The Citizen's Library of Economics, Politics, andSociology UNDER THE GENERAL EDITORSHIP OF RICHARD T. ELY, Ph. D, LL. D. _Director of the School of Economics and Political Science; Professor ofPolitical Economy at the University of Wisconsin_ 12mo. Half Leather. $1. 25, net, each * * * * * *Monopolies and Trusts*. By RICHARD T. ELY, Ph. D. , LL. D. "It is admirable. It is the soundest contribution on the subject thathas appeared. "--Professor JOHN R. COMMONS. "By all odds the best written of Professor Ely's work. "--Professor SIMONN. PATTEN, _University of Pennsylvania_. *Outlines of Economics*. By RICHARD T. ELY, Ph. D. , LL. D. , author of"Monopolies and Trusts, " etc. *The Economics of Distribution*. By JOHN A. HOBSON, author of "TheEvolution of Modern Capitalism, " etc. *World Politics*. By PAUL S. REINSCH, Ph. D. , LL. B. , Assistant Professorof Political Science, University of Wisconsin. *Economic Crises*. By EDWARD D. JONES, Ph. D. , Instructor in Economicsand Statistics, University of Wisconsin. *Government in Switzerland*. By JOHN MARTIN VINCENT, Ph. D. , AssociateProfessor of History, Johns Hopkins University. *Political Parties in the United States, 1846-1861*. By JESSE MACY, LL. D. , Professor of Political Science in Iowa College. *Essays on the Monetary History of the United States*. By CHARLES J. BULLOCK, Ph. D. , Assistant Professor of Economics, Williams College. *Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order*. By EDWARDALSWORTH ROSS, Ph. D. *Municipal Engineering and Sanitation*. By W. N. BAKER, Ph. B. , AssociateEditor of _Engineering News_. * * * * * THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK *In Preparation for Early Issue* *DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS* By JANE ADDAMS, Head of "Hull House, " Chicago; joint author of "Philanthropy and Social Progress. " (_Now ready. _) Miss Addams' Settlement Work is known to all who are interested insocial amelioration and municipal conditions. As the title of her bookshows, it will be occupied with the reciprocal relations of ethicalprogress and the growth of democratic thought, sentiment, andinstitutions. *CUSTOM AND COMPETITION* By RICHARD T. ELY, LL. D. , Professor of Political Economy and Director of the School of Economics and Political Science in the University of Wisconsin; President of the American Economic Association; author of "Monopolies and Trusts, " etc. Topics treated under Custom include the Rent of Land and Custom;Interest and Custom; The Remuneration of Personal Services and Custom;Custom and Commerce. Competition is first discussed with reference to the biological aspectsof the question, and the significance of subhuman competition isconfined and a careful classification of its various kinds is presented. One of the main topics of the book is Competition as a Principle ofDistribution, and its treatment of the subject of price admirablysupplements the theoretical discussion in "Monopolies and Trusts. " *AMERICAN MUNICIPAL PROGRESS* By CHARLES ZUEBLIN, B. D. , Associate Professor of Sociology in the University of Chicago. This work takes up the problem of the so-called public utilities, publicschools, libraries, children's playgrounds, public baths, publicgymnasiums, etc. The discussion is from the standpoint of public welfareand is based on repeated personal investigations in leading cities ofEurope, especially England and the United States. *COLONIAL GOVERNMENT* By PAUL S. REINSCH, Ph. D. , LL. B. , Professor of Political Science in the University of Wisconsin; Author of "World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century as Influenced by the Oriental Situation. " By the author of the "World Politics, " which met so cordial a receptionfrom students of modern political history. The main divisions of thebook are: Motives and Methods of Colonization; Forms of ColonialGovernment; Relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies;Internal Government of the Colonies; The Special Colonial Problems ofthe United States. * * * * * THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY OF ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND SOCIOLOGY EDITED BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH. D. , LL. D. DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OFWISCONSIN * * * * * DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS *THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY OF ECONOMICS, POLITICS, ANDSOCIOLOGY. * 12mo. Half leather. $1. 25 _net_ each. * * * * * *MONOPOLIES AND TRUSTS. *BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH. D. , LL. D. *THE ECONOMICS OF DISTRIBUTION. *BY JOHN A. HOBSON. *WORLD POLITICS. *BY PAUL S. REINSCH, PH. D. , LL. B. *ECONOMIC CRISES. *BY EDWARD D. JONES, PH. D. *OUTLINE OF ECONOMICS. *BY RICHARD T. ELY. *GOVERNMENT IN SWITZERLAND. *BY JOHN MARTIN VINCENT, PH. D. *ESSAYS IN THE MONETARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. *BY CHARLES J. BULLOCK, PH. D. *SOCIAL CONTROL. *BY EDWARD A. ROSS, PH. D. *HISTORY OF POLITICAL PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES. *BY JESSE MACY, LL. D. *MUNICIPAL ENGINEERING AND SANITATION. *BY M. N. BAKER, PH. B. *DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS. *BY JANE ADDAMS. *COLONIAL GOVERNMENT. *BY PAUL S. REINSCH, PH. D. , LL. B. * * * * * _IN PREPARATION. _ *CUSTOM AND COMPETITION. *BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH. D. , LL. D. *MUNICIPAL SOCIOLOGY. *BY CHARLES ZUEBLIN. * * * * * THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE. _THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY_ * * * * * DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS BY JANE ADDAMSHULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO _New York_THE MACMILLAN COMPANYLONDON: MACMILLAN & CO. , LTD. 1902 Set up and electrotyped March, 1902. ReprintedJune, September, 1902. Norwood PressJ. S. Cushing & Co. --Berwick & SmithNorwood Mass. U. S. A. To: M. R. S. PREFATORY NOTE The following pages present the substance of a course of twelve lectureson "Democracy and Social Ethics" which have been delivered at variouscolleges and university extension centres. In putting them into the form of a book, no attempt has been made tochange the somewhat informal style used in speaking. The "we" and "us"which originally referred to the speaker and her audience are merelyextended to possible readers. Acknowledgment for permission to reprint is extended to _The AtlanticMonthly_, _The International Journal of Ethics_, _The American Journalof Sociology_, and to _The Commons_. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGEINTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER IICHARITABLE EFFORT 13 CHAPTER IIIFILIAL RELATIONS 71 CHAPTER IVHOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT 102 CHAPTER VINDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION 137 CHAPTER VIEDUCATIONAL METHODS 178 CHAPTER VIIPOLITICAL REFORM 221 INDEX 279 DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is butanother word for "righteousness, " that for which many men and women ofevery generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which lifebecomes meaningless. Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of thecommunity almost automatic. It is as easy for most of us to keep fromstealing our dinners as it is to digest them, and there is quite as muchvoluntary morality involved in one process as in the other. To stealwould be for us to fall sadly below the standard of habit andexpectation which makes virtue easy. In the same way we have beencarefully reared to a sense of family obligation, to be kindly andconsiderate to the members of our own households, and to feelresponsible for their well-being. As the rules of conduct have becomeestablished in regard to our self-development and our families, so theyhave been in regard to limited circles of friends. If the fulfilment ofthese claims were all that a righteous life required, the hunger andthirst would be stilled for many good men and women, and the clew ofright living would lie easily in their hands. But we all know that each generation has its own test, thecontemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequatelyjudge of its own moral achievements, and that it may not legitimatelyuse a previous and less vigorous test. The advanced test must indeedinclude that which has already been attained; but if it includes nomore, we shall fail to go forward, thinking complacently that we have"arrived" when in reality we have not yet started. To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, topride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demandssocial adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation. It is perhaps significant that a German critic has of late reminded usthat the one test which the most authoritative and dramatic portrayal ofthe Day of Judgment offers, is the social test. The stern questions arenot in regard to personal and family relations, but did ye visit thepoor, the criminal, the sick, and did ye feed the hungry? All about us are men and women who have become unhappy in regard totheir attitude toward the social order itself; toward the dreary roundof uninteresting work, the pleasures narrowed down to those of appetite, the declining consciousness of brain power, and the lack of mental foodwhich characterizes the lot of the large proportion of theirfellow-citizens. These men and women have caught a moral challengeraised by the exigencies of contemporaneous life; some are bewildered, others who are denied the relief which sturdy action brings are evenseeking an escape, but all are increasingly anxious concerning theiractual relations to the basic organization of society. The test which they would apply to their conduct is a social test. Theyfail to be content with the fulfilment of their family and personalobligations, and find themselves striving to respond to a new demandinvolving a social obligation; they have become conscious of anotherrequirement, and the contribution they would make is toward a code ofsocial ethics. The conception of life which they hold has not yetexpressed itself in social changes or legal enactment, but rather in amental attitude of maladjustment, and in a sense of divergence betweentheir consciences and their conduct. They desire both a clearerdefinition of the code of morality adapted to present day demands and apart in its fulfilment, both a creed and a practice of social morality. In the perplexity of this intricate situation at least one thing isbecoming clear: if the latter day moral ideal is in reality that of asocial morality, it is inevitable that those who desire it must bebrought in contact with the moral experiences of the many in order toprocure an adequate social motive. These men and women have realized this and have disclosed the fact intheir eagerness for a wider acquaintance with and participation in thelife about them. They believe that experience gives the easy andtrustworthy impulse toward right action in the broad as well as in thenarrow relations. We may indeed imagine many of them saying: "Cast ourexperiences in a larger mould if our lives are to be animated by thelarger social aims. We have met the obligations of our family life, notbecause we had made resolutions to that end, but spontaneously, becauseof a common fund of memories and affections, from which the obligationnaturally develops, and we see no other way in which to prepareourselves for the larger social duties. " Such a demand is reasonable, for by our daily experience we have discovered that we cannotmechanically hold up a moral standard, then jump at it in rare momentsof exhilaration when we have the strength for it, but that even as theideal itself must be a rational development of life, so the strength toattain it must be secured from interest in life itself. We slowly learnthat life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure maycome quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as fromselfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception ofDemocracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of allmen, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity andequality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as wellas a test of faith. We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained bytravelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and commonroad where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the sizeof one another's burdens. To follow the path of social morality resultsperforce in the temper if not the practice of the democratic spirit, forit implies that diversified human experience and resultant sympathywhich are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy. There are many indications that this conception of Democracy is growingamong us. We have come to have an enormous interest in human life assuch, accompanied by confidence in its essential soundness. We do notbelieve that genuine experience can lead us astray any more thanscientific data can. We realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment comeonly from contact with social experience; that such contact is thesurest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, andconcerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement. Indeed, it is aconsciousness of the illuminating and dynamic value of this wider andmore thorough human experience which explains in no small degree thatnew curiosity regarding human life which has more of a moral basis thanan intellectual one. The newspapers, in a frank reflection of popular demand, exhibit anomniverous curiosity equally insistent upon the trivial and theimportant. They are perhaps the most obvious manifestations of thatdesire to know, that "What is this?" and "Why do you do that?" of thechild. The first dawn of the social consciousness takes this form, asthe dawning intelligence of the child takes the form of constantquestion and insatiate curiosity. Literature, too, portrays an equally absorbing though better adjusteddesire to know all kinds of life. The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widelyread not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in ameasure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know allsorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better socialadjustment--for the remedying of social ills. Doubtless one under the conviction of sin in regard to social ills findsa vague consolation in reading about the lives of the poor, and derivesa sense of complicity in doing good. He likes to feel that he knowsabout social wrongs even if he does not remedy them, and in a verygenuine sense there is a foundation for this belief. Partly through this wide reading of human life, we find in ourselves anew affinity for all men, which probably never existed in the worldbefore. Evil itself does not shock us as it once did, and we count onlythat man merciful in whom we recognize an understanding of the criminal. We have learned as common knowledge that much of the insensibility andhardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents arealization of the experiences of other people. Already there is aconviction that we are under a moral obligation in choosing ourexperiences, since the result of those experiences must ultimatelydetermine our understanding of life. We know instinctively that if wegrow contemptuous of our fellows, and consciously limit our intercourseto certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit thescope of our ethics. We can recall among the selfish people of our acquaintance at least onecommon characteristic, --the conviction that they are different fromother men and women, that they need peculiar consideration because theyare more sensitive or more refined. Such people "refuse to be bound byany relation save the personally luxurious ones of love and admiration, or the identity of political opinion, or religious creed. " We havelearned to recognize them as selfish, although we blame them not for thewill which chooses to be selfish, but for a narrowness of interest whichdeliberately selects its experience within a limited sphere, and we saythat they illustrate the danger of concentrating the mind on narrow andunprogressive issues. We know, at last, that we can only discover truth by a rational anddemocratic interest in life, and to give truth complete socialexpression is the endeavor upon which we are entering. Thus theidentification with the common lot which is the essential idea ofDemocracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics. It is asthough we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human experience, because we knew that a daintier or less potent draught would not carryus to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat andjostle of the crowd. The six following chapters are studies of various types and groups whoare being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptanceof social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct. No attempt is made to reach a conclusion, nor to offer advice beyond theassumption that the cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy, but the quite unlooked-for result of the studies would seem to indicatethat while the strain and perplexity of the situation is felt mostkeenly by the educated and self-conscious members of the community, thetentative and actual attempts at adjustment are largely coming throughthose who are simpler and less analytical. CHAPTER II CHARITABLE EFFORT All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy, which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip awayfrom us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt toact upon them. Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through acourse of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changingmoral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from thestrain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting uponanother. Probably there is no relation in life which our democracy is changingmore rapidly than the charitable relation--that relation which obtainsbetween benefactor and beneficiary; at the same time there is no pointof contact in our modern experience which reveals so clearly the lack ofthat equality which democracy implies. We have reached the moment whendemocracy has made such inroads upon this relationship, that thecomplacency of the old-fashioned charitable man is gone forever; while, at the same time, the very need and existence of charity, denies us theconsolation and freedom which democracy will at last give. It is quite obvious that the ethics of none of us are clearly defined, and we are continually obliged to act in circles of habit, based uponconvictions which we no longer hold. Thus our estimate of the effect ofenvironment and social conditions has doubtless shifted faster than ourmethods of administrating charity have changed. Formerly when it wasbelieved that poverty was synonymous with vice and laziness, and thatthe prosperous man was the righteous man, charity was administeredharshly with a good conscience; for the charitable agent really blamedthe individual for his poverty, and the very fact of his own superiorprosperity gave him a certain consciousness of superior morality. Wehave learned since that time to measure by other standards, and haveceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive respect; whileit is still rewarded out of all proportion to any other, its possessionis by no means assumed to imply the possession of the highest moralqualities. We have learned to judge men by their social virtues as wellas by their business capacity, by their devotion to intellectual anddisinterested aims, and by their public spirit, and we naturally resentbeing obliged to judge poor people so solely upon the industrial side. Our democratic instinct instantly takes alarm. It is largely in thismodern tendency to judge all men by one democratic standard, while theold charitable attitude commonly allowed the use of two standards, thatmuch of the difficulty adheres. We know that unceasing bodily toilbecomes wearing and brutalizing, and our position is totally untenableif we judge large numbers of our fellows solely upon their success inmaintaining it. The daintily clad charitable visitor who steps into the little housemade untidy by the vigorous efforts of her hostess, the washerwoman, isno longer sure of her superiority to the latter; she recognizes that herhostess after all represents social value and industrial use, as overagainst her own parasitic cleanliness and a social standing attainedonly through status. The only families who apply for aid to the charitable agencies are thosewho have come to grief on the industrial side; it may be throughsickness, through loss of work, or for other guiltless and inevitablereasons; but the fact remains that they are industrially ailing, andmust be bolstered and helped into industrial health. The charityvisitor, let us assume, is a young college woman, well-bred andopen-minded; when she visits the family assigned to her, she is oftenembarrassed to find herself obliged to lay all the stress of herteaching and advice upon the industrial virtues, and to treat themembers of the family almost exclusively as factors in the industrialsystem. She insists that they must work and be self-supporting, that themost dangerous of all situations is idleness, that seeking one's ownpleasure, while ignoring claims and responsibilities, is the mostignoble of actions. The members of her assigned family may have othercharms and virtues--they may possibly be kind and considerate of eachother, generous to their friends, but it is her business to stick to theindustrial side. As she daily holds up these standards, it often occursto the mind of the sensitive visitor, whose conscience has been madetender by much talk of brotherhood and equality, that she has no rightto say these things; that her untrained hands are no more fitted tocope with actual conditions than those of her broken-down family. The grandmother of the charity visitor could have done the industrialpreaching very well, because she did have the industrial virtues andhousewifely training. In a generation our experiences have changed, andour views with them; but we still keep on in the old methods, whichcould be applied when our consciences were in line with them, but whichare daily becoming more difficult as we divide up into people who workwith their hands and those who do not. The charity visitor belonging tothe latter class is perplexed by recognitions and suggestions which thesituation forces upon her. Our democracy has taught us to apply ourmoral teaching all around, and the moralist is rapidly becoming sosensitive that when his life does not exemplify his ethical convictions, he finds it difficult to preach. Added to this is a consciousness, in the mind of the visitor, of agenuine misunderstanding of her motives by the recipients of hercharity, and by their neighbors. Let us take a neighborhood of poorpeople, and test their ethical standards by those of the charityvisitor, who comes with the best desire in the world to help them out oftheir distress. A most striking incongruity, at once apparent, is thedifference between the emotional kindness with which relief is given byone poor neighbor to another poor neighbor, and the guarded care withwhich relief is given by a charity visitor to a charity recipient. Theneighborhood mind is at once confronted not only by the difference ofmethod, but by an absolute clashing of two ethical standards. A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city issufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborlyrelations. There is the greatest willingness to lend or borrow anything, and all the residents of the given tenement know the most intimatefamily affairs of all the others. The fact that the economic conditionof all alike is on a most precarious level makes the ready outflow ofsympathy and material assistance the most natural thing in the world. There are numberless instances of self-sacrifice quite unknown in thecircles where greater economic advantages make that kind of intimateknowledge of one's neighbors impossible. An Irish family in which theman has lost his place, and the woman is struggling to eke out thescanty savings by day's work, will take in the widow and her fivechildren who have been turned into the street, without a moment'sreflection upon the physical discomforts involved. The most malignedlandlady who lives in the house with her tenants is usually ready tolend a scuttle full of coal to one of them who may be out of work, or toshare her supper. A woman for whom the writer had long tried in vain tofind work failed to appear at the appointed time when employment wassecured at last. Upon investigation it transpired that a neighborfurther down the street was taken ill, that the children ran for thefamily friend, who went of course, saying simply when reasons for hernon-appearance were demanded, "It broke me heart to leave the place, butwhat could I do?" A woman whose husband was sent up to the city prisonfor the maximum term, just three months, before the birth of her childfound herself penniless at the end of that time, having gradually soldher supply of household furniture. She took refuge with a friend whomshe supposed to be living in three rooms in another part of town. Whenshe arrived, however, she discovered that her friend's husband had beenout of work so long that they had been reduced to living in one room. The friend, however, took her in, and the friend's husband was obligedto sleep upon a bench in the park every night for a week, which he diduncomplainingly if not cheerfully. Fortunately it was summer, "and itonly rained one night. " The writer could not discover from the youngmother that she had any special claim upon the "friend" beyond the factthat they had formerly worked together in the same factory. The husbandshe had never seen until the night of her arrival, when he at once wentforth in search of a midwife who would consent to come upon his promiseof future payment. The evolutionists tell us that the instinct to pity, the impulse to aidhis fellows, served man at a very early period, as a rude rule of rightand wrong. There is no doubt that this rude rule still holds among manypeople with whom charitable agencies are brought into contact, and thattheir ideas of right and wrong are quite honestly outraged by themethods of these agencies. When they see the delay and caution withwhich relief is given, it does not appear to them a conscientiousscruple, but as the cold and calculating action of a selfish man. It isnot the aid that they are accustomed to receive from their neighbors, and they do not understand why the impulse which drives people to "begood to the poor" should be so severely supervised. They feel, remotely, that the charity visitor is moved by motives that are alienand unreal. They may be superior motives, but they are different, andthey are "agin nature. " They cannot comprehend why a person whoseintellectual perceptions are stronger than his natural impulses, shouldgo into charity work at all. The only man they are accustomed to seewhose intellectual perceptions are stronger than his tenderness ofheart, is the selfish and avaricious man who is frankly "on the make. "If the charity visitor is such a person, why does she pretend to likethe poor? Why does she not go into business at once? We may say, of course, that it is a primitive view of life, which thusconfuses intellectuality and business ability; but it is a view quitehonestly held by many poor people who are obliged to receive charityfrom time to time. In moments of indignation the poor have been known tosay: "What do you want, anyway? If you have nothing to give us, why notlet us alone and stop your questionings and investigations?" "Theyinvestigated me for three weeks, and in the end gave me nothing but ablack character, " a little woman has been heard to assert. Thisindignation, which is for the most part taciturn, and a certain kindlycontempt for her abilities, often puzzles the charity visitor. Thelatter may be explained by the standard of worldly success which thevisited families hold. Success does not ordinarily go, in the minds ofthe poor, with charity and kind-heartedness, but rather with theopposite qualities. The rich landlord is he who collects with sternness, who accepts no excuse, and will have his own. There are moments ofirritation and of real bitterness against him, but there is stilladmiration, because he is rich and successful. The good-naturedlandlord, he who pities and spares his poverty-pressed tenants, isseldom rich. He often lives in the back of his house, which he has ownedfor a long time, perhaps has inherited; but he has been able toaccumulate little. He commands the genuine love and devotion of many apoor soul, but he is treated with a certain lack of respect. In onesense he is a failure. The charity visitor, just because she is a personwho concerns herself with the poor, receives a certain amount of thisgood-natured and kindly contempt, sometimes real affection, but littlegenuine respect. The poor are accustomed to help each other and torespond according to their kindliness; but when it comes to worldlyjudgment, they use industrial success as the sole standard. In the caseof the charity visitor who has neither natural kindness nor dazzlingriches, they are deprived of both standards, and they find it of courseutterly impossible to judge of the motive of organized charity. Even those of us who feel most sorely the need of more order inaltruistic effort and see the end to be desired, find somethingdistasteful in the juxtaposition of the words "organized" and "charity. "We say in defence that we are striving to turn this emotion into amotive, that pity is capricious, and not to be depended on; that we meanto give it the dignity of conscious duty. But at bottom we distrust alittle a scheme which substitutes a theory of social conduct for thenatural promptings of the heart, even although we appreciate thecomplexity of the situation. The poor man who has fallen into distress, when he first asks aid, instinctively expects tenderness, consideration, and forgiveness. If it is the first time, it has taken him long to makeup his mind to take the step. He comes somewhat bruised and battered, and instead of being met with warmth of heart and sympathy, he is atonce chilled by an investigation and an intimation that he ought towork. He does not recognize the disciplinary aspect of the situation. The only really popular charity is that of the visiting nurses, who byvirtue of their professional training render services which may easilybe interpreted into sympathy and kindness, ministering as they do toobvious needs which do not require investigation. The state of mind which an investigation arouses on both sides is mostunfortunate; but the perplexity and clashing of different standards, with the consequent misunderstandings, are not so bad as the moraldeterioration which is almost sure to follow. When the agent or visitor appears among the poor, and they discover thatunder certain conditions food and rent and medical aid are dispensedfrom some unknown source, every man, woman, and child is quick to learnwhat the conditions may be, and to follow them. Though in their eyes aglass of beer is quite right and proper when taken as anyself-respecting man should take it; though they know that cleanliness isan expensive virtue which can be required of few; though they realizethat saving is well-nigh impossible when but a few cents can be laid byat a time; though their feeling for the church may be something quiteelusive of definition and quite apart from daily living: to the visitorthey gravely laud temperance and cleanliness and thrift and religiousobservance. The deception in the first instances arises from a wonderinginability to understand the ethical ideals which can require suchimpossible virtues, and from an innocent desire to please. It is easy totrace the development of the mental suggestions thus received. When Adiscovers that B, who is very little worse off than he, receives goodthings from an inexhaustible supply intended for the poor at large, hefeels that he too has a claim for his share, and step by step there isdeveloped the competitive spirit which so horrifies charity visitorswhen it shows itself in a tendency to "work" the relief-giving agencies. The most serious effect upon the poor comes when dependence upon thecharitable society is substituted for the natural outgoing of human loveand sympathy, which, happily, we all possess in some degree. Thespontaneous impulse to sit up all night with the neighbor's sick childis turned into righteous indignation against the district nurse, because she goes home at six o'clock, and doesn't do it herself. Or thekindness which would have prompted the quick purchase of much neededmedicine is transformed into a voluble scoring of the dispensary, because it gives prescriptions and not drugs; and "who can get well on apiece of paper?" If a poor woman knows that her neighbor next door has no shoes, she isquite willing to lend her own, that her neighbor may go decently tomass, or to work; for she knows the smallest item about the scantywardrobe, and cheerfully helps out. When the charity visitor comes in, all the neighbors are baffled as to what her circumstances may be. Theyknow she does not need a new pair of shoes, and rather suspect that shehas a dozen pairs at home; which, indeed, she sometimes has. Theyimagine untold stores which they may call upon, and her most generousgift is considered niggardly, compared with what she might do. She oughtto get new shoes for the family all round, "she sees well enough thatthey need them. " It is no more than the neighbor herself would do, haspractically done, when she lent her own shoes. The charity visitor hasbroken through the natural rule of giving, which, in a primitivesociety, is bounded only by the need of the recipient and the resourcesof the giver; and she gets herself into untold trouble when she isjudged by the ethics of that primitive society. The neighborhood understands the selfish rich people who stay in theirown part of town, where all their associates have shoes and otherthings. Such people don't bother themselves about the poor; they arelike the rich landlords of the neighborhood experience. But this ladyvisitor, who pretends to be good to the poor, and certainly does talk asthough she were kind-hearted, what does she come for, if she does notintend