deal too much about yourself

and your feelings. You watch with morbid interest the perverted

sensations that arise in various parts of your body. You grow

apprehensive about the palpitation of your heart, which is not at all

diseased, but which flutters a little from time to time because the

great nerve of the heart is tired, like the other great nerves and

nerve-centers of your body. You grow apprehensive over the analogous

tremor which you describe as 'inward trembling,' and which you often

feel all through your trunk and sometimes in your knees, hands, and

face, particularly about the eyes and mouth and in the fingers."

The capitalist had started at the mention of the word neurasthenia, and

had seemed much relieved when the physician had declared that the

symptoms were not dangerous. "I had been under the impression that

neurasthenia was practically an incurable disease," he said. "However,

you have described my sensations exactly."

"One hundred per centum of cases of neurasthenia are curable," responded

the specialist. "Neurasthenia is not, as is usually supposed, an equally

diffused general exhaustion of the nervous system. In my opinion, it is

rather an unequally distributed multiple fatigue. Certain more

vulnerable portions of the nervous system are affected, while the

remainder is normal. In the brain we have an overworked area which,

irritated, gives rise to an apprehension or imperative idea. By

concentration of energy in some other region of the brain, by using the

normal portions, we give this affected part an opportunity to rest and

recuperate. New occupations are therefore substituted for the old

habitual one. A change of interests gives the tired centers rest."

"I have heard the 'rest cure' advocated in cases like mine," suggested

the capitalist.

"In the treatment of neurasthenia we must take the whole man into

consideration," said the physician. "We must stimulate nutrition, feed

well the tired and exhausted organism, and, above all, provide some sort

of rest and distraction for the mind. The mind needs feeding as well as

the body. The rest cure is a kind of passive, relaxing, sedative

treatment. The field is allowed to lie fallow, and often to grow up with

weeds, trusting to time to rest and enrich it. The 'exercise and

occupation cure,' on the other hand, is an active, stimulating, and

tonic prescription. You place yourself in the hands of a physician who

must direct the treatment. He will lay out a scheme with a judicious

admixture of exercise which will improve your general health, soothe

your nervous system, induce good appetite and sleep, and of occupation

which will keep your mind from morbid self-contemplation. One of the

best means to this end is manual occupation--drawing, designing,

carpentry, metal-work, leather-work, weaving, basket-making,

bookbinding, clay-modeling, and the like--for in all these things the

hands are kept busy, requiring concentration of attention, while new

interests of an artistic and æsthetic nature are aroused. The outdoor

exercise, taken for a part of each day, if of the right sort, also

distracts by taking the attention and creating interest."

The capitalist had called upon the specialist braced for a possible

sentence of death, prepared at the least to be informed that he was

suffering from a progressive mental malady. Now, while a tremendous

weight was lifted from his mind with the information that he might

anticipate a complete return to health, the idea of devoting his trained

intelligence, accustomed to cope with great problems of trade and

finance, to such trivialities as basket-making or modeling in clay

appeared preposterous. Nevertheless, when the physician told him of a

resort near at hand, established for the treatment of cases just such as

his, where he might be under continuous medical supervision, without

confinement indoors or being deprived of any of the comforts or luxuries

of life, he decided to put himself in the other's hands unreservedly.

The specialist informed him that the length of time required for his

cure would depend largely upon himself. He might, for instance, even

keep in touch with his office and have matters of import referred to

him while he was recuperating his mental and physical strength, but such

a course would inevitably retard his recovery, and possibly prevent it.

To get the best results from the treatment he ought to leave every

business interest behind him, he was told.

The fee that the capitalist paid the specialist made his advice so

valuable that the other followed it absolutely. The next evening saw the

patient in the home of the "occupation and exercise cure." He arrived

just in time to sit down to dinner with a score of other patients, not

one of whom showed any outward sign of illness, though all were taking

the cure for some form of nervous trouble. There were no cases of

insanity among them, however, none being admitted to the institution

under any circumstances. The dinner was simple and abundant, and the

conversation at the tables of a lively and cheerful nature. As everybody

went to bed by ten o'clock--almost every one considerably before that

hour, in fact--the newcomer did likewise, he having secured a suite with

a bath in the main building. Somewhat to the surprise of the capitalist,

who was accustomed to be made much of wherever he happened to be, no

more attention was paid to him than to any other guest of the

establishment, a condition of affairs that happened to please him. He

was told on retiring that breakfast would be served in the dining-room

from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning, but that, if he preferred to remain in

his room, it would be brought to him there at nine o'clock.

The capitalist had a bad night, and was up to breakfast early. After he

had concluded that repast the medical superintendent showed him about

the place, but did not encourage him to talk about his symptoms. The

grounds of the "occupation and exercise cure" comprised a farm of forty

acres located among the hills of northern Westchester County in the

Croton watershed, with large shade trees, lawns, flower gardens, and an

inexhaustible supply of pure spring water from a well three hundred feet

deep in solid rock. The main building, situated on a knoll adjacent to a

grove of evergreen trees, contained a great solarium, which was the

favorite sitting-room of the patients, and the dining-room was also

finished with two sides of glass, both apartments capable of being

thrown open in warm weather, and having the advantage of all the sun

there was in winter. In this building were also the medical offices,

with a clinical laboratory and hydro- and electro-therapeutic equipment,

and accommodations for from twelve to fifteen guests. Two bungalows

under the trees of the apple orchard close at hand, one containing two

separate suites with baths, and the other two living-rooms with hall and

bath-room, were ideal places for quiet and repose. Situated at the

entrance to the grounds was a club-house, with a big sitting-room and an

open fireplace; it also contained a solarium, billiard-room, bowling

alleys, a squash court, a greenhouse for winter floriculture, and the

arts and crafts shops, with seven living-rooms. Every living-room in the

main building, the club-house, and the bungalows was connected with the

medical office by telephone, so that in case of need patients might

immediately secure the services of a physician at any hour of the day or

night.

The arts and crafts shops being the basic principle of the "occupation

and exercise cure," the capitalist was introduced to an efficient and

businesslike young woman, the instructress, who explained to him the

nature of the avocations in which he might choose to interest himself.

Here he found his fellow-patients busily and apparently congenially

employed. In one of the shops a recent alumnus of one of the leading

universities, who had undergone a nervous breakdown after graduation,

was patiently hammering a sheet of brass with a view to converting it

into a lampshade; a matron of nearly sixty, who had previously spent

eight years in sanatoriums, practically bedridden, was setting type in

the printing office with greater activity than she had known before for

two decades; two girls, one sixteen and the other twelve, the latter

inclined to hysteria and the former once subject to acute nervous

attacks, taking the cure in charge of trained nurses, were chattering

gayly over a loom in the construction of a silk rug; a prominent

business man from a Western city, like the New York capitalist broken

down from overwork, was earnestly modeling in clay what he hoped might

eventually become a jardiniere; one of last season's debutantes among

the fashionables, who had been leading a life of too strenuous gayety

that had told on her nerves, was constructing a stamped leather

portfolio with entire absorption; and half a dozen others, mostly young

women, were engaged at wood-carving, bookbinding, block-printing,

tapestry weaving, or basket-making, each one of them under treatment for

some nervous derangement.

The new patient decided to try his hand at basket-making; and, although

he figured out that it would take him about four days to turn out a

product that might sell for ten cents, he was soon so much interested in

mastering the manual details of the craft that he was disinclined to put

the work aside when the medical superintendent suggested a horseback

ride. When, at the advice of the specialist, the capitalist had decided

to try the occupation and exercise cure, he did so with little faith

that it would restore him to health, though he felt that there was

perhaps a slight chance that it might help him. The remedy seemed to him

too simple to overcome a disease that was paralyzing his energies. To

his great surprise, he began to improve at once; and though for the

first week he got little sleep, and his dizziness, with the pain in the

back of his neck and his apprehensions, continued to recur for weeks,

they did so at always increasing intervals.

He learned bookbinding, and sent to his library for some favorite

volumes, and put them into new dress; he made elaborate waste-paper

baskets, and beat brass into ornamental desk-trays, which he proudly

presented to his friends in the city as specimens of his skill. Work

with him, as with the others of the patients, was continually varied by

recreation. In the summer months there were lawn-tennis, golf, croquet,

canoeing, rowing, fishing, riding, and driving. In winter, such outdoor

sports as skating, tobogganing, coasting, skeeing, snowshoeing, and

lacrosse were varied by billiards, bowling, squash, the medicine ball,

and basket and tether ball. The capitalist was astonished to discover

that he could take an interest in games. The specialist, who called upon

his patient at intervals, told him that a point of great importance in

the cure was that exercise that is _enjoyed_ is almost twice as

effective in the good accomplished as exercise which is a mere

mechanical routine of movements made as a matter of duty.

The net result was that, after four months of the "occupation and

exercise cure," the capitalist returned to New York sound in mind and

body, and feeling younger than he had before in years. Complete cures

were effected in the cases of the other patients also, which is the less

remarkable when the circumstance is taken into consideration that only

patients capable of entire recovery are recommended to take the

treatment.

Of course the institution that has been described is only for the

well-to-do, and physicians are endeavoring to bring the "occupation and

exercise cure" within the reach of the poor, and to interest

philanthropists in the establishment of "colony sanatoriums," such as

already exist in different parts of Europe, for those suffering from

functional nervous disorders who are without means. Contrary to the

general opinion, neurasthenia, particularly among women, is not confined

to the moneyed and leisure class; but, owing to the fact that women have

taken up the work of men in offices and trades as well as in many of

the professions, working-women are continually breaking down under

nervous strain, and many, under present conditions, have little chance

for recovery, because they cannot afford the proper treatment. As a

speaker at the last annual meeting of the American Medical Association

declared, "Idiots and epileptics and lunatics are many; but all together

they are less numerous than the victims of nervousness--the people

afflicted with lesser grades of psychasthenic and neurasthenic

inadequacy, who become devoted epicures of their own emotions, and who

claim a large share of the attention of every general practitioner and

of every specialist."

Scientists declare that this premature collapse of nerve force is

increasing to such an extent as to become a positive menace to the

general welfare. The struggle for existence among the conditions of

modern life, especially among those found in the large centers of

industrial and scientific activity, and the steady, persistent work,

with its attendant sorrows, deprivations, and over-anxiety for success,

are among the most prolific causes--causes which are the results of

conditions from which, for the large mass of people, according to a

leading New York alienist, there has been no possibility of escape.

"Especially here in America are people forced into surroundings for

which they have never been fitted," the alienist asserts, "and

especially here are premature demands made upon their nervous systems

before they are mature and properly qualified. The lack of proper

training deprives many of the workers, in all branches, of the best

protection against functional nervous diseases which any person can

have, namely, a well-trained nervous system. This struggle for existence

by the congenital neuropath or the educationally unfit forces many to

the use, and then to the abuse, of stimulants and excitants, and herein

we have another important exciting cause. This early and excessive use

of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco is especially deleterious in its

action upon the nervous system of those very ones who are most prone to

go to excess in their use.

"Therefore, predisposition, aided by the storm and stress of active

competition and abetted by the use of stimulants, must be looked upon as

the main cause for the premature collapse of nerve force which we call

neurasthenia; so it will be found that the majority of neurasthenics are

between twenty-five and fifty years of age, and that their occupations

are those which are attended by worry, undue excitement, uncertainty,

excessive wear and tear, and thus we find mentally active persons more

easily affected than those whose occupation is solely physical. Authors,

actors, school-teachers, governesses, telegraph and telephone operators,

are among those most frequently affected, and the increase of

neurasthenia among women dates from the modern era which has opened to

them new channels of work and has admitted them more generally into the

so-called learned professions. But whatever may be the occupation in

which persons have broken down, it is never the occupation alone which

has been the cause.

"This cannot be too often repeated. The emotional fitness or unfitness

of an individual for his occupation is of the utmost importance as a

causative factor, and overwork alone, without any emotional cause and

without any errors in mode of life, will never act to produce such a

collapse. It is therefore not astonishing that this class of functional

nervous diseases is not confined to the wealthy, and that the rich and

the poor are indiscriminately affected. But certain causes are of

greater influence in the one class, while different ones obtain in the

other. Poverty in itself, with its limitations of proper rest and

recuperation, is a very positive cause. Years of neurological dispensary

work among the poor have convinced me that nervousness, neurasthenia,

hysteria, etc., are quite as prevalent among the indigent as among the

well-to-do."

Physicians agree that the prime requisite in the treatment of these

disorders is the removal of the patient from his or her habitual

surroundings, where recognition of the existence of actual disease is

generally wanting, where the constant admonitions of well-meaning

friends to "brace up" and to "exert your will power" force the sick man

or woman to bodily and mental over-exertion, and where the worries about

a livelihood are always dominant. Such a change alone, however, the

experts say, will help but few, for it is being recognized more and more

that these functional diseases of the nervous system can receive

satisfactory treatment only in institutions, where constant attention

may be had, with expert supervision and trained attendants.

The "occupation and exercise cure" is applicable also to epilepsy, and

is the therapeutic principle of the Craig Colony for Epileptics at

Sonyea, in Livingston County, supported by the State, and that

institution furnishes a general model for the "colony sanatoriums"

suggested for indigent patients suffering from functional nervous

disorders. The Craig Colony was the idea of Dr. Frederick Peterson,

Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, and former President of

the New York State Commission of Lunacy and of the New York Neurological

Society, which he based upon the epileptic colony at Beilefeld, Germany,

that was founded in 1867. The Craig Colony was founded in 1894, and

there are now being cared for within its confines more than thirteen

hundred patients, who have turned out this year agricultural products,

with bricks, soap, and brooms, to the value of $60,000. The colony is

named after the late Oscar Craig, of Rochester, who, with William P.

Letchworth, of Buffalo, purchased the two-thousand-acre tract of land on

which it is situated from the Shaker colony at Sonyea and presented it

to the State, Dr. Peterson devoting several months of each year for nine

years to getting the institution into working order. The first patients

were housed in the old Shaker buildings, which were well constructed and

fairly well arranged for the purpose, but as additional applications for

admission have been made new buildings have been erected. To-day there

are eighty buildings in the colony, but a thousand patients are waiting

for admission, eight hundred of whom are in New York City.

Epilepsy, the "falling sickness," is a most difficult malady to treat

even in an institution for that purpose, and it is impossible to treat

it anywhere else. An epileptic in a family is an almost intolerable

burden to its other members, as well as to himself. The temperamental

effect of the disease takes the form in the patient of making frequent

and unjust complaints, and epileptics invariably charge some one with

having injured them while they have been unconscious during an attack.

Then, too, living at home, they are often dangerous to younger members

of a family, and they are fault-finding, exacting, and irritable

generally. The seizures frequently come on without warning, and the

patient drops where he stands, often injuring himself severely. The last

annual report of the Craig Colony records more than four hundred

injuries within the year to patients during seizures which required a

surgeon's attention, the injuries varying from severe bruises to

fractures of the skull.

The object of the Craig Colony is to remove the burden of the epileptic

in the family from the home without subjecting the patient to the

hardship of confinement with the insane. "Very few epileptics suffer

permanent insanity in any form except dementia," says the medical

superintendent of the Colony. "Acute mania and maniac depressive

insanity not infrequently appear as a 'post-convulsive' condition, that

generally subsides within a few hours, or at most a few days. Rarely

the state may persist a month. Melancholia is extremely infrequent.

Delusions of persecution, hallucinations of sight or hearing,

systematized in character, are almost never encountered in epilepsy."

Only from six to fifteen per cent of epileptics are curable, and hence

the work of the Craig Colony is largely palliative of the sufferings of

the patients. Each individual case is studied with the utmost care,

however, and patients are given their choice of available occupations.

The Colony is not a custodial institution. There are no bars on the

windows, no walls or high fences about the farm. The patients are housed

in cottages, men and women in separate buildings some distance apart,

about thirty to each cottage. In charge of each of these families are a

man and his wife, who utilize the services of some of the patients in

the performance of household work, while the others have their duties

outside. Kindness to the unfortunates under their care is impressed upon

every employee of the Colony, and an iron-bound rule forbids them to

strike a patient even in case of assault.

Besides the agricultural work in the Craig Colony, and that in the soap

and broom factories and the brick-yard, the patients are taught

blacksmithing, carpentry, dressmaking, tailoring, painting, plumbing,

shoemaking, laundrying, and sloyd work. It is insisted on that all

patients physically capable shall find employment as a therapeutic

measure. The records show that on Sundays and holidays and on rainy

days, when there is a minimum of physical activity among the patients,

their seizures double and sometimes treble in number. Few of the

patients know how to perform any kind of labor when they enter the

Colony, but many of them learn rapidly. It has been repeatedly

demonstrated that boys from eighteen to twenty years of age can spend

two years in the sloyd shop and leave it fully qualified as

cabinet-makers, and capable of earning a journeyman's wages.

There are about two hundred children in the colony of epileptics at

Sonyea, more than half of whom are girls. As children subject to

epileptic seizures are not received in the public schools of the State,

the only opportunity for any education among these afflicted little ones

whose parents are unable to teach them themselves or provide private

tutors for them is in the schools of the Colony. Some of the children

are comparatively bright scholars, while the attempt to teach others

seems a hopeless task. For instance, it took one girl ninety days to

learn to lay three sticks in the form of a letter A.

Every effort is made to encourage recreation among the patients in the

Craig Colony, both children and adults. The men have a club of 250

members, with billiards, chess, checkers, cards, and magazines and

newspapers. The boys have their baseball and football, and play match

games among themselves or with visiting teams. The women and girls play

croquet, tennis, and other outdoor games. There is a band composed of

patients that gives a concert once a week, and there are theatricals and

dancing, with occasional lectures by visiting celebrities. As the

Colony, with the medical staff, nurses, and other employees, has a

population of 2,000, there is always an audience for any visiting

attraction. The maintenance of the Colony is costing the State $225,000

the present year.

Since the founding of the Craig Colony similar institutions have been

established in Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey,

Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kansas, and other States are preparing to

follow their example. There are other private sanatoriums throughout the

country similar to the one in Westchester County, where the nervous or

neurasthenic patient who is well-to-do may obtain relaxation and

supervision, but there is no place at all to-day where the man or woman

suffering from curable nervous disorders who is without means can go for

treatment.

