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The Survey
Volume XXX
No. 5

THE COMMON WELFARE

SPREAD OF THE SURVEY IDEA

A hundred and more cities in thirty-four states have asked for surveys or advice in starting local survey movements. This nation-wide service sought from the Department of Surveys and Exhibits of the Russell Sage Foundation, since its organization last October[^[1]], shows how thoroughly the idea has gripped the leaders of social and civic effort throughout the country. Furthermore, leading citizens and organizations, who once looked askance at “exposures” and “muck raking,” have come to understand the constructive value of a survey and now take active part in local efforts in this direction.

In many cases requests are backed by local commercial organizations, chambers of commerce and boards of trade. Business men are recognizing the commercial value of making cities healthier, better and more comfortable to live in. Cities in Canada and several other foreign countries, notably India, have also sought information and advice from the department.

Response to these requests has been determined by several factors—chiefly the timeliness of the proposed survey and its probable influence on other cities. As to timeliness consideration is made of the probability of the project being adequately financed and of its receiving representative local backing. If a city cannot see sufficient value in a survey to be willing to pay for it (especially when all overhead charges are borne by an outside organization) it is considered not ready for a survey. Moreover, the undertaking should be a community enterprise, aimed to advance the well being not of any particular interest or set of interests, but of the community as generally as possible. The survey is an effort toward a democratic solution of local problems, and therefore must be shouldered by representatives of all interests and groups in the population—in other words, by the community through its representatives. Emphasis has been laid upon the importance of the work being done by persons with adequate training and experience. Emphasis has also been placed upon the importance of co-operation with national organizations so that the local program following the survey, whether it involves housing, organized charity, prison reform, or other special effort, will be in harmony with the standards set up by the national organizations in the various fields.

This method of procedure has tended in some instances to hold back surveys rather than to encourage them, and this the department regards as preferable to undertaking surveys where conditions are not favorable.

PATH-FINDER SURVEYING

Two kinds of field work in surveys have been undertaken—“pathfinder’s surveys” and preliminary surveys. The former are quick diagnoses of local conditions pointing to the need of the longer and more intensive survey. They gather enough local facts to indicate the main lines of investigation which should be taken up later, the probable length of time necessary for the survey, and the probable cost.

THE SOCIAL SURVEYOR
Courtesy of the Scranton Tribune-Republican.

At the invitation of the Topeka (Kans.) Federation of Churches given through its president, Rev. Roy B. Guild, such a pathfinder’s survey of Topeka was made in December. As a result, a local survey committee composed of representative citizens was formed, and a campaign started to raise the funds estimated as necessary. Twelve hundred dollars in cash was contributed within a few weeks after the campaign was started. The Chairman, Judge T. F. Garver and Secretary, H. T. Chase have been supported by a strong favorable public opinion among leading citizens.

Similarly, as a result of the sanitary survey of Springfield, Ill., made by Dr. George T. Palmer, local citizens wished such other investigations made as would in the end mean a general survey of the city. At their invitation a “pathfinder’s” survey of Springfield was made by the department, and a local survey committee headed by Senator Logan Hay and with A. L. Bowen, secretary of the State Board of Charities, as secretary, was organized. The appointment of a finance committee has been authorized, and work toward raising the necessary funds is soon to begin.

Another quick diagnosis of city conditions was made by the department recently for Scranton, Pa. The project was urged by the Civic Improvement Committee of the Scranton Century Club, of which Gertrude Lovell is chairman. The Century Club became interested and through its president, Mrs. Ronald P. Gleason, the Department of Surveys and Exhibits was invited to make the preliminary examination. The report presented to an open meeting of the club covered public health and sanitation, taxation and public finance, community assets, civic improvement, education, charity and other betterment agencies, recreation, delinquency, work conditions and relations. The findings and recommendations of this quick diagnosis were given wide circulation in the city by the newspapers.

Among the larger efforts of the department is a preliminary survey of Newburgh. N. Y., which was started March 15. The department’s field director, Zenas L. Potter, is being assisted by Franz Schneider, Jr., also of the department’s staff, in the investigation of public health; Margaret F. Byington of the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation has investigated public and private charity work; D. O. Decker is covering public finance and municipal efficiency; E. F. Brown of the National Child Labor Committee is assisting in the studies of labor conditions; and Franklin Zeiger is studying housing. The New York Consumers League expects also to send a field worker to co-operate for a fortnight. Amy Woods, secretary of the Newburgh Associated Charities, started the movement toward the Newburgh survey. The project has had the support of citizens representing the business-men’s associations, labor unions, churches, charity and other social organizations, city administration and women’s organizations. The findings of this survey are soon to be ready for publication.

The preliminary surveys are designed to attain three kinds of results. First, they aim to reveal sufficient local facts to permit the planning of an intelligent program for community advance, say for a period of five years. Not only liabilities but community assets—the forces to build on and to build with—as well as what to build will be.

Second, the preliminary survey aims to be the means of enlisting public support for measures which champion human welfare. The public official with a vision of what he might accomplish toward social well being needs the support of public opinion. His and other work for city progress are as often hampered by public indifference as by the selfish interests of an active few. Public indifference in matters of its own vital concern disappears quickly when the public is intelligently informed. City self-knowledge is a chief effort of the survey.

Third, the preliminary survey is to collect sufficient data to point out the problems which need more thorough or continuous investigation.

PROSTITUTION BANISHED IN ONE NEW YORK TOWN

It is an innovation for the physicians of any community to protest in a body against prostitution solely on the ground that it is a menace to public health. Yet this has happened in Norwich, a village of 8,000 people in Chenango County, New York.

Newburgh, N. Y., Journal
“I SEE BY THE PAPERS—”

Several months ago, Dr. Paul B. Brooks of Norwich, at a meeting of a district branch of The New York State Medical Society presented a paper on the Relation of the General Practitioner to the Prevalence of Veneral Diseases. In it he declared that the medical profession possessed information which, if frankly revealed, would bring about widespread reforms. Through their inactivity, he said, doctors are more responsible than any other class of citizens for the prevalence of veneral diseases. He asserted that a large percentage of infections of this class could be traced, directly or indirectly, to the public prostitute; that prostitution is, in no sense, a “necessary evil,” and that if “the people demand it,” then the moral sense of “the people” is open to criticism. He believed that the police of any community, large or small, if given power to drive out prostitutes, would be able to protect virtuous women.

Shortly after this some eight or ten physicians, assembled for a meeting of the Physician’s Club of Norwich, fell to comparing notes on the prevalence of veneral diseases in the community. The result was startling. Six or seven houses of prostitution, running openly and apparently without restriction, were turning out dozens of men, and even boys of school age, prepared to spread the scourge among innocent women, and through them, to generations unborn. A large number of the inmates of establishments were known to be actually infected.

The situation impressed these physicians as being so serious that they determined to call a special meeting of the club and to invite the town and village authorities to confer with them. In the meantime they considered the various possibilities, including intervention by the Board of Health, medical inspection, etc. In the end they decided that there was but one feasible plan—to attempt the elimination of public prostitution or at least all but such as was clandestinely practised.

They regarded it as their duty to advise, and demand, if necessary, the removal of the obvious breeding grounds for disease.

When the local authorities met these physicians, some were skeptical as to the results which would follow from such an attempt, though nearly all agreed that the situation was serious enough to demand vigorous action. The village attorney, who had openly opposed public prostitution for many years, after hearing the evidence, declared: “If the fathers of this town were to hear the evidence put before us by these physicians they would mob these place, and discredit every one of us!” Some of the establishments had been in operation for twenty years, and were regarded as fixtures. It was said that they “made business”—certain it was that many physicians had found the inmates regular and remunerative clients, and that all had shared in the income from treatment of the diseases which they bred. Some officials feared that public sentiment would not support radical action and that the morals of innocent boys and girls would be injured by having their attention called to conditions which perhaps had escaped their notice. On the other hand they found themselves in an unusual position—they were confronted by practically all the local physicians, standing shoulder to shoulder in a demand for drastic action.

Finally, these physicians brought the officials to their way of thinking. They voted unanimously to clean out the “red light” district, and proceeded at once and vigorously. In a month they had closed up every known establishment, and had rid the town of a number of street walkers. Greatly to their surprise, they found that public sentiment strongly approved of their action. Since then there has been a reduction of at least 75 per cent in number of the new cases of venereal infection.

After the establishments within the corporation limits had been closed, there was one house without the village jurisdiction, which remained in operation for a short time. During that period, every new case, so far as is known that came to a local physician, could be traced to that establishment. The district attorney collected evidence, including the testimony of a young man who had been infected, presented it to the Grand Jury, and an indictment followed. A few weeks later, the proprietor committed suicide. There has been scarcely a new case since.

“This town of ours,” says a local physician “is just an average town, no better and no worse than other towns similar in size and environment. The physicians, likewise, are average physicians. What we have accomplished can be accomplished elsewhere, assuming that our results are worth while.”

THE DEAD MAN AT MAMARONECK

It took the killing of one man in the prime of life, a strike sympathizer—a small merchant and property holder, he was, of Mamaroneck—and the wounding of half a dozen strikers by local police and New York detective-agency men, to bring to public notice in New York not only the low pay of the Italian “pick and shovel men” employed in the suburban towns along the sound, but also the general violation of New York state laws on jobs done under contract for the state and various municipalities.

By a coincidence, one of the strikers who left the town hall of Mamaroneck on April 16, after the Arbitration Bureau of the New York State Labor Department had brought about a settlement, made much the same comment as was made by the labor representatives before the Massachusetts Board of Arbitration when the Lawrence strike was on.

“Why didn’t they investigate before we had to strike?” he asked. “Why did we have to lose our brother to get what we have a right to anyway?”

The grievances which had led, two days before this settlement, to a fight on a country road leading front Harrison to Mamaroneck were not new.

Three months ago, wage and other demands were presented by the day laborers on road and street work in this section of the state, who had organized a year ago in the General Laborers’ International Union of America. No response was made by the contractors. Thereupon several thousand men throughout the region—which is the community zone of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railway, struck to enforce these demands. On April 14 a couple of hundred strikers marched south from Harrison, doubling their numbers as they went by calling out, some say by force, the laborers on the estates they passed.

At the outskirts of Mamaroneck they were stopped by a score of town officials on the ground that they had no permit to parade. In the fight that followed, it was rock and fist—with a final appeal to knives—against club and gun. One detective had a leg broken and was otherwise seriously injured. The injuries of the strikers were bullet wounds. One was killed. Following the conflict, the sheriff was appealed to to swear in the detectives as his deputies, as vengeance for the killing was feared; but he refused on the ground that that type of men had proved, here and elsewhere, altogether too handy with the gun. They had been brought out from a New York detective office by the mayor and police of Mamaroneck, when the rumors of labor trouble in the contract work grew thick. It apparently had not occurred to the town officials to spend an equal amount of energy in finding out what the trouble was about.

Road fights are not frequent occurrences in this region of gardens and express trains and the alarm spread panic. Isolated households imagined most anything at the hands of the “dagoes” who “must be kept down.” There was a call for volunteer deputies, and citizens responded eagerly with their hunting arms.

The strikers crowded in hundreds to the house of their dead comrade, but after their first outbreak they were found to be so peaceably inclined that all deputies, except the police department’s aides from New York, were withdrawn, and the strikers were even given permission to follow the hearse to the cemetery, the day after the strike settlement. This cortege passed through many of the strike centers at Mamaroneck, Larchmont, New Rochelle, Mt. Vernon, and other towns in which the laborers’ union claims a membership of 10,000. It was the occasion for no disorderly effort at vengeance.

The laborers’ demands of three months ago covered recognition of the union, wage payments by the week, an eight-hour day, a wage minimum for pick and shovel men of $2 a day with revised hour rates for others of the lower grades of work. The eight-hour demand is essentially a demand for compliance with the state law which all the contractors on these public jobs have been breaking by working a nine hour day. The inquiry brought out the fact that the superintendent of the biggest job of all, the state road, was a brother of an official of the State Engineers’ Department, which is charged with the supervision of such work.

WHAT THE ARBITRATION BOARD HEARING REVEALED

By the agreement reached by strikers and contractors at the hearing before the Bureau of Arbitration, the men waived the point of union recognition. Since present estimates on the contractor’s work were made before union demands were presented, the rate of pay for an eight hour day is to be based on $2 for a nine hour day until present contracts expire, all new contracts to be based on $2 for eight hours. Other terms of the agreement call for the abolition of the padrone system; the preferential employment of laborers living in the neighborhood of any piece of work—in itself a blow at the padrone system, with its big employment fees and rake-off from feeding and transporting the labor gangs;—the abolition of the shack lodging house and its keeper and the enforcement of weekly wage payments. The last two are merely corrections of illegal conditions. This agreement was unsigned. It is perhaps given some security by being filed with the bureau, but there was no one designated to follow up and enforce any point except those correcting illegal conditions.

However much the unearthing of these illegal conditions may reflect on the state labor authorities as a whole, they are not the fault of the bureau of arbitration, whose representatives settled the strike largely on terms which call for a living up to the law in the future.

The mediators laid themselves open to criticism, however, in yielding their places as impartial questioners of both parties to the controversy, to a local official who showed open prejudice for the contractors and a tendency to browbeat the strikers throughout the hearing. This official made the original and astonishing statement that the strikers’ demand for recognition was illegal as it constituted a conspiracy in restraint of trade, and that it would therefore render the paper on which their demands were written worthless before the law.

One of his taunting questions was: “How can you demand $2 a day for a man who isn’t worth seventy-five cents?” The president of the union made reply. He was an Italian and he spoke with some heat; perhaps he did not know he was setting off a human estimate against what an economist would call the commodity theory of labor?

“Man wort’ seventy-five cent a day?” he asked. “No man wort’ seventy-five cent, no man wort’ less than two dolla day. Man got a wife, man got a child. Everybody wort’ two dolla day. That the least price will take.

“I like the men live more nice. You no like to live ten in a room. You no like take your children out of the school to work. You no like to be out of work five mont’ in the year. Me figure this pay on basis twelve mont’ to live on seven mont’ pay. That’s dolla day. Can you support five, six child on that?

“Contractor can pay. On some men he make four dolla profit; big profit on all de men. The men they want this two dolla. They no take less.”

Small as this strike was, in several respects it was remarkable. It is an instance of the crystalization of unskilled labor into unions and its spontaneous outbreak—in this instance without any revolutionary I. W. W. leadership. The strike was not in an industrial center, but in a community of homes, and there were people who looked out of their windows and saw how the type of hired detective, who usually operates in out of the way strike regions, shot into a crowd of strikers without guns, who were in more senses than one, to be sure, taking the law into their own hands, but doing so only long after the authority which the men with the guns represented had failed to enforce it.

But beyond all that, the strike revealed the dread, the utter misunderstanding, the gap between the people who live by the sides of the roads and the men who build them. They did not know it was a desire for settled employment, for homes instead of padrone’s barracks that was arousing these workers.

SOME NEW STATE LAWS AFFECTING WOMEN’S WORK

Rhode Island was the first state to legislate in 1913 regarding women’s hours of work. The law had previously failed to provide any protection for women employed in stores. It had prohibited more than fifty-six hours’ work in one week in manufacturing and mechanical establishments, but it allowed more than ten hours’ work in one day for various causes. The new law fixes a flat ten-hour day and fifty-four-hour week for all women employed in any “factory, manufacturing, mechanical, business or mercantile establishment.”

Several measures were presented to the Legislature dealing with this subject. The bill as passed was introduced as a substitute, at the request of Chief Factory Inspector J. Ellery Hudson. It was strongly supported at the hearings before the Legislature by the Consumers’ League of Rhode Island, by the representatives of the labor unions, women’s clubs, and the Rhode Island Medical Society. The removal of the former exceptions in the law is as great a gain as the reduction of hours and the inclusion of mercantile houses. The bill marks a notable advance in Rhode Island.

Another important bill recently passed through effective concerted action was in Delaware, where no law was ever before enacted to limit women’s hours of labor. Two years ago the Consumers’ League of Delaware carried on a campaign for a ten-hour bill. This measure passed the Legislature, but was amended almost beyond recognition in the process, and in the end it was not signed by the governor. This year a ten-hour law committee of the Consumers’ League was formed of which Margaret H. Shearman has been chairman. In spite of bitter opposition, a bill was carried through, providing for a ten-hour day and a fifty-five-hour week. Success followed a campaign of unusual vigor, conducted for months throughout the state. The new law includes women employed in many occupations—“in any mercantile, mechanical or manufacturing establishment; laundry, baking or printing establishment; telephone and telegraph office or exchange.” Women employed in canning establishments are exempted. Many other exceptions and amendments were pressed, but only one concession was made to secure the passage of the bill. This allows one working day of twelve hours each week.

In Texas the Legislature proved more compliant to the powerful lobby which opposed the passage of the first woman’s labor law in that state. Cotton-mill owners, raising the familiar cry that their industry would be ruined, succeeded in having themselves wholly excluded from the new act. They may therefore continue to employ their women workers as long as they choose, while the only manufacturers prohibited from employing women more than ten hours in one day and fifty-four hours in one week are those engaged in the garment trades!

According to the census of 1910 about 4,000 women are employed in the factories in Texas. Textiles are not separately listed, but it is fair to surmise that a small minority of the 4,000 women are garment workers covered by the new law, and that the great majority are employed in the cotton mills, without any legal limitation of hours.

Besides garment workers, the new law includes women employed in any “printing office, dressmaking or millinery establishment, hotel, restaurant or theater, telegraph or telephone office.” Laundry owners are allowed to employ women eleven hours in twenty-four, provided that “time and a half” is paid for work done in excess of ten hours. A comment by the Texas commissioner of labor on the new law is worth quoting: “Will not attempt to apologize for the same,” he writes, “but will admit it is not much.”

In New York a new law has been enacted which is of national as well as state importance. This measure was unanimously recommended by the New York State Factory Investigating Commission after careful investigation. It prohibits the employment of women at night in manufacture, between 10 P. M. and 6 A. M. It brings the Empire State with its 300,000 women employed in manufacture up to the level of the fourteen civilized nations of Europe which have by international treaty abolished the night work of women in factories.

Hitherto only three states, Massachusetts, Indiana and Nebraska, have enacted in their statutes the principle of assuring to working women a fixed period of rest at night—a principle adopted by England as long ago as 1847 in the first factory legislation.

In this country, usage has so blunted our perception of the effects of work carried on to midnight or all night, that the establishment of a legal closing hour is one of the last steps taken even by progressive states. Yet in Massachusetts 10 P. M. has been the legal closing hour in factories for almost twenty-five years, and the great textile trade has flourished with an even earlier closing hour for women, set by law at 6 P. M. since 1907.

In recommending the enactment of the nightwork bill, the Factory Investigating Commission carefully considered the adverse opinion of the New York Court of Appeals, which five years ago, in the Williams case, declared unconstitutional a similar law prohibiting the night work of women. The commission concluded that two new circumstances justified the enactment of a new law and the reargument of the principle at stake before the highest court of New York—the only court of last resort which has rendered a decision on this subject.

