TREND
The Case of Laura Sylvia.By Mary Vida Clark.Outlook.This is the almost unbelievable story of the finding and rehabilitation of a little savage child found living with savage people in the midst of a prosperous farming community in the Hudson River Valley. Miss Clark tells the story from her long experience in placing out work of the State Charities Aid Association of New York. It is not an unusual one, and her comment suggests the possibilities of neglected and degenerate families in the cabin homes of the New England and the southern mountains.
Tiger.By Witter Bynner, andState Regulation of Vice and Its Meaning. By Anna Garlin Spencer. Both in theForum. The first is a one act play dealing with prostitution. A father, a patron, finds his daughter a prisoner in a house of ill fame. “Painful and terrible” says the editorial introduction, “as this may seem to some readers it merely focuses, in dramatic form, the abominable realities to which ‘civilized’ people have so long shut their eye publicly and pharisaically; but to which, in tens of thousands of cases, they have given vicious private and personal encouragement.”
Mrs. Spencer’s article is a careful historical study of state efforts to deal with vice by regulation instead of abolition and to protect monogamy by putting vice on a legal footing.
What We Are Trying to Do.World’s Work.Thirty-five teachers in the Washington Irving High School tell how they are trying in this model New York school to “improve the human machine,” to “form character” and to “perfect womanhood.”
The Coming City.By John S. Gregory, andMy Work for Crippled Children. By Blanche VanLeuvan Browne. Both in theWorld’s Work. In the latter article a cripple woman tells with magnetic simplicity, how, beginning only seven years ago with $6 in her pocket, she has succeeded in building up a hospital-school for cripples in Detroit.
The Coming City tells of the remarkable work of another single individual, John Nolen, who has made more than twenty American municipalities more convenient and more beautiful. It is the record of “a rapidly growing national movement to correct the evils of careless growth and to insure that the cities of the future shall be definitely planned to serve and please their citizens.”
“Conservation as Practised.” By Gifford Pinchot.Pearson’s.The origin and purport of this important article is thus told by the editor: It is written in answer to the article on conservation by Edward H. Thomas, which was published in the January issue of this magazine. Mr. Thomas’s article submitted that conservation in principle was all right but that conservation in practice was nowhere near the principle; that conservation as practised aids monopoly instead of hindering it: and that the West, where conservation is being practised, is getting sick of it.
Mr. Pinchot holds that conservation as practised is for the greatest good of the greatest number. He asked for space in which to correct what he held was a wrong impression on the minds of the magazine’s readers. He answers Mr. Thomas, point by point.
The Cost of Modern Sentiment.By Agnes Repplier.Atlantic.This writer on matters of culture and art for leisurely readers, a vigorous defender of child labor on the stage on the ground of its artistic value, has had it borne in upon her that human interests are today arousing more and more public interest and emotion. Three of these absorbing human issues are the progress of women, the condition of labor and the social evil. Miss Repplier counsels against the misdirecting of sentiment through incomplete knowledge.
The recall last month of a San Francisco municipal court judge, for setting so low a bail on a man charged with rape as to make it possible for him to escape trial by skipping bail, gives special interest to a recent article inThe Sunset Magazineby Miriam Michelson. This is an analysis of the dawning sense of responsibility of the women of a suffrage state toward the social evil:
Now this threatened recall of a police judge is undertaken, I should say, not because the women believe this particular judge to be unique in flagrant adherence to a police court system of leniency in sex-crimes; not because they think him the worst of his type that San Francisco has known; but because they consider him a type and because they consider the police court system one that must be changed. This recall presents something definite, something to do, which feminine hands have been aching for.
Miss Michelson continues:
You may talk to women of the futility of figuring social sex sins, but they seem to be congenitally incapable of believing you. I heard a man talk to an audience in behalf of this measure, and when he touched upon that old, old text—it always has been; it always will be—there came a curious resemblance in every woman’s face within my vision; for every face had hardened, stiffened, was marked with the family likeness of rebellion. The lecturer was addressing himself to deaf ears, to eyes determined not to see.
And this is at once the weakness and the strength of the new element in elections. Those who have watched the ardor of the most eager and high-minded reformers burn out in commissions, in barren resolutions and recommendations, see in the average woman’s limitations that power, that one-idead incapacity to look philosophically on both sides of a question which marks Those Who Can Change Things. You may object that such qualities produce a Carrie Nation. They do, but they also make a Joan of Arc, a Harriet Beecher Stowe....
Her recently awakened realization of equality, the new broom that her conscience is, revolts at a policy that establishes a municipal clinic for women prostitutes, yet by a curious, cowardly subterfuge, overlooks the male’s share in infection; as though the plague created and disseminated in common could have but one source! And in addition to all this, she is learning that when she is ready at last to attack the vested, organized, recognized institution of prostitution, the first result of her activities will mean greater misery and perhaps speedier death for the woman who is already at the lowest point of the social scale....
But over against this set this fact: There are seven hundred women in San Francisco whose one aim in civic life is to found a State Training School for girls gone wrongwho would go right. This association has a representative in Sacramento whose sole business it is to further a bill for the establishment of a helping station for girls on the way to usefulness and moral health, modeled upon similar establishments in other states. Here is work, backed by thirty thousand club women of the state, proceeding definitely, practically to a solution of one of the most appalling obstacles to the crusade against vice.
This work of restoring the prostitute to decency and happiness is the side of woman’s work in the field of vice least developed; it is, however, a side which is most essential. Says Miss Michelson:
But the time has not yet come when woman will face her individual share of atonement for a social sin in which she has acquiesced. Ultimately, with universal suffrage, the wheel of time must place at the door of the protected women responsibility for the prostitute. As yet she can not see herself, in her own home, taking up the broken lives, diseased bodies, debased minds and deadened souls—the by-product of that which men tell her has always been and always must be.
The following passages are from Cardinal O’Connell’s pastoral letter on the labor problem:
The social problem of the relations between employers and employed seems to be the one most fraught with danger to our peaceful living.
The right of a man to provide for his family is a natural one. The living wage which he has a right to demand is the one which will maintain his family in decent and frugal comfort.
He may combine with others to enforce this right and form a union with his fellow-workers to exert the adequate moral power to maintain it or better his condition within the limit of justice.
The worker in the last resort has the right to refuse to work, that is, to strike, and to induce by peaceful and lawful measures others to strike with him.
Capital has a right to a just share of the profits, but only to a just share. Employers should treat those who work under them with humanity and justice; they should be solicitous for the healthful conditions of the place where workmen daily toil; they should use all reasonable means to promote the material and moral well-being of their employes.
Men with money should be careful to regard it as a means to do good rather than an end. There is no double moral standard, no loophole of escape from the sanctions which the moral law of Christ imposes. Men of wealth should not buy that which is not sellable according to Christian ethics.
Workers are just as much bound by the Christian law as their employers. There is a disposition to regard work as an intolerable burden to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible and with as little effort as possible. This is contrary to Christian teaching.
This natural discontent is fomented and intensified by the noisy agitators of Socialism, the enemies of God and man, who would overturn the foundations upon which human society is built, and exile God from His universe.
This singular set of men who seek to conceal the malice of their real principles, but who cannot, are a brood of disturbers. Their doctrines are an abomination striking at the foundations of family life and religion. There is not, and cannot be, a Catholic Socialist. Certain misguided Christians may call themselves Socialists, but, objectively, a Catholic Socialist is an utter impossibility.
Another source of unrest among working people, and one against which they should be warned, is the desire to give themselves over too much to the pleasures of life.
Some of the tricks of the trade are described in the personal experiences of a saleswoman who writes in a recent number of theOutlookon the wastes of retailing. A serious element of waste arises she maintains from downright dishonesty practised in unnamed establishments:
The management cheats the public through the employes, and logically the employes turn about and cheat the management, and in either event the public pays the bills.... A cheese is cut into pieces weighing about a pound each, and all are sold within an hour under four different names and at four different prices. Canned peas which cost ninety cents a dozen are sold at nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen cents a can—all the same grade. The jobber was willing to put different labels on the same goods because he had an order for two carloads.
“Don’t want that pie; want your money back?” said Willie. “How much was it? Seven cents? I thought so. What do you expect? The higher-priced ones were beside it. If you want good stuff, why don’t you pay for it?”
Later I asked Willie what the difference was between the seven and the twelve-cent prune pie, and he told me that the stones were taken out of the twelve and put into the seven-cent lot. I counted the stones or pits in the pie that the angry woman returned. There were forty-three.