* * * * *

_(McClure's Magazine)_

Five illustrations: two wash drawings by André Castaigne showing

mono-rail trains in the future, five half-tone reproductions of photographs

of the car on its trial trip, and one pen-and-ink diagram of the

gyroscopes.

THE BRENNAN MONO-RAIL CAR

BY PERCEVAL GIBBON

It was November 10, 1909--a day that will surely have its place in

history beside that other day, eighty-five years ago, when George

Stephenson drove the first railway locomotive between Stockton and

Darlington. In the great square of the Brennan torpedo factory at

Gillingham, where the fighting-tops of battleships in the adjacent

dockyard poise above the stone coping of the wall, there was a track

laid down in a circle of a quarter of a mile. Switches linked it up with

other lengths of track, a straight stretch down to a muddy cape of the

Medway estuary, and a string of curves and loops coiling among the

stone and iron factory sheds. The strange thing about it was that it was

single--just one line of rail on sleepers tamped into the unstable

"made" ground of the place.

And there was Brennan, his face red with the chill wind sweeping in from

the Nore, his voice plaintive and Irish, discoursing, at slow length, of

revolutions per minute, of "precession," and the like. The journalists

from London, who had come down at his invitation, fidgeted and shivered

in the bitter morning air; the affair did not look in the least like an

epoch in the history of transportation and civilization, till--

"Now, gentlemen," said Brennan, and led the way across the circle of

track.

And then, from its home behind the low, powder-magazine-like sheds,

there rode forth a strange car, the like of which was never seen before.

It was painted the businesslike slatyblue gray of the War Department. It

was merely a flat platform, ten feet wide by forty feet long, with a

steel cab mounted on its forward end, through the windows of which one

could see a young engineer in tweeds standing against a blur of moving

machine-parts.

It ran on the single rail; its four wheels revolved in a line, one

behind another; and it traveled with the level, flexible equilibrium of

a ship moving across a dock. It swung over the sharp curves without

faltering, crossed the switch, and floated--floated is the only word for

the serene and equable quality of its movement--round and round the

quarter-mile circle. A workman boarded it as it passed him, and sat on

the edge with his legs swinging, and its level was unaltered. It was

wonderful beyond words to see. It seemed to abolish the very principle

of gravitation; it contradicted calmly one's most familiar instincts.

Every one knows the sense one gains at times while watching an ingenious

machine at its work--a sense of being in the presence of a living and

conscious thing, with more than the industry, the pertinacity, the

dexterity, of a man. There was a moment, while watching Brennan's car,

when one had to summon an effort of reason to do away with this sense of

life; it answered each movement of the men on board and each inequality

in the makeshift track with an adjustment of balance irresistibly

suggestive of consciousness. It was an illustration of that troublous

theorem which advances that consciousness is no more than the

co-relation of the parts of the brain, and that a machine adapted to its

work is as conscious in its own sphere as a mind is in its sphere.

The car backed round the track, crossed to the straight line, and

halted to take us aboard. There were about forty of us, yet it took up

our unequally distributed weight without disturbance. The young engineer

threw over his lever, and we ran down the line. The movement was as

"sweet" and equable as the movement of a powerful automobile running

slowly on a smooth road; there was an utter absence of those jars and

small lateral shocks that are inseparable from a car running on a double

track. We passed beyond the sheds and slid along a narrow spit of land

thrusting out into the mud-flanked estuary. Men on lighters and a

working-party of bluejackets turned to stare at the incredible machine

with its load. Then back again, three times round the circle, and in and

out among the curves, always with that unchanging stateliness of gait.

As we spun round the circle, she leaned inward like a cyclist against

the centrifugal pull. She needs no banking of the track to keep her on

the rail. A line of rails to travel on, and ground that will carry her

weight--she asks no more. With these and a clear road ahead, she is to

abolish distance and revise the world's schedules of time.

"A hundred and twenty miles an hour," I hear Brennan saying, in that sad

voice of his; "or maybe two hundred. That's a detail."

In the back of the cab were broad unglazed windows, through which one

could watch the tangle of machinery. Dynamos are bolted to the floor,

purring under their shields like comfortable cats; abaft of them a

twenty-horse-power Wolseley petrol-engine supplies motive power for

everything. And above the dynamos, cased in studded leather, swinging a

little in their ordered precession, are the two gyroscopes, the soul of

the machine. To them she owes her equilibrium.

Of all machines in the world, the gyroscope is the simplest, for, in its

essential form, it is no more than a wheel revolving. But a wheel

revolving is the vehicle of many physical principles, and the sum of

them is that which is known as gyroscopic action. It is seen in the

ordinary spinning top, which stands erect in its capacity of a gyroscope

revolving horizontally. The apparatus that holds Brennan's car upright,

and promises to revolutionize transportation, is a top adapted to a new

purpose. It is a gyroscope revolving in a perpendicular plane, a steel

wheel weighing three quarters of a ton and spinning at the rate of three

thousand revolutions to the minute.

Now, the effect of gyroscopic action is to resist any impulse that

tends to move the revolving wheel out of the plane in which it revolves.

This resistance can be felt in a top; it can be felt much more strongly

in the beautiful little gyroscopes of brass and steel that are sold for

the scientific demonstration of the laws governing revolving bodies.

Such a one, only a few inches in size, will develop a surprising

resistance. This resistance increases with the weight of the wheel and

the speed at which it moves, till, with Brennan's gyroscopes of three

quarters of a ton each, whirling in a vacuum at three thousand

revolutions per minute, it would need a weight that would crush the car

into the ground to throw them from their upright plane.

Readers of MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE were made familiar with the working of

Brennan's gyroscope by Mr. Cleveland Moffett's article in the issue of

December, 1907. The occasion of that article was the exhibition of

Brennan's model mono-rail car before the Royal Society and in the

grounds of his residence at Gillingham. For a clear understanding of the

first full-sized car, it may be well to recapitulate a few of the

characteristics of the gyroscope.