These two circumstances are, first, the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the Oregon ten-hour law for women, handed down since the decision in the Williams case was rendered; and second, the existence of many “facts of common knowledge” regarding the physical, moral and economic effects of night work, facts which were not brought to the attention of the New York Court of Appeals when it decided that Katie Mead was not likely to be injured by working at 10.20 P. M. in a given occupation.

When the new case comes up for argument it is reasonable to hope that the New York court will follow the lead of the Supreme Court of the United States in taking “judicial cognizance” of those ascertained facts which go far beyond the single case at bar, and present to the court the world’s experience as to legislation of this character.

CALIFORNIA WOMEN AND THE VICE SITUATION

A red light injunction and abatement bill, not essentially different from the law now in effect in Iowa and Nebraska, passed both houses of the California Legislature with good majorities and was signed by Governor Hiram W. Johnson on April 7. The law declares houses of prostitution and assignation to be nuisances and holds responsible both the proprietor of the house and the owner of the building. It enables any citizen, whether personally damaged or not, to bring action; and it levies a fine against the property itself and forbids its use at any future time for such purpose.[^[2]]

The bill has had a somewhat dramatic history. In 1911 it was introduced at the request of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union by Assemblyman Wyllie, but though favorably reported from the Public Morals Committee it was killed by re-reference to the Judiciary Committee too late to be returned to the floor.

The tremendous general awakening since then on the subject of the social evil and the exposure in San Francisco of the enormous sums reaped by organized vice under the Schmitz-Ruef regime, led to the formation of a society of social hygiene. The efforts of the United States Department of Justice to suppress the traffic in girls led to the establishment of an anti-slavery society; and the State Board of Health, under the leadership of Dr. William F. Snow, made venereal, like other contagious diseases, reportable, though only by case numbers.

Attention has been gradually focussed upon the question of the desirability of segregation of vice or “red light” districts which exist in nearly all the cities of California except Los Angeles, and in most of the larger towns. San Francisco is the only city to make an attempt at systematic regulation and medical examination and this city has been the object of repeated criticism on the part of those who do not believe in the European system of regimentation. It has also done its part in preparing the public mind for a more intelligent discussion of such measures as the injunction and abatement bill, the requirement of a health certificate for marriage, and the several bills limiting the liquor traffic which were offered in the present Legislature.

The bill as passed was sponsored by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and endorsed by the State Federation of Women’s Clubs and the California Civic League, thus rallying to its support the many thousands of women who were given the vote by last year’s suffrage amendment. It is a significant fact that the measure, though approved by many men, was formally endorsed only by ministerial bodies. The large property interests involved and the subterranean coercion of liquor and certain real estate interests, made it impossible to obtain the formal support of commercial organizations.

The campaign on behalf of the measure was, therefore, necessarily a woman’s movement. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union which, as Franklin Hichborn has pointed out, has “the largest single block of votes in the state,” educated their own membership and their men folk. The California Civic League—chiefly composed of those who had been active in the suffrage campaign and whose motto is “study and service”—undertook the systematic work of educating the public on the general subject of the social evil. For four successive months it published syllabi to be studied by its three thousand members in thirty centers. Beginning in January, the union carried on a publicity campaign in the newspapers and during the last two months kept several women speakers in the field talking on the “red light” bill before church congregations, mass meetings, conferences and clubs.

The California Legislature met for the first time under the new law of a divided session, bills being received in January, a recess taken in February, and measures then being discussed and voted upon. During the recess most of the legislators were invited to speak at mass meetings in their own district and to put themselves on record on this particular bill. It soon became known that the delegations from San Francisco and from Alameda County were, with the exception of a very few men, against the bill, while the members of the delegation from southern California were almost unanimously for it.

A picturesque episode of the campaign lay in the selection of Edwin D. Grant of San Francisco to introduce the bill in the senate, for Senator Grant is the successor of a well-known politician, Eddie Wolf, who had misrepresented San Francisco for sixteen years in the Legislature. The replacing of Wolf by Grant was one of the first political results of woman suffrage in the city. Although young and relatively inexperienced, Mr. Grant stood the ridicule of the reactionary press that constantly heckled him as “the boy reformer” and, with the support of older men on the floor, got his bill through without any weakening amendments.

DEBATE BEFORE THE LEGISLATURE

The debates in both houses over this bill brought clearly into view the high political and social ideals of the younger and more recently elected members of the Legislature; and it proved that the women of California, though wholly inexperienced in politics, knew what they wanted and would stand solidly for it. They won, not by lobbying, but by systematic education of the constituencies of the legislators. It is reported that one legislator asked a doubtful colleague if he intended to vote for the bill and the other replied: “Don’t I have to go home?” The floor leader of the senate complained publicly of the “threats” of his constituents who had urged him to vote for the bill and said that they would remember their enemies as well as their friends. Assemblyman Nelson, chairman of the Assembly Public Morals Committee, said that he received 1,800 letters on this subject during the recess.

Although the debate in the assembly was sickening at times, in its revelation of the attitude of certain men toward the whole matter of vice, the measure passed by a vote of 62 to 17. In the senate a strong effort was made by Senator Beban of San Francisco to sidetrack it by substituting an investigation into the relation of women’s wages and vice. But the senate refused to postpone the injunction bill until this special committee should report, and in spite of a five-hour debate, chiefly carried on by those who were trying to explain plausibly why they were going to vote against it, the measure passed by a vote of 29 to 11. Thus, out of a legislature of 120 members, only 28 voted against the bill and of these a majority were from San Francisco and from Alameda County.

After the bill had passed, a final dramatic touch was given by the demand of certain so-called “real estate” interests in San Francisco for a hearing before the governor. The governor announced a public hearing to which came about forty persons, both men and women, representing all the more important protective, civic and moral associations of northern California. The opponents, who perhaps had hoped to get a private hearing, did not appear; whereupon the governor signed the bill.

Meanwhile, even before the bill was signed, money had been raised and tentative plans made for taking care of the women and girls who should be thrown out of the segregated districts. These plans are now being extended to cover the whole state. It is expected that the companion measure, a state training home for girls which carries an appropriation of $200,000, will also pass and this will ultimately provide for minors and those who go through the probation courts. As fast as the injunction measure is enforced the women’s organizations intend to offer a home, medical attendance and employment, if possible, to all refugees who will accept them.

CALIFORNIA WOMEN RECALL A JUDGE

The first recall of a judge under California’s new law took place on April 22 and was accomplished by the women voters of San Francisco. When a police magistrate, C. L. Weller, reduced the bail set by another police judge in the case of a prisoner accused of attacking a young girl, and the prisoner at once fled when released on bail, the women of the city secured 10,000 names to petition for recall. In the recall election Judge Weller was opposed by Wiley F. Crist, who is said to be an enthusiastic young lawyer of strong reform tendencies. Mr. Crist won by a margin of only a few hundred votes in a total of 61,000.

ORGANIZING TO FIGHT CANCER

For some time medical associations have put on record their conviction of the need of systematic work for the prevention of cancer, by the appointment, at congresses and conventions, of committees charged to work upon this subject. These many local efforts came to a head on April 22, when at a meeting in New York under the chairmanship of Dr. Clement Cleveland, the first steps were taken toward the formation of National Anti-Cancer Association.

The need and practicability of work for cancer prevention was pointed out by Dr. LeRoy Broun, chairman of a committee of the American Gynecological Society. Dr. Broun also gave practical suggestions for work among work women, who are the most frequent victims of cancer.

The work of the new association will be along the lines followed by the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, whose methods were described at this meeting by its secretary, Livingston Farrand. This will include magazine articles—the Delineator has indeed already gone into this field—leaflets, instruction by nurses, and lectures before womens clubs and other associations.

A committee of organization, consisting of Leroy Broun, James Speyer, V. Everit Macy, George C. Clark and Frederick L. Hoffman was appointed to report to the Congress of Physicians to be held at Washington next month.

FINGER PRINTS

PROBLEMS[^[3]]

HELEN R. GUTMANN

A method of teaching arithmetic was in vogue some years ago by which the answer to each problem was printed in the back of the book. Sometimes a problem was stated wrongly or the answer given was incorrect. Of course, that complicated matters. I believe they teach arithmetic differently now.

Mildred worked unceasingly at her problem. She worked at it quite cheerfully as she set out briskly in the morning for her two mile walk from her home to the shop where she was employed as a cash girl. She worked at it wearily as she crept home on tired swollen feet, when every automobile as it whizzed past her seemed to scream “cash!” with its shrill siren.

The problem dealt with figures so small it would seem a child in the third grade could solve it. Mildred knew it to be so difficult that no professor of mathematics could have brought her nearer the answer.

This was the problem, though Mildred did not state it in quite the same way. Let x equal $3.50, her earnings. From x, plus the very small and uncertain earnings of her mother, take food for five plus rent and leave enough for a neat black dress. She had multiplied the earnings by many weeks but she had to multiply the food and rent by an equal number and the answer never came right.

Sometimes, just to keep up her spirits, she would pretend she had solved it—then what a pleasant array of problems presented themselves! The black dress meant a clerk’s position and added salary. With that as a beginning one might figure up to a buyer’s position. Somewhere between lay the possibilities of some problems like this:

Let x equal Mildred’s salary: x minus rent, minus food, minus clothes equals y, which is enough left over to permit the tired mother to hire a woman for the washing.

One must be half starved and insufficiently clad to realize the magnitude of that problem, rightly solved. The storms of early spring in New York solve many problems by eliminating the mathematician. In Mildred’s case they only postponed the solving.

Shoes have no hopes nor dreams, nor even problems, to keep them from wearing out in miles of daily walking over cobblestones, and miles of walking back and forth in the store. Mildred’s shoes developed gaps and fissures, and were useless to keep out the wet. Rent was due. There was no money to be spared even for carfare. So huge a sum as new shoes meant was impossible.

