Society: Its Origin and Development

by Henry K. Rowe

PART IV—SOCIAL LIFE IN THE CITY

CHAPTER XXV[ToC]

FROM COUNTRY TO CITY

177. Enlarging the Social Environment.—In the story of the family and the rural community it has become clear that the normal individual as he grows to maturity lives in an expanding circle of social relations. The primary unit of his social life is the family in the home. There the elemental human instincts are satisfied. There while a child he learns the first lessons of social conduct. From the home he enters into the larger life of the community. He takes his place in the school, where he touches the lives of other children and learns that he is a part of a larger social order. He gets into the current of community life and finds out the importance of local institutions like the country store and the meeting-house. He becomes accustomed to the ways that are characteristic of country people, and finds a place for himself in the industry and social activity of the countryside. When the boy who has grown up in a rural community comes to manhood, his natural tendency is to accept the occupation of farming with which he has become acquainted in boyhood, to woo a country maid for a mate, and to make for himself a rural home after the pattern of his ancestors. In that case his social environment remains restricted. His relations are with nature rather than with men. His horizon is narrow, his interests limited. The institutions that mould him are few, the forces that stimulate to progress are likely to be lacking altogether. He need not, but he usually does, cease to grow.

178. Characteristics of the City.—Certain individuals find the static life of the country unbearable. Their nature demands larger scope in an expanding environment. To them the stirring town beckons, and they are restless until they escape. The city is a centre of social life where the individual feels a greater stimulus than in the home or the rural community. It resembles the family and the village in providing social relations and an interchange of ideas, but it surpasses them in the large scale of its activities. It presents many of the same social characteristics that they do, but geared in each case for higher speed. Its activities are swifter and more varied. Its associations are more numerous and kaleidoscopic. Its people are less independent than in the country; control, economic and political, is more pervasive, even though crude in method. Change is more rapid in the city, because the forces that are at work are charged with dynamic energy. Weakness in social structure and functioning is conspicuous. In the large cities all these are intensified, but they are everywhere apparent whenever a community passes beyond the village stage. The line that separates the village or small town from the city is an arbitrary one. The United States calls those communities rural that have a population not exceeding twenty-five hundred, but it is less a question of population than of interests and activities. When agriculture gives place to trade or manufacturing as the leading economic interest; when the community takes on the social characteristics that belong to urban life; and when places of business and amusement assume a place of importance rather than the home, the school, and the church, the community passes into the urban class. Names and forms of government are of small consequence in classification compared with the spirit and ways of the community.

179. How the City Grows.—The city grows by the natural excess of births over deaths and by immigration. Without immigration the city grows more slowly but more wholesomely. Immigration introduces an alien element that has to adjust itself to new ways and does not always fuse readily with the native element. This is true of immigration from the country village as well as from a foreign country, but an American, even though brought up differently, finds it easier to adapt himself to his new environment. An increasingly large percentage of children are born and grow to maturity in the city. There are thousands of urban communities of moderate size in America, where there are few who come in from any distance, but for nearly a hundred years in the older parts of the country a rural migration has been carrying young people into town, and the recent volume of foreign immigration is spilling over from the large cities into the smaller urban centres, so that the mixture of population is becoming general.

180. The Attraction of the City.—Foreign immigration is a subject that must be treated by itself; rural immigration needs no prolonged discussion once the present limitations of life in the country are understood. Multitudes of ambitious young people are not contented with the opportunities offered by the rural environment. They want to be at the strategic points of the world's activities, struggling for success in the thick of things. The city attracts the country boy who is ambitious, exactly as old Rome attracted the immature German. The blare of its noisy traffic, the glare of its myriad lights, the rush and the roar and the rabble all urge him to get into the scramble for fun and gain. The crowd attracts. The instinct of sociability draws people together. Those who are unfamiliar with rural spaces and are accustomed to live in crowded tenements find it lonesome in the country, and prefer the discomfort of their congested quarters in town to the pure air and unspoiled beauty of the country. They love the stir of the streets, and enjoy sitting on the door-steps and wandering up and down the sidewalks, feeling the push of the motley crowd. Those who leave the country for the city feel all these attractions and are impelled by them, but beyond these attractions, re-enforcing them by an appeal to the intellect, are the economic advantages that lie in the numerous occupations and chances for promotion to high-salaried positions, the educational advantages for children and youth in the better-graded schools, the colleges, the libraries, and the other cultural institutions, and such social advantages as variety of entertainment, modern conveniences in houses and hotels, more beautiful and up-to-date churches, well-equipped hospitals, and comfortable and convenient means of transportation from place to place.

181. Making a Countryman into a Citizen.—It is important to enter into the spirit of the young people who prefer the streets and blocks of the town to the winding country roads, and are willing to sacrifice what there is of beauty and leisure in rural life for the ugliness, sordidness, and continuous drive of the city; to understand that a greater driving force, stirring in the soul of youth and thrusting upon him with every item of news from the city, is impelling him to disdain what the country can give him and to magnify the counter-attractions of the town. He has felt the monotony and the contracted opportunity of farm life as he knows it. He has experienced the drudgery of it ever since he began to do the chores. Familiar only with the methods of his ancestors, he knows that labor is hard and returns are few. He may look across broad acres that will some day be his, but he knows that his father is "land poor." As a farmer he sees no future for agriculture. He has known the village and the surrounding country ever since he graduated from the farmyard to the schoolhouse, and came into association with the boys and girls of the neighborhood. He knows the economic and social resources of the community and is satisfied that he can never hope for much enjoyment or profit in the limited rural environment. The school gave him little mental stimulus, but opened the door ajar into a larger world. The church gave him an orthodox gospel in terms of divinity and its environment rather than humanity on earth, but stirred vaguely his aspirations for a fuller life. He has sounded the depths of rural existence and found it unsatisfying. He wants to learn more, to do more, to be more.

One eventful day he graduates from the village to the city, as years before he graduated from the home into the community. By boat or train, or by the more primitive method of stage-coach or afoot, he travels until he joins the surging crowd that swarms in the streets. He feels himself thrilling with the consciousness that he is moving toward success and possibly greatness. He does not stop to think that hundreds of those who seek their fortune in the city have failed, and have found themselves far worse off than the contented folk back in the home village. The newcomer establishes himself in a boarding-house or lodging-house which hundreds of others accept as an apology for a home, joins the multitude of unemployed in a search for work, and is happy if he finds it in an office that is smaller and darker than the wood-shed on the farm, or behind a counter where fresh air and sunlight never penetrate. He will put up with these non-essentials, for he expects in days ahead to move higher up, when the large rewards that are worth while will be his.

In the ranks of business he measures his wits with others of his kind. He apes their manners, their slang, and their tone inflections. He imitates their fashions in clothes, learns the popular dishes in the restaurants, and if of feminine tastes gives up pie for salad. He goes home after hours to his small and dingy bedroom, tired from the drain upon his vitality because of ill-ventilated rooms and ill-nourishing food, but happy and free. There are no chores waiting for him now, and there is somewhere to go for entertainment. Not far away he may have his choice of theatres and moving-picture shows. If he is æsthetically or intellectually inclined, there are art-galleries and libraries beckoning him. If his earnings are a pittance and he cannot afford the theatre, and if his tastes do not draw him to library or museum, the saloon-keeper is always ready to be his friend. The youth from the country would be welcomed at the Young Men's Christian Association on the other side of the city, or at a church if there happened to be a social or religious function that opened the building, but the saloon is always near, always open, and always cordial. Poor or rich, or a stranger, it matters not, let him enter and enjoy the poor man's club. It is warm and pleasant there and he will soon make friends.

182. Mental and Moral Changes.—The readjustments that are necessary in the transfer from country to city are not accomplished without considerable mental and moral shock. Changing habits of living are paralleled by changing habits of thought. Old ideas are jostled by new every hour of the day. At the table, on the street, in office or store, at the theatre or church the currents of thought are different. Social contacts are more numerous, relations are more shifting, intellectual affinities and repulsions are felt constantly; mental interactions are so frequent that stability of beliefs and independence of thought give way to flexibility and uncertainty and openness to impression. Group influence asserts its power over the individual.

Along with the influence of the group mind goes the influence of what may be called the electrical atmosphere of the city. The newcomer from the country is very conscious of it; to the old resident it becomes second nature. City life is noisy. The whole industrial system is athrob with energy. The purring of machinery, the rattle and roar of traffic, the clack and toot of the automobile, the clanging of bells, and the chatter of human tongues create a babel that confuses and tires the unsophisticated ear and brain. They become accustomed to the sounds after a time, but the noise registers itself continually on the sensitive nervous system, and many a man and woman breaks at last under the strain. Another element that adds to the nervous strain is haste. Life in the city is a stern chase after money and pleasure. Everybody hurries from morning until night, for everything moves on schedule, and twenty-four hours seem not long enough to do the world's work and enjoy the world's fun. Noise and hurry furnish a mental tension that charges the urban atmosphere with excitement. Purveyors of news and amusement have learned to cater to the love of excitement. The newspaper editor hunts continually for sensations, and sometimes does not scruple to twist sober fact into stirring fiction. The book-stall and the circulating library supply the novel and the cheap magazine to give smack to the jaded palate that cannot relish good literature. The theatre panders to the appetite for a thrill.

In these circumstances lie the possibilities of moral shock. In the city there is freedom from the old restraint that the country community imposed. In the city the countryman finds that he can do as he pleases without the neighbors shaking their heads over him. In the absence of such restraint and with the social contact of new friends he may rapidly lower his moral standards as he changes his manners and his mental habits. It does not take long to shuffle off the old ways; it does not take much push or pull to make the unsophisticated boy or girl lose balance and drift toward lower ideals than those with which they came. Not a few find it hard to keep the moral poise in the whirlpool of mental distraction. It is these effects of the urban environment that help to explain the social derelicts that abound in the cities. It is the weakness of human nature, along with the economic pressure, that accounts for the drunkenness, vice, and crime that constitute so large a problem of city life and block the path of society's development. They are a part of the imperfection that is characteristic of this stage of human progress, and especially of the twentieth-century city. They are not incurable evils, they demand a remedy, and they furnish an inspiring object of study for the practitioner of social disease.

He who escapes business and moral failure has open wide before him in the city the door of opportunity. He may, if he will, meet all the world and his wife in places where the people gather, touching elbows with individuals from every quarter of the country, with persons of every class and variety of attainment, with believers of every political, æsthetic, and religious creed. In such an atmosphere his mind expands like the exotic plant in a conservatory. His individual prejudices fall from him like worn-out leaves from the trees. He begins to realize that other people have good grounds for their opinions and practices that differ from his own, and that in most cases they are better than his, and he quickly adjusts himself to them. The city stimulates life by its greater social resources, and forms within its borders more highly developed human groups. Beyond the material comforts and luxuries that the city supplies are the social values that it creates in the associations and organizations of men and women allied for the philanthropic, remedial, and constructive purposes that are looking forward to the slow progress of mankind toward its highest ideals.

183. The City as a Social Centre.—The city is an epitome of national and even world life, as the farm is community life in miniature. Its social life is infinitely complex, as compared with the rural village. Distances that stretch out for miles in the country, over fields and woods and hills, are measured in the city by blocks of dwellings and public buildings, with intersecting streets, stretching away over a level area as far as the eye can see. Social institutions correspond to the needs of the inhabitants, and while there are a few like those in the country, because certain human needs are the same, there is a much larger variety in the city because of the great number of people of different sorts and the complexity of their demands. Every city has its business centres for finance, for wholesale trade, and for retail exchange, its centres for government, and for manufacturing; it has its railroad terminals and often its wharves and shipping, its libraries, museums, schools, and churches. All these are gathering places for groups of people. But there is no one social centre for all classes; rather, the people of the city are associated in an infinite number of large and small groups, according to the mutual interests of their members. But if the city has no four corners, it is itself a centre for a large district of country. As the village is the nucleus that binds together outlying farms and hamlets, so the city has far-flung connections with rural villages and small towns in a radius of many miles.

184. The Importance of the City.—The city has grown up because it was located conveniently for carrying on manufacturing and trade on a large scale. It is growing in importance because this is primarily an industrial age. Its population is increasing relatively to the rural population, and certain cities are growing enormously, in spite of Mr. Bryce's warning that it is unfortunate for any city to grow beyond a population of one hundred thousand. The importance of the city as a social centre is apparent when we remember that in America, according to the census of 1910, 46.3 per cent of the people live in communities of more than 2,500 population, while 31 per cent of the whole are inhabitants of cities of 25,000 or more population. When nearly one-third of all the people of the nation live in communities of such size, the large city becomes a type of social centre of great significance. At the prevailing rate of growth a majority of the American people will soon be dwelling in cities, and there seems to be no reason to expect a reversal of tendency because modern invention is making it possible for fewer persons on the farm to supply the agricultural products that city people need. This means, of course, that the temper and outlook of mind will be increasingly urban, that social institutions generally will have the characteristics of the city, that the National Government will be controlled by that part of the American citizens that so far has been least successful in governing itself well.

185. Municipal History.—The city has come to stay, and there is in it much of good. It has come into existence to satisfy human need, and while it may change in character it is not likely to be less important than now. Its history reveals its reasons for existence and indicates the probabilities of its future. The ancient city was an overgrown village that had special advantages for communication and transportation of goods, or that was located conveniently for protection against neighboring enemies. The cities of Greece maintained their independence as political units, but most social centres that at first were autonomous became parts of a larger state. The great cities were the capitals of nations or empires, and to strike at them in war was to aim at the vitals of an organism. Such were Thebes and Memphis in Egypt, Babylon and Nineveh in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Carthage and Rome in the West. Such are Vienna and Berlin, Paris and London to-day. Lesser cities were centres of trade, like Corinth or Byzantium, or of culture, such as Athens. Such was Florence in the Middle Ages, and such are Liverpool and Leipzig to-day. The municipalities of the Roman Empire marked the climax of civic development in antiquity.

The social and industrial life of the Middle Ages was rural. Only a few cities survived the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and new centres of importance did not arise until trade revived and the manufacturing industry began to concentrate in growing towns about the time of the Crusades. Then artisans and tradesmen found their way to points convenient to travel and trade, and a city population began the processes of aggregation and congregation. They grew up rough in manners and careless of sanitation and hygiene, but they developed efficiency in local government and an inclination to demand civic rights from those who had any outside claim of control; they began to take pride in their public halls and churches, and presently they founded schools and universities. Wealth increased rapidly, and some of the cities, like the Hansa towns of the north, and Venice and Genoa in the south, commanded extensive and profitable trade routes.

Modern cities owe their growth to the industrial revolution and the consequent increase of commerce. The industrial centres of northern England are an illustration of the way in which economic forces have worked in the building of cities. At the middle of the eighteenth century that part of Great Britain was far less populous and progressive than the eastern and southern counties. It had small representation in Parliament. It was provincial in thought, speech, and habits. It was given over to agriculture, small trade, and rude home manufacture. Presently came the revolutionary inventions of textile machinery, of the steam-engine, and of processes for extracting and utilizing coal and iron. The heavy, costly machinery required capital and the factory. Concentrated capital and machinery required workers. The working people were forced to give up their small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres. These centres sprang up where the tools were most easily and cheaply obtained, and where lay the coal-beds and the iron ore to be worked over into machinery. From Newcastle on the east, through Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester, to Liverpool on the west and Glasgow over the Scottish border grew up a chain of thriving cities, and later their people were given the ballot that was taken from certain of the depopulated rural villages. These cities have obtained a voice of power in the councils of the nation. In America the industrial era came somewhat later, but the same process of centralizing industry went on at the waterfalls of Eastern rivers, at railroad centres, and at ocean, lake, and Gulf ports. Commerce has accelerated the growth of many of these manufacturing towns. Increase of industry and population has been especially rapid in the great ports that front the two oceans, through whose gates pour the floods of immigrants, and in the interior cities like Chicago, that lie at especially favorable points for railway, lake, or river traffic. As in the Middle Ages, universities grew because teachers went where students were gathered, and students were attracted to the place where teachers were to be found, so in the larger cities the more people there are and the more numerous is the population, the greater the amount of business. It pays to be near the centre of things.

READING REFERENCES

Howe: The Modern City and Its Problems, pages 9-49.

Gillette: Constructive Rural Sociology, pages 32-46.

Strong: Our World, pages 228-283.

Nearing and Watson: Economics, pages 123-132.

Giry and Reville: Emancipation of the Mediæval Towns.

Bliss: New Encyclopedia of Social Reform, art. "Cities."

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CHAPTER XXVI[ToC]

THE MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE

186. Preponderance of Economic Interests.—Such a social centre as the city has several functions to perform for its inhabitants. Though primarily concerned with business, the people have other interests to be conserved; the city, therefore, has governmental, educational, and recreational functions as a social organization, and within its limits all kinds of human concerns find their sponsors and supporters. Unquestionably, the economic interests are preponderant. On the principle that social structure corresponds to function, the structure of the city lends itself to the performance of the economic function. Business streets are the principal thoroughfares. Districts near the great factories are crowded with the tenements that shelter the workers. Little room is left for breathing-places in town, and little leisure in which to breathe. Government is usually in the hands of professional politicians who are too willing to take their orders from the cohort captains of business. Morals, æsthetics, and recreation are all subordinate to business. Even religion is mainly an affair of Sunday, and appears to be of relatively small consequence compared with business or recreation. The great problems of the city are consequently economic at bottom. Poverty and misery, drunkenness, unemployment, and crime are all traceable in part, at least, to economic deficiency. Economic readjustments constitute the crying need of the twentieth-century city.

187. The Manufacturing Industry.—It is the function of the agriculturist and the herdsman, the miner and the lumberman, to produce the raw material. The sailor and the train-hand, the longshoreman and the teamster, transport them to the industrial centres. It is the business of the manufacturer and his employees to turn them into the finished product for the use of society. Manufacturing is the leading occupation in thousands of busy towns and small cities of all the industrial nations of western Europe and America, and shares with commerce and trade as a leading enterprise in the cosmopolitan centres. The merchant or financier who thinks his type of emporium or exchange is the only municipal centre of consequence, needs only to mount to the top of a tall building or climb a suburban hill where he can look off over the city and see the many smoking chimneys, to realize the importance of the factory. With thousands of tenement-house dwellers it is as natural to fall into the occupation of a factory hand as in the rural regions for the youth to become a farmer. The growing child who leaves school to help support the family has never learned a craftsman's trade, but he may find a subordinate place among the mill or factory hands until he gains enough skill to handle a machine. From that time until age compels him to join the ranks of the unemployed he is bound to his machine, as firmly as the mediæval serf was bound to the soil. Theoretically he is free to sell his labor in the highest market and to cross the continent if he will, but actually he is the slave of his employer, for he and his family are dependent upon his daily wage, and he cannot afford to lose that wage in order to make inquiries about the labor market elsewhere. Theoretically he is a citizen possessed of the franchise and equal in privilege and importance to his employer as a member of society, but actually he must vote for the party or the man who is most likely to benefit him economically, and he knows that he occupies a position of far less importance politically and socially than his employer. Employment is an essential in making a living, but it is an instrument that cuts two ways—it establishes an aristocracy of wealth and privilege for the employer and a servile class of employees who often are little better than peasants of the belt and wheel.

188. History of Manufacturing.—The history of the manufacturing industry is a curious succession of enslavement and emancipation. Until within a century and a half it was closely connected with the home. Primitive women fashioned the utensils and clothing of the primitive family, and when slaves were introduced into the household it became their task to perform those functions. The slave was a bondman. Neither his person nor his time was his own, and he could not hold property; but he was taken care of, fed and clothed and housed, and by a humane master was kindly treated and even made a friend. When the slave became a serf on the manorial estate of mediæval Europe, manufacturing was still a household employment and old methods were still in use. These sufficed, as there was little outside demand from potential buyers, due to general poverty and lack of the means of exchange and transportation. Certain industries became localized, like the forging of iron instruments at the smithy and the grinding of grain at the mill, and the monastery buildings included apartments for various kinds of handicraft, but the factory was not yet. Then artisans found their way to the town, associated themselves with others of their craft, and accepted the relation of journeyman in the employ of a master workman; there, too, the young apprentice learned his trade without remuneration. The group was a small one. For greater strength in local rivalries they organized craft guilds or associations, and established over all members convenient rules and restrictions. Increasing opportunities for exchange of goods stimulated production, but the output of hand labor was limited in amount. The position of the craftsman locally was increasingly important, and his fortunes were improving. The craft guilds successfully disputed with their rivals for a share in the government of the city; there was democracy in the guild, for master and journeyman were both included, and they had interests much in common. A journeyman confidently expected to become a master in a workshop of his own.

189. Alteration of Status.—Under the factory system the employee becomes one of many industrial units, having no social or guild relation to his employer, receiving a money wage as a quit claim from his employer, and dependent upon himself for labor and a living. For a time after the factory system came into vogue there were small shops where the employer busied himself among his men and personally superintended them, but the large factory tends to displace the small workshop, the corporation takes the place of the individual employer, and the employee becomes as impersonal a cog in the labor system as is any part of the machine at which he works. It used to be the case that a thrifty workman might hope to become in the future an employer, but now he has become a permanent member of a distinct class, for the large capital required for manufacturing is beyond his reach. The manufacturing industry is continually passing under the management of fewer individuals, while the number of operatives in each factory tends to increase. With concentration of management goes concentration of wealth, and the gap widens between rich and poor. Out of the modern factory system has come the industrial problem with all its varieties of skilled and unskilled work, woman and child labor, sweating, wages, hours and conditions of labor, unemployment, and other difficulties.

190. The Working Grind.—There are many manufacturing towns and small cities that are built on one industry. Thousands of workers, young and old, answer the morning summons of the whistle and pour into the factory for a day's labor at the machine. A brief recess at noon and the work is renewed for the second half of the day. Weary at night, the workers tramp home to the tenements, or hang to the trolley strap that is the symbol of the five-cent commuter, and recuperate for the next day's toil. They are cogs in the great wheel of industry, units in the great sum of human energy, indispensable elements in the progress of economic success. Sometimes they seem less prized than the costly machines at which they work, sometimes they fall exhausted in the ranks, as the soldier in the trenches drops under the attack, but they are absolutely essential to wealth and they are learning that they are indispensable to one another. In the development of social organization the working people are gaining a larger part. The factory is educating them to a consciousness of the solidarity of their class interests. All class organizations have their faults, but they teach their members group values and the dependence of the individual on his fellows.

191. The Benefits of the New Industry to the Workers.—It must not be supposed that the industrial revolution and the age of machinery have been a social misfortune. The benefits that have come to the laboring people, as well as to their employers, must be put into the balance against the evils. There is first of all the great increase of manufactured products that have been shared in by the workers and the greatly reduced price of many necessaries of life, such as matches, pins, and cooking utensils. Invention has eased many kinds of labor and taken them away from the overburdened housewife, and new machinery is constantly lightening the burden of the farm and the home. Invention has broadened the scope of labor, opening continually new avenues to the workers. It is difficult to see how the rapidly increasing number of people in the United States could have found employment without the typewriter, the automobile, and the numerous varieties of electrical application. The great number of modern conveniences that have come to be regarded as necessaries even in the homes of the working people, and the local improvements in streets and sidewalks, schools and playgrounds that are possible because of increasing wealth, are all due to the new type of industry.