When Brennan made his early models, he found that, while the little cars

would remain upright and run along a straight rail, they left the track

at the first curve. The gyroscope governed their direction as well as

their equilibrium. It was the first check in the evolution of the

perfect machine. It was over ten years before he found the answer to the

problem--ten years of making experimental machines and scrapping them,

of filing useless patents, of doubt and persistence. But the answer was

found--in the spinning top.

A spinning top set down so that it stands at an angle to the floor will

right itself; it will rise till it stands upright on the point of equal

friction. Brennan's resource, therefore, was to treat his gyroscope as a

top. He enclosed it in a case, through which its axles projected, and at

each side of the car he built stout brackets reaching forth a few inches

below each end of the axle.

The result is not difficult to deduce. When the car came to a curve, the

centrifugal action tended to throw it outward; the side of the car that

was on the inside of the curve swung up and the bracket touched the axle

of the gyroscope. Forthwith, in the manner of its father, the top, the

gyroscope tried to stand upright on the bracket; all the weight of it

and all its wonderful force were pressed on that side of the car,

holding it down against the tendency to rise and capsize. The thing was

done; the spinning top had come to the rescue of its posterity. It only

remained to fit a double gyroscope, with the wheels revolving in

opposite directions, and, save for engineering details, the mono-rail

car was evolved.

Through the window in the back of the cab I was able to watch them at

then; work--not the actual gyroscopes, but their cases, quivering with

the unimaginable velocity of the great wheels within, turning and

tilting accurately to each shifting weight as the men on board moved

here and there. Above them were the glass oilcups, with the opal-green

engine-oil flushing through them to feed the bearings. Lubrication is a

vital part of the machine. Let that fail, and the axles, grinding and

red-hot, would eat through the white metal of the bearings as a knife

goes through butter. It is a thing that has been foreseen by the

inventor: to the lubricating apparatus is affixed a danger signal that

would instantly warn the engineer.

"But," says Brennan, "if one broke down, the other gyroscope would hold

her up--till ye could run her to a siding, anyway."

"But supposing the electric apparatus failed?" suggests a reporter--with

visions of headlines, perhaps. "Supposing the motor driving the

gyroscopes broke down; what then?"

"They'd run for a couple of days, with the momentum they've got,"

answers the inventor. "And for two or three hours, that 'ud keep her

upright by itself."

On the short track at Gillingham there are no gradients to show what the

car can do in the way of climbing, but here again the inventor is

positive. She will run up a slope as steep as one in six, he says. There

is no reason to doubt him; the five-foot model that he used to exhibit

could climb much steeper inclines, run along a rope stretched six feet

above the ground, or remain at rest upon it while the rope was swung to

and fro. It would do all these things while carrying a man; and, for my

part, I am willing to take Brennan's word.

Louis Brennan himself was by no means the least interesting feature of

the demonstration. He has none of the look of the visionary, this man

who has gone to war with time and space; neither had George Stephenson.

He is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding

his mouth, and heavy eyebrows. He is troubled a little with asthma,

which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps

also accentuates the peculiar plaintive quality of his Irish voice.

There is nothing in his appearance to indicate whether he is thirty-five

or fifty-five. As a matter of fact, he is two years over the latter

age, but a man ripe in life, with that persistence and belief in his

work which is to engineers what passion is to a poet.

The technicalities of steel and iron come easily off his tongue; they

are his native speech, in which he expresses himself most intimately.

All his life he has been concerned with machines. He is the inventor of

the Brennan steerable torpedo, whose adoption by the Admiralty made him

rich and rendered possible the long years of study and experiment that

went to the making of the mono-rail car. He has a touch of the rich

man's complacency; it does not go ill with his kindly good humor and his

single-hearted pride in his life work.

It is characteristic, I think, of his honesty of purpose and of the

genius that is his driving force that hitherto he has concerned himself

with scientific invention somewhat to the exclusion of the commercial

aspects of his contrivance. He has had help in money and men from the

British Government, which likewise placed the torpedo factory at his

disposal; and the governments of India and--of all places--Kashmir have

granted him subsidies. Railroad men from all parts of the world have

seen his model; but he has not been ardent in the hunt for customers.

Perhaps that will not be necessary; the mono-rail car should be its own

salesman; but, in the meantime, it is not amiss that a great inventor

should stand aloof from commerce.

But, for all the cheerful matter-of-factness of the man, he, too, has

seen visions. There are times when he talks of the future as he hopes it

will be, as he means it to be, when "transportation is civilization."

Men are to travel then on a single rail, in great cars like halls, two

hundred feet long, thirty to forty feet wide, whirling across continents

at two hundred miles an hour--from New York to San Francisco between

dawn and dawn.

Travel will no longer be uncomfortable. These cars, equipped like a

hotel, will sweep along with the motion of an ice-yacht. They will not

jolt over uneven places, or strain to mount the track at curves; in each

one, the weariless gyroscopes will govern an unchanging equilibrium.

Trustful Kashmir will advance from its remoteness to a place accessible

from anywhere. Streetcar lines will no longer be a perplexity to paving

authorities and anathema to other traffic; a single rail will be flush

with the ground, out of the way of hoofs and tires. Automobiles will run

on two wheels like a bicycle. It is to be a mono-rail world, soothed and

assured by the drone of gyroscopes. By that time the patient ingenuity

of inventors and engineers will have found the means to run the

gyroscopes at a greater speed than is now possible, thus rendering it

feasible to use a smaller wheel. It is a dream based on good, solid

reasoning, backed by a great inventor's careful calculations; H.G. Wells

has given a picture of it in the last of his stories of the future.

Practical railroad men have given to the mono-rail car a sufficiently

warm welcome. They have been impressed chiefly by its suitability to the

conditions of transportation in the great new countries, as, for

instance, on that line of railway that is creeping north from the

Zambesi to open up the copper deposits of northwestern Rhodesia, and on

through Central Africa to its terminus at Cairo. Just such land as this

helped to inspire Brennan. He was a boy when he first saw the endless

plains of Australia, and out of that experience grew his first

speculations about the future of railway travel. Such lands make

positive and clear demands, if ever they are to be exploited for their

full value to humanity. They need railways quickly laid and cheaply

constructed; lines not too exacting in point of curves and gradients;

and, finally, fast travel. It is not difficult to see how valuable the

mono-rail would have been in such an emergency as the last Sudan War,

when the army dragged a line of railway with it down toward Omdurman.

