And this has been accomplished in the piers and parks in the last three years. But the winter contrast is striking. Fed up all summer, it seems hardly fair that men should be starved all winter. The daily papers printed, during September, 1912, a number of letters, asking why these concerts could not be continued through the winter months. There is but one solution of the problem—the municipal orchestra—and in this connection I cannot do better than quote a letter, written by Mr. Farwell to the New York Times, in response to the various suggestions and inquiries:
“The Central Park concerts have shown once for all that the greatest in music appeals directly and powerfully to the people when it is given to them under the right conditions. This is one of the mysteries of music—its power to short circuit an intellectual by a spiritual process. To wait until some hypothetical time in the future for the high gift of music to be given to the people is to be both dilatory and blind. The time for national initiative is at hand. What the people of New York really need is a permanent municipal symphony orchestra.”
Popular response to good music is no longer an open question. The people have answered it conclusively, and popular demand has become a live issue.
THE HOUSING PROBLEM AS IT AFFECTS GIRLS
EDITH M. HADLEY
President Chelsea House Association, New York
In a factory town, at the lunch hour, have you ever consciously watched the girls and women thronging down the steps and filling the streets surrounding the workshop? Have you listened to their noisy laughter and scraps of conversation and tried to understand their meaning? In 1910, when the last Census of Manufactures was taken, there were over 1,500,000 of these girls and women—factory workers in the United States.
In a large city at nightfall, when the lamps are lighted, have you ever observed the streams of girls flowing into the streets from the offices and great department stores? Again at night, have you seen the girls, waiting at the entrances of tenement houses or on the street corners for their “gentleman friends” who are to emancipate them for a few hours from their cramped and dingy environment? And have you asked yourself where and how do these girls live?
During the last few years we have heard so much about the discontent of the labor classes, the “restlessness of the present age,” that the phrases fall upon unheeding ears. But it takes no Socialist to understand that, if a family man’s expenses are $900 a year, and that working to the best of his ability he can earn only $700 to $800, and that if it costs a girl $8 a week to live, and she cannot earn that much, there must be discontent. It is time for the community to regulate such conditions.
The question of wages is so closely allied to the question of housing that a study of the latter involves some knowledge of the former. Cost of living and standard of living must be approached from a fact basis. Studies by Robert Chapin, Scott Nearing and the commission appointed by Congress, indicate that a man, his wife and three children under fourteen, cannot live and maintain efficiency under $900 a year on the Island of Manhattan. This is not excessive for Boston, Buffalo and Chicago. It is low for Pittsburgh, a little high for Philadelphia and Baltimore but a fair average for the great cities east of the Mississippi and north of Virginia.