“School ain’t no good. The Holy Father he can send ye to hell, and the boss he can take away yer job er raise yer pay. The teacher she can’t do nothing.”
Running the Home, by Martha Bensley Bruère in Good Housekeeping, is an argument for the use of public utilities in place of certain old-fashioned forms of “elbow grease,” on the ground not merely of the saving of labor but of expense. Mrs. Bruère’s conclusion is that the city, with its superior facilities for using centralized facilities for heating, lighting, etc., co-operatively, comes out far ahead of the country. In the budgets she studied the percentage of income spent for the “operation of the household—heat, light, repairs, services, etc.”—in the city was only half what it is in the country.
In Parenthood and the Social Conscience, Seth K. Humphrey (Forum) recommends the lifting of the burden of the hereditary defective from society by “parenthood laws” which would not force sterilization on defectives but would give them the choice of sterilization or segregation. The much controverted Indiana institutional experience is the basis of Mr. Humphrey’s conclusion that many defectives will accept the former method of “ending their miseries with themselves.”
Following up Burton J. Hendrick’s narrative last month of the Jewish invasion of America, Abraham Cahan, “editor, author, and general counselor of the Jewish East Side of New York,” this month begins in McClure’s the material and spiritual history of David Levinsky, a Russian Jew who became an American millionaire.
Frank Barclay Copley in an article in the American Magazine, which receives the commendation of Frederick W. Taylor in an introductory note, thus defines the position of the new science of management toward trade unionism:
“The only way the workers, herded into gangs and treated as machines for grinding out dividends, can defend themselves is through organization. Ordinary unionism, therefore, finds its justification as a war-measure. Scientific management, however, by establishing that community of interest between capital and labor which has so long been obscured by ignorance, creates industrial peace, and the only persons who have reason to oppose it are those who have a personal interest in the continuance of warfare. Under scientific management the workers are not subordinates, but coordinates, and each individual is free to earn, learn, and rise as the Almighty has given him the power. No form of collective bargaining would seem to be called for, because tasks are set and wages fixed, not by arbitrary action, but by knowledge. The only real boss, in fact, is knowledge; and if anyone can speak with knowledge, he will be listened to, and he will have his reward. On the other hand, the tongue of ignorance must be still; and so it follows that to the extent that unionism means the placing of ignorant men in the saddle, or to the extent that it involves high labor costs, to that extent must scientific management always be against it.”