Petrol-driven cars to replace the expensive steam locomotives, easy

rapid transit instead of the laborious crawl through the stifling desert

heat--a complete railway installation, swiftly and cheaply called into

being, instead of a costly and cumbersome makeshift.

The car went back to her garage, or engine-shed, or stable, or whatever

the railway man of the future shall decide to call it. Struts were

pulled into position to hold her up, the motors were switched off, and

the gyroscopes were left to run themselves down in forty-eight hours or

so. When the mono-rail comes into general use, explained Brennan, there

will be docks for the cars, with low brick walls built to slide under

the platforms and take their weight.

While his guests assembled in a store-shed to drink champagne and eat

sandwiches, he produced a big flat book, sumptuously bound, and told us

how his patents were being infringed on in Germany. On that same day

there was an exhibition of a mono-rail car on the Brennan principle

taking place at the Zoölogical Gardens in Berlin; the book was its

catalogue. It was full of imaginative pictures of trains fifty years

hence, and thereto was appended sanguine letter-press. While there

sounded in our ears the hum of the gyroscopes from the car housed in the

rear, I translated one paragraph for him. It was to the effect that one

Brennan, an Englishman, had conducted experiments with gyroscopes ten

years ago, but the matter had gone no further.

"There, now," said Brennan.

* * * * *

(_Everybody's Magazine_)

A NEW POLITICAL WEDGE

THE WAY ST. LOUIS WOMEN DROVE A NINE-HOUR DAY INTO THE LAW

BY INIS H. WEED

It was the evening before the state primaries--a sweltering

first of August night in the tenement district of St. Louis, where

the factory people eat their suppers and have their beds. Men

in shirt-sleeves and women with babies sat on the steps for a

breath of air, and the streets were a noisy welter of children.

Two of the most enthusiastic girls in the Women's Trade

Union League stopped before the group silhouetted in the gaslight

at No. 32 and handed the men in the group this card:

REPUBLICAN VOTERS

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

It is the Women and Children that are the Victims of Manufacturers

and Manufacturers Associations

and it is the

WORKING WOMAN AND CHILD

that demands your protection at the

PRIMARIES, TUESDAY, AUGUST 2nd

Scratch

-------

E.J. Troy

Secretary St. Louis Manufacturers Association and run by them on the

Republican Ticket for the Legislature in the 1st District Comprising

WARDS 10, 11, 2,13, and 24. Precincts 14 of the 15th WARD. Precincts 1,

2, 3 of the 23rd WARD. Precincts 1, 2 of the 15th WARD. Precincts 6, 7,

10, 11, 12, 13 of the 14th WARD. Precincts 1, 4, 5 of the 9th Ward

"So yez would be afther havin' me scratch Misther Troy?" Mike Ryan ran

his fingers through his stubby crop with a puzzled air. "Oi'm always fur

plazin' the loidies, but Misther Troy, he's a frind o' mine. Shure, he

shmokes a grand cigar, an' he shakes yer hand that hearty."

So Mike belonged to the long, long glad-hand line. Well, _personal_

arguments were necessary in his case then. That was the way the girls

sized up Mike Ryan.

"But this ticket has something to do with your oldest girl."

"With Briddie?"

"It sure does, Mr. Ryan. Didn't I hear your wife tellin' what with the

hard times an' all, you'd be puttin' Briddie in the mill this winter as

soon as ever she's turned fourteen? Wouldn't you rather they worked her

nine hours a day instead o' ten--such a soft little kid with such a lot

o' growin' to do? There's a lot of us goin' to fight for a Nine-Hour

Bill for the women and children this winter, an' do you think a

manufacturers' representative, like Troy, is goin' to help us? Look at

his record! See how he's fought the employees' interests in the

legislature! That's a part of his job! _He_ won't vote for no Nine-Hour

Bill!"

And the two girls went on to the next tenement.

They were only two of the hundreds of Trade Union girls who were "doing"

the First Electoral District (about one-third of St. Louis) on the eve

of the primaries. They were thorough. They had the whole district

organized on the block system, and they went over each block house by

house.

_A new move, is it not, this carefully organized effort of factory women

to secure justice through the ballot-box?_

How have St. Louis women attained this clear vision that their

industrial future is bound up in politics? It is a three years' story.

Let us go back a little.

St. Louis is essentially a conservative city. First, it was an old

French town; then a Southern town; then a German tradesman's town. With

such strata superimposed one above the other, it could hardly be other

than conservative. In addition, St. Louis was crippled in the war

between the states. She lost her market. This made her slow.

In the 'eighties, this old French-Southern-German city began to recover

from the ruin of her Southern trade. Little by little she took heart,

for the great Southwest was being settled. There was a new field in

which to build up trade. To-day St. Louis is _the_ great wholesale and

jobbing depot, _the_ manufacturing city for that vast stretch of

territory known as the Southwest.

Since 1890, great fortunes have been amassed--most of them, indeed, in

the past ten years. There has been a rapid growth of industry. The old

Southern city has become a soft-coal factory center. A pall of smoke

hangs over the center of the city where the factories roar and pound.

In the midst of this gloom the workfolk are creating rivers of beer,

carloads of shoes and woodenware, millions of garments and bags, and the

thousand and one things necessary to fill the orders of hundreds of

traveling salesmen in the Southwest territory--and in the South, too,

for St. Louis is winning back some of her old-time trade.

And the toil of their lifting hands and flying fingers has wrought a

golden age for the men who control the capital and the tools. The men

who manage have been shaking hands in their clubs for the past decade

and congratulating themselves and each other over their drinks. "Yes,

St. Louis is a grand old business town. Solid! No mushroom real-estate

booms, you know, but a big, steady growth. New plants starting every

month and the old ones growing. Then, when we get our deep waterway,

that's going to be another big shove toward prosperity.

"Nice town to live in, too! Look at our handsome houses and clubs and

public buildings. Never was anything like our World's Fair in the

history of men--never! Look at our parks, too. When we get 'em linked

together with speedways, where'll you find anything prettier?" Thus the

money-makers in this heavy German town.

But what about the employees--the clerks and the factory workers? Have

they been "in" on this "big shove toward prosperity?" Have they found it

a "nice" town to live in?

No, to each count. For the people at the bottom of the ladder--for the

people who tend machines, dig ditches, and stand behind the notion

counter--St. Louis is a smoky town, where people have gray lungs instead

of pink; a town where franchise grabbing and an antiquated system of

taxation have their consequence of more than New York city rents. A town

whose slums, says Lee Frankel, are the worst in the country. A town

where wages are low (in some occupations twenty-five per cent lower than

in New York City); where employment is irregular, the speeding-up

tremendous, the number of women entering industry steadily increasing,

and where the influx of immigrant labor is pulling down the wage scale

and the standard of living.

The average wage of the shoe-workers in the East is $550 per year. In

St. Louis it is $440 if work is steady--and rents are higher than in New

York City.

It must be remembered that this sum is an average, and that thousands of

shoe-workers earn, less than $440, for full-time work. The same is true

of thousands engaged in other kinds of manufacture and in department

stores.

Somehow the town looks different from the two ends of the ladder.

The government of Missouri and St. Louis has been about as little

adapted to the needs of the industrial worker as it well could be. Men

have been concerned not so much with social justice as with government

protection for money-making schemes.

Business opportunity has depended much on _pliable state and municipal

laws_. How the interests fought to keep them pliable; how St. Louis and

Missouri became a world scandal in this steady growth to riches, we all

know.

We know, too, the period of political reform. People thought the killing

trouble in Missouri lay largely with the governmental machinery; and the

optimists' faith in a state primary law, in the initiative and

referendum as panacea, was white and shining. _They did not see that the

underlying problem is industrial_.

After the reform wave had spent itself, the crooked people who had kept

out of jail crept from their holes and went back to their old job of

beating the game. The only essential difference is that their methods

to-day are less raw and crude. They play a more gentlemanly game; but

the people are still robbed of their rights.

Thus it came to pass that when the cheerful optimist went to the

cupboard to get his poor dog a bone, why, lo! the cupboard was bare.

Meantime the dog has taken up the struggle for social justice on his own

account, not singly but in groups and packs. As yet, although a deal of

snuffing, running to and fro, barking, yelping, and fighting has been

done, little has been accomplished; for one reason, because labor has

lacked great organizers in St. Louis.

It has remained for the working women of St. Louis to make the

industrial idea effective and to reach out with united single purpose to

bend the political bow for their protection.

The Women's Trade Union League, whose real general is Cynthelia Isgrig

Knefler, the most dynamic woman in St. Louis, received its first impetus

only three years ago in the idealism of a brilliant young Irish girl,

Hannah Hennessy, who died at Thanksgiving, 1910, a victim of exhausting

work in a garment shop and of her own tireless efforts to organize the

working girls of her city.

Hannah Hennessy was sent by the Garment Workers' Union to the National

Labor Convention of 1907 at Norfolk, Virginia.

There she glimpsed for the first time the inevitable great world march

of women following industry as machinery takes it out of the home and

into the shop--saw these women, blind, unorganized, helpless to cope

with the conditions offered by organized capital. The vision fired this

Irish girl to a pitch of enthusiasm peculiar to the Celtic temperament.

Back she came to St. Louis with the spirit of the Crusaders, her vision

"the eight-hour day, the living wage to guard the home."

For the first time she saw the broken physical future of women who label

three thousand five hundred bottles of beer an hour, and accept their

cuts and gashes from the bursting bottles as inevitable; of women who

put eyelets on a hundred cases of shoes a day, twenty-four pairs to the

case; of women who must weave one thousand yards of hemp cloth a day to

hold their job in a mill where the possible speed of woman and machine

is so nicely calculated that the speediest person in the factory can

weave only twelve hundred and sixty yards a day; where the lint from

this hemp fills the air and is so injurious to eyes and throat that the

company furnishes medical attendance free.

To undertake the huge task of organizing these thousands of St. Louis

women would require not only vision but time and energy. Hannah's return

meant being engulfed in the vast roar made by rows of throbbing,

whirring machines, into one of which she sewed her vitality at dizzy

speed ten hours a day. Vision she had, but training, time, energy--no!

It was at this point that she met Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, a

leisure-class young woman, who had been gripped by a sense of the

unevenness of the human struggle. Cynthelia Knefler was groping her way

through the maze of settlement activities to an appreciation of their

relative futility in the face of long hours, low wages, and unsanitary

shops.

Then the idealism of these two young women, born on the one hand of hard

experience, on the other of a gentle existence, fused, and burned with a

white light whose power is beginning to touch the lives of the women who

toil and spin for the great Southwest.

Both women possessed fire and eloquence. Hannah's special contribution

was first-hand experience; Mrs. Knefler's the knowledge of economic

conditions necessary to an understanding of our complicated labor

problems. Wise, sane, conservative, Mrs. Knefler not only helped Hannah

to organize branch after branch of the Women's Trade Union League in the

different industries, but set out at once to train strong, intelligent

leaders. She stimulated them to a critical study of labor laws with the

evolution of industry for background.

Night after night for two years Mrs. Knefler and Hannah were out

organizing groups of girls. Mrs. Knefler's friends finally stopped

remonstrating with her. Hannah, utterly self-forgetful despite ten hours

a day in the mills, hurled herself into the new work. Evening after

evening her mother protested anxiously, but Hannah, heedless of her own

interest, would eat her supper and hurry across the city to help groups

of new girls--American, Russian, Roumanian--a confused mass, to find

themselves and pull together.

One June morning in 1910 the papers announced that the Manufacturers'

Association and the Business Men's League had decided on E.J. Troy as

their candidate to the State Legislature for the First District. His

candidacy was also backed by the Republican machine. The papers went on

to say that E.J. Troy was one of "our ablest and most popular fellow

townsmen," that he had grown up in his district, had a host of friends,

and might be expected to carry the primaries by a big majority.