to give them things which are so plainly needed? The visitor says, sometimes, that in holding her poor family so hard toa standard of thrift she is really breaking down a rule of higher livingwhich they formerly possessed; that saving, which seems quitecommendable in a comfortable part of town, appears almost criminal in apoorer quarter where the next-door neighbor needs food, even if thechildren of the family do not. She feels the sordidness of constantly being obliged to urge theindustrial view of life. The benevolent individual of fifty years agohonestly believed that industry and self-denial in youth would result incomfortable possessions for old age. It was, indeed, the method he hadpractised in his own youth, and by which he had probably obtainedwhatever fortune he possessed. He therefore reproved the poor family forindulging their children, urged them to work long hours, and was utterlyuntouched by many scruples which afflict the contemporary charityvisitor. She says sometimes, "Why must I talk always of getting work andsaving money, the things I know nothing about? If it were anything elseI had to urge, I could do it; anything like Latin prose, which I hadworried through myself, it would not be so hard. " But she finds itdifficult to connect the experiences of her youth with the experiencesof the visited family. Because of this diversity in experience, the visitor is continuallysurprised to find that the safest platitude may be challenged. Sherefers quite naturally to the "horrors of the saloon, " and discoversthat the head of her visited family does not connect them with "horrors"at all. He remembers all the kindnesses he has received there, the freelunch and treating which goes on, even when a man is out of work and notable to pay up; the loan of five dollars he got there when the charityvisitor was miles away and he was threatened with eviction. He maylisten politely to her reference to "horrors, " but considers it only"temperance talk. " The charity visitor may blame the women for lack of gentleness towardtheir children, for being hasty and rude to them, until she learns thatthe standard of breeding is not that of gentleness toward the childrenso much as the observance of certain conventions, such as thepunctilious wearing of mourning garments after the death of a child. Thestandard of gentleness each mother has to work out largely by herself, assisted only by the occasional shame-faced remark of a neighbor, "Thatthey do better when you are not too hard on them"; but the wearing ofmourning garments is sustained by the definitely expressed sentiment ofevery woman in the street. The mother would have to bear social blame, acertain social ostracism, if she failed to comply with that requirement. It is not comfortable to outrage the conventions of those among whom welive, and, if our social life be a narrow one, it is still moredifficult. The visitor may choke a little when she sees the lessenedsupply of food and the scanty clothing provided for the remainingchildren in order that one may be conventionally mourned, but shedoesn't talk so strongly against it as she would have done during herfirst month of experience with the family since bereaved. The subject of clothes indeed perplexes the visitor constantly, and theresult of her reflections may be summed up somewhat in this wise: Thegirl who has a definite social standing, who has been to a fashionableschool or to a college, whose family live in a house seen and known byall her friends and associates, may afford to be very simple, or evenshabby as to her clothes, if she likes. But the working girl, whosefamily lives in a tenement, or moves from one small apartment toanother, who has little social standing and has to make her own place, knows full well how much habit and style of dress has to do with herposition. Her income goes into her clothing, out of all proportion tothe amount which she spends upon other things. But, if socialadvancement is her aim, it is the most sensible thing she can do. She isjudged largely by her clothes. Her house furnishing, with its pitifullittle decorations, her scanty supply of books, are never seen by thepeople whose social opinions she most values. Her clothes are herbackground, and from them she is largely judged. It is due to this factthat girls' clubs succeed best in the business part of town, where"working girls" and "young ladies" meet upon an equal footing, and wherethe clothes superficially look very much alike. Bright and ambitiousgirls will come to these down-town clubs to eat lunch and rest at noon, to study all sorts of subjects and listen to lectures, when they mighthesitate a long time before joining a club identified with their ownneighborhood, where they would be judged not solely on their own meritsand the unconscious social standing afforded by good clothes, but byother surroundings which are not nearly up to these. For the samereason, girls' clubs are infinitely more difficult to organize in littletowns and villages, where every one knows every one else, just how thefront parlor is furnished, and the amount of mortgage there is upon thehouse. These facts get in the way of a clear and unbiassed judgment;they impede the democratic relationship and add to theself-consciousness of all concerned. Every one who has had to do withdown-town girls' clubs has had the experience of going into the home ofsome bright, well-dressed girl, to discover it uncomfortable and perhapswretched, and to find the girl afterward carefully avoiding her, although the working girl may not have been at home when the call wasmade, and the visitor may have carried herself with the utmost courtesythroughout. In some very successful down-town clubs the home address isnot given at all, and only the "business address" is required. Have weworked out our democracy further in regard to clothes than anythingelse? The charity visitor has been rightly brought up to consider it vulgar tospend much money upon clothes, to care so much for "appearances. " Sherealizes dimly that the care for personal decoration over that for one'shome or habitat is in some way primitive and undeveloped; but she issilenced by its obvious need. She also catches a glimpse of the factthat the disproportionate expenditure of the poor in the matter ofclothes is largely due to the exclusiveness of the rich who hide fromthem the interior of their houses, and their more subtle pleasures, while of necessity exhibiting their street clothes and their streetmanners. Every one who goes shopping at the same time may see theclothes of the richest women in town, but only those invited to herreceptions see the Corot on her walls or the bindings in her library. The poor naturally try to bridge the difference by reproducing thestreet clothes which they have seen. They are striving to conform to acommon standard which their democratic training presupposes belongs toall of us. The charity visitor may regret that the Italian peasantwoman has laid aside her picturesque kerchief and substituted a cheapstreet hat. But it is easy to recognize the first attempt towarddemocratic expression. The charity visitor finds herself still more perplexed when she comes toconsider such problems as those of early marriage and child labor; forshe cannot deal with them according to economic theories, or accordingto the conventions which have regulated her own life. She finds both ofthese fairly upset by her intimate knowledge of the situation, and hersympathy for those into whose lives she has gained a curious insight. She discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and ittakes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insistso strenuously upon the conventions of her own class, which fail to fitthe bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people. Thecharity visitor holds well-grounded views upon the imprudence of earlymarriages, quite naturally because she comes from a family and circleof professional and business people. A professional man is scarcelyequipped and started in his profession before he is thirty. A businessman, if he is on the road to success, is much nearer prosperity atthirty-five than twenty-five, and it is therefore wise for these men notto marry in the twenties; but this does not apply to the workingman. Inmany trades he is laid upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly alltrades he receives the largest wages in his life between twenty andthirty. If the young workingman has all his wages to himself, he willprobably establish habits of personal comfort, which he cannot keep upwhen he has to divide with a family--habits which he can, perhaps, neverovercome. The sense of prudence, the necessity for saving, can never come to aprimitive, emotional man with the force of a conviction; but thenecessity of providing for his children is a powerful incentive. Henaturally regards his children as his savings-bank; he expects them tocare for him when he gets old, and in some trades old age comes veryearly. A Jewish tailor was quite lately sent to the Cook Countypoorhouse, paralyzed beyond recovery at the age of thirty-five. Had hislittle boy of nine been but a few years older, he might have been sparedthis sorrow of public charity. He was, in fact, better able to wellsupport a family when he was twenty than when he was thirty-five, forhis wages had steadily grown less as the years went on. Another tailorwhom I know, who is also a Socialist, always speaks of saving as abourgeois virtue, one quite impossible to the genuine workingman. Hesupports a family consisting of himself, a wife and three children, andhis two parents on eight dollars a week. He insists it would be criminalnot to expend every penny of this amount upon food and shelter, and heexpects his children later to care for him. This economic pressure also accounts for the tendency to put children towork overyoung and thus cripple their chances for individualdevelopment and usefulness, and with the avaricious parent also leads toexploitation. "I have fed her for fourteen years, now she can help mepay my mortgage" is not an unusual reply when a hardworking father isexpostulated with because he would take his bright daughter out ofschool and put her into a factory. It has long been a common error for the charity visitor, who is stronglyurging her "family" toward self-support, to suggest, or at leastconnive, that the children be put to work early, although she has notthe excuse that the parents have. It is so easy, after one has beentaking the industrial view for a long time, to forget the larger andmore social claim; to urge that the boy go to work and support hisparents, who are receiving charitable aid. She does not realize what acruel advantage the person who distributes charity has, when she givesadvice. The manager in a huge mercantile establishment employing many childrenwas able to show during a child-labor investigation, that the onlychildren under fourteen years of age in his employ were protégés who hadbeen urged upon him by philanthropic ladies, not only acquaintances ofhis, but valued patrons of the establishment. It is not that the charityvisitor is less wise than other people, but she has fixed her mind solong upon the industrial lameness of her family that she is eager toseize any crutch, however weak, which may enable them to get on. She has failed to see that the boy who attempts to prematurely supporthis widowed mother may lower wages, add an illiterate member to thecommunity, and arrest the development of a capable workingman. As shehas failed to see that the rules which obtain in regard to the age ofmarriage in her own family may not apply to the workingman, so also shefails to understand that the present conditions of employmentsurrounding a factory child are totally unlike those which obtainedduring the energetic youth of her father. The child who is prematurely put to work is constantly oppressed by thisnever ending question of the means of subsistence, and even littlechildren are sometimes almost crushed with the cares of life throughtheir affectionate sympathy. The writer knows a little Italian lad ofsix to whom the problems of food, clothing, and shelter have become soimmediate and pressing that, although an imaginative child, he is unableto see life from any other standpoint. The goblin or bugaboo, feared bythe more fortunate child, in his mind, has come to be the need of coalwhich caused his father hysterical and demonstrative grief when itcarried off his mother's inherited linen, the mosaic of St. Joseph, and, worst of all, his own rubber boots. He once came to a party atHull-House, and was interested in nothing save a gas stove which he sawin the kitchen. He became excited over the discovery that fire could beproduced without fuel. "I will tell my father of this stove. You buy nocoal, you need only a match. Anybody will give you a match. " He wastaken to visit at a country-house and at once inquired how much rent waspaid for it. On being told carelessly by his hostess that they paid norent for that house, he came back quite wild with interest that theproblem was solved. "Me and my father will go to the country. You get abig house, all warm, without rent. " Nothing else in the countryinterested him but the subject of rent, and he talked of that with anexclusiveness worthy of a single taxer. The struggle for existence, which is so much harsher among people nearthe edge of pauperism, sometimes leaves ugly marks on character, and thecharity visitor finds these indirect results most mystifying. Parentswho work hard and anticipate an old age when they can no longer earn, take care that their children shall expect to divide their wages withthem from the very first. Such a parent, when successful, impresses theimmature nervous system of the child thus tyrannically establishinghabits of obedience, so that the nerves and will may not depart fromthis control when the child is older. The charity visitor, whose familyrelation is lifted quite out of this, does not in the least understandthe industrial foundation for this family tyranny. The head of a kindergarten training-class once addressed a club ofworking women, and spoke of the despotism which is often establishedover little children. She said that the so-called determination to breaka child's will many times arose from a lust of dominion, and she urgedthe ideal relationship founded upon love and confidence. But many of thewomen were puzzled. One of them remarked to the writer as she came outof the club room, "If you did not keep control over them from the timethey were little, you would never get their wages when they are grownup. " Another one said, "Ah, of course she (meaning the speaker) doesn'thave to depend upon her children's wages. She can afford to be lax withthem, because even if they don't give money to her, she can get alongwithout it. " There are an impressive number of children who uncomplainingly andconstantly hand over their weekly wages to their parents, sometimesreceiving back ten cents or a quarter for spending-money, but quite asoften nothing at all; and the writer knows one girl of twenty-five whofor six years has received two cents a week from the constantly fallingwages which she earns in a large factory. Is it habit or virtue whichholds her steady in this course? If love and tenderness had beensubstituted for parental despotism, would the mother have had enoughaffection, enough power of expression to hold her daughter's sense ofmoney obligation through all these years? This girl who spends herpaltry two cents on chewing-gum and goes plainly clad in clothes of hermother's choosing, while many of her friends spend their entire wages onthose clothes which factory girls love so well, must be held by somepowerful force. The charity visitor finds these subtle and elusive problems mostharrowing. The head of a family she is visiting is a man who has becomeblack-listed in a strike. He is not a very good workman, and this, addedto his agitator's reputation, keeps him out of work for a long time. Thefatal result of being long out of work follows: he becomes less and lesseager for it, and gets a "job" less and less frequently. In order tokeep up his self-respect, and still more to keep his wife's respect forhim, he yields to the little self-deception that this prolonged idlenessfollows because he was once blacklisted, and he gradually becomes amartyr. Deep down in his heart perhaps--but who knows what may be deepdown in his heart? Whatever may be in his wife's, she does not show foran instant that she thinks he has grown lazy, and accustomed to see herearn, by sewing and cleaning, most of the scanty income for the family. The charity visitor, however, does see this, and she also sees that theother men who were in the strike have gone back to work. She furtherknows by inquiry and a little experience that the man is not skilful. She cannot, however, call him lazy and good-for-nothing, and denouncehim as worthless as her grandmother might have done, because of certainintellectual conceptions at which she has arrived. She sees otherworkmen come to him for shrewd advice; she knows that he spends manymore hours in the public library reading good books than the averageworkman has time to do. He has formed no bad habits and has yielded onlyto those subtle temptations toward a life of leisure which come to theintellectual man. He lacks the qualifications which would induce hisunion to engage him as a secretary or organizer, but he is a constantspeaker at workingmen's meetings, and takes a high moral attitude on thequestions discussed there. He contributes a certain intellectuality tohis friends, and he has undoubted social value. The neighboring womenconfide to the charity visitor their sympathy with his wife, becauseshe has to work so hard, and because her husband does not "provide. "Their remarks are sharpened by a certain resentment toward thesuperiority of the husband's education and gentle manners. The charityvisitor is ashamed to take this point of view, for she knows that it isnot altogether fair. She is reminded of a college friend of hers, whotold her that she was not going to allow her literary husband to writeunworthy potboilers for the sake of earning a living. "I insist that weshall live within my own income; that he shall not publish until he isready, and can give his genuine message. " The charity visitor recallswhat she has heard of another acquaintance, who urged her husband todecline a lucrative position as a railroad attorney, because she wishedhim to be free to take municipal positions, and handle public questionswithout the inevitable suspicion which unaccountably attaches itself ina corrupt city to a corporation attorney. The action of these two womenseemed noble to her, but in their cases they merely lived on a lesserincome. In the case of the workingman's wife, she faced living on noincome at all, or on the precarious one which she might be able to gettogether. She sees that this third woman has made the greatest sacrifice, and sheis utterly unwilling to condemn her while praising the friends of herown social position. She realizes, of course, that the situation ischanged by the fact that the third family needs charity, while the othertwo do not; but, after all, they have not asked for it, and their plightwas only discovered through an accident to one of the children. Thecharity visitor has been taught that her mission is to preserve thefinest traits to be found in her visited family, and she shrinks fromthe thought of convincing the wife that her husband is worthless and shesuspects that she might turn all this beautiful devotion intocomplaining drudgery. To be sure, she could give up visiting the familyaltogether, but she has become much interested in the progress of thecrippled child who eagerly anticipates her visits, and she also suspectsthat she will never know many finer women than the mother. She isunwilling, therefore, to give up the friendship, and goes on bearing herperplexities as best she may. The first impulse of our charity visitor is to be somewhat severe withher shiftless family for spending money on pleasures and indulging theirchildren out of all proportion to their means. The poor family whichreceives beans and coal from the county, and pays for a bicycle on theinstalment plan, is not unknown to any of us. But as the growth ofjuvenile crime becomes gradually understood, and as the danger of givingno legitimate and organized pleasure to the child becomes clearer, weremember that primitive man had games long before he cared for a houseor regular meals. There are certain boys in many city neighborhoods who form themselvesinto little gangs with a leader who is somewhat more intrepid than therest. Their favorite performance is to break into an untenanted house, to knock off the faucets, and cut the lead pipe, which they sell to thenearest junk dealer. With the money thus procured they buy beer anddrink it in little free-booter's groups sitting in the alley. Frombeginning to end they have the excitement of knowing that they may beseen and caught by the "coppers, " and are at times quite breathless withsuspense. It is not the least unlike, in motive and execution, thepractice of country boys who go forth in squads to set traps for rabbitsor to round up a coon. It is characterized by a pure spirit for adventure, and the vicioustraining really begins when they are arrested, or when an older boyundertakes to guide them into further excitements. From the verybeginning the most enticing and exciting experiences which they haveseen have been connected with crime. The policeman embodies all themajesty of successful law and established government in his brassbuttons and dazzlingly equipped patrol wagon. The boy who has been arrested comes back more or less a hero with a taleto tell of the interior recesses of the mysterious police station. Theearliest public excitement the child remembers is divided between therattling fire engines, "the time there was a fire in the next block, "and all the tense interest of the patrol wagon "the time the drunkestlady in our street was arrested. " In the first year of their settlement the Hull-House residents tookfifty kindergarten children to Lincoln Park, only to be grieved by theirapathetic interest in trees and flowers. As they came back with anomnibus full of tired and sleepy children, they were surprised to findthem galvanized into sudden life because a patrol wagon rattled by. Their eager little heads popped out of the windows full of questioning:"Was it a man or a woman?" "How many policemen inside?" and eager littletongues began to tell experiences of arrests which baby eyes hadwitnessed. The excitement of a chase, the chances of competition, and the love of afight are all centred in the outward display of crime. The parent whoreceives charitable aid and yet provides pleasure for his child, and iswilling to indulge him in his play, is blindly doing one of the wisestthings possible; and no one is more eager for playgrounds and vacationschools than the conscientious charity visitor. This very imaginative impulse and attempt to live in a pictured world oftheir own, which seems the simplest prerogative of childhood, oftenleads the boys into difficulty. Three boys aged seven, nine, and tenwere once brought into a neighboring police station under the charge ofpilfering and destroying property. They had dug a cave under a railroadviaduct in which they had spent many days and nights of the summervacation. They had "swiped" potatoes and other vegetables fromhucksters' carts, which they had cooked and eaten in true brigandfashion; they had decorated the interior of the excavation with stolenjunk, representing swords and firearms, to their romantic imaginations. The father of the ringleader was a janitor living in a building fivemiles away in a prosperous portion of the city. The landlord did notwant an active boy in the building, and his mother was dead; the janitorpaid for the boy's board and lodging to a needy woman living near theviaduct. She conscientiously gave him his breakfast and supper, and leftsomething in the house for his dinner every morning when she went towork in a neighboring factory; but was too tired by night to challengehis statement that he "would rather sleep outdoors in the summer, " or toinvestigate what he did during the day. In the meantime the three boyslived in a world of their own, made up from the reading of adventurousstories and their vivid imaginations, steadily pilfering more and moreas the days went by, and actually imperilling the safety of the trafficpassing over the street on the top of the viaduct. In spite of vigorousexertions on their behalf, one of the boys was sent to the ReformSchool, comforting himself with the conclusive remark, "Well, we had funanyway, and maybe they will let us dig a cave at the School; it is inthe country, where we can't hurt anything. " In addition to books of adventure, or even reading of any sort, thescenes and ideals of the theatre largely form the manners and morals ofthe young people. "Going to the theatre" is indeed the most common andsatisfactory form of recreation. Many boys who conscientiously give alltheir wages to their mothers have returned each week ten cents to payfor a seat in the gallery of a theatre on Sunday afternoon. It is theirone satisfactory glimpse of life--the moment when they "issue forth fromthemselves" and are stirred and thoroughly interested. They quite simplyadopt as their own, and imitate as best they can, all that they seethere. In moments of genuine grief and excitement the words and thegestures they employ are those copied from the stage, and the tawdryexpression often conflicts hideously with the fine and genuine emotionof which it is the inadequate and vulgar vehicle. As in the matter of dress, more refined and simpler manners and mode ofexpressions are unseen by them, and they must perforce copy what theyknow. If we agree with a recent definition of Art, as that which causes thespectator to lose his sense of isolation, there is no doubt that thepopular theatre, with all its faults, more nearly fulfils the functionof art for the multitude of working people than all the "free galleries"and picture exhibits combined. The greatest difficulty is experienced when the two standards comesharply together, and when both sides make an attempt at understandingand explanation. The difficulty of making clear one's own ethicalstandpoint is at times insurmountable. A woman who had bought and soldschool books stolen from the school fund, --books which are all plainlymarked with a red stamp, --came to Hull House one morning in greatdistress because she had been arrested, and begged a resident "to speakto the judge. " She gave as a reason the fact that the House had knownher for six years, and had once been very good to her when her littlegirl was buried. The resident more than suspected that her visitor knewthe school books were stolen when buying them, and any attempt to talkupon that subject was evidently considered very rude. The visitor wishedto get out of her trial, and evidently saw no reason why the Houseshould not help her. The alderman was out of town, so she could not goto him. After a long conversation the visitor entirely failed to getanother point of view and went away grieved and disappointed at arefusal, thinking the resident simply disobliging; wondering, no doubt, why such a mean woman had once been good to her; leaving the resident, on the other hand, utterly baffled and in the state of mind she wouldhave been in, had she brutally insisted that a little child should liftweights too heavy for its undeveloped muscles. Such a situation brings out the impossibility of substituting a higherethical standard for a lower one without similarity of experience, butit is not as painful as that illustrated by the following example, inwhich the highest ethical standard yet attained by the charity recipientis broken down, and the substituted one not in the least understood:-- A certain charity visitor is peculiarly appealed to by the weakness andpathos of forlorn old age. She is responsible for the well-being ofperhaps a dozen old women to whom she sustains a sincerely affectionateand almost filial relation. Some of them learn to take her benefactionsquite as if they came from their own relatives, grumbling at all shedoes, and scolding her with a family freedom. One of these poor oldwomen was injured in a fire years ago. She has but the fragment of ahand left, and is grievously crippled in her feet. Through years of painshe had become addicted to opium, and when she first came under thevisitor's care, was only held from the poorhouse by the awful thoughtthat she would there perish without her drug. Five years of tender carehave done wonders for her. She lives in two neat little rooms, wherewith her thumb and two fingers she makes innumerable quilts, which shesells and gives away with the greatest delight. Her opium is regulatedto a set amount taken each day, and she has been drawn away from muchdrinking. She is a voracious reader, and has her head full of strangetales made up from books and her own imagination. At one time it seemedimpossible to do anything for her in Chicago, and she was kept for twoyears in a suburb, where the family of the charity visitor lived, andwhere she was nursed through several hazardous illnesses. She now livesa better life than she did, but she is still far from being a model oldwoman. The neighbors are constantly shocked by the fact that she issupported and comforted by a "charity lady, " while at the same time sheoccasionally "rushes the growler, " scolding at the boys lest they jarher in her tottering walk. The care of her has broken through even thatsecond standard, which the neighborhood had learned to recognize as thestandard of charitable societies, that only the "worthy poor" are to behelped; that temperance and thrift are the virtues which receive theplums of benevolence. The old lady herself is conscious of thiscriticism. Indeed, irate neighbors tell her to her face that she doesn'tin the least deserve what she gets. In order to disarm them, and at thesame time to explain what would otherwise seem loving-kindness socolossal as to be abnormal, she tells them that during her sojourn inthe suburb she discovered an awful family secret, --a horrible scandalconnected with the long-suffering charity visitor; that it is in orderto prevent the divulgence of this that she constantly receives herministrations. Some of her perplexed neighbors accept this explanationas simple and offering a solution of this vexed problem. Doubtless manyof them have a glimpse of the real state of affairs, of the love andpatience which ministers to need irrespective of worth. But thestandard is too high for most of them, and it sometimes seemsunfortunate to break down the second standard, which holds that peoplewho "rush the growler" are not worthy of charity, and that there is acertain justice attained when they go to the poorhouse. It is certainlydangerous to break down the lower, unless the higher is made clear. Just when our affection becomes large enough to care for the unworthyamong the poor as we would care for the unworthy among our own kin, iscertainly a perplexing question. To say that it should never be so, is acomment upon our democratic relations to them which few of us would bewilling to make. Of what use is all this striving and perplexity? Has the experience anyvalue? It is certainly genuine, for it induces an occasional charityvisitor to live in a tenement house as simply as the other tenants do. It drives others to give up visiting the poor altogether, because, theyclaim, it is quite impossible unless the individual becomes a member ofa sisterhood, which requires, as some of the Roman Catholic sisterhoodsdo, that the member first take the vows of obedience and poverty, sothat she can have nothing to give save as it is first given to her, andthus she is not harassed by a constant attempt at adjustment. Both the tenement-house resident and the sister assume to have putthemselves upon the industrial level of their neighbors, although theyhave left out the most awful element of poverty, that of imminent fearof starvation and a neglected old age. The young charity visitor who goes from a family living upon a mostprecarious industrial level to her own home in a prosperous part of thecity, if she is sensitive at all, is never free from perplexities whichour growing democracy forces upon her. We sometimes say that our charity is too scientific, but we woulddoubtless be much more correct in our estimate if we said that it is notscientific enough. We dislike the entire arrangement of cardsalphabetically classified according to streets and names of families, with the unrelated and meaningless details attached to them. Our feelingof revolt is probably not unlike that which afflicted the students ofbotany and geology in the middle of the last century, when flowers weretabulated in alphabetical order, when geology was taught by coloredcharts and thin books. No doubt the students, wearied to death, manytimes said that it was all too scientific, and were much perplexed andworried when they found traces of structure and physiology which theirso-called scientific principles were totally unable to account for. Butall this happened before science had become evolutionary and scientificat all, before it had a principle of life from within. The veryindications and discoveries which formerly perplexed, later illuminedand made the study absorbing and vital. We are singularly slow to apply this evolutionary principle to humanaffairs in general, although it is fast being applied to the educationof children. We are at last learning to follow the development of thechild; to expect certain traits under certain conditions; to adaptmethods and matter to his growing mind. No "advanced educator" can allowhimself to be so absorbed in the question of what a child ought to beas to exclude the discovery of what he is. But in our charitable effortswe think much more of what a man ought to be than of what he is or ofwhat he may become; and we ruthlessly force our conventions andstandards upon him, with a sternness which we would consider stupidindeed did an educator use it in forcing his mature intellectualconvictions upon an undeveloped mind. Let us take the example of a timid child, who cries when he is put tobed because he is afraid of the dark. The "soft-hearted" parent stayswith him, simply because he is sorry for him and wants to comfort him. The scientifically trained parent stays with him, because he realizesthat the child is