General and Vocational Training for All.—In education we have not accomplished all that the leaders in that field outlined for us two generations ago, but there is a movement all along the line to make it possible for every person to have at least a fair start toward education in the compulsory free school; and for adults, younger or older, to make up for early deficiencies by constantly increasing later opportunities of special and of general training in the things every citizen should know. Allusion to new specialties of varied educational facilities has before been made.
No one can doubt that as teachers and helpers to teachers, as members of educational societies, and as acting on official boards by appointment, women have been long serving in the ranks and needed the ballot only to make their function more inclusive and more commanding in directive power. When we remember that it is only since 1837, when Horace Mann published the first Report of a State Board of Education and began his great work for the Common School of his country, that we have had even a distinct social goal in this great field of endeavor we cannot be pessimistic about future accomplishment. When that educational leader declared in response to those who remonstrated with him for turning aside from the usual and, for him, brilliant opportunities of the law, "The next generation is to be my client," he started a new profession, and the present effort in education is but the widening of that social furrow. When we recall that Mary Lyon, in opening Mt. Holyoke Seminary for Girls in that same year of 1837, offered the first opportunity to girls of limited means of what could be called higher education, we can better realize how rapid has been the movement to fit women for educational service. We, at least, now have a clearer aim in education and are at liberty to use fit men and fit women alike for its realization. The one great contribution of later times is the determination to share with all the opportunities once held sacred to a select few.
Women's Work in Philanthropy.—In philanthropy there has been so great a transformation both in ideal and in method that it amounts to a change in the centre of gravity. Charity once had for its aim the easing of unbearable misery, the giving of alms to relieve the starving, and personal aid of all sorts to those who were not expected to be lifted out of the category of the poor, those who must be always helped, but should be helped in a spirit of kindness. Now we have the command for permanent care for the helpless where they will not handicap the normal. We have the varied agencies for preventing delinquency in youth and many a new type of moral rehabilitation for all who have stepped but a short distance out of the ordered path of life. We have the ideal of every defective child in permanent custodial homes, every insane person cared for with humanity and trained intelligence, every dependent child readjusted to family life by adoption or trained happily and usefully in residential school, every aged person protected from want and misery in public or private homes, every widowed mother helped to take care of her own children, and every sick person aided by hospital and clinic and visiting nurse and convalescent home in readjustment to normal activity. Finally, we have boldly replaced the motto, "Relieve Poverty," by the new slogan, "Abolish Poverty," and we are impatient with ourselves and with social arrangements if any considerable number of our fellow-beings are obliged without fault of theirs to receive material relief. In all this, what a part has been played by women! Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of the insane in the United States. Louisa Lee Schuyler organized and for fifty years energized and directed the work of the New York State Charities Aid Association which made over into humane and intelligent social care-taking the inherited institutions of a more ignorant and indifferent time. The first woman to serve on the State Board of Charities in New York, Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose motherhood in the family and the state knew no bounds and whose statesmanship comprehended every social relation, is not the last to so serve. "The lady with the lamp," Florence Nightingale, who pioneered in trained nursing has had many a follower in this as in other countries. The annals of all charitable agencies show that at every step, whether recognized as responsible members of the body politic or not, women have done the work in large and efficient measure when the state took over a new job of life-saving and of life-nourishment.
In the realm of penology we have moved far from the old private prison into which the noble could cast his enemy and no one question his acts. We have moved far from the early prison which was easily neglected in all sanitary as in all moral conditions, since it was then only a stopping place, often for a short time only, on the way from court condemnation to hanging or mutilation, flogging or exile. When the prison became a place for longer sojourn, and sentence to it became in itself a legal punishment, humane men and women began to feel the importance of knowing what went on in the places set aside for offenders against the law, and Howard and others set the tendency toward a more humane and reasonable treatment of criminals. We now are at work finding out who are real criminals and who are accidentally caught in the meshes of hurtful circumstances, who among the offenders against the law are mentally responsible, and who are but children of adult bodily size, and what to do for and with the intentional enemy of social order. We have not yet learned to apply the ideals we have gained in wise and effective treatment of the small minority of men, and far smaller minority of women, who cannot or will not walk the safe and well-outlined road of the law-abiding, but we have some concepts that promise to guide us in this particular and the new Penology is born. Men and women alike are working out details of direction and shouldering the heavy social work demanded. The thing that is most conspicuous in Penology is the new attitude of courts of law, of judges and even of juries. This is an attitude of humane inquiry into causes of moral breakdown, and humane dealing with criminals as of right entitled to a fair chance. Surely this is a fatherly attitude taking the place of old punitive ideas.
Culture Aids to the Common Life.—When we come to the new work of making the streets safer for the spirit of youth, and the life of all more protected and happy by recreative measures standardized for personal uplift, we are distinctly in the area of parental functions of the modern state. It takes fatherly men and motherly women to run the public playground, and to make the parks, the museums, the settlement clubs and classes, and the children's rooms in public libraries what we now will that they shall be,—the centres of eager interest and the nursery of character development. The mention of the free public library suggests what is probably the most potent of all the higher social influences in our American life. In the large city and in the small town alike, and even in remote rural districts served by the Loan Libraries, the opportunity to find what will feed the mind and lead toward the delight of the printed page is one that has meant more to more people who were aspiring and able to become leaders in any sphere of life than has any other opportunity; perhaps than even the public school after the main essentials of early grade teaching have been gained.
