Newer ideals of peace

by Jane Addams

FOOTNOTES:

[4] “The Spirit of Modern Philosophy,” Josiah Royce, page 275.

[5] The American City, Dr. Delos F. Wilcox, page 200.

CHAPTER III
FAILURE TO UTILIZE IMMIGRANTS IN CITY GOVERNMENT

We do much loose talking in regard to American immigration; we use the phrase, “the scum of Europe,” and other unwarranted words without realizing that the unsuccessful man, the undeveloped peasant, may be much more valuable to us here than the more highly developed, but also more highly specialized, town dweller, who may much less readily acquire the characteristics which the new environment demands.

If successful struggle ends in the survival of the few, in blatant and tangible success for the few only, government will have to reckon most largely with the men who have been beaten in the struggle, with the effect upon them of the contest and the defeat; for, after all, the unsuccessful will always represent the majority of the citizens, and it is with the large majority that self-government must eventually deal whatever course of action other governments may legitimately determine for themselves.

To demand to be protected from the many unsuccessful among us, who are supposed to issue forth from the shallows of our city life and seize upon the treasure of the citizens as the barbarians of old came from outside the city walls, is of course not to have read the first lesson of self-government in the light of evolutionary science. It is to forget that a revival in self-government, an awakening of its original motive power and raison d’être, can come only from a genuine desire to increase its scope, and to adapt it to new and strenuous conditions. In this way science revived and leaped forward under the pressure of the enlarged demand of manufacture and commerce put upon it during the industrial decades just passed.

We would ask the moralists and statesmen of this dawning century, equipped as they are, with the historic method, to save our contemporaries from skepticism in regard to self-government by revealing to them its adaptability to the needs of the humblest man who is so sorely pressed in this industrial age. The statesman who would fill his countrymen with enthusiasm for democratic government must not only possess a genuine understanding of the needs of the simplest citizens, but he must know how to reveal their capacities and powers. He must needs go man-hunting into those curious groups we call newly arrived immigrants, and do for them what the scholar has done in pointing out to us the sweetness and charm which inhere in primitive domestic customs and in showing us the curious pivot these customs make for religious and tribal beliefs. The scholar who has surrounded the simplest action of women grinding millet or corn with a penetrating reminiscence, sweeter than the chant they sing, may reveal something of the same reminiscence and charm among many of the immigrants. In the midst of crowded city streets one stumbles upon an old Italian peasant with her distaff against her withered face and her pathetic hands patiently “holding the thread,” as has been done by myriads of women since children needed to be clad; or one sees an old German potter, misshapen by years, his sensitive hands nevertheless fairly alive with skill and delicacy, and his life at least illumined with the artist’s prerogative of direct creation. Could we take these primitive habits as they are to be found every day in American cities and give them their significance and place, they would be a wonderful factor for poetry in cities frankly given over to industrialism and absorbed in its activities. As a McAndrews’ hymn expresses the frantic rush of the industrial river, so these primitive customs could give us something of the mysticism and charm of the industrial springs, a suggestion of source, a touch of the refinement which adheres to simple things. This study of origins, of survivals, of paths of least resistance—refining an industrial age through the people and experiences which really belong to it and do not need to be brought in from the outside—would surely result in a revived enthusiasm for human life and its possibilities which would in turn react upon the ideals of government. The present lack of understanding of simple people and the dearth of the illumination which knowledge of them would give, can be traced not only in the social and political maladjustment of the immigrant in municipal centres, but is felt in so-called “practical affairs” of national magnitude. Regret is many times expressed that, notwithstanding the fact that nine out of every ten immigrants are of rural birth and are fitted to undertake that painstaking method of cultivating the soil which American farmers despise, they nevertheless all tend to congregate in cities where their inherited and elaborate knowledge of agricultural processes is unutilized. But it is characteristic of American complacency when any assisted removal to agricultural regions is contemplated, that we utterly ignore the past experiences of the immigrant and always assume that each family will be content to live in the middle of its own piece of ground, although there are few peoples on the face of the earth who have ever tried isolating a family on one hundred and sixty acres or on eighty, or even on forty. But this is the American way—a survival of our pioneer days—and we refuse to modify it, even in regard to South Italians, although from the day of mediaeval incursions they have lived in compact villages with an intense and elaborated social life, so much of it out of doors and interdependent that it has affected almost every domestic habit. Italian women knead their own bread, but depend on the village oven for its baking, and the men would rather walk for miles to their fields each day than to face an evening of companionship limited to the family. Nothing could afford a better check to the constant removal to the cities of the farming population all over the United States than the possibility of combining community life with agricultural occupation. This combination would afford that development of civilization which, curiously enough, density alone brings and for which even a free system of rural delivery is not an adequate substitute. Much of the significance and charm of rural life in South Italy lies in its village companionship, quite as the dreariness of the American farm life inheres in its unnecessary solitude. But we totally disregard the solution which the old agricultural community offers, and our utter lack of adaptability has something to do with the fact that the South Italian remains in the city where he soon forgets his cunning in regard to silk worms and olive trees, but continues his old social habits to the extent of filling an entire tenement house with the people from one village.

We also exhibit all the Anglo-Saxon distrust of any experiment with land tenure or method of taxation, although our single-tax advocates do not fail to tell us daily of the stupidity of the present arrangement. It might, indeed, be well to make a few experiments upon an historic basis before their enthusiasm converts us all. For centuries in Russia the Slavic village, the mir system of land occupation, has been in successful operation, training men within its narrow limits to community administration. Yet when a persecuted sect from Russia wishes to find refuge in America, we insist that seven thousand people shall give up all at once a system of land ownership in which they are experts. Americans declare the system to be impracticable, although it is singularly like that in vogue in Palestine during the period of its highest prosperity. We cannot receive them in the United States, because our laws have no way of dealing with such cases. And in Canada, where they are finally settled, the unimaginative Dominion officials are driven to the verge of distraction concerning registration of deeds and the collection of taxes from men who do not claim acres in their own names, but in the name of the village. The official distraction is reflected and intensified among the people themselves, to the point of driving them into the mediaeval “marching mania,” in the hope of finding a land in the south where they may carry out their inoffensive “mir” system. The entire situation might prove that an unbending theory of individualism may become as fixed as status itself, although there are certainly other factors in the Doukhobor situation—religious bigotry, and the self-seeking of leadership. In spite of the fact that the Canadian officials have in other matters exhibited much of the adaptability which distinguishes the British colonial policy, they are completely stranded on the rock of Anglo-Saxon individualistic ownership, and assume that any other system of land tenure is subversive of government, forgetting that Russia manages to exert a fair amount of governmental control over thousands of acres held under the system which they so detest.

In our eagerness to reproach the immigrants for not going upon the land we almost overlook the contributions to city life which those of them, who were adapted to it in Europe, are making to our cities here. From dingy little eating-houses in lower New York, performing a function somewhat between the eighteenth-century coffee-house and the Parisian café, is issuing at the present moment perhaps the sturdiest realistic drama that is being produced on American soil. Late into the night speculation is carried forward—not on the nice questions of the Talmud and on quibbles of logic; but minds long trained on these seriously discuss the need of a readjustment of the industrial machine in order that the primitive sense of justice and righteousness may secure larger play in our social organization. And yet a Russian in Chicago who used to believe that Americans cared first and foremost for political liberty and that they would certainly admire those who had suffered in its cause, finds no one interested in his story of six years’ banishment beyond the Antarctic circle. He is really listened to only when he tells the tale to a sportsman of the fish he had caught during the six weeks of summer when the rivers were open. “Lively work then, but plenty of time to eat them dried or frozen through the rest of the year,” is the most sympathetic comment he has yet received upon an experience which, at least to him, held the bittersweet of martyrdom.

Among the colonies of the most recently immigrated Jews, who still carry out their orthodox customs and a ritual preserved through centuries in the Ghetto, one constantly feels during a season of religious observance, a refreshing insistence upon the reality of the inner life, and upon the dignity of its expression in inherited form. Perhaps the most striking reproach to the materialism of Chicago is the sight on a solemn Jewish holiday of a Chicago River bridge lined with men and women oblivious of the noisy traffic and sordid surroundings, casting their sins upon the waters that they may be carried far away. The scene is a clear statement that, after all, life does not consist in wealth, in learning, in enterprise, in energy, in success, not even in that modern fetich, culture, but in an inner equilibrium, in “the agreement of soul.” It is a relief to see even this exaggerated and grotesque presentation of spiritual values.

But the statesman shuts himself away from the possibility of using these great reservoirs of human ability and motive power because he considers it patriotic to hold to governmental lines and ideals laid down a century and a quarter ago. Because of a military inheritance, we as a nation stoutly contend that all this varied and suggestive life has nothing to do with government nor patriotism, and that we perform the full duty of American citizens when the provisions of the statutes on naturalization are carried out. In the meantime, in the interests of our theory that commercial and governmental powers should have no connection with each other, we carefully ignore the one million false naturalization papers in the United States issued and concealed by commercialized politics. Although we have an uneasy knowledge that these powers are curiously allied, we profess that the latter has no connection with the former and no control over it. We steadily refuse to recognize the fact that our age is swayed by industrial forces.

Fortunately, life is much bigger and finer than our theories about it, and, among all the immigrants in the great cities, there is slowly developing the beginnings of self-government on the lines of their daily experiences. The man who really knows immigrants and undertakes to naturalize them, makes no pretense of the lack of connection between their desire to earn their daily bread and their citizenship. The petty and often corrupt politician who is first kind to immigrants, realizes perfectly well that the force pushing them to this country has been industrial need and that recognition of this need is legitimate. He follows the natural course of events when he promises to get the immigrant “a job,” for that is undoubtedly what the immigrant most needs in all the world. If the politician nearest to him were really interested in the immigrant and were to work out a scheme of naturalization fitted to the situation, the immigrant would proceed from the street-cleaning and sewer-digging in which he first engages, to an understanding of the relation of these simple offices to city government. Through them he would understand the obligation of his alderman to secure cleanliness for the streets in which his children play and for the tenement in which he lives. The notion of representative government could be made quite clear and concrete to him. He could demand his rights and use his vote in order to secure them. His very naïve demands might easily become a restraint, a purifying check upon the alderman, instead of a source of constant corruption and exploitation. But when the politician attempts to naturalize the bewildered immigrant, he must perforce accept the doctrinaire standard imposed by men who held a theory totally unattached to experience, and he must, therefore, begin with the remote Constitution of the United States. At the Cook County Court-House only a short time ago a candidate for naturalization, who was asked the usual question as to what the Constitution of the United States was, replied: “The Illinois Central.” His mind naturally turned to his work, to the one bit of contribution he had genuinely made to the new country, and his reply might well offer a valuable suggestion to the student of educational method. Some of our most advanced schools are even now making industrial construction and evolution a natural basis for all future acquisition of knowledge, and they claim that anything less vital and creative is inadequate.

It is surprising how a simple experience, if it be but genuine, gives an opening into citizenship altogether lacking to the more grandiose attempts. A Greek-American, slaughtering sheep in a tenement-house yard, reminiscent of the Homeric tradition, can be made to see the effect of the improvised shambles on his neighbor’s health and the right of the city to prohibit the slaughtering, only as he perceives the development of city government upon its most modern basis.

The enforcement of adequate child labor laws offers unending opportunity to better citizenship founded, not upon theory but on action, as does the compulsory education law, which makes clear that education is a matter of vital importance to the American city and to the State which has enacted definite, well-considered legislation in regard to it. Some of the most enthusiastic supporters of child-labor legislation and of compulsory education laws are those parents who sacrifice old-world tradition, as well as the much-needed earnings of their young children, because of loyalty to the laws of their adopted country. Certainly genuine sacrifice for the nation’s law is a good foundation for patriotism, and as this again is not a doctrinaire question, women are not debarred, and mothers who wash and scrub for the meagre support of their children say, sturdily, sometimes: “It will be a year before he can go to work without breaking the law, but we came to this country to give the young ones a chance, and we are not going to begin by having them do what’s not right.”

Upon some such basis as this the Hebrew Alliance and the Charity Organization of New York, which are putting forth desperate energy in the enormous task of ministering to the suffering which immigration entails, are developing understanding and respect for the alien through their mutual efforts to secure more adequate tenement-house regulation and to control the spread of tuberculosis; both these undertakings being perfectly hopeless without the intelligent co-operation of the immigrants themselves. Through such humble doors, perchance, the immigrant will at last enter into his heritage in a new nation. Democratic government has ever been the result of spiritual travail and moral effort. Apparently, even here, the immigrant must pay the old cost, and he seems to represent the group and type which is making the most genuine contribution to the present growth in governmental functions, with its constant demand for increasing adaptations.

In the induction of the adult immigrant into practical citizenship, we constantly ignore his daily experience. We also assume in our formal attempts to teach patriotism to him and to his children, that experience and traditions have no value, and that a new sentiment must be put into aliens by some external process. Some years ago, a public-spirited organization engaged a number of speakers to go to the various city schools in order to instruct the children in the significance of Decoration Day and to foster patriotism among the foreign born, by descriptions of the Civil War. In one of the schools, filled with Italian children, an old soldier, a veteran in years and experience, gave a description of a battle in Tennessee, and of his personal adventures in using a pile of brush as an ambuscade and a fortification. Coming from the schoolhouse, an eager young Italian broke out, with characteristic vividness, into a description of his father’s campaigning under the leadership of Garibaldi, possibly from some obscure notion that that, too, was a civil war fought from principle, but more likely because the description of one battle had roused in his mind the memory of another such description. The lecturer, whose sympathies happened to be on the other side of the Garibaldian conflict, somewhat sharply told him that he must forget all that; that he was no longer an Italian, but an American. The natural growth of patriotism based upon respect for the achievements of one’s fathers, the bringing together of the past with the present, the significance of the almost world-wide effort at a higher standard of political freedom which swept over all Europe and America between 1848 and 1872 could, of course, have no place in the boy’s mind because it had none in the mind of the instructor whose patriotism apparently tried to purify itself by the American process of elimination.

