RAILWAY ACCIDENTS

These two Christmas stamps are next of kin. Our Red Cross stamp is the youngest child of the DanishJulemarkewhich sprang out of a country postmaster's brain to take its place among the most effective weapons in the world-wide fight with the white plague. Of what stout stock the family are,—it is a big family by this time, with sons and daughters in many lands,—this year's issue of the Danish stamp tells at a glance. For the big building pictured in it is the "Christmas Stamp Sanatorium," built for tuberculous children out of the half pennies the Danish people have given these five years as their contribution to the great campaign.

Denmark is a little country. All in all it has not much more than half as many people as the Greater New York, if indeed it has so many. Yet in so short a time it has wrought so great a tangible result. What it has further wrought in the way of arousing public interest and guiding public education in this matter is beyond calculation. For the last is the biggest end of the work of the Christmas stamp, wherever it goes.

In New York city two years ago we raised a great outcry about child cripples, made so by tuberculosis. We counted five thousand or more in the tenements of the metropolis and decided that their one chance of life lay in building a hospital on the seashore, on the lines of the little one now run on Coney Island by the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor. Forthwith money was raised, a quarter of a million of dollars, to build a much bigger one with,and architects were set to work to draw plans. The city appropriated a site in a great seashore park, to be laid out for the people. Then there happened what so often happens in New York when a great public enterprise is to be carried out. It ran into a rut, somehow. Money became tight, the controller could not find the funds, park and hospital were side-tracked and stayed so.

They are side-tracked yet. The money kind-hearted New Yorkers gave for the children is in the bank. The little cripples still crawl around their tenements. The winds blow over the ocean and waste their healing balm. The park is as far away as ever. And the purses of the charitable snap with an extra twist of tightness when they think of it all. Next time we shall plead the children's cause in vain.

That is the way of New York. The picture above tells the way of poor little Denmark. No doubt there is an excuse, or a string of them, for the American city. But excuses do not mend aching joints and wasted frames. How long before New York will catch up with Denmark? Would it not be fine if this lusty son of a worthy sire, the Red Cross Christmas stamp, were to help get us started again?

EMORY R. JOHNSON

University of Pennsylvania

The Confessions of a Railroad Signalman by J. O. Fagan is an exceptionally able book, worthy of the serious attention of every student of the causes of railroad accidents.[1]The author gives his qualifications for writing the book by saying that he "has been a telegraph operator and tower-man for twenty-seven years and part of the time chief clerk to a railroad superintendent," and he further adds that "the extent of territory covered by this experience is even wider than one would suppose. For a telegraph operator is, of necessity, one of the bestposted men in the service." In addition to this experience from which a knowledge of the subject has been gained, the author possesses a remarkably well trained mind and has command of exceptionally clean English.

[1]The Confessions of a Railroad Signalman, J. O. Fagan. Pp. 182. Price $1.00, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1908. This book may be obtained at publisher's price through the offices ofCharities and The Commons.

The main thesis of the book is that accidents are due mainly to non-observance of rules. "Railroad managers, therefore, sooner or later will come to understand that the one thing needed in the railroad service at the present day is to educate employes to appreciate the fact that successful and safe railroading in the future will have to depend, not upon the multiplication of safety devices or the reconstruction of rules, but upon the personal effort and conduct of conscientious, alert, and careful men." Furthermore, the author has "arrived at the conclusion that on our railroads the interests of the community have become secondary to those of the employe and his organization." Mr. Fagan also maintains that "it is actually a matter of reasonable demonstration that at least seventy-five per cent of the casualties might be avoided by increase of interest on the part of the employe, and the earnest concentration of his best thought on the subject."

FROM CONFESSIONS OF A RAILROAD SIGNALMAN

The natural remedy for the situation, as stated by Mr. Fagan, would lie in the observance by employes of the company's rules and regulations, in the discipline by the management of all employes for each and every non-observance of any rule, and the enforcement of discipline with appropriate penalties regardless of the personality of those subjected to discipline. The enforcement of discipline, moreover, should not be made to depend upon consequences resulting from non-observance of rules. Employes should be penalized by loss of pay for their disregard of the rules or regulations whether their actions do or do not result in casualties.

Mr. Fagan, however, believes, and brings convincing evidence to show, that the above remedy is beyond hope. The organizations of which the railroad employes are members take the position that the member who violates a rule is to be defended against condemnation by the public or discipline by the management. Instead of taking the view that the interests of the public are paramount to those of any individual railroad employe, the railroad employes' organization seeks invariably to shield its members against the consequences of their actions. Furthermore, the managers of most railroads have decided that the strict enforcement of the rules and the punishment of those who do not observe the rules result in so many controversies with the labor unions and are so destructive of harmonious relations between the company and the unions, that it is better to strive for harmony rather than to enforce discipline. In other words, discipline and the safety of the public are made subsidiary to the maintenance of harmonious relations with the employes. Such being the situation, Mr. Fagan believes that reform is not to be expected within railway management but must come from the outside as the result of the exercise of governmental authority. The government must punish employes for non-observance of rules and penalize railroad officers for the non-enforcement of their regulations.

The analyses and arguments of the book are convincing. The position taken by Mr. Fagan is one the accuracy of which will doubtless be vigorously denied by the organizations of railroad employes and will be to some extent questioned by the responsible management of railroads. However, it seems to the author of this review that Mr. Fagan has established his thesis.

ARTHUR P. KELLOGG

The simple Italian peasant, he whose meager village life was so accurately drawn by Mr. Mangano in earlier issues of this magazine, is familiar in every city in this country, and we have in America what is probably a fair appreciation of his poverty, his hardships and the longing for better things which send great blocks of the population of rural provinces flocking across the Atlantic. Of industrial Italy we know less, having few sources of information. If the life of the factory towns is really as bad as The Forewarners,[2]by Giovanni Cena, makes it,—if wages are as low, work as hard, housing as squalid and amusements as few,—then we have in the book a story of remarkable growth in wretchedness, for the manufacturing towns of northern Italy are, as Mrs. Humphry Ward points out in the introduction to the English translation, only forty years old.

[2]The Forewarners, Giovanni Cena, 1908, New York, Doubleday, Page and Company. Price $1.50. This book may be ordered at publisher's price through the office ofCharities and The Commons.

The book makes clear the source of the socialist vote in the Italian Parliament and the human stuff which the railway and other big strikes are made of. It is, supposedly, the life story of a Turin printer. Starting as the son of a clay digger, he graduates into the working world after a childhood spent in an orphanage. Having some little education more than his fellows, he becomes a proofreader for a house which is putting on the Italian market the standard works of science and philosophy in all languages. This gives him stronger meat than a weak body and an overwrought mind can digest, and he becomes oppressed with the wrongs of his class, with the grind of the factory and the squalid life of the house where he has a tiny cell in the garret. There he piles up, inproof sheets, a library of the greatest books in the world. Pouring over them by night, half-fed, unsociable, brooding, his mind slips gradually from its moorings and he throws his life away as a sacrifice, for this book, the story of his life and the story of his class, is hidden in his bosom. A tragic death, he believes, will cause it to be published and set afoot nothing short of a revolution.

The book does not tell the manner of his death, but it implies that he threw himself in front of the King's automobile, which he often met in his wanderings outside the city. It typified to him the oppression which he felt,—"the griefs of others I have such a longing to relieve that the desire becomes a torment to me, and I cannot shake myself free from it except by action." Of the automobile drivers he had written: "Whilst the nobility are trying to draw in their claws so as not to exasperate us, here come these bourgeoise parvenus to insult us in our own house. Yes, in our own house, for the highroad belongs to the peasant and the poor man." His studies, which put him above the other workmen, were themselves his undoing, for the substance of Tolstoi and Spencer became so much more to him than the form, that his work grew bad and worse until he was discharged,—an incident convincing to one who has attempted to read proof with an eye to things greater than commas and spelling.

Out of it all he worked a scheme of things as they ought to be, which, whether it came from the proofreader or from the author who takes a proofreader's smarting sense of wrong as his theme, makes an interesting program:

A king who has a lofty ideal of society wishes to lead his subjects up to it by his methods of government, and is willing to abdicate when he feels that they are really free. His chief instruments in the work of redemption are doctors and school teachers. On the one hand freedom, on the other action. Freedom from error whilst doing everything to favor and afford sufficient light. A tendency to abolish all forms of restraint, from the material ones for criminals to the moral ones for all men; from handcuffs to laws. The gradual abolition of hereditary rights of property; every human being to have the needful, and everythingto return to a common fund at his death. The legal personality of women, and the equality of the sexes, to be recognized as steps to the conquest of individuality, liberty, happiness. Each to be free to develop to the utmost his own life, his own affections. Birth and education to be protected. Rest to be ensured to old age. Public hygiene to be watched over till disease be eliminated. Every facility to be afforded to manufactures, commerce and science, so as to encourage man to conquer himself, the earth, the heavens. Faith in progress, as if it were not,—and it is not,—destined to die with our earth. The worship of life.

Such a scheme and the style and force of the book are difficult to associate with the neurasthenic proofreader, skilfully as the author has drawn the background and made the man's thought develop over his proof table.

But whether the character be drawn convincingly or not, the book gives a wonderfully clear and sharp-cut picture of the environment of such a worker. Some bits of description stand out above the others, one of them the Turin tenement, where "from the first flights of stairs, carpeted and warmed by hot air pipes, to the bare flight of our top floor, the steps grew ever steeper and steeper. Each evening we passed through all the social zones, hot, temperate and cold; we were lodged in the arctic regions." There were 142 of these steps to the top floor, where naught but poverty dwelt,—a penniless poet with a sister who supported him, a lonely working girl, a woman of the streets, a drunkard and his screaming, beaten wife and half-witted children, and Cimisin, a cobbler, who always "was whistling at full speed to the accompaniment of his hammer. The tears of women, the curses of drunkards, had for so many years mingled with the merriment of that harmless madman."

His history of the printing shop is complete and modern, even to the point where the men went back to their cases after a strike, only to find that long rows of linotypes with women operators had displaced them. These women, he thought, might have among them one fitted to be his mate, but he was too shy to seek her out. He could see them only as workers at the almost human machines, or where "the cylinders revolved with a loud din, the sheets rained out one on top of the other, the women in their long overalls kept on repeating their monotonous movements, feeding the sheets into the press or collecting them into piles. On two side platforms the women were in constant motion. A hundred women and a hundred men. It was impossible to imagine that relations other than those existing between the several parts of a machine might be formed between these beings created for a mutual understanding." Still he wonders vaguely if

perhaps in this uniformity of action, foreign to and apart from the monotonous toil which exhausts them, something exists, smiles, shines? Have some got a small bird singing in their hearts whilst their hands grow grimy at the wheel?... No love of their work,—that is to say of their life,—inspired them; each of them constantly saw the work of an hour, a mere fragment, leave his hands anonymously and forever, and none of them could ever say of anything, "That is my work!" What will remain of them at the end of their lives to prove that they have lived? In truth, they have not lived.

Of the women in his tenement, girls who were not harnessed to a factory, he found even less of life, though perhaps more of womanhood. Going with his friend to see the latter's young sister in a maternity hospital, he reflects that this is the way with many of them,—"love leads to the hospital." The patients there are mostly unmarried girls. The married ones have few children now. "How talk of love, of family life, in a society which deals out the same ration to the single man and to the father of a family?"

His friend starves, the sister dies, the drunkard's wife, mother of six, takes her life,—everyone whom he knew, it seems, all the associates high up in the attic of the "aëropolis," come to grief and misery and death. He greatly admires the woman, a physician, who visits them. "She picks up, joins, straightens out innumerable threads; she seems to be weaving a tapestry of which she will only complete a tiny bit, a work which she has inherited from one generation and will transmit to another." She offers him a part in her work, but he feels "incapable of giving myself in small doses." He is impatient, irritable for "something ready to hand, swift as lightning," that shall right all wrongs and ease all pain at a stroke. He cannot work with others, or for others, and so he tucks his story into his bosom and starts out to meet the King's car. Almost at the last he confesses, "I have passed beside life."

Reviewed by ROLAND P. FALKNER

To the great majority of people the school report is the only tangible evidence of what the school administration is doing. The citizens generally cannot be expected to know what goes on in the school rooms or in the meetings of boards of education, nor what is taking shape in the back of the superintendent's head. Even were they afforded the utmost opportunity and gifted with such unusual perception, it is not likely that without convenient summaries and condensed statements they could form any idea of the public school system as a whole.

[3]School Reports and School Efficiency by David S. Snedden and William H. Allen for the New York Committee on the Physical Welfare of School Children. New York, 1908. Pp. 183. This book will be sent byCharities and The Commonspostpaid for $1.50.

If the school report is at once the evidence and test of the school administration, it is clear that its ideal is such a marshalling of the facts regarding the schools of the city as will give the reasonably intelligent citizen a clear notion of just how well the schools are performing the duties entrusted to them.

The book before us is a study of the school reports for the purpose of ascertaining how far and in what manner they seek to embody such ideal. It is a study in comparative administration.

This study reveals so wide a diversity among school reports as to preclude the idea of any consensus of opinion as to what they should contain. While uniformity of scope and treatment is not to be expected, it might reasonably be anticipated that the similar purposes of the school administration in different places would give to these reports a certain family resemblance. In so far as such a resemblance can be traced, it does notappear to be so much the result of parallel internal development as the product of external compulsion or suggestion. State educational departments charged with allotment of state school funds according to a fixed unit in school work, have led to an emphasis upon such units. A similar influence has been exerted by the United States Bureau of Education in its request for information along certain definite lines.

Apart from these influences tending toward a certain uniformity, there are other forces working in the same direction though less effectively. The trend of present discussion in educational affairs is not without its influence, and when certain facts are needed to point a moral or adorn a tale the experience of other cities points to investigations or arrangements of material which are new to the city in question. Conscious effort to promote uniform treatment of statistical data, a theme which has been discussed almost to weariness by the National Education Association and kindred organizations, has been singularly fruitless.

With these general considerations by way of introduction, the work takes up its main theme, the scope of educational statistics. In them we find the condensation of educational experience, and here more than in other parts of the text we should expect the experience and practice of one city to be helpful to another. Too often, indeed almost universally, the tables of facts are isolated from the text of the report, and no effort is made to explain their meaning or set forth the salient features which they present. In view of the volume of tabular matter there is a painful poverty of interpretation.

The method pursued by the author in his record of the facts, is to furnish a specimen table from the different reports in regard to each matter touched upon, a selection of the simpler and then the more detailed statements to be found in them. The following heads are treated in this way: School plant, expenditure, census, attendance, age of pupils, promotions, survival, compulsory attendance, high schools, vacation schools, libraries,medical inspection, teachers and summaries. The variety of forms exhibited is highly instructive although, it may be confessed, somewhat bewildering. The author has confined himself so strictly to a study of methods that he is disposed to let the tables speak for themselves. There is here, too, an absence of interpretation. Tables of figures may speak for themselves but to understand them one must know their language. One cannot help but feel that in many cases some explanation why the detailed tables are to be regarded as superior, other than the fact that they are more detailed, would have been more illuminating and would have relieved somewhat the monotony of this important chapter for the general reader.

No attempt is made to outline a model report. We have instead in chapter 5 a series of questions which might be answered in a school report. The list does not pretend to be exhaustive but in reality it constitutes a somewhat formidable program, if it be assumed that the greater part of these questions should receive attention.

Conscious of the fact that somewhat staggering demands are made on the school administration, the discussion of "suggested economies and improvement" comes as an antidote. This is a brief discussion of short cuts and methods to get at desired results. It looks to a simplification of records and such forms and registers as will supply the needed information, without excessive work. This is a very vital point and the suggestions as far as they go are admirable.

While the subject presented in these pages is thoroughly technical, the work may be commended most heartily to school authorities and to all who are interested in the progress of our schools. It is an appeal for exact information and should not be passed by without a hearing. Such information in regard to our schools,—one of the most important branches of our government,—is painfully lacking. It has too often been assumed that the management of schools was a matter for experts of which outsiders could not properly judge. Within certain limits this is true, but it does not distinguish between the scholastic and the administrative sides of school work. We undoubtedly need both among our school authorities, and in the public at large a keener perception of the requisites of a sound and effective administration. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that there is no great business enterprise of the people of which they know so little as they do of their schools. In private affairs such ignorance on the part of directors and stockholders would lead to bankruptcy.

The authorship of the several chapters of the book is distinctly stated. The general considerations herein briefly noted are the work of Dr. Snedden; the particular application to the city of New York is the work of Dr. Allen. Those who are familiar with Dr. Allen's work answer that he can always be relied upon for a readable and spicy statement. But in view of the predominantly local interest of his discussion and the inexorable limits of space, it has seemed best in the foregoing notice to lay the greater emphasis on those large aspects of the subject which are from the pen of Dr. Snedden.

Drawn by Joseph Stella.

BY RICHARD REALF

My father was mighty Vulcan,I am Smith of the land and sea,The cunning spirit of Tubal CainCame with my marrow to me;I think great thoughts strong-winged with steel,I coin vast iron acts,And weld the impalpable dream of SeersInto utile lyric facts.I am monarch of all the forges,I have solved the riddle of fire,The Amen of Nature to need of Man,Echoes at my desire;I search with the subtle soul of flame,The heart of the rocky earth,And out from my anvils the propheciesOf the miracle years blaze forth.I am swart with the soot of my chimneys,I drip with the sweats of toil,I quell and scepter the savage wastesAnd charm the curse from the soil;I fling the bridges across the gulfs,That hold us from the To Be,And build the roads for the bannered marchOf crowned Humanity.

I am monarch of all the forges,I have solved the riddle of fire,The Amen of Nature to need of Man,Echoes at my desire;I search with the subtle soul of flame,The heart of the rocky earth,And out from my anvils the propheciesOf the miracle years blaze forth.

I am swart with the soot of my chimneys,I drip with the sweats of toil,I quell and scepter the savage wastesAnd charm the curse from the soil;I fling the bridges across the gulfs,That hold us from the To Be,And build the roads for the bannered marchOf crowned Humanity.

Published in theNational Labor Tribune,Saturday, February 23, 1878.

Chautauqua Photographic Co.PITTSBURGH.THE POINT, AS SEEN FROM THE HEIGHTS OF THE SOUTH SIDE.

Chautauqua Photographic Co.

PITTSBURGH.

THE POINT, AS SEEN FROM THE HEIGHTS OF THE SOUTH SIDE.

THE PITTSBURGH ARCH SESQUI-CENTENNIAL WEEK.

PAUL U. KELLOGG

Engineers have a simple process by which in half an hour's time they strike off a "blue print" from a drawing into which has gone the imagination of a procession of midnights, and the exacting work of a vast company of days.

God and man and nature,—whosoever you will,—have draughted a mighty and irregular industrial community at the headwaters of the Ohio; they have splashed, as Kipling puts it, at a ten league canvas with brushes of comet's hair. Under the name of the Pittsburgh Survey, Charities Publication Committee has carried on a group of social investigations in this great steel district. In a sense, we have been blue-printing Pittsburgh. Our findings will be published in a series of special numbers of which this is the first, covering in order:

I. The People;II. The Place;III. The Work.

Full reports are to be published later in a series of volumes by the Russell Sage Foundation and, throughout, the text will be reinforced with such photographs, pastels, maps, charts, diagrams and tables as will help give substance and reality to our presentations of fact.

In this sense, then, it is a blue print of Pittsburgh, that we attempt. At least the analogy of the draughting room may make it clear that the work, as we conceive it, lies, like the blue print, within modest outlay and reasonable human compass. Our presentation must frankly lack the mechanical fidelity and inclusiveness of the engineer's negative; but we can endeavor to bring out in relief the organic truth of the situation by giving body and living color, as we see them, to what would otherwise be but the thin white tracings of a town.

Occasional articles have been published during the year, but the results of the Survey are put forward for the first time as a consecutive whole in the pages that follow. Here is the place, then, for a simple statement of the drive and scopeof the work as conceived by those who have carried it forward:

The Pittsburgh Survey has been a rapid, close range investigation of living conditions in the Pennsylvania steel district. It has been carried on by a special staff organized under the national publication committee which prints this magazine. It has been financed chiefly by three grants, of moderate amount, from the Russell Sage Foundation for the Improvement of Living Conditions. It has been made practicable by co-operation from two quarters,—from a remarkable group of leaders and organizations in social and sanitary movements in different parts of the United States, who entered upon the field work as a piece of national good citizenship; and from men, women and organizations in Pittsburgh who were large-minded enough to regard their local situation as not private and peculiar, but a part of the American problem of city building.

The outcome has been a spirited piece of inter-state co-operation in getting at the urban fact in a new way. For consider what has already been done in this field in America. We have counted our city populations regularly every ten years,—in some states every five. We have known that the country has grown and spread out stupendously within the century, and that within that period our cities have spread out and filled up with even greater resistlessness. How goes it with them? What more do we know? True, we have profited by incisive analyses of one factor or another which enters into social well-being,—tuberculosis, factory legislation, infant mortality, public education, to name examples; and we have heard the needs of particular neighborhoods described by those who know them. But there is something further, synthetic and clarifying, to be gained by a sizing up process that reckons at once with many factors in the life of a great civic area, not going deeply into all subjects, but offering a structural exhibit of the community as a going concern. This is what the examining physician demands before he accepts us as an insurance risk, what a modern farmer puts his soils and stock through before he plants his crops, what the consulting electrician performs as his first work when he is called in to overhaul a manufacturing plant. And this, in the large, has been the commission undertaken by the Pittsburgh Survey.

The main work was set under way in September, 1907, when a company of men and women of established reputation as students of social and industrial problems, spent the month in Pittsburgh. On the basis of their diagnosis, a series of specialized investigations was projected along a few of the lines which promised significant results. The staff has included not only trained investigators but also representatives of the different races who make up so large a share of the working population dealt with. Limitations of time and money set definite bounds to the work, which will become clear as the findings are presented. The experimental nature of the undertaking, and the unfavorable trade conditions which during the past year have reacted upon economic life in all its phases, have set other limits. Our inquiries have dealt with the wage-earners of Pittsburgh (a) in their relation to the community as a whole, and (b) in their relation to industry. Under the former we have studied the genesis and racial make-up of the population; its physical setting and its social institutions; under the latter we have studied the general labor situation; hours, wages, and labor control in the steel industry; child labor, industrial education, women in industry, the cost of living, and industrial accidents.

From the first, the work of the investigations has been directed to the service of local movements for improvement. For, as stated in a mid-year announcement of the Survey, we have been studying the community at a time when nascent social forces are asserting themselves. Witness the election of an independent mayor three years ago, and Mr. Guthrie's present fight to clear councils of graft. Within the field of the Survey and within one year, the Pittsburgh Associated Charities has been organized; the force of tenement inspectors has been doubled and has carried out a first general housing census, and a scientific inquiry, under thename of the Pittsburgh Typhoid Commission, has been instituted into the disease which has been endemic in the district for over a quarter of a century. A civic improvement commission, representative in membership and perhaps broader in scope than any similar body in the country, is now in process of formation.

A display of wall maps, enlarged photographs, housing plans, and other graphic material was the chief feature of a civic exhibit held in Carnegie Institute in November and December, following the joint conventions in Pittsburgh of the American Civic Association and the National Municipal League. The local civic bearings of the Survey were the subject of the opening session of these conventions. Its economic aspects were brought forward at a joint session of the American Economic Association and the American Sociological Society at Atlantic City in December.

SCHEME OF THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY.From Pittsburgh Civic Exhibit, Carnegie Institute, November-December, 1908.

SCHEME OF THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY.

From Pittsburgh Civic Exhibit, Carnegie Institute, November-December, 1908.

The present issue is frankly introductory. It deals with the city as a community of people. Pittsburgh is usually defined in other terms. First among American cities in the production of iron and steel, we are told that it ranks fifth as a general manufacturing center. There are forty-seven furnaces within forty miles of the heart of the city, with an annual capacity of over seven million tons of pig iron,—more than twenty-five per cent of the total production in the United States. Statistics of the American iron trade for 1907 show that Allegheny county produced a fourth of all Bessemer steel and a third of all open hearth steel, a fifth of all rails rolled in the United States, a third of all plates and sheets, and very nearly a half of all structural shapes. Pittsburgh proper ranked fourth in foundry and machine shop products, second in brick and tile, pottery and fire clay, and first in electrical apparatus and supplies. In coal and coke, tin plate, glass, cork, and sheet metal,—in products as varied as the fifty-seven varieties of the pickles in which it excels,—its output is a national asset. Pittsburgh stands tenth in postal receipts andfifth in bank deposits. Its banking capital exceeds that of the banks of the North Sea empires and its payroll that of whole groups of American states. Here is a town, then, big with its works.

BLAST FURNACES AT NIGHT.

Again, there is a temptation to define Pittsburgh in terms of the matrix in which the community is set, and the impress of this matrix on the soul of its people no less than on the senses of the visitor. Pipe lines that carry oil and gas, waterways that float an acreage of coal barges, four track rails worn bright with weighty ore cars, wires surcharged with a ruthless voltage or delicately sensitive to speech and codes, bind here a district of vast natural resources into one organic whole. The approaching traveller has ample warning. Hillsides and valleys are seamed with rows of coke ovens, gaunt tipples bend above mine mouths, derricks and bull-wheels stand over fuel wells, and low lying mill buildings, sided with corrugated iron, rear their clusters of stacks like the pipes of huge swarthy Pans. Then comes the city with its half-conquered smoke cloud, with its high, bare hills and its hunch of imposing structures. The place to see Pittsburgh from is a much whittled little stand on the high bluff of Mt. Washington, where votaries of the national game assemble on a clear afternoon and spy upon a patch of green in Allegheny City, hundreds of feet below them, and more than a mile away across the Ohio River. Their business is with Honus Wagner and the three-bagger he is going to knock out. But yours can be with the great Y of the rivers, churned by stern-wheeled steamers and patched here and there with black fleets of coal barges. Below you to the right is the South Side; to the left across the rivers, is Allegheny City, and between them is a little trowel of land piled high with office buildings. This is the "Point," cut short as it is by the "Hump" and by higher hills behind; and flanked by narrow river banks that grudge a foothold to the sounding workshops and lead up and down to the mill towns. You are looking at commercial Pittsburgh. From the Herron Hill reservoir, mid-way between the forks of the Y, you get a panorama of the other side of the community,—Shenley Park to the right of you, with the Carnegie buildings and the ample residences of the East End, and to the left, long swales of small, thickly built houses that make up Lawrenceville and the adjoining home areas.

But it is at night that the red and black of the Pittsburgh flag marks the town for its own. The lines of coke ovens seen from the car windows have become huge scythes, saw-edged with fire. The iron-sheathed mills are crated flame. Great fans of light and shadow wig-wag above furnaces and converters. From Cliff street, the lamps of Allegheny lie thick and clustered like a crushed sky, but from the bridges that span the Monongahela between the mills,—where choleric trains shuttle on either bank, and the rolls are at thumping war with the sliding, red billets,—the water welds the sparks and the yellow tumult, and you feel as if here were the forges of the sunrise, where beam and span and glowing plate are fabricating into the framework of dawns that shall "come up like thunder." Here,—if we doubted it before,—is a town that works; and that works in a big way.

But the people, rather than the product or the setting, concern us. In December, 1907, Pittsburgh and Allegheny were merged, and the Greater City entered the class of Baltimore, St. Louis and Boston. This is the half-million class. Last September, Pittsburgh celebrated its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and a street pageant exhibited both the industrial vigor of the community, and the variety of its people. There was a company of Corn Planter Indians, descendants of the aboriginal Pittsburghers; there were floats representing the early settlers; there were Scotchmen with kilts and bagpipes; nor were they all. A wagon load of Italians bore a transparency,—"Romans dig your sewers," and Polish, Slovak and other racial organizations marched in the costumes of their native countries. For the life of the city has become intricate and rich in the picturesque. That old man you passed on the street was a Morgan raider, and behind him trudged a common soldier of the Japanese War. Here is an American whose Pittsburgh is the marble corridors of an office building, and the night desks of the men in shirt sleeves and green eye shades; and here, one whose Pittsburgh reaches back to a stately old parlor with gilt-framed mirrors and spindling Chippendale. Here is "Belle," who exchanges her winter in the workhouse for a summer in a jon-boat, which she reaches by a plank. Here is thegazdawho ruined himself that his boarders might not starve. And here, the inventor who works with many men in a great laboratory and scraps a thousand dollars' worth of experimentation at the turn of a hand. Here is a gallery of miners pounding their grimy fists at a speech by Haywood in the old town hall; and here a bunch of half-sobered Slavs in the Sunday morning police court.

You do not know the Pittsburgh Districtuntil you have heard the Italians twanging their mandolins round a construction campfire, and seen the mad whirling of a Slovak dance in a mill town lodge hall; until you have watched the mill hands burst out from the gates at closing time; or thrown confetti on Fifth avenue on a Halloween. Within a few blocks of the skyscrapers of the Point, I have seen a company of Syrians weaving almost unceasingly for four days a desert dance that celebrated the return of one of them to Jerusalem. (An Irishman thought it a wake.) A possum swings by the tail at Christmastide in front of that Negro store in Wylie avenue; long bearded Old Believers play bottle pool in that Second avenue barroom; a Yiddish father and five children lie sick on the floor of this tenement; this old Bohemian woman cleaned molds as a girl in the iron works of Prague; that itinerant cobbler made shoes last winter for the German children of the South Side, who were too poor to pay for them, and stuffed the soles with thick cardboard when he was too poor to buy leather. Here is a Scotch Calvinist, and there a Slavic free thinker; here a peasant, and there a man who works from a blue print; engineers, drag outs, and furnace-men from the mill district; yeggs and floppers and '69ers from the lower reaches of the city; strippers and core makers and coffin buffers. There a Russian exile with a price on his head, and here a Shaker of old Pennsylvania stock! You have heard of Shakespeare's London, of the port of Lisbon in the days of the Spanish Main, of the mixtures of caste and race and faith on the trade routes of the East. They are of the ilk of Pittsburgh. How to get orderly plans of social betterment out of the study of such a community is at first sight a staggering question. But the clue to its answer is that same fact that stood out when we looked at Pittsburgh as a city of tonnage and incandescence. These people are here to work. This fact once grasped in its bearings and we get a foothold for estimating Pittsburgh. The wage earners become a fairly well-defined belt in the population. What the issuesof life and labor mean to them will help us in understanding the trend of conditions in industrial communities generally.

First, you have the mere fact of aggregation. Pittsburgh has as many people as the whole state of Pennsylvania had at the opening of the last century; Allegheny county as many as at that time the commonwealths of Massachusetts and New York combined. The Greater City has twice as many as all the future cities of the United States had in 1800; as many as Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, combined, in 1850. Here, then, is a community worthy of as serious statesmanship as that which has served whole commonwealths at critical periods in our national advance. Now in all history, cities have never reproduced themselves. They draw on the country districts to replace the stock that they burn out. But when one-third of the total population comes to live in cities, they can no longer do this. It becomes vitally important that city people live well, else the race lapses. At risk, then, of going over old ground, let us look at some of the dynamic influences that affect the life of this particular community.

No American city presents in a more clear-cut way than Pittsburgh the abrupt change from British and Teutonic immigration. Sociologists tell us that in the mid-eastern valleys of Europe successive waves of broad-headed, long-headed, dark and fair peoples gathered force and swept westward to become Kelt and Saxon and Swiss and Scandinavian and Teuton. They were the bulwark which obstructed the march of Hun and Goth and Turk and Tartar, sweeping in from the East. It is from Slavs and mixed people of this old midland, with racial and religious loves and hates seared deep, that the new immigration is coming to Pittsburgh to work out civilization under tense conditions. A vineyard blighted, a pogrom, torture, persecution, crime, poverty, dislodge them, and they come.

Further, the sociologists tell us that by mixed peoples the greatest advances have been made. It was in Amsterdam, Venice, London, and the Hanse towns, places of mart which brought together the blood and cultures of distant races,—it was here that democracy gathered head and the arts flourished. But in Pittsburgh are the elements of a mixture yet more marvelous. A common fund of Slavic words, almost a Pittsburgh dialect, is finding currency. The Pole still speaks Polish, but he makes an adaptation of his words, and the Slovak understands. The Syrian and Arabian peddlers know these words and use them in selling their wares in the courts and settlements,—a contrast to the great gulfs that still separate the Slav and the English-speaking.

Furthermore, the city is the frontier of to-day. We have appropriated and parcelled out most of our free land. The edge of settlement is no longer open as a safety valve for foot-loose rebels against the fixity of things. They come to the cities. They swarm in new hives. To Pittsburgh especially where men deal with devil-may-care risks and great stakes, come the adventurous and the unreckoning. A smack of the mining camp is in the air about the mill yards.

The life to which these people come is different from that known of any previous generations. We have seen how in Pittsburgh traction lines, tunnels, inclines, telephone wires, weave a city of a size and on a site which would have been impossible in the old days. The householder is far removed from the sources of his food supply. He lives two or three families deep and many to the acre. The very aggregation of people breeds disease, a complication which in turn may yet be balanced by those revolutions in medical science which have brought glad, new optimism to sanitarian and physician.

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