I THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE THE SOCIAL TREND THE SOCIAL TREND BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS, PH.D., LL.D. Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin. Author of "SOCIAL CONTROL," "SOCIAL PSYCHOL- OGY," "THE PRINCIPLES or SOCIOLOGY," CHANGING CHINESE," etc., etc. NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1922 Copyright, 1922, by THE CENTTJBY Co. I'BINTED IK 17. 8. A. To MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE FORWARD-LOOKING DEMOCRATS or THE AMERICAN TYPE THIS BOOK Is DEDICATED INTRODUCTION We moderns are like mariners on a ship sail- ing an uncharted sea. We cannot lay our course in the light of the experience of our ancestors. None of them ever plowed these waters; that is to say, before us no folk ever practised machine production, let its daughters work away from home, bestowed leisure upon multitudes of its wives, saved its babies, vanquished disease, and slew its foes by mechanism, to the extent that we do. So study of the past can not reassure us as to how these things are going to work out. Science and Invention have borne us away from the routes followed by any previous society. They have brought us into strange latitudes where we have nothing to go by. And they do not allow us to feel our way deliberately, put out scout-boats, take soundings. They hurry us on. So the best we can do is to set watchers to scan the horizon. The sociologist is just a man in a crow's nest who knows no more of this sea than his fellows. But from his position INTRODUCTION he will catch sight of coming dangers shoals, sunken rocks, derelicts, cross-currents before they are seen by those on deck. This book is an attempt of an observer at the masthead to judge the probable course of the ship, to call out what lies ahead and how the ship must bear to starboard or to port in order to avoid trouble. EDWARD ALSWORTH Boss. MADISON, WISCONSIN, June, 1922. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAOI I THE MENACE OP MIGRATING PEOPLES ... 3 End of the mollescan stage of mankind. la the na- tion to become a human hodge-podge? Why popula- tion pressure in Asia will increase. Adaptive fecun- dity. Suicide of the adaptive peoples in the pres- ence of low-standard immigrants. -Coming barriers to migration. Possible war between the blind breeders and the prudent breeders. II THE NECESSITY OF AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY . 16 A family of sixteen as a pattern. Is there menace of "race suicide"? Death-rates falling faster than birth-rates. The balking of Azrael. Saving the in- nocents. Possible growth of numbers in this country by 2000 A. D. An endless vista of family restriction. Why we dare not use all of our natural fertility. III FOLK DEPLETION AND RURAL DECLINE . . 34 Soundings in retrogressive America. Strange apathy of young people. Deadness to higher things. Decline of religion, education, family morals, and community spirit. Yet the folk are not degenerate. What hap- pens when a community loses its cream. How blight falls upon the leader less neighborhood. Program for regenerating the stagnant rural communities. IV DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER .... 52 Vanishing of free land in the United States. Secret of the appeal of the conservation movement. Why the farmers have become docile. "Back to the land. Less welcome for the immigrant. Rising cost of living. Appearance of a farm labor class. American optimism. Free land as the mother of social and (political democracy. The "spiritual West." How the passing of the frontier affects personal liberty. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTEB PAGE V THE CHANGING DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN 78 The old home industries. The home-made displaced by the factory-made. Migration of the daughters out into industry. The wives of the well-to-do ac- quire leisure. Their quest of "culture." Are women taken more seriously? What the wives have to pay for being "supported." Is access to the job turn- ing girls away from matrimony? Will it masculinize them? VI WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD .... 100 Culture transmitted chiefly through men. Is this to woman's disadvanage? How men and women differ in instincts. Why vice is chiefly a masculine failing. How men have stamped their innate pugnacity upon the penal system, politics, business, the state, and religion. Women should be critical and suspicious of man-made institutions. VII PHILANTHROPY WITH STRINGS .... 121 Charity as a cloak. Private, unendowed charities static rather than dynamic in their influence. Their administrators conservative. The effective prevention of poverty causes disturbance to some business in- terests. Y. M. C. A. difficulties. Problems of set- tlement wardens. Philanthropy is no substitute for social reform. The proper sphere of private philan- thropy. VIII PROHIBITION AS THE SOCIOLOGIST SEES IT 137 Opium-smoking as a gangrene. Alcohol as the vice of the Occident. Why prohibition had to come. Commercialization of the liquor traffic. Laboratory revelations as to alcohol. Race and strong drink. )How South Europeans became temperate. An al- ternative to prohibition. How the "dry" regime affects woman, the home, and the child. The glass and good fellowship. Liquor and politics. IX THE LEGAX PROFESSION FROM THE SOCIAL POINT OF VIEW 161 Lawyers serve individuals rather than society. How the gravitation of abler lawyers to the richer side pulls institutions out of plumb. Lawyers largely TABLE OF CONTENTS OHAFTM PAO1 waste their efforts against one another. But the law- yer keeps himself in the best of intellectual trim. Why society should lean less on the legal profession. X THE CONSCIENCE OF THE EXPERT .... 1G9 Spread of the laboratory technique into the field of social investigation. The conscience of the trained inquirer. How it differs from other types of con- science. Its strength and its services to the public weal. XI TRAINING CITIZENS WITH "SPUNK" FOR SO- CIAL SERVICE 174 Spread of the combat idea in business and the profes- sions. Commercialism as a religion. The competing social service ideal. All useful occupations "affected with a public interest." WThat ethics our schools should teach. XII FOR A LEGAL DISMISSAL WAGE .... 183 The dismissal wage in Russia under Nicholas II; under Kerensky. Importance of economic security for the employed man. Standards of public or non- gainful employers. "Hire and fire" policy of indus- trial employers. Its inhumanity. Benefits to be ex- pected from a legal dismissal wage. How it could be made to work. XIII FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RIGHT 195 Decline of gossip and triviality. More attention available for matters of real import. The public the last court of appeal of wronged classes. En- deavor of local beneficiaries of injustice to throttle publicity. Free communication still all-important for labor. No excuse for denying it in labor con- troversies. Evil effects of repression. Ventilated grievances not dangerous to the social order. XIV WAR AS DETERMINER 214 Martial determinism. The invention of weapons has been fateful for peoples and civilizations. Modern warfare capitalistic. Consequences. Significance of the comparative strength of Attack and Defense. TABLE OF CONTENTS The strengthening of Defense makes for peace. War may continue mistress of the destiny of society. There will be a "next war." State worship. Ef- fect of democracy, of woman's suffrage on the future of war. No salvation of the nations save in union. THE SOCIAL TREND THE SOCIAL TREND THE MENACE OP MIGRATING PEOPLES 1 T N 1868 Anson Burlingame negotiated a treaty in which the United States of America and the emperor of China cordially recognized "the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and his allegiance." Fourteen years later our Chinese Exclusion Act made a jest of this fine flourish of American political idealism. It has now become apparent that there are other sociological lessons our people will have to learn under the harsh tutelage of facts. 2 In the past the chief guaranty of stability in the relations of races and peoples has been hu- 3 THE SOCIAL TREND man inertia. Most men lived and died within a few leagues of their birthplace. Under the empire of habit they bore their lot, be it never so hard, without reflecting that a brighter life might be awaiting them overseas. Only the ex- ceptional were gifted with the imagination and courage to pluck up and wander forth in the hope of bettering their condition. But this molluscan stage is not likely to last much longer. Since the birth of men now liv- ing, the conditions of the mass movement of peoples have been utterly revolutionized. Not only has steam on land and sea made travel swift and safe and cheap, but the long-distance carriage of human beings has been organized as never before. To-day a peasant living within sight of the rock of Prometheus or the cedars of Lebanon may buy a through ticket to a fron- tier point in the Canadian Northwest. For the sake of the profit to be extracted from them, pen- niless laborers are gathered, despatched, and cared for during their long journey to a desti- nation on the other side of the globe as if they were commercial wares. In the villages of southwestern Asia pas- senger-tickets to some remote zone of oppor- 4 MENACE OF MIGRATING PEOPLES tunity are hawked about as newspapers and apples are cried on our streets. The seller will not only incite the peasant to migrate, but will take a mortgage on his home for the passage- money or accept the bond of some relative that the migrant will within a year remit the sum advanced. Parties of "greenhorns," through- billed from their native village by a professional money-lender, are met at the right points by his confederates, coached on the answers to make to the immigration authorities, and delivered finally to some "boarding boss" in this country who is recruiting labor on commission for a con- struction gang. Besides such means of detaching the limpet from his rock, local adhesions are everywhere being loosened by the spread of the capacity to read and by the prodding of the minds of the masses by the newspapers. So, for better or worse, we have entered on the era of facile migration. No longer is popu- lation rdoTetHltonaTtree in its natal soil. Man- kind deliquesces and flows in broad streams toward any place on earth which holds out the prospect of a better living. The readiness of petty folk to up and away on slight inducement 5 THE SOCIAL TREND is a new thing, but there is no reason to suppose it a passing phenomenon. On the contrary, so far as we can look ahead, the means and desire of removing from one's native land to another will grow. The collecting and forwarding of human beings will become a business and, like any other business, it will be pushed. 3 To-day every people desires to be a nation, that is, a spiritual unit. In the Koman Empire this ideal played no part, and there resulted an amazing hodgepodge of population. We mod- erns are afraid of such collections of human odds and ends as came to people Roman Africa or Syria or the valley of the Nile, because we realize that always such muddled mixing begets absolutist government. Dreading a government not subject to the collective will of the governed, we wish a people to be like-minded enough to develop a common opinion upon political ques- tions. When private conduct and public au^ thority are obedient to public opinion, a nation is able almost to dispense with coercion. Fur- thermore, spiritual oneness prevents the rise of caste barriers to association and intermarriage. 6 Now, cheap travel and full steerages make mock of this ideal of nationality. Any prosper- ous country which leaves its doors ajar will presently find itself not the home of a nation, but a "polyglot boarding-house." The thriving areas of the world will come to be populated by a confused party-colored mass, of divers lan- guages and religions and of the most discord- ant moral and economic standards. Coolies at the breech-clout stage of attire, such as you find in the back districts of the Far East, will jostle the descendants of the Puritans. The enlight- ened will perforce brush shoulders with idol- aters, wearers of amulets, and believers in the evil eye. In the same labor market will com- pete those who sit at meat and those who squat on their heels about a bowl of food, those who insist on a carpet underfoot and those content with a dirt floor, those who honor their wives and those who make them chattels, those who school their children and those who exploit them. Invariably, when elements with such incom- patible traditions intermingle, castes form; so that the nation which persists in welcoming all inoffensive comers will presently find its people 7 THE SOCIAL TREND going asunder into closed groups. The fact is, removal from one land to another is becoming so easy that any nation which is economically well off has to choose whether it will see caste barriers rise in it or will itself rear a barrier against non-assimilable aliens. S 4: In the masses of the Orient, which steam has made next-door neighbors of ours, the family customs and the status of women are such that land shortage, overcrowding, and economic stress have no appreciable effect in checking the flow of babies. With these folk economic ne- cessity does not prompt to family limitation. If the excess of births over deaths cannot be taken care of by the improvement of agriculture or the rise of factory industry and export trade, and the people cannot migrate, then the growth of the local population is accompanied by deepening poverty and misery until mortality rises to such a degree that human beings die as fast as they are born. At this point population is in equi- librium, and conditions need not become worse. This is "the stationary state," which the greater 8 MENACE OF MIGRATING PEOPLES part of the Asiatics seem to have reached cen- turies ago. Within a generation, thanks to Science's con- quest of disease and to the improvement of public sanitation, the death-rate of the more en- lightened peoples has been cut in two. In Nor- way or New Zealand, for example, not over an eightieth of the population die in a year. Now, the application of these new means of saving human lives is upsetting in the Orient the ancient balance between births and deaths. The West, to be sure, sets the example of a low birth-rate as well as a low death-rate ; but the influences which pull down the death-rate come into operation in the Orient much earlier than those which pull down the birth-rate. India and China get pure water, hospitals, antitoxins, serums, and modern medicine before later marriage for girls, the emancipation of wives, obligatory school attendance, and birth- control practices become established among them. During this critical interval, when Asiat- ics born at the high Oriental rate are dying only at the low Occidental rate, population will tend to increase rapidly, and the surplus, be- THE SOCIAL TREND coming mobile under modern inducements to migrate, will move toward any part of the world which promises an easier existence. Various influences have spared western Europe the grim experience of the stationary state Asia has had. She never reduced her women to the hapless lot of most Oriental women. Her access to the New World afforded relief from the pressure of numbers. Improve- ment in the industrial arts, especially in the last centnry and a half, allowed population to grow without making life harder. The impending deliquescence of peoples, particularly of the con- gested and free-multiplying Asiatics, therefore opens to the Europeans and the descendants of Europeans who find themselves in conditions of comparative comfort in the younger regions of the world a truly appalling prospect of a human deluge. Nor is this all. Within the last half-century a most hopeful tendency has shown itself in some parts of western Europe, in Australasia, and in North America. With the penetration of intelligence and individualistic democracy to the broader layers of the people, there appears a phenomenon which rarely, if ever, has show r n 10 MENACE OF MIGRATING PEOPLES itself before on any large scale. This is adap- tive fecundity, or a birth-rate accommodated to the economic outlook for the next generation. When foresight and self-control in respect to family size have become general, a people is in the way of attaining a degree of comfort and an amenity of life such as can never be enjoyed for long by a people of blind fecundity. For its growth is regulated by its standard of living, and with every improvement in agriculture or industry it raises its standard instead of allow- ing the slack to be taken up by mere increase of numbers. No limit can be assigned to the possible amelioration of the lot of the masses when they are canny enough to "salt down" their economic gains in higher standards of liv- ing rather than in rearing big families. Once a people adapts its production of chil- dren to the economic prospect, the free inflow of blindly fecund immigrants has a most calam- itous effect upon its self-perpetuation. Sense- ing the curtailment of its children's chances, it withholds offspring in just the degree that the alien element expands. In handing on the torch of life it seems to act on the principle, "After you, my dear Alphonse!" For this behavior 11 THE SOCIAL TKEND the writer coined twenty years ago the phrase "race suicide," which unfortunately has come to be applied to every form, of prudence in the mat- ter of family. For a people which has arrived at an adaptive birth-rate to admit the surplus population be- gotten by other peoples which multiply with- out taking thought for the morrow is virtually to cut its own throat. To vary the metaphor, once the camel has been allowed to put his head into the tent, the process of displacement goes on quietly, but inexorably, until the camel is the sole occupant of the tent. It is a painless death, to be sure, which extends over a century or two and proceeds without clash or scandal, but no people which foresees it will adhere to the fatal policy of the open door. 5 Prudence in progeny is so much the product of circumstance and accident that it would be ab- surd to claim that its practisers are ipso facto superior types, whereas the prolific peoples are inferior. Nevertheless, it is certain that the brighter races will be the earliest to look 12 MENACE OF MIGRATING PEOPLES ahead and limit the size of the family, while the dullard races will be the last to abandon the blind fecundity which characterizes the animal. During the two or three centuries that will be required for the practice of adaptive fecundity to become general among mankind, unhindered immigration, by favoring the blind breeders at the expense of the prudent breeders, would en- able the stupid and inert peoples to poach on the preserves of the bright and aspiring peoples. Since the latter will not allow themselves to be elbowed off the earth by the superfluous chil- dren of the former, it is certain that every ad- vanced nation will rear immigration barriers. Dogmas of the open door and the melting-pot become absurd in a time when population rolls hither and thither about the globe like particles of quicksilver. The barriers with which each national com- fort area will endeavor to surround itself will not obstruct the passage of culture or culture- bearers. Travelers, officials, students, scholars, merchants, and artists will be able to go any- where without molestation. It is only the broad masses that will be hindered from migration. 13 THE SOCIAL TEEND f* ft One reason for the hesitation of this and other nations about joining in a league of nations is dread of losing control' over immigration. Since every people has an interest in the immigration policy of any people, a strong effort will be made in the interest of world peace to have all dis- putes between governments arising out of im- migration submitted to arbitration. This, how- ever, would tend to the equalization of peoples and races in rights of admission to each country, and would thereby prevent a people discrimi- nating among the streams of immigrants which offer themselves. But, without such 'discrim- ination, it cannot remain in any sense a spirit- ual unity. Hence, it is likely that immigration barriers will be even more jealously reserved from international control than tariff barriers have been. Will the crowded and blindly multiplying peoples tamely submit thus to be excluded from areas on which they might unload their surplus population? May they not make the rearing of such dikes a casus belli? Even now the Jap- anese show themselves restive in the presence of anything which savors of exclusion, and it is 14 MENACE OF MIGRATING PEOPLES not hard to foresee a time when the peoples of India and China and Siam and Egypt may chal- lenge the barriers which keep them out of all the more desirable markets for their labor. Nevertheless, while the overpopulous nations are certain to become aware and resentful of exclnsion, as at once an unjust handicap and an imputation of inferiority, the number of peoples resolved to withdraw from the game of competitive fecundity constantly grows. We have seen Canada, Australasia, South Africa, and several South American republics come into line with the United States in the matter of im- migration. As the dense populations become more mobile, the sense of pressure will grow until, perhaps, Europe will make common cause with the younger societies in recognizing in in- ternational law the right of every nation to sur- round itself with such in migration barrier as seems good to it. Whether the pullulating peoples will acquiesce in any such principle is on the knees of the gods. It may be that the most terrific of all wars, which would involve, no doubt, the entire human race, will be fought on this issue. 15 II THE NECESSITY OF AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY 1 X J "VTOT long ago President Harding noticed in ** the photogravure section of a Sunday news- paper the picture of Mr. and Mrs. Domenico Zaccahea of New York City and their sixteen children ; whereupon he wrote Mrs. Zaccahea con- gratulating her upon being the mother of such a splendid brood. The gesture won the President friends, no doubt, but did it strike a note which needs to be struck? The father of this family is a porter at twenty dollars a week. There is no evidence that he has unusual gifts to endow his children with. By complimenting him the President of the United States encourages our millions of commonplace citizens to court the gratitude of their country by begetting families of sixteen children. Is the country in need of them? i "Proceedings of the American Sociological Society"; Vol. XVI. 16 AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY The other day I greeted a former student of mine who was born in 1830 when the world had had but half as many inhabitants as to-day. In her lifetime she has seen 850 millions of per- sons added to the human race. The Divine command, "Be fruitful and multi- ply and replenish the earth," was uttered to seven people who were all that remained of man- kind after the Flood. There are now 50,000,000 times as many people as there were then. How much longer is this emergency mandate to be considered as still in force? Race suicide? Since this phrase was launched twenty years ago, portentous bigwigs have been wont to send a chill down the spine of their hearers by pictur- ing the enlightened stocks and peoples as headed for extinction because the full quivers of olden time are becoming rare. The clergyman with few children or none at all has felt entitled to thunder like a Hebrew prophet at couples who stop at three or four children whereas their grandparents gave the world ten or a dozen. Family restriction which first showed itself in the vital statistics of France about the middle of the last century, became visible in England in 17 THE SOCIAL TREND 1878, began leaving its mark on Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and Australia in the eighties, attracted notice in Italy, Hungary, and Finland just before the close of the century, and appeared in Germany and Austria in the last decade before the war has been pointed to as if it were a spreading leprosy. No one stops to consider where these peoples would find them- selves to-day if they had gone on having progeny in the old happy-go-lucky fashion. Because it affords such a splendid text for Jeremiads and because a hot controversy has raged about the morality of certain restrictive practices, the shrinkage in the size of families has attracted an enormous amount of attention. Every thoughtful person has heard of it, has been urged to confront it as "a grave problem." On the other hand, few but statisticians, life insurance actuaries, and public health officers have noticed the extraordinary lowering of the death-rate which has been brought about in the last forty years. No one has viewed it "with alarm" or lifted a trumpet against it. It has stolen upon us quietly like a genial south wind in February, like a night drizzle after an August drought. And yet in most countries, so far as 18 AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY population growth is concerned, it quite balances and neutralizes that shortage of the baby crop which has inspired so many gloomy prophecies. The thing is as plain as the black and white squares on a chess-board. Take the fourteen European countries which have worth-while vital statistics running back for forty years or more. Compare their records for the half -decade 1881-85 with those of the last half-decade before the war, viz., 1906-10. You will find that in nine of them the death-rate fell farther than the birth-rate ; so that in 1910 their natural increase was actually greater than it had been a quarter of a century earlier, before forethought and prudence in the matter of family had given much evidence of its presence among the masses. Taking the average for the fourteen peoples, it appears that while the number of annual births per thousand of the general population was five less at the end of the period, the number of annual deaths per thousand was five and one half less! Impatient with the limitations of ink-on-paper, a certain yellow-journalist used to wish, when he had something of great moment to communicate to the public, that he could "make a noise 19 THE SOCIAL TREND resembling thunder." The statistician laments that he cannot thunder to a public which admires families of the Zaccahea type that in the last quarter-century for which we have complete statistics (1881-85 to 1906-10) the death-rate of Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Scotland declined about a fifth. That of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England and Wales, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland was lowered about a fourth; while that of Australia, Bulgaria, and Holland was reduced about a third. In the same period the mortality of the dozen chief cities of the world was reduced by more than one third. Our own country has been tardy in collecting vital statistics. However, we have this most significant fact. In 1900 the death-rate in our "registration area" which then included two fifths of the American people was 17.6 per thousand of the population. In 1919 in a regis- tration area which had expanded until it in- cluded three fourths of us, the rate was 12.9 a reduction of a fourth in nineteen years! According to the committee on elimination of waste in industry of the American Engineer- ing Council the duration of life in America has 20 AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY been increased by five years since 1909. In the last eight years the expectation of life of the in- dustrial policy-holders of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. has been extended from forty-six and one half years to fifty-one years. 2 Save our ingenuity in devising contrivances for blotting out human life, nothing in our time is so sensational as our success in vanquishing certain diseases. For example, in 1911 in the United States the deaths per 100,000 population from the fevers, including typhoid, typhus, and malaria, were only one seventy-third as numer- ous as the deaths from these causes in British India. These fevers are not tropical maladies and there is no climatic or geographic reason for their great prevalence in India. Old records show that these diseases played havoc in this country a century ago. The reason why they scourge us so little to-day is that public author- ity has stepped in and applied the discoveries of preventive medicine. It is this agency that has chased from us those grisly servitors of Azrael, bubonic plague, chol- era, yellow fever, and smallpox. Moreover, 21 THE SOCIAL TREND thanks to increasing personal and social appro- priation of the fruits of medical advance, an- other four of his reapers, viz., typhoid, diph- theria and croup, tuberculosis, and pneumonia have had their sickles dulled. Even at our pres- ent stage of knowledge, did the public but will it, they would have not much more power over us than cholera has. The progress of child-saving alone suffices to offset a large part of the fall in the birth-rate. Peeps into the infant mortality of the less ad- vanced peoples suggest that right down through history from a third to two thirds of those born have perished in the cradle. A decade ago a quarter of the babies born in Hungary and Rus- sia failed to live a year. In Chile in 1913 I found the loss to be a third, in some cities 47 per cent. ! A decade ago Moscow parents were losing half their infants within a twelve- month. As for the Orient, the fate of its in- nocents is horrifying. In 1910 in the innermost province of China an American medical mission- ary with twenty years of practice gave me his opinion that from 75 to 85 per cent, of the chil- dren born in his district die before the end of the second year. The first census the Japanese 22 AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY took in Formosa showed that half of the babies born to the great Chinese population there do not live as long as six months. On the other hand, where the lessons of mod- ern hygiene and medicine have been well conned, infants are saved with a success that our fore- fathers would have attributed to magic. Al- ready there are perhaps a dozen peoples that are getting more than nine tenths of their chil- dren through the first year of life. Our country is near the foot of this enviable class but, never- theless, there are twenty-five American cities which save nineteen babies out of twenty. It is in New Zealand, however, that the wee ones bear a charmed life. In that happy land there are good-sized cities that lose the first year only one infant in twenty-seven! 