Conditions of labor are better. Where building laws are in force, factories are lighter, cleaner, and better ventilated than were the houses and shops of the pre-factory age, and the hours of labor that are necessary to earn a living have been greatly reduced in most industries. There have been mental and moral gains, also. It requires mental application to handle machinery. An uneducated immigrant may soon learn to handle a simple machine, but the complicated machinery that the better-paid workmen tend requires intelligence, care, and sobriety. The age of machinery has brought with it emancipation from slavery, indenture, and imprisonment for debt, and has made possible a new status for the worker and his children. The laborer in America is a citizen with a vote and a right to his own opinion equal to that of his employer; he has time and money enough to buy and read the newspaper; and he is encouraged and helped to educate his children and to prepare them for a place in the sun that is ampler than his own.

READING REFERENCES

Cheyney: Industrial and Social History of England, pages 199-239.

Nearing and Watson: Economics, pages 206-212, 256-266.

Henderson: Social Elements, pages 143-156.

Adams and Sumner: Labor Problems, pages 3-15.

Bogart: Economic History of the United States, pages 130-169, 356-399.

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CHAPTER XXVII[ToC]

THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM

192. What It Means.—The industrial problem as a whole is a problem of adjusting the relations of employer and employee to each other and to the rapidly changing age in the midst of which industry exists. It is a problem that cannot be solved in a moment, for it has grown out of previous conditions and relationships. It must be considered in its causes, its alignments, the difficulties of each party, the efforts at solution, and the principles and theories that are being worked out for the settlement of the problem.

193. Conflict Between Industrial Groups.—The industrial problem is not entirely an economic problem, but it is such primarily. The function of employer and employee is to produce material goods that have value for exchange. Both enter into the economic relation for what they can get out of it in material gain. Selfish desire tends to overcome any consideration of each other's needs or of their mutual interests. There is a continual conflict between the wage-earner who wants to make a living and the employer who wants to make money, and neither stops long to consider the welfare of society as a whole when any specific issue arises. The conflict between individuals has developed into a class problem in which the organized forces of labor confront the organized forces of capital, with little disposition on either side to surrender an advantage once gained or to put an end to the conflict by a frank recognition of each other's rights.

It is not strange that this conflict has continued to vex society. Conflict is one of the characteristics of imperfectly adjusted groups. It seems to be a necessary preliminary to co-operation, as war is. It will continue until human beings are educated to see that the interests of all are paramount to the interests of any group, and that in the long run any group will gain more of real value for itself by taking account of the interests of a rival. Railroad history in recent years has made it very plain that neither railway employees nor the public have gained as much by hectoring the railroad corporations as either would have gained by considering the interests of the railroad as well as its own.

Industrial conflict is due in great part to the unwillingness of the employer to deal fairly by his employee. There have been worthy exceptions, of course, but capitalists in the main have not felt a responsibility to consider the interests of the workers. It has been a constant temptation to take advantage of the power of wealth for the exploitation of the wage-earning class. Unfortunately, the modern industrial period began with economic control in the hands of the employer, for with the transfer of industry to the factory the laborer was powerless to make terms with the employer. Unfortunately, also, the disposition of society was to let alone the relations of master and dependent in accordance with the laisser-faire theory of the economists of that period. Government was slow to legislate in favor of the helpless employee, and the abuses of the time were many. The process of adjustment has been a difficult one, and experiment has been necessary to show what was really helpful and practicable.

194. More than an Industrial Problem.—In the process of experiment it has become clear that the industrial problem is more than an economic problem; secondarily, it is the problem of making a living that will contribute to the enrichment of life. It is not merely the adjustment of the wage scale to the profits of the capitalist by class conflict or peaceful bargaining, nor is it the problem of unemployment or official labor. The primary task may be to secure a better adjustment of the economic interests of employer and employee through an improvement of the wage system, but in the larger sense the industrial problem is a social and moral one. Sociologists reckon among the social forces a distinction between elemental desires and broader interests. Wages are able to satisfy the elemental desires of hunger and sex feeling by making it possible for a man to marry and bring up a family and get enough to eat; but there are larger questions of freedom, justice, comity, personal and social development that are involved in the labor problem. If wages are so small, or hours so long, or factory conditions so bad that health is affected, proper education made impossible, and recreation and religion prevented, the individual and society suffer much more than with reference to the elemental desires. The industrial problem is, therefore, a complex problem, and not one that can be easily or quickly solved. Although it is necessary to remember all as parts of one problem of industry, it is a convenience to remember that it is:

(1) An economic problem, involving wages, hours, and conditions of labor.

(2) A social problem, involving the mental and physical health and the social welfare of both the individual worker, the family, and the community.

(3) An ethical problem, involving fairness, justice, comity, and freedom to the employer, the employee, and the public.

(4) A complex problem, involving many specific problems, chief of which are the labor of women and children, immigrant labor, prison labor, organization of labor, insurance, unemployment, industrial education, the conduct of labor warfare, and the interest of the public in the industrial problem.

195. Characteristics of Factory Life.—Group life in the factory is not very different in characteristics from group life everywhere. It is an active life, the hand and brain of the worker keeping pace with the speedy machine, all together shaping the product that goes to exchange and storage. It is a social life, many individuals working in one room, and all the operatives contributing jointly to the making of the product. It is under control. Captains of industry and their lieutenants give direction to a group that has been thoroughly and efficiently organized. Without control and organization industry could not be successfully carried on, but it is open to question whether industrial control should not be more democratic, shared in by representatives of the workers and of the public as well as by the representatives of corporate capital or a single owner. It is a life of change. It does not seem so to the operative who turns out the same kind of a machine product day after day, sometimes by the million daily, but the personnel of the workers changes, and even the machines from time to time give way to others of an improved type. It is a life that has its peculiar weaknesses. The relations of employer and employee are not cordial; the health and comfort of the worker are often disregarded; the hours of labor are too long or the wages too small; the whole working staff is driven at too high speed; the whole process is on a mechanical rather than a human basis, and the material product is of more concern than the human producer. These weaknesses are due to the concentration of control in the hands of employers. The industrial problem is, therefore, largely a problem of control.

196. Democratizing Industry.—When the modern industrial system began in the eighteenth century the democratic principle played a small part in social relations. Parental authority in the family, the master's authority in the school, hierarchical authority in the church, official authority in the local community, and monarchical authority in the nation, were almost universal. It is not strange that the authority of the capitalist in his business was unquestioned. Only government had the right to interfere in the interest of the lower classes, and government had little care for that interest. The democratic principle has been gaining ground in family and school, state and church; it has found grudging recognition in industry. This is because the clash of economic interests is keenest in the factory. But even there the grip of privilege has loosened, and the possibility of democratizing industry as government has been democratized is being widely discussed. There is difference of opinion as to how this should be done. The socialist believes that control can be transferred to the people in no other way than by collective ownership. Others progressively inclined accept the principle of government regulation and believe that in that way the people, through their political representatives, can control the owners and managers. Others think that the best results can be obtained by giving a place on the governing board of an industry to working men alongside the representatives of capital and permitting them to work out their problems on a mutual basis. Each of these methods has been tried, but without demonstrating conclusively the superiority of any one. Whatever method may come into widest vogue, there must be a recognition of the principle of democratic interest and democratic control. No one class in society can dictate permanently to the people as a whole. Industry is the concern of all, and all must have a share in managing it for the benefit of all.

197. Legislation.—The history of industrial reform is first of all a story of legislative interference with arbitrary management. When Great Britain early in the nineteenth century overstepped the bounds of the let-alone policy and began to legislate for the protection of the employee, it was but a resumption of a paternal policy that had been general in Europe before. But formerly government had interfered in behalf of the employing class, now it was for the people who were under the control of the exploiting capitalist. The abuses of child labor were the first to receive attention, and Parliament reduced the hours of child apprentices to twelve a day. Once begun, restriction was extended. Beginning in 1833, under the leadership of Lord Shaftesbury, the working man's friend, the labor of children under thirteen was reduced to forty-eight hours a week, and children under nine were forbidden to work at all. The work of young people under eighteen was limited to sixty-nine hours a week, and then to ten hours a day; women were included in the last provision. These early laws were applicable to factories for weaving goods only, but they were extended later to all kinds of manufacturing and mining. These laws were not always strictly enforced, but to get them through Parliament at all was an achievement. Later legislation extended the ten-hour law to men; then the time was reduced to nine hours, and in many trades to eight.

In the United States the need of legislation was far less urgent. Employers could not be so masterful in the treatment of their employees or so parsimonious in their distribution of wages, because the laborer always had the option of leaving the factory for the farm, and land was cheap. Women and children were not exploited in the mines as in England, pauper labor was not so available, and such trades as chimney-sweeping were unknown. Then, too, by the time there was much need for legislation, the spirit of justice was becoming wide-spread and legislatures responded more quickly to the appeal for protective legislation. It was soon seen that the industrial problem was not simply how much an employee should receive for a given piece of work or time, but how factory labor affected working people of different sex or age, and how these effects reacted upon society. Those who pressed legislation believed that the earnings of a child were not worth while when the child lost all opportunity for education and healthful physical exercise, and that woman's labor was not profitable if it deprived her of physical health and nervous energy, and weakened by so much the stamina of the next generation. The thought of social welfare seconded the thought of individual welfare and buttressed the claims of a particular class to economic consideration in such questions as proper wages. Massachusetts was the first American State to introduce labor legislation in 1836; in 1869 the same State organized the first labor bureau, to be followed by a National bureau in 1884, four years later converted into a government department. Among the favorite topics of legislation have been the limitation of woman and child labor, the regulation of wage payments, damages and similar concerns, protection from dangerous machinery and adequate factory inspection, and the appointment of boards of arbitration. The doctrine of the liability of employers in case of accident to persons in their employ has been increasingly accepted since Great Britain adopted an employers' liability act in 1880, and since 1897 compulsory insurance of employees has spread from the continent of Europe to England and the United States.

198. The Organization of Labor.—These measures of protection and relief have been due in part to the disinterested activity of philanthropists, and in part to the efforts of organized labor, backed up by public opinion; occasionally capitalists have voluntarily improved conditions or increased wages. The greatest agitation and pressure has come from the labor-unions. Unlike the mediæval guilds, these unions exist for the purpose of opposing the employer, and are formed in recognition of the principle that a group can obtain guarantees that an individual is helpless to secure. Like-mindedness holds the group together, and consciousness of common interests and mutual duties leads to sacrifice of individual benefit for the sake of the group. The moral effect of this sense and practice of mutual responsibility has been a distinct social gain, and warrants the hope that a time may come when this consciousness of mutual interests may extend until it includes the employing class as in the old-time guild.

The modern labor-union is a product of the nineteenth century. Until 1850 there was much experimenting, and a revolutionary sentiment was prevalent both in America and abroad. The first union movement united all classes of wage-earners in a nation-wide reform, and aimed at social gains, such as education as well as economic gains. It hoped much from political activity, spoke often of social ideals, and did not disdain to co-operate with any good agency, even a friendly employer. Class feeling was less keen than later. But it became apparent that the lines of organization were too loose, that specific economic reforms must be secured rather than a whole social programme, and that little could probably be expected from political activity. Labor began to organize on a basis of trades, class feeling grew stronger, and trials of strength with employers showed the value of collective bargaining and fixed agreements. Out of the period grew the American Federation of Labor. More recently has come the industrial union, which includes all ranks of labor, like the early labor-union, and is especially beneficial to the unskilled. It is much more radical in its methods of operation, and is represented by such notorious organizations as the United Mine Workers and the International Workers of the World.

199. Strikes.—The principle of organization of the trade-union is democratic. The unit of organization is the local group of workers which is represented on the national governing bodies; in matters of important legislation, a referendum is allowed. Necessarily, executive power is strongly centralized, for the labor-union is a militant organization, but much is left to the local union. Though peaceful methods are employed when possible, warlike operations are frequent. The favorite weapon is the strike, or refusal to work, and this is often so disastrous to the employer that it results in the speedy granting of the laborers' demands. It requires good judgment on the part of the representatives of labor when to strike and how to conduct the campaign to a successful conclusion, but statistics compiled by the National Labor Bureau between 1881 and 1905 indicate that a majority of strikes ordered by authority of the organization were at least partially successful.

The successful issue of strikes has demonstrated their value as weapons of warfare, and they have been accepted by society as allowable, but they tend to violence, and produce feelings of hatred and distrust, and would not be countenanced except as measures of coercion to secure needed reforms. The financial loss due to the cessation of labor foots up to a large total, but in comparison with the total amount of wages and profits it is small, and often the periods of manufacturing activity are so redistributed through the year that there is really no net loss. Yet a strike cannot be looked upon in any other way than as a misfortune. Like war, it breaks up peaceful if not friendly relations, and tends to destroy the solidarity of society. It tends to strengthen class feeling, which, like caste, is a handicap to the progress of mankind. Though it may benefit the working man, it is harmful to the general public, which suffers from the interruption of industry and sometimes of transportation, and whose business is disturbed by the blow to confidence.

200. Peaceful Methods of Settlement.—Strikes are so unsettling to industry that all parties find it better to use diplomacy when possible, or to submit a dispute to arbitration rather than to resort to violence. It is in industrial concerns very much as it is in international politics, and methods used in one circle suggest methods in the other. Formerly war was a universal practice, and of frequent occurrence, and duelling was common in the settlement of private quarrels; now the duel is virtually obsolete, and war is invoked only as a last resort. Difficulties are smoothed out through the diplomatic representatives that every nation keeps at the national capitals, and when they cannot settle an issue the matter is referred to an umpire satisfactory to both sides. Similarly in industrial disputes the tendency is away from the strike; when an issue arises representatives of both sides get together and try to find a way out. There is no good reason why an employer should refuse to recognize an organization or receive its representatives to conference, especially if the employer is a corporation which must work through representatives. Collective bargaining is in harmony with the spirit of the times and fair for all. Conference demands frankness on the part of all concerned. It leads more quickly to understanding and harmony if each party knows the situation that confronts the other. If the parties immediately concerned cannot reach an agreement, a third party may mediate and try to conciliate opposition. If that fails, the next natural step is voluntarily to refer the matter in dispute to arbitration, or by legal regulation to compel the disputants to submit to arbitration.

201. Boards of Conciliation.—The history of peaceful attempts to settle industrial disputes in the United States helps to explain the methods now frequently employed. In 1888, following a series of disastrous labor conflicts, Congress provided by legislation for the appointment of a board of three commissioners, which should make thorough investigation of particular disputes and publish its findings. The class of disputes was limited to interstate commerce concerns and the commissioners did not constitute a permanent board, but the legislative act marked the beginning of an attempt at conciliation. Ten years later the Erdman Act established a permanent board of conciliation to deal with similar cases when asked to do so by one of the parties, and in case of failure to propose arbitration; it provided, also, for a board of arbitration. Meantime the States passed various acts for the pacification of industrial disputes; the most popular have been the appointment of permanent boards of conciliation and arbitration, which have power to mediate, investigate, and recommend a settlement. These have been supplemented by State and national commissions, with a variety of functions and powers, including investigation and regulation. The experience of government boards has not been long enough to prove whether they are likely to be of permanent value, but the results are encouraging to those who believe that through conciliation and arbitration the industrial problem can best be solved.

202. Public Welfare.—There can be no reasonable complaint of the interference of the government. The government, whether of State or nation, represents the people, and the people have a large stake in every industrial dispute. Society is so interdependent that thousands are affected seriously by every derangement of industry. This is especially true of the stoppage of railways, mines, or large manufacturing establishments, when food and fuel cannot be obtained, and the delicate mechanism of business is upset. At best the public is seriously inconvenienced. It is therefore proper that the public should organize on its part to minimize the derangement of its interests. In 1901 a National Civic Federation was formed by those who were interested in industrial peace, and who were large-minded enough to see that it could not be obtained permanently unless recognition should be given to all three of the interested parties—the employers, the employees, and the public. Many small employers of labor are bitterly opposed to any others than themselves having anything to say about the methods of conducting industry, but the men of large experience are satisfied that the day of independence has passed. This organization includes on its committees representatives of all parties, and has helped in the settlement of a number of controversies.

203. Voluntary Efforts of Employers.—It is a hopeful sign that employers themselves are voluntarily seeking the betterment of their employees. It is a growing custom for corporations to provide for the comfort, health, and recreation of men and women in their employ. Rest-rooms, reading-rooms, baths, and gymnasiums are provided; athletic clubs are organized; lunches are furnished at cost; continuation schools are arranged. Some manufacturing establishments employ a welfare manager or secretary whose business it shall be to devise ways of improving working conditions. When these helps and helpers are supplied as philanthropy, they are not likely to be appreciated, for working people do not want to be patronized; if maintained on a co-operative basis, they are more acceptable. But the employer is beginning to see that it is good business to keep the workers contented and healthy. It adds to their efficiency, and in these days when scientific management is putting so much emphasis on efficiency, any measures that add to industrial welfare are not to be overlooked.

204. Profit-Sharing.—Another method of conferring benefit upon the employee is profit-sharing. By means of cash payment or stock bonuses, he is induced to work better and to be more careful of tools and machinery, while his expectation of a share in the success of the business stimulates his interest and his energy and keeps him better natured. The objections to the plan are that it is paternalistic, for the business is under the control of the employer and the amount of profits depends on his honesty, good management, and philanthropic disposition. There are instances where it has worked admirably, and from the point of view of the employer it is often worth while, because it tends to weaken unionism; but it cannot be regarded as a cure for industrial ills, because it is a remedy of uncertain value, and at best is not based on the principle of industrial democracy.

205. Principles for the Solution of the Industrial Problem.—Three principles contend for supremacy in all discussions and efforts to solve the industrial problem. The first is the doctrine of employer's control. This is the old principle that governed industrial relations until governmental legislation and trade-union activity compelled a recognition of the worker's rights. By that principle the capitalist and the laborer are free to work together or to fight each other, to make what arrangements they can about wages, hours, and health conditions, to share in profits if the employer is kindly disposed, but always with labor in a position of subordination and without recognized rights, as in the old political despotisms, which were sometimes benevolent but more often ruthless. Only the selfish, stubborn capitalist expects to see such a system permanently restored.

The second principle is the doctrine of collective control. This theory is a natural reaction from the other, but goes to an opposite extreme. It is the theory of the syndicalist, who prefers to smash machinery before he takes control, and of the socialist, who contents himself with declaring the right of the worker to all productive property, and agitates peacefully for the abolition of the wage system in favor of a working man's commonwealth. The socialist blames the wage system for all the evils of the present industrial order, regards the trade-unions as useful industrial agencies of reform, but urges a resort to the ballot as a necessary means of getting control of industry. There would come first the socialization of natural resources and transportation systems, then of public utilities and large industries, and by degrees the socialization of all industry would become complete. Then on a democratic basis the workers would choose their industrial officers, arrange their hours, wages, and conditions of labor, and provide for the needs of every individual without exploitation, overexertion, or lack of opportunity to work. Serious objections are made to this programme for productive enterprise on the ground of the difficulty of effecting the transfer of the means of production and exchange, and of executive management without the incentive of abundant pecuniary returns for efficient superintendency; even more because of the natural selfishness of human beings who seek personal preferment, and the natural inertia of those who know that they will be taken care of whether they exert themselves or not. More serious still are the difficulties that lie in the way of a satisfactory distribution of the rewards of labor, for there is sure to be serious difference of opinion over the proper share of each person who contributes to the work of production, and no method of initiative, referendum, and recall would avail to smooth out the difficulties that would be sure to arise.

206. Co-operation.—The third principle is co-operation. The principle of co-operation is as important to society as the principle of division of labor. By means of co-operative activity in the home the family is able to maintain itself as a useful group. By means of co-operation in thinly settled communities local prosperity is possible without any individual possessing large resources. But in industry where competition rules and the aim of the employer is the exploitation of the worker, general comfort is sacrificed for the enrichment of the few and wealth flaunts itself in the midst of misery. There will always be a problem in the industrial relations of human beings until there is a recognition of this fundamental principle of co-operation. The application of the principle to the complicated system of modern industrialism is not easy, and attempts at co-operative production by working men with small and incapable management have not been successful, but it is becoming clear that as a principle of industrial relation between classes it is to obtain increasing recognition. If it is proper to admit the claims of the employer, the employee, and the public to an interest in every labor issue, then it is proper to look for the co-operation of them all in the regulation of industry. The usual experiments in co-operative industry have been the voluntary organization of production, exchange, or distribution by a group of middle or working class people to save the large expense of superintendents or middlemen. Co-operation in production has usually failed; in America co-operative banks and building associations, creameries, and fruit-growing associations have had considerable success, and in Europe co-operative stores and bakeries have had a large vogue in England and Belgium, and co-operative agriculture in Denmark. But industry on a large scale requires large capital, efficient management, capable, interested workmanship, and elimination of waste in material and human life. To this end it needs the good-will of all parties and the assistance of government. Unemployment, for instance, may be taken care of by giving every worker a good industrial education and doing away with inefficiency, and then establishing a wide-spread system of labor exchanges to adjust the mass of labor to specific requirements. Industry is such a big and important matter that nothing less than the co-operation of the whole of society can solve its problems.

This co-operation, to be effective, requires a genuine partnership, in which the body of stockholders and the body of working men plan together, work together, and share together, with the assistance of government commissions and boards that continually adjust and, if necessary, regulate the processes of production and distribution on a basis of equity, to be determined by a consensus of expert opinion. In such a system there is no radical derangement of existing industry, no destruction of initiative, no expulsion of expert management or confiscation of property. Individual and corporate ownership continue, the wage system is not abolished, efficient administration is still to be obtained, but the body of control is not a board of directors responsible only to the stockholders of the corporation, and managing affairs primarily for their own gain, but it consists of representatives of those who contribute money, superintendence, and labor, together with or regulated by a group of government experts, all of whom are honestly seeking the good of all parties and enjoying their full confidence. Toward such an outcome of present strife many interested social reformers are working, and it is to be hoped that its advantages will soon appear so great that neither extreme alternative principle will have to be tried out thoroughly before there will be a general acceptance of the co-operative idea. It may seem utopian to those who are familiar with the selfishness and antagonism that have marked the history of the last hundred years, but it is already being tried out here and there, and it is the only principle that accords with the experiences and results of social evolution in other groups. It is the highest law that the struggle for individual power fails before the struggle for the good of the group, and a contest for the success of the few must give way to co-operation for the good of all.

READING REFERENCES

Ellwood: Sociology in Its Psychological Aspects, pages 188-194.

Adams and Sumner: Labor Problems, pages 175-286, 379-432, 461-500.

Bulletins of the United States Department of Labor.

Carlton: History and Problems of Organized Labor, pages 228-261.

Gladden: The Labor Question, pages 77-113.

Henderson: Social Elements, pages 167-206.

Cross: Essentials of Socialism, pages 11, 12, 106-111.

Wyckoff: The Workers.

