The ideals which animated Mr. Post as editor and which he brings to his work in the Department of Labor, he thus himself expresses in a recent valedictory editorial:
“In citizenship it has been my object and that of my editorial associates through all those years, to inculcate a realization of the larger citizen, the civic whole, whose voice, when conflicting selfishnesses cancel one another, is in a very real sense ‘the voice of God.’ As single taxers, we have worked with the purpose on the one hand of lifting single taxers out of a cult and broadening them with visions of the ever-pulsating world of men wherein their cause must flourish if it is ever to fructify, and on the other of disclosing to all readers with democratic ideals the subtle power of this reform in democratizing industry as well as politics. With more comprehensive scope we have inculcated fundamental democracy as the social principle of which every social reform is at best but a practical application; and with scope still more comprehensive we have identified democracy with that element of the universal which exhibits the physical phenomena of life as product, instead of producer, of those faculties which some of us call ‘intellectual’ and others ‘spiritual.’”
James Mullenbach’s appointment as superintendent of the great Cook County infirmary for the poor of Chicago at Oak Forest is as creditable to President Alexander A. McCormick of the Board of County Commissioners as it is to Mr. Mullenbach.
With his experience as settlement resident at Chicago Commons, as superintendent of the Municipal Lodging House, as assistant superintendent of the United Charities, as secretary of the Land, Labor, and Immigration Officials’ Conference, and as the representative of the social agencies reporting social legislation at the Illinois Legislature, Mr. Mullenbach is regarded as the ideal head for the greatest county institutions west of New York.
It is significant of the new times to find a college educated man who rounded out his professional training on a fellowship in a German University, being sought for and accepting a position, to which only a political appointee has hitherto been appointed. No higher token of the triumph of patriotism on partisanship has been registered in America than this, and many another, achievement of Mr. McCormick in rescuing the County of Cook from the spoils exploitation of his predecessor and in establishing the efficient business management and the humane social standards of his own administration.
The recent death of Edna P. Alter in a trolley wreck near Pasadena, Cal., removes one of the younger workers in the field of organized charity. Miss Alter knew every phase of work in the homes of the poor for she entered the Hudson district of the New York Charity Organization Society as district nurse in 1908, later rounded out her preparation for the work of organized charity by a summer course in the New York School of Philanthropy, and became assistant agent in that district. In the fall of 1910 she rose to the responsible position of secretary of the Associated Charities of Pasadena.
Leo G. MacLaughlin, president of that society, speaks of her work as “sympathetic, kindly, warm-hearted and keenly intelligent. She was one of the founders of the local Associated Charities and her work won favorable attention over a wide area.”