Mildred developed pneumonia.

There are people in every city who put aside their own problems to help solve those of others. To one in Mildred’s straits these became, no longer dreaded agents of charity, to be avoided, but friends. It was due to one of these friends that Mildred recovered. But with convalescence returned her problem, its weary repetition standing between her and health.

It was then the kindly agent went to her former employer. His sympathy was sincere. There were tears in his eyes when the story was finished.

“That must never happen again,” he declared. “Tell her to come to me if she is ever in trouble again. She shall have shoes, or whatever she needs for comfort.”

Charity, however, was not what Mildred required, but adequate pay for service. That could not be granted. It would establish that terrifying thing, a precedent!

Elsewhere the agent met with better success, Mildred has employment again and better pay: And with x as a known and more satisfactory basis, she forms her problems now.

But her old arithmetic remains the lesson book of how many other girls?

EDITORIAL GRIST

HOLDING FAST TO THE TWELVE-HOUR DAY

JOHN A. FITCH

The United States Steel Corporation, in the annual meeting of its stockholders, held in Hoboken, N. J., April 21, took a step which may tend to cause a reaction among that part of the public which had come to believe, on account of the frequent pronouncements by the corporation of its kindly intent toward its employes, that it would take any reasonable and logical step that it might to improve labor conditions.

To make this clear it is not necessary to go back to the addresses in this vein that have been delivered from time to time by executive officers of the corporation before the American Iron and Steel Institute and elsewhere. It is sufficient to refer to the committee of stockholders, appointed by Judge Gary in the fall of 1911, who made a report on labor conditions to the stockholders meeting of 1912. Their report declared that 25¾ per cent of the employes of the corporation were working twelve hours a day. This figure included all employes in mines and quarries, as well as in mills and furnaces. The committee made it clear that “this schedule of work was found in the largest proportion in its departments which are more or less continuous, such as rolling mills, open hearths, and blast furnaces, where the percentage of work for the twelve hours varies from 50 to 60.”

Speaking of the effects of the twelve-hour day, the committee said:

“We are of the opinion that a twelve-hour day of labor, followed continuously by any group of men for any considerable number of years means a decreasing of the efficiency and lessening of the vigor and virility of such men.

“The question should be considered from a social as well as a physical point of view. When it is remembered that the twelve hours a day to the man in the mills means approximately thirteen hours away from his home and family—not for one day, but for all working days—it leaves but scant time for self improvement, for companionship with his family, for recreation and leisure. It is important that any industry be considered in its relation to the home life of those engaged in it, as to whether it tends to weaken or strengthen the normalness and stability of family life. By a reasonable conserving of the strength of the working population of today may we be best assured of a healthy, intelligent, productive citizenship in the future....

“That steps should be taken now that shall have for their purpose and end a reasonable and just arrangement to all concerned, of the problems involved in this question—that of reducing the long hours of labor—we would respectfully recommend to the intelligent and thoughtful consideration of the proper officers of the Corporation.”

As a result of this recommendation, the finance committee of the Corporation appointed a subcommittee of its members, “to consider what, if any, arrangement with a view to reducing the twelve-hour day, in so far as it now exists among the employes of the subsidiary companies, is reasonable, just and practicable.” Their findings are published in the annual report of the corporation for the year 1912, which has recently been issued. The committee calls attention to the fact that the stockholders’ committee found that “only about 25 per cent of the total number of employes” were working twelve hours a day. This, in spite of the fact that the committee distinctly reported that 50 to 60 per cent of actual steel workers were twelve-hour men. But as to relieving the situation, the report reads “it is believed that unless competing iron and steel manufacturers will also enforce a less than twelve-hour day, the effort to reduce the twelve hours per day at all our works will result in losing a large number of our employes, many of them preferring to take positions requiring more hours of work per day.”

The report then points out that a considerable number of men during the past year have left the employ of the Steel Corporation because they have enforced the six day week, and have gone to the employ of other companies where they could work seven days, and expresses the fear that the same thing would happen if an eight-hour day were adopted by the corporation.

Of course, nothing is said in this report, nor was anything said at the stockholders’ meeting of April 21, as to the real reason why workers leave their positions when hours of labor are shortened. The inference to be drawn from the report is that steel workers are so consumed with a passion for work that they do not desire to leave it, even for one day in seven.

The facts are that the cost of this reform was borne by the men. The Steel Corporation did not pay its men their old earnings for their new six day stint. It would be interesting to know the actual wages received by the larger proportion of those who left the employ of the Corporation in order that they might work seven days a week for other companies. We should then be able to draw our own conclusions as to whether it was a passion for work or a desire to support their families in decency and comfort that led them to look elsewhere for work when their earnings were reduced by one-seventh.

But the Steel Corporation found itself, according to its own testimony, in a quandary. A committee of its own stockholders had recommended an abolition of the twelve-hour day. The finance committee had considered the matter carefully and reported back that because its competitors had not changed from the twelve-hour day, they could not. It was a practical difficulty and they intimated that they were unable to solve it. It was to cut this Gordian knot that Charles M. Cabot, the Boston stockholder who was responsible for the investigation conducted last year by the stockholders’ committee headed by Stuyvesant Fish, went to the meeting on April 21 with this resolution:

“Voted, that in view of the Finance Committee’s report that the change from the twelve to the eight-hour day in continuous twenty-four hour processes in our mills and plants is impracticable unless similar action is taken by our competitors; and, further, in view of the fruitful results which followed the appointment by the American Iron and Steel Institute at the instigation of officers of our Corporation of a committee on seven-day labor, which action has led to the very general establishment of the six day week in the steel industry of the United States; that the stockholders request the directors to enlist the co-operation of the steel manufacturers of the United States in establishing the eight-hour day in continuous twenty-four hour processes.”

The purpose of this resolution was to provide the quickest, most efficient manner of solving the dilemma in which the Corporation found itself, and to provide a way whereby there could be restored to the workers such a working schedule, as would not sap their vitality or prevent them from having what the stockholders’ committee thought was necessary time for relaxation and for association with their families. That this resolution was tabled with the consent of the officials of the Corporation, will undoubtedly be interpreted by many as an indication that the Corporation was not sincere in its plea that its hands were tied in trying to meet the demand of the Fish committee for a reduction in hours.

Yet Mr. Cabot performed in offering this resolution possibly his greatest service since he began his campaign to improve the labor conditions in the steel industry even though it was an achievement that he did not have in mind. He forced the Corporation to show its hand; he gave it an opportunity to prove whether or not it really desired, as it was on record as desiring, a fundamental reform. The Corporation gave him an unmistakable answer.

It would have been better if they had not forgotten the wise counsel of William B. Dickson, their former vice-president, when he said, in a speech advocating one day of rest in seven, that if the steel companies themselves did not institute this reform, they would be compelled by law to institute it, and that the law would be far more drastic than the manufacturers of steel would find comfortable.

BEDFORD REFORMATORY

W. J. Lampton, in the New York Times

[Bedford Reformatory, a State institution doing invaluable service in the reclamation of wayward girls, is overcrowded and asks $700,000 from the state for extension purposes.]

Behold, she stands

And stretches out her hands

For aid.

Those firm, strong hands,

Those gentle, helpful hands,

Whose spirit unafraid

Of sin and shame and loss

Have borne the burden of the cross

For girls unnamable, whose feet

Have trod the open street,

The market-place

Of body and of soul,

In search of toll

From any man who gave

To own a common slave,

The chattel of the street.

These Bedford comes to meet,

But not as shameless things;

To them she brings

Love, courage, hope, the better way,

The clean, new day

Whose morning sun awakes

Another world to those half gone

And hopeless ones

To whom there was no other dawn.

And now she stands

With outstretched hands

For aid; the means to lift

Out of the ghastly drift

These girl-souls crying in the night

For kindly light.

And shall she be denied?

Shall men who buy

Deny?

Shall any man, in whom his pride

In his own womankind is strong,

Go wrong

And say

To Bedford: “Nay”?

May 3, 1913.

THE OYSTERMAN
BALTIMORE TO BILOXI AND BACK
THE CHILD’S BURDEN IN OYSTER AND SHRIMP CANNERIES

Investigation and Photographs by

LEWIS W. HINE

for the National Child Labor Committee

[Mr. Hine’s photographs and the equally vivid impressions he sets down in the text, tell a story of child labor along the South Atlantic and the Gulf. In an especial sense these are conditions which public opinion can bring to the door of the Democratic Party to remedy. For in these states that party is dominant, as it is in the nation.

First lies the channel of state action, which has thus far been laggard, and has been obstructed by the child employing interests of the South. At the present time, a child labor bill which would reach this shore work, is pending in Florida. In Mississippi shucking is prohibited but there is no enforcing agency and the work is going on as before.

If the channel of state action fails, child labor reformers point to such national legislation as would prohibit interstate commerce in canned oysters and shrimps which are so humanly costly. The recent decision of the United Stores Supreme Court in the white slave case would seem to indicate that legislation could be drafted which would hold in the courts, and several bills along the lines of the much controverted Beveridge bill of 1907 are now before Congress.

It is for the Democratic Party in state and nation to proceed through one channel or the other.—Ed.]

When we speak of child labor in oyster canning, we refer to the cooked or “cove” oysters, not to the raw ones. Children are not used in opening raw oysters for the sole reason that their fingers are not strong enough. Occasionally one finds young boys at work on the boats dredging for the oysters, but not many children work on the boats, for that is a man’s job.

The two chief sections engaged in the work of canning oysters and shrimps are the Gulf Coast, from New Orleans eastward to Florida, and the Atlantic Coast of Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Maryland was the pioneer state, but it has already been outstripped by Mississippi, and several other states follow close in amount of annual output.