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CHAPTER XXVIII[ToC]

EXCHANGE AND TRANSPORTATION

207. Mercantile Exchange.—Important as is the manufacturing industry in the life of the city, it is only a part of the economic activity that is continually going on in its streets and buildings. The mercantile houses that carry on wholesale and retail trade, the towering office-buildings, and the railway and steamship terminals contain numerous groups of workers all engaged in the social task of supplying human wants, while streets and railways are avenues of traffic. The manufacture of goods is but a part of the process; distribution is as important as production. All these sources of supply are connected with banks and trust companies that furnish money and credit for business of every kind. The economic activities of a city form an intricate network in which the people are involved.

Hardly second in importance to manufacturing is mercantile exchange. The manufacturer, after he has paid his workers, owns the goods that have been produced, but to get his living he must sell them. To do this he establishes relations with the merchant. Their relations are carried on through agents, some of whom travel from place to place taking orders, others establish office headquarters in the larger centres of trade. Once the merchant has opened his store or shop and purchased his goods he seeks to establish trade relations with as many individual customers as he can attract. Mercantile business is carried on in two kinds of stores, those which supply one kind of goods in wholesale or retail quantities, like groceries or dry goods, and those which maintain numerous departments for different kinds of manufactured goods. Large department stores have become a special feature of mercantile exchange in cities of considerable size, but they do not destroy the smaller merchants, though competition is often difficult.

208. The Ethics of Business.—The methods of carrying on mercantile business are based, as in the factory, on the principle of getting the largest possible profits. The welfare of employees is a secondary consideration. Expense of maintenance is heavy. Rents are costly in desirable locations; the expense of carrying a large stock of merchandise makes it necessary to borrow capital on which interest must be paid; the obligations of a large pay-roll must be met at frequent intervals, whether business is good or bad. All these items are present in varying degree, whatever the size of the business, except where a merchant has capital enough of his own to carry on a small business and can attend to the wants of his customers alone or with the help of his family. The temptation of the merchant is strong to use every possible means to make a success of his business, paying wages as low as possible, in order to cut down expenses, and offering all kinds of inducements to customers in order to sell his goods. The ethics of trade need improvement. It is by no means true, as some agitators declare, that the whole business system is corrupt, that honesty is rare, and that the merchant is without a conscience. General corruption is impossible in a commercial age like this, when the whole system of business is built on credit, and large transactions are carried on, as on the Stock Exchange, with full confidence in the word or even the nod of an operator. Of course, shoddy and impure goods are sold over the counter and the customer often pays more than an article is really worth, but every mercantile house has its popular reputation to sustain as well as its rated financial standing, and the business concern that does not deal honorably soon loses profitable trade.

Exchange constitutes an important division of the science of economics, but its social causes and effects are of even greater consequence. Exchange is dependent upon the diffusion of information, the expansion of interests, and growing confidence between those who effect a transaction. When mutual wants are few it is possible to carry on business by means of barter; when trade increases money becomes a necessary medium; world commerce requires a system of credit which rests on social trust and integrity. Conversely, there are social consequences that come from customs of exchange. It enlarges human interests. It stimulates socialization of habits and broader ideas. It encourages industry and thrift and promotes division of labor. It strengthens social organization and tends to make it more efficient. Altogether, exchange of goods must be regarded as among the most important functions of society.

209. Business Employees.—The business ethics that are most open to criticism are those that govern the relations of the merchant and his employees. Here the system of employment is much the same as in the factory. The merchant deals with his employees through superintendents of departments. The employment manager hires the persons who seem best qualified for the position, and they are assigned to a department. They are under the orders of the head of the department, and their success or failure depends largely on his good-will. Wages and privileges are in his hand, and if he is morally unscrupulous he can ruin a weak-willed subordinate. There is little coherence among employees; there are always men and women who stand ready to take a vacant position, and often no particular skill or experience is required. There has been no such solidifying of interests by trade-unions as in the factory; the individual makes his own contract and stands on his own feet. On the other hand, there is an increasing number of employers who feel their responsibility to those who are in their employ, and, except in the department stores, they are usually associated personally with their employees. Welfare work is not uncommon in the large establishments, and a minimum wage is being adopted here and there.

One of the worst abuses of the department store is the low-paid labor of women and girls. It is possible for girls who live at home to get along on a few dollars a week, but they establish a scale of wages so low that it is impossible for the young woman who is dependent on her own resources to get enough to eat and wear and keep well. The physical and moral wrecks that result are disheartening. Nourishing food in sufficient quantities to repair the waste of nerve and tissue cannot be obtained on five or six dollars a week, when room rent and clothing and necessary incidentals, like car-fare, have to be included. There are always human beasts of prey who are prepared to give financial assistance in exchange for sex gratification, and it is difficult to resist temptation when one's nervous vigor and strength of will are at the breaking-point. It is not strange that there is an economic element among the causes of the social evil; it is remarkable that moral sturdiness resists so much temptation.

210. Offices.—The numerous office-buildings that have arisen so rapidly in recent years in the cities also have large corps of women workers. They have personal relations with employers much more frequently, for there are thousands of offices where a few stenographers or even a single secretary are sufficient. Office work is skilled labor, is better paid, and attracts women of better attainments and higher ideals than in department store or factory. Office relations are pleasant as well as profitable. The demands are exacting; labor at the typewriter, the proof-sheets, or the bookkeeper's desk is tiresome, but the society of the office is congenial, working conditions are healthful and cheerful in most cases, and there are many opportunities for increasing efficiency and promotion. The office has its hardships. Everything is on a business basis, and there is little allowance for feelings or disposition. There are days when trials multiply and an atmosphere of irritation prevails; there are seasons when the constant rush creates a wearing nervous tension, and other seasons, when business is so poor that occasionally there are breakdowns of health or moral rectitude; but on the whole the office presents a simpler industrial problem than the factory or the store.

211. Transportation.—A third industry that has its centre in the city but extends across continents and seas is the business of transportation. Manufactured goods are conveyed from the factory to the warehouse and the store, goods sold in the mercantile establishment are delivered from door to door, but enormous quantities of the products of economic activity are hauled to greater distances by truck, car, and steamship. The city is a point to which roads, railways, and steamship lines converge, and from which they radiate in every direction. By long and short hauls, by express and freight, vast quantities of food products and manufactured goods pour into the metropolis, part to be used in its numerous dwellings, part to be shipped again to distant points. Along the same routes passengers are transported, journeying in all directions on a multitude of errands, jostling for a moment as they hurry to and from the means of conveyance, and then swinging away, each on its individual orbit, like comet or giant sun that nods acquaintance but once in a thousand years.

The business of transportation occupies the time and attention of thousands of workers, and its ramifications are endless. It is not limited to a particular region like agriculture, or to towns and cities like manufacturing; it is not stopped by tariff walls or ocean boundaries. An acre of wheat is cut by the reaper, threshed, and carted to the elevator by wagon or motor truck. The railroad-car is hauled alongside, and with other bushels of its kind the grain is transported to a giant flour-mill, where it is turned into a whitened, pulverized product, packed in barrels, and shipped across the ocean to a foreign port. Conveyed by rail or truck to the bakery, the flour undergoes transformation into bread, and takes its final journey to hotel, restaurant, and dwelling-house. Similarly, every kind of raw material finds its destination far from the place of its production and is consumed directly or as a manufactured product. This gigantic business of transportation is the means of providing for the sustenance and comfort of millions of human beings, and in spite of the extensive use of machinery it requires at every step the co-operative labor of human beings.

212. Growth of Interdependence.—It is the far-flung lines of commerce that bind together the peoples of the world. Formerly there were periods of history, as in the European Middle Ages, when a social group produced nearly everything that it needed for consumption and commerce was small; but now all countries exchange their own products for others that they cannot so readily produce. The requirements of commerce have broken down the barriers between races, and have compelled mutual acquaintance and knowledge of languages, mutual confidence in one another's good intentions, and mutual understanding of one another's wants. The demands of commerce have precipitated wars, but have also brought victories of peace. They have stimulated the invention of improved means of communication, as the demands of manufacturing stimulated invention of machinery. The slow progress of horse-drawn vehicles over poor roads provoked the invention of improved highways and then of railroads. The application of steam to locomotives and ships revolutionized commerce, and by the steady improvements of many years has given to the eager trader and traveller the speedy, palatial steamship and the train de luxe.

Transportation depends, however, on the man behind the engine rather than on the mass of steel that is conjured into motion. Successful commerce waits for the willingness and skill of worker and director. There must be the same division and direction of labor and the same spirit of co-operation; there must be intelligence in planning schedules for traffic and overcoming obstacles of nature and human frailty and incompetence. The teamster, the longshoreman, the freight-handler, and the engineer must all feel the push of the economic demand, keeping them steadily at work. A strike on any portion of the line ties up traffic and upsets the calculations of manufacturer, merchant, and consumer, for they are all dependent upon the servants of transportation.

213. Problems of Transportation.—There are problems of transportation that are of a purely economic nature, but there are also problems that are of social concern. The first problem is that of safe and rapid transportation. The comfort and safety of the millions who travel on business or for pleasure is a primary concern of society. If the roads are not kept in repair and the steamship lanes patrolled, if the rolling-stock is allowed to deteriorate and become liable to accident, if engine-drivers and helmsmen are intemperate or careless, if efficiency is not maintained, or if safety is sacrificed to speed, the public is not well served. Many are the illustrations of neglect and inefficiency that have culminated in accident and death. Or the transportation company is slow to adopt new inventions and to meet the expense that is necessary to equip a steamer or a railroad for speed, or to provide rapid interurban or suburban transit. Poor management or single tracks delay fast freights, or congested terminals tie up traffic. These inconveniences not only consume profits and ruffle the tempers of working men, but they are a social waste of time and effort, and they stand in the way of improved living conditions. The congestion of population in the cities can easily be remedied when rapid and cheap transit make it possible for working men to live twenty or thirty miles out of town. The standard of living can be raised appreciably when fast trolley or steam service provides the products of the farms in abundance and in fresh condition.

Another problem is that of the worker. The same temptation faces the transportation manager that appears in the factory and the mercantile house. The expenses of traffic are enormous. Railways alone cost hundreds of millions for equipment and service, and there are periods when commerce slackens and earnings fall away. It is easier to cut wages than to postpone improvements or to raise freight or passenger rates. In the United States an interstate commerce commission regulates rates, but questions of wages and hours of labor are between the management and the men. Friction frequently develops, and hostility in the past has produced labor organizations that are well knit and powerful, so that the railroad man has succeeded in securing fair treatment, but there are other branches of transportation service where the servants of the public find their labor poorly paid and precarious in tenure. Teamsters and freight-handlers find conditions hard; sailors and dock-hands are often thrown out of employment. Whole armies of transportation employees have been enrolled since trolley-lines and automobile service have been organized. Fewer persons drive their own horses and vehicles, and many who walked to and from business or school now ride. Transportation service has been vastly extended, but there are continually more people to be accommodated, and motor-men, conductors, and chauffeurs to be adjusted to wage scales and service hours.

214. Monopoly.—A persistent tendency in transportation has been toward monopoly. Express service between two points becomes controlled by a single company, and the charges are increased. A street-railway company secures a valuable city franchise, lays its tracks on the principal streets, and monopolizes the business. Service may be poor and fares may be raised, unless kept down by a railroad commission, but the public must endure inconvenience, discomfort, and oppression, or walk. Railroad systems absorb short lines and control traffic over great districts; unless they are under government regulation they may adjust their time schedules and freight charges arbitrarily and impose as large a burden as the traffic will bear; the public is helpless, because there is no other suitable conveyance for passengers or freight. It is for these reasons that the United States has taken the control of interstate commerce into its own hands and regulated it, while the States have shown a disposition to inflict penalties upon recalcitrant corporations operating within State boundaries. It is the policy of government, also, to prevent control of one railroad by another, to the added inconvenience and expense of the public. But since 1890 there has been a rapid tendency toward a consolidation of business enterprises, by which railroads became united into a few gigantic systems, street railways were consolidated into a few large companies, and ocean-steamship companies amalgamated into an international combination.

215. Government Ownership vs. Regulation.—Nor did monopoly confine itself to transportation. The control of public utilities has passed into fewer hands. Coal companies, gas and electric light corporations, telegraph and telephone companies tend to monopolize business over large sections of country. Some of these possess a natural monopoly right, and if managed in the interests of the public that they serve, may be permitted to carry on their business without interference. But their large incomes and disposition to oppress their constituents has produced many demands for government ownership, especially of coal companies and railroads, and though for less reason of telephone and telegraph lines. Government ownership has been tried in Europe and in Australasia, but experience does not prove that it is universally desirable. There are financial objections in connection with purchase and operation, and the question of efficiency of government employees is open to debate. Enough experiments have been tried in the United States to render very doubtful the advisability of government ownership of any of these large enterprises where politics wield so large a power and democracy delights to shift office and responsibility. But it is desirable that the government of State and nation have power to regulate business associations that control the public welfare as widely as do railroads, telegraph-lines, and navigation companies. By legislation, incorporation, and taxation the government may keep its hand upon monopoly and, if necessary, supersede it, but the system which has grown up by a natural process is to be given full opportunity to justify itself before government assumes its functions. It is hardly to be expected that government regulation will be faultless, American experience with regulating commissions has not been altogether satisfactory, but society needs protection, and this the government may well provide.

216. Trusts.—The tendency to monopoly is not confined to any one department of economic activity. Manufacturing, mercantile, and banking companies have all tended to combine in large corporations, partly for greater economy, partly for an increase of profits through manipulating reorganization of stock companies, and partly for centralization of control. In the process, while the cost of certain products has been reduced by economy in operating expenses, the enormous dividend requirements of heavily capitalized corporations has necessitated high prices, a large business, and the danger of overproduction, and a virtual monopoly has made it possible to lift prices to a level that pinches the consumer. By a grim irony of circumstance, these giant and often ruthless corporations have taken the name of trusts, but they do not incline to recognize that the people's rights are in their trust. Not every trust is harmful to society, and certainly trusts need not be destroyed. They have come into existence by a natural economic process, and as far as they cheapen the cost of production and improve the manufacture and distribution of the product they are a social gain, but they need to be controlled, and it is the function of government to regulate them in the interests of society at large. It has been found by experience that publicity of corporate business is one of the best methods of control. In the long run every social organization must obtain the sanction of public opinion if it is to become a recognized institution, and in a democratic country like the United States no trust can become so independent or monopolistic that it can afford to disregard the public will and the public good, as certain American corporations have discovered to their grief.

217. The Chances of Progress.—Every economic problem resolves itself into a social problem. The satisfaction of human wants is the province of the manufacturer, the merchant, and the transporter, but it is not limited to any one or all of these, nor is society under their control. The range of wants is so great, the desires of social beings branch out into so many broad interests, that no one line of enterprise or one group of men can control more than a small portion of society. The whole is greater than any of its parts. There will be groups that are unfortunate, communities and races that will suffer temporarily in the process of social adjustment, but the welfare of the many can never long be sacrificed to the selfishness of the few. Social revolution in some form will take place. It may not be accomplished in a day or a year, but the social will is sure to assert itself and to right the people's wrongs. The social process that is going on in the modern city has aggravated the friction of industrial relations; the haste with which business is carried on is one of its chief causes; but the very speed of the movement will carry society the sooner out of its acute distresses into a better adjusted system of industry. So far most of the world's progress has been by a slow course of natural adjustment of individuals and groups to one another; that process cannot be stopped, but it can be directed by those who are conscious of the maladjustments that exist and perceive ways and means of improvement. Under such persons as leaders purposive progress may be achieved more rapidly and effectually in the near future.

READING REFERENCES

Hadley: Standards of Public Morality, pages 33-96.

Nearing: Wages in the United States, pages 93-96.

Nearing and Watson: Economics, pages 241-255, 314-320.

Vrooman: American Railway Problems, pages 1-181.

Bolen: Plain Facts as to the Trusts and the Tariff, pages 3-236.

Bogart: Economic History of the United States, pages 186-216, 305-337, 400-418.

Montgomery: Vital American Problems, pages 3-91.

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CHAPTER XXIX[ToC]

THE PEOPLE WHO WORK

218. Economic vs. Social Values.—Economic interests may receive first attention in the city, but the work that is done is of less importance than the people who work. Things may so fill the public mind that the real values of the various elements that enter into life may become distorted. A penny may be held so close to the eye as to hide the sun. Making a living may seem more important than making the most of life. Persons who are absorbed in business are liable to lose their sense of proportion between people and property; the capitalist overburdens himself with business cares until he breaks down under the nervous strain, and overworks his subordinates until they often become physical wrecks, but it is not because he personally intends to do harm. Eventually the social welfare of every class will become the supreme concern and the study of social efficiency will fill a larger place than the study of economic efficiency.

219. The Social Classes.—There is a natural line of social cleavage that has made it a customary expression to speak of the upper, the middle, and the lower classes. It is impossible to separate them sharply, for they shade into one another. Theoretically, in a democratic country like America there should be no class distinctions, but in colonial days birth and education had an acknowledged social position that did not belong to the common man, and in the nineteenth century a wealthy class came into existence that wrested supremacy from professional men and those who could rely alone on their intellectual achievements. It has never been impossible for individuals to push their way up the social path of success, but it has been increasingly difficult for a self-made man to break through into the circle of the élite. There are still young men who come out of the country without pecuniary capital but with physical strength and courage and, after years of persistent attack, conquer the citadel of place and power, but the odds are against the youth without either capital or a higher education than the high school gives. Without unusual ability and great strength of will it is impossible to rise high if one lacks capital or influential friends, but with the help of any two of these it is quite possible to gain success. Employers complain that the vast majority of persons whom they employ are lacking in energy, ambition, and ability. Important as is the possession of wealth and influence it seems to be the psychic values that ultimately determine the individual's place in American society. We shall expect, therefore, to find an upper class in society composed of some who hold their place because of the prestige that belongs to birth or property, and of others who have made their own way up because they had the necessary qualities to succeed. Below them in the social scale we shall expect to find a larger class who, because they were not consumed by ambition to excel, or because they lacked the means to achieve distinction, have come to occupy a place midway between the high and the low, to fill the numerous professional and business positions below the kings and great captains, and to hold the balance of power between the aristocracy and the proletariat. Below these, in turn, are the so-called masses, who fill the lower ranks of labor, and who are essential to the well-being of those who are reckoned above them.

220. The Worth of the Upper Class.—It is a common belief among the lowly that the people who hold a place in the upper ranks are not worthy of their lofty position, and there are many who hope to see such a general levelling as took place during the French Revolution. They are fortified in their opinion by the lavish and irresponsible way in which the wealthy use their money, and they are tantalized by the display of luxury which, if times are hard, are in aggravating contrast to the hardship and suffering of the poor. The scale of living of the millionaire cannot justify itself in the eyes of the man who finds it difficult to make both ends meet. Undoubtedly society will find it necessary some day to devise a more equitable method of distribution. But it is a mistake to suppose that most of the rich are idle parasites on society, or that their service, as well, as their wealth, could be dispensed with in the social order. In spite of the impression fostered by a sensational press that the average person of wealth devotes himself to the gaieties and dissipations of a pleasure-loving society, the truth is that after the self-centred years of callow youth are over most men and women take life seriously and only the few are idlers. If the investigator should go through the wealthy sections of the cities and suburbs, and record his observations, he would find that the men spend their days feeling the pulse of business in the down-town offices, directing the energies of thousands of individuals, keeping open the arteries of trade, using as productive capital the wealth that they count their own, making possible the economic activity and the very existence of the persons who find fault with their worthlessness. He would find the women in the nature of the case less occupied with public affairs, but interested and enlisted in all sorts of good enterprises, and, while often wasteful of time and money, bearing a part increasingly in the promotion of social reforms by active participation and by generous contributions. The immense gains that have come to society through philanthropy and social organization, as well as through the channels of industry, would have been impossible without the sympathetic activity of the so-called upper class.

221. Who Belong to the City Aristocracy?—Most of those who belong to the upper class are native Americans. They may not be far removed from European ancestry, but for themselves they have had the advantage of a rearing in American ways in the home, the school, and society at large. They are both city and country bred. The country boy has the advantage of physical strength and better manual training, but he often lacks intellectual development, and usually has little capital to start with. The city youth knows the city ways and possesses the asset of acquaintances and friendships, if not of capital, in the place where he expects to make a living. He is helped to success if the way is prepared for him by relatives who have attained place and property, but he is as often cursed by having more money and more liberty than is good for him, while still in his irresponsible years. No place is secure until the young man has proved his personal worth, whether he is from the city or the country and has come up out of poverty or from a home of wealth.

222. Sources of Wealth.—The large majority of persons of wealth have won or inherited their property from the economic industries of manufacturing, trade, commerce, and transportation, or real estate. Certain individuals have been fortunate in their mining or public-service investments; others make a large income as corporation officials, lawyers, physicians, engineers, and architects, but most of them have attained their success as capitalists, and they are able to maintain a position of prominence and ease because they use rather than hoard their wealth. It is easy to underestimate the usefulness of human beings who finance the world of industry, and in estimating the returns that are due to members of the various social classes this form of public service that is so essential to the prosperity of all must receive recognition.

223. How They Live.—Unfortunately, the possession of money furnishes a constant temptation to self-indulgence which, if carried far, is destructive of personal health and character, weakens family affection, and threatens the solidarity of society. The dwelling-house is costly and the furnishings are expensive. A retinue of servants performs many useless functions in the operation of the establishment. Ostentation often carried to the point of vulgarity marks habits of speech, of dress, and of conduct both within and outside of the home. Every member of the family has his own friends and interests and usually his own share of the family allowance. The adults of the family are unreasonably busy with social functions that are not worth their up-keep; the children are coddled and supplied with predigested culture in schools that cater to the trade, and if they are not spoiled in the process of preparation go on to college as a form of social recreation. There are exceptions, of course, to this manner of life, but those who follow it constitute a distinct type and by their manner of living exert a disintegrating influence in American society.

224. The Middle Class.—The middle class is not so distinct a stratum of society as are the upper and lower classes. It includes the bulk of the population in the United States, and from its ranks come the teachers, ministers, physicians, lawyers, artists, musicians, authors, and statesmen; the civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers, the architects, and the scientists of every name; most of the tradesmen of the towns and the farmers of the country; office managers and agents, handicraftsmen of the better grade, and not a few of the factory workers. They are the people who maintain the Protestant churches and their enterprises, who make up a large part of the constituency of educational institutions and buy books and reviews, and who patronize the better class of entertainments and amusements. These people are too numerous to belong to any one race, and they include both city and country bred. The educated class of foreigners finds its place among them, assimilates American culture, and intermarries in the second generation. Into the middle class of the cities is absorbed the constant stream of rural immigration, except the few who rise into the upper class or fall into the lower class. In the city itself grow up thousands of boys and girls who pass through the schools and into business and home life in their native environment, and who constitute the solid stratum of urban society.

These people have not the means to make large display. They are influenced by the fashions of the upper class, sometimes are induced to applaud their poses or are hypnotized to do their bidding, but they have their own class standards, and most of them are contented to occupy their modest station. Only a minority of them own their homes, but as a class they can afford to pay a reasonable rent and to furnish their houses tastefully, to hire one or two household servants, and to live in comfort. Twenty years ago they owned bicycles and enjoyed century runs into the country on Sunday: since then some of them have been promoted to automobiles and enjoy a low-priced car as much as the wealthy appreciate their high-priced limousines. As in rural villages, so in the city they form various groups of neighbors or friends based on a common interest, and find entertainment and intellectual stimulus from such companionship. On the roster of social organizations are musical societies and bridge clubs, literary and art circles, dramatic associations, women's clubs, and men's fraternities. The people meet at dances, teas, and receptions; they mingle with others of their kind at church or theatre, and co-operate with other workers in settlements and charity organizations. They educate their children in the public schools and in increasing numbers give them the benefit of a college education.