in a stage of development in which his imagination hasthe best of him, and in which it is impossible to reason him out of abelief in ghosts. These two parents, wide apart in point of view, afterall act much alike, and both very differently from the pseudo-scientificparent, who acts from dogmatic conviction and is sure he is right. Hetalks of developing his child's self-respect and good sense, and leaveshim to cry himself to sleep, demanding powers of self-control anddevelopment which the child does not possess. There is no doubt that ourdevelopment of charity methods has reached this pseudo-scientific andstilted stage. We have learned to condemn unthinking, ill-regulatedkind-heartedness, and we take great pride in mere repression much as thestern parent tells the visitor below how admirably he is rearing thechild, who is hysterically crying upstairs and laying the foundation forfuture nervous disorders. The pseudo-scientific spirit, or rather, theundeveloped stage of our philanthropy, is perhaps most clearly revealedin our tendency to lay constant stress on negative action. "Don't give;""don't break down self-respect, " we are constantly told. We distrust thehuman impulse as well as the teachings of our own experience, and intheir stead substitute dogmatic rules for conduct. We forget that theaccumulation of knowledge and the holding of convictions must finallyresult in the application of that knowledge and those convictions tolife itself; that the necessity for activity and a pull upon thesympathies is so severe, that all the knowledge in the possession of thevisitor is constantly applied, and she has a reasonable chance for anultimate intellectual comprehension. Indeed, part of the perplexity inthe administration of charity comes from the fact that the type ofperson drawn to it is the one who insists that her convictions shall notbe unrelated to action. Her moral concepts constantly tend to float awayfrom her, unless they have a basis in the concrete relation of life. Sheis confronted with the task of reducing her scruples to action, and ofconverging many wills, so as to unite the strength of all of them intoone accomplishment, the value of which no one can foresee. On the other hand, the young woman who has succeeded in expressing hersocial compunction through charitable effort finds that the widersocial activity, and the contact with the larger experience, not onlyincreases her sense of social obligation but at the same time recastsher social ideals. She is chagrined to discover that in the actual taskof reducing her social scruples to action, her humble beneficiaries arefar in advance of her, not in charity or singleness of purpose, but inself-sacrificing action. She reaches the old-time virtue of humility bya social process, not in the old way, as the man who sits by the side ofthe road and puts dust upon his head, calling himself a contrite sinner, but she gets the dust upon her head because she has stumbled and fallenin the road through her efforts to push forward the mass, to march withher fellows. She has socialized her virtues not only through a socialaim but by a social process. The Hebrew prophet made three requirements from those who would join thegreat forward-moving procession led by Jehovah. "To love mercy" and atthe same time "to do justly" is the difficult task; to fulfil the firstrequirement alone is to fall into the error of indiscriminate givingwith all its disastrous results; to fulfil the second solely is toobtain the stern policy of withholding, and it results in such a drearylack of sympathy and understanding that the establishment of justice isimpossible. It may be that the combination of the two can never beattained save as we fulfil still the third requirement--"to walk humblywith God, " which may mean to walk for many dreary miles beside thelowliest of His creatures, not even in that peace of mind which thecompany of the humble is popularly supposed to afford, but rather withthe pangs and throes to which the poor human understanding is subjectedwhenever it attempts to comprehend the meaning of life. CHAPTER III FILIAL RELATIONS There are many people in every community who have not felt the "socialcompunction, " who do not share the effort toward a higher socialmorality, who are even unable to sympathetically interpret it. Some ofthese have been shielded from the inevitable and salutary failures whichthe trial of new powers involve, because they are content to attainstandards of virtue demanded by an easy public opinion, and others ofthem have exhausted their moral energy in attaining to the currentstandard of individual and family righteousness. Such people, who form the bulk of contented society, demand that theradical, the reformer, shall be without stain or question in hispersonal and family relations, and judge most harshly any deviationfrom the established standards. There is a certain justice in this: itexpresses the inherent conservatism of the mass of men, that none of theestablished virtues which have been so slowly and hardly acquired shallbe sacrificed for the sake of making problematic advance; that theindividual, in his attempt to develop and use the new and exaltedvirtue, shall not fall into the easy temptation of letting the ordinaryones slip through his fingers. This instinct to conserve the old standards, combined with a distrust ofthe new standard, is a constant difficulty in the way of thoseexperiments and advances depending upon the initiative of women, bothbecause women are the more sensitive to the individual and familyclaims, and because their training has tended to make them content withthe response to these claims alone. There is no doubt that, in the effort to sustain the moral energynecessary to work out a more satisfactory social relation, theindividual often sacrifices the energy which should legitimately gointo the fulfilment of personal and family claims, to what he considersthe higher claim. In considering the changes which our increasing democracy is constantlymaking upon various relationships, it is impossible to ignore the filialrelation. This chapter deals with the relation between parents and theirgrown-up daughters, as affording an explicit illustration of theperplexity and mal-adjustment brought about by the various attempts ofyoung women to secure a more active share in the community life. Weconstantly see parents very much disconcerted and perplexed in regard totheir daughters when these daughters undertake work lying quite outsideof traditional and family interests. These parents insist that the girlis carried away by a foolish enthusiasm, that she is in search of acareer, that she is restless and does not know what she wants. They willgive any reason, almost, rather than the recognition of a genuine anddignified claim. Possibly all this is due to the fact that for so manyhundreds of years women have had no larger interests, no participationin the affairs lying quite outside personal and family claims. Anyattempt that the individual woman formerly made to subordinate orrenounce the family claim was inevitably construed to mean that she wassetting up her own will against that of her family's for selfish ends. It was concluded that she could have no motive larger than a desire toserve her family, and her attempt to break away must therefore be wilfuland self-indulgent. The family logically consented to give her up at her marriage, when shewas enlarging the family tie by founding another family. It was easy tounderstand that they permitted and even promoted her going to college, travelling in Europe, or any other means of self-improvement, becausethese merely meant the development and cultivation of one of its ownmembers. When, however, she responded to her impulse to fulfil thesocial or democratic claim, she violated every tradition. The mind of each one of us reaches back to our first struggles as weemerged from self-willed childhood into a recognition of familyobligations. We have all gradually learned to respond to them, and yetmost of us have had at least fleeting glimpses of what it might be todisregard them and the elemental claim they make upon us. We haveyielded at times to the temptation of ignoring them for selfish aims, ofconsidering the individual and not the family convenience, and weremember with shame the self-pity which inevitably followed. But just aswe have learned to adjust the personal and family claims, and to find anorderly development impossible without recognition of both, so perhapswe are called upon now to make a second adjustment between the familyand the social claim, in which neither shall lose and both be ennobled. The attempt to bring about a healing compromise in which the two shallbe adjusted in proper relation is not an easy one. It is difficult todistinguish between the outward act of him who in following onelegitimate claim has been led into the temporary violation of another, and the outward act of him who deliberately renounces a just claim andthrows aside all obligation for the sake of his own selfish andindividual development. The man, for instance, who deserts his familythat he may cultivate an artistic sensibility, or acquire what heconsiders more fulness of life for himself, must always arouse ourcontempt. Breaking the marriage tie as Ibsen's "Nora" did, to obtain alarger self-development, or holding to it as George Eliot's "Romola"did, because of the larger claim of the state and society, must alwaysremain two distinct paths. The collision of interests, each of which hasa real moral basis and a right to its own place in life, is bound to bemore or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, thedestruction of either of which would bring ruin to the ethical life. Curiously enough, it is almost exactly this contradiction which is thetragedy set forth by the Greek dramatist, who asserted that the gods whowatch over the sanctity of the family bond must yield to the higherclaims of the gods of the state. The failure to recognize the socialclaim as legitimate causes the trouble; the suspicion constantly remainsthat woman's public efforts are merely selfish and captious, and are notdirected to the general good. This suspicion will never be dissipateduntil parents, as well as daughters, feel the democratic impulse andrecognize the social claim. Our democracy is making inroads upon the family, the oldest of humaninstitutions, and a claim is being advanced which in a certain sense islarger than the family claim. The claim of the state in time of war haslong been recognized, so that in its name the family has given up sonsand husbands and even the fathers of little children. If we can once seethe claims of society in any such light, if its misery and need can bemade clear and urged as an explicit claim, as the state urges its claimsin the time of danger, then for the first time the daughter who desiresto minister to that need will be recognized as acting conscientiously. This recognition may easily come first through the emotions, and may beadmitted as a response to pity and mercy long before it is formulatedand perceived by the intellect. The family as well as the state we are all called upon to maintain asthe highest institutions which the race has evolved for its safeguardand protection. But merely to preserve these institutions is not enough. There come periods of reconstruction, during which the task is laid upona passing generation, to enlarge the function and carry forward theideal of a long-established institution. There is no doubt that manywomen, consciously and unconsciously, are struggling with this task. Thefamily, like every other element of human life, is susceptible ofprogress, and from epoch to epoch its tendencies and aspirations areenlarged, although its duties can never be abrogated and its obligationscan never be cancelled. It is impossible to bring about the higherdevelopment by any self-assertion or breaking away of the individualwill. The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which atthe same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest typeof progress. The family in its entirety must be carried out into thelarger life. Its various members together must recognize and acknowledgethe validity of the social obligation. When this does not occur we havea most flagrant example of the ill-adjustment and misery arising when anethical code is applied too rigorously and too conscientiously toconditions which are no longer the same as when the code was instituted, and for which it was never designed. We have all seen parental controland the family claim assert their authority in fields of effort whichbelong to the adult judgment of the child and pertain to activity quiteoutside the family life. Probably the distinctively family tragedy ofwhich we all catch glimpses now and then, is the assertion of thisauthority through all the entanglements of wounded affection andmisunderstanding. We see parents and children acting from conscientiousmotives and with the tenderest affection, yet bringing about a miserywhich can scarcely be hidden. Such glimpses remind us of that tragedy enacted centuries ago in Assisi, when the eager young noble cast his very clothing at his father's feet, dramatically renouncing his filial allegiance, and formally subjectingthe narrow family claim to the wider and more universal duty. All theconflict of tragedy ensued which might have been averted, had the fatherrecognized the higher claim, and had he been willing to subordinate andadjust his own claim to it. The father considered his son disrespectfuland hard-hearted, yet we know St. Francis to have been the most tenderand loving of men, responsive to all possible ties, even to those ofinanimate nature. We know that by his affections he freed the frozenlife of his time. The elements of tragedy lay in the narrowness of thefather's mind; in his lack of comprehension and his lack of sympathywith the power which was moving his son, and which was but part of thereligious revival which swept Europe from end to end in the early partof the thirteenth century; the same power which built the cathedrals ofthe North, and produced the saints and sages of the South. But thefather's situation was nevertheless genuine; he felt his heart sore andangry, and his dignity covered with disrespect. He could not, indeed, have felt otherwise, unless he had been touched by the fire of the samerevival, and lifted out of and away from the contemplation of himselfand his narrower claim. It is another proof that the notion of a largerobligation can only come through the response to an enlarged interestin life and in the social movements around us. The grown-up son has so long been considered a citizen with well-definedduties and a need of "making his way in the world, " that the familyclaim is urged much less strenuously in his case, and as a matter ofauthority, it ceases gradually to be made at all. In the case of thegrown-up daughter, however, who is under no necessity of earning aliving, and who has no strong artistic bent, taking her to Paris tostudy painting or to Germany to study music, the years immediatelyfollowing her graduation from college are too often filled with arestlessness and unhappiness which might be avoided by a little clearthinking, and by an adaptation of our code of family ethics to modernconditions. It is always difficult for the family to regard the daughter otherwisethan as a family possession. From her babyhood she has been the charmand grace of the household, and it is hard to think of her as anintegral part of the social order, hard to believe that she has dutiesoutside of the family, to the state and to society in the larger sense. This assumption that the daughter is solely an inspiration andrefinement to the family itself and its own immediate circle, that herdelicacy and polish are but outward symbols of her father's protectionand prosperity, worked very smoothly for the most part so long as hereducation was in line with it. When there was absolutely no recognitionof the entity of woman's life beyond the family, when the outside claimsupon her were still wholly unrecognized, the situation was simple, andthe finishing school harmoniously and elegantly answered allrequirements. She was fitted to grace the fireside and to add lustre tothat social circle which her parents selected for her. But this familyassumption has been notably broken into, and educational ideas no longerfit it. Modern education recognizes woman quite apart from family orsociety claims, and gives her the training which for many years hasbeen deemed successful for highly developing a man's individuality andfreeing his powers for independent action. Perplexities often occur whenthe daughter returns from college and finds that this recognition hasbeen but partially accomplished. When she attempts to act upon theassumption of its accomplishment, she finds herself jarring upon idealswhich are so entwined with filial piety, so rooted in the tenderestaffections of which the human heart is capable, that both daughter andparents are shocked and startled when they discover what is happening, and they scarcely venture to analyze the situation. The ideal for theeducation of woman has changed under the pressure of a new claim. Thefamily has responded to the extent of granting the education, but theyare jealous of the new claim and assert the family claim as over againstit. The modern woman finds herself educated to recognize a stress of socialobligation which her family did not in the least anticipate when theysent her to college. She finds herself, in addition, under an impulse toact her part as a citizen of the world. She accepts her familyinheritance with loyalty and affection, but she has entered into a widerinheritance as well, which, for lack of a better phrase, we call thesocial claim. This claim has been recognized for four years in hertraining, but after her return from college the family claim is againexclusively and strenuously asserted. The situation has all thediscomfort of transition and compromise. The daughter finds a constantand totally unnecessary conflict between the social and the familyclaims. In most cases the former is repressed and gives way to thefamily claim, because the latter is concrete and definitely asserted, while the social demand is vague and unformulated. In such instances thegirl quietly submits, but she feels wronged whenever she allows her mindto dwell upon the situation. She either hides her hurt, and splendidreserves of enthusiasm and capacity go to waste, or her zeal andemotions are turned inward, and the result is an unhappy woman, whoseheart is consumed by vain regrets and desires. If the college woman is not thus quietly reabsorbed, she is evenreproached for her discontent. She is told to be devoted to her family, inspiring and responsive to her social circle, and to give the rest ofher time to further self-improvement and enjoyment. She expects to dothis, and responds to these claims to the best of her ability, evenheroically sometimes. But where is the larger life of which she hasdreamed so long? That life which surrounds and completes the individualand family life? She has been taught that it is her duty to share thislife, and her highest privilege to extend it. This divergence betweenher self-centred existence and her best convictions becomes constantlymore apparent. But the situation is not even so simple as a conflictbetween her affections and her intellectual convictions, although eventhat is tumultuous enough, also the emotional nature is divided againstitself. The social claim is a demand upon the emotions as well as uponthe intellect, and in ignoring it she represses not only her convictionsbut lowers her springs of vitality. Her life is full of contradictions. She looks out into the world, longing that some demand be made upon herpowers, for they are too untrained to furnish an initiative. When herhealth gives way under this strain, as it often does, her physicianinvariably advises a rest. But to be put to bed and fed on milk is notwhat she requires. What she needs is simple, health-giving activity, which, involving the use of all her faculties, shall be a response toall the claims which she so keenly feels. It is quite true that the family often resents her first attempts to bepart of a life quite outside their own, because the college womanfrequently makes these first attempts most awkwardly; her faculties havenot been trained in the line of action. She lacks the ability to applyher knowledge and theories to life itself and to its complicatedsituations. This is largely the fault of her training and of theone-sidedness of educational methods. The colleges have long been fullof the best ethical teaching, insisting that the good of the whole mustultimately be the measure of effort, and that the individual can onlysecure his own rights as he labors to secure those of others. But whilethe teaching has included an ever-broadening range of obligation and hasinsisted upon the recognition of the claims of human brotherhood, thetraining has been singularly individualistic; it has fostered ambitionsfor personal distinction, and has trained the faculties almostexclusively in the direction of intellectual accumulation. Doubtless, woman's education is at fault, in that it has failed to recognizecertain needs, and has failed to cultivate and guide the larger desiresof which all generous young hearts are full. During the most formative years of life, it gives the young girl nocontact with the feebleness of childhood, the pathos of suffering, orthe needs of old age. It gathers together crude youth in contact onlywith each other and with mature men and women who are there for thepurpose of their mental direction. The tenderest promptings are biddento bide their time. This could only be justifiable if a definite outletwere provided when they leave college. Doubtless the need does notdiffer widely in men and women, but women not absorbed in professionalor business life, in the years immediately following college, are baldlybrought face to face with the deficiencies of their training. Apparentlyevery obstacle is removed, and the college woman is at last free tobegin the active life, for which, during so many years, she has beenpreparing. But during this so-called preparation, her faculties havebeen trained solely for accumulation, and she has learned to utterlydistrust the finer impulses of her nature, which would naturally haveconnected her with human interests outside of her family and her ownimmediate social circle. All through school and college the young souldreamed of self-sacrifice, of succor to the helpless and of tendernessto the unfortunate. We persistently distrust these desires, and, unlessthey follow well-defined lines, we repress them with every device ofconvention and caution. One summer the writer went from a two weeks' residence in East London, where she had become sick and bewildered by the sights and soundsencountered there, directly to Switzerland. She found the beaten routesof travel filled with young English men and women who could walk manymiles a day, and who could climb peaks so inaccessible that the featsreceived honorable mention in Alpine journals, --a result which filledtheir families with joy and pride. These young people knew to a nicetythe proper diet and clothing which would best contribute towardendurance. Everything was very fine about them save their motive power. The writer does not refer to the hard-worked men and women who weretaking a vacation, but to the leisured young people, to whom this periodwas the most serious of the year, and filled with the most strenuousexertion. They did not, of course, thoroughly enjoy it, for we are toocomplicated to be content with mere exercise. Civilization has bound ustoo closely with our brethren for any one of us to be long happy in thecultivation of mere individual force or in the accumulation of meremuscular energy. With Whitechapel constantly in mind, it was difficult not to advisethese young people to use some of this muscular energy of which theywere so proud, in cleaning neglected alleys and paving soggy streets. Their stores of enthusiasm might stir to energy the listless men andwomen of East London and utilize latent social forces. The exercisewould be quite as good, the need of endurance as great, the care forproper dress and food as important; but the motives for action would beturned from selfish ones into social ones. Such an appeal woulddoubtless be met with a certain response from the young people, butwould never be countenanced by their families for an instant. Fortunately a beginning has been made in another direction, and a fewparents have already begun to consider even their little children inrelation to society as well as to the family. The young mothers whoattend "Child Study" classes have a larger notion of parenthood andexpect given characteristics from their children, at certain ages andunder certain conditions. They quite calmly watch the various attemptsof a child to assert his individuality, which so often takes the form ofopposition to the wishes of the family and to the rule of the household. They recognize as acting under the same law of development the littlechild of three who persistently runs away and pretends not to hear hismother's voice, the boy of ten who violently, although temporarily, resents control of any sort, and the grown-up son who, by anindividualized and trained personality, is drawn into pursuits andinterests quite alien to those of his family. This attempt to take the parental relation somewhat away from merepersonal experience, as well as the increasing tendency of parents toshare their children's pursuits and interests, will doubtless finallyresult in a better understanding of the social obligation. Theunderstanding, which results from identity of interests, would seem toconfirm the conviction that in the complicated life of to-day there isno education so admirable as that education which comes fromparticipation in the constant trend of events. There is no doubt thatmost of the misunderstandings of life are due to partial intelligence, because our experiences have been so unlike that we cannot comprehendeach other. The old difficulties incident to the clash of two codes ofmorals must drop away, as the experiences of various members of thefamily become larger and more identical. At the present moment, however, many of those difficulties still existand may be seen all about us. In order to illustrate the situationbaldly, and at the same time to put it dramatically, it may be well totake an instance concerning which we have no personal feeling. Thetragedy of King Lear has been selected, although we have been accustomedso long to give him our sympathy as the victim of the ingratitude of histwo older daughters, and of the apparent coldness of Cordelia, that wehave not sufficiently considered the weakness of his fatherhood, revealed by the fact that he should get himself into so entangled andunhappy a relation to all of his children. In our pity for Lear, we failto analyze his character. The King on his throne exhibits utter lack ofself-control. The King in the storm gives way to the same emotion, inrepining over the wickedness of his children, which he formerlyexhibited in his indulgent treatment of them. It might be illuminating to discover wherein he had failed, and why hisold age found him roofless in spite of the fact that he strenuouslyurged the family claim with his whole conscience. At the opening of thedrama he sat upon his throne, ready for the enjoyment which an indulgentparent expects when he has given gifts to his children. From the twoelder, the responses for the division of his lands were graceful andfitting, but he longed to hear what Cordelia, his youngest and bestbeloved child, would say. He looked toward her expectantly, but insteadof delight and gratitude there was the first dawn of character. Cordeliamade the awkward attempt of an untrained soul to be honest andscrupulously to express her inmost feeling. The king was baffled anddistressed by this attempt at self-expression. It was new to him thathis daughter should be moved by a principle obtained outside himself, which even his imagination could not follow; that she had caught thenotion of an existence in which her relation as a daughter played but apart. She was transformed by a dignity which recast her speech and madeit self-contained. She found herself in the sweep of a feeling so largethat the immediate loss of a kingdom seemed of little consequence toher. Even an act which might be construed as disrespect to her fatherwas justified in her eyes, because she was vainly striving to fill outthis larger conception of duty. The test which comes sooner or later tomany parents had come to Lear, to maintain the tenderness of therelation between father and child, after that relation had become onebetween adults, to be content with the responses made by the adult childto the family claim, while at the same time she responded to the claimsof the rest of life. The mind of Lear was not big enough for this test;he failed to see anything but the personal slight involved, and theingratitude alone reached him. It was impossible for him to calmly watchhis child developing beyond the stretch of his own mind and sympathy. That a man should be so absorbed in his own indignation as to fail toapprehend his child's thought, that he should lose his affection in hisanger, simply reveals the fact that his own emotions are dearer to himthan his sense of paternal obligation. Lear apparently also ignored thecommon ancestry of Cordelia and himself, and forgot her royalinheritance of magnanimity. He had thought of himself so long as a nobleand indulgent father that he had lost the faculty by which he mightperceive himself in the wrong. Even in the midst of the storm hedeclared himself more sinned against than sinning. He could believe anyamount of kindness and goodness of himself, but could imagine nofidelity on the part of Cordelia unless she gave him the sign hedemanded. At length he suffered many hardships; his spirit was buffeted andbroken; he lost his reason as well as his kingdom; but for the firsttime his experience was identical with the experience of the men aroundhim, and he came to a larger conception of life. He put himself in theplace of "the poor naked wretches, " and unexpectedly found healing andcomfort. He took poor Tim in his arms from a sheer desire for humancontact and animal warmth, a primitive and genuine need, through whichhe suddenly had a view of the world which he had never had from histhrone, and from this moment his heart began to turn toward Cordelia. In reading the tragedy of King Lear, Cordelia receives a full share ofour censure. Her first words are cold, and we are shocked by her lack oftenderness. Why should she ignore her father's need for indulgence, andbe unwilling to give him what he so obviously craved? We see in the oldking "the over-mastering desire of being beloved, selfish, and yetcharacteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone. "His eagerness produces in us a strange pity for him, and we areimpatient that his youngest and best-beloved child cannot feel this, even in the midst of her search for truth and her newly acquired senseof a higher duty. It seems to us a narrow conception that would breakthus abruptly with the past and would assume that her father had no partin the new life. We want to remind her "that pity, memory, andfaithfulness are natural ties, " and surely as much to be prized as isthe development of her own soul. We do not admire the Cordelia whothrough her self-absorption deserts her father, as we later admire thesame woman who comes back from France that she may include her father inher happiness and freer life. The first had selfishly taken hersalvation for herself alone, and it was not until her conscience haddeveloped in her new life that she was driven back to her father, whereshe perished, drawn into the cruelty and wrath which had now becomeobjective and tragic. Historically considered, the relation of Lear to his children wasarchaic and barbaric, indicating merely the beginning of a family lifesince developed. His paternal expression was one of domination andindulgence, without the perception of the needs of his children, withoutany anticipation of their entrance into a wider life, or any belief thatthey could have a worthy life apart from him. If that rudimentaryconception of family life ended in such violent disaster, the fact thatwe have learned to be more decorous in our conduct does not demonstratethat by following the same line of theory we may not reach a likemisery. Wounded affection there is sure to be, but this could be reduced to amodicum if we could preserve a sense of the relation of the individualto the family, and of the latter to society, and if we had been given acode of ethics dealing with these larger relationships, instead of acode designed to apply so exclusively to relationships obtaining onlybetween individuals. Doubtless the clashes and jars which we all feel most keenly are thosewhich occur when two standards of morals, both honestly held andbelieved in, are brought sharply together. The awkwardness andconstraint we experience when two standards of conventions and mannersclash but feebly prefigure this deeper difference. CHAPTER IV HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT If we could only be judged or judge other people by purity of motive, life would be much simplified, but that would be to abandon thecontention made in the first chapter, that the processes of life are asimportant as its aims. We can all recall acquaintances of whoseintegrity of purpose we can have no doubt, but who cause much confusionas they proceed to the accomplishment of that purpose, who indeed areoften insensible to their own mistakes and harsh in their judgments ofother people because they are so confident of their own inner integrity. This tendency to be so sure of integrity of purpose as to beunsympathetic and hardened to the means by which it is accomplished, isperhaps nowhere so obvious as in the household itself. It nowhereoperates as so constant a force as in the minds of the women who in allthe perplexity of industrial transition are striving to administerdomestic affairs. The ethics held by them are for the most part theindividual and family codes, untouched by the larger social conceptions. These women, rightly confident of their household and family integrityand holding to their own code of morals, fail to see the household inits social aspect. Possibly no relation has been so