TEN CENTS
KATHARINE ANTHONY
It was in a small restaurant in the downtown business district. The girl who came in and sat down opposite me at the "table for ladies" was clearly "office help." She could not have been more than sixteen, and in the boyish-looking brown velvet hat that she wore she appeared scarcely that. Her manner had little of the self-assertiveness so commonly seen in the young girl wage-earner.
"How much is the veg'tubble soup?" she asked the waiter in a confiding tone.
"Ten cents," he said.
The price appeared satisfactory and the waiter went away with his very brief order. While the young girl waited, she caught my eye.
"It's cold today," she remarked, with a winning smile and an air of taking me into her confidence as she had done with the waiter.
"A bit chilly, yes."
"He don't let me down to dinner till so late," she continued, "sometimes half-past one. You get hungry, and then you get over being hungry, and then you don't want nothing when you do go down. You know?"
Yes, I recognized the experience.
"The office where I used to work, we went out to dinner right at twelve every day."
"What keeps you so late now?"
"I guess he just forgets to let me down. He forgets to go out himself, I think."
The waiter brought the soup, a watery looking fluid in which floated a tomato and an onion in partial dissolution. He placed beside the plate a dingy blue check which bore in large print 10c.
"When I'm there a month, I'm going to ask him to let me down every day at a regular hour," she went on. "I'm only there a week now, so I wouldn't ask him yet."
She tasted the soup, but it was apparently not to her liking, or else, as she had said, her appetite had gone when the first feeling of hunger had passed. She glanced at the dirty blue check which committed her to her choice for better or worse, and then tried another spoonful of soup.
"I used to take a cup of coffee and a Charlotte 'roosh' every day, but my mother said I'd starve. She told me I'd got to have soup, it was more stren'thening."
"She was quite right, of course."
"But what's the use of ordering it if you can't eat it after all?"
She regarded the plate disconsolately. A little rallying induced her to make another effort. Then she gave it up entirely.
"I wonder what my mother would say if she could see me now!"
"I wonder!"
Taking two nickels from her small rusty bag, she rose, leaving the plate of cold soup almost untouched. She said good-by with her peculiarly friendly little smile, deposited the blue check and the two nickels at the cash counter, and went back to her afternoon's work.
WILLIAM, A MODERN DRAMA[3]
[3] Drawn from the records of the Juvenile Protective Association, Chicago.
The curtain is about to fall upon a human drama as full of complicating agencies and dramatic ironies as the most exacting either of Greeks or of moderns could require.
The dramatis personae are: a colored youth of twenty-two years; his aged mother (the father disappeared while the youth was still a child in Kansas); a friend who failed him and then too late repented; a partner; a dishonest clerk; a lawyer of similar type; and a judge according to the letter of the law. The acts are only three and brief.
Act I shows William at work for a large firm in Missouri at $9 a week. He manages to live on $3, sending $6 to his mother. He could not write; she could not read. But the weekly money order became the tryst of mother and son, and by it she knew that all was well with him. Among his fellow workmen was one, also a William, who seemed friendly and like William I, anxious to live economically. The two Williams shared a room, and all went well for about three months.
One pay day, William II borrowed from William I the $6 that should go to the mother, but only for a day or so, to be returned surely before the end of the week. But the man disappeared, and with him vanished the money. Then William I went to the little clothes press, and not having a suit of his own, took one of William II's, and pawned it for $6, and sent the money to his mother according to his word. That night, repentant but penniless, William II returned. He expressed himself as well pleased with what had been done with his suit, satisfied to have the money raised by any means possible. So the two, reconciled, slept. But William II rising early in the morning, went for an officer, and charging his room-mate with theft, had him arrested.
"He slep' with me all night there, and in the mawnin he don' have me arrested!"—thus William I mourned his false friend.
So Act I closes with our hero in the penitentiary, locked in for two years. But William II's repentance bore a late fruit. During the two years, he sent out of his own money each week the $6 to the mother of his friend, that she might never know the truth.
Act II shows William working in different places, and for short times, as is the fate of "jail-birds." At last in company with George he opens a restaurant, and prospers, and is popular. Then his evil fate overtakes him. Invited to be door-keeper at a dance one night, he left George in charge of the restaurant. George apparently went out on business of his own, and presently the clerk followed his example, donning for the time a coat of William's. But the clerk needed money; there was none in the pockets of the coat; and so, at a convenient corner, he waylaid a Chinese, relieved him of has funds, and left William's coat by way of compensation. Easily identified by the coat and papers in its pockets, William was as easily arrested—and as easily sentenced. The trial was a farce. A lawyer was appointed by the court. This lawyer took his client's indictment papers, ignored his client, called no witnesses, heard the sentence, and drew his fee.
William appealed to the Pardon Board. But at the time of this appeal, neither George nor the other door-keeper at that dance could be found to prove an alibi for William. The board asked: "have you ever been in prison before?" Alas for William! He could not say no; the board would not listen to his version and investigate the facts. His own truthfulness condemned him, and he was sent up on a five years' sentence.
The setting of Act III is the penitentiary. Falsely accused, without opportunity to prove his innocence, neglected by the lawyer paid to defend him, William, being only a Negro, toiled faithfully in a stone quarry, accumulating a reputation undesirable in the eyes of the world and the law. One day his foot was injured by the crusher. Then after months of stone dust, his lungs became infected. But at last word of his case reached the Juvenile Protective Association, and presently successful proof of his innocence of all connection with the attack on the Chinese was secured, and William was paroled from prison.