People of the middle class are by no means debarred from passing up to a higher social grade if they have the ability or good fortune to get ahead, nor are they guaranteed a permanent place in their own native group unless they are competent to keep their footing. There is no surety to keep the independent tradesman from failing in business or the careless youth from falling into intemperate or vicious habits; many hazards must be crossed and hindrances overcome before an assured position is secured in the community, but the opportunities are far better than for the handicapped strugglers below.

225. Bonds of Union Between Classes.—Though the middle class is distinct from the aristocracy of society in America, it is not shut off from association with it. The same is true in a less degree of the lowest class. Party lines are vertical, not horizontal. Religious and intellectual lines are only less so. The politician cannot afford to ignore a single vote, and the working man's counts as much as the plutocrat's. There are few churches that do not have representatives of all classes, from the gilded pew-holder to the workman with dingy hands who sits under the gallery. The school is no respecter of class lines. The store, the street-car, and the railroad are all common property, where one jostles another without regard to class. Friendship oversteps all boundaries, even of race and creed.

226. The Lower Class.—The lower class consists of those who are dependent upon others for the opportunity to work or for the charity that keeps them alive. They commonly lack initiative and ambition; if they have those qualities they are hindered by their environment from ever getting ahead. Sometimes they make an attempt in a small way to carry on trade on their own resources, but they seldom win success. Their skill as factory operatives is not so great as to gain for them a good wage, and when business is slack they are the first to be laid off the pay-roll, and they help to swell the ranks of the unemployed. Because of the American system of compulsory education they are not absolutely illiterate, but their ability is small; they leave school early, and what little education they have does not help them to earn a living. They do not usually choose an occupation, but they follow the line of least resistance, taking the first job that offers, and often finding later that they never can hope for advancement in it. Frequently they are the victims of weak will and inherited tendencies that lead to intemperance, vice, and crime. Thousands of them are living in the unwholesome tenements that lack comfort and attractiveness. There is no inducement to cultivate good habits, and no possibility of keeping the children free from moral and physical contamination. As a class they are continually on the edge of poverty and often submerged in it. They know what it is to feel the pinch of hunger, to shiver before the blasts of winter, and to look upon coal and ice as luxuries. They become discouraged from the struggle as they grow older, often get to be chronically dependent on charity, and not infrequently fall at last into a pauper's grave.

227. The Degenerate American.—Many of these people are Americans, swarms of them are foreigners who have come here to better their fortunes and have been disappointed or, finding the difficulties more than they anticipated, have settled down fairly contented in the city. Many persons think that it is the alien immigrant who causes the increase in intemperance and crime that has been characteristic of city life, but statistics lay much of the guilt upon the degenerate American. There are poor whites in the cities as there are in the South country. The riffraff drifts to town from the country as the Roman proletariat gravitated to the capital in the days of decadence. A great many young persons who enter the city with high hopes of making a fortune fail to get a foothold or gradually lose their grip and are swept along in the current of the city's débris. Illness, accident, and repeated failure are all causes of degeneration.

Along with misfortune belongs misconduct. Those causes which produce poverty like intemperance, idleness, and ignorance, are productive of degeneracy, also. They render the individual unfit to meet the responsibilities of life, and tend not only to incompetence but also to sensuality and even crime. Added to the various physical causes are such psychical influences as contact with degraded minds or with base literature or art, loss of religious faith, and loss of self-confidence as to one's ability to succeed.

Personal degeneracy tends to perpetuate itself in the family. Drunken, depraved, or feeble-minded parents usually produce children with the same inheritances or tendencies; family quarrelling and an utter absence of moral training do not foster the development of character. A slum environment in the city strengthens the evil tendencies of such a home, as it counterbalances the good effects of a wholesome home environment. Mental and moral degeneracy is always present in society, and if unchecked spreads widely; physical degeneracy is so common as to be alarming, resulting in dangerous forms of disease, imbecility, and insanity. Society is waking to the need of protecting itself against degeneracy in all its forms, and of cutting out the roots of the evil from the social body.

READING REFERENCES

Nearing: Social Religion, pages 104-157.

Commons: "Is Class Conflict in America Growing?" art. in American Journal of Sociology, 13: 756-783.

Henderson: Social Elements, pages 276-283.

Nearing and Watson: Economics, pages 185-193.

Warner: American Charities, pages 59-117, 276-292.

Patten: Social Basis of Religion, pages 107-133.

Blackmar and Gillin: Outlines of Sociology, pages 499-512.

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CHAPTER XXX[ToC]

THE IMMIGRANT

228. The Immigrant Problem.—An increasing proportion of the city's population is foreign born or of foreign parentage. For a hundred years America has been the goal of the European peasant's ambition, the magnet that has drawn him from interior hamlet and ocean port. Migration has been one of the mighty forces that have been reshaping society. The American people are being altered by it, and it is a question whether America will maintain its national characteristics if the volume of immigration continues unchecked. Europe has been deeply affected, and the people who constitute the migrating mass have been changed most of all. And the end is not yet.

The immigrant constitutes one of the problems of society. Never has there been in history such a race movement as that which has added to one nation a population of more than twenty million in a half century. It is a problem that affects the welfare of races and continents outside of America, as well as here, and that affects millions yet unborn, and millions more who might have been born were it not for the unfavorable changes that have taken place because of the shift in population. It is a problem that has to do with all phases of group life—its economic, educational, political, moral, and religious interests. It is a problem that demands the united wisdom of all who care for the welfare of humanity in the days to come. The heart of the problem is first whether the immigrant shall be permitted to crowd into this country unhindered, or whether sterner barriers shall be placed in the way of the increasing multitude; secondly, if restrictions are decided upon what shall be their nature, and whose interests shall be considered first—those of the immigrant, of the countries involved, or of world progress as a whole?

The problem can be approached best by considering (1) the history of immigration, (2) the present facts about immigration, (3) the tendencies and effects of immigration. Migrations have occurred everywhere in history, and they are progressing in these days in other countries besides the United States. Canada is adding thousands every year, parts of South America are already German or Italian because of immigration, in lesser numbers emigrants are going to the colonies that the European nations, especially the English, have located all over the world. European immigration to North America has been so prolonged and abundant that it constitutes the particular phenomenon that most deserves attention. Other nations have fought wars to secure additional territory for their people; the immigrant occupation of America has been a peaceful conquest.

229. The Irish.—Although the early occupation of this continent was by immigration from Europe, after the Revolution the increase of population was almost entirely by natural growth. Large families were the rule and a hardy people was rapidly gaining the mastery of the eastern part of the continent. It was not until 1820 that the new immigration became noticeable and the government took legislative action to regulate it (1819). Between 1840 and 1880 three distinct waves of immigration broke on American shores. The first was Irish. The Irish peasants were starving from a potato famine that extended over several years in the forties, and they poured by the thousand into America, the women becoming domestic servants and the men the unskilled laborers that were needed in the construction camps. They built roads, dug canals, and laid the first railways. Complaint was made that they lowered the standards of wages and of living, that their intemperate, improvident ways tended to complicate the problem of poverty, and that their Catholic religion made them dangerous, but they continued to come until the movement reached its climax, in 1851, when 272,000 passed through the gates of the Atlantic ports. The Irish-American has become an important element of the population, especially in the Eastern cities, and has shown special aptitude for politics and business.

230. Germans and Scandinavians.—The Irishman was followed by the German. He was attracted by-the rich agricultural lands of the Middle West and the opportunities for education and trade in the towns and cities. German political agitators who had failed to propagate democracy in the revolutionary days of 1848 made their way to a place where they could mould the German-American ideas. While the Irish settled down in the seaboard towns, the Germans went West, and constituted one of the solid groups that was to build the future cosmopolitan nation. The German was followed by the Scandinavian. The people of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were increasing in number, but their rough, cold country could not support them all. As the Norsemen took to the sea in the ninth century, so the Scandinavian did in the nineteenth, but this time in a peaceful migration toward the setting sun. They began coming soon after the Civil War, and by 1882 they numbered thirteen per cent of the total immigration. They were a specially valuable asset, for they were industrious agriculturists and occupied the valuable but unused acres of the Northwest, where they planted the wheat belt of the United States, learned American ways and founded American institutions, and have become one of the best strains in the American blood.

231. The New Immigrants.—If the United States could have continued to receive mainly such people as these from northern Europe, there would be little cause to complain of the volume of immigration, but since 1880 the tide has been setting in from southern and eastern Europe and even from Asia, bringing in large numbers of persons who are not of allied stock, have been little educated, and do not understand or fully sympathize with American principles and ideals, and for the most part are unskilled workmen. These have come in such enormous numbers as to constitute a real menace and to compel attention.

TABLE OF IMMIGRATION FOR THE YEAR ENDING JUNE 30, 1914

(Races numbering less than 10,000 each are not included)

South Italians	251,612
Jews	138,051
Poles	122,657
Germans	79,871
English	51,746
Greeks	45,881
Russians	44,957
North Italians	44,802
Hungarians	44,538
Croatians and Slovenians	37,284
Ruthenians	36,727
Scandinavians	36,053
Irish	33,898
Slovaks	25,819
Roumanians	24,070
Lithuanians	21,584
Scotch	18,997
French	18,166
Bulgarians, Servians, and Montenegrins	15,084
Mexicans	13,089
Finns	12,805
Dutch and Flemings	12,566
Spanish	11,064

232. Italians and Slavs.—Most numerous of these are the Italians. At home they feel the pressure of population, the pinch of small income, and heavy taxation. Here it costs less to be a citizen and there are more opportunities for a livelihood. Gangs of Italian laborers have taken the place of the Irish. Italians have established themselves in the small trades, and some of them find a place in the factory. Two-thirds of them are from the country, and they find opportunity to use their agricultural knowledge as farm laborers. In California and Louisiana they have established settlements of their own, and in the East they make a foreign fringe on the outskirts of suburban towns. North Italy is more progressive than the south and the qualities of the people are of higher grade, but the bulk of emigration is from the region of Naples and Sicily. Among the southern Italians the percentage of illiteracy is high, they have the reputation of being slippery in business relations, and not a few anarchists and criminals are found among them. It is not reasonable to expect that these people will measure up to the level of the steady, reliable, and hard-working American or north European, especially as large numbers of them are birds of passage spending the winter in Italy or going home for a time when business in America is depressed. Yet the great majority of those who settle here are peaceable, ambitious, and hard-working men and women.

Alongside the Italian is the Slav. There are so many varieties of him that he is confusing. He comes from the various provinces of Russia, from the conglomerate empire of Austro-Hungary, and from the Balkan states. In physique he is sturdier than the Italian and mentally he is less excitable and nervous, but he drinks heavily and is often murderous when not sober. The Slav has come to America to find a place in the sun. At home he has suffered from political oppression and poverty; he has had little education of body or mind; he is subject to his primitive impulses as the west European long ago ceased to be. It is not easy for America to assimilate large numbers of such backward peoples, but the Slav is coming at the rate of three hundred thousand a year. The Slav is depended upon for the hard labor of mine and foundry, of sugar and oil refineries, and of meat-packing establishments. Hundreds and thousands are in the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and West Virginia. The Bohemians and Poles more frequently than the others bring their families with them, and to some extent settle in the rural districts, but the bulk of the Slavs are men who herd in congested boarding-houses, move frequently from one industrial centre to another, and naturally are very slow to become assimilated.

233. The Jews.—Of all the races that have found asylum in America none have felt abroad the heavy hand of oppression more than the Jew. He has been the world's outcast through nineteen centuries, but in America he has found freedom to expand. One-fifth of all the Jews are already in America, and the rate of immigration is not far from 140,000 a year. The immigrant Jews are of different grades, some are educated and well-to-do, but the masses are poor, and the most recent immigrants have low ideals of living. Few of those who come settle in the country districts; the large majority herd in the city tenements and engage in small trades and manufacturing. Jewish masters are unmerciful as sweaters, unprincipled as landlords, and disreputable as white slavers, but no man rises above limitations that others have set for him like the Jew, and with ambition, ability, and persistence the race is pushing its way to the front. The young people are eager for an education, and are often among the keenest pupils in their classes. Later they make their mark in the professions as well as in business. The Jew has found a new Canaan in the West.

234. The Lesser Peoples.—Besides these great groups that constitute the bulk of the incoming millions, there are representatives from all the nations and tribes of Europe. All parts of Great Britain have sent their people, and from Canada so many have come as almost to impoverish certain sections. French-Canadians are numerous in the mill cities of New England. From the Netherlands there has always been a small contingent. Portugal has sent islanders from the Azores and Cape Verde. The Finns are here, the Lithuanians from Russia, the Magyars from Hungary. The Greeks are pouring in from their sunny hills and valleys; they rival the Italians in the fruit trade, and monopolize the bootblack industry in certain cities. With the twentieth century have come the Turks and their Asiatic subjects, the Syrians and the Armenians. All these peoples have race peculiarities, prejudices, and superstitions. Most of their members belong in the lower grades of society and their coming is a distinct danger to the nation's future. There can be no question, of course, that individuals among them possess ability and even talent, and that certain groups like those from Great Britain and the Netherlands are exceptions to the general rule, but there is a strong conviction among social workers and students that those who are here should be assimilated before many more arrive. Definite measures are advocated by which it is expected that the government or private agencies may be able to make over these latest aliens into reputable, useful American citizens.

235. Public Attitude toward Immigration.—Although interest in national and immigrant welfare is far less keen than it well might be, the tremendous consequences of the wide-spread movement have not passed unnoticed. Wage-earners already here have felt the effects of low-grade competition and have clamored for restrictive legislation. On race rather than economic grounds Asiatics have been excluded except for the few already here. Federal regulation has been increased with reference to all immigrant traffic. This has been based increasingly on investigation by private effort and government commission, and governments and churches have established bureaus on immigration. Aid associations maintain agents to safeguard the newcomer from exploitation, both on the journey and in port. From all these sources a body of information has been gathered that throws light on the causes and effects of immigration.

236. Causes and Effects.—The primary cause is industrial. The desire of the people to improve their economic and social condition is the compelling motive that drives them, in spite of homesickness and ignorance, to venture into an unknown country and to face dangers and difficulties that could not be foreseen. Three out of four who come are males, pioneers oftentimes of a family that looks forward to a larger migration later on. Friends on this side encourage others and commonly supply the necessary funds. Eighty per cent of all who come into Massachusetts make the venture in hope of finding better industrial conditions or to join relatives or friends. In some countries, like Russia, religious and political oppression are expelling causes, and the military service required by the European Powers drives young men away. It has been demonstrated that forty per cent of the immigration is not permanent, but that for various reasons individuals return for a season, some permanently.

Immigration has its good and bad effects. There are certain good qualities in many of the immigrant strains that are valuable to American character, and it cannot be denied that the exploitation of national resources and the execution of public works could not have been accomplished so rapidly without the immigrant. But the bad effects furnish a problem that is not easily solved. Immigrants come now in such large numbers that they tend to form alien groups of increasing proportions in the midst of the great cities. There is danger that the city will become a collection of districts—little Italy, little Hungary, and little Syria—and the sense of civic unity be destroyed. Even more significant is the high birth-rate of the foreigner. Statistics show that with the greater birth-rate of the immigrants there is a corresponding decline in the native birth-rate, so that the alien is supplanting the native American stock. Along with race degeneracy goes lack of industrial skill and declining wages, for the foreigner is ignorant, often unorganized, and willing to work and live under worse conditions than the native American. Among the disastrous social effects are increasing poverty and crime, lack of sanitation, and an increase of diseases that thrive in filth. Illiteracy and slow mentality lower the general level of intelligence. Lack of training in democracy renders the average immigrant a poor citizen, though some State laws give him the ballot without delay. In morals and religion there is more loss than gain by immigration. American liberty tends to become license, scores of thousands lose all interest in the church, and moral restraint is thrown off with the ecclesiastical yoke. Plainly when the immigrant population is predominant in a great city the problem of immigration becomes vital not only to the local municipality but also to the nation, which is fast becoming urban.

237. Americanizing the Alien.—After all is said, the immigrant problem is not insoluble. There is much in the situation to make one optimistic. Thus far the native stock has been able to survive and to give its best to the newcomer. The immigrant himself has no desire to destroy American institutions. He comes longing to share in their benefits. America is to him an Eldorado, a promised land flowing with milk and honey. His children, through the schools and other contacts, learn the language that his tongue is slow to acquire, and absorb the ideas and ideals that are typically American. After all, it is the spirit rather than the form of the institutions that make them valuable. The upper-class American, who is too indifferent to go to the polls on election day, is less patriotic and more harmful to American institutions than the Italian who is too ignorant to vote, but would die on the battle-field for the defense of his adopted country. Many agencies are at work to help the alien adjust himself to American ways and to make him into a good citizen. In the last resort the Americanization of the foreigner rests with the attitude of the native American toward him rather than with the immigrant himself.

READING REFERENCES

Ross: The Old World in the New, pages 24-304.

Fairchild: Immigration, pages 213-368.

Commons: Races and Immigrants in America, pages 198-238.

Roberts: The New Immigration.

Jenks and Lauck: Immigration.

Woods: Americans in Process.

Willis: "Findings of the Immigration Commission," art. in The Survey, 25: 571-578.

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CHAPTER XXXI[ToC]

HOW THE WORKING PEOPLE LIVE

238. In Europe.—A large proportion of the immigrants from Europe have been peasants who have come out of rural villages to find a home in the barracks of American cities. In the Old World they have lived in houses that lacked comfort and convenience; they have worked hard through a long day for small returns; and a government less liberal and more burdened than the United States has mulcted them of much of their small income by heavy taxes. Young men have lost two or three years in compulsory military training, and their absence has kept the women in the fields. From the barracks men often return with the stigma of disease upon them, which, added to the common social evils of intemperance and careless sex relations, keeps moral standards low. Thousands of them are illiterate, few of them have time for recreation, and those who do understand little of its possibilities. Religion is largely a matter of inherited superstition, and as a superior force in life is quite lacking. To people of this sort comes the vision of a land where government is democratic, military conscription is unknown, wages are high, and there is unlimited opportunity to get ahead. Encouraged by agents of interested parties, many a man accumulates or borrows enough money to pay his passage and to get by the immigration officer on the American side, and faces westward with high hope of bettering his condition.

239. In America.—On the pier in America he is met by a friend or finds his way by force of gravity into the immigrant district of the city. Usually unmarried, he is glad to find a boarding place with a compatriot, who cheerfully admits him to a share of his small tenement, because he will help to pay the rent. With assistance he finds a job and within a week regards himself as an American. Later if it seems worth while he will take steps to become a citizen, but recently immigrants are less disposed to do this than formerly. Many immigrants do not find their new home in the port of landing; they are booked through to interior points or locate in a manufacturing town within comfortable reach of the great city; but they find a place in the midst of conditions that are not far different. Unskilled Italians commonly join construction gangs, and for weeks at a time make their home in a temporary shack which quickly becomes unsanitary. Wherever the immigrant goes he tends to form foreign colonies and to reproduce the low standards of living to which he has been accustomed. If he could be introduced to better habits and surrounded with improved conditions from the moment of his arrival he would gain much for himself, and far more speedily would become assimilated into an American; as it is, he is introducing foreign elements on a large scale into a city life that is overburdened with problems already.

Changes in the manner of living are often for the worse. Instead of their village houses set in the midst of the open fields here, they herd like rabbits in overpopulated, unhealthy warrens, frequently sleeping in rooms continually dark and ill-ventilated. They still work for long hours, but here under conditions that breed discouragement and disease, in the sweat-shop or the dingy factory, and often in an occupation dangerous to life or limb. Though they are free from the temptations of the military quarters, they find them as numerous at the corner saloon and the brothel, and even in the overcrowded tenement itself. If they bring over their families or marry here, they can expect no better home than the tenement, unless they have the courage to get out into the country, away from all that which is familiar. Rather than do that or knowing no better way, they swarm with others of their kind in the immigrant hive.

240. Tenement House Conditions.—In New York large tenements from five to seven stories high, with three or four families on each floor, shelter many thousands of the city's workers. These are often built on lots too small to permit of air and light space between buildings. Some of them contain over a hundred individuals. Three-fourths of the population of Manhattan is in dwellings that house not less than twenty persons each. The density of population is one hundred and fifty to the acre. Twelve to eighteen dollars a month are charged for a suite of four rooms, some of them no better than dark closets. Instances can be multiplied where adults of both sexes and children are crowded into one or two rooms, where they cook, eat, and sleep, and where privacy is impossible. Thousands of children grow up unmoral, if not immoral, because their natural sense of modesty and decency has been blunted from childhood. The poorest classes live in cellars that reek with disease germs of the worst kind, and sanitary conditions are indescribable.

If these conditions were confined to the immigrant population, Americans might shrug their shoulders and dismiss the subject with disparaging remarks about the dirty foreigner, but housing conditions like these are not restricted to the immigrant, whether he be Jew or Gentile. The American working man who finds work in the factory towns is little better off. The natural desire of landlords to spend as little as possible on their property, and to get the largest possible returns, makes it very difficult for the worker to find a suitable home for his family that he can afford to pay for. Yet he must live near his work to save time and expense. Old and dilapidated houses are ready for his occupancy, but though they are often not so bad as the large tenements, with their more attractive exteriors, they are not fit dwellings for his growing family. A flat in a three-decker may be obtained at a moderate rental, but such houses are usually poorly built, of the flimsiest inflammable material, and they, too, lack privacy and modern conveniences.

241. Effects of these Conditions.—It must not be supposed that these evils have been overlooked. Building associations and private philanthropists have erected improved tenements, and have proved that the right sort of structures may be made paying investments. State and municipal governments have appointed commissions and departments on housing, fire protection has been provided, better sanitary conditions have been enforced, and hopelessly bad buildings have been destroyed. But slums grow faster than they can be improved, and the rapidly growing tenement districts need more drastic and comprehensive measures than have yet been taken. The housing problem affects the tenant first of all, and in countless instances his unwholesome environment is ruining his health, ability, and character; but it also affects the community and the nation, for persons produced by such an environment do not make good citizens. The roots of family life are destroyed, gaunt poverty and loathsome disease hold hands along dark and dirty stairways and through the halls, foul language mingles with the foul air, and drunkenness is so common as to excite no remark. Sexual impurity finds its nest amid the darkness and ill-endowed children swarm in the streets.

242. Possible Improvements.—There must be some way out of these evil conditions that is practicable and that will be permanent. Those who are interested in housing reform favor two kinds of measures—first, the prevention of building in the future the kind of houses that have become so common but so unsatisfactory, and the improvement of those already in existence; second, provision of inexpensive, attractive, and sanitary dwellings outside of the city, and cheap and rapid transit to and from the places of labor. Both of these methods are practicable either by voluntary association or State action, and both are called for by the social need of the present. There are definite principles to be observed in the redistribution of population. The principle of association calls for group life in a neighborhood, and it is as idle to think that people from the slums can be contented on isolated farms as it is to suppose that they can be converted readily into prosperous American agriculturists. Close connection with the town is indispensable. The principle of adaptation demands that the new homes shall answer to the needs of the people for whom they are provided, and that the neighborhood shall be suited to those needs. The houses will need to be enough better than those in town to offset the greater effort of travel. The principle of control demands that the new life of the people be regulated as effectively as it can be by municipal authority, and if necessary that such municipal authority be extended or State authority be localized. There are difficulties in the way of all such enterprises, but social welfare requires improvements in the way the working people live.

It is notorious that immigrants and working people generally have larger families than the well-to-do. The children of the city streets form a class of future citizens that deserve most careful attention. The problem of the tenement and the flat is especially serious, because they are the factories of human life. There the next generation is in the making, and there can be no doubt about the quality of the product if conditions continue as they are. It is important to inquire how the children live, what are their occupations and means of recreation, their moral incentives and temptations, and their opportunities for the development of personality.

243. How the Children Live.—The best way to understand how the children live is to put oneself in their place. Imagine waking in the morning in a stuffy, overcrowded room, eating a slice of bread or an onion for breakfast and looking forward to a bite for lunch and an ill-cooked evening meal, or in many cases starting out for the day without any breakfast, glad to leave the tenement for the street, and staying there throughout waking hours, when not in school, using it for playground, lunch-room, and loafing-place, and regarding it as pleasanter than home. Imagine going to school half fed and poorly clothed, sometimes the butt of a playmate's gibes because of a drunken father or a slatternly mother, required to study subjects that make no appeal to the child and in a language that is not native, and then back to the street, perhaps to sell papers until far into the night, or to run at the beck and call of the public as a messenger boy. Many a child, in spite of the public opposition to child labor, is put to work to help support the family, and department store and bootblack parlor are conspicuous among their places of occupation. Mills and factories employ them for special kinds of labor, and States are lax in the enforcement of child-labor laws after they are on the statute books.

244. The Street Trades.—Employment in the street trades is very common among the children of the tenements. There are numerous opportunities to peddle fruit and small wares at a small wage; messenger and news boys are always in demand, and the bootblacking industry absorbs many of the immigrant class. By these means the family income is pieced out, sometimes wholly provided, but the ill effects of such child labor are disturbing to the peace of mind of the well-wishers of children. Street labor works physical injury from exposure to inclement weather and to accident, from too great fatigue, and from irregular habits of eating and sleeping. It provokes resort to stimulants and sows the seeds of disease, vice, and petty crime. Moral deterioration follows from the bad habits formed, from the encouragement to lawbreaking and independence of parental authority, and from the evil environment of the people and places with which they come into contact. Children are susceptible to the influence of their elders, and easily form attachments for those who treat them well. Saloons and disorderly houses are their patrons, and when still young the children learn to imitate those whom they see and hear. Even for the children who do not work, the street has its influence for evil. The street was intended as a means of transit, not for trade or play, but it is the most convenient place for games and social enjoyments of all sorts. The little people become familiar with profane and obscene language, with quarrelling and dishonesty, and even with more serious crime, and no intellectual education in the schoolroom can counteract the moral lessons of the street.

245. Playgrounds.—Various experiments for keeping children off the street have been proposed and tried. Vacation schools in the summer provide interesting occupations and talks for those who can be induced to attend; their success is assured, but they reach only a small part of the children. Gymnasiums in the winter attract others of the older class, but the most useful experiments are equipped and supervised playgrounds. For the small children sand piles have met the desire for occupation, and kindergarten games have satisfied the instinct for association. The primitive nature of the child demanded change, and one kind of game after another was added for those of different ages. Swings, climbing ladders, and poles are always popular, and for the older boys opportunities for ball playing, skating, and coasting. All these activities must be under control. The characteristics of children on the playground are the same as those of their elders in society. Authority and instruction are as necessary as in school; indeed, playgrounds are a supplement to the indoor education of American children.

246. The City School.—The school is expected to be the foster-mother of every American child, whether native or adopted. It is expected to take the children from the avenue and the slum, those with the best influences of heredity and environment, and those with the worst, those who are in good health and those who are never well, and putting them all through the same intellectual process, to turn out a finished product of boys and girls qualified for American citizenship. It is an unreasonable expectation, and the American school falls far short of meeting its responsibility. It often has to work with the poorest kind of material, sometimes it has to feed the pupil before his mental powers can get to work. It has to see that the physical organs function properly before it can get satisfactory intellectual results. The school is the victim of an educational system that was made to fit other conditions than those of the present-day city; the whole system needs reconstructing, but the management is conservative, ignorant, or parsimonious in many cases, or too radical and given to fads and experiments. Yet, in spite of all its faults and delinquencies, the public schools of the city are the hope of the future.

The school is the melting-pot of the city's youth. It is the training-school of municipal society. In the absence of family training it provides the social education that is necessary to equip the child for life. It accustoms him to an orderly group life and establishes relations with others of similar age from other streets or neighborhoods than those with which he is familiar. It teaches him how intelligent public opinion is formed, and brings him within the circle of larger interests than those with which he is naturally connected. He learns how to accommodate himself to the group rather than to fight or worm his way through for a desired end, as is the method of the street. He learns good morals and good manners. He finds out that there are better ways of expressing his ideas than in the slang of the alley, and in time he gains an understanding of a social leadership that depends on mental and moral superiority instead of physical strength or agility. As he grows older he becomes acquainted with the worth of established institutions, and his hand is no longer against every man and every man's hand against him. He likes to share in the social activities that occur as by-products of the school—the musical and dramatic entertainments, the athletic contests, and the debating and oratorical rivalries. By degrees he becomes aware that he is a responsible member of society, that he is an individual unit in a great aggregation of busy people doing the work of the world, and that the school is given him to make it possible for him to play well his part in the activities of the city and nation to which he belongs.

READING REFERENCES

Veiller: Housing Reform, pages 3-46.

Riis: How the Other Half Lives.

Clopper: Child Labor in the City Streets.

Martin: "Exhibit of Congestion," art. in The Survey,20: 27-39.

Goodyear: "Household Budgets of the Poor," art. in Charities, 16: 191-197.

"The Pittsburgh Survey," arts, in The Survey, vol. 21.

Lee: Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, pages 109-184.

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CHAPTER XXXII[ToC]

THE DIVERSIONS OF THE WORKING PEOPLE

247. The Demand for Recreation.—The natural instinct for recreation is felt by the working people in common with persons of every class. They cannot afford to spend on the grand scale of those who patronize the best theatres and concerts, nor can they relax all summer at mountains or seashore, or play golf in the winter at Pinehurst or Palm Beach. They get their pleasures in a less expensive way in the parks or at the beach resorts in the summer, and at the "movies," dance-halls, and cheap theatres in the winter. They have little money to spend, but they get more real enjoyment out of a dime or a quarter than thousands of dollars give to some society buds and millionaires who are surfeited with pleasure. Recreation to the working people is not an occupation but a diversion. Their occupation is usually strenuous enough to furnish an appetite for entertainment, and they are not particular as to its character, though the more piquant it is the greater is the satisfaction. Craving for excitement and a stimulus that will restore their depleted energies, they flock into the dance-halls and the saloons, where they find the temporary satisfaction that they wanted, but where they are tempted to lose the control that civilization has put upon the primitive passions and to let the primitive instincts have their sway.

It is a prerogative of childhood to be active. If activity is one of the striking characteristics of all social life, it is especially so of child life. The country child has all out-of-doors for the scope of his energies, the city boy and girl are cramped by the tenement and the narrow street, with occasional resort to a small park. It requires ingenuity to devise methods of diversion in such small areas, but necessity is the mother of invention, and the children of the city become expert in outwitting those whose business it is to keep them within bounds. This kind of education has a smack of practicality in that it sharpens the wits for the struggle for existence that makes up much of the experience of city folk, but it also tends to develop a crookedness in mental and moral habits through the constant effort to get ahead of the agents of social control.

248. Street Games.—To understand how the youth of the city get their diversions it is well to examine a cross-section of city life on Saturday afternoon or Sunday. Family quarters are crowded. Tenements and apartments have little spare space inside or outside. Children find it decidedly irksome indoors and naturally gravitate to the street, to the relief of their elders and their own satisfaction. There they quickly find associates and proceed to give expression to their restless spirits. It is the child's nature to play, and he uses all his wits to find the materials and the room for sport. His ingenuity can adapt sticks and stones to a variety of uses, but the street makes a sorry substitute for a ball-field, and while the girl may content herself with the sidewalk and door-steps, the boy soon looks abroad for a more satisfying occupation. Among the gangs of city boys no diversion is more enjoyable than the game of craps, learned from the Southern negro. With a pair of dice purchased for a cent or two at the corner news-stand and a few pennies obtained by newspaper selling or petty thieving the youngster is equipped with the necessary implements for gambling, and he soon becomes adept in cleaning out the pockets of the other fellows.

249. Young People's Amusements.—Meantime the older boys and girls are seeking their diversions. At fourteen or fifteen most of them have found work in factory or store, but evenings and Sundays they, too, are looking for diversion. The girls find it attractive to walk the streets, while the boys frequent the cheap pool-room, where they find a chance to gamble and listen to the tales of the idlers who find employment as cheap thieves and hangers-on of immoral houses. From these headquarters they sally forth upon the streets to find association with the other sex, and together they give themselves up to a few hours' entertainment. A few are contented to promenade the streets, but amusement houses are cheap, and the "movies" and vaudeville shows attract the crowd. For a few dimes a couple can have a wide range of choice. If the tonic of the playhouse is not sufficient, a small fee admits to the public dance-hall, where it is easy to meet new acquaintances and to find a partner who will go to any length in the mad hunt for pleasures that will satisfy. From the dance-hall it is an easy path to the saloon and the brothel, as it is from the game of craps and the pool-room to the gambling-den and the criminal joint. It is the lack of proper means for diversion and proper oversight of places of entertainment that is increasing the vice, drunkenness, and crime that curse the lives of thousands and give to the city an evil reputation.

250. The Saloon as the Poor Man's Club.—The saloon is an institution peculiar to America, but it is the successor of a long line of public drinking houses. There were cafés among the ancients, public houses among the Anglo-Saxons, and taverns in the colonies. At such places the traveller or the working man could find social companionship along with his glass of wine or grog, and by a natural evolution the saloon became the poor man's club. It is successful as a place of business, because it caters to primitive wants and social interests in considerable variety. It is a never-failing source of supply of the strong waters that bring the good cheer of intoxication, and lull into torpid content the mind that wants to forget its worry or its misery. It is a place where conventionality is laid aside and human beings meet on the common level of convivial good-fellowship. It is the avenue to fuller enjoyment in billiard-room, at card-table, in dance-hall, and in house of assignation, but though the door is open to them there is no obligation to enter. It is first aid to the sporting fraternity, the resort of those who delight in pugilism, baseball, and the racetrack, the dispenser of athletic news of all sorts that is worth talking about. It frequently provides a free lunch, music, and games. It is the agent of the political boss who mixes neighborhood charity with the dispensing of party jobs. "The saloon is a day-school, a night-school, a vacation-school, a Sunday-school, a kindergarten, a college, a university, all in one. It runs without term ends, vacations, or holidays.... It influences the thoughts, morals, politics, social customs, and ideals of its patrons."

251. Substitutes for the Saloon.—An institution that fills a place as large as this in the social life of the American city must be given careful consideration, and cannot be impatiently dismissed as an unmitigated social evil. The saloon is unsparingly denounced as the cause of intemperance, prostitution, poverty, and crime, and much of the charge is a fair indictment, but it is easier to condemn its abuses than to find a satisfactory substitute for the social service that it performs. If the saloon must go, something must be put in its place to perform its helpful functions. It may have to be legislated out of existence in order to check intemperance, for the satisfaction of thirst is its principal attraction, and its prime function is to furnish drink, but the law can be more easily enforced if other social centres are available where the average man can feel equally at home. A model saloon managed by church people or labor unionists has been tried, but has failed to solve the problem. The Young Men's Christian Association on its present basis does not reach the class of men that frequents the saloon. Coffee-houses, reading-rooms, municipal gymnasiums, and baths, may each provide a small part, but none of these nor all together fill the gap that is left after the saloon is abolished. Attractive quarters, recreational facilities, and a spirit of democracy and freedom appear absolutely essential to any successful experiment in substitution. The patrons wish to be consulted as to what they want and what they will pay for, and unless the substitute is self-supporting it is sure to fail. The most promising experiment is an athletic club maintained by regular dues, where there is abundant room for sport and conversation, and where it is possible to secure food at a moderate price and to enjoy lively music at the same time. Under a reasonable amount of regulation such an establishment cannot become a public nuisance, and it supplies a social need on a sound economic basis.

252. Monopoly Experiments.—It has been proposed to draw the virus of the saloon by removing the element of private profit and placing the traffic under State management. The South Carolina dispensary system was such an attempt. It broke up the saloon as a social centre, for drinking was not allowed on the premises, but it did not stop the consumption of liquor, the profits went to the public, and the saloon element became a vicious element in politics. The Norwegian or Gothenburg system was another experiment of a similar sort. The liquor traffic was made respectable by the government chartering a monopoly company and by putting business on the basis not of profit, but of supplying a reasonable demand of the working class. Fifty years' trial has reduced consumption one-half, has improved the character of the saloon, and has removed the immoral annexes. The system is not compulsory, but the people must choose between it and prohibition. The main objection raised against State monopoly or charter is that the government makes an alliance with a traffic that is injurious to society, and that is contrary to the fundamental principle of government. At best it can be regarded as only a half measure toward the abolition of the trade in intoxicants.

253. The Seriousness of the Liquor Problem.—There can be no doubt that the liquor problem is one of the serious menaces to modern health, morals, and prosperity. Intemperance is closely bound up with the home, it is a regular accompaniment of unchastity, it is both the cause and the result of poverty, it vitiates much charity, it is a leading cause of imbecility and insanity, and a provocative of crime. It stands squarely in the way of social progress. It is a complex problem. It is first a personal question, affecting primarily the drinker; secondly, a social question, affecting the family and the community; thirdly, an economic and political question, affecting society at large. Consequently the solution of the problem is not simple. Different phases of the problem demand a variety of methods. Intemperance may be approached from the standpoint of disease or immorality. It may be treated in medical or legislative fashion. It may receive the special condemnation of the churches. One of the most effective arguments against it is on the basis of economic waste. The best statistics are incomplete, but the conservative estimate of a national trade journal gave as the total direct expense in 1912, $1,630,000,000. This minimum figure means eighteen dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country. The indirect cost to society of the wretchedness and crime that result from intemperance is vastly greater. United States internal-revenue statistics indicate an increased consumption in all kinds of liquor between 1900 and 1910, although the territory under prohibition was steadily enlarging.

254. Causes and Effects of the Traffic.—The leading causes of intemperance are the natural craving of appetite and the pleasure of mild intoxication, the congenial society of the saloon and the habit of treating, and the presence of the public bar on the streets of the poorer districts of the city. The mere presence of the saloon is a standing invitation to the men and boys of the neighborhood, and it grows to seem a natural part of the environment. It is far more attractive than the cheerless tenement and the tiresome street. The sedative to tired nerves and stimulant for weary muscles is there; the social customs of the past or of the homeland re-enforce the social instincts of the present and draw with the power of a magnet.

The effects of intemperance may be classified as physical losses, economic losses, and social losses. The immediate physical effect is exhilaration, but this is succeeded by lassitude and incompetency. The stimulus gained is momentary, the loss is permanent. It is well established that even small quantities of alcohol weaken the will power and benumb the mental powers. Habitual use depletes vitality and so predisposes to disease. Life-insurance policies consider the alcoholic a poor risk. The economic effect is a great preponderance of loss over gain. Somebody makes money out of the consumer, but it is not the farmer who produces the grain, the railroad company that transports it, or the government that taxes it; less than formerly is it the individual saloon-keeper, but the brewer and distiller who in increasing numbers own the local plant as well as manufacture the liquor. Neither the nation that taxes the manufacture for the sake of the internal revenue, nor the city or town that licenses the sale, gets enough to compensate for the economic loss to society. Among the specific losses to consumers are irregularity and cessation of employment, due to the unreliability of the intemperate workman and the consequent reluctance of employers to hire him—a reluctance increased since employers are made liable to compensate workmen for accidents; the poverty and destitution of the families of habitual drinkers; and the enormous waste of millions of dollars that, if not thus wasted, might have gone into the channels of legitimate trade. Finally, there is a wide-spread social effect. Intemperance ranks next to heredity as the cause of insanity. One-third to one-half of the crime in the country is charged to intemperance. Alcohol makes men quarrelsome, upsets the brain balance, and introduces the user to illegal and immoral practices. The saloon corrupts politics. It has been estimated that the liquor traffic controls two million votes, and some of it is easily purchasable. When it is remembered that the saloon is in close alliance with the gambling interest, the white-slave interest, the graft element, the political bosses, and the corrupt lobbies, it is easy to see that it constitutes a serious danger to good government throughout the nation.

255. The Temperance Crusade.—Intemperance has grown to be so wide-spread and serious an evil that a crusade against it has gathered strength through the nineteenth century. In colonial days the use of liquors was universal and excited little comment, but groups of persons here and there, especially the church people, opposed the common practice of tippling and began to organize in order to check it. It was not a total-abstinence movement at first, but was designed particularly to check the use of spirituous liquors. Temperance revivals swept over whole States, but were too emotional to be permanent. When the second half of the century began organization became more thorough and the Good Templars and Woman's Christian Temperance Union assumed the leadership of the cause. These organizations stood for total abstinence and State prohibition, and by temperance evangelism and temperance education the women especially pushed their campaign nationally and abroad. Among all temperance agencies the Anti-Saloon League organized in Ohio in 1893, and extending through the United States, has been most effective. It has federated existing agencies and enlisted organized religion. It has pushed no-license campaigns in States that had an optional law, has secured the extension of prohibition to scores of counties in the South and West, and has extended the area of State-wide prohibition, an experiment begun in Maine in 1851, until eighteen States are now under a prohibitory law (1915).

256. Remedies for Intemperance.—There is a general agreement among people who reflect upon social ills that intemperance is a curse upon large numbers of individuals and families through both its direct and indirect effects. It seems well established that even moderate drinking produces physical and mental weakness and even as a temporary stimulant is of small value. It is not so clear how to check the evil without injuring personal interests and violating the liberty which every citizen claims for himself as a right. Three methods have been proposed and tried as remedies for intemperance. The first of these is public appeal and education. Public addresses in which arguments are presented and an appeal made to the emotions have led to the signing of pledges, and sometimes to the control of elections, but they have to be repeated frequently to keep the individual who is moved by his impulses up to the standard. Slower is education through the press and through the school, where the evil effects of alcohol are demonstrated scientifically, but it has been tried patiently, and there is continually a large output of temperance literature.

257. Regulation.—A second method that has been used extensively is regulation. It seems to many persons that the use of liquor cannot be stopped, and if it is to be manufactured and sold, it is best to regulate it by a form of license. In many of the American States the people are allowed local option and vote periodically, whether they will permit the legal manufacture and sale of intoxicants, or will attempt to prevent it for a time. Local option has kept a great many towns and counties "dry" for years, and it is a step toward wide-spread prohibition. It is regarded by many as a better method than a State prohibition that is ineffective. Those who oppose all licensing on principle, do so on the ground that there should be no legal recognition of that which is known to be a social evil.

258. Prohibition.—Prohibition is to most temperance advocates the master key that will unlock the door to happiness and prosperity. The enforcement of prohibition in Russia after the European war began in 1914 had very impressive results in the better conduct and enterprise of the people. Where it has been carried out effectively in the United States, the results soon appear in diminished poverty and wretchedness and in a decrease of vice and crime. The legitimacy of this method is recognized even by liquor manufacturers, and they are willing to spend millions of dollars to prevent national prohibition, realizing that though it would not destroy their business it would greatly lessen the profits. The prohibition policy has bitter enemies among some who are not personally interested in the business. They think it is too drastic and call attention to the sociological principle that prohibitions are a primitive method of social control, but the trend of public opinion is strongly against them on the ground that prohibitions are necessary in an imperfect human society. Government increases its regulation of business of all kinds, and the police their regulation of individuals. The failure of half-way measures has added to the conviction that prohibition rigidly enforced is likely to be the only effective method for the solution of the liquor problem.

READING REFERENCES

Stelzle: The Workingman and Social Problems, pages 21-50.

Moore: "Social Value of the Saloon," art. in American Journal of Sociology, 3: 1-12.

Melendy: "The Saloon in Chicago," art. in American Journal of Sociology, 6: 289-306, 433-464.

Calkins: Substitutes for the Saloon. Regulation of the Liquor Traffic (American Academy), pages 1-127.

Peabody: The Liquor Problem: A Summary.

Grant: "Children's Street Games," art. in The Survey, 23: 232-236.

Partridge: The Psychology of Intemperance, pages 222-239.

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CHAPTER XXXIII[ToC]

CRIME AND ITS CURE

259. The Problem of Crime.—Habitual self-indulgence is at odds with the idea of social control. The man who resents interference with his diversions and pleasures is disposed to defy law, and if he feels that society is not treating him properly he is liable to become a lawbreaker. This is one of the reasons for the prevalence of crime, which on the whole increases rather than diminishes, and is a factor of disturbance in city life. Statistics in the United States show that in thirty years, from 1880 to 1910, the criminal population increased relative to population by one-third. This is only partly due to immigration, nor is it mainly because a large majority of criminals escape punishment. Two facts are to be kept constantly in mind: (1) Crime depends upon certain subjective and objective elements, and tends to increase or decrease without much regard to police protection. (2) As long as there are persons whose habits and character predispose them to crime, as long as there are social inequalities and wants that provoke to criminal acts, and as long as there are attractive or easy victims, so long will thieving and arson, rape and murder take place.

The problem of crime is not a simple one. The individual and his family and his social environment are all involved and changes in economic conditions affect the amount of crime. The task of the social reformer is to determine the causes of crime and to apply measures of reform and prevention. The science of the phenomena of crime is called criminology, that of punishment is named penology.

260. Its Causes.—If there is to be any effective prevention of crime there is needed a clearer understanding of its causes. Criminologists are not agreed about these; one school emphasizes physical abnormalities as characteristic of the criminal, another considers environment the controlling influence. The removal of physical defect has repeatedly made an antisocial person normal in his conduct, and it seems plain, especially from the investigations of European criminologists, that certain individuals are born with a predisposition to crime, like the alcoholic inheriting a weak will, or with insane or epileptic tendencies that may lead early to criminal conduct; but it is not yet proven that a majority of offenders are hereditary perverts. A stronger reason for crime is the unsatisfied desire or the uncontrolled impulse that drives a man to take by force that to which he has no lawful claim. This desire is strengthened by the social conditions of the present. In all grades of society there are individuals who resort to all sorts of means to get money and pleasure, and those who are brought up without moral and social training, and who feel an inclination to disregard the interests of others are ready to justify themselves by illegal examples in high life. Given a tenement home, the streets for a playground, the saloon as a social centre, hard, unpleasant, and poorly paid labor, a yellow press, and a prevailing spirit of envy and hatred for the rich, and it is not difficult to manufacture any amount of crime.