How far a certain cosmopolitan humanitarianism ignoring national differences, is either possible or desirable, it is difficult to state; but certain it is that the old type of patriotism, founded upon a common national history and land occupation, becomes to many of the immigrants who bring it with them a veritable stumbling-block and impediment. Many Greeks whom I know are fairly besotted with a consciousness of their national importance, and the achievements of their glorious past. Among them the usual effort to found a new patriotism upon American history is often an absurd undertaking; for instance, on the night of one Thanksgiving Day, I spent some time and zeal in a description of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the motives which had driven them across the sea, while the experiences of the Plymouth colony were illustrated by stereopticon slides and little dramatic scenes. The audience of Greeks listened respectfully, although I was uneasily conscious of the somewhat feeble attempt to boast of Anglo-Saxon achievement in hardihood and privation, to men whose powers of admiration were absorbed in their Greek background of philosophy and beauty. At any rate, after the lecture was over, one of the Greeks said to me, quite simply, “I wish I could describe my ancestors to you; they were very different from yours.” His further remarks were translated by a little Irish boy of eleven, who speaks modern Greek with facility and turns many an honest penny by translating, into the somewhat pert statement: “He says if that is what your ancestors are like, that his could beat them out.” It is a good illustration of our faculty for ignoring the past, and of our failure to understand the immigrant’s estimation of ourselves. This lack of a more cosmopolitan standard, of a consciousness of kind founded upon creative imagination and historic knowledge is apparent in many directions, and cruelly widens the gulf between immigrant fathers and their children who are “Americans in process.”

A hideous story comes from New York of a young Russian Jewess who was employed as a stenographer in a down-town office, where she became engaged to be married to a young man of Jewish-American parentage. She felt keenly the difference between him and her newly immigrated parents, and on the night when he was to be presented to them she went home early to make every possible preparation for his coming. Her efforts to make the ménage presentable were so discouraging, the whole situation filled her with such chagrin, that an hour before his expected arrival, she ended her life. Although the father was a Talmud scholar of standing in his native Russian town, and the lover was a clerk of very superficial attainments, she possessed no standard by which to judge the two men. This lack of standard must be charged to the entire community; for why should we expect an untrained girl to be able to do for herself what the community so pitifully fails to accomplish?

All the members of the community are equally stupid in throwing away the immigrant revelation of social customs and inherited energy. We continually allow this valuable human experience to go to waste although we have reached the stage of humanitarianism when no infant may be wantonly allowed to die, no man be permitted to freeze or starve, if the State can prevent it. We may truthfully boast that the primitive, wasteful struggle of physical existence is practically over, but no such statement can be made in regard to spiritual life. Students of social conditions recognize the fact that modern charity constantly grows more democratic and constructive, and daily more concerned for preventive measures, but to admit frankly similar aims as matters for municipal government as yet seems impossible.

In this country it seems to be only the politician at the bottom, the man nearest the people, who understands that there is a growing disinterestedness taking hold of men’s hopes and imaginations in every direction. He often plays upon it and betrays it; but he at least knows it is there.

The two points at which government is developing most rapidly at the present moment are naturally the two where it of necessity exercises functions of nurture and protection: first, in relation to the young criminal, second, in relation to the poor and dependent. One of the latest developments is the Juvenile Courts which the large cities are inaugurating. Only fifteen years ago when I first went to live in an industrial district of Chicago, if a boy was arrested on some trifling charge—and dozens of them were thus arrested each month—the only possible way to secure another chance for him by restoring him to his home with an opportunity to become a law-abiding citizen, was through the alderman of the ward. Upon the request of a distracted relative or the precinct captain, the alderman would “speak to the judge” and secure the release of the boy. The kindness of the alderman was genuine, as was the gratitude of all concerned; but the inevitable impression remained that government was harsh, and naturally dealt out policemen and prisons, and that the political friend alone stood for kindness. That this kindness was in a measure illicit and mysterious in its workings made it all the more impressive.

But so much advance has been made in so short a time as fifteen years, toward incorporating kindly concern for the young and a desire to keep them in the path of rectitude within the process of government itself, that in Chicago alone twenty-four probation officers, as they are called, are paid from the public funds. The wayward boy is committed to one of these for another chance as a part of the procedure of the court. He is not merely released by an act of clemency so magnificent and irrelevant as to dazzle him with a sense of the aldermanic power, but he is put under the actual care of a probation officer that he may do better. He is assisted to keep permanently away from the police courts and their allied penal institutions.

In one of the most successful of these courts, that of Denver, the Judge who can point to a remarkable record with the bad boys of the city, plays a veritable game with them against the police force, he and the boys undertaking to be good without the help of repression, and in spite of the machinations of the police. For instance, if the boys who have been sentenced to the State Reform School at Golden, deliver themselves without the aid of the Sheriff whose duty it is to take them there, they not only vindicate their manliness and readiness “to take their medicine,” but they beat the sheriff who belongs to the penal machinery out of his five-dollar fee. Over this fact they openly triumph—a simple example, perhaps, but significant of the attitude of the well-intentioned toward repressive government.

The Juvenile Courts are beginning to take a really parental attitude towards all dependent children, although for years only those orphans who had inherited at least a meagre property were handed over to a public guardian. Those whose parents had left them absolutely nothing were allowed to care for themselves—as if the whole body of doctrine contained in the phrase, “there is no wealth but life,” had never entered into the mind of man. Because these courts are dealing with the children in their social and everyday relations they have made the astounding discovery that even a penniless child needs the care and defense of the State.

The schools for Reform are those which are inaugurating the most advanced education in agriculture and manual arts. A bewildered foreign parent comes from time to time to Hull-House, asking that his boy be sent to a school to learn farming, basing his request upon the fact that his neighbor’s boy has been sent to “a nice green, country-place.” It is carefully explained that the neighbor’s boy was bad, and was arrested and sent away because of his badness. After much conversation, the disappointed parent sometimes understands, but he often goes away shaking his head, and some such words as these issue: “I have been in this country for five years, and have never gotten anything yet.” At other times it is successfully explained to the man that the city assumes that he is looking out for himself and taking care of his own boy, but it ought to be possible to make him to see that if he feels that his son needs the education of a farm school, that it lies with him to agitate the subject and to vote for the man who will secure such schools. He might well look amazed, were this advice tendered him, for these questions have never been presented to him to vote upon. Because he does not eagerly discuss the tariff or other remote subjects which the political parties present to him from time to time we assume that he is not to be trusted to vote on the education of his child, although there is no doubt that the one thing his ancestors decided upon, from the days of bows and arrows, was the sort of training each one should give his son.

The fine education that is given to a juvenile offender may indicate a certain compunction on the part of the State. Quite as men formerly gloried in warfare and now apologize for it, as they formerly went out to spoil their enemies and now go to civilize them, so civil governments, while continuing to maintain prisons, have become more or less ashamed of them, and are already experimenting in better ways to elevate and reform criminals than by the way of violence and imprisonment. We have already said in America that neither a gallows nor an unmitigated prison shall ever exist for a child.