slow to respond tothe social ethics which we are now considering, as that between thehousehold employer and the household employee, or, as it is stillsometimes called, that between mistress and servant. This persistence of the individual code in relation to the household maybe partly accounted for by the fact that orderly life and, in a sense, civilization itself, grew from the concentration of interest in oneplace, and that moral feeling first became centred in a limited numberof persons. From the familiar proposition that the home began becausethe mother was obliged to stay in one spot in order to cherish thechild, we can see a foundation for the belief that if women are muchaway from home, the home itself will be destroyed and all ethicalprogress endangered. We have further been told that the earliest dances and social gatheringswere most questionable in their purposes, and that it was, therefore, the good and virtuous women who first stayed at home, until graduallythe two--the woman who stayed at home and the woman who guarded hervirtue--became synonymous. A code of ethics was thus developed in regardto woman's conduct, and her duties were logically and carefully limitedto her own family circle. When it became impossible to adequatelyminister to the needs of this circle without the help of many people whodid not strictly belong to the family, although they were part of thehousehold, they were added as aids merely for supplying these needs. When women were the brewers and bakers, the fullers, dyers, spinners, and weavers, the soap and candle makers, they administered largeindustries, but solely from the family point of view. Only a few hundredyears ago, woman had complete control of the manufacturing of manycommodities which now figure so largely in commerce, and it is evidentthat she let the manufacturing of these commodities go into the hands ofmen, as soon as organization and a larger conception of their productionwere required. She felt no responsibility for their management when theywere taken from the home to the factory, for deeper than her instinct tomanufacture food and clothing for her family was her instinct to staywith them, and by isolation and care to guard them from evil. She had become convinced that a woman's duty extended only to her ownfamily, and that the world outside had no claim upon her. The Britishmatron ordered her maidens aright, when they were spinning under her ownroof, but she felt no compunction of conscience when the morals andhealth of young girls were endangered in the overcrowded and insanitaryfactories. The code of family ethics was established in her mind sofirmly that it excluded any notion of social effort. It is quite possible to accept this explanation of the origin of morals, and to believe that the preservation of the home is at the foundation ofall that is best in civilization, without at the same time insistingthat the separate preparation and serving of food is an inherent part ofthe structure and sanctity of the home, or that those who minister toone household shall minister to that exclusively. But to make thisdistinction seems difficult, and almost invariably the sense ofobligation to the family becomes confused with a certain sort ofdomestic management. The moral issue involved in one has becomeinextricably combined with the industrial difficulty involved in theother, and it is at this point that so many perplexed housekeepers, through the confusion of the two problems, take a difficult anduntenable position. There are economic as well as ethical reasons for this survival of asimpler code. The wife of a workingman still has a distinct economicvalue to her husband. She cooks, cleans, washes, and mends--services forwhich, before his marriage, he paid ready money. The wife of thesuccessful business or professional man does not do this. He continuesto pay for his cooking, house service, and washing. The mending, however, is still largely performed by his wife; indeed, the stockingsare pathetically retained and their darning given an exaggeratedimportance, as if women instinctively felt that these mended stockingswere the last remnant of the entire household industry, of which theywere formerly mistresses. But one industry, the cooking and serving offoods to her own family, woman has never relinquished. It has, therefore, never been organized, either by men or women, and is in anundeveloped state. Each employer of household labor views it solelyfrom the family standpoint. The ethics prevailing in regard to it aredistinctly personal and unsocial, and result in the unique isolation ofthe household employee. As industrial conditions have changed, the household has simplified, from the mediæval affair of journeymen, apprentices, and maidens whospun and brewed to the family proper; to those who love each other andlive together in ties of affection and consanguinity. Were this processcomplete, we should have no problem of household employment. But, evenin households comparatively humble, there is still one alien, one who isneither loved nor loving. The modern family has dropped the man who made its shoes, the woman whospun its clothes, and, to a large extent, the woman who washes them, butit stoutly refuses to drop the woman who cooks its food and ministersdirectly to its individual comfort; it strangely insists that to dothat would be to destroy the family life itself. The cook isuncomfortable, the family is uncomfortable; but it will not drop her asall her fellow-workers have been dropped, although the cook herselfinsists upon it. So far has this insistence gone that every possibleconcession is made to retain her. The writer knows an employer in one ofthe suburbs who built a bay at the back of her house so that her cookmight have a pleasant room in which to sleep, and another in which toreceive her friends. This employer naturally felt aggrieved when thecook refused to stay in her bay. Viewed in an historic light, thisemployer might quite as well have added a bay to her house for hershoemaker, and then deemed him ungrateful because he declined to live init. A listener, attentive to a conversation between two employers ofhousehold labor, --and we certainly all have opportunity to hear suchconversations, --would often discover a tone implying that the employerwas abused and put upon; that she was struggling with the problemsolely because she was thus serving her family and performing her socialduties; that otherwise it would be a great relief to her to abandon theentire situation, and "never have a servant in her house again. " Did shefollow this impulse, she would simply yield to the trend of her timesand accept the present system of production. She would be in line withthe industrial organization of her age. Were she in line ethically, shewould have to believe that the sacredness and beauty of family life donot consist in the processes of the separate preparation of food, but insharing the corporate life of the community, and in making the familythe unit of that life. The selfishness of a modern mistress, who, in her narrow social ethics, insists that those who minister to the comforts of her family shallminister to it alone, that they shall not only be celibate, but shall becut off, more or less, from their natural social ties, excludes the bestworking-people from her service. A man of dignity and ability is quite willing to come into a house totune a piano. Another man of mechanical skill will come to put up windowshades. Another of less skill, but of perfect independence, will come toclean and relay a carpet. These men would all resent the situation andconsider it quite impossible if it implied the giving up of their familyand social ties, and living under the roof of the household requiringtheir services. The isolation of the household employee is perhaps inevitable so long asthe employer holds her belated ethics; but the situation is made evenmore difficult by the character and capacity of the girls who enter thisindustry. In any great industrial change the workmen who are permanentlydisplaced are those who are too dull to seize upon changed conditions. The workmen who have knowledge and insight, who are in touch with theirtime, quickly reorganize. The general statement may be made that the enterprising girls of thecommunity go into factories, and the less enterprising go intohouseholds, although there are many exceptions. It is not a question ofskill, of energy, of conscientious work, which will make a girl riseindustrially while she is in the household; she is not in the risingmovement. She is belated in a class composed of the unprogressiveelements of the community, which is recruited constantly by those fromthe ranks of the incompetent, by girls who are learning the language, girls who are timid and slow, or girls who look at life solely from thesavings-bank point of view. The distracted housekeeper struggles withthese unprogressive girls, holding to them not even the well-defined andindependent relation of employer and employed, but the hazy andconstantly changing one of mistress to servant. The latter relation is changing under pressure from various directions. In our increasing democracy the notion of personal service is constantlybecoming more distasteful, conflicting, as it does, with the moremodern notion of personal dignity. Personal ministration to the needsof childhood, illness, and old age seem to us reasonable, and thedemocratic adjustment in regard to them is being made. The first two areconstantly raised nearer to the level of a profession, and there islittle doubt that the third will soon follow. But personal ministrationsto a normal, healthy adult, consuming the time and energy of anotheradult, we find more difficult to reconcile to our theories of democracy. A factory employer parts with his men at the factory gates at the end ofa day's work; they go to their homes as he goes to his, in theassumption that they both do what they want and spend their money asthey please; but this solace of equality outside of working hours isdenied the bewildered employer of household labor. She is obliged to live constantly in the same house with her employee, and because of certain equalities in food and shelter she is broughtmore sharply face to face with the mental and social inequalities. The difficulty becomes more apparent as the character of the workperformed by the so-called servant is less absolutely useful and may bemerely time consuming. A kind-hearted woman who will complacently takean afternoon drive, leaving her cook to prepare the five courses of a"little dinner for only ten guests, " will not be nearly so comfortablethe next evening when she speeds her daughter to a dance, conscious thather waitress must spend the evening in dull solitude on the chance thata caller or two may ring the door-bell. A conscientious employer once remarked to the writer: "In England itmust be much easier; the maid does not look and dress so like yourdaughter, and you can at least pretend that she doesn't like the samethings. But really, my new waitress is quite as pretty and stylish as mydaughter is, and her wistful look sometimes when Mary goes off to afrolic quite breaks my heart. " Too many employers of domestic service have always been exempt frommanual labor, and therefore constantly impose exacting duties uponemployees, the nature of which they do not understand by experience;there is thus no curb of rationality imposed upon the employer'srequirements and demands. She is totally unlike the foreman in a shop, who has only risen to his position by way of having actually performedwith his own hands all the work of the men he directs. There is alsoanother class of employers of domestic labor, who grow capricious andover-exacting through sheer lack of larger interests to occupy theirminds; it is equally bad for them and the employee that the duties ofthe latter are not clearly defined. Tolstoy contends that an exaggeratednotion of cleanliness has developed among such employers, which couldnever have been evolved among usefully employed people. He points to thefact that a serving man, in order that his hands may be immaculatelyclean, is kept from performing the heavier work of the household, andthen is supplied with a tray, upon which to place a card, in order thateven his clean hands may not touch it; later, even his clean hands arecovered with a pair of clean white gloves, which hold the tray uponwhich the card is placed. If it were not for the undemocratic ethics used by the employers ofdomestics, much work now performed in the household would be doneoutside, as is true of many products formerly manufactured in the feudalhousehold. The worker in all other trades has complete control of hisown time after the performance of definitely limited services, his wagesare paid altogether in money which he may spend in the maintenance of aseparate home life, and he has full opportunity to organize with theother workers in his trade. The domestic employee is retained in the household largely because her"mistress" fatuously believes that she is thus maintaining the sanctityof family life. The household employee has no regular opportunity for meeting otherworkers of her trade, and of attaining with them the dignity of acorporate body. The industrial isolation of the household employeeresults, as isolation in a trade must always result, in a lack ofprogress in the methods and products of that trade, and a lack ofaspiration and education in the workman. Whether we recognize thisisolation as a cause or not, we are all ready to acknowledge thathousehold labor has been in some way belated; that the improvementsthere have not kept up with the improvement in other occupations. It issaid that the last revolution in the processes of cooking was broughtabout by Count Rumford, who died a hundred years ago. This is largelydue to the lack of _esprit de corps_ among the employees, which keepsthem collectively from fresh achievements, as the absence of educationin the individual keeps her from improving her implements. Under this isolation, not only must one set of utensils serve diverspurposes, and, as a consequence, tend to a lessened volume and lowerquality of work, but, inasmuch as the appliances are not made toperform the fullest work, there is an amount of capital investeddisproportionate to the product when measured by the achievement inother branches of industry. More important than this is the result ofthe isolation upon the worker herself. There is nothing more devastatingto the inventive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind and spirit, thanthe constant feeling of loneliness and the absence of that fellowshipwhich makes our public opinion. If an angry foreman reprimands a girlfor breaking a machine, twenty other girls hear him, and the culpritknows perfectly well their opinion as to the justice or injustice of hersituation. In either case she bears it better for knowing that, and notthinking it over in solitude. If a household employee breaks a utensilor a piece of porcelain and is reprimanded by her employer, too oftenthe invisible jury is the family of the latter, who naturally uphold hercensorious position and intensify the feeling of loneliness in theemployee. The household employee, in addition to her industrial isolation, is alsoisolated socially. It is well to remember that the household employeesfor the better quarters of the city and suburbs are largely drawn fromthe poorer quarters, which are nothing if not gregarious. The girl isborn and reared in a tenement house full of children. She goes to schoolwith them, and there she learns to march, to read, and write incompanionship with forty others. When she is old enough to go toparties, those she attends are usually held in a public hall and arecrowded with dancers. If she works in a factory, she walks home withmany other girls, in much the same spirit as she formerly walked toschool with them. She mingles with the young men she knows, in frank, economic, and social equality. Until she marries she remains at homewith no special break or change in her family and social life. If she isemployed in a household, this is not true. Suddenly all the conditionsof her life are altered. This change may be wholesome for her, but itis not easy, and thought of the savings-bank does not cheer one much, when one is twenty. She is isolated from the people with whom she hasbeen reared, with whom she has gone to school, and among whom sheexpects to live when she marries. She is naturally lonely andconstrained away from them, and the "new maid" often seems "queer" toher employer's family. She does not care to mingle socially with thepeople in whose house she is employed, as the girl from the countryoften does, but she surfers horribly from loneliness. This wholesome, instinctive dread of social isolation is so strong that, as every city intelligence-office can testify, the filling of situationsis easier, or more difficult, in proportion as the place offers more orless companionship. Thus, the easy situation to fill is always the cityhouse, with five or six employees, shading off into the more difficultsuburban home, with two, and the utterly impossible lonely countryhouse. There are suburban employers of household labor who make heroic effortsto supply domestic and social life to their employees; who take thedomestic employee to drive, arrange to have her invited outoccasionally; who supply her with books and papers and companionship. Nothing could be more praiseworthy in motive, but it is seldomsuccessful in actual operation, resulting as it does in a simulacrum ofcompanionship. The employee may have a genuine friendship for heremployer, and a pleasure in her companionship, or she may not have, andthe unnaturalness of the situation comes from the insistence that shehas, merely because of the propinquity. The unnaturalness of the situation is intensified by the fact that theemployee is practically debarred by distance and lack of leisure fromher natural associates, and that her employer sympathetically insistsupon filling the vacancy in interests and affections by her own tastesand friendship. She may or may not succeed, but the employee should notbe thus dependent upon the good will of her employer. That in itself isundemocratic. The difficulty is increasing by a sense of social discrimination whichthe household employee keenly feels is against her and in favor of thefactory girls, in the minds of the young men of her acquaintance. Womenseeking employment, understand perfectly well this feeling amongmechanics, doubtless quite unjustifiable, but it acts as a stronginducement toward factory labor. The writer has long ceased to apologizefor the views and opinions of working people, being quite sure that onthe whole they are quite as wise and quite as foolish as the views andopinions of other people, but that this particularly foolish opinion ofyoung mechanics is widely shared by the employing class can be easilydemonstrated. The contrast is further accentuated by the better socialposition of the factory girl, and the advantages provided for her inthe way of lunch clubs, social clubs, and vacation homes, from whichgirls performing household labor are practically excluded by their hoursof work, their geographical situation, and a curious feeling that theyare not as interesting as factory girls. This separation from her natural social ties affects, of course, heropportunity for family life. It is well to remember that women, as arule, are devoted to their families; that they want to live with theirparents, their brothers and sisters, and kinsfolk, and will sacrificemuch to accomplish this. This devotion is so universal that it isimpossible to ignore it when we consider women as employees. Youngunmarried women are not detached from family claims and requirements asyoung men are, and are more ready and steady in their response to theneeds of aged parents and the helpless members of the family. But womenperforming labor in households have peculiar difficulties in respondingto their family claims, and are practically dependent upon theiremployers for opportunities of even seeing their relatives and friends. Curiously enough the same devotion to family life and quick response toits claims, on the part of the employer, operates against the girlemployed in household labor, and still further contributes to herisolation. The employer of household labor, in her zeal to preserve her own familylife intact and free from intrusion, acts inconsistently and grants toher cook, for instance, but once or twice a week, such opportunity foruntrammelled association with her relatives as the employer's familyclaims constantly. This in itself is undemocratic, in that it makes adistinction between the value of family life for one set of people asover against another; or, rather, claims that one set of people are ofso much less importance than another, that a valuable side of lifepertaining to them should be sacrificed for the other. This cannot be defended theoretically, and no doubt much of the talkamong the employers of household labor, that their employees arecarefully shielded and cared for, and that it is so much better for agirl's health and morals to work in a household than to work in afactory, comes from a certain uneasiness of conscience, and from adesire to make up by individual scruple what would be done much morefreely and naturally by public opinion if it had an untrammelled chanceto assert itself. One person, or a number of isolated persons, howeverconscientious, cannot perform this office of public opinion. Certainhospitals in London have contributed statistics showing thatseventy-eight per cent of illegitimate children born there are thechildren of girls working in households. These girls are certainly notless virtuous than factory girls, for they come from the same familiesand have had the same training, but the girls who remain at home andwork in factories meet their lovers naturally and easily, their fathersand brothers know the men, and unconsciously exercise a certainsupervision and a certain direction in their choice of companionship. The household employees living in another part of the city, away fromtheir natural family and social ties, depend upon chance for the loverswhom they meet. The lover may be the young man who delivers for thebutcher or grocer, or the solitary friend, who follows the girl from herown part of town and pursues unfairly the advantage which her socialloneliness and isolation afford him. There is no available publicopinion nor any standard of convention which the girl can apply to herown situation. It would be easy to point out many inconveniences arising from the factthat the old economic forms are retained when moral conditions whichbefitted them have entirely disappeared, but until employers of domesticlabor become conscious of their narrow code of ethics, and make adistinct effort to break through the status of mistress and servant, because it shocks their moral sense, there is no chance of evenbeginning a reform. A fuller social and domestic life among household employees would besteps toward securing their entrance into the larger industrialorganizations by which the needs of a community are most successfullyadministered. Many a girl who complains of loneliness, and whorelinquishes her situation with that as her sole excuse, feebly tries toformulate her sense of restraint and social mal-adjustment. Shesometimes says that she "feels so unnatural all the time. " The writerhas known the voice of a girl to change so much during three weeks of"service" that she could not recognize it when the girl returned to herhome. It alternated between the high falsetto in which a shy child"speaks a piece" and the husky gulp with which the _globus hystericus_is swallowed. The alertness and _bonhomie_ of the voice of thetenement-house child had totally disappeared. When such a girl leavesher employer, her reasons are often incoherent and totallyincomprehensible to that good lady, who naturally concludes that shewishes to get away from the work and back to her dances and giddy life, content, if she has these, to stand many hours in an insanitary factory. The charge of the employer is only half a truth. These dances may be theonly organized form of social life which the disheartened employee isable to mention, but the girl herself, in her discontent and her movingfrom place to place, is blindly striving to respond to a larger sociallife. Her employer thinks that she should be able to consider only theinterests and conveniences of her employer's family, because theemployer herself is holding to a family outlook, and refuses to allowher mind to take in the larger aspects of the situation. Although this household industry survives in the midst of the factorysystem, it must, of course, constantly compete with it. Women withlittle children, or those with invalids depending upon them, cannotenter either occupation, and they are practically confined to the sewingtrades; but to all other untrained women seeking employment a choice isopen between these two forms of labor. There are few women so dull that they cannot paste labels on a box, ordo some form of factory work; few so dull that some perplexedhousekeeper will not receive them, at least for a trial, in herhousehold. Household labor, then, has to compete with factory labor, andwomen seeking employment, more or less consciously compare these twoforms of labor in point of hours, in point of permanency of employment, in point of wages, and in point of the advantage they afford for familyand social life. Three points are easily disposed of. First, in regardto hours, there is no doubt that the factory has the advantage. Theaverage factory hours are from seven in the morning to six in theevening, with the chance of working overtime in busy seasons. Thisleaves most of the evenings and Sundays entirely free. The average hoursof household labor are from six in the morning until eight at night, with little difference in seasons. There is one afternoon a week, withan occasional evening, but Sunday is seldom wholly free. Even theseevenings and afternoons take the form of a concession from the employer. They are called "evenings out, " as if the time really belonged to her, but that she was graciously permitting her employee to use it. Thisattitude, of course, is in marked contrast to that maintained by thefactory operative, who, when she works evenings is paid for "over-time. " Second, in regard to permanency of position, the advantage is foundclearly on the side of the household employee, if she proves in anymeasure satisfactory to her employer, for she encounters much lesscompetition. Third, in point of wages, the household is again fairly ahead, if weconsider not the money received, but the opportunity offered for savingmoney. This is greater among household employees, because they do notpay board, the clothing required is simpler, and the temptation to spendmoney in recreation is less frequent. The minimum wages paid an adultin household labor may be fairly put at two dollars and a half a week;the maximum at six dollars, this excluding the comparatively rareopportunities for women to cook at forty dollars a month, and thehousekeeper's position at fifty dollars a month. The factory wages, viewed from the savings-bank point of view, may besmaller in the average, but this is doubtless counterbalanced in theminds of the employees by the greater chance which the factory offersfor increased wages. A girl over sixteen seldom works in a factory forless than four dollars a week, and always cherishes the hope of at lastbeing a forewoman with a permanent salary of from fifteen to twenty-fivedollars a week. Whether she attains this or not, she runs a fair chanceof earning ten dollars a week as a skilled worker. A girl finds iteasier to be content with three dollars a week, when she pays for board, in a scale of wages rising toward ten dollars, than to be content withfour dollars a week and pay no board, in a scale of wages rising towardsix dollars; and the girl well knows that there are scores of forewomenat sixty dollars a month for one forty-dollar cook or fifty-dollarhousekeeper. In many cases this position is well taken economically, for, although the opportunity for saving may be better for the employeesin the household than in the factory, her family saves more when sheworks in a factory and lives with them. The rent is no more when she isat home. The two dollars and a half a week which she pays into thefamily fund more than covers the cost of her actual food, and at nightshe can often contribute toward the family labor by helping her motherwash and sew. The fourth point has already been considered, and if the premise inregard to the isolation of the household employee is well taken, and ifthe position can be sustained that this isolation proves the determiningfactor in the situation, then certainly an effort should be made toremedy this, at least in its domestic and social aspects. To allowhousehold employees to live with their own families and among their ownfriends, as factory employees now do, would be to relegate moreproduction to industrial centres administered on the factory system, andto secure shorter hours for that which remains to be done in thehousehold. In those cases in which the household employees have no family ties, doubtless a remedy against social isolation would be the formation ofresidence clubs, at least in the suburbs, where the isolation is mostkeenly felt. Indeed, the beginnings of these clubs are already seen inthe servants' quarters at the summer hotels. In these residence clubs, the household employee could have the independent life which only one'sown abiding place can afford. This, of course, presupposes a highergrade of ability than household employees at present possess; on theother hand, it is only by offering such possibilities that the highergrades of intelligence can be secured for household employment. As theplan of separate clubs for household employees will probably come firstin the suburbs, where the difficulty of securing and holding "servants"under the present system is most keenly felt, so the plan of buyingcooked food from an outside kitchen, and of having more and more of thehousehold product relegated to the factory, will probably come from thecomparatively poor people in the city, who feel most keenly the pressureof the present system. They already consume a much larger proportion ofcanned goods and bakers' wares and "prepared meats" than the moreprosperous people do, because they cannot command the skill nor the timefor the more tedious preparation of the raw material. The writer hasseen a tenement-house mother pass by a basket of green peas at the doorof a local grocery store, to purchase a tin of canned peas, because theycould be easily prepared for supper and "the children liked the tinnytaste. " It is comparatively easy for an employer to manage her householdindustry with a cook, a laundress, a waitress. The difficulties reallybegin when the family income is so small that but one person can beemployed in the household for all these varied functions, and thedifficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fallaltogether upon the mother of the family, who is living in a flat, or, worse still, in a tenement house, where one stove and one set ofutensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit or unfit, making theliving room of the family a horror in summer, and perfectlyinsupportable on rainy washing-days in winter. Such a woman, rather thanthe prosperous housekeeper, uses factory products, and thus no highstandard of quality is established. The problem of domestic service, which has long been discussed in theUnited States and England, is now coming to prominence in France. As awell-known economist has recently pointed out, the large defection inthe ranks of domestics is there regarded as a sign of revolt against an"unconscious slavery, " while English and American writers appeal to thestatistics which point to the absorption of an enormous number of theclass from which servants were formerly recruited into factoryemployments, and urge, as the natural solution, that more of theproducts used in households be manufactured in factories, and thatpersonal service, at least for healthy adults, be eliminated altogether. Both of these lines of discussion certainly indicate that domesticservice is yielding to the influence of a democratic movement, and isemerging from the narrower code of family ethics into the larger codegoverning social relations. It still remains to express the ethicaladvance through changed economic conditions by which the actual needs ofthe family may be supplied not only more effectively but more in linewith associated effort. To fail to apprehend the tendency of one's age, and to fail to adapt the conditions of an industry to it, is to leavethat industry ill-adjusted and belated on the economic side, and out ofline ethically. CHAPTER V INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION There is no doubt that the great difficulty we experience in reducing toaction our imperfect code of social ethics arises from the fact that wehave not yet learned to act together, and find it far from easy even tofuse our principles and aims into a satisfactory statement. We have allbeen at times entertained by the futile efforts of half a dozen highlyindividualized people gathered together as a committee. Their aimlessattempts to find a common method of action have recalled the waveringmotion of a baby's arm before he has learned to coördinate his muscles. If, as is many times stated, we are passing from an age of individualismto one of association, there is no doubt that for decisive andeffective action the individual still has the best of it. He will secureefficient results while committees are still deliberating upon the bestmethod of making a beginning. And yet, if the need of the times demandassociated effort, it may easily be true that the action which appearsineffective, and yet is carried out upon the more highly developed lineof associated effort, may represent a finer social quality and have agreater social value than the more effective individual action. It ispossible that an individual may be successful, largely because heconserves all his powers for individual achievement and does not put anyof his energy into the training which will give him the ability to actwith others. The individual acts promptly, and we are dazzled by hissuccess while only dimly conscious of the inadequacy of his code. Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than in industrial relations, as existing between the owner of a large factory and his employees. A growing conflict may be detected between the democratic ideal, whichurges the workmen to demand representation in the administration ofindustry, and the accepted position, that the man who owns the capitaland takes the risks has the exclusive right of management. It is inreality a clash between individual or aristocratic management, andcorporate or democratic management. A large and highly developed factorypresents a sharp contrast between its socialized form andindividualistic ends. It is possible to illustrate this difference by a series of events whichoccurred in Chicago during the summer of 1894. These events epitomizedand exaggerated, but at the same time challenged, the code of ethicswhich regulates much of our daily conduct, and clearly showed thatso-called social relations are often resting upon the will of anindividual, and are in reality regulated by a code of individualethics. As this situation illustrates a point of great difficulty to which wehave arrived in our development of social ethics, it may be justifiableto discuss it at some length. Let us recall the facts, not as they havebeen investigated and printed, but as they remain in our memories. A large manufacturing company had provided commodious workshops, and, atthe instigation of its president, had built a model town for the use ofits employees. After a series of years it was deemed necessary, during afinancial depression, to reduce the wages of these employees by givingeach workman less than full-time work "in order to keep the shops open. "This reduction was not accepted by the men, who had become discontentedwith the factory management and the town regulations, and a strikeensued, followed by a complete shut-down of the works. Although theseshops were non-union shops, the strikers were hastily organized andappealed for help to the American Railway Union, which at that momentwas holding its biennial meeting in Chicago. After some days' discussionand some futile attempts at arbitration, a sympathetic strike wasdeclared, which gradually involved railway men in all parts of thecountry, and orderly transportation was brought to a completestandstill. In the excitement which followed, cars were burned andtracks torn up. The police of Chicago did not cope with the disorder, and the railway companies, apparently distrusting the Governor of theState, and in order to protect the United States mails, called upon thePresident of the United States for the federal troops, the federalcourts further enjoined all persons against any form of interferencewith the property or operation of the railroads, and the situationgradually assumed the proportions of internecine warfare. During all ofthese events the president of the manufacturing company first involved, steadfastly refused to have the situation submitted to arbitration, andthis attitude naturally provoked much discussion. The discussion wasbroadly divided between those who held that the long kindness of thepresident of the company had been most ungratefully received, and thosewho maintained that the situation was the inevitable outcome of thesocial consciousness developing among working people. The first defendedthe president of the company in his persistent refusal to arbitrate, maintaining that arbitration was impossible after the matter had beentaken up by other than his own employees, and they declared that a manmust be allowed to run his own business. They considered the firm standof the president a service to the manufacturing interests of the entirecountry. The others claimed that a large manufacturing concern hasceased to be a private matter; that not only a number of workmen andstockholders are concerned in its management, but that the interests ofthe public are so involved that the officers of the company are in areal sense administering a public trust. This prolonged strike clearly puts in a concrete form the ethics of anindividual, in this case a benevolent employer, and the ethics of a massof men, his employees, claiming what they believed to be their moralrights. These events illustrate the difficulty of managing an industry which hasbecome organized into a vast social operation, not with the coöperationof the workman thus socialized, but solely by the dictation of theindividual owning the capital. There is a sharp divergence between thesocial form and the individual aim, which becomes greater as theemployees are more highly socialized and dependent. The president of thecompany under discussion went further than the usual employer does. Hesocialized not only the factory, but the form in which his workmen wereliving. He built, and in a great measure regulated, an entire town, without calling upon the workmen either for self-expression orself-government. He honestly believed that he knew better than they whatwas for their good, as he certainly knew better than they how to conducthis business. As his factory developed and increased, making money eachyear under his direction, he naturally expected the town to prosper inthe same way. He did not realize that the men submitted to the undemocratic conditionsof the factory organization because the economic pressure in ourindustrial affairs is so great that they could not do otherwise. Underthis pressure they could be successfully discouraged from organization, and systematically treated on the individual basis. Social life, however, in spite of class distinctions, is much freer thanindustrial life, and the men resented the extension of industrialcontrol to domestic and social arrangements. They felt the lack ofdemocracy in the assumption that they should be taken care of in thesematters, in which even the humblest workman has won his independence. The basic difficulty lay in the fact that an individual was directingthe social affairs of many men without any consistent effort to find outtheir desires, and without any organization through which to give themsocial expression. The president of the company was, moreover, soconfident of the righteousness of his aim that he had come to test therighteousness of the process by his own feelings and not by those of themen. He doubtless built the town from a sincere desire to give hisemployees the best surroundings. As it developed, he gradually tooktoward it the artist attitude toward his own creation, which has nothought for the creation itself but is absorbed in the idea it standsfor, and he ceased to measure the usefulness of the town by the standardof the men's needs. This process slowly darkened his glints of memory, which might have connected his experience with that of his men. It ispossible to cultivate the impulses of the benefactor until the power ofattaining a simple human relationship with the beneficiaries, that offrank equality with them, is gone, and there is left no mutual interestin a common cause. To perform too many good deeds may be to lose thepower of recognizing good in others; to be too absorbed in carrying outa personal plan of improvement may be to fail to catch the great morallesson which our times offer. The president of this company fostered his employees for many years; hegave them sanitary houses and beautiful parks; but in their extremeneed, when they were struggling with the most difficult situation whichthe times could present to them, he lost his touch and had nothingwherewith to help them. The employer's conception of goodness for hismen had been cleanliness, decency of living, and, above all, thrift andtemperance. Means had been provided for all this, and opportunities hadalso been given for recreation and improvement. But this employersuddenly found his town in the sweep of a world-wide moral impulse. Amovement had been going on about him and among his working men, of whichhe had been unconscious, or concerning which he had heard only by rumor. Outside the ken of philanthropists the proletariat had learned to say inmany languages, that "the injury of one is the concern of all. " Theirwatchwords were brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of individualand trade interests, to the good of the working classes, and they weremoved by a determination to free that class from the untoward conditionsunder which they were laboring. Compared to these watchwords, the old ones which this philanthropicemployer had given his town were negative and inadequate. He hadbelieved strongly in temperance and steadiness of individual effort, buthad failed to apprehend the greater movement of combined abstinence andconcerted action. With all his fostering, the president had not attainedto a conception of social morality for his men and had imagined thatvirtue for them largely meant absence of vice. When the labor movement finally stirred his town, or, to speak morefairly, when, in their distress and perplexity, his own employeesappealed to an organized manifestation of this movement, they were quitesure that simply because they were workmen in distress they would not bedeserted by it. This loyalty on the part of a widely ramified andwell-organized union toward the workmen in a "non-union shop, " who hadcontributed nothing to its cause, was certainly a manifestation of moralpower. In none of his utterances or correspondence did the president for aninstant recognize this touch of nobility, although one would imaginethat he would gladly point out this bit of virtue, in what he must haveconsidered the moral ruin about him. He stood throughout for theindividual virtues, those which had distinguished the model workmen ofhis youth; those which had enabled him and so many of hiscontemporaries to rise in life, when "rising in life" was urged uponevery promising boy as the goal of his efforts. Of the code of social ethics he had caught absolutely nothing. Themorals he had advocated in selecting and training his men did not failthem in the hour of confusion. They were self-controlled, and theythemselves destroyed no property. They were sober and exhibited nodrunkenness, even although obliged to hold their meetings in the saloonhall of a neighboring town. They repaid their employer in kind, but hehad given them no rule for the life of association into which they wereplunged. The president of the company desired that his employees should possessthe individual and family virtues, but did nothing to cherish in themthe social virtues which express themselves in associated effort. Day after day, during that horrible time of suspense, when the wiresconstantly reported the same message, "the President of the Companyholds that there is nothing to arbitrate, " one was forced to feel thatthe ideal of one-man rule was being sustained in its baldest form. Ademand from many parts of the country and from many people was beingmade for social adjustment, against which the commercial training andthe individualistic point of view held its own successfully. The majority of the stockholders, not only of this company but ofsimilar companies, and many other citizens, who had had the samecommercial experience, shared and sustained this position. It was quiteimpossible for them to catch the other point of view. They not only feltthemselves right from the commercial standpoint, but had graduallyaccustomed themselves also to the philanthropic standpoint, until theyhad come to consider their motives beyond reproach. Habit held thempersistent in this view of the case through all changing conditions. A wise man has said that "the consent of men and your own conscienceare two wings given you whereby you may rise to God. " It is so easy forthe good and powerful to think that they can rise by following thedictates of conscience, by pursuing their own ideals, that they areprone to leave those ideals unconnected with the consent of theirfellow-men. The president of the company thought out within his own minda beautiful town. He had power with which to build this town, but he didnot appeal to nor obtain the consent of the men who were living in it. The most unambitious reform, recognizing the necessity for this consent, makes for slow but sane and strenuous progress, while the most ambitiousof social plans and experiments, ignoring this, is prone to failure. The man who insists upon consent, who moves with the people, is bound toconsult the "feasible right" as well as the absolute right. He is oftenobliged to attain only Mr. Lincoln's "best possible, " and then has thesickening sense of compromise with his best convictions. He has to movealong with those whom he leads toward a goal that neither he nor theysee very clearly till they come to it. He has to discover what peoplereally want, and then "provide the channels in which the growing moralforce of their lives shall flow. " What he does attain, however, is notthe result of his individual striving, as a solitary mountain-climberbeyond that of the valley multitude but it is sustained and upheld bythe sentiments and aspirations of many others. Progress has been slowerperpendicularly, but incomparably greater because lateral. He has nottaught his contemporaries to climb mountains, but he has persuaded thevillagers to move up a few feet higher; added to this, he has madesecure his progress. A few months after the death of the promoter ofthis model town, a court decision made it obligatory upon the company todivest itself of the management of the town as involving a functionbeyond its corporate powers. The parks, flowers, and fountains of thisfar-famed industrial centre were dismantled, with scarcely a protestfrom the inhabitants themselves. The man who disassociates his ambition, however disinterested, from thecoöperation of his fellows, always takes this risk of ultimate failure. He does not take advantage of the great conserver and guarantee of hisown permanent success which associated efforts afford. Genuineexperiments toward higher social conditions must have a more democraticfaith and practice than those which underlie private venture. Publicparks and improvements, intended for the common use, are after all onlysafe in the hands of the public itself; and associated effort towardsocial progress, although much more awkward and stumbling than that sameeffort managed by a capable individual, does yet enlist deeper forcesand evoke higher social capacities. The successful business man who is also the philanthropist is in morethan the usual danger of getting widely separated from his employees. The men already have the American veneration for wealth and successfulbusiness capacity, and, added to this, they are dazzled by his goodworks. The workmen have the same kindly impulses as he, but while theyorganize their charity into mutual benefit associations and distributetheir money in small amounts in relief for the widows and insurance forthe injured, the employer may build model towns, erect collegebuildings, which are tangible and enduring, and thereby display hisgoodness in concentrated form. By the very exigencies of business demands, the employer is too oftencut off from the social ethics developing in regard to our larger socialrelationships, and from the great moral life springing from our commonexperiences. This is sure to happen when he is good "to" people ratherthan "with" them, when he allows himself to decide what is best for theminstead of consulting them. He thus misses the rectifying influence ofthat fellowship which is so big that it leaves no room forsensitiveness or gratitude. Without this fellowship we may never knowhow great the divergence between ourselves and others may become, norhow cruel the misunderstandings. During a recent strike of the employees of a large factory in Ohio, thepresident of the company expressed himself as bitterly disappointed bythe results of his many kindnesses, and evidently considered theemployees utterly unappreciative. His state of mind was the result ofthe fallacy of ministering to social needs from an individual impulseand expecting a socialized return of gratitude and loyalty. If thelunch-room was necessary, it was a necessity in order that the employeesmight have better food, and, when they had received the better food, thelegitimate aim of the lunch-room was met. If baths were desirable, andthe fifteen minutes of calisthenic exercise given the women in themiddle of each half day brought a needed rest and change to theirmuscles, then the increased cleanliness and the increased bodilycomfort of so many people should of themselves have justified theexperiment. To demand, as a further result, that there should be no strikes in thefactory, no revolt against the will of the employer because theemployees were filled with loyalty as the result of the kindness, was ofcourse to take the experiment from an individual basis to a social one. Large mining companies and manufacturing concerns are constantlyappealing to their stockholders for funds, or for permission to take apercentage of the profits, in order that the money may be used foreducational and social schemes designed for the benefit of theemployees. The promoters of these schemes use as an argument and as anappeal, that better relations will be thus established, that strikeswill be prevented, and that in the end the money returned to thestockholders will be increased. However praiseworthy this appeal may bein motive, it involves a distinct confusion of issues, and in theorydeserves the failure it so often meets with in practice. In the clashwhich follows a strike, the employees are accused of an ingratitude, when there was no legitimate reason to expect gratitude; and uselessbitterness, which has really a factitious basis, may be developed onboth sides. Indeed, unless the relation becomes a democratic one, the chances ofmisunderstanding are increased, when to the relation of employer andemployees is added the relation of benefactor to beneficiaries, in sofar as there is still another opportunity for acting upon the individualcode of ethics. There is no doubt that these efforts are to be commended, not only fromthe standpoint of their social value but because they have a markedindustrial significance. Failing, as they do, however, to touch thequestion of wages and hours, which are almost invariably the points oftrades-union effort, the employers confuse the mind of the public whenthey urge the amelioration of conditions and the kindly relationexisting between them and their men as a reason for the discontinuanceof strikes and other trades-union tactics. The men have individuallyaccepted the kindness of the employers as it was individually offered, but quite as the latter urges his inability to increase wages unless hehas the coöperation of his competitors, so the men state that they arebound to the trades-union struggle for an increase in wages because itcan only be undertaken by combinations of labor. Even the much more democratic effort to divide a proportion of theprofits at the end of the year among the employees, upon the basis oftheir wages and efficiency, is also exposed to a weakness, from the factthat the employing side has the power of determining to whom the benefitshall accrue. Both individual acts of self-defence on the part of the wage earner andindividual acts of benevolence on the part of the employer are mostuseful as they establish standards to which the average worker andemployer may in time be legally compelled to conform. Progress mustalways come through the individual who varies from the type and hassufficient energy to express this variation. He first holds a higherconception than that held by the mass of his fellows of what isrighteous under given conditions, and expresses this conviction inconduct, in many instances formulating a certain scruple which theothers share, but have not yet defined even to themselves. Progress, however, is not secure until the mass has conformed to this newrighteousness. This is equally true in regard to any advance made in thestandard of living on the part of the trades-unionists or in theimproved conditions of industry on the part of reforming employers. Themistake lies, not in overpraising the advance thus inaugurated byindividual initiative, but in regarding the achievement as complete in asocial sense when it is still in the realm of individual action. No sanemanufacturer regards his factory as the centre of the industrial system. He knows very well that the cost of material, wages, and selling pricesare determined by industrial conditions completely beyond his control. Yet the same man may quite calmly regard himself and his own privateprinciples as merely self-regarding, and expect results from casualphilanthropy which can only be accomplished through those common rulesof life and labor established by the community for the common good. Outside of and surrounding these smaller and most significant effortsare the larger and irresistible movements operating toward combination. This movement must tend to decide upon social matters from the socialstandpoint. Until then it is difficult to keep our minds free from aconfusion of issues. Such a confusion occurs when the gift of a largesum to the community for a public and philanthropic purpose, throws acertain glamour over all the earlier acts of a man, and makes itdifficult for the community to see possible wrongs committed against it, in the accumulation of wealth so beneficently used. It is possible alsothat the resolve to be thus generous unconsciously influences the manhimself in his methods of accumulation. He keeps to a certain individualrectitude, meaning to make an individual restitution by the old paths ofgenerosity and kindness, whereas if he had in view social restitution onthe newer lines of justice and opportunity, he would throughout hiscourse doubtless be watchful of his industrial relationships and hissocial virtues. The danger of professionally attaining to the power of the righteousman, of yielding to the ambition "for doing good" on a large scale, compared to which the ambition for politics, learning, or wealth, arevulgar and commonplace, ramifies through our modern life; and those mosteasily beset by this temptation are precisely the men best situated toexperiment on the larger social lines, because they so easily dramatizetheir acts and lead public opinion. Very often, too, they have in theirhands the preservation and advancement of large vested interests, andoften see clearly and truly that they are better able to administer theaffairs of the community than the community itself: sometimes they seethat if they do not administer them sharply and quickly, as only anindividual can, certain interests of theirs dependent upon the communitywill go to ruin. The model employer first considered, provided a large sum in his willwith which to build and equip a polytechnic school, which will doubtlessbe of great public value. This again shows the advantage of individualmanagement, in the spending as well as in the accumulating of wealth, but this school will attain its highest good, in so far as it incitesthe ambition to provide other schools from public funds. The town ofZurich possesses a magnificent polytechnic institute, secured by thevote of the entire people and supported from public taxes. Every man whovoted for it is interested that his child should enjoy its benefits, and, of course, the voluntary attendance must be larger than in aschool accepted as a gift to the community. In the educational efforts of model employers, as in other attemptstoward social amelioration, one man with the best of intentions istrying to do what the entire body of employees should have undertaken todo for themselves. The result of his efforts will only attain itshighest value as it serves as an incentive to procure other results bythe community as well as for the community. There are doubtless many things which the public would never demandunless they were first supplied by individual initiative, both becausethe public lacks the imagination, and also the power of formulatingtheir wants. Thus philanthropic effort supplies kindergartens, untilthey become so established in the popular affections that they areincorporated in the public school system. Churches and missionsestablish reading rooms, until at last the public library system dotsthe city with branch reading rooms and libraries. For this willingnessto take risks for the sake of an ideal, for those experiments which mustbe undertaken with vigor and boldness in order to secure didactic valuein failure as well as in success, society must depend upon theindividual possessed with money, and also distinguished by earnest andunselfish purpose. Such experiments enable the nation to use theReferendum method in its public affairs. Each social experiment is thustested by a few people, given wide publicity, that it may be observedand discussed by the bulk of the citizens before the public prudentlymakes up its mind whether or not it is wise to incorporate it into thefunctions of government. If the decision is in its favor and it is soincorporated, it can then be carried on with confidence and enthusiasm. But experience has shown that we can only depend upon successful men fora certain type of experiment in the line of industrial amelioration andsocial advancement. The list of those who found churches, educationalinstitutions, libraries, and art galleries, is very long, as is againthe list of those contributing to model dwellings, recreation halls, andathletic fields. At the present moment factory employers are doing muchto promote "industrial betterment" in the way of sanitary surroundings, opportunities for bathing, lunch rooms provided with cheap and wholesomefood, club rooms, and guild halls. But there is a line of socialexperiment involving social righteousness in its most advanced form, inwhich the number of employers and the "favored class" are so few that itis plain society cannot count upon them for continuous and valuablehelp. This lack is in the line of factory legislation and that sort ofsocial advance implied in shorter hours and the regulation of wages; inshort, all that organization and activity that is involved in such amaintenance and increase of wages as would prevent the lowering of thestandard of life. A large body of people feel keenly that the present industrial systemis in a state of profound disorder, and that there is no guarantee thatthe pursuit of individual ethics will ever right it. They claim thatrelief can only come through deliberate corporate effort inspired bysocial ideas and guided by the study of economic laws, and that thepresent industrial system thwarts our ethical demands, not only forsocial righteousness but for social order. Because they believe thateach advance in ethics must be made fast by a corresponding advance inpolitics and legal enactment, they insist upon the right of stateregulation and control. While many people representing all classes in acommunity would assent to this as to a general proposition, and wouldeven admit it as a certain moral obligation, legislative enactmentsdesigned to control industrial conditions have largely been securedthrough the efforts of a few citizens, mostly those who constantly seethe harsh conditions of labor and who are incited to activity by theirsympathies as well as their convictions. This may be illustrated by the series of legal enactments regulating theoccupations in which children may be allowed to work, also the laws inregard to the hours of labor permitted in those occupations, and theminimum age below which children may not be employed. The first childlabor laws were enacted in England through the efforts of those membersof parliament whose hearts were wrung by the condition of the littleparish apprentices bound out to the early textile manufacturers of thenorth; and through the long years required to build up the code of childlabor legislation which England now possesses, knowledge of theconditions has always preceded effective legislation. The efforts ofthat small number in every community who believe in legislative controlhave always been reënforced by the efforts of trades-unionists ratherthan by the efforts of employers. Partly because the employment ofworkingmen in the factories brings them in contact with the children whotend to lower wages and demoralize their trades, and partly becauseworkingmen have no money nor time to spend in alleviating philanthropy, and must perforce seize upon agitation and legal enactment as the onlychannel of redress which is open to them. We may illustrate by imagining a row of people seated in a movingstreet-car, into which darts a boy of eight, calling out the details ofthe last murder, in the hope of selling an evening newspaper. Acomfortable looking man buys a paper from him with no sense of moralshock; he may even be a trifle complacent that he has helped along thelittle fellow, who is making his way in the world. The philanthropiclady sitting next to him may perhaps reflect that it is a pity that sucha bright boy is not in school. She may make up her mind in a moment ofcompunction to redouble her efforts for various newsboys' schools andhomes, that this poor child may have better teaching, and perhaps achance at manual training. She probably is convinced that he alone, byhis unaided efforts, is supporting a widowed mother, and her heart ismoved to do all she can for him. Next to her sits a workingman trainedin trades-union methods. He knows that the boy's natural development isarrested, and that the abnormal activity of his body and mind uses upthe force which should go into growth; moreover, that this premature useof his powers has but a momentary and specious value. He is forced tothese conclusions because he has seen many a man, entering the factoryat eighteen and twenty, so worn out by premature work that he was "laidon the shelf" within ten or fifteen years. He knows very well that hecan do nothing in the way of ameliorating the lot of this particularboy; that his only possible chance is to agitate for proper child-laborlaws; to regulate, and if possible prohibit, street-vending by children, in order that the child of the poorest may have his school time securedto him, and may have at least his short chance for growth. These three people, sitting in the street car, are all honest andupright, and recognize a certain duty toward the forlorn children of thecommunity. The self-made man is encouraging one boy's own efforts; thephilanthropic lady is helping on a few boys; the workingman alone isobliged to include all the boys of his class. Workingmen, because oftheir feebleness in all but numbers, have been forced to appeal to thestate, in order to secure protection for themselves and for theirchildren. They cannot all rise out of their class, as the occasionallysuccessful man has done; some of them must be left to do the work in thefactories and mines, and they have no money to spend in philanthropy. Both public agitation and a social appeal to the conscience of thecommunity is necessary in order to secure help from the state, and, curiously enough, child-labor laws once enacted and enforced are amatter of great pride, and even come to be regarded as a register of thecommunity's humanity and enlightenment. If the method of publicagitation could find quiet and orderly expression in legislativeenactment, and if labor measures could be submitted to the examinationand judgment of the whole without a sense of division or of warfare, weshould have the ideal development of the democratic state. But we judge labor organizations as we do other living institutions, notby their declaration of principles, which we seldom read, but by theirblundering efforts to apply their principles to actual conditions, andby the oft-time failure of their representatives, when the individualfinds himself too weak to become the organ of corporate action. The very blunders and lack of organization too often characterizing aunion, in marked contrast to the orderly management of a factory, oftenconfuse us as to the real issues involved, and we find it hard to trustuncouth and unruly manifestations of social effort. The situation ismade even more complicated by the fact that those who are formulating acode of associated action so often break through the established code oflaw and order. As society has a right to demand of the reformingindividual that he be sternly held to his personal and domestic claims, so it has a right to insist that labor organizations shall keep to thehardly won standards of public law and order; and the community performsbut its plain duty when it registers its protest every time law andorder are subverted, even in the interest of the so-called socialeffort. Yet in moments of industrial stress and strain the community isconfronted by a moral perplexity which may arise from the mere fact thatthe good of yesterday is opposed to the good of today, and that whichmay appear as a choice between virtue and vice is really but a choicebetween virtue and virtue. In the disorder and confusion sometimesincident to growth and progress, the community may be unable to seeanything but the unlovely struggle itself. The writer recalls a conversation between two workingmen who wereleaving a lecture on "Organic Evolution. " The first was much puzzled, and anxiously inquired of the second "if evolution could mean that oneanimal turned into another. " The challenged workman stopped in the rearof the hall, put his foot upon a chair, and expounded what he thoughtevolution did mean; and this, so nearly as the conversation can berecalled, is what he said: "You see a lot of fishes are living in astream, which overflows in the spring and strands some of them upon thebank. The weak ones die up there, but others make a big effort to getback into the water. They dig their fins into the sand, breathe as muchair as they can with their gills, and have a terrible time. But after awhile their fins turn into legs and their gills into lungs, and theyhave become frogs. Of course they are further along than the sleek, comfortable fishes who sail up and down the stream waving their tailsand despising the poor damaged things thrashing around on the bank. He--the lecturer--did not say anything about men, but it is easy enoughto think of us poor devils on the dry bank, struggling without enough tolive on, while the comfortable fellows sail along in the water with allthey want and despise us because we thrash about. " His listener did notreply, and was evidently dissatisfied both with the explanation and theapplication. Doubtless the illustration was bungling in more than itssetting forth, but the story is suggestive. At times of social disturbance the law-abiding citizen is naturally soanxious for peace and order, his sympathies