261. Special Reasons for Crime.—Certain special circumstances have tended to encourage crime within the last few generations. The freedom and natural roughness of frontier life gave an opportunity for lawlessness and appealed to those who are scarcely to be reckoned as friends of society. In the mining and lumber camps gambling and drinking were common, and robbery and murder not infrequent. The American Civil War, like every war, stimulated the elemental passions and nourished criminal tendencies. Human life and rights were cheapened. The brute in man was evoked when it became lawful to kill and plunder. The moral effects of war are among the most lasting and the most pernicious. More recently the conditions of existence in the cities have generated crime and are certain to continue to do so as long as slums exist.

The liberty that is characteristic of America easily becomes license, especially if restraint has been thrown off suddenly, as in the case of the immigrant, or of the country youth arriving in the city for the first time and dazzled by the opportunities of his new freedom or with a grudge against society because it has not been hospitable to him. The amount of crime is increased also by the constant increase of legislation. The social regulations that are necessary in the city tend to become confused with the more serious violations of the moral code, and because the first are frequently broken with impunity acts of crime seem less iniquitous. All these reasons help to explain the increase of crime in the cities. It is worth noticing that the blame for it is not to be placed on the immigrant. In spite of his misunderstanding of American law and custom, his overcrowding in houses and streets, his ill-treatment economically and socially, and his common disappointment and discouragement because his dreams of wealth and progress have not materialized, the immigrant as a rule is law-abiding when sober and is less responsible for crime than the degenerate American. It is important to remember that there is a constant inflow of undesirable elements of American population into the cities, as well as an influx of aliens from Europe. The proletariat is not all foreign.

262. Measures of Prevention.—Crime calls for prevention and punishment. Improvements in both are taking place. Various methods of prevention are being proposed and these should be considered systematically. The first step is to prevent the reproduction of the bad. It has even been proposed to take away the life of all who are regarded as hopeless delinquents. Less severe but still radical is the proposal, actually in practice in several States, to sterilize such persons as idiots, rapists, and confirmed criminals. The same end demanded by eugenics may be accomplished by segregating in life confinement all but the occasional criminals. A second step is the right training of children by the improvement home conditions, to include pensioning the mother if necessary, that she may hold the family together and bring the children up properly. The school helps to train the children, but industrial training is needed to take the place of the street trades.

A third step is provision for specific moral and religious education. Many persons think that however good may be the moral influence of a school, there is need of supplementary instruction in the home and the church. In the school itself character study in history and literature helps, and attention to the noble deeds in current life; the introduction of forms of self-government and the study of the life and organization of society are also useful; but some way should be devised for the definite training of children in social and moral principles that will act as an antidote to antisocial tendencies. Experiments have been tried in the affiliation of church and school, and it has been urged that the State should appropriate money for religious training in the church, but the objection is made that such procedure is contrary to the American principle of the separation of church and state. The need of such education awaits a satisfactory solution.

263. The Big Brother Idea.—The most hopeful method of prevention is to provide a friend for the human being who needs safeguarding. Many a grown person needs this help, but especially the boy who is often tempted to go wrong. The Big Brother movement, starting in New York in 1905, befriended more than five thousand boys in six years, and branches were formed in cities all over the country. In Europe the minister is often made a probation officer by the state, to see that the boy or youth keeps straight. In this country through the agency of court or charitable society in some cities each boy in need has his special adviser, as each family has its friendly visitor; sometimes it is a probation officer, sometimes the judge of a juvenile court, sometimes only a charitably minded individual who loves boys. Through this friend work is found, to him difficulties are brought and intimate thoughts confided, and the boy is encouraged to grow morally strong. The immigrant, whether boy or man, often ignorant and stupid, especially needs such friendly assistance. The Boy Scout movement may be extended, or a substitute found for it, but some such organization is needed for the immigrant boy and the native American who is compelled to rely on his own resources. The fear of the law is undoubtedly a deterrent from crime, but it is inferior to the inspiration that comes from friendliness.

264. Educating Public Opinion.—One of the important preventives of crime is work—steady, well-paid, and not disagreeable work, with proper intervals of recreation; added to this a social interest to take the place of the saloon and the dance-hall. With these belong improved housing, a better police system, and cleaner politics. The education of public opinion will eventually lead to a general demand for all of these. The press has the great opportunity to mould public opinion, but in its search for news, especially of a sensational character, it discusses crime in such a way as to excite a morbid interest in its details, and sometimes in its repetition, and the newspaper rarely discusses measures of crime prevention. Many believe that a large responsibility rests upon the church to educate public opinion with regard to social obligation. They declare that the people need to be taught that certain social conditions are turning out criminals as regularly as the factory machine turns out its particular product, and then they need to be aroused in conscience until the will to prevent the evil is fixed. The minister, priest, or rabbi is summoned by the age to be both a prophet and a teacher of ways and means to a people too often unheeding and careless.

265. Theories of Punishment.—The old theory of punishment was that the state must punish the criminal in proportion to the seriousness of his crime, and that the penalty must be sufficiently severe to deter others from similar crime. This primitive theory has been giving way to the new theory of reformation. This theory is that the object of arrest and imprisonment is not merely the safety of the public during the criminal's term of imprisonment, but even more the reformation of the guilty man that he may be turned into a useful member of society. The reformatory method has been introduced with conspicuous success into a number of the American States, and is being extended until it seems likely to supplant the old theory altogether.

266. Three Elements in the Method of Reformation.—The reformatory system includes three elements that are comparatively new. The first of these is the indeterminate sentence now generally in practice in the United States. According to this principle, the sentence of a prisoner is not for a fixed period, but maximum and minimum limits are set, and the actual length of imprisonment is determined by the record the prisoner makes for himself. The second element is reformatory discipline. The whole treatment of the prisoner, his assignment to labor, his participation in mental, moral, and religious class exercises, are all designed to stimulate manhood and to work a complete reformation of character. The third element is conditional liberation, or the dismissal of the prisoner on parole. According to this method, the prisoner is freed on probation, if his record has been good, before his full term has expired, and is under obligation to report to the probation officer at stated intervals until his final discharge. If his conduct is not satisfactory he can be returned to prison at any time. This probation principle has been extended in application, so that most first offenders are not sent to a penal institution at all, but are placed on their good behavior under the watchful eye of the probation officer. Experience with the reformatory method shows that about eighty per cent of the cases turn out well. In the sifting process of the reformatory there are always a few incorrigibles who are turned over to the penitentiary, and most recidivists, or old offenders, are sentenced there directly.

267. Helping the Discharged Prisoner.—Two experiments have been tried to help the discharged prisoner and to improve the treatment of the juvenile criminal. It is a part of the reformatory system to prepare the way for a prisoner's return to society by teaching him a trade while in confinement, and finding him a place to work when he goes out, but under the old system a man was turned loose from prison with a small sum of money, to redeem himself, when he felt the timidity natural to an ex-convict and the stigma of his reputation, and in most cases took the easiest road and returned to crime. To aid him friendly societies were organized, and even now they prove necessary to get a man on his feet. The Volunteer Prison League was organized by Mrs. Ballington Booth to help in the reformation of men in prison and to aid them when they return to society, and homes have been established to give them temporary refuge. Through these efforts not a few criminals that seemed incurable have been reformed.

268. The Juvenile Court.—The juvenile court is the result of the enlightened modern policy of dealing with the criminal. It was the old custom to conduct the trial of the juvenile offender in the same way as older men were tried, and to commit them to the same prisons. They soon became hardened criminals through their associations. But experience proves that with the right treatment a majority of those who fall into crime before the age of sixteen can be redeemed to normal social conduct. Experiments with boys showed that there was a better way of trial and punishment than that which had been in vogue, and the juvenile courts that they devised have been widely adopted. The new plan is based on the principle of making friends with the boy. Personal inquiry into the conditions of his life is made before the trial, then the judge hears the case in private conference with the boy, and after consultation gives directions for his future conduct.

It is plain that the right principle of dealing with crime is to secure the reformation of the criminal and the protection of society with a minimum amount of punishment. Retaliation is no longer the accepted principle; reformation has taken its place. Fundamental to all the rest is the prevention of crime by providing for the needs of children and youth. Methods of reform and reclamation are made necessary, because youthful impulses are not gratified in a way that would be beneficial, and habits are allowed to develop that lead to antisocial practices. Society can protect itself only by providing means for comfortable living, suitable employment, wholesome recreation, and social education.

READING REFERENCES

Henderson: Cause and Cure of Crime.

Wines: Punishment and Reformation, pages 1-265.

Barrows: Reformatory System in the United States, pages 17-47.

Eliot: The Juvenile Court and the Community, pages 1-185.

Travis: The Young Malefactor, pages 100-183.

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CHAPTER XXXIV[ToC]

AGENCIES OF CONTROL

269. Characteristics of City Government.—The activities and associations of such large groups as the people who live in cities must be under social control. It is a principle of American life that the individual be permitted to direct his own energies as long as he does not interfere with the comfort and happiness of others, and in the country there is a large measure of freedom, but in the close contacts of city life constraint has to be in force. In contrast to the strict surveillance that is practised in certain countries, Americans, even in the cities, have seldom been watched or interfered with. The police have been guardians of peace and safety at street crossings and on the sidewalks; occasionally it has been necessary to arrest the doings of disorderly persons, to the annoyance of convivial spirits and small boys, but their functions as petty guardsmen have not given police officers great dignity in the eyes of citizens. City officials have confined their efforts to the routine affairs of their office, and have so often spent their spare time and the city's money freely for the satisfaction of their personal interests that municipal government has gained the reputation of being notoriously corrupt, and has been left to ward politicians by the better class of citizens. Nevertheless, municipal government represents the principle of control and stands in the background as the preserver of the interests of all the people.

270. The Relation of the City to the State.—The American city is almost universally a creature of the State. Town and county government were transplanted from England and naturally accompanied the settlers into the interior, but the city came as a late artificial arrangement for the better management of large aggregations of population, and the form and details of government were prescribed by State charter. The State has continued to be the guardian of the city, often to the detriment of municipal interests. If a city wishes to change the form of local administration, it must ask permission from the State Legislature, and every such question becomes entangled with State politics, and so is not likely to be judged on the merits of the question. Indeed, the whole history of city government condemns the intense partisanship that has directed the affairs of the city in its own interest when the real interests of all the people irrespective of party should have been cared for with business efficiency.

271. Functions of the City Government.—Among the recognized functions of the city government is, first, the normal function of operation. This includes the activity of the various municipal departments like the maintenance of streets, the prosecution of various public works, and the care of health by inspection and sanitation. Secondly, there are the regulative and reformatory functions, which make it necessary to organize and maintain a police and judicial force and to provide the necessary places of detention and punishment. Thirdly, there are educational and recreational functions represented by schools, public libraries, parks, and playgrounds. The tendency is for the city government to extend its functions in order to promote the various interests of its citizens. It is demanded that the city provide musical entertainments, theatres, and athletic grounds, that it open the schools as social centres and equip them for that purpose, that it beautify itself with the most approved adornments for twentieth-century cities; in short, that it regard itself as the agent of every kind of social welfare at whatever cost. Obviously, this programme involves the city in large expense, and there is a limit to the taxation and bonded indebtedness to which it can resort, but better financial management would save much waste and make larger funds available for social purposes without the necessity of raising large additional sums.

272. How the Regulative Function Works.—Doubtless it will be always true that the regulative function in its largest sense will be the main business of the city government. The interests of individuals clash. The self-interest of one often runs counter to the interests of another, and the city government is their mediator. At every turn one sees evidences of public oversight. The citizen leaves home to go to work in the morning. A sidewalk is provided for his convenience and safety if he needs or prefers to walk. The abutters must keep it in a safe condition; open coal scuttles, heaps of sand or gravel, or other obstructions must not remain there, and in winter ice must not threaten hurt. A street is kept clear for the citizen's carriage or automobile if he drives down-town, and a franchise is given a street-railway on certain conditions to provide cheap and rapid transit. For the convenience of the public the street is properly drained and paved, at night it is lighted and patrolled. No householder is permitted to throw ashes or garbage upon the public thoroughfare, no landowner can rear a building above a certain height to shut out light and air. The citizen arrives down-town. The public building in which he works or where he trades is inspected by the city authorities, the market where he buys his produce is subject to regulation, the street hawker who calls his own wares must procure a license to sell goods—law is omnipresent.

273. The Police.—The offender who violates city ordinances must expect to be arrested. Policemen are on the watch to detect such violations and promptly give warning that they cannot be permitted. Repeated violation leads to arrest and trial before a police-court justice, with the probable penalty of a fine or temporary detention in jail. In case of serious crime, the trial is before a higher court, and the punishment is more severe. Such control is necessary for the preservation of order because there are always social delinquents ready to take advantage of too great freedom. A certain class of offenses seems to require different handling. Moral obliquity such as the maintenance of disorderly houses is a corrupting influence, and the police departments of cities have frequently been charged with conniving at immoral practices. Police officials have been found to have their price, and graft has become notorious. For this reason a special morals police has been proposed to have charge of such cases, and experiments have been tried already on that plan.

274. Organization of the City Government.—(1) In America. The police department is but one of several boards or official departments for the management of municipal affairs. The administrative officers are appointed or elected, and are usually under the supervision of the city executive. The usual form of city government is modelled upon the State; a mayor corresponds to the governor and a city council of one or two chambers usually elected by wards is parallel to the State Legislature. The mayor is the executive officer and the head of the administrative system, the council assists or obstructs him, appropriates funds, and attends to the details of municipal legislation. Political considerations rather than fitness for office have usually determined the choice of persons for positions.

(2) In Europe. In Europe municipal government is treated as a business or professional matter, not one of politics, and the results have been so much more satisfactory that American cities have begun to reform their governments. In England cities are governed according to the Local Government Act of 1888, by which cities of more than fifty thousand people become counties for administrative purposes, and control of administration is vested in a council elected by voters of the city. Councillors are regarded with high honor, but their work is a work of patriotism, for they are unpaid, with the result that the best men enter the city councils. Administration is carried on through various committees and through department officials who are retained permanently. In Germany the cities are managed like large households, and their officials are free to undertake improvements without specific legislative permission. The mayor or burgomaster is usually one who makes a profession of magistracy, and he need not be a citizen of the city that he serves. In administration he is assisted by a board of experts known as magistrates, who are elected by the council, usually for life. The council is the real governing body, and its members are elected by the people for six years, one-third of them retiring periodically, as in the United States Senate. The activities of the German cities are more numerous than in this country, yet they are managed economically and efficiently.

275. Organizing Municipal Reform.—The earliest reform movements in the United States were spasmodic uprisings of outraged citizens who were convinced of the corruption of city government. Among the pioneers in organization were leagues of reform in Chicago, Baltimore, and Boston, organized between 1874 and 1885. In 1887 the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Good Citizenship was formed. The weakness of the early movements was the temporary enthusiasm that soon died away after a victory for reform was gained at the polls; within a short time the grafters were in the saddle again. The year 1892 marked an epoch, for in that year the first City Club was organized in New York, followed by Good Government Clubs in many cities, and finally by the National Municipal League in 1894. Two hundred reform leagues in the larger cities united in the National Reform League, with its centre in Philadelphia. After 1905 a new impetus was given to civic reform by the new moral emphasis in business and politics. Better officials were elected and others were reminded that they were responsible to the people more than to the political machine. An extension of reform effort through direct primary nominations came into vogue on the principle that government ought to be by the people themselves: that democracy means self-control. The extension of municipal ownership was widely discussed on the principle that the people's interests demanded the better control of public utilities. There was apparent a new recognition that the city government was only an agent of popular control, not an irresponsible bureau for the enrichment of a few officials at the public expense.

276. Commission Government.—In a number of cases radical changes were made in the charter of the city. Galveston and several other Texas cities tried the experiment of substituting a commission for the mayor and council. The Galveston idea originated in 1901, after a hurricane had devastated the city, and the mayor and aldermen proved unable to cope with the situation. Upon request of an existing civic committee the State legislature gave to the city a new charter, with provision for a commission of five, including a mayor who ordinarily has no more power than any other commissioner. Each man was to manage a department and receive a salary. In four years the commission saved the city a million dollars. Des Moines, Iowa, added to the Galveston plan the initiative, the referendum, and the recall, put in force a merit system for subordinate officials, and adopted the non-partisan open primary. These experiments proved so popular that in 1908-9 not less than one hundred and thirty-eight cities, including most of the large ones, proposed to make important changes in their charters, adopting the most prominent features of the new plan, or adapting the new to the old system.

Commission government has been defined as "that form of city government in which a small board, elected at large, exercises substantially the entire municipal authority, each member being assigned as head of a rather definite division of the administrative work; the commission being subject to one or more means of direct popular control, such as publicity of proceedings, recall, referendum, initiative, and a non-partisan ballot." Commission government is less cumbersome and less partisan than the old system and tends to be more efficient, but the public needs to remember that it is the men in office and not the form of government that make the control of municipal affairs a success or failure. In a few cases only disappointment has resulted from the changes made, and commission government is still in its experimental stage.

277. The City Manager.—A modification of the commission plan was tried in several cities of the South and Middle West in 1913-14. This has been called the city-manager plan. It is founded on the belief that the city needs business administration, and that a board of directors is not so efficient as a single manager employed by the commission, who shall have charge of all departments, appoint department heads as his subordinates, and thus unify the whole administration of municipal affairs. The manager is responsible to the commission, and through it to the people, and may be removed by the commission, or even by popular recall. Such a plan as this is, of course, liable to abuse, unless the commissioners are high-minded, conscientious men, and it has not been tried long enough to prove its worth. The best element in the whole history of recent municipal changes is the earnest effort of the people to find a form of administrative control that will work well, and this gives ground for belief that the experiments will continue until the American city will cease to be notorious for misgovernment and become, instead, a model for the whole nation.

READING REFERENCES

Commission Government and the City Manager Plan (American Academy), pages 3-11, 103-109, 171-179, 183-201.

Goodnow: City Government in the United States, pages 69-108.

Bryce: The American Commonwealth (abridged edition), pages 417-427.

Shaw: Municipal Government in Continental Europe, pages 1-145.

Zueblin: American Municipal Progress (revised edition), pages 376-394.

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CHAPTER XXXV[ToC]

DIFFICULTIES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WORK

278. The Fact of Misery.—A brief study of the conditions in which a city's toilers live and work and play makes it plain that the people have to contend with numerous difficulties. Large numbers of them are in misery, and there are few who are not living in constant fear of it. To a foreigner who did not understand America, it would seem incredible that misery should be prevalent in the midst of wealth and unbounded natural resources, when mines and factories are making record-breaking outputs, when harbors are thronged with ships and the call for workers goes across the sea. But no one who visits the tenements and alleys of the city fails to find abundant evidence of misery and want. People do not live in dark rooms and dirty surroundings from choice, sometimes as many as two thousand in a single block. They do not willingly pay a large percentage of their earnings in rent for a tenement that breeds fever and tuberculosis. They do not feed their babies on impure milk and permit their children to forage among the garbage cans because they care nothing for their young. They do not shiver without heat or lose vitality for lack of food until they have struggled for a comfortable existence to the point of exhaustion. Misery is here as it is in the Old World cities, and it leads to weakness and disease, drunkenness, vice, and crime.

279. Easy Explanations.—It is impossible to unravel completely the skein of difficulties in which the people are enmeshed, or to simplify the causes of the tangle. It is easy to blame a person's wretchedness on his individual misconduct and incompetency, to say, for example, that a man's family is sick and poor because he is intemperate. There might be truth in the charge, but it would probably not be the whole truth. It is easy to go back of the circumstance to the weak will of the man that made him a prey to impulse and appetite and kept him primitive in his habits, but that alone would not explain conditions. It is easy to charge misery upon the ignorance of the woman in the home who is wasteful of food and does not know how to provide for her family, or to charge lack of common sense to the home-makers when they try to raise six children on an income that is not enough for two. It is very common to lay all misery at the door of the capitalist who underpays labor and feels no responsibility for the life conditions of his employee. No one of these explains the presence of misery.

It is easy to propose to society a simple remedy like better housing, prohibition, or socialism, when the only correct diagnosis of conditions demands a prolonged and expensive course of treatment that involves surgical action in the social body. It is easy to raise money for charity, to endow hospitals, and to talk about made-to-order schemes for ending unemployment, poverty, and panic, but it is soon discovered that there is no panacea for the evils that infest society. Back of all personal misconduct or misfortune, of all social specific or cure-all, is the fundamental difficulty that misery exists, that its causes are complex, and that all efforts to provide efficient relief on a large scale have failed, as far as history records.

280. Poverty and Its Extent.—Misery appears commonly in the form of sickness, vice, and poverty. One of these reacts upon another, and is both the cause and the result of another. Mental and moral incapacity, ignorance of hygiene, weakness of will, habits that seem incurable, all of these produce the first two in a seemingly hopeless way; poverty appears to be incurable above the rest. It is poverty that prevents fortifying the will by increasing physical stamina and moral courage, it is poverty that drives a man; to drink or desperation, and it is poverty that prescribes the unfavorable surroundings that do so much to keep a man down. Poverty is a danger flag that indicates the probability of deeper degradation and calls for the individual or group that is better off to lend a hand. Poverty is a goad, a thorn in the flesh of society, that is pushing it along the road of social reform. Private philanthropy, legislative enactment, and much talking are being tried as experiments to find a solution of the difficulty, but theorists and practitioners are not yet in full agreement as to the way out.

There are, of course, different degrees of poverty, ranging from the helpless incompetents at the bottom of the scale to those who are in a fair degree of comfort, but who have so little laid aside for a rainy day that they live in constant fear of the poorhouse. Some struggle harder than others, and maintain an existence on or just above the poverty line—these are technically the poor. Charles Booth defines the poor as those "living in a state of struggle to obtain the necessaries of life." A few cease to struggle at all and, if they continue to live, manage it only by living on permanent charity—these are the paupers. This is a distinction that is carefully made by sociologists and is always convenient.

It is difficult to estimate the extent of poverty with any accuracy, but a few estimates of skilled observers indicate its wide extent. Charles Booth thought that thirty per cent of the people of London were on or below the poverty line. Robert Hunter has declared that in 1899 eighteen per cent of the people in New York State received aid, and that ten per cent of those who died in Manhattan received pauper burial. Alongside these statements are the various estimates of 80,000 persons in almshouses in the United States, 3,000,000 receiving public or private aid, with a total annual expense of $200,000,000. The number of those who have small resources in reserve are many times as great, but industrious, frugal, and self-respecting, they manage to take care of themselves.

281. Causes of Poverty.—It is still more difficult to speak exactly of the relative importance of the causes of poverty. Investigation of hundreds of cases in certain localities makes it plain that poverty comes through a combination of several factors, including personal incompetence or misconduct, misfortune, and the effects of environment. In Boston out of one thousand cases investigated twenty-five years ago (1890-91), twenty per cent was due to drink, a figure nearly twice as much as the average found in other large cities; nine per cent more was due to such misconduct as shiftlessness, crime, and vagrancy; while seventy per cent was owing to misfortune, including defective employment and sickness or death in the family. Five thousand families investigated at another time in New York City showed that physical disability was present in three out of four families, and unemployment was responsible in two out of three cases. In nearly half the families there was found defect of character, and in a third of the cases there was widowhood or desertion or overcrowding. Added to these were old-age incapacity, large families, and ill adjustment to environment due to recent arrival in the city.

Taking these as fair samples, it is proper to conclude that the causes commonly to be assigned to poverty are both subjective and objective, or individual and social. It was formerly customary to throw most of the blame on the poor themselves, to charge them with being lazy, intemperate, vicious, and generally incompetent, and it is useless to deny that these appear to be the direct causes in great numbers of instances, but as much of the negro and poor white trash in the South was found to be due to hookworm infection, so very many of the faults of the shiftless poor in the cities are due more indirectly to lack of nourishment, of education, and of courage. Over and over again, it may be, has the worker tried to get on better, only to get sick or lose his job just as he was improving his lot. The tendency of opinion is in the direction of putting the chief blame upon the disposition of the employer to exploit the worker, and the indifference of society to such exploitation; it is the discouraging conditions in which the working man lives, the uncertainty of employment and the high cost of living, the danger of accident and disease that constantly hangs over the laborer and his family, that devitalizes and disheartens him, and casts him before he is old on the social scrap heap.

Summing up, it is convenient to classify the causes of poverty as individual and social, including under the first head ignorance, inefficiency, illness or accident, intemperance, and immorality, and under the second unemployment, widowhood, or desertion, overcrowding and insanitation, the high cost of living versus low wages, and lack of adjustment to environment.

Poverty is one of those social conditions that appear in all parts of the country, even in the smaller villages, but it is more dreadful and wide-spread in the great cities. In smaller communities the cases are few and can be taken care of without great difficulty; to the larger centres have drifted the poor from the rural regions, and there congregate the immigrants who have failed to make good, until in large numbers they drain the vitals of the city's strength. Yet the problem of poverty is not new. It would be difficult to find any ancient city that did not have its rabble or mediæval village without its "ne'er-do-weel"; and in every period church or state or feudal group has taken its turn in providing relief. In recent years the principle of bestowing charity has been giving way to the principle of destroying poverty at the roots by removing the causes that produce it. This is no easy task, but experience has shown that it is the only effective way to get rid of the difficulty.

282. Proposed Methods of Solution.—The solution of the problem of poverty cannot be found in charity. Properly administered charity is a helpful means of temporary relief, but if it becomes permanent it pauperizes. It never will cure poverty. In spite of all charity organization, poverty increases as the cities grow, until it is clear that the causes must be removed if there is to be any hope of permanent relief. A better education is proposed as an offset to ignorance. Women need instruction in cooking, home making, and the care of children, for girls graduating from a machine or the counter of a department store into matrimony cannot reasonably be expected to know much about housekeeping. Such evils as divorce, desertion, intemperance, and poverty are due repeatedly to failure to make a home. Proper hygienic habits, care of sanitation, simple precautions against colds, coughs, and tuberculosis, make a great difference in the amount of misery. It is a question worth considering whether the home end of the poverty problem is not as important as the employment end. For the man's ignorance and inefficiency it is proposed that the vocational education of boys be widely extended.

The social causes of poverty lead into other departments of sociological study, like the industrial problem, and it is useless to talk about a cure for poverty as an isolated phenomenon, yet there are certain principles that are necessarily involved. The whole subject of the poor needs thorough study. Organizations like the charity societies already have much data. The Russell Sage Foundation in New York City is making invaluable contributions to public knowledge. The reports of the national and State bureaus of labor contain a vast amount of statistical information. All this needs digestion. Then on the basis of investigation and digestion of information comes prompt and intelligent legislation for the amelioration of poverty, until the most shameful conditions in employment and housing are made impossible. Only persistent legislation and enforcement of law can make greedy landlords and capitalists do the right thing by the poor, until all society is spiritualized by the new social gospel of mutual consideration and educated to apply it to community life.

283. Pauperism.—Pauperism is poverty become chronic. When a family has been hopelessly dependent so long that self-respect and initiative are wholly gone, it seems useless to attempt to galvanize it into activity or respectability, and when a group of such families pauperizes a neighborhood, heroic measures become necessary. The families must be broken up, their members placed in institutions where they cannot remain sodden in drink or become violent in crime, and the neighborhood cleansed of its human débris. Pauperism is a social pest, and it must be rooted out like any other pest. If it is allowed to remain it festers; nothing short of eradication will suffice. But when once it is destroyed living conditions must be so reformed that pauperism will not recur, and that can be only by constant vigilance to prevent a continuance of poverty. The problem is one, and its solution must involve both poverty and pauperism.

284. Unemployment.—One of the causes of wide-spread poverty is unemployment. This is due sometimes to physical weakness or lack of ability or character, but as often to industrial depression or lack of adjustment between the labor supply and the employer. There is always an army of the unemployed, and it has increased so greatly through immigration and otherwise that it has demanded the serious attention of sociologists and legislators. Charitable organizations have given relief, but it is not properly a question of charity; private agencies have made a business of bringing together the employer and the employee, but not always treating fairly the employee; permanent free labor exchanges are now being tried by governments.

The National Conference on Unemployment, meeting in 1914, recommended three constructive proposals, which include most of the experiments already tried in Europe and America. These are first the regularizing of business by putting it on a year-round basis instead of seasonal; second, the organization of a system of labor exchanges, local and State, to be supervised and co-ordinated by a national exchange; and third, a national insurance system for the unemployed, such as has been inaugurated successfully in Germany and Great Britain.

The problem of unemployment is less complicated than many social problems, and there is every reason to believe that through careful legislation and administration it can be largely removed. The problem of those who are unable to work or unwilling to work is solved by means of public institutions. The whole problem of poverty awaits only intelligent, energetic, and united action for its successful solution.

READING REFERENCES

Devine: Misery and Its Causes, pages 3-50.

Hunter: Poverty, pages 66-105, 318-340.

Henderson: Dependents, Defectives, and Delinquents, second edition, pages 12-97, 160-209.

Carlton: History and Problems of Organized Labor, pages 431-445.

Martin: "Remedy for Unemployment," art. in The Survey, 22: 115-117.

Booth: Pauperism.

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CHAPTER XXXVI[ToC]

CHARITY AND THE SETTLEMENTS

285. The Impulse to Charity.—The first impulse that stirs a person who sees another in want is immediately to relieve the want. This impulse to charity makes public begging profitable. It is an impulse creditable to the human heart, but its effects have not been approved by reason, for indiscriminate charity provokes deception, and is certain to result in chronic dependency. Wise methods of charity, therefore, constitute a problem as truly as poverty itself. Experience has proved so conclusively that the old methods of relief are unsatisfactory, that it has become necessary to determine and formulate true principles of relief for those who really desire to exercise their philanthropy helpfully. How to help is the question.

286. History of Relief.—Some light is thrown on the subject from the experience of the past. The whole notion of charity as a social duty was foreign to ancient thought. Families and clans had their own dependents, and benefit societies helped their own members. The Hebrew prophets called for mercy and kindness, Jesus spoke his parable of the good Samaritan, and the primitive Christians went so far as to organize their charity, so that none of their members would fail of a fair share. The church taught alms-giving as a deed of merit before God, and all through its history the Catholic Church has done much for its poor. In the Middle Ages it was a part of the feudal theory that the lord would care for his serfs, but in reality they got most help at the doors of a monastery. In modern times the church has shifted its burden to the state. This was inevitable in countries where there was no state church, and it was in accordance with the modern principle that the state is organized society functioning for the social welfare of all the people.

In America the colonies and then the States adopted the English custom of relieving extreme need. At first it was possible for local committees to take care of their poor by doles furnished sparingly in their homes, and to place the chronic dependents in almshouses. The former practice is known as outdoor relief, the latter as indoor relief. Such relief was not administered scientifically, and did not help to reduce the amount of poverty. The almshouses were the dumping-ground of a community's undesirables, including idiots and even insane, cripples and incurables, epileptics, old people, and orphan children, constituting a social environment that was anything but helpful to human development. After a time it became necessary for the State to relieve the local authorities. The defectives and dependents became too numerous for the local community to take care of, and enlightened philanthropy was learning better methods. The result has been the gradual extension of State care and the segregation of the various classes of incompetents in various State institutions, including hospitals for the insane, the epileptic, and the morally deficient, sanitaria for those who suffer from alcoholic and tuberculous diseases, and schools for the proper training of the youth who have come under public oversight.

287. Voluntary Charity.—Public relief has been supplemented extensively by voluntary charity. This has become increasingly scientific. Indeed popular ideas have been largely transformed during the last generation. In the small towns and villages where there was little destitution, and where all knew one another's needs, there was no special need of scientific investigation or charitable organization, but in the large cities it became necessary. Thomas Chalmers in Scotland and Edward Denison and Octavia Hill in England demonstrated the conditions and the advantages of organized effort. The first charity organization society was organized in 1869 in London. Its fundamental principle was to help the poor to help themselves rather than to give them alms. Its aim was to federate all the charitable efforts of London, and while this has not proved practicable, it has greatly increased efficiency and has helped to bind together philanthropic effort all over England. The income of the various charitable agencies of London alone was reported to be $43,000,000 in 1906.

In the United States the first organization on the English model was the charity organization society of Buffalo, founded in 1877; Boston followed with a similar organization the next year. These were followed by the organization of a National Conference of Charities and Corrections, which holds annual meetings and publishes reports that are a valuable storehouse of information. Many charitable agencies of various kinds contribute to the work of relief, some of them really helpful, others actually blocking the way of genuine progress, but all showing the strength of the philanthropic motive in American cities. The closer their alliance with the associated charities the more effective are their measures of charity. Three stages have marked the history of the charitable organization societies, as they have learned from experience. The first has been called the repressive stage. The fear of pauperizing recipients of charity made the societies too strict in their alms-giving, so that hardships resulted that were unnecessary, but such a course was the natural reaction against the indiscriminate charity that had been in vogue. This stage was succeeded by the discriminative, in which help is given discriminatingly, as investigation shows a real need at the same time that efforts are being put forth to make prolonged giving unnecessary. Closely combined with this discrimination, which is in constant use, is the third method of construction. By this constructive method the worker tries to get at the cause of the particular case of poverty and to alter the social conditions so that the cause shall no longer act. Experience and experiment have produced numerous specific measures of a constructive sort, like the establishment of playgrounds and public parks, kindergartens and schools for specific purposes, social settlements and school centres, municipal baths and gymnasiums, tenement-house reforms and the prevention of disease.

288. Friendly Visiting.—The functions of charity organization societies have been described as the co-ordination and co-operation of local societies rather than direct relief from the central organization, thorough investigation of all cases, with temporary relief where necessary, the establishment of friendly relations between the poor and the well-to-do, the finding of work for those who need it, and the accumulation of knowledge on poverty conditions. The actual contact of charitable societies with the people has been mainly through friendly visitors who voluntarily engage to call on the needy, and who meet at regular intervals to discuss concrete cases as well as general methods. These visitors have the advantage of bringing their spontaneous sympathy to bear upon the specific instances that come to their personal attention, whereas the officials of the charity organization society inevitably become more callous to suffering and tend to look upon each family as a case to be pigeonholed or scientifically treated, but the conviction is growing, nevertheless, that the situation can be effectively handled only by men and women who are genuinely experts, trained in the social settlements or in the schools of philanthropy. Whether a voluntary church worker or a charity expert, it is the business of the visitor to make thorough investigation of conditions, not merely inquiring of landlord or neighbors, or taking the hurried testimony of the family, but patiently searching for information from those who have known the case over a long period, preferably through the charity organization society. Actual relief may be required temporarily and must be adequate to the occasion, but the problem of the visitor is to devise a method of self-help, and to furnish the courage necessary to undertake and carry it through. It is important to consider in this connection the character and ancestry of the family, its environment and the social ideals and expectations of its members, if the steps taken are to be effective. The two principles that underlie the whole practice of relief are, first, to restore the individual or family to a normal place in society from which it has fallen, or to raise it to a normal standard of living which it has never before reached; secondly, to make all charity discriminative and co-operative, that it may accomplish the end sought without pauperizing the recipient.

289. Public and Private Agencies.—Institutions and agencies of relief are of two kinds, public and private. It is one of the functions of every social group to promote the welfare of its members. It is to be expected, therefore, that the church and the trade-union will help their own poor, but it is just as proper to expect that the whole community, and even the whole state, will take care of its own needy. The distinction between public and private agencies is not one of fundamental sociological principle, but one of convenience and efficiency of administration. Where the state has extended its activities, as in Germany, relief by such a method as the Elberfeld system is practicable; where public opinion, as in the United States, is not favorable to remanding as much as possible to the government, it is thought best that private agencies should supplement State aid, and in most cases make it unnecessary.

290. Arguments for and Against Private Agencies of Relief.—Some argue that private agencies should do it all. In spite of the large resources at the command of the state and the frequent necessity of legislation to handle the problem, they claim that public aid humiliates and degrades the recipient, while private assistance may put him on his feet without destroying his self-respect; and that public charity is too often unfeeling and tends to become a routine affair, while private aid can deal better with specific cases, show real interest and try experiments in the improvement of methods. There are those who would have all charity given back to the church. They believe the responsibility would stimulate the church's own life, extend its influence among the unchurched, show that it had an interest in the bodies as well as the souls of the people, and bring about co-operation between churches in the districts of town or city. It is of the genius of true religion to be helpful, and the church could soon learn wise methods. In answer to this argument the reply is that at present the indiscriminate charity of the church is doing real harm; that the church does not like to co-operate with other agencies; that it does not have adequate resources to deal with the problem or legal authority to restrain mendicants or segregate the various classes of dependents; and that all persons in the community ought to share in the responsibility of poor relief, and not all are in the church. They recognize the valuable aid of such organizations as the Hebrew Charities and the work of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of the Catholics, but they believe that such as these at best can be only auxiliary to the state.

An illustration of the usefulness of private associations appears in a group of seven boys of foreign parentage in New York City, who organized themselves in 1903 into a quick-aid-to-the-hungry committee. They were only thirteen years old and poor. They lived on the East Side, and pennies and nickels did not make a full treasury. But they knew the need and had an instinct for helping the right people. In seven years these boys helped in more than two hundred and fifty emergency cases; their pennies grew to dollars as they earned more; their charity developed their self-respect; they held weekly meetings for debate, and several of them made their way through college. Funds were supplied, also, from friends outside, who were glad to aid such a worthy enterprise. The great need among private agencies is fuller co-operation with one another and with public boards and institutions. Then duplication of effort, misunderstandings, and wastefulness are avoided, and the hope of a decline in conditions of poverty increases.

There are limits, however, to the ability of private agencies to control the situation. There are cases where the organized community or state must take a hand. There are lazy persons who will not support themselves or their families; there are certain persons who are chronically ill or dependent; there are various types of defectives and delinquents. All these need the authority of the public agencies. Then there are constructive activities that require the assistance and sanction of government, like parks and playgrounds, industrial schools, employment bureaus, the establishment and administration of state institutions, and the enforcement of health, sanitary, and building laws. Of course there is often inefficiency in government management. The local almshouse needs reforming, and the overseers of the poor should be trained experts. The organization and superintendence of state institutions is not ideal, and building arrangements need improvement, but there is a steady gain in the efficiency of boards of trustees and local managers. There is a willingness to learn from experience and a disposition to raise the standards in all departments of administration.

291. The Social Settlement.—However efficient an official board may be in the discharge of its duties, it cannot expect to call out from the beneficiary so enthusiastic a response as can a real friend. The best friends of the poor are their neighbors. It is well known that a group of families in a tenement house will help one of their number that is in specific difficulty, and that the poor give more generously to help their own kind than do those who are more well-to-do. It was a conviction of these principles of friendliness and neighborliness that led to the first social settlements. Because a person lives in an undesirable part of the city he is not necessarily a subject for charity, and the settlement is in no sense to be thought of as a charitable agency. It is a home established among the less-favored part of the population by educated, refined, sympathetic people who want to be neighborly and to bring courage and cheer and helpfulness to the struggling masses. The original residents of Hull House in Chicago believed that class alienation could be overcome best by the establishment of intimate social relationships, and they were willing to sacrifice their natural social advantages for the larger good.

Settlements are not exclusively of the city, but the stress of life is sternest in the cities, and most of the experiments have been made there. They are oases in the desert of the buildings and pavements of brick, with their grime and monotony, and if the people of the desert will camp for an hour and drink of the spring, those who have planted the oasis will be well pleased. To attract them the settlement workers have organized clubs and classes for united study and activity in matters that naturally interest the people of the neighborhood; they have music and dancing and amateur theatricals, and often they supply domestic or industrial training in a small way for the young people who frequent the settlement. The residents aim to give the people what they want; they do not impose anything upon them. They try to satisfy economic and social wants. They try to stimulate the people of the neighborhood to desire the best things that they can get. They co-operate with the police and other departments of the city government, with the library, and with the school. They assist in procuring work for those who want it; they encourage the people to be thrifty and temperate; they help them to get baths and gymnastic facilities, playgrounds, and social centres. They frequently carry on investigations that are of great value and assist charitable agencies in their inquiries and beneficence. They call frequently upon the people in their homes and encourage them to ask for counsel and help if they are in trouble.

The settlement idea grew out of a growing interest in the common people. It was stimulated by Maurice's establishment at London of a working man's college, with recent Cambridge graduates as teachers, and by university extension work in Cambridge; it was suggested further by the location of Edward Denison in the East End of London in 1867. In 1885 Canon Barnett, of St. Jude's Church, London, founded Toynbee Hall under Oxford auspices. The first settlement in the United States was established in New York in 1887, and soon became known as the University Settlement. Hull House in Chicago was started two years later; the first settlement in Boston was founded under the auspices of the Andover Theological Seminary. Most settlements avoid church connections, because of the danger of misunderstandings among people of widely differing faiths.

The settlement has existed long enough to become a true social institution. It has remained true to its original principle of neighborliness, but it has increased its activities as occasion demanded. It has been a useful object-lesson to churches and city governments; some of its methods have been imitated, and in some of the cities its efforts have become unnecessary in certain directions because the city government itself has adopted its plans. The settlement has its critics and its devoted supporters; it is one of the voluntary experiments that shows the spirit of its promoters and that helps along social progress, and it must be estimated among the assets of a community. Here and there in the country among certain groups, as lumbermen, miners, or construction workers, or even in a settled town, many of the methods of the settlement are likely to find acceptance, and the settlement idea of neighborliness is fundamental to all happy and successful social life.

READING REFERENCES

Devine: Principles of Relief, pages 10-28, 171-181.

Warner: American Charities, pages 301-393.

Conyngton: How to Help, pages 56-219.

Henderson: Modern Methods of Charity, pages 380-511.

Henderson: Social Settlements.

Addams: Twenty Years at Hull House, pages 89-153.

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CHAPTER XXXVII[ToC]

EDUCATIONAL AGENCIES

292. The Schools of the City.—An important function of city government and of other institutions is the education of the people who make their home in the city or come to it to broaden their culture. The city provides for its young people as the country community does, by locating school-buildings within convenient reach of the people of every district, but on a much larger and usually a more efficient scale. Better trained teachers, better grading, a more modern equipment and well-proved methods give an advantage in education to the city child, though there are drawbacks in overcrowded buildings and narrow yards for play. The opportunities for social education are broader in the city, for the child comes into contact with many types of people, with a great variety of social institutions, and with all sorts of activities. It is these advantages, together with the higher institutions for study, that attract hundreds and sometimes thousands of students to the prominent social centres. The colleges and universities, the normal schools, the music and art institutes and lecture systems are numerous and attract correspondingly.

293. The Press as an Educator.—The institutions directly concerned with instruction are supplemented by other educational agencies. Among these is the press. The press is an institution that exerts a mighty force upon every department of the city's life. It is at the same time a business enterprise and a social institution. It is a public misfortune that the newspaper, the magazine, and the book publishing house is a private business undertaking, and often stands for class, party, or sectarian interests before those of the whole of society. There is always a temptation to sacrifice principle to policy, to publish distorted or half-true statements from selfish interest, and to prostitute influence to individuals or groups that care little for the public welfare. The publication of a statement or narrative of a crime or other misdemeanor tends by suggestion to the imitation of the wrong by others; it is a well-known fact that a sensational story of suicide or murder is likely to provoke others in the same manner. It is a grave question whether the realistic fiction so much in vogue and published in such quantities is not a baneful text-book on modern society. But when it chooses the press becomes an instrument of immense value to the public. It can turn the light of publicity on dark and dirty places. It can and does provide a means of wise utterance on questions of the day. It keeps a record of the good as well as the evil that is done. It is a means of communication between local groups everywhere, for it publishes what everybody wants to know about everybody else. It introduces the antipodes to each other, and makes it possible for far-sundered groups to unite even internationally for a good cause. As the railroad binds together portions of a continent, so the press links the minds of human beings.

294. A Metropolitan Newspaper.—Take a metropolitan newspaper and see how it reflects the current life of society. Economic interests of buyer and seller are exploited in the advertising columns. In no other way could a merchant so persuasively hawk his wares or a purchaser learn so readily about the market. The wholesaler and jobber find their interests attended to in special columns provided particularly for them. Financial interests are cared for by stock-exchange quotations, news items, and advertisements. All kinds of social concerns are taken care of in the news columns, items collected at great expense from the four quarters of the globe. Gatherings for a great variety of purposes are recorded. Educational and religious interests are given space, as well as sports and amusements; last Sunday's sermon jostles the latest scandal on Monday morning; weather probabilities and shipping news have their corners, as well as the fashion department and the cartoon. The newspaper is a moving picture of the world.

295. The Value of the Press.—The most valuable service rendered by the press is its education of the public mind, so that public opinion may register itself in intelligent action. It provides a forum for the discussion of issues that divide sects and parties, and helps to preserve religious freedom and popular government. Except that it is so frequently trammelled in uttering itself frankly on important public questions, it gives an indication of the trend of sentiment and so makes possible a forecast of future public action. The very variety of printed publications, from the sensational daily sheet to the published proceedings of a learned society, insures a healthy interchange of ideas that helps to level social inequalities and promotes a mutual understanding among all groups and grades of society. The cheapened process of book publication on a large scale, and the investment of large sums of money in the publishing business, with its mechanics of sale management as well as printing, has made possible an enormous output of literature on all subjects and has widened the range of general information in possession of the public. The whole system of modern life would be impossible without the press.

296. The Library and the Museum.—In spite of the efficient methods used for selling the output of the press, large numbers of books would be little read were it not for the collections of books that are available to the public, either free or at small cost. The public library is an educative agency that serves its constituency as faithfully as the school and the press. Its presence for use is one of the advantages that the city has over the country, though the public library has been extended far within one or two decades. The child goes from home to school and widens the circle of his acquaintances in the community; through the daily newspaper the adult gets into touch with a far wider environment, reaching even across the oceans; in the library any person, without respect to age, color, or condition, if only he possess the key of literacy to unlock knowledge, can travel to the utmost limits of continents and seas, can dig with the geologist below the surface, or soar with the astronomer beyond the limits of aviation, can hob-nob with ancient worthies or sit at the feet of the latest novelist or philosopher, and can learn how to rule empires from as good text-books as kings or patriarchs possess.

