“The resources of your commission did not permit it to secure its information by the personal visit of an investigator, hence the information must be less accurate than it might otherwise have been.”
“The commissioners believe that despite the limited accuracy of some of their relief statistics further study of the relief given by charities is not necessary.”
Moreover, regarding the information gained from the children’s agencies as to the causes for the removal of children from their homes, it may be doubted whether these agencies are competent witnesses. The standard of work done by the public agencies and many of the private agencies for the care of children in Massachusetts is unusually high. It may be doubted, however, whether any such agency after the most careful preliminary inquiry is fully able to determine the real economic status of a family which is usually a matter that requires long acquaintance. Many of these societies receiving children who have been removed from their mothers have very little first hand information as to the reason for it. In fact, the report itself, in discussing the information secured through this questionnaire regarding the insurance carried by the families, states: “The fact that the children’s agencies failed to answer this question in so many cases was undoubtedly because they did not possess the information.” For the same reason it is doubtful if they were competent witnesses on many other points calling for knowledge of what happened before the children came into their care.
The statistics secured through method 3 are condemned even more directly. After information had been secured through the questionnaire to public and private relief agencies regarding 1,258 families, Mr. Tilley of the commission arranged for a special study of one hundred of these in their own homes by trained visitors in the service of the State Board of Charity. These studies revealed conditions completely at variance with those stated in the returns received from the agencies themselves. The report itself comments: “It is clear that many records previously received from the overseers, especially, but also from others, were glaringly incorrect.”
It is hardly possible to put confidence in conclusions based upon data whose inaccuracy is so clear. It does not become any more possible when the inaccuracy is frankly conceded by those who reach the conclusions.
Another method of study used by the commission—the compilation of analogies and other non-statistical reasons for proving its case—is rendered impotent in much the same way. In a carefully developed argument the report draws an analogy between the proposed subsidy scheme for widows and the industrial accident compensation plan. “The situation of dependents of men killed by industrial accident is scarcely distinguishable from that of these widows.... Consequently, widows through death of husbands by disease or other non-industrial cause should be dealt with by a similar principle.”
After developing this analogy somewhat elaborately, however, the report says: “The commission rejects the principle of payment by way of indemnity of loss,” apparently abandoning the workmen’s compensation analogy just after making it serviceable.
It would not be difficult to point out other traits which are fatal to the report as a basis for scientific action, for example, its constant introduction of important conclusions with such expressions as “it is obvious,” “the inference is,” “it is not unlikely,” “so far as information was obtainable” and “important inferences are possible.” Moreover, when conclusions are based upon statistics compiled from different sources by different persons with different standards and possibly different interpretations of the questions asked, a report giving these statistics and the conclusions reached should give also a copy of the schedule used in gathering them. The report does not include the commission’s schedule.
With the purpose of the commission to point the way to the adequate assistance of widows most of us like Mr. Tilley, who submits a minority report, are in complete accord. During recent years our enlarging conceptions of social treatment have condemned utterly much of our supposedly efficient work in family and individual reconstruction. There is a widespread conviction of sin in this matter and an earnest searching for the remedy. The mothers’ pension movement is no doubt a result of this; but the conviction of sin and the earnest search are true of many to whom mothers’ pensions seem a remedy of doubtful immediate value.
If we have failed in our relief work, the children of the widow are not the only ones who have suffered. Upon the children of disabled fathers, of incompetent and neglectful parents, of all those tragic families who fall outside the commission’s category of “worthy,” our sins are visited still more heavily. The commission was charged only with the duty of studying the condition of widows; but it seems to have taken some note of families of other types. We read: “Consistently, widows through death of husbands by disease or other industrial cause ... deserve an utterly different kind of treatment from that accorded to the lazy and shiftless, the victims of drink, gambling or other dissipation or persons in transitory or emergency destitution. The commission does not believe that the same persons who administer the general poor law should alone determine the aid for worthy widows. Administration of such aid is sufficiently complicated, difficult and frequent to deserve separate care.” It might be noted incidentally that the cause of a husband’s death is not always a satisfactory test of a wife’s moral habits, and that “widows through death of husbands by disease, etc.” are not infrequently of the unsatisfactory type described by the commission. But a still more important comment is the following from Mr. Pear of Boston: