Modern industry in relation to the family, health, education, morality

MODERN INDUSTRY

IN RELATION TO
THE FAMILY, HEALTH
EDUCATION, MORALITY

MODERN INDUSTRY

IN RELATION TO
THE FAMILY, HEALTH
EDUCATION, MORALITY

BY
FLORENCE KELLEY

General Secretary, National Consumers' League

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA

1914

COPYBIGHT, 1914, BY

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

NOTE

This volume contains the substance — amplified to
accord with the unprecedently rapid progress of
legislation — of four lectures given in 1913 at Teach-
ers' College, Columbia University. They formed the
opening course of lectures delivered annually under
the Isabel Hampton Robb Foundation, established
by the National League of Nursing Education.

336234

MODERN INDUSTRY IN RELATION TO
THE FAMILY

MODERN INDUSTRY AND THE FAMILY

MODERN industry affords, in more generous
measure than the human race has before known
them, all those goods which form the material
basis of family life — food, clothing, shelter, and
the materials and opportunities for subsistence
for husband, wife and children.

But modern industry tends to disintegrate the
family, so threatens it that the civilized nations
are, and for at least one generation have been, ac-
tively building a code intended to save the family
from this destructive pressure.

This is the paradox of Modern Industry.

It is my object to illustrate this paradox by in-
dicating some forms of the pressure of industry
upon the family, and upon each of its elements.

The American ideal of the home — inherited
from the time when we were an agricultural coun-
try— includes father, mother and children living
together in a house; the father the breadwinner,
the mother the homemaker, the children at play
and at school until they reach a reasonable age for

3

4 Modern Industry and the Family

•Work— t&e* boys Jfrelping their fathers with the
: .oMores,;ab,d tEe'girlg learning under their mothers'
eyes the arts of the housewife, the house which
shelters this group being the property of the fam-
ily or in process of becoming their property.
Originally, the typical home was a farm which
furnished subsistence, and the children received
within the family group industrial, religious and
moral training. Our departure from this early
ideal under the pressure of modern industry is
conspicuous.

The paradoxical tendency of the family to disin-
tegrate under pressure of the same industry which
affords it infinite material enrichment offers the
key to a complex, varied legislative movement go-
ing forward in all the civilized nations. Seem-
ingly incoherent, this movement is a ramified ef-
fort to safeguard the family. The mind is wear-
ied even by a partial enumeration of the elements
of the industrial and political code upon which the
modern world is at work to this end.*

* Among those elements the following are important:

a. Compulsory arbitration of labor disputes;

b. Workmen's compensation and social insurance, factory
inspection and compulsory provision of fire precautions and
safety devices;

c. Regulation of working time, including one day's rest in
seven, a short working day, prohibition of night work for

Modern Industry and the Family 5

Such effort to bulwark the family by compre-
hensive legislation arises because, all over the
modern world, a large and increasing proportion
of husbands and fathers are by the nature of their
work taken out of their homes, or killed outright,
or maimed, or they are disabled by industrial dis-
eases, and thus disqualified for their normal duty
of breadwinner.

Or throughout long periods of seasonal unem-
ployment they are recurrently without earnings.
Even when in health and at work, unskilled labor-
ers and many employees of higher grade are so
far underpaid that they cannot maintain their
wives and children, who are, therefore, drawn out
of the home into industry to supplement the earn-
ings of the father; or the home is invaded under
the sweating system by the materials of industry.

women and children, and the utmost attainable restriction of
night work for men;

d. Prohibition of child labor and of homework under the
sweating system;

e. Minimum wage boards and widows' pensions with gen-
erous provision for institutional care of certain classes of
diseased and defective children;

f. Compulsory education prolonged for part time instruc-
tion throughout minority;

g. Housing codes;
h. Pure food laws;

i. The enfranchisement of women.

6 Modern Industry and the Family

Tendency to Celibacy

Vast numbers of men never found families at
all, because they fear to marry upon insufficient
wages insecurely held by reason of the precarious
nature of many employments; or because their
health is destroyed before they reach an economic
position which seems to them to justify mar-
riage; or because the girls whom they would
gladly marry v&rejworn out and broken_down\in the
service of industry.

Abjuring family life is a social loss from every
point of view, most of all when the men who thus
deny themselves are of a high type and animated
by unselfishness. Citizens of Cincinnati are erect-
ing a memorial to such a man, Joe Haeberle, once
head of the truck drivers' union of that city. This
self-taught German immigrant worked himself
literally to death in the service of the children of
Ohio. Having obtained some drinking fountains
for the teamsters' horses, he discovered that the
children made them centres of their play during
school hours. Thus he learned that great numbers
of children were out of school because Cincinnati
had not, at that time, free school books. For
many years he carried on the agitation for free
books, for effective compulsory education and, at
the last, for workable child labor laws. Ham-

Modern Industry and the Family 7

pered by his foreign accent, his uncouth, ill-fitting
clothes, and his uncertain teamster's gait, Joe
Haeberle spent every free evening, every holiday,
every Sunday struggling against indifference, and
prejudice, and active, open hostility, to get for the
children of Ohio the best that any state gives its
children. A few months before his too early death,
he told one of his friends that he had never been
willing to ask a woman to share with him the
hardships of life on the only earnings he could
hope for, ten dollars a week. Faithful to his ideal
of the society of the future in which all children
should have the opportunity of education, un-
selfish in his life and his death, this tender, de-
voted servant of the children lived and died wife-
less and childless.

Compulsory celibacy is the lot of vast numbers
of men employed upon reclamation, schemes,
building railways, tunnels and water power con-
structions. Soinetmies_the work lies far from
civilization^ but oftener — as in Massachusetts,
Connecticut and New York — the inhumane ar-
rangements of the construction companies and
contractors make family life impossible for men
who do this work. Worn-out freight cars and
vermin-ridden bunk houses are not fit homes for
wives and children. But these are the dwellings
afforded for rapidly increasing thousands of work-

8 Modern Industry and the Family

ing men, for years at a time, a group being moved
from one section to another of some great under-
taking, the quality of their quarters varying little.

Of all the occupations which detach men from
home life the oldest is that of the sailors. In
Phoenicia, in the Greece of Homer, their craft
was already an ancient one. In our ports as then
the sailors are proverbially homeless, and their
numbers grow as the industry of Europe, particu-
larly that of Germany and England, lives increas-
ingly by manufacturing and distributing through-
out the world raw materials from the Tropics,
these nations importing meanwhile in ever larger
proportion their own food supplies.*

New and characteristic of modern industry is
the myriad of men who float about on land, their
family life reduced to a minimum by the nature
of their occupations, among whom are commer-
cial travellers, kept perforce away from their fam-
ilies a large part of every year. Sleeping car con-
ductors and porters, and dining car waiters, leav-
ing New York to go to Chicago, may there find or-
ders to go on to Seattle or San Diego, and do not
know when they will again reach home. In gen-
eral, family life in the home is obviously mini-
mized for all those husbands and fathers whose

*The phenomenal development of the cocoa and chocolate
industry and of rubber production are cases in point.

Modern Industry and the Family 9

work keeps them travelling, e. g., railway engi-
neers, firemen and brakemen, conductors, porters
and waiters.

Hotel employes, cooks and waiters, and domes-
tic servants are virtually condemned by the pres-
ent organization of their occupations to separation
from their wives and children. And the demand
of the last named employment for surrender of
the family tie is obviously an element in the per-
manent, universal, unorganized boycott of domes-
tic service by American men. Native white Amer-
ican valets, footmen and butlers virtually do not
exist.

When the farm gave us our ideal of family life,
many varieties of industrial activity were carried
on upon farms and in rural villages. The village
blacksmith once made the plough which the
farmer owned. Now the city of Moline has grown
up around the plough-making industry, producing
millions of ploughs. South Bend makes agricul-
tural wagons, and Auburn manufactures the far-
mers7 binding twine. Many cities thus specialize,
each in one industry formerly conducted on the
farms.

While those industries have gone from rural
life, a new disintegrating element has arisen in the
floating agricultural workers, a new apparition
from the city invading the country for a part of

10 Modern Industry and the Family

the year. When a Settlement recently wished to
send a young man to work on a Connecticut farm,
some forty farmers replied that there would be
work not for the whole year, but for a few months
only. For the prospective farm laborer in a New
England state these offers meant the choice over
the winter between tramping and the city lodging
house.

In the West thousands of men now go annually
from the cities to work in the grain harvest for a
period varying from five to nine months. At Hull
House, years ago, it was horrifying to discover,
in the neighboring frame cottages, Italian women
with children living four families in four rooms
of a flat, one wife and her children in one room,
because the four men breadwinners of the fam-
ilies had gone, early in the spring, to work on the
railroads. Later the men would leave the rail-
roads for the harvesting, beginning in Texas or
Arkansas, working northward into Western Can-
ada, and returning home to Chicago toward
Thanksgiving. Sometimes they did not come back
at all. After the harvest every year, families
were left fatherless by this new American agri-
culture. We thought of this development of
pressure of industry upon family life as an epi-
sode.

After twenty years we know, however, that it

Modern Industry and the Family 11

is a regular part of Western American agriculture,
which affords no foundation for normal home life
for these thousands of migratory employes. In
the canning industry there are, besides floating
families of workers in buildings and sheds, vegeta-
ble and berry pickers by thousands of families in
fields. That is one most striking change that
modern industry has wrought in agriculture and
its immediate derivative industries, canning and
fruit preserving. In the West it is men who mi-
grate in the service of agriculture. In the East it
is largely women with numerous young children.

In the case of sailors, the nature of the work
itself involves the sacrifice of family life in the
home. In many other industries, however, the sac-
rifice is wantonly exacted, as when city railway
companies require the twelve hours day, and the
seven days week, and their men are never at home
to see the children awake. The federal statute in-
tended to preserve the health of railway em-
ployes in interstate commerce permits them to
work sixteen hours in twenty-four !

Night work done in paper mills, glassworks, and
steel manufacture, and a growing number of con-
tinuous industries keeps fathers away from home
and makes impossible any wholesome domestic
companionship. A father at home by day, who is
trying to make up sleep lost the night before

12 Modern Industry and the Family

while at work, is not a helpful element of the fam-
ily life.

Night work of many kinds is obviously un-
avoidable. Its present rapidly increasing dislo-
cation of family life is, however, doubtless des-
tined to be checked in proportion as the workers
attain a deciding voice by strengthening their la-
bor organizations, or by using their votes more
wisely, or even by convincing the courts that the
present distribution of working hours is contrary
to sound public policy.

In the interest of the family life of wage earn-
ers, to assure to fathers opportunity of compan-
ionship with their wives and children, we Amer-
icans, in the Twentieth Century, have to strive
to get by statute that which was laid upon the
race by the Commandments, namely, one day's
rest in seven. This was commanded as of equal
importance with the injunction, Thou Shalt Not
Kill. The Book of Genesis records that the Lord
rested upon the seventh day.

Destruction of Fathers and Injury of Mothers

When families are founded they are, with ap-
palling frequency, disrupted by the destruction
that industry entails upon breadwinners. In
New York, this greatest of all the industrial states,
our highest court has held within three years that,

Modern Industry and the Family 13

to compel employers to pay a fixed compensation
to injured employes or surviving widows and
children, would be taking property from the em-
ployers without due process of law. Yet the
process provided by the statute embodied the
principles common to the compensation laws of
modern industrial nations.* Workmen's com-
pensation was thus held contrary to our consti-
tution. Until this decision can be reversed, work-
ing people will have, in this state, only the barest
gambling chance to receive, under the common
law, some quite incalculable sum awarded by a
jury, after years of delay in the courts. And the
most dynamic of all stimuli — the financial in-
centive for making industry safe — is withdrawn
from employers.

Under this decision industry does not pay its
bills in the greatest industrial state in the Repub-
lic. If a railroad has killed the breadwinner of a

*Ives case, Court of Appeals of New York, March 24,
1911. Judge Werner, the presiding judge of the New York
Court of Appeals, who wrote the decision in the Ives case,
was not re-elected to succeed himself at the election in No-
vember, 1913. At the same election the New York State
Constitution was amended by a popular vote for the purpose
of facilitating legislation creating workmen's compensation.
In December, 1913, a statute was enacted in accordance with
the powers conferred by the amended Constitution. This
new statute also will, however, be tested as to its constitu-
tionality in due time by the New York Court of Appeals.

14 Modern Industry and the Family

family, the railroad industry is not now legally
the debtor of his widow during widowhood, and
of the fatherless children even until the 16th
birthday. If the breadwinner is not killed but
disabled by an injury incident to his work, or by
an industrial disease, transforming him from the
breadwinner to a dragging burden upon his wife
and children, they need not less but greater in-
demnification for their loss, not from taxes, or
charity, but from the industry which deprives
them of their breadwinner. We are, as a nation,
far slower than the nations of Europe to enforce
the payment of this debt to families bereft by in-
dustry of their breadwinners.*

As i marriages_fail to occur, and families fail to
be founded, because of fear of poverty, so, also, in
many families children are not born, or come into
life cruelly handicapped, because of the effects of
industry upon the health of the mothers while,~as
young girls and young women, they worked Jor
wages. Sterility among working class wives,
caused by protracted standing while at work in
their girlhood, is a source of apprehension among
physicians whose practice brings wage-earning
women patients under observation. Sir Thomas

* Obviously, the final simplification of the vexed problem
of widows' pensions lies in the direction of keeping fathers
alive, in good health and at work.

Modern Industry and the Family 15

Oliver, the learned and sympathetic English stu-
dent of American industry from the medical point
of view, recently published, after a journey among
American factories, a warning as to the effect on
the future of the Republic of the employment of
so many young women in manufacture.

The absence from home at night of thousands of
young girls in the telephone service has become a
matter of course. Seventy-five per cent, of these
young workers at night are at the age of 18 years,
according to the latest official report of this state.
Sleep lost at night cannot be made up by day by
people who live in the industrial districts of any
city. What nation ever before took it for granted
that thousands of young girls 18 years old should,
in the way of earning their bread, be away from
home at night? This employment of young girls
may well be taken as an index of cynicism of pub-
lic opinion which accepts, under the corrupting in-
fluence of industry, such disintegration of the
family as inevitable.

The field of employment constantly widens in
which wives are expected to earn wages, as in to-
bacco factories, laundries, cigar making, the gar-
ment trades, and the textiles. It is no longer es-
pecially characteristic of any part of the country
(as the cotton mill regions of New England) or
of any one industry (as the textiles) that women

16 Modern Industry and the Family

continue wage earning after marriage. The cus-
tom tends to become universal. Industry now
counts upon having not only men and girls — as
was for some generations characteristic of Amer-
ican manufacture — but married women as well.
Girls marry with the knowledge that as wives they
will have to work for wages, and accept it as the
will of God, or the course of Nature, when in
their families babies die.

Family life in the home is sapped in its foun-
• dations when the mothers of young children work
for wages. Yet each Census shows a greater num-
ber of cities where married women are so em-
ployed and infant mortality ranges high. In Fall
River, the characteristic textile manufacturing
city of New England, not only is the general death
rate higher than in any other city of the same
size, but infant mortality in particular reaches an
appalling figure.* This has been the history of
the textile industries wherever they have been de-
veloped— in Germany, in England, in this coun-
try— a high infant death rate has been their by-
-product. The double task laid upon mothers in
such industrial communities is more than they
can perform, and the babies pay the penalty with
their lives.

* Census of 1910, and Federal Report on the Conditions of
Labor of Woman and Child Wage-Earners.

Modern Industry and the Family 17

The fact is moreover increasingly conspicuous
that, in working class districts of manufacturing
cities, the death rate of infants is far in excess of
that in regions inhabited by prosperous people in
the same cities. The children are consumed, di-
rectly or indirectly, in the process of producing
goods, and this while they are within the closest
embrace of the family, before they are old enough
for the kindergarten.

Throughout all civilization wages in industries
which employ married women tend to range so
low that only when the whole family is drawn into
wage earning can a subsistence be earned. In this
country it is relatively new, but here, as else-
where, when the textile industries develop, this
disintegration proceeds conspicuously. Except
that men in the occupation are largely supplanted
by their own wives and children, it might truth-
fully be said that the family is bodily transferred
from the home to the mill.

When wives are engaged in night work, the ef-
fect is devastating. Yet in the cotton mills of the
southern states such work is not exceptional, it is
a commonplace part of the life of many mill com-
munities.

18 Modern Industry and the Family

Withdrawal of Children from Homes

In most industrially developed states the com-
munity says to the parent: "You may not let
your child work (except as a newsboy) before its
14th birthday. You must keep your child in
school at least until that birthday, and beyond it
unless the child meets certain fixed requirements
as to stature, health and ability to read and write
English^ You must, moreover, feed and clothe
your boy or girl according to a minimum set for
you by usage. Failing in these things, appro-
priate penalties await you, among which is sheer
deprivation of the guardianship of your child."

In New York State 38,000 children are main-
tained in institutions, paid for out of taxes, be-
cause their natural guardians fail to meet these
requirements. Few of these institutions are
schools in any true sense. Fewer still are colonies
for the care of afflicted children for whom segre-
gation is needed — the mentally deficient, or ad-
vanced cases of tuberculosis. In the main they
are free municipal boarding houses, communist
institutions in which various religious sects at-
tempt the task, financed out of taxes, of bringing
up children by wholesale. Undesirable though it
is, this undertaking constitutes at present the sole
official attempt of state or city to eke out the ef-

Modern Industry and the Family 19

forts of parents who fail, under the pressure of
industry, to meet modern requirements.

Institutional care is, however, an attempt to
substitute charity for justice, necessary so long as
industry does not pay its debts to the disabled
and the bereft.

The stern pressure upon parents has led to a
nation-wide agitation for public pensions for
widows, mothers' pensions or "funds to parents"
acts. And states, cities and charitable organiza-
tions now vie with each other in assuring us that
no child need be undernourished, or unfitted for
school life by reason of destitution.*

Even more numerous than the families whose
breadwinners are dead or disabled are those whose
able-bodied fathers, working in underpaid indus-
tries for an insufficient annual income, cannot sup-
port the children as the community demands.
These account, perhaps more than all other influ-
ences combined for the exodus from home to mill
and mine of boys and girls who should still be
school children.

There is a tremendous and growing draft of
children out of the home into industry. In 1912
in New York City alone 42,000 children, boys and

*The change of attitude on this subject in the brief period
since the appearance of Robert Hunter's volume on Poverty
is striking.

20 Modern Industry and the Family

girls below the age of 16 years, were given work-
ing papers. In all history this is new. Never be-
fore this modern industrial era did tens of thou-
sands of young girls and boys in a single city enter
upon industry away from all control by parents
or by responsible masters under some form of reg-
ulated indenture. Regularly each year, in this
city alone, more than forty thousand boys and
girls enter as independent units into the world of
labor.

The law authorizes the father and mother to
collect wages of minor children. But the employer
has no responsibility for getting the wage into the
hands of parents. Nor is there any responsibility
upon employers for the health and morals of these
young workers. No one who has not lived long
in the foreign colonies can estimate what it means
to an immigrant parent, when a boy decides that
he will no longer acknowledge a duty to his par-
ents and brothers and sisters, will no longer carry
home his wages. In serving on a scholarship com-
mittee it is startling to read in the family record
that there are two older brothers or two older sis-
ters, who recognize no duty toward their parents
or the younger child — the candidate for a scholar-
ship— who is left to suffer hardship or to accept
charity. We acquiesce very generally in the loss
of the sense of duty toward the family on the

Modern Industry and the Family 21

part of sons and daughters because industry has
habituated us, and tempted them, to consider the
worker as an isolated unit, regardless of family
ties.

The House as the Home

Our traditional national ideal of family life in-
cludes owning a home, or entering upon the task
of acquiring one.

Modern industry achieves for business uses the
forty stories of the Metropolitan Tower and the
fifty floors of the Woolworth Building, cheering
the eyes of the city with their beauty. But for
the homes of families who work there is main-
tained— and urgently needed — a nationwide cru-
sade for a minimum standard of construction.
Philanthropy is not yet nobly striving to establish
among working people lofty ideals of healthful-
ness, beauty and comfort, in homes wherein a
worthy life may be lived and childhood may spend
its years in care-free play. Far from it, we are
still amply occupied in striving through philan-
thropic effort and penal statutes to establish mini-
mum standards below which none may descend.

In one-room log cabins among cotton fields in
Georgia and the Carolinas, in fifty-family tene-
ments in New York City, and in the repellent
shacks of miners' families in a dozen mining states,

22 Modern Industry and the Family

the irony is the same. Families who work are so
ill housed that it is a problem of self-defence for
civilization to set a lowest level beneath which no
southern plantation owner, no mining company,
no jerry-building city landlord may offer so-called
"homes/'

Recently I had occasion to come up from Jack-
sonville, Florida, through Georgia, the Carolinas,
and part of Virginia by day. Every new cotton
mill along the railway is costlier, more modern,
and better equipped than the last. But nothing
could be more discouraging than the monotonous
homes surrounding those mills. We have no dig-
nified ideal of family homes for wage-earning fam-
ilies. The farm houses of an older generation,
owned by their occupants, austere in their sim-
plicity, had at least a certain dignity. It is ap-
palling that American people who leave the farms
acquiesce in living in the homes provided for
them in the industrial centres by the industry of
to-day.

Everywhere, the world over, those who would
build wholesome and beautiful houses for work-
ing families, and keep them free from invasion by
industry, are confronted by an insoluble problem.
Everywhere this problem consists of the same two
factors — the low family income of laborers, and
the monopoly power of landowners to make their

Modern Industry and the Family 23

own terms for selling, leasing, renting land for
homes.

In New York and Chicago, in congested dis-
tricts where overcrowding is a perennial source of
disease, I have for more than 20 years observed
the landlords resisting every attempt to raise the
standard of workmen's city dwellings. In New
York, after generations of tenement house reform,
the number of sunless rooms constantly increases.
Every new tenement is larger, built to shelter more
people than the house which it displaces. Infants
and young children — the tenderest, most perish-
able members of the family — succumb most
quickly to the enfeebling influence of sunless
dwellings, overcrowding and bad air. And the
survivors carry with them through life the effects
upon body and character of this bad beginning.
Overcrowding and decency are mutually exclusive.

Overcrowding in tenements arises in part from
the fact that, among unskilled workers, the small
and irregular family wage compels the choice to
be made between food and rent. The question
forever confronting the unskilled laborer's family
is: "Shall we have more food and less space?"
If the decision is in favor of more food, a lodger
or boarder is commonly added to the already large
number of occupants of the flat, with all the de-
moralization and danger arising from the presence

24 Modern Industry and the Family

of an outsider, a non-member of the family. A
neighbor of mine, a tailor out of work, took in a
man who shared the bed of the youngest son. The
little boy acquired, after a single night, an infec-
tion which left him hopelessly, incurably blind.

These facts are all well known, the story of the
tenements and their dwellers has long been thread-
bare, the effort to deal with them has long been
a weariness to the flesh. The tenements persist
and increase from generation to generation. This
is precisely the reason for presenting them once
more — this sinister circumstance that, in spite of
the teachings of modern science and the efforts
to apply modern hygiene to every relation of life,
overcrowded tenements are still here, and New
York City still suffers, in the Borough of Man-
hattan, the densest congestion of population in
the history of the world. And this in spite of all
the wealth created by modern industry.

The explanation is to be found in the control
of industry itself over the minds of reformers
and of the authorities. It is, indeed, industry
which calls people to the congested centres by its
offer of varied work.* It is the Allied Real Estate
industry, the brokers, the builders, the speculators
in land and shelter, who constitute the active

*We have no coherent policy, in any state, calculated to
draw population away from congested city districts.

Modern Industry and the Family 25

enemy to housing progress, just as it is manufac-
turing industry which calls little girls from school
to factory, and commercial industry which sells
foul milk to be fed to babies.

To deal with modern real estate industry in
this unlovely role of obstacle to progress we have
had, hitherto, only little groups of reformers ap-
plying little remedies. And the continuance of
the evil witnesses our failure.

Alone in all the world, our reformers discuss
houses as though they were balloons, or biplanes,
or clouds floating aloft unrelated to the land on
which they stand, unaffected by taxation, de-
tached from the whole plan of the city of which
they form so essential and injurious a part. For
generations our reformers have continued to do
this, untaught by failure, unstirred by the experi-
ments of other cities in other lands.

The comprehensive national policy of Australia
and New Zealand, applied to distributing popula-
tion, is too well known and too elaborate to be
summarized within the limits of a lecture. In
our neighboring country, Canada, Vancouver has
untaxed all buildings by way of placing a premium
upon constructing more of them. England ex-
hibits— besides all the changes arising from the
Lloyd-George land taxes — encouraging experi-
ments in the Garden Cities, in corporate owner-

26 Modern Industry and the Family

ship of land for the common good of the inhabi-
tants. Port Sunlight and Bournemouth are fa-
miliar examples and others, less well known, are
growing up in many parts of England. In Ger-
many, Frankfort and Ulm have for a quarter
century been acquiring land, in their municipal
capacity, for the express purpose of housing work-
ing people in homes satisfactory to them.

We, meanwhile, still putter along with prohi-
bitions and regulations upon owners, builders,
speculators whom we accept as inevitable. We
seem unteachable, refractory to enlightenment
drawn from our own experience of failure, or from
the stimulating examples to be found in other
lands.

Why have we no permanent Federal Commis-
sion on Homes?

Invasion of the Home by Manufacture

In New York City, the greatest, richest centre
of modern industry in the Western Hemisphere,
the home, the house, the tenement — far from
sheltering the family and belonging to it, con-
sumes the family. The tenement house is pro-
verbially a breeding place of tuberculosis and
other social diseases. The high cost of land leads
to congestion of buildings, and this in turn to
insufficient light, air and space for the family

Modern Industry and the Family 27

dwelling. To earn a share of the rent for
cramped, unwholesome quarters, mothers are
withdrawn from household work, and, children
stay from school. They are drawn into industry,
and the kitchen and bedroom become their work-
places.

The assumption universally underlies women's
wages that there is always a male breadwinner
successfully performing his allotted task, and any
earnings of wife and daughter are pin money
added to his steady income. In fact, however, in
the chaos of modern industry, the male adult
breadwinner — father or older brother — happens
with tragic frequency to be dead, killed outright
perhaps by his work — a railway accident, a Ti-
tanic disaster, a mine collapse. Or he may be
gradually poisoned by the materials of his work,
or exhausted by its processes. He may be over-
borne by the temptations of alcohol, predisposed
to them by fatigue. Or he may be alive and
strong in body, mind and morals, but condemned
by the nature of his employment to long and re-
curring idleness without income. Irregularity of
work and earnings is a characteristic experience
of modern industrial life. In these cases the nor-
mal arrangement is inverted, and industry in-
vades the home in search of the labor of the crip-
pled, the bedridden, and the mothers of little

28 Modern Industry and the Family

children. Thus because industry has developed,
bringing in its train underpay, irregularity, dis-
ease and death, and because our industrial code
does not yet protect the family, widows and young
children are forced to take upon themselves the
burden of manufacture in the home under the
sweating system.

The cruel old decision of the Court of Appeals
of New York still stands unchanged since the
Jacobs case. The manufacturer's right to invade
with his materials the homes of the tenement
dwellers can be restricted only when the interest
of the health of the public in the restriction is
obvious to the Court. It was, therefore, deemed
wiser in 1913, not to include in a list of industries
to be banished by statute from the tenements
garments intended for adults! Children are ad-
mittedly endangered by germs transmitted in
tenement homework. Any gain to the family life
of the workers, any freeing of their homes from
invasion by industry, must be clearly subordinate
to safeguarding the health of purchasers, lest the
Court hold the new law contrary to the constitu-
tion.

Ownership of the Home

Incredible sacrifices have been made by mil-
lions of families for the sake of home ownership.

Modern Industry and the Family 29

As long ago as the days of Martin Chuzzlewit,
Charles Dickens revealed a painful aspect of the
real estate gambling which has preyed upon this
effort.

More recently, great manufacturing corpora-
tions in villages and small cities have developed
from this an effective trap, encouraging employes
to buy homes, and so chaining them to the spot.
The owners of homes partly paid for dare not
strike, lest they lose all the payments they have
made. In Auburn, in 1913, the Harvester Works
threatened its striking employes that the works
might be permanently removed. That would
mean the loss of the employes' whole investment
in Auburn, a city of homes.

An opposite method of attaining the same end
is the generation long policy of coal-carrying
roads and coal companies, in Pennsylvania and
West Virginia, where the workers are perforce
tenants of their employers. In Westmoreland,
Pennsylvania, the evicted striking miners lived
for months in tents lent them by other working
men in the hard winter and late spring of 1912.
In the winter and spring of 1913 a similar experi-
ence has befallen the miners in West Virginia.
Whole communities, evicted by coal companies,
have camped in tents lent them by the minework-
ers' union. Evicted wives and newborn babies of

30 Modern Industry and the Family

skilled miners died of cold and exposure in the
midst of the coal fields — a grewsome irony of
modern industry.

By their onslaughts on the family life of min-
ers the coal mining companies and the coal carry-
ing roads may contribute to end the private own-
ership of coal mines, to make coal a national pos-
session, and coal mining and coal carrying a na-
tional service.

Having thus briefly and fragmentarily indicated
the disintegrating effect of modern industry upon
the family as exemplified in the experience of
fathers, mothers, children, young daughters work-
ing at night, and the home itself (in the sense of
physical shelter), there remains — underlying all
family life — the means of subsistence.

The Wage Scale

In a steadily growing proportion of the Ameri-
can nation, the economic foundation of the family
is the wage scale. While our ideal of the home
remains agricultural we have become, also, an
industrial people largely dependent upon wages.
And the wage scale in private industry we have
left to be determined by the play of competition.

A single fact brought to light last year illumines
ironically the relation of modern industry to the
wage earning family. Dr. Caroline Hedger, of the

Modern Industry and the Family 31

Chicago University Settlement, discovered that
children in the neighborhood of the Chicago
stockyards are fed coffee because their parents
cannot afford milk for them. Fathers and moth-
ers who spend their lives in killing cattle and
packing meat, to feed this nation and Europe,
cannot afford for their own children milk in in-
fancy. In the midst of more cows than are
brought together anywhere else, babies are fed
coffee for its cheapness. The railroads' profit on
hauling milk to the city, the milk trust's dividend
derived from distributing milk in the stockyards
district, the milk retailers' profit upon their share
of this work, and the meagre wage paid to men
and women who prepare a staple food for adults,
together result in robbing these babies altogether
of their most necessary food.

Competitive determination of wage scales is
less endurable from decade to decade. Therefore
we see our fellow citizens swarming into the fed-
eral civil service in quest of permanent salaries,
and into state and city employments lured by the
twofold attraction of permanent employment and
retiring pensions, however modest both may be.
Or they seek arbitration of their wage disputes
under the Erdman Act, or demand the creation
of minimum wage boards, at least for women and
minors.

32 Modern Industry and the Family

Why do we Americans not frankly copy the
good democratic method worked out by the Aus-
tralians since 1896, and adopted with some modi-
fications in England since 1910? They create in
an underpaid industry a board composed of rep-
resentatives, elected by employers and by em-
ployes, who meet and consider payrolls and the
cost of living. In the full light of publicity these
representatives of the parties in interest arrive at
an agreement which, if approved by the appro-
priate supervising authority, is thereafter binding
upon both for an agreed time. At the end of the
time, either side may ask for a change and the
negotiations may begin anew.

Our American spirit in relation to such legisla-
tion is undemocratic. Although minimum wage
laws are intended to confirm the economic foun-
dation of the family and check the process of dis-
integration, the members of families most con-
cerned are not necessarily to be consulted accord-
ing to our present initial statutes.

Men are omitted from these new laws upon an
arbitrary assumption that the laws would be un-
constitutional if applied to men. Why do we
Americans refuse to face the fact that women and
minors are earning wages primarily because of
underpaid husbands and fathers, who would gladly
keep their wives at home and their children in

Modern Industry and the Family 83

school? That it is precisely in the interest of the
family that the wages of men should be regu-
lated?

Our new statutes do not, as in Australia, usu-
ally provide for election of members of the boards,
a safeguard of the interests of wageworkers, which
experience has shown to be useful. Unhappily,
this new institution of wage boards thus tends, in
one state after another, to become an eleemosy-
nary arrangement confined to women and minors,
instead of a democratic method of constraining
industry to pay its just debts from week to week,
to afford an honest and sufficient family liveli-
hood to all people, men and women alike, who do
honest work. Why do we not, at the beginning
of public regulation of wages, strengthen the eco-
nomic foundations of family life by providing that
men and women may be elected to represent their
fellow workers, meeting upon wage boards the
representatives of employers (elected by the em-
ployers), the whole group bringing to bear the
collective wisdom of all upon the difficult subject
of the payroll?

Regenerative Forces Within the Family

Within the family itself, two regenerative forces
are slowly becoming manifest, the consumers'
growing consciousness of power over industry,

34 Modern Industry and the Family

and the increasing numbers of enfranchised
women.

English, German, Belgian and Swiss families
have set an example to the rest of the world by
building up cooperative enterprises, retail distri-
butive at first, and now spreading powerfully in
the fields of wholesale distribution and manufac-
ture. Through these agencies cooperating fami-
lies lower prices, raise qualities, and standardize
conditions of employment hi relation to the ar-
ticles consumed in their homes. Incidentally they
compel their non-cooperative competitors to ap-
proach more or less closely the same improved
standards.

England has in its federated cooperative soci-
eties nearly three million members, men and wom-
en, whose capital amounts to more than two and
a half billion dollars wholly invested in coopera-
tive enterprises. Through this movement, a large
proportion of the domestic consumption of the
families is covered.

The German societies report a membership of
more than five and a half million, and an annual
turnover of a billion and a quarter dollars.

The admirable social achievement of the Bel-
gian cooperatives is too well known to require
more than a passing reference.

The Ninth International Cooperative Congress,

Modern Industry and the Family 35

held at Glasgow in 1913, reports delegates from
24 nations, in which there are more than twenty
million members of cooperative societies. Of
these six millions are within the bodies organically
affiliated with the International Cooperative Al-
liance.

The improved quality of the cooperators them-
selves is increasingly recognized as of greater im-
portance than their industrial achievement.
Their self-confidence, business ability, and active
participation in the control of industry have no
parallel among us. In using this vast power at
their command as consumers, American families
have strangely lagged behind. Here is a promis-
ing field of activity ignored by those wives of pro-
fessional men, and better paid employes, whose
economic activities have gone from the home, and
whose enforced leisure is not altogether a source
of satisfaction.

Though the vast majority of consumers are
themselves workers — farmers or wage earners —
they have not yet generally perceived that the
tendency of the family to disintegrate has for its
final cause the lost ownership of their tools by the
workers. The civilized world is, however, gradu-
ally coming to see that it can never return to the
primitive ownership of the agricultural period.
The perception spreads from nation to nation that

36 Modern Industry and the Family

the growing control of industry by those who work
— brain workers and hand workers — means hence-
forth not direct, individual possession, but an im-
measurable variety of forms of participation in
cooperative ownership, public and private.

In America voting women are increasing from
year to year and revealing the regenerative power
of the ballot in the service of the family. Four
and a half million women vote in Washington,
Oregon, California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Alaska,
Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Illinois; and in
thirteen other states the process of enfranchising
women will reach the stage of referendum to the
voters before the election of the next President
in 1916. Already wage earning women and girls
in Arizona, Washington, California, Colorado and
the District of Columbia enjoy the benefits of the
eight hours day; and in Washington, Oregon,
Utah, Colorado, and California minimum wage
laws for them have, with their help as voters, been
enacted, an epoch making innovation, even
though these laws are still experimental and in
need of improvement. It seems reasonable to be-
lieve that these are mere intimations of the meas-
ures of self-defence of the family which are des-
tined to be established by means of new powers
gradually being conferred upon women.

An infinite vista opens before the mind, of re-

Modern Industry and the Family 37

generative power for the restoration and progress
of the family through the development of coop-
eration and community action in the industrial
field. The era of unbridled power exercised by
irresponsible industry at cost of the family — the
fundamental institution of the human race — is
slowly drawing to a close.

Hence the vital strength of the rapidly growing
movement to extend all devices of democratic
government. When the coming worldwide indus-,
trial code for restoring and safeguarding the fam-
ily is at length adopted in its fullness, it will ex-
press the will of the adult people whom it con-
cerns, men and women together. In that direction
lies hope of regeneration of the family under the
conditions created by modem industry.

II

MODERN INDUSTRY IN RELATION TO
HEALTH

MODERN INDUSTRY AND HEALTH

Modern industry offers, in abundance new to
human experience, everything requisite for the
enjoyment of good health. It produces unmeas-
ured wealth in myriad forms — food, clothing,
shelter, books, the means of travel, recreation and
enjoyment.

For fighting disease, too, the arsenal was never
so well furnished. Every year we have more hos-
pitals, more costly and more splendid, more sana-
toria, more clinics, more medical schools, more
training schools for nurses. Endowments for re-
search increase and the discoveries from their
laboratories follow each other in hope-inspiring
succession. Crusades against disease are carried
forward, nationwide in scope, against tuberculosis,
infant mortality, cancer, blindness, the social dis-
eases, and insanity.

From year to year the social functions of doc-
tors and nurses are extended. School doctors and
school nurses are already an old story, their bene-
ficent work is recognized as indispensable, and

41

42 Modern Industry and Health

their ranks are now increased by their colleagues
attached to municipal milk stations. Nursing the
poor in their homes has been, for more than a dec-
ade, a municipal activity in Los Angeles, and has
recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary as a
voluntary activity in New York City. We are
growing accustomed to the presence of nurses in
department stores and factories, to follow-up
nurses from the hospitals, and to nursing in con-
nection with industrial insurance.

It is the new wealth created by modern indus-
try which makes possible this nationwide war
upon disease.

This is, moreover, only a part of the cheerful
tale. Industry affords, almost from day to day,
fresh resources for making work healthful and
pleasant. Improvements in the production of
concrete, steel and glass, and advances in engineer-
ing, make possible the construction of factories
fireproof and perfectly lighted, ventilated, and
heated. Where the outside air is vitiated, it can
be purified by artificial means while it is brought
indoors, and this is increasingly done for commer-
cial purposes. Electrical vacuum processes draw
off dust at the point at which it is generated, so
that neither the particular workman engaged at
a machine hitherto a dangerous dust generator,
nor his colleague working in the same room, need

Modern Industry and Health 43

henceforth suffer from dust. By the use of suit-
able glass shades, electric light can now be tem-
pered to the human eye. Seats of all kinds and
heights are ready on the market. The list of re-
sources made available by industry itself for mak-
ing work wholesome and agreeable can be pro-
longed indefinitely.

Normally industry itself should be an upbuild-
ing process, a daily benefit to mind and body of
all who participate in it. Every sound man and
woman is physically the better for regular active
work. Rational exertion with moderate leisure,
and assured livelihood without worry about daily
bread, naturally conduce to good health. And for
all these things modern industry amply provides
the raw materials. Never before were the techni-
cal conditions so favorable for assuring to all who
work reasonably short hours (to avoid the stupe-
fying effects of monotony and speeding) cheering
rewards, and the consciousness of useful service.

With the help of modern hygiene and prevent-
ive medicine, enriched by all the new resources,
we ought to be living in vigor and enjoyment on
our seventieth birthdays, unless we are cut down
by the enemy in the form of inoperable cancer,
or some obscure disease of the heart, or by one of
the mysterious maladies whose secrets science has
not yet laid bare. Indeed, Professor Metschni-

44 Modern Industry and Health

koff has long encouraged us to hope that our great-
grandchildren may live in physical vigor far be-
yond the century mark. And certain life insur-
ance companies are collecting data about cen-
tenarian policy holders.

At present, however, the average age at death
of the American people, in the registration area,
is approximately 47 years instead of the Biblical
three score years and ten, or the 140 years held
out to the hopes of our successors by the head of
the Pasteur Institute.

Disease and Death By-products of Industry

It is the paradox of modern industry in relation
to health that, while producing the wealth which
enriches medical institutions and sustains the pro-
fessions of scientific research, medicine and nurs-
ing, it gives rise to a considerable part of the dis-
ease which they strive to cure, and the deaths
which they aim to defer. Avoidable disease and
premature death are among its regular by-prod-
ucts, and it exhausts ever widening ranges of
working people. It exerts a continuous injurious
influence upon masses of those who consume its
products, or work in its service.

These sinister facts have been slow to attract
widespread attention because we lack the two

Modern Industry and Health 45

essential sources of knowledge about them — vital
statistics and insurance records.

We are the one great nation without vital sta-
tistics. We do not know how many children are
born each year in our Republic, or how many
people die.

The first service of the federal Children's Bureau
in the initial year of its activity consists in forc.-
ing upon the attention of the nation the fact that,
of our forty-eight states, only eight register births
in accordance with the standard set by the Federal
Census Bureau.* These are the New England
states with Pennsylvania and Michigan. In New
York the vital statistics are good enough to bring
the city within the registration area. But it is
easier to get birth certificates for little Turks born
in Turkey, than for American children born in
the rural counties of New York State when the
children apply for "working papers," and their
birth certificates are their first requisite.

After the vital statistics which we lack, the sec-
ond available source of exact knowledge of the

* These states were admitted to the "provisional registration
area." Not all of them have complete registration. New
laws go into effect (1914) in Arkansas, North Carolina, and
Tennessee, and amendments in some other states. It is not
possible to say whether their results will be satisfactory until
they have had sufficient time to give a fair test, there are so
many conditions affecting the completeness of returns.

46 Modern Industry and Health

relation of disease to industry would be the records
of social insurance such as Germany has been ac-
cumulating throughout a quarter century. In
the coal mining areas and textile manufacturing
districts in Germany, the births and deaths of
children, and the age at death, and causes of
death, of their fathers are known through vital
statistics and social insurance records. The rela-
tive dangers to life and health in these two great
industries can, therefore, be accurately traced.

For the corresponding coal mining areas of
West Virginia and textile manufacturing districts
of New Jersey, we know nothing trustworthy as
to birth, death, health or disease of children or
parents. So, too, in regard to the stockyards re-
gion of Chicago, the second city of the nation.
Although it is a matter of common knowledge that
children born in that part of the city die in great
numbers very young, we have no scientific, official
statement.

After a nationwide crusade lasting ten years,
we have no adequate registration of a disease so
omnipresent as tuberculosis.

We have no national policy with regard to
health, and no scientific basis for the adoption of
such a policy. The absence of vital statistics in-
dicates correctly our national indifference to the
;whole subject. Indeed, in recent years an effort

Modern Industry and Health 47

to create a federal Department of Health with a
representative in the Cabinet has called forth hor-
rifying opposition.

Under these circumstances of national indiffer-
ence to life and health, our belated state in regard
to social insurance follows naturally. The first
American conference on the subject occurred in
1913, and the tenth biennial meeting of the Inter-
national Conference, which will be held in the
United States in 1915, will be the first session held
in this country. Social insurance records are,
thus, for us wholly a hope for the future.

All these difficulties being duly recognized, it is
still true that, at least within the registration area,
we know enough in regard to deaths to venture
certain conclusions. Among these the most im-
portant is that, within that area, the death rate
is too slowly declining, the average life is too
slowly lengthening.*

After living more than twenty years in working
class districts of two leading industrial cities, New
York and Chicago, I am impressed with the deadly
effects, in working class families, of two active
continuing influences — the bad food supply, and
the ignorant mothers in relation to that supply.
Whatever progress has been achieved in prolong-
ing human life by reducing mortality of infants

48 Modern Industry and Health

and young children is due to efforts directly coun-
teracting these agencies.

Commercialized Food

In certain cities charitable societies and boards
of health afford, through a limited number of milk
stations, supplies especially provided for the chil-
dren of the poor and warranted not to kill or in-
jure them. But for the general supply consumed
by families who are neither rich enough to buy
certified milk, nor poor enough for charity, we set
a standard too low for health, too high for the
farmers under present railway charges. Why have
we not good milk for all, since the technical knowl-
edge necessary for obtaining it is now everywhere
available?

A chief difficulty is an industrial one, the slow
service and excessive charges of railroads. These
discourage farmers from enlarging their output,
and in great measure spoil the product in transit,
by exposing it to prolonged heat in summer, and
by tempting shippers to drug milk with preserva-
tives.

Retail dealers constitute a second great diffi-
culty in the way of a wholesome urban milk sup-
ply for all the children. They keep up the price,
and succumb to temptation to spoil milk as food
for babies by adding water or preservatives (for-

Modern Industry and Health 49

maldehyde and others) to their own profit. They
add germs of malignant disease when milk is sold
in little shops that are the front rooms of dwell-
ings in which there happens to be illness. And
their dirty ways often add to milk filth bacteria
that are fatal, particularly during hot weather,
to little children and to invalids. Such hordes of
milk retailers are licensed, that no one can pos-
sibly know how they conduct their business day by
day and hour by hour. Yet this is a matter of
life and death for children.

Before infant mortality can be reduced to its
possible minimum, the milk industry must, in the
interest of all children in all city homes, be munici-
pal like the water supply, and like it safe and
abundant. Although this change obviously can-
not be complete until American railroads are, like
the Swiss railroads, public servants of the people,
hopeful beginnings exist in the municipal milk
stations of New York, Rochester, and a few other
cities.

Minor industrial causes of infant mortality are
worthless baby foods, poisonous soothing syrups,
and long rubbered feeding bottles. For children
a few years older, at the kindergarten and primary
school age, industry purveys candy, soda water
and ice-cream in which glue, lampblack, glucose,
sulphurous acid, saccharin, paraffin, coal-tar dyes,

50 Modern Industry and Health

and many poisonous coloring matters are ingredi-
ents. It is chiefly boys and girls of wage earning
families who buy them, often as substitutes for
regular meals, spending for them pennies left for
food by a mother whose occupation keeps her
away from home at meal times. Children who
buy these substitutes for food do so habitually.
Their appetite for wholesome food is cloyed, their
digestion clogged, and malnutrition follows.

It is hard to conceive of a city or state produc-
ing and distributing substances like these. And
the question, therefore, arises in behalf of the
most dependent, defenceless members of the com-
munity, how long our food supply is to be, en-
trusted to adulterators and speculators?

There is a widespread misapprehension as to
the degree of protection afforded to the public
by the federal pure food law. All the substances
above enumerated are debarred from interstate
commerce if shipped for use as food. But they
can be legally manufactured and sold locally, un-
less state laws or city ordinances against them are
enacted and enforced.

All these injurious articles are sold to New York
City school children in the immediate vicinity of
school buildings. They are manufactured and
consumed within the city, and therefore escape
the national pure food and drug law.

Modern Industry and Health 51

The same exemption applies to tuberculous milk
and meat if produced and sold locally. Every
state is free to legislate or not as it sees fit, and
every community is a law unto itself in the matter
of enforcement. In the whole country, only three
cities have municipal slaughter houses. In these
the city naturally determines the method of pre-
paring the meat supply, and the state laws can
obviously be enforced without incentive to resist-
ance or evasion. If the municipal abattoirs were
supplemented with city markets suitably placed,
one important element of the food problem of
wage-earning families in those cities would be
greatly simplified.

^ Ignorant Mothers

Physicians and nurses working in connection
with milk stations agree that their most useful
service consists in educating mothers in the care
of babies and young children. For of what avail
is it to get certified milk into the tenements, an
expensive and laborious process, if the mothers
then leave it exposed to heat, bad air and flies?
Or if they continue, as before, to feed the babies
coffee, cucumbers and pickles?

The cause of the mothers' ignorance is usually
the insufficient wage of the family breadwinner
which in industrial communities urges the young

52 Modern Industry and Health

girls to leave school from grades below that in
which domestic science instruction even begins.
In the great Southern cotton manufacturing
states — in Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas —
where children enter the mills exceptionally at
seven and eight years, and in great numbers at
eleven and twelve, their minds are not mature
enough to profit by such instruction as future
mothers need for the safety and welfare of their
children.

From the point of view, however, of the life
and health of the next generation, the employment
of little girls in mills is hardly more injurious than
the exhausting and stupefying work of older ones,
from fourteen to twenty. An industrial Republic
needs highly intelligent mothers, capable of tak-
ing care of the health of all the members of the
family, of whom the babies are merely the most
sensitive and perishable. For this reason the
public welfare requires that all working girls
should be kept in attendance at part time con-
tinuation schools far beyond the present limit of
sixteen years of age, whatever modification of
workroom schedules and of existing curricula this
may involve.

The disease most common among working peo-
ple, tuberculosis, is cultivated by wholesale in the
tenement home and in the workroom. Crowded

Modern Industry and Health 53

sleeping rooms, broken rest, insufficient, ill pre-
pared, unsuitable food at home cooperate with
fatigue, dust, strain in the workroom to prepare
the bodies of workers, particularly of the young,
to receive the germ under circumstances favorable
to its development. Nightwork especially predis-
poses the young frame to welcome the plague, for
sleep lost at night cannot be made up in a working
class district.

Tuberculosis is a mass product of modern in-
dustry. Yet in our crusade against it we have,
hitherto, used retail measures. The crusade has,
therefore, no such sweeping reduction in cases to
report as its founders hoped and foretold a decade
ago. The industrial predisposing causes are all
still in force — poverty, fatigue, tuberculous meat
and milk on the market, bad housing, and conges-
tion of population.*

Wages and Health

The cost of living has increased in recent years,
and the standard of living has fallen, certainly for
the unskilled, the common laborers.

*It will be a matter of literally vital interest to watch
the activities of the newly enfranchised women in San Fran-
cisco, Los Angeles and Chicago as to the public health in
these aspects — the care of the food supply, the education of
girls for family life, and the solution of the hitherto insoluble
housing problem.

54 Modern Industry and Health

In the minds of working people the world over
there has never been a doubt that, for their health,
the most important consideration is the standard
of living, steady income, rational in relation to the
cost of food, clothing, shelter. Hence their in-
numerable strikes for increased wages.

Unhappily, the workers have not hitherto con-
trolled this relation, for how do they profit by an
increased wage in the cases in which they succeed
in getting it, if the increase all goes to the land-
lord, the meat trust, the coal trust, the milkman?
Without scientific distribution of the necessaries
of life as pure and cheap as our existing technic
makes possible, the increase becomes illusory.
This long-delayed expansion of public functions
we are justified in expecting of the new voters of
whom so large a proportion are self-supporting,
or the wives of wage-earning men.

As important for the public health as for the
restoration of the family is the new interference
of the public in the determination of wages. It
has become a matter of almost annual recurrence
that the federal government intervenes between
some large congeries of railroads and their or-
ganized employes to maintain the standard of
wages. The new state commissions on women's
wages are obviously destined to contribute to-
wards preventing tuberculosis and insanity by

Modern Industry and Health 55

assuring a livelihood, however modest, to women
workers who have proverbially worked the long-
est hours, at the most wearing tasks, for the most
wretched pay.

The present conflagration of interest and alarm
concerning the wages of women and girls in rela-
tion to the public health and morals was kindled
in greater degree than is commonly known by the
modest little volume, Making Both Ends Meet,
by Edith Wyatt and Sue Ainslie Clark,* which
embodied facts gathered directly from some hun-
dreds of women and girls living away from their
families and supporting themselves. Its publica-
tion stimulated some of the earliest direct efforts
in this country for wage legislation.

i

Preventable Dangers in Industry

The characteristic of modern industry is inces-
sant change. As old processes are abandoned and
new ones introduced, new dangers, new injurious
influences constantly arise, and new powers of
controlling them as well. Among the incidents
of industry varying from branch to branch, from
place to place, are heat, cold, glare, darkness, in-

*Macmillan, 1910. Miss Wyatt is Vice-President of the
Consumers' League of Illinois, and Miss Ainslie made her
investigation while one of the secretaries of the National
Consumers' League.

56 Modern Industry and Health

sufficient lighting, noise, speeding, monotony,
heavy lifting, standing, bad air, dampness, con-
tact with poisonous materials, dangerous machin-
ery, and processes generating dust, gases and
vapors.

These industrial menaces to the health of wage-
earners are discussed in ever fresh editions of for-
eign standard works on industrial hygiene. It is
a striking and discreditable fact that we have, in
the United States, no standard work on this in-
finitely important subject. We are dependent
upon the English writers, Sir Thomas Oliver and
Hutchins and Harrison, although, in many impor-
tant respects, conditions are so different in the two
countries that these valuable works are in part
inapplicable here.*

Indeed, it is only because of the default of sci-
ence in this field that a lay observer finds a re-

*The first American monographs dealing with special as-
pects of industrial disease are still recent, Dr. Alice Hamil-
ton's studies of lead poisoning, published by the U. S. De-
partment of Labor, and Dr. John B. Andrews' investigation
of the use of white sulphur in manufacturing matches.

Two valuable state reports dealing with more general
aspects of health and industry are those of the Mass. State
Board of Health (1907) and the more recent Illinois State
Commission on the Health, Safety and Comfort of Em-
ployes.

The New York State Factories Investigating Commission,
also, in ita current reports contributes valuable data.

Modern Industry and Health 57

spectful hearing. It is as a lay observer that I
venture to report the following observations inci-
dental to my work as factory inspector for the
State of Illinois, or as visitor for the National
Consumers' League, or as one (for a brief month)
of the members of the staff of the Pittsburgh
Survey.

In Chicago, at the Stockyards, in 1895, on an
August day so hot that three employes died of
sunstroke, young immigrant boys were serving as
door-openers of the cooling rooms. A boy open-
ing a door for little electric trains carrying sides
of beef, was — as the door swung open — exposed
to the scorching heat of the outside world. Then
— -as the train slowly passed him — the door swing-
ing inward — he returned to his post inside the
cooling room where icicles hung from the ceiling
because that temperature was necessary for the
meat. All day long, he oscillated between those
extremes of temperature. Cynical, indeed, was
the contrast between the provision for the well-
being of the beef, and the exposure of the immi-
grant boys to pneumonia or rheumatism !

If there is, to-day, any regulation of tempera-
ture at the Chicago Stockyards in the interest of
the health of employes, it has been achieved
through enforcement of the Health, Safety and-i

58 Modern Industry and Health

t Comfort Act, under the new administration, and
x within the past few months.

In Pittsburgh, the Black City, a department
store exhibits marvellous laces, and delicately
tinted, perishable silks. The soot laden city air
is drawn down through a high intake, and kept
physically pure by being pumped through flowing
water and cotton batting. In this store are to be
found the most uniformly courteous, unwearied,
refreshed looking sales clerks in all the city.
When I commented upon this fact to the man-
ager, he agreed that pure, fresh air undoubtedly
was one contributing cause of this desirable con-
dition. "But," he said, "it is only honest to tell
you that we did that in the first place for the sake
of the laces and silks."

In a candy factory in the same Black City of
Pittsburgh, I found on a horribly smoky, muggy
September afternoon, in 1907, a workroom so cool
and refreshing, in which everyone looked so com-
fortable, that I have always remembered it as a
bright spot in a dismal experience. The work-
room was kept at a fixed temperature and the air
pure because the girls were dipping chocolates of
the finest and most expensive quality which would
be ruined if the heat and soot of the city reached
them. For that one room the air was pumped
through cotton batting and cold, flowing water

Modern Industry and Health 59

and, by a fortunate accident, the temperature re-
quired for the chocolates happened also to be
wholesome and agreeable for the workers. The
closing gong sounded while we lingered in the
room, and the girls showed no zeal to rush for
their hats and quit the place. I spoke of this to
one of them, and her quick reply was "Do you
think we're going to be as comfortable as this
again before we get back here to-morrow morn-
ing?"

Surely the time cannot be far distant when the
conscience of the community will demand of the
chocolate industry that it shall do throughout,
for the health and comfort of its workers, what it
now finds it profitable to do in one room in each
factory for the sake of the appearance of its
product.

In a southern city, in the heart of a vast to-
bacco growing region, I was taken to see a new
candy factory of which the citizens were proud.
It was in a fine new concrete building, with in-
numerable windows admitting light and air.
These were open in the mild southern climate,
and a swarm of bees had entered through them in
search of sweets. A battle was going on between
the employes and the bees, and the floor was
strewn with dead and wounded insects. To me as
representative of the consuming public, this floor

60 Modern Industry and Health

was of extraordinary interest. It was of light-
colored concrete, smooth and adapted to the main-
tenance of exquisite cleanliness. The manager
had provided numerous spittoons for the use of
the workmen. Neither he nor they seemed, how-
ever, to feel under obligation to use them, and
the light-colored, smooth concrete floor was dis-
figured in many directions with pools of tobacco
juice, through which flies and surviving wounded
bees crawled in great numbers, crawling after-
wards over candy in various stages of preparation
and packing.

In this new factory the latest machinery was
installed. Here, too, the chocolate room was kept
at a fixed temperature. The candies were of all
qualities, from fine bon-bons to the poisonous
trash which mission Sunday schools buy for their
Christmas trees. Coal-tar dyes of many colors
stood boldly open to view, and our friendly host
offered us candies to eat, unconscious of the hor-
ror inspired by his defiled floor, his spittoons, and
his coal-tar dyes.

There was, at that time, no state factory law,
and no requirement that seats should be provided
for women and girls at work. A large group of
young girls, apparently between 14 and 16 years
of age stood, packing candy for shipment, at a
table far too high for them, which had been origi-

Modern Industry and Health 61

nally adapted to a group of men who were now
working in a different part of the factory. To our
suggestion that the girls could do more work in a
day if the table were lowered and they were al-
lowed to sit, the manager genially replied that
they were paid by the piece and worked as hard as
they could, whatever position they were in. The
concrete floor, which so sadly failed of its purpose
in the matter of cleanliness, was terribly hard
upon the feet of all who had to stand long upon
it. Needless standing is always an indication of
incompetent management. It is less injurious to
boys than to girls because of their different struc-
ture, and because they are so inevitably restless
that they shift about and lessen the harm to them-
selves without knowing that they are doing it.
Their very restlessness often saves them from be-
ing asked to stand except when actively engaged
in tending a machine which automatically keeps
them still.

That factory ships candy in quantities through-
out the Southwest, and the people of the city in
which it stands buy its product with pride and
pleasure because it is the most modern of their
industries. The manager is a much respected,
enterprising citizen, no more aware of the relation
of industry to health and disease than the people
among whom he moves socially.

62 Modern Industry and Health

How far we are from acting upon the idea that
work is one foundation of health, how much
farther from compelling industry to use its own
inherent resources for the good health of the work-
ers, is illustrated by an episode of the Pittsburgh
Survey. During an early conference of the in-
vestigators, in September, 1907, someone sug-
gested that one of the first inquiries should test
the truth of the statement that, in the steel in-
dustry, men were employed 365 days in the year,
twelve hours a day; and twice a month 24 hours
at a stretch, at the turn of the shift from night-
work to daywork on Sunday. All who were pres-
ent agreed, except the questioner, that it seemed
inconceivable that men could endure such strain,
especially in the heat at which much of the work
is done.

After a fortnight, however, Professor Commons
reported that it was true. Those were the work-
ing hours, for the water boys as well as for the
men whom they served, and the consequences were
such as would naturally follow. Occasionally a
man died at his work. Sometimes a man collapsed
on the way home. Strained hearts, paralysis, and
disorders less obviously traceable to a particular
exertion but due to heat, fatigue, and strain car-
ried men off.

The steel industry did not, at that time, get

Modern Industry and Health 63

many local recruits among Americans, or among
foreigners who had been here any length of time.
Employment bureaus were maintained to bring in
men from Ellis Island to Pittsburgh, to work
under that strain.

When the facts were ascertained and made pub-
lic, conditions began very slowly to change in
some degree. Sunday repair work was reduced
in some places; shifts were, in some cases, changed
from two of twelve hours to three of eight hours
each, though 63 per cent, of employes in the steel
industry still worked 12 hours in 24 in the year
1913.

The stockholders of the industry have again
voted against a general reduction of the working
hours to eight; and the legislature of Pennsyl-
vania has again killed a bill which would, if
enacted, have ended the employment at night of
boys fourteen and fifteen years old in making
steel.

Neither the federal government, the State of
Pennsylvania, nor the City of Pittsburgh has
records showing what this overwork has been do-
ing to the health of the workers. When men fell
ill of tuberculosis, rheumatism, or other slow dis-
abling disease, they commonly went home to
Europe to die, so that they did not even appear

64 Modern Industry and Health

in the mortality figures of the decennial federal
Census.

The steel industry had been encouraged in reck-
lessness by a decision of the Supreme Court of
Pennsylvania. If an alien was killed in industry,
the surviving alien dependents living in Europe
could not through counsel, or through the consul
of their own country, appear in any court in Penn-
sylvania to ask damages for the loss of their bread-
winner. This has recently been altered by statute,
so that to-day, if a Slav or an Italian comes to this
country leaving his family in Europe and is killed
while still an alien, his family may claim damages.

Sinister, indeed, for a series of years, was the
influence of that decision upon the health and
safety of workingmen in Pennsylvania. To avoid
the possible costs entailed by the death of native
or naturalized men while at work, employment
agents bringing in recruits for the dangerous in-
dustries were actively tempted by the decision to
prefer detached aliens.

Our greatest manufacturing industry was,
under that decision, moving in the direction ex-
actly opposite to that of Germany and the other
most enlightened industrial nations. They have,
for a quarter century, been striving to stimulate
employers to make industry safe by increasingly
placing upon them the cost of the death or dis-

Modern Industry and Health 65

ability of a wage earner. The employers, under
this compulsion, form mutual insurance compan-
ies and distribute over the whole industry, as they
see fit, the damage cost arising from deaths and
injuries. Such insurance affords the maximum
financial stimulus for employers to make industry
safe. The Pennsylvania decision worked for
years in exactly the opposite way.

Among several states which are now legislating
with intent to make industry safe, perhaps the
most striking experiment is that of Washington.
The statute provides that if, in any occupation,
an employe loses his life or becomes permanently
disabled, his dependents have a valid, legal claim
upon that industry — the wife throughout widow-
hood, the children until the 16th birthday.

This statute has been unanimously sustained by
the Supreme Court of Washington, and is pending
before the Supreme Court of the United States, in
a case to test its constitutionality. There was in
the state one extra hazardous industry, the manu-
facture of explosives. Only two establishments
were engaged in it. One blew up, killing eight
employes. The State of Washington paid the
damages due, under the statute, to the survivors
and to the dependents of the dead, and sent the
bill to the company and its competitor. The com-
petitor is testing the constitutionality of the law.

66 Modern Industry and Health

No other state seems to have gone quite so far
as Washington in its effort to make it worth while
for the extra hazardous industries to reduce their
hazards. The decision of the Supreme Court of
the United States will, therefore, be of epoch mak-
ing importance.

Between the extremes of policy adopted by
Washington on the one hand, and the courts of
Pennsylvania on the other (whose decisions have,
for years, deprived thousands of working people
of compensation for injuries) experiments in great
variety are in process, all directed toward assur-
ing to wage workers and their families some com-
pensation, and to employers new stimulus for
making industry safe.

Any constitution can, with the expenditure of
time and trouble, be brought into line with civi-
lization.* Laws must ultimately be enacted in
every state, assuring to the survivors of men
killed at work some payment of damages, and to
workers hurt but not killed some reasonable com-
pensation for the loss of health, or limbs, or earn-
ing power. In not one state has this yet been
done effectively.

If the Supreme Court of the United States fol-

*This has been conclusively shown by the action of the
voters of New York State during the past three years in
relation to workmen's compensation.

Modern Industry and Health 67

lows the reasoning of the Court of Washington,
the slow process of changing constitutions and
statutes of other states will be relatively easy. If,
however, the Supreme Court of the United States
should follow the reasoning of the New York
Court of Appeals in the Ives case, we shall be con-
fronted by the painful and weary task of amend-
ing the Constitution of the United States. The
recent adoption of two amendments, the first in
nearly fifty years, shows that this process, though
slow and discouraging, is no longer impossible.

Factory Inspection

One serious weakness in our dealing with in-
dustry in relation to health, safety and comfort
lies in our disregard of the factory inspection staff.
In Germany, where accidents and bad health
among employes are causes of direct expense to
employers, the aid and advice of inspectors are
sought for keeping factories safe and wholesome.
Inspectors are technically trained men and wom-
en, carefully fitted for their work and of great im-
portance to both employers and employes. Their
visits are, therefore, welcomed by both.

In this country, on the contrary, inspectors are
selected in consideration of their usefulness to a
party organization, or a trade union, rather than
their technical qualifications for their task. In

68 Modern Industry and Health

the greatest industrial state, New York, where the
inspection staff has the nominal protection of the
civil service law, the State Civil Service Commis-
sion has, for many years, been as actively in poli-
tics as any avowedly political part of the state
government. This is utterly demoralizing to the
inspection staff and the employers, and defeats the
purpose for which the inspectors exist.

Twenty years ago, I cherished hopes of im-
proved provisions for the health of factory work-
ers to come through the employment of women
as inspectors. Experience has shown that there
is a large field in which they can be of great ser-
vice. But neither men nor women can do what
needs to be done until our whole attitude toward
the task is fundamentally changed. At present,
the employes are so hopeless of benefits to be de-
rived from the visits of inspectors, that they are
commonly either wholly indifferent or, sometimes,
willing cynically to join with foreman or superin-
tendent in tricking an inspector and concealing
violations of the law.

A black chapter in our industrial history is this
of our treatment of our factory inspectors. They
have been left in the position of hostile critics —
prosecutors — of corporations infinitely more pow-
erful than themselves. Within the factory they
have been met as enemies, bribed when possible

Modern Industry and Health 69

and, in shamefully numerous cases, removed from
office when they could be neither bribed, tricked
nor intimidated.

Under these sorry conditions the scientific out-
put of these officials is naturally valueless. In-
deed, with the honorable exception of the New
York State reports standardized a few years ago
by Commissioner Sherman, the official reports on
factory inspection only deepen the darkness of our
ignorance of the relation of the different branches
of industry to the health of the workers or the
consumers.

Fatigue and Disease

During the past three-quarters of a century
there has been a continuous movement for a
shorter working day. When, in 1830, my father
was a printer's apprentice in Philadelphia, he and
his fellow apprentices regularly expected to work
in summer "from light until dark," i. e. from the
moment they could see after dawn, until they
could no longer see in the late dusk of the summer
evening. In winter they worked from 6 a. m. to
8 p. m. with an hour for dinner, and a half hour
each for breakfast and supper.

During the three-quarters of a century since
those days, hundreds of thousands of men and
women have engaged in strikes in the hope of es-

70 Modern Industry and Health

tablishing permanently a shorter working day.
In so doing, they were performing, at a terrible
cost to themselves, an invaluable service in behalf
of the public health of this nation. But this fact
was not recognized until within recent years, and
then only incidentally. Even now it appears
probable that far more would have been gained,
and at infinitely less cost in suffering, if the energy
spent in strikes for shorter working hours had all
been directed to enacting and enforcing statutes.
Since 1895, the Supreme Court of the United
States has, at different times and in connection
with several cases, laid down the principle that
the welfare of the community requires some rea-
sonable restriction upon the working hours of
adult men and women. The Court decided in
1898,* that the working day might reasonably be
limited to eight hours for men working under-
ground in mines and smelters. This could be done
because mining was an intrinsically dangerous oc-
cupation. Later, the Court held f that the work-
ing hours of bakers could not be limited by statute
to ten in twenty-four. For if baking had been an
intrinsically dangerous occupation, the women
who have, since the foundation of the Republic,
baked bread for their families, must have suffered

* Holden vs. Hardy, 169 U. S. 366.

t Lochner vs. New York, 198 U. S. 45, 1905.

Modern Industry and Health 71

in health. The Court was not acquainted with
the trade life of bakers. It did not know that, in
American cities, thousands of bakers work under-
ground, almost like miners.

In this decision the Court laid down the prin-
ciple that, where a statute interferes with the free-
dom of contract of adults, professedly in the in-
terest of the public health and welfare, the fact
must be made clear to the Court that the public
health is really concerned.

In this decision began the recent era of sus-
tained, continuing effort for a working day lim-
ited by statute for men and women in manufac-
ture. Upon this decision rests the procedure of
the National Consumers' League whose Commit-
tee on the Legal Defence of Labor Laws has since
1907 continuously prepared briefs for the use of
the courts in cases involving working hours.*

In the preparation of these briefs the fact has
been discovered and popularized that, of all the
industrial causes of disease, none is so universal

* Fatigue and Efficiency, by Josephine Goldmark. The
Russell Sage Foundation, 1912. This fundamental work deal-
ing with the relation of fatigue to disease grew out of a
brief prepared by Miss Goldmark in defence of the Oregon
ten hours' law for women employed in manufacture. The
brief formed the basis of the favorable decision handed
down in January, 1908, by the Supreme Court of the United
States.

72 Modern Industry and Health

as fatigue. Of all the poisons, it is the most uni-
versally diffused, controllable but not to-day con-
trolled. Sinister as many industrial poisons are
now known to be, this one alone invests with a
deadly threat the common run of ordinary occu-
pations. This gives new significance to the com-
plaint that working people are worn out prema-
turely by simple tasks, if these tasks involve mo-
notony or speeding.

We know now for the first time, in a form clear
not only to learned courts, but to the simplest
machine tenders, why these are often old at thirty,
and superannuated at forty years. The omni-
present poison of fatigue prepares the frames for
every germ that lurks.

This consideration it is which led the Supreme
Court of Mississippi to speak recently of the "in-
alienable right to rest," in a decision sustaining as
constitutional a statute limiting to ten hours the
working day of men and women in cotton mills.

The whole procedure in defence of labor laws
has thus been revolutionized. Instead of abstract
discussions of abstract freedom, the procedure is,
to-day, to ascertain the exact facts, to show what
the existing working hours are, what other nations
and states have done about it, and what the medi-
cal profession says on the subject. The final de-
ciding factor is. not "freedom" but health.

Modern Industry and Health 73

The International Conference for Labor Legis-
lation at Berne, Switzerland, in September, 1913,
had for its principal subjects two proposals deal-
ing with working hours. One was the introduction
of the ten hours days for women in manufacture in
all the fourteen nations of Europe, by a treaty
like that which took effect on New Year's Day,
1910, and assured to all women so employed a
period of 11 hours' rest at night, of which seven
hours must fall between 10 p. m. and 5 a. m.

The second proposal was to extend to boys be-
low the age of 16 years the same period of rest at
night which has already been established for
women.

The ambassadors of the fourteen European na-
tions are to meet in Berne, Switzerland, in 1914,
to take action upon these two proposals.

We cannot participate in this treaty procedure
because each of our states is too sovereign to be
bound as to its industrial legislation by an inter-
national treaty. Yet no state is sovereign enough
to bind itself. The action of the European nations
in this field is, nevertheless, of immeasurable im-
portance to us. For what seems to them so ur-
gently needful for the health of the working class
of all European nations, that they deal with it in
this elaborate and comprehensive manner, seems
in consequence to the Supreme Court of the

74 Modern Industry and Health

United States to be reasonable when the individ-
ual American states enact similar measures. And
the Court inclines, therefore, to sustain these
measures as constitutional.

At present, only six of our states have estab-
lished a closing hour at night for the work of
women: Massachusetts, New York, Pennsyl-
vania, Connecticut, Indiana and Nebraska.
Among these six are, however, the four in which
the largest number of women are employed in
manufacture.

Four other states — Arizona, California, Colo-
rado and Washington — have established the eight
hours day for women and girls, and Oregon has
now a working day of eight hours and twenty min-
utes, and a working week of 50 hours for women
of all ages.

In February, 1914, President Wilson signed a
bill limiting to eight hours in one day the work
of women in industry in the District of Columbia.
This applies to virtually all occupations except
domestic service, nursing the sick, and office work.
The bill was introduced at the request of the Na-
tional Consumers' League and is the first eight
hours law for women in the East.

Modern Industry and Health 75

Industry, Health and Vice

While we thus struggle by petty retail measures
against disease, industry produces it by wholesale.
If in reply to this it is objected that much illness
is due not to work but to personal vices, the use of
alcohol and others, the answer is that these, too,
are cultivated as a part of the field of industry.
The wholesale and retail organization of the al-
cohol industry has recently forced itself anew upon
the attention of the nation by its successful re-
sistance to the enfranchisement of women in Wis-
consin, Michigan and Ohio. In all three states
there was a well-organized and largely financed
campaign of producers and distributors of alco-
holic beverages to defeat the suffrage amend-
ments.

The international organization of the white
slave traffic is no longer a subject of dispute. Our
own government and the governments of Euro-
pean nations are legislating with regard to it.

From these two important disease producing
agencies men can free themselves by their own
choice. But inescapable accompaniments of in-
dustry, perennially producing disease for hun-
dreds of thousands of wage-earners, are fatigue,
worry and an insufficient livelihood. Against
these the individual is largely powerless.

76 Modern Industry and Health

In April, 1913, the most terrible of all the rela-
tions of industry to disease entered upon a unique
process of hopeful change. Through the efforts
of the voting women of San Francisco, incited
originally by an obscure woman worker in the
needle trades, Judge Charles Weller was recalled
from the Bench. This judge had degraded his
high office by systematically protecting men who
enticed young girls from honest work into the
fields of dishonor. He had reduced the bail of a
man under trial charged with being a white slaver.
He had protected that incredible American in-
dustry— the white slave traffic.

The new voters of San Francisco enlisted
enough righteous men to form, with them, a safe-
guard for wage-earning girls against the most ter-
rible form of exploitation. In doing this they
went straight to the root of the most threatening
of social diseases, the plague that lurks in unde-
fended girlhood under pressure of underpaid in-
dustry. This incident heralds, I believe, a signifi-
cant approaching change in the relation of in-
dustry to health.

Ill

MODERN INDUSTRY IN RELATION TO
EDUCATION

MODERN INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION

We have no national ideal of education, inher-
ited, traditional, corresponding to our ideal of the
family. Even the little red school house, with the
three R's, meagre symbol of a scant ideal, was
never national. It was Northern and Western,
as the log school house belonged to the pioneers.
The neighborhood school house with a seat for
every child, is, in hundreds of counties in the
South, still a dream of the future.

We are committed to universal, free, compul-
sory education of all citizens as the logical corol-
lary of universal suffrage. But the Census of 1910
reveals the fact that we have more than a million
and a half native whites, ten years old and older,
who are unable to read and write, three per cent,
of their number.* Clearly, therefore, we are not
at present approaching even the minimum educa-
tional achievement demanded of a democratic in-
dustrial Republic as the condition of its con-
tinued existence.

* 1,535,530 persons, 10 years of age and over, of whom
obviously some small per cent, must be presumed to be
mentally deficient.

79

80 Modern Industry and Education

Our ideal of education differs from our ideal of
the family in that it is not inherited, but essen-
tially modern. It differs, also, in that we are not
falling away from it, as we have fallen away, under
the pressure of modern industry, from our ideal
of the family, but are approaching it, however
slowly.

Throughout this lecture I assume that educa-
tion is a lifelong process of fitting human beings
for life in Society, for self-support, for sharing in
the conduct of industry, for parenthood, for the
fullest responsibility of citizenship, for all noble
enjoyment.

For education in this modern, comprehensive
interpretation, industry affords a financial basis
and equipment more generous than the human
race ever before possessed. Lavishly abundant
resources exist for placing instruction at the com-
mand of all men, women and children in the Re-
public. Never was a nation so rich as we are.

The universities number their students by
thousands, the elementary schools count their
pupils by millions. Yet we are confronted by
chronic, wholesale poverty, inextricably associated
with gross ignorance. This holds true among na-
tive Americans of English stock, in the Southern
states, as it does among immigrants in the North-
ern industrial states. The question thus arises

Modern Industry and Education 81

whether poverty and ignorance, in combination,
may not be a by-product of modern industry.

When I was in college, students in this country
were quite without knowledge of the essential
nature of modern industry. At Cornell, where I
was a student in 1876, we were taught no eco-
nomics worthy of the name. At the University of
Pennsylvania my brother learned that the point
of greatest importance in relation to industry was
to understand the theory of a beneficent protec-
tive tariff. At Yale our contemporaries were
taught by Professor Sumner the supreme advan-
tage of free trade. Later, however, Professor Sum-
ner was the first to awaken in our minds a glim-
mering consciousness of a permanent wage-earn-
ing class in this country by his little volume en-
titled "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other."
Even the courageous pioneer work of Professor
Richard T. Ely, at Johns Hopkins, which he has
since carried forward there and at the University
of Wisconsin, had not then begun. The American
faculties of those days cannot be justly blamed
for not giving us what they did not possess. Few
American teachers of economics and sociology
then read French and German. Fewer still had,
like Professor Ely, studied in Europe.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Sheffield, Cornell and Lawrence were new, or still

82 Modern Industry and Education

in prospect. Training men to apply science in the
service of industry was still experimental in the
field of higher education, and social science had
hardly crossed the Atlantic. The American Social
Science Association was not yet a dozen years old.

Then began that application of science in the
service of industry which has increasingly ab-
sorbed our intellectual ability, and largely de-
flected it from the task of widening the boundaries
of knowledge.

The men whose minds were trained (or left un-
trained) by the Faculties of those days are the
Bench and the Bar, the captains of industry, the
Senators and the Faculties of to-day. Men of my
generation, and older men, have hitherto decided
all things relating to industry and to education,
and they are not yet relinquishing that task to
their successors. Upon them rests the full respon-
sibility for the anarchical form of industry in the
United States in contrast with the beginnings of
industrial order visible in some of the European
countries. When, in 1883, I was a student of the
Faculty of Law in Zurich, professors in Switzer-
land and Germany were already lecturing on new
aspects of industry in courses leading to the de-
gree of Doctor of Laws. In the University of
Berlin the same thing was happening. Avowedly
impelled by the hope of checking the revolution-

Modern Industry and Education 83

ary political activity of a rapidly growing party
of wage-earners, Prince Bismarck was calling upon
the universities to apply to industrial problems
the collective wisdom of the leaders of German
economic thought; and under his leadership the
foundations were laid for that nationwide, in-
clusive, industrial insurance which the world is
now slowly copying.

In my student days we heard much, not only at
Cornell, but in the world at large, of the Conflict
of Science and Religion. The President of Cornell
published volumes on this general theme. But
industry, and the laws and courts which bul-
warked it, were sacrosanct. They were the Tem-
ple and the Ark of the Covenant, and critical
study of them would have been blasphemy if any-
one had thought of attempting it.

There could not have been a graver misfortune
for a great nation in the stage of industrial devel-
opment in which we then were, than such incom-
petence in relation to industry as disgraced our
American colleges and universities. The wage-
earners have ever since been tragically paying the
penalty of that default of the higher education,
and they must continue to pay until the men of
my generation now in control of industry, and of
interpreting and enforcing the law in relation to
it, shall give way to the new generation. Criti-

84 Modern Industry and Education

cism, however constructive and suggestive, cannot
help people who are fifty years old and older to
acquire social and industrial vision. The time for
that vision is youth. Only the new generation
can retrieve our sins of omission and commission,
and this they are preparing to do.

Within the academic halls the change amounts
to a revolution. Classes in economics and sociol-
ogy now vie in numbers and popularity with
classes in literature. In their brief, sacrificial ca-
reers Elizabeth Butler, of Columbia, and Carola
Woerishoffer, of Bryn Mawr, heralded the new day
that has come, the new challenge that science of-
fers to industry. This old world can never again
be quite so sodden when thousands of young men
and women are sent forth every year trained to
face the world and to strive all their lives to see
it exactly as it is.

To these successors we must look for a revolu-
tion in education in relation to industry. To
them it will not present itself as a revolution, but
as a natural next step, when they bring into the
foreground of education the teaching of hygiene
as applied to every relation of life. For men and
women accustomed throughout the high schools,
colleges and universities to athletics, to the out-
door life, to physical efficiency, it must seem in-
sanely perverse that we reserve outdoor classes for

Modern Industry and Education 85

the children of less and least vitality. For the
new generation of educational leaders health will
inevitably be the first consideration, in school and
in industry. To the new generation we must look,
therefore, for the new science that we lack — indus-
trial hygiene — and the new pedagogy that will
send forth young workers into industry aware of
the provisions which the state enacts for their
protection, and alert to avail themselves of the
benefits thereof.

One glaring fact confronts the graduates of to-
day, namely, the dominant influence of industry
in determining the ideals and the administrative
policy of our privately endowed universities, col-
leges and schools, and in modifying the state uni-
versities and the public schools. When the gradu-
ates leave the universities it is to enter a world in
which industry calls a million children a year too
early away from the elementary classrooms ir*o
its service. It thus creates as its permanent by-
product within the voting citizenship illiteracy
and stupidity, and broken health bred of monoto-
nous labor.

Enlightening the Consumers

Wholly new within the educational institutions
and in the world at large is the attempt to educate
the consumers to know and use their power in

86 Modern Industry and Education

relation to industry. To-day, more than ever be-
fore, the enlightened consumer can truthfully say:

"When I depart this life, I shall have prac-
tised certain negative virtues. I shall have done
nothing to maintain or encourage certain
evil industries. No young girl will have been
withdrawn from any class in domestic science
to prepare for my use any cigars, cigarettes,
chewing gum or tobacco, or rouge, or hair-
dye, or imitation jewelry. No birds will have
been killed to decorate my hats, no children
kept at home from kindergarten or primary
school, or robbed of their hours, of play to
'willow' plumes for my headgear. In these
modest abstinences I have striven to keep my
individual conscience clear in relation to in-
dustry because I, personally, received some
education as to the powers of consumers."

Every generous young mind can be kindled to a
passionate interest in the relation of working chil-
dren to itself and its material possessions. And
this youthful interest may determine the later
activities of a lifetime, as Lord Shaftesbury re-
lated that, when he was a lad of fourteen years,
the sight of a pauper workingman's funeral modi-
fied the whole subsequent course of his life.

How few, however, compared with the whole
mass, are the enlightened consumers! How diffi-
cult is their path, and how incomplete their pres-
ent achievement! Why, indeed, is education of

Modern Industry and Education 87

consumers left to a volunteer body, such as the
Consumers' League?

What help do the rank and file of students in
colleges and normal schools get from their Fac-
ulties in acquiring this elementary social instruc-
tion? Why do not all the colleges inculcate a
scientific attitude of mind with regard to industry,
awakening the spirit of inquiry, and teaching the
available methods of applying this spirit? The
colleges have long prepared students for the ser-
vice of industry. When will they give a like share
of attention to the mastery thereof?

A while ago I spoke to the students in a South-
ern girls' college. They were so young — 13 to 19
years or thereabouts — that I asked a member of
their Faculty to tell me some of their interests, so
that I might connect my suggestions with those
interests, as we do with children. She replied,
"They don't know anything about anything. They
would gladly take an interest, but the President
and their mothers don't think they ought to know
much about life." Yet many avenues of approach
offered access to those young minds. They were
alive to the usefulness of placing early their
Christmas orders for candy and chocolates. They
responded to an appeal in behalf of overworked
young girls in paper-box factories who prepare,
at the last moment, boxes for Christmas choco-

88 Modern Industry and Education

lates and candies, under pressure of "rush orders"
of belated shoppers. They saw that daguerreo-
types are no longer made because we all prefer
photographs, and horsehair sofas are extinct be-
cause no one would give them houseroom. And
they followed the analogy that goods may be
coveted because their history has been righteous
throughout the processes of production and dis-
tribution. They grasped the suggestion that
everything made to-day is made to be sold, that
the purchaser is the true Lord of Industry, and
that we, all of us, are purchasers. They agreed
that there is no longer any innocent bystander.

Even more necessary is such enlightenment in
high schools and elementary schools. In certain
practical ways it can be begun very early. Thus
the Paulist Fathers in New York City have, for
years, through their Sunday School, appealed to
children, even little ones, and their mothers, to
be considerate about Christmas shopping. And
nuns of teaching orders, during one of their sum-
mer schools on the Pacific Coast, listened re-
ceptively to an officer of the Consumers' League
explaining to them the possibility of similar sug-
gestions to their pupils.

The children in grammar grades, and still more
those in high schools, are keenly alert to sugges-
tions of the power we all potentially possess as

Modern Industry and Education 89

consumers. Their interest in regard to things that
they buy is of the liveliest. They are in nowise
blase. Beginning with their hair ribbons, tracing
them back to the silk mills in New Jersey and
Pennsylvania, school girls care eagerly to know
why, in silk ribbon mills, wages are low, and work-
rooms hot and stuffy, and how it comes that quick,
capable girls, hardly older than themselves, must
serve as pacemakers for slower and less gifted
workers.

Any restless school boy, at the hobbledehoy age,
will listen to the story of the "grinders' phthisis"
that cuts down in their prime men who prepare
blades for pocket-knives; to a description of need-
less danger to other boys arising from unguarded
machines in pencil factories, and of the small pay
that goes with putting rubbers in pencils. Tales
of mine and breaker boys and young lads working
at night in glass works in West Virginia find a
responsive chord in the breasts of school boys,
who readily see that none of us escape using coal
and glass. They, too, perceive that there are, in
this case, no innocent bystanders, that we are all
tarred with the same stick.

Working-class children during their few brief
years in the elementary schools need the appeal
to sympathetic imagination the more because of
the dulling experience that befalls them in the

90 Modern Industry and Education

. long years of work that follow. Their direst need
is for cultivation of their critical sense in relation
to industry.

Refreshing is the alert response of young minds
stirred by the idea of their relation, previously an
unconscious one, as indirect employers. Curi-
ously varied is the expression of the faces of a
high school class when asked how they account
for the fact, by no means inevitable, that other
children of their own age are less educated than
themselves? They are visibly shocked by a blunt
statement that the present difference in oppor-
tunity is due not to their own superior gifts, or
to the superior thrift or generosity, necessarily, of
their parents, but to the defective organization of
education and of industry. To most young minds
the idea is fascinatingly new that the transforma-
tion of industry is to-day the life and death ques-
tion of this Republic.

This new education of youth the Nation sorely
needs. We must establish in all the oncoming
generation an unwearying spirit of inquiry with
regard to industry. Nothing can safely be as-
sumed in relation to it. Is it paying its social
costs? Is its product, indeed, value received?
Does it bring forth beauty? Or does it give us
personal adornment at cost of smoke-laden, filthy
sky and air?

Modern Industry and Education 91

Child Labor

Far, however, from educating the children of
wage-earners to intelligent criticism as consumers,
the schools surrender them too early to the ser-
vice of industry, and tend increasingly to rob the
few years now sacred to childhood by making the
schools' work vocational and industrial*/ The new
vocational effort largely addresses itself to fitting
American youth to escape from machine tending
to become foremen, managers, superintendents.
But in the nature of industry the opportunities
for such work are a trivial fraction of the whole.
Vast multitudes must be machine tenders, and
machines increase daily, and under the present
conditions machines destroy mind.

For more than a century philanthropists have
struggled in England and, more recently, in this
country, to safeguard children of wage earners
from destruction by industry. The National Child
Labor Committee, the National Consumers'
League, the National Education Association, and
other national bodies galore have for years worked
to assure educational opportunity to all the chil-
dren. They strive to establish minimum standards
below which the school year may not be shortened,
children may not leave school unable to read and

92 Modern Industry and Education

write, and industrial employment may be for-
bidden.

Always and everywhere they find the same
forces opposing them. Rural industries claim
children for the beet fields, the cotton and to-
bacco fields, the bean and pea fields, the berry
patches, the cranberry bogs, the canneries, and
the orchards. Coal mines consume boys in break-
ers and underground. Urban industries, too, cot-
ton and woollen and silk mills, glass works, sweat-
shops, the messenger service, and the newspapers,
all industries — the world over — in which children
can be employed, are forever calling them from
school to work.

Only the men and women who are engaged in
the struggle year after year know how powerful
and how active are the interests that profit by the
labor of children. In four Southern states — the
Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama — the cotton
mill interest has hitherto succeeded in pre-
venting the adoption of the fourteenth birthday
as the lowest limit for children beginning to work.
In West Virginia the glass companies and the mine
owners killed all child labor legislation at the ses-
sion of 1913. In Pennsylvania in the same year
the glass companies and the textile manufacturers
successfully made common cause against the
working children, killed the child labor bill, and

Modern Industry and Education 93

kept in force the old law. Under it boys of four-
teen years may still be legally required to work
eight hours at night in glassworks and all other
industries having continuing processes.

Children have a statutory limit of their work-
ing day to eight hours in twenty-four in only one
Southern state, Mississippi, and in only one New
England state, Massachusetts. Forty states now
forbid employment of children before the four-
teenth birthday. Only the Southern cotton manu-
facturing states show no disposition thus to pro-
tect their young boys and girls and give them
time for a rudimentary education. Of children
who work on these terms, what cant it is to say
that they have "a square deal," or "an equal op-
portunity" with children of the socialized North-
western states, with their long childhood safe-
guarded from wage-earning, with abundant
schools, and free university tuition to tempt them
to continue the process of education!

For the unfortunate children, twelve and thir-
teen years old, of the belated Southern cotton
manufacturing states, the federal bill pending be-
fore Congress seems to offer new hope. It rein-
troduces the idea of federal action in defence of
boys and girls now legally employed below the age
of fourteen years in mills and mines. It proposes
to exclude from interstate commerce all goods

94 Modern Industry and Education

derived from mills or mines in which children be-
low the age of fourteen years are employed.

The federal bill thus brings into sharp relief
the fact that native white orphans, of native par-
entage, in Georgia are future citizens of this Re-
public as surely as the happier immigrant chil-
dren of New York, or the native children of the
enlightened and humane Northwestern states. As
future citizens, the children of the South need
fourteen years, at least, of childhood in which to
grow and learn. And the bill appeals to the whole
nation to see that this claim is enforced, this right
is guaranteed to them.

The Working Class Children

Modern industry tends to keep the wage-earn-
ers spiritually poor and dull. Of all the charges
made against it to-day this is the gravest. The
ultimate blasphemy is the proposal to fit children
for industry as industry is. It must be revolu-
tionized before it will be fit for children and youth
to enter. It must first be made democratic and
cooperative, transformed into service.

The need of to-day is for education to enable
children and youth, and men and women, to re-
sist the ruinous, stupefying influence of industry.
To make this resistance successful, the schools
must keep the whole body of young workers on

Modern Industry and Education 95

their rolls at least for regular part time attend-
ance, until the twenty-first birthday, until the edu-
cation for citizenship ends, and education by and
through the duties of citizenship begins.

One short step in this direction has been taken
in Wisconsin and in Ohio, where the working
week of children below the 16th birthday is re-
duced to 48 hours, of which five must be spent in
continuous classes. Enlightened teachers of these
classes strive to rekindle in working boys and girls,
from week to week, the intellectual life which in-
dustry tends to extinguish by dulling monotonous
work. This is one line of hopeful effort in a direc-
tion immeasurably important, for in a Republic
on pain of utter failure the common laborers must
be educated citizens. Massachusetts has for many
years recognized this, at least in a modest degree,
in the statute which holds the employer responsi-
ble for regular school attendance of all illiterate
minor employes.

In speaking to teachers about vocational train-
ing, my one appeal to them is to fit every child to
resist the pressure of industry, to inculcate in all
children the ambition to become cooperative citi-
zens, keeping themselves in health, practising the
art of thinking. Above all else is the need to cher-
ish their critical faculty, to train them to resist
monotony, and to organize their own activities

96 Modern Industry and Education

for themselves, so that they may combat suc-
cessfully the deadliest foe of this Republic, the
lowering of the citizenship by industry. How else
can the wage workers regain their lost share of
control and develop anew the sense of civic and in-
dustrial responsibility?

Far from equipping children to maintain them-
selves against its injurious tendencies, our ele-
mentary schools tend rather to serve as feeders
for industry. Domestic science begins commonly
in the sixth or seventh grade, if at all, while
daughters of working families leave by thousands
from the fifth to enter upon industrial life. When
a little immigrant girl fresh from the steerage en-
ters school in the foreign colony of a manufactur-
ing city, she makes on the first day the acquaint-
ance of Teacher, who is thenceforth her ideal lady.
Teacher is usually young, friendly, dressed in
shirtwaist, necktie, trig skirt, belt, and shoes with
heels. She catches the little girl's imagination,
and a process of imitation begins which lasts at
least until the child's 14th birthday. But through-
out all that time, never once does Teacher do any-
thing which Mother is seen to do at home. If the
windows are ever washed, it is by the janitor or
his assistant, and usually out of school hours. If
the floor is scrubbed, the process is unseen. Wash-
ing day is unknown within the classroom, and

Modern Industry and Education 97

babies are alien to the activities of Teacher. Not
so much as a cup of cocoa or a slice of toast is
she seen to prepare by any girl who leaves from
the "working paper grades."

By their one-sided curriculum, the schools may
truthfully be said actively to divert the little
daughters of wage-earning families from home life
to becoming cash girls and factory hands. For the
schools teach exactly those things which prepare
girls to become at the earliest moment cash chil-
dren and machine tenders: punctuality, regular-
ity, attention, obedience, and a little reading and
writing — excellent things in themselves, but
wretched preparation either for domestic service
as an alternative choice of occupations, or for
homemaking a decade later on in the lives of the
pupils.

With our material supplies in lavish abundance
for the full and generous education of every man,
woman and child throughout this whole country,
our trouble is our own lack of vision, in city, state
and nation.

Teaching is already a public service, although
the ethics of Boards of Education are still largely
commercial, because these Boards are chiefly com-
posed of business men, with an occasional physi-
cian whose ideals vary but slightly from theirs.
The teaching staff itself, being in contact with

98 Modern Industry and Education

the children, is increasingly socially minded. But
the teaching staff, also, is vitiated by sordid ideals
derived from its competitive environment. It,
too, suffers the taint of modern industry.

Where the National Child Labor Committee,
when it entered the field ten years ago, reasona-
bly expected to find its strongest allies, among
principals and teachers, it has found, in a disap-
pointing number of individual cases, an unthink-
ing willingness to surrender children — under pre-
text of their poverty — to the greedy hunger of
mills, mines, sweatshops, cotton fields, and the
city street trades. Many children leave school by
reason of the perverse suggestions of their teach-
ers.

Not from the teaching staff has come the in-
sistent demand for scholarships to keep all the
children in school at least to the 16th birthday.

Surely our grandchildren will look back with
wonder that we, who waste money hi war and
preparations for war, leave 80,000 children perma-
nently in half-time classes for want of school room
in the greatest industrial city in this hemisphere,
and issue in New York City in one year 42,000
working papers to children below the age of 16
years. The records of illiterate children ten to
fourteen years old form a part of every decennial
federal Census, chiefly of native children of native

Modern Industry and Education 99

parents, in the Southern states. We let boys and
girls go into monotonous occupations at fourteen
years old or earlier, before their judgment has had
time to develop. Yet industry holds out to the
rank and file of those who leave from the fifth
and sixth grades — the educational steerage — little
hope of orderly promotion such as they have ex-
perienced in school, and slight promise of later
variety of employment, or material increase in
wages.

All this with no resounding protest from the
teaching staff! Small wonder that the children
lack the instruction adapted to prepare them for
the change from our industrial chaos to the or-
derly industrial service of the future!

Unacquainted with industry and out of touch
with it, untrained in the principles and practice
of cooperation, disfranchised and thus deprived of
the education derived from active citizenship, the
teachers of our schools are, in most of the states,
failing the children to-day, as the universities and
colleges failed their students in the Nineteenth
Century. They are not educating the masses of
children to be masters of industry. On the con-
trary, they are participating — at least to the ex-
tent of passive acquiescence — in the evil process of
making them slaves of machines.

What sixth grade class in this whole nation

100 Modern Industry and Education

sends out its pupils fortified with full knowledge
of the meagre laws framed for their protection?
What children are taught in school that they can-
not before the 16th birthday legally work in New
York after five o'clock in a factory, and after seven
in a store? How many know that they are enti-
tled to seats with backs and to the use thereof
whenever the nature of their work permits such
use? Is there anything that they more urgently
need to know than these eminently practical
items? But how many teachers know even these
few things about industry as it is to-day? And
how can they teach what they do not know?

How many normal schools require their gradu-
ating classes to pass an examination in the pro-
visions of the compulsory education law, and the
labor law applying to children and adolescents?
But without this knowledge, how can the gradu-
ates, when they find positions, be sure of obeying
the statutes themselves? And how can they in-
struct their "working paper classes" and other
appropriate grades as to the protection which the
law provides and the children are entitled to claim
in factories, stores and workshops?

Machine Tenders

Modern industry calls increasingly for common
labor not only to dig with pick and shovel, but to

Modern Industry and Bu-aVion ID!

do a thousand simplified thmg3 for which: jjfetffifj
hands, fourteen to sixteen years old, being obtain-
able for low wages, are commercially preferred to
the hands of older persons. Requiring attention,
speed and some slight dexterity but no other qual-
ity, such work deadens young minds. Machine
tending habituates them to irresponsibility and
monotony, to the utter absence of thought, of in-
ventiveness, of judgment, of ambition. Men and
women who have spent these plastic years in this
way are worse human beings, not better ones, for
their contact with industry.

Obviously machine tending fits no girl for
bringing up children in a home of her own later
on, or for taking any part whatever in domestic
life. The special skill that she needs as future
wife and mother is skill in the art of living. Pro-
longed machine tending prepares no boy for pro-
motion to the post of foreman or superintendent.
On the contrary, the longer a boy tends a machine,
the less is he likely to develop qualities fitting
him for managing men or affairs. In the words
of Joseph Lee, of Boston, president of the Na-
tional Playgrounds Association of America, such
employment dzseducates growing minds.

Work must be done, however. Obviously, it
must not be done by young children, or in large
measure by adolescents. Who shall do it in order

•102 Modern Industry and Education

at. the .least injury .may be wrought? What does
machine tending do to older minds? Many years
ago when I was chief factory inspector of the State
of Illinois, I found, in a tin can factory, a shelf
filled with young boys whose duty was to watch
unceasingly a never-ending procession of lids of
tomato cans, milk cans, soup cans, cans for all sorts
of goods, as these lids came down a slit in an in-
cline from the upper to the lower floor. When a
can lid was defective, a boy picked it out. Small
fingers were cut and tied up in rags. Young legs
and backs were made crooked, young eyes were
strained by continuous watching. The work was
legal, once the boys were 14 years old and had
filed employment certificates at the factory office ;
but young minds and bodies were cramped, stupe-
fied and deadened in that work. I asked Mr.
Henry Demarest Lloyd to go with me to see those
boys, hoping that he might make them the text of
some noble chapter, perhaps in his volume on the
Lords of Industry.

On the way to them he saw a man, white-haired
like himself, watching an endless procession of
cans to which the lids would later be attached.
This work called for no quality of mind, but sus-
tained attention to a horrible monotony. The
man watched perpetually for dents in tin cans,
and when a can was dented, he removed it, using

Modern Industry and Education 103

one hand at long intervals. He needed good sight
in order never to miss a dent. Thirteen years he
had sat there, day after day, looking at cans. Mil-
lions of them had passed before his eyes and gone
their ways to the dump after their brief service
was rendered. His industrial usefulness was re-
duced to the use of his eyes exclusively. If they
should lose their keenness, he would be a pauper.
For discovering dents in cans is not work that so-
ciety recompenses with a margin for savings.

To Mr. Lloyd, then at the height of his powers,
those lost thirteen years were a tragedy. He was
fascinated, horrified at the sight of the slave of the
machine. The man was a native American, edu-
cated to read and write, but at the end of ten
hours' work his eyes were too weary for reading.
All his powers were absorbed by seeking dents in
cans; whatever intelligence he exercised, he had
to summon after exhausting the day's normal sup-
ply of power of attention.

That can-watcher is a type of millions of men
who, in an infinite variety of ways, are reduced to
some one form of attention. Often that is the
sole demand upon one, his other powers atrophy
by disuse. But the permanent tendency of indus-
try is to install more automatic machines, to re-
quire more tenders, perhaps one for one machine,
perhaps one for six, or eight, or twenty. And

104 Modern Industry and Education

their inevitable tendency is to make the machine
tender automatic like themselves. All intelligence
for the performance of a voter's duty the machine
tender must get and keep in spite of his work.

For this more, perhaps, than for any other rea-
son, the working day in industry must be short-
ened for men as well as for women and youth, to
save human faculties from being utterly dead-
ened in the modern process of production, and to
afford leisure for the valuable active uses of the
mind. The unskilled laborer's working day must
be shortened, his wage assured, the tasks of self-
government laid upon him, not only as a citizen,
but in his industry. This the trade unions have
insisted upon for two generations. But the courts
have not yet sustained on these grounds any
statute limiting the hours of labor of men or
women.

The courts hold that, where obvious physical in-
jury results from excessive hours of work, the
freedom of contract may be abridged. But courts
and legislators do not see that an industry which
by long daily hours of monotonous work dulls the
mind of the voters, attacks the life of the Repub-
lic. It has, so far as I know, never been held that
working hours can be shortened by statute in the
interest of the public intelligence.

Had the educated men of my generation been

Modern Industry and Education 105

trained in youth to insight and vision, to discern
the industrial process of stupefying and, on the
other hand, the demand of expanding democracy
for intelligence in all the citizens, how different
must have been their recent attitude toward the
movement for a shorter working day, for one
day's rest in seven, for the abolition of night work
in every possible case!

Democracy makes ever-widening demands upon
the time and intelligence of the citizens. The in-
itiative and referendum, the recall, proportional
voting, direct primaries — the new processes of
democracy — call into action growing bodies of
public-spirited citizens, and demand of the rank
and file a continuing series of decisions on matters
of importance. Workmen's compensation, mini-
mum wage boards, mothers' pensions, the short
working day, child labor, compulsory education,
equal suffrage, are all being legislated upon. Sev-
eral of these measures call for popular votes, and
all of them concern wage-earning people. There
is incessant call for more intelligence in the voting
constituency. But what intelligence can a man
or woman exercise whose mind is dimmed by
spending ten hours or more every day watching
for dents in cans? How can weary eyes and a
jaded mind be used for thoughtful reading on po-
litical subjects? What is left wherewith to make

106 Modern Industry and Education

decisions? It is an irreconcilable conflict of ex-
perience.

The Wage Earners Educating Themselves

Men and women employed in monotonous in-
dustries in this country have missed the stimulus
and education derived by cooperators from their
personal interest in their cooperative business,
because they have shirked the task of cooperative
production and distribution carried forward on a
vast scale during the past half century in Eng-
land and on the Continent. In England one in
six of the adult population is a cooperator, and
wage-earning consumers sharing in the control of
production and distribution acquire admirable so-
cial education in the process. All this has been
lost out of the experience of American wage earn-
ers. Cooperative industry calls for sustained in-
telligent effort by all the cooperators. Public
ownership calls for an intelligently critical voting
constituency forever alert to public affairs. But
how can these qualities be demanded of common
laborers, of machine tenders, of men and women
speeded as American industry drives them to-
day?

Chief among the agencies of education, for good
or evil, is work. The twin sources of human char-
acter which have fitted the race for civilization

Modern Industry and Education 107

are the daily work done since the race began, and
the discipline derived from family life since the
first human mother cradled her first child. The
schools awaken intelligence in multitudes of chil-
dren during the few years of childhood, but the
character and the intellectual development of the
nations are determined by the long, unending dis-
cipline of work.

Our gravest mistake is habitually considering
education as an experience of youth; worse still,
as a process of preparing children for industry.
While consciousness remains, life itself is educat-
ing us.

An illuminating little book, a creative study of
one of our lost opportunities for making industry
the handmaiden of education is unhappily con-
cealed and disguised by its author, Gerald Stan-
ley Lee, under the silly title, "Inspired Million-
aires." It has substantial merit; it presents
vividly the stimulating effect upon mill hands
which would follow if they moved step by step,
in regular promotion, from one part of the work
of the mill to another so that in an industrial life-
time all the employes might come into contact
with every process for which they are not physi-
cally or mentally incapacitated.

Whenever the workers with hand and brain
grasp the possibilities that lurk in this idea, they

108 Modern Industry and Education

will undoubtedly make it the complement to the
present sordid "efficiency" movement. Their goal
will be the efficiency of the manual worker as a
human being, not merely his efficiency in pro-
ducing goods as means to profits. Then no man
will be reduced, like the slave of tin cans, to the
use of his eyes alone. In that man's work there
was never the waste of a motion : there was only
the waste of a human life.

In a near-by university city, which is also a
manufacturing centre, I. spoke recently to an audi-
ence of about four hundred wage-earning men
and women. We were in a loathsome little hall,
used during the week for moving picture shows,
for the cruel waste of the school buildings, unused
at night, entails the cost of rent upon wage earn-
ers who would gladly use schools as they now use
the ugly, ill-ventilated premises which alone their
wages can command. The air was poisonously
bad, but the audience remained from eight to
eleven on Sunday evening, discussing the prosaic
subject of minimum wages boards. Their eager,
sustained attention was wonderful and, at the end
of my hour-long monologue, they asked questions.
I know much more about minimum wages boards
from defending them under that hail of penetrat-
ing questions. They had looked eagerly forward
through the week to Sunday, preparing those

Modern Industry and Education 109

questions. Despite the bad air, they had suc-
ceeded in listening critically. For them any possi-
ble change in industrial conditions, however minor
they may think that change likely to prove under
the test of experience, kindles the mind. They
are people under stress.

This is one of the most vital processes of edu-
cation going forward to-day — this deliberate, con-
tinuing effort of men and women, many of them
already disciplined by experience in labor unions,
to brace themselves against the destructive pres-
sure of industry; to regain for themselves and
their fellow wage earners some share of possession <
and control of industry, through cooperation,
through public ownership, through every possible
extension of democracy.

Thousands of such groups of working men and
women are, throughout their long hours of
monotony in the week, saving their minds from
utter ruin by pondering the themes which they
discuss in their meetings on Sunday. Scattered
everywhere throughout the nation, they are safe-
guarding their health and intelligence, and devel-
oping their morals and citizenship. In spite of
their stupefying work, and with cruelly little help
from the constituted educational authorities, the
wage earners are educating themselves.

IV

MODERN INDUSTRY IN RELATION TO
MORALITY

MODERN INDUSTRY AND MORALITY

We are undergoing a transition in the life of the
nation greater than any hitherto experienced, a
change immeasurably greater than the freeing of
four million slaves, a half century ago, as an inci-
dent of a long and terrible war. This transition
is of such import that it is quite impossible for us
in the midst of it to measure its scope. Whether
or not we are aware of it, whether we like it or not,
we are living in the initial stages of the change
from work done almost universally for private
gain to work in the service of all.

The vast multitude of federal employes who
conduct the postal service, the health service, the
forestry service, are soon to be augmented by rail-
way and telegraph workers administering public
transportation and communication. Postmaster-
General Hitchcock, after introducing parcels posts
and postal banks, left, as his parting message to
the American people, advice that the public should
own the telegraphs and telephones, and several
cities in North Dakota are already taking his ad-

113

114 Modern Industry and Morality

vice.* Postal savings banks and the parcels post
came to us long after Europe had tested them,
and only when our need was so urgent that they
could not longer be deferred, and then only when
the national banks were assured the privilege of
receiving the postal bank deposits at two per cent.
They are now a matter of course.

Vast reclamation schemes applying to swamp
and desert lands, and river regulation on a scale
previously undreamed of, are already carried out,
or are now in process, or are definitely planned by
the federal authorities; and Congress is never
without measures under consideration looking in
these directions.

Mr. Stimson, Secretary of War under Mr. Taft,
made vigorous recommendations for federal activi-
ties in relation to water storage and the use of
power generated from navigable rivers, and the
floods have given new weight to his words. The
Secretary of the Navy has made public facts
which strongly support the bill pending in Con-
gress for establishing public armor plate works for
the use of the Navy.

The physical valuation of the railways by the
Interstate Commerce Commission, a long and ex-
ceedingly difficult step toward public ownership,

* Postmaster-General Burleson is bringing the proposal ac-
tively forward in the Wilson administration.

Modern Industry and Morality 115

is already under way. And an appropriation for
building a federal railroad in Alaska is in force.
Ever- widening areas of industry are coming into
public possession, to be administered by cities,
states and by the federal government: education,
elementary and advanced, the public library busi-
ness, lighting, the provision of milk, water, ice and
coal, the use of water power for generating elec-
tricity, as in the great hydro-electric works at
Lewiston, Maine, and Houston, Texas.*

* Among items too numerous to catalogue the following are
current: —

Seattle owns a street car line, and San Francisco both owns
and operates one; Detroit and Cleveland have voted to
acquire car lines. Boston and New York City own sub-
ways, though the citizens of New York have cause for bitter
regret that theirs is leased to private corporations.

Three Southern cities — two in Texas and one in Tennessee
— own municipal abattoirs, and the federal Department of
Agriculture vigorously recommends that all cities establish
them. City health inspectors are as much a matter of
course as the police, and are now reinforced by school nurses
and doctors, while municipal physicians and nurses in the
tuberculosis service, the maternity service, and the hospital
follow-up work are increasing even more rapidly than are
city milk stations. Serums and vaccines are commonly fur-
nished by public health authorities.

It has recently been held by the Supreme Court of Georgia
that the city of Camilla may make and sell ice, and New
York City is now establishing a municipal ice plant. Schenec-
tady buys and sells ice and coal in the service of its citizens.
Philadelphia has been sustained by the Pennsylvania courts

116 Modern Industry and Morality

The transition from competition to public serv-
ice is far advanced. The very recent change in
attitude of legislatures and courts is more signifi-
cant than the actual tasks already undertaken.

The material conditions for the vast change are
at hand, and many phases of the transition have
already been successfully achieved in other coun-
tries whose experience awaits our study.

The coming public service will test our morality
on the largest scale yet applied to it. Can our
democracy administer industry? Have we, as a
nation, the moral qualities requisite for enduring
that moral strain?

We who are here, living in the midst of the
transition, make our contribution to it consciously
or unconsciously. We shape it, determine its
character, and we are ill-fitted for the task. We
suffer the disadvantage of living in a period when
the morality of our great-grandparents is out-
grown, and that of our grandchildren is not yet
established. We live in a period of disintegration,
of unparallelled moral pressure, and inadequate
moral guidance, with the duty resting upon us of

in its policy of buying land in excess of its immediate needs
in connection with a boulevard.

The state of Wisconsin leases land in its lake region to
summer tenants. It also sells insurance; and savings bank
insurance in Massachusetts is increasingly a state affair.

Modern Industry and Morality 117

scanning the horizon for every ray which may
serve to illumine and guide us.

The fundamental moral teaching that prevailed
on this continent when the Republic was founded
had its roots in the experience of an agricultural
people — its precepts and maxims were in harmony
with and adequate to the clear demands of re-
sponsibility and decency within the rural family.
Those precepts defined the duties of father,
mother and children living upon the farm which
they owned and controlled, from which they de-
rived their subsistence — a self-sustaining group —
and the simple relations of such a family group
with other similar family groups. Complex mod-
ern industrial relations did not develop until the
middle of the Nineteenth Century. Then came,
after the Civil War, the change crescendo to the
full complexity in which we live.

To-day agriculture is still our chief industry,
despite the modern development which has made
us the most industrially productive of all nations;
and the morality of agricultural individualism is
our accepted morality. This affords no adequate
guidance in the intricate relations of our rapidly
changing life; and its insufficiency becomes from
year to year more obvious with the evolution of
industry. Between that obsolete morality which
remains embodied in our laws, and our human

118 Modern Industry and Morality

needs in modern daily life, the contradiction has
become intolerable.

It is ominous that the industrial change comes
not because the American people are intellectually
convinced that it is desirable, but because past
conditions can no longer be endured. It is, for
instance, not reassuring that we are being driven
toward public ownership of railroads by the in-
competence and dishonesty of private manage-
ment, and the consequent sacrifice of life, limb,
health and welfare of employes and of travellers.

This is, however, the case at the present mo-
ment. Over-capitalization, insufficient equip-
ment, overworked employes, appalling railway
accidents, belated travel, delayed freight — these
accompaniments of irresponsible anonymous
ownership are driving conservative New England
toward responsible public ownership of her rail-
roads. Meanwhile the Panama railroad offers an
enticing sample on a small scale of the ability of
the federal government to administer transporta-
tion, even under present difficulties.

Irresponsible Anonymous Ownership

The old theory was that enlightened self-in-
terest could be trusted to conduct industry, that
the sum of all selfish interests would coincide with
public interest. Tested in practice, however, this

Modern Industry and Morality 119

theory has not sustained modern life. Industry
conducted for profit and regulated only by the
pressure of competition (the labor being per-
formed by men, women and children who are
merely "hands") has produced, among its fruits,
the maximum cynical disregard of the manhood,
womanhood and childhood of the workers, and a
loss of moral responsibility in the relation of the
owners of industry to the consuming public.

The fundamental immorality of our era from
which innumerable smaller ills arise is that the
worker has lost the ownership and control of his
tools, his means of production. In the evolution
from the distaff and spinning wheel to the cotton
mill village owned anonymously by bond and
stockholders who may live in Europe, or in South
America, or Japan, the old foundation of indus-
trial morality, honesty between two individual
persons, is no longer adequate.

The modern wage worker deprived of owner-
ship and control of his tools is not obviously de-
pendent like the chattel slave before the emanci-
pation, or the coolie before the exclusion laws, or
the peon, whom the federal government still occa-
sionally discovers in the South, where at this mo-
ment peonage exists, in horrifying forms, in the
mining regions in West Virginia. The great mass
of wage-earning people are not now consciously

120 Modern Industry and Morality

dependent as the Negroes and Chinese were. They
are not like them conspicuously in need of being
freed by the federal authorities.

The fundamental immorality to-day is far more
subtle. Instead of the wage earners owning and
thereby controlling things, as the farmers did in
the agricultural period, they are now under the
control of things (products and means of produc-
tion). Through those things they are controlled
by other human beings who, as stockholders and
bond owners, possess perhaps a great factory town
like Gary, Indiana, or a cotton mill village in
Rhode Island or Georgia — a modern Franken-
stein into which the ancient tools of the workers
have now developed.

As an example of such anonymous, impersonal
ownership, I venture once more to refer to the
former conditions in the steel industry, to the
cruelty, among others, of excessive working hours
in intolerable heat. When in the Pittsburgh Sur-
vey the exact facts were made public, Mr. Charles
Cabot, a stockholder in the steel industry, pro-
tested that these things were not and, in the na-
ture of things, could not be true. When, however,
the statements had all been substantiated, Mr.
Cabot declared that every shareholder in that in-
dustry ought to know these conditions. He,
therefore, asked the corporation for a list of stock-

Modern Industry and Morality 121

holders in order that he might bring the facts to
the knowledge of the owners, his fellow bond and
stockholders in the industry. Three years passed
before he succeeded in getting the list.

In a great corporation owned by bond and
stockholders nobody knows who is the employer.
The employer is a vast composite changing from
day to day with every transfer of stocks and
bonds. Nor are the employes known. Even the
manager or foreman often knows a given employe
only as a number on the pay roll. If the "hand"
is killed, buried, perhaps, in molten metal, no-
body knows who has perished except from the
number on his locker. So entirely anonymous is
the relation between stockholder and employe,
and among fellow owners in the most highly de-
veloped of our industries. This form, this organi-
zation of industry, and this anonymous relation
within it, have grown up since the Civil War.
The steel industry is, perhaps, the perfect example
of the alienation of the anonymous worker and
anonymous employer. It is the current industrial
ideal of organization toward which the great in-
dustries tend — the uttermost detachment of the
worker from ownership of the tools, and utter
freedom on the part of the owners from personal
responsibility alike toward the workers and the
community.

122 Modern Industry and Morality

One incidental result of this detachment is a
lack of scruple on the part of the anonymous
owners of a given industry, the employers of the
labor engaged in it, toward the consuming pub-
lic. One of the earliest maxims laid down for
the guidance of people entering trade is the old
Roman saying: Caveat emptor — Let the pur-
chaser beware! Never was it more applicable
than to-day. The anonymous relation of the per-
son offering goods for sale is fundamentally im-
moral primarily because it is devoid of responsi-
bility.

The federal pure food act proclaims to the world
that our food-producing industries, although they
are organized with greater ability than has ever
before been devoted to the task, cannot be trusted
to feed America. The meat inspection law pub-
lishes similar tidings of the meat industry to the
people who consume its product.

When federal inspection of the stock yards was
forced upon us by the German government, which
excluded from German territory our meat prod-
ucts unless the commercial integrity of the pack-
ers and the purity of their goods were guaranteed
by the federal government, the brand upon the
meat incidentally branded the packers. The
morality of the men in charge of this great staple
American industry has never borne any proportion

Modern Industry and Morality 123

to their ability. Yet the federal Department of
Agriculture for years permitted the sale to us of
meat which could not be guaranteed by it and,
therefore, could not be sent abroad. These things
have been possible because the ownership of the
vast and complicated meat industry had been ir-
responsible. There is no moral restraint on the
part of managers of stock yards. Theirs is a
property, an investment, not a service.

A similar thing was true long ago of the Scotch
fisheries. The contents of the kegs of herring
were notoriously different from their labels, so
that foreign consumers demanded as a guarantee
of honest contents the brand of the English gov-
ernment. Most products are, however, not sold
to foreign nations able to establish and to enforce
upon us an international standard of integrity.
The slow passage of the pure-food law by Con-
gress (requiring eighteen years of continuous ef-
fort) and the painful, largely unsuccessful strug-
gle to get the law enforced against powerful food-
producing companies and their agents in the press,
indicate the patience of the American people in
the presence of commercial dishonesty and lack of
standards.

The public accepts with heartfelt admiration
gifts to charity and to the higher education from
known adulterators of food, so confused are our

124 Modern Industry and Morality

moral standards in relation to industry. And this
confusion is a normal product of modern indus-
try.

One sinister consequence of the anonymous, im-
personal ownership of business, and the accom-
panying degradation of the workers to the posi-
tion of "hands," is their own acceptance of this
position. Filthy or diseased meat, adulterated
eatables, short-weight packages, though the prod-
uct of their labor appear to them to be no con-
cern of theirs. They feel no share in the guilt of
the employing concern under whose orders, and in
whose pay, they put alum in bread, formaldehyde
in milk, tin, lead or iron in silk (in the process of
dyeing), or shoddy in place of wool in garments
to be worn by other working people. Steel work-
ers know when there are blow holes in armor
plates, but they regard it as no affair of theirs.
The negotiation is between the steel manufacturer
and the Navy Department, and the wage earner's
experience has awakened in him no patriot's rage
against such treason. If he thinks at all of the
matter, it is perhaps to reflect that wars are fought
to the profit of financiers, and at cost of working
people, whichever side wins. Or the steel worker
may sullenly remember that he has long been
begging the Government to abolish contract work
and make its own steel plate.

Modern Industry and Morality 125

In any case, the irresponsible state of mind of
employing corporations and indifferent "hands"
is more threatening to civilization than the actual
harm inflicted by alum, formaldehyde, shoddy,
blow holes and all the other poisons and dishonest
products. And this indifference, like the moral
confusion of the general public concerning gifts
derived from these and similar sinister sources for
the higher education, philanthropy and religion,
is a normal product of modern industry.

Our confusion is well illustrated in relation to
our concept of murder.

The Old Commandment in the New Order

The Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, is
still valid in our laws to the extent that the indi-
vidual murderer of an individual person pays with
his life for his crime, the hangman or electrocu-
tioner being held — somewhat whimsically — ex-
empt from the effect of the Commandment. But
wholesale killing in industry as in war remains un-
punished.

Our morality has been sapped by precept and
practice, by living in a society in which the moral
foundations of industry are false and corrupting.
The human mind accepts without revolt that to
which it is accustomed from childhood. Canni-
bals were not horrified at eating their grand-

126 Modern Industry and Morality

parents. Soldiers do not recoil from murder, they
plan it systematically years in advance; and on
the field of battle they bayonet men as butchers
stick pigs. And gentle grandmothers give little
children paper or tin soldiers as playthings, and
read of bayonet charges with enthusiasm.

Owners of tenement houses do not count them-
selves infanticides, though the death rate of babies
in tenements is twice as large as elsewhere. On
the contrary, the real estate interests fight as one
man every requirement of tenement house sanita-
tion which seems to threaten to cut into their
incomes. The landlords' resistance to improved
housing is uninterrupted and nation wide.

Although dirty milk is a permanently active
cause of disease and death, the milk producers and
dealers succeeded in 1913 in defeating legislation
calculated to assure greater cleanliness in the rural
treatment of the milk supply of New York City.

Builders, managers, stock and bond holders of
factories are not punished as murderers, though a
hundred and more men and women perish by fire
and smoke in a single work room. In connection
with the most terrible of factory fires, the owners
of the building have been absolved by the courts
of New York State from all criminal responsibil-
ity for the monstrous slaughter, and the firm is
still doing business.

Modern Industry and Morality 127

When hundreds of women and children on a
Sunday School outing in the East River perished
by drowning, many of the 'victims were lost be-
cause the cork safety belts carried on the boat were
weighted with lead or iron, substances cheaper
than cork in belts bought and sold by weight.
Only the captain of the Slocum was punished.
Manufacturers and dealers in cork safety belts ap-
pear to be free to continue to furnish their death-
dealing wares.

We are by way of forgetting the Iroquois Thea-
tre in Chicago in which children were suffocated
at a matinee. The manager — far from having
been punished for failing to supply the needed
precautions for safety — appeared before a legis-
lative committee at Springfield, in 1911, insolently
to oppose, and demand the repeal of, the benefi-
cent Illinois statute which keeps young children
off the stage.

Some years ago a speculator cornered the ice
supply in summer in New York City. The price
rose, poor mothers could not buy ice, and the list
of deaths of babies lengthened, for milk without
ice is poison in the tenements in summer. Later
for an offence unrelated to this, the speculator was
sent to a federal penitentiary for a long term.
Upon the representations of reputable physicians
that the convict was about to die, the President

128 Modern Industry and Morality

pardoned him. Our moral sense is dulled by
modern industry, and the President in pardon-
ing a single influential one among hundreds
of sick convicts, and one whose record was,
perhaps, the most anti-social of all, did but act in
accordance with prevailing standards.

It is silly and confusing to tilt at Big Business,
as though bigness in itself were the sole or the
chief active element in our political and industrial
immorality. The pushcart peddlers and news ven-
dors who have stands on city street corners are
animated by precisely the same business motives
as the gas trust, the surface car companies and all
the other large exploiters of the cities. And their
very numbers make the little offenders perhaps
the more insidiously poisonous to the community,
in these days of transition to new forms of indus-
try calling for new and loftier morality. The
source of corruption in large and small alike is ir-
responsibility, the relation to the community of
freebooting exploiters in a society which sends
those who fail to the almshouse and the potter's
field.

Morally Extra Hazardous Employments

In any review of the moral aspects of our pres-
ent transition, our failure to develop voluntary
cooperation in distribution looms large. We are

Modern Industry and Morality 129

punished for our sins of omission by having the
vastest department store industry in the world
with its morally extra hazardous employment of
thousands of underpaid, inexperienced young
women and girls, transferred from the meagre life
of the tenement and the narrow, rigid routine of
the elementary school to the midst of luxury such
as had not been invented in the days of Louis
XVI. In the midst of this poisonous luxury they
are paid from three dollars a week upward.

In the interest of the public morals — because of
the nature of the surroundings and the unlimited
access of the public — the demand would be a le-
gitimate one that girls should not be employed
in department stores before the 21st birthday, un-
til their youthful character had time to solidify.

The investment in department stores is stu-
pendous. In the whole country it runs into hun-
dreds of millions, upon which dividends must be
earned. Window dressing, counter dressing, and
newspaper advertising are obviously directed to
the single purpose of enticing consumers, chiefly
women, to buy, in addition to the necessary
staples, articles of which they would otherwise
not think. Its aim is the enticement of consum-
ers, as adulterating goods in manufacture is in-
tended to exploit them.

This particular form of moral strain was un-

130 Modern Industry and Morality

known before the present half century. The dis-
proportion between what the employes get and
what surrounds them, indicates the cynicism, the
blunted sympathy of the consuming public. Were
women richer in discernment, in sympathetic im-
agination, we must have registered long since our
veto upon this /mseducation of ourselves and of
those who serve us in the stores. As an index both
of our undeveloped sympathy and of our potential
power as consumers, these stores are monumental.
We have never even discerned how pernicious is
their influence in the great cities.

Had we developed a cooperative movement in
proportion to our retail distribution, comparable
to the similar movements in England, Germany
and Belgium, our exploitation of young workers
in retail trade could never have reached its pres-
ent extent. In cooperative commerce there is vir-
tually no advertising. Goods are made, trans-
ported and sold to meet human needs which re-
quire no stimulation. The consequent saving to
the public is not confined to dollars and cents. For
both employes and purchasers the saving of
moral strain is incalculable.

How alien to our whole habit of mind is the de-
mand for an administration of industry giving to
the workers active benefit throughout the process
of work itself! We may, indeed, be justly charged

Modern Industry and Morality 131

with having maintained a national policy of pres-
sure upon the wage earners. For generations we
imported slaves. When that form of competition
was abolished, there came the coolies. After their
Irish competitors succeeded in getting them ex-
cluded, peonage and child labor loomed up, and
still exist. Now the steerage brings detached
young girls by tens of thousands from Europe.

Every immigrant girl who enters upon manu-
facture or commerce is a living threat to the
standard of life of men and women already here.
Witness Lawrence, Little Falls, the stockyards,
the underpaid needle trades, the department
stores.

Since the Children's Crusade, dark episode of
the Dark Ages, there has been no international
spectacle at once so pathetic, so cruel, so shameful
to the nations which permit it, as this migration
of young girls lured by American industry.

Moral Self-education by Consumers

For nearly a quarter century the Consumers'
League has been bringing to bear upon industry
the intelligence of consumers in the interests of
their own consciences and of the life, health, in-
telligence and well-being of wage workers. It has
promoted short working hours for women and
children, wage boards, and healthful conditions of

132 Modern Industry and Morality

work, and the abolition of child labor and of the
sweating system. The League holds that con-
sumers are entitled to a clean conscience if they
act as conscientious people; that they can, if they
will, enforce a claim to have all that they buy free
from the taint of cruelty. By faithful organized
inquiry they can ascertain the facts of industry,
and when in the light of the facts standards are
set up, consumers have power to enforce them.
After this quarter century of modest experimental
effort, it is clear that the enlightened consuming
public is destined to play an increasing part in
determining industrial morality.

Nothing could, however, be clearer than the
teaching of this same quarter century's experi-
ence : that no one can, by individual effort alone,
however patient and enlightened that effort may
be, achieve any satisfying personal relation to in-
dustry. The larger the range and scope of the
associated effort, the greater its value, particularly
its educational value, for the participants. Think-
ing people are challenged to ceaseless effort to in-
crease the enlightened power of consumers over
production and distribution, by law, by publicity,
by cooperation.

Modern Industry and Morality 133

Our Preparation for the Change

Our lack is intellectual and spiritual. We dis-
trust ourselves and each other. The mental en-
ergy of our ablest men has been too largely ex-
pended in industrial organization in the service of
greed for dividends. We have been taught too
long, and we have believed too credulously, that
the profit motive is the best of which we are ca-
pable. The failure and crime that we see we at-
tribute to the frailty of human nature, not, as the
facts demand, to the corroding power of industry
on a basis fundamentally immoral.

We all suffer a lack of moral sensitiveness be-
cause we are, throughout our lives, members of a
society in which the average length of life of wage
earners is conspicuously less than the life of pros-
perous people. We accept this with equanimity
as we accept child labor, and avoidable night work
even when performed by young girls, and the
monstrous spectacle of wholesale poverty in the
midst of riches beyond the power of the mind to
compute or to conceive. Our industrial epoch has
corroded our morals and hardened our hearts as
surely as slavery injured its contemporaries, and
far more subtly. There is grave reason to fear
that it may have unfitted us for the oncoming
stage of civilization, as slave owning unfitted the

134 Modern Industry and Morality

white race for freedom and democracy, and left its
blight of race hatred from which the Republic still
suffers.

Acid tests of the industrial morality of every
public movement are the questions : "Does it tend
to restore to the people who work a share in the
ownership and control of the tools of industry?
Does it contribute to the ability of any group of
wage earners to fit themselves in mind, character
and economic position to participate helpfully in
the transition? Does it promote the enactment of
the industrial code?". Whatever is calculated to
enable us as a people, or any group among us, to
make a step forward on the road to peaceful serv-
ice away from the battlefield of greed, is a contri-
bution to the sum total of industrial morality.
And whatsoever hinders a forward step is in itself
actively evil, because it prolongs the existing evil.

We can retrieve our integrity only as we come
to accept as our ideal service instead of profit.
And this can be achieved only as industry becomes
a city, state, and national service. We are, in-
deed, confronted by the task of extending public
ownership of industry, and cooperative distribu-
tion of products, in the interest of the moral life
of the American people.

No one can predict how we, as a nation, shall
bear the strain of industry made collective, and

Modern Industry and Morality 135

permanently a cooperative undertaking of citi-
zens, without the relation of master and men. No
prophet can foretell with certainty whether we
can make that change peacefully, without a great
revulsion and reaction, by reason of the unco-
operative spirit in which we have all been bred.
In the transition from the old industrial society
we need to bring to bear all the wisdom, all the
varied experience and discipline, that life has be-
stowed upon us all. We cannot safely omit from
the common task any human soul however hum-
ble.

In each generation some cause arises which
serves as a touchstone for the genuine democracy
of mankind. Such to-day is the industrial transi-
tion. On the Pacific Coast and in the Northwest
where the citizens have developed democratic in-
stitutions— the initiative, the referendum, the re-
call (including judges), equal suffrage, minimum
wage boards, and the short working day — they go
forward confidently with transition measures.
There the conservation battle rages.

Indeed, the most hopeful feature of our outlook
is our democracy, the fact that manhood suffrage
has long been a matter of course in most of the
states, the rapidly developing movement for giv-
ing votes to women, and the spread of the new de-

136 Modern Industry and Morality

vices of democracy eastward from the Pacific
Coast.

It is the teachers' duty to prepare the minds of
the next generation for carrying on the further
stages of this industrial and political change. But
how can the teachers themselves be fitted for their
task?

The time of transition needs more than all
things else socially minded people, multitudes of
average men and women trained to habits of in-
tegrity and cooperation. But what preparation
has been made for this?

Aside from building and loan associations, and
farmers' clubs and other agricultural organiza-
tions, including the shippers' associations, we are
almost without the experience of industrial co-
operation.

Among industrial wage-earning people — outside
the railway Brotherhoods — organization, asso-
ciated action, has had to fight a losing battle for
its life. In the steel industry, in the stock yards
and packing houses, and in numerous other occu-
pations there has been a systematic and largely
successful movement to extinguish the unions,
some of the most important of which have
perished outright, while others have been per-
manently crippled.

The treasurer of a great manufacturing cor-

Modern Industry and Morality 137

poration explained to me with pride and pleasure
some years ago, on the occasion of his leaving his
office, that, in his opinion, his greatest service had
consisted in the device which he had invented for
making organization impossible among the em-
ployes. This device consisted in a rigid rule that,
whenever the unskilled men in any department
who spoke the same language reached the propor-
tion of fifteen per cent, of all the men in that de-
partment, men speaking other languages must be
engaged. This was avowedly for the purpose of
making it difficult for the men to know each other.
This method has since been widely adopted by
large employers.

For five and twenty years the unions have been
increasingly compelled to place themselves on a
war footing, if they were to exist at all, and the
enormous majority of wage earners are wholly
unorganized. No preparation could be less
adapted than this to a peaceful change to indus-
try organized as a public service. Grave, indeed,
is the responsibility of the men who have done
this, gravest of all when, in the process, they have
deprived working men and women of the consti-
tutional rights of organization and assemblage, of
freedom of speech and of the press!

The causal relation of industry to the present
evils in social life and personal character has been

138 Modern Industry and Morality

slow to compel recognition, slower in this country
than in Europe. With growing insight comes a
challenge to our integrity of intellect and charac-
ter. To see injustice without protesting is to share
in it. To profit by recognized injustice is cynical.

This causal relation reveals itself naturally first
to those who suffer acutely, to men and women
who, working long and hard, get little pay, are in-
jured in health, and die young. Their work brings
them together in mines and mills, in industrial
cities such as the world never before beheld, their
daily experience is in common, they compare
grievances, and are stimulated to common effort
for the common good. Because they can achieve
nothing alone, they are disciplined perforce to
work together, to acquire whatever virtues come
of voluntary association.

Just in proportion as they resist the inherent
tendency of industry and participate in hasten-
ing the change they are agents of regeneration.
Unlike the slaves who were set free without their
own participation, unlike the coolies who were
excluded without protest, the wage earners
through their solidarity, their organizations, their
political party, test the democracy of our time
and are preparing, however haltingly, the condi-
tions necessary to a higher and finer civilization.

The changed morality that is needed to make

Modern Industry and Morality 139

the present transformation in our national life a
beneficent one is yet to be inculcated in the
schools, the colleges and universities. The teach-
ing profession confronts to-day the noble task of
preparing the mind and spirit- of the oncoming
generation for this change. Theirs is the new duty
of inculcating the new ideal of the democracy of
the future: the ideal of service performed not as
philanthropy, not as charity, not alone in the care
of childhood and old age, but in a transformed
industry, a universal service of men and women of
to-morrow — the direct, inevitable consequence of
the industrial development of to-day.

INDEX

Alabama-
child labor in, 52, 92
Alaska —

federal railroad in, 115

women vote in, 36
American —

colleges and universities,
83

Conference on Social In-
surance, 47

industry, 100, 122

monographs on industrial
disease, 56

Social Science Association,

81
Andrews, John B. —

investigation of white sul-
phur in industry, 56
Arbitration —

compulsory — of labor dis-
putes, 4
Arizona —

eight-hour law in, 36, 74

women vote in, 36
Arkansas —

birth registration in, 45

harvesting in, 10
Auburn, 9, 28
Australia, 25, 32, 33
Berlin, University of, 82

Berne-
International Conference
for Labor Legislation
in, 73

Births, registration of, 45, 46

Bismarck, Prince, 83

Boston owns subways, 115

Bournemouth, 26

Burleson, Postmaster - Gen-
eral, 114

Butler, Elizabeth, 24

Cabot, Charles, 120

California —
eight-hour law for women

in, 36, 74

minimum wage law in, 36
women vote in, 36

Camilla, Georgia, city of, 115

Canada, untaxing buildings

in, 25
harvesting in Western, 10

Carolinas, the —
child labor in, 52, 92
housing in, 22

Census, the, 16, 44, 64, 74, 98

Chicago —

congested districts in, 47
new voters in, 53
—Stockyards, 31, 46, 57
—University Settlement, 31

141

142

Index

Child labor, 5, 6, 17, 27, 28,

52, 57, 91, 93, 105, 133
Federal bill, 93, 94, 102
National Committee, 91, 98
Children's Bureau, 45
Cincinnati, Haeberle monu-
ment in, 6

free school books in, 6
Clark, S. A., 55
Code, the industrial, 5, 37,

134

Colorado —
eight-hour day for women

in, 36, 74

Minimum Wage Board, 36
women vote in, 36
Commons, Professor, 62
Compulsory arbitration, 4
Compulsory education 5, 6,

18, 100, 105

Congested districts, 23, 24
Congestion of population in
Borough of Manhattan,
24
Connecticut, closing hour for

women's work, 74
farm labor in, 10
Consumers, 55, 85, 89, 106,

123, 129, 131, 132
Consumers' League, 131, 132
Continuation schools, 52.

in Ohio and Wisconsin, 95
Cooperative Congress (In-
ternational), 34
— distribution, 134

Cooperation, development of,

37, 109
— in England and on the

Continent, 34, 106
Cornell, 81, 83
Cost of living, 53
Court of Appeals of New

York, 13, 28

Dangerous industries, 64, 70
Death rate, 16, 17, 47
Detroit votes to acquire

street car line, 116
District of Columbia, eight-
hour day for women in,
36, 74

Ellis Island, 64
Ely, Professor Richard T., 81
England, 8, 16, 26, 130
Federated Cooperative So-
cieties in, 34
Garden Cities in, 25
Lloyd George land taxes

in, 25

minimum wage laws in, 32
Erdman Act, 31
Europe, 31, 63, 64, 81, 119,

138

night work treaty in, 73
Extra-hazardous industries,

65, 66

morally, 128

Factory inspection, 67, 68
Fall River, 16
Fatigue, 53, 71, 72, 75
— and Efficiency, 71

Index

143

Federal Cabinet, 47
— Census Bureau, 45
—child labor bill, 93, 94
—civil service, 31
— Commission on Homes,

26

— Department of Agricul-
ture, 115, 123
— Department of Health,

47

— Employes, 113
—Government, 63, 119,

122
— inspection of stockyards,

122

— penitentiary, 127
—Pure Food Act, 50, 122
— railroad in Alaska, 115
— Report on Conditions of
Labor of Woman and
Child Wage-earners, 16
Foreign colonies, 48
Frankfort, 26
Garden cities, 25
Gary, Indiana, 120
Georgia, 120
Camilla, 115

child labor in, 52, 92, 94
housing in, 21, 22
Supreme Court of, 115
Germany, 8, 16, 64, 82
cooperative movement in,

130

factory inspectors in, 67
social insurance in, 46, 65

Glasgow, International Co-
operative Congress in, 35
Goldmark, Josephine, 71
Haeberle, Joe, 6
Hamilton, Alice, studies of

lead poisoning by, 56
Health, Safety and Comfort

Act (Illinois), 56, 57
Hedger, Dr. Caroline, 30
Holden vs. Hardy, 70
Homework, 5, 28
Housing —
— codes, 5
—in Carolinas, Georgia,

Virginia, 22

—New York City, 23, 24
— problem hitherto insolu-
ble, 53

Hull House, 10
Hunter, Robert, 19
Illinois —
State Factory Inspector of,

57

women vote in, 36
Indiana, closing hour for

work of women in, 74
Gary, 120

Industrial code, 4, 28, 37, 134
Industrial disease, 14, 56, 63

tuberculosis an, 53
Industrial hygiene, 56, 85
Infant mortality, 16, 49

crusade against, 41
Initiative and referendum,
105, 135

144

Index

Institutions for children, 18
Insurance —
International Conference

on Social, 47
mutual, 65
— records, 45
savings bank, 116
social, 4, 46, 47
International Conference for

Labor Legislation, 73
International Cooperative

Alliance, 35

Interstate Commerce Com-
mission, 114
Ives case, 13, 67
Japan, 119

Kansas, women vote in, 36
Labor organizations, 12, 109,

136, 137
Land taxes, 25
Lee, General Stanley, 107
Lloyd George, 25
Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 102,

103

Lochner vs. New York, 70
Lords of Industry, 88, 102
Los Angeles —
enfranchised women in,

53
nursing the poor in their

homes in, 42
Massachusetts —
State Board of Health, 56
closing hour for women's
work in, 74

Massachusetts — Continued
compulsory education of il-
literate minors in, 95
eight-hour working day of

children in, 93
savings bank insurance in,

116

Metschnikoff, Professor, 43
Michigan —

alcohol industry in, 75

registration of births, 45

Milk stations, 48, 50, 51, 115

Minimum wage boards, 5,

31, 32, 105, 108, 135
— standards of home con-
struction, 21

— standards in education,
91

eight-hour day of working

children in, 93
Supreme Court of, 72
Mothers' pensions, 5, 14
National Consumers' League,

55, 57, 71, 74, 91
—Child Labor Committee,

91

— Education Association, 91
Nebraska, closing hour for

women's work in, 74
New England, 16, 45, 118
cotton mill regions of, 15
farm labor in, 10
working day of children in,
93

Index

145

New Jersey —
birth registration in, 46
silk mills in, 89
New York City, 19, 47, 50
birth registration in, 45
congested district in, 23
housing in, 21, 23, 24, 26
municipal milk stations in,

49, 126
nursing the poor in their

homes in, 42
Paulist Fathers in, 88
— owns subways, 115
working papers in, 98
New York State, 7, 8, 12
children's institutions in,

18
Civil Service Commission,

68
closing hour for women's

work in, 74
Constitution, 13, 28
Court of Appeals, 13, 28,

67
Factories Investigating

Commission, 56
Factory Inspectors, 68
registration of births in, 45
New Zealand, 25
Night work, 4, 5, 11, 12, 15,

17, 62, 73, 74, 89, 105, 133
North Carolina, birth regis-
tration in, 45
Ohio-
alcohol industry in, 75

Ohio— Continued

child labor in, 6

compulsory education in, 6

continuation schools in,
95

free schoolbooks in, 6
Oliver, Sir Thomas, 15, 56
Oregon-
minimum wage law in, 36

women vote in, 36

working day of women in,

71
Ownership, cooperative, 36

corporate, 25

home, 28

irresponsible anonymous,
114, 118

— of business, 124

—of tools, 119, 121

primitive, 35

public, 106, 109, 118, 133
Pasteur Institute, 44
Paulist Fathers, 88
Pennsylvania —

Closing hour for women's
work in, 74

Coal roads in, 29, 30

glass industry in, 92

legislature of, 63

registration of births in, 45

silk mills in, 89

Supreme Court of, 64, 65,
66, 115

Westmoreland, 29
Philadelphia, 69, 115

146

Index

Pittsburgh, 57, 58
City of, 63
Ellis Island to, 63
—Survey, 57, 62, 120

Port Sunlight, 26

Recall, 76, 135

Referendum, 36, 135

Registration —
area, 45, 47
— of births, 45
—of deaths, 46
— of tuberculosis, 46

Rhode Island, 120

Rochester, milk stations in,
49

Russell Sage Foundation,
71

Safety devices, 4

San Francisco —
new voters in, 53
owns street car line, 115
women voters recall Judge
Weller in, 76

Schenectady, 115

Scholarship committee, 20

Seattle owns street car line,
115

Shaftesbury, Lord, 86

Sherman, P. T., Commission-
er of Labor, 69

Slocum disaster, 127

Social insurance, 46

Standard of —
— education, 91
— housing, 21

Standard of —

—living, 53, 54

—wages, 54

Steel industry, 62, 64, 121, 136
Strikes for higher wages, 54

for shorter working hours,

69

Sumner, Professor, 81
Supreme Court of —

— Mississippi, 72

—Pennsylvania, 64, 66, 115

—United States, 65, 66, 70,
71, 74, 75

—Washington, 65
Sweating system, 5, 23
Switzerland, 82
Taxation, 25
Taxes, 14, 18

Tenement houses, 21, 24, 28,
126

certified milk in, 51

—breeding places of tuber-
culosis, 51

—reform, 23, 25
Tennessee, birth registration
in, 45

municipal abattoirs in, 115
Texas, harvesting in, 10

municipal abattoirs in, 115
Tuberculosis, 18, 51

crusade against, 41

preventing, 54

tenements breeding places

of, 26, 52
Ulm, land policy of, 26

Index

147

Unemployment, 5
United States, 47, 56, 82

— constitution, 67

—Supreme Court, 65, 67,

70, 71, 73, 74
Utah-
minimum wage law in, 36

women vote in, 36
Vancouver, untaxing build-
ings in, 25
Vice, 75
Virginia —

housing in, 22
Vital statistics, 45, 46
Vocational education, 95
Wage boards, 5, 31-33, 105,

108, 135

Wages, public interference
with, 54

public regulation of, 33

strikes for increased, 54

unskilled laborers, 23

— legislation, 55

—scale, 31

women's, 27
Washington —

eight-hour law for women
in, 36

women vote in, 36

workmen's compensation in,
65, 67

Weller, Judge Charles, 76
Werner, Justice, 13
Westmoreland, 29
West Virginia boys work at
night in, 89

coal roads in, 28

glass works in, 89-92

lack of vital statistics in,
46

peonage in, 119
Widows, 13, 23

— pensions, 5, 14, 19
Wilson, President, 74

Administration, 114
Wisconsin, alcohol industry
in, 75

continuation schools in, 95

leases land to summer ten-
ants, 115

Woerishoffer, Carola, 84
Working hours, 12, 69, 104

—of bakers, 70, 71

—of children, 93

—miners, 70

— steel industry, 62, 63

strikes for shorter, 69
Working papers, 45, 98, 100
Workmen's compensation, 4,

13, 66, 67, 105
Wyatt, Edith, 55
Zurich, 82

TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIALISM

What it is not; What it is;
How it may come.

BY

EDMOND KELLY, M.A., F.G.S.

Late Lecturer on Municipal Government at Columbia

University. Founder of the City Club and the

Good Government Clubs of New York.

Author of "Government or Human

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