are so justly and inevitablyon the side making for the restoration of law, that it is difficult forhim to see the situation fairly. He becomes insensible to the unselfishimpulse which may prompt a sympathetic strike in behalf of the workersin a non-union shop, because he allows his mind to dwell exclusively onthe disorder which has become associated with the strike. He iscompletely side-tracked by the ugly phases of a great moral movement. Itis always a temptation to assume that the side which has respectability, authority, and superior intelligence, has therefore righteousness aswell, especially when the same side presents concrete results ofindividual effort as over against the less tangible results ofassociated effort. It is as yet most difficult for us to free ourselves from theindividualistic point of view sufficiently to group events in theirsocial relations and to judge fairly those who are endeavoring toproduce a social result through all the difficulties of associatedaction. The philanthropist still finds his path much easier than dothose who are attempting a social morality. In the first place, thepublic, anxious to praise what it recognizes as an undoubted moraleffort often attended with real personal sacrifice, joyfully seizes uponthis manifestation and overpraises it, recognizing the philanthropistas an old friend in the paths of righteousness, whereas the others arestrangers and possibly to be distrusted as aliens. It is easy to confusethe response to an abnormal number of individual claims with theresponse to the social claim. An exaggerated personal morality is oftenmistaken for a social morality, and until it attempts to minister to asocial situation its total inadequacy is not discovered. To attempt toattain a social morality without a basis of democratic experienceresults in the loss of the only possible corrective and guide, and endsin an exaggerated individual morality but not in social morality at all. We see this from time to time in the care-worn and overworkedphilanthropist, who has taxed his individual will beyond the normallimits and has lost his clew to the situation among a bewildering numberof cases. A man who takes the betterment of humanity for his aim and endmust also take the daily experiences of humanity for the constantcorrection of his process. He must not only test and guide hisachievement by human experience, but he must succeed or fail inproportion as he has incorporated that experience with his own. Otherwise his own achievements become his stumbling-block, and he comesto believe in his own goodness as something outside of himself. He makesan exception of himself, and thinks that he is different from the rankand file of his fellows. He forgets that it is necessary to know of thelives of our contemporaries, not only in order to believe in theirintegrity, which is after all but the first beginnings of socialmorality, but in order to attain to any mental or moral integrity forourselves or any such hope for society. CHAPTER VI EDUCATIONAL METHODS As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises thevalue and function of each member of the community, however humble hemay be. We have come to believe that the most "brutish man" has a valuein our common life, a function to perform which can be fulfilled by noone else. We are gradually requiring of the educator that he shall freethe powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life. We askthis not merely because it is the man's right to be thus connected, butbecause we have become convinced that the social order cannot afford toget along without his special contribution. Just as we have come toresent all hindrances which keep us from untrammelled comradeship withour fellows, and as we throw down unnatural divisions, not in thespirit of the eighteenth-century reformers, but in the spirit of thoseto whom social equality has become a necessity for further socialdevelopment, so we are impatient to use the dynamic power residing inthe mass of men, and demand that the educator free that power. Webelieve that man's moral idealism is the constructive force of progress, as it has always been; but because every human being is a creative agentand a possible generator of fine enthusiasm, we are sceptical of themoral idealism of the few and demand the education of the many, thatthere may be greater freedom, strength, and subtilty of intercourse andhence an increase of dynamic power. We are not content to include allmen in our hopes, but have become conscious that all men are hoping andare part of the same movement of which we are a part. Many people impelled by these ideas have become impatient with the slowrecognition on the part of the educators of their manifest obligationto prepare and nourish the child and the citizen for social relations. The educators should certainly conserve the learning and trainingnecessary for the successful individual and family life, but should addto that a preparation for the enlarged social efforts which ourincreasing democracy requires. The democratic ideal demands of theschool that it shall give the child's own experience a social value;that it shall teach him to direct his own activities and adjust them tothose of other people. We are not willing that thousands of industrialworkers shall put all of their activity and toil into services fromwhich the community as a whole reaps the benefit, while their mentalconceptions and code of morals are narrow and untouched by any upliftwhich the consciousness of social value might give them. We are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading andwriting, suspecting them to rest upon the assumption that the ordinaryexperience of life is worth little, and that all knowledge and interestmust be brought to the children through the medium of books. Such anassumption fails to give the child any clew to the life about him, orany power to usefully or intelligently connect himself with it. This maybe illustrated by observations made in a large Italian colony situatedin Chicago, the children from which are, for the most part, sent to thepublic schools. The members of the Italian colony are largely from SouthItaly, --Calabrian and Sicilian peasants, or Neapolitans from theworkingmen's quarters of that city. They have come to America with thedistinct aim of earning money, and finding more room for the energies ofthemselves and their children. In almost all cases they mean to go backagain, simply because their imaginations cannot picture a continuouslife away from the old surroundings. Their experiences in Italy havebeen those of simple outdoor activity, and their ideas have comedirectly to them from their struggle with Nature, --such a hand-to-handstruggle as takes place when each man gets his living largely throughhis own cultivation of the soil, or with tools simply fashioned by hisown hands. The women, as in all primitive life, have had morediversified activities than the men. They have cooked, spun, andknitted, in addition to their almost equal work in the fields. Very fewof the peasant men or women can either read or write. They are devotedto their children, strong in their family feeling, even to remoterelationships, and clannish in their community life. The entire family has been upheaved, and is striving to adjust itself toits new surroundings. The men, for the most part, work on railroadextensions through the summer, under the direction of a _padrone_, whofinds the work for them, regulates the amount of their wages, andsupplies them with food. The first effect of immigration upon the womenis that of idleness. They no longer work in the fields, nor milk thegoats, nor pick up faggots. The mother of the family buys all theclothing, not only already spun and woven but made up into garments, ofa cut and fashion beyond her powers. It is, indeed, the most economicalthing for her to do. Her house-cleaning and cooking are of the simplest;the bread is usually baked outside of the house, and the macaroni boughtprepared for boiling. All of those outdoor and domestic activities, which she would naturally have handed on to her daughters, have slippedaway from her. The domestic arts are gone, with their absorbinginterests for the children, their educational value, and incentive toactivity. A household in a tenement receives almost no raw material. Forthe hundreds of children who have never seen wheat grow, there aredozens who have never seen bread baked. The occasional washings andscrubbings are associated only with discomfort. The child of such afamily receives constant stimulus of most exciting sort from his citystreet life, but he has little or no opportunity to use his energies indomestic manufacture, or, indeed, constructively in any direction. Noactivity is supplied to take the place of that which, in Italy, he wouldnaturally have found in his own surroundings, and no new union withwholesome life is made for him. Italian parents count upon the fact that their children learn theEnglish language and American customs before they do themselves, and thechildren act not only as interpreters of the language, but as buffersbetween them and Chicago, resulting in a certain almost patheticdependence of the family upon the child. When a child of the family, therefore, first goes to school, the event is fraught with muchsignificance to all the others. The family has no social life in anystructural form and can supply none to the child. He ought to get it inthe school and give it to his family, the school thus becoming theconnector with the organized society about them. It is the childrenaged six, eight, and ten, who go to school, entering, of course, theprimary grades. If a boy is twelve or thirteen on his arrival inAmerica, his parents see in him a wage-earning factor, and the girl ofthe same age is already looking toward her marriage. Let us take one of these boys, who has learned in his six or eight yearsto speak his native language, and to feel himself strongly identifiedwith the fortunes of his family. Whatever interest has come to the mindsof his ancestors has come through the use of their hands in the openair; and open air and activity of body have been the inevitableaccompaniments of all their experiences. Yet the first thing that theboy must do when he reaches school is to sit still, at least part of thetime, and he must learn to listen to what is said to him, with all theperplexity of listening to a foreign tongue. He does not find this verystimulating, and is slow to respond to the more subtle incentives of theschoolroom. The peasant child is perfectly indifferent to showing offand making a good recitation. He leaves all that to his schoolfellows, who are more sophisticated and equipped with better English. His parentsare not deeply interested in keeping him in school, and will not holdhim there against his inclination. Their experience does not point tothe good American tradition that it is the educated man who finallysucceeds. The richest man in the Italian colony can neither read norwrite--even Italian. His cunning and acquisitiveness, combined with thecredulity and ignorance of his countrymen, have slowly brought about hislarge fortune. The child himself may feel the stirring of a vagueambition to go on until he is as the other children are; but he is notpopular with his schoolfellows, and he sadly feels the lack of dramaticinterest. Even the pictures and objects presented to him, as well as thelanguage, are strange. If we admit that in education it is necessary to begin with theexperiences which the child already has and to use his spontaneous andsocial activity, then the city streets begin this education for him in amore natural way than does the school. The South Italian peasant comesfrom a life of picking olives and oranges, and he easily sends hischildren out to pick up coal from railroad tracks, or wood frombuildings which have been burned down. Unfortunately, this process leadsby easy transition to petty thieving. It is easy to go from the coal onthe railroad track to the coal and wood which stand before a dealer'sshop; from the potatoes which have rolled from a rumbling wagon to thevegetables displayed by the grocer. This is apt to be the record of theboy who responds constantly to the stimulus and temptations of thestreet, although in the beginning his search for bits of food and fuelwas prompted by the best of motives. The school has to compete with a great deal from the outside in additionto the distractions of the neighborhood. Nothing is more fascinatingthan that mysterious "down town, " whither the boy longs to go to sellpapers and black boots, to attend theatres, and, if possible, to stayall night on the pretence of waiting for the early edition of the greatdailies. If a boy is once thoroughly caught in these excitements, nothing can save him from over-stimulation and consequent debility andworthlessness; he arrives at maturity with no habits of regular work andwith a distaste for its dulness. On the other hand, there are hundreds of boys of various nationalitieswho conscientiously remain in school and fulfil all the requirements ofthe early grades, and at the age of fourteen are found in factories, painstakingly performing their work year after year. These later are themen who form the mass of the population in every industrial neighborhoodof every large city; but they carry on the industrial processes yearafter year without in the least knowing what it is all about. The onefixed habit which the boy carries away with him from the school to thefactory is the feeling that his work is merely provisional. In schoolthe next grade was continually held before him as an object ofattainment, and it resulted in the conviction that the sole object ofpresent effort is to get ready for something else. This tentativeattitude takes the last bit of social stimulus out of his factory work;he pursues it merely as a necessity, and his very mental attitudedestroys his chance for a realization of its social value. As the boy inschool contracted the habit of doing his work in certain hours andtaking his pleasure in certain other hours, so in the factory he earnshis money by ten hours of dull work and spends it in three hours oflurid and unprofitable pleasure in the evening. Both in the school andin the factory, in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, hisrecreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessnessof adding evening classes and social entertainments as a mere frill to aday filled with monotonous and deadening drudgery constantly becomesmore apparent to those who are endeavoring to bring a fuller life to theindustrial members of the community, and who are looking forward to atime when work shall cease to be senseless drudgery with noself-expression on the part of the worker. It sometimes seems that thepublic schools should contribute much more than they do to theconsummation of this time. If the army of school children who enter thefactories every year possessed thoroughly vitalized faculties, theymight do much to lighten this incubus of dull factory work which pressesso heavily upon so large a number of our fellow-citizens. Has ourcommercialism been so strong that our schools have become insensiblycommercialized, whereas we supposed that our industrial life wasreceiving the broadening and illuminating effects of the schools? Thetraining of these children, so far as it has been vocational at all, hasbeen in the direction of clerical work. It is possible that thebusiness men, whom we in America so tremendously admire, have reallybeen dictating the curriculum of our public schools, in spite of theconventions of educators and the suggestions of university professors. The business man, of course, has not said, "I will have the publicschools train office boys and clerks so that I may have them easily andcheaply, " but he has sometimes said, "Teach the children to writelegibly and to figure accurately and quickly; to acquire habits ofpunctuality and order; to be prompt to obey; and you will fit them tomake their way in the world as I have made mine. " Has the workingmanbeen silent as to what he desires for his children, and allowed thebusiness man to decide for him there, as he has allowed the politicianto manage his municipal affairs, or has the workingman so far shared ouruniversal optimism that he has really believed that his children wouldnever need to go into industrial life at all, but that all of his sonswould become bankers and merchants? Certain it is that no sufficient study has been made of the child whoenters into industrial life early and stays there permanently, to givehim some offset to its monotony and dulness, some historic significanceof the part he is taking in the life of the community. It is at last on behalf of the average workingmen that our increasingdemocracy impels us to make a new demand upon the educator. As thepolitical expression of democracy has claimed for the workingman thefree right of citizenship, so a code of social ethics is now insistingthat he shall be a conscious member of society, having some notion ofhis social and industrial value. The early ideal of a city that it was a market-place in which toexchange produce, and a mere trading-post for merchants, apparentlystill survives in our minds and is constantly reflected in our schools. We have either failed to realize that cities have become great centresof production and manufacture in which a huge population is engaged, orwe have lacked sufficient presence of mind to adjust ourselves to thechange. We admire much more the men who accumulate riches, and whogather to themselves the results of industry, than the men who actuallycarry forward industrial processes; and, as has been pointed out, ourschools still prepare children almost exclusively for commercial andprofessional life. Quite as the country boy dreams of leaving the farm for life in town andbegins early to imitate the travelling salesman in dress and manner, sothe school boy within the town hopes to be an office boy, and later aclerk or salesman, and looks upon work in the factory as the occupationof ignorant and unsuccessful men. The schools do so little really tointerest the child in the life of production, or to excite his ambitionin the line of industrial occupation, that the ideal of life, almostfrom the very beginning, becomes not an absorbing interest in one's workand a consciousness of its value and social relation, but a desire formoney with which unmeaning purchases may be made and an unmeaningsocial standing obtained. The son of a workingman who is successful in commercial life, impresseshis family and neighbors quite as does the prominent city man when hecomes back to dazzle his native town. The children of the working peoplelearn many useful things in the public schools, but the commercialarithmetic, and many other studies, are founded on the tacit assumptionthat a boy rises in life by getting away from manual labor, --that everypromising boy goes into business or a profession. The children destinedfor factory life are furnished with what would be most useful underother conditions, quite as the prosperous farmer's wife buys afolding-bed for her huge four-cornered "spare room, " because her sister, who has married a city man, is obliged to have a folding-bed in thecramped limits of her flat Partly because so little is done for himeducationally, and partly because he must live narrowly and dressmeanly, the life of the average laborer tends to become flat andmonotonous, with nothing in his work to feed his mind or hold hisinterest. Theoretically, we would all admit that the man at the bottom, who performs the meanest and humblest work, so long as the work isnecessary, performs a useful function; but we do not live up to ourtheories, and in addition to his hard and uninteresting work he iscovered with a sort of contempt, and unless he falls into illness ortrouble, he receives little sympathy or attention. Certainly no seriouseffort is made to give him a participation in the social and industriallife with which he comes in contact, nor any insight and inspirationregarding it. Apparently we have not yet recovered manual labor from the deep distrustwhich centuries of slavery and the feudal system have cast upon it. Toget away from menial work, to do obviously little with one's hands, isstill the desirable status. This may readily be seen all along the line. A workingman's family will make every effort and sacrifice that thebrightest daughter be sent to the high school and through the normalschool, quite as much because a teacher in the family raises the generalsocial standing and sense of family consequence, as that the returns aresuperior to factory or even office work. "Teacher" in the vocabulary ofmany children is a synonym for women-folk gentry, and the name isindiscriminately applied to women of certain dress and manner. The samedesire for social advancement is expressed by the purchasing of a piano, or the fact that the son is an office boy, and not a factory hand. Theovercrowding of the professions by poorly equipped men arises from muchthe same source, and from the conviction that "an education" is wastedif a boy goes into a factory or shop. A Chicago manufacturer tells a story of twin boys, whom he befriendedand meant to give a start in life. He sent them both to the Athenæum forseveral winters as a preparatory business training, and then took theminto his office, where they speedily became known as the bright one andthe stupid one. The stupid one was finally dismissed after repeatedtrials, when to the surprise of the entire establishment, he quicklybetook himself into the shops, where he became a wide-awake and valuableworkman. His chagrined benefactor, in telling the story, admits that hehimself had fallen a victim to his own business training and his earlynotion of rising in life. In reality he had merely followed the lead ofmost benevolent people who help poor boys. They test the success oftheir efforts by the number whom they have taken out of factory workinto some other and "higher occupation. " Quite in line with this commercial ideal are the night schools andinstitutions of learning most accessible to working people. First amongthem is the business college which teaches largely the mechanism oftype-writing and book-keeping, and lays all stress upon commerce andmethods of distribution. Commodities are treated as exports andimports, or solely in regard to their commercial value, and not, ofcourse, in relation to their historic development or the manufacturingprocesses to which they have been subjected. These schools do not in theleast minister to the needs of the actual factory employee, who is inthe shop and not in the office. We assume that all men are searching for"puddings and power, " to use Carlyle's phrase, and furnish only theschools which help them to those ends. The business college man, or even the man who goes through an academiccourse in order to prepare for a profession, comes to look on learningtoo much as an investment from which he will later reap the benefits inearning money. He does not connect learning with industrial pursuits, nor does he in the least lighten or illuminate those pursuits for thoseof his friends who have not risen in life. "It is as though nets werelaid at the entrance to education, in which those who by some means orother escape from the masses bowed down by labor, are inevitably caughtand held from substantial service to their fellows. " The academicteaching which is accessible to workingmen through University Extensionlectures and classes at settlements, is usually bookish and remote, andconcerning subjects completely divorced from their actual experiences. The men come to think of learning as something to be added to the end ofa hard day's work, and to be gained at the cost of toilsome mentalexertion. There are, of course, exceptions, but many men who persist inattending classes and lectures year after year find themselves possessedof a mass of inert knowledge which nothing in their experience fusesinto availability or realization. Among the many disappointments which the settlement experiment hasbrought to its promoters, perhaps none is keener than the fact that theyhave as yet failed to work out methods of education, specialized andadapted to the needs of adult working people in contra-distinction tothose employed in schools and colleges, or those used in teachingchildren. There are many excellent reasons and explanations for thisfailure. In the first place, the residents themselves are for the mostpart imbued with academic methods and ideals, which it is most difficultto modify. To quote from a late settlement report, "The most vauntededucational work in settlements amounts often to the stimulationmentally of a select few who are, in a sense, of the academic type ofmind, and who easily and quickly respond to the academic methodsemployed. " These classes may be valuable, but they leave quite untouchedthe great mass of the factory population, the ordinary workingman of theordinary workingman's street, whose attitude is best described as thatof "acquiescence, " who lives through the aimless passage of the yearswithout incentive "to imagine, to design, or to aspire. " These men aretotally untouched by all the educational and philanthropic machinerywhich is designed for the young and the helpless who live on the samestreets with them. They do not often drink to excess, they regularlygive all their wages to their wives, they have a vague pride in theirsuperior children; but they grow prematurely old and stiff in all theirmuscles, and become more and more taciturn, their entire energiesconsumed in "holding a job. " Various attempts have been made to break through the inadequateeducational facilities supplied by commercialism and scholarship, bothof which have followed their own ideals and have failed to look at thesituation as it actually presents itself. The most noteworthy attempthas been the movement toward industrial education, the agitation forwhich has been ably seconded by manufacturers of a practical type, whohave from time to time founded and endowed technical schools, designedfor workingmen's sons. The early schools of this type inevitablyreflected the ideal of the self-made man. They succeeded in transferringa few skilled workers into the upper class of trained engineers, and afew less skilled workers into the class of trained mechanics, but didnot aim to educate the many who are doomed to the unskilled work whichthe permanent specialization of the division of labor demands. The Peter Coopers and other good men honestly believed that ifintelligence could be added to industry, each workingman who faithfullyattended these schools could walk into increased skill and wages, and intime even become an employer himself. Such schools are useful beyonddoubt; but so far as educating workingmen is concerned or in any measuresatisfying the democratic ideal, they plainly beg the question. Almost every large city has two or three polytechnic institutionsfounded by rich men, anxious to help "poor boys. " These have beencaptured by conventional educators for the purpose of fitting young menfor the colleges and universities. They have compromised by merelyadding to the usual academic course manual work, applied mathematics, mechanical drawing and engineering. Two schools in Chicago, plainlyfounded for the sons of workingmen, afford an illustration of thistendency and result. On the other hand, so far as schools of this typehave been captured by commercialism, they turn out trained engineers, professional chemists, and electricians. They are polytechnics of a highorder, but do not even pretend to admit the workingman with his meagreintellectual equipment. They graduate machine builders, but not educatedmachine tenders. Even the textile schools are largely seized by youngmen who expect to be superintendents of factories, designers, ormanufacturers themselves, and the textile worker who actually "holds thethread" is seldom seen in them; indeed, in one of the largest schoolswomen are not allowed, in spite of the fact that spinning and weavinghave traditionally been woman's work, and that thousands of women areat present employed in the textile mills. It is much easier to go over the old paths of education with "manualtraining" thrown in, as it were; it is much simpler to appeal to the oldambitions of "getting on in life, " or of "preparing for a profession, "or "for a commercial career, " than to work out new methods on democraticlines. These schools gradually drop back into the conventional courses, modified in some slight degree, while the adaptation to workingmen'sneeds is never made, nor, indeed, vigorously attempted. In the meantime, the manufacturers continually protest that engineers, especially trainedfor devising machines, are not satisfactory. Three generations ofworkers have invented, but we are told that invention no longer goes onin the workshop, even when it is artificially stimulated by the offer ofprizes, and that the inventions of the last quarter of the nineteenthcentury have by no means fulfilled the promise of the earlierthree-quarters. Every foreman in a large factory has had experience with two classes ofmen: first with those who become rigid and tolerate no change in theirwork, partly because they make more money "working by the piece, " whenthey stick to that work which they have learned to do rapidly, andpartly because the entire muscular and nervous system has become bydaily use adapted to particular motions and resents change. Secondly, there are the men who float in and out of the factory, in a constantlychanging stream. They "quit work" for the slightest reason or none atall, and never become skilled at anything. Some of them are men of lowintelligence, but many of them are merely too nervous and restless, tooimpatient, too easily "driven to drink, " to be of any use in a modernfactory. They are the men for whom the demanded adaptation isimpossible. The individual from whom the industrial order demands ever largerdrafts of time and energy, should be nourished and enriched from socialsources, in proportion as he is drained. He, more than other men, needsthe conception of historic continuity in order to reveal to him thepurpose and utility of his work, and he can only be stimulated anddignified as he obtains a conception of his proper relation to society. Scholarship is evidently unable to do this for him; for, unfortunately, the same tendency to division of labor has also producedover-specialization in scholarship, with the sad result that when thescholar attempts to minister to a worker, he gives him the result ofmore specialization rather than an offset from it. He cannot bringhealing and solace because he himself is suffering from the samedisease. There is indeed a deplorable lack of perception and adaptationon the part of educators all along the line. It will certainly be embarrassing to have our age written downtriumphant in the matter of inventions, in that our factories werefilled with intricate machines, the result of advancing mathematical andmechanical knowledge in relation to manufacturing processes, butdefeated in that it lost its head over the achievement and forgot themen. The accusation would stand, that the age failed to perform a likeservice in the extension of history and art to the factory employees whoran the machines; that the machine tenders, heavy and almost dehumanizedby monotonous toil, walked about in the same streets with us, and sat inthe same cars; but that we were absolutely indifferent and made nogenuine effort to supply to them the artist's perception or student'sinsight, which alone could fuse them into social consciousness. It wouldfurther stand that the scholars among us continued with yet moreresearch, that the educators were concerned only with the young and thepromising, and the philanthropists with the criminals and helpless. There is a pitiful failure to recognize the situation in which themajority of working people are placed, a tendency to ignore their realexperiences and needs, and, most stupid of all, we leave quite untouchedaffections and memories which would afford a tremendous dynamic if theywere utilized. We constantly hear it said in educational circles, that a child learnsonly by "doing, " and that education must proceed "through the eyes andhands to the brain"; and yet for the vast number of people all around uswho do not need to have activities artificially provided, and who usetheir hands and eyes all the time, we do not seem able to reverse theprocess. We quote the dictum, "What is learned in the schoolroom must beapplied in the workshop, " and yet the skill and handicraft constantlyused in the workshop have no relevance or meaning given to them by theschool; and when we do try to help the workingman in an educational way, we completely ignore his everyday occupation. Yet the task is merely oneof adaptation. It is to take actual conditions and to make them thebasis for a large and generous method of education, to perform adifficult idealization doubtless, but not an impossible one. We apparently believe that the workingman has no chance to realize lifethrough his vocation. We easily recognize the historic association inregard to ancient buildings. We say that "generation after generationhave stamped their mark upon them, have recorded their thoughts in them, until they have become the property of all. " And yet this is even moretrue of the instruments of labor, which have constantly been held inhuman hands. A machine really represents the "seasoned life of man"preserved and treasured up within itself, quite as much as an ancientbuilding does. At present, workmen are brought in contact with themachinery with which they work as abruptly as if the present set ofindustrial implements had been newly created. They handle the machineryday by day, without any notion of its gradual evolution and growth. Fewof the men who perform the mechanical work in the great factories haveany comprehension of the fact that the inventions upon which the factorydepends, the instruments which they use, have been slowly worked out, each generation using the gifts of the last and transmitting theinheritance until it has become a social possession. This can only beunderstood by a man who has obtained some idea of social progress. Weare still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision oflabor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the productlong enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "thedivision of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawingthem together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide tobuild a road, and one digs, and one brings stones, and another breaksthem, they are quite inevitably united by their interest in the road. But this naturally presupposes that they know where the road is goingto, that they have some curiosity and interest about it, and perhaps achance to travel upon it. " If the division of labor robs them ofinterest in any part of it, the mere mechanical fact of interdependenceamounts to nothing. The man in the factory, as well as the man with the hoe, has a grievancebeyond being overworked and disinherited, in that he does not know whatit is all about. We may well regret the passing of the time when thevariety of work performed in the unspecialized workshop naturallystimulated the intelligence of the workingmen and brought them intocontact both with the raw material and the finished product. But theproblem of education, as any advanced educator will tell us, is tosupply the essentials of experience by a short cut, as it were. If theshop constantly tends to make the workman a specialist, then the problemof the educator in regard to him is quite clear: it is to give him whatmay be an offset from the over-specialization of his daily work, tosupply him with general information and to insist that he shall be acultivated member of society with a consciousness of his industrial andsocial value. As sad a sight as an old hand-loom worker in a factory attempting tomake his clumsy machine compete with the flying shuttles about him, is aworkingman equipped with knowledge so meagre that he can get no meaninginto his life nor sequence between his acts and the far-off results. Manufacturers, as a whole, however, when they attempt educationalinstitutions in connection with their factories, are prone to followconventional lines, and to exhibit the weakness of imitation. We find, indeed, that the middle-class educator constantly makes the mistakes ofthe middle-class moralist when he attempts to aid working people. Thelatter has constantly and traditionally urged upon the workingman thespecialized virtues of thrift, industry, and sobriety--all virtuespertaining to the individual. When each man had his own shop, it wasperhaps wise to lay almost exclusive stress upon the industrial virtuesof diligence and thrift; but as industry has become more highlyorganized, life becomes incredibly complex and interdependent. If aworkingman is to have a conception of his value at all, he must seeindustry in its unity and entirety; he must have a conception that willinclude not only himself and his immediate family and community, but theindustrial organization as a whole. It is doubtless true that dexterityof hand becomes less and less imperative as the invention of machineryand subdivision of labor proceeds; but it becomes all the morenecessary, if the workman is to save his life at all, that he should geta sense of his individual relation to the system. Feeding a machine witha material of which he has no knowledge, producing a product, totallyunrelated to the rest of his life, without in the least knowing whatbecomes of it, or its connection with the community, is, of course, unquestionably deadening to his intellectual and moral life. To makethe moral connection it would be necessary to give him a socialconsciousness of the value of his work, and at least a sense ofparticipation and a certain joy in its ultimate use; to make theintellectual connection it would be essential to create in him somehistoric conception of the development of industry and the relation ofhis individual work to it. Workingmen themselves have made attempts in both directions, which itwould be well for moralists and educators to study. It is a strikingfact that when workingmen formulate their own moral code, and try toinspire and encourage each other, it is always a large and generaldoctrine which they preach. They were the first class of men to organizean international association, and the constant talk at a modern labormeeting is of solidarity and of the identity of the interests ofworkingmen the world over. It is difficult to secure a successfulorganization of men into the simplest trades organization without anappeal to the most abstract principles of justice and brotherhood. Asthey have formulated their own morals by laying the greatest stress uponthe largest morality, so if they could found their own schools, it isdoubtful whether they would be of the mechanic institute type. Coursesof study arranged by a group of workingmen are most naïve in theirbreadth and generality. They will select the history of the world inpreference to that of any period or nation. The "wonders of science" or"the story of evolution" will attract workingmen to a lecture whenzoölogy or chemistry will drive them away. The "outlines of literature"or "the best in literature" will draw an audience when a lecturer inEnglish poetry will be solitary. This results partly from a wholesomedesire to have general knowledge before special knowledge, and is partlya rebound from the specialization of labor to which the workingman issubjected. When he is free from work and can direct his own mind, hetends to roam, to dwell upon large themes. Much the same tendency isfound in programmes of study arranged by Woman's Clubs in countryplaces. The untrained mind, wearied with meaningless detail, when itgets an opportunity to make its demand heard, asks for generalphilosophy and background. In a certain sense commercialism itself, at least in its larger aspect, tends to educate the workingman better than organized education does. Its interests are certainly world-wide and democratic, while it isabsolutely undiscriminating as to country and creed, coming into contactwith all climes and races. If this aspect of commercialism wereutilized, it would in a measure counterbalance the tendency whichresults from the subdivision of labor. The most noteworthy attempt to utilize this democracy of commerce inrelation to manufacturing is found at Dayton, Ohio, in the yearlygatherings held in a large factory there. Once a year the entire forceis gathered together to hear the returns of the business, not so muchin respect to the profits, as in regard to its extension. At thesemeetings, the travelling salesmen from various parts of the world--fromConstantinople, from Berlin, from Rome, from Hong Kong--report upon thesales they have made, and the methods of advertisement and promotionadapted to the various countries. Stereopticon lectures are given upon each new country as soon as it hasbeen successfully invaded by the product of the factory. The foremen inthe various departments of the factory give accounts of the increasedefficiency and the larger output over former years. Any man who has madean invention in connection with the machinery of the factory, at thistime publicly receives a prize, and suggestions are approved that tendto increase the comfort and social facilities of the employees. At leastfor the moment there is a complete esprit de corps, and the youngest andleast skilled employee sees himself in connection with the interests ofthe firm, and the spread of an invention. It is a crude example of whatmight be done in the way of giving a large framework of meaning tofactory labor, and of putting it into a sentient background, at least onthe commercial side. It is easy to indict the educator, to say that he has gotten entangledin his own material, and has fallen a victim to his own methods; butgranting this, what has the artist done about it--he who is supposed tohave a more intimate insight into the needs of his contemporaries, andto minister to them as none other can? It is quite true that a few writers are insisting that the growingdesire for labor, on the part of many people of leisure, has itscounterpart in the increasing desire for general knowledge on the partof many laborers. They point to the fact that the same duality ofconscience which seems to stifle the noblest effort in the individualbecause his intellectual conception and his achievement are so difficultto bring together, is found on a large scale in society itself, when wehave the separation of the people who think from those who work. Andyet, since Ruskin ceased, no one has really formulated this in aconvincing form. And even Ruskin's famous dictum, that labor without artbrutalizes, has always been interpreted as if art could only be a senseof beauty or joy in one's own work, and not a sense of companionshipwith all other workers. The situation demands the consciousness ofparticipation and well-being which comes to the individual when he isable to see himself "in connection and cooperation with the whole"; itneeds the solace of collective art inherent in collective labor. As the poet bathes the outer world for us in the hues of human feeling, so the workman needs some one to bathe his surroundings with a humansignificance--some one who shall teach him to find that which will givea potency to his life. His education, however simple, should tend tomake him widely at home in the world, and to give him a sense ofsimplicity and peace in the midst of the triviality and noise to whichhe is constantly subjected. He, like other men, can learn to be contentto see but a part, although it must be a part of something. It is because of a lack of democracy that we do not really incorporatehim in the hopes and advantages of society, and give him the place whichis his by simple right. We have learned to say that the good must beextended to all of society before it can be held secure by any oneperson or any one class; but we have not yet learned to add to thatstatement, that unless all men and all classes contribute to a good, wecannot even be sure that it is worth having. In spite of many attemptswe do not really act upon either statement. CHAPTER VII POLITICAL REFORM Throughout this volume we have assumed that much of our ethicalmaladjustment in social affairs arises from the fact that we are actingupon a code of ethics adapted to individual relationships, but not tothe larger social relationships to which it is bunglingly applied. Inaddition, however, to the consequent strain and difficulty, there isoften an honest lack of perception as to what the situation demands. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our political life as it manifestsitself in certain quarters of every great city. It is most difficult tohold to our political democracy and to make it in any sense a socialexpression and not a mere governmental contrivance, unless we take painsto keep on common ground in our human experiences. Otherwise there isin various parts of the community an inevitable difference of ethicalstandards which becomes responsible for much misunderstanding. It is difficult both to interpret sympathetically the motives and idealsof those who have acquired rules of conduct in experience widelydifferent from our own, and also to take enough care in guarding thegains already made, and in valuing highly enough the imperfect good sopainfully acquired and, at the best, so mixed with evil. This widedifference in daily experience exhibits itself in two distinct attitudestoward politics. The well-to-do men of the community think of politicsas something off by itself; they may conscientiously recognize politicalduty as part of good citizenship, but political effort is not theexpression of their moral or social life. As a result of thisdetachment, "reform movements, " started by business men and the betterelement, are almost wholly occupied in the correction of politicalmachinery and with a concern for the better method of administration, rather than with the ultimate purpose of securing the welfare of thepeople. They fix their attention so exclusively on methods that theyfail to consider the final aims of city government. This accounts forthe growing tendency to put more and more responsibility upon executiveofficers and appointed commissions at the expense of curtailing thepower of the direct representatives of the voters. Reform movements tendto become negative and to lose their educational value for the mass ofthe people. The reformers take the rôle of the opposition. They givethemselves largely to criticisms of the present state of affairs, towriting and talking of what the future must be and of certain resultswhich should be obtained. In trying to better matters, however, theyhave in mind only political achievements which they detach in a curiousway from the rest of life, and they speak and write of the purificationof politics as of a thing set apart from daily life. On the other hand, the real leaders of the people are part of the entirelife of the community which they control, and so far as they arerepresentative at all, are giving a social expression to democracy. Theyare often politically corrupt, but in spite of this they are proceedingupon a sounder theory. Although they would be totally unable to give itabstract expression, they are really acting upon a formulation made by ashrewd English observer; namely, that, "after the enfranchisement of themasses, social ideals enter into political programmes, and they enternot as something which at best can be indirectly promoted by government, but as something which it is the chief business of government to advancedirectly. " Men living near to the masses of voters, and knowing them intimately, recognize this and act upon it; they minister directly to life and tosocial needs. They realize that the people as a whole are clamoring forsocial results, and they hold their power because they respond to thatdemand. They are corrupt and often do their work badly; but they atleast avoid the mistake of a certain type of business men who arefrightened by democracy, and have lost their faith in the people. Thetwo standards are similar to those seen at a popular exhibition ofpictures where the cultivated people care most for the technique of agiven painting, the moving mass for a subject that shall be domestic andhuman. This difference may be illustrated by the writer's experience in acertain ward of Chicago, during three campaigns, when efforts were madeto dislodge an alderman who had represented the ward for many years. Inthis ward there are gathered together fifty thousand people, representing a score of nationalities; the newly emigrated Latin, Teuton, Celt, Greek, and Slav who live there have little in common savethe basic experiences which come to men in all countries and under allconditions. In order to make fifty thousand people, so heterogeneous innationality, religion, and customs, agree upon any demand, it must befounded upon universal experiences which are perforce individual and notsocial. An instinctive recognition of this on the part of the alderman makes itpossible to understand the individualistic basis of his politicalsuccess, but it remains extremely difficult to ascertain the reasons forthe extreme leniency of judgment concerning the political corruption ofwhich he is constantly guilty. This leniency is only to be explained on the ground that hisconstituents greatly admire individual virtues, and that they are at thesame time unable to perceive social outrages which the alderman may becommitting. They thus free the alderman from blame because hiscorruption is social, and they honestly admire him as a great man andhero, because his individual acts are on the whole kindly and generous. In certain stages of moral evolution, a man is incapable of actionunless the results will benefit himself or some one of hisacquaintances, and it is a long step in moral progress to set the goodof the many before the interest of the few, and to be concerned for thewelfare of a community without hope of an individual return. How far theselfish politician befools his constituents into believing that theirinterests are identical with his own; how far he presumes upon theirinability to distinguish between the individual and social virtues, aninability which he himself shares with them; and how far he dazzles themby the sense of his greatness, and a conviction that they participatetherein, it is difficult to determine. Morality certainly develops far earlier in the form of moral fact thanin the form of moral ideas, and it is obvious that ideas only operateupon the popular mind through will and character, and must be dramatizedbefore they reach the mass of men, even as the biography of the saintshave been after all "the main guide to the stumbling feet of thousandsof Christians to whom the Credo has been but mysterious words. " Ethics as well as political opinions may be discussed and disseminatedamong the sophisticated by lectures and printed pages, but to the commonpeople they can only come through example--through a personality whichseizes the popular imagination. The advantage of an unsophisticatedneighborhood is, that the inhabitants do not keep their ideas astreasures--they are untouched by the notion of accumulating them, asthey might knowledge or money, and they frankly act upon those theyhave. The personal example promptly rouses to emulation. In aneighborhood where political standards are plastic and undeveloped, andwhere there has been little previous experience in self-government, theoffice-holder himself sets the standard, and the ideas that clusteraround him exercise a specific and permanent influence upon thepolitical morality of his constituents. Nothing is more certain than that the quality which a heterogeneouspopulation, living in one of the less sophisticated wards, most admiresis the quality of simple goodness; that the man who attracts them is theone whom they believe to be a good man. We all know that children long"to be good" with an intensity which they give to no other ambition. Wecan all remember that the earliest strivings of our childhood were inthis direction, and that we venerated grown people because they hadattained perfection. Primitive people, such as the South Italian peasants, are still in thisstage. They want to be good, and deep down in their hearts they admirenothing so much as the good man. Abstract virtues are too difficult fortheir untrained minds to apprehend, and many of them are still simpleenough to believe that power and wealth come only to good people. The successful candidate, then, must be a good man according to themorality of his constituents. He must not attempt to hold up too high astandard, nor must he attempt to reform or change their standards. Hissafety lies in doing on a large scale the good deeds which hisconstituents are able to do only on a small scale. If he believes whatthey believe and does what they are all cherishing a secret ambition todo, he will dazzle them by his success and win their confidence. Thereis a certain wisdom in this course. There is a common sense in the massof men which cannot be neglected with impunity, just as there is sure tobe an eccentricity in the differing and reforming individual which it isperhaps well to challenge. The constant kindness of the poor to each other was pointed out in aprevious chapter, and that they unfailingly respond to the need anddistresses of their poorer neighbors even when in danger of bankruptcythemselves. The kindness which a poor man shows his distressed neighboris doubtless heightened by the consciousness that he himself may be indistress next week; he therefore stands by his friend when he gets toodrunk to take care of himself, when he loses his wife or child, when heis evicted for non-payment of rent, when he is arrested for a pettycrime. It seems to such a man entirely fitting that his alderman shoulddo the same thing on a larger scale--that he should help a constituentout of trouble, merely because he is in trouble, irrespective of thejustice involved. The alderman therefore bails out his constituents when they arearrested, or says a good word to the police justice when they appearbefore him for trial, uses his pull with the magistrate when they arelikely to be fined for a civil misdemeanor, or sees what he can do to"fix up matters" with the state's attorney when the charge is really aserious one, and in doing this he follows the ethics held and practisedby his constituents. All this conveys the impression to thesimple-minded that law is not enforced, if the lawbreaker have apowerful friend. One may instance the alderman's action in standing byan Italian padrone of the ward when he was indicted for violating thecivil service regulations. The commissioners had sent out notices tocertain Italian day-laborers who were upon the eligible list that theywere to report for work at a given day and hour. One of the padronesintercepted these notifications and sold them to the men for fivedollars apiece, making also the usual bargain for a share of theirwages. The padrone's entire arrangement followed the custom which hadprevailed for years before the establishment of civil service laws. Tenof the laborers swore out warrants against the padrone, who wasconvicted and fined seventy-five dollars. This sum was promptly paid bythe alderman, and the padrone, assured that he would be protected fromany further trouble, returned uninjured to the colony. The simpleItalians were much bewildered by this show of a power stronger than thatof the civil service, which they had trusted as they did the one inItaly. The first violation of its authority was made, and varioussinister acts have followed, until no Italian who is digging a sewer orsweeping a street for the city feels quite secure in holding his jobunless he is backed by the friendship of the alderman. According to thecivil service law, a laborer has no right to a trial; many aredischarged by the foreman, and find that they can be reinstated onlyupon the aldermanic recommendation. He thus practically holds his oldpower over the laborers working for the city. The popular mind isconvinced that an honest administration of civil service is impossible, and that it is but one more instrument in the hands of the powerful. It will be difficult to establish genuine civil service among these men, who learn only by experience, since their experiences have been of sucha nature that their unanimous vote would certainly be that "civilservice" is "no good. " As many of his constituents in this case are impressed with the factthat the aldermanic power is superior to that of government, soinstances of actual lawbreaking might easily be cited. A young man mayenter a saloon long after midnight, the legal closing hour, and seathimself at a gambling table, perfectly secure from interruption orarrest, because the place belongs to an alderman; but in order to securethis immunity the policeman on the beat must pretend not to see into thewindows each time that he passes, and he knows, and the young man knowsthat he knows, that nothing would embarrass "Headquarters" more than tohave an arrest made on those premises. A certain contempt for the wholemachinery of law and order is thus easily fostered. Because of simple friendliness the alderman is expected to pay rent forthe hard-pressed tenant when no rent is forthcoming, to find "jobs" whenwork is hard to get, to procure and divide among his constituents allthe places which he can seize from the city hall. The alderman of theward we are considering at one time could make the proud boast that hehad twenty-six hundred people in his ward upon the public pay-roll. This, of course, included day laborers, but each one felt underdistinct obligations to him for getting a position. When we reflect thatthis is one-third of the entire vote of the ward, we realize that it isvery important to vote for the right man, since there is, at the least, one chance out of three for securing work. If we recollect further that the franchise-seeking companies payrespectful heed to the applicants backed by the alderman, the questionof voting for the successful man becomes as much an industrial one as apolitical one. An Italian laborer wants a "job" more than anything else, and quite simply votes for the man who promises him one. It is not sodifferent from his relation to the padrone, and, indeed, the twostrengthen each other. The alderman may himself be quite sincere in his acts of kindness, foran office seeker may begin with the simple desire to alleviatesuffering, and this may gradually change into the desire to put hisconstituents under obligations to him; but the action of such anindividual becomes a demoralizing element in the community when kindlyimpulse is made a cloak for the satisfaction of personal ambition, andwhen the plastic morals of his constituents gradually conform to his ownundeveloped standards. The alderman gives presents at weddings and christenings. He seizesthese days of family festivities for making friends. It is easiest toreach them in the holiday mood of expansive good-will, but on their sideit seems natural and kindly that he should do it. The alderman procurespasses from the railroads when his constituents wish to visit friends orattend the funerals of distant relatives; he buys tickets galore forbenefit entertainments given for a widow or a consumptive in peculiardistress; he contributes to prizes which are awarded to the handsomestlady or the most popular man. At a church bazaar, for instance, thealderman finds the stage all set for his dramatic performance. Whenothers are spending pennies, he is spending dollars. When anxiousrelatives are canvassing to secure votes for the two most beautifulchildren who are being voted upon, he recklessly buys votes from bothsides, and laughingly declines to say which one he likes best, buyingoff the young lady who is persistently determined to find out, with fivedollars for the flower bazaar, the posies, of course, to be sent to thesick of the parish. The moral atmosphere of a bazaar suits him exactly. He murmurs many times, "Never mind, the money all goes to the poor; itis all straight enough if the church gets it, the poor won't ask toomany questions. " The oftener he can put such sentiments into the mindsof his constituents, the better he is pleased. Nothing so rapidlyprepares them to take his view of money getting and money spending. Wesee again the process disregarded, because the end itself is consideredso praiseworthy. There is something archaic in a community of simple people in theirattitude toward death and burial. There is nothing so easy to collectmoney for as a funeral, and one involuntarily remembers that the earlyreligious tithes were paid to ward off death and ghosts. At times oneencounters almost the Greek feeling in regard to burial. If the aldermanseizes upon times of festivities for expressions of his good-will, muchmore does he seize upon periods of sorrow. At a funeral he has thedouble advantage of ministering to a genuine craving for comfort andsolace, and at the same time of assisting a bereaved constituent toexpress that curious feeling of remorse, which is ever an accompanimentof quick sorrow, that desire to "make up" for past delinquencies, toshow the world how much he loved the person who has just died, which isas natural as it is universal. In addition to this, there is, among the poor, who have few socialoccasions, a great desire for a well-arranged funeral, the grade ofwhich almost determines their social standing in the neighborhood. Thealderman saves the very poorest of his constituents from that awfulhorror of burial by the county; he provides carriages for the poor, whootherwise could not have them. It may be too much to say that all therelatives and friends who ride in the carriages provided by thealderman's bounty vote for him, but they are certainly influenced by hiskindness, and talk of his virtues during the long hours of the ride backand forth from the suburban cemetery. A man who would ask at such a timewhere all the money thus spent comes from would be considered sinister. The tendency to speak lightly of the faults of the dead and to judgethem gently is transferred to the living, and many a man at such a timehas formulated a lenient judgment of political corruption, and has heardkindly speeches which he has remembered on election day. "Ah, well, hehas a big Irish heart. He is good to the widow and the fatherless. " "Heknows the poor better than the big guns who are always talking aboutcivil service and reform. " Indeed, what headway can the notion of civic purity, of honesty ofadministration make against this big manifestation of humanfriendliness, this stalking survival of village kindness? The notions ofthe civic reformer are negative and impotent before it. Such an aldermanwill keep a standing account with an undertaker, and telephone everyweek, and sometimes more than once, the kind of funeral he wishesprovided for a bereaved constituent, until the sum may roll up into"hundreds a year. " He understands what the people want, and ministersjust as truly to a great human need as the musician or the artist. Anattempt to substitute what we might call a later standard was made atone time when a delicate little child was deserted in the Hull-Housenursery. An investigation showed that it had been born ten dayspreviously in the Cook County hospital, but no trace could be found ofthe unfortunate mother. The little child lived for several weeks, andthen, in spite of every care, died. It was decided to have it buried bythe county authorities, and the wagon was to arrive at eleven o'clock;about nine o'clock in the morning the rumor of this awful deed reachedthe neighbors. A half dozen of them came, in a very excited state ofmind, to protest. They took up a collection out of their poverty withwhich to defray a funeral. The residents of Hull-House were thencomparatively new in the neighborhood and did not realize that they werereally shocking a genuine moral sentiment of the community. In theircrudeness they instanced the care and tenderness which had been expendedupon the little creature while it was alive; that it had had everyattention from a skilled physician and a trained nurse, and evenintimated that the excited members of the group had not taken part inthis, and that it now lay with the nursery to decide that it should beburied as it had been born, at the county's expense. It is doubtful ifHull-House has ever done anything which injured it so deeply in theminds of some of its neighbors. It was only forgiven by the mostindulgent on the ground that the residents were spinsters, and could notknow a mother's heart. No one born and reared in the community couldpossibly have made a mistake like that. No one who had studied theethical standards with any care could have bungled so completely. We are constantly underestimating the amount of sentiment among simplepeople. The songs which are most popular among them are those of areminiscent old age, in which the ripened soul calmly recounts andregrets the sins of his youth, songs in which the wayward daughter isforgiven by her loving parents, in which the lovers are magnanimous andfaithful through all vicissitudes. The tendency is to condone andforgive, and not hold too rigidly to a standard. In the theatres it isthe magnanimous man, the kindly reckless villain who is alwaysapplauded. So shrewd an observer as Samuel Johnson once remarked that itwas surprising to find how much more kindness than justice societycontained. On the same basis the alderman manages several saloons, one down townwithin easy access of the city hall, where he can catch the moreimportant of his friends. Here again he has seized upon an old traditionand primitive custom, the good fellowship which has long been bestexpressed when men drink together. The saloons offer a common meetingground, with stimulus enough to free the wits and tongues of the men whomeet there. He distributes each Christmas many tons of turkeys not only to voters, but to families who are represented by no vote. By a judiciousmanagement some families get three or four turkeys apiece; but what ofthat, the alderman has none of the nagging rules of the charitablesocieties, nor does he declare that because a man wants two turkeys forChristmas, he is a scoundrel who shall never be allowed to eat turkeyagain. As he does not distribute his Christmas favors from any hardlyacquired philanthropic motive, there is no disposition to apply thecarefully evolved rules of the charitable societies to hisbeneficiaries. Of course, there are those who suspect that thebenevolence rests upon self-seeking motives, and feel themselves quitefreed from any sense of gratitude; others go further and glory in thefact that they can thus "soak the alderman. " An example of this is theyoung man who fills his pockets with a handful of cigars, giving a slywink at the others. But this freedom from any sense of obligation isoften the first step downward to the position where he is willing tosell his vote to both parties, and then scratch his ticket as hepleases. The writer recalls a conversation with a man in which hecomplained quite openly, and with no sense of shame, that his vote had"sold for only two dollars this year, " and that he was "awfullydisappointed. " The writer happened to know that his income during thenine months previous had been but twenty-eight dollars, and that he wasin debt thirty-two dollars, and she could well imagine the eagernesswith which he had counted upon this source of revenue. After some yearsthe selling of votes becomes a commonplace, and but little attempt ismade upon the part of the buyer or seller to conceal the fact, if thetransaction runs smoothly. A certain lodging-house keeper at one time sold the votes of his entirehouse to a political party and was "well paid for it too"; but being ofa grasping turn, he also sold the house for the same election to therival party. Such an outrage could not be borne. The man was treated toa modern version of tar and feathers, and as a result of being heldunder a street hydrant in November, contracted pneumonia which resultedin his death. No official investigation took place, since the doctor'scertificate of pneumonia was sufficient for legal burial, and publicsentiment sustained the action. In various conversations which thewriter had concerning the entire transaction, she discovered greatindignation concerning his duplicity and treachery, but none whateverfor his original offence of selling out the votes of his house. A club will be started for the express purpose of gaining a reputationfor political power which may later be sold out. The president andexecutive committee of such a club, who will naturally receive thefunds, promise to divide with "the boys" who swell the size of themembership. A reform movement is at first filled with recruits who areactive and loud in their assertions of the number of votes they can"deliver. " The reformers are delighted with this display of zeal, andonly gradually find out that many of the recruits are there for theexpress purpose of being bought by the other side; that they are mostactive in order to seem valuable, and thus raise the price of theirallegiance when they are ready to sell. Reformers seeing them drop awayone by one, talk of desertion from the ranks of reform, and of the powerof money over well-meaning men, who are too weak to withstandtemptation; but in reality the men are not deserters because they havenever actually been enrolled in the ranks. The money they take isneither a bribe nor the price of their loyalty, it is simply theconsummation of a long-cherished plan and a well-earned reward. Theycame into the new movement for the purpose of being bought out of it, and have successfully accomplished that purpose. Hull-House assisted in carrying on two unsuccessful campaigns againstthe same alderman. In the two years following the end of the first one, nearly every man who had been prominent in it had received an officefrom the reëlected alderman. A printer had been appointed to a clerkshipin the city hall; a driver received a large salary for services in thepolice barns; the candidate himself, a bricklayer, held a position inthe city construction department. At the beginning of the nextcampaign, the greatest difficulty was experienced in finding acandidate, and each one proposed, demanded time to consider theproposition. During this period he invariably became the recipient ofthe alderman's bounty. The first one, who was foreman of a largefactory, was reported to have been bought off by the promise that thecity institutions would use the product of his firm. The second one, akeeper of a grocery and family saloon, with large popularity, waspromised the aldermanic nomination on the regular ticket at theexpiration of the term of office held by the alderman's colleague, andit may be well to state in passing that he was thus nominated andsuccessfully elected. The third proposed candidate received a place forhis son in the office of the city attorney. Not only are offices in his gift, but all smaller favors as well. Anyrequests to the council, or special licenses, must be presented by thealderman of the ward in which the person desiring the favor resides. There is thus constant opportunity for the alderman to put hisconstituents under obligations to him, to make it difficult for aconstituent to withstand him, or for one with large interests to enterinto political action at all. From the Italian pedler who wants alicense to peddle fruit in the street, to the large manufacturingcompany who desires to tunnel an alley for the sake of conveying pipesfrom one building to another, everybody is under obligations to hisalderman, and is constantly made to feel it. In short, these veryregulations for presenting requests to the council have been made, bythe aldermen themselves, for the express purpose of increasing thedependence of their constituents, and thereby augmenting aldermanicpower and prestige. The alderman has also a very singular hold upon the property owners ofhis ward. The paving, both of the streets and sidewalks throughout hisdistrict, is disgraceful; and in the election speeches the reform sideholds him responsible for this condition, and promises better pavingunder another régime. But the paving could not be made better without aspecial assessment upon the property owners of the vicinity, and payingmore taxes is exactly what his constituents do not want to do. Inreality, "getting them off, " or at the worst postponing the time of theimprovement, is one of the genuine favors which he performs. A movementto have the paving done from a general fund would doubtless be opposedby the property owners in other parts of the city who have already paidfor the asphalt bordering their own possessions, but they have noconception of the struggle and possible bankruptcy which repaving maymean to the small property owner, nor how his chief concern may be toelect an alderman who cares more for the feelings and pocket-books ofhis constituents than he does for the repute and cleanliness of hiscity. The alderman exhibited great wisdom in procuring from certain of hisdown-town friends the sum of three thousand dollars with which touniform and equip a boys' temperance brigade which had been formed inone of the ward churches a few months before his campaign. Is it strangethat the good leader, whose heart was filled with innocent pride as helooked upon these promising young scions of virtue, should decline toenter into a reform campaign? Of what use to suggest that uniforms andbayonets for the purpose of promoting temperance, bought with moneycontributed by a man who was proprietor of a saloon and a gamblinghouse, might perhaps confuse the ethics of the young soldiers? Why takethe pains to urge that it was vain to lecture and march abstract virtuesinto them, so long as the "champion boodler" of the town was the manwhom the boys recognized as a loyal and kindhearted friend, thepublic-spirited citizen, whom their fathers enthusiastically voted for, and their mothers called "the friend of the poor. " As long as the actualand tangible success is thus embodied, marching whether in kindergartensor brigades, talking whether in clubs or classes, does little to changethe code of ethics. The question of where does the money come from which is spent sosuccessfully, does of course occur to many minds. The more primitivepeople accept the truthful statement of its sources without any shock totheir moral sense. To their simple minds he gets it "from the rich" and, so long as he again gives it out to the poor as a true Robin Hood, withopen hand, they have no objections to offer. Their ethics are quitehonestly those of the merry-making foresters. The next less primitivepeople of the vicinage are quite willing to admit that he leads the"gang" in the city council, and sells out the city franchises; that hemakes deals with the franchise-seeking companies; that he guarantees tosteer dubious measures through the council, for which he demands liberalpay; that he is, in short, a successful "boodler. " When, however, thereis intellect enough to get this point of view, there is also enough tomake the contention that this is universally done, that all thealdermen do it more or less successfully, but that the alderman of thisparticular ward is unique in being so generous; that such a state ofaffairs is to be deplored, of course; but that that is the way businessis run, and we are fortunate when a kind-hearted man who is close to thepeople gets a large share of the spoils; that he serves franchisedcompanies who employ men in the building and construction of theirenterprises, and that they are bound in return to give work to hisconstituents. It is again the justification of stealing from the rich togive to the poor. Even when they are intelligent enough to complete thecircle, and to see that the money comes, not from the pockets of thecompanies' agents, but from the street-car fares of people likethemselves, it almost seems as if they would rather pay two cents moreeach time they ride than to give up the consciousness that they have abig, warm-hearted friend at court who will stand by them in anemergency. The sense of just dealing comes apparently much later thanthe desire for protection and indulgence. On the whole, the gifts andfavors are taken quite simply as an evidence of genuine loving-kindness. The alderman is really elected because he is a good friend and neighbor. He is corrupt, of course, but he is not elected because he is corrupt, but rather in spite of it. His standard suits his constituents. Heexemplifies and exaggerates the popular type of a good man. He hasattained what his constituents secretly long for. At one end of the ward there is a street of good houses, familiarlycalled "Con Row. " The term is perhaps quite unjustly used, but it isnevertheless universally applied, because many of these houses areoccupied by professional office holders. This row is supposed to form ahappy hunting-ground of the successful politician, where he can live inprosperity, and still maintain his vote and influence in the ward. Itwould be difficult to justly estimate the influence which this group ofsuccessful, prominent men, including the alderman who lives there, havehad upon the ideals of the youth in the vicinity. The path which leadsto riches and success, to civic prominence and honor, is the path ofpolitical corruption. We might compare this to the path laid out byBenjamin Franklin, who also secured all of these things, but told youngmen that they could be obtained only by strenuous effort and frugalliving, by the cultivation of the mind, and the holding fast torighteousness; or, again, we might compare it to the ideals which wereheld up to the American youth fifty years ago, lower, to be sure, thanthe revolutionary ideal, but still fine and aspiring toward honorabledealing and careful living. They were told that the career of theself-made man was open to every American boy, if he worked hard andsaved his money, improved his mind, and followed a steady ambition. Thewriter remembers that when she was ten years old, the villageschoolmaster told his little flock, without any mitigating clauses, that Jay Gould had laid the foundation of his colossal fortune by alwayssaving bits of string, and that, as a result, every child in the villageassiduously collected party-colored balls of twine. A bright Chicago boymight well draw the inference that the path of the corrupt politiciannot only leads to civic honors, but to the glories of benevolence andphilanthropy. This lowering of standards, this setting of an ideal, isperhaps the worst of the situation, for, as we said in the firstchapter, we determine ideals by our daily actions and decisions not onlyfor ourselves, but largely for each other. We are all involved in this political corruption, and as members of thecommunity stand indicted. This is the penalty of a democracy, --that weare bound to move forward or retrograde together. None of us can standaside; our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe thesame air. That the alderman has much to do with setting the standard of life anddesirable prosperity may be illustrated by the following incident:During one of the campaigns a clever cartoonist drew a posterrepresenting the successful alderman in portraiture drinking champagneat a table loaded with pretentious dishes and surrounded by otherrevellers. In contradistinction was his opponent, a bricklayer, who satupon a half-finished wall, eating a meagre dinner from a workingman'sdinner-pail, and the passer-by was asked which type of representative hepreferred, the presumption being that at least in a workingman'sdistrict the bricklayer would come out ahead. To the chagrin of thereformers, however, it was gradually discovered that, in the popularmind, a man who laid bricks and wore overalls was not nearly sodesirable for an alderman as the man who drank champagne and wore adiamond in his shirt front. The district wished its representative "tostand up with the best of them, " and certainly some of the constituentswould have been ashamed to have been represented by a bricklayer. It ispart of that general desire to appear well, the optimistic andthoroughly American belief, that even if a man is working with his handsto-day, he and his children will quite likely be in a better position inthe swift coming to-morrow, and there is no need of being too closelyassociated with common working people. There is an honest absence ofclass consciousness, and a naïve belief that the kind of occupationquite largely determines social position. This is doubtless exaggeratedin a neighborhood of foreign people by the fact that as each nationalitybecomes more adapted to American conditions, the scale of its occupationrises. Fifty years ago in America "a Dutchman" was used as a term ofreproach, meaning a man whose language was not understood, and whoperformed menial tasks, digging sewers and building railroadembankments. Later the Irish did the same work in the community, but asquickly as possible handed it on to the Italians, to whom the name"dago" is said to cling as a result of the digging which the Irishmanresigned to him. The Italian himself is at last waking up to this fact. In a political speech recently made by an Italian padrone, he bitterlyreproached the alderman for giving the-four-dollars-a-day "jobs" ofsitting in an office to Irishmen and the-dollar-and-a-half-a-day "jobs"of sweeping the streets to the Italians. This general struggle to risein life, to be at least politically represented by one of the best, asto occupation and social status, has also its negative side. We mustremember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, andthat the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhapsmost dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct, the power to give only just weight to the opinion of neighbors, is butfeebly developed. A form of constraint, gentle, but powerful, isafforded by the simple desire to do what others do, in order to sharewith them the approval of the community. Of course, the larger thenumber of people among whom an habitual mode of conduct obtains, thegreater the constraint it puts upon the individual will. Thus it is thatthe political corruption of the city presses most heavily where it canbe least resisted, and is most likely to be imitated. According to the same law, the positive evils of corrupt government arebound to fall heaviest upon the poorest and least capable. When thewater of Chicago is foul, the prosperous buy water bottled at distantsprings; the poor have no alternative but the typhoid fever which comesfrom using the city's supply. When the garbage contracts are notenforced, the well-to-do pay for private service; the poor suffer thediscomfort and illness which are inevitable from a foul atmosphere. Theprosperous business man has a certain choice as to whether he will treatwith the "boss" politician or preserve his independence on a smallerincome; but to an Italian day laborer it is a choice between obeying thecommands of a political "boss" or practical starvation. Again, a moreintelligent man may philosophize a little upon the present state ofcorruption, and reflect that it is but a phase of our commercialism, from which we are bound to emerge; at any rate, he may give himself thesolace of literature and ideals in other directions, but the moreignorant man who lives only in the narrow present has no such resource;slowly the conviction enters his mind that politics is a matter offavors and positions, that self-government means pleasing the "boss" andstanding in with the "gang. " This slowly acquired knowledge he hands onto his family. During the month of February his boy may come home fromschool with rather incoherent tales about Washington and Lincoln, andthe father may for the moment be fired to tell of Garibaldi, but suchtalk is only periodic, and the long year round the fortunes of theentire family, down to the opportunity to earn food and shelter, dependupon the "boss. " In a certain measure also, the opportunities for pleasure and recreationdepend upon him. To use a former illustration, if a man happens to havea taste for gambling, if the slot machine affords him diversion, he goesto those houses which are protected by political influence. If he andhis friends like to drop into a saloon after midnight, or even want tohear a little music while they drink together early in the evening, heis breaking the law when he indulges in either of them, and can only beexempt from arrest or fine because the great political machine isfriendly to him and expects his allegiance in return. During the campaign, when it was found hard to secure enough localspeakers of the moral tone which was desired, orators were imported fromother parts of the town, from the so-called "better element. " Suddenlyit was rumored on all sides that, while the money and speakers for thereform candidate were coming from the swells, the money which wasbacking the corrupt alderman also came from a swell source; that thepresident of a street-car combination, for whom he performed constantoffices in the city council, was ready to back him to the extent offifty thousand dollars; that this president, too, was a good man, andsat in high places; that he had recently given a large sum of money toan educational institution and was therefore as philanthropic, not tosay good and upright, as any man in town; that the corrupt alderman hadthe sanction of the highest authorities, and that the lecturers who weretalking against corruption, and the selling and buying of franchises, were only the cranks, and not the solid business men who had developedand built up Chicago. All parts of the community are bound together in ethical development. Ifthe so-called more enlightened members accept corporate gifts from theman who buys up the council, and the so-called less enlightened membersaccept individual gifts from the man who sells out the council, wesurely must take our punishment together. There is the difference, ofcourse, that in the first case we act collectively, and in the secondcase individually; but is the punishment which follows the first anylighter or less far-reaching in its consequences than the more obviousone which follows the second? Have our morals been so captured by commercialism, to use Mr. Chapman'sgeneralization, that we do not see a moral dereliction when business oreducational interests are served thereby, although we are still shockedwhen the saloon interest is thus served? The street-car company which declares that it is impossible to dobusiness without managing the city council, is on exactly the same morallevel with the man who cannot retain political power unless he has asaloon, a large acquaintance with the semi-criminal class, andquestionable money with which to debauch his constituents. Both sets ofmen assume that the only appeal possible is along the line ofself-interest. They frankly acknowledge money getting as their ownmotive power, and they believe in the cupidity of all the men whom theyencounter. No attempt in either case is made to put forward the claimsof the public, or to find a moral basis for action. As the corruptpolitician assumes that public morality is impossible, so many businessmen become convinced that to pay tribute to the corrupt aldermen is onthe whole cheaper than to have taxes too high; that it is better to payexorbitant rates for franchises, than to be made unwilling partners intransportation experiments. Such men come to regard political reformersas a sort of monomaniac, who are not reasonable enough to see thenecessity of the present arrangement which has slowly been evolved anddeveloped, and upon which business is safely conducted. A reformer whoreally knew the people and their great human needs, who believed thatit was the business of government to serve them, and who furtherrecognized the educative power of a sense of responsibility, wouldpossess a clew by which he might analyze the situation. He would findout what needs, which the alderman supplies, are legitimate ones whichthe city itself could undertake, in counter-distinction to those whichpander to the lower instincts of the constituency. A mother who eats herChristmas turkey in a reverent spirit of thankfulness to the aldermanwho gave it to her, might be gradually brought to a genuine sense ofappreciation and gratitude to the city which supplies her littlechildren with a Kindergarten, or, to the Board of Health which properlyplacarded a case of scarlet-fever next door and spared her sleeplessnights and wearing anxiety, as well as the money paid with suchdifficulty to the doctor and the druggist. The man who in his emotionalgratitude almost kneels before his political friend who gets his boy outof jail, might be made to see the kindness and good sense of the cityauthorities who provided the boy with a playground and reading room, where he might spend his hours of idleness and restlessness, and throughwhich his temptations to petty crime might be averted. A man who isgrateful to the alderman who sees that his gambling and racing are notinterfered with, might learn to feel loyal and responsible to the citywhich supplied him with a gymnasium and swimming tank where manly andwell-conducted sports are possible. The voter who is eager to serve thealderman at all times, because the tenure of his job is dependent uponaldermanic favor, might find great relief and pleasure in working forthe city in which his place was secured by a well-administered civilservice law. After all, what the corrupt alderman demands from his followers andlargely depends upon is a sense of loyalty, a standing-by the man who isgood to you, who understands you, and who gets you out of trouble. Allthe social life of the voter from the time he was a little boy andplayed "craps" with his "own push, " and not with some other "push, " hasbeen founded on this sense of loyalty and of standing in with hisfriends. Now that he is a man, he likes the sense of being inside apolitical organization, of being trusted with political gossip, ofbelonging to a set of fellows who understand things, and whose interestsare being cared for by a strong friend in the city council itself. Allthis is perfectly legitimate, and all in the line of the development ofa strong civic loyalty, if it were merely socialized and enlarged. Sucha voter has already proceeded in the forward direction in so far as hehas lost the sense of isolation, and has abandoned the conviction thatcity government does not touch his individual affairs. Even Mill claimsthat the social feelings of man, his desire to be at unity with hisfellow-creatures, are the natural basis for morality, and he defines aman of high moral culture as one who thinks of himself, not as anisolated individual, but as a part in a social organism. Upon this foundation it ought not to be difficult to build a structureof civic virtue. It is only necessary to make it clear to the voter thathis individual needs are common needs, that is, public needs, and thatthey can only be legitimately supplied for him when they are suppliedfor all. If we believe that the individual struggle for life may wideninto a struggle for the lives of all, surely the demand of an individualfor decency and comfort, for a chance to work and obtain the fulness oflife may be widened until it gradually embraces all the members of thecommunity, and rises into a sense of the common weal. In order, however, to give him a sense of conviction that his individualneeds must be merged into the needs of the many, and are only importantas they are thus merged, the appeal cannot be made along the line ofself-interest. The demand should be universalized; in this process itwould also become clarified, and the basis of our political organizationbecome perforce social and ethical. Would it be dangerous to conclude that the corrupt politician himself, because he is democratic in method, is on a more ethical line of socialdevelopment than the reformer, who believes that the people must be madeover by "good citizens" and governed by "experts"? The former at leastare engaged in that great moral effort of getting the mass to expressitself, and of adding this mass energy and wisdom to the community as awhole. The wide divergence of experience makes it difficult for the goodcitizen to understand this point of view, and many things conspire tomake it hard for him to act upon it. He is more or less a victim to thatcurious feeling so often possessed by the good man, that the righteousdo not need to be agreeable, that their goodness alone is sufficient, and that they can leave the arts and wiles of securing popular favor tothe self-seeking. This results in a certain repellent manner, commonlyregarded as the apparel of righteousness, and is further responsible forthe fatal mistake of making the surroundings of "good influences"singularly unattractive; a mistake which really deserves a reprimandquite as severe as the equally reprehensible deed of making thesurroundings of "evil influences" so beguiling. Both are akin to thatstate of mind which narrows the entrance into a wider morality to theeye of a needle, and accounts for the fact that new moral movements haveever and again been inaugurated by those who have found themselves inrevolt against the conventionalized good. The success of the reforming politician who insists upon mere purity ofadministration and upon the control and suppression of the unrulyelements in the community, may be the easy result of a narrowing andselfish process. For the painful condition of endeavoring to ministerto genuine social needs, through the political machinery, and at thesame time to remodel that machinery so that it shall be adequate to itsnew task, is to encounter the inevitable discomfort of a transition intoa new type of democratic relation. The perplexing experiences of theactual administration, however, have a genuine value of their own. Theeconomist who treats the individual cases as mere data, and the socialreformer who labors to make such cases impossible, solely because of theappeal to his reason, may have to share these perplexities before theyfeel themselves within the grasp of a principle of growth, workingoutward from within; before they can gain the exhilaration and upliftwhich comes when the individual sympathy and intelligence is caught intothe forward intuitive movement of the mass. This general movement is notwithout its intellectual aspects, but it has to be transferred from theregion of perception to that of emotion before it is reallyapprehended. The mass of men seldom move together without an emotionalincentive. The man who chooses to stand aside, avoids much of theperplexity, but at the same time he loses contact with a great source ofvitality. Perhaps the last and greatest difficulty in the paths of those who areattempting to define and attain a social morality, is that which arisesfrom the fact that they cannot adequately test the value of theirefforts, cannot indeed be sure of their motives until their efforts arereduced to action and are presented in some workable form of socialconduct or control. For action is indeed the sole medium of expressionfor ethics. We continually forget that the sphere of morals is thesphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is butobservation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment, thata situation does not really become moral until we are confronted withthe question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obligedto act upon our theory. A stirring appeal has lately been made by arecognized ethical lecturer who has declared that "It is insanity toexpect to receive the data of wisdom by looking on. We arrive at moralknowledge only by tentative and observant practice. We learn how toapply the new insight by having attempted to apply the old and havingfound it to fail. " This necessity of reducing the experiment to action throws out of theundertaking all timid and irresolute persons, more than that, all thosewho shrink before the need of striving forward shoulder to shoulder withthe cruder men, whose sole virtue may be social effort, and even thatnot untainted by self-seeking, who are indeed pushing forward socialmorality, but who are doing it irrationally and emotionally, and oftenat the expense of the well-settled standards of morality. The power to distinguish between the genuine effort and the adventitiousmistakes is perhaps the most difficult test which comes to our fallibleintelligence. In the range of individual morals, we have learned todistrust him who would reach spirituality by simply renouncing theworld, or by merely speculating upon its evils. The result, as well asthe process of virtues attained by repression, has become distasteful tous. When the entire moral energy of an individual goes into thecultivation of personal integrity, we all know how unlovely the resultmay become; the character is upright, of course, but too coated overwith the result of its own endeavor to be attractive. In this efforttoward a higher morality in our social relations, we must demand thatthe individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personalachievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only inconnection with the activity of the many. The cry of "Back to the people" is always heard at the same time, whenwe have the prophet's demand for repentance or the religious cry of"Back to Christ, " as though we would seek refuge with our fellows andbelieve in our common experiences as a preparation for a new moralstruggle. As the acceptance of democracy brings a certain life-giving power, so ithas its own sanctions and comforts. Perhaps the most obvious one is thecurious sense which comes to us from time to time, that we belong to thewhole, that a certain basic well being can never be taken away from uswhatever the turn of fortune. Tolstoy has portrayed the experience in"Master and Man. " The former saves his servant from freezing, byprotecting him with the heat of his body, and his dying hours are filledwith an ineffable sense of healing and well-being. Such experiences, ofwhich we have all had glimpses, anticipate in our relation to the livingthat peace of mind which envelopes us when we meditate upon the greatmultitude of the dead. It is akin to the assurance that the deadunderstand, because they have entered into the Great Experience, andtherefore must comprehend all lesser ones; that all themisunderstandings we have in life are due to partial experience, andall life's fretting comes of our limited intelligence; when the last andGreat Experience comes, it is, perforce, attended by mercy andforgiveness. Consciously to accept Democracy and its manifoldexperiences is to anticipate that peace and freedom. INDEX[1] Alderman, basis of his political success, 226, 228, 240, 243, 248, 267; his influence on morals of the American boy, 251, 255, 256; on standard of life, 257; his power, 232, 233, 235, 246, 260; his social duties, 234, 236, 243, 250. Art and the workingman, 219, 225. "Boss, " the, ignorant man's dependence on, 260, 266. Business college, the, 197. Charity, administration of, 14, 22; neighborly relations in, 29, 230; organized, 25; standards in, 15, 27, 32, 38, 49, 58; scientific _vs. _ human relations in, 64. Child labor, premature work, 41, 188; first laws concerning, 167, 170. City, responsibilities of, 266. Civil service law, its enforcement, 231, 233. Commercial and industrial life, social position of, compared, 193. Commercialism and education, 190-199, 216; morals captured by, 264; polytechnic schools taken by, 202. Coöperation, 153, 158. Cooper, Peter, 202. Dayton, Ohio, factory at, 216. Death and burials among simple people, 238. Domestic service, problem of, in France, England, and America, 135; industrial difficulty of, 106; moral issues of, 106. Education, attempts at industrial, 201; commercialism in, 196, 201; in commercialism, 216; in technical schools, 201; lack of adaptation in, 199, 208, 212; of industrial workers, 180, 193, 199, 219; offset to overspecialization, 211; public school and, 190, 192; relation of, to the child, 180, 185, 193; relation of, to the immigrant, 181-186; university extension lectures and settlements, 199; workingmen's lecture courses, 214. Educators, mistakes of, 212; new demands on, 178, 192, 201, 211. Family claim, the, 4, 74, 78; daughter's college education, 82; employer's _vs. _ domestic's, 123, 124; on the daughter, 82; on the son, _ibid. _ Family life, misconception of, 116. Filial relations, clash of moral codes, 94. Funerals, attitude of simple people toward, 238. Household employee, the, 108, 109; character of, 112; domestic _vs. _ factory, 116, 118, 119, 122; isolation of, 109, 111, 117, 120, 132; morals of, 125; unnatural relation of, 113, 120, 121, 126, 127; unreasonable demands on, 113, 115; residence clubs for, 133; social position of, 114, 119, 122. Household employer, the, undemocratic ethics of, 116; reform of, in relation to employee, 126. Household, the, advantages and disadvantages of factory work over, 129; competition of factory work with, 128; difficulties of the small, 135; industrial isolation of, 117; industry of, transferred to factory, 104, 105; lack of progress in, 117; origin of, 104; social _vs. _ individual aspects of, 103; suburban difficulties of, 134; wages in, 131. Hull-house experiences, 43, 53, 58, 59, 240, 247. Human life, value of, 7, 178. Individual action _vs. _ associated, 137, 153, 158; advantages of, 158, 162; limitations of, 165; moral evolution involved in, 226. Individual _vs. _ social needs, 155, 269. Individual _vs. _ social virtues, 224, 227, 265. Italian immigrant, the, conception of abstract virtue among, 229; dependence of, on their children, 184; education of, 185; new conditions of life of, 181. Juvenile criminal, the, evolution of, 53-56, 187. Labor, division of, 210, 213; reaction from, 215. Law and order, 172, 174, 234. Moral fact and moral idea, 227, 229, 273. Morality, natural basis of, 268; personal and social, 6, 176, 103. Philanthropic standpoint, the, its dangers, 150, 155-157. Philanthropist, the, 154, 175-176. Political corruption, ethical development in, 270; formation of reform clubs, 246; greatest pressure of, 260; individual and social aspect of, 264; leniency in regard to, 239; responsibility for, 256, 263; selling of votes, 244-246; street railway and saloon interest, 262. Political leaders, causes of success of, 224. Political standards, 228, 229, 251-253, 261; compared with Benjamin Franklin's, 255. Referendum method, the, 164. Reformer, the, ethics of, 270. Reform movements in politics, causes of failure in, 222, 240, 262, 272, 274; business men's attitude toward, 265. Rumford, Count, 117. Ruskin, 219. Saloon, the, 243, 264. Social claim, the, 4, 77; child study and, 92, 180; misplaced energy and, 90. Social virtues, code of employer, 143, 148; code of laboring man, _ibid. _ Technical schools, 201; adaptation of, to workingmen, 204; compromises in, 203; polytechnic institutions, 202; textile schools, 203; women in, _ibid. _ Thrift, individualism of, 31, 40, 212. Trades unions, 148, 158, 167, 169, 171; sympathetic strikes, 174. Workingman, the, ambition of, for his children, 191, 258; art in relation to, 218; charity of, 154; evening classes and social entertainment for, 189; grievance of, 211; historical perspective in the work of, _ibid. _; organizations of, 214; standards for political candidate, 257. [Footnote 1: This index is not intended to be exhaustive. ]