Part 24

When we say that even if Dickens had grossly exaggerated the character of the Yorkshire schools there would have been no great harm in it, we have in mind two points of contrast between the task on which he was engaged and the spirit of his time, on the one hand, and the general objective of present-day reform movements and the spirit of our time, on the other. Upon the desirability of putting an end to Dotheboys Halls, if they were but one tenth as evil as they are represented to us in _Nicholas Nickleby_, there can be no difference of opinion among decent human beings. The question of degree may be of scientific or historical interest, it can have no practical bearing on the decision to be reached. An overstatement of the case may intensify our emotions, it can hardly mislead our judgment. To know that such a state of things exists is to desire its extinction; such a thing as the balancing of gain against loss, of immediate benefit against collateral or ulterior injury, does not enter into the question at all. Very different is the case with regard to most of the problems that are enlisting the interest of those who to-day are striving for the betterment of social conditions. There is hardly one of these problems which does not have wide ramifications connecting it with the whole economic and social system. In hardly one of them is it possible to say: Here is a flagrant wrong whose existence no rightminded person can tolerate, whose immediate removal is a clear duty, about whose extinction we need not hesitate for a moment on the score of any evil which may accompany the good. And this complexity of the problems places the question of exaggeration, or misrepresentation, or false perspective, upon an essentially different footing. As soon as the question of cost--the question of what sacrifices, or what dangers, or what ulterior evil effects, may be involved--enters into the situation, the question of degree becomes of vital moment. To represent a given evil as a vast affliction when in reality it is confined within narrow bounds, to represent it as hideous, morally or materially, without just basis, is in these cases much more than a mere violation of the abstract requirements of truth. These issues turn fundamentally on the weighing of the good to be gained against the sacrifices or dangers which the proposal involves. And the reformer who, however excellent his purposes, grossly magnifies the evil deceives and misleads the public just as a merchant does who weighs with false scales, or a gambler who plays with loaded dice.

So much for the nature of the specific questions at issue. But there is a contrast far more important still, which turns upon the spirit of the time. In our day no serious attack can be made upon any particular evil in any way connected with the existing economic order, without being regarded by great multitudes as part of a general indictment against that order. At the center of the socialist movement there is now, as there has been at any time in the past half-century, a body of convinced believers in the inherent unfitness of the existing order to serve man's material and moral needs, and in the feasibility of a new order which shall replace it to the infinite improvement and elevation of mankind. But the growth of socialistic and semi-socialistic sentiment which has been going on at so extraordinarily rapid a rate during the past decade, especially in this country, is due in only a relatively small measure to the making of doctrinal converts. The growth has been in the main, or at least primarily, not at the center, but on the fringe, of the socialist body. It has come about, above all, through that unprecedented stimulation of humanitarian interest and humanitarian endeavor in connection with the problems of the poor which is in itself a just cause both for pride and satisfaction in our generation. Between this humanitarian activity, directed toward various specific forms of social betterment, and that kind of discontent with the existing order which lies at the basis of socialism, there is at once a sharp contrast and an intimate connection. The socialist--at least the socialist as he has traditionally been--makes it the first tenet of his practical doctrine that social-betterment endeavors are not only vain, but mischievous. He holds that they tend to patch up a system which is hopelessly evil, and to reconcile to its continuance those who, if they were not thus deluded, would see that the only remedy lies in its extinction. In reality, however, the worker for social-betterment schemes, while helping to make the existing order sounder with one hand, is constantly giving powerful aid to the socialists with the other. For it is part of his task to concentrate public attention upon evils which would otherwise remain unnoticed in the background; and it is safe to say that in the impression made by these agitations upon multitudes of sensitive natures lies the chief source of that enormous recruiting of the forces making towards socialism which we have been witnessing. In so far as this result is the natural accompaniment of the unfolding of a truthful picture of society, it must be accepted as an inevitable fact. Even so, it might be deplored that a development so momentous should in so large a measure turn on the state of mind of persons unequipped with such mental qualities, and such intellectual training, as would fit them duly to weigh the defects against the virtues of the existing order, and duly to consider the objections to the proposed remedy as well as its allurements. But, as the matter stands, what is actually being furnished to these susceptible minds and hearts is in large measure a mass of distorted representations of the truth. The falsity of the picture is often a matter of direct exaggeration or misstatement, oftener it is a matter of false perspective, chiefly taking the form of making a part pass virtually for the whole. But however it is brought about, we have continually before us the spectacle of numbers of well-meaning persons, through careless exaggeration or distortion of the truth, misleading multitudes of young and ardent spirits into a readiness to throw overboard the fundamental institutions of society.

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_Children of Strife. A Dramatic Story of Rich and Poor in New York._ Such is the title of a novel that is appearing in the _Delineator_, an old-established journal of large circulation, devoted primarily to fashions, housekeeping matters, and the like. It is very specially "featured." Its first chapter is ushered in with this notice, conspicuously printed in large type below the title: "Special Request: Great things may hinge upon this novel. Just how great will depend upon your reception of it. It is thrilling fiction but back of it is something else. Will you watch for that something, keeping each instalment by you for reference?" Those who dutifully follow this last injunction will begin by keeping by them for reference a picture of the ways of business that is extremely interesting. Chapter I is entitled "The Corporation." Its opening scene is in the private office of a flourishing capitalist. Many little touches are given to heighten the stage effect, but the real point of interest concerns the giving out of a contract relating to the construction of a twenty-one story building. Griffiths, the capitalist, holds an impromptu meeting of the construction company, the other directors being office dummies; the question to be decided is whether steel columns or cast-iron columns are to be used:

"What's the difference in cost?" asked Mr. Griffiths, shortly, casting a cursory glance over the items.

"If we use the iron we'll save about eighteen thousand dollars," the secretary replied, "but the architect says we'll be taking a risk."

"How _much_ of a risk?" Mr. Griffiths retorted quickly. "Doesn't Littleton think the building will stand up?"

"He _thinks_ so," Williams rejoined deprecatingly. "There are houses on both sides. He _thinks_ it'll stand up. It ought to."

"Well," said Mr. Griffiths, pushing back his chair. "Nothing venture, nothing have. Eh, Williams?"

Williams smiled a perfunctory smile in response to his employer's little jest.

"Let's get to work," went on Mr. Griffiths. "Call the roll. All present--full board. (Note that.) We waive reading the minutes of the last meeting, and there are no reports. Mr. Flynt offers the following resolution: Resolved, That the secretary be and hereby is empowered to accept and ratify the contract heretofore drawn up with Peck & Simpson, for iron columns (By the way, Williams, White is the chief inspector for that district. You can handle him, eh?), and to execute the same on behalf of the Company. All in favor say 'Aye;' contrary minded, 'No.'" The chair canvassed the vote and reported that a majority of votes were in favor of the resolution. It was so voted. "That's all. Meeting adjourned. Good morning."

What happens in Chapter III will surprise nobody. Griffiths' little daughter is with her father in his luxurious library, absorbed in a story-book, both of them enveloped in a delicious silence. But the silence is suddenly broken by a curious and startling sound:

The sound had suggested a sliding, the collapse of something; it was like the falling in of a gigantic house of cards. Fascinated, Ruth's eyes sought her father's face. It was transformed, livid; his hands clutched his chair--clutched it so convulsively that, plump though they were, the veins stood out on them in purple knots.

"The building," he whispered with bloodless lips. "It's gone."

The sliding stopped momentarily; the very air seemed to stay still in an awful hush of expectation; then it caught up a new sound--a sound that far exceeded the sliding in horror; a sound to freeze the blood, even the warm, quick blood of a child; a sound big with every emotion ever evoked by the voice of any tenor who ever has sung--the inarticulate protest of men about to be smothered--the wail of human beings caught in a trap, like rats.

Now, it would of course be preposterous to regard a cheap melodramatic novel in a fashion magazine as a subject for serious criticism; and it would be equally absurd to make the policy of such a magazine, taken in itself, an occasion for solemn moralizing or rebuke. But in publishing this rubbish, the _Delineator_ is a magazine of fashion in more senses than one; it is but following, according to its lights, a fashion current in much higher circles of "uplift" literature. That this grotesque presentation of the ways of business appears, and is given all possible prominence and emphasis, not in a journal devoted to reform but in one which seeks its circulation among the women of the average "bourgeois" home, is precisely what gives significance to a piece of fiction otherwise too insignificant to mention. Evidently the editor of this magazine imagines, rightly or wrongly, that the state of mind prevailing among his readers is such as to make a thing of this kind go. They have become so accustomed to a diet of sensationalism and exaggeration, he may well reason, that they will never stop to inquire whether the building of collapsible skyscrapers is a common practice--whether indeed such a thing has ever happened at all--or in any other way to question the truth of a portrait evidently designed to represent a large part of the capitalist class. To ask whether either writer or editor really believes the picture to be true--to hark back to Dickens's solemn assurance of the truthfulness of his indictments against the evils he attacked--is the most that need be said on the subject, to anyone accustomed to sober or responsible thinking. But among the millions of defenceless people--young, half-educated, well-intentioned, untrained to serious thought--to whom such stuff is being fed every day, there is a vast number that are misled by it into a false view of the world, and into a state of mind that is most unwholesome and deplorable.

What is thus dealt out in popular fiction, what was for a time to be seen filling the pages of nearly every popular magazine professedly as plain fact, is met with in a hundred forms in the daily newspapers--even those of a good type--and in the outgivings of many excellent persons, and many worthy associations, engaged in social-betterment work. A very few instances must suffice for illustration.

"The outstanding infamy of certain of our modern industries is the linking to the belts of factories and mills of two million children." This statement, and variants of it which pile up the agony now in one direction now in another, we find continually cropping up in the high places of social reform. The quotation is from an address made a year ago by William B. Patterson, secretary of the commission on social service of the Philadelphia Federation of Churches. He was speaking before the first annual Progressive Conference of Pennsylvania, and presumably his object was to show the dire need of the Progressive movement for the remedy of a stupendous evil. But we turn to an article on child labor in the United States by Dr. Jacob S. Raisin, a Troy rabbi, printed very prominently in the _Knickerbocker Press_, for a more vivid realization of this gigantic horror. Here are some extracts from the article:

Two million children are virtually enslaved in our cotton mills, coal mines and sweat-shops over the breadth and length of our country--two million little ones!

At the same time that thousands of children in our city enjoyed their Christmas vacation and rejoiced over their newly acquired presents, two million children of the same tender age, of the same Caucasian race and citizens of the same prosperous land, were pining away in the dark subterranean caves of the coal mines in the east, in the dangerous cotton mills and tobacco factories of the south and the sweat-shops everywhere.

Two million souls are annually sacrificed to commerce and to greed. Parents do not get sufficient to keep the souls and bodies of their little ones together. Mothers must leave their suckling babes to seek for their livelihood, and these infants, in turn, if they survive until they are six, must begin the battle of life on their own account.

The United States Census of 1910 gives the total number of mine-workers under sixteen years of age in 1909 as 8,151, of whom 3,117 were working below ground and 5,034 above ground. The number of wage-earners under sixteen years of age in manufacturing industries is stated as 161,493; and it is shown that the percentage of workers under sixteen to the whole number of workers in these industries fell from 3.4 per cent. in 1899 to 2.9 per cent. in 1904 and 2.4 per cent. in 1909. Figures concerning sweat-shops are not given.

What we have before us, therefore, is a gross overstatement, on the face of it; after making all possible allowance for false returns of age in the census, it is evident that, merely as a matter of the surface figures, the case is enormously exaggerated. But this is not all. The impression is always sought to be conveyed that these two millions are, in large part at least _little_ children; whereas even of the (say) two hundred thousand workers under sixteen who are actually "linked to the belts of factories and mills," and of the (say) four thousand who are laboring "in the dark subterranean caves of the coal mines," it is obvious that only a small fraction can be under fourteen. That there ought not to be a single one may be true enough; but unless we are to throw reason overboard altogether, we must make a distinction between a question concerning a few hundreds, or a few thousands, of little children, and one concerning two million. And these very agitators _do_ recognize the distinction; else why make all this noise about the figures? Driven into a corner, they would doubtless fall back on the iniquity of having even a single child in all the land deprived of its birthright of happiness; but in the meanwhile they work the two million for all it is worth. As for the violation of the Ninth Commandment, the true Progressive, whether Christian or Jew, presumably finds in the principles of the New Morality ample exemption from any acute pangs of conscience on that score.

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In the early part of the year 1910, the Consumers' League of New York obtained permission from the _American Magazine_ to reprint as a leaflet a little article of two pages which had appeared in the January number of that periodical under the title _Some Dangers from High Prices_. The article which the excellent persons who conduct the work of that League considered so important a document was devoted in the first place to a very precise account of what had happened in a certain restaurant with which the writer was familiar, and which was frequented in part by shop-girls; and secondly to the issuing of a most solemn and tragic warning as to what this country was threatened with as a consequence of the situation which this happening indicated. This is the experience:

Five and six years ago I used to go to a restaurant which fed about three hundred shop-girls a day.... I used to write down what they could get for 15 cents. Here are three dishes each of which then cost 15 cents. Two eggs on toast, with bread; a nice little meat pie, hot and appetizing; chicken on toast with a rice border. The chicken was all dark meat, to be sure, but it was meat and the rice border was generous. In short, in that restaurant six years ago there was for 15 cents honest nourishment fitted to build up an honest constitution such as the trunk class of America ought to have. And in the long run those girls chose the nourishing food. Two years ago a change came. I noticed a habit of lunching off a potato salad. I soon saw the reason. The little meat pie had moved up to 25 cents, the chicken on toast to 30 cents. Potato salad, one of the girls told me, was the only "interesting" thing left for 15 cents. Going there last September I said to one of the waitresses:

"What are these girls eating now?"

"Ah," she sighed, "it is dreadful! They ought not to pay more than 15 cents; so many of them just have griddle cakes, or sweets and coffee. They can have two cream cakes and coffee or an eclair and coffee for 15 cents."

Please notice the sliding scale of nourishment therein displayed in six short years. From chicken on toast with a wholesome rice border to potato salad and from potato salad to an eclair and coffee. One can fairly see the nourishment ooze out! It is only fair to add, however, that the manager told me that they were losing their shop-girls somewhat: they were going where there were no waitresses, where they served themselves at counters. There one could get real nourishment for 20 cents.

Upon the basis of this interesting little story, and of the loose talk of "a dealer in milk" with whom she had conversed, the writer finds that there is a "canker at the heart of our prosperity," that "our great, prosperous country is at the parting of the ways." "A little more," she warns us, "and you will have the trunk class of America an underfed class, being slowly but surely forced down in the social scale." And so forth.

Now it is nothing that such an article should have appeared in a popular magazine; nor is it perhaps a matter worth finding fault with that the managers of an important humanitarian organization, which is in many ways doing excellent work, should have had so little critical judgment as to regard as an exceptionally important contribution to public discussion what is so manifestly the mere expression of one person's superficial observations and impressions. What _does_ give significance to the Consumers' League's performance is that it demonstrates an indifference to facts--a lack of the sense of responsibility for the essential veracity of anything to which one gives one's name and which one actively disseminates among the public--that would be amazing were it not unfortunately so common. In half an hour, any officer of the Consumers' League could have discovered that in New York "honest nourishment" of precisely the kind referred to in the _American_ article was to be obtained for fifteen cents in any one of hundreds of clean, roomy, cheerful restaurants--not "where they served themselves at counters," but with good waiting by a fine type of waitresses. At the time the leaflet was issued, there had been no rise of prices at all in this class of restaurants in New York; since then there has been a rise in some of them, affecting certain dishes; but in no case, I believe, has the rise been more than that from fifteen to twenty cents. The _great_ rise in food prices has taken place in the four years _since_ January, 1910; and yet to this day one can get, in any one of the scores of handsome popular restaurants scattered all over the business section of New York, a nourishing meat or egg luncheon, well served, for fifteen or twenty cents, according to choice.

This may seem very homely matter, beneath the dignity of a quarterly REVIEW. But the homeliness, or insignificance, is only on the surface. The thing I am concerned with is not the bread and meat I am talking about, but the state of mind of a class of men and women considerable in point of mere numbers and tremendously important in their influence on the political and social currents of the time. With a responsibility resting on them a thousandfold greater than any that belonged to reformers like Dickens--a thousandfold greater both because the problems they touch are incomparably more complex and because the consequences of their agitation spread out immeasurably beyond the particular problems they touch--with this responsibility for truthful representation upon them, how far are they from that realization of it which is so solemnly avowed by the author of _Nicholas Nickleby_! And in this matter of the luncheon, small as it may seem in itself, the moral obtrudes itself with peculiar distinctness. For here everything turns absolutely on degree. If the shop-girl can get to-day for twenty cents the luncheon she could formerly get for fifteen, the whole terror disappears; for five cents a day is thirty cents a week, and surely it is not out of the question that there has been a rise of wages sufficient to cover this difference. Yet these good people evidently think it no harm to give out a solemn warning of national degeneration and ruin, based on figures which a few minutes' inquiry would have compelled them to reject, and on an allegation of fact as to the actual fare of working girls which a half-day's tour of the restaurants of New York would have shown to have no substantial basis. That the rise of prices has been hard on working people, that if it takes place without compensating rise of wages it must have serious consequences, is true enough; but between this and the sort of thing we have been discussing there is precisely the difference that there is between reason and unreason, between responsibility and recklessness.

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