That evening at the weekly dinner of the officers of the Women's Trade

Union League at the Settlement, Mrs. Knefler hurried in: "Girls, have

you seen the morning papers? Do you know that we've got E.J. Troy to

contend with again?"

At the same moment in dashed Hannah Hennessy by another door, calling

out, "Girls, they're goin' to put Troy on the carpet again!"

To both speeches came half a dozen excited replies that that's just what

they were talking about!

Over the potatoes and meat and bread-pudding the situation was discussed

in detail.

"Yes, 'twas him, all right, that thought up most of those tricky moves

when we was tryin' to get our Nine-Hour Bill before," reflected a wiry,

quick-motioned girl during a second's pause.

"Don't it just make you boil," began another, "when you think how he

riled 'em up at every four corners in Missouri! He had every old country

storekeeper standin' on end about that Nine-Hour Bill. He had 'em

puttin' on their specs and callin' to mother to come and listen to this

information the manufacturers had sent him:--how the labor unions was

tryin' to get a Nine-Hour Bill for women passed; how it would keep their

youngest girl, Bessie, from helping in the store when the farmers drove

in of a Saturday night; and how it was a blow at American freedom."

"E.J. Troy's got to be squenched at the primaries," said a third,

quietly and decisively.

"But how?" asked a more timid officer.

Bing! Mrs. Knefler got into action. There never was a woman for whom a

difficult situation offered a more bracing tonic quality. The business

meeting that followed fairly bristled with plans.

The girls' first move was to go before the Central Labor Body and ask

them to indorse their objections to E.J. Troy. Definite action beyond

indorsement the girls did not ask or expect. This much they got.

One day a little later, when Mrs. Knefler's campaign was beginning to

take form, a representative of E.J. Troy called Mrs. Knefler on the

telephone. The voice was bland, smooth, and very friendly. Wouldn't

she--that is--ah--er--wouldn't her organization confer with Mr. E.J.

Troy? He felt sure they would come to a pleasant and mutually helpful

understanding.

Mrs. Knefler explained to the mouthpiece (take it either way) that it

would be quite useless; that the stand of the League was taken on Mr.

Troy's previous record and on the "interests" he represented; that while

they had nothing against him in his private capacity, as a public

servant they must oppose him. All this in Mrs. Knefler's suavest

fashion. She feels intensely, but she never loses her self-possession.

That's why she is such a formidable antagonist.

It was the last week in June--they had just a month before the primaries

in which to rouse public opinion. The newspapers must help, of course.

Mrs. Knefler went to the editors. They were polite, they admitted the

justice of her stand, but they were evasive. Mrs. Knefler opened her

paper the next morning after she had made the rounds, to find not a

single word about the danger to the working woman's interests.

What could the papers do? Weren't they in the hands of the "big cinch,"

as a certain combination of business men in St. Louis is known?

Naturally they refused to print a line. You never step on your own toe,

do you, or hit yourself in the face--if you can help it?

One must admit that things looked bad for the League. How were girls who

raced at machines all day, who had neither money nor the voice of the

press, to rouse this sluggish, corrupt city to the menace of sending to

the legislature men like E.J. Troy, pledged body and soul to the

manufacturers? How could they waken the public to woman's bitter

necessity for shorter hours? The case looked hopeless, but Mrs. Knefler

merely set her teeth, and got busy--decidedly busy.

She planned a campaign that no other St. Louis woman in her class would

have had the courage to tackle. Mrs. Knefler is a member of the club

that is the St. Louis clubwomen's "holy of holies." They have a

club-house that just drips art, and they steep themselves in

self-culture. As a group their consciousness of the city's industrial

problems is still nebulous. The high light in which Mrs. Knefler's work

must inevitably stand out is intensified by this background of

self-culture women, with a few--only a few--rash daughters shivering

around preparatory to taking their first cold plunge in the suffrage

pool.

In such an atmosphere Cynthelia Knefler planned and carried out the

biggest, the most modern and strategic campaign for the working woman

ever waged outside a suffrage state. It was done simply because her

heart was filled with the need of the thousands of helpless, unorganized

girls for protection from the greed of organized capital.

There are moments when love gives vision and raises us head and

shoulders above our group. So it was with Cynthelia Knefler, brought up

in this conservative city, educated in a prunes-and-prisms girls'

school, steeped in the Southern idea that no "lady" would ever let her

picture or her opinions get into the newspapers, and that making public

speeches was quite unthinkable!

The press was silent, but at least Mrs. Knefler could speak to the labor

unions. She and two other women appealed to every labor union in St.

Louis with a speech against E.J. Troy. They fought him--not as a man,

but as a representative of the "big interests." Mrs. Knefler made

seventy-six speeches in that one month before the primaries. That meant

hurrying from hall to hall on hot summer nights and making two speeches,

and sometimes three and four, while her friends were wearing white

muslin and sitting on the gallery, to get the cool of the evening.

Mrs. Knefler's mind was working like a trip-hammer that month; seeking

ways and means for rousing the busy, unthinking, conglomerate mass of

people to the real issue. Money in the League was scarce. There are no

rich members. But out of their wages and out of raffles and

entertainments the League had a small reserve. Part of this they used to

print sixty thousand cards. So that when you went in to get a shave your

glance was caught, as the barber turned your head, by this red ticket

"Scratch E.J. Troy." When you stopped in for a loaf of bread, a red

ticket behind the glass of the case advised you to "Scratch E.J. Troy."

When you went in for a drink, there leaped into sight dozens of little

red tickets: "Scratch E.J. Troy."

There are always some men, though, who are moved only by the big, noisy

things of life. Only Schneider's band sounds like music to them; only

"Twenty Buckets of Blood, or Dead Man's Gulch" appeals to them as

literature; and the only speaker is the man who rips out Old Glory and

defies forked lightning. In a political campaign the little red ticket

is lost on that kind of man. Mrs. Knefler understood this. So one hot

July day huge posters in high, wood-block letters screamed from

billboards and the walls of saloons and barber shops and labor halls:

"Union men and friends, Scratch E.J. Troy."

All this printing and bill-posting was expensive for working girls. They

came back at the Central Labor body again. "Your sympathy is great, but

your funds are better," they said.