JOHN SPARGO, The Bitter Cry of the Children

Introduction: This book…was one of the classics of the progressive literature of exposure. One task of such books was to expose to middle-class view the suffering of invisible millions. Spargo did not limit himself to the ravages of factory labor alone, but examined the effects of economic deprivation on the nutrition, education, recreation, and family environment of millions of American children. The book had a powerful effect, and stimulated, among other things, the drive for as national child labor law. Like the best books of its type, it conveyed a message more disturbing than human suffering-that the sufferers were innocent, the victims of the social system. Spargo drew a radical conclusion: the answer was not charity for the casualties, but prevention, in the form of extensive social reconstruction.

The burden and blight of poverty fall most heavily upon the child. No more responsible for its poverty than for its birth, the helplessness and innocence of the victim add infinite horror to its suffering, for the centuries have not made tolerable the idea that the weakness or wrongdoing of its parents or others should be expiated by the suffering of the child. Poverty, the poverty of civilized man, which is everywhere coexistent with unbounded wealth and luxury, is always ugly, repellent, and terrible either to see or to experience; but when it assails the cradle it assumes its most hideous form. Underfed, or badly fed, neglected, badly housed, and improperly clad, the child of poverty is terribly handicapped at the very start; it has not an even chance to begin life with. While still in its cradle a yoke is laid upon its after years, and it is doomed either to the in infancy, or, worse still, to live and grow up puny, weak, both in body and in mind, inefficient and unfitted for the battle of life. And it is the consciousness of this, the knowledge that poverty in childhood blights the whole of life, which makes it the most appalling of all the phases of the poverty problem.

Biologically, the first years of life are supremely important. They are the foundation years; and just as the stability of a building must depend largely upon the skill and care with which its foundations are laid, so life and character depend in large measure upon the years of childhood and the care bestowed upon them. For millions of children the whole of life is conditioned by the first few years. The period of infancy is a theme of extreme plasticity. Proper care and nutrition at this period of life are of vital importance, for the evils arising from neglect, insufficient food, or food that is unsuitable, can never be wholly remedied. "The problem of the child is the problem of the race," and more and more emphatically science declares that almost all the problems of physical, mental, and moral degeneracy originate with the child. The physician traces the weakness and disease of the adult to defective nutrition in early childhood; the penologist traces moral perversion to the same cause; the pedagogue finds the same explanation for his failures. Thanks to the many notable investigations made in recent years, especially in European countries, sociological science is being revolutionized. Hitherto we have not studied the great and pressing problems of pauperism and criminology from the child-end; we have concerned ourselves almost entirely with results while ignoring causes. The new spirit aims at prevention. ...

According to the census of 1900, there were 25,000 boys under sixteen years of age employed in and around the mines and quarries of the United States. In the state of Pennsylvania alone,-the state which enslaves more children than any other,-there are thousands of little "breaker boys" employed, many of them not more than nine or ten years old. The law forbids the employment of children under fourteen, and the records of the mines generally show that the law is "obeyed." Yet in May, 1905, an investigation by like National Child Labor Committee showed that in one small borough of 7000 population, among the boys employed in breakers 35 were nine years old, 40 were ten, 45 were eleven, and 45 were twelve-over 150 boys illegally employed in one section of boy labor in one small town! During the anthracite coal strike of 1902, I attended the Labor Day demonstration at Pittston and witnessed the parade of another at Wilkesbarre. In each case there were hundreds of boys marching, all of them wearing their "working buttons," testifying to the fact that they were bona fide workers. Scores of them were less than ten years of age, others were eleven or twelve.

Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his fellows say that "he's got his boy to carry round wherever he goes." The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead. Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners' consumption. I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid, and the birds sang in chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had ,wallowed. '

I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of ten and twelve years of age doing it for fifty and sixty cents a day . ...

Poverty and Death are grim companions. Wherever there is much poverty the death-rate is high and rises higher with every rise of the tide of want and misery. In London, Bethnal Green's death-rate is nearly double that of Belgravia; in Paris, the poverty-stricken district of Menilmontant has a death-rate twice as high as that of the Elysee, in Chicago, the death-rate varies front about twelve per thousand in the wards where the well-to-do reside to thirty-seven per thousand in the tenement wards. The ill-developed bodies of the poor, underfed and overburdened with toil, have not the powers of resistance to disease possessed by the bodies of the more fortunate. As fire rages most fiercely and with greatest devastation among the ill-built, crowded tenements, so do the fierce flames of disease consume most readily the ill-built, fragile bodies which the tenements shelter. As we ascend the social scale the span of life lengthens and the death-rate gradually diminishes, the death-rate of the poorest class of workers being three and a half times as great as that of the well-to-do. It is estimated that among 10,000,000 persons of the latter class the annual deaths do not number more than 100,000, among the best paid of the working-class the number is not less than 150,000, while among the poorest workers the number is at least 350,000.

This difference in the death-rate of the various social classes is even more strongly marked in the case of infants. Mortality in the first year of life differs enormously according to the circumstances of the parents and the amount of intelligent care bestowed upon the infants. In Boston's "Back Bay" district the death-rate at all ages last year was 13.45 per thousand as compared with 18.45 in the Thirteenth Ward, which is a typical working-class district, and of the total number of deaths the percentage under one year was 9.44 in the former as against 25.21 in the latter. Wolf, in his classic studies based upon the vital statistics of Erfurt for a period of twenty years, found that for every 1000 children born in working-class families 505 died in the first year; among the middle classes 173, and among the higher classes only 89. Of every 1000 illegitimate children registered--almost entirely of the poorer classes--352 died before the end of the first year. Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, Senior Physician of the Metropolitan Free Hospital, London, declared some years ago that the death-rate of infants among the rich was not more than 8 per cent, while among the very poor it was often as high as 40 per cent. Dr. Playfair says that 8 per cent of the children of the upper classes, 36 per cent of the tradesman class, and 55 per cent of those of the working-class the under the age of five years.

And yet the experts say that the baby of the tenement is born physically equal to the baby of the mansion. For countless years men have sung of the Democracy of Death, but it is only recently that science has brought us the more inspiring message of the Democracy of Birth. It is not only in the tomb that we are equal, where there is neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, but also in the womb of our mothers. At birth class distinctions are unknown. For long the hope-crushing thought of prenatal hunger, the thought that the mother's hunger was shared by the unborn child, and that poverty began its blighting work on the child even before its birth, held us in its thrall. The thought that past generations have innocently conspired against the well-being of the child of to-day, and that this generation in its turn conspires against the child of the future, is surcharged with the pessimism which mocks every ideal anti stifles every hope born in the soul. Nothing more horrible ever cast its shadow over the hearts of those who would labor for the world's redemption from poverty than this spectre of prenatal privation and inherited debility. But science comes to dispel the gloom and bid us hope. Over and over again it was stated before the Interdepartmental Committee by the leading obstetrical authorities of the English medical profession that the proportion of children born healthy and strong is not greater among the rich than among the poor. The differences appear after birth. Wise, patient Mother Nature provides with each succeeding generation opportunity to overcome the evils of ages of ignorance and wrong, with each generation the world starts afresh and unhampered, physically, at least, by the dead past.

The golden years return.

And herein lies the greatest hope of the race; we are not handicapped from the start; we can begin with the child of to-day to make certain a brighter and nobler to-morrow as though there had never been a yesterday of woe and wrong.

Introduction: It is hard to overestimate the influence of Christianity as one assesses the causes of the progressive uprising. Most Americans even then were not fervent, practicing Christians, and most clergymen did not find that their New Testament contained any grounds for criticism of the existing order. But men like Rauschenbusch, George Herron, Charles Sheldon. John A. Ryan, and the layman Richard T. Ely made a powerful case that Jesus would have been a reformer (or a socialist) if he came to America in the time of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Their passionate sermons, essays, and novels swelled the ranks of reform with young men and women whose motivation was altruism, whose style was evangelical, and whose faith in moral persuasion was boundless. A few, like Rauschenbusch, even rejected capitalism.

Our business life is the seat and source of our present troubles. So much ought to be plain to all who care to see. It is in commerce and industry that we encounter the great collective inhumanities that shame our Christian feeling, such as child labor and the bloody total of industrial accidents. Here we find the friction between great classes of men which makes whole communities hot with smoldering hate or sets them ablaze with lawlessness. To commerce and industry we are learning to trace the foul stream of sex prostitution, poverty, and political corruption. Just as an epidemic of typhoid fever would call for an analysis of the water supply, so these chronic conditions call for a moral analysis of the economic order and justify the presumption that it is fundamentally unchristian. Business men themselves concede that it is; some by calmly denying that Christian principles have anything to do with business; others by sadly confessing that Christianity ought to govern business, but that it would mean loss or ruin to put Christian ethics in practice.

Business life is the unregenerate section of our social order. If by some magic it could be plucked out of our total social life in all its raw selfishness, and isolated on an island, unmitigated by any other factors of our life, that island would immediately become the object of a great foreign mission crusade for all Christendom. Our argument, therefore, will now concentrate on this unredeemed portion of the social order.

