Parliament and the human stuff which the railway and other big strikes
are made of. It is, supposedly, the life story of a Turin printer.
Starting as the son of a clay digger, he graduates into the working
world after a childhood spent in an orphanage. Having some little
education more than his fellows, he becomes a proofreader for a house
which is putting on the Italian market the standard works of science
and philosophy in all languages. This gives him stronger meat than a
weak body and an overwrought mind can digest, and he becomes oppressed
with the wrongs of his class, with the grind of the factory and the
squalid life of the house where he has a tiny cell in the garret. There
he piles up, in proof sheets, a library of the greatest books in the
world. Pouring over them by night, half-fed, unsociable, brooding, his
mind slips gradually from its moorings and he throws his life away as
a sacrifice, for this book, the story of his life and the story of his
class, is hidden in his bosom. A tragic death, he believes, will cause
it to be published and set afoot nothing short of a revolution.
The book does not tell the manner of his death, but it implies that he
threw himself in front of the King's automobile, which he often met in
his wanderings outside the city. It typified to him the oppression which
he felt,--"the griefs of others I have such a longing to relieve that
the desire becomes a torment to me, and I cannot shake myself free from
it except by action." Of the automobile drivers he had written: "Whilst
the nobility are trying to draw in their claws so as not to exasperate
us, here come these bourgeoise parvenus to insult us in our own house.
Yes, in our own house, for the highroad belongs to the peasant and
the poor man." His studies, which put him above the other workmen,
were themselves his undoing, for the substance of Tolstoi and Spencer
became so much more to him than the form, that his work grew bad and
worse until he was discharged,--an incident convincing to one who has
attempted to read proof with an eye to things greater than commas and
spelling.
Out of it all he worked a scheme of things as they ought to be, which,
whether it came from the proofreader or from the author who takes a
proofreader's smarting sense of wrong as his theme, makes an interesting
program:
A king who has a lofty ideal of society wishes to lead his
subjects up to it by his methods of government, and is willing
to abdicate when he feels that they are really free. His chief
instruments in the work of redemption are doctors and school
teachers. On the one hand freedom, on the other action. Freedom
from error whilst doing everything to favor and afford sufficient
light. A tendency to abolish all forms of restraint, from the
material ones for criminals to the moral ones for all men; from
handcuffs to laws. The gradual abolition of hereditary rights of
property; every human being to have the needful, and everything
to return to a common fund at his death. The legal personality of
women, and the equality of the sexes, to be recognized as steps
to the conquest of individuality, liberty, happiness. Each to be
free to develop to the utmost his own life, his own affections.
Birth and education to be protected. Rest to be ensured to old age.
Public hygiene to be watched over till disease be eliminated. Every
facility to be afforded to manufactures, commerce and science, so
as to encourage man to conquer himself, the earth, the heavens.
Faith in progress, as if it were not,--and it is not,--destined to
die with our earth. The worship of life.
Such a scheme and the style and force of the book are difficult to
associate with the neurasthenic proofreader, skilfully as the author has
drawn the background and made the man's thought develop over his proof
table.
But whether the character be drawn convincingly or not, the book gives
a wonderfully clear and sharp-cut picture of the environment of such a
worker. Some bits of description stand out above the others, one of them
the Turin tenement, where "from the first flights of stairs, carpeted
and warmed by hot air pipes, to the bare flight of our top floor, the
steps grew ever steeper and steeper. Each evening we passed through
all the social zones, hot, temperate and cold; we were lodged in the
arctic regions." There were 142 of these steps to the top floor, where
naught but poverty dwelt,--a penniless poet with a sister who supported
him, a lonely working girl, a woman of the streets, a drunkard and his
screaming, beaten wife and half-witted children, and Cimisin, a cobbler,
who always "was whistling at full speed to the accompaniment of his
hammer. The tears of women, the curses of drunkards, had for so many
years mingled with the merriment of that harmless madman."
His history of the printing shop is complete and modern, even to the
point where the men went back to their cases after a strike, only to
find that long rows of linotypes with women operators had displaced
them. These women, he thought, might have among them one fitted to be
his mate, but he was too shy to seek her out. He could see them only as
workers at the almost human machines, or where "the cylinders revolved
with a loud din, the sheets rained out one on top of the other,
the women in their long overalls kept on repeating their monotonous
movements, feeding the sheets into the press or collecting them into
piles. On two side platforms the women were in constant motion. A
hundred women and a hundred men. It was impossible to imagine that
relations other than those existing between the several parts of a
machine might be formed between these beings created for a mutual
understanding." Still he wonders vaguely if
perhaps in this uniformity of action, foreign to and apart
from the monotonous toil which exhausts them, something exists,
smiles, shines? Have some got a small bird singing in their hearts
whilst their hands grow grimy at the wheel?... No love of their
work,--that is to say of their life,--inspired them; each of them
constantly saw the work of an hour, a mere fragment, leave his
hands anonymously and forever, and none of them could ever say of
anything, "That is my work!" What will remain of them at the end of
their lives to prove that they have lived? In truth, they have not
lived.
Of the women in his tenement, girls who were not harnessed to a factory,
he found even less of life, though perhaps more of womanhood. Going with
his friend to see the latter's young sister in a maternity hospital, he
reflects that this is the way with many of them,--"love leads to the
hospital." The patients there are mostly unmarried girls. The married
ones have few children now. "How talk of love, of family life, in a
society which deals out the same ration to the single man and to the
father of a family?"
His friend starves, the sister dies, the drunkard's wife, mother of six,
takes her life,--everyone whom he knew, it seems, all the associates
high up in the attic of the "aëropolis," come to grief and misery and
death. He greatly admires the woman, a physician, who visits them.
"She picks up, joins, straightens out innumerable threads; she seems
to be weaving a tapestry of which she will only complete a tiny bit, a
work which she has inherited from one generation and will transmit to
another." She offers him a part in her work, but he feels "incapable
of giving myself in small doses." He is impatient, irritable for
"something ready to hand, swift as lightning," that shall right all
wrongs and ease all pain at a stroke. He cannot work with others, or for
others, and so he tucks his story into his bosom and starts out to meet
the King's car. Almost at the last he confesses, "I have passed beside
life."
SCHOOL REPORTS[3]
Reviewed by ROLAND P. FALKNER
To the great majority of people the school report is the only tangible
evidence of what the school administration is doing. The citizens
generally cannot be expected to know what goes on in the school rooms or
in the meetings of boards of education, nor what is taking shape in the
back of the superintendent's head. Even were they afforded the utmost
opportunity and gifted with such unusual perception, it is not likely
that without convenient summaries and condensed statements they could
form any idea of the public school system as a whole.
[3] School Reports and School Efficiency by David S. Snedden and William
H. Allen for the New York Committee on the Physical Welfare of School
Children. New York, 1908. Pp. 183. This book will be sent by CHARITIES
AND THE COMMONS postpaid for $1.50.
If the school report is at once the evidence and test of the school
administration, it is clear that its ideal is such a marshalling of the
facts regarding the schools of the city as will give the reasonably
intelligent citizen a clear notion of just how well the schools are
performing the duties entrusted to them.
The book before us is a study of the school reports for the purpose of
ascertaining how far and in what manner they seek to embody such ideal.
It is a study in comparative administration.
This study reveals so wide a diversity among school reports as to
preclude the idea of any consensus of opinion as to what they should
contain. While uniformity of scope and treatment is not to be expected,
it might reasonably be anticipated that the similar purposes of the
school administration in different places would give to these reports
a certain family resemblance. In so far as such a resemblance can
be traced, it does not appear to be so much the result of parallel
internal development as the product of external compulsion or
suggestion. State educational departments charged with allotment of
state school funds according to a fixed unit in school work, have led to
an emphasis upon such units. A similar influence has been exerted by the
United States Bureau of Education in its request for information along
certain definite lines.
Apart from these influences tending toward a certain uniformity, there
are other forces working in the same direction though less effectively.
The trend of present discussion in educational affairs is not without
its influence, and when certain facts are needed to point a moral or
adorn a tale the experience of other cities points to investigations
or arrangements of material which are new to the city in question.
Conscious effort to promote uniform treatment of statistical data, a
theme which has been discussed almost to weariness by the National
Education Association and kindred organizations, has been singularly
fruitless.
With these general considerations by way of introduction, the work takes
up its main theme, the scope of educational statistics. In them we find
the condensation of educational experience, and here more than in other
parts of the text we should expect the experience and practice of one
city to be helpful to another. Too often, indeed almost universally, the
tables of facts are isolated from the text of the report, and no effort
is made to explain their meaning or set forth the salient features which
they present. In view of the volume of tabular matter there is a painful
poverty of interpretation.
The method pursued by the author in his record of the facts, is to
furnish a specimen table from the different reports in regard to each
matter touched upon, a selection of the simpler and then the more
detailed statements to be found in them. The following heads are
treated in this way: School plant, expenditure, census, attendance,
age of pupils, promotions, survival, compulsory attendance, high
schools, vacation schools, libraries, medical inspection, teachers
and summaries. The variety of forms exhibited is highly instructive
although, it may be confessed, somewhat bewildering. The author has
confined himself so strictly to a study of methods that he is disposed
to let the tables speak for themselves. There is here, too, an absence
of interpretation. Tables of figures may speak for themselves but to
understand them one must know their language. One cannot help but feel
that in many cases some explanation why the detailed tables are to be
regarded as superior, other than the fact that they are more detailed,
would have been more illuminating and would have relieved somewhat the
monotony of this important chapter for the general reader.
No attempt is made to outline a model report. We have instead in chapter
5 a series of questions which might be answered in a school report. The
list does not pretend to be exhaustive but in reality it constitutes a
somewhat formidable program, if it be assumed that the greater part of
these questions should receive attention.
Conscious of the fact that somewhat staggering demands are made on
the school administration, the discussion of "suggested economies and
improvement" comes as an antidote. This is a brief discussion of short
cuts and methods to get at desired results. It looks to a simplification
of records and such forms and registers as will supply the needed
information, without excessive work. This is a very vital point and the
suggestions as far as they go are admirable.
While the subject presented in these pages is thoroughly technical,
the work may be commended most heartily to school authorities and to
all who are interested in the progress of our schools. It is an appeal
for exact information and should not be passed by without a hearing.
Such information in regard to our schools,--one of the most important
branches of our government,--is painfully lacking. It has too often
been assumed that the management of schools was a matter for experts of
which outsiders could not properly judge. Within certain limits this
is true, but it does not distinguish between the scholastic and the
administrative sides of school work. We undoubtedly need both among
our school authorities, and in the public at large a keener perception
of the requisites of a sound and effective administration. It is not,
perhaps, too much to say that there is no great business enterprise of
the people of which they know so little as they do of their schools. In
private affairs such ignorance on the part of directors and stockholders
would lead to bankruptcy.
The authorship of the several chapters of the book is distinctly stated.
The general considerations herein briefly noted are the work of Dr.
Snedden; the particular application to the city of New York is the work
of Dr. Allen. Those who are familiar with Dr. Allen's work answer that
he can always be relied upon for a readable and spicy statement. But
in view of the predominantly local interest of his discussion and the
inexorable limits of space, it has seemed best in the foregoing notice
to lay the greater emphasis on those large aspects of the subject which
are from the pen of Dr. Snedden.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._]
HYMN OF PITTSBURGH
BY RICHARD REALF
My father was mighty Vulcan,
I am Smith of the land and sea,
The cunning spirit of Tubal Cain
Came with my marrow to me;
I think great thoughts strong-winged with steel,
I coin vast iron acts,
And weld the impalpable dream of Seers
Into utile lyric facts.
I am monarch of all the forges,
I have solved the riddle of fire,
The Amen of Nature to need of Man,
Echoes at my desire;
I search with the subtle soul of flame,
The heart of the rocky earth,
And out from my anvils the prophecies
Of the miracle years blaze forth.
I am swart with the soot of my chimneys,
I drip with the sweats of toil,
I quell and scepter the savage wastes
And charm the curse from the soil;
I fling the bridges across the gulfs,
That hold us from the To Be,
And build the roads for the bannered march
Of crowned Humanity.
Published in the _National Labor Tribune_,
Saturday, February 23, 1878.
[Illustration: _Chautauqua Photographic Co._
PITTSBURGH.
THE POINT, AS SEEN FROM THE HEIGHTS OF THE SOUTH SIDE.]
[Illustration: THE PITTSBURGH ARCH SESQUI-CENTENNIAL WEEK.]
THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY
PAUL U. KELLOGG
Engineers have a simple process by which in half an hour's time they
strike off a "blue print" from a drawing into which has gone the
imagination of a procession of midnights, and the exacting work of a
vast company of days.
God and man and nature,--whosoever you will,--have draughted a mighty
and irregular industrial community at the headwaters of the Ohio; they
have splashed, as Kipling puts it, at a ten league canvas with brushes
of comet's hair. Under the name of the Pittsburgh Survey, Charities
Publication Committee has carried on a group of social investigations
in this great steel district. In a sense, we have been blue-printing
Pittsburgh. Our findings will be published in a series of special
numbers of which this is the first, covering in order:
I.--The People;
II.--The Place;
III.--The Work.
Full reports are to be published later in a series of volumes by the
Russell Sage Foundation and, throughout, the text will be reinforced
with such photographs, pastels, maps, charts, diagrams and tables as
will help give substance and reality to our presentations of fact.
