The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE SURVEY
Volume XXX, Number 1, Apr 5, 1913

List of Contents (created by transcriber)

[THE COMMON WELFARE]
[FINGER PRINTS]
[EDITORIAL GRIST]
[COMPENSATION FOR OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES]
[THE SOCIAL AIM IN GOVERNMENT]
[THE SAND BED]
[A JUDGE LINDSEY OF THE "IDLE FORTIES"]
[NEIGHBORLINESS AND A COUNTRY COMMUNITY]
[A NEW MINISTER TO MINDS DISEASED]
[CIVIL WAR IN THE WEST VIRGINIA COAL MINES]
[SOCIAL FORCES]
[STRANGE INCENSE]

[THE COMMON WELFARE]

RESPONSE TO FLOOD CALLS

For the first time in the history of our great disasters, the country's machinery for relief has been found ready to move with that precision and efficiency which only careful previous organization could make possible. In the flood and tornado stricken regions of the Mississippi valley the Red Cross has given splendid evidence of the effectiveness of its scheme of organization and of its methods as worked out on the basis of experience at San Francisco, and as tested by the Minnesota and Michigan forest fires, the Cherry mine disaster, and the Mississippi Floods of last year.

Utilizing the largest and ablest charity organization societies which serve as "institutional members," a force of executives and trained workers was instantly deployed. With foreknowledge of just what to do and how to do it, and without friction, these men and women have reinforced the spontaneous response to emergency of citizens and officials in the stricken communities.

Omaha's tornado had scarcely died down when Eugene T. Lies of the Chicago United Charities was on his way to the city. Ernest P. Bicknell, director of the National Red Cross, had reached Chicago, en route to Omaha, when news of the Ohio floods turned him back. The same news summoned Edward T. Devine from New York. It was Mr. Devine who organized the Red Cross relief work at San Francisco, following the earthquake and fire of 1908. Mr. Bicknell established headquarters at Columbus, itself badly in the grip of the waters. At Dayton Mr. Devine, C. M. Hubbard of the St. Louis Provident Association and T. J. Edmonds of the Cincinnati Associated Charities concentrated their services.

When Cincinnati and its vicinity needed help, Mr. Edmonds returned to his home city. The Omaha situation by this time could spare Mr. Lies for Dayton. To Piqua, Sidney and other Ohio and Indiana flood points went James F. Jackson of the Cleveland Associated Charities and other workers from various organizations. The news from the Ohio and other floods almost swamped that of an isolated disaster in Alabama where a tornado devastated the town of Lower Peachtree. To handle the relief at this point the Red Cross dispatched William M. McGrath of the Birmingham Associated Charities, who had seen service a year ago in the Mississippi floods.

To work under the direction of these executives, agents have been drafted from the staffs of charitable organizations scattered throughout the entire middle West, and even as far east as New York. Close co-operation was at once established between this force, hastily organized local committees and various branches of federal and state government service. In Ohio the resources, equipment and staffs of the army, the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, the life-saving service, the militia, the naval militia, and state departments of public health, have all been applied promptly to the problem of emergency relief. Governor Cox of Ohio, as ex-officio chairman of the Ohio Red Cross State Commission, did much to assure this early co-operation.

Following the first work of rescue and relief, sanitation looms up as one of the gravest problems of the Indiana and Ohio valleys. Immediately upon the arrival of the secretary of war at Dayton a sanitary officer was appointed, who divided the city into sixteen districts, each in charge of a district sanitary officer. Each of these selected his own staff from among local physicians and volunteer physicians from other cities. Red Cross nurses in considerable numbers were early supplied. Instructions in brief form have been sent broadcast over the city giving definite directions to the inhabitants for the safeguarding of health. The sewer and water systems are being reopened as rapidly as possible.

Early this week the expectation was that, although the dead in the city would not total 200, it would be necessary to feed many thousands of people for a week and several thousand for several weeks. The Dayton situation, though more severe, was typical of what was to be found in other stricken towns.

The extent of the Omaha disaster is already reported in statistics which are said to be complete and accurate. The summary includes: 115 lives lost; 322 seriously injured; at least 1,000 slightly injured; 822 houses destroyed: 2,100 houses partially wrecked; property loss estimated at $7,500,000; 733 families being fed in relief stations (March 30); 59 dead; 150 injured and $1,000,000 property loss in surrounding towns. Efforts are being made by the real estate exchange to prevent the raising of rents. The plans suggested for rebuilding include a county bond issue of $1,000,000 and the securing of other money from the packing and railroad companies to be loaned without interest.

President Wilson's call to the nation for relief, and the quick action of governors and mayors in rallying their states and cities, started emergency supplies and funds for supplementing the tents, blankets and rations which the army and militia had rushed into the field. The National Cash Register Company, whose undamaged factories in Dayton were of great value in providing shelter and space for relief administration, secured through its officers in other cities supplies and money which were promptly forwarded. The company officials did much to systematize the local relief, and department heads assumed charge of different divisions of the work. Organization charts and diagrams were printed at the factory so that the people of the city could act intelligently.

Early this week the relief funds were reported to have reached $408,000 in New York, $300,000 in Chicago, $105,000 in Boston, and varying sums in other cities. Most of the money was contributed through the Red Cross. Contributions received at its Washington headquarters totalled $816,000, with New York first, Massachusetts second and Illinois third in size of contributions.

Some small gifts were as significant as the larger ones. A young man who appeared to be a poorly paid clerk came to the Red Cross office in New York at the noon hour last Friday and pulled from his pocket a five dollar and a one dollar bill. The person in charge asked him if he was not giving more than his share, and suggested that he keep the one dollar hill. "No," said he, "I've kept some small change for carfare and lunch, and tomorrow's pay day." One letter accompanying a small contribution read:

"Just one short year ago, when the ill-fated Titanic deprived me of mine all, the Red Cross Society lost not a moment in coming to my aid. Through you I now wish to give my 'widow's mite' to help the stricken ones in the West, and I only wish I could make it a thousand times as much."

Emergency supplies and funds have been prompt and abundant, but the extensive work ahead of lifting household and community life out of desolation justifies and requires a very large fund. For, as Mr. Devine, with the San Francisco catastrophe in the background of his experience, telegraphed after reaching Dayton: "The disaster is appalling even if the loss of life is less than it was feared."

Spontaneous contributions through a variety of channels are usually sufficient for immediate needs, and the Red Cross is following its customary policy of reserving as much of its funds as possible for permanent rehabilitation. When a disaster comes in any part of the country the nearest "institutional members" of the Red Cross at once dispatch trained members of their staffs to the scene. Each organization has an "emergency box" containing, convenient for carrying, an equipment including detailed printed instructions, record cards, Red Cross flag, expense sheets, vouchers, etc. The use of this equipment, especially the uniform record cards, which have been carefully prepared on the basis of the San Francisco experience, means that help is not lost or wasted, but gets to the people who need it most. Even more important, it means that help is given not merely to keep victims of the disaster from starvation and exposure during the weeks immediately following, but to afford a reasonable lift on the road to the recovery of the standard of living maintained before the disaster.

A RELIEF SURVEY BY THE SAGE FOUNDATION

This emphasis on rehabilitation is the message of a report[1] which, by a coincidence, was on the press for the Russell Sage Foundation when news of tornado and flood came from the middle West. It is the first comprehensive review of emergent relief work following great disasters. It is based on the San Francisco experience and put forth as a "book of ready reference for use on occasions of special emergency."

[1] San Francisco Relief Survey. By Charles J. O'Connor. Francis H. McLean and others. Survey Associates, Inc., for the Russell Sage Foundation. To be published April 18, the seventh anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake. Price postpaid $3.50. Orders for delivery on publication day may be sent to The Survey.

The volume presents a study of the organization and methods of relief following the San Francisco earthquake and fire, made for the Foundation by a group of people who held responsible positions in connection with the relief work. It is to appear on April 18, the seventh anniversary of the disaster.

For the assistance of those in the middle West upon whom heavy responsibilities came so suddenly, the Sage Foundation sent out post haste advance copies of the first two sections of the report as a practical handbook to charity organizations in and near the stricken regions.

The Relief Survey is divided into six parts: Organization and Emergency Period; Rehabilitation: Business Rehabilitation; Housing Rehabilitation; After Care; The Aged and Infirm. Some of the prime points emphasized for the "Organization and Emergency Period" are the following:

1. The recognition of the American National Red Cross, with its permanent organization, its governmental status, and its direct accountability to Congress for all expenditures, as the proper national agency through which relief funds for great disasters should be collected and administered; thus securing unity of effort, certainty of policy, and a center about which all local relief agencies may rally.

2. The importance of postponing the appointment of sub-committees until a strong central committee has been able to determine general policies and methods of procedure. The hasty organization of sub-committees at San Francisco resulted in much unnecessary overlapping effort and some friction when committees got in each other's way. The relief forces were not united until a whole week after the disaster, and after unfortunate difficulty and bitterness.

3. The desirability of contributions, especially those in kind, being sent without restrictions, as only the local organization is able to measure relative needs at different periods of the work. At San Francisco much pitifully needless restrictions imposed by those who sent funds or supplies from distant states. The delays in securing authority for the wise use of these contributions were well-nigh intolerable. The only safe course lies in placing implicit trust in an efficient and recognized director of relief such as the Red Cross is in a position to furnish.

4. The value of utilizing for emergency administration a body so highly organized and so efficient as the United States Army, to take charge of camps, and to bring to points of distribution the supplies required for those in need of food and clothing.

5. The wisdom of reducing the bread line and the camp population as quickly as possible after the disaster so that the relief resources may be conserved to meet the primary need of rehabilitation. The care used in emergency expenditures means much in husbanding resources so that permanent rehabilitation may be efficient and thorough.

6. The need of establishing a central bureau of information to serve from the beginning of the relief work as a clearing house, to prevent confusion and waste through duplication of effort.

7. The necessity of utilizing the centers of emergency distribution for the later rehabilitation work of district communities and corps of visitors.

8. The necessity of incorporation for any relief organization that has to deal with so large a disaster.

9. The possibility of a strict audit of all relief in cash sent to a relief organization. The impossibility of an equally strict accounting for relief in kind, because of the many leaks and the difficulties attendant upon hurried distribution. Care in this direction is assured if the Red Cross is fully utilized.