3 That in our huge composite American pop- ulation clogged with some extremely backward elements Death should take, year after year, but one in seventy or one in seventy-five is an utterly new thing in the experience of peoples. Even if we were a stationary people and not an ex- panding people, I suppose that only one in fifty 23 THE SOCIAL TREND or one in fifty-five would die in a twelvemonth. In all the life of our race, extending over a thous- and centuries and more, the like of this has never been known. It behooves us to adapt our be- havior to it as we adapt our behavior to arti- ficial light or power machinery or the auto- mobile. But we see these things, so we recog- nize at once the necessity of conforming our con- duct to them. On the other hand, most of us do not see this latter-day crippling of Azrael and therefore do not realize that any change in our standards of judgment is called for. For example, through its first millennium and a half during which its doctrines crystallized the Christian church was in the presence of a human mortality which must have been from two to four times that which we experience to- day. Naturally the church became fixed in the idea that overpopulation is nothing to worry about and in her profound wisdom she branded as a sin the deliberate curtailment of conjugal fecundity. Can this position be maintained in- definitely into the future in view of the astound- ing success of modern medical science and sani- tation in enabling people to live out a normal life term? 24 AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY 4 If only the good men who are so dogmatic in this matter would condescend to apply the test of arithmetic! Conceive that as a people we came under the conviction of sin with respect to our current widespread practice of restricting the size of the family. Suppose that, while keeping mortality down to thirteen per thousand, our women would feel it their duty to emulate the prolificacy of the hausfraus of Prussia during the decade be- fore the war when the Kaiser constantly incited them to produce what turned out to be "cannon- fodder." Ignore migration into or out of this country. Well, then, by the end of this century the United States would contain more people than all Europe does to-day. Suppose again that while preserving human life with our present success we should for the next seventy-eight years have children at the present rate of the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and the Italians. In that case, the year 2000A. D. would see the population of our country more than five hundred millions. However, the Teutons taught us to stigma- tize the Latins as "decadent," and there is, in- 25 THE SOCIAL TREND deed, reason for suspecting that in these peoples a great many couples have no more children than they think they can provide for. Their upper class and intelligentsia are by no means care- less multipliers. Let us turn, then, to the simple and unspoiled people of the Balkans. If American women should give themselves to child- bearing with the whole-heartedness of the women of Bulgaria and Rumania, by the close of this century our country, if it kept its present mortal- ity, would boast as many human beings as there are now in all Asia and Africa ! Go a bit further. Suppose that American womanhood rose still more nobly to the demands of their heaven-ordained destiny. Imagine that they bore children as freely as the secluded wives of British India or the women of Russia under Nicholas II. Of course, with so many babies in the population it would be hard to keep our low death-rate. Then, too, low mortality and big families simply do not go together. Various studies show that children born into families of more than nine are two or three times as likely to perish in their infancy as those born into families of less than five. Moreover, many women would have their lives cut short by ex- 26 AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY cessive child-bearing. There are settlements of the foreign-born in our Middle West in which the typical woman dies trying to bring into the world a twelfth, fifteenth, or twentieth baby. Nevertheless, imagine that with the aid of more skill and science we could hold our death-rate down to thirteen while the birth-rate swelled to forty-eight per thousand. In that case our country at the end of this century would have a population equal to that of the entire globe at the outbreak of the World War ! Let us venture on another hypothesis. More than any other people in the world the French Canadians realize what we are authoritatively assured is the Christian ideal in this matter of re- production. Nowhere are women so submissive to the admonitions of their spiritual director, so resigned to the burden of children that is laid upon them. Hence a fecundity in certain parts of the Province of Quebec which is not matched in any other part of the world where there is such a thing as vital statistics. In a year fifty- five babies are born per thousand of population nearly two and a lialf times as many as in our "registration area." To be sure, it is the graveyard rather than the 27 THE SOCIAL TREND nursery that is populated by these heroic sacri- fices. Students of the Loyola School of Sociol- ogy and Social Service in Montreal have estab- lished that a baby born in that city is twice as likely to die in infancy as a Toronto baby, more than twice as likely to die as a New York baby, and four times as likely not to survive the first year as a baby born in Brookline, Massachusetts. This, however, has really nothing to do with the matter of fulfilling one's duty in respect to re- production. Now if our people came to be as docile and devout as these habitants of French Canada, every couple willing to have "as many children as God sends," why, then about three thousand of those born among us this year would as octoge- narians see our country peopled by three billions of human beings ; that is, by thrice the population of Asia and Africa to-day with seventy million folks thrown in for good measure. Of course no such numbers could be maintained here, but the calculation shows what we let ourselves in for if we take the Zaccahea family as our ideal. Suppose that, instead of looking at the per- formance of other peoples, we should go to our 28 AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY ancestors for a standard. We do not know the birth-rate or death-rate of our great-grandpar- ents, bat we do know that through the forty years intervening between the inauguration of George Washington and that of Andrew Jack- son the natural growth of our population aver- aged 3 per cent, a year. Should we equal their record for the remainder of this century the American people would then be two thirds as numerous as the present inhabitants of the globe! With such Matterhorns of prolificacy in full view, how mortifying appears the actual per- formance of American mothers ! Even with the aid of millions of big-family foreign-born in our midst, their fruitfulness is only about a third of that of the French Canadians in the good old days and a mere half of what you find among the Slavic peoples. Our excess of births over deaths is only 70 per cent. Our natural growth of population is a little less than 1 per cent, a year. Keeping this up for seventy-eight years and ignoring immigration, we should come to the year 2000 A. D. with only 222 millions of 29 THE SOCIAL TREND population a sorry showing if you want num- bers. It is evident then that millions upon millions of American married couples perhaps the majority of those of native stock are in some de- gree slackers. They are regulating the size of their families, and this by other means than marital abstinence. Nor is there any prospect that the situation will improve. For the death- rate of our people will be brought still lower. In twenty years the experimenters, the doctors, the public health agencies, and the social workers have pulled it down more than a quarter. Per- haps they can pare it down another quarter in the next twenty years. 1 Why, even if there were no fresh conquests of disease, the mere putting into effect everywhere among us of measures which are now operating with success somewhere l In a recent bulletin Dr. Louis I. Dublin, statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., says: "It is obvioua that at least one-third of the deaths that occur each year may be prevented or postponed. In some communities, the pro- portion of such deaths may reach even one-half." He deems it entirely possible to extend the expectation of life to sixty-five years by putting into general operation the forces which in localized areas have so definitely demonstrated their capacity to reduce the death rate. He believes that the year 1930 will see a large part of this addition to the life span actually accomplished. 30 AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY would reduce our death-rate to one in a hundred each year. 2 So one need not strain his imagi- nation in forecasting an annual mortality of nine in a thousand, or even eight. But, as more par- ents and grandparents round out their lives and death is well-nigh banished from the nursery, there will be fewer gaps in families to be filled and we shall see the annual baby crop shrink to nineteen or even eighteen. Even then, how- ever, our population will be growing as fast as it now is and certainly as fast as it is possible for it to grow without lowering our standard of liv- ing- There is, then, ahead of us an endless vista of restriction of the size of families. We shall leave unused an increasing portion of that fer- tility which became established in our species long ago in order to meet a rate of wastage which no longer presents itself in civilized life. In China about all of human natural fertility is needed in order to balance deaths, particularly the excessive mortality of infants. In southern and eastern Europe about half of this fertility is now required to maintain numbers; in cen- 2 By cutting our infant mortality rate to that of New Zea- land three and a half years could be added to the life ex- pectation of the American people. 31 THE SOCIAL TKEND tral Europe a third ; in Scandinavia, Great Brit- ain, Australasia, and the United States a fourth or less. Some of us will live to a time when a fifth or even a sixth of human reproductive power will suffice to keep up our population. To be sure, after several decades a stationary popu- lation would include such heavy contingents of the later age-classes that the annual death-rate would hover in the neighborhood of fifteen, and perhaps 30 per cent, of human fertility would be required if numbers were to be maintained. Even then, however, the calling into operation of as much as half of the reproductive power of our race would be sheer madness. Fewer births in sympathy with fewer deaths, in order that human increase shall not outrun wealth production, signifies that a new thing has come into the life of mankind; viz., a fecundity that adapts itself to the economic prospect. In view of their miraculous victories over disease, adaptive fecundity is, indeed, the only safeguard of the enlightened peoples against the dismal fate of overcrowded China. If such deliberate limitation of family size is a sin, then what an appalling prospect of Divine displeasure opens up ! For, with further reductions in the mortal- 32 AN ADAPTIVE FECUNDITY ity rate, an increasing proportion of American parents, an increasing proportion of the members of the white race, an increasing number of the peoples of the globe will either have to violate what they arc assured is God's law or else mul- tiply until it will be necessary to hang out on our planet the "Standing Room Only" sign! 6 If we have no cause to fear lest the advanced peoples grow too slowly it does not follow that all is well. Curtailment of fecundity is most practised by the capable and ambitious and least by the inert and commonplace. Hence the people grows faster at the bottom than at the top. While the general American birth-rate is quite reasonable under the circumstances, there ought to be bigger families among the rising, and smaller families among the stagnating; more progeny left by the gifted, and fewer by the dull ; less prudence in the good homes, and less reck- lessness in the hovels and tenements. But that, as Kipling would say, is another story. 33 Ill FOLK DEPLETION AND RURAL DECLINE TN September, 1911, I spent a fortnight with a friend on a walking trip in certain parts of New England in order to get terms of compar- ison for certain studies I was making of the people of the Middle West. The counties I vis- ited were chiefly those which for a long time have been losing population and gaining no new industries. I talked freely with Y. M. C. A. secretaries, school principals and superintend- ents, clergymen, physicians, heads of State insti- tutions, officials, business men, and other intel- ligent citizens. The data were not secured for publication, and I now submit them only in the hope that they may throw light on a problem that is presenting itself in those parts of the East and Middle West which have contributed most heavily to the upbuilding of other common- wealths. 34 FOLK DEPLETION The striking thing I found in these counties was the opinion generally held by thoughtful people that the community is not up to its for- mer standard. Whether this is the case or not, the fact that those in the best position to know think so is worthy of serious attention. There is complaint that the young people lack "ginger." A leader in boys' work said that his lads cannot be persuaded to go on a "hike" to mountain or lake on Saturday afternoon in order to camp there overnight. The prospect of a nine-mile walk "scared them out." Twenty might promise, but scarcely half a dozen would show up at the rendezvous. If a "rig" were pro- vided, all were glad to go. The boys in the larger centers were said to be more active in disposition. In the small villages there sometimes is no re- sponse to the "Boy Scout" program. A hotel pro- prietor noticed that, whereas in his youth every boy had some work to do and did it, now many boys between fifteen and eighteen are irrespon- sible and worthless, and their parents support them in idleness. The more spirited and ambi- tious boys keep going away, so that those who remain are rather apathetic. He remarked that the feeling of the young fellows about their base- 35 THE SOCIAL TKEND ball games with other towns does not run as high as it did in his boyhood. Some school princi- pals observe that during recess their pupils are content to stand about and talk, chaff, and play tricks on one another instead of taking part in active games. In high school the boys show very little interest in their base-ball team, and when a match game with another school comes off not more than half of the boys and one fifth of the girls attend. Few will pay ten cents a month to support their athletic league, although they spend their money freely enough on motion- picture shows. In a river community in which motor-boating is very popular, it has been found impossible to interest the young people in water sports. Their one stimulus to sustained physical exer- tion is dancing. A certain Y. M. C. A. secretary said that the boys he works among display normal physical en- ergy, but that the young men over eighteen are noticeably sluggish, owing to the fact that be- fore the age of eighteen most of the more ener- getic have gone away to the cities. There was much complaint that lads quit school as soon as 36 FOLK DEPLETION the law allows, and then, in spite of paren- tal entreaties, loaf about town and go to the bad. 2 I was astonished to learn that quite often it is necessary to show the school children how to play. School men hailing from other States were puzzled by this strange juvenile apathy. Left to themselves, the children stand about, scuffle, or play practical jokes on one another. In some cases, when shown how to play regular games, they respond eagerly and idolize the teacher who has shown them how to play. Clergymen find if they can get a group of boys to take "hikes" in summer, skate in winter, and engage in regu- lar sports, many of them will eventually become interested in religion and education. The usual complaint is that the young people are not interested in anything worth while, but that they play cards, dance, visit motion-picture shows, and run the streets. School principals say that it is very hard to get work out of pupils, that they have to amuse the pupils in order to get along with them. From their elders they 37 THE SOCIAL TKEND inherit the tradition that the school is a place for fun and that the teacher is their natural enemy, to be foiled if possible. Among the pu- pils of the high school the corporate spirit is said to be weak. The singing schools, debating societies, and lyceums which, two generations ago, played so great a part in the life of the rural young people are no longer heard of. The only collective recreation the young people or- ganize is the dance. There is general complaint that the rising gen- eration is frivolous, and indifferent to all higher things. "Not a particle of zeal or ambition among the young people either in village or country districts," says a county Y. M. C. A. secretary of wide knowledge. "Those in the church won't do a thing for its institutional life," says a clergyman. "No bottom; nothing to build on," comments a religious worker. A professor in a certain college had been struck by the absence of social enthusiasms among the students. In the entire three hundred there was not one to whom the leadership of a boy's club could be entrusted. Only the "sissy" type of young man offered himself for social service. 38 FOLK DEPLETION 3 In the stagnating counties the problem of the juvenile presents itself in the acutest form in which I have ever known it. There is no provi- sion for the recreative life of young people; no playground, meeting-place, or social center. The school playground is merely a bare area, the churches rarely offer anything social or rec- reative, and the young people seem to have lost the power to use the school-house in the old ways. Said a town official to me, "One of the greatest problems before the American people to- day is what to do with the young people in the evening." He did not know that in many local- ities the problem has been met and solved. "Hanging about the streets" is rife and "haunt- ing the pool-rooms" is growing. Cigarette smok- ing is general among the boys and meets with little or no parental opposition. Sex conscious- ness arrives early and, in the absence of compet- ing interests, the effects are alarming. As regards the relations between boys and girls, it would be idle for me to present here such statements as were given to me, for they would be received with a shout of incredulity. However, they are not in the least abnormal or 39 THE SOCIAL TREND against nature. They are precisely what may be expected under the three conditions of lack of wholesome and innocent recreation, absence of religious influences, and want of parental su- pervision. "Talk about the purity of the open country !" said one. "The moral conditions among our country boys and girls are worse than in the lowest tenement-house in New York. In the cities the youth has interests, something to take his mind off his instincts. Here life in the iso- lated farm-houses during the winter is likely to be lonely and dreary for young people. Nobody to see, nobody going by. What is more natural than that the boys should get together in the barn and while away the long winter evenings talking obscenity, telling filthy stories, recounting sex exploits, encouraging one another in vileness, perhaps indulging in unnatural practices?" The head of a State institution said that his most sod- den and hopeless cases of moral deterioration came from isolated homes among the hills. He believes that 75 per cent, of the bad boys and girls who are not mentally deficient could have been saved if they had been provided with proper play and recreation. 40 Lament over the inattention or indifference of parents to the morals of their children was uni versal among those I met. A State Y. M. C. A. officer said to me that among the hundreds of boys in his boys' clubs he had found but two who had been instructed by their parents in matters of sex. In some parts most parents give their daughters no instruction in sex, with the result that the girls may go wrong without the slight- est knowledge of the possible consequences. It is said that parents don't pretend to know w r here their sons and daughters are in the evenings and don't care. They are ignorant of the evil effects of premature sex life, and have no concern about the conduct of their young people. The want of public spirit and the absorption of well-to-do people in their private pursuits and pleasures is said to be very marked. In one town a responsible man declared that "eight out of ten business men here contribute nothing to the leadership of the social life of the com- munity. Their wives play bridge, entertain one another, tipple on the sly, and in some cases do worse. Their interest in home, or church, or school is very slight." In another town I was 41 THE SOCIAL TREND told that men who are prominent or in a posi- tion to exert an uplift influence refuse to take a moral stand on any matter for fear of losing their customers or clients, hurting their business relations, or raising their taxes. 5 The clergymen are often alive to the situation and wish to socialize the work of the church so as to make it a positive influence in the lives of the young people, but their deacons and trus- tees will not allow the building to be used for anything but worship. As a consequence the church is declining in attendance and support and in some communities has come to be a neg- ligible factor. I was told that in the open country people never think of going to church, and many youths have never seen the inside of a sacred edifice. Earnest men in the pulpit and out of it complain that the church does not make itself felt on moral issues such as gaming, di- vorce, and juvenile vice. They lament that it is not conscious of a mission to the community. Many of the younger clergymen have a social message, but under the circumstances they are quite powerless. Said one clergyman: "The 42 FOLK DEPLETION stubborn individualism of the old deacons and elders is breaking the hearts of the earnest pas- tors up here. The conservative members are killing the church." 6 Some of my informants offered no explanation of these bad tendencies. Some look upon them as the trend of the age, and imagine that the whole American people is going to the dogs. Others think that people about them have de- generated. The explanation which occurred to me, because the phenomena I observed do not dif- fer essentially from what may be observed in certain rural parts of a dozen older States, I laid before at least a score of intelligent persons, and not one disputed its plausibility. It seems to me that the root of the trouble is not folk degeneration but folk depletion. Cer- tain of the counties visited had more rural pop- ulation eighty years ago than they have to-day. For three, even four generations the hemor- rhage has been going on. If the emigration to the cities and to the West had" carried away just average persons, it could not affect the char- acteristics of the people; but if those who left 43 THE SOCIAL TREND were unusual in respect to some native quality, then their leaving would impoverish the people in respect to this quality. Perhaps the trait most distinctive of those who cut their moorings in order to follow the call of distant opportunity is the spirit of initia- tive. They have it in them to make a start, in spite of home ties, the bonds of habit, and the restraints of prudence. Had they not emi- grated', their spirit of initiative would have shown itself along other lines. They would have been among the first in the community to change their method of farming, to introduce some new crop, to embark in an untried in- dustry, or to promote some community enter- prise. A heavy outflow of this element need not leave the community poorer in physique, or brains, or character, but it does leave it poorer in natural leaders. This is serious because natural leaders are of the utmost value to society. Not only is it they who launch improvements, but they per- form a peculiar service in keeping up to the mark the various institutions which minister to the higher life of the community. The bulk of the people are unable to start or direct those 44 FOLK DEPLETION institutions, although they appreciate and sup- port them when once they exist. Often have I seen a depressing slump in the religious, so- cial, and recreative life of a neighborhood, fol- lowing the moving away of two or three fami- lies of initiative. Usually those who insist upon and know how to get good schools, vigorous churches, and abundant means for social enjoy- ment, are a minority, often a very small minor- ity. My own observation is that frequently the loss of even the best tenth will cut down by 50 per cent, the effective support the community gives to higher interests. The continual departure of young people who would in time have become leaders results eventually in a visible moral decline of the com- munity. The roads are neglected, which means less social intercourse and a smaller turnout to school and church and public events. School buildings and grounds deteriorate, and the false idea takes root that it pays to hire the cheaper teacher. The church gets into a rut, fails to start up the social and recreative activities which bind the young people to it, and presently ceases to be a force. Frivolity engrosses the young because no one organizes singing schools, 45 THE SOCIAL 1 TREND literary societies, or debating clubs. Presently a generation has grown up that has missed the uplifting and refining influence of these com- munal institutions. There is a marked decline V in standards of individual and family morality. Many couples become too self-centered to be willing to rear children. It is observed that people are no*t up to the level of their fore- father's, that they are coarser in their tastes and care less for higher things. Vice and sensuality are not so restrained as of yore. The false opin- ion goes abroad that the community is "degen- erate" and therefore past redemption. All this may result from the continual ab- straction from a normal population of too many of that handful of born leaders which is needed to leaven the social lump. Let no one imagine that the symptoms of folk depletion are confined to the stagnating coun- ties of New England. This phenomenon has a wider range than most people suspect. The dis- franchisement of seventeen hundred citizens of an Ohio rural county for selling their votes lets in a ray on the dry rot of spots that have missed the electrifying touch of railroad or city. The knots of gaping tobacco-chewing loafers that 46 FOLK DEPLETION haunt the station platform in some parts of the Middle West prove that the natural peacemakers of that locality have gone to create prosperity elsewhere. In parts of southern Michigan, Illi- nois, Wisconsin, and even as far west as Missouri there are communities which remind one of fished-out ponds populated chiefly by bullheads and suckers. I have not come upon the phenom- enon, however, in Minnesota, Iowa, or the States farther west. On the basis of wide studies, Dr. Warren H. Wilson, head of the church and country life de- partment of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, declared in 1909 : Allowing for some exceptions, not too numerous, it may be said that throughout the prosperous and pro- ductive farming regions of the United States, which have been settled for fifty years, community life has disappeared. There is no play for the children; there is no recreation for young people; there are no ade- quate opportunities for acquaintance and marriage for young men and women; there is not a sufficient edu- cational system for the needs of country people; and there is not for the average man or woman born in the country an economic opportunity within reach of his birthplace, such as will satisfy even modest desires. There is not in a weak community that satisfaction of 47 THE SOCIAL TEEND social instinct which makes it "a good place to live in." Time was in New England and New York and Pennsylvania when there was a comm/unity to which every farmer belonged with some pleasure and pride. The absence of community life throughout these country regions expresses to-day what one man calls "the intolerable condition of country life/' 1 If this widespread moral sag betokened a de- generation of the people, what an appalling pros- pect would lie before us! But, as I see it, only rarely is degeneration present. The bulk of the people in these rural counties are essentially like the bulk of Americans of the same stock in any other part of the country. They are normal, not subnormal. Their engrossment in business and pleasure, their indifference to cultural and spiritual interests, their lack of public spirit, are precisely what you would find in most other communities but for the presence of a certain small minority who set strict standards of pri- vate conduct, family life, and child up-bringing, and persuade the majority that looser standards and practices are "low." It is these who take the lead in communal undertakings, better i "Publication of the American Sociological Society"; Vol. V, p. 174. 48 FOLK DEPLETION roads, schools, churches, and organized school life. The children of the rest are enlightened and refined by the influences radiating from such agencies, and thus the moral plane of the community rises from generation to generation. No doubt community decline from folk de- pletion has been occurring sporadically for thousands of years. If it has remained for our time to diagnose the disease and its cause, it is because the double attraction of city and fron- tier, coupled with the influence of schools and newspapers, has depleted our old rural communi- ties with an unprecedented rapidity. But there are indications that ours is not the only country affected with the malady. From England, Italy, and Scandinavia come tales of rural populations retrograding, owing to the loss of their am- bitious units by emigration. 97 t The question of remedies for folk depletion brings up nearly the whole problem of the ameli- oration of country life, and the lines of proce- dure can be only briefly indicated. 1. The more ambitious young people migrate because they imagine larger opportunities of 49 individual success and social usefulness else- where. The only way to retain this precious leaven is to show them satisfying opportunities at home. Either new industries should be in- troduced, or else they should be led to perceive new possibilities in old industries. Here is the rdle for a strong State agricultural college and experiment station. 2. By traveling exhibits, local demonstration farms, or a State farmers' adviser in every county, the State should provide the eager and capable young people with good reasons for stay- ing on the farm. By serving as object-lessons to their less progressive neighbors, their suc- cess in improved agriculture and in horticul- ture will eventually lift the economic plane of the whole community. 3. The rural pastor should be specially trained for his job, and the ministry of a rural church should be looked upon as an honorable life ca- reer. 4. The standard of local public education ought to be determined less by the will of the people of the locality and more by the fixed pur- pose of the people of the whole State. 5. The recreative, social, and civic services of 50 FOLK DEPLETION the school ought to be made equal in importance to the giving of instruction to boys and girls. 6. The pay, emoluments, and dignity of the teaching profession ought to be such as to attract into it ambitious, positive, and dominant indi- viduals who, in whatever community they may teach, will of themselves take the lead in stimu- lating higher interests and inducing others to aid in supporting these interests. 7. Better school buildings, grounds, and equip- ment, by the aid they can lend in the economic and moral rehabilition of the community, would prove to be, not an extravagance, but a profit- able investment. 8. At present the subject-matter of instruction in rural schools directs the thoughts and longing of the pupils toward the cities. The curricu- lum ought to be so modified as to make life in the country hold out to them more of interest and promise. 9. Organization of farmers should be pro- moted, not only for the improvement of their material conditions, but also to provide oppor- tunities for social enjoyment and to give a lever- age for natural leaders among them. 51 IV DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER ft! HE public thinks that a great social change - can hinge only on some great event; a bat- tle, treaty, law, or party struggle. The sociolo- gist, however, knows that among the greatest happenings are things which do not occur at any particular time or place. The Social current may be bent most by things which never get into the despatches at all. About twenty-five years ago American society turned the sharpest corner it has turned since the abolition of slavery; and yet the public noticed nothing then, nor even now does it generally realize what happened. Throughout its history the American people have developed in the presence of abundant land. Always there was good land to be had for little or nothing if only you would take the trouble to go West. Wherever it might be on the Great Kanawha or on the Columbia, the 52 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER frontier spelt opportunity for the common man. Neither fever and ague nor scalping savage could check the westward stream of land-seekers hoping to get their feet on the first rung of the ladder. The passion for economic independence was so intense that, by the time a region had been sparsely occupied, it would be contributing to the tide moving on to settle the frontier be- yond. It is a fact that each tier of Western States was settled principally by overflow from the States nearest to it. The Ohio Valley furnished the people who settled along the Upper Mississippi, and their children in turn played the major role in peopling the trans- Missouri region. The westward movement was a response to the lure of opportunity rather than to the lash of need. This is shown by the way in which the rate of expansion kept pace with the growing liberality of the Government to the settler. The more nearly the public domain was offered as free land, the more eager was the rush to the frontier. Settlement spread from the Alle- ghanies to the Mississippi much more slowly than from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. Through the nineteenth century the rate of 53 THE SOCIAL TREND westward march of the frontier was continually accelerated, so that it was never moving so fast as it was in the last two decades before it ended. But, more than two decades ago, the frontier as a large determining factor in the life of the American people ceased to exist. To be sure, the first grapple with rude nature is still to be witnessed in some parts. In Idaho I have seen pioneers literally hewing their farms out of the white pine forests and growing grain amid the stumps, just as a hundred years ago pioneers were doing amid the hard woods of Indiana. The few remaining parcels of virgin land can have, however, no such significance for our people as did the frontier when it was a broad, irregular belt stretching unbroken from the northern to the southern boundary of the country, in which were created nearly every year some tens of thousands of new homes. There is still public land of a sort to be had, but, as a great shaping condition, the frontier has disappeared and with it has ended the expansive free-land epoch that constituted our national childhood. Without wishing it, yet with nobody to blame, we have entered upon the era of lim- ited natural resources, and intensive utilization. 54 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER The change is almost as sharp as the youth experiences when he ceases to receive aid from home and for the first time is thrown upon his own resources. There is, to be sure, in the Far West, much waste which will in time be brought under culti- vation ; but dry land that costs $30 to $50 an acre to get water to is not an opportunity for penni- less families such as used to move out upon the public domain and forthwith achieve financial independence. When I was a boy in Iowa the farmer's son on the twenty-first birthday was pre- sented by his father with a team, a wagon, and perhaps a few farm implements. After working a year for wages, he married the girl of his heart, put bows and canvas on his wagon, and drove out to the margin of settlement in Kansas, Ne- braska, or the Dakotas. Before he reached his twenty-third birthday he was an independent farmer on a quarter-section of virgin land, which would certainly gain from five to ten thousand dollars in value by the time he was old. Now the young man must needs work on wages or as renter for fifteen or perhaps twenty years be- fore he can "get ahead" enough to have a farm of his own. And he will be thirty-five or forty 55 THE SOCIAL TREND years of age before lie is where the other man was at twenty-three years of age. So long as the fertile prairie beckoned him, the discontented American in the older States enjoyed an option to move up or to move on. Now there is little for him to gain by moving on, and, since "Room at the top!" is the gospel for the exceptional man, it is hard to escape the conclusion that for the commonplace man the circle of opportunities has become relatively narrower. The superior man, however, su- perior in ability, in education, in resources, or in connections finding in the ceaseless progress of organization in our society a widening scope for the exercise of his superiority, more and more easily raises himself above the mass. Since industrialism is, as it were, a wide-an- gled prism which refracts population more than does simple farming, it is likely that in days to come the social spectrum in America will be lengthened. The slackening of expansion in the nineties was almost dramatic in its suddenness. In the five years ending 1884 the average annual en- largement of our food-bearing area was near 7,000,000 acres. In the five years following it 56 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER was less than 3,000,000 acres. In the succeed- ing ten years, 1889-99, it was 800,000 acres and would have been a minus quantity had not millions of acres of meadow lands been plowed up. Between 1860 and 1890 the median point of cereal production moved west about 120 miles a decade, whereas during the nineties it migrated only twenty-five miles. During the seventies the median point of improved farm acreage moved west 131 miles, during the eighties 107 miles, dur- ing the nineties only fifty-seven miles. During the nineties the center of population shifted west only fourteen miles, as against forty-eight miles in the eighties, fifty-eight in the seventies, and an average of fifty miles a decade during the first century of the republic. How land values shot up as soon as the ex- tension of the crop-bearing area slackened is clearly seen from the following census figures: 1870-80 1880-90 1890-1900 1900-10 Per cent, increase in number of farms 50 14 26 11 Per cent, increase in farm acreage 31.5 16.3 35 5 Per cent, increase in improved farm THE SOCIAL TREND 1870-80 1880-90 1890-1900 1900-10 acreage 50 25.6 16 15.4 Per cent, increase in value of farm property 36 32 27 100.5 Per cent, increase in value of farm land 37 30 26 118 Think of the aggregate farm land of the United States gaining 118 per cent, in value in a single decade! Had we been an ignorant peasant people the sudden ending of arable public land in the rain- belt would have brought us up sharply as if we had met a stone wall, and the blow to popular hopes and ideals would have been tragic. But, being ingenious and enterprising, our people, finding themselves unexpecetdly at the end of the sunset path, at once pushed out laterally in quest of new margins and found various buffers to ease the shock. Means were found to make the country stretch to fit its growing population. The numerous New England "abandoned farms," which startled the public during the latter part of the eighties, were quietly reoccupied, and 58 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER many stretches of poor or heavy soil which the land-seeker had contemptuously passed by in the old days began to be turned to account. In the Middle West millions of acres of swamp and overflowed lands were diked and drained while a great cry went up that the Western rivers should be caught and turned upon the desert. Since reclamation could best be financed and directed from Washington, there was a rapid growth of the functions of the Federal Government in re- lation to the settlement of the remaining public domain. The enthusiastic popular response to the idea of conserving our natural resources was another evidence that we were on a new tack. For twenty or even thirty years before President Roosevelt in 1906 united a number of kindred policies and launched them under the name of "conservation," certain government scientific bureaus as well as certain university geologists and economists had been denouncing our waste of Nature's stored wealth and prophesying of the dearth to come. The people paid little heed to such warnings until it had been borne in upon them that the agricultural frontier was gone for- ever. W T ithin about ten years after the event it- 59 THE SOCIAL TEEND self, the public mind was ripe for the conserva- tion idea. The same state of mind lies behind the enor- mous expansion in the activities of the Depart- ment of Agriculture. A few inches below the surface of the American farm lies a second farm that is rarely tilled. Shallow plowing and scanty cultivation may do when a man is spread- ing himself out thin- over a quarter-section ; but when the farmer has to provide farms for his two boys out of that same quarter-section, he is glad to be shown how to get more from the soil. So long as there was a West to send boys to, he was content with the old simple tillage. I can remember how the Iowa farmers used to jeer at the professors in the State college of agriculture! "Them fellers with their book learnin' can't teach me nothin'," was how many a granger put it. Now the farmers themselves sit meekly at the feet of experts who explain to them seed-selection and scientific tillage, while the agricultural colleges are visited by hosts of young men keen to learn how to make farming pay. The "back-to-the-land" agitation is the after- math of the disappearance of the frontier. So 60 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER long as we were spreading over the boundless wilderness there was little chance to make money in agriculture. The Homestead Law, by which any one who would go to cultivating wild land got a farm as a gift, operated as a bounty on agriculture, and, of course, caused it to be over- done. No matter how ruinously low the price of farm produce sank, the plow went right on with its conquests, for the settler looked for his reward in the increase in the value of his home- stead rather than in the proceeds from the sale of his crops. Continually fine old farms from Massachusetts to Indiana lost value because of the disastrous cheapening of their produce ow- ing to the stimulated extension of grain-grow- ing in the West. Once the process had ended, the price of pro- duce rose, and at last there was a chance to make a good living by putting brains, training, and money into farming instead of merely hard work. The back-to-the-land gospel is a recognition of the fact that to-day the young fellow who quits the farm for good may be turning his back on a better opportunity than he will ever find in the glittering city which beckons him. Since reclamation and better farming fell far 61 THE SOCIAL TREND short of making the soil stretch to our need, there began an exodus of Americans seeking in the Canadian Northwest that cheap land which was no longer to be had here. In the first dec- ade of this century, we lost half a million to Canada, for the most part not jobless men seek- ing wages but farmers of the Middle West who had sold their holdings for from f 80 to $125 an acre in order to obtain Saskatchewan land for their sons at $20 an acre. For the first time in our history Americans in large numbers have bidden good-by forever to the Stars and Stripes because they no longer wave over free land. But the margins taken together failed to re- tain for agriculture its old preeminence. Be- fore 1900 we exported a third of our wheat crop : a decade later the proportion was about an eighth. America, which a generation ago was chief purveyor of fresh beef to the United King- dom, began in 1914 to import ship-loads of chilled meat from Argentina. Meanwhile the swing of our people over into manufacturing a shift greatly accelerated by a huge immigra- tion has quite reversed our rating of foreign markets. Thirty years ago we were intent on feeding Europeans and worried lest Germany 62 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER should exclude our pork. Now our interest is in the countries about the Pacific which may be induced to absorb our exports of manufac- tures. We are solicitous about the maintenance of the "open door" in the Orient and keen on breaking into South American trade. So long as there was a vacant Great West, it was rational to welcome the immigrant who would plant himself in the wilderness. Why should empty stretches which aliens' would make blossom with the homes of men be reserved for coyote, prairie-dog, and rattlesnake? But the immigrants of the last twenty-five years have generally failed to find a footing on the soil. In 1910 there was one Scandina- vian farmer for every eight persons of Scandina- vian birth in this country and one German farmer for every eleven persons of German birth ; but it took 130 Poles, Hungarians, or Italians among us to furnish one farmer. Unable to en- gage in food-growing, most of the immigrants have had to press into the labor market, compete for jobs with those already here, and thereby cre- ate a sense of pressure which nourishes a rising 63 THE SOCIAL TKEND demand for the restriction* of foreign immigra- tion. It is safe to predict that the cheerful come- on-boys-there's-room-for-all attitude toward the congested peoples of the world will never again prevail in this country. We have paid a high tuition to learn the lesson which we might have had for nothing by studying the pages of Mal- thus and his successors. During the first decade of this century, while our population grew 21 per cent., the volume of the ten principal crops of the country in- creased only 9 per cent. No wonder the people feel themselves between the jaws of high cost of living, and look angrily about for some one to blame! During the eighteen years after 1896 the retail cost to Americans of their fifteen prin- cipal articles of food rose more than 70 per cent. Athough this reflects a general upward move- ment due to the increasing plentifulness of gold, there is no doubt that, despite the gain of labor in productiveness during this period, there was actually a fall in real wages. The chief causes of this sinister phenomenon have been the ex- haustion of our supply of virgin arable land 64 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER and an unprecedented volume of immigration. Every political leader offers his own explanation of the rise in the cost of living, and his own remedy. Few perceive that the old low level of food prices can be restored only by restoring to us a public domain like the one we have lost. While greater economy in distribution, the elim- ination of superfluous middlemen, and a brush- ing away of the leeches that tap the stream of food-stuffs at various points on its way from the farms to the larders may afford some relief, it is certain that never again will the American people know the higher foods to be so abund- ant and cheap as they were in the middle of the nineties, when under the stimulus of the home- stead bounty agriculture had reached the limit of its facile expansion. 1 The trebling of farm lands in value, while it has converted millions of farm-owners into petty capitalists, and lightened the weight of mortgage indebtedness which was felt so acutely in the early nineties and which had much to do with nationalizing the demand for "free i Our participation in the war brought a confusing shift of price levels. It is only in- the period previous to 1917 that lines of fundamental tendency may be read from the course of prices. silver," raises a formidable barrier to the ascent of the farm laborer. When I was a boy, no gray- haired man worked on a farm for wages unless he was drunkard or wastrel. So short and easy was the path to farm ownership that virtually all the farm "hands" were less than thirty-five years of age. With good land worth from flOO to |200 an acre, the climb is now far longer and harder, and many, lacking the requisite intelligence and character, will re- main hired laborers or renters throughout life. With greater permanency in the farm la'borer class, its needs should be more considered and its lot made more tolerable. As it comes to in- clude older persons, more provision should be made for married men with families. In time, no doubt, we shall see much farm help accom- modated, as in the Old World, in detached cot- tages instead of eating at the farmer's table and sleeping in the garret. Even if henceforth fewer of them can look forward to eventual ownership, it does not follow that farm labor- ers need be objects of pity. Many pioneers shortened their lives with overwork and priva- tion so that it is quite possible that a properly protected and organized farm laborer class may 66 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER enjoy more of the essentials of a rational human existence and see their children better educated than could the settlers of the American wilder- ness. 5 With the frontier disappeared one of the greatest obstacles to the success of the labor movement in this country. On the Pacific Slope not infrequently one comes upon the bearer of a name that thirty or forty years ago sent a shiver down the spine of the Eastern employer. He may have been the organizer of an aborted labor-union, the leader of a strike that failed, or the stormy petrel of some fierce industrial strife. Often, too, one's host on ranch or fruit farm proves to be an intelligent Eastern work- ing-man who foresaw what was coming and broke away while yet there was time. Not our last frontier alone, but the earlier frontiers as well, have afforded haven to the discontented spirits of the working class the natural leaders who would have welded and wielded their class had they but stayed by it. Although to-day the em- ployers continually draw up into their well-paid service many of the brightest men in the ranks 67 THE SOCIAL TKEND of labor, the greater stability and generalship of the labor movement in the last twenty years is due in part, no doubt, to the closing of the old outlet for insurgent and blacklisted working- men. 6 Having skimmed the cream off the continent, having stripped the tenderloin of the quarry, we are undergoing a spiritual transformation like to" that of a flush youth who, having run through his inheritance, finds himself forced to stoop for the first time to petty calculations and despised economies. Having scooped the lus- cious heart out of the watermelon we are now among the seeds, or even approaching the rind. A century and more of access to boundless nat- ural wealth fostered in the social mind the con- viction that for us all evils vanish in a larger good and that Divine Providence will see to it that Americans pay no serious penalty for their folly, negligence, or extravagance. If poor farming wore out the soil, there were limitless leagues beyond; if fire were allowed to ravage the forests, there were better forests further on ; if the grafter stole the public revenues, the citi- 68 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER zens jested, for was there not enough prosperity to stand it? How often facts mocked the hard- won wisdom of our forefathers! In America somehow a "rolling 1 stone" did "gather moss." "Waste not want not" was made a joke by mine- owners and lumber-men. Moreover, optimism seemed justified by the irrepressible growth of the country. Every economic crisis was followed by a higher wave of prosperity. Normally cities, businesses, fortunes, land values, crop totals, incomes, changed in only one direction they grew. Standstill or decline was an abnormal thing, in need of explanation. The "bull" temperaments tended in the long run to amass bigger fortunes than the "bear" temperaments. So often did the economic buoyancy of the country avert the natural recompense of error that the intelligent foreteller of such penalties was scoffed at as "croaker" and "calamity howler" and "pessi- mist." "Booms," frenzied speculation, over- building, overborrowing, overdoing of public im- provements, overexpansion, overconfidence, and extravagance are among the fruits of the beam- ing optimism bred in us by access to huge stores of natural wealth. Now that the American peo- 69 THE SOCIAL TREND pie are beginning to be squeezed in the vise of the law of diminishing returns, they are likely to gain something of the proverbial canniness and frugality of the Scot. Free land was an equalizer, for it admitted all comers to possession of the chief instrument of wealth production. At the frontier no man would work long for a farmer or pay rent when for next to nothing he could get other land just as good and farm it himself. The town artisan had to be paid a wage large enough to keep him from turning farmer. Moreover, such differ- ences as there were in respect to economic con- dition did not put distance between people. In general, class distinctions show themselves, not between those who possess and those who do not possess, but between those who possess and those who not only do not but apparently cannot pos- sess. Always in the West whether the "West" was Ohio or Idaho the rich banker has not ob- jected to the penniless but capable young man calling on his daughter, because the banker had been penniless himself when he married, and be- cause he knew that this young man would be as 70 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER well off as the banker now is when he had reached the same age. The abundance of opportunity of the frontier, coupled with equal access to these many opportunities, engendered a sense of social equality which gradually became part of "Americanism," and in the older States hindered the social consequences of economic stratification from glaringly showing themselves. Arthur Chapman covers the case in his poem, "Out Where the West Begins": Out where the handclasp 's a little stronger, Out where the smile dwells a little longer, That 's where the West begins. Out where the sun is a little brighter, Where the snows that fall are a trifle whiter, Where the bonds of home are a wee bit tighter, That's where the West begins. Out where the skies- are a trifle bluer, Out where friendship 's a little truer, That's where the West begins-. Out where a fresher breeze is blowing, Where there 's laughter in every streamlet flowing, Where there's more of reaping and less of sowing, That's where the West begins. Out where the world is in the making, Where fewer hearts in despair are aching, 71 THE SOCIAL TEEND That's where the West begins. Where there 's more of singing and less of sighing, Where there 's more of giving and less of buying, And a man makes friends without half trying, That 'a where the West begins. O O Again, the frontier has been a maker of politi- cal democracy in this country. In our early his- tory there was a tendency toward class govern- ment and the growth of vested interests in the seaboard States where society was slipping into grooves. The younger States of the West, on the other hand, showed a strong tendency to sweep away the props of class rule. The States of the Ohio Valley introduced into our political practice the abolition of property qualifications for the suffrage, of property and religious qual- ifications for office-holding, the increase in the proportion of elective officials as compared with appointive officials, shorter terms of office, rota- tion in office, and the submitting of State con- stitutions for popular ratification. It stood for "State's rights" as against Federal authority, for State banks as against the Bank of the United States. From the West at different times has swept eastward Jeffersonian and Jacksonian De- 72 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER mocracy, Lincoln Republicanism, Grangerism, Populism, Bryanism, and Progressivism, to- gether with such contemporary political innova- tions as direct primary, initiative, referendum, recall, and the popular election of United States Senators. While the aggressive democratic spirit kin- dled in the zone of the most abounding and dif- fused opportunity has constantly spread back into the older communities and broken the spell upon them of old families, old wealth, and old prestige, it does not follow that with the ending of the frontier we shall begin to lose our democ- racy, even that we shall cease to become more democratic. To be sure, one of the mammae of democracy is dried up. But, though the physical West passes, there is a spiritual West, such as has inspired the democratic movement in long- settled countries like France and Norway. From time to time there appear emancipating spirits who spurn man-made distinctions of place, rank, and money and whose hearts go out toward every man as toward a brother. Such, are the poets and the prophets; such are the humanizing Isaiahs, Garrisons, Mazzinis, Victor Hugos, and Tolstois, who recall us to natural 73 fellowship, who impress us with our likenesses even when conditions are exaggerating differ- ences, who level men at the very moment new so- cial terraces are rising. Let no one leave out of the reckoning this spiritual West. 9 Now that the frontier is gone, not so many of us will be able to drink deep of personal liberty. The pioneers were in thraldom to the swamps, the stumps, the shaggy wilderness, the wretched roads, the fevers, and the "varmints." They lacked music, art, books, refined society, good medical attention, the thousand conveniences, pleasures, and stimuli of the riper communities. But they were freer from the will of other men than the more comfortable denizens of the East. They were little burdened with government, law, public opinion, custom, and conventionality. They knew and enjoyed their freedom and it went to their heads, producing that intoxication which the West has always wrought on a cer- tain type. Henceforth, the bold independent spirits who have been wont to find a satisfying freedom on the spacious frontier will have to endure" the dwarfing pressures and accept the 74 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER painful standardizing of a complex social life without hope of escape, unless, indeed, they are able to climb up into the exhilarating zone of mastery where one is still an integer. As compensation the citizen can expect to be bet- ter protected, housed, warmed, clothed, nursed, schooled, informed, entertained, and edified than was the old-time American. That domestic husbandly and the handicrafts are gone and nearly everybody lives by catering to others makes it imperative to conform to the wishes of these others. This has a good side in that the vicious man is obliged to become outwardly decent lest he lose employment, or patronage, or credit. The employer has been a mighty force for lessening intemperance. Sex irregularity has been obliged to become more furtive. The great improvement in manners is due in part to the power of firms and companies to exact politeness of their employees in dealing with the public. Sheer publicity is more anti- septic than ever before; but the dread of grave material damage if one takes the unpopular side or speaks out his mind against some intrenched evil is taking the backbone out of people at an alarming rate. The preacher knows he can be 75 struck through his wealthy pew-holders, the ed- ucator through his school board, the editor through his big advertisers, the officer of a com- pany through his board of directors, the work- ing-man through his boss. The lawyer fears to lose the corporation cases, the physician dreads the loss of his place on the faculty of the medical school, on the hospital staff, or on the board of health, the merchant is silent lest the banks shut off his credit, the manufacturer realizes how vul- nerable he is to the ferreting reporter or the fac- tory inspector. No one dares speak until others are speaking, move until others have led. After suffering awhile from ingrowing moral convic- tions, people may reach the point of not having any strong moral convictions. Backwoods, prairie, and placer bred the go-it- alone spirit to which nothing was more galling than the taking of orders. Conversely mill, railroad and department-store teach hierarchy and obedience. But the autocratic and harsh discipline of these highly organized enterprises must be softened; for after having drunk so deeply of the sweet cup of individual liberty, the American will not endure the irksome collar of obedience unless he can feel, as does the public 76 DOING WITHOUT THE FRONTIER school teacher or the college professor, that he bows not to the will of his immediate superior, but to the requirements inherent in all organi- zation. 77 THE CHANGING DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN M AS a boy I lived for some time in the family of a pioneer uncle in Iowa. His log-cabin was a perfect fairyland for a child because of the fascinating industries carried on in it. Before the big open fireplace we passed ntany an autumn evening paring, quartering, and stringing apples and hanging them in festoons about the kitchen to dry. That was long before grocers began to purvey evaporated apples. Before the advent of winter great crocks of plum-butter and apple- butter were prepared, as well as jars of marma- lade, kegs of pickles, and barrels of salt pork. In the smoke-house hams and bacon were curing, while in every corner of the cellar lay a pile of vegetables preserved under straw or dry earth. From the ashes in the great leach was drained the lye, which when boiled from time to time 78 DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN with refuse fat in the huge iron kettle outdoors furnished "soft soap" for the use of all save guests. Not only were there quilting-frames and candle-molds, but discarded in the attic lay a card, a hackle, a spinning-wheel, and vari- ous other home-made implements, the use of which lay quite beyond tfre ken of a boy. Now, at one time these industries were char- acteristic of most American households. Nearly all that was eaten and worn in the family had been manufactured by the hands of its women- folk. In those days nothing was heard as to the "economic dependence" of the wife, of her being "supported." My aunt, busy in and about the house, was as strong a prop of the family's pros- perity as my uncle afield with his team. Uncle knew it, and, what is more, sJic knew he knew it. Gradually, however, a silent revolution has taken place in the lot of the home-staying woman. The machine in the factory has been slipping invisible tentacles into the home and picking out, unobserved by us, this, that, and the other industrial process. The knitting- machine has taken the knitting; the power- driven sewing-machine, the making of garments. The oil-refinery molds candles for the household, 79 THE SOCIAL TREND and the soap-manufacturer .has made junk of lye leach and soap-kettle. The packing-house has made the smoke-house a relic, while the store- blanket has relegated the quilting-frame to the garret. The surplus milk goes to the creamery, so that the churn is becoming a curiosity. Can- neries of all kinds crowd the grocer's shelves with preserved fruits and vegetables which for- merly could be had only by the skill and care of the housewife. So, one by one, the operations shift from home to factory until the only parts of the housewife's work which remain unaffected are cooking, washing, cleaning, and the care of children. It seems safe to say that four fifths of the industrial processes carried on in the average American home in 1850 have departed never to return. What has been done with the energy thus released? It certainly has not been diverted to rearing a larger brood of children. The first census of the United States in 1790 showed that in the whole population there were nineteen white chil- jdren under sixteen years of age for every ten white women more than sixteen years of age. In 1900 the census revealed that the children and 80 DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN women in the white population were about equal in number. 1 This means that the average woman to-day has half as many children to look after as had her great-grandmother. 2 One consequence of the shriveling of the house- hold in economic importance is the great mi- gration of daughters from the home where there is little for them to do to the factory, the laun- dry, the restaurant, the store, the office, and the class-room. At present there are in this country not far from eleven millions of women above six- teen years of age gainfully employed, and the proportion is rapidly growing. Between 1880 and 1910 the population of females above ten years of age wlio. were at work for money rose from 14.7 per cent, to 22 per cent., and there is no reason to doubt that' the proportion of women at work increased to the same extent. In 1900 one woman in every five was engaged in a gainful occupation ; in 1910 nearly one out of every four was a gainful worker. The results of the 1920 census are not yet available but they will show the same trend. Women wage-earners i See "A Century of Population Growth" ; p. 105. THE SOCIAL TKEND are increasing in number faster than men wage- earners and form an ever greater contingent in the great industrial army. This swelling exodus out from the home into remunerative industry is not for a moment to be interpreted as a tendency for the wife to quit the domestic hearth. To be sure, in 1900 a third of all widows and more than half the di- vorced women were earning wages, but probably not one wife in fifteen is working outside her home. On the whole, wage-earning women are single women, and nearly half of these single women are less than twenty-six years of age. Of these girl wage-earners it is pretty nearly safe to say that four fifths of them will marry and five fifths think they will. Here is the root of the reason why few of them fit themselves seriously for their work, take the pains to acquire skill, or organize in defense of their interests as earners. Why bother with such matters if in a year or two you are going to have a husband to take care of you? Consider, now, the married woman in the home. How is she affected by the passing of in- 82 DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN dnstrial processes from her little realm? The wife of the unskilled, poorly-paid wage-earner probably gets no gain at all from it. The hus- band's wage proving insufficient, now that nearly t everything used in the household is bought, the wife takes a job in the factory or goes out to wash or scrub or sew, and home-life goes by the board. Or she adds to the family income by keeping boarders or by taking home work given out by warehouses or factories. In general, the industrial home-work of the wife is so miserably paid that her economic value to the family may well be less than in the days when she made their food and clothing with her own hands. Before the war an in- vestigation in Massachusetts showed that half the home-workers earned less than eight cents an hour and two thirds of them less than ten cents. Half of the home-workers on wearing- apparel earned less than seven cents an hour, while half of those producing paper goods at home received less than five cents an hour, i. e., far below a living wage. The whittling away of household industry by the factory variously affects the wives of the better-paid, e. g., the skilled workers. Since 83 THE SOCIAL TREND more and more the family consumes the bough ten rather than the home-made, there is an increas- ing strain on the earnings of the husband. There is a growing need of more money in order to meet the requirements of the customary stand- ard of living. So the wife may follow her dis- appearing work into the mill, asserting in pickle or biscuit factory, in cannery or millinery es- tablishment, woman's immemorial concern with the production of food and clothing. But if the earnings of the husband suffice, the wife continues in the home, occupying herself in satisfying wants of a higher character. Every time an invasion from the factory releases her from some old task, she sets about gratifying some higher want. She cleans and dusts and tidies as never before. She switches from mak- ing the useful to fabricating the ornamental lambrequins, and curtains, and doilies, and fancy work. She becomes the provider of comforts rather than the provider of simple utilities, and takes it upon herself to minister as well as she can to the intellectual and esthetic needs of her family. The next higher economic class, the women- folk of business and professional men, are those 84 DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN who have experienced the greatest change in their lot. Since their husbands' income avails to purchase comforts and even luxuries as well as utilities, they are entirely absolved from making anything whatever. Able usually to in- stall a menial in the kitchen, they find them- selves possessed, after their children have emerged from infancy, of a leisure such as has been throughout history the exclusive privilege of a small aristocracy. Visit the comfortable homes, and in nine cases out of ten you will find that the men are hard at it wresting a steady income from a com- petitive world. On the other hand, perhaps a third of the wives may be called leisured. Busy they may be, but they are busy doing what they please and not what they must. Among a people that boasts of fewer elegant idlers than any other well-to-do people in the world, the household springs of serious occupation have so dried up that it is a fact that married women are furnishing most of the membership of America's leisure class. 4 What did the women do with the leisure cast 85 THE SOCIAL TREND into their laps by the filling of the home with factory product? Many, alas, knew nothing better to do with the priceless gift than to fritter it away in competi- tive ostentation, in feverish reciprocal entertain- ment, in the giving and receiving of empty atten- tions which they sought to dignify with the phrase "social duties." Some, however, discovered a new r61e of the mother in respect to child culture, and dedicated their leisure to educating and training their chil- dren better than the school-teacher could do it. Others spent it in devotional exercises and church work, with apparently no other outward effect than to deepen in men the impression that religion is a matter for women. A large num- ber, aware of a certain void in their lives, en- gaged in the pursuit of "culture." Of how this might be gained they had but the vaguest idea, but they divined that you must get far away from the present and the practical. So forty or forty- five years ago home-staying women began timidly to band together into self-improvement clubs, where they took turns in reading papers on Etruscan Art and Botticelli and Miracle-Plays, 86 cribbed too often, I fear, from the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." Timidly they came nearer the Renaissance, Napoleon, Bismarck; Corot, Millet, Whistler; Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Montessori until now there are actually hundreds of thousands of women absorbing the best books and lectures on sanitation, child-welfare, industrial diseases, domestic architecture, social centers, and hous- ing-reform. It has come to the point that ex- perts in community problems win an earlier and a fuller hearing from women than from men. Nor have the women's clubs stopped here. The party "boss" got his grip on politics partly because the "good" citizens were too busy to watch what he was doing with his control. Now, the interesting thing about the women banded for the study of community concerns is that they have as much leisure as the boss him- self. Their leaders are as able as he and it is imposssible to "square" them, for they are ob- sessed with the idea that the true aim of poli- tics is public welfare, not private profit. So the persistent civic curiosity of the women is play- 87 THE SOCIAL TKEND ing havoc with the system that the boss has "put over" the male voters. In the few years that they have been poking about, peering into the management of the county almshouse, the disposal of police-court cases, liquor-law enforce- ment, "red light" policy, the treatment of girl strikers, and other incidents of local government, the awesome veil has been rent, the mysteries of man-made politics have been exposed to the mul- titude, and male prestige has suffered a rude shock. 5 Bear in mind, too, that, while the wives have been gaining leisure and the courage to put it to such incendiary use, their yoke-fellows are worse driven than ever. Competition in all lines is said to be keener, and the average mer- chant or newspaper man will assure you that the demon of Work chases him harder every year. Is it not notorious that out of deference to the Tired Business Man the drama has been nearly driven from the stage by the "girl show" ? Now, what is going to happen when it is the wives: who have the time to read Bergson and 88 DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN Synge and Yeats ; to become acquainted with the theories of Ferrero and Metchnikoff and Mendel ; to learn the findings of Goddard and Healy and Havelock Ellis ; to have interpreted for them the reports of the immigration commission, the child-welfare bureau, the industrial relations commission and other significant documents? Shall we not see the day when on election morn- ing the business man will say to his wife: "Molly, you've had time to read and get wise to these things. Tell me, now, what is an execu- tive budget?" Considering, besides this portent, that three girls now graduate from high school for every two boys, that nearly two fifths of the college students and of the June crop of bachelors are young women, that four fifths of the teachers are women, and that trained women able to "make good" are found in increasing numbers in nearly all the professions, who can doubt that the influence of women both in the home and out of it is bound to grow and that the sexes are ap- proaching an equality in the management of society and in the shaping of civilization? 89 THE SOCIAL TREND 6 But is the case really so simple as that? As the lot of the wife becomes easier, the work- ing-girl more often regards marriage as a haven, a release from hard work, a life-long security won not by yoke-fellowship but by sheer favor. It is true that young women able and willing to do remunerative work feel quite independent of man's favor. But great numbers, lacking in efficiency or self-reliance, shrink from the thought of self-support. This type is more tol- erant of male failings, vices, and bad habits. The rakish but eligible young man appears to meet with quite as much indulgence from nice girls as he did! two generations ago. Observe, too, how it is nowadays between husbands and wives. When with spinning, weaving, knitting, churning, pickling, curing, and preserving, the home was a workshop, the wife was not "supported" by her husband. He knew the value of her contribution and took her seriously, even if he did belittle her opinions on politics and theology. But, with the industrial decay of the home, it is more and more often the case that the husband "supports" his wife. In the well-to-do homes and it is chiefly here 90 DOMESTIC POSITION OF .WOMEN that the status of women in general is deter- mined the wife has lost her economic footing. Apart from motherhood, her r61e is chiefly orna- mental. The husband is the one who counts, whose strength must be conserved, who cannot afford to be sick. Of course, much emphasis is laid on the wife's maternal contribution. But, aside from the one wife in six who rears no child, will wives feel and be able to persuade men that the bearing and rearing of three or four children offsets forty or fifty years of maintenance? Grandmother bore on the average six or eight children besides performing a hundred tasks which never present themselves in the modern household. It is a cherished bit of make-believe that the husband is compensated by his wife's graces, her accomplishments, her culture, her social and pub- lic activities ; that the "companionship" of so fine a creature is an equivalent for all she costs. But will nothing of patronage creep into the at- titude of the bread-winner toward his unproduc- tive mate? Having given up the role of busy Martha, is it not up to her to assume the role of the adoring Mary? How will the case appear in the eyes of the 91 THE SOCIAL TREND wife? As the woman of leisure realizes that everything she eats, wears, enjoys, and gives away comes out of her husband's earnings, her rising impulse to assert herself as his equal is damped by consciousness of her abject economic dependence. She is tempted to pay for support with subservience, to mold her manner and her personality to his liking, to make up to him by her grace and charm for her exemption from work. This "being agreeable" means often that she must subordinate her individuality, hide her divergent wishes and opinions or adopt his. But this sort of thing dwarfs the woman, spoils the man, and revives just the thing we fancied was dead for ever, i. e., male ascendency. So, although the surface current seems to be bearing women toward full equality with men, there is an undercurrent which runs in the other direction. Eleven million girls and women are outside the home slowly becoming valuable fac- tors in the working world. But within the home are more than twice as many wives, most of them constantly losing in economic significance. Will they emerge from their shelter erelong and find a way of reconnecting themselves with productive labor, or will more and more of them 92 DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN become passengers on a ship worked by the other sex? Certainly the cumulative effect of numer- ous small inconspicuous changes has brought women into a crisis on which turns the future of the relation of their sex to society and civiliz- ation. 7 Alarmists scent danger in the opening of oc- cupations to women, especially the better-paid ones, such as the professions. They fear lest so many of them will prefer financial independence to domesticity that the marrying contingent will be lowered below the danger-point. It is cer- tainly true that not more than a quarter of each generation of women may turn their backs upon motherhood if the continuance of the race is to be assured. Nor is it less true that the remuner- ative job relieves young women of that stern necessity of attracting a mate which confronted girls in the days of our forefathers, when a husband was the sole "meal-ticket" in sight. It ought to be borne in mind, however, that if spinsterhood is becoming more attractive on the economic side, the same is true of wifehood. Every year a proposal of marriage comes a little 93 THE SOCIAL TKEND nearer to being an offer of lifelong support. Every year, among the people in middling cir- cumstances and above, the lot of the married woman is a little easier. The working-women who are so well off as not to covet marriage on good terms are, indeed, few in number. The overwhelming majority are unskilled and poorly paid, so that self-support in no wise turns them from marriage, although it does cause them to be less in a hurry about it. 8 So much is said of women in the professions, "bachelor maids," the higher cost of the mar- ried state, and the postponement of marriage that it comes as a shock to discover that in point of fact Americans are one of the most married peoples on the face of the earth. More of us are wedded than in any country in Europe west of Hungary. The Magyars and the Slavs are the only Europeans who give themselves up to matrimony with greater abandon than we do. Moreover, there is nothing to show that we are losing our unusual fondness for the married state. Out of a hundred American women in 1890, thirty-two were single ; in 1900, thirty-one ; 94 DOMESTIC POSITION OP WOMEN in 1910, only thirty. Nor are women passing into wifehood later than formerly. Of girls be- tween fifteen and twenty-four years of age half were married in 1010 as against 47 per cent, twenty years earlier. In order to make this encouraging showing, it is not at all necessary to count in our huge ele- ment of early-marrying East Europeans. Take the girls of American parentage; in 1890 just about half of them were married, in 1910 nearly 52 per cent, had stood before the altar. After all the "to do" lest young women lured by chances of well-paid work turn their faces away from marriage, it is rather startling to find that all that has happened is that one or two women out of a hundred who, two decades ago, would sooner or later have become wives, now never marry at all. The persistent spinsters have come to the point of constituting seven or eight out of every hundred women certainly no very alarming proportion ; while women who do marry are marrying earlier. Some persons would have us believe that the latitude of divorce tolerated among us, whereby one marriage in ten is terminated in a court, is a foe of matrimony. The fact is that, if any- 95 THE SOCIAL TREND thing, it contributes to make marriage popular. The more matrimony is seen to be a trap from which you can never release yourself once the door has snapped to, the shyer will you be of entering it. Certainly the peoples that are de- nied all reasonable relief for conjugal unhap- piness for example, the South Americans are just the ones with the least inclination to marry and with the greatest illegitimacy. 9 Many imagine that women were never so fem- inine as when the sex was restricted to the home, and dread lest contact with non-domestic pur- suits is having a masculinizing effect upon them. In truth, the tendency ought to be precisely the reverse. If anything, women are coming to be oversexed. Formerly everywhere, and even to- day in most humanity outside of western Europe and the United States, the proportion of women who might reject motherhood was so small as to be negligible. Women married whether or not they felt or inspired love. There was no other mode of life open to them. Only in the home was there a place for them. But, now that it is easy and safe for a woman to earn her bread, 96 DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN and now that in almost any walk of life she can go about without the male protector at her side, there is a refusal of matrimony not only by those with a gift, a call, or a cause, but also by those who lack tlie instinct for mating and children. Women of a certain neuter or even masculine endowment are now for the first time withholding their heredity from the stream of life. This means that each generation of women will be the daughters of the more feminine mem- bers of the previous generation. If, therefore, the rejection of marriage and motherhood by one woman in- a dozen has any racial effect, it ought to make the female sex in the course of time more thoroughly feminine in its instincts. Whether this confinement of motherhood to the more feminine women will affect the psychic en- dowment of their sons as well as their daughters is a very interesting query. 10 If ever the number of young women who pre- fer self-support with independence to marriage becomes so large as to imperil race continuance, it does not follow that society should close to women the doors that admit to the higher kinds 97 THE SOCIAL TEEND of work, should immure the handicapped sex again in the conventional "woman's sphere" from which they have so recently escaped. It would be fairer and quite as effective for society to make matrimony more attractive. One means would be to lift the ban on the woman's staying with her job after marriage. At present the couple are intimidated by the sneering comment : "She 's married a man who is n't equal to supporting his wife." With the decreasing importance of women's labor in the home, there is greater need of money income. The sacrifice involved in two salaried persons undertaking to live on the salary of one deters both men and women from marriage until the man has attained the point of being able to meet the situation single-handed. The social con- vention against the wife earning outside the home may encourage children but it undoubtedly discourages matrimony. The throttling of alcoholism is another pro- marriage policy. Liquor has been man's poison, not woman's; and until lately a serious propor- tion of young men were barred from considera- tion by a sensible working-girl because of their habits. Is it rash to estimate that at least 15 or 98 DOMESTIC POSITION OF WOMEN 20 per cent, of sought young women who re- mained single did so because of dread of becom- ing the wife of a drinker? Long before throwing more difficulties in the way of women following or fitting themselves to follow the higher callings, the true friend of the home will recognize that if desirable women remain single not all the fault may lie with them. Men may be loath as well as women. What must be the bearing on this point of the commercialized prostitution that has been al- lowed to spread in nearly all our cities? Can any one doubt that a traffic providing men with a cheap and irresponsible indulgence of their sex appetite is the deadliest foe of the orderly sex relation that has ever appeared? At all ages the proportion of married persons is smaller in city than in country and one cause is the access of city men to this loathsome market. Not until society has throttled these twin cobras, the liquor traffic and the social evil, will it be entitled to cast a doubtful eye upon the attitude of success- ful working-women toward matrimony. 99 VI WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD * 1 T \ 7HO feed the current of ideas in which our * * minds live and move like fishes in a stream? Why, chiefly the clergy, the educators, the newspaper men, the lawyers, and the judges. Few of us have opinions which have not been formed upon ideas conveyed to us through these groups. Now, although women are a half of all folks, it is a striking fact that very few of them are members of these groups. Small, in- deed, is their part in handing on directly to adults the treasures of culture. How many of the sermons preached from our pulpits last Sunday came from a woman's mind? About one in 171. And newspaper edi- torials? Certainly not more than one in thirty. And lectures in colleges and universities? Per- haps one in fifteen. Of the arguments before i Courtesy of "The Delineator." 100 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD the courts only one in 190 is made by a woman. And as for decisions from the bench which fix the basic relations among us, why, all of them come from male judges. So, for all our admitting girls to the colleges and women to the professions, it is safe to say that nine tenths of the river of ideas in which our minds are bathed flows out from the lips and pens of men. A century ago, no doubt, the diffusing of culture was still more a sex monop- oly. Then, perhaps, 95 per cent, of opinion- making ideas reached the public through men's minds. And in Shakspere's day it may have been 98 per cent. In fact, ever since the learned professions arose, this has been pretty nearly "a man-made world," to use Mrs. Oilman's happy phrase. Nor is there much prospect of its being any- thing else anyhow not just yet. Take the hundred brightest boys your county produces. There is nothing to hinder their go- ing in for leadership if they choose to. But the hundred brightest girls? Every one realizes that, if they go to the pulpit, the desk, the sanctum, the bar, and the bench, our race will run to scrubs. It will never do for all moth- 101 THE SOCIAL TEEND erg to be second-raters. If more than a quarter of the brightest girls turn away from marriage and motherhood, society may well take alarm. In the long run, the gifted women are of more value to society as mothers than as celibate preachers and teachers and editors. And, since the rearing of a real family say, four children consumes from sixteen to twenty of a woman's best years, how can the gifted women share equally with the gifted men in the leadership of society? Not that the men will always utter nine tenths of all that counts, as now; but shall we ever see the time when they contribute less than three quarters? 2 Is it hard on women that this is so nearly a man-made world? Not if mind is sexless. But as everybody realizes, there is sex in mind. If men had to live in a world in which nine tenths of the sermons, lectures, editorials, court argu- ments, and judicial decisions emanated from women, would n't they become a bit restive? See how the high school lad frets when all his teachers are women. Mark how men rage when female disapproval threatens any of their pas- 102 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD times and pleasures. Is it then not likely that women find themselves in a misfit world? Is man-made culture any more congenial to normal women than a culture worked out chiefly by and for women would be congenial to normal men? Sex in intellect? No, but there is sex in in- stinct. For purposes of her own nature gave the male an extra dose of pugnacity. Have you ever noticed how boys take to sports in which you hit something with fist, or foot, or bat, or mallet, or cue, or racket, or marble, or bullet? The thwack appeases the male's latent pugnac- ity. There is a mighty throb of joy, an exqui- site moment, when the foot strikes the pigskin, or the bat meets the ball, or your alley sends flying the other fellow's marble. The "game" fish is one that "strikes" and "fights," so that the sportsman thrills with ecstasy. Girls at play, on the other hand, do not care much for the thwack. They like to toss or catch the ball rather than bat it. They love dancing and skip- ping the rope and games of chasing and being chased. The reason man carries cane or stick, while the woman does not, is that the stick "comforts his innate ferocity," as Veblen suggests. In his 103 THE SOCIAL TKEND way of grasping and brandishing it one can see that his subconscious self is rapping the head of an imaginary enemy. The angry man is im- pelled to assault the person of his enemy. The angry woman assails his ego with stinging epi- thet or biting remark. The clash between women is more psychic and less animal than that be- tween their men folk. The instinct to conserve life another's as well as one's own is stronger in the female. The male, of course, reacts vigorously to attack, for this rouses his fighting spirit ; but he is less heed- ful than the female of insidious danger calling for caution and care. Any doctor will tell you women patients obey his injunctions better than male patients. In the "camps" of our Far West the miners gen- erally were foolhardy in handling explosives and sinking shafts until they acquired wives. It was then not long before they began to behave as if life and limb were worth taking trouble about. The world over, men are more reckless in their pleasures than women. While traveling in the interior of China in 1910, I inquired in each locality as to the prevalence of opium-smoking. 104 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD In every case the men had succumbed to the vice far more than the women. Among us there has been a like difference between the sexes in the use of strong drink. Nowhere has the intemperance of women come within hailing distance of that of their men. But in China I observed this queer thing; in the worst districts the women were not so far behind the men in opium-smoking as elsewhere. The same is true of alcoholism. In the alcoholized slums of London and Glasgow many women tope. It seems that when a vice so overpowers the men that it consumes their earnings and manhood, their women, abandon- ing their instinctive caution, resort to the bowl or the pipe in order to forget their anguish. What a pathetic token of despair! Years ago in a Wyoming saloon one of the sociologist's perquisites is the right to go any- where in the name of "social investigation"- I observed a slight cow-boy, who had earned $18 in a month of "riding herd," playing by himself at the faro-table. In half an hour, with no com- pensating excitement, he had lost to the dealer half his month's pay. This set me to wondering whether women do such foolish things. Since then I have asked at least half a hundred per- 105 THE SOCIAL TREND sons, "Have you ever known a working-woman to gamble away her wages?" So far I have not had an affirmative answer. In October, 1917, a Cossack officer with his company boarded our train in the Caucasus. In the evening he got hold of some "home-brew" at a way-station and presently he was gloriously drunk and trying to eject us all from the coupe. Now, at a time when Russian soldiers were hoist- ing unpopular officers on their bayonets, it was almost suicidal for this officer to make a beast of himself before his men. Yet he swal- lowed the liquor knowing perfectly well what it would do to him! Weeks later I saw a crowd of natives gazing curiously at a man lying in the gutter of a street in Samarkand. It was a Russian officer dead drunk. When he put the enemy into his mouth to steal away his brains he well knew what mad- ness it was at this critical moment to lower the prestige of his uniform in the eyes of the natives. But he could not control his hankering. 3 No doubt the craving for fire-water and the love of gaming are as strong in one sex as in 106 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD the other. If less often women let it run away with them must we not conclude that women have more self-control? Of course we men try to dodge this unpalatable inference by pretend- ing that woman's hankerings are weak. Woman is the lesser man and all thy passions matched with mine Are as moonlight unto sunlight: and as water unto wine. But they can't put over this fiction be- cause women show grip on themselves all along the line. Wherever I have gone I have found the women doing their duty, as they saw it, bet- ter than the men were doing their duty. Would any one hold that the Japanese men are on as high a moral plane as the Japanese women? Do Chinese women come as short of their duty as Chinese men? Among the cholos of tropical South America I found that in the typical instance it was the woman who toiled and saved and somehow brought up her children; while the father, lazy and self-indulgent and un- reliable, did little to support his family. And where, the world over, will you find husbands living up to their marriage-vows as faithfully on 107 THE SOCIAL TKEND the whole as wives? With us Americans the moral interval between the sexes is rather less than elsewhere, not because our women are less good, but because our men more nearly come up to the demands of their ideals. No fair-minded man will charge the other sex with special responsibility for the existence of prostitution. The social evil uses women but exists for men. The demand, being much wider, discredits the male sex much more than the sup- ply discredits the female sex. Moreover, two fifths or more of the prostitutes are weak- minded, and when one deducts from the remain- der those who have been entrapped and those who have been driven by want, the number of fallen women who follow their loathsome pro- fession out of liking must be small indeed. What folly do we find among women to match men's addiction to vice? Fashion? But is fash- ion the product of feminine demand as saloon and brothel are products of masculine demand? Fashion grows out of a demand for decoration which, in turn, springs from the competition of women for marriage. Among us at present the female bears the burden of decoration which in the lower species is borne by the male. Man 108 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD does not need antlers, comb, wattles, ruff, crest, or plumes because he offers his mate support. The wife has come to be economically depend- ent upon her husband in most cases, and hence there has sprung up among women an ex- aggerated competition in decoration which is in- cidental to securing a supporting mate. Which sex is responsible for the foot-binding that crippled the women of China? At first glance you blame the mothers who bind the con- fining bandages upon the feet of their little daughters. But why does the mother inflict such torture upon her own flesh and blood? Be- cause without the "golden lily" foot the daughter will not be sought in marriage. And are the lads of China so silly as to consider only the girl's foot? No, the taste of the lads has noth- ing to do with determining which girls shall be sought in marriage. It is the fathers that choose the brides. Thus it develops that this terrible cross the heaviest that has ever been laid on women in a state of civilization has been laid on the girlhood of China by the de- natured taste of middle-aged fathers, each bound that his son shall have as modish a wife as the next one! 109 THE SOCIAL TREND Although worked out chiefly by and for men, our contemporary culture professes to be ra- tional, and women are expected to accept it and help hand it on. When women revolt at certain features of it, their protest is regarded as merely the reaction of feeling against reason. But if we examine this man-wrought culture with a critical eye, it appears that much of it rests on instinctive unreasoned masculine pref- erence. Let us probe it at a few points. When the ordinary man is withstood or diso- beyed by some one within his power, the "old Adam" surges up in his breast. He clenches his teeth and mutters to himself, "I '11 show ye !" This is why the history of the treatment of the offender is so dismal even downright sickening. Ever at the shoulder of the men who deal with him lawmaker, judge, prosecutor, and, es- pecially, the jailer or warden have hovered the he-instincts, calling for pain, ever more pain, in subduing the recalcitrant. And all the ugly, cruel things prompted by male anger and vindictiveness bastinado, cat-o'-nine-tails, keel- hauling, solitary confinement, silence, the "black 110 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD hole" men have, at one time or another, draped in shining white and bidden mankind bow down to as "Justice" ! But now women, some of them very clever at managing big unruly males, are scrutinizing the penal system we men have set up. Will they be fooled by this "Justice" bluff? It is not straight punishment we have to blush for so much as the stupid brutality in dealing with incarcerated men. Consider how the cap- able contriving school-ma'am keeps in order her headstrong mischievous boys. Does she rely on just the smart of the rod? Not she. There are many weapons in her armory argument, ap- peal, example, sarcasm, humor, rivalry so that by one means or another she controls the bad boy without much use of the whip. Can you imagine such a woman running a penitentiary without exhibiting a like resourcefulness in over- coming opposition? If the women we shall presently see on penal boards and commissions will trust their own good sense when they come to consider our prisons, and not swallow all that the men tell them, there will eventually be more management in them and less punishment. Ill THE SOCIAL TREND 5 As soon as the democratic movement of about a century ago bestowed the ballot upon masses of raw, instinctive American men, their crude pugnacity began to pervert politics into mimic warfare. The citizens went asunder into two camps the political parties, each of which de- veloped a groundless hostility to the other. Po- litical discussion borrowed from fighting such words as "campaign," "battle," "the enemy," "chief," "slogan," and "banner." It imported military features such as uniforms, marching companies, and torchlight processions. "Ral- lies" were held as the Indians held war-dances to get up fighting steam. Success at the polls was celebrated in the spirit of the triumphant game-cock. The winning party called it a "vic- tory," argued that "To the victors belong the spoils," and thereupon proceeded to convert the public officers into party assets. Thus out of militarized politics was born that foul thing the "spoils system" which for more than half a century disgraced American democracy and, the world over, gave popular gov- ernment a black eye. When I was a student in Germany thirty-four years ago, it was our de- 112 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD based politics that was oftencst offered as a justi- fication for keeping the Hohenzollerns. So that in a way our "spoils system" made possible the World War. Male intelligence finally cut away the ugly growth, but still our man-managed politics re- tains the blare and clash dear to the heart of juveniles. Now that women vote, the men who run politics want to lure them into the parties as now constituted, make thick-and-thin partisans of them, and pervert thoughtful female citizens into excited screeching, flag-waving viragos. They will have vehement female Republicans or vehement female Democrats on the party com- mittees, but the male politicians have not the slightest intention of surrendering the reins. Still less do they intend to give any recognition to the critical party-lukewarm women who want to know what all this political hullabaloo and pother is about. The women will help demasculinize our poli- tics if they hold aloof from political ghost-danc- ing, form their own non-partisan voters' organ- izations, and cultivate in their ranks the civic rather than the party spirit. Instead of allow- ing themselves to be herded and tagged, let them 113 THE SOCIAL TREND stand apart and incalculable, and the parties will come to them. If, on the other hand, they throw themselves into politics as into a game, they will actually corrupt politics, for on ac- count of their fair-play sense being less developed than men's they will be trickier and more crooked. 6 Looked at philosophically, business is simply the social system of making and distributing goods. It exists to serve the public, but society allows individuals to make money in business be- cause not otherwise can it obtain their services. That the claims of these profit-seekers should ac- tually take precedence over life and limb, over health and morality, is preposterous. Yet good men, who are not in the least financially inter- ested, oppose us when we try to get the children out of the factory into the school, abolish night w r ork for women, make factory conditions such that the health of working-girls will not suffer, pull down unsanitary tenement-houses, and re- quire vessels to carry enough life-boats and sea- men to save the passengers in case of disaster. The reason is that their susceptible instinct for 114 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD fighting has led the less thoughtful men to mis- conceive business as they have misconceived poli- tics. They have come to look upon it as a prize- ring, where men battle one another for fortunes. It is a pity that in these fights some of the inno- cent public get hurt, but it can't be helped. It won't do to spoil the match. To check the sale of diseased meat, or "doctored" canned goods, or "salted" mines, or spurious oil-stock, or watered securities, or town lots under Lake Michigan ; to curb peonage, or cornering, or combining, or re- bating, or espionage, or blacklisting, would be like depriving the prize-fighter of his shrewdest blows, his cleverest tricks. So, obsessed by this "arena" or "great game" idea of business, num- bers of humane and well-disposed men rush to the aid of business when it seeks to evade salu- tary regulation in the public interest. Of themselves, women do not arrive at this false conception. Their eyes are clear enough to see that business exists in order to serve the pub- lic, that money-making by business men is not its primary aim. In their simplicity of heart, the poor things insist that the palming off of putrid- ity and poison in the guise of food upon mothers in quest of nourishment for the children they 115 THE SOCIAL TREND have risked their lives to bring into the world is not business at all but sheer villainy! To curry favor with advertisers, actual and potential, thousands of newspapers and periodi- cals over our country are substituting the false prize-ring idea of business with immunity of business men from "interference" for the pub- lic-service idea. If, in the face of this vast poi- sonous propaganda, woman clings to her own sound idea of business, it will be because she confides in her common sense and will not let men fool her. 7 Armament competition, militarism, and war are diseased growths springing chiefly from the masculine instincts of domination, pugnacity, and destruction. They are no more implied in the coexistence of states than "pistol-toting" and dueling are implied in the coexistence of in- dividuals. It is chiefly because men run them that states, when they are crossed, bristle up like wild boars. Women do not resort to bloodshed to settle their disputes, and states would not do so if they reflected woman's bent. The fact that some of the worst chauvinists 116 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD and force-worshipers are women, that in bel- ligerent nations women are among the most obstinate "die-hards" and haters, does not prove woman bellicose by nature. It proves simply that she can be duped. By making out the war to be "defensive" and representing the enemy as aim- ing to destroy her sons and her home, the wily militarists arouse and enlist woman's maternal and life-conserving instincts. No, in faith, it is the men that must bear the blame for war. Until their minds are drugged with falsehoods women see wholesale homicide for what it is. When right after the worst self- inflicted calamity that has ever befallen the white race, one hears bull-necked militarists de- tail with calmness nay, even with professional zest what "we" will do to our enemy in the "next war" ignoring always what the enemy will be doing then to us, one is tempted to let the women take entire charge in the hope that they would put these ultra-hes where they be- long in the mad-house! During the age-long struggle to extend the reign of law, the ultra-hes ruffled up at every suggestion of arbitrating private disputes or submitting them to a tribunal. The courts 117 have cut the combs of these game-cocks, but it is just the same spirit, inter-reflected among mil- lions of males, that gives us the haughty defiant state, willing to enter a bout of mass slaughter rather than yield a point. It is to be hoped that the new women citizens in all lands, re- jecting the homicidal traditions of the he-state, will impart to the government something of their own reasonable and pacific disposition. o o Many of the religions bear the stamp "man made." The Mohammedan heaven with its bands of houris to solace the faithful is ob- viously by and for a man. Valhalla the Norse heaven where warriors fight all day and was- sail all night, must have been born in the imag- ination of the male. ,What attraction would it have for a pious woman? Note, too, how for thousands of years the deity has been "He." Surely it is as easy to think of ourselves as off- spring of a divine Mother as of a divine Father ! In fact, through the ancient mother-descent period the deities were mostly goddesses. There is a queer old Babylonian inscription in which we catch the deity changing sex, for in the upper 118 WOMEN IN A MAN-MADE WORLD part of it the pronoun is "She" and in the lower part "He." Christianity started without sex bias and ap- pealed as much to one sex as to the other. It is no more a "he" religion than a "she'' religion. It is just "human," and that is one cause of its success. But men got it under their control and masculinized it so far as they could. They allowed no women to be priest or prelate, stressed the hell-fire (fear) motive as women would never have done, and let it be overgrown by a life-hating asceticism, which woman's in- stincts tell her is sheer nonsense. 9 Women may vote, but if the men direct the thinking behind their votes, men will rule society as heretofore. To free their minds women should do two things: First, they should get by themselves and try to arrive at a point of view of their own regard- ing social questions. If intelligent developed women on exchanging views find that a certain man-made institution or doctrine grates upon their natures or revolts them, they may well be- come suspicious of it. Let them heed the hints 119 THE SOCIAL TREND of their womanly intuitions and instincts. Second, instead of accepting uncritically what the other sex hands them, women should endeav- or to drill down to fundamentals. Let them hear what impartial sexless science has to say. Even if they are men, the spokesmen of science will not impose on them the product of sex- biased thinking. The economists will not teach the prize-ring idea of business, the political scien- tists will not recommend militarized politics, the penologists will not advocate terroristic treat- ment of the offender. By harking back to first principles instead of falling in with current mas- culine conventions, women will save themselves from being puppet voters pulled by strings in the hands of men. 120 VII PHILANTHROPY WITH STRINGS * 1 T F there is one thing on which all men have at ^ all times agreed, it is the beauty and excel- lence of philanthropy. In the days before the common people had gained control, govern- ment made no effort to relieve human suffering, and the resources for its alleviation had to be coaxed out of private hands. To the ministers of relief the generous giver seemed a saint, and so the tradition grew up that it is unbecoming to "look a gift horse in the mouth." Inevitably the gratitude and admiration which the public feels for benevolence is taken advantage of by those seeking to ingratiate them- selves with their fellow-citizens. It has long been recognized by the sponsors for charitable enterprises that the candidate for public office i Courtesy of "The Atlantic Monthly." 121 THE SOCIAL TREND offers an easy mark for the collector. The pop- ularity-hunter has always appreciated the wis- dom of subscribing handsomely to benevolent en- terprises. Infamous businesses have sought to insure tolerance for their nefarious operations by giving heavily and conspicuously to charities with a strong sentimental appeal. Liquor-deal- ers and proprietors of gambling-houses and keepers of low resorts have been prompt with big contributions for the relief of visible dra- matic suffering, such as the hunger or cold of women and children. In the bad old days of bank failures, the cap- italist who had slipped out of the back door of a bank with a satchel of loot, while the tricked depositors were yammering in vain at the front entrance, sought to turn aside public odium and win his way back to respectability by a con- sistent course of diplomatic and ostentatious giving. Public utility companies have often made a point of subscribing to charitable and civic undertakings, and their generosity has fluc- tuated pretty closely with the imminence of at- tack upon their privileges and their policies. The resort to philanthropy as a means of pro- pitiation becomes more general as the public be- 122 PHILANTHROPY WITH STRINGS comes more and more critical of the ways of business. A dozen years ago it was often predicted that "muck-raking'' would so wound, exasperate, and alienate the rich that the foun- tains of benevolence would dry up. Exactly the opposite has occurred. Exposure has had a wonderful effect in loosening the purse-strings of the exposed and exposable. As the imperti- nent question, "Where did he get it?" becomes more insistent, and busybodies with lanterns go poking and peering about the foundations of majestic fortunes, the rush to philanthropic cover becomes ever more noticeable. All the gifts by which wrong-doers contrive to cover their nakedness with the mantle of respect- ability cost society more than they are worth. They are virtually purchases of unmerited leni- ency with money, and tend to break down the moral law just as compounding a felony breaks down the criminal law. It would be well if gifts of ill-gotten wealth were cast back into the teetli of the giver until he gave evidence of repentance and restitution. But, from the nature of the case, a compromising donation almost never meets with such a reception. It is a gift to a particular charity a babies' fresh-air fund, a 123 THE SOCIAL TREND newsboys' home, or a rescue mission. The direc- tors of the charity have this work at heart and naturally feel that the Spartan-like rejection of a large and much-needed contribution would be tantamount to engaging in moral sanitation at the expense of the babies or newsboys or Magda- lens. Each charity, therefore, is under a strong inducement to stick to its own task, take thank- fully whatever money comes to it for its work, and refrain from facing broad* questions as to the relation between modes of wealth-getting and the social welfare. This is the reason why private unendowed charities must, on the whole, be listed among the static rather than the dynamic forces in society. They have every temptation to center their at- tention on their own bit of blessed work and to take the world as they find it. Why should they entertain questionings that might oblige them to discriminate between donations? What wel- come will they have for ideas which are likely to offend or alarm their donors? Have they not every inducement to regard the class of poor whom they serve, and the class of rich who pro- vide them with the means of serving the poor, as natural and fixed features in the social 124 PHILANTHROPY WITH STRINGS system? So we have the anomaly that groups of people who have a very wide knowledge of special conditions, and who have acquired pre- cious experience in particular lines of social serv- ice, have little to say when projects of social reconstruction are brought upon the carpet. Not only do many of them hold aloof from con- structive social reformers, but often they throw cold water on proposed remedies and policies which are in successful operation elsewhere. There is another and a greater limitation upon private philanthropy. Of late we have dropped the old, simple, soothing explanation of the cause of human misery. Nowadays we know too much about distress to dismiss it as merely the result of unfitness for the struggle for exist- ence. We have learned that people struggle, not in still water, but in an agitated medium full of up-currents and down-currents; that poor swimmers may be borne up and good swim- mers may be carried down. A quarter of a century ago social workers took to investigat- ing seriously the head-waters of the endless flow of miserable people defiling before them. They have traced up the tributaries of this flood, and, instead of finding their sources to be individual 125 THE SOCIAL TREND congenital defects, they have found many of them to be adverse social conditions. This being true, the really big thing to do is not just to handle the current of dependents as it flows past, but to get at the sources and find a way of plugging them up. Nature cannot be changed save by the slow methods of eugenics, congenital weak- ness cannot be cured, but an adverse social con- 'dition admits of its being removed. Some of these conditions can be removed with- out disturbing anybody much, unless it be the taxpayer. Such are city congestion, or convivial social customs, or truancy, or lack of recreation facilities. But most of the adverse social con- ditions are mixed up with some lucrative busi- ness, and you cannot go about to abolish them without having a business interest on your back. The social conditions which create down-cur- rents are usually conditions of work or condi- tions of living including under this latter, hous- ing, food, and recreation. Now, the caterers to vice who seize upon, pervert, and exploit the in- stinct of young people for pleasure, have been pretty well outlawed, and there is no danger lest social workers be embarrassed by donations from that quarter. 126 Few, indeed, are the legitimate charities which have been brought under any obligation to the liquor traffic, gambling, the social evil, or the commercialized theater. Only a few years ago, however, very respectable donors were protest- ing against raising the question of the hoirsiug of the working-class population. Happily, the movement for the betterment of housing is now so far advanced that it has become disgraceful knowingly to draw rentals from rotten and dis- ease-breeding tenement-houses. People who care to be respected have bowed to the require- ments of the housing laws or else shifted their investments to other kinds of property. This leaves the real fight to center around the ques- tions of the conditions and pay of labor. Now, there are few fortunes which do not rest on businesses that are more or less sensitive to such questions. The proposition that the con- ditions of labor need amendment if we are go- ing to lessen very much the flow of misery and degradation, is a terrible shock to the whole policy of reliance on private philanthropy. Few indeed are the administrators of unendowed phil- anthropies who can advance many steps along this path without barking their shins. 127 THE SOCIAL TKEND In Pennsylvania steel towns the Young Men's Christian Association has been quite inert with respect to any problem of the steel- workers which involves their relations to the company such as the effects of the seven-day week, the twelve-hour day, the all-night shift, the twenty-four-hour turn every other week, or the preventable work acci- dents for the reason that much of the money that runs it comes from the officers and superin- tendents of the mills. To be sure, the association inspires young men to lead a cleaner life, but what in mill towns is this problem compared with the problem of con- ditions of work? I talked once with an asso- ciation secretary about conditions in the West Virginia coal-field. In one district where he has a strong work, the company owns 35,000 acres of land, everything except the right-of-way of the railroad through that district. The moment one leaves the right-of-way, the company may treat him as a trespasser. If an investigator goes there without company authorization he may be treated as a trespasser the moment that he steps from the depot platform; if a labor 128 PHILANTHROPY WITH STRINGS organizer goes in there, the company can order him out of the house of any employee; a mission- ary going in there must have a company permit. Moreover, a band of company sluggers, known as the "wrecking crew," takes in hand any agi- tator or organizer who comes in, and beats him up so that he cannot proceed with his purpose. I asked the association secretary what he thought of this feudalism. He replied that such a system is necessary under the conditions and that it produces wonderful results. Prostitutes and gamblers are kept out, there are no saloons, liquor can be brought in only on order, and the company allows no liquor wagon to leave a case of beer at any house where lately there has been drunkenness or "rough-house." This man was a good man, but he did not consider whether the system was making men or making serfs. He was interested only in whether the miners drank, and how they lived. The only association secre- tary who could succeed in that district would be one who took that point of view, for much of his support came from the company, which was in- terested in preventing the men from making themselves unfit for their work. In a certain city an energetic association sec- 129 THE SOCIAL TREND retary was just completing Ms fund for a fine new building. One night his wife was called out to a case of distress, through which he got an insight into the bad conditions surrounding young working-women in his city. After care- fully getting up his facts, he formed a committee, secured speakers, and announced that on Friday there would be a public meeting to consider the problem of the young working-women in local industries. Promptly he was summoned by telephone to meet the directors of his association, and when he entered the room, one of his Chris- tian backers burst out upon him with, "What in h 1 do you mean by getting up this public meet- ing? Don't you know I 've got eighty girls working in the basement of my department- store?" His other directors were equally stern, and he was ordered to call off his meeting or lose all the important contributions to his building fund. He held his meeting and immediately thereafter resigned. I greatly admire the Young Men's Christian Association, and the only reason that I mention it so often here is because I have oftener stum- bled upon its problems. But it is no more em- 130 PHILANTHROPY WITH STRINGS barrassed in this respect than are the church and the church philanthropies. Nor are the secular charities free. During a strike of the iron-molders in a mining-machin- ery works in a State capital, the company de- clared a lock-out and advertised throughout the State: "Wanted, skilled iron-molders. Good pay. No strike." Some molders removed to the capital to get this work and found too late that they were to be used as strike-breakers. Two such families sought relief of the Associated Charities, and the secretary expostulated with the president of the machinery company for bringing up-state iron-molders into distress by luring them into a strike situation. The reply he got was : "You people can't complain of hav- ing to handle such cases. Don't we contribute $150 a year to your work?" A student of mine, after three years of charity organization work, said to me : "Professor, I >ve quit. There 's nothing in it. The game 's too thin. We coax money from the people who are the beneficiaries of the abuses that produce the wrecks we deal with. They let us deal with the wrecks, but we can't touch or even show up the 131 THE SOCIAL TREND conditions that produce them, because that would affect their income." And the young man concluded : "No more for me. I 'm going to be a factory inspector, or something of that sort, where I won't be a dead letter." 3 The head worker of a social settlement, who had made plans for a much-needed housing investigation in the vicinity of the settlement, had to ditch the investigation because real estate owners, who contributed each a few hundred dollars a year to the settlement fund, sent word that they were able to look after their property themselves. In another case, a board representing the "donor" point of view so curbs the head worker in his endeavors to take part in the movements affecting the welfare of his neighborhood that he avows to me that he is straining every nerve to gain sufficient financial support in his neighbor- hood to justify him in cutting loose entirely from down-town philanthropists. A social worker who had resided in many settlements said to me : "Most of the successful settlement heads that I know are one thing to 132 PHILANTHROPY WITH STRINGS their boards and a quite different thing to their clientele. Unless they can play this game well, they are lost. For if at the demand of their boards they exclude radicals and socialists from settlement clubs and gatherings, censor the list of speakers, and denature the discussions before the men's club, they lose their hold on the neigh- borhood. If, on the other hand, the settlement is a place of free speech and the residents show a lively interest in everything affecting the wel- fare of the neighborhood, no matter what em- ployers or corporations they may fall afoul of, they lose their hold on the board." The opposition of boards of directors of settlements to giving any real power in respect to policy to a house-council consisting of the res- idents themselves, or to conceding any place in its direction to representatives of the various neighborhood associations which the settlement has called into being, discloses an attitude of patronage inspired by upper-class ideas as to the stewardship of the rich over the poor. The action of the entire body of eight volunteer resident workers in one of the oldest and most renowned social settlements in this country, in withdrawing from the house because 133 THE SOCIAL TREND the council (half of them Wall Street men who never come near the house and little compre- hend the needs of the neighborhood) regarded it as an act of insubordination for them to join the settlement society and elect one of their own number to the council, illustrates how those who give mere money arrogate to themselves the con- trol of the policy of the settlement to the exclu- sion of those who give time and service. No wonder that the social center, which uses public property and stands for community self-help, in- spires so much more hope than the social settle- ment which represents the spirit of philanthropy. Talk with a working-man and he will tell you : "To h 1 with philanthropy ! I want not charity, but justice." When an injured working-man receives compensation, as he does now, he can hold his head higher than he could when he was aided by a charity. A wise settlement warden once declared in his report that a large part of the work at his settle- ment was "of a disappearing character." He maintained a playground in the settlement back- yard just long enough to induce the park com- mission to establish a better one in the park across the street. He held cooking classes in 134 PHILANTHROPY WITH STRINGS the settlement until the public schools put in cooking. He provided evening instruction for working-boys until the State put in a continu- ation school. He ran a little employment office until the State established a big, well -equipped employment bureau in his neighborhood. Here is the natural and logical relation of phil- anthropy to social reform. It is the function of private philanthropy to pioneer, to experi- ment, to try out new things and new methods, and just as soon as it has found the right way and standardized the method that gives results, the time has come for the community to take over the function. This releases a certain amount of private time and money to go on and tackle something else. The means for initiating and carrying on experimental lines of social work must come from private benevolence, but the standardized lines of social work ought to be provided for by the community or the State. Once the philanthropist set up a drinking foun- tain ; now there is good city water laid on every- where. In olden times kind-hearted people pro- vided "ragged schools" for the waifs of the al- leys ; now there are public schools for all. Once the benevolent created funds to provide meals 135 THE SOCIAL TREND for indigent prisoners in the jails; but John Howard induced the state to feed its prisoners. Time was when the defectives were cared for by charitable groups; now the state provides for these unfortunates. There will always be op- portunity for private philanthropy to render sig- nal services; but a democratic society with a proper spirit of independence will not allow it- self to form the bad habit of leaning upon the large private donor, but will take as its maxim, "Let us do it ourselves." 136 VIII PROHIBITION AS THE SOCIOLOGIST SEES IT l 1 QJ IXTEEN years ago thoughtful Chinese woke to a realization of how the opium cancer had eaten into their vitals. The use of the drug had spread with truly appalling rapidity. The Chinese people were using seventy times as much as they had used in 1800. Annually twenty-two thousand tons of opium were absorbed, most of it converted into thick smoke and inhaled by a legion of smokers estimated to number at least twenty-five millions. In the poppy-growing provinces a shocking proportion of the adults were addicted to the habit. In the cities of Szechuan half the men and a fifth of the women smoked. In Kansu three men out of four were devotees of the pipe. Districts were to be found in which virtually the whole adult population had given themselves up to the seduction and l Courtesy of "Harper's Magazine." 137 THE SOCIAL TKEND were sinking into a state of indescribable leth- argy, misery, and degradation. Realizing that unless the people speedily re- nounced the vice that was undermining its man- hood there was no hope for China among the nations, the empress dowager issued, in 1906, the famous Anti-opium Edict, the opening gun in the most extensive warfare on a destructive private habit that the world has ever known. In 1910 I traveled for months through the far in- terior of China and on every hand met evidences of the resolute fight to stamp out the production of opium. In many districts where the poppy had been the staple crop, like corn in Kansas or cotton in Alabama, not a poppy field was to be seen. As a result, the local price of opium was from two to ten times that of the year before, while food w r as more plentiful and cheap than it had been for years. As week after week I traversed the scene of conflicts, often fierce and sometimes bloody, between the officials supported by the re- formers and patriots, and the poppy-growers, traders, and den-keepers supported feebly by the slaves of the pipe, I reflected, "Is any vice coil- ing itself about us whites as opium coiled itself 138 PROHIBITION about the Chinese?" As in a flash I saw that alcohol is to our people what opium is to the yellow race. And their experience had estab- lished that there are private drug habits society dares not let alone. For a very long time the hand of government had been withheld in China, and if any principle of self-limitation lurked in the opium vice it ought to have declared itself long before. But, as a matter of fact, opium smoking did not confine itself to fools and weak- lings. It did not consume the chaff and leave the wheat. Like a gangrene, it ate deeper and deeper into the social body, spreading from weak tissue to sound, until the very existence of the Chinese race was at stake. Moral suasion had not availed to arrest the progress of the gangrene. It had been found necessary to resort to heroic treatment, i. e., to make opium inaccessible. Might not our gan- grene, despite the growth of temperance senti- ment, go on eating into us until we made alco- holic beverages inaccessible? Thus China's experience with the juice of the poppy converted me to prohibition. 139 THE SOCIAL TKEND 2 The "dry" movement in this country was by no means a fanatical outburst against a vice already beaten to its knees by half a century of temper- ance agitation. What happened among us was that a part of American society turned away from liquor while the rest became wetter and wetter. The army of drinkers which survived the temperance simoon of the forties and fifties of the last century had been reinforced by mil- lions of immigrants Irish and Germans and Slavs many of whom, owing to their relatively high earnings in this country, found themselves able for the first time to indulge freely in alco- holic pleasures. Another momentous thing happened a pro- found change in the system for supplying drink. The catering of liquor became commercialized. It came to be a "big business" intent on profits always more profits. From being shrinking and apologetic, it became brazen and aggressive. It no longer pleaded humbly for leave to assuage existing thirsts. In order to "promote busi- ness" it deliberately and methodically set itself to create new thirsts. It advertised, gave away 140 PROHIBITION samples, subsidized convivial organizations, en- couraged festal customs, of a "damp" character, planted saloons in new places, and brought them into close partnership with the great social plagues, gambling and prostitution. In olden time alcoholic beverages were no more "pushed" than hen's eggs are "pushed." But as production and distribution were centralized, the business grew more capitalistic, the saloon-keeper came to be the brewer's man, while systematic efforts were made to "shove" liquor, especially beer. Between 1880 and 1907 the annual per capita consumption of all liquors in this country rose from ten gallons to nearly twenty-three gallons! Far, then, from being a superfluous stroke at a dying social custom, prohibition was an urgent social-defense measure forced by greedy liquor interests which were so short-sighted that they would not leave non-drinkers alone. Continu- ally they plotted to tempt the public into a larger consumption. Their ambition seemed to be to convert the rising generation of males into per- ipatetic tanks. A long and variegated experience with at- tempts to regulate the liquor traffic showed that it was incapable of being made decent and law- 141 THE SOCIAL TREND abiding. It would respect no law, heed no warn- ings or protests. Always it was secretly dig- ging under or insolently breaking over any bounds the community set to it. So, not out of a sour resentment of other people's pleasures, but out of bitter experience with an unmiti- gated social evil, grew the sentiment for destroy- ing it, "root and branch." When parents and other earnest people realized that here was a sin- ister thing doing its utmost to ensnare our boys and ravel out the fabric of sound principles and good resolutions which home and school and church had been at such pains to weave into the soul of youth, they hardened their hearts and struck it down. Certain unforeseen developments have caused prohibition to triumph sooner than one had a right to expect. In the early crusade against alcoholism what was deplored was the intemper- ate use of intoxicants. The "temperate" user was the model. Later, total abstinence was urged, on the ground that the moderate drinker sets a bad example to the weak and, moreover, 142 PROHIBITION runs the risk of being overpowered by his habit and swept into the abyss of excess. But thirty years ago evidence began to pour out of Euro- pean physiological and psychological labora- tories that even in small quantities alcohol is an upscttcr and dcrangcr of the functions of the mind as tocll a$ of the body. The sense of re- lease and augmented power that comes with a glass or two was proved a cheat and a delusion. To his horror, that darling of the early moralists, the moderate drinker, was pulled from his ped- estal and pilloried as an ignorant self-poisoner. Then the development of industry came to help the besiegers of the fort of folly. The traveling public began to be nervous about the drinker at the engine-throttle, the telegraph-key, the switch- board. The factory system supplanted the handicrafts, and a new class* the employers, came to realize how drink plays havoc with pro- duction. As workers became machine tenders the damage from the liquor habit in impairment of efficiency and in injury to delicate and costly machinery became ever" more unmistakable. More and more employers came to look upon pro- hibition as a labor-efficiency policy, and it was 143 THE SOCIAL TKEND largely these men who financed the movement which brought the liquor interests to grief, de- spite their millions for propaganda. The World War was the crowning disaster to John Barleycorn. In the interest of military efficiency and as a food-conservation measure all the belligerent governments set clamps on liquor. This staging of drink as an economic drain and the foe of national strength has been an illum- inating object-lesson to thoughtless millions. In the face of the whole world King Gambrinus has been shamed and set at naught, so that the out- lawing of the drink traffic by the governments, as already the opium traffic has been outlawed, appears to be only a question of time. Broadly seen, prohibition is the device of the young northern peoples to overcome their con- stitutional handicap in competing with the older and soberer races. It seems as if all varieties of men at their first contact with intoxicants liter- ally go crazy over them. In vinous exaltation the primitive races especially find the most glor- ious experience of life. To supply a tribe of Es- 144 PROHIBITION kimos or Australian blacks with plenty of strong drink proved to be a swift way of despatching them. The infatuation of the American Indian for "fire-water" has been proverbial. The affin- ity of the indigenous population of Mexico for puJquc and mescal is notorious. All down the Andean uplift the natives are gradually destroy- ing themselves with chicJia and pisco. The "un- conquerable'' Araucanians were in the end bowled over by the product of distilleries planted among them for that very purpose. The worst alcohol- ism in the world to-day is among the Chilean masses, who are more than half Indian. Once a people has easy access to what an Irish poet, who sang a thousand years ago, called "the heavenly dew," it begins to undergo "alcoholic selection." Those to whom the delights of intox- ication are irresistible sooner or later drink themselves to death or, at any rate, leave a weakened progeny which quickly perish. Con- versely, the sober survive and they transmit to their posterity their distaste for vinous exhil- aration. Some of the Mediterranean peoples have known the vine for four or five thousand years, so that long ago those among them who 145 THE SOCIAL TREND could not refrain from abusing the "blood of the grape" eliminated themselves. Sooner or later their intemperate stocks ran out, the result being that the sobriety of these peoples is the marvel of the later arrivals at the banquet of civilization. Alcoholic selection no doubt set in among the nomad Israelites with their settlement in the Promised Land. It was sure to come when every man dwelt "under his own vine and fig-tree." Naturally, therefore, the Old Testament abounds in warnings against wine, but not the New Testa- ment, for by then the Jews had become the liquor-proof people which we find them to-day. The early Greek lawgivers struck at drunken- ness with a severity we have never touched. Al- exander's Greeks were so bibulous that in one of the wine-drinking matches which he encouraged thirty-six contestants died from over-drinking. Yet in a few centuries alcoholics were nearly ex- tinct among the Hellenes, while the modern Greeks are models of sobriety. Having never been exposed to the test of the flowing bowl, the early Teutons were terrible was- sailers. Tacitus remarks, "Intemperance proves as effectual in subduing them as the force of 146 PROHIBITION arms." But in the course of the Dark Ages the monasteries spread the cultivation of the vine over the slopes of southern Germany, so that all through the Middle Ages their furious drinkers were quaffing themselves to destruction. This is why to-day the Germans occupy in respect to alcoholism a middle place between northern and southern peoples. An analysis of 2075 charity cases in our cities showed that drink as the cause of poverty occurs but half as often among the German cases as among the Irish, and two thirds as often as among native American cases. Among the foreign-bora in our jails and prisons only one German in twenty-two was committed for intoxication as against one out of three Irish, one out of five Scotch, and one out of eight Scandinavians. How amazing is the contrast between races in their constitutional craving to be "lit up" comes out very clearly in the records of the charity hos- pitals of New York. Liquor is responsible for more than a fifth of the cases treated. It is the root of the trouble in a quarter of the native Americans treated, in a third of the Irish pa- tients, and in two fifths of the native-born of Irish 147 THE SOCIAL TREND fathers. On the other hand, one out of sixty Italian patients, one out of seventy Magyar pa- tients, one out of eighty Polish patients, and one out of a hundred Hebrew patients is in the hos- pital on account of inebriety ! Or take the sons of the "land of the vine." The proportion of Italian charity cases charge- able to drink is only a sixth of that for foreign- born cases and a seventh of that for cases among native Americans. Alcoholism is found among the Italians in the charity hospitals from a tenth to a twentieth as often as among north-European patients in the same institutions. From the hygienic point of view it is a great pity that the people of this country are over- whelmingly of northern extraction. It is cer- tain that there would be no liquor problem here, ergo no prohibition, if sober Neapolitans had landed on Plymouth Kock, if abstinent Portu- guese had settled Virginia instead of hard-drink- ing English, if temperate Wallachians had planted themselves in Pennsylvania instead of thirsty Germans and Scotch-Irish, if coffee-sip- ping Turks had peopled the West instead of bib- ulous Hibernians and Scandinavians. Had we 148 PROHIBITION Americans only the anti-alcoholic inheritance of Cretans, Syrians, and Armenians, we might dispense with "restrictions on personal lib- erty." But, being what we are, there are open to us just two solutions of the drink problem. Stoi- cally we may submit ourselves to alcoholic se- lection a process in our case made trebly dev- astating by the modern cheapness of manufac- ture of alcoholic beverages and the facilities for keeping them at every man's elbow all the time. In anguish we may endure the loss of perhaps a million lives a decade from intemperance as result of the hurricane of temptation the un- curbed liquor interests would let loose upon us. With aching hearts we may tolerate the wreck- ing of perhaps half a million homes in the same period. We may steel ourselves while myriads of wives and mothers have their lives poisoned by worry lest some of their dear ones fall a prey to the insidious drug. Well, the reward for con- sistently keeping our hands off the agent of havoc would be that by the end of this century we should have passed the peak of our suffering and by the year 2100 A. D. our descendants might 149 THE SOCIAL TREND be as constitutionally resistant to alcoholic be- guilement as are the Portuguese to-day! The alternative to this dismal prospect is pro- hibition i. e., wringing the neck of the liquor business so that our unfortunate temptables, no longer teased and baited and snared for the sake of the profit to be extracted from their weakness for alcohol, will be left free to pur- sue the normal interests of life. What social effects other than the lessening of crime and pauperism, which are too obvious to be worth discussing may be anticipated from the banishment of strong drink? For one thing, it is bound to improve the position of women, especially in the lower levels of society. Liquor has been the great enemy of the abstinent sex. No thoughtful woman finds anything captivating in a drinking song or takes "John Barleycorn" as a joke. Usually deep potations let loose the satyr in man and put attractive women at the mercy of lust coupled with superior physical strength. The female vampire, of course, will lose one of her means of making infatuated males submit to her blood- sucking; but decent women, who have to trust their brains and character to command from the 150 PROHIBITION more muscular sex the respect to which they feel entitled, know that their moral and intel- lectual merits are never at greater discount than in the eyes of intoxicated men. If we succeed in making an end of toping there will be one stone the less in the way of Cupid's car. Machine industry and certain other economic developments, by opening to the weaker sex countless opportunities of self-support, have relieved capable young women of the economic necessity of marriage. Working-girls now scoff at taking husbands "for the sake of a meal- ticket," and are more inclined to consider whether life with the wooer opens a prospect of happiness. With the spread of this critical at- titude toward marriage no doubt there must be a growing number of young women who remain single rather than tie themselves to a man whose drinking habits arouse their distrust. So far as this is the case, the change we may look for in social customs ought to promote matrimony by increasing the number of eligible young men and diminishing the risks of the self-supporting girl who marries. In prohibition the home scores a signal tri- umph. It is a matter of common knowledge 151 THE SOCIAL TKEND that among the masses in Europe the sexes have never gone asunder in their pastimes to the ex- tent that they have in our wage-earning popu- lation. Among us the taboo on woman's shar- ing of vinous delights (which came to be con- sidered the exclusive prerogative of the male) set up as counter-attraction to the home the male drinking resort, in which, unlike the German biergarten and the English "public house," a decent woman was never to be seen. Thereupon began a silent but determined duel between the American wife, seeking to retain the companionship of her mate and have his cooperation in rearing their children, and the keeper of the male resort on the lookout for profitable patrons. The wife lured her husband, and later her sons, with the comforts and charms of home rugs and curtains, the easy-chair, the trimmed lamp, games, books, music, and the society of good women. The saloon-keeper lured with bright lights, the shining bar, the brass rail, glistening glass, huge mirrors, sensual paintings, privacy for "a quiet game," and (sometimes) the society of loose women. The duel went on with varying fortunes. It 152 PROHIBITION turned out that in most cases the American women of the "middle" class had the time, means, and ingenuity to create for their men a domestic environment which possessed greater attrac- tiveness than the male drinking resort. Among wage-earners, however, overcrowding, poverty, and want of knowledge too often thwarted the wife's pathetic endeavor to tempt her man to spend his time and money in the home rather than in the saloon. Now, happily, prohibition comes to the assistance of this much-enduring woman and opens to her the means to build a home which will give her and her daughters an opportunity to exert a refining influence upon the coarser natures of her menfolk. Says a report from Richmond: "Hundreds of men are taking the pay envelope home now and spending their evenings there, men who had not done so before in twenty years. With- out doubt, one of the first things that drinking men do when the saloon is no longer open to them is to move back into their homes, and then to move themselves and their families into bet- ter homes." In Denver the gas company found that under prohibition, despite the shutting 153 THE SOCIAL TREND down of the saloons, its business steadily in- creased because more gas was being used in the homes. When one wearies of the home it is now not the male resort pool-room, men's club, coffee- house, or other "substitute for the saloon" that is likely to be visited, but rather some rec- reation place which men and women, parents and children, can enjoy together. It will be the park, the "zoo" the soda-fountain, the motion-film theater, or the social center. With the ending of the sociability institution built up about the absorption of alcohol the mem- bers of the family are encouraged to have more of their pleasures in common. Not only is there prospect of women enjoy- ing greater consideration and influence with men, but with prohibition a vista of hope is opened for multitudes of hapless children. Since their security lies primarily in their unconscious appeal to the tender instinct and to the sense of obligation, children suffer the most from the drinking habits of the bread-winner. Liquor soon blunts the parental sense of obligation, while, by setting aside ordinary every-day in- hibitions, it opens a freer course to the instincts. 154 This unbridling of the primitive self seems to favor the more elemental instincts, such as pug- nacity, lust, and self-assertion. In general, the man under the influence of liquor tramples brutally upon the rights and claims of his chil- dren. Occasionally a man is actually more gen- erous and tender in his cups than when sober, but the rule is the other way. Now that, on top of free public education and the banning of child labor, the saloon-keeper's till will no longer jingle with the money which should feed and clothe the wage-earner's children, we may look for a generation of young people virtually all of whom will have had their chance. Those in whom the glass is wedded to good fellowship and good fellowship is wedded to the glass will have trouble in finding new means of bridging the gulf that has resulted. Still, sub- stitute thawers will be found, for nobody has ever pretended that, on the whole, abstainers are less sympathetic and brotherly, more self- centered and shut up within themselves, than drinkers. If it requires potations to set up a genial current of feeling, how hedged and lone- some must be the Rumanian, the Arab, the Gipsy, the Syrian! And, on the other hand, what a 155 THE SOCIAL TREND loving expansive wight the Russian, the Nor- wegian, the Scot must have been half a cent-ury ago, before the desiccation of northern Europe began ! The fact is, whatever social custom bids men do together in token of friendliness will pres- ently become charged with significance and set up a flow of good feeling between the partici- pants. To "get next," Near-Easterners drink coffee, while Far-Easterners drink tea. Our an- cestors hit upon the custom of touching glasses and swallowing beverages of high alcoholic con- tent. There is no reason to suppose that sip- ping "soft" drinks together, or smoking together, or playing backgammon together might not serve equally well as a symbol of amity. Then, too, much of the crude, maudlin gre- gariousness that comes after the third glass is a temporary, deceptive thing fool's gold. You can't build anything on it. Is there any con- tinuing good work Red Cross or Belgian re- lief, or the reclamation of the "down and out" which has relied on the social feeling evoked by alcoholic drink? The wine-cup has played a part in relieving ennui, banishing care, and helping men forget 156 PROHIBITION their troubles. Many of long-established habits will therefore be hard put to it to open fresh sources of solace and inspiration. Still, such sources will be found, let no one doubt it. In Kansas a generation has grown up without re- course to liquor, and one hears more young peo- ple singing of an evening in a Kansas town than one hears in the lands of the vine. In the eigh- teenth century much hard toping went on amqng American college students. The custom has passed away, but in its place have sprung up many varieties of "high jinks" unknown to the college of olden time "rushes" and "hops," "song fests" and "circuses," athletic "meets" and foot-ball "rallies." With wassail or without, the spirit of youth will sparkle and foam. In all previous wars it has been considered inevitable that men removed from home and exposed to the frightful boredom of barracks and camp and trenches should drink in order to brighten a black existence. One of the most glowing chapters in the history of the World War will be the story of the successful efforts to pro- vide for the social recreation of our soldiers over- seas and in the training-camps. A really mar- velous ingenuity and insight into human nature 157 THE SOCIAL TREND has been shown by the religious agencies work- ing to supply our soldiers at home and abroad with recreation which will banish tedium and outpull the allurements of vice. It is not too much to say that the problem of satisfying the social instinct of segregated men without the aid of intoxicants has been solved and we may be proud of the fact solved by Americans ! That the closing of the saloon will go a long way toward purifying politics nobody will deny. The wholesale use of free drinks to sway the electorate is one of the blackest chapters in the history of political democracy. The defenders of governing dynasties and classes love to point to the role of liquor in the selections which reg- ister the will of the "sovereign people." Long before any other curb was imposed on the liquor sellers, the American commonwealths closed the saloons on election day in order to prevent scandalous scenes of orgy and riot about the polling booths. Money will continue to be used illegitimately in politics, and under prohibition men will be found who will sell their votes. But it is safe to predict that fewer votes will be corruptly swayed and that they will never again be sold at such bargain prices as in the 158 PROHIBITION days when no limit was imposed on the role of liquor in politics. Since it has been the element with the fewest wholesome pleasures and recreations, the wage- earners rather than the business men, the pro- fessional men, or the leisure class, which ha* been hardest hit by alcoholism, we may antic- ipate 'that the banishing of strong drink will result in accelerating the economic and political advance of labor. The free drinkers among the wage-earners have furnished few resolute or in- telligent fighters for the working-men's cause. They have been so many weak spots in labor's phalanx. In a dry society it will be harder to fuddle and befool the worker into voting for policies which are in the interest of another class and against the advancement of his own class. One of the great surprises of Soviet Russia has been that it has not dissolved in chaos. Contrary to what we expected, the "man on horseback" has not taken charge and the Rus- sians do not think he is coming. That a workers- and-peasants' regime did not result in anarchy leading to a military dictatorship is largely owing to the heavy hand the leaders laid on 159 THE SOCIAL TREND liquor. Warned by the scenes of demoraliza- tion which followed access of the Red Guard to the wine-cellars of the Winter Palace, the kom- missars went about to destroy the numerous hidden stocks stored for the refreshment of the Petrograd well-to-do. In December, 1917, I beheld sights which would have cheered the heart of the royal author of the proverb, "Wine is a mocker." I saw men in wrecked wine-cel- lars wading up to their ankles in the ruddy liquid and the snow of a street stained rich red where fire-hose was draining the contents of the cellars into the sewers. Here, perhaps, is the secret of why the Russian proletarian revolu- tion has not followed the course which history led us to expect. 160 IX THE LEGAL PROFESSION FROM THE SOCIAL POINT OF VIEW rjlHERE is a world of difference between call- * ing a man a "good" lawyer and calling him a "good" bacteriologist or health officer. In the one case the man is appraised from the private point of view, in the other from the public point of view. Winning cases is not social service; it is social service to help justice prevail and to make the law respected. The "good" lawyer like as not aids the wrong cause as often as he aids the right ; oftener, in fact, for owing to his reputation for winning "hard" cases his talents will be sought by litigants who have the least to say for themselves. It used to be said of the leading criminal lawyer of Massachusetts that no crook undertook a serious crime in that State without first inquiring as to the health of Rufus Choate. The "good" health officer, on the other hand, is "good" from the community point of 161 THE SOCIAL TKEND view, not from the point of view of a litigant with a weak case or a law-breaker facing trial. Lawyers are experts as to legal rights, so there is no place for them in a despotic society. They flourish only under free government and are justly proud of the fact that the bar unanimously offers resistance to any tendency to arbitrary rule. This, however, constitutes no sweeping certificate of merit for the legal profession. The oft-lauded services it renders to society are real, but so are its disservices, which it is careful never to mention. Subject, of course, to the restrictions of the professional code, lawyers generally practise law for gain. Usually the litigant with the more money to spend on his case will command the services of the abler lawyers, i. e., those who have the reputation of winning cases. The wrong decisions these lawyers are able to bring about when pitted against w^eak or inexperienced opponents become precedents quoted in future lawsuits. Thus, under the system of judge- made law, the legal rights of the financially weaker class of litigants are continually nib- bled away, while the class confronting them accumulates unfair advantage. As on the foot- 162 THE LEGAL PROFESSION ball field the team with the better interference gains ground from the other team, so in the struggle between opposed classes the high-priced astute lawyers constitute the "interference" for the side with the more money to spend. The doctrine of the assumption of risk could never have reached its concluding stage of monstrosity but for the inequality of pressure applied to it from opposite sides. When the balance of rights has been so dis- turbed that the weaker class regularly gets the worst of it in court, a political struggle for re- dress breaks out. But once the legislature has been moved to enact a statute setting back the stakes to the old line, the ingenious lawyers of the interest affected proceed by clever sophis- tries and hair-splittings to befuddle the judges until they have whittled the statute down to the vanishing-point. Aside, then, from bringing about the triumph of injustice in particular adjudicated cases, the practice of lawyers following the bigger re- tainer contributes to destroy the equilibrium of classes by aiding the rich and concentrated in- terest to encroach upon the one that is poor or scattered. 163 THE SOCIAL TEEND Until the establishment of railroad and public utility commissions, the rights of railway pas- sengers, gas consumers, and telephone users were being nibbled away by just this inequality in litigation. In such relations as between merchant and customer, master and seaman, master and servant, the cumulative effects of the one side's commanding always the better law- yers have been serious, nay even disastrous. One motive in the creation on all hands of pure food commissions, trade commissions, and in- dustrial commissions has been to correct the dangerous list resulting from the gravitating of legal ability to the side with the larger purse. Before these tribunals of experts, making up their minds not on ordinary court-room testi- mony but on the findings of trained investigators, the power of the lawyer to affect the decision is so circumscribed as to threaten his eventual elimination. A visitor from Mars would be amazed that an adroit lawyer who has amassed a fortune help- ing corporations to enrich themselves at the expense of the public should ever have the effront- ery to seek political favors at the hands of his fellow-citizens. Stranger yet, the voters some- 164 THE LEGAL PROFESSION times make such a man governor or senator under the impression that they are getting a "smart" man's services for a tithe of their com- mercial value. Of course, in such cases the voters make a bad bargain. Men do not gather figs from thistles, secure the best social service from the hardened private servant. The corpo- ration "counsel" who late in life takes on the public as his client may mean well by his new client, but he is usually incapable of perceiving the public interest at points where it clashes with the private interests he has been accustomed to champion. Voters would never do such foolish things had they not been steadily plied with the false doc- trine that the bar in toto is the bulwark of pop- ular rights, and that the lawyer who consist- ently serves the private interest which offers him the most money is in some mysterious way rendering a public service. The truth is, of course, that this type of attorney is to the faith- ful defender of the actual legal rights of his client what the hired gunman is to the loyal po- liceman, what the professional expert witness is to the genuine chemist or alienist. In the light of healthy common sense, the lawyer who hires 165 THE SOCIAL TREND himself without conviction is no more respect- able than the woman who hires herself without love. The doubtfulness of the legal profession from the social point of view comes out clearly when one compares it with other professions. Engi- neers do not pit their science and ingenuity against one another but against nature. Phys- icians are not thrusting against each other but against disease. Teachers combat not other teachers but ignorance. These serve society by serving private interests which are harmonious with, the public interest. But half, perhaps even three fourths, of the learning, logic, labor, and ingenuity of the legal profession, probably the best manned of them all, is wasted in blow and parry, thrust and counter-thrust. Only a fraction of the labors of lawyers actually serves society by drawing out the truth, clearing up situations, clarifying rights, and developing law in the direction of social need. The waste of lawyers' efforts through forensic contention is like that of competing advertising experts only the public have never perceived it as they perceive the waste of advertising. The latter is so evident that its service in stimulat- 166 THE LEGAL PROFESSION ing and educating consumers to avail themselves of new utilities is overlooked. There is some- thing pathetic in the plea of "ad men" to be taken seriously by a public too likely to regard them as nothing but artists in convincing men- dacity. No doubt their coming together to raise ethical standards for their work and cast out the liars will in time gain them that standing with the public which they deserve. Of the intellectual eminence of the legal pro- fession there can be no question. So alluring are forensic triumphs, so rich the rewards of success, that when in my classes I detect an un- usually brilliant student and, in the hope of steer- ing him into creative scholarship, ask him what he intends to do, it is almost a foregone conclu- sion that he will reply he intends going into the law. The close relation of the law to politics, arising in part from the ease with which the prac- tice of law can be dropped and resumed after a period of public life, lends it an added attrac- tiveness in the eyes of ambitious young men. Intellectually, too, the lawyer keeps himself re- markably fit. Pitted always against opponents who pounce with joy upon every loose statement of his, every flaw of reasoning, every awkward 167 THE SOCIAL TREND use of citation or evidence, lie is required always to keep himself in training like an athlete. The preacher becomes soft from preaching to those who will never take him to task for the holes in his logic. The teacher becomes oracular and enervated from continually handing down his ideas to immature minds unable to confute him. The editor grows flabby who can take his time about replying to criticism. The lawyer, on the other hand, has to keep hard his intellectual thews, for his success hinges on his constant readiness to put up a good defense. No wonder that the public has formed the habit of looking to the bar for guidance. And yet, while private, ofttimes even anti-so- cial service, prevails over social service in the practice of law, while the majority of lawyers are unable to distinguish the sham from the gen- uine in social service, it would be well if the pub- lic barkened less to the opinion of lawyers and listened more to the advice of the more disinter- ested and socialized scholars, social workers, sanitarians, school-men, geologists, and econo- mists. Looking as these do to the public for em- ployment, they have not trained themselves into taking the private and oftentimes anti-social point of view. 168 THE CONSCIENCE OF THE EXPERT T T is fortunate that at a time when social in- * terests are coming to be more distinct and segregated from private interests, society finds at its elbow servants of a new type of loyalty. For two centuries there has been growing up in the experimental laboratory an ideal of exactness and a reverence for tested fact, since without these there would be no success in the high em- prise of wrestling from nature her secrets. Brilliantly justified in physics and chemistry the laboratory method has of late been applied to many other fields. Nearly all branches of inquiry have adopted this procedure for widen- ing the bounds of truth. The standing of a university as a research institution is deter- mined by its laboratories. The buildings of a modern medical school consist almost entirely of laboratories. Nowadays the first thing wise men do when they are face to face with a grave 169 THE SOCIAL TREND problem, relating, say, to food values or venti- lation or juvenile delinquency, or whether ani- mals reason, or the harmfulness of adulterants, is to equip a research laboratory for working it out. We have realized that the old-fashioned reflection and discussion are but a poor method of finding truth. The spirit of the laboratory is a sense of the all-importance of fact, a nervousness as to error, a willingness to take infinite pains in measuring and verifying. Formerly only chemists and engi- neers went out into their life work with this spirit. But of late laboratories have so multi- plied in the universities, the research bureaus of government, and the big industrial concerns, that you will find this spirit in many groups of social servants, such as physicians, psychiatrists, crim- inologists, statisticians, sanitarians, charity agents, social workers, factory inspectors, and probation officers. The lawyers and the preachers have scarcely caught it, but in the school of jour- nalism with "Accuracy always" a wall motto and a daily prayer the students are getting it. Whether the conditions of newspaper employ- ment will permit them to act upon it remains to be seen, 170 THE CONSCIENCE OF THE EXPERT The laboratory technique was developed in the interest of inquiry into nature. The spirit grew up as a child of the passion for universal or sci- entific truth. But there is no reason why it should not be also the handmaiden of the quest for practical truth. Taking pains to eliminate error, conscientious observation, scrupulous fidelity in reporting what has been found surely these need not be confined to the priests of pure science ! Why may not the newspaper reporter, the public accountant, the census agent, the wage investigator, the health inspector, the psy- chopathic expert attached to the juvenile court be stirred by the same religion? This laboratory spirit, like the spark of rad- ium incessantly sparkling at the bottom of the spinthariscope, is the moral capital of the expert, the divine spark that keeps him loyal and incor- ruptible. It is this asset which accounts for the rapidly growing willingness to use him in the public service. There is of course no such thing as "government by experts." The mali- cious phrase is but a sneer flung by the scheming self-seekers who find in the relentless veracity of modestly-paid trained investigators a barrier across their path. There is nothing to indicate 171 THE SOCIAL TKEND that experts in social or governmental problems will be as freely chosen for legislature or for public office as are now lawyers and business men. But it is certain that society will more and more make use of the expert, not so much because he has special knowledge and the correct method of acquiring knowledge as because he brings to his task a certain fanaticism for truth which has become infinitely precious now that at so many points powerful selfish agencies are at work to distort or suppress the truth. Who could have foreseen a quarter of a century ago that the young people going out from our univer- sity laboratories and seminaries would show such resistance as they have shown to temptation and intimidation? Something of the high pas- sion of science is in them and keeps them im- mune while they breathe infected air. This conscience of the expert is a new ally in the eternal fight for the public weal. Public spirit, civic passion, loyalty to one's oath of office these are moral forces of long standing. The expert's conscience is none of these, al- though, of course, it is often associated with them. It is not at all the same thing as love of your fellow-men or devotion to the state. It 172 THE CONSCIENCE OF THE EXPERT may appear in persons who are not in the least reformers or uplifters. It consists in a deter- mination, come what may, to find the exact truth about the matter committed to one and to re- port that truth. Whether or not a good use is made of this truth is not the expert's chief con- cern. How he will feel as to that depends on his quality as a man and a citizen. His conscience is at peace once he has communicated the truth it is his business to discover to those who ought to use it. And this is natural, for there is nothing intense that is not narrow. Army officer, jockey, and prize-fighter each will risk anything for his honor because it relates to just one thing. The officer must not run away, the jockey "pull" his horse, or the boxer "throw" the fight. Likewise the honor of the expert con- sists in just one thing, viz., reporting the exact truth. That done he lapses into the man and the citizen. 173 XI TRAINING CITIZENS WITH "SPUNK" FOE SOCIAL SERVICE J \\7lTHIN the last twenty years many of our colleges and universities have caught something of the social view of things. But in the schools naive commercial ideas prevail. Our more promising youth still issue from the class-room into practical life with glowing visions of a personal and private success. They have been told of the wonderful chance to rise and have been stimulated with the assurance that the harder they studied the sooner they would get up in life. "Out in the world," we tell them, "there is the great game, and there are the great prizes. Go in and win." Upon many of us it has not dawned that one aim of our public schools should be to make it impossible for our young folks to accept the game as they find it. i An address before the National Educational Association. 174 THE SOCIAL TREND Into the public mind have filtered during the last twenty years many of the newer ideas about the meaning of industry and trade. But, on the other hand, business men have been drawing together into associations and barkening to the utterances of their big dominating personalities. While the social view has been making headway in the general public, the contrary manner of thinking has been hardening and defining it- self within the business world. Commercialism has become self-conscious and aggressive. It insists that business is an arena in which the strong-hearted and the capable con- tend with one another for the Supremely Desir- able, i. e., money. In this battle, strength has a place and cunning has a place. The "tricks of the trade" are to be tolerated as we tolerate the feints and ruses of the prize-ring. Obviously, the rules of the fight should not be changed while the fight is going on, and, of course, the fight is going on all the time. To tie down the combatants with rules limiting the use of their superior strength, adroitness, or cunning, spoils sport and is unfair to the "better man." In these commercial battles, natural resources, working-men, and child toilers come to be looked 175 THE SOCIAL TREND upon as mere raw material to be moved about, husbanded, or sacrificed, as the exigencies of the fight may demand. As to the consuming public for the sake of which, in sooth, all such enterprise exists it lies vague in the dim back- ground with no interest in the fight save as humble and admiring spectators. The hamper- ing of the contending business men with pure food laws, sanitary requirements, safety regu- lations, anti-combination acts, and finally the meddling of a trade commission, on the alleged behalf of the consuming public, is held to be an intrusion and an impertinence inflicted on "legit- imate business" by the demagogy of "politi- cians." In some of the professions likewise the combat idea is well established. The typical newspa- per man is by no means apologetic as to the sen- sationalism, red ink, fakes, deceitful head-lines, and spiced news, by which he has beaten his rival in circulation. Most of the lawyers are warm defenders of the time-hallowed contentious procedure by which our courts ascertain the right and wrong of disputes, despite the obvious consideration 176 SOCIAL SERVICE that the stronger side ought to win the case, not the side with the stronger champion. 2 Despite the impression social ideas have made on the worker and the producer, com- mercialism has gone on developing within its sphere until it is becoming a religion. Boards of trade and chambers of commerce are its tem- ples. The business interests are its priests. Its holy days are Monday to Saturday. Its promise is prosperity. Its first great commandment is "Let us alone." Its plea is "Suffer little child- ren to come unto me and forbid them not." Its beatitude is "Blessed is the employee who de- mands nothing and expects nothing, for verily he shall not be disappointed." Its favorite par- able is of the man who burned down his barn to get rid of the rats. This whole conception of business as a jungle fight, with its implied admiration of the money- maker as a wonderfully powerful and clever fellow, its thinly veiled contempt for a man who wins only a livelihood, its cool ignoring of the public for whose sake business exists, belongs 177 THE SOCIAL TREND in a class with trial by ordeal and judicial com- bat. Slowly there is rising in the popular mind the idea that businesses and professions are not owned by the men who, for the moment, are en- gaged in them, that they are but instrumental- ities for meeting the wants of the public, not roped rings for the conduct of a prize-fight; that while oceans of legal verbiage are poured forth on the question whether or not this or that business is "affected with a public interest," there is, in fact, no legitimate business or pro- fession that is not affected with a public interest, and should not be required to square itself with the ascertained social welfare. 3 The social service that is supreme is not some bit of charitable work, but the following of one's calling as service, not as exploit. Education for social service is to open the eyes of the young to the social nature of their work in life, to purge their minds of a current false notion that to enter one's life work is to take a hand in a poker-game or put on the gloves for a prize- fight. It is to persuade them that it is wisdom to spend wealth for more welfare, but folly to 178 SOCIAL SERVICE spend welfare even somebody else's welfare for the sake of more wealth, that industries should be run to yield livelihoods rather than profits, that a "living wage" should come before a "living dividend," that commercialized sports, commercialized amusements, commercialized newspapers, and commercialized vice are tumors, not flesh, that "prosperity" in the business man's sense is but one element in social well-being and not always the greatest. The next social service is to fight the anti- social tendency of the combat regime. Educa- tion for social service ought not to damp the primal impulses of moral indignation. Six sev- enths of American teachers are women, and there is danger lest they, with their ladylike ideas of conduct, quench the natural pugnacity of our boys below the point of even chivalrous "spunk." Certainly, a woman-taught generation is show- ing an alarming willingness to take oppression and robbery lying down. The good government movement, I observe, attracts many mild-man- nered gentlemanly citizens quite bluffed by the wardheeler's invitation to the use of the natural weapons. I fear our schools are turning out too many sissies, and that the rough greedy ele- 179 THE SOCIAL TREND ment are taking advantage of it. I for one de- plore the ladylike citizen. Social service im- plies not only a willingness to be spent for the common good, but, as well, a capacity for ire and hard hitting. 4 One way to divert the people from funda- mentals is to get them hurrahing for petty betterments. I sometimes suspect that trivial social service is employed to side-track people from economic reform. The kept newspaper is strong for "swat the-fly," anti-roller-towel, and "clean-up" movements. Likewise, it seems as if little charities for newsboys or tenement babies or hospitals prosper greatly just because they raise no embarrassing questions and leave the public with a soothing illusion that some- thing adequate is being done. It seems to me sometimes as if the springing up of a great variety of petty charities which annoy nobody, antagonize nobody, and produce but trifling results, is to be interpreted as an endeavor to switch the public mind from the big social services involving questions of fares, 180 SOCIAL SERVICE prices, wages, hours, and conditions of work, which antagonize prominent people but which also hold forth the possibility of raising the plane upon which great groups of us live. Not that there is a purpose behind it all; but those who start innocent charities get support and put them through, while those who promote movements that lessen somebody's profits or div- idends or rentals get the cold shoulder and fail. So that the promoters of social service learn the lesson, "Ask for reading-rooms, or fresh air, or teddy-bears; don't ask for less risk or fewer hours, or for more pay or more rights." A democracy, then, will use its schools to coun- teract the anti-social spirit that too often rad- iates from the big masterful figures of commer- cial life. It will rear its youth in the ethics of brotherhood, team-work, and responsibility. In educating for social service, it aims at some- thing greater than lessons in kindness and con- sideration. It presents life from a new angle. It meets current notions of success and reward with more exacting ideals growing out of a new vision of social welfare. It aims to turn out youth ready not only to make their calling a 181 THE SOCIAL TEEND service, but to grapple with the old egoistic carnivorous type and eject him from places of influence where he can be a sinister model and pace-setter for the next generation. 182 XII FOB A LEGAL DISMISSAL WAGE fTlHE old Russian government which was a conspiracy for helping the great capitalists and landowners to hold down and exploit the producing mass, though, to be sure, these mag- nates were often enough sick of the corruption and wickedness of the bureaucracy that safe- guarded their economic interests withheld from Russian working-men the right to strike by requiring them to give their employer a cer- tain number of days' notice before quitting his employ. In order to appear to "tote fair" be- tween labor and capital, the old regime offset this by a law requiring the Russian employer to pay his dismissed employee for two weeks beyond the term of employment. After the March, 1917, revolution an endeavor was made to enforce this law and to give the dis- 183 THE SOCIAL TREND missed workman a right to a month's wages in- stead of a fortnight's wages. In a number of in- dustries the month of leeway was established by joint agreement. In the typographic industry masters and men agreed to a three months' min- imum term of employment. When I was at Baku in September, 1917, the oil firms were conclud- ing an agreement with their 70,000 employees which stipulated, among other things, that on dismissal an employee should receive a month's pay for every year he had been in the service of the firm. The employers made no protest on this point for it simply made general a prac- tice which long had been followed by the best oil companies. In some cases the demands went pretty far. A large American manufacturing concern near Moscow was asked by its men to pay three months' dismissal wages for every year of ser- vice. On the break-up of the office force of a certain American life insurance company with headquarters in Petrograd the men put in a claim for six months' pay all around. I do not know how the dismissal wage idea 184 FOR A LEGAL DISMISSAL WAGE has fared under the new industrial order in Russia, and I have little information as to its actual working during the troublous time in 1917 before the old order was broken up. But I believe that it rests on a sound principle and deserves to be seriously considered as a means of stabilizing industrial relations in this country. In a mature and humane civilization great importance is attached to the economic secur- ity of the individual. As the civil service de- velops, the public employee is protected in var- ious ways against abrupt and undeserved dis- missal. In the universities it is customary to notify the instructor some time in advance of the termination of his employment. The pro- fessor is usually given a year's notice or else his salary is continued for at least half a year after his services are dispensed with. School boards, hospitals, churches, and non-gainful organizations generally feel that it is indecent to cut off a faithful servant without giving him a reasonable time to look around for another place. Even from private employers profes- sional men are usually able to secure an agree- ment not to end relations without a month or more of notice. 185 On the other hand, the practice of American industrial employers is really amazing in its lack of consideration for the worker found super- fluous. No doubt many firms take a pride in building up an'd maintaining a stable labor force and give serious attention to the plight of the man they have to drop. But the average em- ployer seems to give himself not the slightest concern as to what is to become of the worker let out through no fault of his own. I have heard of a firm long aware of the necessity of curtailment waiting till half an hour before the evening whistle blew to post a notice throwing hundreds of men out of a job for an indefinite time. Since Americans are not generally inhumane, the barbarous "firing" policy so characteristic of our industries can be accounted for only as a survival from the time of the small concern when the competent workman let out could walk around the corner and get a job just as good. That such is not the case to-day may be learned simply by interviewing a number of working- men as to what loss of job has meant to them. What tales of tramping the streets looking for work, of rushing hither and thither on a rumor 186 FOR A LEGAL DISMISSAL WAGE that this firm or that is taking on men, of return- ing night after night worn out and discouraged to an anxious family, of the sharp cutting down of household expenses, the begging of credit from butcher and grocer, the borrowing of small sums from one's cronies, the shattering of the hopeful plans for the children! Here are real tragedies, hundreds, nay thousands, of them a year in our large centers, yet the general public goes its way quite unconscious. No wonder among wage-earners the bitter saying is rife, "A working-man is a fool to have a wife and kids." What of the far greater number who are employed continuously but who are always worrying lest they lose their jobs without warn- ing? From conversation with wage-earners one gathers that fear of finding a blue slip in the pay envelope really poisons life for multitudes. So long as many employing concerns move in their present ruthless inscrutable way, not deigning to give their men any advance hint of what will happen to them, there will be resent- ment and unrest in the ranks of labor, no matter how reasonable the hours and pay. 187 THE SOCIAL TREND 3 The tragedy in the situation of the wage-earner in the modern industrial organization has been his insecurity. Step by step we have lessened this. Mechanic's lien laws did away with the risk of losing his pay, postal savings banks with the risk of losing his savings, "safety first" with the risk of preventable industrial accidents, accident compensation with the risk of losing livelihood by injury in his work, pensions with the risk of a destitute old age. The chief in- security which remains is that of losing one's job. How can we lessen that? Bestow upon the workman who has been with the employer long enough to establish the presumption that he is of value say, six months the legal right to receive a fortnight's free wages when he is dismissed without fault on his part. This would give him two weeks to look about and find him- self another job. Even if he has nothing saved up and no credit, it would be a month or more before his family came into acute distress. There are few competent men who cannot find a job in a month unless times are hard, and during hard times their recourse will be an alto- 188 FOR A LEGAL DISMISSAL WAGE gether different provision, namely, unemploy- ment insurance. Still more important, how- ever, is the consideration that the man who has made good on the job and continues to make good would be relieved of the haunting fear of off-hand dismissal. It will not pay his employer to "fire" him for frivolous reasons, and if busi- ness is slack the men let out will be men recently taken on, who have not yet established the right to the dismissal wage. The dismissal wage should not be looked up- on as something held back out of wages which a man will never get unless he is "fired." It should be regarded In the light of the "compen- sation for disturbance" which some countries allow the evicted tenant who has farmed the land well. Of course the man who "fires himself" by persistent negligence or misconduct should get no dismissal wage, and since an unscrupulous employer might charge fault when there is none, there will have to be local boards to hear com- plaints on this score. The employee who quits of his own free will to take a better job or do something else has no claim. But since such an employee might 189 THE SOCIAL TKEND "soldier" or grow careless just in order to get himself "fired," the employer must have the right to escape paying him a dismissal wage by prov- ing to the local board that he is "soldiering." As a matter of fact no workman could afford to get the reputation among employers of being that kind of a man. Until we have accident, sickness, and old age insurance, incompetency arising from accident, sickness, or old age would not, of course, release the employer from the obligation to pay a dis- missal wage. The dismissal wage might be combined with a system of unemployment in- surance by providing that the unemployment allowance should not begin until the end of the term for which free wages are paid. The legal dismissal wage should not become involved with strikes and lockouts. Let the rule be that the striker has not relinquished his job any more than the man who has been absent on account of sickness. When the man resumes his job whether on his terms or on the employer's he has whatever rights he had when he struck. Only in case he applies for his job and is refused is he entitled to a dismissal wage. If he never applies, he gets nothing. 190 FOR A LEGAL DISMISSAL WAGE Let the lockout be looked upon as if it were a temporary stoppage owing to a fire or a dearth of fuel or raw material. When the men are taken on again all is as before. If they stay away they get nothing. If they are refused their old jobs they get the dismissal wage. If the employer goes bankrupt his men's dis- missal wages constitute precisely the same kind of claim on his assets as their back wages. Since an employer could avoid dismissing a man by cutting his wages to so low a point that the man would quit of his own accord, the cut- ting of a competent workman's pay below the "going" wage for the time and place should be construed as dismissal. Likewise when an employee without fault is reduced to a lower position in the works, or is shifted permanently to harder or more onerous work, the workman should have the option of staying on or claim- ing dismissal pay and leaving. What of "lay-off" when, on account of slack business, the men dismissed are not replaced? Instead of dismissing men, let the employer cut down hours uniformly in the shop, and not until he cuts them below half-time shall the men have the option of staying or of taking their dismissal 191 THE SOCIAL TREND wage -and leaving. When a man is laid off be- cause there is not enough work to keep him busy but the job is supposed to be held open to him, let the dismissal wage payment be strung out through six weeks. If the employer has him back sooner he saves himself something. A board to decide all such questions should be created in each industrial community. One member should represent employees, another employers, and the third should be named by the State industrial commission. How would the legal dismissal wage affect employers? On all hands it is agreed that the amount of labor turnover in American industries is scandalous. I know of an industry employ- ing 28,000 men which not long ago hired and "fired" at least that many men a year. Fifty- seven Detroit plants in 1918 took on and let out two and a half times as many men as they carried on the pay-roll. Few employers have any conception of what they lose by such a turn- over. The inquiries of M. W. Alexander show that the hiring of 22,031 unneeded employees in twelve factories involved an economic waste of a million dollars, that is, 3^ per cent, of the total wage bill. 192 FOR A LEGAL DISMISSAL WAGE The obligation to pay a dismissal wage would give such employers a motive to make their practice conform to that of those thoughtful and humane employers who have brought their annual turnover in some cases down to 30 per cent, with profit to themselves and contentment to their employees. They would find it paid to give attention to human engineering, to install employment managers who would investigate why an employee is doing badly and would find a way to remove the cause. Before letting a man go with a fortnight's free wages, they would try him out in different positions or depart- ments, in the hope of finding the right place for him, or would even provide him with the in- struction which would enable him to make good on the job. Just as the burden of accident compensation sinks to the minimum in the case of the employer who takes the most pains and goes to the most expense to eliminate accidents from his mill, so the burden of a legal dismissal wage will be least on the employer who picks his men most carefully, tries them out most speedily, and gives the most care to building up a permanent labor force. By providing the worker with an added 193 THE SOCIAL TEEND inducement to keep a good job and the employer with an added inducement to keep a good man, it would tend to stabilize American industry and favor the survival of the types of employer and worker society ought most to encourage. 194 XIII FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RIGHT 1 T N our time, the eaae and abundance of com- munication have profoundly affected the general mind. The bulk of the people no longer move in the ruts worn by their ancestors. Mere tradition grows steadily weaker and rules fewer subjects. Hoary beliefs disintegrate under our very eyes. Nursery teachings, childhood impres- sions, imbibed prejudices, are no longer the principal sources of private opinion. More than ever before people make up their minds accord- ing to contemporary knowledge, impressions, or ideals. The number mentally supple enough to change their position on fundamentals after the fortieth year, after even the fiftieth year, rapidly grows. In a word, the minds of people seem to be passing from a crystalline state to a plastic state. 195 THE SOCIAL TKEND I know of far-away shut-in valleys in which the principal topics to talk over during the long Sunday visits of relatives are: who has become engaged, how the cattle are doing, and how the servants are behaving. For thousands of years personal and neighborhood affairs have formed the staple of conversation. Choked with this weed of gossip, the channels of intercourse per- mitted little of value to flow from mind to mind. With the growth of general interest in large and significant events these channels have cleared themselves as if by magic. The secret of the seemingly unlimited elasticity of public atten- tion, which enables it continually to observe and react to a larger number of remote happenings, is its neglect of the petty, private matters that formerly engrossed it. A century ago with references to matters of deep public import the people were like a jury with one or two members paying attention, the rest asleep, musing, or gossiping. Now they are like a jury with half or two thirds of the members alert and attentive to the proceedings of the court-room. As more and more this jury 196 FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION sits up and takes notice, it becomes a better tri- bunal to appeal to. Even the friends of victims of injustice as remote as incarcerated Russian progressives or the terrorized rubber-gatherers of the Congo or the Putumayo deem it worth while to reach and inform the American public. How much more easily will the wrongs of any maltreated group of our fellow-citizens be pressed upon its attention! The supplicant strives nowadays to gain the ear of the public as of old he sought to catch the eye of the Roman proconsul borne through the street in his open litter. To-day the public pays heed to outcries that formerly fell on deaf ears. By thrusting out much gossip and trashy fiction it has made room in its mind for the dramas of social life. So many readers have found truth movingly pre- sented more enthralling than the yarns spun by the story-tellers, that the newspaper, magazine, or 'book that readably recounts some tale, in- credible yet true, of contemporary oppression, that throws a veracious search-light into some sepulcher of corruption, whited with pious legal phrases or sanctimonious pretexts, is likely to gain both glory and money. The muck-rakers, 197 THE SOCIAL TEEND despite the sensationalists and liars-for-profit that follow in their wake, deserve the credit of having roused a great many dozing jurors. Two or three decades ago most of the sym- pathy of the public with the victims of wrong exhaled into thin air without being of the least direct service to them. Step by step, however, instruments have been fashioned by which an aroused public may make itself felt in a very practical way in the issue raised in a convict- camp, a mill-center, a coal-field, or a copper- district. The number of probes private, insti- tutional, State, and national which are avail- able for thrusting into an ulcerous-looking spot is greater every year. The resentment of the local powers and their on-hangers at this damaging interference from outside is very naive. Said a lawyer at Lawrence to Mr. John Graham Brooks: "We are trying up here to mind our own business. I would n't mind a bit if the rest of the world did the same." "He thought a vigorous purge that should clean his city from the nausea of sociologists would be a good begin- ning." But the State of Massachusetts came into the Lawrence situation, then the Federal Govern- ment. The business element in San Diego 198 FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION imagined it could harry I. W. W. disturbers as it pleased. "But damnation !" said one of them to Mr. Brooks, "it 's nobody's business outside this town." But the newspapers looked in, then the representative of the governor, lastly the attorney-general. Then, too, the collective mind has got itself hands as well as eyes. Above the shame and damage of such revelations local powers fear various agencies which an indignant public may employ to restrain or punish unscrupulous might. Besides remedial legislation they dread what may happen from the intervention of a State or Federal prosecutor, a public utilities commission, an industrial commission, a tenement-house commission, or a State board of health. Hence the felt need of smothering the first mutterings of discontent, of throttling those initial utter- ances which may attract the notice of the big justice-loving public and bring into the delicate local situation all manner of alien and unman- ageable factors. 3 Trade-unions and protective labor laws have brought about great improvement in the condi- 199 THE SOCIAL TREND tions of many groups of workers, but there is no justification yet for slipping into a mood of complacency. Industrial accidents have been dealt with effectively in some States, but no method has been worked out by law for dealing with preventable industrial diseases. The hours of women workers have been standardized in a few States during the last few years, but legis- lation has done little to correct the evil of an excessive workingday for men. Trade-unions have secured no small measure of independence and security for the skilled, but the unskilled and especially the casual laborers have remained unorganized. The capitalistic method of pro- duction continually extends its sway and brings under its influence new groups of workers. The organization of capital has outrun even the organization of labor. In many fields the employer has so gained in power that the employees find themselves under a quiet, irre- sistible hydraulic press crushing down their manhood, their self-respect, and their hope of a larger reward out of their larger product. Now, if ever, labor needs every weapon which its forefathers gained. Now is the worst pos- sible time to tolerate the abridgment of any 200 FBEEDOM OF COMMUNICATION constitutional guaranty won for men by the conflicts and the sacrifices of the past. And yet, during the hist dozen years, the tales of the sup- pression of free assemblage, free speech, and free press by local authorities or by the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. These rights are not trampled upon, as in the days of George III, by an arbitrary government determined to have its way in defiance of the popular will. They are attacked at the insti- gation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communication but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power. So it is coming about that the weakest and worst-treated groups of wage-earners, the factory women, the mill operatives, the casual or seasonal laborers, the miners in isolated company-owned camps, the migatory unskilled, and the unemployed, who least of all can afford to lose any lever by which they may raise themselves, are having ancient rights wrested out of their hands under the pretext that their exercise relates, not to the lawful tactics of organizing and presenting demands backed by the threat of a strike, but 201 THE SOCIAL TKEND to rebellion against lawful authority and to the destruction of property. It is inexpressibly shocking that the rights of free communication established so long ago at such cost of patriot blood, time-tested rights which in thousands of instances have vindicated their value for moral and social progress, ac- cepted rights which in the minds of disinterested men are as settled as any principle of human conduct can be, should with increasing fre- quency be flouted by strong employers and set at naught by local authorities. Are the agitators of to-day more artful or inflammatory than those of other times? Are wage-earners more ignor- ant, less self-controlled, less able to distinguish right from wrong or truth from error? Is there some unrepresented section of the people bent upon subverting our form of government? Is there a convinced class working resolutely and in concert to bring about a state of anarchy? No, there is no such crisis. If freedom of com- munication could be established in a time when most men were unable to read and write, were ignorant of the responsibilities of citizenship 202 FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION and inexperienced in discounting the spoken or written word, how rock-fast ought it to be to- day, when virtually the entire population reads, and the traditions of self-restraint, of the duty upon the people of obeying the law they them- selves have made, and of the righting of wrongs by orderly procedure have become deeply rooted in the overwhelming majority of the population ! No, it is not at all the approaching shadow of anarchy that has caused Detroit, Little Falls, Lawrence, Paterson, Spokane, Seattle, San Diego, Butte, Missoula, Paint Creek, Cabin Creek, Cripple Creek, Las Animas County, and a number of other towns and districts at various times within recent years to turn recreant to American principles. The constitutional rights of free communication have been denied to socially insignificant persons, sometimes in order to prevent the exposure of local political cor- ruption and crime, but usually in order to spare certain employers the risks of a successful strike or the snaffle collective bargaining imposes upon their arbitrary .will. Could any apostasy to principle be more contemptible than depriving the weak of the chief weapon by which they may achieve commpn economic action? Yet 203 THE SOCIAL TREND nothing less sordid than this seems to lie .behind the multiplying interferences with free assem- blage, free discussion, and liberty of the press. To judge from the lavish use of the club and the cell, the rantings of kept newspapers, and the bombardment from the big howitzers of social defense, one might suppose that nothing less is at stake than monogamic marriage, the life of civil officials, and the institution of private property. So great a pother are the profits from long hours, low wages, false measurement, ar- bitrary fines, speeded labor, company stores, and the evasion of the law's requirements of safety and sanitation able to raise when menaced by the advent of an intrepid agitator with sugges- tions of organization and strike. A mortifying anti-climax must it be to the good citizen who has been drawn into sanctioning high-handed meas- ures against "disturbers" to find later under- neath the "law-and-order" movement nothing but the pecuniary alarm of a handful of greedy and arrogant local magnates, who by the unholy use of their financial power have been able to force the city authorities, the police-courts, the business men, the pulpits, and the newspapers to fight their battles ! 204 FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION What we are witnessing in recent years is not at all an anarchistic movement among wage-earn- ers but the struggle of the worst-paid or worst- treated laborers to improve their position and exact the treatment due to men. Does any can- did student of society doubt that the grievances of the sections of labor which are being organized by the I. W. W. are quite as real and serious as the grievances of which in times past the rail- road men, the miners, the longshoremen, the printers, the telegraphers, the iron-molders, the structural iron-workers, and many other groups of skilled working-men complained? These past movements for the betterment of conditions were certainly accompanied by strong emotion, bitter- ness, class animosity, irresponsible leadership, Utopian proposals, and lurid rhetoric, which lent color to the capitalists' cry that law and order were in danger. There was always enough wild language and violence by individuals to allow such officials, courts, politicians, newspapers, pulpits, and colleges as were subservient to the employing class and would fight the labor move- ment at its bidding to pose as the saviors of so- ciety against crime and spoliation. I remember how in 1884 the Knights of 205 THE SOCIAL TEEND Labor leader I called on carefully pulled down the blinds before he would talk. And yet many of the reforms his organization sought restric- tion of child labor, the establishment of bureaus of labor statistics, postal savings banks, inheri- tance taxes, the use of arbitration in labor dis- putes, the gradual introduction of the eight-hour day have already been, or are being, realized, and few disinterested citizens would have it otherwise. Does not the distance we have come since then in recognizing and removing remediable hardships of labor suggest that we may have a considerable stretch of travel ahead of us in the same general direction? We look back upon the wrongs and needless sufferings of a bygone generation of labor and regret that the scales did not sooner fall from our eyes. We wish that the labor of 1884 had not been denied the protection which we now acknowledge as the right of labor. But a generation hence, what rights will the ill-paid, floating, seasonal, or unskilled laborers enjoy with the full ap- proval of all the better elements of the then society, which to-day are being denied them, while their organizations, demonstrations, pa- 206 FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION rades, agitations, and strikes are being de- nounced as anarchistic and criminal? If in- deed the public has nothing to learn when these sections of labor gain the lime-light and a voice, if the public knows all about the frauds and ex- tortions of private employment agencies, the sell- ing of jobs by foremen, the conditions in con- struction camps, the violation of labor laws by employers, the oppressive fines for alleged bad work, the employer system of espionage, the cut- ting of the piece price, etc., then the mass-meet- ings, parades, and demonstrations of labor may be prohibited without prejudice to their cause. So likewise if all the laborers who suffer from the same oppression are perfectly alive to their wrongs and are acting in perfect concert to ob- tain redress, then, perhaps, it will make no dif- ference to them if the government arrests their speakers, confiscates their literature, jails their editors, and forbids their gatherings. To be sure, freedom of communication opens a way for voicing false and pernicious the- ories as well as for just complaints and sal- utary propaganda. To facilitate the circula- 207 THE SOCIAL TBEND tion of true and valuable doctrines while at the same time checking the promulgation of fan- tastic or baleful ideas would be good social policy if only there were a sure touchstone to tell the gold from the lead. But since to entrust discrimination among ideas to any man or board subjects communication to arbitrary judgment, so that presently it ceases to be free even for truth in case the truth happens to be distasteful, there is nothing left but to tolerate the propaganda of false doctrines as the inescap- able price to be paid for the boon of liberty. Although the preaching of specious folly puts truth and wisdom on the perpetual qui vive, it would be strange indeed if they should shrink from the test of free discussion. "Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth," says Milton, "so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licencing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength." When one considers the enormous artillery of talent, learning, ingenuity, and eloquence the estab- lished order is able to employ in its defense, when one reflects that wealth, social influence, the school, the pulpit, the press, the professions, officials, public men, and the persons of light 208 FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION and leading in the community can ordinarily be counted on to throw their full weight against a propaganda that is really fanatical and sub- versive, one wonders why society should be rocked to its base by the advent in a mill popu- lation of a few labor agitators or I. W. W. organ- izers. Is it not strange that, after a century of free communication during which the lit- eracy, intelligence, discrimination, and self-con- trol of the plain people have advanced with giant strides, the dominant class in mining and in- dustrial centers should feel called upon to shep- herd their wage-earning fellow-citizens and by the use of the ban protect their weak and callow minds against the appeals of agitators? Let us not sound a retreat on the ground that new and shattering ideas are seeking utterance. The proportion of our fellow-citizens who respect property and law on solid rational grounds and are proof against incendiary appeal is now far larger than in times past. Individuals may be thrown, off their base by crack-brained notions, but no body of wage- earners among us has by oratory alone been brought into an inflamed and seditious state of mind. Always a working-class explosion has 209 THE SOCIAL TREND been preceded by long mistreatment and oppres- sion. I know no instance in which workers have generally accepted the heresy that government is necessarily an engine of the capitalist class, until they have seen the laws enacted to protect them violated with impunity, while their own spokes- men and leaders met with outrage from the police and repression by the lower courts. Nor does the doctrine of "no agreements" or the practice of sabotage take root among wage-earners until they have long smarted under the sense of griev- ances without hearing or remedy. Counsels of desperation rarely elicit response from men aware of enjoying protection and benefit from the laws. It is not the wage-earner, as such, but the wage-earner that is intimidated and abused, who is aroused by bitter and fiery appeals. What is the magic by which a young stranger on a soap-box rouses mill operatives to the desperate resolve to strike and starve when all the time the bosses, the business men, the pol- iticans, the editors, the teachers, and the preach- ers have plied them with a contrary set of ideas? Is it not that the latter have stood by uncar- ing while their fellow-citizens were treated as something less than men? Had the local scribes 210 FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION and Pharisees but lifted up protesting voices, their counsels in the hour of crisis would not have fallen on deaf ears. Repression of agitation tends to rally all the conservative, lawabiding working-men to the defense of those of their class who seem op- pressed. On the other hand, only good results from a scrupulous regard for the rights of the fractious element coupled with the enlistment of the sober-minded wagS-earners in efforts to solve the social problems affecting themselves. Let me quote from a private letter from an au- thority on the labor movement on the Pacific coast: Last winter San Francisco was burdened with an ex- tremely trying group of unemployed. They camped near the heart of the city and suffered from- the stimulating oratory of the I. W. W.'s at all hours of the day and night. The Labor Council was called up- on to assist in solving the city's problem. The members of its committee soon learned something of the diffi- culties that surround the giving of relief. As a result the labor papers and meetings were the most drastic in their condemnation of "grafters" and "crazy" oratory. Complete liberty of speech and assembly, combined with a demand that the more conservative wage-earners assist in solving the problem, prevented 211 THE SOCIAL TREND what might have been an extremely serious situation. Professor Eaves goes on to say: The history of the sailors' union in San Francisco affords an instructive illustration of the way in which working-men outgrow radical leadership. Their or- ganization was effected under the influence of the Internationalists. A glance at the document published in the Appendix of Powderly's book will show that Burdette Haskell, an early leader of the union, held, views quite like those of the most radical of present I. W. W.'s. Probably this sort of fiery doctrine was needed to arouse the sailors to faith in their powers to better their conditions, but after a few years, when the organization settled down to the sober business of managing its affairs in an effective way, such hard- headed, sensible, law-abiding citizens as Furuseth, Macarthur, and Scharrenberg were put in charge. The tactics then for controlling subversive ideas is not the application of the gag but the redress of real grievances. There is no need of the hurried resort to high-handed tyrannical measures. Our social order is not so weak as its more vociferous champions imagine. Our institutions are not, like the walls of Jericho, to be leveled by a blast upon the trumpet. What is going on under our eyes is not the break-up of 212 wociety but the painful struggle upward of sec- tions of the laboring class which have been in the most depressed and helpless condition. In their struggle with the powerful their initial weapons are the unhindered disclosure of their wrongs and free discussion of plans for con- certed action. For organized society to allow these weapons to be wrenched out of their hands would be connivance in one of the greatest in- iquities that could be committed. 213 xrv WAR AS DETERMINER TT'AKL MAKX'S doctrine of economic deter- * minlsm, according to which it is chiefly changes in the technique of production which al- ter the course of society, needs to be rounded out with a doctrine of martial determinism which shall show how much the relations of classes, so- cieties, peoples, races, and cultures have been in- fluenced by the development of the technique of war. War has always been a master force. A phil- osophy of history becomes a vain dream in view of the extent to which the current of history has been deflected by small differences at criti- cal moments. Greek fire, used first against the Saracens in the seventh century, probably pre- served the Byzantine Empire for several cen- turies against the Eastern pressure and gave 214 WAR AS DETERMINER Europe a chance to become strong. It was the armor of the crusaders that enabled them to roll back the Saracens and maintain for two hundred years a Latin kingdom in Syria. Only the walls of Constantinople and Attila's ignor- ance of the art of siege spared the city from being laid waste by the Huns. The native kingdoms of Mexico and South America were overthrown and the Indians en- slaved by a handful of Spaniards who, however, had the enormous advantage of possessing horses, armor, and firearms. But for gunpow- der, the whites of this country, instead of sweep- ing in a single century from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, might by now have outposts as far west as the Father of Waters. If, in the thir- teenth century, the Slavs could have met the Mongols with guns, they would not have fallen under the hideous despotism which kept them far behind the other peoples of Europe in devel- opment. As one to-day reconnoiters the Great Wall of China, that serpent in stone clambering boldly up the steepest slopes, creeping along the sheer precipices, and following ever the comb of the mountains in order that the ground may slope 215 THE SOCIAL TREND from it both ways, one realizes what a perfect checkmate it must have given to the raiding no- mads of Mongolia. Thanks to seventeen hun- dred miles of such wall, the Chinese went ahead undisturbed until, by the eighth century, they possessed undoubtedly the most advanced civil- ization in the world. Thus the destiny of societies and civilizations has turned on the issue of battle, and this has often been determined by the technique of fight- ing. Warfare, in fact, undergoes an evolution due, not to changes in the ethics and psyehol- logy of the combatants, but to invention. Any new weapon or tactics which proves effective is sure of early adoption. The dropping of the old but inferior is much prompter in the military field than in the industrial field, for, in a mat- ter of life and death, no people is so foolish as to follow blindly the rut of the past. Be it never so custom-bound, a race will discard its old-time weapons and tactics of fighting once it has suffered from new and more deadly weapons and tactics. Now, within our own time the evolution of war- fare has been greatly accelerated by the inven- 216 WAR AS DETERMINER tors, and the trend of this evolution is fateful for the group development of mankind. For one thing the cumulative effect of modern martial inventions has been to push warfare constantly in the direction of capitalism. The amount of lethal capital the average soldier works with lias greatly increased while the cost of the battle- ship has grown out of all proportion to the number required to man it. The overwhelm- ing growth of the machinery factor has for- ever laid the affrighting specter of the subju- gation of the civilized by brave and fecund bar- barians such as broke through the defense of the Roman Empire. The easy destruction of the dervishes by machine-guns at the battle of Om- durman settled it that henceforth the barbar- ian is out of the running save as the instrument of an advanced people. A second consequence of war becoming cap- italistic is that only the wealthy or highly in- dustrial uatians can wage war with any prospect of success. The money cost of fighting having grown much faster than the blood cost, that bel- ligerent is doomed to defeat which has not either great resources and credit for buying war ma- 217 terials or else an abundance of technical knowl- edge and industrial skill to divert to their manu- facture. A third consequence is the greater time nec- essary for fabricating an efficient fighting ma- chine. Big guns, turrets, emplacements, disap- pearing gun-carriages, and battle-ships cannot be improvised, but must be begun months be- fore they can be used. The soldier, too, is not to be made in a day, but is becoming like a skilled artisan who must be trained for a considerable time. The result is that less and less dares a nation to consider its potential defensive re- sources as equivalent to available resources. Eeal security calls for preparedness, and prepar- edness becomes steadily more costly as warfare grows more capitalistic. The advance of invention is, moreover, so rapid that war capital soon comes to be out of date. An improved rifle is adopted, and at once mil- lions of rifles of the old pattern become junk. A nation lays out some scores of millions in equip- ping its army with thousands of field-guns and suddenly some inventor of a gun of longer range or quicker fire obliges it to scrap them all. The interval between the proud launching of an iron- 218 WAR AS DETERMINER clad and its last service as target for the guns of a younger vessel continually shortens. The consequence is that the burden of armed peace approximates that of war and the nations wel- come war as possibly opening a door of escape from the crushing weight of incessant rearma- ment. 2 Another way in which martial invention bends the stream of social history is by altering the rel- ative strength of attack and defense. Walls, moats, drawbridges, casemates, mines, disappear- ing gun-carriages, armor-plate, steel turrets, abattis, wire entanglements, anti-aircraft guns, and strategic railways are landmarks in the de- velopment of defense. Battering-rams, mortars, siege-guns, armor-piercing projectiles, asphyx- iating gas, hand-grenades, bomb-dropping air- craft, torpedoes, and submarines have told par- ticularly on the side of attack. The distinction between attack and defense signifies most in land fighting. In sea fighting the distinction is less important and in air fighting it disappears altogether, the reason being that no uniform and fluid medium can be made to furnish either shel- 219 THE SOCIAL TREND ter to the defenders or obstacles to the assailants. Now, the relation between the defense and the attack of a given terrain is an imperious deter- miner of social destiny. When defense has little advantage over attack, numbers count, conquest is easy, the little peoples cower before the big peoples, empires become more formidable the bigger they grow, and the nations are in unstable equilibrium. When, on the other hand, smoke- less powder, high-power firearms, machine-guns, steel turrets, and land mines make the defense many times stronger than the attack, a state that is strong in defense finds itself weak in invading the territory of another. Small peoples with powerful neighbors are able to maintain their independence. The aggressive empire is held by some handful of brave mountaineers and the nations tend to remain each in its own place. Those who believe that true civilization is spread by peaceful radiation rather than by force of arms will rejoice when the developing technique of warfare gives a great advantage to defense and will grieve when it allows attack to overtake defense. When the new forty-two centi- meter howitzers at a stroke wiped out most of the military value of the world's forts, the fu- 220 ture of the little nations and the peace-loving peoples looked black indeed. The unexpected development of the art of trench resistance has, however, restored them some measure of security. The military failure of the Zeppelins is another ray of hope in the gloom. Of course, no one would wish defense to be so strong as to guarantee the success of every revolt and hence make large states impossible. The battering-ram was the answer to the mud walls of Babylonian towns, but to the thick stone walls of the dark ages there was no answer until gunpowder made it possible to mine them or breach them with cannon-balls. When count or baron or bishop could flout the authority of any king not strong enough to beleaguer him and starve him into submission, the state be- came too decentralized to fulfil its civilizing mission, and private war was the order of the day. It was gunpowder that enabled law to quell the near-anarchy of the feudal regime. To-day, however, national freedom and the independent evolution of the peoples are bound up with the art of war taking such a course of development as shall make aggression costly and dangerous. 221 THE SOCIAL TKEND 3 There is no assurance that war and the dread of war will be less potent in deflecting and de- termining the life of society than they have been. Indeed, it is possible that the hand of Mars will be heavier upon us in the future. The improve- ment of communication lowers those natural barriers and wipes out those distances which formerly gave the nations a sense of security. Moreover, far from arriving at settled spheres and final relations between the nations, we find ourselves in a tumultuously dynamic epoch which will certainly outlast this century. There is population pressure, which tends to control the policy of Japan, Russia, and Ger- many, and will eventually shape the policy of China. The diffusion over the globe of the arts of saving life, long before the masses have ab- andoned blind multiplication, threatens to sub- ject the comfortable peoples to violent endeavors at reajustment on the part of the teeming peo- ples. If surplus population does not migrate, it must at least find a vent abroad for its prod- ucts. Hence, the population pressure reflects itself in a struggle among the nations for colonies 222 WAR AS DETERMINER and dependencies to serve as markets. Since the secretion of capital goes on at an accelerated pace, there is an eager quest for opportunities out over the globe to invest capital in the profit- able exploitation of natural resources. The appeal of capitalistic syndicates to their national government to find them such opportunities, to protect them in the resulting property rights, and to checkmate their rivals makes states aggressive and unsettles friendly international relations. We have no warrant for expecting soon an economic equilibrium among the different regions of the globe. Asia and Africa have been making progress, but Europe and North America have been forging ahead still faster. The interval between the advanced countries and the back- ward countries determines the eagerness of the former to act economically upon the latter, and there is no prospect that this interval will lessen in our time. And it is precisely the scramble of the advanced nations to take part in the control, settlement, and exploitation of the rest of the world which constitutes the chief trouble-breeder among them. 223 4 How often we hear said : "This is to be the last war!" These outbursts of destructive human energy so shock the growing humane feeling and are so alien to the habits of thought fostered by industrialism that civilized man refuses to recognize their inevitableness. Yet, if anything may be safely predicted, it is that wars as bad as this will occur in the future unless a Great Union be formed to canalize international rivalries as the American Union has canalized in.tersta.te rivalries. No doubt this generation will not tolerate another such orgy of destruction. Through our time war will be known for what it is. But when the cripples, widows, and orphans are gone, when invention and the exploitation of fresh natural resources have lightened the war debts and have created a new basis for national borrowing, when mothers yet unborn have reared millions of youths to be bred in a febrile nation- alism and inflamed with a machine-made patri- otism, then the dynasts, the Junkers, the traders, and the drill-masters will prepare the materials for another explosion on perhaps a still vaster scale. 224 WAR AS DETERMINER Incredible? But where is the force that will be able to prevent it? May we look to religion for any clearer or more authoritative utterances as to the wickedness of bloodshed? Is there the slightest prospect that the peace movement will control the opinion-forming agencies and the prestige commanded by highly organized govern- ments reaching out for lands, markets, and dependencies in the less developed portions of the world? Nor will the clearest demonstration of the economic waste of war and armament have more effect upon commercial minds than it has had in the past. The aggressive nation that forces militarism upon its unwilling neighbors always dreams of recouping itself by conquests and indemnities. The growing aversion to wanton aggression, instead of hampering the pro- vocative foreign policy of statesmen, simply obliges them to resort to a more elaborate hypocrisy. The extent to which the people may be deluded with the idea they are dying in a war of defense seems limitless. In the absence of visible menace or actual aggression nothing but state-worship will induce the common people to face the burdens and horrors of war. How, then, if among the masses 225 THE SOCIAL TREND there spread a resentment at the ghastly sac- rifices they are called upon to make for this idol? Is there any hope of a turning of popular opinion to the wholesome internationalism that cap- tivated thinkers of half a century ago? The fact is, nationalism to-day has a far stronger appeal than it had in the days of Cobden and Bright. The evils of unregulated machine industry and private capitalism have opened to the state a new sphere of service and have led the bulk of the people to look to it, to trust it, and to love it for the protection it affords. The popularity the state gains by its salutary inter- vention in the industrial and social field it has very cleverly turned to account in winning sup- port for its aggressive policies. Thus much of what is saved by its beneficent activities is poured into the insatiable maw of armament and war. The paternal state saves the working-man from unguarded machinery, industrial poisons, and a pauper old age, only to oblige him to perish miserably in battle as a state slave. Under its present guidance the modern state has proved to be something the working people can neither live without nor, alas, live with. 226 WAR AS DETERMINER 5 But suppose democracy spreads. What if the working class, instead of remaining a mere beneficiary of state action, should succeed in wresting control of the state from the land-own- ing aristocracy, the capitalists, and the traders? What if foreign policies were determined by working-class leaders or by statesmen dependent upon working-class support? A political revolution in this sense would solve our problem only in case it were general. Other- wise peace-loving democracies might be forced into the hated path of armament and war by the pace-making of a single powerful militarist au- tocracy. Furthermore, democracies may be reckoned as anti-militarist only- in case they limit their numbers. The sense of pressure, which will soon appear in a blindly multiplying people, can be successfully appealed to by the jingoist demagogue who argues for breaking by force or the threat of force into the preserves of some less crowded people. With mystic clerics, a priori moralists, sentimentalists, militarists, aristocrats, and monarchs at one in teaching the people that it is a deadly sin to restrict the size of the family, population pressure seems likely 227 THE SOCIAL TREND to resume its ancient baleful r61e of gadfly. No doubt much may be done to drag foreign policy out of its dark corner, but it is vain to dream of putting a brake on the chariot of Mars by relegating to the people the determination of foreign policy. The citizens at large lack the basis of a reasoned judgment on such matters; so that their vote could record nothing but their comparative confidence in the champions of ri- val policies. Idle likewise is it to demand that, before a nation be committed, the question of peace or war shall be decided by a popular ref- erendum. Aside from the fact that, owing to the technique of warfare, the delaying nation may put itself at a grave disadvantage, there is the difficulty that the people are ignorant of the interests involved. Much as the people may hate war, they hold some things as worse than war. As to what is really at stake in a dispute with another country they have no means of judging save what their leaders tell them; so that their vote amounts to nothing more than an expression of confidence or doubt respecting the statesmen at the helm. Some hope much from the admission of women to the electorate, arguing that they are free 228 WAR AS DETERMINER from the innate pugnacity of males and that those who bring life into existence will instinc- tively recoil from the policies which lead to its wholesale destruction. It is certain that if women obeyed the promptings of their own na- tures their participation in government would strengthen the party of- concession and com- promise. But there is little indication that en- franchised women are going to register in poli- tics their native intuitions and reactions. There must come first an intellectual emancipation of women which has little more than begun. The readiness of most women to believe what men tell them as to matters remote from their ken and their hysterical, uncritical response to the appeals of militarists wearing the mask of patriotism forbid us to. expect much from their votes. 6 It appears, then, that the nations taken sep- arately have no power to extricate themselves from the vortex into which they are being sucked. As the horizon darkens, a people so far from the center of strife as the Americans find them- selves obliged to abandon the traditions of a 229 THE SOCIAL TEEND century and to begin casting their sons and their substance into the lap of the war god. Not only will such sacrifices tend to grow with time but they will be made use of by militarists to spur jaded peoples across the sea into mak- ing still greater sacrifices for "defense and se- curity." It is a great pity that the means provided for defense admit usually of being employed as Well for aggression, and therefore may inspire suspicion, fear, and counter-arming in other nations. If there were a kind of cannon which would go off only when on home ground, or a type of military training which would be use- less away from the national soil, the govern- ment adopting them would be no more minatory than if it girdled the country with cement-lined trenches. The submarine torpedo-boat did at first present itself as peculiarly a weapon of protection. But the rapid development of a sea-going submarine able to create havoc at a long distance from its home base has converted it into an offensive arm of great deadliness. The devising of the superdreadnaught carrying guns of a weight and caliber which had been supposed to be possible only in coast-defense guns has 230 WAR AS DETERMINER wiped out another distinction between the in- instruments of defense and those of attack. The civilized peoples find themselves, there- fore, confronting this situation : l 1. The treaties between the great powers guaranteeing the security of the little peoples have become "mere scraps of paper." 2. "Warfare has become a capitalistic enter- prise and fighting a skilled occupation, so that, more and more, success in war hinges on elabor- ate preparation. 3. The armament and training a militarist government desires in support of aggression may be secured of its people under the pretext that they are necessary for national safety. 4. The prudent preparations a peace-loving people makes for defense may be construed by other peoples as designed for aggression. 5. Armament and trail ing acquired for de- fense admit of being employed in aggression in case the nation changes its attitude toward inter- national law and morality. 6. The nation that outarms the others runs no risk in so doing and may be rewarded for its preparedness by success in war. i Written at the close of 1915. 231 THE SOCIAL TKEND 7. The nation that is first to disarm or that lags behind the rest in preparation for war runs the risk of being thwarted or beaten. 8. From the foregoing it follows that the war- loving nations have the power to force the peace- loving nations into the gloomy path of armament or war, whereas the peace-loving nations have no power to force the war-loving nations into the sunny path of peace. The men of Mars set the pace for the rest of the world. A cool, relentless analysis of the situation dis- closes, then, little ground for hopeful anticipa- tion. On the contrary, the prospect is one of the blackest that humanity has ever faced: a spread over the world of the policy of competi- tive armament; an ever larger share of produc- tion shunted into the bottomless pit of prepared- ness; a more general sacrifice of the flowering years of male life to military training ; a gradual starvation of such state services as education, research, public recreation, and social ameli- ortion all this, punctuated from time to time by colossal wars resulting in the slaughter of millions and the laying waste of populous and flourishing areas of the globe. Such is the appalling outlook if we continue 232 WAB AS DETERMINER on the national line. Is there no door of escape? One, indeed, there is. A thousand times groups of men have faced a crisis like that which con- fronts the nations. The well-disposed have been obliged to go always armed and on the qui vive because of the presence in their midst of a few bullies who encroached upon others and would not submit the resulting disputes to arbitration. A traveler informs us that among the feud-rid- den Berdurani of northeastern Afghanistan the villages and fields bristle in all directions with round towers. These are constantly occupied by men at enmity with their neighbors in the same or adjoining villages, who, perched up in their little shooting boxes, watch the opportunity of putting a bullet into each other's body with the most persevering patience. The fields, even, are studded with these round towers, and the men holding them most jealously guard their lands from anyone with whom they are at feud. ... If even a fowl strays from its owner into the grounds of another it is sure to receive a bullet from the adversary's tower. So constant are their feuds that it is a well-known fact that the village children are taught never to walk in the center of the road, but always from the force of early habit walk stealthily along under cover of the wall nearest to any tower. This recalls the chronic strife among the 233 THE SOCIAL TREND Scotch Highlanders of olden times and the Al- banians of to-day, the vendettas of Corsica, the feuds of Kentucky mountaineers, and the hered- itary enmities between adjacent Chinese villages all due, not to love of combat, but to the ab- sence of law. In the Icelandic saga of Burnt Njal we see very clearly that domestic peace has been brought about, not by the spread of the spirit of reasonableness and love, but by the creation of courts the awards of which have force behind them. Men united to create and to support legal institutions, not out of friend- liness, but because they had found their feuds intolerable. On the whole the pacific disposi- tion has been the offspring rather than the parent of the regime of law. Now the only way of escape of the advanced nations from the ruinous results of their inevit- able competition for place and advantage in the backward parts of the globe lies in their com- bining to create an organization provided with the means of adjudicating disputes and enforc- ing awards. Thinking in terms of the nation is destroying the people of Europe at the rate of ten thousand a day. Is it not high time we were thinking in terms of some Inter-nation, 234 WAR AS DETERMINER League of Peace, World-federation, OP other vast unit capable of keeping the peace without stereotyping the status quo or hindering the sur- vival of the fittest and the success of the adapted? 235 Date JUN 11 - N 61 965 rt 9 t I UC SO/TURN WOONAl. LBWW f O.ITV ~A~001 345602'