To sit in a public library and watch the eager interest of each newcomer, to see the patience, the understanding, the sympathetic attitude and the earnest effort to be of utmost service which the librarian almost invariably shows, and to see the absorbed attention of the readers in what they have been assisted in selecting, is to bless the generosity and public spirit of every one who has made the public library so common a blessing. Not all books are equally helpful, not all give equal pleasure, it is true, but when one gets a book with a message in it for him, what a joy!
One often thinks of the lovely song of Emily Dickinson when sitting thus in a public library:
"He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor
Or that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy ways
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!"
Many Languages in One Country.—In this connection must be noted the effort of many to limit this "bequest" to the language of the country. In another connection we have noted the difficulty that inheres in having many differing tongues in one community, the difficulty of reaching a common ideal and method of living when language is a barrier and not an aid to companionship. This barrier of language to the foreign-born is often cited as a reason why the immigrant is handicapped. It is also a reason why social efforts and religious influences often fail of success and why so many native-born Americans fail to understand the newer Americans. If, as many prophesy, the English language becomes the standard tongue for business and diplomacy and literature, all the best products of every nation being made available by translation, at least, for those speaking English, it can become that ruling tongue only by slow degrees. Meanwhile, the chasm between citizens of a common country made by differing languages may be bridged by far greater effort on the part of older Americans gifted in the use of foreign tongues. We see women by the hundreds flocking to Europe and the East to "get local color" and perfect themselves in foreign languages, who might find at their own doors, among those illiterate in English, but with a wealth of knowledge of their own native literature and speech, men and women who would be able, if rightly approached, to exchange national values both in literature and history to mutual advantage. The need of adult education on the part of the foreign-born is not always a need to be met by condescending from above to those of low intellectual estate. It is often a mere requirement to master another form of speech by those, already linguists, or at least in possession of a broader use of language than is the average citizen of the United States. The ways of social helping in this line are many and of the highest political importance. The variety of languages spoken in the United States, however, is not so serious an obstacle to the intercommunication of our population for political information and in organization for common ends of the public good as is the shameful condition of illiteracy among the electorate. The foreign-language publications in the United States numbered, in 1914, 1404, of which 160 were dailies, with total circulation per issue of 2,598,827, and 868 weeklies with a total circulation per issue of 4,239,426, and other publications to the number of 376 with a total circulation per issue of 3,609,735. These foreign-language journals are not all or many of them devoted to "stirring up strife" and do not prevent absorption of the foreign-born in the body politic. They are, on the contrary, necessary means of making those who speak foreign tongues acquainted with facts and conditions which newcomers need to know and understand. During the Great War our government used these foreign-language publications to spread broadcast appeals for financial and personal support. The excellent "Foreign Language Information Service," still existing and having Federal backing, has in hand the introduction into the principal foreign-language publications of information and appeal calculated to make good American citizens. The demand that has been made in moments of excitement for the abolition of the foreign-language press is therefore as stupid as it is unfriendly. Only by the use of his native tongue can a man who does not yet understand English be made to feel and act as a genuine part of the citizenship of his adopted country. It is for those who cherish real Americanism to try to get into these publications, which are the strategic point of contact between older and newer Americans, all that is deemed vital to the welfare of our common country. Through a wise use of this material in every free public library and in the multiplied Loan Libraries in remote districts, the newcomers in our country who read intelligently their own language and are eager to learn, may gain all that a good citizen needs to know. And if in parallel columns the English with the foreign language should be used to convey the same thought, the progress will be doubly fast in true Americanization.
Personal Conservation.—In the conservation of natural resources for the benefit of all the people we have been slow to understand either our social danger, or our social opportunity, but our Federal Government is setting us notable lessons and local communities are trying to learn and follow them, and Women's Clubs all over the country are staying up the hands of officials and trying to help save the people's inheritance for the people's wealth; surely a fatherly and a motherly office if any state function can be. When we enter the area of protection of the young and weak and ignorant against the exploitation of vice and greed and selfishness, we are in the very centre of that parental care which the modern state now seeks to give to its citizens. When the Great War turned into training camps the flower of our youth, these agencies for moral protection and social watch-care which had been so largely developed as volunteer and private social work, became the resource of a government bent on keeping men "fit to fight," and on preserving young women in the vicinity of the camps both from giving and receiving harmful influences. Since then, more than ever, such agencies for moral protection have become official in civic life and have the endorsement and the aid of government. It is one new feature of all modern protective work that women are employed as members of the police, as matrons in public places supported by tax, and indeed in places of commercial recreation, as judges of special courts where parole and methods of suspended sentence are used, and in all places where boys and girls are exposed to danger and to temptation. Thus the home influence is spreading out toward the work-place and the play-centre—truly a retranslation of family service in terms of the public life.