In the matter of public charities, also, we are not timid as to extending the function of the government. We build enormous city hospitals and almhouses; we care with tenderness for the defective and the dependent; but for that great mass of people just beyond the line, from whom they are constantly recruited, we do practically nothing. It has been said that if a workingman in New York falls a victim to pneumonia, he is taken to a hospital and given skilled treatment; if it leaves him tubercular the city will have a care over him, and valiantly will stand by, putting him into a public sanatorium, providing him with nutritious food and fresh air until his recovery. But if he is turned away from the hospital without tuberculosis, merely too depleted and wretched to go back to his regular employment, then the city can do nothing for him unless he be ready to call himself an out-and-out pauper. We are afraid of the notion of governmental function which would minister to the primitive needs of the mass of the people, although we are quite ready to care for him whom misfortune or disease has made the exception. It is really the rank and file, the average citizen, who is ignored by the government, while he works out his real problems through other agencies, although he is scolded for staying at home on election day, and for refusing to be interested in issues which really do not concern him.

It is comparatively easy to understand the punitive point of view which seeks to suppress, or the philanthropic which seeks to palliate; but it is much more difficult to formulate that city government which is adapted to our present normal living. As over against the survivals of the first two, excellent and necessary as they are, we have but the few public parks and baths, the few band concerts and recreation piers—always excepting, of course, the public schools and the social activities slowly centering around them; for public education has long been a passion in America, and we seem to have been willing to make that an exception to our general theory of government.

While governmental functions have shown this remarkable adaptation and growth in relation to the youth, whether he be in the public schools, in the Juvenile Court or in the reformatory, we hesitate to assume toward the adult this temper of the educator who humbly follows and at the same confidently leads the little child. While the State spends millions of dollars and employs thousands of servants to nurture and heal the sick and defective, it steadfastly refuses to extend its kindliness to the normal working man. The Socialists alone constantly appeal for this extension. They refuse, however, to deal with the present State and constantly take refuge in the formulae of a new scholasticism. Their orators are busily engaged in establishing two substitutes for human nature which they call “proletarian” and “capitalist.” They ignore the fact that varying, imperfect human nature is incalculable, and that to eliminate its varied and constantly changing elements is to face all the mistakes and miscalculations which gathered around the “fallen man,” or the “economic man,” or any other of the fixed norms which have from time to time been substituted for expanding and developing human life. In time “the proletarian” and “the capitalist” will become the impedimenta which it will be necessary to clear away in order to make room for the mass of living and breathing citizens with whom self-government must eventually deal.

There is no doubt that the existence of the mass, the mere size of the modern city, increases the difficulty of the situation. Charles Booth’s maps portraying the standard of living for the people of London afford almost the only attempt at a general social survey of a modern city, at least so far as it may be predetermined from the standard of income. From his accompanying twelve volumes may be deduced the occupations of the people with their real wages, their family budget and their culture level, and, to a certain extent, their recreations and spiritual life. If one gives one’s self over to a moment of musing on this mass of information, so huge and so accurate, one is almost instinctively aware that any radical changes, so much needed in the blackest districts, must largely come from forces outside the life of the people. An enlarged mental life must come from the educationalist, increased wages from the business interests, alleviation of suffering from the philanthropists. What vehicle of correction is provided for the people themselves, what device has been invented for loosing that kindliness and mutual aid which is the marvel of all charity visitors? What broad basis has been laid down for a modification of their most genuine and pressing needs through their own initiative? The traditional Government expresses its activity in keeping the streets clean and the district lighted and policed. It is only during the last quarter of a century that the London County Council has erected decent houses, public baths, and many other devices for the purer social life of the people. American cities have gone no further, although they presumably started at workingmen’s representation a hundred years ago, so completely were the founders misled by the name of government, and the temptation to substitute the form of political democracy for real self-government dealing with advancing social ideals. Even now London has twenty-eight Borough Councils, in addition to the London County Council itself, fifteen hundred direct representatives of the people, as over against seventy in Chicago although the latter city has a population one-half as large. Paris has twenty Mayors, with corresponding machinery for local government, as over against the New York concentration in one huge City Hall, too often corrupt.

In Germany, perhaps more than anywhere else, the government has come to concern itself with the primitive essential needs of its working-people. In their behalf, the Government has forced industry, in the person of the large manufacturers, to make an alliance with it. The manufacturers are taxed for accident insurance of workingmen, for old-age pensions and sick benefits; and a project is being formed in which they shall bear the large share of insurance against non-employment when it has been made clear that non-employment is the result of an economic crisis brought about through the maladministration of finance.

Germany proposes to regulate the maximum amount of rent which landlords of certain types of houses may be permitted to require, quite as the usury laws limit the maximum amount of interest which may be demanded. And yet industry in Germany has flourished, and this control on behalf of the normal workingman as he faces life in his daily vocation has apparently not checked its systematic growth, nor limited its place in the world’s market. As a result of this constant supervision of industry, the German police although a part of a military government, are constantly employed in the regulation of social affairs; and in these branches of government it is remarked that they are dropping their military tone and assuming toward the people the attitude of helpers and protectors. The police force in Germany is the lowest executive organ of the interior government and there are, therefore, as many kinds of police departments as there are different departments in this interior government. They follow the Government inspectors of the forest, the railways, the fields and roads, to see that their instructions are obeyed. In the Department of Public Health it is the police officers who finally enforce instructions in regard to vaccination, meat inspection, sale of food-stuffs, and the transportation of animals; in the department of factory inspection the police not only enforce the provisions of the factory laws, but they are responsible for the books in which the wages paid to minors are recorded; and it is from the police stations that the cards of the Government insurance for working-people are issued. Any special investigation ordered by the legislature is, as a matter of course, undertaken by the police. These varied activities, of course, require men of education and ability, and the very extension of function has broken down the military ideal in the country where that ideal is most firmly intrenched. But in a Republic founded upon a revulsion from oppressive government we still keep the police close to their negative rôle of preserving order and arresting the criminal. The varied functions they perform in Germany would be impossible in America, because it would be hotly resented by the American business man who will not brook any governmental interference in industrial affairs. The inherited instinct that government is naturally oppressive, and that its inroads must be checked, has made it a matter of principle and patriotism to keep the functions of government more restricted and more military than has become true in military countries.

Almost every Sunday in the Italian quarter in which I live various mutual benefit societies march with fife and drum and with a brave showing of banners, celebrating their achievement in having surrounded themselves by at least a thin wall of protection against disaster, upon having set up their mutual good will against the day of misfortune. These parades have all the emblems of patriotism; indeed, the associations present the primitive core of patriotism, brothers standing by each other against hostile forces from without. I assure you that no Fourth of July celebration, no rejoicing over the birth of an heir to the Italian throne, equals in heartiness and sincerity these simple celebrations. Again one longs to pour into the government of their adopted country all this affection and zeal, this real patriotism. A system of State insurance would be a very simple device and secure a large return.

Are we in America retaining eighteenth-century traditions, while Germany is gradually evolving into a Government logically fitted to cope with the industrial situation of the twentieth century? Do we so fail to apprehend what democracy is, that we are really afraid to extend the functions of municipal administration? Have we lost that most conservative of all beliefs—the belief in the average man, and thereby forfeited Aristotle’s ideal of a city “where men live a common life for noble ends”?

CHAPTER IV
MILITARISM AND INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION

American cities have been slow to consider industrial questions as germane to government, and the Federal authorities have persistently treated the millions of immigrants who arrive every year upon a political theory and method adopted a century ago, because both of them ignore the fact that the organization of industry has completed a revolution during that period. The gigantic task of standardizing the successive nations of immigrants throughout the country has fallen upon workmen because they alone cannot ignore the actual industrial situation. To thousands of workmen the immigration problem is a question of holding a job against a constantly lowering standard of living, and to withstand this stream of “raw labor” means to them the maintenance of industrial efficiency and of life itself. Workingmen are engaged in a desperate struggle to maintain a standard of wages against the constant arrival of unskilled immigrants at the rate of three-quarters of a million a year, at the very period when the elaboration of machinery permits the largest use of unskilled men.

It may be owing to the fact that the workingman is brought into direct contact with the situation as a desperate problem of a living wage against starvation; it may be that wisdom is at her old trick of residing in the hearts of the simple, or that this new idealism, which is that of a reasonable life and labor, must, from the very nature of things, proceed from those who labor; or possibly it may be because amelioration arises whence it is so sorely needed; but certainly it is true, that, while the rest of the country talks of assimilation as if it were a huge digestive apparatus, the man with whom the immigrant has come most sharply into competition, has been forced into fraternal relations with him.

Curiously enough, however, as soon as the immigrant situation is frankly regarded as an industrial one, as these men must regard it, the political aspects of the industrial situation is revealed in the fact that trade organizations which openly concern themselves with the immigration problem on its industrial side, quickly take on the paraphernalia and machinery which have hitherto associated themselves only with governmental life and control. The trades unions have worked out all over again local autonomy, with central councils and national representative bodies and the use of the referendum vote; and they also exhibit many of the features of political corruption and manipulation.

The first real lesson in self-government to many immigrants has come through the organization of labor unions, and it could come in no other way, for the union alone has appealed to their necessities. One sees the first indication of an idealism arising out of these primal necessities, and at moments one dares to hope that it may be sturdy enough and sufficiently founded upon experience to make some impression upon the tremendous immigration situation.

The movements embodying a new idealism have traditionally sought refuge with those who are near to starvation. Although the spiritual struggle is associated with the solitary garret of the impassioned dreamer, it may be that the idealism fitted to our industrial democracy will be evolved in crowded sewer ditches and in noisy factories. It may be contended that this remarkable coming together of the workingman and the immigrant has been the result of an economic pressure, and is without merit or idealism, and that the trades union record on Chinese exclusion and negro discrimination has been damaging. Be that as it may, this assimilation between the immigrant and the workingman has exhibited amazing strength, which may be illustrated from two careful studies made in two different parts of the country.

To quote first from a study made from the University of Wisconsin of the stock yards strike which took place in Chicago in 1904[6]: “Perhaps the fact of the greatest social significance is that this was not merely a strike of skilled labor for the unskilled, but was a strike of Americanized Irish, Germans, and Bohemians, in behalf of Slovaks, Poles, and Lithuanians.... This substitution of races in the stock yards has been a continuing process for twenty years. The older nationalities have already disappeared from the unskilled occupations, and the substitution of races has evidently run along the line of lower standard of living. The latest arrivals, the Lithuanians and Slovaks, are probably the most oppressed of the peasants of Europe.” The visitors who attended the crowded meetings of the strikers during the summer of 1904 and heard the same address successively translated by interpreters into six or eight languages, who saw the respect shown to the most uncouth of the speakers by the skilled American men representing a distinctly superior standard of life and thought, could never doubt the power of the labor organizations for amalgamation, whatever opinion they might hold concerning their other values. This may be said in spite of the fact that great industrial disturbances have arisen from the under-cutting of wages by the lowering of racial standard. Certainly the most notable of these have taken place in those industries and at those places in which the importation of immigrants has been deliberately fostered as a wage-lowering weapon; and even in those disturbances and under the shock and strain of a long strike, disintegration did not come along the line of race cleavage.

The other study was made in the anthracite coal fields, and was undertaken from the University of Pennsylvania[7]: “The United Mine Workers of America is taking men of a score of nationalities, English-speaking and Slav, men of widely different creeds, languages, and customs, and of varying powers of industrial competition, and is welding them into an industrial brotherhood, each part of which can at least understand of the others that they are working for one great and common end. This bond of unionism is stronger than one can readily imagine who has not seen its mysterious workings or who has not been a victim of its members’ newly found enthusiasm. It is to-day the strongest tie that can bind together 147,000 mine workers and the thousands dependent upon them. It is more than religion, more than the social ties which hold together members of the same community.”

It was during a remarkable struggle on the part of this amalgamation of men from all countries, that the United States government, in spite of itself, was driven to take a hand in an industrial situation, owing to the long strain and the intolerable suffering entailed upon the whole country. Even then, however, the Government endeavored to confine its investigation to the mere commercial questions of tonnage and freight rates with their political implications, and it was only when an aroused and moralized public opinion insisted upon it that the national commission was driven to consider the human aspects of the case. Because of this public opinion, columns of newspapers and days of investigation were given to the discussion of the deeds of violence, discussions having nothing to do with the original demands of the strikers and entering only into the value set upon human life by each of the contesting parties. Did the union encourage violence against non-union men, or did it really do everything to suppress violence? Did it live up to its creed which was to maintain a standard of living that families might be properly housed and protected from debilitating toil and disease, and that children might be nurtured into American citizenship? Did the operators protect their men as far as possible from mine damp, from length of hours proven by experience to be exhausting? Did they pay a wage to the mine laborer sufficient to allow him to send his children to school? Questions such as these, a study of the human problem, invaded the commission day after day during the sitting. One felt for the moment the first wave of a rising tide of humanitarianism, until the normal ideals of the laborer to secure food and shelter for his family, a security for his own old age, and a larger opportunity for his children became the ideals of democratic government.

Let us imagine the result if, during the long anthracite strike, the humane instinct had so over-mastered the minds of the strikers, and so exalted their passions that they had lifted a hand against no man, even though he seemed to be endangering their cause before their eyes. Such a result might have come about, partly because the destruction of life had become abhorrent and impossible to them engaged as they were in the endeavor to raise life in the coal regions to a higher level, and partly because they would have scorned to destroy an enemy in order to achieve a mere negative result when the power lay within themselves to convert him into an ally, when they might have made him a source of help and power, a comrade of the same undertaking. If the element of battle, of mere self-seeking, could be eliminated from strikes, if they could remain a sheer uprising of the oppressed and underpaid to a self-conscious recognition of their condition, so unified, so irresistible as to sweep all the needy within its flood, we should have a tide rising, not to destruction, but to beneficence. Let us imagine the state of public feeling if there had been absolutely no act of violence traceable, directly or indirectly, to the union miners; if during the long months of the strike the great body of miners could have added the sanction of sustained conduct to their creed. Public sympathy would have led to an understanding of the need these miners were trying to meet, and the American nation itself might have been ready to ask for legislation concerning the minimum wage, and for protection to life and limb, equal to the legislation of New Zealand or Germany. But because the element of warfare unhappily did exist, government got back to its old business of repression.

To preserve law and order is obviously the function of government everywhere; and yet in our complicated modern society, especially as thousands of varied peoples are crowded into cities, it is not always easy to see just where real social order lies. The officials themselves are sometimes perplexed, and at other times deliberately use the devices of government for their own ends. We may take once more in illustration the great strike in the Chicago stock-yards. The immediate object of the strike was the protection of the wages of the unskilled men from a cut of one cent per hour, although, of course, the unions of skilled men felt that this first invasion of the wages increased through the efforts of the union, would be but the entering wedge of an attempt to cut wages in all the trades represented in the stock-yards. Owing to the refusal on the part of the unions to accept arbitration offered by the packers at an embarrassing moment, and because of the failure of the unions to carry out the terms of a contract, the strike in its early stages completely lost the sympathy of that large part of the public dominated by ideals of business honor and fair dealing. It lost, too, the sympathy of that growing body of organized labor which is steadily advancing in a regard for the validity of the contract, and is faithfully cherishing the hope that in time the trades unions may universally attain an accredited business standing.

The leaders after the first ten days were, therefore, forced to make the most of the purely human appeal which lay in the situation itself, that 30,000 men, including the allied trades, were losing weeks of wages, with a possible chance of the destruction of their unions on behalf of the unskilled who were the newly arrived Poles and Lithuanians, unable as yet to look out for themselves. Owing to the irregular and limited hours of work—a condition quite like that prevailing on the London docks before the great strike of the dockers—the weekly wage of these unskilled men was exceptionally low, and the plea of the strikers was based upon the duty of the strong to the weak. A chivalric call was issued that the standard of life might be raised to that designated as American, and that this mass of unskilled men might secure an education for their children. Of course no appeal could have been so strong as this purely human one which united for weeks thousands of men of a score of nationalities into that solidarity which only comes through a self-sacrificing devotion to an absorbing cause.

The strike involved much suffering and many unforeseen complications. At the end of eight weeks the union leaders made the best terms possible. Through these terms the skilled workers were guaranteed against a reduction in wages, but no provision was made for the unskilled in whose behalf the strike had at first been undertaken. Although the hard-pressed leaders were willing to make this concession, the politicians in the meanwhile had seen the great value of the human sentiment which bases its appeal on the need of the under dog and which had successfully united this mass of workingmen into a new comradeship with the immigrants. The appeal was infinitely more valuable than any merely political cry, and the fact that the final terms of settlement were submitted to a referendum vote at once gave the local politicians a chance to avail themselves of this big, loosely defined sympathy. They did avail themselves of this in so dramatic a manner that they almost succeeded, solely upon that appeal, in taking the strike out of the hands of the legitimate officers and placing it in their own hands for their own political ends.

The situation was a typical one, exemplifying the real aim of popular government with its concern for primitive needs, forced to seek expression outside of the organized channels of government. If the militia could have been called in, government would have been placed even more dramatically in the position of the oppressor of popular self-government. The phenomenal good order, the comparative lack of violence on the part of the striking workmen, gave no chance for the bringing in of the militia. The city politician was of course very much disappointed, for it would have afforded him an opening to put the odium of this traditional opposition of government, an opposition which has always been most dramatically embodied in the soldier, upon the political party dominating the State but not the city. It would have given the city politician an excellent opportunity to show the concern of himself and his party for the real people, as over against the attitude of the party dominating the State. But because the militia was not called, his scheme failed, and the legitimate strike leaders who, although they passed through much tribulation because of this political interference, did not eventually lose control.

The situation in the Chicago stock-yards also afforded an excellent epitome of the fact that government so often finds itself, not only in opposition to the expressed will of the people making the demand at the moment, but apparently against the best instincts of the mass of the citizens as a whole.

For years the city administration had so protected the property interests invested in the stock-yards, that none of the sanitary ordinances had ever been properly enforced. The sickening stench and the scum on the branch of the river known as Bubbly Creek at times made that section of the city unendurable. The smoke ordinances were openly ignored, nor did the meat inspector ever seriously interfere with business, being quite willing to have meat sold in Chicago which had not passed the inspection for foreign markets. The water steals, too, for which the stock-yards were at one time notorious, must have been more or less known to certain officials. But all this merely corrupted a limited number of inspectors, and although their corruption was complete and involved entire administrations, it did not actually touch large numbers of persons. During the strike of 1904, however, 1,200 policemen, actual men possessed of human sensibilities, were called upon to patrol the yards inside and out. There is no doubt that the police inspector of the district thoroughly represented the alliance of the City Hall with the business interests, that he did not mean to discover anything which was derogatory to the packers nor to embarrass them in any way during the conduct of the strike. Had these 1,200 men, more than a regiment in numbers, been a regiment in training and tradition, they, too, would have seen nothing, and would have been content at heart, as they were obliged to be in conduct, to have arrested the strikers on the slightest provocation, and to have protected the strike-breakers.

But they were, in point of fact, called upon to face a very peculiar situation, because of the type of men and women who formed the bulk of the strike-breakers, and because, during the first weeks of the strike, these men and women were kept constantly inside the yards, day and night. In order to hold them at all, discipline outside of working hours was thoroughly relaxed, and the policemen in charge of the yards, while there ostensibly to enforce law and order, were obliged every night to connive at prize-fighting, at open gambling, and at prostitution. They were there, not to enforce law and order as it defines itself in the minds of the bulk of healthy-minded citizens, but only to keep the strikers from molesting the non-union workers. This was certainly commendable, but, after all, only part of their real duty.

Because they were normal men living in the midst of normal life and not in barracks, they were shocked by the law-breaking which they were ordered to protect, and much drawn in sympathy to the strikers whom they were supposed to regard as public enemies. An investigator who interviewed one hundred policemen found only one who did not frankly extol the virtues of the strikers as over against the shocking vices of the imported men. This, of course, was an extreme case brought about by the unusual and peculiar type of the imported strike-breakers. There is, however, trustworthy evidence incorporated in affidavits which were at the time submitted to the Mayor of Chicago, concerning the unlawful conduct of the men who were under the protection of the city police.

It was hard for a patriot not to feel jealous of the union and of the enthusiasm of those newly emigrated citizens. They poured out their gratitude and affection upon this first big friendly force which had offered them help in their desperate struggle in the New World. This devotion, this comradeship, and this fine esprit de corps should have been won by the Government itself from these newly arrived, scared, and untrained citizens. The union was that which had concerned itself with the real struggle for life, shelter, a chance to work, and bread for their children. It had come to them in a language they could understand, through men with interests akin to their own, and it gave them both their first chance to express themselves through a democratic vote, and an opportunity to register by a ballot their real opinion upon a very important matter.

They used the referendum votes, the latest and perhaps the most clever device of democratic government, and yet they used it to decide a question which the government supposed to be quite outside its realm. When they left the old country, the government of America held their deepest hopes, and represented that which they believed would obtain for them the fullness of life denied them in the lands of oppressive governments. It is a curious commentary on the fact that we have not yet attained self-government when the real and legitimate objects of men’s desires must still be incorporated in those voluntary groups for which the government, when it does its best, can only afford protection from interference. As the religious revivalist looks with longing upon the fervor of a single-tax meeting, as the orthodox Jew sees his son stay away from Yom Kippur service in order to pour all his religious fervor, his precious zeal for righteousness which has been gathered through the centuries, into the Socialist Labor Party—so a patriot finds himself exclaiming to the immigrant, like another Andrea del Sarto to his wife, “Oh, but what do they—what do they to please you more?”

The stock-yards strike afforded an example of the national appeal subordinated to an appeal made in the name of labor. During the early stages of the strike it was discovered that newly arrived Macedonians were taking many of the places vacated by the strikers. One of the most touching scenes during the strike was the groups of Macedonians who would sit together in the twilight playing on primitive pipes singularly like the one which is associated with the great god Pan. The slender song would carry amazingly in the smoke-bedimmed air, affecting the spectator with a curious sense of incongruity.

When the organized labor of Chicago discovered that the strikers’ places were taken by Greeks, the unions threatened, unless the Greeks were “called off,” to boycott the Greek fruit-dealers all over the city, who with their street stands are singularly dependent upon the patronage of workingmen. The fact that the strike-breakers were Macedonians, as it happened, was an additional advantage at the moment; for the Greeks have been much concerned to make it clear that Macedonia belongs to Greece, and have hotly resented the efforts of Bulgaria to establish a protectorate over the country. They therefore responded at once to this acknowledgment of their claim, and, partly to show that the Macedonians and Greeks were countrymen, partly because they resented the implication that a Greek could act a cowardly part in any situation, and also, doubtless, because they were merchants threatened with loss of trade, they made superhuman efforts to clear the yards of Macedonians. This they accomplished in a remarkably short time. So reckless were they in the methods they used that it was common gossip throughout the Greek colony that strike-breakers would be refused the comforts of religion by the Greek priests in the city, although doubtless this rumor was unfounded. This utter recklessness of method, this determination to deter strike-breaking at any cost, is, of course, a revelation of the war element which is an essential part of any strike. The appeal to “loyalty” is the nearest approach to a moral appeal which can be safely made in the midst of a war of any sort. During a long strike one result of the non-moral appeal is to confuse the situation so that it becomes utterly impossible to tell how many men refuse to become strike-breakers because they are terrorized and how many stay away from conviction. The non-moral appeal not only sins against the principles advocated by trades unionists, but it contradicts itself and brings great confusion into the situation, as war ideals always do when thrust into a peaceful society. It was, for instance, quite impossible to tell whether the lowering in the type of man who was willing to take a striker’s place, so that at last only very ignorant men from the southern plantations could be induced to work, was due to a species of class consciousness, a response to the demand felt so strongly by labor men—“Thou shalt not take thy neighbor’s job”—or whether workingmen are becoming so afraid to take striker’s places that these places must at last be given to men who have come from such remote parts of the country that “they do not know enough to be afraid.” The unions themselves could take no accounting of their real strength because of the terrorism which had become thrust into the situation. And yet all that the stock-yards workers were demanding through this long and disastrous strike, was the minimum wage which has been guaranteed by conservative governments elsewhere, and is recognized even in the United States in much governmental work under the contracts of civil or Federal authorities. So timid are American cities, however, in dealing with this perfectly reasonable subject of wages in its relation to municipal employees, that when they do prescribe a minimum wage for city contract work, they allow it to fall into the hands of the petty politician and to become part of a political game, making no effort to give it a dignified treatment in relation to the cost of living and to the margin of leisure. In this the English cities have anticipated us, both as to time and legitimate procedure. Have Americans formed a sort of “imperialism of virtue,” holding on to preconceived ideals of government and insisting that they must fit all the people who come to our shores, even though they crush the most promising bits of self-expression in the process? Is the American attitude toward self-government like that of the Anglo-Saxon towards civilization, save that he goes forth to rule all the nations of the earth by one pattern, while we remain at home and bid them to rule themselves by one pattern? We firmly decline not only to consider matters of industry and commerce as germane to government, but we also decline to bring men together upon that most natural and inevitable of all foundations, their industrial needs.

The government which refuses to consider matters of this sort, or at least waits until their neglect becomes a scandal before it consents to deal with them, as a result of this caution forces the most patriotic citizens to ignore the Government and to embody their scruples and hopes of progress in voluntary organizations. To be afraid to extend the functions of government may be to lose what we have. A government has always received feeble support from its constituents as soon as its demands appeared childish or remote. Citizens inevitably neglect or abandon civic duty, when their government no longer embodies their genuine desires. It is useless to hypnotize ourselves by unreal talk of colonial ideas, and of our patriotic duty towards immigrants as though the situation was one demanding the passage of a set of resolutions when we fail to realize that the nation can be saved only by patriots who are possessed of a contemporaneous knowledge.

As industrial relations imply peaceful relations, under a certain rough reorganization and reconstruction of governmental functions which the association of labor presents, it is inevitable that in its international aspects the association should formally advocate universal peace. Workmen have always realized, however feebly and vaguely they may have expressed it, that it is they who in all ages have borne the heaviest burden of privation and suffering imposed on the world by the military spirit.

The first international organization founded, not to promote a colorless peace, but to advance and develop the common life of all nations, was founded in London in 1864 by workingmen, and was called simply “The International Association of Workingmen.” They recognized that a supreme interest raised all workingmen above the prejudice of race, and united them by wider and deeper principles than those by which they were separated into nations. They hoped that as religion, science, art, had become international, so now at last labor might take its place as an international interest. A few years later, at its third congress in Brussels they recommended that in case of war a universal strike be declared.

There is a growing conviction among workingmen of all countries that, whatever may be accomplished by a national war, however moral the supposed aim of such a war, there is one inevitable result—an increased standing army, the soldiers of which are non-producers, and must be fed by the workers.

The surprising growth of Socialism, at the moment, is due largely to the fact that it is the only political party upon an international basis, and also that it frankly ventures its future upon a better industrial organization. These two aspects have had much more to do with its hold in industrial neighborhoods than have its philosophic tenets or the impassioned appeal of its propagandists. The Socialists are making almost the sole attempt to preach a morality sufficiently all-embracing and international to keep pace with even that material internationalism which has standarized the threads of screws and the size of bolts, so that machines may become interchangeable from one country to another. It is the same sort of internationalism which Mazzini preached when distracted Italy was making her desperate struggle for a unified and national life. He issued his remarkable address to her workingmen and solemnly told them that the life of the nation could not be made secure until her patriots were ready to die for human issues. He saw, earlier than most men, that the desire to be at unity with all human beings, to claim the sense of a universal affection is a force not to be ignored. He believed that it might even then be strong enough to devour the flimsy stuff called national honor, glory, and prestige, which incite to war and induce workingmen to trample over each other’s fields and to destroy the results of each other’s labor.

Workingmen dream of an industrialism which shall be the handmaid of a commerce ministering to an increased power of consumption among the producers of the world, binding them together in a genuine internationalism. Existing commerce has long ago reached its international stage, but it has been the result of business aggression and constantly appeals for military defense and for the forcing of new markets. In so far as commerce has rested upon the successful capture of the resources of the workers, it has been a relic of the mediaeval baron issuing forth to seize the merchants’ boats as they passed his castle on the Rhine. It has logically lent itself to warfare, and is, indeed, the modern representative of conquest. As its prototype rested upon slavery and vassalage, so this commerce is founded upon a contempt for the worker and believes that he can live on low wages. It assumes that his legitimate wants are the animal ones comprising merely food and shelter and the cost of replacement. The industrialism of which this commerce is a part, exhibits this same contemptuous attitude, but it is more easily extended to immigrants than to any other sort of workmen because they seem further away from a common standard of life. This attitude toward the immigrant simply illustrates once more that it is around the deeply significant idea of the standard of life that our industrial problems of to-day centre. The desire for a higher standard of living in reality forms the base of all the forward movements of the working class. “The significance of the standard of life lies not so much in the fact that for each of us it is different, as that for all of us it is progressive,”[8] constantly invading new realms. To imagine that for immigrants it is merely a question of tin cups and plates stored in a bunk versus a white cloth and a cottage table, and that all goes well if sewing-machines and cottage-organs reach the first generation of immigrants, and fashionable dressmakers and pianos the second, is of course a most untutored interpretation. Until the standard of life is apprehended in its real significance and made the crux of the immigrant situation, as recent economists are making the power of consumption the test of a nation’s prosperity, we shall continue to ignore the most obvious and natural basis for understanding and mutual citizenship.

Because workmen have been forced to consider this standard of living in regard to immigrants as well as themselves, they have made genuine efforts toward amalgamation. This is perhaps easily explained, for, after all, the man in this country who realizes human equality is not he who repeats the formula of the eighteenth century, but he who has learned that the “idea of equality is an outgrowth of man’s primary relations with nature. Birth, growth, nutrition, reproduction, death, are the great levelers that remind us of the essential equality of human life. It is with the guarantee of equal opportunities to play our parts well in these primary processes that government is chiefly concerned”[9] and not merely with the repression of the vicious, nor with guarding the rights of property. All that devotion of the trades union for the real issues and trials of life could, of course, easily be turned into a passion for self-government and for the development of the national life if we were really democratic from the modern evolutionary standpoint, and held our town-meetings upon the topics of vital concern.

So long, however, as the Government declines to concern itself with these deeper issues involved in the standard of life and the industrial status of thousands of its citizens, we must lose it.

If progress were inaugurated by those members of the community who possess the widest knowledge and superior moral insight, then social amelioration might be brought about without the bungling and mistakes which so distress us all. But, over and over again, salutary changes are projected and carried through by men of even less than the average ethical development, because their positions in life have brought them in contact with the ills of existing arrangements. To quote from John Morley: “In matters of social improvement, the most common reason why one hits upon a point of progress and not another, is that one happens to be more directly touched than the other by the unimproved practice.”[10] Perhaps this is a sufficient explanation of the fact that untrained workmen are entrusted with the difficult task of industrial amelioration and adjustment, while the rest of the community often seems ignorant of the truth that institutions which do not march with the extension of human needs and relationships are dead, and may easily become a deterrent to social progress. Unless we subordinate class interests and class feeling to a broader conception of social progress, unless we take pains to come in contact with the surging and diverse peoples who make up the nation, we cannot hope to attain a sane social development. We need rigid enforcement of the existing laws, while at the same time, we frankly admit the inadequacy of these laws, and work without stint for progressive regulations better fitted to the newer issues among which our lot is cast; for, unless the growing conscience is successfully embodied in legal enactment, men lose the habit of turning to the law for guidance and redress.

I recall, in illustration of this, an instance which took place fifteen years ago. I had newly come to Chicago, fresh from the country, and had little idea of the social and industrial conditions in which I found myself on Halsted Street, when a dozen girls came from a neighboring factory with a grievance in regard to their wages. The affair could hardly have been called a labor difficulty. The girls had never heard of a trades union, and were totally unaccustomed to acting together. It was more in the nature of a “scrap” between themselves and their foreman. In the effort toward adjustment, there remains vividly in my memory a conversation I had with a leading judge who arbitrated the difficulty. He expressed his belief in the capacity of the common law to meet all legitimate labor difficulties as they arise. He trusted its remarkable adaptability to changing conditions under the decisions of wise and progressive judges. He contended, however, that, in order to adjust it to our industrial affairs, it must be interpreted, not so much in relation to precedents established under a judicial order which belongs to the past, but in reference to that newer sense of justice which this generation is seeking to embody in industrial relations. He foresaw something of the stress and storm of the industrial conflicts which have occurred in Chicago since then, and he expressed the hope that the Bench of Cook County might seize the opportunity, in this new and difficult situation, of dealing with labor difficulties in a judicial spirit.

What a difference it would have made in the history of Chicago during the last fifteen years if more men had been possessed of this temper and wisdom, and had refused to countenance the use of force. If more men had been able to see the situation through a fresher medium; to apprehend that the old legal enactments were too individualistic and narrow; that a difference in degree may make a difference in kind; if they had realized that they were the first generation of American jurists who had to deal with a situation made novel by the fact that it was brought about by the coming together of two millions of people largely on an industrial basis!

Our constitutions were constructed by the advanced men of the eighteenth century, who had studied the works of the most radical thinkers of that century. Radicalism then meant a more democratic political organization, and in its defence, they fearlessly quoted the Greek city and the Roman Forum. But we have come to admit that our present difficulties are connected with our industrial organization and with the lack of connection between that organization and our inherited democratic form of government. If self-government were to be inaugurated by the advanced men of the present moment, they would make a most careful research into those early organizations of village communities, folk-motes, and mirs, those primary cells of both industrial and political organizations, where the people knew no difference between the two, but, quite simply, met to consider in common discussion all that concerned their common life. They would investigate the crafts, guilds, and artels, which combine government with daily occupations, as did the self-governing university and free town. They would seek for the connection between the liberty-loving mediaeval city and its free creative architecture, that art which combines the greatest variety of artists and artisans. They would not altogether ignore the “compulsion of origins” and the fact that our present civilization is most emphatically an industrial one. In Germany, when the Social Democratic party first vigorously asserted the economic basis of society and laid the emphasis upon its industrial aspect, the Government itself, in a series of legislative measures, designated “the Socialism of Bismarck,” found itself dealing directly with industry, through a sheer effort to give itself a touch of reality. The Government of Russia, in the first year of the Japanese War, made an effort to relieve the needs of the people. The bureaucracy itself organized the workmen into a species of trades unions through which the Russian Government promised to protect the proletarian from the aggressions of capital. The entire incident was suggestive of the protection afforded by the central State to the slowly emancipated serfs of central Europe when the barons, reluctant to give up their rights and privileges, so unjustly oppressed them.

Shall a democracy be slower than these old Powers to protect its humblest citizen, and shall it see them slowly deteriorating because, according to democratic theory, they do not need protection?