Vw ^ PATH gf LABOR A SYMPOSIU/A ; ! i!j{ i'iliiiiii 111 III i!i! H 3jr L ■ THE PATH OF LABOR The Path of Labor THEME Christianity and The World's Workers "/ am among you as he that serveth" Authors M. KATHARINE BENNETT GRACE SCRIBNER JOHN E. CALFEE A. J. McKELWAY L. H. HAMMOND MIRIAM L. WOODBERRY WALTER C. RAUSCHENBUSCH COUNCIL OF WOMEN FOR HOME MISSIONS New York, N. Y. Copyright, 1918 Council of Women for Home Missions New York HNSl FOREWORD Those who labored with such desire and earnestness for the selection of a theme for the textbooks for 1918-1919, that should present not only a vital but a paramount issue to the church at this time when only great realities and Issues claim serious thought, chose better than they knew when they elected Chris- tianity and the World's Workers. It is generally conceded that the most decisive single factor in the world contest today is that of Labor. That there is always danger of over emphasis by any group having the power in the body politic is axiomatic. It becomes therefore even more important now than when the theme was suggested (nearly two years ago) for our church con- stituency to address itself to such a study of economic relation- ships as shall open the way for a more complete understanding of the fundamental rights and facts involved, that a basis of think- ing may be attained whereby the mutual welfare of all society may be advanced along the line of a Christian democracy. "Christian" because the body of influence set in motion by Christ is the greatest spiritual force in the life of humanity, and upon it depends the world's hope for redemption from oppression, injustice and war. At the outset of our thinking on this theme we might profitably seek a definition of the term "Christianity," for this word which calls so inspiringly to millions of people carries a sinister re- minder of pogroms and persecutions to millions of others. The Rev. Dr. Charles Jefferson of New York City, says: "Christianity is a large word, and it cannot be defined in a sen- tence for the reason that it is used in different meanings by different persons, and also by the same person on different occa- sions, and for different purposes. In one sense Christianity is v the example and teaching of Jesus Christ. What he is and what he taught constitutes pure and undefiled Christianity. To know what Christianity is we must look at Jesus Christ and study his funda- mental principles. "But the religion of Jesus Christ has been in the world 1900 years and has worked itself out into a mass of institutions and ceremonies and creeds. All of these taken together are often called Christianity. For instance, the Christianity of the United States would include the whole universal church in the United States, with its worship and its achievements. "While Christianity in the narrower sense must commend itself to everybody's heart, Christianity in the larger sense has many imperfections, and is capable of many reformations and improve- ments." The rapidly increasing participation of women in all forms of industry is apparent to everyone. Mrs. Hilda Richards, Chief of the Woman's Division of the Federal Department of Labor, says : "Assuming that the duration of the war is three years, it is safe to say that the increase of women in industry will be doubled and amount to three millions in this country." The Council of Women for Home Missions in sending forth this latest volume of its Mission Study Books does so with the eager hope that it may serve to interpret women in their various forms of service to each other, and be another influence in making Christianity the keystone of the changing social order. Publication Committee. VI CONTENTS I. The Call to Service Page 3 II. In City Industries Page 27 III. In Mountains and Mills Page 83 IV. Among Negro Laborers Page in V. In Lumber Camps and Mines Page 139 VI. Justice and Brotherhood Page 165 Bibliography Page 188 ILLUSTRATIONS Family of Cotton Pickers, Oklahoma Frontispiece Street Trades Page 32 Women Packing Salmon Page 56 A Road in the Mountains Page 88 Worker in Modern Cotton Mill Page 96 Model Teacher's Home Page 116 School Farm, Brunswick County, Virginia. .. .Page 116 Development of a Lumber Camp Page 144 Mining in the Streets of Nome Page 152 I THE CALL TO SERVICE M. KATHARINE BENNETT "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." — Genesis 3:19. "For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat." — II Thes- salonians 3:10. "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?" — Ecclesiastes 1:3. "Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?"— Ecclesiastes 3 :22. "The labour of the righteous tendeth to life."— Proverbs 10:16. "For we are laborers together with God." — 1 Corinthians 3 :9. "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." — Matthew 11:28. "While we are fighting for freedom we must see, among other things, that labor is free; and that means a number of inter- esting tilings. It means, not only that we must do what we have declared our purpose to do— see that the conditions of labor are not rendered more onerous by the war — but also that we shall see to it that the instrumentalities by which the conditions of labor are improved are not blocked or checked." — President Woodrow Wilson in his speech before American Federation of Labor, November, 1917. THE PATH OF LABOR i THE CALL TO SERVICE "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" is a condition common to mankind : the few who in comfort- able dependence may stand aside careless of the work-a- day world do not alter the truth that for most of the human race life is made up of days of toil and hours of weariness ; for the many the struggle for food, clothing and shelter is the issue of paramount and pressing im- portance; it drags at life's larger impulses, hampers and stifles the yearning for higher things. Those who work for wages that allow no margin of ease so outnumber the well-to-do that their problems are significant of the constant modifications in the life of the nation ; they are the basis of its economic and political structure and on their welfare rests its permanency. Their misfortunes may strike at the root of social institutions ; their prosperity will be reflected in the whole political organism ; their standards will permeate 3 4 THE PATH OF LABOR the ethical life of the nation. Fifty million of the people in the United States, one-half of its population, live in communities of less than 2,500 inhabitants. Labor's problem is, therefore, not a sectional one, con- fined to any part of the country, but is the problem of the city, of the small town, of the rural region. During 1916 and 1917 questions relating to labor have been scarcely second in public interest to those connected with the war, for the problems that beset those who strive in the economic warfare are more widespread than ever, while at the same time labor's unrest becomes of ever keener importance to the country as a whole. The over- whelming need of production, the necessity for adapta- tion of service to new accomplishment would of them- selves emphasize labor's importance, but when to these is added a general dislocation of labor, the result is of bewildering effect. Then, too, the path of labor is being trodden by feet unaccustomed to its roughness and its steeps are being climbed by a great new and untried army of workers. Economic and patriotic pressure alike are drawing into the industrial group many whose activities have been bounded by the home, or who have rendered unremunerated service. As the Army and Navy have been recruited from among all the people of the country, so labor is recruiting itself from all ranks and from all parts of the land, and the readjustments necessary to the new economic conditions will be felt in isolated communities and among secluded peoples who may fail to connect their vexing uncertainties with the great events of the national life. But the working through of time-long plans goes on, THE CALL TO SERVICE 5 and more and more comes the realization that "the frustrations of circumstances are but episodes" that must be met by the peoples of a period as they contribute their share to world making. Organized Labor Unfortunately the word "labor" is today being so gen- erally translated in terms of organization that many fail to associate problems of sweeping scope, presented by great bodies of workers, with the daily difficulties of small communities or isolated individuals. The swift current of the world's great movements, however, drives back eddies which reach into remote coves and bays and which engulf many who are ignorant of the source or sweep of the irresistible forces at work. Highly organized labor has a strength and power that scattered and unorganized units cannot have, but in this very strength lies a menace to labor itself. The Ameri- can Federation of Labor alone reported in 1917 a mem- bership of 2,371,434. The official co-operation of so large a group is decidedly well worth the winning, and agencies of all kinds exert pressure to assure themselves of the sympathy and the votes of a body that is repre- sentative of labor throughout the United States. The endorsement of the Federation carries with it a country- wide, although unofficial, propaganda and it therefore attracts the most active effort on the part of those desiring endorsement. For example : "The liquor problem is being considered by organized labor as never before, largely because of the industrial situation pro- duced by the war, and also because the question of food 6 THE PATH OF LABOR supply makes the liquor problem of supreme importance. For some time the liquor men have been trying to cap- ture the labor movement. Already quite a number of State central labor unions have voted in favor of the liquor traffic because of the urgent request of bartenders and brewery workers." 1 Great numbers of the members of the Federation are opposed to the liquor traffic, and the American workingman is on the whole sober, yet a sectional question involving one type of workers can be made to misrepresent American labor and to seem to secure a backing for a great agency of evil. Since the outbreak of the Great War the attitude of organized labor has been the subject of much discussion, for it has found in its hands the power to so clog the wheels of industry as to greatly impede, if not to stop, the war. 'They form the army behind the battle line," and when a testing time comes, no one need doubt that labor will meet its opportunity finely and splendidly with that devo- tion that is characteristic of American manhood. Among the disturbing rumors and discussions of the day it may be well to remember the fair summing up of the case made by John A. Fitch, who forbids that organized labor in its motives be differentiated from other groups. He says: "Labor is patriotic, but its patriotism is like that of nearly everyone else. Most of us are patriotic at heart, but we seldom are willing to make anything less than a supreme sacrifice for our country. It doesn't seem worth while. Short of that we go about our busi- ness in the usual way." * Organized labor alone can ex- press itself concretely ; it vocalizes the ambitions not only of its own group but of labor in general, and those out- 1 The Christian Work. November, 1917. * The Survey, December. 1917. THE CALL TO SERVICE 7 side of its ranks share in the results of its efforts. During 1915-1917 the demands of labor increased wages greatly; this increase raised the cost of production; the increased cost of food, clothing, etc., led to new requests on the part of labor. In the summer of 1917, "The Depart- ment of Labor at Washington estimated that, as com- pared with January, 1915, the average daily wages per man had increased 38 per cent, in the cotton-manufac- turing industry and 53 per cent, at the iron and steel mills. These industries were typical in this respect of many others." ' We are yet too near the economic uncertainties of 1917 to have the perspective for a final word, but it is possible to suggest a few of the forces that, combining with the immense demand for war production, are magnifying in the national life the place and attitude of labor. Immigration One of the first effects of the war felt in the United States was the cutting down of the number of immigrants arriving at her ports. The warring nations of Europe in 1914 and 1915 called home the reservists of their armies, and, by the tens of thousands, able-bodied work- men laid down the pick and shovel, stopped the looms, drew the fires and answered the call of their mother country. In 1913 there were 843,000 more aliens admitted to this country than departed; in 1915 "the arrivals of European aliens in this country, immigrant and non-immigrant, were exactly 16,900 short of depar- tures";* in the year ending June 30, 1917, the official • Scribner's Magazine, October, 1917. 4 Scribner's Magazine, October, 1917. 8 THE PATH OF LABOR figures show a total of aliens admitted of 362,877; the net gain for that year was, however, only about 200,000. The peoples furnishing the largest number of immi- grants for 1917, in numerical precedence, were: Italian 38,950 English 32,246 Greek 25,919 French 24,405 Scandinavian 19,596 Irish 17,462 Hebrew 17,342 Mexican 16,438 Spanish 15,019 Scotch 13,350 Portuguese 10.194 Japanese 8,925 African 7,971 It is interesting to make a few comparisons with 1914 as follows : 1914 1917 Italian 296,414 38,950 Hebrew 138,051 17,342 Polish 122,657 3,109 Russian 44,957 3,711 Ruthenian 36,727 1,211 Slovak 25,819 244 Syrian 9,023 976 Roumanian 24,070 522 Magyar 44,538 434 The economic life of this country has, for years, been built on the basis of a large and ever-increasing supply of unskilled labor ; the newer immigrants have mined the coal, laid the railroads, felled the forests, built the sub- ways, tunneled the mountains ; as each group has pushed its way to a larger economic independence, its work has been taken over, not by its own Americanized sons, but THE CALL TO SERVICE 9 by a group of more lately arrived strangers from over the sea. Man labor has seemed inexhaustible in supply and of small value. Suddenly all this has changed ; the source of supply has been closed. Southeastern Europe needs her own men, and industry in the United States finds itself facing a shortage of that type of labor which has been doing the fundamental work that made other labor possible. Off to the Front While industry was trying to readjust itself to the difficulties caused by a curtailed immigration, the United States entered the war, and approximately a million young men were called to the camps; these came from every form of labor; the farm, the shop, the mine, trans- portation, offices, colleges shared alike in the embarrass- ment of necessary readjustments. A walk about the business sections of any city or large town where service flags are displayed, suggests the widespread shiftings occasioned by the calling of the men to the colors. In some cases 50% of the employees of a business have been taken. In readjusting the work to such conditions those remaining who have had some experience and who show adaptability are necessarily pushed upward to man the more important positions, thus again tending to em- phasize the shortage of unskilled labor. New Industries Simultaneously with the lessening of immigration and the formation of the new United States Army, industry became greatly stimulated and especially along certain 10 THE PATH OF LABOR lines. These later became of paramount importance and it became of immediate necessity that labor should be recruited for their equipment. Huge munition and gun plants sprang into existence as though by magic and demanded thousands and tens of thousands of workers, skilled and unskilled ; the need of clothing and equipment for a million men stimulated factories to the nth degree of production ; food supplies, not only for this country but for its allies in Europe, called for increased agricultural forces; lumber for great cantonments and for a fleet of wooden vessels sent new forces to the forests — every- where an inordinate activity has resulted. But labor is needed not only for these new, or freshly stimulated lines of work ; they in turn must be supplied with raw material, and there has resulted a great chain of awakened indus- tries; food must not only be produced, it must be con- served ; factories call for metals and for coal, and mining becomes a vital part of the whole process ; cotton and wool pass into the insatiable maw of looms and the work of the farm increases; yet the demand is ever for "more, more." The raw material must reach the factory or workshop ; the finished product must go to the consumer ; transportation, by land and sea, requires large groups of workers. Directly and indirectly an uncounted multitude must serve if the needed supplies shall reach those who have taken on themselves the grim responsibility of soldierhood. No large group of unemployed existed in the country in 1914; the withdrawal of those who returned to Europe and of those who have gone to form the National Army brought about an acute labor situation. The usual activ- THE CALL TO SERVICE 11 ities could not continue and the new ones be supplied with workers ; there became necessary the transference of labor from the less necessary forms of production and its replacement in new groups. Such a change must come — in many instances plants will be altered to meet the new needs arising daily because of the war, and labor thus remain fixed in location while producing essential rather than non-essential articles ; in other cases there will be necessary the diversion of labor geographically as well as industrially. "There is no reason for a decrease in the total value of goods manufactured, but they must be products having a direct or indirect relation to the present necessities of the nation." ' The result has been a serious dislocation of labor; the shif tings and realignments have caused general confusion, bringing new social as well as economic problems. But shifting of labor has not been enough to meet the new situation — an added supply of labor has become necessary if the wheels of industry are to turn. Substitutes We are apt to feel that the entrance of women into gainful employment is a new factor brought about by Nineteenth and Twentieth Century conditions. Women have, however, always been a part, and an important part, of the industrial system of this country. They not only have not been "doing men's work" or "driving men out," but have been urged and pressed into this service. As colonial records show, the colonist fathers, economists and political leaders, believed it better for women to be employed in factories than to live in even comparative 'New York Times, December, 1917. 12 THE PATH OF LABOR idleness, and their pressure, as well as that of necessity, began a system that has grown and developed with the years. "In 1794 when Trench Coxe found it necessary to reply to the argument that labor was so dear as to make it impossible for us to succeed as a manufacturing nation and that the pursuit of agriculture should occupy all our citizens, he at once called attention to the fact that the importance of women's labor must not be overlooked, since manufactures furnished the most profitable field for its employment. And in the early part of the last century, a new factory was called a blessing to the community among other reasons, because it would furnish employ- ment for the women of the neighborhood. Later it was said that women were kept out of vice simply by being employed, and, instead of being destitute, provided with an abundance for a comfortable subsistence." 6 From colonial days to the present there has been a steady growth both in the numbers of women employed and in the list of occupations open to them. This in- crease, before the present war "has been only normal, considering the rate of increase in population, in the group of industrial occupations designated in the census as manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, while there has been a disproportionately large increase only in the occupational group trade and transportation." The statistics of women who in 1910 were employed in gainful occupations is of interest, especially as showing a generally unguessed distribution in the various forms of labor. The census of that year showed 8,075,772 women employed, as follows: " Women in Industry, Abbott. THE CALL TO SERVICE 13 Domestic service 2,530,846 Manufacturing, etc 1,820,980 Agriculture, animals, etc 1,807,501 Professional 733,885 Clerical 593,224 Trade 468,088 Unclassified 121,248 The group that has principally attracted legislative at- tention is the second — manufacturing. This is because those thus employed work in groups, and thus become officially articulate, and also because they compete to some extent at least with men, both organized and unorganized. The first and third groups, while numerically rivaling the second, are made up of those whose work is more indi- vidualistic. The workers in these groups do not, in their capacity as workers, mingle with large groups similarly employed, and their relations to their employers have remained of a much more personal character thin is the case in the factory. The influences causing readjustment in man labor will of necessity bring about changes in the woman group. The demands of the war will more and more curtail the production of luxuries and cause the concentration of labor on things vital to present conditions. In the manu- facturing group this fact will bring many shiftings; but as large numbers of men will be withdrawn from this group, the women remaining therein will be subjected to a disproportionate amount of readjusting. Even then, however, it is probable that there will not be found with- in the group enough workers to supply the demand. This will probably be equally true of group 3. "Agri- culture, Animals, etc.," because of the food demands. The present tendency would indicate that group 1, "Do- 14 THE PATH OF LABOR mestic Service," will lose large numbers who will go to fill the vacancies in groups 2 and 3. An interesting by-product of the war is thus suggested, as much shift- ing in this direction would necessitate vital changes in the customs and manners of social life. Personal com- fort and desire will, however, give way before national need, and American womanhood, whether served or serving, will cheerfully readjust itself to changed con- ditions. But there will come — is coming as we write — not only regroupings among those already employed in gainful occupations, but an entrance into the field of profitable employment by large groups of women who have here- tofore remained outside the ranks of labor, many being of those who have served in volunteer work. European countries have had to call on their women to aid largely in work specifically allied to the war, and to share in service outside of the homes. There is, perhaps, to be no more interesting by-product of the Great War than this larger entrance of women into industry and all that it may presage of social and economic change. In England there are today about 1,256,000 women who have taken work formerly done almost wholly by men, raising their employment total from about 3,282,- 000 to 4,538.000. This total employment does not in- clude domestic servants, women in small shops or on farms, or nurses in military, naval or Red Cross hospi- tals. Over 200,000 are now engaged in agricultural labor. Still more are employed in the great war-time industry of munitions-making. How vast that industry has be- come is indicated by the fact that the Ministry of Muni- THE CALL TO SERVICE 15 tions is now employing 2,000,000 persons and is spend- ing nearly $3,500,000,000 a year. The same process of substitution of female for male labor has naturally obtained in Germany, while France, also, now depends largely upon her women in the fac- tories, as well as on the farms. These women will go in large numbers into kinds of work that have heretofore been mainly in the hands of men. As we go to press, a few women street car con- ductors and taxi drivers are taking the places of men; some cities are trying women as postmen ; elevator boys are being replaced by girls ; railroad yards are rinding women satisfactory as workers, while factories of all kinds are utilizing ever larger groups of women. There seems at this time no line of employment that per se is closed to women because of sex, and the possibilities of another twelve months are beyond prophecy. This situation is not peculiar to any one part of the country; the stress of national life is drawing the people of all parts and those of all races into the maelstrom. The ever-widening circles of demand are reaching into the retired village, into the mountains and the valleys ; all of life is being stirred by the new national conscious- ness that is springing from a common danger and a common aim. The South, that fifty years ago was forced to adjust itself after an upheaval of the foun- dations of its social and economic life, is again face to face with a need of readjustment. Negro labor, feeling the present unrest, is moving in great groups to the North and West ; New England is feeling the cutting off of immigrant labor and is calling women to man its fac- 16 THE PATH OF LABOR tories; the West finds its labor seized with a new rest- lessness and looks forward with uncertainty. The Gov- ernment sends out over the country its call for 10,000 trained women for service in the departments — every- where are stirrings, shif tings, readjustments. Spiritual Influences In all of this there is a wide and an interesting field for economic discussion ; we are, however, especially concerned with that phase as it relates to the moral and spiritual life of the workers. From the marvelous shift- ings and realignments of the time there must evolve new spiritual values as well as new social and economic sit- uations. The church of Christ cannot stand aside from a situation of such grave importance. Its relationship to individuals in the great groups affected insures an abiding interest in the perplexities that beset those indi- viduals in their work-a-day lives, as well as in the final solution that may evolute from the turmoil of the day. Christian women may well study deeply and think carefully of the changing lives of hundreds of thousands of workers, many of whom are women, and those mostly young women. Many of these are bewildered and dis- tressed by the enforced absence in the army or navy of the breadwinner, by a new necessity of self-support, or because this support must be gained under new condi- tions ; others are excited and exhilarated by the break in the routine of life. Both groups are uncertain, tenta- tive: they are in an impressionable and therefore pre- carious attitude. The very natural reaction to new en- vironments and new conditions will be that they shall THE CALL TO SERVICE 17 free themselves from the past, and that they shall make for themselves lives unhampered by customary re- straints, and therefore they need to receive a message which will make clear to them the seeming chaos of the present-day world. One industry alone may illustrate the new situation : munition works have been built in communities where existed only a small margin of extra labor; to supply workers for these plants operatives have been drawn from a wide circle of towns ; in most cases no provision for housing or caring for these new workers was pro- vided before they appeared — the result has been difficult for the men ; for the girls there has been a situation fraught with real danger. The Y. W. C. A., by a few experimental boarding houses and recreational centers, has shown the need and possibilities of caring for these groups of unassimilated workers who may be drawn into a community, but neither the Association nor any or- ganization can meet all the needs. Christian people who live adjacent to such problems must study them and find the solutions therefor. A virile Home Missions may well concern itself with the problems of labor; it has ever been its responsibility to search out the lonely or the neglected, to minister to those whose way is difficult, and to those who are facing new and untried conditions. Home Missions has also an ever-widening conception of the scope of its service in a new cooperation with the economic and social life of men, with their physical as well as their spiritual well-being. It preaches a gospel that presages a broader and truer interpretation of the brotherhood of man. There 18 THE PATH OF LABOR is no greater service for Home Missions than that it shall interpret the Fatherhood of God to those whose feet often stumble as they pass on the path of labor. A Call to Church Women In January, 1917, the Council of Women of Home Missions, composed of the representatives of sixteen Woman's Boards of Home Missions, feeling keenly the alienations that were recognized, placed itself upon rec- ord in the following statement : "The Council of Women for Home Missions wishes to bring to the attention of its Constituent and Corresponding Boards the urgent and increasing need of a more intelligent and sympathetic understanding between the women of the church and the women in industry. It is happily true that many women in industry are at the same time women of the church and that many of the women who are members of the church are already deeply interested in the social and economic problems which especially affect women ; but we must admit with heartfelt sorrow that a division into classes along this line exists among the women of our country and that it is difficult to bridge the gulf that separates them, since there is good reason to fear the women in industry believe that a lack of comprehension of their problems and a failure to co-operate in solving them mark the attitude of the women of the churches. "The Council of Women for Home Missions believes that the time has come when our Women's Home Mission Boards should take some part in meeting this situation. We remem- ber that the Boards are organized to do a specific work and that these conditions and questions appear to lie outside the boundaries of that work. Yet in the broadest and most Christlike aspect of the work nothing that concerns the womanhood of our country can be looked upon as alien to it, nor can the Boards be indifferent to the social and eco- nomic welfare of these multitudes of women who should be, but who are not, one with the missionary women of the churches in the bonds of a common belief and in the service of a common Savior and Lord. THE CALL TO SERVICE 19 "The Council, therefore, desires to recommend most earnestly that each Board seek to find some way which shall be consonant with its policy by which the women of its churches may be led to acquaint themselves with the ques- tions which are of vital importance to the women in industry, and to enter sympathetically into their effort to solve them. "There must be women in every church or in every organ- ized group of churches who could and would respond to this need and this opportunity without lessening in any degree their response to the specific needs of their denominational work. The need is not for a new department of work nor, indeed, for the putting of a new burden upon the shoulders of those who are already overburdened, but the need is rather for a call to the women of the churches to reach out more intelligently and more sympathetically to their sisters in the working world." It would seem that this statement was prophetic of the vital condition that has so soon come, when all the prob- lems of labor have been intensified and the problems of the women in industry multiplied. If these problems were a challenge to the women of the churches in 1916, surely in 1918 that challenge has become imperative in time and force. Christian women must help many to readjust themselves to new conditions, must help them to find in the new life that power that shall keep them true to the best ideals of American womanhood, must help to build out of change and turmoil a fine and Christian citizenry. The future of the race as well as its present emergencies will need to be guarded; an educational program that shall teach to adult as well as child a real Americanization develop- ment, that will make and keep the nation intact, must be presented ; the church as the material embodiment of the spirit of love and faith must offer its help to all. All this then should be the approach of Christian women 20 THE PATH OF LABOR to a study of the path of labor with its difficulties and its needs. Alienation From the Church That an overwhelming number of those who follow the path of labor are alienated from, or at best, careless of the church as an organized body cannot be denied. In large cities the Protestant church has shown a marked tendency to withdraw from those districts where live those who work with their hands and to concentrate among the numerically limited well to do. The reasons given for this withdrawal are that a lack of attendance makes the church unnecessary and makes its financial support impossible. A few missions, of varying degrees of popularity, reach a limited number, but leave abso- lutely untouched the great groups of workmen and their families — American or foreign. In the smaller towns the same tendency is marked, accentuated by the absence of "missions," and by the occasional presence of success- ful and aggressive churches that stand out as proof of the existence of a generally neglected power. In rural com- munities, where thirty years ago were prosperous Prot- estant churches, and where the present inhabitants are, to a large extent, the children of those who attended and supported these churches, there may be found today Country Life Departments of Church Boards earnestly engaged in revivifying somnolent groups. Says one student of this question : "After an exhaustive study of a number of selected representative fields in different parts of the United States, Strong (Dr. Josiah) con- cludes that less than 30 per cent, of the population of THE CALL TO SERVICE 21 America are regular attendants, perhaps 20 per cent, are irregular attendants, while fully one-half never attend any church at all, Protestant or Catholic. This per- centage of attendance seems too high. Investigations made by the writer in New England towns, and by a friend in a large part of Boston, would not warrant an estimate of even 15 per cent, of the population as regular attendants. Statistics also show that church membership is steadily declining in proportion to population." T Such figures prove conclusively that the great work to be done by the church among the large groups of people affected by the present labor difficulties, must be done largely with those who have lived apart from the church, careless of their own needs or of the help that church could give. To these groups the church has at this time a definite ministry — in welcoming them into the commu- nities to which economic need may take them, in attach- ing them to the local church body, in heartening them for their tasks, in showing to them that "No nation is safe without Jesus. The America of the future, like America of the past, must be a spiritual reality, or we are doomed." Causes There are doubtless many reasons, springing from in- numerable sources, for the lack of church attendance — some due to indifference, some to positive antagonism, but the one great general cause, it is certain, is that for multitudes of people attention is concentrated on the problems of physical existence ; the rapid increase of material things to the few raises hope in the minds of many that they, too, may be among those who will share * The Church and the Wage-Earners, Thompson. 22 THE PATH OF LABOR largely in the wealth of the country. This hope directs thought and energy into the channel of commercialism. Whatever tends to bring about the realization of the hope is keenly sought to the exclusion of other things which seem of less immediate importance. This position is emphasized by the great increase of secular literature in the form of newspapers and cheap magazines, which provide a reading supply that directs the attention still further toward material things and away from the con- templation of matters relating to the spirit. Travel in- creases and Sunday travel especially. Church attend- ance suffers thereby, and more and more the Church seems a thing apart from the problem of life. While a few are actively antagonistic to the church for one reason or another — a few because of persecu- tion suffered in other lands, the great mass of non- church goers are frankly indifferent, if that can be called indifference which is without thought, i. e., the church does not appear on their horizon except as the agency of marriage and death — they ignore it because they never think of it. The writer met at a large hotel in a promi- nent Southern resort, a cultured woman of over thirty years of age who had lived her life in a fine Northern city, but who frankly said that she had never attended a church service in her whole life — had never been sent to Sunday-school, and never gave the matter a thought. This seems incredible, yet is perhaps not so exceptional as we would like to think. A Program of Service To command the attention of the great throng that is THE CALL TO SERVICE 23 apart from the church, that body must present an aggres- sive program of service; it must preach a gospel of jus- tice, of brotherliness, of love; it must translate its preach- ing into daily practice in large things and in small ; it must concern itself with this world's relationships as well as with those of a future life; with clearness and direct- ness it must convince all that "man cannot live by bread alone." V II IN CITY INDUSTRIES GRACE SCRIBNER If ye fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self, ye do weli. — Jas. 2:8. Bear ye one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. — Gal. 6 : 2. We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak and not to please ourselves. — Rom. 15 : 1. Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God. — Luke 18:16. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof. — Ezek. 8 : 5. "Where cross the crowded ways of life, Where sound the cries of race and clan, Above the noise of selfish strife, We hear Thy voice, O Son of man! "O Master, from the mountain side, Make haste to heal these hearts of pain, Among the restless throngs abide, O tread the city's streets again, " 'Till sons of men shall know Thy love, And follow where Thy feet have trod; Till glorious from Thy heaven above Shall come the city of our God." II IN CITY INDUSTRIES The Children On the streets of my city 4,500 children under sixteen years old, and as young as twelve, toil long hours. We pass them, my fellow citizens and I, on every down-town street corner, in all kinds of weather, quite oblivious of the incongruity of young children working under such conditions on the streets of a Christian city. Occasion- ally a mis-shapen young body, bending under the weight of a stack of the Sunday edition, or a shivering urchin, blue with the cold and wet, may rouse a passing indigna- tion. But for the most part, this young toiler is taken for granted; the sympathy of a hurrying populace is re- served for the unseen child in the mill or factory. Among those forty-five hundred children are news- boys, bootblacks, and street venders. Often thinly-clad in the coldest weather, exposed to the fickle chance of the skies and the jostling crowds, working long and irregular hours, they are allowed by a careless community to barter their health and future vitality for a miserable and un- certain pittance. Not only is their health undermined by exposure, night work, irregular eating and sleeping 21 28 THE PATH OF LABOR hours, but the moral environment is destructive of all that the nation values in its manhood. There is every encouragement to dishonesty and evasion of the demand of school authorities; saloons and other vicious places swing wide open; the vices of the street, smoking, drink- ing and petty gambling are all forced upon these children as a natural part of their education. Once out from under the restrictions of family control, the lure of the street grows more and more irresistible. Independence of parental authority grows into defiance not only of family, but often of community. Regular employment becomes impossible after the small excitements of the street. The shrewd lad, so sharp-witted upon the street, is sleepy and stupid in the school-room, after the long hours, night and morning, at his work. A comparison of 295 newsboys with boys of the same class who were not working revealed that the newsboys were below the ave- rage, both in proficiency and in school work. A description of the conditions in newspaper mailing- rooms reads like a tale from the early factory conditions in England: "Hundreds of boys are herded together in badly-ven- tilated rooms for hours at a time. The treatment of these boys during the time when the copies, hot from the press, are being distributed needs to be humanized. The boys fight for copies as though it were a matter of life and death. I have seen them climb over one another's backs in their efforts to get nearest the distributing counter, the boys underneath bearing the load rather than yielding the place. The attendant in charge often uses a stick most freely." IN CITY INDUSTRIES 29 But this is not the London of Charles Dickens, nor the Paris of Victor Hugo. It is Boston in 1915. Such are the general conditions, and Boston is rather careful, as cities go, of the newsboys, bootblacks and venders who work upon its streets. Besides the newsboys there are upon the streets of every city the messenger and delivery boys. They con- front the same dangers from exposure and overwork ; the same temptations to dishonesty and delinquency ; and in addition have forced upon them the moral dangers which even maturity ought not to be called upon to face. At the most impressionable age, these young boys are sent to take messages, carry parcels and run errands for every type of evil place in the city's vilest underworld. Saloons, houses of prostitution and gambling dens are not only open and beckoning, but require the services of these boys in the regular course of their daily work. An in- vestigation of night messenger service in the five years previous to 1915, in cities representing every section of the country, failed to reveal a single night messenger whose work had not brought him into contact with vice. In the words of a prominent government executive, "The newsboy service is demoralizing, but the messenger ser- vice is debauching. It ruins children by the dozens, and if any boy comes out of this service without having suf- fered moral shipwreck, he can thank the mercy of God and not the protecting arm of the community that stands idly by and makes no attempt to save him from tempta- tion." His verdict is confirmed by a report of the United States Department of Labor, which found that among nearly five thousand cases of juvenile delinquency re- 30 THE PATH OF LABOR ported among working children, 54 per cent, were among the street workers alone. The conclusion of the report is "Street work is a prime agency for the promotion of juvenile delinquency; and this becomes more impressive when we reflect that forms of street work are few, while the variety of inside employment is almost without end. There can be no question about the relation of street work to juvenile delinquency." Some pages of the Chicago Vice Commission Report are still burned into the consciences of those who are fighting the children's battle. So terrible were the revelations concerning these "Night Children," as they were called, that they will not bear repeating here ; but they cannot be forgotten until the conditions which they describe have been banished forever. Deplorable as are the conditions surrounding the chil- dren who trade upon the street, these children do have the rudimentary beginnings of state and municipal pro- tection. There remain scores of little workers whom no law or city ordinance can touch — unprotected by any sort of regulation. These are the wood-pickers, the baggage-carriers, the boys and girls engaged in filthy scavenger work, gathering wood from destroyed build- ings, coal from the freight yards, decayed fruits and vegetables from markets, and picking over the city dumps for rubbish which may be sold for a few pennies. No adequate inquiry has ever been made concerning the number of children who are toiling in one or another of these ways upon the streets of this great and wealthy country. One writer conservatively estimates the appal- IN CITY INDUSTRIES 31 ling total of three hundred thousand, not counting those who do not come under some sort of regulation. In Mills, Factories, Canneries, Workshops Heretofore the children in the manufacturing estab- lishments have been chiefly in the public eye. There the evils were most obvious and most readily grasped. Now, after many years of determined effort, and many rebuffs and disappointments, the friends of these children have secured a Federal law which prohibits their employment under sixteen years of age in mines and quarries and under fourteen in manufacturing establishments, and which does not allow any of these to work more than eight hours a day, nor at night. Assuming, however, that this law will be adequately enforced, and that is a large assumption, it reaches only 150,000 children. The incredible total of 1,850,000 is still outside its protec- tion. This means that all the evils of the old conditions are still to be borne, even in some of the most advanced states, by children as young as fourteen. How many children between fourteen and sixteen are in the fac- tories, and under what conditions they work, we do not know. But we can get faint glimpses from scattered re- ports. In Massachusetts, for example, there were last year 42,000 of that age in the manufacturing industries of the state. In the cotton mills of the South there were, some years ago, according to a government estimate, 14,- 000 of that age at work, and in the New England mills nearly 10,500. These numbers have unquestionably been greatly increased since that time. 32 THE PATH OF LABOR The physical effects of such work upon boys and girls are abundantly evident. In the textile mills of New England young girls operate as many as eight looms at a time, when to operate more than two is to disregard life and health. In the cotton mills, whether in the North or in the South, the same menaces to health are found: noise, dust and lint in the air and excessive hu- midity. Says a Federal Report: "The noise of the machinery is nerve-racking; the work in many occupa- tions requires constant attention, and in some of the rooms the air is hot and moist to an unnecessary and in- jurious degree." The death rate for cotton-mill opera- tives is unusually high. It has been found that about one in every two deaths among them between the ages of fifteen and 44 is due to tuberculosis, and that boys be- tween fifteen and nineteen years have a death rate twice as high as that for non-operatives ; girls of the same age have an even higher death rate. Says an observer of these mill children : "I could not get myself to believe that those children were really fourteen years old ; physi- cally they were not developed ; dry of lip and shrunken of body ; children without light in their eyes and without color in their cheeks and without song on their lips ; I asked one of the boys whether he ever played. He looked at me with his lifeless eyes as though in surprise, and answered, 'No, I never played.' " Consider that picture of child life in the face of the varied activities craved and needed by the growing lad and the young girl. In place of diversified activities, they are bound to the ma- chine all day long, repeating for eight hours a few end- less and meaningless motions. From this constant over- Courtesy of Sat. Child Labor Cotr. Street Trades IN CITY INDUSTRIES 33 strain results a weakening and an ultimate degeneration of the muscles and the general health. In addition to the menace to health, there is the danger to life and limb. Children of this age are not yet devel- oped sufficiently to avoid accidents in some of the dan- gerous occupations of the factories. It was found by government inspectors a few years ago that, although children are employed in the comparatively safe occu- pations, the rate of accidents among them was more than double that of the older workers. The deterioration wrought on the health of the child is alone enough to condemn factory work for children. But there are more sinister results. The work is unskilled monotonous labor, the performing of the same tedious tasks day after day and week after week. It teaches nothing of value; it leads to nothing: it retards rather than promotes intel- lectual development. It is blind alley work, sooner or later leaving its followers helpless against the solid wall of skilled labor's competition. An occupation that in this day of specialization fits a boy or girl for nothing and is devoid of prospects is a curse rather than a blessing. In 314 out of 406 positions investigated in New York there was absolutely no training. "The vast majority," says the investigator, "who leave school enter low grade in- dustries, untrained, unguided, unguarded, where they average between $4 and $4.50 a week and jump from job to job, with consequent loss to industry and themselves." And so long as these children are in the mill they can- not go to school. Often the mills and the community provide night schools. But how much can a boy of fourteen learn in a night school after eight hours of 34 THE PATH OF LABOR deadening factory work? "Every child should work, but at work that develops, not deadens," says the Na- tional Child Labor Committee. "Encourage work if it trains the child to be a better citizen. Stop it if it merely makes money for the parent or the employer. We must not grind the seed corn." And again, "No one can read the record of conditions, heat and exposure, speed and nervous tension, overstrain and monotony, absence of training and opportunity, without wondering whether the minimum standards set up in the new law are not grotesquely inadequate." But physical and mental hazards do not tell the whole story of risk placed upon young life by work in the mills and factories. Such breaking down of the vitality, such stunting of mental development leads inevitably to moral ruin in a large number of cases. Nearly five thousand cases of juvenile delinquency were studied a few years ago by government statisticians, to discover the relation between child labor and delinquency. More than half the number were working children, and that portion were responsible for 62 per cent, of the total charges. The workers among these offenders were also guilty of the more serious charges and came before the courts most often. In spite of their better home conditions in gen- eral, the workers went wrong most frequently. Health, mental development, and morals all must be risked when the child of fourteen is allowed to begin a wage-earning career, even in the safer confines of the factory. IN CITY INDUSTRIES 35 The Invasion of the Home Walk down the aisles cf almost any department store. On every hand are evidences of the industry of baby fingers. Here are the gay roses and violets fashioned by tiny hands working wearily long after more fortunate children are in bed. Here also are the dainty bootees and dresses for the new baby ; pretty buckles and delicate jabots and rosettes, all made by little children in tene- ment homes; base balls, tennis balls, all kinds of paper goods, jewelry, many articles of apparel for both men and women, a never-ending list of goods carried home from the factory and "finished" by small hands working untold hours. Young Mary Minora, fifteen years old, who had worked at finishing since she was ten, told the Industrial Relations Commission that she had worked on garments three days a week, and gone to school two. Beginning at eight in the morning and working until nine at night, she could make sixty cents a day if she worked fast enough. In Massachusetts in 1914 one-fifth of all workers in home industries in the state were children under fourteen, and one-half of all the people working on paper goods were children. When the Federal Gov- ernment made its study of women and children a few years ago, it discovered that over 91 per cent, of the children in shops were fourteen and fifteen years old, and none were under twelve. But two-fifths of the children working in tenement industries were below that age. Nobody knows or could estimate the working hours of these children. But it is pretty certain that wherever work is allowed to be taken into the homes from the fac- 36 THE PATH OF LABOR tories, children are pretty sure to be employed on it, both before and after school hours, even if the school laws are obeyed. Laws regulating the hours of work for children here are valueless, for it is impossible to enforce them. The school laws themselves are difficult of en- forcement under such conditions. Out of 512 children between six and thirteen years old in families in New York where tenement work was done, 100 were not at- tending school. Here in dirt and filth, darkness and disease, little children work long days for a mere pit- tance. Says one investigator concerning one of the largest branches of the clothing industry: "This ready- made clothing is often finished in the homes of a class of people whose undernourished condition, due to poverty and lack of thrift and hygienic sense, general low standard of living and dirty habits make them most susceptible to contagious diseases. In two congested blocks of New York City where a large proportion of men's clothing is sent to be finished, the death rates due to contagious diseases are abnormal." "No sweat-shop goods" in the advertisement does not protect the consumer or the worker; for while the garment may have been manufac- tured under good conditions, it may also have been finished under the worst possible conditions. And for what ? "A little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights." Turning shirt cuffs from early morning until late at night, one to five cents a dozen pairs ; making fancy bows, two cents a dozen ; turning shirt- facings, seven-eighths of a cent for three dozen. What wonder that Louis Hine, who is recording social history in this country by the photographs he is IN CITY INDUSTRIES 37 getting of some of these conditions, says vehemently, "The Home is for the Family — Industry Keep Out I" On the Stage and in the Fields The stage children, and those used in the production of motion pictures, must not be forgotten. The National Child Labor Committee is finding it necessary to begin agitation in behalf of the children who work in motion- picture studios, as it has long worked against allowing children to appear on the stage. In this new and rapidly- increasing industry, practices have been found which can be classed as nothing short of cruel. Nerve shock and fright are the least of the evils to which children are be- ing subjected in the production of motion pictures. Children in agricultural work are not usually thought of as having any relation to the city ; but the city, with its evil conditions for children, is rapidly invading the country. And from the city districts many children go with their parents into the rural sections to assist with the crops. Where the school laws are not stringent or not well enforced, the long hours of work begin in May and last until October or later. The children return to the city schools, depleted in strength and ill and exhausted from overwork and undernourishment. Says a Phila- delphia school principal : "The children who returned from the country after the berry-picking and canning season were in a most deplorable condition, morally, physically and intellectually, due to improper food, poor housing and want of supervision. They are mentally unfit in many cases even to remain in the grade from which they left. It is as though some unseen hand had wiped 38 THE PATH OF LABOR their minds clear of all they had previously been taught. At the age of fourteen these children are often still in the third and fourth grades." The Results to Society When England went into the South African War and began to seek recruits among the mill workers an appalling revelation awaited her. Four times the standard for physical efficiency had to be lowered, and still 10,000 out of every 11,000 were found to be unfit for military ser- vice. What happened in England in those years has been happening also in this country. The present Federal Army Draft is revealing a large proportion of physically unfit. Many of these young men are among those who were reported by the Federal census seven years ago as working children. How far were the conditions under which they worked responsible for their present inability to measure up to the army requirements ? There is not an abundance of evidence on hand to aid in determining that, but scat- tered investigations bear witness. A study of newsboys in Chicago some years ago revealed that one-third of the boys sent to the John Worthy School were suffering from venereal disease, and that practically all the newsboys who came to the school were a third below normal in physical development. A recent investigation in Massachusetts states that the measurements of mill boys as compared with other classes of boys are decidedly low; that one- third of them are physically undeveloped ; that even tak- ing the figures for the mill boys themselves, the sixteen- year-old boys show a gain of only 0.64 of an inch in height IN CITY INDUSTRIES 39 over the fifteen-year-old boys, and an actual decrease of 2^4 pounds in weight. Such meagre figures are but a feeble indictment of the actual conditions. A truer estimate is found in the de- spairing protest of the young worker himself when his voice occasionally reaches an indifferent public; as for example, the fourteen-year-old Tennessee girl, pale and thin with overwork, who drank carbolic acid because she had worked for four years, ten hours a day, and wanted "rest"; or the other girl of fifteen who told the inves- tigator that she was "too beat out for to be amused when I get home from my day's work." Her ambition was to get to bed as fast as she could, and she hoped she would die soon ; or the young textile mill workers in Massachu- setts, fourteen years old, who, when questioned about playing base ball, replied one by one, time after time, "O, I don't play base ball. I'm too old. I'm working now." Too old for base ball at fourteen ! Out of the mouths of these babes is our civilization con- demned. We are breeding a race of incompetents. Physi- cal deterioration, mental deficiency, moral depravity, feeble-mindedness all follow in the train of neglected childhood. Writ large in the nation's life is the record of this neglect. Health specialists are discovering an in- crease of degenerative diseases. This means the tearing down of the very foundation of physical life, a using up of the vital physical force upon which the future of so- ciety is dependent. Educators are adding their testimony. There are five million illiterates groping their way through this prosperous land. Says Owen Lovejoy, "The 260,020 illiterates in New York and the 389,775 in Georgia are 40 THE PATH OF LABOR all witnesses to our industrial selfishness. They are the hewers of wood and drawers of water; they build the houses they cannot occupy ; they till the soil, but do not reap the harvest ; they prune the vine, but do not eat the fruit thereof. And when the illiterate discovers that a crime has been committed against him — then what? In the majority of states six grades, and even less, are re- quired before children are allowed to go to work. The average American child is sent out to the task of making a living equipped with six grades of schooling. And our whole national life, in industry, in business, in the pro- fessions, in politics and even in our diplomatic service bears the hallmark of a sixth grade educational system." The outlook upon life of a child of fourteen, emerging illit- erate and listless after five or six years of hard labor, is hopelessly blank, and it is no wonder that so many children with such a past develop into tramps and into the great army of casual laborers, drifting from place to place, with no citizenship and no part nor lot in the common life of the nation. The economist also has something to say about the social wreckage involved. He points out that when children are brought into the factory to compete against the labor of men, the whole family earns altogether on an average no more than the father would earn if they were not allowed to enter the field against him. In North Carolina the mill operative reaches a maximum wage of 13 cents an hour when he is between 25 and 29 years old. The Massachusetts maximum is 18 cents an hour between the ages of 45 and 49. Children work be- cause the parents' wages are low, and the parents' wages are low because the children pull wages down. Thus the IN CITY INDUSTRIES 41 boy who helps to support the family by underbidding his own father in the labor market is scarcely an economic asset, except to the operators. And meantime the family life is broken down, the health, mentality and morals of all its members suffer, and society pays the mounting cost in feeble-mindedness, vice and drunkenness, and the broken and helpless lives of men and women, old before their time, who end their short working career in the state's public institutions. The ordinary burden of the neglect of childhood is heavy enough. But it will be many times increased by the war. The experience of the warring countries indicates beyond question the inevitably disastrous effects upon the chil- dren. In England a large portion of the elementary school system is in ruins, three million children between the ages of twelve and seventeen being out of school. Juvenile delinquency in both England and Germany has increased at an alarming rate. This nation cannot hope to escape the war's devastating influence upon its child life. Not many reports are available, but in Massachusetts alone the number of working children between fourteen and sixteen years old increased from 25,000 to 42,000 in 1916. and according to present figures for 1917 the number will certainly run to 60,000. Fighting the Children's Battle Nearly fifteen years ago the National Child Labor Com- mittee was organized to rouse the nation to the fact of child labor. From that time it has worked unceasingly. No state has escaped its influence. State by state it has carried on the crusade, gaining a law against night work 42 THE PATH OF LABOR here, an eight-hour-day law there; in one group of states keeping the children out of the mines before they were sixteen ; in another out of the factories before they were fourteen. Little by little it educated the nation until it become possible to carry through to success the new Fed- eral law, which does for the children in all states what had been done for them in only a few. The significance of this outstanding achievement lies not so much in what it actually accomplishes, as in the fact that it breaks a path for higher attainment. It gives to all the states a minimum standard, above which each may rise as rapidly as the people are willing. It clears the way also for better school laws. How nec- essary this campaign is may be seen when it is realized that nearly half the states still accept poverty as a legiti- mate excuse for exempting from the child labor and school laws. The need now is for a campaign in each state for more rigid educational laws. The new Federal law will not offer the protection which it might, and the states will not benefit from it adequately, unless this is done. For many of the children who will be taken from the fac- tories by the law may yet be allowed to go into local es- tablishments, such as stores and bakeries, and in this way may be worse oft" than before, since twenty-eight states have not yet adopted an eight-hour law for children in such enterprises. The need here is for local and state action, to build up the good already accomplished by the national law. The way is cleared now also for better attention to the boys and girls between fourteen and six- teen in the factories. Says the Massachusetts Child Labor Committee: "Has the state performed its whole task IN CITY INDUSTRIES 43 with reference to the 30,000 children in its mills when it has secured laws limiting their hours of labor, prohibiting their employment at night, and providing for their medical inspection ? There is much more to do. This is merely negative. It makes the task of the children less weari- some, but accomplishes tittle that is beneficial in a posi- tive sense." So the campaign now must center on getting children under sixteen out of the factories ; they have left school at the age when they most need guidance and vision ; and however inadequate the school, it is better than the factory, for the aim of the school is to benefit the child, while the aim of the factory is to benefit from him. Another step in the campaign is the providing of medical inspection of school children. Before a child is allowed to enter upon a career of wage-earning he should have a certificate of physical fitness. Some states re- quire physical examination before allowing the child to go to work, but this is not enough. Those states must go further and provide a system of continuous inspec- tion after the children have gone to work. Only in this way can occupations which are detrimental to the health of children be revealed and the children taken from them and put at less harmful work. Only in this way also can incipient diseases be discovered, and the work permit cancelled until the child is restored to good health. Laws regulating the work aspect of the child's life are only half the battle, however. The whole child labor question is now rapidly becoming a question of educa- tional standards. Along with laws regulating the condi- tions of the children's labor must go school laws, and 44 THE PATH OF LABOR ordinances, seeking to lengthen the educational oppor- tunity for children. To this end every state needs higher compulsory edu- cation laws. Every community needs part time and con- tinuation schools. In Boston a system of continuation schools has been worked out whereby those children be- tween the ages of fourteen and sixteen who have gone to work are required to attend school for a certain period each week. These schools classify the students, not ac- cording to educational standards, but according to need. Those who have no decided preference for any branch of work are put into general improvement classes, where the instruction resembles that of the ordinary day school, but is made somewhat more concrete. Those children having a well-defined vocational aim are given training which will advance them toward the calling to which they aspire. A third group is composed of those whose work gives opportunity for advancement into skilled occupations, and they are trained for promo- tion into the positions ahead. An inspiring achievement by the friends of voca- tional education has given a great impetus to indus- trial education. This is the passage of the Federal Act for Vocational Education adopted in February, 1917. The law carried an appropriation of $1,656,000 for disbursement the first year, with annually increas- ing amounts up to the eighth year, when the amount then reached, $7,162,200, should remain the annual appropriation. This Federal money is now at the dis- posal of the various states, and may be claimed by them as soon as they meet the standards and require- IN CITY INDUSTRIES 45 merits of the law. Within the first ten months after the law was adopted, forty-six states had taken the necessary steps to secure the Federal aid and establish a system of vocational education. Another feature of the campaign is the securing of mothers' pension laws to care for the relatively small number of working children who are aiding widowed mothers. In much of this agitation for better standards of legislation, in education, and in the all-around devel- opment of child life, the National Child Labor Com- mittee has been the leader. To characterize the work of this committee merely as a piece of reform work is to miss entirely the spirit and temper of the whole enterprise. From the beginning it has shown no quarter to the exploiters of childhood. Willing to take any concession it could gain, it has yet held aloft the high purpose of developing every child to the fullest possible extent of his capacities, physical, mental and moral. It meets there on common ground with the Protestant churches whose principles de- clare for the abolition of child labor and "for the fullest possible development of every child, especially by the provision of proper education and recreation." Each of these advance steps will aid in substantial measure in making necessary adjustments in the in- dustrial order. They will aid in eliminating the waste and friction incident to misplaced labor power. They will help in the democratization of our educational system. It is for the Christian to remember, however, that 46 THE PATH OF LABOR no society can endure which does not recognize that full opportunity must be extended to every child. These are ameliorations; they are not final remedies. The Christian conscience can never be content until there is no privileged group in society, benefiting from the labor of those who perform the hard and dangerous work of the world. We can never be con- tent until the child's future usefulness and happiness, not the present prosperity of the family or the in- dustry, are the determining factors in his vocation ; not until every Christian catches the vision of a world where no class is condemned to carry the heavy bur- dens throughout life, while other classes escape with the easier tasks. Among Women In 1910 there were over eight million wage-earning women in American industries. The number since that time has unquestionably grown very much larger, and with the pressure upon women due to the war, there is sure to be a great new influx of women into industrial life. Contrary to popular conception, these women have not willfully left the old home tasks for work in the factories. What they have done is to follow their traditional occupations as those occupa- tions have been transferred from the home to the fac- tory. Women still prepare the food, make the cloth- ing, launder the linen and perform countless other tasks necessary for the family, but they do this work in the factory instead of in the home. Once out of the home in pursuit of their traditional calling, how- IN CITY INDUSTRIES 47 ever, and under the necessity of providing for their own life and often for dependents, they have ranged far afield. In the past decade they have entered many occupations heretofore closed to them, and by the time the readjustments of the present year are made, few indeed will be the occupations not entered by women. What are the conditions under which this army is working? What are the questions that confront these women in their new fields of labor? The Long Day First in importance comes the long day. A waitress was testifying at a conference on the eight-hour day. "I don't think anybody's got a home any more," she said. "You all come into the restaurants for your meals. Then for twelve hours or more we're cleaning and scrubbing and digging for you, and feeding you all for the measly sum of $5 a week. The girls say to each other over and over again, 'Why isn't there a law?'" For a decade and more the working women them- selves and those who are interested in their welfare have been raising continually the same question, "Why isn't there a law?" Yet up to the present time only five states and the District of Columbia have restricted the working day of women to eight hours. Some states have estab- lished nine hours, some ten, as the legal length of the working day, and some have adopted practically no protective measures whatever to guard against over- 48 THE PATH OF LABOR work. Hence it is still possible to overwork women in the majority of states with no fear either of the law or public opinion. That the situation is taken advantage of is abundantly evident. The special investigations made by the Fed- eral Government in its study of women and children revealed that in addition to the overlong hours in the industries studied, overtime work was frequently re- quired. In the cotton textile industry the legal hours ranged from 58 to 66; in the men's clothing industry, even though the study was made in a time of depres- sion, and the facts of overwork very difficult to secure, it was found that in 33 per cent, of the establishments visited in New York and 23 of these in Pennsylvania, even the scant provisions of the state to protect the women were violated. The National Consumers' League discovered, in interviewing a thousand women, that 58 per cent, exceeded the 54-hour limit of the state; that 20 per cent, worked twelve hours a day, and that a third of the number did not have even one day of rest a week. These are typical examples. They leave no room for encouragement that even the inadequate laws now in existence, limiting women's work to nine and ten hours a day, are supplying a minimum of legal protec- tion. Every available report tells over again the same story. Wherever there is no state law to stand be- tween the women and the greed, or the indifference or the helplessness of the employer, they are the vic- tims of overwork. It is fair to assume that a large proportion of the wage-earning women of the country IN CITY INDUSTRIES 49 are suffering all the disadvantages which come in the train of the excessively long day. Quite apart from the physical, the mental and the moral results of such a condition, there is the ques- tion of the right of every individual to the leisure to develop his own life. The universal need for expan- sion, the inner compulsion of every human being to develop his own individual life, the imperative desire for growth and the expression of life in terms of something more than the bare necessities of physical living — all these are crushed out, life is stunted and deformed under the pressure of a day which leaves no time or strength for these fundamental needs. What wonder that the point of keenest interest among the women, then, is the shorter day? Night work for women has been condemned by all civilized countries but our own. Notwithstanding the obvious evils, which are patent to the most care- less observer, only five states prohibit it. Custom has been a strong barrier against the employment of women at night. But new war industries are break- ing down those barriers, and the pressure of after- the-war conditions will force women into it in greater numbers than ever before. In England, where women had not worked at night in factories for many years, they came back in full force under the pressure of the war. So in Connecticut, women, unprotected by a state law when the munitions industry invaded the state, have been conspicuous in the night work in the factories. In Illinois also women are working ten- 50 THE PATH OF LABOR hour shifts, day and night, amid all the evil conditions incident to night work. A Living Wage What can a girl or woman live on? When the Minimum Wage Board of Massachusetts first met, an employer on the board suggested that the place to begin with their deliberations was to find out what it cost a working woman to live in Massachusetts. They deliberated for a meeting or two. What kind of a room would a dollar a week pay for? What was the lowest possible figure for three meals a day? Should the girl have enough to pay for any sort of entertain- ment? They asked themselves these and similar ques- tions, and finally taking everything into consideration they agreed upon a minimum figure. Then the chair- man of the board said quietly, "I call your attention to the fact that 95 per cent, of the working women of this state are earning less than that figure." Said one member who was present at that meeting, "It was like a bombshell ! It had never entered their heads before that in paying wages they were providing the means of life for human beings." Within the past few years there have been many other scientific attempts to arrive at the amount which it takes to keep a human life in decency. Employers on the witness stands have drawn up model budgets by which girls could exist on eight dollars a week. Minimum Wage Commissions have been at work dis- covering how much it costs to live in different cities under various conditions. Philanthropically inclined IN CITY INDUSTRIES 51 people have gone into factories and tried living for a week on what they could earn and have come back to tell what living on six or eight dollars a week means. Out of it all has come a general agreement, even among the most scientific, that seven dollars a week represents the level of bare necessities, just enough to keep body and soul together. Eight dollars a week is considered not enough to live decently upon under American conditions. But what are the figures which tell the incredible tale of how much this great army of women actually earn or rather what they receive? Figures, though not abundant, are not wanting here. Fifty per cent, are receiving less than the amount agreed upon as the lowest subsistence level. Over 75 per cent, receive less than eight dollars a week, and only 23 per cent, are getting the amount agreed upon as necessary for a living wage. A Massachusetts study revealed that among 12,000 women over eighteen years of age ten per cent, were receiving less than four dollars a week; the general conclusion drawn from the entire report was that almost half of them were living on less than $6, and three-fourths of them on less than eight. In New York City it was discovered that 87 per cent, of the women waiters whose incomes were studied received less than $9 a week, which is the sum agreed upon by investigators as the lowest min- imum on which a woman can live in that citv. Even among those who could depend upon receiving food 52 THE PATH OF LABOR and tips in addition, 31 per cent, were not getting a living wage. That such conditions are not confined to industrial centers is revealed in the study of such a typical American city as Springfield, Illinois. Here it was found that women in laundries received $6 a week, salesgirls in the five and ten cent stores were getting as low as $4 and $5 a week. The investigators who made this report declared that there is no reason to believe such conditions exceptional; they are typical, and represent another kind of America than the tradi- tional one, and one that is destined to gain the ascen- dancy. They frankly condemned the low standards prevailing. In Ohio also, the Industrial Commission found that out of more than 110,000 women over a third worked for less than $7 a week and over half for less than eight. Among these were many whose work demanded a high degree of skill. Last year the working women in a small Middle- Western university town went on strike demanding increased wages. Here at the very door of the uni- versity were all the problems of an industrial center; underpaid working girls, underpaid foreigners, in- creased cost of living and a strike. When the facts came to light it was found that the small industrial plant was making unusual profits, that two professors of the university held stock in the concern, and that the girls were working for an average of $6.50 to $7.50 a week. It is not necessary for the average wage-earner to read a book to find out how little he can do with his IN CITY INDUSTRIES 53 income. But a budget figured down to the last cent cannot be without interest to women who must, whether they will or not, profit by the work of these other women who must live upon that budget. A typical attempt to discover what a minimum wage will buy is this by the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, figured for women in factories where cloaks, suits, dresses and waists are made: Per Week Board and room $5.75 Clothing 1.50 Laundry 25 Car fare 10 Doctor and dentist 25 Church 10 Vacation 25 Education 18 Recreation 25 Savings 25 Incidentals 10 $8.98 It is a significant fact that after eight weeks had been spent in an effort to arrive at the lowest pos- sible amount, and that amount was found to be $8.98, it had to be cut down to $8.75 because the higher figure was so far above the wages being paid that it was not possible to enforce so abrupt a change. The whole tale is not told when the weekly wage is known. For lost time must come out of even that meagre wage. The prevailing custom is: the lower the pay, the more frequently is lost time deducted. The stenographer in an office may lose time from illness 54 THE PATH OF LABOR or other causes and have no reduction in her salary. But every day, and sometimes every hour, lost by the girl in the factory must be paid for out of the scant weekly earning. Add to that again the hazard of unemployment. Many of the trades which employ great numbers of women are seasonal trades, driving the workers al- most beyond endurance at certain seasons, and laying them off entirely at others. During the dull season it is often impossible to find work in other industries, and many days, and sometimes weeks, pass before work is again found. It is estimated that anywhere from 12 to 30 per cent, of time is lost in this way. There is small comfort in the view usually held that these women work for "pin money," and are therefore under no hardship because of low wages or irregular employment. For the facts do not bear out this cheer- ful view. According to the reports available, "pin money" workers are such rare exceptions that they merit no attention in any study of the situation. Nor is there much more comfort in the belief that these women live at home. A large proportion of them do. But they come from bankrupt families, families so poor that it is impossible for them to live without the assistance of these wage-earners. Hence, far from being better off financially, they are often worse off, having no independent life, giving all of their earnings to the family, and receiving in return even less than the amount would purchase were they free to spend it on their own living. One report reveals IN CITY INDUSTRIES 55 that more than 50 per cent, of the women of twenty- five years and older gave their entire earnings to their families; and a study of younger women reveals 75 per cent, of them contributing all to the support of the family. The public has been slow to admit any relation be- tween wages and morals. It has very naturally and legitimately repudiated the implication that working women were any more susceptible to moral danger than any other class of women. But the fact is that low wages, long hours and ugly surroundings place a pressure upon life which no one ought to be called upon to bear. It falls heaviest upon the working women, who are denied the legitimate avenues of ex- pression for their normal interest in life. Jane Addams tells us of the experience of a young Scotch girl who worked in a candy factory to support a blind sister and paralytic father. For three years she worked hard and conscientiously, adding to her factory earnings by evening work at glove-making. In the midst of this hard and monotonous experience she became acquainted with a chorus singer in a cheap theater. The contrast between her own endless drudgery and the glitter of her friend's career broke down her de- votion to her family, and she disappeared, declaring that she would never go into a factory again. The pious father was convinced that she was "ensnared by the devil"; Miss Addams says that she was un- able to dismiss the case with that simple explanation, but was haunted with all sorts of social implications. Mrs. Louise DeKoven Bowen, who has for years 56 THE PATH OF LABOR been associated with the Juvenile Protective League in Chicago, tells of a young widow trying to support herself and her four-year-old child on the $3.50 a week she earned in a down-town restaurant. She paid $2 a week for her rent, and with the remaining $1.50 feci the child. Her own meals she snatched from th( left-overs on the plates at the restaurant. She waii pretty and attractive and began to receive invitations to dine out with men, and accepted because she felt that she must have a good meal now and then. One man with whom she dined realized the temptations of her situation, and went to the United Charities, say- ing that unless something were done for her she would be forced into an immoral life. Recent reports of vice commissions indicate clearly that the pressure of poverty is no small factor in forcing women into a life of prostitution. The pres- sure comes not only from wages insufficient to main- tain life and the denial of all the instinct for beauty and pleasure, but also in forcing young women to live in cheap neighborhoods which are honeycombed with vicious places, and which come to be an ever-present evil suggestion. Working Conditions "How is it that you are able to maintain your rapid production without premiums?" a mill superin- tendent was asked. "Oh," he replied, "We keep the piece rate so low that they have to keep right at it in order to make a living." i urtesy \\ ON i '. I' \i Sai uon »/ 1/i.v.v Woodberry IN CITY INDUSTRIES 57 And the workers who found it necessary to "keep right at it" in order to make any kind of a living were compelled to remain in the one posture best adapted to the process, without interruption, if they were to maintain the speed and accuracy demanded. Of all the complaints of workers against the condi- tions of their work, none is heard more frequently than the protest against the speed and monotony in- volved. Day after day, week after week, they are driven to the very point of exhaustion in order to keep up with the speed set by the ever-quickening machines. In the early years of the textile industry a woman tended two slowly-running looms. The number gradually increased until now in some of the processes she is compelled to look out for twelve or sixteen. Everywhere there is the drive of the indus- trial system ; not only the women in the factories, but women in large offices are driven far beyond health safety by the late afternoon rush of every day. It is part of the price which is paid by a civilization intent upon the making of things without regard to what the process will do to the makers. Added to the strain of speed is intolerable mon- otony. A telephone operator answers about 225 calls every hour, and each call requires six different operations. Those six different operations are per- formed over and over, a hundred, two hundred, some- times in emergencies, three hundred times every hour for eight hours at least. An operator who has had long experience in one of the Eastern cities says that 58 THE PATH OF LABOR before the eight-hour day went into effect, it was not uncommon for girls to drop to the floor, one after an- other, from exhaustion during the last working day of the week. In the sewing trades women and girls sit for long hours amid the roar of machinery, watch- ing a machine that carries twelve needles and sets four thousand stitches a minute. In the canneries women work the long day through, their eyes and attention constantly fixed on moving conveyors; under the hands of other women in canneries pass 54 to 80 cans a minute to be capped. In the old-style laundries it is necessary to throw the whole weight of the body, sixteen times a minute, on the lever, and to apply at least 100 pounds of pressure. In the course of one hour a hundred thousand pounds of energy are required of one woman at a single machine. A minister who was interested in the condition of the laundry workers of his city tried one of the machines and said that it taxed his strength to throw the lever. The girl in charge told him that she became so overtired that she must frequently take a day off. Other Complaints There are still other complaints about working conditions. Systems of petty fines in various indus- tries rob the workers of even part of their meagre earnings. A few years ago the waitresses in Chicago were striking; one of the grievances advanced by the girl who was picketing the restaurant was that when- ever she made a mistake in taking an order, or when- ever the customer made a mistake and charged her IN CITY INDUSTRIES 59 with it, she was compelled to pay for the food sent back to the kitchen, but not permitted to have it for her own meal. In other establishments workers are fined for tardiness and for mistakes in sewing. Conditions of safety and sanitation appear often in the list of grievances. No one who is conscious of the dependence of the country upon its wage-earning women can forget the series of fearful fires, a few years ago, by which scores of women and girls lost their lives. To the horror of all who read about it last year, a shop which had witnessed the crowning tragedy of the series was found to countenance once more exactly the same conditions ; the manufacturer, brought into court, was fined a small sum and the matter thus dismissed. A study made in the glass industry some years ago revealed that sanitary conveniences were woefully lacking. Says the report, "For all female workers, the provision of proper washing facilities is at least highly desirable, while for many such workers, proper con- veniences for washing and also for dressing are im- perative as matters of decency." Yet of the 116 fac- tories where women were employed which were visited by the government agents, nearly three-fourths of them were unequipped with washrooms, only eight had rest rooms and but five provided lunch rooms. Even in such small centers as the leading cities in the State of Maine, a report by the State Bureau of Labor reveals that there were no lunch rooms where meals were prepared available for the girls, and that 60 THE PATH OF LABOR in no case was there provision of rest rooms, recreation rooms or good toilet facilities. All of these conditions have an effect too important to be overlooked. Says a report of the United States Health Service, concerning general working condi- tions, "If an employee works and lives in squalor and semi-darkness, he gradually loses his self-respect, grows careless in his habits, becomes discouraged, and in short lacks incentive to conserve his health, and therefore becomes a hazard in any occupation." But a far more serious matter is the direct threat to life and health which is involved in the very nature of many occupations. Tuberculosis claims many victims from among the industrial wage-earners; garment workers, cigar makers and tobacco workers, clerks, book-keepers and office assistants, compositors and printers, machinists, and other groups run a dispro- portionate risk because of the nature of the work per- formed. In a study of garment workers made by the United States Health Service, it was found that the rate of tuberculosis among this group was three times as high as among United States soldiers, and of course highest among the most poorly paid. Spinal defects were also common ; there was much subnormal vision ; and nervous affections were frequent. The piece workers, driven to exhaustion in rush seasons, suffered acutely from introspection and forebodings over the future when the dull season set in and the reaction began. Among the 1,000 women examined, but 2 per cent, were free from disease. The conclusion of the report was that there existed a clear and direct con- IN CITY INDUSTRIES 61 nection between the occupation and the diseases from which the women suffered. The striking girls in a twine factory in Illinois last year complained that the dust and lint were so thick in the air that they caused eruptions on their faces and hands. It is a commonplace that waitresses suffer with foot troubles, and that the heavy strain of stand- ing for long hours and carrying heavy burdens destroys the physical capacity for maternity. The Fear of the Future The risk of the working woman is not complete when the tale of her long hours, low wages, and bad working conditions has been told. There is the con- stant fear of the jobless future. Living on the lowest minimum which can support life, what is she to do if the job fails? Even in normal times or in times of unusual activity like the present, there is still the problem of finding work for many women. In times of depression, employment offices of all kinds are crowded with women seeking work of any kind suf- ficient to keep body and soul together until the perma- nent place appears. At all times there are sudden shifts in industrial processes of which the wage- earners are the chief victims. Scores of girls may be released from employment, sometimes without a moment's notice ; some other industry in the same state may need girls, and even if the work is such that replacement is easy, there is yet no adequate machin- ery provided either by the local community or the state, to aid in making the adjustment. The wage- 62 THE PATH OF LABOR earner must bear the bulk of suffering which results from this chaotic state of industry. In Bondage to the Job Every one of these problems concerning the working women of this country is destined to be accentuated many times by the present war. Women in uncounted numbers are rushing into new and untried occupations. A large proportion of them have gone to stay. Never again will they find their horizon bounded by the simple duties of the home. They have entered the industrial ranks as permanent factors. New dangers will confront this army of untried workers. Not only will long hours and low wages and bad conditions bear upon them, but new diseases will attack them. In the munitions industry especially, which women are entering in such numbers, the danger to their health and life will be such as does not face women in the older industries. Strange poisons, which no one has yet studied sufficiently to know their effects upon human life will threaten them ; from the meagre reports on these factories thus far made, it is evident, even in the few months for which records are available, that the workers are suffering unusual danger. One study declares that it is a rarity to find a worker who has been in a certain industry for more than eight months who is not a victim of poisoning from chemicals used in the industry. Reports from communities which have gone into the munitions business reveal almost incredibly bad living and transportation facilities for the women workers. IN CITY INDUSTRIES 63 The Larger Question of Human Welfare No consideration of this situation which ends with the individual woman and her just grievances can throw adequate light upon what it all means in terms of human welfare and race advancement. Overwork means continual fatigue; fatigue means not only a lowered resistance power to disease, but it means the generating of an active poison which saps the vital energy of the worker day by day. Testimony by the volume is available showing what overwork does to woman's capacity for motherhood. It is no less a foe of the spiritual life. If the womanhood of this country is to have opportunity for anything like normal de- velopment, overwork must be destroyed. The living wage is likewise a necessity for normal living. When the woman works for less than will maintain life in safety and decency, at that point begins a long train of evils which do not cease with her life. For low wages mean bad housing and undernourish- ment; the next step is sickness; then comes loss of time, with consequently less income. So the vicious circle continues; and the results are passed on to the woman's children, who are born without strength, who grow up without the care which a normal mother can give, and who add to the country's burden of physical degenerates. Wages determine every detail of life ; they determine of what value the woman shall be as a citizen, and as a mother, for they determine the level of life at which she shall live. They determine even the length of her 64 THE PATH OF LABOR life, and the character and training she will bring to her task of motherhood. Development, whether physi- cal, mental, moral or spiritual, costs money, for development comes by way of the things which make decent living available. Insanitary conditions, the strain of the speed at which modern industry is run, and the deadly monotony of modern industrial processes all leave their telltale mark upon the woman's life, and not upon hers only, but upon the children which come after her. "I know girls," says Mrs. Raymond Robins, "who never think of spending money for carfare or lunches or laundry or outings, and never dream of earning enough to make life even half-way decent and com- fortable or giving a chance for any realization of aspir- ation or ideals or education, and yet these girls by the tens of thousands, in the face of such constant denial of all that makes life worth while have held their womanhood intact and protected its integrity. To the courage, the grit, the fineness of character all can tes- tify who know intimately the daily life of working girls. But well may we question the civilization, the democracy, the Christianity, of a community tolerating such conditions." And what will be the social result if the woman is not allowed full freedom to find her larger life in organized relationship with her f ellow- workers ? There can be but two possible outcomes to a denial of that sort under any conditions ; the first is that a race of slaves will be bred ; already a certain section of the IN CITY INDUSTRIES 65 working population bitterly refers to its condition as wage-slavery. The end of that is not only ruin for the slave but like ruin for the master. For no man and no group of men can become masters of the life and destiny of their fellows without destroying the very democratic liberties which they themselves hold dear. The other outcome, and the more probable one in a civilization as far advanced as ours, is that the workers will rise in rebellion, and buy with their blood that freedom for which people always and everywhere have been willing to sacrifice their lives. Such a con- dition need not come. But unless at this point a Christian civilization recognizes the justice of the demand of a large section of its population for liberty and freedom in their industrial relations, it is not impossible that it may come. The Campaign for Freedom It was a new day in American law-making when the National Consumers' League led the fight before the Oregon Supreme Court for the shorter work day for women. For all its effort was based upon the facts concerning the need of the women rather than upon the precedents in the law books. Strange testimony was presented in that case — evidence from social workers, from economists, from factory inspectors, from physicians, all showing beyond any doubt the evil effect of long hours upon health, mentality and morals. And the case was won. No fear of uncon- stitutionality now impedes the progress of states on this measure. The field is clear for work in every 66 THE PATH OF LABOR state where women still lack the legal protection of an eight-hour day. The fight will not be easy. Whenever a campaign is on for the shorter work day for women, all the forces of reaction can be counted upon to oppose it. In Maine, for example, when the campaign was on for a 54-hour week for women and minors, the measure was opposed by a body calling itself the Maine Industrial Expansion Commission. The identity of the leaders of this commission was carefully concealed, but the popular belief was that the textile interests were the sponsors. At any rate, the commission flooded the state with circulars describing the calamity which would befall the state's industrial interest if the law should be passed, and stating that manufacturers were coming into Maine from other localities in order to avoid complying with the requirements for shorter hours. If Maine joined the other states, the manu- facturers would be left without refuge. Last year in Massachusetts, the textile interests bitterly opposed the campaign for the eight-hour day for women. The same stories were current which have been heard these fifty years and more when labor legislation has been attempted. Manufacturers would be driven away from the state ; wages would drop to a lower level ; women would be replaced by men ; production would be low- ered and thus cause an undue hardship to the em- ployers. In one such campaign a manufacturer asserted that if the law should be passed he would have to leave the world. But the law was passed, and those who conducted the fight testify that the manu- IN CITY INDUSTRIES 67 facturer did not have to "leave the world" or even the state, and that he is still making a sufficient income to support himself and his dependents in much more than "frugal decency." Minimum Wage Law The next great campaign led by this league was the fight for the Minimum Wage Law. The constitution- ality of minimum wage legislation has also now been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. Twelve states now have some form of the minimum wage law, and its benefits are already apparent from investigations which have been made into its work- ings. None of the fears expressed by the employers, by some of the organized laboring men and by others who were honestly afraid of the results, have been supported by the facts. All available evidence indi- cates that it works only benefit and that none of the disasters predicted occur. These campaigns have established the constitution- ality of laws regulating the employment of women. Every state may now proceed with making protective laws for women unimpeded by the fear that all its work will be overturned by an adverse decision by the United States Supreme Court. It is established that the welfare of society demands this legislative protec- tion. We may now move forward faster. The working women themselves have given valiant service in the campaign. The National Women's Trade Union League organized in 1903 has worked 68 THE PATH OF LABOR hand in hand with the National Consumers' League. These organized working women have added their in- dustrial power to the political effort made by their friends. In the states where public opinion has been too laggard and indifferent to secure the eight-hour day the women themselves in certain establishments have gained it either through strikes or threats of strikes. What a commentary upon a Christian civil- ization, that a body of women, upon whose labor the whole community is dependent, must enforce its demands for a reasonable working day by dropping work and undergoing untold hardships through loss of wages, public disapprobation, oftentimes the loss of any employment altogether and the necessary hard re- adjustment to new conditions ! Women have won for themselves, in this way and through popular education of the community, many sub- stantial gains. Wherever women are organized into unions, better conditions are apparent. One of the most thrilling moments in the recent history of trade- union organization among women in this country was when at the national convention of the league, a year or two ago, a white-haired woman rose to tell of her success in organizing the scrubwomen of the down- town districts of Boston. The scrubwomen, old and wrinkled, with hands hardened by rough toil, working long hours and far into the night, receiving less for their labor than men who were doing the same work, and often supporting their children by their toil, these women, through the trade-union movement had caught a glimmer of hope. Their modest organization had IN CITY INDUSTRIES 69 already secured higher wages for them. Meeting in their own councils, they at last were stirred by a glimpse of industrial freedom ; a new kingdom of self- respect and citizenship had opened up to them. Popular demand among enlightened citizens every- where is adding power to the campaign. Many em- ployers who are convinced not only of the benefit to the community but of the benefits to their business are helping rather than opposing. It remains for the church women to add their organized strength to the movement. What is the Goal? What is the hope of the immediate future? What goal have the friends of the wage-earning women and children set themselves as the next steps in their campaign? A brief review of the standards which they have set up will serve as a measuring rod for every com- munity. Here is the present aim : Boys under 14 and girls under 18 must be kept out of the street trades. Require a permit from the superintendent of schools for boys under 16 who desire to go to work, and prohibit them from working at night. Allow no boys under 16 to enter dangerous occupa- tions. Make no exemptions for boys under 14 who desire to engage in gainful occupations of any kind. Prohibit boys under 18 from working more than 70 THE PATH OF LABOR eight hours a day and allow no boys under 21 to engage in night messenger service. A standard like this can be enforced much more carefully and successfully if the community will pro- vide safeguards so that children will not lightly leave school to go to work. Work permits should be re- quired of all children under 18, indicating that at least six grades of school have been completed, and that an employer has promised work and will report back to the officer who issues the permit as soon as the child leaves his establishment. The second point of attack is from the angle of the school laws. No exemption from school should be permitted for children under 18 unless they are shown to have permission from the proper authorities to engage in wage-earning occupations, and are above the age limit set by the law. Even those under 18 who are at work should be required to attend daytime continuation schools at least six hours each week, until they have completed eight or more grades of schooling. The mothers' pension law of the state should sup- plement the school law and be so drawn that it gives aid to the mother until the time the state law allows the child to go to work. Here are the terms of that minimum amount of life which we at present contemplate for the children. Will any Christian say that we dare stop there? Those who follow a Master who proclaimed children to be the stuff of a new Kingdom can never be satis- fied with this meagre standard. They must work un- IN CITY INDUSTRIES 71 ceasingly until every child has his full share of that development which will in time make possible a new earth. The women who have organized themselves into trade unions under the leadership of the National Women's Trade Union League have set up for them- selves the following goal : Organization of all working women into trade unions. The eight-hour day. A minimum wage scale. Equal pay for equal work. Full citizenship for women. It is a modest demand. Its reasonableness is the more apparent when this standard is compared with the demands made by the Christian churches upon modern industry through their Social Creed : The right of employees and employers alike to organize. Release from employment one day in seven. The gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practicable point, and for that degree of leisure for all which is a condition of the highest human life. A living wage in every industry and the highest wage that each industry can afford ; and the most equitable division of the product of industry that can ultimately be devised. The organized church women and organized wage- earning women have therefore a common goal. They need to join hands for its accomplishment. New Opportunities From the earliest times Christian women have found their ministry among the needy of the world. Among the poor, the sick, the strangers and the friendless they have gone with deeds of mercy and missions of kindness. The modern home missionary movement "J 2 THE PATH OF LABOR has followed people into their homes; if those homes were set up across the mountains and deserts of a new country, the Christian womanhood of the nation has followed them there. If the homes were in the crowded sections of great cities, and if they housed strangers from other lands, there, too, the women have sought to carry their ministries of Christian com- passion. And now, if church women would still follow people out from their homes with the Christian ideal, they must follow them as they move out into a different world, the World of Industry. It is a new world. It is a ruthless world. If the Christian womanhood of America is not able to follow the women and children as they go out from the shelter of their homes into this developing world, what hope is there that this new world will ever be under the sway of the Christian ideal? The call sounds clearly. Here are children in untold numbers who may never come under the influence of a kindergarten, a Sunday-school, a mission school or a Christian college. They are beyond the reach of all the institutions which we have set up. Is not the call then to follow them to the streets, to the shops and stores and factories, and to work for them in new ways and by new methods? Must we not join hands with those who are already crusading for the children, and lend the power of our organized Christian idealism to the campaign ? Every local community furnishes a field, every store IN CITY INDUSTRIES 73 where a boy or a girl works too many hours is a chal- lenge to the Christian womanhood of that community ; every town where a boy or a girl works on the streets is a direct bid for the influence of Christian women; every factory where a child works for the good of the owner or for a shortsighted parent instead of for his own development is an affront to a Christian con- science. There is not a village, not a town, not a city, and scarcely a suburb where all the child life of the community is held in sacred trust for the future. Could there be a louder or a clearer call to women who have long followed new calls and walked over hard places in fulfilling their Christian mission? The organized wage-earning women likewise are waiting for the time to come when their more fortu- nate sisters in the churches will extend a hand to them in their bitter struggle. Wherever individual church women have entered into that struggle and made it their own, they have been able to put strength and courage into the women who were bearing the brunt of it. There are heartening examples all over the country of individual women who have gone from the churches to assist in this battle. What might not be done, if the organized power of Christian womanhood were massed behind the attack upon the evils from which these women suffer? How the church women may help in each com- munity, just where they will step into line and lend their aid will be determined by the conditions already existing there. What are the state laws, and what are the city ordi- 74 THE PATH OF LABOR nances? Under what conditions do children work on the streets and in the stores? Do the people of the community understand that work for children is usually wholly unnecessary? That in only a minimum number of cases where studies have been made has it been found that poverty was the compelling cause for the street work of children? Do they realize that work in stores and other local establishments is almost as dangerous to health and morals as work in factories and mines? What about school regulations? Does the state require a specific amount of education before it allows children to go to work? Does it make any provision for further education after children have entered into paid occupations? Does the state follow these chil- dren with any kind of medical inspection or care, and is anybody interested in seeing whether they have a maximum amount of opportunity for advancement? Quite as important as getting the laws, is the matter of getting them enforced. To pass laws without pro- viding the machinery for their enforcement is useless. In many states where laws have with great difficulty been passed to protect the children, they are almost valueless because they are not adequately enforced. One inspector for a whole state, for example, cannot possibly see that the law is being enforced, and the law might almost as well not exist. In still other cases, where there is an adequate force of inspectors, the law is a farce because the courts will not convict powerful employers. In Ohio, for example, last year 115 prosecutions were instituted in three months for IN CITY INDUSTRIES 75 violation of the laws relating to women and children, and 72 per cent, were either suspended or remitted. What is lacking here is a community consciousness of the folly of such conditions. There is no other agency so powerfully and adequately equipped as the Christian church to bring home to a careless and indif- ferent public the sin of contempt for the laws which the common conscience has approved as necessary for the common welfare. Women of the church have an especial obligation and opportunity to cry out against such injustices until no court will dare to allow such contemptuous disregard of the law. The Present Needs For the children the outstanding needs are : 1. Community recognition of the needs of children in local establishments and on the streets. 2. Compulsory education laws which will require a certain standard of education before a child is allowed to go to work, and provision for further education and training after he has left school for a gainful occupa- tion. 3. Medical inspection of children, with more rigid health requirements before they are allowed to begin work, and recurring inspections thereafter to see that the new work is not destructive to their health. Among the women the outstanding needs are: 1. A Federal law giving the eight-hour day. 2. Minimum wage legislation in every state. 76 THE PATH OF LABOR 3. A separate bureau for women under the Federal Department of Labor. Many campaigns will be carried through before these needs are met. Will the women of the churches be ready to lend their assistance as one effort after an- other shall be made to reach the goals set up? Making a Beginning Here and there are groups of church women who have felt upon their conscience the pressure of these industrial conditions. They are feeling that they must align themselves definitely for an organized attack upon the un-Christian conditions which are menacing the lives of other women and of countless little chil- dren. Individual women are giving expression to their feeling of obligation, and their sense of shame at profiting by the labor of these weaker ones, with no attempt made to lighten their burden, to protect them from the heartless exploitations of careless employers and an indifferent public. The most notable example of activity in this field by church women is that furnished by the Chicago Church Woman's Federation. A committee was ap- pointed by this body to "follow labor developments, especially where women and child labor are involved, to ascertain the efforts for bettering conditions which are being made by the National Child Labor Com- mittee, the Women's Trade Union League, etc., and to suggest means by which the federation may co- operate with these groups or may take the initiative in an effort for social justice." IN CITY INDUSTRIES 77 The first venture of the new committee was to send delegates to a conference called by the National Con- sumers' League and the Women's Trade Union League to launch a campaign for a Federal eight-hour day for women. The outcome was a resolution by the body in favor of such legislation and a recommenda- tion that the active support of the organization be given. Not long after, a serious strike broke out among the garment workers of the city. At first it seemed to the church women that they must keep their hands off the situation ; inexperienced in labor matters, fearing to cause division in their ranks, it seemed impossible to do anything. But as the strike progressed and the needs of the girls became acute, the injustices of their situation were brought clearly before the public mind, and "common human decency put inaction to shame," to use the words of the chairman of the Labor Commit- tee. A friend of the strikers told in simple but graphic terms of brutal arrests, of weak and hungry girls need- ing the help of the more privileged. The news letter of the society called to action. The women began to distribute cards in the churches calling for help for the strikers ; from that they went on to furnishing speakers for strike meetings ; to testifying in court when girls were arrested without cause; to visiting the shops to verify the contention of the strikers that inadequate bookkeeping made it impossible to determine what the average wages were without a scientific investigation ; and finally, together with a committee from the min- isterial bodies of the city, they called a meeting of 78 THE PATH OF LABOR strikers and employers to discuss the situation in the presence of representative citizens. At the present time they are bravely attempting to get a stable agree- ment between employers and employed by which such disastrous strikes may in the future be avoided. Meantime, an exhibit of labelled goods, showing what it means to the workers and to the public to have cloth- ing made under sanitary conditions, has been pro- moted, the Church Women co-operating with the National Consumers' League and making room for the exhibit in their own offices. That the efforts of these church women have given new hope to the workers is apparent in a recent inci- dent. Not far from Chicago a new munitions plant has been built. Scores of girls from Chicago went to work in the plant. They found unspeakable condi- tions; ten-hour shifts, night work, low wages, bad transportation, and no decent provision for housing. The community provided no recreation whatever for the factory women ; feeling was keen in the conservative old town that the factory girls were not decent and not fit to be admitted to the homes or to the social life of the town. Then the workers thought of their friends in the churches and appealed to them for help. They wanted to know if it would not be possible for the church women to take up the matter of community conditions and to put in a social-service worker. Says a member of the Labor Committee, "Now I feel that that is significant — their thinking of the church at all in this connection." IN CITY INDUSTRIES 79 Is it significant? Does it forecast the day when the more privileged women in the churches will turn to these less fortunate ones and wage the battle for their emancipation? Does it mean that here is opening up the next call to Christian service, the next great adven- ture to be undertaken for the Kingdom ? Ill IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS JOHN EDWARDS CALFEE ALEXANDER JEFFREY McKELWAY In his hand are the deep places of the earth, the strength of the hills is his also. — Psa. 95 : 4. And I will make all my mountains a way, and my highways shall be exalted. — Isaiah 49:11. If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity; And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul : then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy dark- ness be as the noon day. And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places : thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations ; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.— Isaiah 58: 9-10, 12. For there are men in these mountains as well as minerals, and industry digs them out to separate them, and to transform those who are fit unto better things. But industry does not care for the poor, the weak, the handicapped. God does ; and in His behalf Christianity sends forth its appeal for practical Cnristian help and sympathy with the mountaineer. H. Paul Douglass. Ill IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS JOHN EDWARDS CALFEE Mountaineers If we are to understand the mountain people we must know their ancestry, their mentality, their spirit- ual inheritances, their ideals, their capacity for devel- opment, and their means for satisfying their souls' desires. It is grossly unfair to judge a people by their accomplishments without some inventory of the avail- able means of attainment which are within their reach. That we may have this understanding we must go back to the opening year of the seventeenth century. To be exact and at the same time personal, King James I. in the year 1607 confiscated the estates of the native Irish from six counties of Ulster and replanted these estates with Scotch and English Presbyterians. They were aliens in blood, ideals and religion to the Irish, being looked upon as usurpers — all of which led to many bloody battles. When the leases expired the church people and the Crown had a falling out; the prosecutions of the Crown set the former to immigrat- ing to lands of larger freedom. Horace Kephart has estimated this exodus to include fully thirty thousand 83 84 THE PATH OF LABOR people during a two-year period ; many ultimately find- ing a home in America along what was, at that time, the westernmost frontier. Trained in the willingness to take care of themselves, schooled in fighting, con- firmed, as Justin Winsor says, "in the belief of original sin, total depravity, predestination and election," and "seeing no use in an Indian but to be a target for their bullets," they found a rare opportunity for some excit- ing fighting. These people of Scotch-Irish descent, now known as Mountaineers, have taken several post- graduate courses in the art of war. Besides fighting with the Indians, they have fought the British, the Mexicans, and during dull seasons have fought each other. The mountain feud is the vermiform appendix of bygone times which has rootage back in the dark ages of mediaevalism. Tradition, habit of mind and manner of living qualified these pioneering people for their future homes in the mountains of what is now generally known as Appalachian America. The Highlander has always been a Bible protestant, a hater of slavery, a firm believer in natural justice and slow to recognize any authority, other than that which is based upon real merit and personal worth. He is an extreme individualist, a devotee to personal valor, and finds co-operation a most difficult lesson to learn. Where Do the Mountaineers Live? Next in importance to the blood of any people is their home — the environment, natural resources and location with reference to the well-beaten paths of progress and civilization. The Mountaineers occupy IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 85 the mountain ends of eight adjoining states. To this fact may be due much of the retardation in their devel- opment. The numerous 6tate boundary fences have kept apart a people who are naturally homogeneous in speech, manners, customs and ideals and thus has been prevented that coherence which is fundamental to race consciousness, a condition quite essential to the devel- opment of strong leadership. They have been taken into the councils of the state too little except by sheer force of superior individual ability. A strong, wise, foresighted native leadership is an imperative need of those who are remote from centers of population. The Highlanders' misfortune has been that of being stranded far out of the course of the well-beaten paths of progress, which have detoured to the north and south of the rugged mountains. The combined area of the Mountaineers' land is about twice the size of the New England States. It has been estimated that from 85 to 90 per cent, of it is on mountain slopes, with 70 per cent., or more, steeper than a rise of one foot to every five. What was once a good home in pioneering days when the population was sparse, hunting good, the methods of living and farming primitive, and when men and women fought the forces of nature with their wits and their bare hands, has been changed. The transformation has come about in the most natural way in the world ; the yearly increasing population has pressed harder upon the limits of subsistence until that pressure has become so fierce in the extremely rugged sections that the land has been called by one writer "The Land of Do Without." 86 THE PATH OF LABOR Two Classes of Rural Mountain People The Land of Do Without lies back of the Land of Enough. The inhabitants differ from each other in geographical position and personal possessions, more than in social or inherent qualities. The difference, if written in one word, would be the word "Opportunity." The early settlers naturally occupied the high, broad, rich river valleys. The mathematical propensity of the mountain people to be good at multiplication soon filled the land of first choice, then the movement was started for the valleys, coves, hillsides, etc. The first class of this social stratum of mountain folk has good homes and conveniences, such as are found upon the average good farm. The other group, at the head of long narrow creeks and upon the steep mountain sides, are those about whom there should be much sympa- thetic concern. These people are the real citizens of the Land of Do Without. They are known for the isolation and solitude of their homes and the many things which they do not have; many of which they have never even seen. More than this, they are known for the stoical way in which they bear their hard- ships, some of these being unsatisfied soul desires which burn deep down into the heart. Home Life The typical mountain home is the log cabin of our forefathers. The house has few rooms — a main room, and a lean-to quite often, but seldom does it contain more than three or four rooms. In the more remote sections the fireplace still has the preference over the IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 87 stove for the very good reason given me by a woman who said, "Why, I can cook and warm at the same time by a fireplace !" Cooking utensils are few, the pot and the skillet being the standbys. The food is too often poorly prepared and without variety, con- sisting in main of corn pone and fat meat, with the addition of beans, onions and cabbage during the growing season. Pictures and books are as scarce as the other necessities of life. We look in vain for the familiar and inspiring face of the Boy Jesus, neither do we find any of our national heroes alive in either pic- ture or book to inspire to character formation. This is indeed the Land of Do Without. The boys and girls marry young and rear large families. A mother of fifteen is no uncommon occur- rence, but a very high rate of infant mortality prevails, owing to the restricted diet, poorly prepared food and lack of knowledge of the simplest laws of health, hygiene and sanitation. The bonds of home ties are wonderfully strong, in fact the Mountaineers' loyalty is measured by ties of blood. He never fails in hospitality and loyalty to friends and kinsfolk. It is extremely difficult to per- suade parents of feeble-minded or epileptic children to give them up to the care of state institutions. They prefer to keep them at home, feeling that any other course would be infidelity to family love and devotion. Parents are super-indulgent in dealing with their chil- dren. It is a common thing for a parent to account for a child's misdeeds by saying, "He just would be to do it," or that "His mother was a Smith, and nobody 88 THE PATH OF LABOR never could make a Smith do nothing he didn't want to do." The mother, gaunt and overworked and silent as she may be, is the center of the home. Her duties are many and varied. Besides giving birth to a large family, and attending to the household duties, she invariably cares for the chickens and milks the cow, carries the water and often splits the wood; then she is expected to be both ready and willing to give a lift in the corn field with the hoe, or to have a hand in making of molasses and saving the fodder. The father is inconsiderate, but rarely unkind to either mother or children ; he retains his forefathers' love of hunting and fishing and his prowess with a gun is a never failing source of joy. In his necessary trips down the creek to the store, or to the county seat on court day, he comes in contact with fellowmen — hence broadens his field of vision and lessens the dull monotony. In the majority of cases it is the mother who longs for better things and greater opportunities for her boys and girls than she has herself had. A prominent edu- cator who has spent his life in the mountains says, "I have yet to see illiterate children of a literate mother ; but, have found many, many cases of illiterate children of a literate father." This one truth impresses the great need of seeking out and educating the future mothers of American citizens. Religious Life The Mountaineers are strongly Protestant. They have inherited the beliefs of their grandsires and their IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 89 isolation has kept them in the same narrow paths. The writer, during all his travels throughout the moun- tain regions, has never met a professed infidel. They are over-fond of arguing upon religious subjects. Ser- mons are usually doctrinal, especially if there be brethren of a different faith at hand with whom a con- troversy may be provoked. Church houses, as they are always called, are few and rarely attractive either within or without. There are whole counties without one good church building outside the county seat. Thousands of people do not hear on an average two sermons a year. The Sunday-schools are more numer- ous, and are usually held in the school house. They start with the beginning of good weather in the sum- mer and suspend operations during the long winter months. They are in many cases organized by young folks of the community who have been away at school during the year and have felt the need of uplift for the ones at home. In cases where the Sunday-school lives throughout the year, the credit is almost invariably due to one of these returned young people, now the district school teacher, who has caught the vision. Schools The public schools are of short duration, running from four and a half to seven months a year. The school buildings are in many cases extremely poor with little equipment for teaching purposes. The attendance is irregular because the roads are bad, and because of the illiteracy and near illiteracy of many parents who are unable to realize the importance of 90 THE PATH OF LABOR schooling. The illiterate voters number fully 15 per cent, of the voting population ; when to this are added the illiterates and near illiterates of all others over ten years of age the figures become appalling. Education beyond the arts of reading and writing and figuring rapidly passes into the realms of luxury and is con- sidered by some grown-ups as unnecessary and worth while only for those who aspire to become lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc. Teaching is looked upon by many people as an easy way to earn money sitting down ! Schools are sought after and sometimes pur- chased by an agreement with the trustee to board with him or render him some special favor, even a cash price is a condition going back only a few years. The Mountaineer has been shut in by the barriers of nature to primitive conditions of two centuries ago when mus- cular power was man's greatest need ; consequently he has not yet come into a deep realization of the value of schools and books. Bridging the gap from making a living by the sweat of the brow to the employment of scientific knowledge and skill is a leap of six gener- ations and demands not only great educational states- manship but patient effort and encouragement in arousing desire for intellectual things. In those localities, scattered here and there through- out the mountain region, where mission schools and community centers have been established, the change for the better in conditions physical, mental and moral is at once apparent. Too much credit cannot be given to the value of these small but efficient centers of light in uplifting the mountaineer. By long and careful IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 91 study on the subject I am convinced that we never can bring the great mass of the people out to the light, but, on the other hand, we must carry the light in. I feel confident in saying that were a half dozen such centers of influence established in each mountain county of the seven states, the so-called "mountain problem" would be solved in a generation, and the wealth of sturdy, pure Anglo-Saxon population would be ready to take its place as one of the great assets of our nation ! Occupations For many years farming and lumbering have been the chief occupations and means of livelihood. The conditions of those living in the valleys or broad up- lands have already been referred to. "The mountain problem" deals with those in isolated coves and on steep hillsides, and here we find farming conditions most discouraging. Hillsides are cleared of their natural growth of timber, the ground is stirred by shallow plowing, corn is planted for the first crop, and because the grade is too steep for a horse, it must be tended by hand. When the crop is gathered the ground lies bare and unprotected, and by the return of springtime much of the top soil has been washed away by the frequent violent rains. Repetition of this program for a number of years renders the soil no longer fit to raise anything and it is then allowed to "lie out." Effort is made to raise no more than will be required to keep the family in corn meal and the cow and mule in fodder during the winter months. 92 THE PATH OF LABOR Some explanation of this lack of inclination to be fore- handed is necessary. The menfolk are idle much of the time, not because they are temperamentally lazy — the reason is an environmental one in which there is no economic outlook. The land is by very nature fitted to poultry and stock raising or to fruit growing. These pursuits have so far met with little favor, for why grow peaches or apples, or have eggs and butter for market, when there is no market? The stagnant conditions of the commercial life are due largely to lack of means of transportation. Ideas of progress resemble people in that they require roads over which they may travel. A few national highways running through the mountains and connecting trade centers with outlying districts would quadruple the energies and products of the whole region. The razor-back hog and the scrub cow have had their place, for they, too, like their master have been able to endure hardships and look out for part of their own board. They will pass away as roads, schools and churches come in. The day is at hand when all mission work in the mountains must take into consideration the construction of roads, con- necting the work with the outside world, and what is more, it must think of them as an imperative necessity taking rank in importance with buildings. I fear too much of the pointing has been up while the great need has been for some wise person to point the way out. Leadership out as well as up is fundamental to all mission work in the mountains. IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 93 Public Works We are hearing more and more, during the last few years, of changing conditions in the mountains owing to the development of coal and lumber camps. There is no coal in the Carolina mountains, but exceptionally rich fields extend down through Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Tapping these fields railroads are rapidly creeping up the hollows into many remote dis- tricts, thus bringing in the outside world, with all its accompanying blessings and evils. Conditions in coal and lumber camps, so far as their influence on the life of the people is concerned, are very similar. On the whole the camps appear to have bettered conditions, in that there is always steady work to be had, at good wages, and many now handle money who before had very little. Many camps maintain district nurses and company doctors. There has been some difficulty in keeping the men steadily at work, the habit being to get a little money ahead and then lay off until more is needed. This tendency is due to the fact that the mountain man is an individualist, and co-operation is a principle yet to be learned. However, camps are reluctant to bring in foreign labor where it can be at all avoided. One amusing incident is told of a com- pany being unable to induce the natives to do the necessary grading for the railroad, but when Negroes were imported for the labor, they made much com- plaint, and threatened to run them off. One authority says, "The spirit and life of the miner is better than it was fifteen years ago ; they send their children to day school and Sunday-school better, they 94 THE PATH OF LABOR live in better houses, they respond more readily to appeals for better roads, better schools and improved conditions generally." In this brief study of the Mountaineer and his present condition, an effort has been made to state facts simply and clearly but without a spirit of pessim- ism. Hard and trying as life in many of its aspects is, it is not hopeless. The very fact that these sturdy folk respond slowly to changing conditions, but never- theless surely and steadily, but makes the task the more worth while. Nowhere else in our country can be found such a group of native American stock with a more perfect sense of loyalty and devotion to our nation. These men of the mountains will acquit themselves on the battlefields of Europe second to none. They know neither the word cowardice nor fear of hardships. The great mountain people are the nation's richest undeveloped asset and destined to take their rightful place at no far distant time. IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 95 IN MILLS ALEXANDER JEFFREY McKELWAY Southern Factory Workers Because of its kindly climate, abundant rainfall and for the most part productive soil, the South has always been an agricultural rather than a manufac- turing section of the country. The comparatively few manufacturing enterprises established before 1861 shared the general ruin wrought by the Civil War, and industry did not begin to revive until the eighties. During the last three decades, there has been a tre- mendous advance in manufactures of various kinds, especially where the cheapness of fuel as in Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, or the harnessing of waterpower as in Georgia and the Carolinas, has encouraged the establishment of factories and work- shops. Along the Piedmont edge of the cotton-belt, the prevailing industry for the last thirty years has been the cotton mill. Beginning with Danville, Virginia, the cotton manufacturing region of the South stretches in a wide curve, with its convex side turned toward the coastal plain, to the western borders of Alabama. Mis- sissippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas have compar- atively few cotton mills. In Alabama, the cotton-mill industry competes with the steel and iron industry for first place. In Tennessee both woolen and cotton mills are important. In North Carolina it is the prevailing 96 THE PATH OF LABOR industry, though the manufacture of woodenware and furniture has a center at Thomasville, and there are large tobacco factories at Winston-Salem and at Dur- ham. In Virginia the manufacture of tobacco is a more important industry than cotton manufacture, but in Georgia cotton manufacturing is the commanding industry of the state, and in South Carolina is almost the sole industrial enterprise. South Carolina stands next to Massachusetts in the number of spindles, and North Carolina has more cotton mills, though of smaller size than either of the states just mentioned. The nearness of the supply of the raw material, access to coal fields, abundance of waterpower and above all cheap labor, made it inevitable that the characteristic and commanding industry of this section of the South should be the manufacture of cotton. Yet it is a pity that an industry that has always, in England, New England, and the region around Philadelphia been cursed with low wages and the wholesale employment of women and children should have been given such a place of importance in the New South. The cotton industry cannot thrive in a high-wage state unless the ranks of the workers are constantly recruited, as in Massachusetts and New England, generally from an immigrant population that has not attained to the American standard of living. Sources of Labor The cotton mill operatives of the South are almost exclusively of native American stock. In North Car- olina, the census shows that less than one-tenth of IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 97 one per cent, are of foreign birth or parentage. Dur- ing the long period of agricultural depression follow- ing low prices for corn, cotton, and tobacco, it was an easy matter to persuade the tenant farmers, with no immediate prospect of bettering their condition on the farms, to move to the cotton mill where, unfortunately, the husband and father found little work that was possible for him, but where the labor of his children and his womankind was in demand. The labor supply was drawn in part from the mountain region of the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee, it being roughly estimated that about one-fourth of the labor supply came from the mountains: mainly from the Piedmont region, where most of the mills were located, and from the coastal plain, into which the mills have also pene- trated, though not in such numbers as exist in the Piedmont. The racial stock in the mountain regions is English, with an admixture of Scotch-Irish. In the Piedmont section Scotch-Irish, with a good proportion of English and German stock, German colonies having settled this region before the Revolution. In the Cape Fear section of North Carolina, the Highland Scotch form the chief supply of cotton mill labor, and in the cotton mills of the coastal plain the English stock pre- dominates. The people on the tenant farms, or from farms of their own in mountain coves and the sandy region of the coastal plain, had small opportunities for educa- tion on account of the short school terms and the use of the children on the farms ; The churches, though numerous, were generally occupied once or twice a 98 THE PATH OF LABOR month, the majority of the people, except in the Scotch and Scotch-Irish regions where they are Presbyter- ians, being members of the Methodist and Baptist Churches. When they came to the cotton mills, school buildings were in most cases accessible, but the de- mand for the labor of the children left the schools stripped of children over ten or twelve years of age, the age depending upon the standards of the state child labor law of the period and its enforcement. Until very recently, children of ten years of age could be em- ployed by law in South Carolina and Georgia, and there was little enforcement of the law which estab- lished a twelve-year age-limit. In North Carolina the statutes still permit the employment of children of twelve years and there is practically no enforcement of the law. In addition to the employment of children at an early age, there was the long working day to be considered, at first with no restriction of hours, then with the establishment of a sixty-six hour week, which meant a twelve-hour day for the first five working days of the week, with a half-holiday on Saturday; now with the sixty-hour week for children under six- teen, which means an eleven-hour day. For many years, night work, even for children, added its horrors to the situation, both physically and morally, North Carolina being the worst sinner in this regard. Now night work for children under sixteen is pretty gener- ally prohibited by law, though sometimes with poor enforcement of the law. IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 99 Missions and Cotton Mills Mission churches have been established in cotton mill villages, yet few of these churches are self- sustaining or have regular services every Sunday. Sunday schools are more generally sustained. But the moving habit of cotton mill employes, constantly striving to benefit their condition at the next mill, has militated against the permanence of church member- ship and support. Nor have the churches shown any steady or continuous zeal for the religious needs of the factory workers, mill churches having been more of a liability than an asset from the point of view of financial support. It can be readily imagined, also, that after a sixty-six or sixty-hour week of work, after night work in many mills continuing until Saturday, midnight, there was little encouragement for either adults or children to attend church and Sunday School on Sunday. With old church relations that had been established in the country ceasing, with those re-estab- lished in the mill villages frequently discontinued through the removal of families from one mill to another, the church-going habit, so characteristic of the Southern people, was largely broken. Corporation and Betterment Work In recent years, the larger and more prosperous cotton mills, denominated by the South Carolina Com- missioner of Labor, "show mills," have become inter- ested in alleviating the monotonous condition of fac- tory employes by the establishment of numerous kinds of betterment work, paid for, of course, by the 100 THE PATH OF LABOR employes themselves, through the large dividends their labor allows the mill-owners to accumulate. In some mills hospitals have been established, Y. M. C. A. halls erected and their work encouraged, playgrounds maintained for the children, in a few instances swim- ming pools supplied, schools of longer terms with better buildings and better paid teachers supported in part from mill funds, and more regular church services supplied through the payment of a part of the preachers' salaries by the corporation. But at the same time, the very mill owners who thus advertised their benevolence have been in many cases the influ- ential part of the cotton mill lobby that at the state capital has resisted any legislation looking to the abolition of child labor or the shortening of the hours of labor even for the mothers of the race or for their children. Federal Child Labor Bill It was partly because of the child labor conditions of many of the Southern states, though the child labor evil is a national one and no part of the country has been wholly free from it, that the Congress of the United States at last took up the problem of child labor as one of national concern, and in the summer of 1916 passed the Federal Child Labor bill, which Presi- dent Wilson approved on September 1 of that year. The new Act, however, did not go into effect until September 1, 1917, and on the last of August, an injunction against the enforcement of the act was sought, on the nominal petition of a father of cotton IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 101 mill children, who claimed that he was entitled to their wages until they were twenty-one years of age, but really on the motion of the Southern Cotton Manufac- turers, who employed an imposing array of counsel to argue that the Child Labor Act was unconstitutional. Judge James E. Boyd, Federal judge of the Western District of North Carolina, agreed with the contention of these attorneys and granted the injunction against the enforcement of the Federal law within the juris- diction of his court. That has not interfered with its enforcement elsewhere in the United States, however, and Congress provided a fund of $150,000 to enforce it. The duty of administering the law and inspecting the factories and workshops was assigned to the Child Labor Division of the Children's Bureau, Miss Grace Abbott, formerly of Chicago, being the efficient chief of that division. The Department of Justice has appealed the injunction case to the Supreme Court of the United States and the friends of the children throughout the nation hope and pray that that great Court will see its way clear to sustain the constitu- tionality of an Act that means so much for the welfare of the children and their protection from the conse- quences of child labor. The Federal Child Labor Act provides, in brief, that the products of no mine or quarry in which children under sixteen years of age are employed, shall be shipped in inter-state or foreign commerce, and that the products of no factory, cannery or work-shop shall be shipped in inter-state or foreign commerce, if such establishments employ children under fourteen years 102 THE PATH OF LABOR of age at all, or children under sixteen are employed more than eight hours a day, or more than six days a week, or at night. The effect of the law has already become manifest in the dismissal from employment of thousands of children. For it is a well-known fact that Federal laws, enforced by Federal courts, are much more effective as a terror to evil-doers than state laws, whose enforcement too often rests with courts and juries of the vicinage which may be inclined to tolerate the very evils they are sworn to correct. The existence of the Federal law has also proved influential in inducing the legislatures of several states, with the acquiesence if not the active support of the manufacturers, to bring their state legislation on child labor up to the Federal standards, as manu- facturers doing business in low standard states would naturally be the objects of the special vigilance of Federal inspectors. It is not too much to say that President Wilson signed a second Emancipation Proclamation on September 1, 1916. The Challenge to Home Missions The practical abolition of child labor in its worst form which will inevitably result from the adequate enforcement of the Federal law, and the new state laws, will give a splendid opportunity to ministers and home mission workers for doing a long neglected work among a population rich in possibilities of service to both church and state. One of the first effects will be an advance in wages. The textile industry gener- ally has been a low-wage industry because it has IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 103 involved a system of family labor, in which the women and children of the household have all contributed their toil for the family support. It is a well under- stood economic law that child labor reduces the wage scale, and that the restriction of child labor, and more certainly its abolition, raises wages for the adult worker. When the child can compete with its father in the labor market, in industry requiring in most of its operations so little skill and experience that the labor of the child is as valuable as the labor of the adult, the wage scale is measured by the child stan- dard. What are high wages for a child are low wages for the head of a household on which to support his family with the mother the home-maker and the chil- dren at school. When all the members of a family able to work are employed, the sum of wages will support the family, and higher wages for the individ- ual worker, not being necessary, will not be paid. The establishment of the eight-hour day also tends to the raising of the wage scale through the increased demand for workers. The opportunity for the education of the children is an equal opportunity for religious instruc- tion, for religion does not thrive where illiteracy pre- vails, and "ignorance is not a remedy for anything." With more comfortable living conditions, through a better wage scale, with greater leisure through the prevalence of shorter hours, there is larger opportunity for the minister and the mission worker to gain the attention and interest of the people in the things of the spirit. The mill churches will tend more and more to self-support and the people will feel that the 104 THE PATH OF LABOR churches supported by themselves belong to them. The old complaint of the mill-workers against the mill- owner, "We work in his mill, we send our children to his school, we go to his church, we are sent to his hospital, we live in his houses and we are buried in his grave-yard," will be forgotten. For one of the worst things about the estate of the Southern mill- workers is the existence of a belated, though some- times benevolent feudalism, which has effectually pre- vented the growth of democracy and the establishment of democratic institutions. Lack of Organization The organization of the factory workers in the cot- ton mills into labor unions has been generally impos- sible, on account of the opposition of the factory owners; and the helplessness of the individual in deal- ing with the officials of a corporation has been ren- dered worse by the lack of education, of which child labor has deprived a whole generation of cotton-mill- workers, and by the ownership of the mill villages with all that they contain by the employers and not by the employes. There is nothing more likely to develop the independence of the mill workers than a better wage scale and better living conditions. Hith- erto, his freedom of choice in many essential things has been the liberty of exchanging one feudal lord for another, by moving to another mill village. When the prohibition movement began to make headway in the South, one of the first restrictions of the liquor traffic was that made for rural regions and IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 105 unincorporated towns. With this step gained, the incorporation of towns and villages was actually dis- couraged, lest the saloon should be permitted entrance by a vote of the people concerned. But now, with the Southern states so largely prohibition territory and with national prohibition on the way, the reason for this anomalous condition of affairs in the South no longer exists. Ministers, teachers and mission work- ers can do no more valuable service to factory com- munities than by starting movements for the incor- poration of factory villages. As the case stands now in the typical cotton mill town of the South, the people have absolutely no voice in their own local govern- ment. They vote on state and national issues and have frequently displayed a notable degree of inde- pendence of the expressed wishes of their employers in casting their votes. But local self-government for them does not exist. Yet they come of a self-govern- ing race and they are sending their sons now to the battlefields of Europe to help in making the world safe for democracy. What a travesty it is that these returning soldiers of America, when they resume their old life in the cotton factories of the South, should have no voice in the election of the town or school officials, local authority, wherever it exists, being wholly in the hands of their employers. For illustra- tion, a minister who was once employed by the writer as a child labor investigator, was forbidden access to the school building, was forbidden to sleep in the vil- lage hotel and was practically ordered off the premises as a trespasser, on the ground that the village and all 106 THE PATH OF LABOR that it contained was mill property. The owner of another factory town is called the "King" of the vil- lage and rather boasts of an incident that has been published more than once, of the visit of a so-called "labor agitator" to the community, and of the order which the King issued and was duly obeyed, that the visitor should be put on the next train leaving town and threateningly invited not to return. With the incorporation of mill villages, the people will have the privilege of electing their own Mayor or Commis- sioners, of adopting directly or indirectly their own ordinances, of appointing their own school boards, and of paying for their schools through just and equitable taxes, poll taxes and property taxes, which will fur- nish more ample funds for school purposes under a system of local district taxation, than have ever been provided even by the most liberal mill management through benevolent contributions. Misnomers There has been a great deal of nonsense spoken and written about the "poor white trash" of the South. The phrase was originally given by the negro slaves to the whites of the overseer or tenant class who were unable to own slaves themselves. There is no "poor white" class in the South that is distinct from the poor of any other section. There are "poor whites" in re- mote regions of New York State that have remained poor for generations, and the same conditions have obtained throughout the more inaccessible mountain regions of the Appalachian system from Pennsylvania IN MOUNTAINS AND MILLS 107 to Alabama. There are also other districts in the South, where, because of the poverty of the soil, the natives have remained in comparative poverty, and are locally styled, "hill-billies," "sand-hillers," or "crack- ers," the latter designation coming from the primitive methods of pounding corn in a mortar to make hominy or coarse meal. But there is no fixed "poor white" class in the South. The tenant class on the farms and the cotton mill employees, are comparatively poor, be- cause of hard conditions of existence and the absence of education which tends to the perpetuation of ignorance and poverty into the next generation. But in general it may be said that the "poor whites" of the South are a class of people which in the mass is constantly rising into a better condition, from which a large proportion are constantly emerging into affluence and influence, and into which are constantly sinking those who have failed in the battle of life, who drag their children down with them. But this is true of those whom we call "the poor" everywhere. There is no more fertile field in the country today for relig- ious, educational, social and civil agencies than the neglected mill villages of the South. The Opportunity The Church should approach the problem of reach- ing and training and evangelizing the mill population of the South not from the viewpoint of their miserable condition which should appeal to the sentiment of pity, but from the knowledge that here are a people of native American stock, who have resisted immor- 108 THE PATH OF LABOR ality in family relations, who are naturally religious, and who only need opportunity to respond quickly to the stimulus which the training of the church and the school can give. The writer has been a teacher in a mill school, a pastor of a church with mission churches for factory villages, the superintendent of the home mission work of his church in a manufacturing state of the South, and for the past thirteen years one of the Secretaries of the National Child Labor Com- mittee, whose first mission was the abolition of child labor, but which is now beginning its constructive task in the encouragement of education for the chil- dren of all the people. It is now advocating the exten- sion of Federal aid to primary education for the wiping out of the remaining illiteracy of the nation and for the Americanization of the foreign population. He can testify to the brightness and willingness to learn of the younger generation and to the sobriety, decency, and self-respect of the greater part of the older mem- bers of factory communities. The coming generation has been saved from the menace of racial degeneracv and the lowering of all the standards of life, through the abolition of the child labor evil. And now for the Church of Christ the fields are white for the harvest of souls. IV AMONG NEGRO LABORERS LILY HARDY HAMMOND My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. — John 5 : 17. But we beseech you, brethren, that ye study to be quiet and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, that ye may walk honestly toward them that are without. — I Thess. 4:11, 12. Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. — II Tim. 2:15. Every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labors, it is the gift of God. — Eccles. 3:9, 11, 13. TO AMERICA James Welden-Johnson, Litt. D. How would you have us, as we are? Or sinking 'neath the load we bear? Our eyes fixed forward on a star? Or gazing empty at despair? Rising or falling? Men or things? With dragging pace, or footsteps fleet? Strong, willing sinews in your wings? Or tightening chains about your feet? IV. AMONG NEGRO LABORERS The Great War has left no people of earth un- touched. From the beginning, here in the United States, it has been creating new problems, and setting old ones in new and wider relations. We can never be the same again. Either we will climb a little nearer to the far, high democracy of Jesus Christ, or we will sink in our relations with the Negro, as well as in all other relations. We speak of "the Negro problem" as if white people were outside of it — spectators merely, or at most stu- dents of it; yet white people are a most vital and prob- lematic half of it. The war is showing this in new and unexpected ways. It first lifted the Negro, physically, and in the nation's thought, out of a sectional environ- ment, and set him in one that is national. Beyond this, the world's agony is bringing to all of us world thoughts, world consciousness and duties and hopes. Slowly the Negro is being drawn within the scope of this new world-inclusion of humanity, never again to be broken off, by our provincial thoughts, from his true world relations. The Negro laborer can be understood only as part 111 112 THE PATH OF LABOR of the world-mass of laborers. Races differ enormous- ly in development as well as in deep seated character- istics, but there are certain elements of health and progress essential to all races, just as the same chemi- cal elements are essential to the myriad forms of vegetable life. Be it sequoia or wood-sorrel, every plant must have oxygen, carbon, hydrogen; brown, yellow, white or black, the basal elements of man- growth are the same for all — justice and opportunity, to the full capacity of each. This the war is teaching. Weak peoples, undeveloped folk, the ignorant, the oppressed — these too must be set on this common plane and share these elemental necessities of all human life. The Farm Laborer The world over, these least esteemed of laborers have suddenly been discovered as of new and porten- tous significance to the human race. The war, we are told, is to be won or lost on the farms, in the fields, where the world's poorest and most neglected toilers bend over the furrows in ignorance of their own resources and of those of the soil in which they delve. All ignorance, all apathy, all lack of world-relations and world-view of the "hand" in the field has become a menace to the freedom of the human race. The majority of American Negroes belong to this poorest, most exploited world-class. Three fourths of the ten millions of them are country dwellers. Over half of all who work for money, men and women, are farmers or farm "hands." And since in the brief limits AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 113 of one chapter it is impossible to consider the many small groups of colored laborers, it seems best to take this great representative class and look at it as it is, a thin cross-section of the world's farming folk, now seen as essential to those fine, high phases of life which have seemed most remote from their rough, uncultured toil. The world is looking at them with new eyes. Here in the South we are looking. And to some of us the old "Negro problem" dissolves like a moving pic- ture scene into the world-wide, age-old problem of poverty, ignorance and neglect. The War and Negro Labor The first effect of the war upon Negro labor has been largely to remove it from its accustomed haunts. Southern white folk have viewed this phenomenon with mingled feelings, largely dependent upon the extent to which personal interests have been affected by the sudden shrinkage in the labor supply; but they are being forced beyond this personal, provincial view to a new consideration of the Negroes and of their relations to them. If these relations are to continue on a scale adequate to the need it begins to appear that a broader basis must be found — a basis not sec- tional, but human. This the war is doing for white people, as well as for the Negro. And the North? To the Negro, for fifty years, the North has been a land of promise. The war shows that his apparent stability in the South has been largely due to lack of opening there. Whether because of racial quality or of environment, the power of initia- 114 THE PATH OF LABOR tive in the race is low; they do not, as a race, move against obstacles. But as soon as a vacancy for labor was created they flowed into it as steadily as water flows down hill. The pathos of it was their belief that they were going to friends; that they would find not only that kindliness in personal relations to which they were so largely accustomed, but beyond that a wider race-justice and a deeper regard for them as men. But the emigration of hundreds of thousands of them has aroused the fears of laboring folk, and has taxed friendliness to the breaking-point. The clashes in the North, the terrible riots in the Middle West, the warn- ings of union labor, threats of segregation, sporadic demands for separate schools — all these show a grow- ing antagonism wherever the waves of migration have left any considerable deposit of black laborers. If the South is becoming aware of its most neglected toilers as an indispensable asset of its prosperity, the North is waking to them as citizens undesired, or as tools to be used and cast aside. This also the war has done. It has set the Negro before us as a national concern, a national question to which the times demand an answer. A War for Democracy We are fighting, we say, for the freedom of the human race ; for the rights of feeble folk ; for the little nations, the helpless groups, those whom the ruthless strong would exploit. We ask no compensation but the achievement of a wider justice for mankind. The thought of Ireland has clouded our sense of comrade- AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 115 ship with England : she must measure up to the world- standard the war has set. And the Negro? Our personal share of the world- responsibility of the strong to the weak? This new, national Negro, who has emerged from his ancient sectional dwelling-place to stand before the nation with the old antagonism darkening the new environ- ment: have we seen him or ourselves in our world- relations yet? What will we do with the Negro? — Not we the South, but we the Nation. This is the question to which the war demands of us an answer: and accord- ing to our answer shall we rise or fall. What should England do with Ireland? Russia with the Jews? The Turks with the Armenians? All these are racial questions, some of them different in kind, all of them in degree, from ours; yet all, like ours, to be worked out by changing applications of the unchanging Law — by the right of the weakest to jus- tice, and to the opportunity to become and to do the best that it is in him to be and to achieve. One cannot, in the limits of one chapter, dig into the past or attempt explanations : I have tried to do that, as far as I can, in a book. 1 What is here needed is some outline of present conditions, and of things done, and possible to be done, to better them. Southern by long descent, my heart is with my people and my faith and with my country too. We have not seen the Negro yet. The war has shocked us into a new consciousness of him ; but we have not clearly seen him or ourselves in our world-relations. Out of '/n Black and White: An Interpretation of Southern Life, Revell. 116 THE PATH OF LABOR this fire of death and agony we may hope to emerge world-dwellers, with larger vision; but we enter it a provincial nation, regarding ourselves as a separate entity, not as an integral part of world life. And it is of conditions among us provincial folk we must speak plainly, but with faith and hope. Conditions in the South Of the 7,000,000 Negroes over ten years of age, 5,000,000 are reported by the census as "engaged in gainful occupations"; of these, 3,000,000, men and women, do agricultural work. Obviously, the condi- tion of this great class is of more importance to the 10,000,000 than the condition of all other working groups combined. The migrants are chiefly from this class. Their numbers, variously estimated at from 250,000 to 500,000, show their deep dissatisfaction with conditions on the farms. Yet the average white farmer, who employs, perforce, the average colored help, is as dissatisfied as the Negro. A conversation recently overheard in a public place recited experiences which could be easily duplicated in most rural sections of the farther South. The speakers, a cotton factor and a lawyer, each owned a farm near the city, in which they were sink- ing most of the profits of their city business. Like all farm owners, they supplied their tenants with shelter, food, necessary cash, tools, seed and fertilizer. One of them, just before harvesting a crop too small to repay him for advances to the tenant, found that the Model Teacher's Home Built by Principal and Schoolboys Courtesy of Jcancs-Matcr I- una) School Farm, Brunswick Co., Va. AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 117 latter, instead of using the expensive fertilizer pro- vided, had sold it for a song to buy whiskey. "It wouldn't have done you any good if he had put it on," said the other. "I have quit my business and stood over one set of tenants after another, and seen the fertilizer go on ; but the gathered corn and cotton shrink at night. I didn't buy any fertilizer this spring; the more I put into my farm the more I lose." Their talk covered an experience of years. They had no explanation of the dishonesty and shiftlessness of the Negroes beyond the usual one that "niggers" are like that, and you can't help yourself. The South's one hope, they thought, lay in immigration after the war. How this might affect the Negro did not occur to them ; they were thinking in terms of farm owners who understood building up soil but were absolutely ignorant about building up labor. This, however, was before the exodus began. Another common trouble in some sections is the laborer's desertion of his employer, notwithstanding his contract, at the most critical period of cultivation, or when some perishable crop needs harvesting. A Mississippi lawyer, who is so much the Negro's friend that he has frequently stood for them in the Courts when it was against his own interests to do so, said recently that more than a score of Negroes in his county had left him in this way, owing him from fifty to five hundred dollars for cash and groceries ad- vanced, in addition to causing the loss of his crops ; and that his was a common experience. This ex- plained, he said, the illegal schemes resorted to to 118 THE PATH OF LABOR hold farm laborers; it was that or ruin for many- farmers. A white man, he declared, could be jailed for breaking a contract; but with a Negro there was no redress. "Can't he be jailed, too?" was asked. "He won't mind that, especially if winter is coming on ; and the white man's support of him is merely shifted to another item of his budget." Against this must be set the recent statement of a Louisiana planter who employs some 1,500 colored laborers. He has no trouble, he says; but for years he has followed a policy of building up his working force as well as his soil. Their homes are sanitary; each family has its own garden patch, and time to cultivate it. Improved methods of agriculture are taught, and they are encouraged to practice them on their own land. Thrift and ambition are promoted; but the more independent the men become the more closely are they bound to the man who has made it to their interest to promote his. Instances like this are exceptional; yet in every county of every State some Negroes show daily that integrity, efficiency and thrift are possible to the race. In some industrial centers as well as on some great farms welfare work for colored employees is being most successfully carried on. At Greensboro, N. C, and at Birmingham and Corona, Ala., such work is found as beneficial for blacks as for whites. Workers of both races respond in the same way to good hous- ing, schools, recreation centers, libraries, Y. M. C. A. work, etc. ; and the white employers concerned are AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 119 unanimous in the belief that such work among - their colored laborers pays financially as well as from a humanitarian standpoint. This was also shown in a statement made by a prominent business man of New Orleans before a recent gathering of club women in that city. He said that in an investigation made con- cerning the Negro exodus by an organization to which he belonged, and extending through a number of counties, it was found that few Negroes had gone from those plantations where housing conditions were good, or where the men had a chance to get ahead for themselves : the heaviest emigration was from those farms which offered the "hand" little more than exist- ence in return for his labor. But here again there are exceptions. A certain Mississippi town was denuded of its cooks and butlers last winter without warning. Many of these house- hold workers had been in the employ of the same fam- ily for from three to twenty years ; yet only one servant told her employer when she left that she would not be back in the morning; the rest just disappeared. Unfortunately they left behind them a deepened dis- trust of the Negroes, and a new bitterness toward them, which tinges the thoughts of the community concerning the entire race. It is the old deadly, dead- ening story over again, "They're like that, and you can't help yourself." The Negro Viewpoint What is the Negro view? This question is being asked more and more. In a number of cities promin- 120 THE PATH OF LABOR ent white men are calling together Negro leaders to discuss the causes and cure of the present situation. They give, with little variation, the following reasons : their people's legal status, lack of protection to life and property, deprivation of civil rights, segregation laws, low wages, and lack of educational advantages for their children. These grievances are receiving a wider attention than ever before. It grows plainer that in the welfare of the Negro the welfare of the South is at stake. It is one more lesson in God's great course in world- justice — another demonstration that selfishness can- not pay in the long run, even in dollars and cents. Agricultural experts estimate the agricultural loss of the South through the exodus as $200,000,000.00 for 1917. The most influential newspapers are saying plainly that if the Negro is to stay in the South it must be made to his interest to do so. Lack of Legal Protection "The great majority of us are safe, all our lives," said an educated Negro when questioned lately; "and we all know that. The trouble is, none of us is sure that we individually belong to that majority. When something happens like that case you referred to, where an honest, hard-working man couldn't be pro- tected by whites who respected him from a small, law- less gang, it sends a shock through my people from one end of the State to the other. They're afraid. Honesty doesn't protect. They know such things don't happen often ; but they know it's quite possible AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 121 they may be the next one. That is what it seems to me you friendly white people fail to appreciate — the background of fear in colored life. It's hard to be a man when you're always uneasy, not just for yourself, but for everybody you love. And unless you live on a higher level than most people ever get up to, it's hard to be a man when you feel being a man doesn't protect you." That this condition will end, and that the war and the migration will hasten its ending, seem to the writer certain. Plans for concerted Southwide effort for better law-enforcement and protection of the Negroes were under consideration by influential Southern men before we entered the war; and a recent inquiry showed that leading men in every State and in every walk of life are ready to help any practical movement to that end, and feel the urgent need of it. But injus- tice and prejudice are not confined to the South ; it will help us all to remember that the obstacles to jus- tice are, like the responsibility to achieve justice, not sectional but national. North and South we should set about our common task with a new humility, and a new patience with one another. Yet the South should lead the way, both because of the future and -of the past. National justice waits on Southern leadership. Lack of Civil Rights The lack of civil rights is increasingly a cause of bitterness among the Negroes, and will cut deeper every year until those rights are granted. The demand for such rights, among all races, gathers strength as 122 THE PATH OF LABOR the race approaches fitness for citizenship. Every- thing that makes the Negro less of a menace to our institutions and more of an industrial and moral asset to the nation increases his desire for civil rights, and his resentment at being deprived of them. To just the extent that he emerges from ignorance, inefficiency and vice ; to just the extent that he adds to our economic prosperity ; to just that extent will his de- mand for citizenship, and the danger of refusing it, grow. Some signals of that danger are already discernible. A wealthy Louisianian said not long ago, "The status of the Negro, the whole relation of the white race to him, is a question that is already rising for settlement. It will never down again until it is settled right. We must go to the bottom of things before we can have real peace or prosperity in the South." That all Negroes should have the franchise no one who knows them will believe; nor do their leaders ask it. It is madness to put the destiny even of ignorance in ignorant hands; and the overwhelming mass of the Negroes are ignorant to an extreme degree. Even when not ignorant they lack the race experience of self-control, the centuries-long training toward democracy of the whites. For the majority of them a benevolent paternalism appears a present necessity. But we need a test of citizenship which will apply to all alike, regardless of the color of their skin. An ignorant voter is liable to be an un-moral rather than an immoral voter; but as such he is a menace to hon- est government regardless of his race. The basis of AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 123 ascendancy, as a great Alabamian has pointed out, is fitness for it, not skill in holding other races down. True faith in our own race requires justice to the weak about us. The Negro who measures up to the test should vote : and the white man who cannot should be shut out. This is the crucial point. To stand here is to invire criticism from every scheming politician in the land. But politicians pass: and God's laws of justice stand. The best South, in ruling the Negroes out of politics when scarcely any of them were fitted to vote, was safeguarding both them and the government from cor- ruption. The strange thing is they did not see they opened the way for corruption in giving the ballot to whites whose ignorance was in no way neutralized by the color of their skins, and who are still a menace to democracy and a temptation to unscrupulous politicians. Segregation Laws and Housing The average Negro does not want white neighbors any more than they want him ; but he does want decent surroundings. The Negroes of the better classes object with bitter intensity to being forced to live, as many of them are, in white vice-districts. This condition, together with the ugliness and unhealthful- ness of most sections allotted for colored homes, drives some to seek a place in white districts. Christian whites must stand for justice in this vital matter; if they do, there will be no need for segregation taws. This form of justice is less urgent in the North than 124 THE PATH OF LAEOR in the South only because fewer Negroes live there. In every city of the nation where Negroes in any con- siderable number are found the principle of this justice is violated. It is true it is not a racial injustice; it is part of the world-injustice of indifference and greed to the poor; but it falls heavily on the Negroes, North and South. Yet in both sections it has been demonstrated that colored laborers can be healthfully and attractively housed at moderate rentals, and to the reasonable profit of the investor in real estate. This is shown on a large scale in Cincinnati and Washington ; and in smaller ventures in Kansas City, in Newport News, Va., in several Georgia experiments, and in other places. Low Wages and Poor Education These causes of unrest are closely linked. Very often decent living is impossible on the wages paid colored labor; yet in many instances such labor is paid all that it is worth; for ignorance produces little and costs much. What follows applies chiefly to the country schools. Conditions in the cities are more or less mitigated, some cities having excellent school facilities for colored children, and all of them making better pro- vision for them than can be found in the country. But the heart of the race problem lies in the country. Over three-fourths of the colored people are born, work, and die there. The country wage, the country home, the country school, are vital to any just solu- AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 125 tion. If the churches are to serve the Negro they must meet his country needs, and touch and broaden his country life. When this is done the wage ques- tion will settle itself. It is a common saying that the resources of the South have as yet been merely scratched on the surface; it is even more true of her labor resources than of her material and agricultural assets. A Remarkable Report A flood of light is thrown on the condition and needs of colored people by a recently-issued Report on Negro Education. 2 It represents three years of work by a group of experts under the direction of the U. S. Bureau of Education, with the financial co- operation of the Stokes Foundation. Southern State officials and leading men have also assisted, as well as the leading institutions for colored youth which are supported by Northern churches and philanthropy. It is the first national investigation and survey, and from it there emerges a well-considered, constructive edu- cational program for the race which will doubtless be increasingly worked out by both sections in co-opera- tion with the Negroes themselves. An abstract of the Report will be sent free to any applicant : Only the barest outline can be given here. It does full justice to the efforts and sacrifices of both North and South ; yet a comprehensive survey shows, as in our foreign mission fields, overlapping and waste, and the possi- bility of fitting an educational program more closely to the needs of the people. Almost unconsciously, as * Negro Education; Bulletin, 1916. No. 39. Department of Interior, Bureau of Education. 126 THE PATH OF LABOR one reads, one sees in a new light the status of Negro labor, the exodus, the Negro himself, and much that many of us have considered racially characteristic. Southern Schools The South spends annually about $6,000,000.00 on colored public schools — a small sum as compared with the needs, or with the sum spent on schools for whites ; yet the South is still relatively poor, so that while the percentage of State income spent on education is often larger than in other sections, the actual sum per child of school age is only a half or a third of the sum avail- able in the North and West. Many children between the ages of six and fourteen are unprovided for — about 25% of white children and 43% of colored. When all is said this is a serious discrepancy; but even more serious is the waste of the money spent. A Southern State Superintendent says : "There has never been any serious attempt in this State to offer adequate educational facilities for the colored race. The average length of the term for the State is four months ; practically all of the schools are taught in dilapidated churches ; . . . practically all the teachers are incompetent, possessing little or no education . . . some of them have as many as 100 students to the teacher." A Southern supervisor of white elementary rural schools writes : "I never visit one of these (Negro) schools without feeling that we are wasting a large part of this money and are neglecting a great opportunity. The Negro AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 127 school houses are . . . usually without comfort, equipment, lighting- or sanitation. . . . Most of the teachers are absolutely untrained, and have been given certificates, not because they have passed the county examination, but because it is necessary to have some kind of Negro teacher. Among the Negro rural schools which I have visited I have found only one in which the highest class knew the multiplication table." It was in view of such facts that the Woman's Mis- sionary Council of the Southern Methodist Church put among the duties of the Social Service Committees of its auxiliaries the visiting of colored public schools, "requiring of the public authorities that their premises be kept sanitary, helping to secure colored teachers of a high grade, and favoring the introduction of indus- trial training." There is here a vast field for home mission work and for the education of the public conscience. There are also signs of a growing interest on the part of the whites in these schools, and of their appreciation of the work of the agents of the Jeanes Foundation in the rural schools — an appreciation in- creasingly shown in money contributions, and in attendance at closing time to inspect the industrial work introduced, and the exhibits of the boys' and girls' clubs. The day of indifference is passing. The Southern University Race Commission has issued a strong appeal to the college men of the South to arouse public interest in colored public schools "on the ground of the public welfare and common justice." 128 THE PATH OF LABOR The Need for Teachers Southern State reports show that over 50% of all colored public school teachers have themselves had less than six elementary grades of schooling. In the rural districts, where 75% of the race live, this lack of training is shared by three fourths of the teachers. The waste of money runs yearly into millions : the human waste is incalculable. It is out of these conditions that almost the greatest need of the race rises, an outstanding challenge to the humanity and the Christianity of America : the moral need, the human need, the labor need, for teachers who can teach in the rural schools the things that country people need to know for upright, efficient, happy country living. Teachers Supplied by North and South The South spends yearly about one-third of a mil- lion dollars on industrial and normal schools for Negroes. Some of them do excellent work ; but greatly increased accommodations and equipment are needed : and the wise advice of the Southern (white) Teachers' Association should be heeded in all the States, instead of as at present in only one or two. Southern white teachers should take part in the teacher-training in all the schools, and thereby build up ideals of service in both races. The churches of the South are helping to create a sentiment which will make this possible. In all denominations there is some movement of the white women toward helping the colored women in their missionary organizations ; and AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 129 in the Southern Presbyterian and Southern Methodist churches there is a distinct and growing effort to establish points of communication between cultured white women and Negro homes. This is shown in settlement work, in the teaching of colored Sunday- School classes, in institutes for colored home-makers, and in Community Clubs organized by white women and run in co-operation with educated colored women for the benefit of colored mothers. This work, small as it is, is yet scattered through many States. It is reinforced by the work of the W. C. T. U. and the Y. W. C. A. women, and splendidly, and to a fast- growing extent, by Southern Club women. All this is bound to react in time upon public sentiment, and to help in making possible the ideal set forth by the Southern Teachers' Association above referred to. Meanwhile, and for fifty years, nearly all the trained teachers the Negro race has furnished have come out of schools financed by Northern churches and North- ern philanthropy. These agencies furnish yearly about $2,500,000.00 for these schools, the Negroes themselves giving about $500,000.00 more for higher education yearly. Money, however, is the least part of what the North has given : and this it is time for us to recognize. Not- withstanding some mistakes and some misfits, the men and women who have spent themselves in the colored schools have been of the North's best blood and cul- ture, and have been moved by that spirit of service to the neediest which is of the very essence of Christi- anity. They gave this service, too, in the time of 130 THE PATH OF LABOR famine — in those bleak and barren years when the best white South, which had so long supplied ideals to the Negroes through a thousand channels of daily contact, was withdrawn into the desert of its own suffering; and when the South, in a changed world, began to work out a new development in which neither race had found its adjustment to the other. On them have fallen the burden and the honor of a preparation of colored leaders which make possible the Negro's co-operation in the adjustment which is to come. Increased Efficiency for Northern Schools The Bureau of Education reports 625 schools for the higher education of Negroes. Half of the $3,000,- 000.00 spent yearly upon them comes from North- ern churches, $1,000,000.00 from Northern phil- anthropy, and $500,000.00 from Negroes. 266 of these schools are classed as "important." Others do good work in a small sphere. Some are said to be "justified only on denominational grounds." Many of them are known as "colleges," yet 75% of the 87,000 pupils are in elementary grades, 11,500 are in second- ary departments, and only 1,500 are real college students. The waste and overlapping here are ap- parent. It also appears that the old classical type of college education is mainly offered, though white colleges have made large adjustments to present-day needs. This is partly because of the Negro's attitude. The average member of the race knows little of the vast development, here and abroad, of industrial education AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 131 for whites ; nor of the connection between his own industrial ignorance and his unsatisfactory economic status. Hampton, Tuskegee, and other industrial schools have shown the Negroes within their influence the way of progress for the masses of their own — or any — race; but to the majority real education means Latin, Greek and mathematics ; and hand-labor smacks of a return to that slavery which above all things they rightly desire to be done with. This great class does not know what a real college is ; the name itself is the magnet. And the more easily attained the d< is the closer it approximates their vague ideal of the highest educational good. Yet the masses of every race must work with their hands. Their education must lift, beautify and make efficient a life of toil if it is to be education in the highest sense. And since, for as far ahead as one can now see, most Negro workers are destined for agri- cultural labor, the outstanding need is for teachers who can adjust the masses to that labor in a way to secure for them healthful, successful and happy lives. This the Bureau of Education pleads for as the main work, numerically speaking, of the Northern schools. The Need for First-class Colleges The need of highly trained leaders for our 10,000,000 American Negroes is a self-evident fact. No group in our Nation needs such leaders more. The outstanding poverty of every college for Negroes in the country shows a lack of vision, and even of business imagina- tion, among white people little less than calamitous. 132 THE PATH OF LABOR Until they have an adequate leadership the masses must stumble along, a moral and economic burden instead of the moral and economic asset they can become. The death rate among Negroes clamors not only for better administration of our health laws, but for thousands of well-prepared Negro doctors to lift the sanitary standards of their people. The need for a ministry of a high type is, according to the best Ne- groes, appalling; and their preachers who have had fine college training stand out like lighthouses on a rocky coast. The material is there; it is for lack of its development that the people perish in storms of emotionalism divorced from morality. Highly-trained social workers are necessary; and the fine efficiency of those already at work should silence every doubt as to the Negro's ability for this work. They are proving their ability under the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes in both North and South ; and under the auspices of some Southern City Federations of Women's Clubs ; of the Women's Mis- sionary Council of the M. E. Church, South ; of many Northern churches; of the Jeanes Foundation, and of at least one Southern city government. Colleges there must certainly be. But the 1,500 college students should not be scat- tered through institutions where 90% of the pupils are in elementary and secondary work: the Report hopes for concentration of college work in a few highly- equipped institutions only; and for the rest to centre on preparing teachers for the public schools trained in AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 133 history, elementary science, pedagogy, agriculture, industries, hygiene, sanitation and community better- ment. Further Teacher-training All schools for negroes put together, however, can supply only a small number of the teachers urgently needed. For the great present emergency the Slater Board, under the direction of a Southern man, has worked out a plan of co-operation with State and county educational boards by which one school in a county may be made an eight-grade school, superior teachers engaged, and, in addition to the eight grades taught, simple courses given in the subjects enume- rated in the last paragraph. The General Education Board is also co-operating with Southern State au- thorities in this work. It, and the rural, industrial, and community betterment work done by Negroes under the Jeanes Foundation, should have the intelligent co- operation of the Christian and patriotic South. The task is too great for any one section or set of agencies. As we learn to work together, North and South, white and black, Christians, philanthropists, patriots, the work will be done without waste or overlapping, and with more and more efficiency, to the upbuilding of our common country and of the kingdom of God among us. Trained Preachers Needed No one more emphasizes this need than the educated Negroes, ministers included. There are a very few 134 THE PATH OF LABOR theological schools for them; more or less practical courses are offered in several institutions ; and three Southern churches — Presbyterian, Methodist and Bap- tist — have long acknowledged their obligation as Christians to assist in this work. The need, however, is as great as for properly-trained teachers ; and at the recent quadrennial meeting of the Federal Council of Churches plans were recommended for closer co- operation between white and colored churches through bi-racial local ministerial meetings, with consideration of and co-operation in meeting local needs and prob- lems ; for the holding of large numbers of preachers' in- stitutes yearly, in which courses in the Bible should be given by w T hite and colored ministers, and also courses in hygiene, sanitation and community work. The Southern Methodist Church has been trying out this plan for three or four years with real success ; and it is hoped that some adequate, concerted effort may soon be made. Conditions in the North The "Negro problem" in the North is even more purely urban than it is rural in the South, and because most of the Negroes are newcomers into slum condi- tions already established for other races it should be easier there to see the so-called Negro problem for what it really is — the human problem of the poor, the unfortunate, the ignorant, the unfriended, the weak. In every Northern city, as in those of the South, there are educated, capable colored men and women who are doing what they can to help these less fortunate AMONG NEGRO LABORERS 135 of their people. North and South, Christian whites should come in touch with these leaders and give both sympathy and help. Perhaps one of the finest instances of this form of social service is that of the co-operation between the white and colored Women's Civic Clubs of Baltimore. A committee from the white club, headed by the daughter of a former presi- dent of Johns Hopkins, meets regularly with a com- mittee from the colored club, and the two organiza- tions are working side by side toward the same fine ends — better homes, better children, wider opportu- nities and greater happiness for all the people of the city. The National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, composed of Northern and Southern whites and blacks, with headquarters in New York City, has organized work and trained workers in a number of cities of both sections. They seek the co-operation of Christian white people, and often find, as in Nash- ville, Tenn., their largest opportunity in the backing of white churchwomen and laymen. They are doing fine work in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and other places. Organizations such as this must be fostered and given the co-operation of our missionary forces. It is not enough, North or South, to do things for the Negro; we must do things with the Negro if we arc to be honest representatives of Jesus Christ. The Obligation of Women Women are the centripetal forces of the human race; the home-makers, the life-bearers, the chil>!- 136 THE PATH OF LABOR keepers, and no one group of mothers in any commu- nity or nation can keep their own safe without safe- guarding all. Vice and disease are as democratic as death itself. The real heart of the race problem is in the attitude of the privileged woman to the unprivi- leged ; and God has so woven us all into his great web of life that if we fail in our duty to these poorest women and girls and homes, our own sons and daugh- ters must pay the penalty for our neglect. We must see women as women first, and afterward as of this race or that. Justice before the law for all men alike — that Christian America must achieve if she fights with honor this war for human freedom ; opportunity for every child of every race — this human right we must secure for Negroes as for others if we are to be a Christian nation. But fundamental to both these things lies respect for womanhood as such. To those who have glimpsed something of their struggle, the fight of Christian colored women for the purity and safety of colored girls is one of the most moving things to be found in America. Who can help them but the Christian white women? And women belong together ; God has appointed it so. There is no stand- ard but a common standard, no security but a com- mon security, no right but a common right. Let us stand for that, in our own hearts, in the minds of our children, in our homes, and in our public and church life. Thus shall we, too, fight the battle of the world's freedom and lift our country, even a little, toward that far high democracy of Jesus Christ "Toward which the whole creation moves." V IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES MIRIAM L. WOODBERRY Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for the gold where they find it. Iron is taken out of the earth and brass is molten out of the stone. As for the earth, out of it cometh bread ; and under it is turned up as it were fire. — Job 28 : 1, 2, 5, 28. What is the wisdom taught of the trees? Something of energy, something of ease ; Steadfastness rooted in passionless peace. Life-giving verdure to upland and glen, Graces — compelling the praises of men, Freedom — that bends to the eagle and wren. Largess — expanding in ripeness and size, Shadow — that shelters the foolish and wise, Patience that bows 'neath all winds of the skies. Uprightness — standing for truth like a tower; Dignity — symbol of honor and power ; Beauty that blooms in the ultimate flower. Stephen Henry Thayer, Pulp and Paper Magazine. V IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES Lumber Camps It is a far cry from 1848 when Henry W. Longfellow wrote in the first verse of "Evangeline" his fascinating introduction to our forests — "This is the forest primeval, The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, in garments green, Indistinct in the twilight, Stand like druids of old, With voices sad and prophetic. Stand like harpers hoar, With beards that rest on their bosoms" to the ringing appeal in one of our scientific magazines for the United States Government to appropriate money to be expended in aeroplanes for the patrolling of our national reserve forests. During that time the poetry of the woods, enveloping the life of the birds, the customs and warfare of the wild beasts, the more fascinating historic days of Indian warfare, has grad- ually succumbed to the steady song of the woodman's axe, invariably followed by the sudden springing into view of the huge saw mills, a few great industrial cities, but more often miles and miles and miles of 139 140 THE PATH OF LABOR waste timber sections and the weird, unsightly spaces of logged off land. We usually think of our timber resources and forests as located on our northern border, stretching from Maine to Washington; but all States in the Union, with the exception of Nebraska, have lumber industries, ranging from Washington, Wisconsin, Virginia and Louisiana, where wage-earners are employed in log- ging camps and mills, numbering not over 43,000 or less than 30,000, to Rhode Island, Kansas, Nevada and Utah, each state averaging less than one hundred men on pay-roll. The very nature of the work makes the compiling of statistics of little value except to open the eyes of the church to the importance of doing transient work and being willing to furnish leadership to a constantly moving people. In five years' time Washington ad- vanced from the fifth to the first, Louisiana advanced from the seventh to the third, Mississippi advanced from the thirteenth to the ninth, Wisconsin dropped from the second to the fifth, Pennsylvania dropped from the fourth to the sixth, and Minnesota dropped from the sixth to the tenth. Labor Facts That Affect the Background and Scope of Christian Activities The work in the camps is an outdoor problem offer- ing no opportunities to women except cooking. The children belong to the few lumberjacks and foremen who must command the outposts. The work in the saw mills is an indoor problem, IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 141 offering various types of employment to women and children. The last census prints this table : Women employed in saw mills and lumber camps 43.7% " planing mills 32.2% " packing box factories 24.1% Children under 16 years of age, saw mills and logging.. 54.4% " " " " " " planing mills 18.2% " " " " " packing box factories... 27.4% The number of women employed shows compar- atively little change during the last decade. The num- ber of children employed shows a decrease for the decade as a whole ; although somewhat larger in 1909 than in 1904, the proportion which they formed of the total has however decreased during each intercensal period. The maximum employment of wage earners in the logging camps of the country takes place during the winter, and in the lumber mills during the summer and fall. Conditions with respect to distribution of employment during the year differ widely, however, in different sections of the country. In the Western States most of the logging is done during the winter months while the lumber mills run throughout the year, being usually somewhat more active during the summer than during the winter. In the Southern States, on the other hand, both logging and mill work continue with little change or interruption throughout the year. Thus there were more than four times as many wage earners employed in the logging camps of New Eng- land in December as were employed in July of the same year. In the logging operations of the five states 142 THE PATH OF LABOR bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, there were only 7.8 per cent, more wage earners employed in December than July. A Day in a Lumber Camp This really begins the day before, with a train trip through the logged off stump land that always pre- cedes a lumber camp. A night in a small house very near a large saw mill, with an alarm clock that goes off very promptly at a quarter of five A. M. Then a stumbling walk over the stumps and planked paths of the mill settlement into the large boarding house for a hearty breakfast with one hundred men. The foreman of the wood's crew is the host and I am next introduced to the fireman and the engineer, for all visitors depend upon their courtesy. The engineer must keep his seat on the engine, but the fireman can stand and surrender his to a guest. We push "empties" (unloaded freight cars) ten miles back into the woods and penetrate the deep, majestic tim- ber lands. It seems sacrilegious. One feels that wild beasts, birds and Indians belong in that environment, but that this modern, scientific outfit spells mischief. It is destruction. Destruction of the forest in order to construct the city. There are four camps to visit. No. 1 is about deserted. The timber is cut and most of the little buildings, built on sled foundations, are about to be moved. No. 2 is in the full program of activity, with its cook house, its bunk house and a few homes for the families of the men who must be stationed at the IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 143 outposts. At No. 3, where the men have been cutting for two weeks, we stayed while the train returned to the settlement with its empties loaded with logs, and for three hours watched the timber falling. Trees three hundred years old, felled in thirty minutes by two men, two axes and one saw nine feet long. Just as the tree is ready, the men at the saws jump aside, and the word "Timber!" rings through the woods. Everybody stops work. There is a soft, singing noise which gradually emerges into a crash, and a monarch has fallen, but only for a few minutes' repose. Ropes belonging to a donkey engine are quickly flung out into the air, caught and attached, and our tree is soon swinging through the heavens, this time in a hori- zontal position, and with a few deft motions by the men, a few quick signals, finds itself securely loaded with six or more similar logs, and traveling towards the settlement. We will travel with this log and its companions, stopping at camp No. 4. This morning it was dense woodland. Now a small, cleared place has appeared. Ropes, wire and tackle are attached to a tree, a small donkey engine has been located, three trees have already fallen, and camp No. 4 is born. We pass the burned shack of a lonely woodsman, see the remains of a coffee pot, soldered by the fire on to a piece of the stove, the charred and twisted pieces of furniture, and wonder if the occupant escaped and where he fled for shelter from a forest fire. But one also feels sorry for the dignified tree speeding towards civilization: a cold plunge will introduce it 144 THE PATH OF LABOR to the river and a slow, drifting journey will take it to the mill provided it escapes the horrors of a river jam. At this point one can introduce the word "Mis- sionary," for the land left behind, pruned of its great trees, shows a tangle of sticks, stumps and slashings, which will soon be opened by some enterprising real estate agent for settlement. The man who buys this logged off land will know the meaning of the word "toil." Ten dollars' worth of dynamite is often used to blow up one stump, and the settler, who clears the land, is the true pioneer. At this point, also, comes the dawning of permanent missionary work, for the saw mill town usually re- mains fifteen or twenty years, with a population never less than five hundred, offering every opportunity for service. If the camp is in a "wet" State, the work of the lumberjack preacher is primarily laboring with the wreckage caused by the saloon. At one camp, a little girl came up to us and, with the frankness of childhood, looked into the pastor's face and said, "May I hang around you all day? Last Sunday they got me so drunk I was sick until Wednesday." This minister had only visited the camp once before, a year previous, and the child had remembered the little Sunday-school service, the simple singing and the picture card, which mean so little to our own children. If a camp is in a "dry" State the opportunities for service cannot be exaggerated. A man who has spent long days in the woods and in the mills enjoys reading, checkers, and simple moving picture exhibits, while the one to whom ■ .f.v of Miss M. H ' "I'M' NT - -. \ BER ( AMP I. Working in the "Deep i sawmili Town, B km M> . 1917 ;• gAWMU is I.I •.; Bl R I v P '■ - Sl i I ""< si . I .1 ■■ i Bi i di rc i . Si rTLEMENT 6. Si nday Schooi in t Li bei IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 145 drinking is relaxation thinks his day is not quite complete without a brutal fight. Missionary Work The constantly changing location of the camps probably accounts for the dearth of descriptive litera- ture, as a small forest can be demolished by one hun- dred men while an article is being written, set up in type and distributed — but wonderful work has been done. To the Presbyterians belongs the credit of being the only denomination that has kept a Secretary for fifteen years w r ho has general oversight of all lumber camp districts, with four general missionaries under him who have no churches, but are free to go from camp to camp, with a pack on their backs. They visit, call on the wounded, become acquainted with the men, hold services, social and religious. To them are due in great measure the cleaned up camps, sanitary bunks, spring beds and wholesome recreations of the present. The first points are not so much in conversion of men as in improved comforts and social conditions. Three years ago the Onalaska Lumber Co. pur- chased 34,000 acres of timber land. They erected a small mill and shortly after cut and sawed enough timber to erect a large mill and build a town. A large company store, the company offices and homes emerged with the lightning speed of American indus- try, and in three years to a day the community opened its doors to the settler. The church was also there, with a pastor and his wife in the field — only one 146 THE PATH OF LABOR church, denominational in name, community in spirit. The Baptists, in addition to a large program of work in many States, have a most unique work that is "launched by a launch." A man and his wife, who combine the varied talents of preaching, singing, writing, cooking and navigating, live on a small steamer, and minister, not only to a long line of little rural Sunday-schools on the Pacific coast, but to the lumber camps that border the large shipping ports. The Congregationalists have centered more of their work in the logged off land settlements in the Middle West in furnishing foreign-speaking pastors for the settlements which surround the ship-building industries of the Northwest, and establishing one college with an academy department that ministers primarily to the chil- dren whose fathers and mothers have been the pioneers who have subdued the wilderness. All the denominations have a devoted band of Sunday- school missionaries whose untiring services have checked crime, saved life, and helped to swing many a camp into righteousness. In Mines The longing to obtain and the willingness to seek for hidden treasure lies dominant in every race and tribe and is the propelling force back of most of the voyages of the past and the industries of the present. The ro- mantic stories of America's marvelous resources have brought the people of the world to these shores, and every new invention of science, or the perfection of IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 147 larger and stronger instruments, only serves to locate or bring to the surface more material wealth. Referring to dry statistics, we find that in forty-one out of forty-eight of the states included in the United States, the value of products taken from the mines yields annually over the million mark per state ; Pennsyl- vania leading with coal, California and Colorado fol- lowing with gold and silver, Montana producing zinc, lead, silver, copper and iron, and Alaska unmeasured and unfathomed riches. Already jewelers are begin- ning to get Oriental prices for the Montana sapphire, the Texas diamond, the Wyoming amethyst, the Cali- fornia opal and the Alaska garnet. The term "mine," in the commercial world, repre- sents a distinct mining operation, one or more of which may be controlled by some operator. In many minerals, such as precious stones, small placer gold mining, etc., the mining operations are not carried on continuously at the same locality. The term "oper- ator" represents the individual or company which con- trols the mine. As a large percentage of gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc are often obtained from the same ores, the communities where these operations arc car- ried on present the largest and most complicated human problem. The size of a cam]) varies from the lonely Alaskan prospector, who is often seen panning for gold on the banks of the river or digging in the streets of a now town, to the biggest mining proposition in the world, located at Butte, Montana, which may serve as an 148 THE PATH OF LABOR illustration of a mining town, though on a larger scale than any other. Butte, Montana Beginning with one small mine, known as the "Perch of the Devil," this camp has become a city, with a reputation that extends around the world. Its fabulous wealth of copper is beyond the glories pic- tured in Aladdin's palace and it will prove the central interest of all industrial problems for fifty years to come. Butte has a population of ninety thousand people. Of this, one-quarter are single men who come from everywhere, as some one has said, "for whom nobody cares, nobody weeps and nobody watches." Nine hun- dred miles of underground treasure has been blocked out, and at the present speed will take twenty thou- sand men, working on three shifts of eight hours each, one hundred years to mine. So Butte is on the map to stay. The life of the city is divided into three periods of eight hours each ; one-third of its population is at work, one-third at play and one-third asleep each hour of the twenty-four in a day. Just as many people are buying tickets for the theatre at quarter of eight in the morning as there are at quarter of eight in the evening. In 1916, 17 per cent, of the population was in jail — mostly for short sentences often repeated. The city boasted the largest bar in America — situated right in the center of the town, keeping sixteen bar- tenders busy. It also was the home of the smallest IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 149 restaurant — a tiny table, four plates and one cook doing business night and day. Everything that is produced in the city goes out; everything that is consumed must be brought in. The output is distributed mostly in the East, and enriches home life, particularly in Boston and New York. The question which naturally puts itself to us is, what can the church do under such conditions? In this com- munity, that produces one-fourth of all the copper which goes to make ammunition for the allies, with a cosmopolitan population of which fully one-half is militantly pro-German, where the company have militia stationed to restrain the conflicting passions of antagonistic races in the mines, one minister comes forward with this declaration : "The most important influence must be the steadying power of the Gospel." Churches in Butte are trying to afford a spiritual bal- ance wheel for this seething mining camp. Every evening while individual affairs are coming to a climax, special services are held in which a spiritual interpre- tation is given of the significance of the flag behind the pulpit. Within one year two miracles have been per- formed — the red-light district has been closed, and dur- ing the dramatic temperance campaign for the State of Montana, Butte was the only city that went dry. Challenge of the Coeur d'Alenes In Northern Central Idaho we face the great chal- lenge of the Coeur d'Alenes. The town of Wallace is absolutely unique in its geographical situation. It is placed like the hub of a wheel, from which radiate 150 THE PATH OF LABOR twenty mining gulches, the inhabitants of which turn to Wallace for supplies, inspiration and recreation. A year's study could easily be given to this most unusual and strategic phase of our industrial life. The follow- ing extract from the pen of a local pastor will intro- duce us to the challenge: "Those of you who have formed your mental picture of a western mining camp from reading the novels of Rex Beach or attending the movies may be surprised to hear of conditions as they actually exist in one of the largest lead-producing centers of our country. The Coeur d'Alene Mining District occupies the County of Shoshone in the "Panhandle" of Idaho, lying next to Montana on the upper waters of the Coeur d'Alene River. The center of the district is the city of Wallace, a beautiful, progressive, busy town of about 5,000, which has attractive homes, excellent schools, hospitals, library, and paved streets which are thronged Avith automobiles. The first and truest impression one gets of the place is that of prosperity. Everyone is making money or is here to make money. The district is immensely rich. Last year $33,000,000 worth of ore was taken out from the hills and over $12,000,000 of this was clear profit to the mining companies. Wages are high. At present a bonus, varying with the price of lead, is paid to all the workmen employed by the mining companies. This, now equal to $1.25, added to the standard wage of $3.50, makes a mucker's wages $4.75 for a day's work. Living expenses are correspondingly high, however, and it is doubtful if most of the men are able to save a large part of their income ; but to receive and spend a good deal of money gives at least the feeling of prosperity. The spirit of the region is the spirit of the miner, and the spirit of the miner is that of the gambler. The early prospector staked his life and grub-stake against a belt full of "dust." The present miner risks the chance of being crushed by falling rock or smothered by underground fire for the high wages. Nearly everyone in the region owns stock in some mine or prospect. The minister's salary (with the exception of the present one), the school teacher's savings, the doctor's fees, the workman's wages, the stenographer's pay, the housewife's pin money, even the school-children's nickels all go to buy mining stock, and the big blackboards with their changing figures, which adorn nearly every other window in the business part of the town, are watched IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 151 daily with feverish interest. A "hasher" in a cheap restaurant told me that he made and lost $7,000 in one year. A young lady teaching in our Sunday-school entered my .study one day and joyfully announced that through a tip given her by the broker for whom she worked she had "made" $14 the day before. There are perhaps a half dozen men in Wallace who a few years ago were common workingmen and today are worth millions. There are probably thousands of others who have left their fortunes in a hole in the hills and gone away "busted," but they are forgotten. Prosperity is the drawing power of the region. Everyone who comes here is drawn by the lure of gold, and his greed is fed until it becomes an all-absorbing passion, crowd- ing out for the time, at least, all other and higher interests. The reason that I am presenting this picture is not to boom the sale of western real estate, but to show if I can that I'ros- perity is a greater obstacle to the work of the Gospel than Poverty. You have often heard the plea made for the poor Home Missionary with his pitiful salary of $600 or less, paid largely in cord wood and unmarketable vegetables, whose measly stipend has been augmented by the help of a lone cow "which cow is now dead and the poor baby deprived of his neces- sary milk and the overworked wife sick in bed and won't you all give a few pennies and send some clothes in the Christmas box?" Well do I know the truth of this picture for I have often worn the welcome garments from those blessed Home Missionary boxes, and my father brought up a family of seven on a Home Missionary's salary, but this is not the story of a dead cow or a sick baby. Rather, I want you to see that a people K'ven over heart and soul to the pursuit of quickly gained wealth are harder to reach with the Gospel call than those in the grip of poverty or even starvation. Some one has described them as "a people whose God is Gold and whose hope is a hole in the ground." I do not want you to think of my people as altogether Godless and ruled by greed and living in the lap of luxury. While they are here in the pursuit of wealth it docs not follow that they keep possession of it all. The stock- of most of the paying mines are held now by eastern people. The companies send tlu-ir dividends to New York and leave their dump-piles here, and with these dumps are left a large number of economic and problems that the companies have not been aide or willing to solve. More than this, these people are not greedy. Their money-lust has been fed and it has grown prodigiously; the chance of riches has given tO them the miner's lever piety may be due to your poverty, or to your lack of opportunity to get great wealth quickly), but the mining people are pro 152 THE PATH OF LABOR ially generous and open handed. When once their interest is stirred they give as readily as they get and penuriousness is despised and almost unknown among them. In the last drive for the Red Cross we nearly doubled our apportionment and gave five times as much per capita as the rest of the country. They are often careless with their money. Many of them come from the best homes of New England and the East, from environments of culture and refinement and religion ; lured to the Golden West by dreams of sudden wealth they leave the "im- pedimenta" of religion among the heirlooms of the old home- stead and come to their new home in the spirit of a vacation, morally and religiously. There is a corresponding lack of permanence in the feelings of the people. As soon as their pile is made or they have struck it rich they will leave, and so the church and culture and things that make for character and permanency are forced to wait while they rush to the "killing while the killing is good." Such conditions produce a shifting, restless population. Half of the congregation in our church will frequently be strangers. We preach to a procession which has not time to pause and listen. Of the 6,000 young men in the mines and mills I doubt if a fraction of one per cent, is ever touched by the church in any way at all, or ever made aware of its existence. This is one community that is not overchurched. If all the population should take a notion to go to church at the same time, not one- tenth of them could sit down, and yet we are seldom crowded for room. There are several acute social problems that have arisen in such conditions as these. One of them is Homelessness. A large proportion of the laboring men are single or living away from their families, most of them boarding at the company "beaneries," and the crowded conditions of most of the mining camps give them no chance whatever for any physical or social recreation. One company has built and maintains a Y. M. C. A., and some of the others have plans underway for the same kind of buildings for the men. Another social problem is the lack of the Sabbath. The wheels never stop. In mine and mill the work goes on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. The men work in three shifts ; the morning from 7 A. M. to 3 P. M., afternoon from 3 P. M. to 11 P. M., and "graveyard," from 11 P. M. to 7 A. M. Every two weeks a man changes shift. The housewives will be able to realize some of the problems this brings to a home where there are also children to be fed and sent to school. With the exception of one company — the Bunker Hill-Sullivan — no miner in the district ever has a Sabbath and IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 153 would not know what to do with it if he had it. Working under such conditions the men, though far above the average in alertness and intelligence, become rather rough and irresponsible and careless of human life. There is, or was, a cer- tain kind of drill used in mines called the "Widow-maker," which is guaranteed to kill a man in three years because of the poison- ous dust that enters his lungs. Yet this drill was extensively used and was in favor among the men because of its ease of handling and has only recently been made illegal by a law drafted by the Treasurer of the Wallace Church. In the past, the Coeur d'Alenes have been the seat of some of the most violent labor troubles in the history of our country. The Western Federation of Miners, so well remembered for their policy of dynamiting back in 1898, had their headquarters at the little town of Gem for years, and began their work of terrorizing here and at Kellogg. During the present crisis the men have remained loyal and quiet, due partly to the high wages paid and to the presence of Government troops who headed off any possible agitation; but we are a long way yet from having any feeling of real "brotherhood" and human interest between the owners and the workers of the -mine. How to create such an interest between a company whose office is on Broadway and whose stockholders are anywhere under heaven, and the boys in the muck here in the Coeur d'Alenes is a problem that will take more than the Church to solve. Many social conditions have improved greatly in the last few years. State prohibition has banished the saloon and, although bootlegging is common since it is but a few hours' walk to Montana and a notorious town, we are ready to testify that the worst kind of prohibition is far better than the best kind of license, and heartily hope that the civilized east may some time come up to us in this respect. Prostitution has until very recently been legalized and preserved with tender care and devo- tion. One of the choicest business sites in the heart of the city of Wallace was given over to the housing of about 100 girls who were fined regularly once a month and the fines paid into the school fund; every industry in the town from the physician and the drug store to the laundry and the church profited directly or indirectly from their presence. It was only through the action of the United States Government for the pro- of the soldiers stationed here that this district has been recently closed. The former pastor of a little church in . . . led the fight some years ago for closing up the business there. He won out but "he had to leave town soon after." This problem of the mining district, briefly pictured, our church has endeavored to take up somewhat as a laboratory experiment 154 THE PATH OF LABOR to find out if there is any way in which the Church of Christ can minister to these dire needs and bring a social gospel to bear on the thousands of homeless, restless miners. The Sab- bathless week, the grumbling labor unrest that in the past has been a festering sore threatening the very heart of democracy, the shifting, restless, gold-seeking population, the indifference toward the church and even religion and morals present some unsolved problems; to the experiment we have tried to bring the best endeavor of our local and national denominational forces, planning to unite the work of the whole district sur- rounding Wallace in a sort of larger parish with an adequate force to serve its varied needs. No church has solved this problem as yet. No work in such a mining community has been permanent and far-reaching though many times there have been brilliant and sporadic efforts made. We have no blazed trail to follow, but we must try and find a way. We cannot afford to leave such a challenge unmet. With faith and persistence and devotion and optimism undaunted we must try to answer the need. So far the church has had some success. While men will barely stop to listen, the boys and girls are more easily reached and an entering wedge in social service has been started by such work as the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. Last summer we had eighty-five in a Boy Scout Camp for two weeks, a most successful and valuable experiment in the county-wide service which is reaching many homes that the church has not been able otherwise to touch. Seventy-five girls enjoyed a camp of a week at a nearby lake, and our little Sunday-school has a half dozen clubs for the young people that have proven of value in directing service as well as stimulating interest. The Sunday-school has grown to an enrollment of over 200, an increase of about 400%, and the church services are well attended. The big problem of reaching the men in the mines is so far unsolved. The most successful effort in that direction is the Y. M. C. A. at Kellogg, built by the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mining Company, and some of the other companies are planning work similar to this. The help of the Home Missionary Society, which has for the past two years met the salary of our Church Assistant, has been a paying investment and a most gracious service for which we are deeply grateful. She has taken comfort and fellowship to many homes, has been an inspiration in the work of the church, the Sunday-school, the choir and among the girls and the young people. Aside from this gift the field has cost the Society only $90 for the two years, but a more far-reaching and aggres- sive work must soon be undertaken, especially in the surrounding IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 155 camps, and another man added to the working force. We can make no promises for the future. The conventional ways of measuring success may be entirely lacking in our work. The procession comes and goes. We must often sow our seed to the wind and trust that the kingdom prospers though our owa organization may dwindle and fail. The price of lead may close up half of the mines, or a bad strike might close up all of them, and just then, when the church is most needed, but when as in the past we have generally turned our backs and run away, we must be ready to double our efforts and stick to the job through thick and thin. We may not be able to find a solution for many of the greatest social problems, for the man who is close to the fight is often prevented from doing much in that direction, but we must continue to try and must stand ready to enter any door of service as soon as it is opened. When the recent labor troubles incident to the entering of our country into the war, began to threaten some of the great industries on which the army was dependent, the Government hurried troops here to prevent any trouble or agitation. Bullets must be made for the war and lead must be produced to make them and so at any cost the mines must be protected. If it is so paramount that the Government take these steps to protect the mines, is it not just as necessary that the Church take ade- quate steps to protect and enrich the lives of the men in the muck who produce the ore and the lead? Coal Mines No study of America is complete without a vision of the coal regions of the East, especially the anthracite section of Pennsylvania, which for years has proved the power house of national wealth and comforts; its resources made our first millionaires, and the Welsh miners who first handled the pick brought a religious fervor, a knowledge of the Scriptures, a love of debate, and a musical ability that any country could ill afford to lose. A typical mining section is guarded geographically by the huge culm piles, that seem to shut out the world and hem in the inhabitants. The day begins 156 THE PATH OF LABOR early, as the first rays of the rising sun look upon a community of small houses sending forth its masculine constituency, and by seven o'clock hardly a man is seen outside of the general grocery men, mechanics, post-office officials, etc. The housework is soon accomplished, and the children off to school ; the women have ample time for neighborly visiting, and friendships are strong. At four o'clock in the after- noon all is astir. Supper preparations begin ; large tubs are filled with hot water, and the men return blackened beyond recognition with the toil of the day. Few sights are more fascinating to a visitor than the transformation when the men appear, devoid of the miner's cap and light, with fair skins and blue eyes instead of the black begrimed countenances that give an unearthly expression to the best-looking men among them. In visiting a mine it is best to first see the breakers ; here small boys sit over rivers of rushing coal and pick out all lumps of refuse that is not coal. They neither talk nor play, for the roar of the coal is deafening and the soot renders a near neighbor invisible. The next promotion is to drive a mule; one wonders a boy ever lives to grow up, for a mule is not interested in people under the best of circumstances, and when he lives underground, miles away from the sunshine, his dis- position suffers. But a boy must handle a mule and not be handled by him. The next graduation is to tend the gates. Here he stands and watches signals. Some come to him through the ear, some through the eye, and on his prompt obedience, hang the lives of IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 157 hundreds of men, for as he opens and shuts the doors, the air rushes in and down the passages where the men are at work. After this, he loads coal; then handles dynamite. There is one other promotion reserved for the man with a clear eye, a steady hand, and a nimble foot — that of fire-boss. When you wake in the night and hear the clock strike two, breathe a prayer for the solitary men who all over our mining regions are dropping into the center of the earth. They examine all the stock ; enter every chamber where dynamite will be placed, and mark out and plan the work for each miner who enters. Few men hold in the palm of their hand so much human life. The introduction of electricity is rapidly changing the life in the mines ; the breaker boys are gradually disappearing, motor trucks are replacing the mules, and the most fascinating spot now for a visitor to stand is in the center of the machine shop, where wheels and bands, bars and bolts are in repose. One man sits on a small platform, watching a clock, and when a small bell rings he places his foot on a pedal, his hand on a lever, and all is astir; coal rushes down the troughs in the breakers, cars start on many levels, and apparently, as if by magic, the coal is hoisted in to the breaker, crushed by the crusher, and sifted in its downward flight ; finally it lands in an oblong square box which, with one judicious turn, is shifted -to a spur track and becomes one of a trainload, ready to start on its journey. This means fewer men of the old type — more of the scientific, mechanical, trained experts. The old style building, composed of wood, with a 158 THE PATH OF LABOR roof made of tin, is gradually giving way to the pretty cement house. More workmen are owning homes. Much of this prosperity follows in the wake of suc- cessful temperance campaigns. But in the best camps an atmosphere of tragedy broods over all the homes ; again and again a large black vehicle appears on the main street ; children stop playing, women rush to the doors, some watching every turn of the wheels, as though daring the equip- age to stop at their door; others covering their eyes and stuffing their ears in order not to hear the wheels stop. But stop it always does, and then one witnesses the true kindness of the human heart. One look is in all eyes, and that look translated into English spells, "It might have been mine ; it might have been mine." Here are generosity, sympathy and sacrifice. The high death rate in the mining regions is due to crowded con- ditions, recklessness, carelessness ; the inability of the foreigner to understand English and read signs, fur- nishes the foundation of social and religious life and activities. The life generates wonderful characteristics. I was visiting in one home when the subject of thank- offering gifts came up, and I learned that the lady of the house had four times in her life taken a boy whose parents had been killed, educated him and brought him up to manhood as a thank-offering because her husband had not been killed when a large accident had taken its toll of life. I remember a wedding, when a young couple began their married life by taking into their home a four- IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 159 year-old boy, whose father had been killed and whose mother had unconsciously breathed the fumes from a burning culm pile and been sulphurized. I remember a devotional service conducted by an English woman who came over here a bride, and who four times in her life had seen a strong man leave her breakfast table to return before noon mangled. Her theme was, "The Promises of God." They had not failed her although her father, her husband, and two sons had left her to struggle alone, with a small daughter to sup- port. My choicest memory revolves around a large camp where a church had been a flourishing institution in the early days, and, during a change of population, had been reduced to only four members ; for forty years it struggled along but never quite died. Finally a girl was sent there to labor, not a Daughter of the Revolution, but a Daughter of old Poland. She revived every department; became the minister and also the lady of the manse. One Children's Sunday, after services in the church tastefully decorated with laurel, when the speaking was over and the babies had been baptised we were descending the steps when we met a small girl balancing a large infant brother in her arms. We stopped to admire ; she looked up and said, "Didn't me Peter do fine? I baptised him all day Sat- urday so'se he wouldn't act scart." After our laugh, Miss S. turned to me and said, "There is the problem ; if you give them the best you have to share in leader- ship and equipment, you will find the big sisters able to handle the obstreperous Peters !" 160 THE PATH OF LABOR Mines and the War At the outbreak of European hostilities, America turned to the mining world for four great leaders to repre- sent, not American industries, but the American spirit of brotherhood : Herbert C. Hoover, Chairman of Commission of Belgian Relief, W. L. Hannold, Director in America for Belgian Relief, Edgar Rickard, Asst. Director in America for Belgian Relief, J. V. N. Dorr, Chairman of "Belgian Kiddies," all mining engineers. At the time of America's entrance into the World War the miners responded with: Company A, 27th U. S. Engineers, the first military mining unit to be organized in the United States Army, and today, posted in most of the great min- ing corporations, is to be found this : NOTICE Appreciating the fact that American miners and smelters are patriotic, the following suggestions are made to avoid misunder- standing and unintentional wrong conduct : Acts and words permissible in peace times may be treasonable in war times. To American Citizens 1. Avoid arguments and discussions. They lead to disturbances and serious trouble. 2. Act considerately toward non-citizens and citizens of foreign birth. 3. Be on the alert to safeguard American interests by reporting to us at once any suspicious actions or words. 4. Avoid all waste of time and material. Wars are won by serving at home and in the shop as well as by soldiers in battle. 5. Guard carefully against fires. Report carelessness in the IN LUMBER CAMPS AND MINES 161 use of inflammable and dangerous materials and the accumula- tion of waste matter. Keep fire buckets and barrels filled. 6. Wherever you can be of most value to your country is the place for you, whether it be in the mines, the mill, the smelter, the refinery, or the trenches. Then, in many languages, the following: To Non-Citizens You come to this country voluntarily, and have made your living among us. Act during these times so that the citizens of America will welcome your countrymen in the future. Avoid any act or word that may arouse suspicion. Obey the law. Talk English, if possible, and don't argue. VI JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH I have put my spirit upon him ; he will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. He shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither decide after the hearing of his ears. — Isa. 3 : 3. A bruised reed will he not break, and a dimly-burning wick will he not quench. He will not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set justice in the earth. — Isa. 42 : 1-4. Not by might nor by power, but by my spirit, saith Jehovah of Hosts. — Zech. 5:6. "The greatest service which the church can render society just at present would be to contribute the spirit of Jesus to the ideals which are provocative of discontent." The church as a social organization is expected to develop a quality of life on the part of its members which shall express itself in their economic and political activity in accordance with the principles of Christianity. — Shailer Mathews. VI JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD It is a significant and cheering fact that the Council of Women for Home Missions has proposed to its great constituency to study the condition of Labor. A generation ago such a study would have seemed foreign to the aims of home missions and remote even from the purpose of Christianity. Today every ad- vance in the historical and psychological understand- ing of religion shows us how deeply the religious life of any age, or sex, or race, or social class, is influenced and determined by the social relations of that human group. If we want to give effective moral and religious help to boys, we must realize them as boys, different from girls and different from men, with a moral code of their own ranging from the ethics of savagery to the longings of sainthood. In the same way, if we want to understand working people and offer them the divine help of Jesus Christ, we must take them as working people. To entitle this course of study to a place in Home Mis- sion work it must be linked up with Christianity. It would not be enough to get correct economic or 165 166 THE PATH OF LABOR sociological ideas about labor conditions. We must see the situation of the working people and their rela- tion to the other social classes through the mind of Jesus Christ. They are not merely labor force, or citizens, but potential children of God who have a right to a full salvation, and all our thinking about them and our actions for them must have a redemptive purpose and quality in them. That alone makes our study Christian. Beginnings The first home mission enterprise was the aposto- late of the Twelve when Jesus sent them two by two through the villages of Galilee (Matthew 9, 32 to 10, 42). It was prompted by a fresh realization gained by Jesus of the condition of the working people in their homes. This filled him with a deep compassion. The people reminded him of a leaderless and undefended flock of sheep, scattered and with flanks torn where wild beasts had preyed on them. (The Greek words imply this.) Under the stress of this impression of the wretchedness of the common people, Jesus created a new leadership for them, which became the germ of the Christian Church and the forerunner of all organ- ized missionary work. Home Mission work, there- fore, only returns to its first beginnings when it deals with the condition of the working classes. Women have a capacity to understand people which often baffles and surprises men. But only if they are interested in people. If their heart is not engaged, they may be cruelly blind and prejudiced. They will JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 167 do their best work only if the sympathetic spirit of Christ is behind their womanly intuitions, especially in understanding any social class other than their own. Jesus had an astonishing inclination to cross conven- tional lines under the impulse of his boundless inter- est in people. It was not fitting for a Jew to have dealings with Samaritans or pagans; it was not proper for a teacher to talk with a woman ; it would never do for a holy man to eat with a publican or have a woman of the street touch him. But Jesus did all that. His sense of humanity was too strong for class lines to check it. Moreover, he always discovered something great or fine in these improper people — faith in a pagan captain, gratitude in a Samaritan, upwelling love in a prostitute. As a prospector strikes gold in the rock, so Jesus struck God in men. He was a dis- coverer and connoisseur of human beauty because he loved people. At rare moments, when we look into the eyes of a baby or kneel by our dead, we have a mystic realization of the divine core hidden in our humanity. This spiritual divination was the constant possession of Jesus. If we have walked with him for years, we should share his sense of the worth of per- sonality and his disregard for any class lines that separate man from man. If we accept the lines drawn by sinful pride and contempt, we are of this world and ourselves in need of salvation. Now, if Jesus were set in the midst of a modern city, could anything keep him away from the working people? How long would it take him to be accepted as their friend and as one of them? What would lie 168 THE PATH OF LABOR say if he found that few of them go to the churches called by his name? Should not we do what he would do if he were bodily in an American city? The Church is the body of Christ; it is here to carry his thoughts and impulses into collective action. Its feet must go where his mind is eager to get. A sincere understanding of the working class is not, however, a wholly pleasurable experience. One does not come out of it without some scars on his soul. Indeed, if we follow up this study, it may change our view of the whole social world we live in, and it may shake our self-satisfaction. It may lead us to a deeper and more lasting repentance than that which we experienced when we first became Christians. We may begin with the idea that we have something to give to the working people, and discover that we our- selves need what they can give us. History of Labor Have we ever realized that a large part of the his- tory of labor is written in the history of slavery? Was not our own so built? All civilizations previous to our own were built on slave labor. The slaves were sometimes the bulk of the working class. The free laborers were dragged down by the competition of slave labor, and were always in danger of slipping down into the slave class through debt, bad harvests, war, or oppression. The serfdom of the Middle Ages was a modified form of slavery. The unfreedom of the workers has always been a social device for exploiting them ; it enabled their masters to coerce and drive JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 169 them, to pay them little, and to cloak with the sem- blance of legal right any cruelty and hardness in their treatment. Serfdom lasted in Russia till 1861, and remnants of it in parts of Western Europe till the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In the colonization of America the problem con- fronted the upper class colonists how to secure manual labor in the new world to do for them what the Euro- pean peasant did at home. The Spaniards promptly enslaved the Indians and depopulated entire islands and coast sections by their cruel hunt for labor. It was a sad disappointment for North American planters that the Northern Indians could not be forced to bear the yoke of slavery; they would slay their masters and die first. It was to supply a tractable and cheap labor supply that the African slave-trade plied its work. It is not so generally known that during our colonial period perhaps half of the white immigrants came here in a state of peonage, as "indentured servants," and were sold at the wharf or hawked about the villages in chains, and their labor sold for a term of years. In short, slavery in some form has been an almost universal solution of the labor problem throughout history; it has prevailed down to our own times and has deeply affected the social and political history of our own country. Christian civilization did not find it intolerable to treat the laborers thus. The Church itself for centuries owned slaves and serfs to till its great lands. Only in modern times did it rise to the conviction that it is inconsistent with Christianity to deprive a fellow-man of freedom in order to appro- 170 THE PATH OF LABOR priate his labor product. On the whole the Church accepted slavery as part of the social order, softening its hardness but not striving to end the institution. Thus in slavery and thralldom the working people have been the human basis of civilization. By their unfree labor others enjoyed wealth, education, pleas- ure, and splendor. Indirectly we are all beneficiaries of their age-long oppression, and it is wholly just that we all should bear some of the evil results of slavery, and strive to heal the injustice that our forefathers inflicted. The South is still industrially backward because a group of Southerners thought black slave labor more profitable than free white labor. The white immigrants coming to the North from some parts of Europe are only a short remove from serf- dom ; if they bear the evidences of unfreedom in their bodies, their intellects, and their customs, we should not wonder and despise them. They are what their exploiters have made them. In God's eyes humanity is a family unit. The debt contracted by one continent is paid by another, and the sins of one generation are the doom of the next. Our labor situation today can not be understood, either from a scientific or from a religious point of view, unless we bear in mind the ages of unfree labor from which the working people have just emerged, and the institutionalized evil and collective guilt stored up by all this mass of oppression. Is slavery still in effect anywhere today? What is meant by peonage? What is the moral difference be- tween slavery and the contract-labor system in prisons? Has the war temporarily introduced compulsory labor? JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 171 Is there any danger that the freedom of the working class in Europe will be permanently cut down by na- tional necessities arising after the war? If the protec- tion of the law were withdrawn, is there any danger that the feebler portion of the working class, e. g., Negroes, or immigrants in mining districts, could be reduced to un- free labor once more? Land and Labor Turning now to our own time, we can roughly divide the working people into those who labor in the country on the land, and those who work in mines and shops and stores in industry and commerce. The condition of the workers in agriculture depends on their relation to the land. If they own a proper amount of land and work it themselves, they arc ideal workmen, and usually the very type and strength of their nation. This has, on the whole, been the blessed condition of the farmers in our country. This normal condition of our farmer class has kept up the wages of the workers in the cities, assimilated the immigrants, and made a republican form of government workable. Among this class of people who were both workers and owners of property, our free American churches have done their best work, and here still are the chief roots of their strength. In France the Revolution substituted peasant pro- prietorship for feudal land tenure, and the grip of the peasant on his land is one of the causes for the tenacity and moral strength developed by France during the present war. On the other hand, where the effects of 172 THE PATH OF LABOR the French Revolution did not pervade, in England and Ireland, in Italy and Austria-Hungary, in Rou- mania, in East Prussia and in Russia, great land owners still own the soil. The proprietors either farm the land by agricultural laborers, or they let it to tenant farmers who employ the laborers. There are, then, in these countries two or even three layers of population on the land, who must all get their living from it, and as the upper class has much power and the lower very little, the division of the proceeds is not by right but by might, and bears hard on the agricultural workers. Does this concern religion? If the Old Testa- ment means anything to us, it surely does. The Mosaic Law laid great stress on the principle that every Israelite family was to have its allotment of land, which could never be permanently alienated. When great estates developed as in heathen nations, the Hebrew prophets regarded this as a fatal menace to their nation. When the working class is in posses- sion of the land, it has the possibility of thrift, free- dom, and moral health. When a class of wealthy proprietors own the land, those who do the labor are subjugated, unfree, exposed to partisanism and moral decay. We have a clear demonstration of both facts in the history of Ireland. Landlordism for centuries ruined Ireland and debased a gifted race. Since 1870 a series of laws have been passed enabling the peasants to acquire their holdings. The effect of this, combined with cooperative buying and selling, has been a social and moral regeneration of the people. JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 173 The land is God's fundamental gift to the people. It is the material basis for all life. A just method of common possession and of distribution for use is the A B C of justice and fraternity. To allow a privileged group to monopolize the land and thereby to control and exploit those who labor, subtly subverts all demo- cratic institutions and makes genuine Christian rela- tions of the social classes practically impossible. Home Missions have an up-hill road where the country working class is deprived of the basis of life and liberty. What shall we say, then, to the fact that our country is steadily drifting into the system from which other countries are emerging? In 1890 twenty-eight out of one hundred farms in the United States were operated by tenants ; in 1910 thirty-seven out of one hundred farms — an increase of thirty-two per cent, in twenty years. The Commission on Industrial Relations found "not only that the economic condition of the tenant was extremely bad, but that he was far from being free, while his future was regarded as hopeless. Badly housed, ill-nourished, uneducated and hopeless, these tenants continue year after year to eke out a bare living, moving frequently from one farm to another in the hope that something will turn up. Without a large family the tenant cannot hope to succeed or break even, so in each tenant family numerous chil- dren are being reared to a future which under present conditions will be no better than that of their parents, if as good." We are allowing a growing part of the American farmer class to become tenants and peas- 174 THE PATH OF LABOR ants. The tenants can have no interest in the perman- ent institutions of the community, the roads, the schools, or the churches. Prosperous farmers are the best soil for church life; shifting tenant farmers are very poor soil; and mere laborers who come and go with the harvest season are drifting human sand. The tenant system is bound to progress rapidly henceforth. As fast as our farm land is occupied and as the population grows, agricultural land gains a monopoly value and rapidly rises in price. The tenant is unable to buy a farm and remains a tenant. Farm land becomes an attractive investment because of its unearned increase in value. We shall henceforth have a great body of big and little landlords who live at ease on their investments and support the churches, and a lot of tenants and laborers who toil for a mere living and are out of gear with the churches. Our system of land ownership, which was fine as long as there was plenty of new land, will now curse us by the monopoly element in it, unless we can find some system by which the collective ownership by the people is asserted and the unearned value is taken by the com- munity which creates it. This is one of the great questions which the future asks of our nation : Will America use God's unex- ampled gift of land for the use of all who labor, or for the enrichment of those who have ceased to labor? The moral and religious future of the nation depends on the answer. JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 175 Home Mission Duty Meanwhile Home Mission duty lies all around those who live in the country and the villages. They must go after the classes which are in danger of being un- churched, the tenants and laborers and immigrants, who are new to the community and unrelated to the churches. Here we run against the limitations of local denom- inational churches. Their vision is usually bounded by their own membership. They do not see the com- munity as a whole, nor do they have a clear sense of religious obligation toward those who do not belong to them. The practical result is that each church holds to its permanent and propertied families, but that the poorer and more transient families and single individuals are nobody's concern, and remain aliens in the midst of God's commonwealth. This is the way the working class drops out of the churches. When we have the well-to-do and the poor in our communities, a class contrast is set up which it is not easy to bridge, and which acts as a permanent denial of Christ's law of love and fellowship. Country com- munities are crammed with petty class pride, which is part of original sin and directly neutralizes Home Mission work. Working people will rather stay away from church than be snubbed or patronized ; this is a sign of moral health and an assertion of human equality. A sincere study of the social problems, com- bined with a better acquaintance with Jesus Christ, would scour the pride from our souls which tarnishes and rusts them. 176 THE PATH OF LABOR Industrial Laborers We turn now from the agricultural to the industrial working class. Modern civilization is distinguished for its enormous development of industry and com- merce, and the absolute and relative size and weight of the working class engaged in them. In contrast with the scattered agricultural laborers, the industrial workers are trained to work and act together, and have growing intelligence and education, and strong class- consciousness. We have not won the world for Christ if this great class is alienated from the Christian religion. We have emphasized the fact that the workingman in agriculture is secure and normally equipped only if he has a fair holding of land of his own on which he can apply his labor force and resources, and that he is exposed to exploitation if the land is in the possession of another class. Is there any similar distinction in the lot of the industrial laborers ? During the later Middle Ages the artisans in the free cities of Europe developed a social organization fitted to their needs. They owned their tools and hedged about the skill and secrets of their craft; they were organized in guilds which protected the individual ; they had politi- cal power in their local community to put a stop to profiteering. Their aim was to secure a fair price for their work, to assure every worker his raw material and his customers, and to shackle commercial greed and the desire to monopolize trade. The Church enforced the ethical ideas and customs which supported this industrial system. This handicraft system came as near as possible JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 177 to giving every worker the same comfortable security in his trade which farmers have when they own their farms. 1 This world of small craftsmen came to an end when power machinery displaced hand tools and craft skill. The business class gained political control, and broke down the guild organization and the protective laws. The world of independent artisans in small shops was gradu- ally transformed into a world of capitalistic employers and proletarian workingmen working in evergrowing factories. This unique historical transition in economic life has been called the Industrial Revolution. It began in full force at the end of the eighteenth century and is not yet complete. Whenever this change takes hold of a new section of the world, as for instance, our south- ern states, or Japan, we say that it is "becoming industrialized." Now this economic change causes fundamental moral and spiritual changes. It increases material wealth and awakens desires. It holds boundless possibilities of wealth before the possessing classes, sets no limit to acquisition, and makes material goods the goal of life. It has made the Tenth Commandment a dead letter and the saying of Jesus about serving either God or Mammon a riddle which few can guess. There has been a great increase in practical materialism and paganism. On the other hand, the working class has so precarious a hold on existence that they too have to concentrate their attention intensely on the material side of life. They find themselves in a world in which other people own all the opportunities of labor. A good job is the greatest favor to bestow on a workman because it is his sole hold 1 See Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages. 178 THE PATH OF LABOR on God's earth. His wage is the only key to food, home, and recreation. He must sell the working force of his body and mind and soul and get as much as he can for it. Wage-earners must make their bargain with people who are strong by right of possession, while they them- selves have a stomach that gives them no rest, and per- chance a family that tugs at their heart-strings. Some employers are fair and kind ; others are hard ; in general a certain average of wages holds for such and such em- ployment which even good employers cannot better much. For the vast majority the rule holds: "Once a workingman, always a workingman." If a person has a job and a wage, it is a question of vitality and capacity whether he can hold on. In the country, people work in the open air. In shops they are exposed to insufficient air-space and ventilation, gases and fumes, fluff, and tubercular fellow-workmen. The machinery sets the pace; the interest of the employer is in a maximum output. Physical exhaustion poisons the body with an accumulation of waste products. If the worker is a child or a woman, additional elements of strain and danger are obvious. An eight-hour or a nine- hour day makes the difference between happiness and misery. Overtime work, unless highly paid, becomes a rankling grievance. In many industries the inexorable forces of power machinery are a permanent menace ; one moment of weariness and inattention, and the tender flesh is cut and mangled. These risks are taken at so much per week. Employers and wage-earners are each dependent upon the other, but their interests are not identical. Their JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 179 relations may easily become antagonistic and break out into the bitterness of open warfare. In any negotiations the single worker is nearly powerless ; only if organized can they hope to wrest concessions from the other side, which is entrenched behind the fortifications of property, trained intelligence, and law. Because of the power of trade unions, employers have often done their utmost to break down or prevent the organization of their men, though they themselves are always highly organized and very class-conscious. The men, on the other hand, know well that the failure of their organization hands them over to the mercy of their opponents. The right to organize is to them the very foundation of hope and liberty. In other countries, Australia, England, Germany, and France, the right to organize is generally recognized ; our own country is very backward at this point. Busi- ness on the whole is still autocratic ; it does not concede within its domain the principle of democracy and responsible government. Present-Day Conditions This is a one-sided summary of the situation and it makes a sombre picture, but our best statistical informa- tion supports it. The report of the Commission on Industrial Relations of 1915 is the latest official summary in our country, and would repay reading. Only in a few highly paid occupations do the incomes of working- men range from $1,500 to $2,000 a year. Two-thirds to three-fourths of adult males in industrial occupations earn less than $15 a week, and females less than $8. Nearly half of the latter earn less than $6. How far 180 THE PATH OF LABOR could we ourselves go on that? An exhaustive investi- gation by the Immigration Commission (1909) on the earnings in coal mining and other basic industries showed that the combined family income (average size: 5.6 members) of 64 percent was less than $750, and of 31 percent was less than $500. Thirty percent eked out their income by keeping boarders or lodgers, and what that means for the moral and spiritual qualities of family life, women are best qualified to imagine. Of course the war has temporarily brought very high wages and prosperity to large groups of workmen. On the other hand, the rise in the cost of living for years past, and especially of late, has cut down the buying value of the dollar, and has automatically impoverished all families with stationary incomes. Since 1890 immigration from England, Germany, France and the Scandinavian coun- tries has almost ceased. Our labor conditions have a bad reputation in the progressive countries of Europe. This is the situation in our great country, which has a lavish equipment by nature, an energetic people, and only a relatively light population. It does not look as if it were God's fault. Great Britain has been one of the richest of all countries, farthest advanced in indus- trialization, with prolific sources of income from over- seas trade "and colonies. Yet government reports have acknowledged that a third of the people live in great poverty. "Of 714,000 people who die annually in the United Kingdom, 686,541 die poor or very poor. Only 27,459 bequeath any property worth mentioning." ' Charles Booth counted 88.6 percent, of the people of Lon- don among the poor. s In 1904 one out of every three * L. G. C. Money, Riches and Poverty, p. SI. 'Life and Labor of the People of London. JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 181 persons dying in London died within the walls of a poor- house, a hospital, or an insane asylum. * On the other hand, one and one-half percent, of the population of Great Britain held before the war property valued at nearly thirty billion dollars, and in our country two per- cent, of the population are estimated to own sixty percent, of the wealth. Surely the poverty of the poor is in some causal con- nection with the wealth of the old aristocracy in Great Britain and the new aristocracy in America and vice versa. The only honest way to explain the situation in all industrial countries is to recognize that the possession of the essential properties of the globe has enabled a small proportion of humanity to take for themselves the larger part of the proceeds of labor, paying the working people only the minimum on which they can live during the working years of their life. It is no wonder that our country is in a state of chronic social unrest, with occasional local outbreaks of industrial revolution, and with periodical recurrence of hard times and stagnation. All this contradicts the Christian conception of moral relations so completely that every Christian intellect which sincerely faces the facts must be deeply disquieted. What could we say to the accusation of the prophet that "the spoil of the poor is in your houses," or to the warn- ing of James that the cry of the laborers whose earnings are withheld goes up to God? How will the social con- dition of the Christian nations stand the scrutiny of God's justice if those who toil, have not. and those who toil not, have? Such power and wealth as the upper classes have today can be justified only on the supposition that they * Fabian Tracts, No. 5, p. 13. 182 THE PATH OF LABOR are stewards for the rest of the nation. But if masses of their productive fellow-workers are left in poverty, what about this irresponsible system of stewardship? Or again, how do our conditions square with the law of love and the Christian conception of human fellowship? I have summed up these facts once more because we can see our Home Mission task in all its tremendous seriousness and sadness only when we face the social condition of the agricultural and industrial working classes. Our local communities are groups with a spirit- ual unity of life ; our nation is a great social unity. Therefore we all share in the responsibility for any wrong done unless we have done our utmost to prevent it. And who has done that? Not only all individuals, according to the measure of their intelligence and social influence, but all social institutions bear responsibility for any such permanent evil in the community. Our legislatures, our courts, and the press are directly responsible for the fact that our nation has for many years steered straight into these undemocratic and unchristian conditions. And what about the Church? It has for ages con- trolled the moral teaching of mankind. It has been richly equipped by the Christian nations with archi- tecture, income and educated leaders. In our country no other organized moral force can compare with it. Its effectiveness in overcoming the seductive customs, the false philosophy, and the financial entrenchments of the liquor traffic, shows what the Church can do when it employs in earnest even a part of its vast resources. If now, it has for centuries allowed the JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 183 peasants of Europe to be submerged and exploited by the landowners, and if it has allowed modern civiliza- tion to repeat the same wrong in new forms in modern industrialism, it must bear responsibility in proportion to its power. The chief charge against the Church is not positive wrong-doing but inaction. In his description of the great judgment Jesus makes that the sole charge against the good people: "I was hungry, naked, and in prison, and you did nothing." The working class might continue this and say to the Churches: "I was landless, unemployed, unorganized, overworked, un- derpaid, and exploited, and you were not aware of it." The great State Churches of Europe have always been submissive to the governments, and the governments themselves have been controlled by the possessing classes. The free churches of America, Great Britain, and the British Colonies are constitutionally and theoretically under the control of the common people, but in reality they are dominated, financially and intel- lectually, by the able, intellectual, and well-to-do. These naturally voice their point of view and their philosophy of life, and align the churches on their side. When once the two great social groups exist and are widely separated by their habits of life, this result is inevitable. This class alignment has been further accentuated by a fact of tremendous significance : the working peo- ple have largely dropped out of the membership of the churches. This fact became undeniable in the eighties. It holds true of all industrialized countries. 184 THE PATH OF LABOR In no great industrial city have the churches been able to hold the working people in their natural propor- tions. Causes Why not? Doubtless a combination of causes are at work. (1) Working people follow their job. They move often, and thereby drop out of connection. (2) In big cities church life is expensive. Calls for contributions are frequent and insistent. When a family has seven hundred dollars a year there is not much of a margin for the higher needs. Food, cloth- ing, and shelter come first. In some time of trouble a family stays away and does not come back. (3) The atmosphere of a church, with its adornments, its social manners, its style of public speech, does not seem to offer an attractive habitat for workingmen. Foremen, teachers, clerks, stenographers find it congenial. Artisans and factory workers seem often to shrink from it. They hardly care to come to a church even if a socialist or labor man speaks there. The American "public forums" and the British Brotherhood and P. S. A. meetings attract them. But these have a different spiritual atmosphere. (4) Many working- men are immigrants. They bring the evil memories and antagonisms of Europe with them, and bunch all the churches in general condemnation, just as we per- haps do with "socialists and anarchists." (5) Among the most intelligent and class-conscious workmen there is an increasing feeling of deep antagonism and resentment. They feel that the Church has always JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 1S5 stood in with the oppressors of labor and is paid for its silence ; that sincere preachers are "soft-pedalled" or lose their jobs; and that the efforts of the Church to conciliate the working people are efforts to rope them in and utilize them for church needs, and not sincere efforts to cooperate with them for their better- ment. In recent years the increasing study of the social sciences, the pressure of the labor problem in our national life, the spread of socialism, and all the har- rowing facts in the condition of the people, have invaded the consciousness of many able and devoted ministers, and laymen, and women. They have suf- fered the agony of a vicarious repentance on behalf of the church and have taken up a prophetic ministry to arouse God's people from their blindness and their connivance in the wickedness of our social order. This effort has cost some of them dear, but it has not be< a in vain. There has been a spiritual awakening in large sections of the Church. 8 This has immediately reacted on the attitude of the working class leaders. In cities where even one or two conspicuous ministers have spoken fearlessly and steadily for the just inter- ests of labor, a kinder feeling has come to prevail, and even a realization of the great help the Church may yet give. Needs The church in recent years has not been lacking in earnest efforts to win back and serve the working people. It has built costly institutional plants. De- 8 See Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order, Part I. 186 THE PATH OF LABOR voted ministers and social workers have broken their health and their hearts over the task. Evangelistic efforts have carried the old gospel to the poor with the energy of strong personalities and efficient organi- zation. Yet the situation itself has not changed. Something deeper is needed. We ourselves need a baptism of repentance and a new attitude toward life. We have long silently accepted and endorsed stand- ards of moral conduct which were the product of high-grade selfishness and the active cause of much of the sin and misery of the world. We did not realize how far the business morality of the world is away from the law of Christ. We need a new revelation of the mind of Jesus Christ and the same vision of the Kingdom of God which lived within him. As long as we inwardly consent to the present social order, we are hardly good enough to carry the gospel of Christ to the working people. When we gain enlight- enment, our attitude to the working people changes. We come to understand and pardon their sins and frailties, and to love them with the same sense of trust and respect which Jesus felt for the people. And then we shall find that we have spiritual access to them, and get response when we speak to them of their deeper needs. Whether we can win them back to the Church I do not know. Probably not unless there is a demo- cratic reconstruction of society which will close the great gulf that is always fixed between Dives and Lazarus, and will substitute for the two antagonistic classes which now confront each other, a single class JUSTICE AND BROTHERHOOD 187 in which all work by hand and brain and serve the common needs, and in which all have property rights in the common resources of nature and in the accumu- lations of civilization. Such a social order would be the natural basis for a Christian relation among men, and would set up no barriers to good-will. In our present social world Christianity is a divine misfit and is involved in inconsistencies and compromises. The church and the working class would both be set free if the wrongs inflicted on the laborer, and the wrongs by which he reacts against wrong, were healed through Christ's law of justice and brotherhood." • For a fuller interpretation of Christ's social laws, se>? the author'* Social Principles of Jesus, Association Press, New York, £916, Theology for the Social Gospel, Macmillan. 1917. 188 THE PATH OF LABOR BIBLIOGRAPHY Social American in the Making. — By M. E. Ravage. Harper, Pub. American Labor Unions. — By Helen Marot. $1.25. American Labor Year Book. — 50 cents. Artificial Flozver Makers. — Van Kleeck. Survey Associ- ates, New York. Boyhood and Lazvlessncss. — The Neglected Girl. — Gold- mark and True, Survey Associates, N. Y. Chapters in Rural Progress. — By K. L. Butterfield. $1.00. Child Labor in City Streets. — Clopper. Macmillan, New York. Cyclopedia of American Agriculture. — By L. H. Bailey. Vol. IV, "Farm and Community." Fatigue and Efficiency. — Goldmark. Charities Publica- tion Committee, N. Y. Labor and Liberty. — By Rabinowitz. Rabinowitz, 159 Marcy Ave., Brooklyn. Labor Problems. — T. S. Adams and Helen L. Sumner. $1.60. My Mother and I. — By E. G. Stern. Macmillan, Pub. National Child Labor Committee Pamphlets. — 105 East 22nd St., New York, N. Y. Past and Present. — By Thomas Carlyle. Poverty and Riches. — By Scott N earing. $1.00. Safeguards for City Youth at Work and at Play. — Bowen. Macmillan, New York. Saleswomen in Mercantile Stores. — Butler. Charities Publication Committee, N. Y. BIBLIOGRAPHV 189 Six Centuries of Work and Wages. — By Thorold Rogers. Social England. — By Traill. Street-Land. — Davis. Small, Maynard Co., Boston. The Ancient Lowly. — By C. Osborne Ward. 2 vols. $2.00 each. The Church and the Wage Earners. — By Thompson. The Granger Movement. — By S. J. Buck. $2.00. The Immigrant and the Community. — By Grace Abbott. The Century Co. The Labor Movement. — By Harry F. Ward. $1.25. The Labor Movement in America. — By R. T. Ely. $1.25. The Living Wage of Women Workers. — Bosworth. Longmans, Green & Co., N. Y. The Nezv Encyclopedia of Social Reform. — Bliss. The Rural Life Problem of the United States. — By Sir Horace Plunkett. $1.25. The State and the Farmer. — By L. H. Bailey. $1.25. The Social Unrest. — By John Graham Brooks. 75 cents. The Survey Magazine. — New York, N. Y. Woman and Labor. — By Olive Schreiner. $1.25. Women and Work. — By H. M. Bennett. Appleton, Pub. Women are People. — By A. Miller. Doran, Pub. Women and Social Progress. — By Scott Nearing, Ph.D., and Nellie M. S. Nearing. The Macmillan Co.. Pub. Women and the Trades. — Butler. The Charities Publi- cation Committee, New York. Women Workers and Society. — McLean. McClurg, Chicago. Women and War Work. — By Helen Frazer. $1.50. G. Arnold Shaw, Pub., 1735 Grand Central Terminal, New York, N. Y. 190 THE PATH OF LABOR Women in Industry. — By Grace Abbott. Appleton, Pub. Young Working Girls. — Woods and Kennedy. Hough- ton, Mifflin & Co., Boston. Mountain The Article by Miss De Long in the Survey for March, 1917. Christian Reconstruction in the South. — By H. Paul Douglass. $1.50. Pilgrim Press, Boston, Mass. The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths. Chapter, The Forgotten Man. — By Walter H. Page, Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, N. Y. The Southern Highlanders and Other Articles. — By John C. Campbell, Asheville, N. C. The Southern Mountaineers. — By Dr. Samuel T. Wilson. Literature Department, Presbyterian Home Missions, 156 Fifth Ave., New York, N. Y. Our Southern Highlanders. — By Horace Kephart. The Outing Publishing Co., New York, N. Y. Races Christian Reconstruction in the South. — By H. Paul Douglass. $1.50. Pilgrim Press, Boston, Mass. Following the Color Line. — By Ray Stannard Baker. $2.00. Doubleday, Page & Co. In Black and White. An Interpretation of Southern Life. —By H. L. Hammond. $1.25. Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, N. Y. Negro Life in the South. — By W. D. Weatherford. 50 cents. The Association Press, New York, N. Y. Negro Year Book. — Division of Records and Research Tuskegee Inst., Tuskegee, Ala. BIBLIOGRAPHY 191 Race Adjustment.— By Kelly Miller. $2.00. Neale Pub. Co., Washington, D. C. Southern Women and Racial Adjustment. The Slater Foundation. — By L. H. Hammond. Pamphlet. Free upon application to J. H. Dillard, Charlottes- ville, Ya. The Basis of Ascendency. — By Edgar Gardner Murphy. $1.25. The Macmiflan Co., New York, N. Y. The Story of the Negro. — By Booker T. Washington. 2 vols. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, N. Y. LUMBER AND MINING Anthracite Coal Communities. — By Peter Roberts. Black Trail of Anthracite. — By S. R. Smith. Coal Mining Described and Illustrated. — By T. H. Walton. Higgins, a Man's Christian. — By Norman Duncan. The Timber Supply of the United States. — By U. S. De- partment of Agriculture, Forest Service. Circular 166. Gifford Pinchot, Forester. Issued July 10, 1909. Slav Invasion and Mine Workers. — By Peter Roberts. POETRY Songs of the Work-a-Day World. — By Berton Braley. Songs of the Work-a-Day World. The Forest Ranges. — By Berton Braley. The Parable. — James Russell Lowell. The Singing Man. — Josephine Preston Peabody. The Spell of the Yukon. The Pines; The Woodcutter, Rhymes of a Rolling Stone; The Logger. — By Robert W. Service. 192 THE PATH OF LABOR The Toiling of Felix. — Henry Van Dyke. Up in the Maine Woods. — By Holman Day. FICTION All Among the Loggers. — By C. B. Burleigh. A Story of a Piece of Coal. — By E. Appleton. Big Timber. — By B. W. Sinclair. Black Diamonds. — By S. Dyer. Boss of Wind River. — By A. W. Chrisholm. (Pertaining to Logging Camps and River Drives) Cavanaugh — Forest Ranges. — By Hamlin Garland. E. John Dorn, Promoter. — By C. Banks. Freckles. — By G. S. Porter. Girl of the Limberlost. — By G. S. Porter. Heart of the Red Firs. — By A. W. Anderson. In the Carquinez Woods. — By Bret Harte. King Spruce. — By Holman Day. Luck of Roaring Camp. — By Bret Harte. Man from Glengarry. — Ralph Connor. Prescott of Saskatchewan. — By Harold Bindloss. River Man. — By Stewart E. White. The Blazed Trail. — By Stewart E. White. The Cabin. — By Stewart E. White. The Parish of the Pines.— By Thos. D. Whittles. The Pass.— By Stewart E. White. Told in the Hills. — By Ryan. Trail of the Axe. — By Ridgwell Cullum. Twenty Years a Lumberjack. — By T. Hall. Ways of the North. — By Warren Cheney. When the Forests are Ablaze. — By H. B. Judsen. When Wilderness ivas King. — By Randall Parish. Year in a Coal Mine. — By J. Husband. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below JAN 3 ^ 3 f«ft 2 9 1362 MAR 2 1 1943 JAN s 1 1S64 /.► EA LD-UftU ' Form L-9-35wi-8,'28 .»•** lifl* SEf>9 1968 3 1158 01%"^' UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILIT AA 001 164 189 1 *» £. < \* ^ r s