A TYPICAL OYSTER AND SHRIMP CANNERY

WORKING UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYE OF THE BOSS

Every year about October, hundreds of Polish and Bohemian people (some authorities say thousands) are herded together by various bosses or “padrones” in Baltimore and other centers of the South shipped over to the coasts by train and by boat and set up in shacks provided by the canning companies. We are told by one of the canners, “We give these people all the modern conveniences.” The modern conveniences appear to be summed up in artesian wells. If there were no cold or wet weather in these parts, if waste and sewage were carried off, and if there were no crowding, these temporary quarters would be endurable; but in cold, or hot, or wet weather they are positively dangerous, especially to children. One row of dilapidated shacks that I found in South Carolina housed fifty workers in a single room house. One room sheltered eight persons, and the shacks were located on an old shell pile within a few rods of the factory, a few feet from the tidal marsh where odors, mosquitoes, and sand flies made life intolerable, especially in hot weather.

There is a prevailing impression that in the matter of child labor the emphasis on the labor must be very slight, but let me tell you right here that these processes involve work, hard work, deadening in its monotony, exhausting physically, irregular, the workers’ only joy the closing hour. We might even say of these children that they are condemned to work.

RAMSHACKLE SHEDS HOUSING NEARLY FIFTY WORKERS PORT ROYAL, S. C.

THREE-YEAR-OLD ALMA WHOSE MOTHER IS “LEARNIN’ HER THE TRADE”

Come out with me to one of these canneries at three o’clock some morning. Here is the crude shed-like building, with a long dock at which the oyster boats unload their cargoes. Near the dock is the ever present shell pile, a monument of mute testimony to the patient toil of little fingers. It is cold, damp, dark. The whistle blew some time ago, and the young workers slipped into their meager garments, snatched a bite to eat and hurried to the shucking shed. The padrone told me “Ef dey don’t git up, I go and git ’em up.” See those little ones over there stumbling through the dark over the shell piles, munching a piece of bread, and rubbing their heavy eyes. Boys and girls, six seven and eight years of age, take their places with the adults and work all day.

The cars are ready for them with their loads of dirty, rough clusters of shells, and as these shells accumulate under foot in irregular piles, they soon make the mere matter of standing one of physical strain. Notice the uncertain footing, and the dilapidated foot-wear of that little girl, and opposite is one with cloth fingers to protect herself from the jagged shells—they call them “finger-stalls.” Their fingers are often sore in spite of this precaution.

When they are picking shrimps, their fingers and even their shoes are attacked by a corrosive substance in the shrimp that is strong enough to eat the tin cans into which they are put. The day’s work on shrimp is much shorter than on oysters as the fingers of the worker give out in spite of the fact that they are compelled to harden them in an alum solution at the end of the day. Moreover, the shrimp are packed in ice, and a few hours handling of these icy things is dangerous for any child. Then, too, the mornings, and many of the days, are cold, foggy and damp.

The workers are thinly clad, but, like the fabled ostrich, cover their heads and imagine they are warm. If a child is sick, it gets a vacation, and wanders around to kill time.

The youngest of all shift for themselves at a very early age. One father told me that they brought their baby, two months old, down to the shucking shed at four o’clock every morning and kept it there all day. Another told me that they locked a baby of six months in the shack when they went away in the morning, and left it until noon, then left it alone again all the afternoon. A baby carriage with its occupant half smothered under piles of blankets is a common sight. Snuggled up against a steam box you find many a youngster asleep on a cold morning. As soon as they can toddle, they hang around the older members of the family, something of a nuisance, of course, and very early they learn to amuse themselves. For hours at a time, they play with the dirty shells, imitating the work of the grown-ups. They toddle around the shed, and out on to the docks at the risk of their lives.

A little older and they learn to “tend the baby.” As a substitute for real recreation, this baby tending is pathetic.

Mary said, “I shucks six pots if I don’t got the baby; two pots if I got him.”

As soon as they can handle the oysters and shrimps, they are “allowed to help.”

The mother often says, “Sure. I’m learnin’ her de trade,” and you see many youngsters beginning to help at a very early age. Standing on a box in order to reach the table, little Olga, five years old, was picking shrimps for her mother at the cannery I visited. Later in the day, I found her at home worn out with the work she had been doing, but the mother complained that Olga was “ugly.” Little sympathy they get when they most need it! Four-year-old Mary was working irregularly through the day shucking about two pots of oysters. The mother is the fastest shucker in the place, and the boss said,

“Mary will work steady next year.” The most excitement that many of them get from one month to another is that of being dressed up in their Sunday best to spend the day seeing the sights of the settlement.

Now we all know that the amount of work these little ones can do is not much, and yet I have been surprised and horrified at the number of hours a day a six or a seven year old will stay at work, and this with the willing and eager consent of the parents. “Freckled Bill,” a bright lad of five years, told me that he worked, and his mother added reproachfully,

“He kin make fifteen cents any day he wants to work, but he won’t do it steady.”

Annie, seven years old, is a steady worker. The mother said, for her benefit, of course, “She kin beat me shuckin’, an’ she’s mighty good at housework too, but I mustn’t praise her too much right before her.”

This is only one of the means used to keep the children at work. Another method is to tell the neighbors that Annie can shuck eight pots a day. Then some other child beats the record, and so the interest is kept up, and incidentally the work is done and the family income enlarged. Can we call that motherhood? Compared with real maternity, it is a distorted perversion, a travesty. The baby at Ellis Island little dreams what is in store for him.

Hundreds of these children from four to twelve years of age are regularly employed, often as helpers, for the greater part of the six months if it is a good season. At three and four years of age they play around and help a little, “learnin’ de trade.” At five and six years of age they work more regularly, and at seven and eight years, they put in long hours every working day. This is the regular program for these children day after day, week after week for the six months of their alleged—“outing down South.”

I remarked to one of the village people, “It’s a wonder that these youngsters live through it all.”

“Yes,” she replied, “and when they don’t live through it, there is a corner over in a little cemetery waiting for them, and many of them go there.”

You see, “They’re only Hickeys.”

I suppose the cemetery is one of the “conveniences” that the company does not boast about.

CHILDREN OF THE OYSTER CANNERIES
A young girl who has been shucking six years and earns a dollar a day; a little mother who alternates baby tending and oyster shucking; a ten-year-old worker has no time for school.

The wages of these workers vary according to their locality, and the kind of season they find. The work on the shrimp is better paid than oyster shucking, but it is much more irregular. On the latter families frequently earn ten and fifteen or twenty dollars a week so when there are several children, and the work is steady, there is a great temptation to make them all help. Children of seven years earn about twenty-five cents a day, and at eight and ten years of age often fifty cents a day or more. At twelve and fourteen years they frequently earn as high as a dollar a day and this is adult pay. The fastest adult shucker seldom earns much more than a dollar a day after years of experience. What then is the outlook for children beginning this industry?

“What is your name, little girl?”

“Dunno.”

“How old are you?”

“Dunno.”

“How many pots do you shuck in a day?”

“Dunno.”

And the pity of it is that they do not know.

What then do they know? Enough to stand patiently with the rest picking up one hard, dirty cluster of shells, deftly prying them open, dropping the meat into the pot; and then go through this process with another and another and another, until after many minutes the pot is full—a relief, for they carry it over to the weigher and rest doing nothing a minute, and walk back,—such a change from the dreary standing, reaching, prying and dropping—minute upon minute, hour upon hour, day upon day, month after month. Or perchance, for variety, the catch may have been shrimp, and then the hours of work are shorter, but the shrimp are icy cold, and the blood in one’s fingers congeals, and the fingers become so sore that she welcomes the oysters again.

Are you surprised then to find that many children seem dumb and can not understand our language?

“But we educate them” some canners tell us.

This is the way they do it. In the few places where I found any pretense to education the children shucked oysters for four hours before school. Then they went to school for half a day, returning at one o’clock for a hurried lunch. They worked for four hours more, five days in the week. On Saturday they put in an alleged half day consisting of eight or nine hours work. Is it any marvel that the school principal told me “It isn’t satisfactory, but at least we are giving them some help in learning the language.” They need the help. At another place, with two canneries, but two children were going to school, and the illiteracy of both adults and children was appalling.

“There is no compulsion about schooling here,” the principal said.

The “vocational guidance” which most of them receive, year in and year out, is seen in the sheds where under the eagle eye of the boss, who watches to see that they do not shirk, and under the pressure of parental authority, they put in their time where it will bring tangible returns. One padrone told me:

“I keep ’em a-working all the year. In the winter, bring ’em down here to the gulf. In Summer, take ’em to the berry fields of Maryland and Delaware. They don’t lose many weeks’ time, but I have a hard time to get ’em sometimes. Have to tell ’em all kinds of lies.”

So here we have a certain kind of “scientific management” of child labor by means of which even the vacation time of the children is utilized.

“Why do they do it?”—that question comes to one over and over; what keeps these little ones at their uninteresting task? In the first place, their immigrant parents are frugal, even parsimonious, and every little helps. Then they think it keeps the children out of trouble, little realizing that they are storing up trouble when they grow up, handicapped by lack of education, broken physically, and with a distaste for work. Small wonder if they drift into the industrial maelstrom of cheap, inefficient labor, and float on as industrial misfits.

If we look at it from the employer’s point of view, we find his chief justification is that children are needed because the goods are perishable, and must be put up immediately. You ask him if the children are not perishable, and he says he can’t see that they are spoiled. “It doesn’t hurt ’em. They’re tough. I began myself at their age,” and so on. It will be long years before these employers will be looking at this children’s labor with a long-range finder, a problem to be met along with that of improved machinery. The children themselves are docile; they do as they are told; they are imitative, like to do what the rest are doing; they are easily stimulated by the idea of competing with other children; and they are very sensitive to criticism and ridicule. I do not, however, recall a single case of a child being whipped for not working. It can easily be seen that with the parents, or employers, and children against it, the task of liberation from this commercialized family peonage of immature workers is not an easy one.

