THE CASE OF LAURA SYLVIA. By Mary Vida Clark. _Outlook._ This is the
almost unbelievable story of the finding and rehabilitation of a
little savage child found living with savage people in the midst of
a prosperous farming community in the Hudson River Valley. Miss
Clark tells the story from her long experience in placing out work
of the State Charities Aid Association of New York. It is not an
unusual one, and her comment suggests the possibilities of neglected
and degenerate families in the cabin homes of the New England and
the southern mountains.
TIGER. By Witter Bynner, and STATE REGULATION OF VICE AND ITS MEANING.
By Anna Garlin Spencer. Both in the _Forum_. The first is a one act
play dealing with prostitution. A father, a patron, finds his
daughter a prisoner in a house of ill fame. “Painful and terrible”
says the editorial introduction, “as this may seem to some readers
it merely focuses, in dramatic form, the abominable realities to
which ‘civilized’ people have so long shut their eye publicly and
pharisaically; but to which, in tens of thousands of cases, they
have given vicious private and personal encouragement.”
Mrs. Spencer’s article is a careful historical study of state efforts
to deal with vice by regulation instead of abolition and to protect
monogamy by putting vice on a legal footing.
WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO DO. _World’s Work._ Thirty-five teachers in the
Washington Irving High School tell how they are trying in this model
New York school to “improve the human machine,” to “form character”
and to “perfect womanhood.”
THE COMING CITY. By John S. Gregory, and MY WORK FOR CRIPPLED
CHILDREN. By Blanche VanLeuvan Browne. Both in the _World’s Work_.
In the latter article a cripple woman tells with magnetic
simplicity, how, beginning only seven years ago with $6 in her
pocket, she has succeeded in building up a hospital-school for
cripples in Detroit.
The Coming City tells of the remarkable work of another single
individual, John Nolen, who has made more than twenty American
municipalities more convenient and more beautiful. It is the record
of “a rapidly growing national movement to correct the evils of
careless growth and to insure that the cities of the future shall be
definitely planned to serve and please their citizens.”
“CONSERVATION AS PRACTISED.” By Gifford Pinchot. _Pearson’s._ The
origin and purport of this important article is thus told by the
editor: It is written in answer to the article on conservation by
Edward H. Thomas, which was published in the January issue of this
magazine. Mr. Thomas’s article submitted that conservation in
principle was all right but that conservation in practice was
nowhere near the principle; that conservation as practised aids
monopoly instead of hindering it: and that the West, where
conservation is being practised, is getting sick of it.
Mr. Pinchot holds that conservation as practised is for the greatest
good of the greatest number. He asked for space in which to correct
what he held was a wrong impression on the minds of the magazine’s
readers. He answers Mr. Thomas, point by point.
THE COST OF MODERN SENTIMENT. By Agnes Repplier. _Atlantic._ This
writer on matters of culture and art for leisurely readers, a
vigorous defender of child labor on the stage on the ground of its
artistic value, has had it borne in upon her that human interests
are today arousing more and more public interest and emotion. Three
of these absorbing human issues are the progress of women, the
condition of labor and the social evil. Miss Repplier counsels
against the misdirecting of sentiment through incomplete knowledge.
* * * * *
The recall last month of a San Francisco municipal court judge, for
setting so low a bail on a man charged with rape as to make it possible
for him to escape trial by skipping bail, gives special interest to a
recent article in _The Sunset Magazine_ by Miriam Michelson. This is an
analysis of the dawning sense of responsibility of the women of a
suffrage state toward the social evil:
Now this threatened recall of a police judge is undertaken, I should
say, not because the women believe this particular judge to be unique
in flagrant adherence to a police court system of leniency in
sex-crimes; not because they think him the worst of his type that San
Francisco has known; but because they consider him a type and because
they consider the police court system one that must be changed. This
recall presents something definite, something to do, which feminine
hands have been aching for.
Miss Michelson continues:
You may talk to women of the futility of figuring social sex sins, but
they seem to be congenitally incapable of believing you. I heard a man
talk to an audience in behalf of this measure, and when he touched
upon that old, old text—_it always has been; it always will be_—there
came a curious resemblance in every woman’s face within my vision; for
every face had hardened, stiffened, was marked with the family
likeness of rebellion. The lecturer was addressing himself to deaf
ears, to eyes determined not to see.
And this is at once the weakness and the strength of the new element
in elections. Those who have watched the ardor of the most eager and
high-minded reformers burn out in commissions, in barren resolutions
and recommendations, see in the average woman’s limitations that
power, that one-idead incapacity to look philosophically on both sides
of a question which marks Those Who Can Change Things. You may object
that such qualities produce a Carrie Nation. They do, but they also
make a Joan of Arc, a Harriet Beecher Stowe....
Her recently awakened realization of equality, the new broom that her
conscience is, revolts at a policy that establishes a municipal clinic
for women prostitutes, yet by a curious, cowardly subterfuge,
overlooks the male’s share in infection; as though the plague created
and disseminated in common could have but one source! And in addition
to all this, she is learning that when she is ready at last to attack
the vested, organized, recognized institution of prostitution, the
first result of her activities will mean greater misery and perhaps
speedier death for the woman who is already at the lowest point of the
social scale....
But over against this set this fact: There are seven hundred women in
San Francisco whose one aim in civic life is to found a State Training
School for girls gone wrong who would go right. This association has a
representative in Sacramento whose sole business it is to further a
bill for the establishment of a helping station for girls on the way
to usefulness and moral health, modeled upon similar establishments in
other states. Here is work, backed by thirty thousand club women of
the state, proceeding definitely, practically to a solution of one of
the most appalling obstacles to the crusade against vice.
This work of restoring the prostitute to decency and happiness is the
side of woman’s work in the field of vice least developed; it is,
however, a side which is most essential. Says Miss Michelson:
But the time has not yet come when woman will face her individual
share of atonement for a social sin in which she has acquiesced.
Ultimately, with universal suffrage, the wheel of time must place at
the door of the protected women responsibility for the prostitute. As
yet she can not see herself, in her own home, taking up the broken
lives, diseased bodies, debased minds and deadened souls—the
by-product of that which men tell her has always been and always must
be.
* * * * *
The following passages are from Cardinal O’Connell’s pastoral letter on
the labor problem: