Part 4

Although, like Hayne’s famous speech on Foote’s resolution, this book shoots a passing reference at almost every topic of public affairs, it is in essence an argument for establishing an employment bureau in connection with every educational institution in the United States. The reasoning of the treatise, like its rhetoric, is thoroughly ill-digested. While the author has imagination enough to see the perfect beauty of a social adjustment which would provide a suitable occupation for every educated person, and an educated person for every occupation, she apparently relies on the sentimentality and good-heartedness of mankind to bring this about.

Her program for starting an employment bureau is to get a handful of men and women into a parlor and start one. The task of launching raw youngsters on their life-work is to be done at first by volunteers “whose imaginations are quickened by a longing to serve humanity.” The author is evidently unacquainted with the history of vocational guidance in Boston, which has emphasized above all else the need of full and scientific information about industry and individual aptitudes before placement is sparingly attempted. She says not a word about the age at which children are to be steered into jobs, and is apparently unfamiliar with recent investigations in New York, Cincinnati and Philadelphia, which have made it alarmingly probable that there are no positions in cities into which it is wise or safe to place children. She seems to accept as good, without discrimination, any and all attempts at vocational training, at the same time not realizing that such training should precede organized placement.

In a word, the book embodies nearly all of the fallacies and half-truths which make so difficult the progress of wise educational readjustment in this country at the present time. Mrs. Diggs describes herself as the chairman of the Department of Employment Bureaus of the National Social Center Association. It is to be hoped that if that organization ever addresses itself to active propaganda, it will not adopt Mrs. Diggs’ views on finding work for children.

WINTHROP D. LANE.

CATCH-MY-PAL

By REV. R. J. PATTERSON, LL.B. Geo. H. Doran Co. 192 pp. Price $1.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.07.

The author, a Presbyterian minister, in the north of Ireland, catches enthusiasm from a Catholic priest, and a temperance movement of great significance results, enrolling 130,000 men in a year’s time, chiefly by the work of ex-drinkers for their former “pals.” The book is a glowingly Irish account of what has been a unique illustration of the power of sheer brotherhood, applied after the method of the Gospels and in the unconventional spirit of the Good Samaritan. The material given here is to be classed for significance in interpreting religious experience with two recent publications—Varieties of Religious Experience and Twice-Born Men.

Perhaps the core of the book is the conclusion phrased in words previously and independently used by Professor Horne: “Sometimes conviction leads to action.... Sometimes action leads to conviction.” The experience of the mystic seems incalculable; the religion of the Gospels and of this book reveal a constant, lawful and infinite power, a source of true miracle, latent until men take its challenge and by a brotherly act of will allow it to work its wonders through them. “All our attempts to save a man,” says Mr. Patterson, “should be made at the point where he understands.... [Jesus] began at the blind man’s eyes, at the lame man’s feet, at the deaf man’s ears, at the dumb man’s tongue.” This movement has given also another proof of the pressing necessity of social centers for men, equally attractive and unconventional as the saloon, and the author has interesting things to say about “Temperance saloons,” public opinion, and legislation.

J. F. BUSHNELL.

THE LIFE OF ELLEN H. RICHARDS

By CAROLINE L. HUNT. Whitcomb & Barrows. Boston. 328 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.66.

CAROLA WOERISHOFFER, HER LIFE AND WORK

Bryn Mawr College, Class of 1907. 137 pp.

“The large, outgiving life” is a graphic phrase used by the biographer of Ellen H. Richards in introducing the story of her sixty-eight well-spent years. Mrs. Richards was a woman in whose nature the quality of acquisitiveness seems almost to have been omitted. She gave boundlessly of herself to individuals and to the common welfare. Her thoughtfulness for friends and associates and her notable public services were intrinsic forms of self-expression. Apparently, she was incapable of a perfunctory act. Her letters to friends, the gift for the coming baby, the “treat” for the girl student away from home for the first time, the pot of flowers sent to a new neighbor, her letters to “correspondence” students, her analysis of the water supply of the state of Massachusetts, her leadership in the home economics movement—all these things, from the least to the most important, were but the sincere expressions of her outpouring spirit.