Nothing can take the place, the editors of the Relief Survey testify, of the spirit and devotion of the local committees. At San Francisco the citizens showed splendid self-reliance and faith in the future, which enabled them to rebound from fortune's sudden blow, and show what sustained and co-operative effort can achieve. But the most important factor, especially for permanent rehabilitation, in so great and complex a relief problem is a trained staff. This the American Red Cross, through the co-operation of charity organization societies throughout the country, is constantly prepared to bring together on short notice. Mr. Bicknell represented the Red Cross at San Francisco after Mr. Devine's departure, and was thus unusually well equipped to plan the methods which the Red Cross has devised for emergency use.

SOCIAL LEGISLATION AND THE EXTRA SESSION

An open letter was sent to President Wilson this week with over forty-five signatures, urging the importance of a group of social measures which were neither voted down nor passed at the last session of Congress. In the opinion of the signers, among whom are included some of the Democratic leaders who have been foremost in social reform, this overhanging social legislation should be definitely acted upon at the extra session. The movement to this end was encouraged by the positions taken by President Wilson in his inaugural address.

The letter is the outgrowth of a meeting of men and women interested in social legislation held last week in New York at the call of Edward T. Devine as associate editor of The Survey. The signatures to the document are those of individuals solely. The particular measures will be urged at the forthcoming Congress by such national organizations as the American Association for Labor Legislation, National Consumers League, National Committee for Mental Hygiene, National Child Labor Committee, the American Prison Labor Association and the Gloucester Fisherman's Institute. While each organization is committed only to the measures in its own field, all of them have a common interest in seeing that the extra session takes up social legislation in addition to the tariff and currency. The letter follows:

The President,
The White House,
Washington. D. C.
Dear Mr. President:—

On the eve of the convening of the Sixty-Third Congress in special session, the undersigned desire to bring to your attention certain bills of importance which have received the favorable consideration of the last Congress, but which, owing to various reasons, failed of affirmative action.

Nothing could set more vividly before the country the urgency of such measures than the words of your inaugural address, in which you pointed out the need for perfecting the means by which the government may be put at the service of humanity in safeguarding the health of the nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well as their rights in the struggle for existence. The country has been stirred by your declaration:

"This is no sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of justice. There can be no equality of opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts."

The undersigned are aware that the time and energy of Congress will be largely expended upon the revision of the revenue and currency statutes. Without in any way meaning to minimize the importance of these subjects, we wish to lay emphasis upon what we believe to be the necessity for the passage of certain other measures directly affecting the health and happiness of hundreds of thousands of citizens. The legislative proposals which we present to you are not new; several of them have met with little open opposition; some have been passed by one house of Congress; others by both; all have been prepared by experts and are based upon tried principles already embodied either in the federal laws, in the laws of the various states, or in the laws of other nations. An example is the bill which aims to compensate workingmen employed in interstate commerce for accidents to life and limb. Another is the eight-hour bill for women in the District of Columbia, which was lost through an accident in the closing hours of the last Congress.

The measures which had not passed when Congress adjourned and which are herewith advocated are as follows. It is the principles underlying these several bills rather than the specific provisions of any measure that we wish to be understood as urging upon the attention of the President and Congress:

Providing compensation for federal employees suffering injury or occupational diseases in the course of their employment.

Providing compensation for employees in interstate commerce suffering injury in the course of their employment.

Harmonizing conflicting court decisions in different states by giving the state itself the right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Establishing the eight-hour day for women employed in certain occupations in the District of Columbia.

Co-ordinating the federal health activities and strengthening the public health service.

Providing in the immigration act for mental examination of immigrants by alienists; safeguarding the welfare of immigrants at sea by detailing American medical officers and matrons to immigrant-carrying ships.

Providing a hospital ship for American deep-sea fishermen.

Providing for the betterment of the conditions of American seamen.

Establishing a commission to investigate jails and the correction of first offenders.

Abolishing the contract convict labor system by restricting interstate commerce in prison-made goods.

Legislation giving effect to the principles underlying such proposals as these would constitute, we believe, an important step in the accomplishment of the forward-looking purposes which you have placed before the American people.

Caroline B. Alexander
Frederic Almy
Louise de Koven Bowen
Louis D. Brandeis
Howard S. Braucher
Allen T. Burns
Charles C. Burlingham
Richard C. Cabot
Richard S. Childs
John R. Commons
Charles R. Crane
Edward T. Devine
Abram J. Elkus
H. D. W. English
Livingston Farrand
Homer Folks
Ernst Freund
John M. Glenn
Josephine Goldmark
T. J. Keenan
Florence Kelley
Howard A. Kelly
Arthur P. Kellogg
Paul U. Kellogg
John A. Kingsbury
Constance D. Leupp
Samuel McCune Lindsay
Charles S. Macfarland
W. N. McNair
Charles E. Merriam
Adelbert Moot
Henry Morgenthau
Frances Perkins
Charles R. Richards
Margaret Drier Robins
W. L. Russell
Thomas W. Salmon
Henry R. Seager
Thomas A. Storey
Graham Taylor
Graham Romeyn Taylor
Lillian D. Wald
James R. West
W. F. Willoughby
Stephen S. Wise
Robert A. Woods

COMPULSORY MINIMUM WAGE LAW IN OREGON

Oregon's minimum wage law,[2] which was recently signed by Governor West, is the first one in America to have a compulsory clause. Failure to pay the rate of wages fixed and in the method provided by the law is punishable by fine or imprisonment or both. In Massachusetts, the first state to establish minimum wage boards, the only penalty is the publication of the names of offending employers in four newspapers in the county where their industries are located.

[2] See Minimum Wage Legislation by Florence Kelley, on page [9] of this issue.

The Oregon law applies only to women and children. It prohibits their employment in any occupation in which the sanitary or other conditions are detrimental to health or morals, or for wages "which are inadequate to supply the necessary cost of living and maintain them in health." It likewise forbids the employment of minors "for unreasonable low wages." An Industrial Welfare Commission is created to determine minimum wages, maximum hours and standard conditions of labor.

The commission is authorized to call a conference of representatives of the employers, the employees and the general public to investigate and make recommendations as to the minimum wage to be paid in a given industry. If the commission approves these recommendations they become obligatory. The powers of the Oregon commission to determine hours and conditions of health and morals are more extensive than those delegated to an industrial commission by the legislature of any other state. The members of the commission are to be appointed by the governor.

The successful campaign for this law and the drafting of the bill itself was based upon an extensive investigation conducted by the Social Survey Committee of the Oregon Consumers' League. Wages, work conditions, and cost of living were studied in Portland and elsewhere throughout the state. The inquiry was directed by a trained investigator, Caroline J. Gleason of Minneapolis, formerly a student of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. The work was started in August 1912 and the information covered 7603 women wage earners in Portland and 1133 throughout the rest of the state. Wage statistics were tabulated for 4523, and are particularly valuable in the cast of the department stores which placed their pay rolls at the disposal of the survey committee. Generous co-operation from committees in twenty-five counties of the state was secured.

In the drafting of the bill the experience of the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Board was studied. Legal advice was secured and the constitutionality of the measure is upheld in an opinion by the attorney general of the state.

Social workers from Washington and California have been in touch with the investigation and the preparation of the bill. They have arranged to have bills drawn up on the same lines introduced as soon as the legislatures of their own states convene. The passage of the same measure by the three coast states is regarded by the social workers in each as a desirable and important piece of uniform legislation for an area in which industrial conditions and problems are similar.

The Social Survey Committee in its report gives the principles and facts which form the basis of the demand for the legislation as follows:

1. Each industry should provide for the livelihood of the workers employed in it. An industry which does not do so is parasitic. The well-being of society demands that wage-earning women shall not be required to subsidize from their earnings the industry in which they are employed.

2. Owing to the lack of organisation among women workers and the secrecy with which their wage schedules are guarded, there are absolutely no standards of wages among them. Their wages are determined for the most part by the will of the employer without reference to efficiency or length of service on the part of the worker. This condition is radically unjust.

3. The wages paid to women workers in most occupations are miserably inadequate to meet the cost of living at the lowest standards consistent with the maintenance of the health and morals of the workers. Nearly three-fifths of the women employed in industries in Portland receive less than $10 a week, which is the minimum weekly wage that ought to be offered to any self-supporting woman wage-earner in this city.

4. The present conditions of labor for women in many industries are shown by this report to be gravely detrimental to their health; and since most women wage earners are potential mothers, the future health of the race is menaced by these unsanitary conditions.

A NEW FEDERAL AGENCY FOR SETTLING STRIKES

An important power vested in Secretary Wilson of the new federal Department of Labor, which has hitherto practically escaped attention, gives to him the right assumed by President Roosevelt, when he initiated the machinery for settling the coal strike of 1902. The provision referred to in the law creating the department reads as follows:

"That the secretary of labor shall have power to act as mediator and to appoint commissioners of conciliation in labor disputes whenever in his judgment the interests of industrial peace may require it to be done."

Speaking of this section Secretary Wilson gave this interview to the Washington Post:

"The secretary of labor, by the terms of the act creating the new department, is empowered to act as mediator in disputes between labor and employers. The policy to which I shall adhere during my administration will be to do all I can to bring labor and capital together in mutual conferences, so that they may settle their own differences."

It has been pointed out that this power can be invoked at the will of the secretary. In this way he can bring public attention to bear upon any labor dispute which he believes warrants his official notice. Mr. Wilson has as yet given no indication as to how frequently he expects to use this power. Attention has also been called to the fact that this section may have an important effect upon the Erdman Act for settling transportation strikes.

[FINGER PRINTS]

TEN CENTS

KATHARINE ANTHONY

It was in a small restaurant in the downtown business district. The girl who came in and sat down opposite me at the "table for ladies" was clearly "office help." She could not have been more than sixteen, and in the boyish-looking brown velvet hat that she wore she appeared scarcely that. Her manner had little of the self-assertiveness so commonly seen in the young girl wage-earner.

"How much is the veg'tubble soup?" she asked the waiter in a confiding tone.

"Ten cents," he said.

The price appeared satisfactory and the waiter went away with his very brief order. While the young girl waited, she caught my eye.

"It's cold today," she remarked, with a winning smile and an air of taking me into her confidence as she had done with the waiter.

"A bit chilly, yes."

"He don't let me down to dinner till so late," she continued, "sometimes half-past one. You get hungry, and then you get over being hungry, and then you don't want nothing when you do go down. You know?"

Yes, I recognized the experience.

"The office where I used to work, we went out to dinner right at twelve every day."

"What keeps you so late now?"

"I guess he just forgets to let me down. He forgets to go out himself, I think."

The waiter brought the soup, a watery looking fluid in which floated a tomato and an onion in partial dissolution. He placed beside the plate a dingy blue check which bore in large print 10c.

"When I'm there a month, I'm going to ask him to let me down every day at a regular hour," she went on. "I'm only there a week now, so I wouldn't ask him yet."

She tasted the soup, but it was apparently not to her liking, or else, as she had said, her appetite had gone when the first feeling of hunger had passed. She glanced at the dirty blue check which committed her to her choice for better or worse, and then tried another spoonful of soup.

"I used to take a cup of coffee and a Charlotte 'roosh' every day, but my mother said I'd starve. She told me I'd got to have soup, it was more stren'thening."

"She was quite right, of course."

"But what's the use of ordering it if you can't eat it after all?"

She regarded the plate disconsolately. A little rallying induced her to make another effort. Then she gave it up entirely.

"I wonder what my mother would say if she could see me now!"

"I wonder!"

Taking two nickels from her small rusty bag, she rose, leaving the plate of cold soup almost untouched. She said good-by with her peculiarly friendly little smile, deposited the blue check and the two nickels at the cash counter, and went back to her afternoon's work.

WILLIAM, A MODERN DRAMA[3]

[3] Drawn from the records of the Juvenile Protective Association, Chicago.

The curtain is about to fall upon a human drama as full of complicating agencies and dramatic ironies as the most exacting either of Greeks or of moderns could require.

The dramatis personae are: a colored youth of twenty-two years; his aged mother (the father disappeared while the youth was still a child in Kansas); a friend who failed him and then too late repented; a partner; a dishonest clerk; a lawyer of similar type; and a judge according to the letter of the law. The acts are only three and brief.

Act I shows William at work for a large firm in Missouri at $9 a week. He manages to live on $3, sending $6 to his mother. He could not write; she could not read. But the weekly money order became the tryst of mother and son, and by it she knew that all was well with him. Among his fellow workmen was one, also a William, who seemed friendly and like William I, anxious to live economically. The two Williams shared a room, and all went well for about three months.

One pay day, William II borrowed from William I the $6 that should go to the mother, but only for a day or so, to be returned surely before the end of the week. But the man disappeared, and with him vanished the money. Then William I went to the little clothes press, and not having a suit of his own, took one of William II's, and pawned it for $6, and sent the money to his mother according to his word. That night, repentant but penniless, William II returned. He expressed himself as well pleased with what had been done with his suit, satisfied to have the money raised by any means possible. So the two, reconciled, slept. But William II rising early in the morning, went for an officer, and charging his room-mate with theft, had him arrested.

"He slep' with me all night there, and in the mawnin he don' have me arrested!"—thus William I mourned his false friend.

So Act I closes with our hero in the penitentiary, locked in for two years. But William II's repentance bore a late fruit. During the two years, he sent out of his own money each week the $6 to the mother of his friend, that she might never know the truth.

Act II shows William working in different places, and for short times, as is the fate of "jail-birds." At last in company with George he opens a restaurant, and prospers, and is popular. Then his evil fate overtakes him. Invited to be door-keeper at a dance one night, he left George in charge of the restaurant. George apparently went out on business of his own, and presently the clerk followed his example, donning for the time a coat of William's. But the clerk needed money; there was none in the pockets of the coat; and so, at a convenient corner, he waylaid a Chinese, relieved him of has funds, and left William's coat by way of compensation. Easily identified by the coat and papers in its pockets, William was as easily arrested—and as easily sentenced. The trial was a farce. A lawyer was appointed by the court. This lawyer took his client's indictment papers, ignored his client, called no witnesses, heard the sentence, and drew his fee.

William appealed to the Pardon Board. But at the time of this appeal, neither George nor the other door-keeper at that dance could be found to prove an alibi for William. The board asked: "have you ever been in prison before?" Alas for William! He could not say no; the board would not listen to his version and investigate the facts. His own truthfulness condemned him, and he was sent up on a five years' sentence.

The setting of Act III is the penitentiary. Falsely accused, without opportunity to prove his innocence, neglected by the lawyer paid to defend him, William, being only a Negro, toiled faithfully in a stone quarry, accumulating a reputation undesirable in the eyes of the world and the law. One day his foot was injured by the crusher. Then after months of stone dust, his lungs became infected. But at last word of his case reached the Juvenile Protective Association, and presently successful proof of his innocence of all connection with the attack on the Chinese was secured, and William was paroled from prison.

How far he may recover from the injuries received during this imprisonment remains to be seen. How much of opportunity to work and support himself and the aged mother society will offer an injured Negro with two prison records is a grave question. But the matter may be settled by the quiet falling of the curtain upon the sad little drama of the life of William.—S.

[EDITORIAL GRIST]

JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN 1837-1913

Mr. Morgan was for seventeen years treasurer of the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York which founded The Survey and under which it was published until the fall of 1912. When, in 1907, the parent society launched Charities Publication Committee in order "to give national scope and breadth" to the magazine, Mr. Morgan was one of fifteen guarantors who gave $1,000 each the initial year to promote its educational work. Last summer he gave $250, the sum asked from him, toward the clearance of an overhanging deficit, in advance of the institution of the Survey Associates as an independent and co-operative under-taking.

The public's chief concern in Mr. Morgan's great activities has been the play of his powerful individuality in the rapid reconstruction of the "mass of wrecked corporations which blocked the path of American finance" following the panic of 1893, and in "heading the forces of conservatism in the great business emergency" of 1907; his part as the "immense constructive genius" throughout the period of expansion in America's "large creative activities."

The "economic necessity or value of the enormous industrial combinations" shaped at his hands will, in the words of the New York Evening Post, "be the crux of later historical controversy over the great career now ended"; and the same is true of the ultimate effects on the working life of the people of his instrumentality in extending the country's railroads, in improving its banking, and in projecting its facilities for the manufacture of large staples.

Said Major Henry L. Higginson, New England's foremost philanthropist and financier, in commenting on Mr. Morgan's death: "To make a great fortune is little; to be a great citizen is much." The Survey will, in an early issue, publish an appreciation of other phases of Mr. Morgan's trenchant personality by an associate in the fields of art and philanthropy.

Here, one circumstance which concerns this magazine closely may be set down. The Pittsburgh Survey was made at a period of restlessness and irritation in many high quarters, following a succession of investigations and exposures. The period was also one of sensitiveness among every day people lest the organs of publicity might be controlled by invisible influences. Charities and the Commons (as The Survey was then called) bore Mr. Morgan's name as treasurer on its contents page while its staff was delving into the Pittsburgh district. The Pittsburgh Survey was conceived not for the purpose of internal counsel and report, but for the purpose of spreading before the public the facts as to life and labor in the region, where the two greatest individual fortunes in history had been made by Mr. Morgan's contemporaries, where he had in turn become the dominant factor, and where social tendencies observable everywhere had "actually, because of the high industrial development and the great industrial activity, had the opportunity to give tangible proof of their real character and their inevitable goal."

It must remain for Mr. Morgan's business associates to say how much affirmative concern he had given or came to give to the working conditions in those industries in which he controlled vast holdings, or to such far-reaching reforms as the safety campaign. But the staff of the Pittsburgh Survey can bear witness that no word of admonition ever reached them, no trace of pressure to minimize or gloss over or reserve for private consumption the human outcroppings of a thousand million dollar corporation. The situation did not change after our first strictures as to the seven-day week, the twelve-hour day, work accidents and the like had been spread broadcast. If they reached Mr. Morgan's ears, he was willing to let this left hand of philanthropic inquiry take the exact social measure of what had been done or left undone in the fiscal and industrial enterprises in which he was the master entrepreneur.

MR. WEST'S ARTICLE[4] PROTESTED

[4] See Civil War in the West Virginia Coal Mines on page [37] of this issue.

NIGHT LETTER

Charleston, W. Va.,
March 30, 1912.

"Owing to delayed trains, did not reach home nor receive your telegram of Friday until last night. West manuscript received and read this morning. Am directed to renew protest against its publication as contrary to facts in most important particulars and most unfair in attitude and spirit. An article published in your journal on a matter so important should be prepared by one of your own staff from facts gathered by your own investigator. Am authorized to place in your hands immediately five hundred dollars, being amount estimated by you as necessary to cover expense of special examination and article, and urge you in justice and fairness to accept and use it for the purpose. It is impossible to prepare an answer to the West article and have it in your hands tomorrow, nor is one-fifth the space given West article sufficient for an adequate reply thereto. If you decline to make your own investigation and report, it is submitted that justice requires that time be given so that West article and reply may appear in same issue and space equal to article be given for reply. If you refuse this I respectfully ask the publication of this protest with Mr. West's paper."

[Signed] Neil Robinson.
[Secretary West Virginia Mining Association.]

In line with the general practice of The Survey when an article makes major charges against an institution or industry—a copy of Mr. West's manuscript was sent on March 20 to the secretary of the West Virginia Mining Association, with a request that he indicate any points which "seem to you in error."

On March 26 The Survey received a letter from Mr. Robinson, who called in person the day following to protest against the publication of the article as unfair, and not of the calibre expected of The Survey by the public. He also offered us every facility if we would make an independent staff investigation. We stated that such a staff inquiry in the West Virginia field was beyond our means, that we had exercised due care in selecting Mr. West as a non-combatant observer, and that the manuscript had stood the test of criticism in various quarters. Further, we stated that if Mr. Robinson could there and then dislodge the major statements of fact in the article, we would surely not publish it; otherwise, we would hold two pages of the same issue of The Survey open until Monday of this week for a statement in rebuttal.

In the interval a galley proof of the article was sent Mr. Robinson containing revisions to cover minor points of criticism made by him and other critics. Later issues of The Survey are open to the West Virginia operators for a full reply; and the findings of a federal inquiry which would resourcefully and dispassionately cover the ground would, of course, be handled at length.

Y. M. C. A. GROWTH

The Young Men's Christian Association began in 1851, sixty-two years ago. The property value in plant and equipment, increased in the first ten years of the twentieth century more than in all the previous fifty years; the membership doubled, a tremendous growth.

Will the next decade show a like growth for organized charity with proper effort?

THE TOWN CONSTABLE

J. J. KELSO

The town constable is one of the most important links in the chain of social service, and yet he is seldom taken into consideration by the active workers for social betterment.

A town constable was recently held up to public censure at a church meeting for failure to wipe out certain well-known evils. When asked about it the next day his reply was: "The law is being enforced in this town just as far as the people will stand for." His idea, you see, was that observance of law was a matter of education, of moral backing, and without this strong, sustaining support, one man, even with a badge and a club, could not go beyond a certain point.

The idea got into another constable's head once that his duty was to carry out the law, no matter what people thought about it, and to his great surprise it was not long before his resignation was insisted upon. He did splendid service and really frightened law-breakers, so much so that they got busy in bringing about his downfall. Where were the good people? Entirely missing. Here and there a man under his breath would give the official a word of faint praise, but in the council church members allowed themselves to be made the tools for his destruction. "Well meaning, but lacking in judgment" was the decision; "rash, hasty, ill-advised," and so he had to go in disgrace, while the law-breakers smiled quietly and continued on in the old way. Public meetings in that town still continue to denounce the well-known evils, indifferent to the fate of the officer who thought he had all the forces of good at his back.

Still another constable, whom I know well, told me privately that he started out in the same way, but got a hint that he could not hold his situation and, having a young family to support, he concluded it would be the part of wisdom to let well enough alone, especially as the men who counselled him were church leaders, who ought to know the sentiment of the town on moral questions.

Some towns have a high moral tone largely because of the good influence of the head of the police department. Others are on a low plane of moral observance because the constable is indifferent, if not indeed hostile, to advance measures. Lack of encouragement and appreciation is often the secret of this indifference.

Visiting a town on one occasion to take part in a meeting on social reform, I asked the constable who happened to be at the station if he knew Rev. S. Thomas Strother. "No."

"Well, do you know Rev. Milton Smoot?"

Receiving another negative, I enquired in surprise, "Why surely you are acquainted with the preachers of your town?"

"No," he said, in a surly tone, "they have no use for the likes of me." Here was a man, specially appointed guardian of the town and invested with the high dignity of safeguarding the lives, morals and property of the community, whose mental attitude toward the better element was evidently one of hostility. The explanation given me later was that he was a recent appointee, only there a month, and there was not sufficient time to get acquainted. "Well," I replied, "if I had been you people I would have gotten up a banquet and given him such a welcome as would hearten him in his great work for years to come." It is all in the way you look at these things.

At a large church gathering on social welfare I took occasion to exalt the office of constable and to praise the man who held that office. He was at the back of the hall and I could see was greatly surprised at this recognition. He came to me afterwards and earnestly expressed his thanks. "No one has given me that much encouragement before," he said, "and it will help me a great deal, especially as I want the young fellows of the town to know I am their friend and not their enemy."

Social and church workers, let the town constable know that he is appreciated, let him feel that good work is recognized, that if he is attacked because of fearless discharge of his duty, he will have behind him an unflinching body of men who will make his trouble theirs and fight for a righteous cause as well as talk at church meetings.

MINIMUM WAGE LEGISLATION

FLORENCE KELLEY
Secretary National Consumers' League

Governor West of Oregon has signed a bill creating a Minimum Wage Commission. Oregon thus follows Massachusetts in this new field of industrial legislation. Minimum wage bills have been introduced in the legislatures of California, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The New York Factory Investigating Commission will doubtless be continued and empowered to investigate wages.

The Oregon law and all the pending bills have one characteristic in common: they are alarmingly undemocratic. They fail to afford to American employees in underpaid industries those democratic safeguards which characterize English and Australian legislation. They apply to women, oblivious of the fact that wives and daughters work because their man breadwinner does not earn enough to support the family. These laws and bills ignore the youth and shifting nature of the working force in the underpaid industries which is so largely made up of young girls. They need the moral support of their men fellow-workers in negotiating about wages.

In America the governor appoints the commission, and the commission selects the wage board. The board determines the lowest wage and the women and girls take what they get. The recipients of the wages are not allowed to elect representatives to the boards. They are, in fact, not represented at all. The Kansas bill was killed by the legislature. It substituted "an adjuster" for commission and boards.

If these other ill-considered bills become laws, it will be the work of years to remodel them on more democratic lines, and on wise and just principles in the light of the experience of Australia and England.

"THE HAND OF THE POTTER TREMBLES"

SOLON DE LEON

To lead poisoning among lead smelters, white lead workers and painters, we have grown accustomed. Now comes the revelation of wide-spread plumbism, or "potters' palsy," among workers in the potteries.

Trenton, New Jersey, the third largest pottery center in the country, has recently been the scene of a brief study conducted by the American Association for Labor Legislation. Brief as was the study it revealed many cases of this disease.

One case was that of a fifteen-year-old orphan, as dipper's helper in a pottery. He handles cups and saucers after they have received their coat of glaze and before they are taken to the kiln. He gets his hands covered with glaze. There are no washing facilities at the plant where he works. When visited at home he had spots of white lead over the front of his shirt. After nine months as dipper's helper he began to complain of general ill health, with pains in the stomach. He worked interruptedly for another month, and finally came down with an attack of acute and excruciatingly painful poisoning which required a week's hospital treatment.

A young girl, now married and a mother, worked in a tile plant for six years, the last three of which she was a dipper. Within three months after starting the latter work she suffered a typical violent lead colic attack, accompanied by nausea and digestive derangements. The attack lasted a week, and was followed by three more at intervals of several months.

A former glost kiln-man of forty-five had worked in the Trenton potteries continuously for upwards of twenty years. Five years ago he was stricken with complete double wrist-drop and for two years was totally incapacitated.

Another practically useless pair of hands belongs to a workman forty-nine years old. Lead poisoning crippled him and deprived him of his trade at the age of thirty-three. He used to be a "ground layer." That is, he rubbed lead colors with a short brush into the surfaces to be decorated. In the course of fifteen years he had eight or ten severe attacks. In the last one, sixteen years ago, both arms were paralyzed. For two years he had to be clothed and fed. Now his arms have recovered their flexibility, but his hands still hang shrivelled and powerless to open or straighten themselves. For a livelihood he has been forced to take up an unskilled job requiring no manual work, but seven days' labor a week.

A color mixer in a tile works began after ten years to suffer from cramps in the stomach, nausea and biliousness. A number of physicians told him it was lead colic. He grew steadily worse, and four years later he died. The death certificate gives pulmonary tuberculosis as the cause, but the physicians on the case agreed in stating that lead formed at least a considerable complication.

So run the records of a few of the cases.

There are about 21,000 potters, the makers and enamelers of iron sanitary ware in the United States. Of these, 2,500 or over 10 per cent are declared by Dr. Alice Hamilton in her report to the United States government to be exposed in the regular course of their work to the risk of lead poisoning. Within two years 510 cases of poisoning were found.

It is now generally accepted that the one word "cleanliness" sums up the requirements for the abolition of such occurrences. Yet the workshops in the pottery and allied industries are at present almost without exception run with utter disregard of this fundamental consideration. They are as a rule dusty, ill-ventilated and poorly lighted. Washing facilities are almost unknown.

In New Jersey and in seven other states the legislatures have now pending before them the aptly christened "cleanliness bill," drafted by the Association for Labor Legislation after careful study to counteract just these conditions. The proposed measure establishes strict sanitary provisions in potteries and all works making or handling lead salts. It takes a leaf from successful English and German legislation by establishing "duties of employees" as well as "duties of employers," and by fixing a fine for failure to comply. The bill has passed the lower house in Missouri, and has been reported favorably by the lower house committee to which it was referred in Ohio and in New Jersey. A similar law has been in force in Illinois for two years with excellent results. Many progressive manufacturers admit the wisdom of these regulations and will not oppose them. Others are actively in favor.

WHY IS THE PAUPER

SUGGESTIVE FACTS AS TO CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF DESTITUTION REVEALED BY A STUDY OF A MID-WESTERN ALMSHOUSE[5]

[5] In taking the rather exhaustive social histories of the 200 inmates of the Sangamon County Poor Farm, I was assisted by Mary Humphrey and Mary Johnson, without whose intelligent and enthusiastic co-operation this preliminary study could not have been made.

GEORGE THOMAS PALMER, M. D.

SUPERINTENDENT HEALTH DEPARTMENT, SPRINGFIELD, ILL.

Drawings by Alfred S. Harkness

Poorhouse it was, this mid-western abode of unfortunates, regardless of the resolution of the Conference of Charities and Correction recommending that it and its host of fellows be known as "county homes."

This particular poorhouse was comfortably perched upon a hill, surrounded by elms and oaks and walnuts, overlooking a land of plenty—a "prosperous-looking" poorhouse it was with well-bred Holstein cows wading knee-deep in clover on land worth $250 an acre. The verdant pastures, the fields of grain, the white fences, the silo and the barns, the splendid old brick house, might have belonged to a delightful country estate so apparently did they bespeak good farm management. Good order and spick-and-spanness also characterized broad veranda and hall, the living rooms of the superintendent, and almost might the same terms have been applied to the dwelling place of the inmates.

This, seemingly, was no place to come for the ugly story of destitution—for the revolting facts which force us, almost against our wills, to paint our picture in glaring yellow. But the destitution was there. You could see it in the expression, the gait and the posture of the inmates; you could smell it in the unmistakable smell of poverty and you could feel it in the indefinable something which grips you and oppresses you in an institution of this kind.

It was a poorhouse and nothing but a poorhouse—a good poorhouse, if there is such a thing, but a poorhouse none the less. Like thousands of similar institutions, it stood ready to receive the individual when he strikes the very bottom of the toboggan slide of life, to house him and to feed him humanely enough, but with the saving of dimes and nickels regarded as the cardinal virtue of efficient management. It was an "asylum of poverty"—no more what such an institution might be than the lunatic asylum of twenty years ago is like the hospital for the insane of the present day. Like thousands of others, it was one of those places where we receive the unfortunate; where we label him a pauper; where we tolerate his presence until death reduces the county expense or until he goes out into the world again not a whit better off, physically, mentally or morally, on account of his association with us.

