Part 2

When the five buildings were burned there were 280 pupils and twelve teachers in attendance. The loss will be about $20,000 with practically no insurance owing to the extreme difficulty that Negroes always experience in the South in getting their property covered against loss.

The Kowaliga School is distinct in the service it is rendering to the community. Its aim is not to train skilled workmen or highly educated leaders, but rather to properly fit the Negro boys and girls of the community to live better in that community. The "book work" is carried as far as the eighth grade. The boys are taught agriculture and manual training and the girls are trained in the home life which they will probably take up on leaving school. As the school grew, Mr. Benson felt that it was not enough to train these boys and girls without giving them some opportunity to put their training to practical use. Consequently in 1900 the Dixie Industrial Company was founded "to improve the economic condition and social environment of the farm tenants of the South by establishing seasonal industries and furnishing them with steady employment the year round; to build better homes and help them to avoid the oppressions of the old system of mortgaging crops." The company now owns about 10,000 acres of farm and timber lands, operates a saw-mill, a turpentine still, cotton ginnery, cotton-seed and fertilizer mill, a store and forty farms, affording homes and employment for 300 people. It has a paid-up capital of $66,000, a surplus of $12,000, is earning eight per cent annually, and paying four per cent annual dividends.

The industrial company provides work the year round for the rural population and thus fills in the time of the seasonal workers who before were busy only about half the year.

The fire will not directly affect the Dixie Industrial Company. It will temporarily cripple the school and until funds are forthcoming that work must be discontinued. "It means beginning all over again after thirteen years' work," said Mr. Benson, who was in New York at the time of the fire; "but I am going back this week and make another start."

REVISING CHICAGO'S CIVIL SERVICE SYSTEM

A complete revision of the civil service system for Chicago is promised by Elton Lower, president of the City Civil Service Commission. After eight years' connection with the city departments the commissioner devoted himself for over a year mainly to studying the working of the civil service in Boston, New York, Washington and Chicago and to the examination of the promotional methods used by railway, manufacturing and other corporations. Securing requisite support from the city administration, he now announces a complete reversal of the form and revision of the rules under which the merit system has been operated in the city.

The distinctive features of the new plan are grading by duties, descriptive titles, defining the duties of the grades, uniformity of compensation within each grade, advancement from grade to grade only by competitive examination, and a greater degree of unity and independence in the departmental administration of efficiency tests and promotional procedure within its own bounds. Examinations in all departments and grades are to subordinate scholastic to practical tests, and to give greater importance to physical conditions and the investigation of character in order to meet the requirements of service, rather than require knowledge of facts. It is hoped to raise the standard of efficiency and promotion by taking the tests in each department from its own system of keeping records and accounts. As the departments will be held individually responsible for the way they keep these, the inevitable comparison and contrasts between them will tend to level their standards up to the highest.

Salaries may be raised only for an entire rank and not for individuals within the rank. Provision for grouping employes within the grades is made on the basis of efficiency, seniority or time required by service. The passing mark will be the only test of physical fitness. A similar flat-grading is proposed for work requiring skill and experience. Testing the applicant's qualifications in these respects, as is done for New York and Boston by the trade schools, is preferred for Chicago. A free transfer permits employes to pass from one department to another for promotional examinations, the original entrance examination thus giving a city employe a slight advantage over outsiders in competing for grades. Identification tests include finger prints.

The civil service commission began to institute these features among the employes of its own office some time ago. It first secured proper quarters and modern sanitary facilities, and then began training employes for its own work for which experienced applicants were lacking. Mr. Lower maintains that if such a system is firmly established and built up it will be likely to withstand lax administration because "it will take as much study and thought to tear it down as to construct it." Whatever wrong things may be introduced into it, he thinks, "will make conditions no worse than they have been under the system that has hitherto prevailed."

The Chicago Public Library will profit as much by the re-classification of its force and by this scheme of promotion as any other city administration, since its work has suffered more for the lack of finer tests of efficiency within more specialized grades, and also from being under the same regulations as other departments with whose requirements its service has little or nothing in common. To have a civil, self-regulating service system virtually its own, will free its directors, the librarian and his staff for that initiative which will give to this fourth largest library in the United States the leadership which may be rightly demanded for it.

ANOTHER ATTEMPT FOR A NEW CHICAGO CHARTER

The Chicago Charter Convention reassembled last week at its own initiative to renew its attempt to prepare a city charter that the Legislature will adopt and the people will accept at the polls. Its first laborious effort was so ruthlessly made over by the contending party factions in the Legislature two years ago that the measure suited no one. Many members of the convention repudiated it and the people overwhelmingly rejected it at the polls. To conserve their hard and fundamental work, the convention ventured to reassemble last autumn and appointed a committee to revise its own bill in the light of its fate at the capitol and the polls. In so doing the amendments made by the Legislature have been carefully considered and most of them eliminated. The measure thus nearly restored to its original form has been changed to conform to suggestions prompted by the criticisms and discussions through which the bill and act passed. This revision is now to come before the convention which faces many interesting and strenuously contested issues. Among them are the limiting of the city's bonded indebtedness to four per cent, the assumption by the city of ten per cent more of the cost of public improvements, municipal suffrage for women, stringent provisions against corrupt practices, the retention of the party circle on the ballot, the local regulation of the liquor traffic and the Sunday closing of saloons, the centralizing of school management, and the consolidation of four park boards.

Preliminary to all these issues the question is to be decided whether the convention will supersede itself by proposing to the Legislature either to authorize the election of a new charter commission by the people, or to call a constitutional convention. These proposals are not likely to interfere with the procedure of the present convention to complete its own charter bill. Notwithstanding the fierce factional fight that now absorbs the energies of the Legislature so that it has not yet attempted to attend to public business, one of the prominent members of the House of Representatives assured the convention that if it agreed upon a measure and rallied to its support the public sentiment of Chicago, it would be enacted and referred to the referendum vote of the people.

THE SCIENCE OF BETTER BIRTH

The scientific foundations for the slowly rising science of "eugenics" grow apace in the research laboratories of our universities. Some of their most authoritative representatives demonstrated this fact at the recent joint meeting of the Physicians' Club of Chicago and the Chicago Medical Society. In strictly scientific spirit and phrase, with interesting stereopticon illustrations of their biological experiments, four professors brought their facts to bear upon the doctors for their inferences as to the analogy between the heredity in animal and plant life, and the development of human kind. Two professors of zoology, Dr. Castle of Harvard and Dr. Tower of the University of Chicago gave respectively "an experimental study of heredity," and "experiments and observations on the modification and the control of inheritance." A beautiful parallel was presented by Dr. Gates, professor of botany at the University of Chicago, in studies of inheritance in the evening primrose. Dean Davenport of the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois ventured the most direct application of the suggestions from scientific experimentations to the propagation of the human race. Drawing the lessons to be learned from the breeding of animals, he said that the question preliminary to any consideration of the subject is "whether the end of our breeding is to be the production of a few superior individuals, or the general elevation of the race. If it is the first, we must proceed as in the breeding of thoroughbred race horses; if it is the second, as in the production of good fat stock for the farm." Preferential mating, he thinks, produces in the long run, persons of exceptional talent. "Like mates with like, and people with exceptional ability in any line are naturally thrown together by their common tastes and thus uniting bring forth phenomenal individuals in all lines." The solution of the problem of the deterioration of the stock lies, he thinks, not so much in stricter marriage laws, as in the absolute prevention of reproduction among "the culls, human as well as animal." To colonize other classes of the unfit as strictly as we do the insane is the only way he sees of doing this. "Let a man be taken into court and his ancestor record investigated. If we find his parents were dominantly bad, it means that he is fifty per cent bad. If his grand parents were also bad, he is twenty-five per cent more bad. When he gets to ninety per cent bad, it is certain that he must be colonized. There is a strict mathematical law that runs through it all."

Whatever may be thought of such definite suggestions, it is too true as the secretary of the Physicians' Club affirms, that "man is at a distinct disadvantage when compared with domestic animals in being denied 'good' breeding. He is the child of chance and so to speak is born, not bred." Surely, however slowly, the science of improving the propagation of the human race will receive its recognition as having place among the hierarchy of the sciences and will be practically applied by those who respect themselves and have any regard for their posterity.

CONFERENCE ON DENTAL HYGIENE

The Conference on Oral and Dental Hygiene held in Boston recently brought out, perhaps more than anything else, the relation between, the physical condition of the teeth and the general health of the body, and the great necessity for lay intelligence in the matter. Prof. Irving Fisher of Yale, the opening speaker, dwelt on these points, and declared that civilized man tries to avoid mastication by the use of pulverized, liquified and pappified foods; that civilization has brought about a pressure of time with the result that we eat by the quick lunch counter and the clock, whereas the animal eats his meal in peace; that we eat too fast, to the injury of our teeth, as shown by the fact that those who do masticate food thoroughly have better teeth; and that experience shows thorough mastication results in better health and greater efficiency. Prof. Timothy Leary of Tufts College said that proper mastication does away with an important source of supply of putrefactive bacteria, and eliminates conditions favoring gastric cancer.

Dr. Samuel A. Hopkins believes that the solution of many of the difficulties lies in seeking out the educators and in working through them and through the various settlements and the workers in public and charitable institutions. Of particular importance are all those who work with children. William H. Allen of New York lays to the ignorance and the indifference and the carelessness of the public a great many of the difficulties. He believes that

if hospitals ever refuse to give bed treatment for twelve weeks to a man suffering from jaw trouble when the dentist could give "ambulant" treatment while the man supports himself and his family; if physicians ever stop spending time, money, medicine and hospital space on tubercular patients who reinfect themselves whenever food, medicine or saliva pass over their diseased teeth and gums; if dentists are ever generally added to the attending, visiting and consulting staffs of hospitals; if education of dentists for profit ever gives way to education for health and training; if the dental profession is ever given the rank with other specialties and society given the corresponding protection, it will be because laymen intervene.

Dr. Horace Fletcher declared that it is definitely known that the flow of gastric juices is started in the stomach by psychic stimuli. If the food is taken without enjoyment the juices are not secreted and the food remains undigested. "Any dispute at the table, an angry word, a discussion over a bill, or a sharp retort, are sufficient to stop this digestive process," he said.

Dr. David D. Scannell of the Boston School Committee made the startling statement that fully seventy-five per cent of Boston school children have dental disease, which means that there are about 75,000 school children in Boston needing attention. Dr. Scannell bases his statement upon investigations made in Brookline, New York, and through the district nursing associations. Dr. Scannell said that the present dental work in schools is done with good intention but it is sporadic. Money should be set aside for examination and treatment of all school children, conducted through an out-patient dental department on the same basis as the eye and ear departments of free treatment.

Dr. Walter B. Cannon of the Harvard Medical School showed the dangers lurking in school drinking cups. His statements were supplemented in the exhibit provided by the Dental Hygiene Council of Massachusetts by pictures showing a filthy vagrant using a public drinking cup, immediately followed by a mother who gave her little girl a drink from the same cup.

The exhibit is the only one in existence in this country. It was taken in part from the tuberculosis exhibit, but has been greatly increased and supplemented by an exhibit from Strasbourg.

In the closing session, President Eliot of Harvard pointed out the relation between defective physical conditions and defective government. "The bad physical condition of our people is due largely to the unhealthy conditions under which the men do their ordinary work and the women pursue their domestic employments. To improve the public health we must have better regulations and laws. We cannot create and improve the public playgrounds which are open air parlors without honest and efficient city and town government," he said. Dr. Eliot thinks that the medical profession is the most altruistic of all occupations, with the possible exception of the ministry.

INSURANCE AND BUILDING LOANS

One of the defects of the building and loan societies, long recognized in some quarters, has been the probable loss of the home to the family of the member who dies before payment has been completed. At the time when the widow most needs the home for her children, the payments cannot be met and the association is reluctantly obliged to foreclose the mortgage.

A plan to meet this situation, frequent in the aggregate, has been devised and practised in New England, by requiring the borrower to take out an insurance policy on the least expensive straight-life plan, to an amount equal to the mortgage. The insurance premium is payable monthly with the payment on the loan, the association turning it over to the insurance company, and undertaking to adjust the payments if the latter's premium periods do not coincide. The face of the policy is made payable to the loan association which, in case of death, takes from the insurance money the amount remaining unpaid on the mortgage, and gives the widow the balance with a deed for an unencumbered home. In the great majority of cases where the borrower lives to complete his payments, the policy is surrendered to him when his mortgage is cancelled, to be continued or dropped as he pleases.

The plan was described at the annual banquet of the Metropolitan League of Co-operative Savings and Loan Associations, New York, by J. Q. A. Brackett, former governor of Massachusetts, who is urging it on a national scale as a necessary adjunct to what, in his native state, is termed the co-operative bank.

More than two hundred men attended the banquet, representing ninety-five constituent companies with 35,129 depositors, and controlling assets of sixteen million dollars. One who attended could not fail to be impressed with the evident feeling of these men that their paramount duty is not to make money for their particular organizations, but to help the average member buy a home. Ninety per cent of them are unsalaried. One association, it was reported, has reduced its interest rate without request of its borrowers. In the words of the president, the main desire of building loan associations should be "the encouragement of the habit of saving without irritating penalties and restrictions and with equitable provision for the mishaps possible to those undertaking a contract for specific saving extending over a long period of years."

THE SIGHTLESS AND THEIR WORK

The wonderful gains made by the blind in overcoming their heavy handicap was brought strikingly to public attention at the second annual sale and exhibition of the New York Association for the Blind. Women were at work on small hand looms, on linen looms, and on carpet-weaving looms. A blind girl operated a power machine. Stenographers sat at their work, fingering ordinary typewriters, and transcribing notes from phonographic dictation. There were all the usual, simpler displays of chair caning, basket weaving and broom making and there was music, both vocal and instrumental. The guests were told interesting stories of many of the workers. One was of a man who applied to the association for help when first stricken blind and most despondent, thinking that all avenues of usefulness had been closed to him. As a result of the instruction given to him, he is now able to earn a good salary and to support his family.

The work of the association has so increased during the past year, that besides the building on Fifty-ninth street and the workshop on Forty-second street, the special committee for the prevention of blindness has an office in the Kennedy Building at 289 Fourth avenue. In co-operation with the State Department of Health the committee is working particularly toward the prevention of ophthalmia neonatorum. Following are the members of the committee: P. Tecumseh Sherman, chairman, Dr. Eugene H. Porter, Dr. Thomas Darlington, Dr. F. Park Lewis, Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, Thomas M. Mulry, Dr. John I. Middleton, Miss Louisa L. Schuyler, Mrs. William B. Rice, Mrs. Edward R. Hewitt, Miss Winifred Holt, Miss Lillian D. Wald and George A. Hubbell, executive secretary.

BERLIN'S SCHOOL OF PHILANTHROPY

Europe, and especially Germany, follow very closely every new experiment along social lines, undertaken by American cities or individuals. One imitation of American methods was the establishment of separate courts for children, though neither detention homes nor the splendidly equipped schools for delinquent boys and girls, which the most progressive states of the Union have, are found in Germany. The state governments in most cases do not take the initiative; private citizens study the question and urge the necessity for a change, until public opinion, thoroughly aroused comes out so strongly in favor of a new measure, that the authorities are forced to yield. In October, 1908, a social school for women opened its doors in Berlin with the help of different societies and in co-operation with private citizens, of whom Dr. Munsterberg is the best known to the readers of this magazine. A close study of the methods of the New York and Chicago Schools of Philanthropy had been made and some of their features successfully copied. The aim of the school is to give German women new chances for service whether they wish to devote some of their time as volunteers or desire to become paid officers of philanthropic agencies. Field practice will show how the same problems, which confront social workers, repeat themselves only in a smaller way in the families and individual. To the training in both theory and practice two years are devoted. The theoretical work in pedagogy, social questions, economics and domestic science, is supplemented in the first year by kindergarten and day nursery work, and in the second year by a special training gained through working at different social agencies, like the Bureau of Charity, juvenile court committees, relief and aid societies. All these agencies hope to get a staff of experienced helpers and workers through their co-operation with the school. The state's schools, through which the girls have to pass prior to their admission, have very little of the modern spirit. In contrast too with the great variety of courses in the state _lyzeums_, the courses are restricted in number and carefully selected. They are however most appropriate for women, since they present not only a picture of the development of modern society, but emphasize particularly woman's position.

The director, Dr. Alice Salomon, is one of the most able and conservative leaders of German women. There is a good attendance at the new school.

THE RUDOWITZ CASE

GRAHAM TAYLOR

The decision of Secretary Root to deny the demand of the Russian government for the extradition of Christian Rudowitz is a great relief to all true Americans, and thousands of their foreign born fellow citizens all over the land. The right of asylum for political refugees was at stake in the case of this Lutheran Protestant peasant. The extradition was demanded on the ground that he had been identified as one of a band of twelve or fifteen marauders who were guilty of three homicides, arson and robbery in the village of Beren, Courland, in January, 1906. The defendant denied the charges of personal participation in the alleged crimes and submitted proof that Courland was then in a state of temporarily successful insurrection, and that the killing was ordered by the revolutionary party then in control, as an execution of spies who had betrayed many of their own people into the hands of the military authorities by whom they were summarily shot.