How far he may recover from the injuries received during this imprisonment remains to be seen. How much of opportunity to work and support himself and the aged mother society will offer an injured Negro with two prison records is a grave question. But the matter may be settled by the quiet falling of the curtain upon the sad little drama of the life of William.—S.
[EDITORIAL GRIST]
JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN 1837-1913
Mr. Morgan was for seventeen years treasurer of the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York which founded The Survey and under which it was published until the fall of 1912. When, in 1907, the parent society launched Charities Publication Committee in order "to give national scope and breadth" to the magazine, Mr. Morgan was one of fifteen guarantors who gave $1,000 each the initial year to promote its educational work. Last summer he gave $250, the sum asked from him, toward the clearance of an overhanging deficit, in advance of the institution of the Survey Associates as an independent and co-operative under-taking.
The public's chief concern in Mr. Morgan's great activities has been the play of his powerful individuality in the rapid reconstruction of the "mass of wrecked corporations which blocked the path of American finance" following the panic of 1893, and in "heading the forces of conservatism in the great business emergency" of 1907; his part as the "immense constructive genius" throughout the period of expansion in America's "large creative activities."
The "economic necessity or value of the enormous industrial combinations" shaped at his hands will, in the words of the New York Evening Post, "be the crux of later historical controversy over the great career now ended"; and the same is true of the ultimate effects on the working life of the people of his instrumentality in extending the country's railroads, in improving its banking, and in projecting its facilities for the manufacture of large staples.
Said Major Henry L. Higginson, New England's foremost philanthropist and financier, in commenting on Mr. Morgan's death: "To make a great fortune is little; to be a great citizen is much." The Survey will, in an early issue, publish an appreciation of other phases of Mr. Morgan's trenchant personality by an associate in the fields of art and philanthropy.
Here, one circumstance which concerns this magazine closely may be set down. The Pittsburgh Survey was made at a period of restlessness and irritation in many high quarters, following a succession of investigations and exposures. The period was also one of sensitiveness among every day people lest the organs of publicity might be controlled by invisible influences. Charities and the Commons (as The Survey was then called) bore Mr. Morgan's name as treasurer on its contents page while its staff was delving into the Pittsburgh district. The Pittsburgh Survey was conceived not for the purpose of internal counsel and report, but for the purpose of spreading before the public the facts as to life and labor in the region, where the two greatest individual fortunes in history had been made by Mr. Morgan's contemporaries, where he had in turn become the dominant factor, and where social tendencies observable everywhere had "actually, because of the high industrial development and the great industrial activity, had the opportunity to give tangible proof of their real character and their inevitable goal."
It must remain for Mr. Morgan's business associates to say how much affirmative concern he had given or came to give to the working conditions in those industries in which he controlled vast holdings, or to such far-reaching reforms as the safety campaign. But the staff of the Pittsburgh Survey can bear witness that no word of admonition ever reached them, no trace of pressure to minimize or gloss over or reserve for private consumption the human outcroppings of a thousand million dollar corporation. The situation did not change after our first strictures as to the seven-day week, the twelve-hour day, work accidents and the like had been spread broadcast. If they reached Mr. Morgan's ears, he was willing to let this left hand of philanthropic inquiry take the exact social measure of what had been done or left undone in the fiscal and industrial enterprises in which he was the master entrepreneur.
MR. WEST'S ARTICLE[4] PROTESTED
[4] See Civil War in the West Virginia Coal Mines on page [37] of this issue.
NIGHT LETTER
Charleston, W. Va.,
March 30, 1912."Owing to delayed trains, did not reach home nor receive your telegram of Friday until last night. West manuscript received and read this morning. Am directed to renew protest against its publication as contrary to facts in most important particulars and most unfair in attitude and spirit. An article published in your journal on a matter so important should be prepared by one of your own staff from facts gathered by your own investigator. Am authorized to place in your hands immediately five hundred dollars, being amount estimated by you as necessary to cover expense of special examination and article, and urge you in justice and fairness to accept and use it for the purpose. It is impossible to prepare an answer to the West article and have it in your hands tomorrow, nor is one-fifth the space given West article sufficient for an adequate reply thereto. If you decline to make your own investigation and report, it is submitted that justice requires that time be given so that West article and reply may appear in same issue and space equal to article be given for reply. If you refuse this I respectfully ask the publication of this protest with Mr. West's paper."
[Signed] Neil Robinson.
[Secretary West Virginia Mining Association.]
In line with the general practice of The Survey when an article makes major charges against an institution or industry—a copy of Mr. West's manuscript was sent on March 20 to the secretary of the West Virginia Mining Association, with a request that he indicate any points which "seem to you in error."
On March 26 The Survey received a letter from Mr. Robinson, who called in person the day following to protest against the publication of the article as unfair, and not of the calibre expected of The Survey by the public. He also offered us every facility if we would make an independent staff investigation. We stated that such a staff inquiry in the West Virginia field was beyond our means, that we had exercised due care in selecting Mr. West as a non-combatant observer, and that the manuscript had stood the test of criticism in various quarters. Further, we stated that if Mr. Robinson could there and then dislodge the major statements of fact in the article, we would surely not publish it; otherwise, we would hold two pages of the same issue of The Survey open until Monday of this week for a statement in rebuttal.
In the interval a galley proof of the article was sent Mr. Robinson containing revisions to cover minor points of criticism made by him and other critics. Later issues of The Survey are open to the West Virginia operators for a full reply; and the findings of a federal inquiry which would resourcefully and dispassionately cover the ground would, of course, be handled at length.