We had come to the place for the purpose of ascertaining to what extent tuberculosis prevailed among the two hundred inmates and to ascertain the degree of protection afforded these unfortunates against infection from the disease. As our work progressed this question came to me more and more insistently: "Why are these men and women dependents? What, if anything, could be learned if they were permitted to tell their own stories of misfortune?"

Social history blanks were prepared, and two intelligent young women were set at the task of supplementing physical examinations with a series of questions relative to the past lives of the inmates. Due allowance was made for natural exaggeration when a person told of the glories of his past, and like allowance was made for the faulty memory which had lost its record of personal faults, vices and dissipations. As far as possible the reliability of the story was determined by checking up with certain definite and obtainable facts.

At the outset of the work, a wave of fear spread over the place born of the belief that we were cataloging the inmates to send them to an "asylum"; but when this was quieted, the history taking was uneventful.

Eliminating those who were mentally incapable of being interviewed, we were able to prepare 137 quite complete records. Of those interviewed, 32 were women and 105 men. Practically all the women, incidentally, were there on account of insanity, drug addiction or actual illness. There were 131 white inmates, 5 Negroes and one who claimed to be an Indian. Sixty-nine were single, that is 60 per cent of the males and but 27 per cent of the females. Nineteen had living husbands or wives and 47 were widowed. Of those who had married, 42 had married once only; 13 stated that they had married twice and 4 that they had married three times or more.

To the penny-wise county official it is of practical interest to note that 34 of the inmates, or about 25 per cent, had living children and that even casual inquiry showed many instances in which the children were financially able to take care of these unfortunates, as the laws of Illinois provide that they shall do.

Thirty of the inmates were born in Illinois; 36 in the United States outside of Illinois; while Ireland and Germany came next with 21 representatives each. There was no Jew in the almshouse.

Three of the inmates admitted that their parents had been dependent upon public charity; 24 admitted alcoholism or drug addiction on the part of their parents; 4 were the children of the insane and one was the daughter of a criminal. The fathers of 106 came from laboring and agricultural classes, while the fathers of 6 were professional men.

Nineteen of the inmates had had no education whatever; 12 claimed to be able to read and write but had never gone to school; 4 had attended school less than one year; 15 had attended less than five years; 71 claimed a complete "common school" education and 7 had gone to high school or college. Four had been compelled to earn a living under ten years of age; 12 from ten to twelve years; 41 from twelve to fifteen years and 31 had begun work between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one years.

With this showing, the question naturally arises: Is there any connection between lack of education, child labor and the poorhouse?

One of the male inmates had been a pharmacist, one a civil engineer; 28 had learned trades and 53 were laborers. Of the females, 17 were house servants and one a teacher.

To ascertain something of the past financial condition, we inquired as to the highest wage each had made, the amount he had inherited and the greatest amount he had ever accumulated. Six had never made more than $10 to $20 per month; 21 had made from $20 to $50 per month and 28 claimed to have made over $100 per month. Fourteen had inherited property worth less than $500; 11 had inherited from $500 to $1,000; 5 from $1,000 to $5,000, and one had inherited from $5,000 to $10,000. Thirty-five of the inmates had never accumulated as much as $500 at any one time; 22 had possessed from $500 to $1,000; 20 had owned from $1,000 to $5,000; 7 from $5,000 to $10,000, and four had had over $10,000.

As to their habits, vices and dependence, 88 were users of alcohol and 35 of these had been heavy drinkers. Four females and one male were addicted to drugs. Thirty-nine had been arrested once, and four more than once. The causes of arrest were drunkenness and disorderly conduct 22; vagrancy 10; theft 1; assault 4 and participation in a strike 1. Two of the inmates had been in other almshouses; 7 had occupied beds in charity hospitals; 2 had grown up from orphan asylums and 4 had been helped by lodges and unions. Many had received county orders before coming to the almshouse.

What light such data as the foregoing, if collected in large numbers of similar institutions, would throw upon the underlying causes of destitution, is, of course, speculative. It seems to me, however, that they might give us a more intelligent idea of the connection between pauperism and the marriage of the unfit; lack of education; child labor; lack of trade or definite vocation; poor mentality; lack of religious influence; divorce or failure to marry; alcohol and drugs; vice and preventable disease.

If these remote influences lie beyond the imaginative possibilities of the average almshouse superintendent and county official, there were certain other facts brought out in this study which should appeal to the most practical and hard-headed. These facts seem to point the way to the rehabilitation of the unfortunate; the way of placing him on his feet again. They also point directly to the reduction in the almshouse population and the consequent decrease in public expense.

Getting at the direct causes of dependence, it was found that old age was the chief factor, 47 of the inmates being over 70 years of age. This number of dependents, incidentally, could be materially reduced by tracing out near relatives legally responsible for their care.

Drugs and alcohol were responsible for 25 dependencies—a less encouraging group until we have intelligent public treatment for these cases. Twenty-five of the inmates were crippled while 18 were there on account of general illness. Doubtless many of these cases would be amenable to treatment if properly studied and diagnosed.

Six were victims of advanced tuberculosis, and it may be assumed that the nature of the illness was unrecognized as the patients were housed in dormitories with the uninfected. There were unquestionably other tuberculosis cases undiagnosed who were not only losing their chance of cure; but were exposing and infecting others. I am impressed, incidentally, that almshouses, with their armies of transients going to the crowded, unventilated quarters of the poor, are very considerable spreaders of tuberculosis.

The insane, feeble-minded and epileptic aggregated perhaps 50—an almshouse population which should be and must be decreased by more adequate state provision for these afflicted.

Syphilis was responsible for 3 dependencies, and probably many more would respond to the Wassermann test and could be restored to health by specific treatment.

The 4 blind and aged inmates might be made to see by simple cataract operations.

Many of the inmates expressed the wish that they might be restored to health that they could go out into the world again upon their own resources. But 58 replied, when asked what they wanted to do in the future, that they wanted to stay where they were, under the friendly roof of the poorhouse.

This does not imply hopeless pauperism, however. Sick, neglected, weak and despondent—of course, they want to stay in some place, even in the poorhouse, where they are not eternally ordered to move on by the police; viewed with suspicion or fear by self-respecting citizens or in constant danger of arrest for vagrancy. Such forlorn men not infrequently commit petty crimes to guarantee their being housed in jail during a cold winter.

I am optimistic enough to believe that if the physical conditions of each inmate were studied; if his ills were cured and he was made stronger in body, he would be given courage, more ambition and more purpose in life. To this extent pauperism is directly curable.

True, there are among the destitute those who are hopelessly marked—branded by heredity; cursed by environment; wrecked by disease; deficient in body and in mind, with little or nothing to work upon. By the same token there are those in other branches of medicine who are hopelessly sick—those who are beyond the reach of the surgeon's knife or the physician's prescription. There are those among the insane who give no ray of hope to the most enthusiastic alienist.

But when we progress to the point of classifying our paupers; of studying intelligently the various causes of destitution; of endeavoring to make our almshouses places of cure rather than mere asylums for the victims of poverty, our percentage of "recoveries" will be surprisingly high.

The difference in methods between the modern insane hospital and the almshouse is striking. A man is admitted to an institution for the insane in a thoroughly irrational and excitable condition. His case is studied and it is found that he has cerebral syphilis. Proper treatment is instituted and, in all probability, the patient is returned to his family cured and a useful member of society.

In another case, syphilis has rendered a man physically inefficient, dissipated and despondent. He drifts to the poorhouse where he is catalogued simply as a "pauper." The chances are that the cause of his pauperism is not detected. If he announces it himself, he may receive the hurried, occasional visit of a contract doctor. Even the drugs that are given him may be crude and impure, bought by contract from the lowest bidder. Little or no provision is made for his intelligent and systematic treatment. He may be drugged with mercury until he is salivated; he may be neglected until his open sores cause him to be housed in the basement away from the other inmates. He is merely a syphilitic pauper and the rough fare of the poorhouse is looked upon as better than he deserves.

As a matter of fact, he is a sick man; sick of a curable disease and his cure may restore him to useful citizenship and remove him from the county expense.

Or again, there comes to the almshouse a man who is tired—a man who will not work. Perhaps he is losing a little weight and he is known to have been drinking more whiskey than he did when he worked harder. You are tempted to compel him to work; to drive him to earn his meager board and bed. The superintendent has no time to note that he has a little fever at night or to see that he clears his throat from time to time. Without physical examination, we have no way of knowing that we are dealing with an incipient consumptive. The average superintendent knows nothing of the deadly weariness of this disease; the weariness that invades every muscle of the body; which makes work impossible; which prompts men of higher moral fiber to drink whiskey or seek other stimulation.

This "lazy devil" is begrudged our poorhouse food, when, as a matter of fact, he ought to have, and at public expense, better food than we have ever thought of giving him. With fresh air, milk, eggs, nourishing food, intelligent treatment and perfect rest, this man can get well and resume a place in the world. With ordinary almshouse care and almshouse fare, we are signing his death warrant while we are guaranteeing his prolonged dependence upon public charity.

We receive old men who have worked hard and who have made an honest living before their eyesight failed and they became almost blind. We label these men as paupers and do not stop to question if a simple operation for cataract would not restore them to useful occupation.

The spirit of the average almshouse is illustrated in this—one Illinois county has a contract with a dentist to pull the teeth of poor farm inmates. There is no provision for saving teeth. If the inmate is writhing with toothache, he must take his choice; lose a good tooth on contract, or grin and bear the pain. The supervisors can see no reason why a pauper should want to save his teeth or why he should be permitted to do so. And yet a cheap filling would cost little more than the primitive and mutilating operation of extraction.

These are mere instances of the obvious curative possibilities in the almshouse—instances where the county's duties are so apparent, in which the right and humane way is so clearly the cheap and economical way that the matter should require no discussion. It is the line of direct cure which the county, as a matter of sound administration, should make it possible to carry out. It means first the careful physical examination of every inmate of every almshouse, not by the medical man who bids lowest to get the contract, but by the most capable diagnostician available.

But this is only the beginning. The big possibility is what the almshouses of the nation can do to ascertain the more remote causes of poverty and destitution, for, as in the case of the insane, when we know the causes of destitution, we can carry out our most effective work before the pauper becomes a pauper—before he comes slinking, wretched and despondent, to the door of the county farm.

Tuberculosis will never be eradicated by merely treating the sick; yellow fever could not have been stamped out by simply caring for the afflicted; pauperism will never be materially affected by what we do when the pauper has reached his last ditch. We must fight tuberculosis by striking at its causes; we have already eliminated yellow fever by the same sane process. We would have gone further in our battle against pauperism, perhaps, were it not that pauperism is the only disease that has never invaded the home of the rich. No multi-millionaire has ever endowed a research laboratory for the study of destitution in memory of a petted child struck dead by its poisonous fangs.

But every almshouse has its clinic in poverty and I am convinced that if every inmate in every poorhouse throughout the nation could be made to tell the story of how he came to be there; if every one could be examined for physical and mental causes, and if all these data could be gathered together in systematic form, a great stride would have been made in formulating an intelligent campaign against dependence.

[COMPENSATION FOR OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES]

JOHN B. ANDREWS

SECRETARY AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR LABOR LEGISLATION

The introduction in Congress of a bill which extends the workmen's compensation principle to embrace occupational diseases places before the American people an entirely new range of problems in the field of social insurance.

The federal government since 1908, and fifteen states during the past two years, have recognized the wisdom and justice of the compensation principle in dealing with the victims of industrial accidents. Now comes the demand that the American people, through Congress, adopt exactly the same principle in dealing with federal employees who are incapacitated for work by occupational diseases.

What is the present situation?

"The government gives no compensation for lead poisoning because, technically, it is not an accident, which is true, for under the circumstances it is a dead certainty."

—This quotation from the report of an investigator for the New York State Factory Investigating Commission is neither a playful nor an exaggerated statement. On the contrary, we now have complete confirmation of its truth in the official report and in the sober legal phrase of the solicitor for the Department of Commerce and Labor.[6]

[6] Opinions of the Solicitor for the Department of Commerce and Labor dealing with Workmen's Compensation. 1912.

It all came about in this way. A man named Schroeder went to work in the federal navy yard at Brooklyn. One of our big war ships, the Ohio, came to the dock and Schroeder was sent down into the water-tight compartments called "coffer-dams" to burn off the old coat of paint in preparation for a new. As a result of breathing the fumes of the lead paint, Schroeder was incapacitated for work by acute lead poisoning. He lost thirty-seven days on this account, and he applied to the government for the payment of compensation equal to the wages he had lost.

This statement was made by the attorney for the United States government:

"The question in this case is whether acute lead poisoning contracted in the course of employment is an injury within the meaning of the compensation act. If the inhalation of noxious gases is a necessary incident to the workman's employment, there can be nothing accidental in the injury resulting therefrom. This latter consideration disposes of the present case....

"It cannot be said that these fumes were inhaled by accident. The fumes were necessarily produced by the work he was engaged upon. The inhalation of such fumes was to have been expected and probably could not have been avoided. Lead poisoning, under the circumstances, was the natural, if not the inevitable, result."

Schroeder got not one penny.

Aside from the fact that lead poisoning in this case was really preventable; aside from the fact that several enlightened nations have absolutely prohibited the use of poisonous lead paints for the interior of their war ships, and aside from the fact that there was no one to warn Schroeder of the dangerous nature of his occupation, there is one big final reason why this decision of Uncle Sam's Attorney was even more unfortunate than it was necessary. The financial cost of this unnecessary case of acute lead poisoning, in addition to the personal suffering, fell upon poor Schroeder. Most men will agree that such financial losses should fall upon the employer. In this case the employer was the nation, which means all of us, you and me.

We owe Schroeder something more than an apology. While the federal government is publishing excellent reports on lead poisoning in the factories of private employers and is translating and distributing in fat volumes the workmen's compensation laws of European countries, can the United States afford to do less than make provision for reasonably safe work places in the government service? And can this country afford to ignore the good example of these European laws which provide compensation for such victims of occupational diseases?

A few months after the unfortunate Schroeder case a man named Hill was employed at placing floor plates in the engine room of the war ship St. Louis in the Puget Sound Navy Yard. Meantime, red and white lead paint was being applied in the bilges of the vessel.

"As a result of this exposure to lead fumes, a sufficient amount of lead was taken into claimant's system to produce 'toxic amblyopia, both eyes,'"

which means

"disease of vision from imperfect sensation of the retina, without organic lesion of the eye."

This disease incapacitated Hill on the thirteenth day after his first exposure to the poison. The exposure lasted only seven days. Said the solicitor:

"It is accordingly possible to refer the claimant's injury to an event capable of being fixed in point of time. In the second place, the injury to the claimant's eyes was neither reasonably to be expected, nor the natural or inevitable consequence of the work he personally was engaged upon. The injury must therefore be ascribed to accident. The claimant's particular work had nothing to do with the painting operations going on about him. His work as a ship fitter related to the laying of places in the boiler room; the painting was being done by others."

And this claim was approved.

But if, instead of Hill, one of the painters had been poisoned and incapacitated by the fumes of lead paint, a similar claim would not have been allowed by the solicitor. This is made perfectly clear by his decision in the John Freiman case.

John was a laborer in the Boston Navy Yard, and it was his duty to scale off lead-painted compartments on ships. He became incapacitated by "lead poisoning contracted in the course of his employment," and his superior officer certified that the injury was not due to negligence or misconduct. After John had suffered several weeks as a result of "painter's colic" and chronic lead poisoning, his claim was submitted. It was necessary to decide whether the law applies to disease due to the occupation. The solicitor declared:

"There is no such special provision made, and I can find nothing which would, in my judgment, justify its application to a case of lead poisoning or 'painter's colic.'"

The difficulties involved in legal technicalities become apparent. The following story, verbatim from the government report (page 201), about William Murray, who suffered with compressed air illness, strikingly illustrates the point:

"The claimant in this case is a laborer employed by the Reclamation Service, at Arizona shaft, Colorado River siphon. The claimant's duties required him to work in compressed air. In consequence, he was attacked with 'a severe case of bends,' which 'settled in nearly all parts of the body.' When originally presented the claim was disallowed on the ground that the bends is a disease, and diseases contracted in the course of employment as distinguished from injuries of an accidental nature are not within the operation of the compensation act. A reconsideration of this action 'with a view to the allowance of the claim, if the same is deemed to come within the letter of the statute as it seems to come within its spirit,' is now requested by the secretary of the interior, who writes that a refusal to approve this claim may cause a number of men to leave the work, as, on account of the bends, it is generally regarded as very hazardous."

And the former decision was reversed!

The solicitor has passed upon other cases of occupational disease, with some decidedly interesting results.

Mary A. Crellin was a folder of heavy paper at the Government Printing Office. Continuous strain upon her fingers and wrist caused a degeneration of the tendon sheath. A tumor or cystic growth developed. Mary was obliged to have it surgically removed. Then she thought the government, and not she, ought to stand the loss of wages due to her incapacity. This attracted attention. Said the medical officer of the Government Printing Office:

"This is the first case that I ever observed or noticed among folders, until I examined a number of skilled female laborers employed in this office upon the same vocation—that of folding sheets of paper—of which five presented a similar condition, but of such size as not to interfere with the manipulation of the hand."

The solicitor decided that in this tendon degeneration there was "no accidental element." It was "not due to injury." It was "due to excessive use" in the service of Uncle Sam. Mary's claim was denied.

Another case—a plate printer, J. B. Irving, who was on the night force in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. In the course of a night he printed 900 sheets, and as he handled each sheet he looked for a few seconds at a bright engraved plate which reflected into his eyes. One night last March the bureau tried out some new electric lights, and their use was continued three successive nights. Irving thereupon stopped work, and the doctor diagnosed his case as "Retinitis conjunctivitis, both eyes." He was unable to keep his eyes open in a bright light. After investigation, the solicitor decided that in this case compensation should be granted on the ground that the injury was not anticipated, nor was it the result of any slow accumulation of trifling injuries.

Sunstroke, which is known as a disease, is compensated under the act. The straining of the ligaments about the wrist, known as "synovitis of the wrist" and scheduled as a disease under the British act, has been compensated. "Vaccinia" from vaccination is compensated. A long-standing case of flat-foot was compensated, even though the use of a simple wedge made the injured one better than before.

John Sheeran, who contracted pneumonia due to exposure at the Soo Canal, was denied compensation. But J. B. Atkinson, who fell from a ladder and continued to work 181 days thereafter, until typhoid fever took him off within a week, "died by reason of his injury," because the fall "lowered his vitality, ... which rendered him peculiarly susceptible to typhoid infection, ... which resulted in his death."

The question may fairly be raised as to whether it is not a bit unfair to an administrative official to place him under the embarrassment of interpreting a statute so as to cover, for example, some but not all cases of industrial lead poisoning. Would it not be much better plainly to include occupational diseases in the law?

After more than four years of experience under the present law the government recently published the first official report upon its operation. Sixty-six closely printed pages of this report are devoted to embarrassing questions which have arisen because of claims arising out of occupational diseases. The administration in its awards has been as liberal as could be expected under the unfortunate legislative restrictions. The solicitor for the department has taken a keen interest in its operation. He has been faithful and alert. One of his most urgent recommendations for a change in the law is that it be extended to embrace occupational diseases.

The present federal law is known as the Workmen's Compensation Act of May 30, 1908, and is America's pioneer compensation law. It was a step forward, but only a step. Fortunately, state legislatures have not copied its main provisions, for they are totally inadequate. This federal law applies to only about one-third of our 350,000 civilian employees. It grants no relief for incapacity lasting less than fifteen days, it makes no provision for medical treatment, and one year's wages is the maximum benefit even for total blindness or death. In fact, the present law is so deficient that its original sponsors now waste no words in its defense, but frankly apologize for its shortcomings. "Not a revision," says one in a position to know, "but a new law is needed."

The draft of a new law, prepared after months of careful investigation of experience of this and all other compensation acts, and drafted with infinite care at the instigation of the Association for Labor Legislation, has been introduced in Congress by Senator Kern. Surely the United States should now provide for its own government employees incapacitated by industrial accidents and occupational diseases a system of safety and sanitation coupled with compensation at least equivalent to that furnished by the most progressive nations of the world. The bill now before Congress offers this immediate opportunity.

Nor can the state legislatures longer ignore the injustice of this arbitrary distinction between accidents and diseases due to the peculiar conditions of employment.

In a pamphlet on Industrial Diseases and Occupational Standards, published in May, 1910, the writer urged immediate consideration of this problem, and said:

"No intelligent person can go far in the study of compensation for industrial accidents without realizing that a logical consideration of the facts must lead likewise to compensation for industrial diseases."

Since then three momentous years have passed. One state after another is preparing to meet this problem, which becomes steadily more pressing. One of the three great national political parties now pledges itself to work unceasingly in state and nation for trade disease compensation. Wisconsin has the promise of relief in the political platform of the present administration; Ohio, by recent constitutional amendment, is prepared for action; Pennsylvania is following this example; several states, including Massachusetts and Michigan, by a liberal interpretation of present laws, are coquetting with the issue; New Hampshire has boldly introduced specific legislation on the subject.[7]

[7] In 1912 the Association for Labor Legislation prepared, in co-operation with the United States Bureau of Labor and the Library of Congress, a critical bibliography on industrial diseases. Fifty printed pages of titles were thus made available on this important subject. European countries have published volumes on compensation for industrial diseases, but, as far as can be learned, this is the first American article under this title.

Leading countries of Europe have already taken this step. Great Britain in her Workmen's Compensation Act of 1906, in addition to accidents, included in the first schedule six diseases of occupation. That schedule has been extended until it now includes no less than twenty-four distinct maladies due to peculiar conditions of employment. Germany, as a result of the experience of a quarter of a century, in her new imperial code expressly has declared for similar action. Switzerland, in her system accepted by referendum vote in February, 1912, makes like provision for insurance against occupational diseases. The government of Holland, in November, 1912, laid before Parliament a bill to regulate the insurance of workmen against industrial diseases in connection with the proposed sickness insurance.

DOUBLE WRIST-DROP
Hands of workman paralyzed for sixteen years as result of lead poisoning. Five of his fellow workmen were killed by lead poisoning before they were forty. Victims of lead poisoning are not compensated under American laws because technically an occupational disease is "not an injury."

The arguments used so effectively by advocates of compensation for accidents, and now so generally accepted by all men, apply with even greater force in the consideration of relief for the victims of occupational diseases. No one will doubt, for example, that placing the financial cost of lead poisoning upon the lead industry will promote greater cleanliness in the lead trades. It will pay to clean up. A considerable part of the money now paid to employers' liability companies and to ambulance chasers could, under a just system of compensation, go where it belongs—to the injured workman or his family. Expensive, annoying, and unsatisfactory litigation could be reduced to a minimum. Information concerning special danger points in industry would be automatically pointed out to the factory inspectors in a manner both prompt and sure. Unnecessary occupational diseases would then be prevented, and that is the real problem.

The principle is admitted that workmen should be compensated for injuries by accident arising out of their employment. It is only consistent that incapacity caused by diseases due to the employment should also be included. Some diseases are, in the ordinary use of the term, accidental. But many people work where trade diseases of an insidious nature are contracted and where there is constant risk of illness on that account. These diseases are as serious as accidents. There is no social justification for drawing an arbitrary line of distinction—the principle of compensation is no longer in an experimental stage. A compensation law should include, says Sir Thomas Oliver, the leading English authority on the subject, "industrial diseases, the consequences of which may be immediate or remote, and which are often more severe than accidents."

It must be admitted that even our discredited system of employers' liability has afforded occasional relief to the victims of accidents. But even this uncertain and irregular protection, poor as it is, has in most instances been denied to workers exposed to the creeping horror of industrial disease. The exact occupational cause of the affliction is, of course, more difficult to prove. The employee is thus placed at still greater disadvantage in dealing with his employer. American judges, basing their opinions on outgrown decisions of the British House of Lords, have declared that "industrial injuries" include only those afflictions of an accidental nature whose cause can be ascribed to a definite point of time, and have thus almost universally barred even from the occasional and expensive relief of employers' liability the victims of such typical maladies as the match maker's "phossy jaw," the lead worker's "wrist-drop" and painter's colic, the boiler maker's deafness, the glass worker's cataract, the potter's palsy, the hatter's shakes, and the compressed air worker's bends.

The public has not yet forgotten pitiful cases where match manufacturers, through the work of their attorneys, were able to deny all financial relief to their victims of "phossy jaw." And there are cases now pending in the courts where men totally blinded by the fumes of wood alcohol have year after year sued in vain for some financial relief from brewery companies which employed them to varnish the inside of beer vats.

Occasionally, however, large awards have been made. But they, as in the case of damage suits arising out of accidents, encourage further expensive litigation. One case of wood alcohol poisoning in Ohio (Joseph Frank vs. The Herancourt Brewing Co., 82 O. S., 424) is now a matter of record. The Supreme Court compelled the employer to pay $12,500, with interest and costs, aggregating over $15,000.

"After five years of litigation, six hearings in three different courts, including two trips to the Supreme Court, printing of several thousand pages of record testimony and briefs, taking voluminous depositions in different parts of the country involving great expense, during which the injured workman—in this instance rendered blind—was totally unable to support his wife and family, the wife being obliged to work at nights in downtown cafes, scrubbing floors after midnight, in order to provide scant food for herself and babies while the latter slept."

This verdict is of peculiar interest, according to the well-known Cincinnati law firm which prosecuted the case, because it is the first instance so far as they have been able to ascertain in which there has been a recovery from injuries resulting from the poisonous influence of wood alcohol.

But do not be misled by this rare case. And do not hastily conclude that the new state insurance law in Ohio has rendered justice in such cases more certain, for the contrary is true. A victim of industrial lead poisoning appealed to the state board under that law, and the attorney general, on October 26, 1912, ruled that disability due to lead poisoning was an occupational disease and "not an injury" under the act. Similar decisions have been made by the Washington State Insurance Department.

In fact, with the exception of occasional instances in two or three states, where claims have been paid by employers without protest, the victims of occupational diseases in America are still practically without relief.

[THE SOCIAL AIM IN GOVERNMENT]

SAMUEL McCUNE LINDSAY

PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL LEGISLATION, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

"This not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!"

—Thus spoke the President of the United States in his inaugural address. Legislation in nation and state, giving expression to the will of the people and often to their aspirations, is supposed, in theory at least, to emanate from the representatives of the people. In European governments there is usually a privileged initiative on the part of the executive branch of the government or the administrative officers who represent the electoral majority, that is, "the government of the day." Thus the government bills in the British Parliament are the only ones sure of full consideration. In American legislatures a somewhat similar role is played by the President and the governors of the states in their legislative programs as outlined in the messages they send in accordance with constitutional prerogative or command. As party leaders they voice the dominant wishes of the voters and interpret public opinion; as chief executives they exercise great power over the legislatures in compelling compliance with the people's mandates.

A comparison and study of the subject-matter of President Wilson's inaugural and the inaugurals or messages of thirty-five governors opening legislative sessions since January 1 of this year, shows the great influence of the progressive forces of the nation which were victorious in all parties and in all of the states at the polls in November. A more confident note, new in most cases, is struck in all these pronouncements. It is the social spirit and the social conscience in every community that seeks and demands a new adjustment of law and government to human needs, and for the people, a new freedom.

President Wilson voices this new feeling best.

"Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government may be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health of the nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well as their rights in the struggle for existence. This no sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of justice. There can be no equality of opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts. The first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary laws, pure food laws, and laws determining conditions of labor which individuals are powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very business of justice and legal efficiency.

"These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected, fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual right. This is the high enterprise of the new day; to lift everything that concerns our life as a nation to the light that shines from the hearth-fire of every man's conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should do this as partisans; it is inconceivable that we should do it in ignorance of the facts as they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither they cannot tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.

"And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God's own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics, but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action."

Governor Cox of Ohio, speaking for a state that had just made many fundamental changes in its organic law by adopting the recommendations, almost in their entirety, of a constitutional convention, says:

"Progressive government, so called, which means in its correct understanding, constructive work, along the lines pointed out by the lamps of experience and the higher moral vision of advanced civilization, is now on trial in our state. Every constitutional facility has been provided for an upward step and Ohio, because of the useful part it has played in the affairs of the country, is at this hour in the eye of the nation.

"The state has the resources, human and material, to make a thorough test of the principle of an enlarged social justice, through government, and the results of our labors will extend beyond state borders. A thorough appreciation, therefore, of the stupendous responsibility before you, and full recognition of the probable insidious resistance to be encountered, will add immeasurably to your equipment to meet the emergency. If I sense with any degree of accuracy the state of public mind, I am correct in the belief that a vast preponderance of the people of all classes have faith both in the wisdom and the certain results of a constructive progressive program of government. Let us in full understanding of the consequences of our acts maintain this measure of public confidence and encourage the faith of those who are honestly skeptical because of the apprehension generated in their minds by a third class, which may be unconsciously prompted by sordid impulses developed by unbroken preferences of government.

"No fair-minded person will dispute the logic nor question the equity of any plan which contemplates legislative action entirely within the limitations of suffrage endorsement. If the legislature, in the passage of a single law, runs counter to public desire or interest, the people through the referendum have the means to undo it. No greater safeguard can be devised by the genius of man, and to question either the moral or practical phase of this arrangement, is to admit unsoundness in the theory of a republic. In other days changes in government such as are made necessary everywhere by our industrial and social conditions, would have been wrought by riot and revolution. Now they are accomplished through peaceful evolution. He must be indeed a man of unfortunate temperamental qualities who does not find in this a circumstance that thrills every patriotic fiber in his being."

Governor Sulzer of New York, in similar vein, says, speaking of the proposed amendment to the constitution of the United States, providing for the popular election of senators:

"I favor this change in the federal constitution, as I shall every other change that will restore the government to the control of the people. I want the people, in fact as well as in theory, to rule this great republic and the government at all times to be responsive to their just demands."

