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 
 
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