Her impulse for service was re-enforced by a remarkable talent for administration. It was this which made possible the extraordinary generosity of her life. It was scientifically managed from the start. At the height of her career, as Miss Hunt remarks, Mrs. Richards was doing the work of ten people. Even as a little girl, Ellen Swallow had shown her capacity to carry on a triple career by helping her mother at home and her father in the “general store,” besides doing the lessons proper for a little girl. Later she combined teaching with housekeeping and storekeeping and helped to earn the money with which she went to college. During the greater part of her two years at Vassar, she supported herself by tutoring. From this time on, as student in the Boston Institute of Technology and subsequently as instructor, Mrs. Richards was steadily increasing the range of her energies and activities. The history of her life is the history of the inauguration of many social and scientific movements.

As a leader, she united to a marked degree the qualities of pioneer and conservator. To have been the first woman to enter the Institute of Technology and to have opened the way for other women was for her a life-long satisfaction. She was never weary in fighting the battle for the higher education of women. But she had also a strong instinct for sustaining the victory so hardly won. This is illustrated by a reproachful letter which she wrote to a woman friend, a college professor, who had fainted. “Take beef three times a day for a fortnight to tone yourself up,” she wrote, “and don’t do it again. It is fully as important to keep in physical condition as to have a mental grasp. Nowadays the last card they can trump up against us is that we are not physically equal to what we try to do. The more prominent we are the more closely they watch us. Just now, too, when so much is in the air against woman’s education.”

The volume is issued as a memorial and was prepared with the co-operation of Professor Richards and a committee of Mrs. Richards’ friends representing her various interests.

* * * * *

At the age of twenty-five, Ellen Swallow was just pulling herself free from the narrow life of a New England village and starting off to Vassar College. At the same age, Carola Woerishoffer, thanks to a more favorable environment and a more enlightened generation, had finished her college course and entered upon a well-established career of social service. When her gallant and useful life came to a tragical end in an automobile accident at this same age, she had already accomplished much that was worth recording.

A picture of her life and personality is given in a small memorial volume, which consists chiefly of a series of addresses made by personal friends at a meeting held in Greenwich House shortly after her death. In the descriptions of her friends, the girl’s devotion to athletics, her spirit of comradeship, her strong-willed nature, her democratic instincts, her German fondness for thoroughness and hatred of dilettantism, and her sense of social responsibility as the possessor of wealth are the qualities which are made to stand out as most representative of her.

The spirit in which her social work was done was thus described by one of the speakers: “She and another young woman, Elizabeth Butler, who also did immeasurably hard things and who also left us forever this summer—they undertook so simply the things that to us of my generation seemed a moral adventure, a wonderful undertaking,—these young women took them in such a matter-of-fact way. It did not seem to Carola an adventure to go into laundries any more than it did to Elizabeth Butler to go into the depths of blackest Pittsburgh. The things were there, and we had to know about them, and it was all matter-of-fact, just as it would have been for an able-bodied man to go and look at things and come back and tell the world what it bitterly needs to know about them. It was all matter-of-fact for them, and I believe they are forerunners of new generations of women who will insist in their youth on knowing life as it is, on facing the world clear-eyed and changing these things which we of my generation, in our youth, shirked and preferred not to know.”

KATHARINE ANTHONY.

BOOKS RECEIVED IN APRIL

A BUNCH OF LITTLE THIEVES. By David S. Greenberg. The Shakespeare Press. 336 pp. Price $1.35; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.46.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SOCIALISM. By Allan L. Benson. B. W. Huebsch. 188 pp. Price $1.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.10.

SYNDICALISM, INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM AND SOCIALISM. By John Spargo. B. W. Huebsch. 243 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.35.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE. By H. G. Wells. B. W. Huebsch. 61 pp. Price $.60; by mail of THE SURVEY $.65.

THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE. By Karl Marx. Chas. H. Kerr & Co. 160 pp. Price by mail of THE SURVEY $.50 (cloth), $.25 (paper).

SABOTAGE. By Emile Pouget. Chas. H. Kerr & Co. 108 pp. Price by mail of THE SURVEY $.50 (cloth), $.25 (paper).

WAY STATIONS. By Elizabeth Robins. Dodd, Mead, & Co. 371 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.64.

THE WOMAN WITH EMPTY HANDS—WHO IS SHE? Dodd, Mead & Co. 76 pp. Price $.50; by mail of THE SURVEY $.56.

DIVORCING LADY NICOTINE. By Henry Beach Needham. Forbes & Co. 70 pp. Price $.35; by mail of THE SURVEY $.39.

THE MAN AND THE WOMAN. By Arthur L. Salmon. Forbes & Co. 145 pp. Price $.75; by mail of THE SURVEY $.81.

WOMEN AS WORLD BUILDERS. By Floyd Dell. Forbes & Co. 104 pp. Price $.75; by mail of THE SURVEY $.80.

THE HAPPY FAMILY. By Frank Swinnerton. Geo. H. Doran Co. 308 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.36.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE. By Oliver Onions. Geo. H. Doran Co. 284 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.35.

GOLD, PRICES AND WAGES. By John A. Hobson. Geo. H. Doran Co. 178 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.32.

FURTHER REMINISCENCES. By Henry Mayers Hyndman. The Macmillan Co. 545 pp. Price $5.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $5.20.

THE BRITANNICA YEAR BOOK, 1913. Edited by Hugh Chisholm, M. A., Oxon. Encyclopedia Britannica Co. 1226 pp. Price $2.25; by mail of THE SURVEY $2.40.

THE PHILIPPINE PROBLEM. By Frederick Chamberlain. Little, Brown & Co. 240 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.60.

WHEN TO SEND FOR THE DOCTOR. By F. E. Lippert, M.D., and A. Holmes, Ph.D. J. B. Lippincott Co. 265 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.34.

PRIMER OF PHYSIOLOGY. By John W. Ritchie. World Book Co. 250 pp. Price $.80; by mail of THE SURVEY $.88.

FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. By P. A. Kropotkin. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 477 pp. Price $.75; by mail of THE SURVEY $.82.

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT. By Oscar S. Strauss. The Century Co. 379 pp. Price $2.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $2.15.

THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION IN FLORIDA. By William Watson Davis, Ph.D. Longmans, Green & Co. 769 pp. Price $4.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $4.23.

THE LARGER ASPECTS OF SOCIALISM. By William English Walling. The Macmillan Co. 406 pp. Price $1.50; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.63.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL VALUE OF CHRISTIANITY. By George Chatterton-Hill, Ph.D. The Macmillan Co. 285 pp. Price $2.75; by mail of THE SURVEY $2.88.

CHRISTIAN UNITY AT WORK. Edited by Charles S. MacFarland. Federal Council of Churches in America. 291 pp. Price $1.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.15. A copy of the Business Proceedings of the Council is sent, free of charge, with the book.

THE MODERN TREATMENT OF MENTAL DISEASES. Volume I. Edited by William A. White, M.D. Lea and Febiger. 867 pp. Price $6.00; prepaid of THE SURVEY $6.35.

TREND

LEADERS IN THE MONTH’S MAGAZINES

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, and STATE REGULATION OF VICE AND ITS MEANING. By Anna Garlin Spencer. Both in the _Forum_. 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, and MY WORK FOR CRIPPLED CHILDREN. By Blanche VanLeuvan Browne. Both in the _World’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 in _The Sunset Magazine_ by 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 wrong who 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 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 WORKMAN’S RIGHTS

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.

PRINCIPLES GOVERNING EMPLOYERS

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.

WARNING FOR RICH

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.

WARNING FOR WORKMEN

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 the _Outlook_ on the wastes of retailing. A serious element of waste arises she maintains from downright dishonesty practised in unnamed establishments: