i)i;i'l'ii"V'. t,i I ' ' I v'tm THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK BY ARTHUR JAMES TODD, Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AND DIRECTOR OF THE TRAINING COURSE FOR SOCIAL AND CIVIC WORK IN THE XmiVERSITY OF MINNESOTA Npm fork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1919 All rights reserved Copyright, 1919 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1919. MM 17 SL> PREFACE Three facts have conspired to overcome a natural hesitation to commit the enormity of another book in these disturbed times: First, the exigencies of social reconstruction demand that some threads of policy be offered to those who grope through the labyrinth. Second, the unparalleled official recognition of social work by the government — by President Wilson, Sec- retary Baker, Secretary Daniels, Secretary Lane, the governors of various States, and others — ^puts social workers, new and old, upon their mettle. The very pro- posals of statesmanlike social workers which were form- erly stigmatized as visionary, revolutionary, or immoral '^^ are now embraced wholesale as the social creed which r. alone can save a country in its hour of crisis. Hence, — social workers must practice the humility and modesty of science; they must also make good and justify by p their works the new faith placed in them. This means ^. a constant effort to refresh their own mental outfit and ~" to improve their equipment by every possible means. . Third, the enormous war-time extension of various ^ forms of social-welfare activity has called into service ^ hundreds and even thousands of men and women, some ^^ of them only partly trained, many of them utterly untrained. Whether they elect to seek professional training or whether they enlist only as volunteers and amateurs, if they are to become permanent assets instead of liabilities to scientific social work they must somehow or other get the scientific and professional attitude toward their work. Now a profession is distinguished from a trade by several marks. A trade is based on practical rules and VI PREFACE is followed for a livelihood. A profession is based on principles, a thoroughgoing knowledge of contributory sciences, and a definite code of conduct. One lives by a trade but in a profession. Membership in a pro- fession includes the obligation to extend the boundaries of one's science while maintaining the scientific attitude toward each day's problems. Alfred Russell Wallace once published a book which he called "Studies Scien- tific and Social." Was this a covert slap at social science as distinguished from scientific science? Rather, I think, an attempt to show that the same rigorous scientific mind could compass the problems of both exact science and human society. Social science and its applications must share the spirit, if not the strict tech- nique, of the exact sciences. The elements of scientific approach and scientific prevision must be back of all social reform which hopes to weather the storms. Since most of real social reform must be carried out through detailed administrative methods by social workers, the main part of this book has to do with their problems. But it seemed advisable to restate the phil- osophical and psychological principles upon which I believe sound social work is based and by which it is justified. Moreover, social workers as well as other people are prone to become so absorbed in the routine of their daily work, so entangled in the details of indi- vidual cases, that they are likely to lose all sense of per- spective and to become unable to see the \voods for the trees. Hence two or three chapters on the trend of social movements are offered as a means of orientation. Since the frontier of the social case worker joins that of the reformer and propagandist, surely no one will object to including some cautions to social reformers, partic- ularly when they may be taken with equally good grace by the social worker. If the inclusion of such concrete problems as why workers and agencies go stale or how to reduce labor turnover in social agencies seems to de- PREFACE Vii stroy the placid flow of our philosophical brook, or if the introduction of crabbed graphs and statistical tables jars upon delicately tuned aesthetic nerves, the justifi- cation must plainly be that science is not only an atti- tude but a method. The scientific spirit will justify itself in social work only if it can reveal the hidden potencies of individuals and agencies, evoke their en- ergies most effectively, and point the way not only to solving methodically each day's problems but to taking an appropriate place in the whole foreward movement of humanity. However the argument may seem to stray, it comes back constantly to one central theme, namely, what is the social worker's part in the move- ments for enlarging the charter of human Hberties, and on what terms can he serve that cause most effectively? Since, as we shall discover, the scientific spirit signifies loyalty and cooperation, it behooves me here to tender my heartiest appreciation to all those friendly social workers whose challenge has evoked these pages, and particularly to that large group whose patient self- analysis made possible Chapters VI and VII. Arthur James Todd. Minneapolis, February, 1919. CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE vii CHAPTER T NATURAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL WRONGS. ... i n. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 17 m. RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM ... 38 IV. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK . . 62 V. SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM. ... 86 VI. THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK 108 VIL THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 132 VIII. THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 160 IX. SOCIAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL WORK 193 INDEX 208 tx THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK CHAPTER I NATURAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL WRONGS Modern social-reform movements and organized social work can be interpreted from two standpoints: First, as the concrete expression of a new social philos- ophy; second, as the natural consequences of a series of historical facts. The first is a problem in social ethics, political philosophy, and the changing mores. The second is a chapter in economics and poUtical his- tory of which we need scarcely do more than review some of the paragraph headings. The agrarian revolu- tion in eighteenth-century England; the industrial revolution in all the major nations of the Western World saving perhaps Russia and Spain; the political revolu- tions and the democratic movements of the last century and a half; the new means of transport and communica- tion; wholesale world-wide immigration; socialism; the development of political economy and sociology; trades unionism; cooperative and municipal enterprise; and the emergence of the State as a positive welfare agency — these are the signposts along the way. It is indeed an amazing history, a record of turmoil and conflict, of feverish activity and hectic imaginings, of stupidity and heroisms, reason and blind worship of cherished fallacy. But this whole record is shot through with a distinct thread of social philosophy, no less striking because not always explicit. It is that thread which 2 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK we want now to pick out and examine as a guide to formulating for social workers the social unfolding since the middle of the eighteenth century. In the year 1789 the French Constituent Assembly pubUshed to the world its famous declaration called The Rights of Man; and Thomas Paine two years later re- newed the challenge in his famous pamphlet aimed at Edmund Burke who, in a reactionary frame of mind, had ventured to criticise the French revolutionists and their brave declaration. As a matter of history, for at least three-quarters of a century Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, the Constituent Assembly, and Thomas Paine seemed to have won out over Burke and other timorous conservatives of his day. The trouble was that while Burke was technically nearer the truth than Paine, his fears so colored his reasoning as to give it the appearance of prejudice and fallacy. There is no forcing of analogies or misreading of history when I say that modern social-reform movements and social work represent a series of concrete attempts to define and redefine the Rights of Man. They are the index of a growing self- consciousness about the expression of social "interests" in law and economic organizations. At times the social movement takes on the character of violence as in Chartism or the American Civil War or the philosophy and practice of syndicalism. At times it appears in the theory of class struggle. Still again it comes to Ught in the humble guise of a legislative plea for a living wage or for health insurance. But always it is the problem of rights, whether natural or acquired. And whether con- scious or not, it is pretty generally aligned with eight- eenth-century idealism and that vision of social justice crystallized in the famous trinity of social demands — liberty, equality, fraternity. It is always fairly easy to formulate an indictment of social wrongs, but it is by no means equally easy to find a convincing way of righting them. If a people resents NATURAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL WRONGS 3 the encroachments of its rulers and balks at being taxed it can say that governors rule and tax only by consent of the governed and that it has a ''natural right" to revolt or regicide. If the ruler on his part suffers from dynastic egotism he may talk familiarly of Ich und Gott or may attempt to crush incipient revolt by announcing that he rules by natural right — the divine right of kings. If one objects to being consigned to the Bastille without any other warrant than a courtier's jealousy he may announce his natural rights to life, liberty, and the pur- suit of happiness. If he is discontented with his wages he may claim by natural right a living wage. If a capi- talist objects to income taxes or legal limitation upon profits he may appeal to his natural right to make what he can. If a saloon or other public nuisance is closed up or destroyed by prohibitory law its owner may demand compensatory damages by natural right. Such cases could be multiplied almost indefinitely. They all suggest the need of definition. What is a right, a natural right, an inaUenable, imprescriptible right? Are rights always rights? Are all rights equal rights? Is a right in time of peace equally a right in time of war? Are we bom with rights or do we achieve them? Is might right, and if so, whose might? Who or what is the final arbiter of rights? There is scarcely any other field in which human opinion plays so fast and loose as in this field of rights. Not all men, of course, are quite so absurd as the student who defined natural rights as ''the rights or privileges which we enjoy after birth." Another student was per- haps somewhat nearer the truth in her definition of rights as "the things which one man thinks he has and others think he hasn't." Turgot, the eighteenth cen- tury French philosopher-statesman, saw the connection between wants and rights but failed to show how the connection really came to be made. He said, "God by giving to man wants and making his recourse to work 4 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK necessary to supply them, has made the right to work the property of every man." This is good socialism of the early type, but it is poor sociology and savors of creation by divine fiat. Blackstone's " Commentaries " gave the legal definition of rights as "a number of private immunities" which are either, he says, "that residuum of natural liberty, which is not required by the laws of society to be sacrificed to public convenience; or else those civil privileges, which society hath engaged to provide, in lieu of the natural liberties so given up by individuals." The definition is sound so far as it accounts for rights in terms of social expediency; it is fallacious in so far as it conceives society to be a conscious contract. Long ago the theory of society as conscious contract was exploded. We now understand that society is mental organization almost as spontaneous and uncon- scious as the growth of a plant or animal. The modern writers on politics and sociology have struck pretty directly at the heart of this matter. Pro- fessor Sumner declared that the mores can make anything right. This might justly be paraphrased into saying that custom can make any act or function a right; or briefly, customs make rights. In another place Sumner says, "Rights have come to be expressions of the rules of the game in the competition of life. . . They are not absolute. They are not antecedent to civilization. They are a product of civilization, or of the art of li\'ing as men have practiced it and experimented on it, through the whole course of history." A great historian of politics hits the target even more squarely with his definition of a right as "a power enforced by public sentiment," and especially by his comment that "a right is really the creation of public sentiment, past or present." In his own charming way Huxley, during his controversy with General Booth and the Salvation Army, illuminated this whole problem of the social creation of rights. "I cannot speak of my own knowledge," he says, "but I have NATURAL RIGHTS AITO SOCIAL WRONGS $ every reason to believe that I came into this world a small reddish person, certainly without a gold spoon in my mouth, and in fact with no discernible abstract or concrete 'rights' or property of any description. If a foot was not, at once, set upon me as a squalling nui- sance, it was either the natural affection of those about me, which I certainly had done nothing to deserve, or the fear of the law which, ages before my birth, was painfully built up by the society into which I intruded, that prevented that catastrophe. If I was nourished, cared for, taught, saved from the vagabondage of a wastrel, I certainly am not aware that I did anything to deserve those advantages. And, if I possess anything now, it strikes me that though I may have fairly earned my day's wages for my day's work, and may justly call them my property — yet, without that organization of society, created out of the toil and blood of long gener- ations before my time, I should probably have had nothing but a flint ax and an indifferent hut to call my own; and even those would be mine only so long as no stronger savage came my way." Now if we summarize this conception, we may define a right as an interest that has been approved, selected, tested, and generalized through social experience. In other words, society creates rights. Or, put in another way, rights are privileges which have the O. K. of society. Rights are only natural as society itself is natural. Since rights grow out of the exigencies of group life and are indeed its product, it is evident that organized social purpose and activity may abridge, amend, or add to the existing sum of rights. Bentham and Austin held that there could be no such thing as a right which was inde- pendent of the State; but this is not strictly true. The State as the most powerful form of social organization tends to become the final arbiter in defining what is right or wrong; yet at the same time it does not decide in a vacuum, but rather upon the basis of past expe- 6 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK rience and proven or assumed expediency. The reference is always to general social experience. A right, then, is a privilege conferred by society and sanctified by expediency. But is a right always a right? Here we touch upon the ethical no less than upon the historical aspect of rights and interests. Phillips Brooks we remember said, ''No man has a right to all of his rights." And the reason is that some rights are righter— that is, apparently more expedient than others; just as some interests are higher than others when measured by certain standards. The altruistic interests stand higher in the culture scale of either individual or group than the interests in sex or beefsteaks or bridge; that is, if we admit the existence of such apparent facts as con- science, character, progress, humanity. And rights vary from age to age because wants and interests shift or rise. Hence the conflict between conservative and progressive, standpatter and radical. The conservative insists upon maintaining present or past rights, present comforts. The progressive sees new and wider interests or rights in the future; since for him the good is enemy of the best he is willing to forego and even trample down merely right rights for righter rights. He is especially interested in harmonizing old interest-conflicts and in widening to the uttermost limits the participation of every member of a group in the satisfaction of his legiti- mate wants through the proceeds of the common toil of all. This is the sum and substance of the plea for social justice. This analysis makes it quite apparent that rights are only beliefs about human welfare and that they are nei- . ther self-evident nor self-justifying nor unchanging. Individual rights are always limited by contemporary questions of public policy or by the conflict of other rights. It will probably scandalize the man in the street, particularly the propertied man, to learn that he has no absolute natural right to land, profits, interest, or private NATURAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL "V^TIONGS ^ property of any sort and that those so-called imprescrip- tible rights have validity only in so far as they promote individual and social well-being. But the moment you attempt to handle political, economic, or international problems with a legalistic mind, steeped in the doctrine of natural rights, you land in confusion, disaster, and anarchy. Our own social muddles and the present international catacylsm will not be settled upon the basis of crude, absolute right, but on a basis of livability. Granting that there are no such things as absolute, natural rights, there still remains the problem of _ ex- tending the area of what we believe to be social utiHty and personal expansion. Unmistakably, many different methods of approach are possible in the attempt to work out what is livable, useful, and attainable through either legislation or so-called case work in the achieving of these new ideals of expanding the social spirit. Not all of these methods are equally valuable. They range all the way from pure sentimentality to the delusion of direct action and violence. In urging that a constant pressure to redefine rights is at the same time a movement to revise the general concept, ''humanity," one must constantly be on guard to discriminate between humanity and what old Uncle Everard Romfrey called "humani- tomtity. " That discrimination will appear in our analysis of sentimentaUty. Likewise, the cause of human rights is not to be served by indiscriminate attack. I am re- minded here of the EngUsh schoolboy who wrote in his exammation paper that "All geometry begms with a general denunciation." There are certain canons of ommon decency and of effective agitation which apply even to a pseudo-democracy corrupted by yellow jour- nalism. Another form of disservice to the social movement for enlarging human rights is mere busybodying. Ra- bmdranath Tagore says somewhere, "Either you have work or you have not. When you have to say, ' Let us 8 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK do something,' then begins mischief." It is just this attitude which has caused a good many undiscriminating people to lump together the real apostles of human rights and the mere camp follower or bushwhacker. There are also not a few so-called reformers who thr6ugh false credentials have secured entrance into the lists of the real reformers and social workers but who soon reveal themselves by their superficiality and their fads. I struck a gathering of these people not long ago at a congress devoted presumably to the subject of social purity. Rarely have I seen such an exhibition of twaddle versus science, or of meddling Pharisaism and complac- ency. Such men and women are not likely to do much for the enlargement of human freedom. There is stUl another method of freeing men from so- cial wrongs and clothing them with new rights, and that is the familiar method of direct action. The I. W. W.'s have no priority rights nor patent upon this method of social reform by violence. Peter the Great stands as one of the great exponents of this method of quick and inexpensive reform. After his sojourn in Germany, Holland, and England, we are told that he returned to his capital convinced ''beyond a shadow of doubt that the one abiding error in his country's ways was conserv- atism." With a good deal of penetration he attacked the problem first through externals. Thus, on the 26th of April, 1698, he called together some of his chief leaders in a little wooden hut at Peobrazhenskoye and there by his own hand deliberately cfipped off their beards and mustaches. Later, he passed a series of sumptuary laws forbidding certain ancient costumes and prescribing the apparel of Western Europe. That was his method of treating with conservatives when he was faced with the question of redefining the rights of the Russian gentleman. And it must be admitted that in the heat of conflict over a particular social measure, acts of violence and sabotage frequently creep in. This was true in Chartism; it was NATURAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL WRONGS 9 trae in the antislavery movement; and it has been true with certain wings of the modern woman-suffrage party. It is always present as a subtle temptation, for to smash a prime minister's window, or an abolitionist's printing press, or a miller's machinery always gives the sense of satisfaction in quick and substantial achievement. But a social worker or the social reformer need not have the slightest sympathy with such acts of sabotage and still quaUfy for Kirkman Gray's definition as "the perfect agitator." His heart may swell with sympathy as the result of his daily contact with grave social injustice. He may be moved to violence as a catharsis for his pent- up feelings. But he must forego the resort to such crude methods if he is to act as the mediator between the socially fortunate and the socially neglected. Such work of mediation demands that one's sense of perspec- tive and one's clear vision of relative values must remain imobscured. To see red either chronically or spasmodi- cally is not likely to make one a safe apostle of human rights. The new "bill of rights" as fully enacted or in the process of enactment during the last hundred and fifty years is a very impressive sight. The right to freedom is perhaps the most outstanding of these new attempts to redefine human rights; and I mean by that term not only the abolition of negro slavery, but also the move- ments to abolish serfdom and peonage, white slavery, convict slavery, and wage slavery. These are all angles of the same fundamental human problem. A very con- siderable proportion of social energies during the latter half of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century have been poured into channels leading toward the accomplishment of this vision of a freer human personality. As a corollary to the right of personal freedom men have added the right to a decent income. You find this in the form frequently of a demand for a living wage. lO THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK Minimum-wage legislation for women and children has already met in part this demand. But there is a growing call for a widening of the concept to include all workers, men as well as women, unorganized as well as organized. The new demand made orignally by the Fabian Society in England and taken up by the British Labor Party's program for social reconstruction after the war with its echoes at the National Conference of Social Work in 19 18 has crystallized pretty definitely into what is called now the "platform of national minimums"; that is, certain minimum standards of health, wages, and other living conditions as they affect citizenship. It is a very fertile concept, and it proves conclusively the real nature of rights. It shows beyond question how these rights arise in localized opinion, are fostered through agitation, and are finally crystallized in popular conviction as expressed in constitutional amendments and statutory legislation. Another significant corollary to the right of freedom is the right to organize for economic protection. The answer to this right is of course the whole trades-union movement with its gradual compelling of courts and legislatures to cast overboard the old doctrines of con- spiracy and to recognize the right of peaceable assem- blage, protest, and wage bargaining. How long this right is to be pressed will depend upon how long the possibility of exploitation lingers on in our industrial organization. Another fundamental right now becoming more and more recognized is the right to leisure. This is based partly upon a perception that all advances in human culture have been made through leisure-time activities. It is also based upon the complementary fact that men can remain neither healthy individuals, sound parents, nor good citizens unless they have proper time for rest and recuperation. The social reforms to meet this newly demanded right are to be found in labor-union agitation, NATURAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL WRONGS II in legislative acts and judicial decisions limiting the hours of the working day. The greatest single monument in this field is the famous brief presented by Mr. Justice Brandeis and Miss Goldmark in the so-called Oregon Eight-hour Case, Bunting vs. The State of Oregon. The "Pittsburgh Survey" offered a startling backgroimd against which to sketch in the need for adding this par- ticular right to the social equipment of every normal individual. Not even the war and its preoccupation with intense industrial activity was able to set aside the conviction of the right of this demand for leisure. In- deed, it has been officially recognized in the notable series of studies upon fatigue in British munition plants. A decent working day and various forms of welfare and recreational work have been the war-time concessions to this insistent demand. The right to education stands perhaps only second to the right to freedom in the great nineteenth century bill of rights. The enlargement and extension of systems of universal free public education, the creation of the public schools, elementary, intermediate, high, and university, with all their accessories, indicate how keenly the justice and the utility of this right have been per- ceived. But that this is not a natural right was clearly indicated in the arguments of English conservatives as late as 1870 in favor of retaining education as a private industry and against a state monopoly of the field. As a connecting link between the right to education and the right to leisure stands the new right to recreation. This right is fundamentally a recognition of the imperious character of the play instinct, and an understanding that if this instinct is balked of legitimate satisfaction it will find its satisfaction in devious ways. The answer to this demand is found in the creation of public play- grounds, parks, municipal theaters, concerts, boys' and girls' clubs, settlements and social centers. The war has given an opportunity to demonstrate on a tremendous 12 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK scale the value of learning through decent organized recreation how really to "play the game." It has been said frequently that the fundamental difference in mental attitude between the German and the American is that the German does not know how "to play the game" because he has never fully perceived that this right to recreation was a community obUgation. Another whole series of new rights created by nine- teenth century social perception may be united under the term " the right to health." I mean by this not only the right to pubhc sanitation and the right to preventive hygiene, but also the right to protection from impure and adulterated foods. Many of these aspects of the problem were gathered by Mrs. Florence Kelley in her excellent little book, "Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation." But there are other health rights equally important. One of these in particular has been receiving increasing attention for at least half a century; namely, "the right to a decent habitation." This right is by no means fully won, for altogether too many people still think that if a person cannot afford to live in anything but a chicken house or a basement, it is nobody's business. We are learning that there is a level of housing decency below which no citizen, whatever his rank, shall be al- lowed to drop. This applies not only to private homes but also to joint houses, to tenements, to industrial camps, to lodging houses, hotels, prisons, and other pub- licinstitutions. Here again the war has strengthened the position of the social workers and the housing reformers and has made it pretty clear that this fundamental right stands a good chance of attaining a permanent position in any bill of fundamental human rights. We may consider just one more angle of the right to health. It might be phrased as "the right of children to a chance to start Hfe right." That is, the right of chil- dren to a clean bill of health, to a parentage untainted by uimecessary and preventable diseases or degenera- NATURAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL WRONGS 1 3 cies. It is this right to which at least a part of the modem eugenics movement addresses itself. But along with eugenics, of course, are to be marshaled all sorts of agen- cies from the Federal government down to the local home-finding society which are working for the protec- tion and welfare of children. The Federal government with its Children's Year program in 19 18 illustrated very clearly the perception of this right and also the realiza- tion that it is not a negligible part of the citizen's pro- tective code but rather that it is a fundamental part of this supremely important right to health. The history of the nineteenth century with its reform of poor law administration, with its various movements to abolish imprisonment for debt, to introduce the re- formatory spirit into the prison system, to abolish cap- ital punishment, and to provide more rationally for the care of delinquent children indicates a growing tendency to impute to the delinquent the right to a certain min- imum of decent care. The point is not that the criminal is any less crimmal than he used to be, nor any less deserving of all discipline and punishment, but that the commimity is too good, too prosperous, and too right- minded to tolerate anything less than a really humane ideal. The State as an evolved and civilized social institution cannot afford to indulge in the crude, prim- itive methods of torture and revenge; and just as it has outgrown through its ver}'- decency and its development those primal brutalities, so it tends to go a step further and establish certaui new standards of positive decency in its methods of reclaiming "human scrap." Somewhat the same situation is involved in the treat- ment of the poor, particularly through public adminis- tration. It is quite arguable, of course, that the poor, even the so-called unworthy poor, are just as shiftless and wastrel as they were in the days of Elizabeth. But here again the point is that the whole level of our stand- ard of decency has risen measurably in the last three or 14 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK four centuries, and that we cannot tolerate from either public or private authorities any standard of treatment of any class whatsoever which is out of keeping with our minimum ideal of what any human creature should re- ceive. This tendency to accord to the poor the right not only to relief but to decent relief with an ever rising standard of decency, accounts for the often noted fact that while the number of the poor apparently decreases, the cost of maintaining them does not always decrease but rather tends to rise. One of the most significant extensions of human rights which we have been witnessing, particularly in the last twenty or thirty years, is the recognition of the right of women to full equality in all social life. This appears in various guises. You meet it in that broad current of mixed motives and purposes sometimes called feminism; you find it in the organized suffrage movement; you find it in the women's trade-union league; you find it most recently in the various methods by wWch women have thrown themselves into war service. No better illustra- tion could be offered than the woman's movement of how a right, no matter how "natural" it may be, has to be achieved through agitation, education, and the production of an irresistible conviction that the extension of such a privilege is essential to the highest social welfare. It also illustrates the same thing from another standpoint, namely, that many people are anxious to concede this right to women in order to be at peace and in order that the restless energies of women now absorbed in winning suffrage and other forms of recognition may be poured into channels for constructive social effort. I have been speaking so far mainly of individual rights, the rights of the citizen. But there has been also a tendency to enlarge a concept of the rights of the com- munity, which we are learning to recognize under such terms as social control, the police power of the State, the social-welfare function of government, and the commu- NATURAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL WRONGS . IS nity right to self-protection. It is implicit also in such ideas and movements as eugenics and conservation. For example, various voices arise from time to time asserting the right of the community to protect itself against criminals and defectives by cutting them off through segregation, birth control, sterilization, and other forms of negative eugenics. These suggestions have not yet taken full form as community rights, and the reason is, we say, because public opinion has not yet crystallized itself fully in their favor. This illustrates clearly both the twilight zones from which all rights emerge and also the method by which they are brought from twilight into full sunlight. A very remarkable extension of the right of the coin- munity through its inherent police power may be seen in various legislative, judicial, and executive acts to pre- vent poverty, disease, and crime through prohibiting certain harmful agencies like the saloon, the house of prostitution, lotteries, race-track gambling, the sale of habit-forming drugs, and patent medicines. So thor- oughly is this sense of right becommg ingrained in the public mind that only here and there does one hear any longer of compensation for destroying any of these nox- ious busmesses. This idea of the abatement of public nuisances bids fair to have a wide extension. ^ Some of the more positive aspects of this police power will appear in more strikmg and detailed form in a later chapter on the trend of social reform. . Finally there is a tendency to a very much broader^ and more comprehensive framing of community rights which is attaming a wider and wider public interest. We might put this down as the right of the community, present and future, to an imimpaired heritage of healthy citizens and of a productive domain. From one stand- point, this right summarizes all other rights both indi- vidual and social, and in a sense may be said to epitomize the whole of rational social policy. May the day soon l6 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK come when these rights will not be mere words nor mere laws falling into desuetude, but when they may form the charter of our liberties and when they may become the sohd basis upon which a finer superstructure of civiliza- tion may be erected. Meanwhile, let them serve as lighthouses for the social worker as he steers his course through the troubled currents of modern social life. CHAPTER II THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT To round out an adequate concept of "rights" and to smooth the approach to a scientific view of social work it is necessary to formulate a more coherent philosophy of social betterment. This involves primarily a brief re- view of some theories of the relation of the individual to the social group. Thus only can we arrive at the basic sanctions for social-welfare activity or assess responsibil- ity for its costs and conduct. It is doubtful if any of us are still such outrageous optimists as to argue for the present world as the best possible of all possible good worlds. Our common sense and our scientific analysis agree that there is room for improvement. But as to who or what needs improve- ment or who should make it, or whether it makes itself by an inevitable tendency to perfection, there may be considerable divergence of conviction. Personally I am unable to rest my faith in the perfectionist doctrines of eighteenth-century Turgot and Condorcet or their nine- teenth-century representatives, Bachofen and Werge- land and Pelletan. Man has no incorrigible hankering after perfection, nor is he guided in the direction of im- provement by an irresistible force, as the spirit is supposed to impel the hand of a medium at a seance or direct the scribe in literal dictation of inspired scriptures. Man wills to improve when he wants to improve. Progress is voluntary after we leave certain low levels of culture. Social betterment, then, is not something imposed by Powers above, but an attitude of human minds, senti- ments, and wills. 17 1 8 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK We are speaking here of social betterment, not individ- ual improvement, though the process in either case is identical. But who is charged with social improvement? Is it everybody's business, or that of kings, priests, coun- cils, and legislatures? Is it something savoring of uni- versal duty, or is it merely a luxury to be enjoyed by a favored few, as leisure, wealth, or whim suggest? The answers to these questions range themselves into two pretty clearly marked groups which we have got into the habit of calling respectively individualism, and altruism or mutualism. On the one hand we have, say, Sumner's essays on "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other," with their general text that "to mind one's own business is a purely negative and unproductive injunction, but, taking social matters as they are just now, it is a sociolog- ical principle of the first importance. There might be developed a grand philosophy on the basis of minding one's own business." Or we might turn to Max Stirner, the most uncompromising individualist of the nineteenth century, in his "The Ego and His Own." "Thousands of years of civilization," he declares, "have obscured to you what you are, have made you believe you are not egoists but are called to be idealists (' good men ') . Shake that off! Do not seek for freedom, which does precisely de- prive you of yourselves, in * self-denial; ' but seek yourselves, become egoists, become each of you an almighty ego . . . if the State is a society of men, not a union of egos each of whom has only himself before his eyes, then it cannot last without morality, and must insist upon morality. Therefore we two, the State and I, are enemies. I, the egoist, have not at heart the welfare of this ' human society,' I sacrifice nothing to it, I only utilize it; but to be able to utilize it completely I transform it rather into my property and my creature, — i. e., I annihilate it, and form in its place the Union of Egoists.^' On the other hand, we are met with Comte and his sociology culminating in the religion of humanity; with THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 1 9 the philosophy of solidarity which characterizes the France of the Third Republic; with State Socialism; with such books as Dr. McCoimell's "Duty of Altruism " or with that whole more or less vague and spontaneous body of attempts to formulate and utilize good will which we may call social-welfare movements. Let me illustrate with a handful of maxims from Auguste Comte's writings. ''The perpetual aim of human life: the main- tenance and improvement of the Great Being, whom we must at once love, know, and serve." ''Devotion of the Strong to the Weak, Respect from the Weak for the Strong." "The whole human problem consists in es- tablishing Unity, personal and social, by the constant subordination of selfishness to Altruism." "With all our efforts, the longest life well employed will never enable us to pay back more than an imperceptible part of what we have received." "The Education of the Race, like that of the individual, prepares us gradually to Live for Others." "The characteristic of Education is this, above all: a Being naturally inclined to live for self and in self is to be made disposed to live for others so as to live again in others by others." This is of course the age-old philosophical problem of the One and the Many; stated in its newer form it is the question of the relation of the individual to society. The attempt to harmonize these two presumed opposites is, I believe, the essence of the "social question." And if we agree that this is "the age of the social question," it is because the age is striving to reconcile the interests of individual and group. But can they be reconciled? Is the proposition as definite as a problem in arithmetic, with only one valid solution? You remember that even in arithmetic Sir Roger de Coverley found much to be said on both sides. And there is the story of a Yale pro- fessor with the proper academic open mind who was stating the evidence for the existence of God. Some persons, he said, hold that the Divine Being exists; 20 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK others, that He does not; the truth lies halfway between. But can the truth about the individual and society be stated in this catholic way? Let us see first whether the two terms are really in opposition. It may be that the problem is improperly framed and that we are forcing doors that are already open. This will involve defin- ing what we mean by "individual" and " social" or "society." Suppose we begin by saying dogmatically that there is no real opposition between individual and society; but that both words represent different aspects of the same thing. Is the individual created primarily for society, or society for the individual? Neither. Which is prior in time or importance? Again neither. Like the "halves" in Plato's Symposium they are complementary and indispensable to each other. They are the same thing. They are merely two of the perhaps many modes in which the creative impulse has chosen to express itself — both equally vaUd and equally useful. Bergson in his "Creative Evolution" has stated this matter compre- hensively, and since we are discussuig philosophy, it may be permissible to quote him: "A part is no sooner de- tached than it tends to reunite itself, if not to all the rest, at least to what is nearest to it. Hence, throughout the whole realm of Hfe a balancing between individuation and association. Individuals join together into society; but the society, as soon as formed, tends to melt the associated individuals into a new organism, so as to be- come itself an individual, able in its turn to be part and parcel of a new association. . . But this itself (speaking of polyzoism in lower animals) reveals to us, in the gene- sis of the individual, a haunting of the social form, as if the individual could develop only on the condition that its substance should be split up into elements having themselves an appearance of individuahty and united among themselves by an appearance of sociality. There are numerous cases in which Nature seems to hesitate THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 21 between the two forms, and to ask herself if she shall make a society or an individual. The slightest push is enough, then, to make the balance weigh on one side or the other. . . The evolution of hfe in the double direc- tion of individuality and association has therefore noth- ing accidental about it; it is due to the very nature of life." ^ As I have shown elsewhere ,2 in human society nature seems to have solved the puzzle by creating the individ- ual's real self out of the stuff of society, and on the other hand to have trusted to variations in the individual for the constant renewing and freshening of the social mass. So far as I am able to make out the philosophical in- dividualist's position, it is something like this: I am cre- ated different from everything else, I am individual, unique, inexplicable. By the law of nature I am per- mitted, even required, to magnify and perfect that dif- ference, my own unique nature. Hence I invoke a com- bination of the scientific doctrine of selection of favorable variations ^vith the metaphysical doctrine of natural rights; by virtue of this combination, I myself, the unique variation, am constituted the selector. The position of the individualist appears then to be an unwarrantable extension of the eudonomic theory of divergent evolu- tion, i. e. the inherent power in different individuals of the same species to deal in different ways with the same en- vironment. On the other side of what seems to be at first view an impassable gulf appear a great body of scientists who utterly repudiate such an individualistic conception of human nature. The social psychologists, Tarde, Durk- heim. Trotter, MacDougall, Baldwin, Cooley, Thorsch, Boodin — indeed nearly every sociologist and all the phi- losophers who have taken the trouble to investigate social ^ " Creative Evolution," pp. 251-252. ^ "Theories of Social Progress," Chap. IV. 22 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK processes — find the individual born of society, caught in its matrix, as much in and of it as though he were a drop of water in the Gulf Stream. Professor Cooley states the situation very clearly: "To many people it would seem mystical to say that persons, as we know them, are not separable and mutually exclusive, like physical bodies, so that what is part of one cannot be part of another, but that they interpenetrate one another, the same element pertaining to different persons at different times, or even at the same time: yet this is a verifiable and not very abstruse fact. . . Man's psychical outfit is not divisible into the social and the non-social . . . he is all social in a large sense, is a part of the common human life." ^ The so-called "organic" school of social theorists put the matter much more positively. In their hands the individual is a mere biological atom, a bit of social proto- plasm with no more and no less independence than a cell in a jellyfish. This far I cannot follow, for society is really mental unity, mental organization rather than a biological organism. But no social worker need hesitate to go at least as far as certain clear-sighted health workers, and he dare not hold back behind them. Let him go to Milan and visit the famous clinic for occupational diseases: he will find his true philosophy cut in stone, for the corner stone of that clinic bears this motto, "In aliis vivimus, movemur, et sumus." In others we live, move, and have our being. Or let him read Witter Bynner's "The New World" for a somewhat mystical render- ing of the same philosophy in noble verse. Or let him listen to old Walt Whitman roll out his "For You, O Democracy": "Come, I will make the continent indissoluble I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the lifelong love of comrades. * "Hmnan Nature and the Social Order," pp. 12, 61, 90-1. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 23 I will plant companionship thick as trees all along the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and aU over the prairie* I wUl make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks, By the love of comrades , By the manly love of comrades." It is now time to clear up our definitions. In the first place both individual and society are abstractions. Soc- rates offered his weeping friends the prospect of a merry race in their search for him, the real Socrates, who to mor- Val appearance was about to be killed. Likewise if you go on the still hunt for the individual you are fore- doomed to illusion and disappointment. You will dis- cover that the individual is only a convention, a concept. Put him under the microscope and you will melt him away into an infinitude of molecules or atoms that are dancing about with partner molecules or atoms from the air, the earth, or other living creatures. Analyze his mind, his self, and you will find that there is no inchvidual there but only a multitude of potential individuals held to- gether by the exigencies of the moment. Analyze again those potential individuals and you will find them to be strikingly like ideas and potential selves you have met before. You will conclude that your individual, like Ulysses, is part of all that he has met. You will find that he is individual in the morphological sense; for in- stance, he will have a set of finger prints quite unique. But I am sure you will not be content with the definition worked out a while ago, that the individual is merely "the detached and solitary human monad hermeti- cally sealed in two hundred pounds of acquisitive avoir- dupois." You will refuse to define him in anything but really human terms. You will find that your individual is a composite mixture of his mother's body, his father's 24 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK temper, his grandfather's love of horses, his brother's re- sentment at having the bedclothes pulled off, his nurse- maid's fear of ghosts, his teacher's love of polished shoes, his gang's predilection for running when a poHceman appears, the American youth's tendency to overdress and to drop the ing from his participles, the business man's philosophy of success, the preacher's fear of hell, and the saint's vision of heavenly glory. His language, his ideas, his standards of Hving, his codes of honor, his whole outlook upon life are borrowed; they are in no sense native, they are every one acquired; and they are what make him man, an individual man. We call him an mdividual man by courtesy. If he insists that he is an irreducible, unique center of acquisition, we deny him even that dubious right; we show him that he is simply a bundle of cells which are hungry, and a congeries of ideas that think and move. He is merely a convention. If he calls evolutionary zoology to witness, we can show him that natural selection chooses species, not individuals. From the standpoint of human evolution it is significant that it was not the gorilla living more or less apart, but his much weaker cousin, the social monkey, that was elected to so honored a position in our genealogy. On every hand you find evidences of social soHdarity in the sub-human world. "Not only are species interde- pendent as well as partly in competition, iDut there is an absolute dependence in all ihe higher species between its different members which may be said to imply a de facto altruism, as the dependence upon other species implies a de facto cooperation. Every animal, to say nothing else, is absolutely dependent for a considerable part of its existence upon its parents." ^ Moreover, every higher species has certain so-called race instincts that have apparently nothing to do with the life or welfare of the individual. Indeed they are ^ Leslie Stephen, " Social Rights and Duties," Vol. I, p. 234. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 2$ only intelligible when translated into terms of group in- terests. Such are the mating or the parental instinct, and the impulse to rush to the defense of comrades or the weak and helpless. We might add, too, such a strongly marked instinct as the impulse to toss alms to every beggar. I should not want to be misunderstood as basing rational and advanced civilization upon mere group in- stincts; far from that. But these illustrations go to show at least that society is not, nor never was, a free contract between separate human monads endowed with a full equipment of natural rights. Let us reiterate now that from the evolutionary point of view human rights or the rights of the individual are not rights at all but rather social privileges, arising out of, and sanctified by, group experience and conferred by the group for its own wel- fare. TJte individual is not, then, a natural product; he is a product of civilization; and civilization is social achieve- ment. But the individualist may refuse to rest his case upon natural science and evolution. He may insist that how- ever naturalistic sociology may strive to identify the individual with the group, religion disengages the individ- ual and makes the unit soul the end and aim of creation. But at best the evidence from religion is conflicting. Totemism, the ancestor cult, reincarnation, and group responsibility for sin are the prevailing marks of primi- tive religion. The first gods were group gods. And God is still accused of scourging whole communities for the misdeeds of certain of their members. Christianity, it is true, summons men to the care of their own priceless inalienable, individual souls. "What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? " {Mark viii, 36) . Here is extreme, irreducible, individualism. Its flower came in subject- ivism, the right of private judgment espoused by the Protestant Reformation; and its seed, the multiplicity of Christian sects which the modern idea of federation is trying to weld once more into a coherent mass. But in 26 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK spite of this fact I believe we may say that the most original and engaging idea of Christianity was not the value of the individual soul, but the concept of the Mystic Body. The metaphor of the vine and its branches states the same concept of organic unity and association. Again, the marginal rendering of the familar text "The kingdom of heaven is within you," which makes it read, "The kingdom of heaven is among you," has been em- phasized as the real spirit of early Christianity. Some- thing may also be guessed from the scanty references to primitive Christian communism. The evidence from religion proves to be a boomerang; for the appeal is always made not to your or my private ideas of religion, since they would not be accepted in the forum of dis- cussion, but to religious bodies, or platforms of religious dogma, or to religious teaching. But all these spell or- ganization, authority, and the subjection of, or rather the inclusion of, the individual within a doctrinal circle. The individualist in his appeal to Christian dogma gets en- tangled in the very meshes he would escape. The individualist may take his final stand on the high- lands of transcendental philosophy. There, of course, we cannot follow him. He is safe; for there, as in the wonderland of Alice and her looking-glass, anything may happen. He is in the heaven of the Absolute. He is safe so long as he stays there. But if he grows hungry or cold or interested or communicative or anything, in short, but pure contemplation contemplating contempla- tion he is down in the midst again. In the midst of what? Of you and me! He resumes his personality, he lives once more, because he lives in us and we in him. He finds his real life in that very conventionality and ab- straction which deny him an absolutely unique self. It would appear, however, that there are individuals — at least near-individuals. I can conceive of one type, those transcendentalist and momentary individuals which we have just indicated. And I have actually seen THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 27 the only other type known; namely, the gelatinoid de- fective such as we house in institutions for the feeble- minded. The idiot is as near the pure individual as we are likely to get in this world; and he would perish in a week if left in company with like individuals. His only chance of life is the social nature and the physical sound- ness of the rest of us. Even the criminal who is commonly considered as an extreme individualist and antisocial is social in spite of himself; for he lives off and through society, and usually has gang ties, or ties with women. Try as he will, then, no man liveth unto himself. We are hopelessly part and parcel of each other. The term individual becomes, consequently, mere shorthand for the phrase "a working unity of ideas derived from social experiences." And the feeling of individuality comes from the stress of competition between ideas and im- pulses derived from the various association groups of which we are a part. Now, turning to society, we find it no less an abstraction than the individual. It is a conventional shorthand way of saying "association of interest-groups," or "large or- ganization of smaller groups." But what is organization? It certainly is neither place nor thing. It is merely re- lation. Society is relationship, mental community. And it has no existence apart from the individuals who fur- nish the occasion for relationship. It is quite indisput- able that if all the ninety-two odd million persons who made up "society" in the United States at the Census of 19 10 suddenly died in a night like Sennacherib's Assyrian host, there would be no American "society" left in the morning. But, on the other hand, if there were no such thing as American society, no American could live. By society I understand mental community, commu- nity of thought, sentiment, interests, ideals, fears, loyal- ties ; mental integration. Society is a zone of like-minded- ness. A society, to use the popular term, is merely a group of persons who are like-minded. This does not 28 THE SCIENTIPIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK mean that they are like-minded in every respect. One man may belong to a dozen or a thousand societies. A popular, ambitious man at college is likely to wear a vest front full of insignia designating him as a member of various so-called honor societies. The big group that most people think of as society is a web of almost count- less strands of lesser societary groupings. A man is a member of as many societies as he has interests, and society in the big is merely the integrated sum of this play of interests. By man's social nature, then, we mean only that he has interests created by group life, or inter- ests which only group life can satisfy. It would not be difficult to show that all man's higher interests, also his sexual interest (which, by the way, is a race and not an individual interest), and even for the most part his self- maintenance interest cannot be satisfied outside of group life. Hence it is fallacious to assume, as, for example Benjamin Kidd did, that the interests of the individual and the interests of the group are "inherently and essen- tially irreconcilable." These interests are reconciled in actual Ufe every day, else society would dissolve and its members along with it. So far is it from the truth that individual interests are irreconcilable with group inter- ests, that actually the opposite is the reaHty ; for it is the reconciliation of individual interests that creates social groups in the first instance, and maintains them in the second. So much clearing of ground seemed necessary before addressing the real problem at issue; namely, what is a man's duty to society? That is the kernel of the "social question." A good deal of vaporizing has sur- rounded the word social. Most of us have been con- victed of using the word hazily or with mental reserva- tions. I plead guilty to having written of socializing the engineer, of social education, and of the social church. I find that the word sometimes refers to the problem of capital and labor, or to the problem of prostitution, or to THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 29 general ethics, or to the widening of opportunity for the individual. All that I mean by the word here is sum- marized in the recent answer of Professor Small to the challenge that we take account of stock with regard to this adjective. He says: ''The plain matter of fact with which all our sociologizings start is that no person exists in a moral vacuum. Contradiction of everything like a moral vacuum conception of the lot of persons is the sum and substance predicated in all accurate uses of the term ' social.' That is, every person's Ufe touches other persons ' lives. . . A ' social point of view ' means con- sideration of the whole problem as an affair of the effect upon all the persons concerned of each possible alterna- tive, and choice of action in accordance with the esti- mated balance of interests. " ^ From this standpoint a man's social duty is first to rec- ognize that he is a social product, a loan, so to speak, from the common bank, which, for want of a better word, we may call the social mind. Second, consequently, that he must order his relationships, his society, in such a way that he may make the largest possible contri- ution to the common bank from which he got his " start." It is manifestly impossible for a man to choose his company in the absolute sense which individualists urge, for a man inherits by far the larger part of his com- pany. "The Uving," said August Comte, "are more and more governed by the dead." Renan and LeBon have both demonstrated the power of the "dust of dead gods." But in a more limited sense a man chooses his society. Since he cannot live without a society he is likely to choose one ready-made or the first one that happens to satisfy the interests of the passing moment. Hence primitive groups were chiefly food and sex and defense groups; and their modern prototypes far out- number all other forms of association. But since some of 1 "American Journal of Sociology," Vol. XIX, pp. 654-5. 30 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK these primary interest-groups may easily become dan- gerous to the interests of the larger group, some form of control, perhaps even of coercion, is necessary to bring about their adaptation to the larger need. Hence pro- bation officers either break up or modify gangs of juve- nile delinquents in spite of the fact that they are perfectly natural and spontaneous associations. And police destroy organized bandits or associations of thieves or Black Hand societies, though again they are natural interest-groups. It is evident that some form of interference must reg- ulate the relations of constituent groups to the bigger thing we call society in the large. In other words, standards of value must be set up and applied to acts of groups as well as those of individuals. Those groups whose acts menace the whole must be suppressed; those that further the whole encouraged. Hence the work of government, and by consequence that of rational educa- tion, is to develop in the individual standards of val- uation that will incline him with as little coercion as pos- sible to select those associations which will minister to the welfare of the whole, and by reflection to himself. I do not mean by this, certainly, that the State is neces- sarily that higher group for which the individual ought to be fitted. Nor do I mean that sense of obedience to law is the sole test of social fitness. Emerson declared that the highest virtue was always against the law; but neverthe- less he compromised and paid his taxes, without loss to either himself or his fellows. The quality of a society may perhaps always be measured by the number and character of its heretics, provided always that their here- sies are not suicidal like bUnd Samson's. But the here- tic is not an individualist. He is always looking for a new and better society than those of which he is made. He may refuse to conform to clothing group A, or food group B, or religion group C, or political group X, Y, and Z. But it is always because he is trying to cast his lot THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 3 1 with ideal groups A^ B^ and so forth. He is not trying to dodge social responsibility; he is trying to create new types of social responsibility and to urge others to as- sume those responsibilities by joining with him in his Utopia or his New Jerusalem, or his great Free Sponta- neous Commonwealth of Anarchism. It is evident, then, that the philosophy of social bet- terment and social work must take some such view of the relation of the individual to society as we have sketched. Since association is still partly coercive, partly volun- tary, social reform and social work must utilize both types of measures. But the tendency should be more and more to ehminate a social solidarity based upon con- straint and to develop voluntary and contributive types of association. Since, however, only complete knowledge is virtue, and since for a long time to come no individual or interest- group can compasscomplete knowledge of the effects upon others of its desires and acts, some authority for inter- ference and review must be lodged somewhere ; and how- ever crude or unsatisfactory it may seem, that author- ity must be lodged in the real leadership of the larger group. Hence the individual must learn the negative virtue of obedience and adaptation, even of subordina- tion and renunciation. The individualist has never been able to make out a convincing case for his thesis that no relation but one of mutual advantage is desirable or ethical. His proposi- tion is untenable unless couched in most transcendental terms. Neither does he convince that education must always be unconstrained and spontaneous. I suppose even the man who thought children should be allowed to burn themselves in order to learn the fundamental principle in physics and physiology that "fire burns," would not hesitate to put a screen around his open fire- place to keep his child from falling in. That screen gives away his whole case; it is likewise the symbol of all 32 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK good social work. He argues for training to think for oneself; in other words, for the open mind. But can he not see that this training is the most severe regime of discipline through which child or man can be put? The reason why the altruist urges originality and the open mind is that such minds are a social asset, in that they are contributive rather than purely adaptive or depend- ent. We must get away from the idea that to think in social terms is stagnation. Or that group interests are served by sheep minds. Or that progress is due to the unconstrained and unrestrained activity of individuals. Who will maintain that self-seeking is maintaining the open mind? Is it not rather a sign of mental squint? If self-seeking be the spring of progress, the society that has the largest number of criminals is the most progressive. Nor is individual invention to be taken as the measure of progress unless some organized power exists for the selection and protection of the inventor and his product. Pure self-interest and individual exploitation simply mean that the big gorilla inventor will snuff out the lit- tle chimpanzee inventor and destroy or steal his inven- tion. For example, a good many years ago an inventor patented a remarkable improvement in rifles. His self- interest prompted him to sell the patent to a firearms manufacturing company. The company found that the improvement conflicted too seriously with the type of gun they were making and marketing, so suppressed it in their own self-interest. The inventor is still waiting for the promised royalties. Nobody knows how much latent or active genius has been suppressed in just this way. Instead of less interference, such cases suggest measurably more power of social review. It is true that the individual creates; but his creation avails nothing without some power to preserve his crea- tion; and that power lies in the group. Society stores up the power generated by happy variations in its mem- bers. Law, a social product, is one of the means by which THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 33 this storing and conserving process is made possible. And it is this very storage of material and spiritual achieve- ment that releases the individual of to-day from having to work painfully through the history of the ages. In short, social heredity, the storage battery of past achieve- ment, creates the individual of the present. And that so- cial heredity is the record of the selection not only of dif- ferences and spontaneous variations, but of similarities in individuals, and of successful methods of social control. But the individual's duty to the group is not satisfied by a mere policy of noninterference, or of passive indif- ference. Most of the individualists I know have stood for the simple policy of "you let me alone and I'll let you alone." As if it were possible ! A cannot be let alone by B however passionately he desires it. And with the very best show of consistency possible A cannot and in fact will not let B alone. My colleague X believes in cultivating his mind, loves to tramp in the high moun- tains "where only man is \dle," loves to eat and drink, eschews all ideas of career, denies that he has any social responsibility or that he ought to do anything he does not want to do; his chief aversion is steady work; he stoutly maintains that he wants every-body else to enjoy the same freedom from responsiblity he enjoys. What is the re- sult? His father and his friends pay the bills. He has involved B whether B wanted to be involved or not. Suppose, again, that A has a child which he proposes to rear according to the principle of spontaneous budding of intellect and character. He will avoid correction, warnings, and all measures of formal interference or show of authority. A's wife or friends soon begin to pay the bill in worry, in broken furniture, in embarrassment over the antics of a young savage. The child itself will prob- ably not thank its sire for his Icissez-faire policy. And the community in the long run will have to supply the needed element of control which the parent might have given at much less cost in time and suffering. Individ- 34 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK ualism too frequently simply means laziness, or self- indulgence, or a downright policy of self-aggrandizement at the expense of one's fellows. And no complacent philosophy of mutual hands off can gloss over this fact. The positive aspect of a man's duty to his social group is no less emphatic in its claims. I deny by anticipation the innuendo that the duty of positive social service is merely old-fashioned charity or "dead men's shoes." That is too close to the cynic's creed, as expressed, for example by Samuel Butler, the vitriolic painter-novelist. "Can anyone," he asks, "do much for anyone else un- less by making a will in his favor and dying then and there?" Charity is often simply an attempt to plaster a N sore; constructive social service is paying back into the common fund the capital which has made us what we are, with a reasonable interest which may be used to swell the common fund for the benefit of others and perhaps of ourselves. A man's minimum duty is the support of himself and of those obviously dependent upon him. But the group may justly demand something in addition for the progressive welfare of the social whole. Surely at this date I do not need to go into the individual bene- fits to be received from community activity for health, safety, recreation, or culture. Huxley in his essay on "Administrative Nihilism" and Edmond Kelley in his early work, "Evolution and Effort," scotched for good and all the serpent of individualism in these respects. But can the matter not be carried legitimately a step farther? May not social duty be stretched beyond the mere point of preventing danger, disease, crime, or a few cases of chronic pauperism, to the point of creating a social environment which will favor the positive increase of well-being for every member of a community? I think it can and must. The individual is by very definition committed to this task. He can only Hve out a rounded life, a free life, a unique life, by joining voluntarily in the common enterprise of social advance. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 35 In such a statement of the philosophic base of social betterment sanctions it is not essential that we say just how the individual is to serve. The common principle of division of labor will attend to that. Naturally his first service will be rendered to the narrower and more pressing interest-groups to which he belongs. He will consider family, labor union, professional class, birth caste, re- ligious or philosophical sect, and so forth before he rises to the height of caring for the higher integration of which these are but fragments. His chief service to these groups will be to lead them to feel their own limitations and to seek a more \ital and organic unity with other groups. Little by little his own vision should broaden, and theirs; in time he should be able to compass in his imagination and in his sympathy that great Being, Humanity, which according to Comte is the only real individual. There is no need for sentimentality here; in- deed there is not room for it. There is no sense of mar- tyrdom, but instead an opportunity to demonstrate that probably there is economic and sociological truth in the profound sentiment uttered by Jesus that he who loseth his life shall find it. He who strives to enlarge his con- cept of life by renouncing the petty cultivating of his fondly perfumed ego will arrive at a sense of life and power undreamed-of and abiding. As a matter of fact most of the programs of recent times bear the stamp of this philosophy. Socialism is the most avowed example. Socialism is right in its reaction against that species of individualism which has resulted in what it calls the anarchy of modern industry. The wisest socialists, least of all people, want slavery, dead levelism, or the extinction of personality. They want to clear the ground of the material hindrances to the development of a really adequate personality.N They seek for a voluntary and contributive type of association which will look to the common good and joy in it. Hence the socialist aims at precisely the same target as his 36 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK individualist brother. But he is on somewhat surer ground; for he franlvly accepts the social definition of the individual, and he recognizes the necessity of having some organized power to review social survival values. The chief objections to socialism are, it seems to me, its methodology of class struggle, and its too rigid concept of sharply distinct classes. The theory of class struggle is a too easy excuse for blind fury and destructive vio- lence. Worse than that, it is looking at the whole past history of mankind with a blind eye. For humanity, human nature, man as we know him, is the creation of good will, teamwork, federation, yes, love. Mere struggle or hate or dissension never created anything. Moreover, society is not a set of pigeonholes or water- tight compartments, but a cross web of infinitely fine strands of interest. Classes cut across classes, form, break down, and form again. The failure of general strikes illustrates how classes do not cohere. I can see no prospect for social reform through socialism unless sociahsts focus their efforts more and more consistently upon education in dynamic morality and in administra- tive abihty, That is to say, the sociahsm of Wells and Sidney Webb holds more of promise than that of the Marxists. Progressivism stood somewhat within the pale of such revisionist socialists as Bernstein, who admit reform measures while waiting for full cormnunity assumption of the means of production. Whether it is dead beyond resurrection as a separate political party or not, it has left already on contemporary thought an indelible pro- test against economic individualism of the militant type. Paradoxical as it sounds. President Wilson's New In- dividualism was genuinely socialistic, at least to the extent that it aimed to control big business in the inter- ests of the smaller producer, by curbing not its social but its individualistic tendencies. It sought to general- THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT 37 he opportunity, not by laissezfaire but by more effective social control. The war has temporarily at least com- mitted the government to a much more rigorous regime of control. But should political leaders attempt to re- vive ante-bellum kid-glove methods of social control over industry they will probably fail and their failure will simply strengthen the socialist in his rejection of all mere temporizings with militant self-interest. Finally, of philosophic individualism itself we may venture to conclude that it is simply the transition stage between the instinctive sociality of primitive men and the rational self-subordination of citizens of the City of God. That degree of social perception will mean, let us recognize frankly, the elimination of the social worker, because men will have ceased to exploit each other and will have been educated to spontaneous service. It will mean the passing of our clumsy organizations and in- stitutions for human welfare. In their place — who knows — we may be able to establish, "Without edifices or rules or any argument, The Institution of the dear love of comrades." CHAPTER III RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM Plunged as we have been in the midst of wars and rumors of wars, where the very foundations of existing law and order, to say nothing of the whole great struc- ture of what we have been calling the civilized world, seemed to be toppling, it may seem a vain hope to talk of social reform. Surely the appearances are against the prophet. But prophets were always the servants of lost causes. We may comfort ourselves with the hope that humanity has second wind, perhaps even tenth and hundredth winds. There is hope, too, in the fact that all of the straws are blowing in the direction of generally accepting the modern trend of social reform as distinctly good poHcy in terms of national strength. Hence, in spite of the fears of some social workers that the war is going to leave the whole world in such a state of moral and economic bankruptcy that it will be impossible to find a leader with liberal inclinations or a cent for financ- ing schemes of social improvement, it is possible to be- lieve that after the nightmare is over statesmen and business men and all good citizens will find that the sur- est and speediest road to reconstruction of social health and prosperity is along the paths being traced out by \ the more clear-sighted of those much abused friends of hu- \ manity called the progressives, the liberals, the reformers. Professor Sumner used to reduce the whole business of social reform to terms something like this: A and B get together and decide what C shall do for D. And there is no denying that a lot of half-baked "uplift," particularly 38 RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 39 of the sentimental or ''tag-day " type, does fit Sumner's formula admirably. But the social reform to which I want to direct attention is of a somewhat different stripe. To be sure it is A and B getting together to do something for D. But its fundamental purpose is not to throw D perpetually upon the charity of C, but, so far as it is possible, to create a type of society in which D can look after himself. In other words, the dominant note in social reform to-day is not some petty messing about trying to give this particular D a little bit of medi- cine, that D a bit of good advice, and a million other D's bundle days or free soup and ten-cent lodging houses. It is trying to stop or at least to slow up the manufacture of D's. We may call this trend, perhaps, the preventive phase of social policy. Now, of course, we must be reasonable. Social re- formers are not trying to make the sun rise in the West nor to rule winter out of the year's calendar. They are trying to keep within range of the humanly possible. But right here we must remember that some of us have a larger dose of faith than other people. And some folks are able to see farther and more clearly than their neigh- bors. Consequently even the modest outline of what I conceive that people of social vision believe to-day may seem to the myopic Faint Hearts utter hallucination. But remember this, every accepted institution with all its show of immemorial solidity was once but a dream. When one turns to the field of modern so-called good works, the charitable agencies, the societies for promot- ing legislation, the Pro-thises and the Anti-thats, he al- most throws up his hands in despair at the prospect of attempting to get any clew to an orderly analysis of the welter. But a close study of those agencies and those social forces that are really counting for something in the noisy loom of modem welfare work brings into prom- inence at least three very clearly defined tendencies or lines of action. 40 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK II The first of these hits one squarely between the eyes wherever he turns. It is the fact that we live in an age of more or less constructive criticism, based upon the beginning at least of scientific research. Gossip credits a United States senator with observing recently that pontics is becoming more difficult every year. People formerly were contented with the torchlight procession, the band, and the campaign quartet; the speech was the merest incident; nobody was expected to pay any atten- tion to it. ''But now," he says, "things have changed, and I have to be careful what I say!" Constituencies are becoming somewhat more alert. Taking this tend- ency at its best, let us say that the preliminary to any really valid social reconstruction is critical discussion. I do not mean, obviously enough, mere venting of spite or venom; I do not mean incendiarism; I do not mean preaching of violent revolution; I do not mean the atti- tude that whatever is is wrong; nor that type of Mes- sianic conceit which sees in itself the center and circum- ference of rightness. To one such a local wit recently voted a heraldic seal inscribed to So-and-So, Esquire, rampant, above the remainder of Minneapolis dormant! I mean the tendency to accept the principle that things change, and that the only way to transmute mere change into rational betterment is to get the facts, ponder over them, discuss them, and extract, if possible, some hint as to appropriate policy. Such an attitude commits us clearly to accepting the three canons of profitable criticism. First, it must be sin- cere, not mere notoriety seeking nor general grouchiness nor emotional explosion. Next, it must be seasonable and timely. The crisis of war or other social cata- clysms which require speedy and unhampered admin- istrative activity must set aside temporarily some of the normal privileges of men, including the unlimited right RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 41 of discussion. President Wilson stated this principle very clearly in his letter to Max Eastman a few months after our entry into the war, by saying: "I think that a time of war must be regarded as wholly exceptional and that it is legitimate to regard things which would in ordinary circumstances be innocent as very dangerous to the public welfare." Here, of course, we strike bottom on the problem of "rights" analyzed in a preceding chapter. The third canon of criticism requires that it be constructive; that is, based on acquaintance with facts, probity, and a sense of perspective. Mark this, facts, like rights, are only relative, never absolute, and only take on meaning when arranged with reference to other facts. This is the snare of amateur statistics which must have prompted Mark Twain's advice to "get your facts first; then you can distort 'em as much as you please." Granting these rules of the game, what is the proper attitude toward social criticism? The standpatter says, of course, that talk is cheap. Now talk is cheap, far cheaper than deputy sheriffs or Uhlans. Our remote ancestors were direct actionists; they bothered little about discussion. If things were not as they ought to be, the big club or the battle-ax was trotted out to break the cake of custom by the simple method of break- ing heads. Nature seems to have foreseen this method of social reform by providing thicker skulls for our primi- tive forbears. But the whole trend of human history has been to substitute for force some form of more nearly rational persuasion. Slips occur, and parleying breaks down, but the principle remains. To some minds it is hazardous to attempt to dissolve the cake of custom or the established order by such in- direct methods. To such minds there is always some- thing hauntingly dangerous in loosing the human tongue. Teachers still lose their jobs because they allow their students to analyze the institutions under which we live. 42 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK It is still risky to discuss the family or private property or the tariff or the antiquity of man or comparative re- ligion. Such things are safe enough so long as they are kept as dead specimens in a museum. But to hint that they are live issues sends a thrill of horror up the spines of our Brother Fearfuls. Such minds prefer to step gin- gerly along Problem Street refusing to look either to the right or to the left, hoping and praying only that if the volcano of denunciation and revolution must break out it will at least be after they are safely out of harm's way. But the more robust type of mind is not afraid to face things squarely, and to say that all is not well with the institution of the family, that the whole form and con- tent of family life may change immensely for the better, that religion still wears the unclean rags of earlier ma- terialism and superstition, that private property is not nearly so sacred as supreme courts have thought, that private business is not private property but public trust, that with all our American assurance we are provincial and at least a generation behind warring Europe in many of the essential arts of life. Mind you, the men and wo- men who say such uncomplimentary things about our country, our times, our institutions, are not merely nor exclusively anarchists, nor socialists, nor squint-eyed radi- cals. They are the hundreds of thousands of studentswho pass through high school and college; they are the nearly four million members of the American Federation of Labor; they are captains of business like Mr. George W. Perkins who tells us that our thinking is so wrong and our business methods so bad that no peace between capital and labor is possible until we change our ways ; or bankers like Mr. F. W. Vanderlip who accuses American business men of being socially shortsighted because they are illit- erate in economics; they are you and I, sober thinking conservatives who daily challenge the world to answer for its wrongheadedness. We are all critics; that is, all of us who are not mere RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 43 vegetables or cows. The desperately poor do not crit- icise. They simply feel miserable. Criticism, rational criticism in particular, requires courage and the energy that comes from sufficient food, clothing, shelter, leisure, and education. Perhaps the most valuable product of three centuries of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, one century of free public schools, and fifty years of positive science and public libraries is just this ability to look about with a certain amount of critical judgment. I do not say that there is not a vast amount of mere carping and fault finding and misjudging — even the best of coal leaves some ash. But the point is that the test of social as well as individual life is the abihty to see a problem and to solve it; and the ability to see a problem is fundamentally an exercise in critical judg- ment. Big business men are being taught to meet this criti- cal attitude with the arts of prestige. A well-known American publicity man addressing a group of railway officials declared that success in solving the railroad ques- tion rests upon the art of getting believed in, as Henry VIII and William HohenzoUern were able to get their people so to believe in them that their contented sub- jects were glad to have them do whatever they desired. Running the gantlet of organized criticism is recog- nized as a serious matter, and rightly so. The method, says the publicity man, is to make the pubUc believe it is contented. Contented cows do not criticise but give rich milk ! We are told to judge not lest we be judged. That sim- ply means we are to know the facts. Judgment or the critical attitude does not mean condemnation. Know your community, know your city, survey, cast up your social balance sheet: these are the day's slogans. This is what I mean by the tendency to constructive criticism. Savages when asked why they do certain things simply say, "We have always done them so, our fathers before 44 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK US did likewise. Therefore what is is right." The savage you see, is the arch standpatter. But the modern social reformer refuses membership in the old tribe. For him the best is yet to be. Hence he makes investigations, he prepares statistics, he studies wages, housing, indus- trial accident, child labor, and all the rest of it. He pub- lishes reports. He founds journals hke the The Survey, The New Republic, The National Child Labor Bulletin, Housing Betterment, The American Labor Legislation Re- view, and a dozen others. The government wakes up and adds its quota of ammunition to the discussion, with cen- sus reports, bulletins on wages, industrial hygiene, cost of Hving, infant welfare, child labor, homes for working folk. These are the multiple plows which are being driven daily through the friable soil of our minds, that same soil which but a few generations ago would have re- quired dynamite to break it up for the sowing process. Let meetings of protest multiply, then; let nothing be done to hinder the freest expression of the right to assem- ble and voice approval or grievance, of course within the three canons already laid down as to legitimate and prof- itable criticism; let the printing presses groan and the postman stagger with the multitude of pamphlets and journals of social discussion. If, for example, Comstock- ery and the police or the church attempt to suppress de- cent discussion of such a vital issue as birth control, we may be sure it will be indecently distorted in the press or elsewhere. Prudery invokes prosecutions against vari- ous sorts of well-meant inanity, but inanity persecuted assumes the cloak of wisdom. The crank is not going to be any less cranky if you bottle him up. Let him uncork ere he burst. Meanwhile the men and women of social vision will see to it that nothing is done in a comer, and upon the basis of the facts that they dig out of the cor- ners and elsewhere, we may hope to have some hints of a better type of social structure. This, then, is what I mean by the strong trend toward RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 45 constructive criticism as a method of social reform. And despite much vapidity and muckraking and so-called "raids on prosperity," the trend is unmistakably sound, valuable, and productive. If I were to summarize the value to social reform of this social criticism I should say that it lies in making our social policy the result of care- fully thought-out convictions and not a hit-or-miss series of scared concessions to stave off revolt. Inci- dentally it waters the springs of that real democracy for which we went forth to battle. in The second unmistakable trend in modem social re- form is the tendency toward collective control over all the conditions of community life. From the legal stand- point we might call this trend the rapid extension of the police power of the State. Clearly this cannot mean in- creasing the number of professional policemen, sheriffs, or militia. So far as I know there is no tendency to in- crease the negative side of police work. Clubs and hand- cuffs are even less in evidence than they were a genera- tion ago. It is the increase of positive policing which is so pronounced. It is the use of policemen as sanitary inspectors or safety devices that we have to notice. For example, in New York policemen have been directed to protect socialist meetings from interference and disturb- sances intead of dispersing them by clubs and riding them down. And not long ago, they were used as in- vestigators of unemployment. But police power means far more than policemen. The police power or "public polity power" of the State means the general-welfare function of the State. Our Constitution laid upon this government a century and a quarter ago the duty of promoting the general welfare. But government was somewhat slow in grasping the meaning of this duty. It was concerned chiefly with protecting us from foreign 46 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK danger and from violence or disruption from within. Its general attitude was to keep hands off until trouble ac- tually threatened. But a distinct change of attitude is now observed. The sum of state duty is not now merely to avoid trouble but to "secure and promote the public welfare." The government is not the passive policeman, but the active welfare worker. It actually initiates good works instead of merely reviewing the acts of humanity 's well-wishers. It does not wait until disputes arise be- tween industrial factions, but now tends to assume col- lective control over the industrial conditions which breed disputes. In short, its function is more and more clearly preventive and constructive. Let me illustrate. For the first century of our national life, public author- ity permitted an almost absolutely unrestricted exploita- tion of the country's natural resources in land, timber, water, minerals. It was the era of expansion and con- quest of a rude, untamed, but marvelously rich wilder- ness. Incredible fortunes were amassed. But inciden- tally incredible wastefulness and improvidence grew before our eyes. At last the idea burst upon us that the principle of unlimited exploitation, of "after us the del- uge," was unsound social policy, and the government interfered. Now comes the policy of national conserva- tion of natural resources. Now the government sets aside national reserves of forest and mineral lands, assumes control over sources of natural water power, reclaims desert land or swamp, protects wild game, and the like. Community control over what is regarded as the community heritage is now definitely, though be- latedly, accepted as a business principle. Not very long ago we read a statement from Judge Gary of the United States Steel Corporation to the effect that " It is rapidly dawning upon the clearest thinking of our citizens that there is still a higher kind of efficiency than that of com- petitive individualism; namely, the efficiency of prop- erly devised and safeguarded cooperation." Notice, in RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 47 passing, that it is at least a half turn in a gradual revo- lution in the idea of private property. This is the posi- tive side of it. Whatever else the great war may accom- plish it is sure to emphasize this positive principle in the process of social reconstruction. The negative appears in the cumulative tendency to suppress things and trades considered harmful to health and efficiency or abhorrent to decency. Hence the nation-wide wave of prohibition, the Federal Food and Drugs Act, the Mann Act pro- hibiting the White Slave trade, and the pretty general move to suppress commercialized vice. Another phase of the same tendency appears in the world-wide drift toward public ownership of the great public utilities — transportation, light, heat, power, min- erals. Government ownership in Alaska and the mu- nicipal ownership of many utilities are salient examples. The wide range of these new forms of pubhc ownership is disconcerting to the older generation. Many Ameri- can cities now own their own lighting, heat, and water plants, telephones, street cars, street-paving plants, electrical supply stores, ice and cold-storage plants, ferries, theaters, abattoirs, markets, and coal yards be- side their regular education, health, and recreational equipment. You notice I called the tendency a drift. By that I meant to say that whether it is a good tendency or a bad tendency it is too early to judge. But the ten- dency itself is undeniable. It may be that the people have not fully counted the costs. It may be that the wastes and the inefficiency will be great. But the drift has set in just the same. Wholesale interference of government in business in the European War has shown that the thing is possible and even immensely practicable even in such strongholds of individualism and suspicion of govern- mental initiative as England. And we may be sure that the lesson will not be lost to the American people. In- deed many great utihty corporations are silently pre- paring for der Tag. Many of them will make no serious 48 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK protest; many will welcome public ownership as a relief from public regulation; some are actually abetting the move. This may be State Socialism, but whatever the name, it is with us; and we may be pretty sure that the movement will not stop with the utilities we have men- tioned. Other basic utilities covering food, housing, leisure may easily follow. And all under the principle of positive police power in the service of public welfare. Meanwhile, both the very momentum of the current itself and the examples of European countries borne in upon us by the stress of the war speed up the rate of public assumption of control. The Non-Partisan League of the upper Mississippi Valley openly demands not merely state but federal ownership of grain elevators and other marketing agencies. Massachusetts gravely votes on a constitutional amendment permitting cities and towns to buy and sell necessities of life for the ben- efit of their citizens. New Jersey acts somewhat sim- ilarly. In California the state market commission began to fix maximum prices of fruit, fish, and other products at least a year before the federal food administration got under way, and the courts by inference have sus- tained its exercise of power. The sLxty-fourth Congress appropriated $50,000,000 for a government controlled merchant marine, $11,000,000, for a government armor- plate factory, and many more millions for good roads and land reclamation. It becomes increasingly apparent that the only water-power legislation which this country will tolerate must include rigorously guarded provisions for federal control and easy "recapture" of rights leased to private companies. The governments, both state and national, are waking up to a new concept of their duty in the field of housing, town planning, and small holdings of land. The federal Congress appropriated at least $100,000,000 for housing munition workers. Massa- chusetts by constitutional amendment permits building, with public funds, homes for workers to be sold at cost. RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 49 The State of California is launching a small farms experi- ment of unusual interest. And in general it may be said that the courts are becoming more and more liberal in their recognition of community over individual rights in such matters as zoning, excess condemnation, or nui- sances. Quite apart from the war, strong demands have been going up from conservative quarters for federal control or ownership or any other method by which the anthracite coal monopoly might be broken up. And we have moved so far toward federalizing the railroads that there is scant likelihood of our ever going bacji to the old and wasteful system of private exploitation. Whether telephones, cables, and telegraphs follow is merely a matter of expediency about which it is not easy to stir up much feverish emotion. More straws indicating the force and direction of the current will appear in a later chapter. Take another illustration. The police power of the State provides the legal basis for labor legislation. All that mass of law and court decisions relating to wages, hours of labor, child labor, accident compensation and women's work which has been piling up recently relates back to the primary constitutional provision about pub- lic welfare. But you may ask, as many others have been asking, " Who is the public? Are labor unions, the unem- ployed, women and children the public? Isn't the owner of property or the employer also the public? " Quite so. But the point is, that our whole American political and social system is based upon industrial property right, as President Hadley shows. Our federal govern- ment and our Constitution are distinctly creations by and in behalf of a propertied class. Private property has been the guide to legislation and court decisions. Labor has been conceived of only in terms of its attitude to property. Indeed because laboring people have been looked upon as potentially equal to other property hold- ers before the law, labor has usually been the defendant 50 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK in court actions. But recently an urgent attempt has been made to mark off the rights of the individual as against those of property. "Where the acquisition of property is measurably within the reach of all there can be no conflict between property rights and individual rights. But since the Civil War there has been develop- ing in this country a larger and larger class to whom the acquisition of even a small amount of property is less and less possible. And at the same time there have appeared large accumulations of property in the hands of a small number of persons. Thus has arisen a conflict between property rights and individual rights." Thus writes Professor W. F. Dodd, one of America's ablest students of the constitutional aspects of social legislation. About the facts there can no longer be any reasonable question. In the last twenty-five years, several author- itative studies have been made of the distribution of wealth and income in the United States. Spahr, Brooks, Hunter, Rubinow, and most recently Professor King have demonstrated the gross inequalities in the incidence of property and income. I suppose it is perfectly safe to say that two-thirds of our total population are wage workers not wholly without property, but at least in- considerable from the standpoint of fixed capital; about one-fifth are farmers and the remaining one-seventh, capitalists, small traders, and members of the professional class. It is well within the truth to say that somewhat less than one-half of all our people are propertyless, at least from the standpoint that they do not possess enough to benefit either by the discipline of ownership or the social stability which property confers; nor are they insured against the vicissitudes of the industrial system. It is for this reason that the disinherited, the property- less, the weaker classes have become of such concern to the police power of the State, and this is why the interests of owners of large property as such must give way to the broader interests of society. "The individual, RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 5 1 whether with or without property, is the object of the new social and industrial legislation," says Dodd; not in the sense of some absolute individual, but in the sense of a vital part of an organic whole. It is apparent to such conservative thinkers as President Hadley that whether we like it or not the current is flowing toward the protec- tion of the weaker and that there can be no permanent turning back. We are committed to a policy of protec- tion, protection of our nation's human resources, for that, in short, is what the whole thing amounts to. That is why courts, notably the United States Supreme Court, are coming more and more to consider not narrow legal technicalities but broad social poHcies in labor decisions; that is why they no longer ask themselves, is some tradi- tional theory of free contract contravened, but are the health, morality, and efficiency of workers at stake? For example, the courts gave respectful attention to the great briefs of Mr. Brandeis not because they referred to aged and respectable laws, but because they appealed to facts of psychology, of physiolog}', of economics, of sociology, of race welfare. And in general it may be held that the ac- ceptance of these facts, the frank recognition of the in- equality of bargaining power between employee and em- ployer, is the point of departure for most labor legislation, notwithstanding the equally frank and clear perception that such an attitude and such legislation is undeniably and necessarily class legislation. The Supreme Court gave this idea classic expression in its famous doctrine of "reasonable classification" as laid down in the case of Holden v. Hardy in 1898. Said the court: "It is by recognizing this inequality of bar- gaining power, coupled with a public purpose, that the courts pass over, in any particular case, from the theory of class legislation to the theory of reasonable classifica- tion. The two are identical in one respect; all classifica- tion is class legislation, but the kind of class legislation which the courts condemn is that which they consider 52 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK to be 'unreasonable' classification. Class legislation benefits or burdens one class against others where there is no real inequality or no public benefit. ' Reasonable ' classification benefits or burdens a class where there is real inequality to be overcome and a public benefit to be attained. That which is class legislation at one time may become reasonable classification at a later time, if the court perceives that what it once thought was equal- ity is really inequality, and what it once thought was merely private benefit is also public benefit." This is why laws and court decisions multiply, fixing certain minimums of wages, hours of labor, and working conditions. There is, for example, a well-defmed ten- dency to establish minimum wages by law. Primarily the laws apply to women, but there is no real reason why they should not be extended to men. Modern industry is so complex and cost-accounting systems so imperfect that it is all but impossible to give exact mean- ing to the phrase, "the product of one's own labor" as it could be given under the old handicraft system where a single worker turned out a complete article. Economic theory can fix certain limits, but within these there is a certain twilight zone in which law or bargaining or both must operate and decide. Otherwise, as Chief Justice White inferred in upholding the Adamson law in 19 17, we should be reduced to a position of stalemate in which a void or rather a state of anarchy existed by virtue of the fact that private right had destroyed public right. Hence in terms of general social policy we might say that minimum wage reform is an attempt, not to subsidize the inefficient but to make up the "social deficit be- tween wages and life." It must be recognized, moreover, that a good deal of real wage legislation goes on under other names. I mean that there is even in the United States a notable tendency toward what might be called "national distribution" or indirect subventions to private income in the forms of RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 53 vocational education, recreation (playgrounds, bathing beaches, pubUc baths, parks, community centers, etc.), insurance, pensions, to supplement industrial distribu- tion in the form of wages. Not all these moves have so far demonstrated their unqualilied right to be. The matter of old-age pensions, for example, is obviously a makeshift sort of measure, a confession that sickness, vocational unpreparedness, speeding up of industry, imcompensated accident, low wages, thriftlessness, and other untoward conditions have been allowed to produce a dependent and helpless old age. But on the whole we shall have to be prepared for a considerable extension of police power in these forms of public welfare. In this connection we might point out the strong trend toward public as against private relief work ; or, if you prefer, the tendency to supplant private charity with public relief. The whirlwind of mothers' pension legislation and the extension of public supervision over private charities are clear illustrations. Along the same line is the tendency to regulate hours of labor. Here organized labor itself has taken the lead and set as a general standard an eight-hour day. How far short of that ideal we have fallen is apparent to anybody living in any great industrial center where labor unions have been crushed, as in the Pittsburgh district, or where areas have been given over to big unregulated production in basic industries. It may be that the hours of men's labor have to be left to bargaining by strikes and the other arms of industrial conflict, or to the gradual pene- tration into the thick skulls of captains of industry that a ten-hour or twelve-hour day is, generally speaking, terribly wasteful both in the short run and the long run. Meanwhile, however, public control has extended itself over the hours of women and children, with night work prohibited. The average minimum child-labor age, taking the country as a whole, is approximately fourteen years. But there is a distinct tendency to con- 54 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK sider sixteen as the normal school period, and with the development of vocational education, to extend the pe- riod of half-time work three or four years longer by means of continuation schools. The legislatures and courts, under the guise of caring for posterity, have constituted women and children a favored class. Just as soon as they wake up officially to the fact that fathers are equally necessary to posterity we may rest assured that what is sauce for the goose will be recognized as sauce for the gander, and more definite protection will be given to men with regard to their working day. Some legislation has recognized also the advisability of one day's rest in seven. And organized labor in general approves the idea, but refuses to go on record in favor of any one particular day of the seven. One of the most remarkable and rapid extensions of police power has occurred within the last few years in the field of accident and sickness prevention, not only among factory or railway workers, but throughout the whole so- cial body. Safety First, Play Safe, Be Careful, Walk Right, Don't Spit, Swat the Fly, Bat the Rat, and sim- ilar slogans greet us where'er we walk. And rightly so. All such efforts to conserve the lives and health of men, women and children, are based upon the sociological principle that we are all members one of another, that we are hopelessly bound together with bonds all but or- ganic, that as one person or group is disabled all the rest must suffer sympathetically. Another illustration. PubKc responsibility for unem- ployment is gradually being shouldered. The experiences of the winter of 19 14 waked us up as never before to the necessity of organizing industry and in particular the labor market so as to avoid the tremendous losses in money, in character and in industrial efficiency through intermittent employment. Both the federal and some state governments are coming to a realization that the job is so immense that perhaps only the welfare power of RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 55 the State can handle it. Of course for a long time we have had at least in name public employment bureaus. But the less said about them the better. The recent tend- ency has been for the federal government to extend this bureau service, to relate reclamation and conservation projects and other forms of public works to periods of depression in ordinary industry. There is even talk of following European examples by introducing some form of unemployment insurance; Massachusetts is actually considering a bill for this purpose. Demobilization has aggravated the need for stabilizing employment and for forcing extensions of pubhc service in this direction. There is every prospect of certain extensions of the idea of public insurance against sickness and industrial disease. So far the American mind has resented the idea of compulsory insurance, and our constitutions, federal and state, as they now stand, back up this attitude of mind. But Wisconsin has already gone into the business of public life insurance; California and other States are writing industrial insurance; the federal government set a revolutionary pace with its military and naval insurance law of 19 17; and the great private life-insurance compan- ies are beginning to take heed of the competition and to mend their ways. They are much in the same position as the utility corporations and have had the same warning sounded in their ears. The growing concept that private property is a public trust may be expected to attain such strength that the law, the constitutions, and the courts will become more favorably disposed toward the idea of compulsory insurance for health. If I am compelled to give of my time and my money to keep my sidewalk clean or to send my children to school, why should I re- fuse to contribute for insurance, particularly when one of the surest results of that insurance policy will be to re- move some of the conditions which threaten my health and the health of my fellow citizens? This argument is implicit in the insurance movement, and is almost cer- 56 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK tain to catch the public mind in time. If we could only devise some word less odious than compulsory, the way would be sure and quick. This is just as true of compul- sory vocational education as of insurance. If we could do the business without the adjective, in one generation or sooner custom would accept the practice and we should feel the weight of insurance scarcely more than we feel the weight of the atmosphere. In all of these extensions of public-welfare power must be recognized certain ideas somewhat disruptive to the nice old tidy arrangement of our governmental house. Somehow or other the kitchen threatens the sovereignty of the parlor or bedroom; and there is danger that the coachman may sometimes install himself as butler or cook. The old fetish of absolute separation of the powers of government is assailed, at least by impUcation. Both courts and legislatures are still somewhat jealous over relinquishing to administrative agencies the powers of legislation and judgment on matters of detail. But the tendency is undoubtedly to enlarge the scope of admin- istrative activity. State Boards of Control exercise many judicial and rule-making powers in pubhc charitable and correctional activities. They prescribe rules governing state institutions, adjudge disputes between counties on matters of responsibility for the poor, etc. Minimum Wage Boards and Industrial Welfare Commissions have been given authority to frame and prescribe minimum wages and detailed standards of working conditions, for example, in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the three Pacific States. This means both a process of judgment, the deter- mination of fact by accurate and reasonable investigative methods, and detailed legislation, the fixing of standards and rules based on those judicial findings, within the gen- eral legislation creating such boards or commissions. If at any future time the objections to this delegation of authority are renewed on constitutional grounds and are sustained by the United States Supreme Court it will RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 57 be possible still to forestall such objections by a definite constitutional amendment similar to that passed by California in 19 14 expressly permitting it. That this redistribution of governmental powers is inevitable appears in an expUcit statement made by the highest court of Minnesota in the case of State ex. rel. John F. Kelly v. Henry Wolfer, involving the power of the Board of Control to transfer a prisoner from one penal institution to another. The court held that the newer concept of punishment as reformative treatment "of necessity involves an extension of the administrative side of the penal system, and imperatively demands greater freedom and wider powers on the part of the executive and administrative officers. . . The changes in the conceptions of * punishment' and of sentence for crime . . . necessarily require that the constitutional division of the government into three departments should receive, so far as the question here under con- sideration is concerned, a more liberal construction than might have been logically possible when this provision was inserted in the first American Constitution. . . Con- stitutions are not made for existing conditions, nor in the view that the state of society will not advance or im- prove, but for future emergencies and conditions, and their terms and provisions are constantly expanded and enlarged by construction to meet the advancing and improving affairs of men." Moreover, historically, it is perfectly possible to prove that the executive branch of government is usually the dynamic agent, and that if government contributes anything at all to social progress it is through wise and foreward reaching administration. Let me summarize here briefly the chief aspects of the trend toward collective control. They are, first, the tend- ency to substitute a sense of unnecessary waste and a desire to conserve social resources for the older attitude of condescending pity and the thrill of horror over the grim ways of an inscrutable Providence. Second, the 58 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK tendency toward public ownership of basic public util- ities. Third, the tendency to magnify the interests of persons against those of property. Fourth, the fixing of minimum standards of wages, hours, health, and safety in industry. Fifth, public responsibility for insuring the education, health, life, and employment of all citizens. And all of these may be considered not as dangerous and illegal innovations, but as extensions of the fundamental and inherent police power of the State. Incidentally you can see the close bearing which these factors have upon the general problem of dependency and crime, particu- larly upon their reduction or elimination. IV The third path along which social reform has been moving comes as the necessary result of the extension of public control. It is the tendency to recognize the expert and real civil service in public administration. As Pres- dent Hadley says, "Demand for state control of indus- try and for trained civil service must go hand in hand." One would not of course hazard a reputation for con- servative statement by saying that we had attained already the desired goal of administrative honesty or efficiency in the public service. Governmental dry rot and political corruption are not yet quite stamped out. But remember I am speaking not of accomplished facts but of general tendencies. Hence I can safely say that there is a distinct move in the direction of better public administration. Americans are slowly giving up their inherited prejudice against the expert. They may still consider that they are the equal, politically and socially, of the expert, but they are willing in many instances to admit that he knows his special business better than they do. The success of such men as Goethals and Gorgas with the Panama Canal, the introduction of the City Manager into many American city governments, the RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 59 establishment of Bureaus of Municipal Research and of Legislative Reference, federal and state, have done much to fix in the public mind the desirability of turning ex- pert work over to expert hands. President Wilson 's war administration has stamped the principle with almost epoch-making authority. The American public will not soon nor easily forget that men like Hoover, Vanderlip, Davidson, Edison, Baruch, and Rosenwald left their busi- ness at the country's call and placed their expert ability at its service. The reaction upon standards of adminis- tration cannot fail to be enormously favorable. Heretofore, American government has suffered far less from sheer dishonesty than from the general obses- sion that every American was a Jack-of-all-trades and consequently was fitted to turn his hand to anything from prison warden or labor commissioner to secretary of state or ambassador to the Court of St. James. Hence the tendency to extend governmental control over wider social areas, particularly as accelerated by the war, must carry with it an extension of means for training expert public servants in the problems of concrete administra- tion, along with the demand for better means of checking up the honesty of public officials. Unless the ebb tide of war leaves a deposit of a leisured expert governing bureaucracy which refuses to return to its shops and its factories, men must be educated to fill their places. Such schemes, therefore, as the University Training Schools for Public Service proposed by certain American political scientists, economists and sociologists are welcomed as harbingers of a higher level of goverimiental efl&ciency. And the further fact that several universities have train- ing schools for social and civic work, business adminis- tration, and consular service adds to our hope that gov- ernment may became a real vocation. It is at this point that the path of constructive criticism joins that of expert service. Sidney Webb, the great English Fabian, discovered long ago that mere 6o THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK agitation for social change would accomplish little or nothing except the ultimate destruction of the agitator unless it were coupled up with definite training in ad- ministration. Hence the founding of the London School of Economic and Political Science and the entrance of many young liberals and socialists into government employ. But, finally, the expert leader can do little without the support of an intelligent public, able at least to compre- hend what the expert is driving at. That means at bot- tom trained, just, sound public opinion. How can we get it? We shall have in the long run to depend upon the public school. To be precise and perhaps a bit dogmatic we shall have to socialize more completely the public schools. I do not mean that we shall turn them into factories or shops, nor make them over into debating societies for the discussion of social problems. But we should organize them — teachers, students, curriculum — in such fashion that the product of the public school shall at least know how to recognize a social problem without being knocked on the head, and shall have some knowledge about how to form an intelligent opinion upon public affairs. We have made a beginning by introduc- ing economic and sociological subjects into some high schools. But that is only a feeble and sporadic effort. We must extend the movement to include every high school. We need not stop with the bare adding of such subjects to the curriculum. Why should not every sub- ject, whether mathematics or language or geography or history, be given a social orientation, both in content and method of intruction? And why wait till the high school, which so far is closed to nine-tenths of American youth? I stand squarely for introducing the child to social prob- lems the minute he enters the receiving class in the ele- mentary school. North Dakota has already worked out a sort of syllabus for this kind of teaching. What this frontier State has done every State and every school RECENT TENDENCIES IN SOCIAL REFORM 6 1 must do if the paths which social vision has marked out as the paths of progress are actually to lead to a higher social level and not into the morass of futile palavering. These three lines of tendency all represent, at their best, a distinct gain in the direction of putting public affairs upon a more nearly scientific basis. Criticism to become really constructive must ground itself upon the facts elicited by scientific investigation; and this seems to be what is actually happening as the result of new methods of social research and pubHcity. Social control and community welfare through exercise of the police power have been successful just in so far as they con- formed to scientific fact on ihe one hand and took on the character of broad, flexible, scientific experiment on the other. They have failed in so far as they have played traitor to the scientific spirit and prostituted themselves to the doctrinaire. The tendency toward utilizing trained and expert service in community affairs is a triumph for the scientific spirit and the methods of science. It is perfectly clear, too, that if social workers are to be dependable partners in the approaching social reorganization which these lines of tendency plainly suggest they must not only equip themselves with some such philosophy as we have already sketched out, but must also catch the spirit and the outlook of science in every aspect of their craft. It behooves us, therefore, to examine more closely the strands of relationship be- tween science and social work. CHAPTER IV THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK Science and the Scientific Spirit are big words. Be- cause they are so pregnant and talismanic, they must be used with caution. Social work, likewise, has entered the popular vocabulary of key phrases, and apparently covers a multitude of both sins and virtues. Its very vagueness prompts the attempt to couple it with the concept, science, in the effort to determine whether it is a mere wraith or a good, sound structure of flesh and bone. Even the most superficial acquaintance with much of what passes for social work leaves one with such a taste in his mouth that he turns almost instinctively away and is ready to catch at any phrase which promises relief. "Science" promises such comfort and relief from loose thinking, looser talk, and the wasting of great reservoirs of valuable energy. It smacks of challenge and a trial of strength. In this chapter, borrowing an analogy from engineering, I propose to apply the concept of science and scientific method to test the "strength of materials " in what we commonly call social work. That it is worth while you may infer from the fact that the number of social workers, professional and amateur, has grown prodigiously in the last ten years, and con- tinues to grow apace. New York City alone claims a force of four thousand paid social workers. London school authorities not long ago issued a call for seven thousand volunteer school and home visitors. The American Red Cross asks for several regiments of Home Service workers for its Civilian Relief department and 62 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 63 has developed institutes for training them in twenty-five centers. There are some twoscore of social workers' clubs, under various names, in the United States. AH the broad-gauge colleges and universities, together with schools of philanthropy and social work, aim at turning out every year a new battalion of men and women de- voted to social work. What constitutes social work and a social worker cannot then be turned aside as a mere academic question. Social work as we know it to-day was born of a sense of responsibility to society. So ran the report of the Committee on Education for Social Work at a recent National Conference of Charities. But that statement does not bring us very far on the road to knowing what social work really is. Is it charity? Is it social reform? Is it professional doing good and earning one 's Hving by it? Is it doing for other people what they cannot do for themselves? Is it ''an effort to perfect social relation- ships" ? If you applied for membership in a Social Workers ' Club and gave any or all of these qualifications, would you be accepted? Nobody knows. At any rate, the definitions they imply are vague enough. If you turn, say to that great decennial encyclopedia, the United States Census, you will be plunged into even deeper darkness, for in it you will find social workers pigeonholed with such semiprofessional pursuits as ab- stractors, notaries, justices of the peace, fortune tellers, hypnotists, spiritualists, etc. (sic!), healers (except physicians and surgeons), officials of lodges, societies, etc., religious workers, keepers of penal institutions, theatrical owners, managers, and officials. Of course, from the standpoint of ethics, social work is simply responding to the urge of that conscience which W. K. Clifford called "the voice of Man within us, com- manding us to work for Man." And from the standpoint of sociological theory, all work is social because man is inexorably social to the core and must always work 64 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK for or with or against somebody else. He cannot work in a social vacuum. But all work is a sum of social pluses and minuses, when measured by its contribution to so- cial welfare. Some kinds of work may yield us zero or even less. For example: a notorious thief of Milan once said to Lombroso, "I do not rob; I merely take from the rich their superfluities." And a brigand chief said to his judges: "God has sent us on the earth to punish the avaricious and the rich. We are a kind of divine scourge." It is evident that these men were doing social work, but rather of the negative sort and certainly beyond the pale of common social approval.. Again, motherhood is fun- damental social work, but many minuses enter into it; many children would better have remained unborn, for they become social liabiHties in the shape of criminals and defectives. Scientific agriculture and invention in general are unquestionably forms of social work, in the sense that they contribute to the material basis upon which all social hfe on this planet must rest. But the invention may be turned to uses wholly destructive, hence may yield by-products fatal to human welfare. Dynamite may bore a railroad tunnel and blast the foun- dation pits for a temple or, dropped from a Zeppelin, rend in pieces innocent women and children. But what about giving Christmas baskets to the poor? Is that not nearer real social work? Take this case and see if you find any minuses: A family in a neighboring city received twelve baskets of food at the Christmas season. The Good Fellows or other well-wishers had done their work thoroughly. The head of the family threw up his job at once. About the first of the following February he went to the United Charities office and asked that the pleasant episode be repeated. This was social work, but it is an open question whether in such cases bombs are really much worse than baskets. None of these examples of social work satisfy. None are illuminating or convincing. But I still beHeve there THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 65 is such a thing. It must, however, be stated in broader terms. And it can be. A bulletin of the New York School of Philanthropy defines social work as "any form of persistent and deliberate effort to improve living or working conditions in the community, or to relieve, diminish, or prevent distress, whether due to weakness of character or to pressure of external circumstances." We might go a step further or add a touch of literary varnish, and say that social work ought to stand for organizing scientifically the forces, personal and material of a community in such a way as to eliminate waste and friction, and to raise progressively the capacity of every member for productivity, service, and joy in Hfe. But, you may say, that is simply applied or practical sociology. That, to my way of thinking, is precisely what it is; and that is why "social work" and the "scientific spirit" must always be linked in theory and practice. Hence the field of social work is broad, but at the same time may be pretty definitely laid out for purposes of planting and cultivating special crops. The three chief crops I find to be, first, the spread of socialized intelli- gence; second, alleviative and remedial work on behalf of the subnormal or handicapped members of the com- munity; third, organized prevention against adverse and depressive forces in the community. This does not mean that for each of these crops we must have a separate type of "social worker." Indeed, the opposite ought to be true. Every juvenile court judge, or visiting nurse, or friendly visitor should combine the three functions of education, relief, and prevention. But for purposes of concentration and economy of effort, a division of labor may be necessary. Yet such a division ought to leave room for each t3^e of worker to play into the other's hand. Those of us who are working to edu- cate the public to its social duty and to bring about peaceful readjustments in social institutions, need the information which only the worker with the imder dogs 66 IHE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK can give. And the friend of the under dogs needs the breadth of view begotten of contact with the worker engaged in removing adverse conditions through pre- ventive social legislation. And so on back and forth. II We may assume, then, with considerable assurance that social work not only is, but sets for itself a huge and intricate problem. Whether it is a fully fledged pro- fession or only a profession in the makmg is of no im- portance to this present discussion. The real point is that the scientific spirit is necessary to social work whether it is a real profession or only a go-between craft. The cat is now out of the bag, but where has she jumped? No matter, but the mere opening of the bag starts a throng of questions. Chief of these I find in my own mind to be: why do people want to do social work, particularly if it is so hard and so comprehensive? Is it, perhaps, as the cynically minded claim, because of the "supply of the unfortunate to exercise their virtue on"? Or because they "conceive service as a kind of exploitation of mental inferiority, and so find a moral satisfaction in the thought of the intellectual poor whom they will have with them alway"? Are we absolutely sure that this is cynicism, or may it not be genuine moral probing? Perhaps, how- ever, I had better put the question this way: How can you get people to do social work? Back of all true social work must stand the impulse to serve. But whence is it to come? It is natural, you say. I grant that some psychologists claim we all have an in- stinct for seeing others well off. That was what Clifford meant by "the voice of Man within us, commanding us to work for Man." But unfortunately there are other voices within us commanding us to steal from, and lie to, and exploit, and otherwise abuse our fellow men. Our instincts never run along a smooth, even road in one di- THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 67 rection. They cut across and jostle each other fiercely. Instinct can never be swallowed raw as an explanation of noble or even fairly decent human conduct. It must always be liberally salted with discipline and education before taking. Experience and training have shown men that some form of mutual service contributes to social and personal weU-being. The original instinct to serve, however, had to be brought out through a long process of holding the lid down on other rival instincts. Mere instinct and emo- tion are blind and unsafe guides to conduct. That is why so many of us land in the ditch with our benevolent schemes. That is why I am so suspicious of appeals to act on impulse. That is why I deplore such senti- mental calls as appeared in the press on February 29, 1 9 16. We were urged by the president of a group of benevolent women to gain a day. How? In her own words: "A chance will come to every one to do something charitable that day. Let us do as our first impulse tells us. For once let's not consult what we call our 'better judgment ' nor use 'scientific charity ' in what we do for others. Let's do more sunshine and less char- ity." Such talk is simply the call to "go on the loose." It is precisely the same psychological path that impels men to get drunk or to fly at each others' throats in war. Civilization is the result of the illuminated and disciplined will. There is no unerring instinct to do good. To de- pend upon mere feeling or impulse is to revert to nature, to eighteenth-century mythology, Rousseau, and the cult of the "happy savage." But if the impulse to serve is not instinctive, shall we say it must be religious? Is it not the dynamic side of faith? Recall that famous chapter on the nature and fruits of faith in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Abel and Abraham and Moses, Joseph, David, the prophets and many another worthy "who through faith subdued king- doms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped 68 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens," were impelled to service through religious fer- vor. But like many other social workers they seem to have failed of their full reward — if we may judge from the somewhat cynical comment of the narrator of their trials. The religious motive has always been one of the strong forces back of the impulse to social amelioration. Hebrew and Chinese and Hindu sacred texts teach it. Christianity fostered certain types of charity. The cal- endar of Christian saints is redolent with them. Not a Httle of the best in so-called organized philanthropy (both spirit and methods) is traceable to the work of St. Vincent de Paul. The preaching of such men as Charming in New England during the thirties and forties of the last cen- tury fed the new tide of humanitarianism which brought us broader and more decent care of the afflicted, partic- ularly the defectives and law breakers. But neither instinct nor religion is sufficient; neither confers capacity, necessarily. Vincent de Paul's great work may be said to have begun by recognition of this principle. You remember his first case: a benevolent lady had asked him to recommend to his parishioners a certain needy family. He did so at the morning service. In the afternoon he visited the family himself only to find them already almost overwhelmed with gifts of food and money. "Behold noble but ill-regulated charity," said the saint, and set to work at once to make the benev- olent impulse effective through vision and organization. That was the scientific spirit. Again, Channing's preach- ing was not the only spring that started Dorothea Dix upon her marvelous crusade on behalf of the insane in our country. For years, notable doctors had been im- porting the ideas of Pinel from France and Tuke from England. And for three years Miss Dix studied these new, scientific methods of treatment for the mentally de- THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 69 fective. It was this new, precise knowledge that gave some solid backing to her fervid moral enthusiasm. Her science guided her religion and made it efficient. In- deed, I am not sure but that it was science that drove her to the work and rehgion which served as ally. At any rate, science does create the will to serve. The new knowledge of heredity has stimulated a whole tribe of eugenists, however mistaken they may prove to be. The more scientific the art of healing becomes, the more it becomes permeated with a sense of community duty and service. The newer developments of economic science and sociology have impelled us toward conservation of natural and human resources, labor legislation, health and sani- tary work, protection of children, control of industry for social ends. Science yields place to no other source of enthusiasm for social amelioration. And science has her heroes. It would be easy to write the litany of scien- tific martyrs — Priestly, Lyell, T^ndall, Darwin, Huxley, Reed, Laveran, IVIanson, Ross, Lazear, Carroll, and a hundred others, who were stoned and sawn asunder, were tempted, destitute, afflicted, tormented, slain, like their brethren of religious faith. But the glory of science is that to enthusiasm it adds anewquaUty. Let me illustrate: The impulse to serve, I said, must be present; otherwise there is no motive power. But the impulse alone is not enough. Volunteers by the million would never make an army. An army of raw recruits is actually worse than no army — it is in the way; it has to be transported, it clogs the service; it has to be fed, and takes food from abler mouths; it gets in the way of trained men; its own fears may stampede the reg- ulars into rout and confusion. Only training — exacting, rigorous training — can make over the mob of recruits from a liability into an asset. That training is military science. Likewise, the hundreds of volunteers respond- ing to the call to enlist in the social-service army against needless want and misery must be trained lest they re- 7© THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK main mere cumberers of the ground. That is what I mean by the application of the scientific spirit to social work. The new quality which science adds to the impulse to serve is ordered intelligence, the discipline of knowledge. *'If science does not produce love it is insufficient," wrote Amiel. I believe it not only enlarges the area of man's sympathy — that is, his love — but makes it effective. "Scientific" is not the logical opposite of "loving" or "warm" or "hearty" or "brotherly"; the real antipode of these qualities is mechanical routine. Ill Perhaps we should pause to run down to its lair the fearful word, science, and say exactly what we mean by the scientific spirit. Huxley said, "Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense." Isn't that a good deal? A trained and organized mind in contrast with a mental scrap bag; a disciplined army as against a motley, rambling mob. Science in the most generally accepted sense, like humor, is the detection of relation- ships; it is the relating of cause to effect. This means two things: first, that the scientific mind is always full of prob- lems; it never takes things for granted; it never contents itself with fatalistically and complacently accepting effects. This means, it is evident, in the second place, that everything is caused by something else. Shake- speare makes Pisanio in "Cymbeline" say that "fortune brings in some boats that are not steered." Science denies that absolutely and irrevocably, if the lack of steering implies that ships just wander into port moved by no forces but chance. The spirit of science was nobly ex- pressed by Matthew Arnold in the couplet: "Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from Chance have conquered Fate." The main business of science is to rid the world of chance and luck. Our forefathers charged their sickness and pov- THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 7 1 erty and pain to bad luck, hostile ghosts, an angry god, or a fickle goddess. Take down your Shakespeare Con- cordance and see how many hundred times his creations tallc of fortune, luck, chance. Listen to the uncompli- mentary, even vile names they call her — crooked, blind, skittish, a foe, a strumpet, and worse. Remember that all primitive philosophy, politics, and religion are based in no slight degree upon luck and magical devices for con- trolling it. Even now men persist in the same unflatter- ing concept of Providence by inserting in their contracts exemptions from responsibility in certain business con- tingencies involving what they are pleased to call "acts of God." Earthquakes and fierce tempests at sea are acts of God. Poverty is one of the mysterious ways in which Providence works his wonders to perform. Pestilence is a divine scourge. War, God judging the nations. Now, modern science is vastly too respectful, too devout, too well informed to perpetuate such childish attempts to connect effect and cause. Therefore in ridding the world of chance, it works in two ways — critical and construc- tive. Huxley has phrased both these aspects in his let- ters. In one he says, "Among public benefactors, we reckon him who explodes an old error as next in rank to him who discovers new truth." On the constructive side he writes, "To be accurate in observation and clear in description is the first step towards good scientific work." In sum, the work of science is to get at truth; not only at facts, but at the vital relationships between facts. Science does not claim to have complete knowledge of the truth or to have established perfect order out of chaos in this world. It is less an accomplished fact than an attitude. Professor Sumner suggests this in his defini- tion of science as "knowledge of reality acquired by meth- ods which are established in the confidence of men whose occupation it is to investigate truth." Hence, in con- necting science with social work, our aim is not so much immediate results as an attitude of mind; for, as Huxley 72 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK pointed out, "The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors," This does not mean, of course, that the scientist does not strive to know the greatest possible amount of truth. He is no mere dab- bler or dilettante. Scientific truth is a serious business and cannot be achieved as you order goldfish or libra- ries or art galleries. You may buy a college degree or the God-bless-you's of a poor family, but you cannot buy the scientific attitude. Science, like the wisdom of Solomon, is above rubies and eludes all but the resolute, serious hearts. Carlyle, in spite of his frequent wrongheadedness, was one of the best friends to social work raised up in the last century ; not by the institutions he founded or the tech- nique of family rehabilitation he worked out, but by his unflinching determination to see through the social shams of his time and to purge our systems, and his own, of cant or driveling. Such an acid test transforms mere vague opinion into dynamic opinion. It makes for the sci- entific spirit by refusing absolutely to allow any institu- tion or idea or practice to take refuge behind some- body's mere say-so or to be frightened by the cry that it is old or sacred or in the nature of things and there- fore not to be molested by mere man. The scientific spirt refuses to call a hope or a longing a proved fact, no matter how urgent that longing or that hope may be. I may long to see parole work done with a hundred per cent efficiency; but that does not justify me in publishmg that ninety-five per cent of my paroled men "make good" after leaving the prison gate. Much as I might have wished for a better showing, I was never able as a probation officer to claim more than one-half or two- thirds of my cases as successful. I may abhor the sight of painted women selling their bodies on the streets, but that does not justify me in saying that mere repressive legisla- tion orpolicemen will wipe out prostitution. Science bases THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 73 its hopes on facts. It refuses to rest its case on the lead- ings of mere temperament. Huxley said, "Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian concep- tion of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down be- fore fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn noth- ing. . . My business is to teach my aspirations to con- form themselves to fact, not to try and make facts har- monize with my aspirations." There are several other concrete marks of the scien- tific spirit which should be considered. It is broad, tol- erant, earnest, imaginative, enthusiastic, but poised and self-controlled. It is not impatient of contradiction and criticism given honestly and sincerely. It is fearless, truthful, teachable. It is able to withstand mob mind, sentimentality, sensationalism, and petty partisanship. It does not deny that a thing exists merely because it is not easily seen; but it refuses to fudge intelligence and the moral nature by claiming to see something before it really is seen. It also declines to think "the difficulties of disproving a thing as good as direct evidence in its favor." Finally, the scientific spirit means generosity, fellow- ship, and hearty cooperation untainted by jealousy. Witness, for example, the cordial feeling between Darwin and A. R. Wallace. Wallace always spoke of the "Dar- winian theory" although, since he was the codiscoverer of natural selection, it might with equal justice have been called the "Darwin- Wallace theory" or the "Wallace theory." Likewise Darwin, with fine generosity, recog- nizing that Wallace's splendid contributions to natural science brought him little financial return, set in motion a plan for securing a Civil List pension for Wallace, who was at the time nearly sixty. Huxley was equally gener- ous and enthusiastic. He lent his heartiest support and 74 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK was able a few weeks later to hurrah over the success of the plan. A similar bit of generosity occurs in Huxley's undertaking the task of writing a chapter on the work of his old opponent, Sir Richard Owen, for the latter's bio- graphy. As a final instance let me cite the generosity of eighteen of Huxley's scientific friends who in 1873 placed £2,100 in the bank and informed him that he was forth- with to take a vacation for his health. It is this fine spirit of cooperation, according to H. G. Wells, that has made modern science. "The whole dif- ference of modern scientific research from that of the Middle Ages," he says, "the secret of its immense suc- cesses, lies in its collective character, in the fact that every fruitful experiment is published, every new dis- covery of relationship explained. In a sense, scientific research is a triumph over natural instinct, over that mean instinct that makes men secretive, that makes a man keep knowledge to himself, and use it slyly to his own advantage. The training of a scientific man is a training in what an illiterate lout would despise as a weakness, it is a training in blabbing, in blurting things out, in telling just as plainly as possible and as soon as possible what it is he has found. To ' keep shut ' and bright-eyed and to score advantages, that is the wisdom of the common stuff of humanity yet. To science it is a crime. The noble practice of that noble profession, medicine, for example, is to condemn as a quack and a rascal every man who uses secret remedies." And the same spirit must animate social workers if they are to make their work truly scientific and really professional. Most professions, whether law, medicine, preaching, or teaching, begin with the assumption that all a man needs is knack, luck, nerve, and persistent industry. Their professional aims are at first usually personal success and social prestige. But as they become per- meated with the scientific spirit they rise out of mere crafts, and change both their aims and their methods. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 75 The community spirit and a professional code are both cause and effect of their improved technique. Social work has been going through just these throes of development. Hence it is ahnost superfluous to ask why social work should take on the character of science. It is hardly a question of may or may not. Rather, should we say, it is a matter of the categorical must. Is it shocking to declare that one must do good accord- ing to scientific rule? The highest praise accorded to Jesus of Nazareth is that he went about doing good. Do I be- lieve he did it "scientifically"? I do, most emphatically. For the good is always relative, and to choose between the good and the best demands an illuminated and disciplined intelligence. A very considerable section of Christendom to-day beUeves that Jesus was the most scientific person that ever trod this globe. Science made his good work discriminative. Since so many people in the world still seem to fail of understanding either the spirit of Chris- tianity or the spirit of science it may not prove amiss to elaborate this point. An unknown correspondent has taken me to task for venturing to couple Jesus with sci- entific thought. She writes: " . . .1 am studying sociology and am convinced that it is an indispensable subject to one who would work effec- tively for the advancement of civilization. I find myself so puzzled by your statements concerning Jesus that I am impelled to ask for enlightenment. I class myself with the not unintelligent middle class to use a phrase from the New Republic; I can follow Lester F. Ward, Frankliu Giddings, Albion Small, et al., but find myself unable to reconcile the acceptance of Jesus as a historical character with the scientific attitude. Science refutes His divinity and history fails to establish the claim to His existence. Therefore, your introduction of Jesus into an essay ad- vocating the scientific spirit is either evidence of the in- sufficiency of your scientific knowledge or of the insin- cerity of your presentation of that knowledge. I do 76 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK not wish to seem harsh, but those who aspire to teach must cheerfully welcome criticism, that they may orient themselves before they act as a compass to less favored members of society." Since this letter is not only manifestly sincere, but also rather typical of a considerable body of dissident thought it demands a respectful hearing. In the first place let it be said that the scientific spirit does "cheerfully welcome criticism." A modern sociolo- gist insists that the spirit and method of science is such that no idea is held as sacred. Science, said Huxley, must not be impatient of criticism. "'Authorities,' 'disciples,' and ' schools' are the curse of science; and do more to interfere with the work of the scientific spirit than all its enemies." Darwin not only courted the dis- covery of contrary instances to his favorite generaliza- tions, but even made a practice of writing down any exceptions he noted or could think of lest they be for- gotten. Huxley credits Carlyle with having stimulated the scientific attitude by insisting upon sincerity, pro- bity, making things clear, and getting rid of cant and shams of all sorts. Now, then, is there any contradiction of this attitude in suggesting that Jesus worked scientifically? Let us remember first of all that science is not a mass of facts but an organization of perceived relationships between them. It is an outlook, an attitude of mind, a method of confronting the universe and wringing truth out of it. Moreover, it is a pyramid resting not upon a base of unshakable fact but upon an apex of metaphysical as- sumption. It is a method of transfoiTtiing mere guess or flabby opinion into dynamic understanding. Waiving for the moment any question of the historicity of Jesus or the authenticity of the Christian narrative, let us apply these tests to Jesus ' work as described in the gospels. If he accomplished the works credited to him or spoke the words ascribed to him he satisfies the tests. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 77 For in the first place he emphasized getting at truth — the truth that sets free. Next, he used the scientific method of demonstration by successful experiment. He verified his fundamental assumption that this is a spir- itual world by inductive methods, Thus he passes the test of scientific consistency by living and demonstrating his theory. Again he did his work openly; there was nothing of the dark-room charlatan about his methods. He would be more at home in a laboratory or public clinic than with the astrologers or alchemists. His science was enlarging and expansive, not the pseudo- science which Wordsworth satirized as demanding "That we should pry far off yet be unraised; That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore. Viewing all objects unremittingly In disconnection dead and spiritless; And still dividing, and dividing still, Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied With the perverse attempt while littleness May yet become more little; waging thus An impious warfare with the very life Of our own souls!" Finally, Jesus showed the true scientific spirit by sharing his knowledge and his methods. He taught his disciples how to heal and otherwise demonstrate his theories of life. He told them they should do even greater works than he had done. His followers apparently kept up the work of spiritual healing for three hundred years. It is perhaps superfluous to add that he paid the famihar penalty which many another scientist has suffered for his faith. Socrates, Jesus, Giordano Bruno are all members of the same great scientific brotherhood, having passed through the same grim portal of martyrdom. And no more in the one case than in the other does the question of ''divinity" figure. That is a problem of theology without the slightest relevance to this question of scien- tific attitude. 78 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK Now we come to the problem of the historicity of Jesus, or if you prefer, to the authenticity of the Christian tradition. But does it make any difference in this issue whether any such person called Jesus ever lived or not? If Professor Drews or Mr. J. M. Robertson succeed in demonstrating that Christ is simply a myth-comply, a generic name for a cycle of Hellenic and Oriental legends, or if the gospel narrative be set aside as unhistorical and inaccurate, the record itself, simply as a human document, remains unimpeached. For if not Jesus, nor Matthew, nor John, nor any of the individuals supposedly concerned, then somebody else manifested the spirit and maintained the attitude described in the New Testament story. It is the characteristic attitude and not the particular personality which concerns us primarily. For is it not possible to reckon and reckon profoundly with the in- fluence of even a legendary character like Hercules or Homer or Socrates or Barbarossa? Nobody knows whether one single blind Homer or a hundred wandering Greek poets wrote the "Iliad " and the "Odyssey." But nevertheless we talk of Homer 's use of the epithet, of his wonderful powers of compact description, of his sense of movement and color; and his heroes become educational and ethical models. We know of the hfe and death of Socrates largely through the dramatic dialogues of Plato; yet his character has stood out as the inspiration to gen- erations of souls struggling with the problems of truth, justice, and immortality. Was he a man or only a dra- matic character invented by Plato? No difference. Like- wise with William Langland, the traditional author of "Piers Plowman." Professor Manley considers that this is not a personal but a dramatic name covering several fourteenth-century writers; but whether or not there was such a person as William Langland has absolutely nothing to do now at this range of five centuries with the effect of "Piers Plowman" as the fountain source of a great stream of social protest in English literature. And THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 79 as we look back to Jack Cade and his revolution we may be pretty sure that it was inspired by the vision of Piers and not necessarily by the visionary poet or poets. And who wrote Shakespeare? Was it Bacon or Roger Manners, fifth Count of Rutland, or a group of winebibbing actors or one William Shakespeare of Avon himself. Quite evidently in Shakespeare's own words "the play's the thing" and Olivia or Portia, Lear or Macbeth, Dogberry, Bassanio, Hamlet, Romeo, and Brutus are just the same wonderful and stimulating creations regardless of their Uterary paternity. These plays, like unsigned Grecian statues, stand by their own majesty and need no petty personalities as their credentials. To add one more example, Whately, I believe, proved once that Napoleon never Hved; yet who doubts the effect of the Napoleonic tradition? No, if the New Testament be nothing but a tissue of fairy tales and Jesus but a fairy prince, the story is not a whit less instructive to the scientist. The pity of it all is that a Christendom pretending to believe the story has carefully selected out the least credible or important parts of it and has made them the corner stones of faith while rejecting the really scientific elements which were its core. Finally, there are certain aspects of Jesus' teaching which are basic to a wholesome concept of social work, and which may be called scientific without abusing the term. His concept of God as love and of all worship or service as love is the key to any sound process of social amehoration. His vision of social justice as laid down in the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest Magna Charta of human rights and liberties ever formulated. In his doctrine of the vine and its branches he lays down not only a plan for church organi- zation — the church universal, the communion of the saints, the City of God, the Mystic Body — but he fore- casts a leading concept of modern sociological theory; 8o THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK namely, that human society is an organic unity, if not of the biological, then of the psychological order. And, mark this, that organic unity as Jesus saw it seems to overleap every barrier of geography or race and to antic- ipate what we begin to call the international mind. If, as I believe is the case, rehgion and science are not absolute opposites but are complementary, mutual cor- rectives, then Jesus rendered science and social work a magnificent service by two contributions. First, his con- sistency, living and demonstrating the theory of God as ever-present and all powerful. Second, his idealism: an absolute idealism which conceived God as all in all, a power that makes not only for righteousness but also for health, peace, and the hfe more abundant. It was this indomitable optimism which sustained him and which preserves and energizes the modern social worker whether he be churched or unchurched. Christian or non-Chris- tian, or name any name prescribed in the codes whereby man must be saved. IV Now turning back into the main highway of our argu- ment, if you demand a concrete and explicit answer to the question. Why should social work be done in the scientific spirit? I should say, for two reasons. It is a dangerous, if not to say extra-hazardous, trade, from the standpoint of the worker himself; and it is a delicate and even perilous adventure from the standpoint of those whom social workers would serve. Anybody who has ever tried to befriend the poor, the sick, the broken in spirit, the down-and out, knows the tremendous strain on body and nerves. The constant tugging at one's sympathies, the recoil of disgust at the sight of filth, disease, and broken character, the lurking possibihty of contagion, the discouragement over failure after faithful ministration — all these wear down the fine edge of one's good will. It is easy to get the scolding THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 8 1 habit, to develop a spirit of moral peevishness, to assume the role of apostle, to exaggerate one's own sense of amiable virtues by constant contrast with the lives of those whom we may suppose to have wasted income and opportunity. The persistent giving of good advice is subtly degenerative to one 's moral nature. Good people must beware of misinterpreting the maxim about man's extremity being God's opportunity. Man's extremity never means the doctor's or the preacher's or the social worker's opportunity for bossing and humiliating. On the other hand, if one escapes the Scylla of nagging, it is easy to fall into the Charybdis of complacency; then you have a sentimental Good Fellow, masculine gender; Lady Bountiful, feminine gender. If I were a "case" being "friendly \'isited" I should prefer the scold. And the danger to sound social policy is greater from the Good Fellow, for he means, enter the patron, exit the real neighbor and good citizen. The scientific spirit does away mth obtrusive personal- ity; it pours a healthy astringent upon one's ego. It broadens our sense of personality until we get the idea firmly fixed that we are merely representing the best thought of the community and are not exploiting our own vanity upon the poor and needy. This is a very subtle temptation and can only be met by rigorous scientific self-immolation. Another hazard grows out of nervous strain and the air of patronage: this is the tendency to measure one's courtesy and good manners by social ranks. Discourtesy is no longer a good business asset. Even railroad ticket agents before the war were being trained to say,Thank you. But in the older relief type of charity a certain kind of waspishness and thinly veiled contempt still survives in places. I have never forgiven a prominent Boston charity worker for snapping her fingers in the face of an applicant for aid in San Francisco during those strenuous rehabilitation days after the disaster of 1906. I do not know whether the man's case was worthy 82 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK or not; but I do know that no real scientist would so forget the common decencies. I have before me a post card written to a poor woman by the milk and ice association of an Eastern city. It disdains all friendly salutation and reads simply: ''If you do not report at regular Mothers Meeting Friday or Saturday, July 23, or 24, at 10 a. m. at Blank Building your milk will be stopped." It ends likewise abruptly without even the dry courtesies of a business letter. Does social service mean such for- getting of ordinary manners? St. Francis of Assisi, patron of relief workers, saw the value of courtesy. "Know, beloved Brother," he once said, "that courtesy is one of the essential qualities of God, Who maketh His sun to shine and His rain to fall upon the just and upon the unjust, through Courtesy; and Courtesy, is also the sister of Charity, which puts out Hatred and preserves Love alive." As an antidote to the personal dangers of social work, and as a rough statement of the scientific attitude, I might add a sentence from the veteran head of the New York School of Philanthropy: "What charitable visi- tors need more than money in their purse is faith in their poor, humility of spirit, jolly comradeship, sheer psychic power to carry conviction for the right and sensible action against every argument springing from discour- agement or bitterness or suspicion; from ignorance or stubborness or weakness; even against such plausible arguments as arise from the very virtues and sound instincts of the poor." Charitable reUef of all sorts is a difficult and delicate job whether you consider the recipient or the community at large. Mediaeval charity often bred beggars. Cash donations from either private or public funds may induce chronic pauperism. Personal service may easily cause a poor family to lose its self-respect and to "get Hmber." Private charities have been known to compete for the care of families, not for the sake of the families, but to THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 83 enhance their own prestige. Private charity sometimes pulls against public agencies, and vice versa. During the winter of 19 14 certain families in Pittsburgh were aided by several settlements, benevolent individuals, and private charity societies; none of these agencies knew that others were interested; each thought it was in con- trol. Finally, to complete the mess, the policeman of the district went about from house to house "to ascertain the needs" preparatory to a raid on the city treasury. To make confusion worse confounded, the city was suddenly caught in the throes of a "bundle day." One poor woman left a job bringing her in two dollars a day and stood for three bitterly cold days in a line at the bundle warehouse. When she finally got inside, all she could find was a bundle of old clothes worth at most fifty cents. Such charity is not only unscientific, it is criminal. So is the charity that makes each family or case the vested interest of a benevolent individual or society. So is the system of township relief as it used to be administered in New England, where whole towns were pauperized and corrupted. Illustrations might be mul- tipHed ad nauseam. But how can the scientific spirit in charity lessen its hazards? Chiefly by developing the rigorous determina- tion to see clearly. That means thinking through each problem. The first distinctive test of a scientific worker is his ability to see and formulate a problem clearly. This is diagnosis equally in medicine, in law, in educa- tion, and in social work. It is hunting out cause and effect in all their ramifications, whether the problem be restoring a family to economic independence or writing social insurance laws on the statute books. It is refusing to be bluffed by what "everybody believes." Remember that "everybody" used to believe in witches, in posses- sion by devils as the cause of insanity and epilepsy; "the best people" until recently believed that drink caused ninety per cent of all poverty and crime, and that un- 84 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK employment was a matter of downright personal laziness. Many people still believe that eighteenth-century English workpeople were debased wholly by the English system of public relief; they forget all the other forces contribut- ing to that degeneration. Many good charity workers also still profess to beheve, because Mayor Seth Low and his associates abolished public outdoor relief in Brooklyn in 1888, that public relief is necessarily corrupting. The average person still beHeves that because United States military pensions have been grotesquely extravagant, all other forms of public insurance or pensions are necessa- rily vicious. For the most part these opinions are simply swallowed. But no real scientist swallows without examination; he maintains the critical judgment and the open mind. To see a social problem clearly means also to get away from mere impressions. It is astonishing how many of our decisions are made upon mere chance impressions. Love at first sight is matched by condemning a criminal because of the "look out of his eyes." The man in the street gives a quarter to a beggar if he "likes his looks." The family that can assume an air of broken gentility scores high in favor at the charity ofi&ce. The crook that looks Uke a gentleman may get off on probation. The de- vout and compliant convict used to hookwink pardon and parole boards. There is in all this an element of bene- ficent charlatanry, charitable palmistry, or phrenology. It is utterly unscientific, just as unscientific as the reason an Industrial Worker of the World gave me recently for his belief that unemployment is increasing. He insisted that he knew it by personal experience and by the length- ened bread lines in an Eastern city. It is the same spirit that makes the optimistic poet sing of God in his heaven and well-being on earth when he feels well, or that drives the pessimist with bad digestion to call this the rottenest of all rotten worlds. The "general feel of things " is not a sound guide to either social theory or practice. I grant THE SCrENTEFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK 85 that it is difficult to get beneath mere impressions; it takes time and persistence. We did not need Goethe to tell us that doing is easy but thinking hard— that is, real thinking, thinking through a problem to some sound con- clusion and not mere daydreaming. But such thinking is the price of scientific work which will do more good than harm. The final question is how and where to get this scien- tific training. Science is both an attitude and a tech- nique. The attitude, which I analyzed earlier, can be cultivated without teachers, books, or colleges. The technique, particularly social technique, may be had from the Hterature of economics, political science and soci- ology in their applied aspects. You may go to college or to a school of philanthropy; you may imbibe methods from a trained social worker in your community. But remember that the technique of science is never fixed. Science always moves on. The charitable methods of twenty years ago may be utterly obsolete now. Our methods, even the most scientific, may be the laugh- ingstock of our descendants in the twenty-first century. Social work may become a profession, if by that we mean that in addition to having an ideal of promoting social welfare, social workers become really qualified to do their work as no other profession can. It will become truly scientific only when every social worker sets as his ideal not drawing his meed of praise or money for turning off the day's work with as little friction as possible, but knowing the truth as it is and adding to the sum of truth for the creation of a world more worth living in and work- ing for. To work for the truth that shall make you free — ■ that is the scientific spirit. CHAPTER V SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM Up to this point I hope it is perfectly clear that social work to be scientific must express organized intelligence and good will to men. But in arguing thus for illumi- nated sympathy as an indispensable mark of the genuine scientific spirit one must not be misunderstood as capit- ulating to the apostles of "softness." The sword of the scientific spirit is good steel, forged in the warmth of hu- man emotions but tempered in the cooling waters of hard thinking. We must now get hold of some of the element- ary rules of that tempering process. The tragedies of leadership in social reform and social work result in the main from failure to work out a prac- ticable basis of partnership between ideas and sentiments. Men recognize theoretically that ideas always appear swaddled in feelings. But many of us go about the day's business apparently on the assumption that ideas are as clear cut and unemotional as hammers or rifles. Hence our projects fail to capture men's hearts and imagina- tions. We have to recognize that, after all, reason in men is only the very tip of their iceberg of mental life. We live by our sentiments, even by our illusions. They fur- nish the real motive power which makes things go. They are at the bottom of our choices. And while educated choices are the prerequisite to any sort of social change worthy the name of progress, the process of education must include some canalizing of the sentiments. The re- former who does not include this in his program of good works is foredoomed to failure. But it is notorious that in many of our fellow citizens 86 SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 87 both sentiment and reason have been short-circuited into bathos and sentimentality. And the words "social re- former" have become almost an epithet of derision, be- cause some would-be leaders with insufficient sand and iron in their systems have capitalized this tendency to- ward sickly softness, and, as a result, have scored per- sonal successes with indecent haste, have scratched paths which could not be followed, and which must be resur- veyed and laid out at great cost and inconvenience. I asked a friend recently about the speech of a housing re- former she had been urged to hear. "It was too sticky- mouthed," was the curt comment. But it is that very stickiness and sweety- sweetness, or the "tear in the. voice," that scoops in votes and money from certain sec- tions of the population. Some people are organically drunk, or so nearly so, that the slightest whiff of senti- mentality starts them reeling; and a big dose may in- duce delirium. Since social reform and social work must steer between the two dangers of cold, sterilized, depersonalized ideas and warm, saccharine, oily, oozy, intoxicating, overper- sonalized sentimentalism, we must be sure that we recog- nize sentimentaHsm when we see it, and do not hit the wrong heads in the name of reason and clear thinking. In the first place, enthusiasm is not sentimentality. George Meredith, the savage baiter of sentimentalists, remarked that "Nonsense of enthusiasts is very diffierent from nonsense of ninnies." I doubt if any American would consider ex-President Taf t as either soft-minded or tender toward the "sob squad." But he said recently, in a notable address, " Give me misdirected fervor, wild tbeo- ries, if only the sincere spirit of service is alive, because the hard experience of practical results will temper this into useful activity later." That is, the enthusiast is hon- est, but the sentimentalist will fudge the truth and stage a lie if it will snare the silly fowl he is after. Here we must beware of confusing the issue by accepting the dis- 88 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK tinction sometimes made^ between social reform as "pas- sionate" and economic theory as "intellectual." Such reformers as Plato, More, or Comte were not passionate. The real distinction, if there be one, should be made be- tween theories of social reform and economic theory; or between social reformers and economic reformers. To illustrate: protectionists, bimetallists, ship subsidists, and laissez fairehts have been just as passionate in their way as are the most eloquent pleaders for "social justice" or eugenics, or single tax, or widows' pensions, or minimum- wage legislation. Professors of Greek defending some theory of interpretation have been known to fan up a pillar of fire equal to the most ardent enthusiasm of the most passionate social reformer. Human life is dynamic, and its calorie value may be expressed equally in the field of theory or practice. If acrimony be counted a species of passionate negative enthusiasm, I challenge any fair- minded person to produce from the field of social reform any person or project betraying more ardor of passion or prejudice than is displayed by the critics or opponents of reform. Enthusiasm for social reform is no more repre- hensible than enthusiasm over breeding a new strain of cattle or formulating a new theory of value. Construct- ive social reform ought to look upon itself and be looked upon merely as the administrative aspect of a develop- ing body of economic and political laws. It must recog- nize the Hmitations imposed by those laws, and without hysteria. But at the same time it is quite appropriate for the reformer to see in these "laws" only relative fijf- ity, and to accept them only as working conventions, as shore marks of levels in the scientific and practical ex- periences of the past. This attitude of mind may be ir- reverent or heretical or contemptuous, with or without heat; but it is hardly to be called sentimental. 1 See, e. g., W. H. Hamilton, " Economic Theory and Social Reform," Jour. Pol. Econ., June, 1915. SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 89 Neither will clear thinking confuse sentimentalism with ideals, dreams, or Utopias. No thoroughgoing Utopist was ever sentimental; the more radical and complete his Utopia the less he is open to the charge. To take only one test, no sentimentalist would for a second think of breaking up the family; on the contrary, he weeps at the idea of a hard hearted juvenile court judge separating a child from its drunken and wastrel parents. But every Utopist, from Plato and Campanella and More down to Sir Francis Galton and the eugenists, has advocated some more stringent form of social control over the family. The "practical man" frequently makes the mistake of classing the "dreamer" with the softhearts. But while dreams may be wrapped in emotion they are often as de- void of sentiment as a formal syllogism. Sentimentality never leaves a solid precipitate; but remember once more that ever}' institution, every invention, ever>' sober gray law was once a dream in the heart of some human being. The social reformer must dream and dream magnifi- cently; the very poignancy of his dream stings him into the attempt to cast it into the mold of realized fact. Be- cause he dreams while other men merely slop about in feeling or stumble into hasty action, he may come nearer scoring a bull's-eye on the target of truth. That is why Aristotle seems to have counted the poet more reliable than the historian as interpreter of serried facts. The idealist, too, belongs rather with the dreamer and Uto- pist than with the sentimentalists. It is a matter of sur- prise and regret that such a really great social scientist as Professor W. G. Sumner should have heaped contempt upon ideals as a motive factor in social development; for ideals are really the finished sketches by which social reconstruction is to be guided. Ideals, Sumner says, are illusions. But so is a tool, so is a house, so is science, so is history, if you take the trouble to analyze them far enough. Every man who counts for anything in the world is an idealist. He is a sentimentalist only if he fails 90 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK to take his ideals seriously and uses the slapstick or ex- poses his beating heart in order to wring a spasm of fac- titious feeling from his audience. The genuine social reformer demands social reconstruction, not because ex- isting arrangements are out of joint with his particular ideal scheme, but because he believes he can show that it is possible to replace them by others more in harmony with existing human character and human resources. Indeed, it takes a sturdy heart to be a real idealist. It was no mean-spirited or defeated man who could write credo quia absurdum as the key to the program of revo- lutionary ideahsm laid down by the pioneers of the Chris- tian church: Tertullian was no tender-minded "soft peda- gogist." Moreover, imagination is not sentimentalism. Senti- mentality never raised a single human being one inch above his old level. But, we are told, "moral evolution has consisted almost wholly in the increasing liberation of the imagination." The social reformer must not hesi- tate to use his imagination. Indeed, if he is to succeed at all, it must be in large part because he can slip into the skins of his fellows and put himself in their places. He must master the new "psychology of attitudes," which in plain English means the ability to use the imagination as a guide in interpreting prejudices and preconceptions. As Mr. H. G. Wells points out, if we are going to arrest our present pretty clear drift toward revolution or revolutionary disorder, it must not be through train- ing a governing class to get the better of an argu- ment or the best of a bargain; it must be through laying hold of the imaginations of " this drifting, sullen, and sus- picious multitude, which is the working body of the coun- try." It takes imagination to lay hold of imagination. Sentimentality will not do it. We may pass by with only incidental reference the obvious fact that much of conservatism is merely senti- mental attachment to what is old and familiar: the do- SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 91 tard is always sentimental. The young radical may be wrong-headed and self -centered, but he is less likely, by contrast, to be soft. He may be dogmatic, uncomprom- ising; he may fit exactly Peacock's satire and say to him- self, After careful meditation And pronounced deliberation On the various petty projects that have been shown, Not a scheme in agitation For the world 's amelioration Has a grain of common sense in it, except my own. But the more dogmatic, the harder he is. Radicalism and heresy run the risk of degenerating into sentimen- talism only when they, too, have been passed in the race and are about to be relegated to the shelves of conserva- tive and accepted truth. The "practical man," whether he be a social reformer or whether he decry meddling with the social order, is frequently if not always a bit of a sentimentalist, just as the dotard conservative and the self-made man and the amiable, easy-going parent are sentimentalists; and for much the same reason. They all are inclined to drivel over their own pet virtues, to fondle them, to make them the ready excuse for certain ineptitudes in thinking or cer- tain gross breaches of good taste. It is precisely these practical conservative men and women who are so suspicious of preventive measures in the field of charitable relief. They sentimentalize over the maintenance of existing class lines and fear any move to eliminate the patron or to promote real independence and self-help. A sweet, pretty, friendly visitor, of the type that goes calling on the poor in a limousine, was discussing socialism recently with a student. "Good heavens!" she cried, "I don't want any of this horrible socialism. If we get socialism I won't have any poor to visit." Nero is still in our midst, stimulating his di- 92 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK gestion by parading the poor before him. I hoped, evi- dently in vain, that we had buried the attempt to store up merit by practicing on the poor. It is just these para- sites who have brought discredit upon the phrase "so- cial service." I confess a growing tendency in myseK to delete it from my vocabulary, simply because it is so of- ten a mixture of pious cant, meanness, cloudy vision, and sentimentalism. So far our analysis seems clear enough. But now comes a troop of questions not so easily answered. Is it senti- mental to be interested in one's fellow men? Is it possi- ble really to love them, or at least to have some social re- gard for them, their rights, their interests? Or have all the lovers of mankind been merely soft pretenders? Is ''enlightened self-interest" the only safe guide out of the sloughs of sentimentalism? A recent lecture by a prom- inent business man closed with this stirring appeal and Godspeed to his student hearers: "I hope you all make a barrel of money!" Shall we lie tamely down, accept the tip, and pass it along to ardent youth that the only things worthy the interest of sane, healthy, virile, scientific, sensible men are stocks and bonds, laws of exchange, prin- ciples of finance, and the whole round of mere money grubbing? Or permit to go unchallenged that time-hon- ored fallacy, the economic man? Shall we brand as silly and sentimental the principle that we are all part and par- cel of each other, a principle as sound in sociology as it is in ethics? Or shall we lay as the basis for all social polity, all social legislation, all social reform, the absolute rock of fact, namely, that we are each and all of us social to the very core, and that we are only real men and women as we are vitally interested in others and disposed to cooperate with, as well as exploit, them? Sociology is not sentimentality. It is not merely the science of making poor folks richer and happier at other people's expense. It is a science in the making which is attempting to tell us that we are hopelessly SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 93 bound up one with the other, and that none of us are safe or sane so long as any stupid, wretched, ignorant, or pro- foundly miserable folks are tolerated in our midst. In- terest in fellow men turns out to be science, not senti- mentality. Here we might stop and summarize. Sentimentalists, it appears, are essentially parasites, spiritual Malaprops. They are cheats, who try to get something for nothing. They are, as George Meredith declared, "they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done"; and their practices "a happy pastime and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heart- less; but a danming one to them who have anything to forfeit." They are the folks who decry organized effort to prevent poverty and try to obtain a bargain-counter dose of warmth and coziness from a nickel sUpped to a street beggar or from a bunch of dirty cast-off clothes conferred upon the worthy poor on bundle day. ^ They are the people who drive us to madness by their "im- paired waterworks." I am reminded of the matinee idol who, exasperated to the quick by ill-timed tears, blurted over the footlights, "Now, ladies, please: I want you to cry, I'm paid to make you cry, but for God's sake cry in the right place!" "To every thmg there is a season," said the Preacher; "a time to weep and a time to laugh." But he assigns no place to sentimental insipidity, for every sane man knows that sympathy must always walk with science. It must never get away from understanding and must always be sure that it is playing in time and tune. That is why we give short shrift to both the person who is always " feelmg his feelings, " and to the " Gawdsaker." The "Godsaker," according to Wells, is the curse of all progress, the hectic consumption that kills a thousand good beginnings and promising experiments in social wel- fare. He is "the person who gets excited by any delib- erate discussion and gets up wringing his hands and screaming, ' For Gawd's sake, let's do something now!''^ 94 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK There is no lack of concrete social problems confront- ing the reformer by which to test our analysis of senti- mentality. In some quarters it is still considered senti- mental or worse to speak of the abolition of poverty. But Professor Hollander and other economists are proving statistically that the modern civilized world is producing or could produce enough and more than enough of food, clothing, and shelter to provide decently for every human being; hence that poverty, as we are familar with it, is un- necessary. Poets like Heine, anarchists like Kropotkin, and sociaUsts like Hertzka told us this long ago, but we smiled indulgently and called them dreamers drunk with feeling. But now that the problem can be put to us in mathematical form and pictured in statistical graphs we begin to foresee the solution of poverty as not only prac- ticable but as good form. The same holds true of the problem of unemployment. Men were called sentimental who declared that a reserve pool of underpaid and irregularly employed laborers is not only bad ethics but bad business. The prevailing business code held, and it still holds in certain financial circles, that under-employment is in the nature of things, is one of the laws of economics; and that therefore it is as useless to try to solve the problem of unemployment as to solve the problem of gravitation. But the president of the Steel Trust woke up to the fact that perhaps this busi- ness axiom was wrong, and became chairman of the New York Committee for the study of unemployment. Not long ago the president of the American Blower Company scattered widely copies of the Detroit plan for relieving and perhaps eliminating unemployment. These men — and their number is increasing — are not sentimentalists. Several years ago the greatest authority on unemploy- ment in England declared that " practicabihty is never anything but a relative term — dependent upon the ur- gency with which an object is desired and upon the incon- veniences which men are prepared to undergo in its pur- SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 95 suit. It is practicable for most people to run a mile to save a life. It is not practicable for any one to run a mile unless he is prepared to get warm. So it is not prac- ticable for a nation to get a mastery of unemployment without being prepared to submit to some change of industrial methods and customs." That this was sound sense and not sentiment is amply demonstrated by the fact that the social urgency bred by the crisis of war so re-organized British industry that unemployment was less than at any other time in the last thirty years. Much criticism of the existing industrial order is branded by standpatters as ebullition of parlor socialists and extravagant youths fed upon too much sociology. But President Taft, in his message of February 2, 191 2, recommending a commission on industrial relations, took occasion to say: "Numerous special investigations, offi- cial and unofficial, have revealed conditions in more than one industry' which have immediately been recognized on aU sides as entirely out of harmony with accepted Ameri- can standards. It is probable that to a great extent the remedies for these conditions, so far as the remedies in- volve legislation. He in the field of state action," What clearer sailing orders could any social reformer ask, and who would charge their author with ebullition? The whole tendency toward state control over wide areas of social acti\dty spells sentimental degeneration to the old-fashioned laissez faireist. One of the first not- able court pronouncements for state control occurred in the famous case of Munn v. Illinois. The United States Supreme Court held that "when one devotes his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use and must sub- mit to be controlled by the public, for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has created." The court later, in a great decision compelling railroads to equip their cars with safety devices, rejected the plea of the railroads that the law would work hardship upon them. 96 TPIE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK It accepted Lord Eldon's maxim that it is better to look hardship in the face than to break down the rules of law, and went on to point out that a preventable accident injures somebody: "Such an injury must be an irrepa- rable misfortune to some one. If it must be borne entirely by him who suffers it, that is a hardship to him. If its burden is transferred, so far as it is capable of transfer, to the employer, it is a hardship to him. It is quite con- ceivable that Congress, contemplating the inevitable hardship of such injuries, and hoping to diminish the economic loss to the community resulting from them, should deem it wise to impose their burdens upon those who could measurably control their causes, instead of upon those who are, in the main, helpless in that regard." The court may have reasoned fallaciously, but very- few critics have charged it with erring on the side of senti- mentality in cases involving the police power or social re- form in general. If American courts are sentimental at all, it is in the other direction; that is, toward soft- hearted regard for precedent, for the old, for the well- established. Perhaps in no other field of social reform has the charge of sentimentalism been so persistent as in attempts to re- construct our tax systems. I have no brief to file for any particular scheme of financial reform, but I do suspect that the so-called tax experts are frequently either dis- ingenuous or sentimental when they fly at the head of a reform proposal and brand it as "the economic folly of taxing productive forces into despondency." I am in- clined to feel that even the most extravagant and aggres- sive tax refomiers have a right to a serious hearing, partic- ularly after reading the conclusion of a recent Massachu- setts tax commission to the effect that the "study of the commission revealed that there was no science of taxa- tion save that of its evasion." Again, the demand of labor and labor's apologists for what they call a fair share in the products of their toil SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 97 may sometimes exude sentimentality. But what of the deliberate attempts to provoke sentimental responses made by labor's opponents? What about the myth of " widowsanorphans " ? Or the drool about free trade and empty dinner pails? On the first day of the great Law- rence strike the president of the American Woolen Com- pany said in the course of a public statement: "While manufacturers under normal conditions would be glad to see their employees earn more money, the Massachusetts mills are paying all that they can afford to pay in the present situation. The mills are still suffering from a long period of extreme depression due to the tariff agi- tation at Washington." Yet we are assured by a repu- table authority that one of the very factories in question had paid for itself, equipment and all, in the two years since its completion. Is criticism of such mendacity sentimental? Is it sentimental to criticise the Colorado situation? The report of the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics for 1909-10 stated baldly that the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company sought to nullify and violate laws calculated to protect the interest of the miner and used its "powerful influence to defeat the enactment of any law that had for its purpose the safeguarding of the lives and health of its employees." We all recognize that no Httle perverse sentimentalism has gone into the plea for restrictions upon the labor of women and children, and we condemn it without stint. But what of the sentimental interest of employers in maintaining woman's right to work as many hours as she wants to, or in permitting children to become captains of industry at any age they please? People, strange as it may seem, are still able to stir up a claptrap sort of senti- mental indignation over the poor widow whose child is prohibited from following his calling as newsboy or gum- seller or messenger boy on city streets late at night. Other people are still gullible enough to swallow the senti- mental appeal of the less ef&cient employer for aid i» g8 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK averting the destruction to industry and to nation if child labor is withdrawn or if the twelve-hour shift for men and night work for women are prohibited. Such feeble folk need some such bracing and manly tonic as a nota- ble Connecticut employer gave not long ago on the sub- ject of child labor. He said, "We are not here primarily to do business; . . . any business which employs chil- dren so young that their physical and moral growth is dwarfed and stunted is, to the extent to which it so em- ploys them, an evil in the community, and not a benefit." But a lot of patient, hard thinking must be endured by a considerable section of the public before it becomes quite immune to such patent disregard for social welfare under the guise of sincere pleading for the "worthy poor." Not all police or school authorities are yet immune. Some are. I remember hearing the superintendent of a California cannery fly into a passion one day and declare that he could whittle out of a shingle better men than the local school board because they were so sentimental as to in- sist that the schools should open on the day set by law. Is it sentimental to show up and to fight the state of business mind illustrated by the following editorial in the silk manufacturers' ofi&cial journal? "An ideal location would be one in which labor is abundant, in- telligent, skilled, and cheap; where there were no labor unions and strikes; where the laws of the state made no restrictions as to the hours of work or age of workers; where people were accustomed to mill life; and where there were no other textile mills in the vicinity to share in the labor and bid up its price. . . In towns where there is a fair population and no manufacturing industries of mom- ent a good supply of female help can usually be had at low prices; but should other industries come to the town, the demand for help may soon exceed the supply and the employer find, owing to the bidding up of the labor, that its cost is greatly increased, and its character arrogant and independent, and with no growth to the town equal to the increasing employment offered, he finds himself in a very uncomfortable position. . .'* SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 99 This is just that combination of shrewdness and driv- eling self-pity that disgusts us in a loquaciously drunk man or woman. A friend of mine was once indiscreet enough to volunteer to pilot a drunken woman homeward. The woman leaned heavily on her, and they zigzagged down a crowded sidewalk, to the incessant refrain, "My heart is broke. Now would you believe it? My heart is broke. Now would you believe it? " Only Shakespeare and a jury of angels could unscram- ble the mixture of sentimentalism, piety, and probity which every social worker or reformer sooner or later en- counters. Perhaps nowhere is he more likely to run afoul of it than in the field of housing and sanitation. Here is a sample: The president of the Sloss-Shefheld Steel and Iron Company, of Birmingham, Alabama, wrote an indig- nant protest against the report of Birmingham's indus- trial conditions published in the Survey early in 19 12. "Why [he cried], who is there in his right senses will deny that hogs are the natural and logical scavengers of a min- ing camp? Sanitary conditions in a mining camp! Pooh! I'd rather have twelve hogs than fifty men clean- ing up my camps!" This is the grotesque side of such drunken slaver. But sometimes the intoxication is much more subtle. The report of the New York Consumers' League for 19 10 de- scribed an interview with a prominent Philadelphia mer- chant at a settlement house in which he was deeply in- terested. He said: "I have 1,200 girls working for me. These girls come to me healthy, happy, full of spirit. They work a year and grow thin and sickly and then go home, and come back again after a while, and work a lit- tle longer and go away too weak to work, and I find they have died of tuberculosis. But nothing can be done about it. It is the dust in the air." "But," said his interlocu- tor, "surely something can be done. You could remove the dust in the room by opening the windows." "No [he went on], we cannot open the windows, because it creates lOO THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK a draft which moves the dust from the machines and im- pairs the purity of the white cloth. It would bring less in the market and my stockholders would not stand for it." Crocodile tears; disgusting crocodile tears. In such cases the real sentimentalists are those ready apologists for spiritual wickedness in high places, those who whitewash the business gorilla and indict his crit- ics. Let me cite a flagrant example. In September, 19 II, the dam owned by the Bay] ess Pulp and Paper Company broke and wiped out the town of Austin, Penn- sylvania. The engineering journals bitterly condemned the owners and constructors of the dam, and charged that the disaster was without excuse, because the owners knew only too well that it was a flimsy and menacing structure. But a neighbor of the owners said after the coroner's inquest over the seventy-six victims: "Through- out the whole community these men stand well. They are exceedingly fine characters — capable, honorable, and public-spirited. . . They are liberal in their help to some of the most worthy causes in the city, and their wives also are similarly interested. . . I have talked with many people since the terrible disaster at Austin, and I have not yet heard one harsh or bitter word against either of these men. . . I saw them both for a few min- utes on the day following the disaster. They were utterly prostrated. Neither of them is physically robust or rug- ged". . . (etc., ad nauseam). This is simply a survival of the ancient cult of crim- inals; the elder, vigorous superstition has merely faded out into mawkish, reverential sentimentality. There is little to choose between the sentimentalism of unbreeched reform legislation and the sentimental vacuity of benev- olent feudalism. We all agree that many grievous blunders have been made in the field of social pathology through poor-law administration. And I think none of us would deny that sentimentaUsm has gone hand in hand with a certain SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM lOI hardness and dogmatism in the interminable debates over public-poor-law policy. But we must never forget that there is a sentimentaHty that bewails the shiftless- ness and thrif tlessness of the poor while condoning iden- tical qualities in the pauperized well-to-do. It is just that very sentimentalism which breeds disastrous forms of social counter-selection against which social reformers train their guns. Their aim may be askew: Mr. Carne- gie's scheme for abolishing large inheritances, for in- stance, may be a poor sort of projectile; but the target is plainly visible to anybody who will take the trouble to look straight. Sentimentality plays havoc in the domain of child welfare. It has killed a thousand times more babies than perished in Herod's massacre. Nearly anybody with a slight equipment of passing good looks and a bit of nerve can organize and foist upon the soft, credulous public a charity for babies or children. "Save the kiddies" will wring tears and dollars from thousands who would pass unheeded a call to "Prevent infant mortality." Time was when any little company of good ladies could open an orphanage or home for foundluigs. And nobody seemed to think of connecting sentimentality wdth the tremen- dous death rate in those jerry-built institutions, or with the narrowed, hampered, and broken lives in store for the pitiful survivors. So long as one was "doing good," he or she could not be held responsible for such grievous re- sults. Hence when state boards of charity proposed to visit, inspect, and check up these children's charities they were charged with hard-heartedness and coldness and meanness and lack of elementary human sympathy. The same story might be told of the foundation of "tours" for the reception of Ulegitimate infants. They permitted baptism and the saving of souls, but they promoted in- fant mortality, desertion, and illegitimacy in the name of good works. It is quite possible to refuse complete assent to the I02 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK over-wrought pleas of the eugenists and workers for pre- vention of feeble-mindedness, to recognize the sentimen- tal twang in much of the chatter about race suicide and the fittest racial stocks, and still to support reform legislation aimed at taking out of their families those feeble-minded persons who seem to menace the welfare of a community. There has been altogether too much senti- mental red fire over the threatened break-up of the fam- ily when a social worker or a court attempted to remove a feeble-minded household drudge from lazy or design- ing parents. And it is sentimentality of a peculiarly ran- cid sort that crows over a clever job done when it has suc- ceeded in marrying off a feeble-minded village butt. In this connection may I protest in the name of decency against those sentimental judges who think they have solved the problem of happy marriage and community peace when they coerce a young rake into marrying an impressionable girl who succumbs to his seduction, or when they tell two people in whom the light of love has burned out to "go right home now and make up"? Let no man join what God hath put asunder. In housing reform much sleazy work has had to be un- done and done over because people have felt and wept and legislated first, and investigated afterward. Shame and disgust over the presence of nasty housing conditions in one's city only become efficient shame and cathartic disgust when they are illuminated by the fullest study in the coolest frame of mind of the widest possible array of facts from one's own and from other cities. The tear in the propagandist's voice must be balanced by tolerance and determination to know the truth on the part of the constructive reformer. Whether housing laws come or not is a matter of secondary import. A tenement law based upon tears is either repealed or pigeonholed. In this analysis of sentimentalism I approach with a good deal of trepidation the subject of mothers' pensions. Without attempting to pass upon the merits or demerits SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 103 of such pension legislation, or without deciding whether or not mothers' pensions are merely left-handed outdoor relief, it must be noted that much of this legislation in its rapid spread from State to State has been in the nature of sentimental infection. In by no means every case have its protagonists considered carefully their local problem — they have heard of such laws in other States; they have ''caught the spirit"; they have simply responded to sug- gestion and imitated, or seen a chance to win popularity. It is an example of mob mind; you will recall that mob mind is a social phenomenon in which thought bears an inverse ratio to feeling. It is unnecessary and perhaps altogether unwise to ask for the repeal of any of these laws. But it surely is the path of sound social policy to ask that any further demands for the extension of sim- ilar legislation should be met with counter-demands to show proper grounds of fact and not mere vaporizings over the perhaps mythical virtues of home life as it is not infrequently practiced. The sentimental doer of good plagues the constructive reformer in many spots, but of the whole devil's brood of sentimental inventions none is more exasperating than the "Tag Day." In some American cities every day seems to be Tag Day. We are held up in the streets to buy a miserable little paper flower for the orphans, or a wilted real flower for the cripples. And in Pittsburgh a while ago women on the streets and signs on the street cars bade us buy a tag and save a soul at the rescue mis- sion. Such sentimentality not only defrauds legitimate welfare work, it also hinders the development of sound institutional finance and recruits the army of street beg- gars. Only second to Tag Days in their potential irritation to the healthy-minded are subsidies from the public treasury granted by sentimental legislators to private charitable enterprises coddled by their sentimental con- stituents. I am not here concerned with the charge that I04 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK such subsidies are a "slush fund" for financing corrupt politics. I am rather tilting at that attitude of mind which the legislator assumes when he answers a critic of some notoriously inefficient applicant for subsidies with a benevolent smile and an emotional quaver: "Ah, but they're such nice people; they mean so well; they aren't your cold, hard, scientific folks who ask a lot of questions and do nothing; they mean well, and they do a lot of good. Ain't that what we're here for, to do good?" The most dangerous aspect of these movements for Tag Days, Bundle Days, Mothers' Pensions, and the like is that they represent "organized emotion." Mob mind in the old days was fairly easy to control, because it could be localized, shamed, or frightened out of itself. A cannon, a troop of mounted police, or a persuasive orator could disperse it. But modern means of commu- nication — newspapers, magazines, reports, telephone, tel- egraph — all permit mob mind to gather headway almost imperceptibly over wide areas. Whole cities, states, and even the nation may be caught in its swirl. The news- papers, always on the alert for the "human interest" story, will exploit anything not absolutely tabooed or libelous which will move to tears. The cardinal virtue in newspaperdom seems to be not exact truth but "punch"; and punch must be considered as the technique of obtaining attention under false pretenses, the "ability to achieve the end without the means"; not the art of getting results, but the legerdemain trick of getting an appearance of results. The sentimentalist, needless to say, fails to see through the trick. Moreover, certain questionable associations, like the notorious Mothers' Pension League, conduct a nation-wide propaganda for profit. Such subtle stimulants to emotionalism can be neutralized only gradually by requiring that the journal- ist's professional training shall include the study of economics, finance, social legislation, and the adminis- tration of charities and correction; and by nerving social SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 105 workers to stand resolutely against any compromise with buncombe. Certain types of social work, too, are constantly men- aced by the danger of cultivating a sentimental attitude. A settlement head resident tells me she has tried to find out why so few students attending training courses for social work choose settlement work as their career. One young woman whom she asked replied directly, ''It's because I don't want to just sit around and be an in- fluence!" In settlement work and probation, friendly visiting and amateur case work there are always some people who putter about everlastingly and never get anywhere; they scheme and fuss and waste their own and others' energies getting and maintaining what they call a "friendly contact." Now all social welfare work rests at last upon friendship, but, as any one knows who has read his Emerson, friendship is something infinitely greater than emotional ooze. It should be perfectly apparent by this time that the Promised Land of wholesome social life caimot be seen clearly by eyes dimmed with easy tears; nor can the calls to constructive social work be heard above the thumping of a fluttery heart. Social reform of any and every kind must be thought out and carried through in the scientific spirit. No one should insist that it confine itself to statistics and a cold, hard voice. It must, if it be truly scientific, utilize to the fullest every worthy quality of human nature — sentiment, humor, imagination. The great religious teachers, the master dramatists, the makers of modern science, knew the secret of communicating their visions. Huxley could kindle enthusiasm for evo- lution just as effectively as Shakespeare evoked faith in a moral universe through Macbeth or Lear. Social reformers should likewise take their cue. In a word, social reform must more and more get away from any suspicion of driveling appeal to the froth in human nature, and must learn the art of purging its ideas with facts and I06 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK of projecting those ideas upon the plane of imagination. The leaders who can learn this art will steer a safe and fruitful course between the timid and squint-eyed stand- patter on the one shore, and, on the other, the silly dab- ster who thinks this old world of ours can be changed by a turn of the hand or a quickened heartbeat. To them must be committed the job of applying W. S. Gilbert's famous remedy for foolishness: "On fire that glows With heat intense We turn the hose Of common sense, And out it goes At small expense." The rule is admirable if the streams supplying the reser- voir can be kept fresh and flowing. It is perhaps beside the mark to inquire which science or group of sciences may hold the master key to this delicate art. But at least enough has been said to hint that while sociology may well be "first aid" to sick com- munities, it is not to be considered as the good-looking doctor who allows female hypochondriacs to weep on his shoulder and sentimentalize over their imaginary woes. Those of us who have assumed a certain leader- ship in applied sociology must set our faces resolutely against tremulous haste or muddled sentiment in the process of instigating social change. And while maintain- ing hospitable, elastic, open minds, we must discipline ourselves to the practice of that decent reticence and self-control which ought to mark a real profession, and which come only from rigorously thinking through a mass of evidence proportionate to the gravity of each problem as it rises in the day 's work. Am I leaving the impression that the social reformer must be a monster of blood and iron, or that social amel- ioration must be a policy of Schrecklichkeit as bitter and SENTIMENTALITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 107 unrelenting as natural selection? I have, it is true, been emphasizing, for the sake of arriving at a proper balance, the negative side of this problem; but not by any means to the exclusion of its positive aspects. Because we are human beings dealing with other human beings we must have, as I said at the beginning, warmth, imagination, enthusiasm, heroic self-sacrifice, and plenty of them; but all these amiable qualities must be conserved, knit together, focused, and reenforced by the will to think clearly and the will to know profoundly. When faith and love, vision and disciplined intelligence can be welded into one, we shall have such a corps of expert leadership that the very gates of hell itself shall not pre- vail against us. CHAPTER VI THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK If clocks did not run down after they were once wound up, and if people and things did not tend eternally to gather moss, how much simpler would be the problems of life; how much simpler our social work. Indeed it is pretty safe to say that there would be no social work at at. Social problems arise in the main from faulty adap- tation. Some persons and institutions just happen, others live too long, still others never seem to reach the point where you can say of them that they are really alive at all. Some live and work fairly well for a time, then suddenly come to a standstill. Nothing is more embarrassing than a machine that without warning stops functioning at a critical moment: say, a machine gun that jams on the firing line, an automobile that goes dead when you are miles from home, or a locomotive that refuses to start its load on a slippery track. In mechan- ics this phenomenon is called the "dead center," which engineers define as "the position of a crank when the turning moment exerted on it is zero", or "the point where a connecting rod has no power to turn a crank." Discarding all thought of attempting a bad pun or of applying the analogy too rigorously, I still believe a sim- ilar phenomenon is common in communities and individ- uals. We speak of "dead towns" or "backwater com- munities"; this public official is a "dead one," his rival a "live wire"; students "go flat," athletes "get stale." A Harvard professor boasted that he hadn't changed a word of his courses in thirty years. He had been dead- io8 THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK 109 centered for a quarter of a century. A successful college president told me a while ago he was so swamped with routine that he hadn't thought two consecutive fresh thoughts in five years. The superintendent of La Petite Roquette, the detention prison for young offenders in Paris, became convinced a few years ago that the dietary of his institution was insufficient, and directed the cooks to modify it according to his plans. They rebelled. Had the present diet not been going along nicely for a hundred years? Why change? Innovations are odious to the dead or sleeping. When I entered the probation office in San Francisco a good many years ago the case records were kept on narrow strips of cardboard to fit into an ordinary folded legal-document envelope. They were almost impossible to manage; we could scarcely get them into a typewriter, and, if we succeeded, but little could be said within the cramped space. Time, energy, and pa- tience were wasted; our work was hampered; only huge efforts could offset the inherent clumsiness and deadness of such a record system. I waited for something to hap- pen, not wanting to be the new broom. Something did happen — the great earthquake and fire came along and cleared out every record blank of every sort, made a clean sweep; we had to begin from the bottom. What an opportunity for a new system ! Yet think of the price — Providence and a hundred-million-dollar fire — to jerk us out of our dead center. Such inertia is overwhelmingly expensive. It is the most costly phase of "good works"; it forms by far the largest part of our bill of wastage. When we talk of econ- omy and efficiency or conservation of natural and human resources we mean in the main overcoming inertia, rout- ing somebody or some institution out of a state of sus- pended animation. And most of the talk about scientific management or canons of efficiency centers about this same problem of applying energies, now wasted, to con- necting rods in such a way that cranks will turn. no THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK Civilization might be defined as an attempt to achieve steadiness, persistence, and economy in the application of energy. The animal is born with instincts and ac- quires habits which act as his balance wheel, but only in rare instances does he create of himself anything to correspond to the human institution as a steadier. De- spite instincts and habits both animal and primitive man lack the persistence and continuity of effort which we ascribe to civilized man. The great problem of social evolution seems to have been the changing of an alter- nating current into a steady flow, the substitution of ideals, motives, disciplines, institutional forms and reg- ulated social pressure for the mere ebb and flow of primal instinct and feeling. But the goal is not yet achieved. You and I still vibrate between the pit and the seventh heaven. Social institutions, like factories, vary in their day-by-day output. And steadiness may be so exagger- ated as to become a vice instead of a virtue. Says Mr. Dooley: "Yes, Prosperity has come hoUerin' an' screamin*. To read th' papers, it seems to be a kind iv vagrancy law. No wan can loaf anny more. . . Prosperity grabs ivry man be th' neck, an* sets him shovelin ' slag or coke or runnin ' up an ' down a ladder with a hod iv mortar. It won 't let the wurruld rest. . . It goes around Hke a poHsman givin ' th ' hot f ut to happy people that are snoozin' in th' sun. 'Get up,' says Prosperity. 'Get up, an' hustle over to th' rollin' mills: there's a man over there wants ye to carry a ton iv coal on ye 'er back.' 'But I don 't want to wurruk,' says th ' lad. ' I 'm very comfortable th ' way I am.' ' It makes no difference,' says Prosperity. ' Ye 've got to do ye 'er lick. Wurruk f 'r th ' night is coming.' Get out an ' hustle. Wurruk, or ye can 't be unhappy; an' if th' wurruld isn't unhappy, they'se no such thing as Prosperity." Whether we must be ceaselessly active or work inter- mittently can only be determined pragmatically. By our fruits must we be judged. Here, then, comes in the use of scientific tests, of measurements, of gradings. THii DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK III II In the judgment cf social work, scientific efificiency tests will have to be applied to both institutions and individuals. Let us begin with the institution. A survey- will usually bring out the state of a community's armor for social defense; it will show the absolute gaps that need filling, the spots where the armor is worn thin, the places where it is so thick that instead of protecting the community, the community must spend itself in support- ing this dead weight. From this standpoint social sur- veys must more and more take on the character of city plans; and the arrangement and distribution of institu- tions to meet community needs should become more and more a branch of social and civic architecture. A community that tolerates unnecessary duplication of its charitable plant is dead-centered. But how much duplication is necessary or permissible? Should every group of well-intentioned women or every religious sect be allowed to start an orphanage or hospital or mission merely because they want to? No more than every person who has a grievance, however petty, should be allowed to indulge himself in the joy of litigation. We be- gin to recognize that private charity is a public trust and have made a start at inspection and licensing, but only a bare start. To make that supervision fair, some tech- nique of accurate judgment has yet to be worked out. This applies equally well to the problem of deciding when a particular institution is dead-centered, i. e., when it has outlived its usefulness. Social structures, like the human appendix and other vestigial organs, tend to per- sist long after their original contribution to well-being has been used up. Have we not all encountered organ- izations like the legendary Ford automobile that ran nine miles without gasoline, simply on its reputation? The history of philanthropy is full of examples of the dead hand, the maladjusted endowment, of "vested rights" to doing good of a highly needless and even a 112 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK vicious kind and in a particularly heedless way. In no other field, perhaps, does time make ancient good so quickly and manifestly uncouth. Social control over vestigial philanthropy must become very much more vigorous before we can be assured of re- lief from the inefficiency and loss it now entails. But again, we run against the difiiculty of not having a sound system of grading. We assume, at least for all practical purposes, that we can tell when a man is dead. The doctor has certain objective tests like holding a mirror over the man 's mouth. And the coroner 's jury solemnly and con- fidently register the verdict that So-and-So has yielded up his vital spark for good and all. But where is the doctor or coroner's jury who can perform the same func- tions of test and autopsy upon a suspect charitable insti- tution? What sort of mirror could be devised, or how secure a coroner's jury for such a job? Social work is still graded largely by whim, by sentimentaHty, by con- tagious approval or disapproval radiating from some powerful personaHty; by fad or craze; by petty griev- ance or pettier ambition, vanity or pique. These are the attitudes that determine newspaper backing or criticism; that feed or dry up reservoirs of private bene- faction; that dictate legislative votes and appropriations. Some provision must be made for pruning dead social branches or for absorbing useless and cumbersome accu- mulations of social tissue in the form of bequests, endow- ments, and the other elements of philanthropic equip- ment. I cannot go into the details of such a policy of social control, nor am I competent if I had the time. I may suggest, however, that as social life is organic and in a constant state of flux, and as our bodies are said to undergo a complete change every seven years, we ought to take account of our social equipment at least every ten years and ought to provide for a technique of survey, grading, and judgment, accurate and rigorous enough to relieve us of the incubus of charitable survivals and to in- THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK I13 sure that no really useful organization for social welfare will be cut off. But, you may say, why not trust to natural selection to perform this useful act of review? Of course in the long run the principle of selection does operate, and the inefficient or dead institution will be ex- terminated. But social Hfe by its very nature tends to nulHfy this rude selective process. Hence things some- times survive because of a fictive value. The business of the statesman and social worker, then, is to point out real values, to rub off the tinsel, to show up the fool's gold and uncover the unmistakable precious metal. How much of real gold and how much of gold brick is there in the philanthropy of your community? You must be able, social workers, to assay your social agencies for the bene- fit of an all too credulous public that still fails to see how coy looks and fair words do not mean sound social work. Another phase of organized philanthropy must be passed over with bare mention. Organized welfare work means system. But it means dead center when it is so thoroughly reduced to fixed rule and routine that every- body knows just what to expect. In other words, the sociological principle of anticipation comes into play. Thus the beggar learns to know that the business man or the charity society of a certain neighborhood relaxes at certain seasons; the tramp knows a given house or town as "easy"; deserting husbands know the compassion of a certain group of benevolent women for deserted waves ; the young delinquent soon learns to ''know the ropes" of court procedure ; the alien learns by heart the answers he must make to get his naturalization papers; the shop- keeper notices that cheap boarding houses for young women are the hobby of some of his fellow citizens and figures that he can pay lower wages. The really neces- sitious frequently hide their misery rather than be drawn through the knothole of an unvarying procedure of in- vestigation. A moribund organization stands by its 114 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK "principles," its system, its methods; it is inflexible; be- lieves in creation by fiat and plenary revelation; shies at any notion of progressive development of truth. The live organization is adaptive, mobile; its guiding princi- ple is to anticipate anticipation. Ill Did you ever see a town or a social agency suddenly blaze out into new life as by spontaneous combustion? I never did. The reason is that such things don't happen. Commmiities tend toward the thick mud of the rut and do not know the art of pulling themselves out by their own bootstraps. When an agency or town gets a new lease of life it is usually because of crisis: new blood, strangers who come with ideas, angels bearing visions, a new invention, the sudden strain of having to compete with a rival, or threatened extinction. Usually the iner- tia is overcome, new power added, the crank set in mo- tion once more, by personalities whether hostile or friendly. Just because dead-centered persons make dead- centered agencies and because live wires vivify social in- stitutions, it is vital to know how people work, what feeds their energies, what makes them "peter out," what gives them second wind, and what finally sends them to the scrap heap. This is a field which scientific investigation has barely descried so far. We hear of efficiency systems in factory management, of vocational guidance, and of business psychology. But of this interesting attempt to deter- mine the principles of liveness and deadness in the busi- ness world, little account has been taken in social work. Once or twice within the last year or so a demand has been made that we social workers analyze ourselves and our jobs. But Httle or no response came. With all the difiidence born of tackling a new field I prepared a set of questions which were submitted to several hundred social workers in various fields and in several cities. The idea of THE CENTER DEAD IN SOCIAL WORK II5 the questionnaire was to find out whether social workers in their daily rounds were exceptions to the general psy- chological principle that people work by ups and downs, that they get into ruts, that they strike dead centers. I wanted to find out primarily the things or conditions which hinder the individual from doing his best, and which multiphed and prolonged finally land him in the dumps of inefficiency or self-reproach. So far no detailed individual intensive tests have been devised for social workers such as the experimental pys- chologists have applied to the learning process in general or to such problems as telegraphy, foreign languages, typewriting, and stenography. These things can be re- duced to measurements and order more easily than so- cial work. The laboratory tester can set down so many words per minute as my output in telegraphy to-day ; so many to-morrow; so many next week, next month, in three months, half a year, and so on. He can plot my curve of learning or productivity easily enough, noting my gains in power, my lapses and my steady ploddings. He can also discover many of the factors back of my vari- ations in accomplishment. But the kaleidoscopic vari- ety of social work and the inherent difficulty of reducing that variety to some measurable unit makes our prob- lem much more complex. What should be our unit quantity? The number of cases handled or solved per day? Families treated or rehabilitated? Boys saved or improved? Dispensary patients cured or visited? Homeless men fed, settled down, married, put to work, or passed on? Ex-convicts reclaimed? Drunkards and would-be suicides salvaged? Number of hours or days per case? Per capita cost? Energy expended? Calories of food used? You see the complexities. They have nothing to do with whether social work is a profession or not, for the same complexities crop out in the attempt to apply efl&ciency tests to preaching, medicine, law, and teaching. The prime difficulty is that all these profes- ii6 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK sions are creating — as their chief business — certain intan- gible, imponderable values, which though almost be- yond human measurement are nevertheless the most real things of life. Who can measure health or spiritual well- being or culture in absolute units? Yet some measure, either direct or indirect, must be found to prevent pro- fessional misfits, wastage of valuable energy, and the sense of futility which sometimes threatens to engulf the most poised and optimistic of us. During the past fifteen years several educational psychologists (Bryan and Harter, Swift, Johnson, Book, Thorndike and others) have been experimenting on the process of learning. All agree that progress in learning is never steady but always by jumps. In diagraming their results, figures like the following appear: I: Telegraphy (Bryan and Harter). H: Writing Shorthand (Swift). Ill: Reading Shorthand (Swift). IV: Balltossing (Thorndike). V: Russian (Swift). THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK I17 Each of these curves shows characteristic peaks and val- leys connected usually by fairly level spaces, called techni- cally "plateaus of learning." These plateaus mark the learning of chemistry, of telegraphy, foreign language, music, mathematics, ball-tossing, whist, chess, and check- ers. To adopt my own term they represent deadcenters. Now some extremely interesting conclusions crop out of these experiments in locating and diagnosing dead centers, which are highly significant to the learning of technique in social work. In learning a foreign lan- guage two great plateaus occur: the first just below the point of so-called "working proficiency"; the second, just below "complete mastery." Another point of vital importance is that "equal amounts of work do not pro- duce equivalent results;" that is, the time element in learning must always be reckoned with in determining the relation between effort and result. Further, one of the salient marks of learning is habit or automatic con- trol, and this automatization goes on throughout the process of learning, but suffers ups and downs. Still more significant is the fact that dead centers suddenly disappear almost overnight, just as spring some April evening seems to summon every reserve to break through the crust of winter, and we wake next morning to a world of new glory, or as names suddenly pop into our heads after long periods of ardent quest in vain. Granting that plateaus or dead centers occur, what do they mean? You may interpret them as "resting places in effort" or breathing places or periods of assimilation, reflection, digestion, adjustment, incubation, like the lulls between the assaults on Verdun. They warn of conscious or unconscious mental revolt against further crowding and cramming; they are hints of mental or moral indigestion. "Plateaus have at least two causes. Considered from the point of view of automatization they are resting places. The learner has overshot his permanent power and must wait until the automatization Il8 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK is perfected. They are also due to a slump in enthusiasm. Monotony overcomes the learner. Further, these two causes react upon one another. . ." In the study of chemistry at the University of Indiana a plateau known as "the period of depression" was recognized. Students showed a phase of rapid improvement in the first months, followed by a long period of slow progress. This was not due to any inferiority in the latter part of the labora- tory manual. It came from the difficulty in assimilating the large number of elementary facts learned at the beginning. When the student's attention could finally be turned from this mastering of tools his curve began to rise again. We can state the causes of dead centers and their mas- tery more explicitly. Physical conditions such as fatigue, loss of sleep, and lowered vitality may mean loss of self- control. Swift, in his experiment on learning Russian, found that "a slight fatigue or any mental disturbance whatever" drove away newly acquired technical skill and caused a relapse into cruder methods. Periods of rest like the Sunday interval register themselves in rises of ability. Depression associated with monotony may not cause plateaus but seems to prolong them. Return- ing pleasure and confidence prophesy new advances. Strong distractions scatter energy and hinder the learn- ing process. Waning interest, from whatever the cause, is perhaps the surest drag weight to learning and good work. Taking off the keen edge of enthusiasm lessens one's output. Pleasure in success causes a learner to redouble his efforts. Sense of strain in trying to unlearn bad habits or to cram facts and methods induces depres- sion. A small boy already stuffed to the bursting point and being plied with yet more food said amiably that he * ' could still chew but couldn 't swaller ; " had he been plied with such distasteful stuffs as knowledge or methods he, like us, would have been less amiable. There are limits to our absorptive capacity. THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK II9 In learning typewriting the effort to spurt is appar- ently "helpful if not too severe, but overstrain exhausts the learner and hinders his progress by bringing into the focus of consciousness processes that serve him best when in the background." In telegraphy it is intense effort which educates. Each new step costs more than the former. Hence between sixty and seventy-five per cent of beginners become discouraged upon the plateaus of the curve just below the main-line rate (average, toler- able skill). "As a rule ordinary operators will not make the painful effort necessary to become experts." One of the evidences of mastery in one's profession seems to be a certain independence of influences which strongly affect the beginner. External influences are said to exert a very profound effect upon inexperienced telegraph operators; they suffer from stage fright, while older experts become even more fluent under subjective disturbances like fear and anger. So clear is this fact that Bryan and Harter generalized it into the rule that emotion stimulates the expert, but paralyzes the beginner. Now what are the bearings upon social work of these psychological experiments? How does cramming or overtraining, or bad training or fatigue, or emotion affect the social worker? Can a social worker get second wind and climb above his plateau? Will a consuming interest or high emulation express itself in better case work? Does jealousy or fear paralyze him? Does a sense of being a misfit hamper one? Do social workers know themselves? Can they answer such simple ques- tions as: Does your job fit you well or does it chafe and pinch and strain like a badly shaped shoe or corset? Does it blister your conscience and spoil your good temper? Will time reduce the stiffness and rubbing, or is the misfit permanent? Can you adapt by growing callous places in your conscience and a permanent kink in your temper? Would vocational guidance and advice have helped you? 120 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK These, and many others like them, were the question- ings that prompted the wording of my questionnaire. For the answers let me cite replies sent in by social workers. They come from many fields, from organized charity, probation, hospital social service, district nurs- ing, institutional teaching, settlement, child-placing, travelers' aid, boys' club, civic club, and municipal research work. They cover varied periods of service from a few months to forty years. The training repre- sented varies quite as much, ranging from incompleted grammar school to University and Schools of Philan- thropy. The general tone of the returns is highly optimistic. Practically all admit ups and downs, plateaus and dead centers in their work. Their psychology is the psy- chology of the old plantation refrain: "Sometimes I'se up, sometimes I'se down, sometimes I'se almost level wid de groun'." But there seem to have been few con- scious cases of out-and-out misfit. A partial explanation is the fact that most of those who reported went into social work because they liked it, because they were "called to service," or because it was the logical outcome of previous studies; one went so far as to say that it was "innate desire" that impelled to social work. Another explanation is that many of these workers had been at their posts such a short time that the first exaltation and enthusiasm, the wonder of it all, had not yet passed away. Partly because of this general satisfaction, the attempts to measure personal efficiency and fitness for the work are comparatively rare. Few if any sound objective methods have been tried. Several pleaded so much work or such varied work that no time was left for self-analysis or measurement. One was contented with a general dififused satisfaction as the measure of success. Some experience decreasing worry and friction. One says: "Each year I finish in better shape physically and ner- vously. Cases seem less complicated and are not so apt THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK 121 to get on my nerves." Others record gains in poise and confidence. Somewhat more definite is this case: ''The test of my efficiency has come through noting the in- creasing ease with which I carry responsibility, supervise the work of other people, and the ability to keep a large amount of work in order." One suggests this rather illuminating test: "I am now able to leave a greater number of clients in a satisfied mood." Another sets down the increasingly intelligent use of outside organi- zations as an index of improvement. The ability to get at the core of a problem, to grasp a situation more quickly, to cut down the expenditure of time and energy seem to be the commonest tests. Says one: "I find I spend less time per call, return for information overlooked less frequently, can gain the cordial interest of people more quickly," etc. On the other hand, one worker reports a gain in efficiency because she now spends at least twice and often thrice as much time and energy on cases as she did a year ago, and claims as a result a larger percentage of successful cases. Some have adopted more nearly objective tests. One reports running over the results produced under given circumstances as compared with similar results produced in former years. Several use a "daily log" somewhat like the piece- time schedules of the shop efficiency managers. These, while full of promise, need to be widely extended before they attain full scientific usefulness. One person reports taking a few minutes each day to get a perspective, to sift out the important from the trivial, to coordinate work. Another uses a quarterly test: "Every three months I make a review of work and mental attitude for three things: (i) results; (2) wastage of time and uimecessary acts; (3) mistakes." Another makes a careful analysis at least once a year, and occasional time studies. In still another case which I have been watching for many months with great interest, the worker has been patiently trying a recapitulation and study of twelve years' work 122 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK in one district of a large city, using every statistical method possible, with the utmost detachment of mind, in the effort to arrive at a judgment of fitness in terms of concrete accomplishment. There is abundant evidence that social workers, like other learners and workers, experience periodical losses of efficiency. The causes are multifarious. Most of them seem to proceed from the nature of the worker himself, but some also lie in adverse conditions surrounding the work. Overwork stands easily first, numerically, as a depressive influence. This tallies closely with the ex- periments of the psychologists. Crowding or cramming begets a feeling of futility. It is only fair to say, however, that very often a sense of being overworked is really only failure to perceive general unfitness for the job or waste- ful methods or inadequate training. One writer says frankly on this latter point, "The broader one's training, the more one's work is simplified." Nerve exhaustion, fatigue (cumulative fatigue, one reports), loss of sleep, bad health, variations in vitality and temperamental twists, figure frequently in these analyses. Eye strain is not to be overlooked here any more than in the conduct of delinquent children as a factor in irritability and wasted effort. But worry is, next to overwork, the chief hamper reported ; nearly a third of all the returns admit this vampire; worry is a factor in overwork and all its train of evil consequences. But, as with the sense of crowding, worry may be only a symptom of maladapta- tion. It may come also from the strain of trying to live up to one's idea of his own precious ego. In whatever guise it may appear, worry is always and everywhere fear; and fear is the shortest known road to paralysis and death. Whether one is too young or too old for his job is a difficult and delicate question to answer; but I have found several people who felt that their youth frequently hin- dered good work. Nobody seemed to feel too old, and THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK 1 23 nobody felt it incumbent to propose a definite dead line beyond which a social worker should retire to the shelf. One person suggested, however, that fifty-five might be too old for certain kinds of work with youths; and an- other that no philanthropist so far had taken thought for "the comfort of worn-out charity workers." Sex seems to be no hamper, largely for the reason that it is usually reckoned with by those responsible for electing workers to their positions. Size, however, is noted by one worker as of importance. She charges that her short stature sometimes loses her the respect of those whom height would impress. Somewhat more important then these are the adverse effects of lack of cooperation on the part of fellow work- ers or the community. Some fifteen per cent report this. One writes: ''My greatest discouragement comes from a lack of understanding on the part of the general public." Another complains that volunteers take the bit in their teeth and refuse to run in step with trained workers. But on the whole the esprit de corps seems to be fairly satisfactory. The nature of the work itself drains off the energies of many. The recurrent sight and smell of misery, the depressing stories, the monotony of routine, the lack of competent direction and leadership, the sense of spend- ing huge energies for trifling results, the enormous sense of responsibility in dealing with human destinies, are set down as sources of wastage. The most important factor in depression, writes one shrewd observer, "is the result of watching the work of prominent social workers. They seem to put so much energy into their work and yet are thwarted to such a degree that one naturally wonders if it is worth while." Another confesses frankly dropping occasionally into the dumps as the result of feeling that our work tends to prolong bad social condi- tions. There is also the feeling of futility, closely asso- ciated with overwork, which comes from the superficial 124 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK slapdash way in which many of us have to turn off our multiform tasks. The bewildering variety of problems which confront the social worker in every field baffles and disheartens particularly the beginner. Usually, however, he develops some specialized talent or enough general experience to enable him to see the common underlying elements in superficial diversities. I do not find that as a rule the difficulty of a job de- presses the vigorous, properly trained worker. Occa- sionally it discourages, but more frequently it seems to act as a challenge, it unlooses the reserves of pride and grit. As in maternity, so in some social jobs, knowledge that when one says A he must also say B nerves to the highest effort. I recall my own case. A friend who was anxious to induct me to a certain office took me before the Board controlling it. The Board was hospitable, with one exception — a man who was anxious to appoint one of his proteges. He pointed out the difficulties of the job and called attention to my deceptively youthful appearance. Finally, slapping his fat legs for emphasis, he thundered at me, ^'Now do you think you can do this work?" My self-respect and pride were chafed, so I summoned my most leonine expression and shot back at him, "I've got to do it." He voted for me at once. Criticism nerves many people apparently to extra effort merely to disprove the critic; it begets the attitude of *'I'll show you;" but it is rather a costly way of securing high effort and large output. Low salaries and insufficient funds play a small role as direct factors in "plateaus"; but they may cut an un- suspectedly large figure indirectly. On the whole I find social workers quite calm on the subject of salaries; they recognize that many of them are absurdly "sweated," but accept that fact as they would perhaps the whims of climate, ad majorem gloriam Dei! Lack of promotion is a minor factor also, though in combination with other factors must react unfavorably. Social workers seem THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK 12$ also to obey the gospel injunction to take no thought for the morrow ; for almost without exception they deny any fear of the future. Some write emphatically that there is just as much future for them as they care to make. One says, "I don't care a pin about the future." In de- fault of decisive evidence I put this down to Henley's philosophy in his "Invictis" (*'I am the captain of my soul," etc.) rather than to possible impending matrimony! Uncertainty about being able to hold one's job seems to be about equally balanced by the inertia, complacency, and lack of stimulus which come from holding endowed positions. Very little complaint is registered on the score of com- munity suspicion or hostility. On the whole, relations seem to have been cordial. But several cases to the con- trary stand out, with rather sad evidences of retarded work as a result. Both the quantity and quality of one's output is grievously affected when, as one correspondent puts it, you have to waste time playing for confidence and guarding against being "double-crossed," or in over- coming uncertainty about the backing of boards in put- ting through pieces of work you feel to be vital. A cor- dial community attitude, on the other hand, "helps a lot," "stimulates for better work," "acts as a spur," is one of the most important elements, say those who have been beneath the harrow. The effect of one's own home life upon his work is such a delicate and perhaps poignant question that it is almost hopeless to expect much information from a question- naire. Yet some direct statements appear. One writer says lack of sympathy and cooperation at home cause most of the downs or slumps. Fortunately, the home life of the average social worker is congenial, therefore is an asset rather than a liability; but domestic life marked by jealousy, suspicion, clash of temperament, or unbri- dled criticism is disastrous to the worker, whether pro- bation officer, C. O. S. secretary, or railway engineer. 126 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK I have left till this point the effects of inadequate training. One is astonished at first at the lack of pro- fessional training pretty generally reported; but the won- der passes when we realize that professional schools for social work are a development of the last decade. One successful man says that when he was urged to under- take a certain charity job he demurred because he knew nothing about such work. A hopeful sign, said the ap- pointive power; a sign that you are willing to learn and that once in the work you will probably stick to it. This case turned out well, but many others do not. At least twenty per cent of all my returns bewail being handi- capped by improper education and training. Some re- gret the lack of a better fundamental education before special training. This is quite in line with the experience of training schools for social workers and of those who have the oversight of the workers at their posts. The majority of social workers enter their field because they like it, they say. But, as many of them confess, this lik- ing, this interest in people, interest in health, in boys' clubs, in service, in humanity, carmot at once be trans- lated into real ability or effective service. Hence they must blunder along, acquiring methods which must later be unlearned, practicing upon a none too patient public, and only reach a modicum of skill after months or years of hard experience. Do you wonder, then, at serious ups and downs? It is largely because of this lack of specific training before entering a particular field that the social worker's curve follows in its gyrations the curve of the student of telegraphy, shorthand, or chem- istry. Can you wonder, either, that social workers go stale or actually break down? Social work is a dangerous trade because in its very essence it is dealing with social and spiritual maladjustment, and by the very complexity of those maladjustments taxes our every resource of good temper, faith, sympathy, and nicety of judgment. There THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK 1 27 is little relief from the daily pressure. This is brought out by repeated testimony to the fact that too much variety rather than too much routine tends to baffle and wear the worker down. The danger signals of impend- ing breakdown in one's spiritual fitness for his job are impatience, touchiness, h3rpersensitiveness, physical pain, shortage in ideas, lack of interest or joy in the work, and abnormal flashes of bad temper. The effects are easily recognizable: inability to think quickly or clearly, '' think- ing incoherently and skipping from one job to another," feeling that one is "cumbered with much serving and spending time on unimportant things," superficiaUty, try- ing to find the easiest way, incapacity for prolonged ef- fort, wasting time in thinking without doing, sense of un- certain grasp, "disgust with the job and a desire to change," loss of resourcefulness, spontaneity and power to inspire, indecision, hysteria, and temporary crippling of sound judgment. IV This whole study would be an unprofitable tale if it did not suggest how we may clamber out of the sloughs of despond and scale the heights beyond our present plat- eaus. That we can is clear from experience. Sometimes ups seem to foUow downs almost as naturally as hills match vales. One correspondent shrewdly explains this as coming from "a sense of exhilaration about landing safe, or even landing at all." Reaction through sheer gratitude, like convalescence! Another proposes harder work as the cure for a grouch, but wisely adds that per- haps "taking it out on others" is what he really has in in mind. But most of us are not of such resilient natures that our curves of energy rise merely from weathering hard times. The uses of adversity are by no means al- ways sweet; frequently they deaden and brutalize. Hence remedies must be invoked to restore our mental and spiritual equilibrium. A good night's rest, sleep, 128 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK food and exercise, going away from people who try one's nerves, cutting off outside distractions, retiring from the world, getting out of doors, are common resources. Pres- ident John L. Finley has long followed the custom of say- ing to faculties and students at vacation partings, "read a new book, make a new friend, take a long walk." Golden advice; there is no better tripod upon which to base your personal and social health. Good books are like alpenstocks in our efforts to climb. Most social workers cling to The Survey as their chief professional guide, supplemented by the technical journals covering their special fields, conference reports, and the like. For general reading they follow the stand- ard magazines, with considerable emphasis upon the At- lantic Monthly and New Republic. The Ladies Home Journal is read by at least one worker, " to keep human." De gustihus non! Dr. Cabot, Henderson, Jane Addams, Stevenson, Emerson, Kipling, books on efficiency, and detective stories share honors with the Bible. Those few cases where no time for reading was reported were just the cases in which depression seemed most deep-seated and chronic. The wisdom of vacations with pay seems beyond ques- tion. The gain to the worker redounds to his organiza- tion. To many of my correspondents, apparently, the idea of a sabbatical seemed so new that they were at sea. Some, however, announced positively that a year out of every seven or eight, spent in reeducation, would be enormously profitable. If it is true, as one veteran sug- gests, that in every new decade we must unlearn the teachmgs and methods of the precedmg decade, it would be the part of wisdom to plan for such periods of renewal and reapprenticing as part of our schemes of organized social effort. My final point has to do with special sources of help. Conferences are pretty generally approved; meetings with fellow social workers, likewise; though one writer THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK 1 29 rather snappishly declared that social workers have no new ideas, as they simply repeat what they have read in books. The backing of loyal friends is a universal source of strength. Optimism seems to be a desirable asset in such friends. Encouragement by superiors and good teamwork with one's fellows loom large. Sympathy of domestic mates is frequently noted. Meeting with re- sourceful individuals and strong personalities is usually helpful; but one writes, "Strong personalities make me tired." Evidently a legitimate protest against having to coddle or placate or hobnob with some notable tyrant, some bloodsucker, some personaUty that demands in- stead of giving or inspiring. Some curious, abnormal in- dividuals get their greatest help from talking shop, from making speeches — God save the mark! More derive help from hearing others speak, from preachers who think, from great lecturers, from University Extension courses. Others draw courage and fire from the biog- raphies of the great veterans in social work. One speaks of the value of self-communion through a personal diary. Another of growing an imagination. Still another of the stimulus from personal ambition for leadership. The magnitude of the problem stirs up some strong souls; one writes: "The one hundred million people in the United States— folks— are my greatest inspiration and give me courage for the future." The desire to plumb the very depths of things may also constitute inspiration. To me, writes a young man, "the most inspiring thing is that there is a wonderfully increasing tendency to get to the bottom of social work and put it on a systematic and businesslike basis. . . " The assurance of doing good work also helps — "the con- viction that one is doing real work and being paid for it," as one phrases it. Belief in humanity and confidence in God's love illuminate some dark hours. Indeed reli- gion very commonly appears as the energizing factor in recuperation or progress. A large proportion of social 130 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK workers testify to this fact. Some speak specially of the benefits of Christian Science; others of prayer. Some discriminate carefully between their religion and the church; my own personal religion, not my church, says one. Another observes: "It is difficult to state the effect of religion at this time. The ordinary church depresses me and I have come to feel that the church which ought to have 'being' as its motto has the commercial idea of ' acquiring ' very much in the forefront. I do not think that social workers any more than other men can afford to disregard religion, but I do not see how they can be in- fluenced very much by tradition and creed." This per- son's demand for a less other-worldly type of rehgion is echoed by another: "Religion should be playing an im- portant positive part, but is playing only a negative one, due in part to failure to find any organized expression of religion which seems to fill the need within one. There is, of course, the belief that things are really growing better and the hope that one may have a share in making this old world a better place for some to live in." Religion in this and other cases would seem to offer the emotional background for an attempt to believe in the possibility of progress, of destmy controlled for progressive social amelioration. Several general hints suggest themselves by way of summarizing the facts in this study. Time ought to be definitely allowed in a worker's sched- ule for periodically checking up. Disinterested experts should be called in occasionally as auditors are in busi- ness offices, or municipal research experts in public af- fairs, or as the Life Extension Institute proposes for its members, for a sympathetic taking stock of our techni- cal and spiritual resources. Teachers of methods of so- cial work should include ways of self-testing and anal- ysis which can be used as barometers and help in forestalling tragic misfits. No social worker should be considered as fitted for his job until he has achieved a phil- THE DEAD CENTER IN SOCIAL WORK 131 osophy of life which will work in time of strain and cri- sis. The cause of social reconstruction, as we all know, is not seldom impeded by jangling personalities. Spir- itual dependents and defectives may be found in offices as well as in tenement houses. Just as sound industrial life requires provision for periodic reeducation of its workers if they are to keep up with the advance of mechanical and business technique, so professional life, and above all the profession of social work, must provide for peri- odical " retreats " for the refreshing of its workers. Scien- tific social work cannot be satisfied with a few months of initial professional training if it would avoid com- munity or personal ruts and dead-centering. The spirit of science demands that the worker shall not only add constantly to his own equipment but that he shall share with his fellows for the enlargement of the whole. Only by prodigality in providing for and encouraging the ceaseless upbuilding of its social workers in health, cul- ture, and mental poise can a community secure that economy of effort which will make sure that if we must have plateaus of staleness and valleys of humiliation, at least they will recur less often and at a constantly higher and higher level. CHAPTER VII THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES The scientific spirit, as we have seen, is the true de- terminant of the social worker's attitude toward his profession and his clients. It offers, moreover, an ap- proach to the problem of efficiency, whether from the standpoint of a welfare organization or of its personnel. We have already analyzed some of the factors in the individual's going stale; and we hinted broadly at some of the reasons which conspire to dead-center an organi- zation. It remains to show by a single concrete example how the methods of science may perhaps aid in stabiliz- ing the administration of social work. One of the most annoying and persistent problems common to both industry and social work is the constant shifting of the staff. Mr. Carnegie once said that if his plant burned down it could be rebuilt without delay and with no appreciable loss; but if his organization were disrupted his whole business of producing steel would be crippled if not utterly destroyed. This is the nightmare of the "general strike" or of any local strike or lockout. Employers have sensed this clearly enough for a century and took precautions early against such crises by at- tempting to have them branded as conspiracies and by enlisting police and military forces to prevent or suppress them. But they were much slower to recognize the losses entailed by the anarchy of attrition; that is, by the cease- less round of hiring and firing. This they not only con- sidered inevitable, but even aided and abetted by hold- ing desperately to the unlimited right to discharge and by conniving to maintain a reserve pool of surplus labor. 132 THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 133 Even "scientific management" itself was brought rather belatedly to recognize the wastage involved in such incessant shifting in the personnel of production. Time studies and the elimination of needless motions were right enough so far as they went, but they could not stop the leakage incurred by having to teach a new gang every morning the lessons which the gang the day before had barely learned. But within the past five years two new ideas have crept into scientific management. First, the perception that a worker is something more than a nameless wheel in the organization of an industrial plant; that industry cannot be separated from other social concerns; that employees have homes and other interests besides the interest in a particular job. Second, the idea of the employment manager, who will unite psychology, social vision, business acumen, and common sense in the at- tempt to apply science to the process of filling jobs. Already employment management has acquired almost the dignity of a profession; certainly it is to be recognized as a skilled vocation, and will continue to be necessary in some form or other, no matter how far the present tide of affairs sweeps us away in the direction of a democratic or even socialistic organization of industry But these employment managers working individually and through their conferences have done much more than serve their employers by adding to his profits or the workers by stabilizing their earnings. They have ren- dered a distinct service to both theoretical and applied social science by demonstrating in concrete figures the losses through misplacement, casual displacement, and no less casual replacement of men in jobs. Mr. M. W. Alexander of the General Electric Company made one of the pioneer studies of this problem. He covered, for the year 19 12, the hiring and firing of twelve factories employing an average of 40,622 men and women. To maintain this average, "42,571 persons were engaged 134 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK during the year, whereas the engagement of only 20,540 could be defended on even liberal grounds. Therefore 22,031 persons were hired above the apparently necessary requirements." Now what did this cost? By a detailed analysis he figured that the average cost of hiring and firing was $53.92 for each new employee and $16 for each rehired employee — a total of nearly one million dollars. The pay roll of these twelve factories totaled some $29,000,000; nearly 33^ per cent therefore of this amount represented faulty employment methods. More- over if the experience of these twelve concerns were a fair statistical sample of the state of manufacturing industries the country over the annual national losses would run up to the amazing figure of $172,000,000 based on the number of employees, $187,000,000 based on capitalization, and $248,000,000 based on total sales. And these figures cover only such items of cost to the employer as instruction, wear and tear, spoiled work, reduction in output, and accidents. They tell nothing of the still greater losses to the employees themselves. But are these figures typical? In the old days before the Ford Motor Company introduced scientific em- ployment methods its experience was even worse. From October, 19 12, to October, 19 13, it hired 54,000 men to keep up an average force of 13,000 — a 400 per cent turnover. Other concerns report a turnover of from 1 25 to 240 per cent. An analysis of fifty-seven Detroit plants revealed an average turnover of 252 per cent in 19 16. On the Great Lakes the Lake Carriers ' Association found in 19 13 that when the normal number required to man completely their fleet was 10,476 they actually hired 52,094, a turnover of about 400 per cent. Three years later this figure had jumped to more than 500 per cent. I am unable to find anybody who can tell me what should be considered a normal turnover, but some em- ployment managers talk as if zero were the normal ob- jective to be attained. THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 135 What is the bearmg of all this upon social work? Without attempting to assimilate too closely the experi- ences, methods, and standards of modern business to those of organized social work, it looked Uke a fertile field of inquiry to attempt a study of how staff turnover affects social agencies. In making it there were no blazed trails to follow, save the few hints from the field of in- dustry. A detailed questionnaire prepared with great care and submitted to the executives of various social agencies (including the American Association for Organ- izing Charity) was sent to all of the large and one hundred and forty of the smaller relief societies in the United States and Canada. All but three of the larger and seventy-two of the smaller societies returned replies usable in whole or in part. Only thirteen of the forty-two children's agencies responded; and of this number so few were in manageable form that their effect upon the whole study was found to be slight. A still smaller num- ber of settlements responded; hence their experience is quite negligible for the conclusions as a whole. Of all the cities responding thirty-nine reported the size of their staff and the turnover for the five years ending in the spring of 19 17 in such shape that compar- isons could be made. The percentage of turnover for the seventeen cities with a staff of ten persons (exclusive of purely clerical workers) or over ranged from 47 to 292, with an average for the whole group of 144. (Table I.) The only serious omissions from this group are Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco, but there is no reason to believe that their experience differs sufficiently from the seventeen other large cities to change their average materially. ^ * As this volume was going through the press, the United Chari- ties of Chicago reported the turnover for its field workers (super- intendents, assistant superintendents, visitors, visiting house- keepers, stenographers, clerks and directors of volunteers) as 53.3 per cent for 1916-17; 68.6 per cent for 1917-18; and 43 per cent for the first nine months of 1918-19. 136 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK TABLE I TOTAL TURNOVER BY CITIES— FIVE-YEAR PERIOD I. Seventeen Cities with Staff of Ten or Over Total Total Per cent City Turnover Staf Turnover Atlanta 17 10 17° Baltimore 45 33 136 Boston 25 1 26 96 Brooklyn 113 loS i°8 Buffalo 30 20 150 Chicago- Jewish Aid 28 18 156 Cincinnati 20 27 74 Cleveland 57 49 116 Columbus 27 13 208 Detroit 37 23 161 Milwaukee 11 14 79 Minneapolis 52 25 208 Montreal 7 ^5 47 New York 146 50 292 Philadelphia 58 44 132 Pittsburgh 252 22 2 114 Washington 3° 12 250 Totals 728 506 144 Similar returns from twelve smaller cities with relief agencies having a staff of less than ten persons re- vealed a more striking range of turnover. From a minimum of 25 per cent the figures soared to 300 per cent, with an average of 98 per cent for the whole group. (Table II.) 1 Boston gives no figures for changes in group employed less than two years. 2 Estimated. THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES I37 TABLE II TURNOVER IN Twelve Cities with Staff of Less than Ten City Total Total Percent Turnover Staff Turnover Cambridge 2 5 40 DaUas 8 9 89 Des Moines 5 5 100 Erie 6 5 120 Oakland 4 6 67 Peoria 7 4 ^75 Providence 9 7 ^^9 Reading 4 4 100 Savannah 12 4 300 Springfield (Mass.) i 4 25 Wheeling 2 7 28 Youngstown 7 8 87 Totals 67 68 98 Several interesting facts cropped out in the process of analyzing these returns. In the first place some agencies had never thought of keeping such a check upon the vicis- situdes of their staff. One executive wrote that if we could renew the request for figures five years hence he would have them, since the very mquiry had challenged him to more careful observation. Several others made copies of their returns for their own guidance as a sort of balance sheet. In certain agencies the turnover had been so rapid among the higher executives that nobody had the facts from personal experience for even two years back, to say nothing of a five-year period. In one or two cases of smaller New England relief societies there had been no change of staff in from ten to twenty-five years ! Speaking by and large, upon the basis of these figures, 138 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK the turnover in some social agencies is much lower, in others rather higher than the experience of certain indus- trial plants. But on the whole the advantage is dis- tinctly with the social agencies, particularly if, in making the comparison, we remember that our returns are for a five-year period, while the figures from industry represent the annual rate. This is what might have been expected, since we are dealing with a semiprofessional class at least, by contrast with a very large percentage of un- skilled or only partially skilled labor in the industries quoted. Most of the agencies reporting did not pretend to know definitely what the proper or normal percentage of turn- over should be; they had no exact figures nor any con- vincing experience to base a judgment upon. Twenty- five, however, hazarded answers more or less tentatively. They begin with one whose guess is a counsel of perfec- tion: there should be no turnover! The rest shade off in the direction of actualities. Fifteen say 10 to 20 per cent is a proper annual turnover; four say 25; the remainder from 30 to 40. Since the bare figures of total turnover tell us nothing of how differences in professional rank or attainment af- fect tenure of office and stability of staff, the next step in our problem is to analyze the total five-year turnover by ranks and by years of service. The reports of twenty- seven cities with 770 workers are available for this com- parison. (Table III.) It required some interpretation of staff titles to reduce the various returns to some com- mon denomination. For example, it was necessary to make a separate pigeonhole entitled "special secretary " to take care of such diversities as French secretary, church secretary, anti-tuberculosis secretary. But on the whole the reports from these twenty-seven cities were in such shape as to be readily comparable, thanks to a fair standardization of office organization. Even a superficial glance at Table III shows at least THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 139 two critical points which substantiate generally ac- cepted experience. First, the greatest turnover (both absolute and relative) is in the group of visitors or dis- trict agents — that is, among the newer recruits; and this shift is in inverse ratio to length of service. Second, the next greatest ratio of change occurred among district secretaries, but with the time element transposed, for the largest percentage of turnover was among those of long- est service. The immediate presumption is of course that they were largely promotions to higher executive posi- tions. But for many reasons the most significant feature of this whole table is the distribution of percentages in the totals. Nearly half the changes occurred within less than a year after employment! Two-thirds within two years ; and three-quarters within three years. As we shall discover later many of these changes are due to maladjustments of various sorts — lack of training, general unfitness, domestic dif&culties, and the like. I40 THE SCIENTIPIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK TABLE III TURNOVER BY RANKS AND YEARS OF SERVICE Reports of Twenty-seven Cities Less Rank 5 yrs. 4-5 3-4 2-3 1-2 than Totals or more yrs. yrs. yrs. yrs. i yr. Gen. Secy, or Supt. . . 6 3 4 6 2 3 24 Asst. Secy, or Asst. Supt 6 3 2 2 2 2 17 Dist. Secretary 29 13 22 21 11 3 99 Case Supervisor i i 3 3 i 9 Financial Secretary. .. . i i 2 4 2 10 Asst. Dist. Secretary.. . 2 i 4 11 13 5 36 Employment Secretary . i i Registrar 3 2 i 6 Visitor or Dist. Agt 14 15 17 55 nS 271 490 Visitor Assistant 5 6 1 1 Nurse 3 4 2 i 4 i5 29 Visiting Housekeeper . . 214 3 10 Confidential Exchange . i i Visitor in Training 19 ^9 Special Secretary i 121 5 Reception Clerk 2 i 3 Totals 66 42 61 109 163 329 770 Percentage of Total Turnover 8.5 5.5 8.0 14. i 21 .2 42.7 100. o The complement to this set of figures appears in the re- turns from twenty-six cities on the length of service of various ranks of present members of the staff. (Table IV.) THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 141 TABLE IV LENGTH OF SERVICE BY RANKS Reports of Twenty-six Cities Less Rank 5 yrs. 4-5 3-4 2-3 1-2 than Totals or more yrs. yrs. yrs. yrs. i yr. Gen. Secy, or Supt 14 11 4 i 21 Asst. Secy, or Asst. Supt 12 3 I 2 5 I 24 Dist. Secretary 34 11 16 14 13 7 95 Case Supervisor 5 4 3 3 i i 17 Financial Secretary. ... 13 i 5 Asst. Dist. Secretary. . . 2 5 5 8 3 23 Emplojonent Secretary. i i Registrar 5 i 3 2 2 13 Visitor or Dist. Agt 14 11 21 36 58 65 205 Visitor Assistant 3 4 7 Nurse 7 4 5 6 7 32 61 Visiting Housekeeper . . 4 2 2 7 15 Visitor in Training. ... 13 13 Special Secretary 5 i i 4 11 Reception Clerk i 12 4 Totals 99 35 60 75 104 142 515 Here again the critical points are the district secre- taries and the visitors, and as before with the time ratios reversed. For while nearly half the district secretaries have served four years or more, and two-thirds more than three years, one-third of the visitors have been on the staff less than a year, over sixty per cent less than two years, and four-fifths less than three years. This appears much more clearly in Table V and in the graph based upon it. The rapid descent of the solid line indicates the relative stability of the higher ranks on the staff, while the giddy soaring of the dotted line tells a mute story of constantly "breaking in" new and inexperi- enced workers. 142 THE SCIENTEFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK TABLE V ABRIDGED TABLE SUMMARIZING TABLE IV Total of Jour Total of re- Length of service highest ranks tnaining ranks 5 years or over 65 34 4-5 years 19 16 3-4 years 21 39 2-3 years 19 56 1-2 years 23 81 Less than i year 10 132 Totals 157 358 GRAPH ILLUSTRATING TABLE V B"yrs.+ 4-6 yrs. 3-4 yrs. 2-3 yrs. 1-2 yrs. Less than 1 1 IJO Solid lin Distr. Secj e includes G< ., Case Supe n. Secy., Asi rvisor. it. Secy,, 1 1 1 j Dotted I other Subo ne includes rdinate Posit Visitors, Nur ions. ses, and the 1 1 1 1 1 I iOU 1 1 1 1 90 1 1 1 80 70 / / / / / \ y / f SO 40 \ \ / / / 30 \\ / / / - ^ S^ 20 X^ / \ 10 A THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 143 The attempt to work out some valid idea of the aver- age length of service proved unsuccessful for several rea- sons, but principally through the fact that most of the smaller societies were unable to compute any average which would mean anything. It is true that thirty-two agencies did venture to suggest an average, which in two- thirds of the cases ranged between two and four years. Only two ran over four years. The period of service showed such wide ranges — from a few days to as high as ten, twenty-five, and even thirty-nine years — that any attempt to scramble such figures and call it an average would have been merely ludicrous. It is significant that a good many executives who filled out the returns had been on the job such a short time that they could not give the ancient history of their organizations. One man wrote that he was the third secretary in three years. Again, other agencies were too young to have any signif- icant figures yet. On the other hand, some cities like Worcester, Massachusetts, change their social agencies very slowly. The first secretary of the Associated Chari- ties there stayed four years. Her successor is still at work after twenty-two years of service. She writes that ''all the social workers in Worcester, public and private, stay!' ' By contrast one Eastern executive cleaves to the opinion that "five years seems a fair period of service. In exceptional cases only should long periods of service be desirable." Here, of course, we run into a stone wall, and can only adjourn scientific hope until some sure method is worked out for diagnosing dead center in a social agency. Such a diagnosis will tell us how long one should stay with a social agency before wearing out his welcome. An attempt was made to discover whether there is any difference in the proportion of turnover in public as com- pared with private agencies. The general burden of opin- ion inclines toward the idea that there is no difference. However, a considerable number of comments indicate a 144 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK belief that there are relatively more changes in private agencies than in public. Likewise, concerning the en- dowed as compared with the unendowed agency, what few clear opinions were secured tended toward the gen- eral conclusion that the endowed agencies are the more stable. It is curious to find that in a good many in- stances the same reason is given why endowed and pub- lic agencies are more stable. The reason is not flattering, since it is usually a suggestion that these agencies are more wooden, antiquated, routineer, and involved in pol- itics. The evidence here is so conflicting as to be ui no sense authoritative. It simply reveals curious little prej- udices and echoes of unpleasant local situations. The question of periodicity forms another interesting angle of approach to the whole problem. Is there an open and a closed season for social workers? Is social work a seasonal industry? Out of thirty agencies report- ing their experience seventeen found their changes in staff rather uniform throughout the year; thirteen re- ported seasonal or periodic shifts. Some misunderstood the question and found neither uniform nor seasonal changes! And many had no reliable data or were too small or too young to judge. Several of the larger agen- cies reported most changes between spring and the end of the summer. This is probably, as New York's ex- perience suggests, because of the easing down of the winter rush. The New York Charity Organization Society employed 57 per cent of its one-year workers during the four winter months. In attempting to come at closer grips with the reasons for turnover, two classes were set up; namely, voluntary changes and dismissals for cause. We have the expe- rience of twenty-nine cities involving 603 workers as a basis for analyzing the reasons for voluntary changes. (Table VI.) One out of every eight went because of death or old age or physical disability. About the same proportion married. Nearly forty per cent resigned to THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 145 TABLE VI REASONS FOR VOLUNTARY CHANGES Experience of Twenty-nine Cities * Reasons Number oj Cases Died • 10 Retired because of age or disability 51 Resigned to marry 87 Resigned to enter social work that paid better 163 Resigned to enter social work that gave higher rank.. . . 61 Resigned to enter social work that offered promotion. . . 18 Resigned to enter social work for which better fitted ... 42 Left social work to enter other pursuits 51 Resigned on account of ill health 24 Resigned because work depressing i Resigned because work "too hard" 7 Sought "more congenial work" 3 Sought more training 14 Resigned for various family complications 21 Moved 3 EnUsted 3 Entered Red Cross i Other miscellaneous reasons 36 No special reason 7 Total 603 take positions offering more attractive salary, higher rank, or better chances for promotion. The most signif- icant item is, however, the hint of maladjustment. If we may interpret leaving social work to enter other pursuits as a question of lack of fitness for social work, and add these cases to those where unfitness is frankly confessed, we roll up a total of fifteen per cent of misfits. Not all are misfits, however. One very poignant letter * Includes returns from some agencies whose figures were in- conclusive for Tables III and IV. 146 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK explaining why the questionnaire had not been ac- knowledged earlier stated that the writer had broken down from overwork and closed as follows: "The study you will make from data collected will be most interest- ing. It is a forward step which I indorse. I really am alive to the vital issues of the day along every branch of sociological endeavor, but it is against human nature for me to have to do two people's work all the time and three parts of the time at the heaviest season of each year. Am seriously considering giving up social work and seeking some other means of livelihood." At this point the question of vocational guidance, or misguidance, emerges; and the emphasis is heightened if we add to the number of misfits those who for various reasons left to secure more training. Domestic complications, such as objection of parents or sickness in the family, accounted for a good many changes. Finally into the pigeonhole "miscellaneous reasons" are stowed away such causes as travel, prolonged holiday, "retired to a ranch," "released to another organization which needed worker more" (camouflage or the millennium?) "need change of altitude," left to become a nun, or foreign missionary, or study for the ministry. This is by no means an un- wholesome or dispiriting story. The desire for advance- ment is perfectly healthy and should be encouraged and met so far as the resources of an organization are con- cerned. Loyalty to the organization or to its chief should never be shouted so loud that the voice breaks, especially if the shouting is unaccompanied by some more substantial argument. The fifteen to twenty per cent of misfits, to a greater or less degree, remain a stumbling- block which will be in part explained later after exam- ining the reasons for dismissals from the staff. THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 147 TABLE VII LENGTH OF SERVICE OF PERSONS DISMISSED FOR CAUSE Experience of Twenty-five Cities Less Period Served 5 yrs. 4-5 3-4 2-3 1-2 than Not Total or more yrs. yrs. yrs. yrs. I yr. stated No. of Persons 13 4 4 IS 45 ISO 17 248 TABLE VIII REASON FOR DISMISSAL Experience of Twenty-five Cities Reason No. of Cases Reorganization of agency 11 Special job finished 17 Term expired 71 Financial incapacity 4 General incapacity 61 Lack of proper training 22 Immorality proved or suspected 4 Inability to do teamwork 24 Insubordination 5 Disloyalty (to agency) 4 Tactlessness 8 Indiscretion 6 Unfitted by ill health i Dishonesty i * Unpromising material " 7 "Slackers," capable but lacking in interest 2 Total 248 T48 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK The best approach to the figures of dismissals for cause is perhaps through an analysis of the length of service in such cases. Here we have the experience of twenty-five cities involving 248 cases. Table VII shows that eighty per cent of them had been on the staff less than two years. The immediate presumption is that most of these were seasonal "fill-ins" or inexperienced workers who soon proved to be misfits. . This presump- tion is pretty well justified by the analysis of the specific reasons for dismissal (Table VIII.) One out of every six apparently was discharged automatically after finishing a predetermined period or job. Recall that many agencies add extra workers for the winter rush and drop them in the late spring. Staff reorganization was responsible for a few changes, but it is an open secret that reorgani- zation is frequently a means of getting rid of deadwood when no other method avails. Far more serious than either of these is the factor of incapacity or maladjust- ment, however denominated. Considerably over half of all the cases come under this heading. Not all such cases are chargeable to unwise vocational steering or bad judgment on the part of executives; but either those executives or the agencies responsible for training the misfits, or both, should see to it that the figures of ten per cent for improper training and another ten per cent for inability to do teamwork are materially reduced. Just how this responsibihty for poor judgment is to be divided may appear by inquiring who hires and what methods of recruiting are used. Apparently in nearly all the smaller societies the board of directors hires all the staff. In the larger agencies the usual procedure is for the board to appoint an executive secretary who selects the rest of the staff. In thirty out of seventy-two cases the secretary, superintendent, or other chief executive did the hiring. In twenty-six cases the board hired all with or without recommendation by the executive. In fifteen others the executive recruited his staff with ap- THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 149 proval or advice of the board or a special board com- mittee. In a few cases the heads of departments as- sumed this responsibility. The methods of recruiting were just about as varied and uncoordinated as those of the munition or ship plants in the early days of the war. Some agencies frankly acknowledged the use of all methods, some con- fessed no fixed method. Twenty-three depended upon chance applications. Personal search, "scouting" at conferences, personal acquaintance, or special tips from friends netted a good many. Schools of Philanthropy were credited as the best source by twenty-three agen- cies; the American Association for Organizing Charity came next with nine; the Intercollegiate Bureau with eight; college placement bureaus and university contacts yielded seven. Advertising, training classes, and appli- cation waiting Usts brought in a few more. Here we encounter one of the weak spots in organized social work. It can be strengthened in at least two ways: by standard- izing gradually the professional education of social work- ers, and by developing sound placement bureaus on lines suggested by the National Social Workers' Exchange. There can be no doubt that many changes, particularly in the larger well-established relief agencies, result from the practice of beginners using them as training schools or stepping-stones. Thirty-five out of fifty-four have had this experience. This number, with only three or four exceptions, includes every large society. Boston answers, yes, decidedly, to a question on this point: "the chief reason for the many changes in our staff." Minneapolis modestly says "yes to a certain extent — at least we like to believe so!" Pittsburgh thinks it is to be expected and desired. New York agrees it is unavoidable, but would not encourage people to join its staff with that understanding, except as volunteers. Cleveland finds it less true now than in the past, presumably because the community has developed other means for training. 150 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK Other cities hope that they are entering a period when such a state of affairs will obtain. A side light on the migration of social workers is thrown by the report that the workers trained by some of the smaller agencies wander off to the big cities, while such a city as Brooklyn finds that its district secretaries leave for positions of greater responsibility in smaller towns. To a certain extent this tendency is offset by proper increases in salary. But in spite of the general recognition that better salaries tend to stabilize a working staff a good many charitable agencies still pay, or are forced by circum- stances to pay, low salaries even at the risk of losing their workers as soon as they become really efficient. The experience of the larger agencies is about equally divided on this point. Some say they are not conscious of any such reasoned practice; others admit it as an unfortunate fact in the past; still others state definitely that this has been the regular policy of their boards. It is a situation closely resembling "sweating" and seems particularly marked in a large majority of smaller agen- cies. This leads to the whole question of salary schedules and their effect upon turnover. In general we may say that most larger agencies have some sort of a progressive salary scheme or are trying to develop one. By con- trast most of the smaller societies have none at all or else their progression is so limited as to be ineffective. Various modifications of the method crop out. One city uses a progressive scale for the first twenty months of service, then resorts to "promotion on merit." An- other scales up to a maximum of $70, but promotes slowly after that. Several use the graduated method for the apprenticeship stage of visitors in training only, and apparently use the method of higgling in the market thereafter. There seems to be no doubt that other things being equal where such a recognized possibility of salary THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 151 increases is in practice it tends to hold the staff together, at least for from two to five years. Here and there some doubt is expressed as to its effect, but in such cases the trouble would seem to lie not in the principle of progres- sion but in the low standard of salaries in general which makes it difficult to meet competition. That these cases are exceptional may be inferred from the mournful plaint of the secretary of a good-sized Western society who deplores the breakdown of her staff because her directors do not see the need for such a method since business concerns are not run on that basis. Another exception proves the rule — and more : a Middle-West agency reports that its workers stay on in spite of low salaries. Evi- dently the good old days of piety, renunciation, chastity, and good works are not utterly swallowed up in the new salaried, scientific charity! The question finally simmers down to a determination of what is a decent living wage for a social worker. By what standard shall it be measured? It seemed to be not unreasonable at least to inquire how salaries in relief agencies compared with those prevailing for elementary or high-school teachers. Out of sixty agencies replying to this question twenty-two claim that their salaries compare very favorably with those of teachers; eighteen find them less, particularly for beginners; five consider them fairly comparable; seven are on a par with elemen- tary but not high schools. A few details will clothe these statistical bones with flesh. In Boston salaries of social workers compare more favorably with those of teachers after the period of apprenticeship is over. In Pittsburgh, salaries are lower at first, but after three years are about equal to elementary-school salaries. In Minneapolis they are apparently bigger at first, but the maximum is lower except for executive positions. In Brooklyn, Des Moines, and Sioux City, for example, they are consider- ably lower; in Cambridge, 10 to 15 per cent lower except for general secretary. Hamilton, Ohio, pays the general 152 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK secretary less than a high-school teacher, and visitors less than elementary teachers. In Dallas, Texas, visitors' salaries compare with those of elementary teachers, but the superintendent or general secretary is comparable with only the lowest high-school salary. In several cities in different parts of the country the executive secretary ranks about equal with or above the high- school teacher; but the visitors seem to offset this gain by running considerably lower than elementary school teachers. On the whole, this is not a showing distinctly flattering to social work. We are apparently still faced here with a survival of mediasval thought which confided so large a part of charity and good works to the care of unpaid monastic orders. But the increased demand for social workers since the outbreak of the war is already registering its benevolent effect in a rise of the salary schedule. It is to be hoped that this advantage can be carried over into times of peace, for there is no doubt that it would have a marked effect upon the stabiHty of social organizations. It is a matter of common observation in the business world that competition for workers sometimes degen- erates into shameless stealing of trusted employees. The question of whether a similar situation held in the field of social work was put to the various agencies con- cerned. In the vast majority of cases a flat "No" came as the reply. Only a very few cases had suffered the con- trary experience. Some of the executives replying to this question stated that sometimes they felt personal resentment, but that the ethics of these practices had not been established and they were inclined to accept the situation philosphically. Apparently, deliberate piracy of this sort has very little to do with the general average of turnover. There is no doubt that one of the results of rapid turnover in social agencies is the enforced promotion of unprepared and inexperienced workers to positions of THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 1 53 responsibility. About one-third of some forty agencies reporting have been the victim of such necessity. This is particularly true of the larger agencies. Some of them say frankly that they have to do it altogether too fre- quently. For example, one says flatly that "Every promotion the last two and one-half years has been too soon for the work or the worker. One resulted disas- trously." Only one agency reports such a promotion as a brilliant success and imphes that it was a great gamble. Most of the societies reporting that they had not suffered in this way belong to the group whose staffs are so small that they are not arranged upon a hieratic basis. It is quite evident that one great source of trouble is the fact that workers move about so rapidly that they do not thoroughly master the elementary stages of their jobs in such a way as to become good timber for promotion to the higher ranks. The question arises as to what effect the training or lack of training of social workers has upon their mobility. An effort was made, therefore, to ascertain what t>'pe of training workers actually employed by relief agencies had. Table DC on page 1 54 shows the percentages of the staff of seventy-two relief agencies having specialized types of training. 154 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK TABLE IX Percentages of Staffs of 72 Relief Agencies with Specified Types of Training Seventeen Fifty-five Type of training larger smaller agencies agencies College 46.5 40.9 Full College 43-1 38.2 Part College or Normal 2.8 2.0 Post Graduate 0.6 0.7 School of Philanthropy 18.2 24. Trained by Organization 33-0 43-3 Nurse's Training 12.0 7.0 Special Training in Russell Sage Foundation, Etc, 4-5 2.4 No Special Training IS-2 10. Ambiguous 0.6 6.0 These have been divided into the larger agencies having a staff of ten or over, and smaller agencies having a staff of less then ten. Nearly half of the workers in the larger agencies have had either part or full college training, and two-fifths of the workers in the smaller agencies were similarly equipped. Schools of Philanthropy contributed a slightly larger share to the smaller agencies. The lat- ter also apparently depended more upon training by the organization itself than did the larger agencies. It is somewhat surprising to find that a larger proportion of the big agencies utilize people without any special train- ing. This should not be unduly emphasized, however, since in dealing with relatively small numbers a statis- tical exaggeration of a slight difference could easily be made. It is perfectly apparent from some of these fig- ures that social work on the whole is entitled to the claim of professional standards since at least two-thirds of all the workers employed by all of the seventy-two agen- THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 1 55 cies had either academic or professional training with, in some cases, specialized training in addition. In this con- nection it is worthy of note that a good many of the agen- cies believe that to increase the professionalizing of so- cial work will reduce the turnover. In all justice it must be said, however, that a nearly equal number are of the opinion that such a professionalizing will not only fail to cut down the turnover but will actually increase it. A clearer idea of what is involved in rapid turnover may be derived from an analysis of how long it takes to train or break in a new worker. The length of time re- quired to train a relief worker is apparently from three months to a lifetime, if we may judge from what the re- lief agencies report. Out of fifty-two agencies reporting, six figured this time at from less than sLx months to a year; nineteen from one year to two years; seven from two years to three years; two from one to three years; six could make no estimate, and one suggested that a lifetime would be none too long for his particular kind of work. It is understood that in most of these returns the unit for training is a case visitor. Naturally, the question is not an easy one to answer offhand. One agency, for instance, called it an impossible question, as so much depends upon the individual. Of course it does, and it also depends upon the individual who is supervising the training. Nev- ertheless, speaking by and large, certain general princi- ples of practice emerged. From long experience, some of the older agencies have crystallized this experience fairly definitely. Philadelphia, for example, considers a worker in training for one year, with a further year before be- coming a superintendent. Cleveland has a training of seven months technically, but this really means from two to three years. In New York the practice varies, but it is not unusual for a visitor to be promoted to an assistant district secretary after one year of training and to a dis- trict secretaryship in two years. Not all of the agencies have reduced their practice to any such clear-cut basis. 156 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK Some of them qualify their requirement of six months' training by adding the phrase, "if the worker has nat- ural aptitude." Some depend upon a primary trying- out period of three months as the minimum time neces- sary to prove a worker's fitness. When one considers that some agencies would require an office training of a year or so after college and school of philanthropy courses, while others would require no more from beginners with no previous background of social or college training, it is pretty evident that the process of standardization has not been carried very far yet in this particular or else that the exigencies of local community life vary enormously. The period of training required of most beginners in a rehef agency figures largely in an estimate of what it really costs to break in a new worker. Industry figures this item at from $40 to $200, and even as high as $1,000 for a foreman. The problem has never been worked out so clearly for social agencies, since a cost-accounting sys- tem is more difficult to operate in philanthropic agencies than in a manufacturing plant. However, a few sugges- tions have been gathered bearing upon this problem. Out of thirty-three agencies reporting two figured the cost of breaking in a new worker at about $50; one at from $50 to just under $100; five from $100 to $300; three from $300 to $500; one at $600; one at $1,000; seventeen had never figured it out, and three were inclined to believe that the worker really pays his way from the beginning. The agencies sometimes figure that if a worker sticks or if a volunteer makes good the cost will be eventually offset by service. This may be true if salaries are low. Let me add a few illustrations to the bare figures. Springfield (Illinois) and Harrisburg figure that the agencies lose practically the first three months'salary of a new worker; York raises this to a year's salary; Lansmg puts it at $50 per month for the first four months; Forth Worth, about two months' salary; Lincohi, two months of partially handicapped work in the office; Washington, $200 as a THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 1 57 moderate estimate, $ioo for training and $ioo for wasted relief; Winnipeg has no definite figures but recog- nizes the waste in unnecessary relief; Cleveland, Buffalo, Cambridge, and other societies have never reduced the problem to terms of money but know that it costs much in time, nervous energy, poor case work, lack of cooper- ation, and the very valuable time of supervisors. Du- luth exhibits a rare spirit of resignation by claiming that it costs nothing to break in a new worker because other workers put in overtime! This, of course, is simply side- stepping the issue, because somebody must eventually pay the bill. The more scientific view is the one sug- gested already, that if a worker stays with his job long enough the employer may recoup the initial loss by ad- justing the scale of salaries to cover the waste. At any event it is evident enough that the rapid turnover is even more vital to a social agency than to a business house be- cause of the peculiar nature of social work. Good will is a precious asset in business, but in a social agency one must consider not only the attitude of clients but of the contributing and of the critical public as well. What- ever tends to stretch unduly or to snap the threads of good will which bind an agency to its public must be reckoned a serious loss. And even if it cannot be stated in definite terms on a balance sheet, there is always a cer- tain loss of morale involved in an unstable staff. Right here is one of the sources of weakness with which many executives are charged; namely, that they become so in- volved in their case work and office routine as to lose sight of any contact with the public. By frank confes- sion and by common experience we know that much of the time and energ}^ of executives goes into petty adjust- ments of mistakes caused by new workers which ought to be saved for the wider education of the public. Any- thing which will reduce this wear and tear upon the execu- tive and stabilize the staff should make of such an agency a much more effective community educational resource. 158 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK Finally, we come to the question of means suggested for cutting down turnover. By an overwhelming major- ity, higher salaries are set down as the means most likely to accomplish stability; not only higher salaries, but better adjusted salaries, standardized salaries, and perhaps a somewhat nearer equalization in the salaries of subordinates and higher executives. Among a great miscellany of suggestions, the following stand out: better professional preparation; reduced size of districts; better general working conditions; more free time for workers to study their work; more attention to systematic train- ing; stricter requirements for employment; greater op- portunity for individual development and encouragement to originality; dignifying the job by wider education in the meaning of social work; reducing overwork par- ticularly during the v/inter rush; cultivating loyalty to the organization; recognizing the value of continued service; making yearly contracts. In all this list of suggestions there is not a word in favor of scientific testing to determine an applicant's fitness for social work. Is it not time at least to begin experimenting with some such psychological tests as the University of Minnesota uses for prospective entrants into its medical school? Surely social work has achieved sufficient definiteness of content and method to be capable of formulation into principles wliich could be translated into the categories of a set of psychological tests. In running through the mass of detailed suggestions one must not lose sight of the fundamental fact that there are two desirable objectives in the organization of a staff: first, efficiency, and second, justice. If a staff is dead-centered it needs the acid of disintegration in- stead of the glue of salaries to hold it together. And on the second point, we are in absolute agreement with the superintendent of the New York Charity Organization Society who urges that it is better not to reduce the THE LABOR TURNOVER IN SOCIAL AGENCIES 1 59 turnover if that would involve decreasing earned pro- motions. In reviewing this brief study one cannot escape the conviction first and last that whatever wastage in social work results from the shifting sands of staff organization is traceable in large part to a lack of the real scientific spirit. It is either improper or insufficient training; that is, lack of scientific preparation. Or it is misplacement, which again results from an unhappy combination of lack of scientific acumen and lack of common sense. Most of the faults of personality which brought about dismissal were open violations of the social workers' code as analyzed in our study of the scientific spirit. Finally there is a certain myopia of outlook which ren- ders the lives of some workers sterile and destroys what- ever soHd fruit their agencies might have been able to produce. A singularly clear and open-minded letter came to me on this point from an Associated Charities secretary. She writes: "I have come to feel within the last two years that one reason for the lack of permanency in the staffs of Charity Organization Societies may be a certain unrest and impatience for results among the workers themselves. When workers learn to take the long view which looks for permanent results only in terms of years, and to form the habit of taking root, for better or worse, in one community and identifying them- selves with the life of that community, we will probably for the first time realize the possibilities of our profession." She is right; but perhaps it is not mere crazy optimism which bids us believe that when social work shall have attained the full status of a profession and accepted all the responsibilities laid upon a profession as distinct from a trade, a really scientific attitude will mark the mind of the social worker, which will confer poise upon the individual worker, stability upon his organization, and long range, illuminated, well-articulated types of service upon our patient communities. CHAPTER VIII THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK One aspect of the scientific spirit has so far been allowed no explicit share in this study of the background of social work. Yet it is extremely important and must have been sensed as a constant overtone in the discus- sion. I mean the adventurous spirit. Without the gesture of daring, the hardihood of thinking boldly, the undertaking of even the most unpromising experiments, the trying of what appear to be hopelessly unopenable doors, without these science is dead, just as religion without faith is dead. Indeed, as we have already shown, science has had its martyrs for the faith, and it was just that magnificent exhibition of half a century of militant faith which has shaken the world out of its complacency and compelled it to adjust its thinking to a universe of new dimensions. Science, then, is adventure m spirit and method, although to be sure we judge it finally by its works. Ideas usually pass through at least four stages. First, what might be called the incubator or germinal period. Next, the apologetic, the stage of tentative search for backing. Third, the militant or aggressive stage, when powerful exponents conduct bold propaganda, assume the airs of the victorious, and feel the thrills of conquest. Finally, the obsolescent or conventional stage when the idea has outlived its usefulness or everybody is tired of it or it ceases to shock anybody or has been fully inte- grated to the social tradition. Scientific ideas, such as evolution or eugenics, have been making history in these i6o THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK l6l modes. Apparently scientific social work is now entering the third stage; and this is by no means an abnormal development. For social work, if it is to be truly scien- tific and able to prove itself, must partake of the quality of daring and cannot escape the tendency to militancy. This does not mean, however, any counsel to obstinacy or heedlessness or wild-cat schemes — they are antipodal to the spirit of science. Hence its venturesome experi- ments must be committed to the trained and tried hand and not to the tyro if they are to result in creditable works and the means of genuine social advance. The war has given opportunity for trying daring social experiments on an unheard-of scale. Now that the agony of suspense is over and the dusts of feverish activ- ity are blowing away it is profitable to examine what has been going on, how these experiments comport with the spirit of science, and how much of war-time social adventuring may be expected to carry over into the permanent life of peace. Social science, we are told, has not yet reached the stage of being a predictive science, in the same sense that the astronomers are able to forecast an eclipse or a comet's recurrence. We know only too well that it is impossible always to see through in all of their ramifications the pos- sible effects of any piece of social reform or social work. Neither sociologists nor social workers are crystal gazers. But they in common with all scientific workers not only have the right, but are called upon to extract some mean- ing from their gathering of facts. This is not so much mere prophecy as it is observation of straws blown by certain currents of events. However, in the observation tour which we are about to undertake, we shall not try to play the part of Mr. H. G. Wells and anticipate in great detail what the caldron of events is about to boil forth. If we drop into the prophetic vein we shall try to observe the rules of the game which distinguish scientific observation from amateur prediction. l62 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK II While I have in mind primarily the effect of the war upon social work, I am not interested in predicting how many social workers are going to be able to hold their jobs after the war. Some of us, I hope, will lose them. It is always our business to stimulate preventive meas- ures which will render our own little particular minis- trations superfluous. But other kmds of social work will undoubtedly develop. This war may end war, but it will certainly not bring the millennium. Hence, social workers need not look forward to a general demobiUza- tion of their brigades. There will still be plenty for them to do. No doubt there will be many shifts in attitude and method. New concepts of reHef will probably be estabUshed, Hkewise new educational attitudes, new atti- tudes between employer and welfare staff. Industrial relations workers, for example, may modify profoundly their view of their jobs; they will perhaps even in some cases begin to play the part of the tail waggmg the dog. In general we may say the great war merely empha- sized three ante-bellum trends; namely, the tendencies towards organized criticism and pubUcity, community control over all community conditions, and the use of trained experts. Not all these are moving at equal rates, however; but on the whole we are moving at a vertig- inous speed, and we are learning tremendous lessons with- out stopping to figure the cost. Just as the Federal Con- gress with comparatively little discussion voted in one year after the beginning of the war larger appropriations than the total cost of our national govermnent since its foundation, so we are leaping with more than seven- leagued boots in the country's social program. In less than six months after the war America had jumped fifty years or more, and in so far as the army and navy are concerned, distanced every competitor in the world in the matter of social insurance. THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 63 Social work in spite of these changes will continue to recognize that social progress is the result of two proc- cesses; namely, case work with individuals, formative, reformative, amehorative, personal service; and manipu- lation of mass conditions in the environment, preven- tive and legislative measures. But in the future social work will probably conceive both of these phases more adventurously. Since the social worker is so frequently an optimist by the very necessities of his profession, he is quite open to the fallacy of confusing swiftness of motion with actually getting somewhere promptly and surely. Hence, in view- ing the war situation, one must observe two general cau- tions. First, while as individuals and as communities we have learned many new lessons, perhaps they are only like cramming for an examination, or a species of death- bed repentance. Remember that human nature changes but slowly. Second, in spite of the fact that we are more of a nation than ever before, owing to the spread of a vast new network of organizations (for food, coal, transport control, war camp service. Red Cross work, etc.), and although new habits of social perception have sprung into being and new efftciencies and capacities have been uncovered, we must not expect all these new war-born virtues and measures to carry over into peace times. That would put us on a perennial war footing and realize our worst fears of militarism. But some will almost nec- essarily carry over. People will not easily forget, for ex- ample, that if a clubhouse for men in war khaki is a good place as an antidote to the saloon and the brothel in their leisure hours, a clubhouse will be equally good for the homeless man, the unattached casual migratory worker, or the immigrant in times of peace. Neither will it be easy to convince some of our people that if a black man is a good enough American to send to the trenches to save Democracy in France he is not a good enough Amer- ican to ride in a white man's sleeping car or put up at a 164 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK decent hotel, or go to a decent school, or vote unham- pered for Democracy at home. Ill The industrial world is experiencing a series of mira- cles. It is slowly dawning upon us that capitalism as we know it now is not the only nor the eternal economic form. Indeed, does it not look as though old-fashioned laissez faire capitalism is on the run? Mr. Schwab blurts out his conviction that the future is to be domi- nated by the man who labors with his hands. Many re- actionary newspapers which were caught napping have made grotesque figures of themselves by attempting to explain what Mr. Schwab meant and by assuring their readers that Mr. Schwab did not realize what he meant or did not say it. Yet Mr, Schwab and other business leaders know exactly what they are talking about. They are sensitive to the drift of events. Mr. Hoover feels it strongly. In his address to the Pittsburgh Press Club in April, 19 18, he said: "As I have seen this war develop from an active participation in its backwash and misery, since the first day, I have seen growing out of the masses of people in every country aspirations for a great economic change. That change, broadly, will be that those who work with their hands will obtain a larger portion of this world's goods and those that work with their brains will obtain less." A significant straw here is the fact that American editors are really beginning to take notice of labor-party programs. Recall the columns of news ca- bled across from England about the after-war reconstruc- tion program of the British Labor Party. The famous visit which President Wilson made to the American Fed- eration of Labor meeting in Buffalo late in 19 17 and his address there put the stamp of national recognition upon the principle of collective bargaining. This principle is becoming more and more one of the THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 165 fundamental attitudes of the American government. ^ A still more hopeful sign is the growing recognition of industrial democracy. That the government could print so vivid and frank an avowal of industrial mis- management as the report of President Wilson's medi- tation commission on the Arizona mining situation February 10, 19 18, and that the government should fol- low it up by the indictment of twenty-five business men by a federal grand jury, is a pretty clear sign that some leaders are at least becoming aware of the fact that sa- botage and the anarchy of direct violent action are swords which employers no less than I. W. W.'s have been used to wieldmg. The implication is that we are beginning to see how some form of orderly collective bargainmg is the only method by which violence in industrial struggles can be diverted. Men are asking themselves which is worse, "ca canny" or sweated wages and speeding up. They are both leaves from the same deadly upas tree, and they represent the same unproductive state of mind manifested by the old schooldame who said, "It's but little they pays me and it's but little I teaches them." Social workers will necessarily cultivate a closer under- standing of and with labor. They must not hesitate to show where they stand, not as timid neutrals awaiting a knock-out fight between workmen and employer, not as Brother Fearfuls afraid of having their heads cut ofif in some new Labor Reign of Terror, not as accomplices in putting over a class-conscious program, but as real media- tors and interpreters, as real teachers, aiding labor to educate and discipline itself for sane and productive cit- izenship as partners in the common job of making life more tolerable and just. They will do well to remember that labor statesmen though not completely "in the sad- dle" begin now to share the floor with professional dip- lomats. They will remember also that these labor states- men are puttmg forward new and constructive plans for education, industrial peace, and social justice which 1 66 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK would have seemed utterly Utopian had they not already begun in a measure to realize themselves. The right, or inevitability perhaps I should say, of eminent domain over both capital and income forces its way month by month to clearer recognition by statesmen, capitalists, and workers. A simple analogy is largely responsible. The workers gave up both capital and in- come when they went to the trenches. Hence, the stay- at-homes must not only not profiteer, but must pay all the costs. Conscription or draft means a virtual con- fiscation of both the life and the property of the soldier. While recognizing that men will frequently give their lives much more readily than their purses our rulers are apparently not disposed to halt in their exaction of prop- erty as well as life. We seem to be in for what our courts, a few years ago, would have gravely tabooed as con- fiscation of property. Lloyd George says that capital must pay for the cost of war. Francis Heney urges this as the time to begin now to equalize opportunity by cutting off special privileges and by reacquiring the five fundamental elements of the public domain — timber, coal, oil, natural gas, and water power. Both Lloyd George and Heney may be demagogues, but the ideas they voice are becoming more and more well-articulated public opinion. The new income and excess profits taxes are the surest indication that this idea of eminent domain over property will not be diverted to some future gen- eration, but that it is actually to be put into practice early. And we may be pretty sure that these new ad- ventures in taxation and the lessons learned from them will not be lost immediately after the treaty of peace. The standard books on taxation are in a fair way of being reedited or scrapped after the present crisis. There seems to be a pretty well-marked current toward wider control over prices and wages. The British Labor Party demands the fixing of maximum prices and statu- tory minimum wages. There is a strong possibility that THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 67 the war-time measures for conservation of food and for price limitation may prove so satisfactory that they will, in certain fields at least, be carried over into peace times. As to sumptuary legislation, prophecy becomes somewhat difficult. The war necessarily restricted the output of luxuries and through social pressure hindered their com- sumption. National prohibition is the most outstanding example of this field of activity. War-time prohibition rang the knell of the alcohol traffic in this country. Be- cause the British Army Council issued an order limiting the height of women's leather shoes, some people have become alarmed lest we be regimented and forced into a military control of our dress if not of our occupation. There are two possibilities, however, as to the outcome of this whole business of fixing prices and wages as well as of decreeing what we shall and what we shall not eat or drink or wear. The people may acquire a taste for such regimentation and may demand that it be retained and even extended; or they may, on the other hand, get sick of it and react in the other direction toward an extreme laissez /aire. Unless all indications fail, our apparent course will be toward present or even more intensive control within certain fields of production and distribu- tion and in the fixing of wages and prices, while in others the normal state of peace economics will be resumed. But even this temporary moratorium on accepted economic "laws" is sufficient to give the conservative supporters of economic orthodoxy mie mauvaise quart d'heure. We seem increasingly committed also to the idea of the State as proprietor. Of course for a long time we have been accustomed to the state account system as used in certain prisons for the marketing of prison-produced goods such as binder twine, farm machinery, rag carpets, canned goods, brushes, and brooms. But apparently these feeble beginnings are going to receive an enor- mous extension. Not only exigencies of the war itself but the stirrings of public opinion and the programs for 1 68 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK social reconstruction are uniting to crystallize a strong demand for further nationalization of basic utilities. The British Labor Party in very measured terms asks for the nationalization of land, railways, mines, and electric power. In America the Nonpartisan League and other agencies more pleasing to the capitalistic press are making similar demands. More cities are considering taking over traction systems. The attorney general of Massachusetts went on record recently as favoring the public purchase and operation of the Boston and Maine Railroad system. Such demands, therefore, are no longer in the nature of outlawry, for they represent the well-thought-out convictions not only of propagandist agencies but of a very numerous group of conservative and successful business men who hold these views even though they do not use the soap box for airing them. The enormous success of the United States Govern- ment's Mihtary and Naval Insurance Act is another straw indicating the way the current of economic events may be expected to turn in the near future. With an army of over 3,000,000 men, the government wrote insurance to the amount of some thirty-seven billions of dollars. This makes it the greatest single life-insurance company in the world, which, without having an actual monopoly, cannot fail to be a dominating factor in the insurance business of the whole country. Whether the idea of military preparedness leads America into creating an enlarged permanent military establishment profiting by the present generous insurance plan or not, govern- ment insurance on a huge scale is evidently here to stay. Whether this will mean that in the process of reconstruc- tion the government will tend to squat on the whole insurance field is a matter beyond prophecy. There is no doubt, however, that the strong hand of the government will act as a further stabilizer of the insurance business. The very necessity for working out some modus operandi whereby war-time insurance can be converted into or- THE AD\TENTIIROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 69 dinary life insurance means that some sort of under- standing must be reached with the private insurance companies. This in all probability will result in pretty close government regulation and control. From the standpoint of insurance as an idea, this policy is of great significance. It means that the pressure brought upon enlisted men to insure under the government act will teach them the value of insurance either under some form of ordinary commercial Ufe insurance or some contributory form of state insurance. It means also that men who have already been carrying small insurance poHcies will probably increase them; for instance, there are many cases reported of men who have been carrying a thousand dollar policy in a commercial company who now have taken the full ten-thousand dollar limit allowed under the government scheme. There seems, however, to be no indication that the government insurance scheme is going to crush out private companies. To the contrary, for the first year after the government's policy went into effect, some of the big private insurance com- panies claim they did a larger business than ever, in- dicating what I just pointed out; namely, that the whole concept of insurance has been stimulated and is making an appeal to men who never considered it seriously before. In spite of the very marked tendency of many dis- charged soldiers to allow their war-time policies to lapse, the lesson and the stimulus cannot wholly be lost. As a more or less conscious corollary to these schemes of insurance must be noted the apparent disposition on the part of this country to handle more vigorously than ever the unemployment evil. The British Labor Party in its reconstruction program calls for a national and imperial policy for the abolition of unemployment from the British Empire. "It has always been a fundamental principle of the Labor Party (a point on which, significantly enough, it has not been 170 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK followed by either of the other political parties) that, in a modern industrial community, it is one of the foremost obligations of the government to find, for every willing worker, whether by hand or by brain, productive work at standard rates. "It is accordingly the duty of the government to adopt a policy of deliberately and systematically preventing the occurrence of unemployment, instead of (as heretofore) letting unemployment occur, and then seeking, vainly and expensively, to relieve the unemployed. It is now known that the government can, if it chooses, arrange the public works and the orders of national de- partments and local authorities in such a way as to maintain the aggregate demand for labor in the whole kingdom (including that of capitalist employers) approximately at a uniform level from year to year; and it is therefore a primary obligation of the government to prevent any considerable or widespread fluctuations in the total numbers employed in times of good or bad trade. But this is not all. In order to prepare for the possibility of there being any un- employment, either in the course of demobilization or in the first years of peace, it is essential that the government should make all necessary preparations for putting instantly in hand, directly or through the local authorities, such urgently needed public works as (o) the rehousing of the population alike in rural districts, min- ing villages, and town slums, to the extent possibly of a million new cottages and an outlay of three hundred millions sterling; (b) the immediate making good of the shortage of schools, training colleges, technical colleges, etc., and the engagement of the nec- essary additional teaching, clerical, and administrative staffs; (c) new roads; (d) light railways; (e) the unification and reorgani- zation of the railway and canal system; (/) afforestation; (g) the reclamation of land; {h) the development and better equipment of our ports and harbors; (i) the opening up of access to land by co- operative small holdings and in other practicable ways. More- over, in order to relieve any pressure of an overstocked labor mar- ket, the opportunity should be taken, if unemployment should threaten to become widespread, (a) immediately to raise the school- leaving age to 16; (b) greatly to increase the number of scholarships and bursaries for secondary and higher education; and (c) sub- stantially to shorten the hours of labor of all young persons, even to a greater extent than the eight hours per week contemplated in the new education bill, in order to enable them to attend technical and other classes in the daytime. Finally, wherever practicable, THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 171 the hours of adult labor should be reduced to not more than forty- eight per week, without reduction of the standard rates of wages." In our own country the Department of Labor is taking hold resolutely of the situation and is extending and coordinating its system of employment bureaus in so far as congressional imagination allows it funds. The government's land and housing policy is another remarkable departure from staid orthodox economic policy. Both Maine and California are now either mak- ing loans to farmers or else preparing good land for their settlement. This is by no means the old policy of simply turning loose ardent young people upon unbroken and untracked public land where they would work their souls out in the bitterness of trying to wrest a living from the savage frontier. There is a vigorous demand in many quarters for extension of this policy of utilizing good public lands as a method of easing up the pressure of demobilization. This is proposed also in England, Canada, and Australia. Land for soldiers has always been an attractive method of taking up the industrial slack at the end of a war, but it has so frequently been a wasteful and heart-eating proposition that the new administrative intelligence will probably follow the lead of California rather than our own precedent after the Civil War. The strong letter which Secretary Lane wrote to President Wilson in June, 1918, heightens this conviction. He said, in part: "My Dear Mr. President: I beHeve the time has come when we should give thought to the preparation of plans for providing opportunity for our soldiers returning from the war. Because this department has handled similar problems, I consider it my duty to bring this matter to the attention of yourself and Congress. "At the close of the Civil War America faced a somewhat sim- ilar situation. But fortunately at that time the public domain offered opportunity to the home-returning soldiers. The great part the veterans of that war played in developing the West is one of our epics. The homestead law had been signed by Lincoln 172 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK ill the second year of the war, so that out of our wealth in lands we had farms to ofifer the million of veterans. It was also the era of transcontinental railway construction. It was likewise the period of rapid; yet broad and full, development of towns and communi- ties and states. "To the great number of returning soldiers land will offer the great and fundamental opportunity. The experience of wars points out the lesson that our service men, because of army life with its openness and activity, will largely seek out-of-doors vo- cations and occupations. This fact is accepted by the aUied Euro- pean nations. That is why their programs and policies of relocat- ing and readjustment emphasize the opportunities on the land for the returning soldier. The question then is ' What land can be made available for farm homes for our soldiers? ' "We do not have the bountiful public domain of the sixties and seventies. In a hteral sense, for the use of it on a generous scale for soldier farm homes as in the sixties, ' the pubHc domain is gone.' The official figures at the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 191 7, show this : We have unappropriated land in the continental United States to the amount of 230,657,755 acres. It is safe to say that not one half of this land will ever prove to be cultivable in any sense. "While we do not have that matchless public domain of '65, we do have milHons of acres of undeveloped lands that can be made available for our home-coming soldiers. We have arid lands in the West; cut-over lands in the Northwest, Lake States, and South; and also swamp lands in the Middle West and South, which can be made available through the proper development. Much of this land can be made suitable for farm homes if properly handled. But it will require that each type of land be dealt with in its own par- ticular fashion. The arid land will require water, the cut-over land wiU require clearing, and the swamp land must be drained. Without any of these aids, they remain largely ' No Man's Land.' The solution of these problems is no new thing. In the admirable achievement of the Reclamation Service in reclamation and drain- age we have abundant proof of what can be done. "Looking toward the construction of additional projects, I am glad to say that plans and investigations have been under way for some time. . . Any plan for the development of land for the re- turning soldier will come face to face with the fact that a new pohcy will have to meet the new conditions. The era of free or cheap THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 73 land in the United States has passed. We must meet the new conditions of developing lands in advance — security must to a degree displace speculation. "There are certain tendencies which we ought to face frankly in our consideration of a policy for land for the home-coming soldier. First, the drift to farm tenancy. The experience of the world shows without question that the happiest people, the best farms, and the soundest political conditions are found where the farmer owns the home and the farm lands. . . It is evident that since the war in Europe, there has been a decided increase in the trend toward the city, because of industrial conditions. The adoption by the United States of new policies in its land-development plans for returning veterans will also contribute to the ameUoration of these two dangers to American life. "A plan of land development, whereby land is developed in large areas, subdivided into individual farms, then sold to actual bona- fide farmers on a long-time payment basis, has been in force not only in the United States under the Reclamation Act, but also in many other countries for several years. It has proved a distinct success. "A very small sum of money put into the hands of men of thought, experience, and vision will give us a program which will make us feel entirely confident that we are not to be submerged industrially or otherwise by labor which we will not be able to ab- sorb, or that we would be in a condition where we would show a lack of respect for those who return as heroes, but who will be without means of immediate self-support. A million or two dol- lars, if appropriated now, will put this work well under way. "This plan does not contemplate anything like charity to the soldier. He is not to be given a bounty. He is not to be made to feel that he is a dependent. On the contrary, he is to continue in a sense in the service of the government. Instead of destroying our enemies he is to develop our resources." It thus appears that this demand for land for dis- charged soldiers is from certain angles inseparably iden- tified with the work in vocational reeducation and re- habilitation of the war-disabled. Closely allied to the call for a new public-land policy is the government's manifest determination to enter at last upon a definite city plannmg and housing policy. 174 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK The appointment of national housing administrators and the creation of a housing corporation within the Depart- ment of Labor indicates that however tardily we may- have entered the game, we are in it to stay. While this was a war emergency measure, and despite congressional mangling of the scheme immediately after the armistice, it is not Hkely to be confined to the period of the war. Our newly found contacts with Europe will make it much easier to bring across the Atlantic the new ideas in this field which a generation's work over there has accumu- lated. It is to be remembered that European warring nations even in the midst of their manifold problems have been tremendously concerned over housing and town planning. The building up of new munition cen- ters, the cry for taking advantage of the period of demob- ilization to relieve city slums and unnecessary conges- tion, together with the reconstruction of devastated towns, will give an impetus to new scientific town plan- ning. The proof that these ideas are penetrating America is that special courses on the subject of scientific town planning and reconstruction work are already proposed by certain American colleges. There is every prospect that with the multiplying of city planning commissions some of these projects will finally come to a head instead of being merely filed away on already overloaded library shelves. We may forecast, moreover, an increasing acceptance of the principle of the white label and other production standards. The Council of National Defense early after its creation recommended for all manufacturers of gov- ernment suppHes proper standards regarding women's working hours, wages, sanitary conditions, etc. The Sec- retary of War in his creation of the board of standards for clothing manufacture, although it was abolished a few months after its creation, fixed a policy which was as- sumed definitely by the War Department for the control of its purchases. This, no doubt, was due to the fact that THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 75 Mr. Baker was president of the National Consumers' League; but the fact that he took such a stand cannot fail of effect through the country at large. It has set the broad official seal of disapproval upon sweated industry. IV The prophet now approaches a little closer the problems of the future as they concern more intimately the social worker. What, for instance, is there in store for organ- ized criticism and pubHcity? This question is pertinent for at least two reasons. First, because so much social work is the result of organized investigation and public- ity focused upon social disabilities which need Hghten- ing or removal; and second, because many social workers are regularly employed in such publicity. We recognize that government in war time is to a considerable extent a repressive machine. War necessitates a good deal of apparently arbitrary action in the interest of securing that social coherence without which vigorous and suc- cessful prosecution of a war seems impossible. But does that mean we shall become habituated to censorship and the crushing of freedom of speech, assemblage, and our other ancient rights guaranteed by constitutions and stat- utes? Remember that constitutions can never guaran- tee absolute rights. They rather state desirable ideals, as we have demonstrated in the analysis of "natural rights." I, for one, have no fear but that after the spasm of war hysteria is over, we shall resume our feast of " pitiless publicity," and the courts will begin to reverse the acts of scared legislatures and executives,^ and this even 1 A significant example has occurred in Minnesota. The State Supreme Court reversed an order of the governor who had removed from office a county probate judge on grounds of opposing the war poHcy of the United States. The court held that elected pubhc officials can be removed only for malfeasance and not for acts and conduct having no relation or connection with performance of 176 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK while fully recognizing the possible attempt to fasten upon us the habit of accepting "treated" news or pre- pared or safe or ofi&cial news as a method of quenching liberal inquiry and propaganda. Meanwhile, it is quite remarkable how much has been achieved in the last three years by the Federal Children's Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For example, three monumental studies of infant mortality in relation to income have been made by the Children's Bureau within this period. If there is any tendency to suppress legitimate social in- vestigation these studies would long ago have been crushed to the ground, because they are brimful of con- firmation for the demands of those dangerous incendia- ries who have been urging national minima ! In all prob- ability these bureaus will go on increasing their value and significance as research and publicity agencies. Is it not possible that in addition to them the enormous pub- licity work of the surgeon general's office and the federal board for vocational education will continue? Is it pos- sible or desirable, further, that we should have a govern- ment intelligence bureau for the purpose of giving out facts, political, economic, social, international, like weather or crop reports or the monthly review of the Bureau of Labor Statistics? I can see great danger in issuing a special periodical apologetic for the government. It might easily become the agency for Junkerdom and bu- oflScial duty. " Scolding the President of the United States, par- ticularly at long range," remarks the court, "condemning in a strong voice the war policy of the federal authorities, expressing sympathy with Germany, justifying the sinking of the Lusitania, by remarks made by a public officer of the jurisdiction and limited authority possessed by a judge of probate under the constitution and laws of this state do not constitute malfeasance in the dis- charge of official duties and therefore furnish no legal ground for re- moval." Wholesome doctrine, however much we deplore the lack of real perception and patriotism in the officer in question, and much easier to hand down after the actual close of hostilities. THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 77 reaucracy. On the other hand, for the proper creation of public opinion, it is fundamental that somehow or other we get plain, unvarnished, uncolored statements of fact such as the commercialized public press cannot or does not furnish us now. We are almost reduced to the necessity of choosing between foundations for news dis- tribution or government bureaus. In the field of control and administration of philan- thropy the plow of new opinion is driving deep furrows. Just as the Civil War gave an impetus to state central- ized care of dependents, defectives, and delinquents, so the recent war has promoted federalized as well as state interest in these matters. The problems of the draft, of demobilization, of insurance are reenforcing the trend toward public and away from private relief sys- tems. Moreover, financial pressure may act as the se- lective force against weaker and less efficient social agen- cies, particularly, may it be hoped, against those which are dead-centered and which have been merely living upon their laurels. The huge proportions of the war problem have been reflected in the reorganization of great welfare agencies upon a similar huge pattern. The Red Cross is now the greatest corporation in the world. Business men wel- come it as an admission of the value of big business meth- ods. Many of them would extend the principle of local charity indorsement to a national scale and would make the Red Cross or some other equally big agency the li- censer of all philanthropies, war or peace. Does this mean at last the trustification of philanthropy? One of my friends writes asking: ''Should the home service of the Red Cross, now organized on a national basis, be de- veloped and intensified so that it would be practically tak- ing the place of local organized charity and local public outdoor relief? " The fear implicit in this letter is rather widespread. I doubt, however, if it will be realized. While the new movement cannot fail to affect pro- 178 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK foundly local relief agencies and their methods, and while local agencies may appreciate whatever financial stim- ulus or direct grants may come from the big war agen- cies, they are not ready yet to surrender their private in- terests and prerogatives. From the standpoint of the individual social worker who has taken service during the war with one of these big agencies, a somewhat tangled prospect appears. For ex- ample, the prestige of the Red Cross makes the social worker's problem much easier. It greases the skids for workers and is the open sesame to many doors which it is difficult for ordinary charity organization society work- ers to open. Lawyers, doctors, dentists, undertakers, all give liberally of their time, much of it absolutely free, and hospitals take Red Cross cases on a fifty-fifty basis. Both professional and volunteer workers may trade on this prestige during war time or they may get an undue idea of the ease with which their problems clear up. All of this means that when they get back to their regular offices with all the old problems of finance and hostile criticism they are likely to suffer the psychology of shell shock and feel a sense of futility and depression. But on the other hand, it is altogether possible — is it not? — that some of this great war program of social work will have so familiarized people with social work under the magi- cal name of Red Cross or rehabilitating the disabled sol- dier that it may carry over into peace times and help allay some suspicions and prejudices against organized social work. While I do not look for any immediate na- tional organization even of home-service work in the Red Cross upon the same extensive and intensive plan which rules at present, there is a strong probability that this magnificent war organization will not be allowed to go to pieces and rust in times of peace, but that it will be maintained and applied to some specific field of social work such, for example, as public health. The financial aspect of this problem while not domi- THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 79 nant, perhaps, is none the less extremely attractive to the prophet. The Red Cross has taught us many things about charitable publicity and finance, and these lessons are sure to carry over into peace times even though it may not continue as a partner on a half and half basis with local relief agencies. The war has pruned the support of some agencies, has swelled the finances of others, has scared some givers, is inspiring others. But the net result is that giving is more universal and more democratic than ever before. The habit of giving like that of insurance has been formed by thousands who never thought it possible heretofore. The business of thrift goes hand in hand with that of benevolence and reaches down even into the ele- mentary school. In a Red Cross membership campaign at Christmas, I called at a house where a little girl danced up and down as she threw open the door. She had been watchmg the team of solicitors from her win- dow and was frightened at the thought that perhaps we might pass her house by. She had learned at school about the Red Cross and had acted as a missionary in her neighborhood. When even the children of the street are thrSled by the prospect of giving, it is not crazy opti- mism to believe that a new sense of service may be in process of formation for the coming generation. Unless all signs fail, philanthropic finance for the next generation will be adventurous finance. Social workers may not have to beg for every penny they need to spend upon preventive programs. The war has taught us that the day of miracles is not over. It has also taught us the value of the experimental method even though that ex- periment involves tremendous financial outlay. Norman Angell observed a while ago that the conviction that gov- ernmental action can make economic adjustments^ of much wider scope than was supposed and the conviction of its moral justification are to focus upon a third phenom- enon; namely, the determination in the future to be ad- venturous and experimental in social reform. Says he: l8o THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK "When the English ' maximalist' is told, as of course the economists will tell him, that his programs will fail, his relation to some years of war experience prompts him to take the Une: ' Suppose it does fail, and we have to try something else? Will it cost ten million lives, the youth of a whole generation, like the war? ' He has seen cer- tain military enterprises utterly fail, enterprises which he knew were considered gambles by those who ordered them, and which in fact were afterwards condemned officially as errors. Yet those who, in the circumstances, perhaps rightly, ordered those gambles knew they would cost dreadful suffering, unimaginable horrors, innumer- able lives. When therefore he is told that his industrial experiment will disturb credit and upset trade, he will be quite unimpressed. He will certainly take the risk. He will introduce a little of the strenuousness and ad- venture of war into the life of peace, and make it a little less ' soft and slothful.'" For the financing of these adventures in social reform, surely the income tax will be retained and extended; and new forms of taxation will probably be found, partic- ularly on marginal businesses such as child-labor indus- tries and on excess profits. Moreover, disarmament or limitation of armament is likely if sane counsels prevail in peace negotiations and after. This will mean not only the releasing of vast energies for the production of food, clothing, shelter, education, and other preventives of so- cial misery but also the enlisting of huge sums of cap- ital and income for funding social amelioration and pro- gressive experimentation. For a while it looked as though the principle of the financial federation would receive a strong reenf orcement by war finance and for a few weeks the war-chest fad threatened to sweep the country. However, the brakes were suddenly thrown on by the very agencies such as the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. from which the im- pulse was supposed to have been derived. Notwith- THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK l8l standing the fact that these mighty agencies had to bow before public persuasion and cast in their lot with lesser national and local agencies in the war-chest drives, or that these drives have been uniformly successful in two hundred cities, it is quite evident that financial federa- tions are not going to sweep all before them in an easy conquest. If they do succeed in conquering the coun- try it will not be through steam-roller invasion but by nibbling trench warfare. Meanwhile, nearly two score cities have definitely undertaken to transform their war chests into community chests for financing local welfare agencies. For carr>dng through this work of adventurous social reform there is no question but that there will be an in- creasing demand for trained social experts. Social work is recognized as never before by the national govenmient and by hundreds of business and professional men as the result of various "drives" and actual personal service. Therefore, as never before, there is laid upon all social workers the responsibility for justifying the faith placed in them. In carrying out the broadened community proj- ects incident to war, to demobilization and to recon- struction thereafter, more social workers than ever will be needed. The training schools for social work register this increased pressure of demand, for their classes are larger than ever. This is not only a question of the pro- fessional but also of the volunteer. The Red Cross has been spreading ideas of skilled social work in more than three thousand communities, issuing pamphlets on social work in editions of one hundred thousand and more, and training through its home service institutes hundreds of volunteers many of whom will or should want to go fur- ther into real professional work. Churches, too, are learning the value of training and organization in social work. l82 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK Two special problems crop out of these facts ; namely, how to retain these trained volunteers after the war mo- tive subsides, and what will be the effect of war work and volunteer service upon accepted standards of social tech- nique. In answer to the first of these questions, I should say that there are four future uses for the volunteers. They may be used as territorials somewhat like the Red Cross nurses, subject to emergency call in times of dis- aster. They may be used in the new pubhc relief as that system approaches, as institution visitors, as mem- bers of county boards of child welfare, volunteer pro- bation officers, parole officers, mothers' pension inves- tigators. They may be used for school and child-welfare work as leaders of more effective parent and teachers' associations and the W.ie, and as supporters of both pub- Uc and private agencies doing such work. They may be used also as radiating centers for social publicity in ex- tending the ideas of social work into outlying districts, the small towns, villages, and open country, and as local correspondents for the creation of public opinion which may be brought to bear upon legislators when questions of social-welfare policy arise. In answer to the second question it may be said that there is no necessary reason why war work should relax the standards of sound social technique. There is, of course, some practical danger that sentimentality and the fear of public criticism may provoke unwise open-handed- ness and mere good-natured contacts instead of scientific social work. This means some danger of pauperiza- tion and insistence upon the right to relief. The main- tenance of the insurance attitude as the guiding thought particularly in Red Cross home-service work means that these dangers are minimized; hence this wide extension of war-relief work by utilizing trained social workers may even bring about a material reduction of the dependent attitude which would easily grow up under the patronage of thousands of little unorganized sentimental agencies. THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 83 Neither is there any apparent special danger of diluting social work as a profession with half-trained volunteers, providing these volunteers fully realize that they are only half trained and do not misuse their opportunity to learn. It is best to safeguard both the volunteers and their clients by insisting that while, for example, Red Cross home-service work is essentially insurance work of the complementary type, no insurance plan however well de- vised can soften every vicissitude nor can it work without the wholehearted cooperation of the insured. War work may actually have improved technique by jarring workers out of their routine, by changing workers to new jobs and new types of work, by eliminating what- ever of condescension or mere detective methods still lingered on in organized relief, by broadening scope and vision through contact with bankers and manufacturers and soldiers and professors, by experiences in Europe with great creative plans for rebuilding towns, rehabil- itating refugees, reclaiming war cripples, etc., by inter- national exchange of successful methods or bitter fail- ures, by dint of having to meet larger intakes of cases and problems with straightened financial support. VI I have already hinted that we have moved forward with seven-leagued boots in our conception of the value of organized community recreation in promoting physi- cal and mental efficiency and in maintaining mihtary mo- rale. The Y. M. C. A. may be counted on not to lose the momentum it has achieved but to maintain it through its wonderful organization. Likewise, the Playground and Recreation Association of America has secured through its War Camp Community Service a new following and a new prestige. If its soldiers' and sailors' clubhouses and hang-outs are not maintained permanently it will be because other and more strategically located centers 184 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK have been provided to carry out the identical principle of looking after the welfare of single men enlisted in sea- sonal industry. Perhaps we shall not need recreational substitutes for saloons or brothels, but I believe we shall; for the play in- stinct and the sex instinct are imperious and if balked of innocent and legitimate expression will find their satis- factions by devious channels. Perhaps I ought to use the new term "sublimation" instead of substitution, be- cause that term signifies not only substitution but also transformation and development of an impulse. It should be possible in this process of sublimation through recreation to stimulate creative art expression in the mas- ses of American manhood. This possibility is rendered all the more likely because of the new artistic horizons which were opened to our men in France: for going across the seas meant not only rewriting the history and geography which they learned in their elementary school days; it meant also bringing these men into contact with two thousand years of artistic development in a coun- try particularly sensitive and particularly fertile in the field of art. Let the Long Faces shake their gloomy heads and cry this is no time for play, war and reconstruction are se- rious work, business is man's chief end and good, put away childish things. In the end we shall learn that de- mocracy demands for its success two things: not the bread and circuses of the cynic, but a certain amount of material prosperity and leisure, leisure for thought and for play, and prosperity wherewith to pay the piper. The problem of educational reconstruction is of vital concern to social workers because of our increased faith in technical or vocational education as a partial remedy for individual and social unpreparedness. There is also a new faith in the possibility of reclaiming and utilizing "human scrap" through education, the reeducation of the war-disabled, of the work-shy, of the industrial mis- THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 185 fits. The minority report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws pointed out these possibilities to us at least ten years ago, but it took the catastrophe of war to force upon us the magnificent concept which that report contained. Hence I look for a very wide extension of vo- cational training, of continuation schools, of physical education, and instruction in social hygiene.^ I antici- pate also an extension of school and home visitors, the all-year use of school plants, of vocational guidance,^ of social-center utilization of school plants for continuation school work, and the like. We shall probably witness also an extension of the period of compulsory schooling in some form or other to the age of eighteen or beyond, just as we see the age of consent and the Juvenile Court age rising. I am not sure but that we may see some form of universal community service exacted of all youths as the climax to their educa- tion, either as a tribute to the vision of the psychologists who, like William James, have been looking for moral equivalents of military training for service, or to the theories of the constructive sociologists who aim at creat- ing contributive types of personality, or even as a com- promise with the propagandists for universal military service. I should not be surprised to see a new emphasis and a new direction given to manual training by pro- vidmg it with some real point such, for example, as has been offered by the Junior Red Cross manual. Sloyd work and other forms of manual crafts take on a new meaning when they are done under some strong impulse like war, for the saving of life or for conserving health and man power. If there is any doubt as to the connection between the new educational work, the war, and social work, let it be dispersed immediately in the light of the humiliating discovery of seven hundred thousand men of draft age who could neither read nor write and of the still more humiliating discovery that there are over five and a half 1 86 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK million illiterates over the age of ten in this America of ours, this leader of democracy. Social workers will ren- der a notable service to the country by backing up Sec- retary Lane's proposal to President Wilson for a bill to end America's illiteracy, or even perhaps by going a step further with the creation of a really active United States department of education which could correlate and de- velop the various educational services on behalf of the ne- gro, the immigrant, the rural child, and other forgotten armies in our midst. Among other significant straws, we must not over- look the health problem. In general it is safe to forecast a much more intense activity for health conservation, also a keener perception of the significance of infant mor- tality and protected maternity. The challenge of tuber- culosis in France and the experiences of trench life will recall attention to the problem of causative factors of tuberculosis in both town and country. Likewise the emergency call for war housing has forced upon the gov- ernments of all the warring nations some attention to de- cent housing as a factor in health and productivity. Fur- thermore we are witnessing an increased attention to mental hygiene as a health consideration. This fact was iterated and reiterated day after day at the National Conference of Social Work in Kansas City, 1918.^ It re- sounded through the Conference on Demobilization and in the meetings of American public health officials dur- ing the winter of 19 18. The developing of psychiatric social work on behalf of the war-disabled is further evi- dence of the disposition of the government and social workers to take the necessary forward steps in this field of mental hygiene.^ I have already spoken of the probable effects of the 1 Particularly noteworthy and commendable are the mono- graphs and reports on neuropsychiatry issued by the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 87 great coordinating plan between the United States Gov- ernment, the Red Cross, and other agencies for the rec- lamation of "human scrap," but what will happen when the jingoists and propagandists for universal military service run up against the fact of physical defects in the young man drafted for military service? An incredible number, for example, of rural young men were rejected by the military examiners. This fact should shock the country out of its dream of ideal health conditions auto- matically prevalent on the farms. The fact is that most of this physical degeneration results from defective so- cial environments, as was proved by the great British Interdepartmental Report on Physical Degeneration pubHshed ten years ago as the aftermath of the Boer War. Certain of the standpat newspapers have been printing editorials glorifying universal military service as the cure for physical defects. I quote from one of the most ram- pant of these journals: "On the score of health alone military training stands approved in every unbiased mind. What it will do in a few months to remake and upbuild young men physically is now a matter of demonstrated fact in every camp in the land. The change from weakness to strength, from the slouch to the upstanding poise, from sallowness to ruddiness, from laggard to jubilant feet, from lusterless to clear eyes — it is a transformation to marvel at and to delight in. It means a better store of energy to apply during a lifetime to the tasks of farm, factory, office, and shop. It will make democracy more efi&cient, life sweeter, men happier, posterity sturdier." It is perfect nonsense to assume that even the United States Army can make silken purses out of sows' ears. No military man would attempt to produce a good soldier out of a rotten body and a weakened mind. The army wants men potentially fit. The remedy for physical de- generation, then, is not universal military service but a broad constructive program of community health, food, recreation, housing, and all of the other factors which l88 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK make for physical soundness, mental poise, and social wholesomeness. One is not surprised to find that from the British report may be gathered abundant testimony by military men confirming just these contentions of the pubUc-health workers and the social reformers. True preparedness must begin one lap at least ahead of mili- tary service. The army and navy should not be expected to cumber themselves with the job of repairing the social neglect of both city and country the nation over. It is very evident that the program of social-hygiene education, of repressive measures, and of clinical treat- ment of venereal disease will carry over into peace times. The taboo on discussion of this subject has been pried off. The conspiracy of silence is broken. Sex disease is no longer a private weakness or folly but a grave public concern. Much of whatever reticence and secrecy still remain may be overcome by properly dividing the prob- lem into its two phases of physical heaUng and moral regeneration. The diverse agencies which are working on these two aspects of the problem now; namely, the government, the Y. M. C. A., the American Bureau of Social Hygiene, state boards of health, and certain pri- vate societies will scarcely rehnquish their undertakings or scrap their organizations when the particular war emergency is passed. When the communities fully realize that it has been actually far safer for a young man to be in and about one of the training camps or posts of the United States Army than to walk the streets of the aver- age American town, they will hardly fail to cormect cause and effect and to recognize that the preventive and cura- tive measures adopted to maintain miUtary morale are equally valuable as pubUc-health measures in times of peace. The proposal by the government to create an interdepartment bureau of social hygiene with large appropriations for community research indicates that so far as the pubUc authorities are concerned at least, there is a firm resolution to make this work an integral THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK 1 89 part of public policy hereafter. Finally, as I have al- ready suggested, there is a possibility that the Red Cross might become a great health promoting agency partic- ularly through its civilian relief department after its war work is done. There will be no danger in such an adaptation of Red Cross machinery if it is not tied up to some special medical interest and if it is made a genuine public-health agency for the furtherance of preventive sanitation both rural and city. In all probability the whole immigration question will take on new coloring as the result of war's ravages in Europe and of our new rapprochements with our alHes. It is quite to be expected that some measure of discrim- ination in hospitality will be extended to prospective mi- grants from Europe. Whether any very definite boycott against immigration from present alien enemy nations will be consummated along with some form of economic boycott cannot at present be predicted. But there is good reason for believing that many European countries will not only not encourage emigration but will prob- ably take definite steps by attractive measures to per- suade intending emigrants to stay at home. The rebuild- ing of European economic life will probably claim most of the able-bodied men heretofore constituting the bird- of-passage type of emigrant. At home we are faced with a vigorous determination to translate into fact our pious wishes about peaceful or attractive assimilation of the foreign born in our midst. This does not mean ruthless Americanization, nor coercive methods such as have characterized either Prussia or Russia in their deal- ings with Alsace or Schleswig-Holstein or Ruthenia. It does mean opening up immigrant pools through settling the "language question" and through requiring that fundamental instruction in both private and public schools shall be in English. It also means utilizing set- tlements, social centers, night schools, continuation schools, and other agencies for citizenship. Already IQO THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK through legislation and through community organization this work of Americanization is being undertaken. The foreign-language school which under the guise of relig- ious liberty or through a too unsuspecting tolerance had become a center of anti-American propaganda, is now upon the operating table. State councils of defense and state legislatures are being called upon to settle this question and to insure that every person in this country shall have ready access through the common language to all the cultural inheritance which America has to offer. Incidentally this new emphasis upon education will almost necessarily mean strengthening the movement for a reasonable working day which would admit of a certain amount of leisure for education. Sheer physical fatigue as a result of a long working day has been the ally of deliberate foreign propaganda in preventing the assimilation of thousands of well-meaning immigrants. Neither should we overlook the significance of the negro migration northward. This new contact of the negro with the North, his new taste of free movement, and his coservice in the armies of the republic will change and are already changing the attitude of the South. They will also create many new problems of housing, health, unemployment, and illegitimacy in our northern com- munities. This must mean not only a broad policy on the part of the communities where the negroes locate, but also the developing of a much larger corps of profes- sionally trained negro social workers to mediate between the newcomers and their neighbors and to help in the process of adjustment. Would it be too much of a strain upon our imagination to forecast, as the result of military training of millions of young men of impressionable years and as the result also of war-time measures in food conservation, price fixing and health work, a new respect for law? Citizens are learning not merely to tolerate the law but to cooperate in administering the law; for instance, with regard to THE ADVENTUROUS ATTITUDE IN SOCIAL WORK IQI espionage, treason, and prostitution. But that we have a long way to go and that the millennium is hardly yet within hail is indicated by the prevalence still of lynch- ing and mob violence. The terrorism of the mob is just as bad as Junker autocracy whether it is a question of burning a negro in Georgia or lynching an Illinois miner with a German name, or hustling out of town a speaker ready for an address in defense of Tom Mooney in Cal- ifornia, or of deporting I. W. W.'s from Bisbee. The fact, that taking the country as a whole, the prison and reformatory population shows a marked reduction is not necessarily attributable to any gain in respect for law, but probably rather to miHtary enlistment of the adven- urous and of a large number of casual workers, and also to the control of the sale of liquor. At the same time there is much of suggestion in this fact to point the way for social policy in reducing the rate of crime with the re- turn of peace. So far as can be seen now, it is going to take much more than a world war to improve very much our present system of criminal procedure. Perhaps the new contact of America with English and continental criminal law will mean spreading much more generally the demand for improvement which has heretofore been sounded only by a few leaders of the bar like ex-Presi- dent Taft and Elihu Root. The new stirrings in the woman's movement is also a significant mark of the trend of the times. Women's economic services in the war have become what Mr. As- quith called the "unanswerable argument" for the ex- tension of suffrage. With the settlement of the suffrage issue, an enormous store of energy will be released from suffrage propaganda to other constructive social efforts. The education incidental to winning the suffrage ought to yield a larger, more intelligent, and perhaps militant public backing to social work. The war itself has opened up new phases of public work to women, or at least has emphasized their inherent fitness for them; both in 192 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK England and America they are serving as police, as con- stables, as recruiting agents for food conservation, in spe- cial protective work for girls. Since the beginning of the war nearly two hundred and fifty thousand women have been added to the government service in this country alone. This new training in administrative ability ought to yield valuable by-products to social work. The prophet ceases. Not from weariness nor discour- agement, however; for he lines up with Amos and Joel rather than with Jeremiah. But why prophesy when the event is already upon us? Scientific social work and heightened social perception are growing apace. New definitions of human rights and of social justice are ham- mering themselves out upon the anvils of world tragedy. Our young men see visions and even some of our old men begin to dream dreams. It is to no small degree in the hands of social workers to redeem those visions from mere hallucination and to translate those dreams into sober fact. If this Great War ends war it will do so only because we have helped to canalize the energies which now race torrentially toward military destruction, and to turn them in the direction of solving those inexorable, indivertible social problems which without the slightest resort to metaphor may well be called the moral equiva- lents of war. CHAPTER IX SOCIAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL WORK In those rare moments when the busy professional person seizes a bit of leisure to think some show of order into the tangled mass of events that assail him day after day, he is frequently the victim of two opposing ideas. First he succumbs to a sense of futility, the foolishness of trymg to do anything with this disease called human life or civilization or to the conviction that we are but the footballs of circumstance, the puppets of blind forces beyond mortal reach. Or else he shakes off this supine and paralyzing belief and flies to the other extreme, be- comes exhilarated by the thought that man is the meas- ure of all things, and ends by preening himself upon being the real Atlas who carries the world and would not yield it up even to Hercules himself. But between these two extremes of passive pessimism and unctuous egotism there lies a middle ground which may be surveyed in the scientific spirit as the basis for a sound structure of the principles and practice of social progress. And it is on this middle ground that the social worker must plant himself. The notion of progress is neither a joke nor a chimera. It is a scientific concept, just about as definite as most leading ideas in this world, although not claiming the fine simplicity of a mathematical formula. This concept involves the idea that man is potentially progressive and modifiable in nature. One suggestive proof at least is modern man's threefold superiority to his primitive ancestry. Modem man has outstripped primitive life through the mass and sweep of his intelligence, through 193 194 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK inventions for insuring him against raw Nature's vicis- situdes, and through his social integration. Progress as we conceive it involves, moreover, the idea of active control over fate; of mastery over blind drift. That is to say, progress is not inevitable nor automatic nor universal nor in the nature of things; it is rather rare, it is costly, and it comes only through human effort rightly directed, through the ministry of thought, through in- telligence consecrated to the supreme purpose of human betterment. Man must work out his own salvation, he must control or perish, he must learn the rules of the game in order to utilize the forces of the universe for his own purposes; but he must have a purpose. Hence resolute determination is fundamental; mere pious long- ing or daydreaming of Utopias will not do the job. It may be that in spite of taking thought to master fate and captain its soul humanity may perish stillborn in the womb of an unwilling Mother Nature or may be devoured by hostile cosmic forces; but it is safe to say that without effort such a fate is almost inevitable, while with it there is at least a good fighting chance of victory and improvement. To that putting forth of effort the social worker con- tributes in two ways : through case work with individuals or families, and through general measures of utility to whole classes or groups. Case work recognizes that so- cial advance requires a progressive amelioration of hu- man character, growth in knowledge, self-control, pro- ductive capacity, obedience, loyalty, thrift, teamwork, unselfishness, prudence, and imagination. Legislation and other mass measures for social reconstruction recog- nize, on the other hand, that human character cannot develop in a vacuum nor subsist on nothing: it needs a proper social environment with education, discipline, controls, rewards, penalties, and opportunity. Let me illustrate. Social life, we say in sociology, is determined by three SOCIAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL WORK 195 great "controls," the physical environment, man's own nature (physical and mental inheritance), and social heredity (institutions, customs, beliefs, laws, and the like). Now in each of these fields of control social work may perform its twofold function. For example, the physical en\'ironment may rise up and smite, as it fre- quently does, by earthquake or volcano or cyclone or flood or tornado. Social work hastens to soften the blow by disaster rehef to individuals. Incidentally, however, it gathers the facts with which to point the way to flood and fire prevention, or other methods of protecting whole companies of men against the wild vagaries of physical nature. Again, social work may figure in the field of biological control, either negatively by preventing the adverse selection which results from unwise charity, or positively through aiding favorable selection by offer- ing to natural endowments of mind and body the widest and freest social opportunity for development. The so- cial worker who checks the mating and the multiplying of the feeble-minded or venereal is serving racial progress by preserving the level of racial fitness won through long ages of biological selection. Likewise by rescuing sound, fit children and placing them in decent homes social work aids both social and racial progress since it saves and re- leases potential productive capacity. When we come to the role of social work in adjusting or repairing man's own handiwork, his social organiza- tion, we are overwhelmed with materials. War, for ex- ample, the selector between rival social structures, de- stroys more than it creates. The last five years of war have seen a greater holocaust of life and property than a whole century of natural calamities piled up. And it would have been even more destructive were it not for the Red Cross, the patriotic funds, the insurance, the munitions welfare work, and other mitigations of stark misery at home and abroad. Again, social work stands squarely against allowing Frankenstein to become the 196 THE SCIENTEFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK victim of his monster, private property, when that prop- erty system invades the still more sacred rights of per- sons. Thus the social worker stands frequently as a shock absorber between capital and labor. Social case work, too, dealing with family problems, opens up the whole problem of the relationship between the family as an institution and human progress. Such illustrations might be added indefinitely, but these few will suffice to estabHsh the fact that social work as a progressive factor might be interpreted in terms of the great fundamental controls over social destiny. It stands as padding against the buffetings of the physical environment, it aids in keeping unobstructed the chan- nels of human biology, and it modifies and promotes the institutional hfe of mankind. Hence it is a part of prac- tical sociology or social technology, the art of community control over fate. So far very well, you say; but how does that tell me whether my particular hobby, say, community surveying or birth control or health insurance, makes for social prog- ress? Not every social-welfare scheme can be passed in review here, but certain objective tests can be laid down by reference to which any scheme may be judged. At least five fairly workable tests have been estabUshed in the attempt to give concrete meaning to the term social progress. We may for brevity call them the wealth, health, population, order, and opportunity tests. Let us take them one by one and see what they really mean. In applying the wealth test we are not to be so naive as to suppose, for example, that because the recorded per capita wealth of the United States leaped from $308 in 1850 to $1965 in 1912 the average inhabitant of this country was six times better off at the end of those sixty- two years. Much of this presumed "wealth" is merely heightened valuation of lands or securities. The actual land or its products in consumable goods did not in- crease sixfold. Nor did every individual's share increase SOCIAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL WORK 197 equally or even proportionately, as studies of ownership have disclosed. What the social worker must know be- fore he can decide that his particular scheme is progres- sive in terms of real commimity wealth is whether pro- ductive skill and the will to produce are growing, whether the stock of houses and coal and potatoes and milk and good wearing cloth is actually expanding or whether only prices are going up ; whether increasing wealth means in- creasing leisure or only overwork; whether the increased product really reaches people who are cold or hungry or ill-housed or thinly clad or whether it is wasted by faulty distribution or deUberately destroyed by the profiteers for the sake of maintaining scarcity prices; whether prosperity is really passed around in such a way that every normal person shall possess at least enough property to acquire the discipline and stability which come from ownership and the feeling of having some stake in the common Hfe; whether the piled-up wealth is the mainspring of domestic broils and international wars or a source of peace and domestic tranquillity. The wealth test is not so simple as it sounds. By this analysis of its wider meanings must you judge your minimum- wage law, your income tax, your profit-sharing scheme, your factory-welfare work, your state or municipal owner- ship, and your cooperative commonwealth. Or take the health test. A declining general or infan- tiel death rate or an increasing Hfe span has been called the verifiable test for a progressive community. But it is not to be taken as absolute or unique. Before becoming too complacent over saving the lives of a hundred thou- sand babies in one year — a noble and chivalrous purpose beyond doubt — one must be sure that he is not saving human trash and piling up social liabilities or that he is not encouraging heedless padding of the birth rate. And before concluding that to prolong the average length of life is an absolute good one must be sure that life is made worth living and that the extra lap added is not a sen- 198 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK tence to pain, slow starvation, misery, and friendless- ness. It is not mere vegetative existence but the life more abundant which must add the convincing and determin- ing seal of approval to all health work. Remember in your hospital social service or anti-tuberculosis work, your baby clinics and maternity hospitals and school inspections, that while death is a tragic waste, it is not the supreme tragedy. A life of futility, of unrequited and unilluminated toil, without hope, without a goal, without the exaltations that come from a sense of accom- plishment and worth-whileness, this is the final touch of bitter irony, this is the real mortahty which social work is called upon to combat and conquer. These two tests converge upon the third, the popula- tion test. It is usually assumed that an increasing popu- lation is the mark of a progressive group, while a declin- ing or stationary population implies social decadence or impairment of racial vitality. But this bald statement of the case needs much qualification. There is no indis- putable mark of virtue or superiority in a high birth rate, for militarism or ruthless capitalism or lust or sentimen- tality or an ambitious church may manipulate the organs of social control to subject women to sexual slavery and to stimulate men to unbridled paternity. There has been altogether too much of Luther's fatalistic optimism urg- ing to be fruitful and multiply for God would provide. Nor, on the other hand, is a low birth rate or a stationary population an inevitable mark of social degeneracy. Who since the Marne or Verdun dares to call France decadent? Or who lifts the voice in praise of German and Austrian superiority because of their birth rates? What we are after is not large populations, but good, sound, healthy, integrated, intelligent populations. We reckon not by how many babies are born, but by how many we rear and make into productive citizens. Net birth rate counts. Both positive and negative eugenics focus on this princi- ple. Hence sound social work, like sound statesmanship, SOCIAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL WORK 199 is to be judged by what it does to promote a high aver- age of health, vitality, and capacity in a population. This is the measuring stick which must inexorably be ap- plied to all such proposals as birth control, sterilization or segregation of the unfit, encouragement of the fit to mate, endowment of motherhood, " absolute motherhood," and all such war-time devices to repair the ravages among male population as marriages by proxy, war brides, polyg- amy, and official illegitimacy. If the Great War brings us nearer a League of Nations, a League to Enforce Peace, or some other new international organization to keep the peace, this test of high average fitness stands a still greater chance of prevailing over the older rabbit-hutch policy of national strength. For the smaller nations are apparently coming into their own through some princi- ple of federation which tends to nullify the law of the big battalions. The new law of population resembles the formula for the quantity of money, which states that the quantity of money is the total amount of all kinds of cir- culable media — metal currency, checks, and so forth, multiplied by the rapidity of circulation or turnover. Accordingly national strength is expressed by the total units of population multiplied by their average mobility and capacity (N S =P X AC). This is the clearest cue for the social worker, and it in- volves another; namely, that to secure the highest aver- age capacity useful social variations must be favored and stimulated. In plain English this means working against dead-levelism or sheep-mindedness and encouraging a considerable dash of heresy, independence of thought, innovation, and initiative. In practice this necessitates freedom of discussion and daring to think over or discuss even the most untoward and ticklish subjects. I do not mean that the social worker is to promote anarchy or sub- sidize free love. I do not mean that social workers should be uncompromising radicals. They need neither smoke, gamble, drink cocktails, nor join the Sinn Fein to qualify 200 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK for their profession. But neither should they be afraid to tackle any proposal or practice on its merits however hoary with taboo it may be. Social work should lend its aid everywhere and always to any move which promises to develop the open mind; for the open mind, the flexible mind, the elastic mind is the first condition of progress, since progress is fundamentally growth from error into truth. This is the function of constructive discontent. No true social worker is complacent; he must be divinely discontented, for discontent with what was built this world and will rebuild it into the City of God. But constructive discontent requires opportunity to function progressively. Balked or constricted or denied expression it festers and irritates or explodes into aim- less violence. Hence the test of social opportunity as a test of progressive social work. By opportunity I mean the chance to be well born, to be decently cared for dur- ing childhood, to be decently educated, to play; a chance to develop one's productive skill; a chance of getting into the place where one's abilities, native and acquired, can express themselves to their highest; access to all the great heritage of culture that the ages have compounded and sent down to us; and the chance to participate in every normal social activity for which we are fitted. The world is sprinkled with morons, but, after all, the normal ex- ceed the abnormal nearly ten to one; and an almost in- credible store of talent lies latent and undeveloped in the great averages of mankind. The social worker's chief positive task through case work and mass work is to un- lock this store of productive ability, to turn it into indus- try, thrift, creative art, and citizenship. The new democ- racy of which we dream will be progressive and indeed possible only as we are able to develop a skilled leader- ship consecrated to unselfish service, and a sufficient meas- ure of income, leisure, and education to enable the average citizen to sense the common need, to feel the thrill of the common purpose, and to enlist for its realization. This SOCIAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL WORK 20I socializing of opportunity is the testing stone for all such projects as vocational training and guidance, limitation of child labor, continuation schools, vocational therapy, the universal franchise, the right to organize for collec- tive bargaining, and many of the other ''rights" which men have claimed and fought for in the last hundred years. It is Ukewise the core to the idea of democracy if that word has any solid content whatever. Morover, it confers real meaning upon the struggle to control the con- ditions which menace Ufe and health, for it adds the idea of quality to the otherwise empty gain of mere length of days. Finally, it is the only method by which con- tributive as contrasted with dependent types of social personality can be created or educated. The last test, that of order and stability, involves many problems deeply imbedded in the theory and practice of social work. For crime, poverty, broken family life, mi- gratory labor, and war all tear holes in the fabric of so- cial order. Let no one be deceived into beUeving that these are necessary "costs of progress," even though sometimes they appear like the mud stirred through the social stream when its course is changed in a^ period of transition. Crime is an index of progress only in a some- what paradoxical sense; that is, if the rate of serious crime diminishes while that of newer and pettier offenses rises, it may indicate that the social conscience is growing more sensitive and begins to recognize as crimes acts which heretofore have been tolerated. In this sense so- cial work may contribute to progress, by searching out some of the more imponderable factors in crimmal cau- sation and in helping to brand as distinctly anti-social acts which we have been in the habit of considering as only unsocial or even as shrewd business practice. Laws against food adulteration, unfair prices, sweated or child-made goods, truck payment, and usury illustrate how social censure crystallizes itself into the criminal code. 202 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK Let me repeat that poverty is not a legitimate cost of progress. It is rather the index of social ineptitude and retardation. When we think of Europe as having made progress since the Black Death in spite of all handicaps of war or pestilence, it is not only because of the great era of invention, discovery, fine arts, and State building, but also because in these five centuries we have risen from a condition where nine-tenths of the people were at the poverty line to a level where scarcely more than one-tenth are so submerged. This insurance aspect of social life is one of the surest objective measures of material prog- ress. But it is more than that, since poverty means the development of intelligence, of independence, and of the courage which is born of a sense of possible control over hostile forces. Involuntary poverty is the submerged mind. The significance of that fact appears when you re- member that all human culture, all the finer things which make Hfe worth while are the product of leisure activi- ties. Enforced poverty inhibits creative activity and expresses itself only in dull resentment or passivity. The aboUtion of poverty, then, will not only remove a toxin which limits productivity but will release immense res- ervoirs of creative capacity in art and industry and citi- zenship. Make no apologies, then, to the theorists of social progress for any and every attempt to wipe out poverty. Every stroke against it cuts away another bit of the jungle which hinders our onward march. "Poverty, " said Aristotle, "is the parent of revolution and crime." Every social measure reducing it becomes thus a new block in the great highway to social order, stability, and justice. So long as men continue this side of heaven to dwell in families the stability of family life is of grave con- cern to social order. Whatever, therefore, social workers can do to promote sane matings or reduce domestic friction is so much to the good in terms of social prog- ress. This does not mean merely reducing illegitimacy SOCIAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL WORK 203 or divorce. It means also releasing women from sexual dependence, it means controlled reproduction, it means adequate leisure and income for companionship and efficient parenthood, it means rational comradeship, it means some method by which obvious and unnecessary mistakes in mating may be prevented before they reach the altar or the divorce court. It means working out a new technique, perhaps, for forecasting the mental antag- onisms and temperamental twists which result in sex neuroses, hysterias, and all the other pathologic problems which fall to the lot of the psycho-analyst. It means, finally, to make of the home not an absurd fetish, but a radiating center for the virtues of friendship and hos- pitality and for other intangible but no less socially val- uable aesthetic products. The bearing of this concept of the family upon such a phenomenon as the migratory worker is patent enough. For founding a home is an adventure in social order. The home builder and property owner is courted by Church and State and employer alike. A system of industry that depends upon or encourages the bird of passage is economically no less than morally wasteful. Just one illustration will prove this. Prostitution and venereal disease are economic wastes, whether you measure them in the short run or the long run, whether in terms of sick- ness, unemployment, irregular output, police costs, or depleted race vitality. And they will remain unsolved social problems so long as armies of casual workers roam about lacking the ballast of home ties themselves and disturbing the normal ratio of the sexes in the communi- ties where they camp. Whatever, then, social workers can do to stabilize the mentally normal migratory worker and to make it possible for him through proper voca- tional training and decent income to settle down into the domestic harness may be set off as a progress asset. Civ- ilized man with his marvelous means of transportation must beware of falling a victim to his own devices. In 204 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK his annihilation of space he must heed lest he annihilate many of those most precious, salutary responsibilities and ties which have made him ordered man out of the irresponsible and vagrant savage. At first glance it would seem that social work as such could do nothing to reduce the anarchy of war. But closer analysis shows many openings for direct and in- direct service. First of all I suppose the social worker serves the cause of human order and progress by being a real pacifist, by his insistence upon the substitution of mediation and rational persuasion for blind force in the settlement of group conflicts. Let there be no misunder- standing about what I mean by pacifism in general or with reference to the present war. There is a whole universe of difference between pacifism and passivism. I call myself a scientific pacifist and can only see in war more of wastage than of profit to humanity, but I want to see the conflict through which we have just passed fought through to a successful finish in the shape of sta- bility, order, and wholesome discipline. I want peace, a durable peace, through the creation of new understand- ings and new soUdarities between nations, after they have tried vainly by wholesale murder and anarchy to adjust their grievances. The trouble with America during the first years of this war was not, however, the pacifism of a few social workers and religious leaders; much of that pacifism was genuine and serviceable, some of it was questionable posing, affec- tation, or downright cowardice. But the real trouble was passivism, sentimentality, international myopia, and an utterly unscientific sense of our remoteness from and unconcern with what was going on in the cockpit of Europe. We sat cultivating international laissez /aire, and with a tragic lack of perspective beHeved that mani- fest destiny would bring us out on top of the human heap unscathed, even though rather inglorious. It took three years for us to wake up to the fact that we are all of one SOCIAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL WORK 205 blood, part and parcel of each other, and that the trag- edy of Europe involved us inexorably. I am afraid that it took us social workers also a long time to waken to the true situation and to reach the conclusion that true pacifism if it would combat mili- tarism must fight now and fight with grimmest deter- mination. Fortunate it is for ourselves and fortunate for this country if we have screwed up our minds to grasp the fact that war is not to be eliminated by supine sub- jection to the Hun, whatever his guise, but by applying the police idea to international affairs and by sublimating the war impulse. Organized poHcing has aided enor- mously m cutting down the toll of violent crimes in the last century. As I see it, America has determined that this same effective policing shall be introduced to control and checkmate nations which pillage and rob and mur- der wantonly, and to grapple with, intern, or even exter- minate the implacable and the insane nations. In other words, just as the violent and bloody types of men have been weeded out through the selective process of law and criminal justice within groups, so also a similar system must be set up and operated for selecting to final ex- tinction the lawless and willful nations of the earth. Social workers can accomplish a great task of media- tion and interpretation by spreading this police concept of America's war, peace and reconstruction mission. This is a form of constructive patriotism for which social workers are pecuHarly fitted since they by the very na- ture of their profession must come into close contact with the humble, the ignorant, the foreign bom, and the dismherited whose apathy or hostility to America's pur- poses has been so largely the result of our poKcy of neg- lect and insouciance. The creation of interracial under- standings, the ministry of amalgamation, the easing up of social adaptations — all these are the peculiar function of our profession. In sociological parlance the social worker is an agent for social pollination, or cross-fertilization of 2o6 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND SOCIAL WORK cultures. Need I illustrate by the labors of Jane Addams, Mary MacDowell, Robert Woods, Peter Roberts, Graham Taylor, or a score of others? Moreover, in the most literal sense social work is real military preparedness. Only a sound, intelligent popu- lation can make a good fighting machine in these days of colossal conflict. Whatever prevents social deteriora- tion aids in this protective work. Think, too, of the great tasks turned over to social workers in preparing our armies, in maintaining war morale — the work of the Red Cross, the Fosdick Commission, the War Camp Com- munity Service, the Y. M. C. A., and other great organ- izations laboring as official or quasi-official adjuncts to the army and navy. The government's stupendous war- time social-welfare policy was at once the greatest oppor- tunity professional social work ever had, and its great- est challenge. It is from this standpoint that we are wholly justified in hazarding the belief that social work itself may turn out to be one of the "moral equivalents of war," a sub- limation of the impulse to fight, a technique, and a field of battle. Is it beyond possibility that the vigorous business and professional men who enlisted in the various forms of noncombatant war service when disqualified for army or navy will yield to the fascination of fighting alcohol and vice and laziness and thriftlessness and extravagance and sickness and bad housing and industrial exploitation after the wars are over? Some, of course, will be glad to get back to money-making and whist and beer, glad to be done with committees and drives and solicitation. But many more will find it impossible to settle back into the old ways of letting things drift and of doing good vicariously. They will want to consolidate victory, to gather the fruits of peace in a democracy of service, and to make sure by their own contributions that this fear- ful struggle shall not have been in .vain. These, then, are some of the implications of social prog- SOCIAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL WORK 207 ress as they touch scientific social work. Remember, however, that humanity has been at least half a million years in the making, and that in consequence human re- construction and social progress are slow. Science is purposive and ameliorative, but it is also patient. The late Vice President Fairbanks left a trust fund of $50,000 the income of which is to be distributed to social-welfare agencies every fifty years for five hundred years. For five hundred years! Was this Indiana conservatism wielding the dead hand, or was it common sense? Five hundreds years! Not even the eugenists or the Bolshe- viki could transform the world in five centuries. Cheap houses can be build overnight on the sand, but the gos- pels tell us of their speedy end. The road to the great house of many mansions which humanity is building for itself is long and winding; it has to be built over morasses of human depravity which must be drained; it must be blasted through mountain ranges of selfishness and prej- udice; it must skirt giddy chasms full of the bones of the unwary. But it is building, and will continue building just so long as men lend their science and their love and their skill to the great commission. Is it not a glorious privilege that social workers are permitted to share in- creasingly in this supreme and thrilling enterprise of hu- man engineering? That is the goal of the scientific spirit, and that also is its highest reward. INDEX Abatement of public nuisances, IS, 49- Accident prevention, 54, 96. Administration of philanthropy, 177. Administrative fimctions of government extending, 56- 57- Adventurous spirit, Ch. VIII. Altruism, 20, 32. Americanization, 189. Anarchism, 31, 42, 165, 199, 204. Angell, Norman, quoted, 179. Aristotle, quoted, 202. Bergson, quoted, 20. Birth control, 15, 196, 199. Blackstone, quoted, 4. British Labor Party, 10, 164, 166, 168, 169. Bundle days, 83, 104. Capital and labor, 196. Case-work, 7, 163, 194, 196, 200. Causes of turnover, 145 ff. Censorship, 175. Charitable publicity, 179. Charity, 34, 39, 53, 68, 82, 173, 177. Child labor, 97, 170. Child welfare, 12-13, loi. Christianity, 25-26, 68. City planning, 174. Civilization, no. Class legislation, 5. Class struggle, 2, 36. Collective bargaining, 164-165. Collective control, 45 ff., 162. Comte, quoted, 18, 19, 29, 35. Conservation, 15, 46, 109. Conservatives, 6, 8, 42, 69, 91. Constructive criticism, 40 fif., 162, 175. Cooley, quoted, 22. Cost of labor turnover, 133, 156. Cost of progress, 201, 202. Courtesy, 81-82. Crime and progress, 201. Criminals, improved care of, 13. Criminal negligence, 100. Criminal procedure, 191. Cutting down turnover, 158. Dead center, Ch. VI. Dead hand, in, 207. Demobilization, 171, 177. Democracy, 45. Direct action, 41, 165. Distribution of wealth, 50. Dodd, quoted, 50-51. Education, 11, 19, 28, 30, 31, 165, 170, 176, 184, 190. Efficiency tests, 115 fif., 120. Eugenics, 13, 15, 207. Expert, use of in public service, 58ff., 162. 209 2IO INDEX Family, 42, 102, 125, 196, 202. Law, 30, 32, 190, 201. Fatigue, 11, 118, 122. Leisure, lo-ii, 18. Federal children's bureau, 176. Length of service in social Feeble-minded, 102, 195. agencies, 142, 143. Financial federation, 180. Living wage, 2, 3, 9, 151. Freedom of speech, 40, 44, 175, Lynching, 191. 199. Government as welfare agency, 44 ff-, 52, 53- Hadley, quoted, 49, 51. Migratory labor, 203. MiUtary training, 187. Minimum wage, 10, 52, 166, 197. ^ Mob mind, 104. Health, 12-13, 54, 99, 186, 189, Mothers' pensions, 53, 102, 104, 197. Heretics, 30, 91. Housing reform, 12, 48, 87, 102, 170, 173, 184. Huxley, quoted, 4, 34, 71-72, 73, 76. Mystic body, 26, 79. National conference of social work, 10. Nationalizing land, etc., 168. Natural rights, 3. Negro, 190. Old age pensions, 53. Illegitimacy, 190, 199, 202. Illiteracy, 185. Immigration, 189. Industrial democracy, 165. Individual, relation of to social Pacifism vs. passivism, 204. group, Ch. 11. Philosophic individuaUsm, 21, L W. W.'s, 8, 84, 165, 191. 37- IneflSciency in social workers, Physical degradation, 187. causes of, 122 S. Plateaus of learning, 116-117. Infant mortaHty, 176, 197. Plato, quoted, 20. Instincts, 24, 67, no, 184. Insurance, 55, 84, 168, 177, 179, 183, 195, 196, 202. Jesus, 35, 75, 77. Labor legislation, 49. Laissez faire, 33, 37, 95, 164. Land policies, 171. Lane, Secretary, land policy of, Prevention, 39. 171. Price fixing, 166-167 Play, 184. "Police power," 14-iS, 45, 49, 53, 58. Poor law, 13, 100. Population test for progress, 198. Poverty, abolition of, 94, 202. Poverty and progress, 201- 202. INDEX 211 Private property, 6, 42, 47, 49, 58, 196. Probation officers, 30, 72. Profession, marks of a, vii. Progress, 6, 17, 32, 163, Chap. IX. Progress, tests for, 196. Progressive, 6, 36, 38. Prohibition, 47, 167. Prostitution, 203. Psychiatric social work, 187. Pubhc opinion, 60, 167, 177. Pubhc ownership, 47, 49. PubUc subsidies to private char- ity, 103. PubUcity, 17s, 182. Recreation, 11, 128, 163, 183, 187. Recruiting social workers, 148- 149. Red Cross, 177 ff., 188, 195, 206. Reformation, 25, 43. Relief, 14, 162, 178, 182, 183. Religion, 25, 67, 129, 160. Rights, 2-6, 9ff., 25, 41, 50, 175, 201. Sabotage, 8. St. Francis of Assisi, 82. St. Vincent de Paul, 68. Salaries and social work, 124, ISO. Sanitation, 99. Science and social work, Ch. IV. Scientific management, 109. Self-interest, 32, 92. Sentimentality, 7, Ch. V. Settlements, 11, 105. Shorter work day, 10-11, 53, 171, 190. Slavery, 8, 35, Small, quoted, 29. Social duty, 29. Social heredity, 33. Social hygiene, 188. Social opportunity test for progress, 200. Social psychology, 21 fif. "Social question," 19, 28. Social solidarity, 31. Social work, definitions of, 65 flf. Social work, as miUtary pre- paredness, 206. Social work, as moral equiva- lent of war, 206. Socialism, i, 19, 35, 48, 91. Society, theories of, 4, 22-23, 27, 80. Stages of an idea, 160. State, 5, 13, 30, 45, 167, 202. Statistics, 41. Sterner, quoted, 18. Sumner, quoted, 4, 18, 37, 71, 89. Sweated industry, 175. Syndicalism, 2. Tag days, 39, 103. Tax reform, 96, 166, 180. Trades Unions, i, 10. Training for public service, 59. Training for social work, 126, 131, 153 ff-, 159, 181. Trustification of philanthrophy, 177. Turnover in staff, Ch. VII. Unemployment, 54, 84, 94, 170, 190. 212 INDEX Vestigial philanthrophy, iii fif. Volunteer social workers, Ch. VII, 182. War, effects on social work, 11- 12, 37, 38, 40, 59, 161 £f. War chests, 180. Wealth as test of progress, 196 Wells, quoted, 74, 90, 93. Whitman, quoted, 22. Women's public service, 191. Women's rights, 14, 191. 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