Five and six years ago I used to go to a restaurant which fed about three hundred shop-girls a day.... I used to write down what they could get for 15 cents. Here are three dishes each of which then cost 15 cents. Two eggs on toast, with bread; a nice little meat pie, hot and appetizing; chicken on toast with a rice border. The chicken was all dark meat, to be sure, but it was meat and the rice border was generous. In short, in that restaurant six years ago there was for 15 cents honest nourishment fitted to build up an honest constitution such as the trunk class of America ought to have. And in the long run those girls chose the nourishing food. Two years ago a change came. I noticed a habit of lunching off a potato salad. I soon saw the reason. The little meat pie had moved up to 25 cents, the chicken on toast to 30 cents. Potato salad, one of the girls told me, was the only "interesting" thing left for 15 cents. Going there last September I said to one of the waitresses:
"What are these girls eating now?"
"Ah," she sighed, "it is dreadful! They ought not to pay more than 15 cents; so many of them just have griddle cakes, or sweets and coffee. They can have two cream cakes and coffee or an eclair and coffee for 15 cents."
Please notice the sliding scale of nourishment therein displayed in six short years. From chicken on toast with a wholesome rice border to potato salad and from potato salad to an eclair and coffee. One can fairly see the nourishment ooze out! It is only fair to add, however, that the manager told me that they were losing their shop-girls somewhat: they were going where there were no waitresses, where they served themselves at counters. There one could get real nourishment for 20 cents.
Upon the basis of this interesting little story, and of the loose talk of "a dealer in milk" with whom she had conversed, the writer finds that there is a "canker at the heart of our prosperity," that "our great, prosperous country is at the parting of the ways." "A little more," she warns us, "and you will have the trunk class of America an underfed class, being slowly but surely forced down in the social scale." And so forth.
Now it is nothing that such an article should have appeared in a popular magazine; nor is it perhaps a matter worth finding fault with that the managers of an important humanitarian organization, which is in many ways doing excellent work, should have had so little critical judgment as to regard as an exceptionally important contribution to public discussion what is so manifestly the mere expression of one person's superficial observations and impressions. What does give significance to the Consumers' League's performance is that it demonstrates an indifference to facts—a lack of the sense of responsibility for the essential veracity of anything to which one gives one's name and which one actively disseminates among the public—that would be amazing were it not unfortunately so common. In half an hour, any officer of the Consumers' League could have discovered that in New York "honest nourishment" of precisely the kind referred to in the American article was to be obtained for fifteen cents in any one of hundreds of clean, roomy, cheerful restaurants—not "where they served themselves at counters," but with good waiting by a fine type of waitresses. At the time the leaflet was issued, there had been no rise of prices at all in this class of restaurants in New York; since then there has been a rise in some of them, affecting certain dishes; but in no case, I believe, has the rise been more than that from fifteen to twenty cents. The great rise in food prices has taken place in the four years since January, 1910; and yet to this day one can get, in any one of the scores of handsome popular restaurants scattered all over the business section of New York, a nourishing meat or egg luncheon, well served, for fifteen or twenty cents, according to choice.
This may seem very homely matter, beneath the dignity of a quarterly Review. But the homeliness, or insignificance, is only on the surface. The thing I am concerned with is not the bread and meat I am talking about, but the state of mind of a class of men and women considerable in point of mere numbers and tremendously important in their influence on the political and social currents of the time. With a responsibility resting on them a thousandfold greater than any that belonged to reformers like Dickens—a thousandfold greater both because the problems they touch are incomparably more complex and because the consequences of their agitation spread out immeasurably beyond the particular problems they touch—with this responsibility for truthful representation upon them, how far are they from that realization of it which is so solemnly avowed by the author of Nicholas Nickleby! And in this matter of the luncheon, small as it may seem in itself, the moral obtrudes itself with peculiar distinctness. For here everything turns absolutely on degree. If the shop-girl can get to-day for twenty cents the luncheon she could formerly get for fifteen, the whole terror disappears; for five cents a day is thirty cents a week, and surely it is not out of the question that there has been a rise of wages sufficient to cover this difference. Yet these good people evidently think it no harm to give out a solemn warning of national degeneration and ruin, based on figures which a few minutes' inquiry would have compelled them to reject, and on an allegation of fact as to the actual fare of working girls which a half-day's tour of the restaurants of New York would have shown to have no substantial basis. That the rise of prices has been hard on working people, that if it takes place without compensating rise of wages it must have serious consequences, is true enough; but between this and the sort of thing we have been discussing there is precisely the difference that there is between reason and unreason, between responsibility and recklessness.
To prove that exaggeration and distortion and misleading presentation abound in the reform literature of our time is not the purpose of this paper; even if fifty examples were adduced, it would prove nothing. What I am endeavoring to do is to cite a very few illustrations, which I believe that intelligent readers will recognize as typical, and to bring out their significance as bearing on a widespread state of mind. In this regard, the next instance is peculiarly instructive. In the Atlantic Monthly for March, 1910, there is an article by E. A. Ross, entitled The Suppression of Important News. The Atlantic is not a "muckraking" magazine, and the writer is not a "muckraker;" he is a man of national note, and a professor in the Department of Economics in the University of Wisconsin. Much that he says about the shortcomings of newspapers is true; but the article gives a preposterously false impression of the conduct of the press of this country as a whole. However, I do not ask the readers of this Review to take my word for this; neither can I enter upon what would be the very considerable task of proving my assertion. I wish only to call attention to a single short paragraph in Prof. Ross's article:
The party system is a "sacred cow." When a county district court declared that the Initiative and Referendum amendment to the Oregon Constitution was invalid, the item was spread broadcast. But when later the Supreme Court of Oregon reversed that decision, the fact was too trivial to be put on the wires.
Now, if this means anything, it means that it is the policy of the Associated Press, in regard to such a matter as the Initiative and Referendum system in Oregon, to endeavor to conceal from the American public the fact that the attempt to overthrow it in the courts of the State had failed. To characterize such a notion as silly would be to place it on far too high a plane. That a person of Prof. Ross's training, and position in the country, should find it possible to believe such a thing is melancholy to think of; and, what is more to the purpose, it betrays a state of mind that is fraught with all manner of evil possibilities. For it is a state of mind in which probability, that indispensable guide of sane thinking, is dismissed from its place; in which whatever seems to point toward a preconceived thesis is accepted without scrutiny and carefully treasured up, and whatever points the other way gets scant attention; in which the sense of the true proportions of things is hopelessly lost. What the actual facts were about the transmission of that news from Oregon makes no difference; the failure "to put it on the wires," which Professor Ross alleges, may possibly have taken place. But no intelligent human being waits to find out whether Beiliss actually did or did not murder a child in order to reject with scorn and contempt the idea that the blood of murdered Christian children forms part in the ritual of the Jewish Passover; we need no evidence on the subject—it is disposed of by its intrinsic absurdity. That Prof. Ross should have failed to see the intrinsic absurdity of such a notion of the newspaper press of the United States as is implied in the paragraph above quoted—that others who talk about the suppression of news should betray similar want of sane perception—is, to my mind, one of the most significant illustrations of the general phenomenon that I am discussing.
If these illustrations have served to bring out some of the chief aspects of the state of mind which underlies the exaggeration that disfigures the reform agitations of our time, the purpose for which they have been cited has been fulfilled. As evidence of the fact that such exaggeration is widely current they of course amount to nothing; nor, as I have already said, would the piling up of a large number of examples have any probative force. There is a great deal of sober and responsible writing in reform quarters, and there is a great deal of the opposite kind. It would be idle to attempt to form any estimate of the ratio between the one kind and the other. But every reader must recognize that the type of thing which I have been discussing is abundant, and that it plays an important part in influencing the opinions of large bodies of well-meaning people. It may not be amiss, however, to make brief mention of a few more examples illustrating various phases of the phenomenon.