Charities and the Commons: The Pittsburgh Survey, Part I. The People

by Various

INDUSTRIAL ITALY

ARTHUR P. KELLOGG

The simple Italian peasant, he whose meager village life was so accurately drawn by Mr. Mangano in earlier issues of this magazine, is familiar in every city in this country, and we have in America what is probably a fair appreciation of his poverty, his hardships and the longing for better things which send great blocks of the population of rural provinces flocking across the Atlantic. Of industrial Italy we know less, having few sources of information. If the life of the factory towns is really as bad as The Forewarners,[2] by Giovanni Cena, makes it,—if wages are as low, work as hard, housing as squalid and amusements as few,—then we have in the book a story of remarkable growth in wretchedness, for the manufacturing towns of northern Italy are, as Mrs. Humphry Ward points out in the introduction to the English translation, only forty years old.

[2] The Forewarners, Giovanni Cena, 1908, New York, Doubleday, Page and Company. Price $1.50. This book may be ordered at publisher's price through the office of Charities and The Commons.

The book makes clear the source of the socialist vote in the Italian Parliament and the human stuff which the railway and other big strikes are made of. It is, supposedly, the life story of a Turin printer. Starting as the son of a clay digger, he graduates into the working world after a childhood spent in an orphanage. Having some little education more than his fellows, he becomes a proofreader for a house which is putting on the Italian market the standard works of science and philosophy in all languages. This gives him stronger meat than a weak body and an overwrought mind can digest, and he becomes oppressed with the wrongs of his class, with the grind of the factory and the squalid life of the house where he has a tiny cell in the garret. There he piles up, in proof sheets, a library of the greatest books in the world. Pouring over them by night, half-fed, unsociable, brooding, his mind slips gradually from its moorings and he throws his life away as a sacrifice, for this book, the story of his life and the story of his class, is hidden in his bosom. A tragic death, he believes, will cause it to be published and set afoot nothing short of a revolution.

The book does not tell the manner of his death, but it implies that he threw himself in front of the King's automobile, which he often met in his wanderings outside the city. It typified to him the oppression which he felt,—"the griefs of others I have such a longing to relieve that the desire becomes a torment to me, and I cannot shake myself free from it except by action." Of the automobile drivers he had written: "Whilst the nobility are trying to draw in their claws so as not to exasperate us, here come these bourgeoise parvenus to insult us in our own house. Yes, in our own house, for the highroad belongs to the peasant and the poor man." His studies, which put him above the other workmen, were themselves his undoing, for the substance of Tolstoi and Spencer became so much more to him than the form, that his work grew bad and worse until he was discharged,—an incident convincing to one who has attempted to read proof with an eye to things greater than commas and spelling.

Out of it all he worked a scheme of things as they ought to be, which, whether it came from the proofreader or from the author who takes a proofreader's smarting sense of wrong as his theme, makes an interesting program:

A king who has a lofty ideal of society wishes to lead his subjects up to it by his methods of government, and is willing to abdicate when he feels that they are really free. His chief instruments in the work of redemption are doctors and school teachers. On the one hand freedom, on the other action. Freedom from error whilst doing everything to favor and afford sufficient light. A tendency to abolish all forms of restraint, from the material ones for criminals to the moral ones for all men; from handcuffs to laws. The gradual abolition of hereditary rights of property; every human being to have the needful, and everything to return to a common fund at his death. The legal personality of women, and the equality of the sexes, to be recognized as steps to the conquest of individuality, liberty, happiness. Each to be free to develop to the utmost his own life, his own affections. Birth and education to be protected. Rest to be ensured to old age. Public hygiene to be watched over till disease be eliminated. Every facility to be afforded to manufactures, commerce and science, so as to encourage man to conquer himself, the earth, the heavens. Faith in progress, as if it were not,—and it is not,—destined to die with our earth. The worship of life.

Such a scheme and the style and force of the book are difficult to associate with the neurasthenic proofreader, skilfully as the author has drawn the background and made the man's thought develop over his proof table.

But whether the character be drawn convincingly or not, the book gives a wonderfully clear and sharp-cut picture of the environment of such a worker. Some bits of description stand out above the others, one of them the Turin tenement, where "from the first flights of stairs, carpeted and warmed by hot air pipes, to the bare flight of our top floor, the steps grew ever steeper and steeper. Each evening we passed through all the social zones, hot, temperate and cold; we were lodged in the arctic regions." There were 142 of these steps to the top floor, where naught but poverty dwelt,—a penniless poet with a sister who supported him, a lonely working girl, a woman of the streets, a drunkard and his screaming, beaten wife and half-witted children, and Cimisin, a cobbler, who always "was whistling at full speed to the accompaniment of his hammer. The tears of women, the curses of drunkards, had for so many years mingled with the merriment of that harmless madman."

His history of the printing shop is complete and modern, even to the point where the men went back to their cases after a strike, only to find that long rows of linotypes with women operators had displaced them. These women, he thought, might have among them one fitted to be his mate, but he was too shy to seek her out. He could see them only as workers at the almost human machines, or where "the cylinders revolved with a loud din, the sheets rained out one on top of the other, the women in their long overalls kept on repeating their monotonous movements, feeding the sheets into the press or collecting them into piles. On two side platforms the women were in constant motion. A hundred women and a hundred men. It was impossible to imagine that relations other than those existing between the several parts of a machine might be formed between these beings created for a mutual understanding." Still he wonders vaguely if

perhaps in this uniformity of action, foreign to and apart from the monotonous toil which exhausts them, something exists, smiles, shines? Have some got a small bird singing in their hearts whilst their hands grow grimy at the wheel?... No love of their work,—that is to say of their life,—inspired them; each of them constantly saw the work of an hour, a mere fragment, leave his hands anonymously and forever, and none of them could ever say of anything, "That is my work!" What will remain of them at the end of their lives to prove that they have lived? In truth, they have not lived.

Of the women in his tenement, girls who were not harnessed to a factory, he found even less of life, though perhaps more of womanhood. Going with his friend to see the latter's young sister in a maternity hospital, he reflects that this is the way with many of them,—"love leads to the hospital." The patients there are mostly unmarried girls. The married ones have few children now. "How talk of love, of family life, in a society which deals out the same ration to the single man and to the father of a family?"

His friend starves, the sister dies, the drunkard's wife, mother of six, takes her life,—everyone whom he knew, it seems, all the associates high up in the attic of the "aëropolis," come to grief and misery and death. He greatly admires the woman, a physician, who visits them. "She picks up, joins, straightens out innumerable threads; she seems to be weaving a tapestry of which she will only complete a tiny bit, a work which she has inherited from one generation and will transmit to another." She offers him a part in her work, but he feels "incapable of giving myself in small doses." He is impatient, irritable for "something ready to hand, swift as lightning," that shall right all wrongs and ease all pain at a stroke. He cannot work with others, or for others, and so he tucks his story into his bosom and starts out to meet the King's car. Almost at the last he confesses, "I have passed beside life."

SCHOOL REPORTS[3]

Reviewed by ROLAND P. FALKNER

To the great majority of people the school report is the only tangible evidence of what the school administration is doing. The citizens generally cannot be expected to know what goes on in the school rooms or in the meetings of boards of education, nor what is taking shape in the back of the superintendent's head. Even were they afforded the utmost opportunity and gifted with such unusual perception, it is not likely that without convenient summaries and condensed statements they could form any idea of the public school system as a whole.

[3] School Reports and School Efficiency by David S. Snedden and William H. Allen for the New York Committee on the Physical Welfare of School Children. New York, 1908. Pp. 183. This book will be sent by Charities and The Commons postpaid for $1.50.

If the school report is at once the evidence and test of the school administration, it is clear that its ideal is such a marshalling of the facts regarding the schools of the city as will give the reasonably intelligent citizen a clear notion of just how well the schools are performing the duties entrusted to them.

The book before us is a study of the school reports for the purpose of ascertaining how far and in what manner they seek to embody such ideal. It is a study in comparative administration.