On the Atlantic Coast more Negroes are employed, than on the Gulf Coast, and they do not work the children very much, except where they have come under the influence of the immigrant workers. In almost every case, the bosses and padrones agree that the Baltimore workers are much more satisfactory than the Negroes. They say:

“There is no comparing them. The whites work harder, longer hours, are more easily driven, and use the children much more.”

The chief advantage of Negro help is that it saves the cost of transportation. Where it is necessary to get the work done promptly the immigrants are imported.

That this exploitation of the children is absolutely unnecessary is proven by the canneries that get along without them. It needs merely more efficient planning on the part of the managers, and better supervision on the part of the state. It is certainly a condition not to be endured when we consider the hardships involved—the long hours, the monotonous and tiring work, the irregular conditions of work and of life, the exposure, the unsanitary surroundings, the moral dangers, the lack of education, and the double exploitation of summer and winter.

One morning I found a little cannery worker setting about her endless job. At the end of the day as I passed near, human nature asserted itself. She asked me to photograph her dolly too, this oyster shucker.

SHE SHUCKS OYSTERS
For twenty-five cents a day. Seven-year-old Gulf Coast worker.

M’AMS AND SUPERM’AMS

How the public school, responding to the trend of the twentieth century, is developing new staff and personality to link up the classroom with the individual aptitudes of children and with their life outside of school hours, with home-making, workmanship and community life.

THE VISITING TEACHER

THE VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR

THE HOUSEHOLD ADMINISTRATOR

SOCIAL SERVICE AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

ELEANOR HOPE JOHNSON

SECRETARY COMMITTEE ON THE HYGIENE OF SCHOOL CHILDREN, PUBLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

Kate Douglas Wiggin, in one of her most appealing stories, tells of a child who was walking in a garden with his mother when they came upon a misshapen tree. In reply to the mother’s question as to why the tree was crooked the child replied that he guessed someone had stepped on it when it was little. So it is with many of the children in our larger cities—they get stepped on physically, intellectually and spiritually when they are young.

Little Ivan, whose mother had come here from Russia after passing through we know not how many scenes of terror and suffering, bore the stamp of her misery on his face and in his soul. When he came to a New York public school at eight years of age it seemed impossible that teacher and textbook should be able to do anything for him. He was ragged and dirty and could not speak. But after patient effort the teacher of the special class, where he had been put, found that he was not a mute and that he did understand English. Next, his mother was seen, and she became so interested in her boy’s welfare that his ragged days were brought to an end. A new suit of clothes and a clean face transformed him into an intelligent and alert looking youngster. Now he is struggling with the words, “boy and ran, dog and book,” and is attacking the other branches with some notion of what they are all about. His destructive tendency is being dealt with firmly and patiently, and there are great hopes that some day Ivan may develop into a normal and sturdy boy.

NELLO, THE “UTTERLY BAD”
Until a visiting teacher went to his home and found his mother dying of cancer, Nello nursing her and the three younger children, and the father sharing his morning beer with the undersized boy. The schoolroom tantrum was understood then. Nello was sent to the country.

This story of Ivan is a good illustration of what the school can do to help prevent the little trees from being so harshly trodden upon. It is also a good illustration of the manner in which they can do it. For it is one of the most promising signs of our times that our conception of the process called education is a constantly broadening one. It is no longer enough to teach children to read, write and cipher, even to draw, cook and sew. We have been in the past contented with the dictum that the public schools exist in order to abolish illiteracy, but now we are inclined to take the fuller meaning which, surprisingly enough, the dictionary gives: “to educate is to qualify for the business and duties of life.” Up to now, unfortunately, the dictionary has not been followed with too great care. Much time has been lost and from the results of this loss we are now suffering. In our new vision, the schools must not only train children toward constructive citizenship, but must do what they can to prevent the development of destructive citizens, must help in overcoming completely the original anti-social condition into which psychologists tell us children are born.

Industrial teaching and vocational guidance through the public schools should do much to bring about this training toward constructive citizenship. But for the equally important task of prevention some preliminary work must be done. Obstacles must be removed. Those who can profit by such training must be sifted out from those who cannot, and through the schools we must fit by some preliminary process, those who at first sight seem unfit. For in the schools are often found the beginning of all the bitter problems with which our strongest philanthropic organizations are struggling so manfully. “Millions for cure, nothing for prevention” sometimes seems to express pretty clearly where the emphasis has been placed in the past. The schools can help greatly if they would get back behind the present situation, and discuss, point out, and if necessary, perform these acts of prevention.

What does all this mean? It means that social service must come to be regarded as a justifiable function of the schools, as justifiable as it has already become in the case of at least two other institutions.

Upwards of twenty years ago a militant clergyman in New York is quoted as having said: “It is all very well to talk of saving souls, but I never yet have seen a soul that was not connected with a body.” At that time religious work was confined much more closely than it now is within certain traditional limits, and these ringing words did much to turn the attention of the churches toward their old ideal of social service.

A later grafting of the spirit of social service on long established practices is shown in the progress of hospital social service. What first opened the eyes of the medical profession is not recorded, but it was soon proven that the assurance given to a woman at the hospital that her children were being well cared for in her absence hastened her recovery, and that the visits of a wise and sympathetic nurse or trained social worker to the home of a discharged patient almost always succeeded in preventing that patient’s return because of a relapse due to carelessness or ignorance. A physician in a large Boston hospital where the social service is famous for its completeness and efficiency has said that a good social service nurse saves her salary twice over by the cures she hastens and the returns she prevents.

There is a tradition in this country on which we greatly pride ourselves, that education, at least in certain of its fundamental branches, is free to all who wish to avail themselves of the opportunity afforded by the state. Indeed, we go so far in most of our states as to make it not only free but compulsory between certain ages. But look carefully through any large school and many a small one, and you will find children who would gladly partake of this free education but who for many reasons, and through no fault of their own, are unable to do so. Children who sit idly in school or stumble blindly through a grade or two, and children whose names are finally taken from the register because for them no place in school can be made. And so we come to see that our free education is for those fortunate ones who are fitted for it, while for others it is practically non-existent. You can compel a child to go to school, but you cannot compel him to profit by his stay there.

The story of Nello is a pathetic illustration of this. Here was a boy of eleven, pitifully small for his age, who had been placed in an ungraded class, and was disturbing the class and distracting the teacher by his utter badness. A visitor was asked to investigate the home conditions and find out a possible explanation for his incorrigibility. She found ample cause. Nello’s mother was dying of cancer. His father was a heavy drinker, often out of work, who shared his beer with the small boy instead of getting proper food for him each morning. Nello was the only nurse his mother and the three younger children had, and his burden of responsibility gave him no other outlet except the schoolroom tantrum. A nurse and proper food were secured. The two youngest children were placed temporarily in an institution. Nello was taken to a doctor who said that the boy was permanently dwarfed because of his alcoholic diet, and the father was induced to discontinue this and give him milk instead. With better food and some time in the country it may be proved that Nello is only temporarily dwarfed mentally, even if his physical state is permanent. In any event, with the burden, too great for his narrow shoulders, finally removed the boy is now doing well in school and his future is not hopeless.

CLASS FOR ANAEMIC CHILDREN IN A NEW YORK PUBLIC SCHOOL
When the room is in a building the windows are so arranged that the largest amount of air is taken into the room. The windows are never closed.

Happily certain phases of the situation are now being remedied. Through the increase in the differentiation of special classes within the schools our educational systems are making education more nearly free to all, and so taking a most important part in the great work of prevention. We are ceasing to think quite so exclusively of the ambulances at the foot of the precipice and are building our fence, foot by foot, across its top. By means of these special classes, the different demands which differently constituted minds and bodies make are in great part met, the fact that certain obstacles prevent many minds from attaining full development is recognized; and due allowance is made for the effect physical and mental handicaps have on individual education.

To give an instance: In the public schools of New York these special classes are carried out to an admirable extent. Physical handicaps are recognized and provided for in the classes for cripples, for blind, anaemic and tubercular children, and in the School for the Deaf. The teachers of these classes come to know a great deal about the homes and the individual difficulties of their pupils, and what home or medical care will be of the greatest assistance to them educationally. Bodies are cared for, lunches even are furnished, that the mind may have a chance to grow strong and keen—for the school lunch is more and more recognized as a real factor in education.

For the backward children and for those who are mentally rather than physically defective, there are other special classes; those for the over-age children, for foreigners who come to school before they have learned to speak English, for children who are trying to get their working papers, and the so-called Ungraded Class for those who are apparently or really backward to a hopeless extent. Often members of this latter group find their way into the classes for foreign children or those who are trying for working papers, so limiting the best usefulness of those classes.

But one step further must be taken, and in some places and in some connections is being taken in this work of prevention, and of bringing together the incomplete little being and his opportunity for becoming more complete. This step is the adaptation of the ideal of social service to our educational work and through it we shall finally come to see, I believe, the supremely important part the schools must play in the solution of our most perplexing social problems. Often this part will be not to take the actual steps themselves, but to point out to other especially equipped agencies the steps that must be taken by them in order to prevent future misery and crime. From the schools must come our most valuable information and advice concerning the treatment of various groups of dependent children. They constitute the great dragnet and the natural clearing house.

The day is fast coming when just as surely as social service is an inseparable and honored part of both religious and medical institutions, so it shall be of our educational work. Phases of this service or movements closely allied to it, are already being slowly introduced into the public school systems of some cities, volunteer agencies are carrying on a more definite social service in close connection with the schools, and always a good teacher, interested to learn of the home surroundings of her pupils, is the most effective social service worker the schools can have.