Again, in speaking of the value of human life and its conservation, Governor Sulzer says:

"If Americans would excel other nations in commerce, in manufacture, in science, in intellectual growth, and in all other humane attainments, we must first possess a people physically and mentally sound. Any achievement that is purchased at the continued sacrifice of human life does not advance our material resources, but detracts from the wealth of the state. The leaders of our civilization now realize these fundamental truths, and the statesmen, the scientists, and the humanitarians are endeavoring more and more to protect human life and to secure to each individual not only the right to life, but the right to decent standards of living.

"We have had to change old customs and repeal antiquated laws. We must now convince employers that any industry that saps the vitality and destroys the initiative of the workers is detrimental to the interests of the state and menaces the general welfare of the government. We must try to work out practical legislation that will apply our social ideals and our views of industrial progress to secure for our men, women and children the greatest possible reserve of physical and mental force.

"I hold it to be self-evident that no industry has the right to sacrifice human life for its profit, but that just as each industry must reckon in its cost of production the material waste, so it should also count as a part of the cost of production the human waste which it employs.... No business has an inalienable right to child labor. No industry has a right to rob the state of that which constitutes its greatest wealth. No commerce that depends on child labor for its success has a right to exist. Let us do what we can to protect the children of the state and preserve their fundamental rights.... Human life is infinitely more valuable than the profit of material things. The state for its own preservation has the right to demand the use of safer and more hygienic methods, even if at greater cost of production to the employer. Occupational diseases should be studied, and the results of careful investigation embodied in laws to safeguard the health and lives of the workers."

Governor Craig of North Carolina, another Democrat, but from the more conservative southland, strikes the same note, when he says:

"We have not realized the moral benefits that should have resulted from modern progress. Avarice has been stimulated; hope and opportunity have been denied; antagonism and resentment have been generated. All classes have suffered. We realize the conditions; the injustice has been uncovered. It cannot stand in the clear, calm and resolute gaze of the American people. They are determined that our law shall be based upon a higher conception of social obligation and that our civilization shall mean a higher social life. They have put their hands to the plow and will not look back."

Let me quote from one more Democratic governor, this time a voice from the far West. Governor Hunt of Arizona says:

"Recent political events of national magnitude and world-wide importance clearly prove the people's awakening to their necessities, their duties and responsibilities. The overwhelming triumph of militant progressive democracy and the simultaneous springing into prominent existence of another great party founded upon and professing the championship of those cardinal principles of popular government which have long been synonymous with progressive democracy, discloses a miraculous growth of progressive conviction, a well-nigh unanimous determination on the part of the people to assume full control of the government which, while over them, is rightfully of and for them, marks a leading epoch in the history of the world's advancement."

The National Progressive Party could scarcely have hoped to accomplish more than to bring such sentiments and these high aims to the fore, in the officially announced purposes of their late antagonists who were the victors in the recent elections. When we remember, however, the initiative and responsibility in legislation which the chief executive in nation and state has come to have in our system, the fact that the above quoted passages are typical of all the governors' messages is doubly significant. It warrants us in believing that the hour has struck when the things for which the social workers of the country have striven will become vital in the organization of American society.

More detailed examination of the recommendations of the governors shows some interesting tendencies. If the advice of the governors is followed some system of workmen's compensation will supplement or supersede our antiquated and unsocial system of employers' liability. This is the subject upon which public opinion seems to have most definitely crystallized. No less than twenty-one governors make definite favorable recommendations, and in three cases (Arizona, California and Oregon) a state system of insurance is advocated. If all of these states were added to those that already have passed adequate compensation laws, the system of workmen's compensation would be extended practically over all of the industrial area of the United States. This result seems inevitable, although the work may not be completed in this legislative year.

Next to workmen's compensation in point of popularity seems to be the necessity for a public utilities law, or a public service commission, or the extension of the powers of state supervisory authorities over public service corporations. This is a subject of positive recommendation on the part of fourteen governors. In an equal number of states the pending amendment to the United States constitution providing for the popular or direct election of Senators receives a favorable recommendation, while in the other states the governors transmit the amendment without comment for appropriate action by the legislature. The Kentucky Blue Sky Law, or some similar provision for state supervision of investment proposals and securities offered for public subscription, is the subject of comment and positive recommendation in eleven states.

In an equal number of commonwealths important recommendations are made with respect to increasing the powers of their labor departments, including factory inspection and other provisions for the enforcement of the labor laws. Several governors express a desire for a much more serious recognition of the state's duties in its relations to labor, especially that of women and children. In some instances—notably Ohio, where an industrial commission is proposed, Wisconsin, whose industrial commission, already the model for several other states, is to have increased powers, and New York, for which an industrial commission is also proposed—such recommendations are far-reaching and would mean a practical reorganization of this department of state activity. The governor of Rhode Island recommends the adoption of a fifty-four hour law to harmonize with recent legislation in New York and Massachusetts. In North Carolina a stronger child labor law is urged, and in Wyoming the prohibition of the employment of boys under sixteen in mines. This would bring Wyoming up to the standard already adopted in the leading mining states.

Popular government still has need of better agencies for expression, and numerous reforms in the organization of state governments are proposed. Restlessness under antiquated constitutional limitations is manifest everywhere. President Wilson in his last message as governor of New Jersey, voiced this feeling in strong language. He said:

"I urge upon you very earnestly indeed the need and demand for a Constitutional Convention. The powers of corrupt control have a numerous and abiding advantage under our constitutional arrangements as they stand. We shall not be free from them until we get a different system of representation and a different system of official responsibility. I hope that this question will be taken up by the legislature at once and a constitutional convention arranged for without delay, in which the new forces of our day may speak and may have a chance to establish their ascendancy over the rule of machines and bosses."

Similarly a constitutional convention is urged or numerous constitutional amendments are proposed in six other states. The short ballot is advocated in six; the initiative, referendum and recall as a means of extending the control of the people over their legislation is recommended in nine states, in most of which a constitutional amendment would be necessary; and the adoption of rules to carry out a constitutional amendment already passed is recommended in Idaho. A larger measure of home rule for cities is urged by the governors of six states (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Missouri). The United States constitutional amendment providing for the income tax is urged for favorable adoption in three states. An amendment to the state constitution providing for woman suffrage is favorably recommended in five states (New York, Pennsylvania, Montana, Nevada and Iowa), and the immediate extension of suffrage to women in municipal affairs by the governor of Connecticut. Direct Primaries are still an issue in two states (New York and Tennessee). The need for stronger corrupt practices acts is presented in three states. Three governors also declare for a direct presidential preference primary (Iowa, Minnesota and Wyoming), while ballot reform is advocated in three states (Maine, Michigan and Wyoming).

Better legislative methods and the establishment of a legislative reference, research and drafting bureau are proposed in four states (Arizona, Minnesota, Ohio and Oklahoma). The governor of Arizona asks for an anti-lobbying statute. The fiscal policy of the state is a matter of some comment in practically every message, and in five states measures for taxation reform are proposed. In five states, including one of the previous group, the governors recommend an increase of inheritance taxes or the establishment of an inheritance tax where it does not already exist.

Constructive and far-reaching measures are suggested pertaining to public health. A decided awakening is noticeable in this field. Eight governors recommend more or less definite reorganization of the public health service and an extension of the powers of the public health authorities, state and local. In one additional state (New York) the governor has appointed an important commission. The results of its labors will probably be enacted into law at this session of the legislature. Pure food legislation and better protection of weights and measures receive attention in two states each, as does the greater restriction of the liquor traffic in two states. Special provision for the care of tuberculous persons is mentioned in five states.

Another important and popular subject of recommendation, in which the results of the last annual conference of governors are noticeable, concerns the better care of prisoners—their employment in outdoor work and opportunities for earning wages, part of which shall go to reimburse the state for the cost of their maintenance and part to the support of their dependent families. These matters are subjects of favorable recommendation in nine states. The general reform of the criminal law, especially the shortening of legal processes and the restriction of the right to appeal, is urged in four states, including Iowa, in which the governor recommends the abolition of grand juries.

A direct tax in support of higher education is urged in three states, and provision for the wider use of school buildings as social centers in the same number. Even more significant, the governors of two states (North Carolina and Tennessee) urge state-wide compulsory education. In four commonwealths co-operation with other states is proposed in accordance with the recent recommendation of President Taft addressed to the governors of several states. This urged an extension of rural credits and the provision of some plan similar to the land banks in foreign countries, to help the farmer get the necessary capital for a better system of agriculture. Minimum wage laws are proposed in five states. In two of these and one additional state public aid to dependent widows and mothers with children is recommended.

Curiously enough, the reform of marriage laws and of those providing a remedy for desertion and non-support, a subject reported upon by the Uniform Law Commissioners, does not figure so largely in the governors' recommendations as would be supposed. The uniform law commissioners have proposed an excellent and very carefully worked out statute for uniform marriage and marriage license laws. This receives only partial endorsement at the hands of three governors, while stricter desertion and non-support laws also have the endorsement of three governors.

Guarantee of bank deposits is proposed in three states and three of the western states (Arizona, Missouri and Tennessee) have recommendations for an extension of state authority, or the establishment of a state department, to induce immigrants to settle within their borders. A better regulation of prize-fighting is being agitated in Nevada. Its prohibition, along with that of gambling, is strongly urged by the governors of New Mexico and Oklahoma. The governor of Arizona asks for a statute prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons, while the governor of South Carolina asks the legislature to repeal the present statute on this subject in that state.

Non-partisan election of judges is recommended in Idaho and Pennsylvania, and the Kansas legislature is asked to petition for an amendment to the constitution of the United States to provide for the election of federal judges.

Better care of juvenile delinquents, state-wide supervision of moving picture shows, stricter regulation of loan sharks, better inspection of mines, and compulsory arbitration of labor disputes are each recommended in at least one state.

Thirty-nine legislatures have already met this year, and some of them have completed their legislative sessions. Two more will convene within the next three months, making forty-one in all which will play a part this year in the formulation of the statute law of the country. Our statute law is already increasing in volume at a rate that has caused some alarm. It is sorely in need of revision in many important particulars. Statesmen and reformers alike desire earnestly that it be undertaken with greater care and more painstaking labor in order that our state laws may give better expression to the present standards of conduct and to the needs of our own times.

[THE SAND BED]