This study reveals so wide a diversity among school reports as to preclude the idea of any consensus of opinion as to what they should contain. While uniformity of scope and treatment is not to be expected, it might reasonably be anticipated that the similar purposes of the school administration in different places would give to these reports a certain family resemblance. In so far as such a resemblance can be traced, it does not appear to be so much the result of parallel internal development as the product of external compulsion or suggestion. State educational departments charged with allotment of state school funds according to a fixed unit in school work, have led to an emphasis upon such units. A similar influence has been exerted by the United States Bureau of Education in its request for information along certain definite lines.

Apart from these influences tending toward a certain uniformity, there are other forces working in the same direction though less effectively. The trend of present discussion in educational affairs is not without its influence, and when certain facts are needed to point a moral or adorn a tale the experience of other cities points to investigations or arrangements of material which are new to the city in question. Conscious effort to promote uniform treatment of statistical data, a theme which has been discussed almost to weariness by the National Education Association and kindred organizations, has been singularly fruitless.

With these general considerations by way of introduction, the work takes up its main theme, the scope of educational statistics. In them we find the condensation of educational experience, and here more than in other parts of the text we should expect the experience and practice of one city to be helpful to another. Too often, indeed almost universally, the tables of facts are isolated from the text of the report, and no effort is made to explain their meaning or set forth the salient features which they present. In view of the volume of tabular matter there is a painful poverty of interpretation.

The method pursued by the author in his record of the facts, is to furnish a specimen table from the different reports in regard to each matter touched upon, a selection of the simpler and then the more detailed statements to be found in them. The following heads are treated in this way: School plant, expenditure, census, attendance, age of pupils, promotions, survival, compulsory attendance, high schools, vacation schools, libraries, medical inspection, teachers and summaries. The variety of forms exhibited is highly instructive although, it may be confessed, somewhat bewildering. The author has confined himself so strictly to a study of methods that he is disposed to let the tables speak for themselves. There is here, too, an absence of interpretation. Tables of figures may speak for themselves but to understand them one must know their language. One cannot help but feel that in many cases some explanation why the detailed tables are to be regarded as superior, other than the fact that they are more detailed, would have been more illuminating and would have relieved somewhat the monotony of this important chapter for the general reader.

No attempt is made to outline a model report. We have instead in chapter 5 a series of questions which might be answered in a school report. The list does not pretend to be exhaustive but in reality it constitutes a somewhat formidable program, if it be assumed that the greater part of these questions should receive attention.

Conscious of the fact that somewhat staggering demands are made on the school administration, the discussion of "suggested economies and improvement" comes as an antidote. This is a brief discussion of short cuts and methods to get at desired results. It looks to a simplification of records and such forms and registers as will supply the needed information, without excessive work. This is a very vital point and the suggestions as far as they go are admirable.

While the subject presented in these pages is thoroughly technical, the work may be commended most heartily to school authorities and to all who are interested in the progress of our schools. It is an appeal for exact information and should not be passed by without a hearing. Such information in regard to our schools,—one of the most important branches of our government,—is painfully lacking. It has too often been assumed that the management of schools was a matter for experts of which outsiders could not properly judge. Within certain limits this is true, but it does not distinguish between the scholastic and the administrative sides of school work. We undoubtedly need both among our school authorities, and in the public at large a keener perception of the requisites of a sound and effective administration. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that there is no great business enterprise of the people of which they know so little as they do of their schools. In private affairs such ignorance on the part of directors and stockholders would lead to bankruptcy.

The authorship of the several chapters of the book is distinctly stated. The general considerations herein briefly noted are the work of Dr. Snedden; the particular application to the city of New York is the work of Dr. Allen. Those who are familiar with Dr. Allen's work answer that he can always be relied upon for a readable and spicy statement. But in view of the predominantly local interest of his discussion and the inexorable limits of space, it has seemed best in the foregoing notice to lay the greater emphasis on those large aspects of the subject which are from the pen of Dr. Snedden.

Drawn by Joseph Stella.