In this sense, then, it is a blue print of Pittsburgh, that we attempt.
At least the analogy of the draughting room may make it clear that the
work, as we conceive it, lies, like the blue print, within modest outlay
and reasonable human compass. Our presentation must frankly lack the
mechanical fidelity and inclusiveness of the engineer's negative; but we
can endeavor to bring out in relief the organic truth of the situation
by giving body and living color, as we see them, to what would otherwise
be but the thin white tracings of a town.
Occasional articles have been published during the year, but the results
of the Survey are put forward for the first time as a consecutive
whole in the pages that follow. Here is the place, then, for a simple
statement of the drive and scope of the work as conceived by those who
have carried it forward:
The Pittsburgh Survey has been a rapid, close range investigation of
living conditions in the Pennsylvania steel district. It has been
carried on by a special staff organized under the national publication
committee which prints this magazine. It has been financed chiefly by
three grants, of moderate amount, from the Russell Sage Foundation for
the Improvement of Living Conditions. It has been made practicable by
co-operation from two quarters,--from a remarkable group of leaders
and organizations in social and sanitary movements in different parts
of the United States, who entered upon the field work as a piece of
national good citizenship; and from men, women and organizations in
Pittsburgh who were large-minded enough to regard their local situation
as not private and peculiar, but a part of the American problem of city
building.
The outcome has been a spirited piece of inter-state co-operation in
getting at the urban fact in a new way. For consider what has already
been done in this field in America. We have counted our city populations
regularly every ten years,--in some states every five. We have known
that the country has grown and spread out stupendously within the
century, and that within that period our cities have spread out and
filled up with even greater resistlessness. How goes it with them? What
more do we know? True, we have profited by incisive analyses of one
factor or another which enters into social well-being,--tuberculosis,
factory legislation, infant mortality, public education, to name
examples; and we have heard the needs of particular neighborhoods
described by those who know them. But there is something further,
synthetic and clarifying, to be gained by a sizing up process that
reckons at once with many factors in the life of a great civic area, not
going deeply into all subjects, but offering a structural exhibit of
the community as a going concern. This is what the examining physician
demands before he accepts us as an insurance risk, what a modern farmer
puts his soils and stock through before he plants his crops, what the
consulting electrician performs as his first work when he is called in
to overhaul a manufacturing plant. And this, in the large, has been the
commission undertaken by the Pittsburgh Survey.
The main work was set under way in September, 1907, when a company
of men and women of established reputation as students of social and
industrial problems, spent the month in Pittsburgh. On the basis of
their diagnosis, a series of specialized investigations was projected
along a few of the lines which promised significant results. The staff
has included not only trained investigators but also representatives
of the different races who make up so large a share of the working
population dealt with. Limitations of time and money set definite bounds
to the work, which will become clear as the findings are presented.
The experimental nature of the undertaking, and the unfavorable trade
conditions which during the past year have reacted upon economic life in
all its phases, have set other limits. Our inquiries have dealt with the
wage-earners of Pittsburgh (a) in their relation to the community as a
whole, and (b) in their relation to industry. Under the former we have
studied the genesis and racial make-up of the population; its physical
setting and its social institutions; under the latter we have studied
the general labor situation; hours, wages, and labor control in the
steel industry; child labor, industrial education, women in industry,
the cost of living, and industrial accidents.
From the first, the work of the investigations has been directed to the
service of local movements for improvement. For, as stated in a mid-year
announcement of the Survey, we have been studying the community at a
time when nascent social forces are asserting themselves. Witness the
election of an independent mayor three years ago, and Mr. Guthrie's
present fight to clear councils of graft. Within the field of the
Survey and within one year, the Pittsburgh Associated Charities has
been organized; the force of tenement inspectors has been doubled
and has carried out a first general housing census, and a scientific
inquiry, under the name of the Pittsburgh Typhoid Commission, has been
instituted into the disease which has been endemic in the district
for over a quarter of a century. A civic improvement commission,
representative in membership and perhaps broader in scope than any
similar body in the country, is now in process of formation.
A display of wall maps, enlarged photographs, housing plans, and
other graphic material was the chief feature of a civic exhibit held
in Carnegie Institute in November and December, following the joint
conventions in Pittsburgh of the American Civic Association and the
National Municipal League. The local civic bearings of the Survey were
the subject of the opening session of these conventions. Its economic
aspects were brought forward at a joint session of the American Economic
Association and the American Sociological Society at Atlantic City in
December.
[Illustration: SCHEME OF THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY.
From Pittsburgh Civic Exhibit, Carnegie Institute, November-December,
1908.]