But when the effort is made to introduce direct social service into the school system itself a suspicion has often been felt on the part of the governing body, or on that of the taxpayer, that here is an attempt to turn the schools into charitable centers. They do not seem to realize nor take to heart the message of that minister of twenty years ago that while it is all very well to talk about training the mind, no one has ever yet seen a mind that was not connected with a body. The obstacles which often prevent the mind’s full development must be discovered and removed before the education the schools offer can be taken full advantage of. The same close relationship which hospital social service bring about with a patient’s home must be established by the school with the homes of its pupils—as in the case of Nello—so that any hindrance to a child’s education existing there may be ascertained and as far as possible overcome. Much social service of a valuable kind has been carried on in connection with some of the special classes in the New York city schools by outside agencies devoted to the care of particular forms of physical defect, and their assistance to both teachers and pupils has been generous and effective. In some cases the closest relation has existed between these organizations and the school system, as in the case of the classes for cripples. But as yet none of this work has been made an actual part of the system, though its value is recognized and the volunteer service used to the fullest extent.

CLASS FOR CRIPPLED CHILDREN IN A NEW YORK PUBLIC SCHOOL
Note the adjustable chairs which can be suited to the particular difficulty of the child occupying it. Much manual work is done in these classes.

Last year the social worker who was supplied to the department of ungraded classes of the New York public schools by the Public Education Association proved abundantly the need for such work in connection with all the special classes for children who are backward from any cause whatever. Children who appeared to be hopelessly defective were taken by this worker to hospitals or clinics and found to be far more nearly normal than had been at first supposed. Children who seemed to be in immediate danger of getting into evil ways because of their mental defect and whose parents were unequal to the task of keeping them from harming themselves or others, were placed in institutions where they could be taught and cared for. Out of a hundred cases investigated the visitor succeeded in placing nineteen in institutions. Unwillingness on the part of parents or lack of room in the institutions prevented putting the others there also. On the other hand, the child who could not remain in the regular grades because of mental weakness was visited at home, his difficulties explained to the parents, who were ignorantly and often cruelly blaming him for a fault not his own, and he was finally placed, with the parents’ full understanding and consent, in an ungraded class. Adjustments have been made which will affect many a child’s whole career for good, advice has been given at home which has in some cases changed the status of an entire family.

GROUP FROM A CLASS FOR FOREIGN CHILDREN IN A NEW YORK PUBLIC SCHOOL
These children of immigrant parents enter the class immediately on landing. The average stay is three months, when they go out into the regular grades for which they are fitted, according to the previous education they have had in their own countries. One teacher says: “They absorb just like little sponges. They are so eager to learn.”

Because of the work done by this visitor and the effective way in which the inspector of ungraded classes has incorporated her work into the general plan for these classes; and also on account of the recommendation made by the State Charities Aid Association that more knowledge should be secured by the schools of the atypical children there, the New York Board of Education has decided to install two such visitors in the Department of Ungraded Classes. This is the first time, so far as I know, that an appropriation has been made by a school system for such a purpose. It is a step towards fulfilling this newer ideal of education of which New York city may well be proud.

It is impossible to measure the good that would result if this service were widened to include the other classes for backward children I have mentioned, particularly the working paper classes. At the Board of Health the other day a pretty Italian girl of fifteen was examined for her working paper. Her writing of the simplest English sentence was so poor that her paper was refused, and she was told she must stay in school until she was sixteen. The girl and her father came in despair to appeal to the head of the department. It was not a case of poverty; the father had work, and so had older brothers and sisters. On the girl’s side it was discontent and restlessness—“I do not want to go to school any more; they scold me all the time.” She had been in a special working paper class and had undoubtedly been dull and unambitious. The father had a more serious story. His English was halting, they talked only Italian at home, he told me, which accounted somewhat for the girl’s curious mistakes. But the mother was dead, the older sister working, and there was no one at home to look after the girl in her hours after school. The father’s distressed face showed clearly his perplexity as to the chaperonage of his daughter according to the Italian ideas. It was not safe or proper that she should be at home alone or wandering about the streets; she was better off at work. Whether the father’s statement was true or not, without much question the girl will never go regularly to school again, if she goes at all—in spite of attendance officers and all—and for another year she cannot go legally to work. It is not hard to guess the sequel, and the remedy is equally easy to see. How long will it take us to learn that when we take something from young people which they must not have, we must at the same moment supply its place with something desirable but safe. Social service directly connected with the school would solve the future of the pretty little Italian and of many others in the same evil case. They want not only the careful schooling that will correct the lack which prevents them from going to work, but, more than that, the home visiting which shall explain the need for this further training and arouse interest in the connection between school and work.

The best example of volunteer social service in connection with the public schools is that which for several years has been carried on by various outside agencies interested in linking more closely the school and the home, but always limited to work with the regular grades.

The Home and School League of Philadelphia has done valuable work in arousing interest in this direction, and now a number of such visitors are at work in the city supported by various private organizations. They are doing the same sort of work as that done by the visitors in New York and Boston, although from the reports it would seem that both in Philadelphia and Boston special attention is given by them to vocational guidance. A particularly valuable piece of work has been done by the home visitor appointed by the Armstrong Association to work among the colored pupils of Philadelphia; the Friend’s Preventive Association, the Juvenile Protective Association, and the Children’s Aid Societies, also support visitors. These are being used to an increasing degree by the Bureau of Compulsory Education of Philadelphia in carrying on the preventive work connected with that bureau.

In Boston there are now five full-time and seven or eight part time school visitors. Each visitor is engaged by some private organization, such as the Women’s Educational Association, the Home and School Association, a group of settlements, or by some individual. She is attached to a special school or district and does all her work there. This is the arrangement in all three cities. The work has been supervised by a committee of the Women’s Educational Association, and this committee represents settlements and other social agencies. Work of this sort, but on a smaller scale, is being done both in Worcester, Mass., and in Rochester, N. Y., the visiting teachers working under the Public Education Association of New York have been increasingly effective in their efforts to solve for the often overburdened teacher problems connected with individual children.

Efforts have been made from time to time by the supervising force to instruct teachers to visit the homes of the children in their classrooms and ascertain the conditions under which they were living, but with the present large size of classes in most public schools this has been found to be quite impracticable. Besides this, to overcome the difficulties in the way of a child’s education much visiting of an expert sort and many efforts for outside co-operation are often necessary, for which the teachers could not possibly find time. Separate visitors are therefore needed. There are so many illustrations of the sort of work they do, that it is hard to select one that is more telling than the rest.

From the report of a Boston visitor we learn of Angelina Conti, who was constantly tardy, frequently absent, and never alert or quick in her recitations. “She seems to lack ambition,” says the report, “and must be dropped into a lower grade unless something can be done to brace her up.” The visitor is sent to the home. She finds that Angelina is the oldest of nine children and that the family lives in three rooms. The burden of the family seems to rest on Angelina, who must wash the clothes every afternoon when she comes from school, and go for the baby’s milk before school in the morning. Angelina is a perfectly compliant, patient little soul. She has a headache most of the time, but expects to do all that her mother asks of her. She hopes that the teacher won’t “degrade” her.

The visitor urges Mrs. Conti to send a younger child for milk in the morning so that Angelina can come promptly to school. The headaches are reported to the school nurse, who sends Angelina to the hospital for much needed treatment. The whole situation is explained to the teacher, who gladly promises to send Angelina home promptly in the afternoon so that she may have time for her housework. There is a much better understanding between Angelina and her teacher, her health improves, she comes more regularly and keeps her class. Thus is the first step in preventing dependency taken.

An interesting part of the work of these social service workers has been to bring to bear on the lives of these “difficult children” all the agencies which might be of assistance. This same Boston visitor states in her report that “this new work of visiting the homes of the school children is one of continual co-operation with principals, teachers, truant officers, janitors and the children themselves, also with hospitals, dispensaries, employment agencies, the Associated Charities, or whatever the emergency may demand.” Too often this sort of effort is scattered and ineffective because of the lack of connection between agencies. With a visitor working from the school as a starting point and not from any private organization, the connection is quickly made and the influence of each helping agency is strengthened by the added influence of every other. This has proved to be just as true in the case of medical social service, particularly that of public hospitals and institutions, and one might almost prophesy that some day the relief work of philanthropic agencies will come only in response to calls from the social service departments of church, hospital, public institution and school, and that a great clearing house for these agencies, public and private, will be the best way of organizing charity.

Be that as it may, social service is as surely needed in connection with training people’s minds as it is with saving their souls and curing their bodies. It is easier to train our vines to grow straight and sure and to cling to the lattices we choose for them, if at the same time the soil is watered and enriched that the roots may be strong, and all things harmful to the plant’s health are carefully kept from it. “As the twig is bent the tree’s inclined,” but the twig must be strong and healthy as well as straight, if the tree is to do its part in forming the forests our country must have if it would be prosperous. Surely anything that will make more effective the mental training and development of our country’s future citizens is as fully justified.

THE VISITING TEACHER IN ACTION

MARY FLEXNER

VISITING TEACHER, PUBLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, NEW YORK CITY

Walter preferred to play ball under the kindly protection of the Queensborough Bridge to attending school where he had no chance to show his ability as a leader. He had successfully evaded all the visits of the truant officer, and when his teacher asked me, a visiting teacher, to try my luck, I wondered what I should find. I called first upon his mother at her place of business and found her in thorough sympathy with the school, but apparently powerless to make her son attend. Walter took advantage of the fact that she left the house before he did, and as they alone comprised the family, he could disobey her and go to school or not as he saw fit. There was no one but himself to report to her in the evening just how he had spent his day.

I chose supper time for my first visit, and found him, as I hoped, at home, a little tired from his day’s play and hungry, of course. His mother was there too. She was surprised when I told her that her son had not attended school that day, nor indeed for many days previously. We talked of many things, and just before leaving, I ventured to ask Walter what he wanted to be when he was a man. He was then twelve years old. He did not hesitate an instant. He wanted, he said, to be an architect. And then his mother showed me a little calendar he had painted which adorned the closet door. We struck a bargain. If he went to school regularly, I was to arrange with his teacher to give him a palette and brushes so that he could paint. It was possible to do this as he was in a special class in which the course of study is more easily adapted to the child’s needs.

The next morning, when I opened the classroom door, two pairs of smiling eyes greeted me—the teacher’s and Walter’s. At once the teacher and I planned our campaign. Walter was to learn that at school he could get a chance at leadership too, for could he not play games there? At first, perhaps, they seemed tame compared with those under the bridge, for the classroom or the school-yard, even when given over to ball or bean-bag, does not easily associate itself in the child’s mind with scenes of adventure. However, the chance of some time being captain of the team had charms even for him. The proof is to be found in the fact that he attended school regularly, earning, in so doing, his palette and brushes and at the end of the term promotion to a regular class.

The work of the visiting teacher has passed the experimental stage. The position was created to bridge a gap in the existing school machinery. The visiting teacher’s province lies outside that of the regular teacher, the attendance officer and the school nurse, though like the attendance officer and the school nurse, she goes into the child’s home. To her is assigned the group called the “difficult” children, and it is her aim to discover, if possible, the cause of the difficulty which manifests itself in poor scholarship, annoying conduct, irregular attendance, or the need of or desire for advice on some important phase of life. It is too much to expect the regular teacher, handicapped as she is by her large class, to cope with such situations. Nor is it to be expected that those qualified to act as attendance officer or school nurse, were they not already overburdened, should do the work of the visiting teacher. In her is united the training that makes a teacher and a social service worker, and it is because of this combination that she is able to widen the regular teacher’s reach and help her interpret and solve the problems as they present themselves.

From the school she learns that the child is apparently making little effort; that his work is “C” or worse; that he is perpetually making trouble in the class room and is never attentive: that he seems lifeless, unable to keep pace with the class; that he attends so irregularly that it is impossible to teach him anything, or that he has no time to study and the situation at home is such that he must leave school and go to work. With these facts as clues she sets to work; it is impossible to define her methods, for they vary with her tact and resourcefulness and with the specific character of the problem before her. Briefly, they are the methods that spring from a friendly interest, an intimate personal relation.

Between the home and the school the visiting teacher vibrates, carrying to the former the school’s picture of the child and returning to the school to reinforce that impression or to shed new light upon the problem. There is no fixed number of times that she is expected to travel this path, as there is no fixed hour of the day for her visits. The urgency and complexity of a situation alone determine her movements. Nor is there any regular routine of action that she follows. Whatever in her judgment seems imperative, she endeavors to effect, using to this end everything the ingenuity of man has devised to make smooth the rough places of life.

It is a focussing of interests that she demands. The child is the pivotal point on which she hopes to bring all her knowledge and experience to bear. Sometimes it is the expert teacher’s training that she invokes; sometimes the psychologist or the physician, general or special, that she consults; or again it is the social worker to whom she appeals. Before these she lays the facts, the reasons why her services have been sought and from them she asks co-operation. To the adult, she is the visiting teacher; to the child, she is simply the “lady cop.”

The results achieved do not always show a complete cure. In some cases there has been a marked improvement in scholarship, conduct or attendance,—at least a good start in the right direction has been made. In other cases the child has been transferred to a different class, regular, special or ungraded, or to a trade school, where his chances at succeeding in making a place for himself are increased. Again, the information the visiting teacher shares with the regular teacher has resulted in a change of attitude toward the child, in an expansion or contraction of the course of study, or in her giving the child extra instruction in study periods or out of school hours. Finally, he has been helped to promotion, even to graduation.

Last year 1,157 cases were handled by the seven visiting teachers maintained in New York by the Public Education Association. The majority of these came directly through the school, but in a few instances the visiting teacher was called in by the child’s mother, a neighbor, or the child himself, all of whom, looking to her for help, show not only an appreciation of the fact that something is wrong, but also an understanding of what the visiting teacher is trying to accomplish. Their appeal emphasizes the necessity for just such a connection as she makes. Other cases came through settlements, charity organizations, churches, or the visiting teacher herself, whose attention had been attracted to some child on her rounds through the classrooms. In every instance, however, before the child technically becomes a case, the principal and teacher are conferred with. His school record must show him to be below standard in either scholarship, conduct or attendance, or in need of such advice or information as will, if followed, enhance his general well being.

Five hundred and five of the children visited were below standard in scholarship. This deficiency might be due to any one of a number of causes directly traceable to “home conditions,” such as congested or unsanitary living quarters, child labor, “overburdened childhood,” and ignorance of or indifference to the school’s claims. Or it might be that some school adjustment was necessary; for example, de-moting the child that is mentally and physically unequal to the grade’s requirements; or drawing him out in recitations, should he be nervous or timid; or helping him in the preparation of the studies that trouble him.

Three hundred and thirteen children were below standard in conduct; that is, they were either out of sympathy with the school environment or they were guilty of some offence, such as stealing, lying, cheating, or sexual irregularity.

Four hundred and sixty-five children were irregular in attendance. Since the same child is sometimes below standard in scholarship and irregular in attendance, or in need of advice and information, the groups here mentioned often overlap and the numbers total more than 1,157.

Six hundred and seventy-five needed advice or information. In all of these cases the child needed someone to plead his cause either at home or at school, that he might be the more thoroughly understood and that his special need, whether it be recreational, physical, or vocational, might be satisfied.

The task of the visiting teacher is plain. She must get at the facts. This she does by studying closely the child’s environment, realizing that he is the product of varied associations and influences. There are circles within circles—the home, the school, the immediate neighborhood, and what at times seems almost “beyond his ken,” the great wide world itself. No analysis of the forces that in their play and interplay tend to shape this young life would be complete that did not include the shifting, kaleidoscopic scenes amid which so often his plastic years are spent; nor would the picture be lifelike did it not show upon its face the changes that are wrought through that remoter contact with men and things.

The action followed depends naturally upon what the investigation reveals. Should the home be at fault, then an effort is made to remove the “trouble maker,” and, should this be impossible, then effort is made at least to effect some compromise, the benefit of which the child will reap both in the home and in the school.

Margaret had many times struck a discordant note in the classroom. At home she had always had her own way. Small wonder, then, that she played the prank she did in the assembly. In the midst of the gathering of some five hundred children when the morning exercises were being held, she spoke loud enough to be disturbing, and when reprimanded and told to leave the hall, she walked its full length on her heels, thus creating a greater disturbance and openly defying the principal’s authority. She was sent home and the matter was explained to her parents. The child felt that she had been insulted because ordered from the room, and the mother, unfortunately, took her side. At first she could not be made to see that if her child saw fit to leave the hall as she chose, the other 499 might use their wits to the same end and pandemonium result. Only after repeated interviews with the visiting teacher and after the child had lost fully a month of school did the mother allow her to return.

Sometimes it happens that the child has neither time nor place to study. “The noise, it gets me all mixed up,” is her pathetic comment. The neighborhood is scoured till a quiet room is found, either in a settlement, a sisterhood, or a public library, and then the mother’s co-operation is enlisted and many times secured when she understands that noise, interruptions and general disorder are not conducive to the formation of good habits of study.

Should it happen that the child’s work is seriously impaired because his sleep is interfered with, either because the mother’s work is carried late into the night and goes on in the child’s so-called bedroom, or because he is allowed to partake too freely of tea and coffee, the injurious effects of this way of living are demonstrated and the family is, in the one case, urged to move to better rooms, and in the other, plead with until milk and cocoa are substituted for tea and coffee. If then, the longed-for change sets in, showing itself in the child’s ability to make normal responses at school, word is carried to the home and thereby is strengthened the bond that makes these two centers one in their desire to promote the child’s well being.

But there are times when the cause is not so obvious and does not lend itself so easily to a simple solution. It happens often that what to the school appears a lack of co-operation on the part of the home means only that the parents have tried and failed. Again and again the visiting teacher is besought “Use your influence,” “Come and advise us,” “Robert” or “Alice,” “pays attention to you,”—all of which reduced to its lowest terms means that somewhere there is failure to understand. “It is because we are treated as we are at home that we run the streets,” is the way one girl of fourteen sums up the situation.

On the other hand it may happen that the source of the difficulty is to be found in the school itself, in the conditions that surround the child there, which, in the light of the information gathered in the home, expose to view some serious maladjustment. Perhaps it is a case of simple misunderstanding between teacher and pupil, the former holding the latter to a sort of rule-of-thumb scale of measurement when, mentally and physically, the child is incapable of following. Handicapped by nature, perhaps one of a long line similarly affected, is it to be expected that his reactions will be what in age and grade they should be? For such as he the hope lies in a curriculum so elastic that at some point the spark of interest cannot fail to be struck.

In the class room Lillian, a frail girl of thirteen, had apparently made only the impression of being a slow, sleepy, listless child. The first interviews showed her ill at ease. She studied hard every evening, she insisted; but when she was questioned in the class all the carefully memorized facts flew to the winds, she was so afraid. History was her Waterloo. Try as she would, she could not conquer. The outlook was not promising. The visit to the home revealed that she loved to draw. Tony, the black and white spaniel, and Nellie, his fox-terrier companion, had up to that time been her only models. In her leisure moments she sketched them lying before the kitchen stove, or curled up, asleep, under the table.