What the library does for intellectual satisfaction the museum and art-gallery do for æsthetic appreciation. They make their appeal to the love of beauty in form, color, or weave, and call out oftentimes the best efforts of an individual's own genius. Often the gift of one or more public-spirited citizens, they register a disposition to serve society that is sometimes as useful as charity. Philanthropy that uplifts the mind of the recipient is as desirable as benevolence that plans bodily relief; the soul that is filled has as much cause to bless its minister as the stomach that is relieved of hunger. The picture-galleries of Europe, the tapestries, the metal and wood work, the engravings, and the frescoes, are the precious legacy of the past to the present, not easily reproduced, but serving as a continual incentive to modern production. They set in motion spiritual forces that uplift and expand the human mind and spur it to future achievement.

297. Music and the Drama.—Music and the drama have a similar stimulating and refining influence when they are not debauched by a sordid commercialism. They strengthen the noblest impulses, stir the blood to worthy deeds by their rhythmic or pictorial influence, unite individual hearts in worship or play, throb in unison with the sentiments that through all time have swayed human life. Often they have catered to the lower instincts, and have served for cheap amusement or entertainment not worth while, but concert-hall and theatre alike are capable of an educative work that can hardly be equalled elsewhere. When in combination they appeal to both eye and ear, they provide avenues for intellectual understanding and activity that neither school nor press can parallel. Recent mechanical inventions, such as automatic musical instruments and moving pictures, have added greatly to the range and effectiveness of music and the drama, but they only intensify and popularize the appeal to the senses. It is to be remembered that individual and social stimuli must be varied enough to touch men at all points and call out a response from every faculty of their nature. These arts, therefore, that make life real and socialize it and cheer men and women on their way, play a vital part in the education of society and deserve as serious consideration as the other educational agencies and institutions that find a place in the social economy of the community. Numerous amateur musical and dramatic societies testify to the interest of the people in these refined arts.

298. The Need of Social Centres.—Books and pictures, music and the drama are so many mild stimulants to those who use and appreciate them, but there are large numbers of people who rarely read anything but the newspaper, and who attend only cheap entertainments. These people need a spur to high thoughts and noble action, but they do not move in the world of culture. They need a stronger stimulant, the tang of virile debate about questions that touch closely their daily concerns, discussions in which they can share if they feel disposed. In large circles of the city's population there is a lack of facilities for such public discussion, and for that reason the people fall back on the prejudices of the newspapers for the formation of their opinions on public questions. Disputes sometimes wax warm in the saloon about the merits of a pugilist or baseball-player; questions of the rights of labor are aired in the talk of the trade-union headquarters; but the vital issues of city, state, and nation, and the underlying principles that are at stake find few avenues to the minds of the mass of the people. In the country the town meeting or the gathering at the district schoolhouse provides an occasional opportunity, or the grange meeting supplies a forum for its members, but even there the rank and file of the people do not talk over large questions often enough. In the city the need is great.

299. The City Neighborhood.—It is well understood that large cities have most of their public buildings and business structures in one quarter, and their residences in another; also that the character of the residential districts varies according to the wealth and culture of their inhabitants or the nationality and occupation to which they belong. The city is a coalition of semidetached groups, each of which has a unity of its own. The necessities of work draw all the people together down-town along the lines of streets and railways; now and then the different classes are shaken together in elevators and subways; but when they are free to follow their own volition they flow apart. Those who are on terms of intimacy live in a neighboring street; the grocer from whom they buy is at the corner; the school where their children go is within a few blocks; the theatre they patronize or the church they attend is not far away; the physician they employ lives in the neighborhood. Except the few who get about easily in their own conveyances and have a wide acquaintance, city dwellers have all but their business interests in the district in which they live, and which is seldom over a square mile in extent.

Some municipalities are coming to see that each district is a neighborhood in itself and needs all the democratic institutions of a neighborhood. Among these belongs the assembly hall for free speech. It may well become a centre for a variety of social purposes, but it is fundamentally important that it provide a forum for public discussion. As the rich man has his club where he may meet the globetrotter or the leader of public affairs distinguished in his own country, and as the woman's club of high-minded women has its own lecturers and celebrities of all kinds, so the working man and his wife have a right to come into contact with stimulating personalities who will talk to them and to whom they can talk back.

300. Forum for Public Discussion.—Such democratic gatherings fall into two classes. There is the public lecture or address, after which an opportunity for questions and public discussion is given, and there is the neighborhood forum or town meeting, at which a question of general interest is taken up and debated in regular parliamentary fashion. In a number of cities both plans have been adopted. On a Sunday afternoon or evening, or at a convenient time on another evening of the week, a popular speaker addresses the audience on a theme of social interest, after it has been entertained for a half hour with music; following the address a brief intermission allows for relaxation, and then for an hour the question goes to the house, and free discussion takes place under the direction of the leader of the meeting. Sometimes series of this sort are supplied by churches or other social organizations; in that case many of the speakers are clergymen, and in some forums the topics are connected with religious or strictly moral interests; but even then the discussion is on the broad plane of the common concerns of humanity, and there is a zest to the occasion that the ordinary religious gathering does not inspire. The second plan is modelled after the old-fashioned town meeting that was transplanted from the mother country to New England, and has spread to other parts of the United States. It is a gathering of all who wish to discuss freely some question that interests them all, and it is more strictly co-operative than the first plan, for there is no one speaker to contribute the main part of the debate, but each may make his own contribution, and by the power of his own persuasion win for his argument the decision of the meeting. Besides stimulating the interest of those who take part, such a debate is a most effective educator of the public mind in matters of social weal.

READING REFERENCES

Henderson: Social Elements, pages 228-253.

King: Social Aspects of Education, pages 65-97, 264-290.

Ward: The Social Center, pages 212-251.

Wolfe: The Lodging House Problem, pages 109-114.

Addresses and Proceedings of the National Education Association, 1905, pages 644-650, "Music as a Factor in Culture."

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CHAPTER XXXVIII[ToC]

THE CHURCH

301. The Place of the Church in the Urban Community.—In the city, as in the country, the religious instinct expresses itself socially through the institution of the church or synagogue. Spiritual force cannot be confined within the limits of a single institution; religion is a dynamic that permeates the life of society; yet in this age of specialization, and especially in a country like the United States, where religion is a voluntary affair, not to be entangled with the school or the State, religion has naturally exerted its influence most directly through the church. Charity and settlement workers are inspired by a religion that makes humanitarianism a part of its creed, and a large majority of them are church members, but as a rule they do not attempt to introduce any religious forms or exercises into their programmes. Most public-school teachers have their religious connections and recognize the important place of religion in moulding character, but religious teaching is not included in the curriculum because of the recognized principle of complete religious liberty and the separation of church and state. The result has been that religion is not consciously felt as a vital force among many people who axe not directly connected with an ecclesiastical institution. Those who are definitely connected with the church in America contribute voluntarily to its expenses, sometimes even at personal sacrifice. Most people who have little religious interest realize the value of the mere presence of a meeting-house in the community as a reminder of moral obligations and an insurance against disorder. Its spire seems to point the way to heaven, and to make a mute appeal to the best motives and the highest ideals. The decline of the church is, therefore, regarded as a sign of social degeneracy.

302. Worship and Church Attendance.—The church exists in the city because it has certain specific functions to perform. To maintain public worship, to persuade to definite convictions and inspire to noble conduct, to furnish religious education, and to promote social reform are its essential responsibilities. Worship is a natural attitude to the individual who is prompted by a desire to adjust himself to the universe and to obtain the peace of mind that follows upon the establishment of a right relationship. To most people it is easier to get into the proper atmosphere and spirit of worship in a public assembly, and they therefore are accustomed to meet at stated intervals and bow side by side as if in kinship together before the Unseen. Long-established habit and a superstitious fear of the consequences that may follow neglect keep some persons regular in church attendance when they have no sense of spiritual satisfaction in worship. Others go to church because of the social opportunities that are present in any public gathering.

In recent years church attendance has not kept pace with the increasing population of the city. A certain pride of intellect and a feeling of security in the growing power of man over nature has produced an indifference to religion and religious teachers. Multiplicity of other interests overshadows the ecclesiastical interests of the aristocracy; fatigue and hostility to an institution that they think caters to the rich keeps the proletariat at home. In addition the tendency of foreigners is to throw off religion along with other compulsory things that belonged to the Old World life and to add to the number of the unchurched.

303. Evangelism and the History of Religious Conviction.—A second function of the church is to exert spiritual and moral suasion. It is a social instinct to communicate ideas; language developed for that purpose. It is natural, therefore, that a church that has definite ideas about human obligation toward God and men should try to influence individuals and even send out evangelists and missionaries to propagate its faith widely. Those churches that think alike have organized into denominations, and have arranged extensive propaganda and trained and ordained their preachers to reason with and persuade their auditors to receive and act upon the message that is spoken. Several of the large cities of the United States contain denominational headquarters where world-wide activities receive direction, veritable dynamos for the generation of one of the vital forces of society.

The convictions that prompt evangelism and missionary zeal are the result of centuries of race experience. The Catholic, the Protestant, and the Jewish churches have all grown out of religious experience and religious thinking that have their roots in early human history. The very forms of worship and of creed that constitute the framework of religion in a modern city church date far back in their origins. The religious instinct appears to be common to the whole human race. In primitive times religious interest was prompted by fear, and the early customs of sacrifice and worship were established by the group to bring its members into friendly relations with the Power outside themselves that might work to their undoing. Temples and shrines testified to man's devotion and stirred his emotions by their symbols and ceremonies. A special class of men was organized, a priesthood to mediate with the gods for mankind. Children were taught to respect and fear the higher powers, and their elders were often warned not to stir the anger of deity. As the human mind developed, impulse and emotion were supplemented by intellect. As man ruminated upon nature and human experience he was satisfied that there was intelligence and power in the universe, divine personality similar to but greater than himself, and his reason sanctioned the religious acts to which he had become accustomed. He added a creed to his cult. He did not associate his moral ideas and habits with his religious obligations; these ideas and habits grew out of the customs that had been found to work best in social relations. Pagan religions were slow to develop any kinship between religion and morals. It was among the Hebrews that the loftier idea of a God of holiness and justice, who demanded right and kindly conduct among men, came into prominence, and a few religious prophets went so far as to declare that sacrifice was less important than conduct. The fundamental teachings of Christianity were based on the same conception of social duty and on the religious conception of God as benevolent and loving, calling out loving fealty of heart rather than external rite and sacrifice. In Christian times religion has become a spiritual and moral motive power throughout the world.

304. Church Organization.—Throughout its long history society has adjusted the organization of its religious activities to social custom and social need. The church in any country is a name for an organized system, with its nerve-centres and its ganglia ramifying into the remotest localities. In the local community it binds together its members in mutual relations, even though they live on different sides of a city, or even in the suburbs. It has its relations to young and old, and plans for the spiritual welfare of human beings of every age through its boards and committees, classes and clubs. It presents a variety of group types to match the inclinations and opinions of different types of mind. One type is that of a closely knit, centralized organization, claiming ecclesiastical authority over individual opinions and practices on the principle that religion is a static thing, a law fixed in the eternal order, and not to be improved upon or questioned. Another type is that of loosely federated ecclesiastical units, flexible in organization and creed, cherishing religion as a dynamic thing, suiting itself to the changing mind of man and adjusting itself to individual and social need. It is a social law that both theology and organization conform in a degree to the prevailing social philosophy and constitution, and therefore no type can remain unchanged, but relatively one is always conservative and the other always liberal, with a blending of types between the two extremes. Denominational divisions are due partly to variety of opinion, partly to ancestry, and partly to historical circumstance; some of these divisions are international in extent; but through every communion runs the line of cleavage between conservatism and liberalism in the interpretation of custom and creed. The tendency of the times is to minimize differences and to bring together divergent types in federation or union on the ground that the church needs unity in order to use its strength, and that religion can exert its full energy in the midst of society only as the friction of too much machinery is removed.

305. Religious Education.—A third function of the church is religious education. This function of education in religion belongs theoretically to the church, in common with the home and the school, but the tendency has been to turn the religious education of children over to the school of the church. The minister, priest, or rabbi is the chief teacher of faith and duty, but in the Sunday-school the laity also has found instruction of the young people to be one of its functions. Instruction by both of these is supplemented by schools of a distinctly religious type and by a religious press. As long as society at large does not undertake to perform this function of religious education, the church conceives it to be one of its chief tasks to teach as well as to inspire the human will, by interpreting the best religious thought that the centuries of history have handed down, and for this purpose it uses the latest scientific knowledge about the human mind and tries to devise improved methods to make education more effective. Education is the twin art of evangelization.

306. Promotion of Social Reform.—As an institution hoary with age, the church is naturally conservative, and it has been slow to champion the various social reforms that have been proposed as panaceas. It has been quite as much concerned with a future existence as with the present, and has been prompt to point to heavenly bliss as a balance for earthly woe. It has concerned itself with the soul rather than the body, and with individual salvation rather than social reconstruction. It is only within a century that the modern church has given much attention to promoting social betterment as one of its principal functions, but within a few years the conscience of church people has been goading them to undertake a campaign of social welfare. Other institutions have needed the help of the church, and in some cases the church has had to take upon itself the burden that belonged to other organizations; moral movements, like temperance, have asked for the powerful sanction of religion, and the church has used its influence to persuade men. What has been spontaneous and intermittent is now becoming regular and continuous, until a social gospel is taking its place alongside individual evangelism. The Biblical phrase, "the kingdom of God," is being interpreted in terms of an improved social order. Religion, therefore, becomes a present-day force for progress, and the church an agency for social uplift.

307. Adapting the Church to the Twentieth Century City.—The church in the country has a comparatively simple problem of existence. It fits into the social organization of the community, and in most cases seldom has to readjust itself by radical changes to fit a swift change in the community. It is different with the church in the city. Urban growth is one of the striking phenomena of recent decades; local churches find themselves caught in the swirl, grow rapidly for a time, and then are left high and dry as the current sweeps the crowd farther along. Often the particular type that it represents is not suited to the newer residents who settle in the section where the church stands. It has the option of following the crowd or attempting a readjustment. To decamp is usually the easier way; readjustment is often so difficult as to be almost impossible. Financial resources have been depleted. The existing organization is not geared to the customs of the newcomers. Forms of worship must be improved if the church is to function satisfactorily. The popular appeal of religion must be couched in a new phraseology, often in a new language. Religious educational methods must be revised. Social service must be fitted to the new need. Small groups of workers must be organized to manage classes and clubs, and to get into personal contact with individuals whose orbit is on a different plane. The church must become a magnet to draw them within the influence of religion. It finds itself compelled to adopt such methods as these if it is not to become a mere survival of a better day.

If, however, a locally disabled church can call upon the resources of a whole denomination, it may be able to make the necessary adjustments with ease, or even to continue its spiritual ministry along the old lines by means of subsidies. It is reasonable to believe that society will find a way to adjust the church to the needs of city people. It cannot afford to do without it. The church has been the conserver and propagator of spiritual force. It has supplied to thousands of persons the regenerative power of religion that alone has matched the degenerating influence of immoral habits. It has produced auxiliary organizations, like the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young Women's Christian Association. It has found a way, as in the Salvation Army, to get a grip upon the weak-willed and despairing. Missions and chapels in the slums and synagogues in the ghettos have carried religion to the lowest classes. These considerations argue for a wider co-operation among city people in strengthening an institution that represents social idealism.

READING REFERENCES

Trawick: The City Church and Its Social Mission, pages 14-22, 50-76, 95-99, 122-160.

Strayer: Reconstruction of the Church, pages 161-249.

Menzies: History of Religion, pages 19-78.

Rauschenbusch: Christianizing the Social Order, pages 7-29, 96-102.

McCulloch: The Open Church for the Unchurched, pages 33-164.

Coe: Education in Religion and Morals, pages 373-388.

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CHAPTER XXXIX[ToC]

THE CITY IN THE MAKING

308. Experimenting in the Mass.—The modern city is a gigantic social experiment. Never before have so many people crowded together, never has there been such a close interlocking of economic and social and religious associations, never has there been such ease of communication and transit. Modern invention has given its aid to the natural effort of human beings to get together. The various interests that produce action have combined to make settlement compact. The city is a severe test of human ability to live peaceably and co-operatively at close quarters. In the country an unfriendly man can live by himself much of the time; in the city he is continually feeling somebody's elbows in his ribs. It is not strange that there is as yet much crudeness about the city. Its growth has been dominated by the economic motive, and everything has been sacrificed to the desire to make money. Dirty slums, crowded tenements, uncouth business blocks, garish bill-boards and electric signs, dumped rubbish on vacant lots, constant repairs of streets and buildings—these all are marks of crudity and experimentation, evidences that the city is still in the making. Many of the weaknesses that appear in urban society can be traced to this situation as a cause. The craze for amusement is partly a reaction from the high speed of modern industry, but partly, also, a social delirium produced by the new experience of the social whirl. Naturally more serious efforts are neglected for a time, and institutions of long standing, like the family, threaten to go to pieces. A thought-provoking lecture or a sermon on human obligation does not fit in with the mood of the thousands who walk or ride along the streets, searching for a sensation. The student who looks at urban society on the surface easily becomes pessimistic.

309. Reasons for Optimism.—This new experience of society will run its course. Undoubtedly there will go with it much of social loss, but there is firm ground for believing that there will be more of social gain. It is quite necessary for human beings to learn to associate intimately, for population is steadily increasing and modern civilization makes all classes and all nations more and more dependent on one another. The pace of life will slow down after a time, there will be less of social intoxication, and men and women will take their pleasures more sanely. Eventually they will listen to a message that is adapted to them, however serious it may be. One of the most hopeful factors in the situation is the presence of individuals and organized groups who are able to diagnose present conditions, and who are working definitely for their improvement. Much of modern progress is conscious and purposeful, where formerly men lived blindly, subject, as they believed, to the caprice of the gods. We know much about natural law, and lately we have learned something about social law; with this knowledge we can plan intelligently for the future. There is less excuse for social failure than formerly. Cities are learning how to make constructive plans for beautifying avenues and residential sections, and making efficient a whole transportation system; they will learn how to get rid of overcrowding, misery, and disease. What is needed is the will to do, and that will come with experience.

310. Reasonable Expectations of Improvement.—Any soundly constructive plan waits on thorough investigation. Such an organization as the Russell Sage Foundation, which is gathering all sorts of data about social conditions, is supplying just the information needed on which to base intelligent and effective action. On this foundation will come the slow process of construction. There will be diffusion of information, an enlistment of those who are able to help, and an increased co-operation among the numerous agencies of philanthropy and reform. The most obvious evils and those that seem capable of solution will be attacked first. Intelligent public opinion will not tolerate the continued existence of curable ills. Pure water, adequate sewerage, light, and air, and sanitary conveniences in every home will be required everywhere. Community physicians and nurses will be under municipal appointment to see that health conditions are maintained, and to instruct city families how to live properly. Vocational schools and courses in domestic science will prepare boys and girls for marriage and the home, and will tend to lessen poverty. Undoubtedly the time will come when it will be seen clearly that the interests of society demand the segregation of those who cannot take care of themselves and are an injury to others. Hospitals and places of detention for mental and moral defectives, and the victims of chronic vice and intemperance, as well as criminals of every sort, will seem natural and necessary. Larger questions of immigration, industrial management, and municipal administration will be studied and gradually solved by the united wisdom of city, state, and nation.

311. Agencies of Progress and Gains Achieved.—An examination of what has been achieved in this direction by almost any one of the larger cities in the United States shows encouraging progress. Smaller cities and even villages have made use of electricity for lighting, transportation, and telephone service. The water and sewerage systems of larger centres are far in advance of what they were a few years ago. Bathrooms with open plumbing and greater attention to the preservation of health have supplemented more thorough efforts to the spread of communicable diseases. Increasing agitation for more practical education has led to the creation of various kinds of vocational schools, including a large variety of correspondence schools for those who wish specific training. There are still thousands of boys and girls who enter industrial occupations in the most haphazard way, and yield to irrational impulse in choosing or giving up a particular job or a place to live in; similar impulse induces them to mate in the same haphazard way, and as lightly to separate if they tire of each other; but the very fact that enlightened public opinion does not countenance these practices, that there are social agencies contending against them, and that they are contrary to the laws of happiness, of efficiency, and even of survival, makes it unlikely that such irrational conduct can persist. As for the social ills that have seemed unavoidable, like sexual vice, current investigation and agitation, followed by increasing legislation and segregation of the unfit, promises to work a change, however gradual the process may be. Numerous organizations are at work in the fields of poverty, immigration, the industrial problem, reform of government, penology, business, education, and religion, and thousands of social workers are devoting their lives to the betterment of society.

312. Conference and Co-operation.—Improvement will be more rapid when the various agencies of reform have learned to pull together more efficiently. It is frequently charged that the friction between different temperance organizations has delayed progress in solving the problem of intemperance. It is often said that there would be less poverty if the various charitable agencies would everywhere organize and work in association. The independent temper of Americans makes it difficult to work together, but co-operation is a sound sociological principle, and experience proves that such principles must be obeyed. If the principle of combination that has been applied to business should be carried further and applied to the problems of society, there can be no question that results would speedily justify the action. Perhaps the greatest need in the city to-day is a union of resources. If an honest taxation would furnish funds, if the best people would plan intelligently and unselfishly for the city's future development, if boards and committees that are at odds would get together, there is every reason to think that astonishing changes for the better would soon be seen.

Suppose that in every city of our land representatives of the chamber of commerce, of the city government, of the associated charities, of the school-teachers, of the ministers of the city, of the women's clubs, of the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young Women's Christian Association, of the labor-unions, and of the agencies that cater to amusement should sit together once in two weeks in conference upon the interests of all the people of the city, and should honestly and frankly discuss the practical questions that are always at the fore in public discussion, and then should report back for further conference in their own groups, there can be no doubt that the various groups would have a far better understanding and appreciation of one another, and in time would find ways and means to adopt such a programme as might come out of all the discussion.

313. The Crucial Test of Democracy.—World events have shown clearly since the outbreak of the European war that intelligent planning and persistent enforcement of a political programme can long contend successfully against great odds, when there is autocratic power behind it all. Democracy must show itself just as capable of planning and execution, if it is to hold its own against the control of a few, whether plutocrats, political bosses, or a centralized state, but its power to make good depends on the enlistment of all the abilities of city or nation in co-operative effort. There is no more crucial test of the ability of democracy to solve the social problems of this age than the present-day city. The social problem is not a question of politics, but of the social sciences. It is a question of living together peaceably and profitably. It involves economics, ethics, and sociological principles. It is yet to be proved that society is ready to be civilized or even to survive on a democratic basis. The time must come when it will, for associated activity under the self-control of the whole group is the logical and ethical outcome of sound sociological principle, but that time may not be near at hand. If democracy in the cities is to come promptly to its own, social education will soon change its emphasis from the material gain of the individual to co-operation for the social good, and under the inspiration of this idea the various agencies will unite for effective social service.

READING REFERENCES

Howe: The Modern City and Its Problems, pages 367-376.

Goodnow: City Government in the United States, pages 302-308.

Eldridge: Problems of Community Life, pages 3-7.

Ely: The Coming City.

Boston Directory of Charities, 1914.

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