Our first need is to analyze our economic system so that we may understand wherein and why it is fundamentally unchristian. Most of us have accepted our economic system as we accept our stomach, without understanding its workings. Nor is it easy to understand the moral essentials of this huge and complicated social machinery. We have no such historical perspective of it as our great-grandchildren will have when they study the Great Industrial Transition of the Twentieth Century in college. We are like a swimmer in a stormy sea. To negotiate the next wave is the great object of his concern, but whether that wave is part of a tidal current sweeping him toward shore or out to sea, his narrow horizon does not tell him. So amid the swift changes of our age we find it hard to distinguish between incidental troubles and the essential drifts of our economic system.

We stumble along untraveled trails when we attempt an analysis of our economic system from a Christian point of view. The collective intelligence of the Christian Church has not really come to any clearness about the fundamental moral relations involved in modern economic life. It instinctively condemns some of its worst excrescences, but even among its leaders many have no clear grasp of the moral nature and genius of our industrial and commercial world. We have been neglecting the Doctrine of Sin in our theology. We might look to Christian business men for an incisive comprehension of the moral conditions amid which they work, but most of them are so driven by business that they have no time to consider their situation broadly and with historical insight. They see keenly what is immediately necessary, but in the broader tendencies of their life a vast collective will bids them go, and they go. They are slaves of the lamp. Business imposes its point of view on them just as the Catholic Church molds the ideas of the priests who labor in it. When "practical men" do theorize, they are often the dizziest theorizers of all ....

The reign of competition is a reign of fear. The rate of mortality for small business concerns is higher than infant mortality. If all the leaden weight of fear of all business men who watch a vanishing margin of profit through the year could be gathered up and set before us in some dramatic form, it would palsy our joy in life. Business panics merely render this chronic condition acute and make men high up who have been secure in prosperity feel the same sufferings which others have felt who went down before them. A reign of fear is never a reign of God. Fear makes children lie and businessmen cheat. In competition the worst man sets the pace, and good men follow because they are afraid. A capable mind with no bowels of mercy to hinder who can wring the last ounce of strength from his men, and who put women and children to work wherever men can be displaced, can outbid a morally sensitive man unless the latter has some counterbalancing advantage elsewhere. In a cooperating group the efficiency and courage of the best members of the team hold the rest up to their level; in commercial competition the greed and inhumanity of the worst infect the rest through the medium of fear. For this reason considerations of humanity have often had so little response from communities of businessmen composed largely of Christian persons. Individually they are kind-hearted men; but as members of a competitive social order they are driven by fear and forgetful of mercy. Workmen complain when their employers speed up the machinery, which compels them to keep up with its pace or be hurt. But their employers are also slaves of a huger machine, and many of them are seeking with laboring breath to keep up with a treadmill that will mangle them if they do not.

The objection will be raised that the instinct of competition is inherent in human life and that its free play is a necessary factor in the evolution of the race. That is quite true. Life would lose much of its zest and of its educational value if competition were eliminated from it. But there is no danger whatever that it will be. Young men will always compete for the love of woman (and sometimes that game is reversed); students will compete for educational honors; workmen will compete for leadership within their group; statesmen will compete for popularity and power. When the ablest are honored and promoted, it benefits all. A superior type is thereby placed in a conspicuous position, and the rest are more or less modeled after it. The unsuccessful competitors may suffer all the pangs of disappointed, ambition, but they are not usually impoverished or disgraced. A college boy who fails to win a prize is not on that account reduced to high school rank. A workman who fails to be promoted to the position of foreman does not lose his old job. Such emulation advances some without ruining the rest. For that kind of competition an economic system founded wholly on cooperation would offer splendid chances, with more publicity and fame for the winners than is now offered in business life.

For a century the doctrine of salvation by competition was the fundamental article in the working creed of the capitalistic nations. It was the "natural theology" of industry, and no political economy was orthodox that did not preach it. Governments felt it would be a sin to interfere while competitors were having a Donnybrooke Fair. In theory it is still in effect in our country. Businessmen are indignant when workingmen refuse to permit unrestrained competition among themselves. Government is supposed to punish combinations "in restraint of trade." But in practice competition is being hemmed in and tied up on all hands. None of the big leaders of business believe in it. If they do, their faith is even farther removed from their works than usually. The doctrine of competition was once historically useful because it helped to clear away an outgrown economic system and to substitute larger cooperating groups for the little groups of the handicraft system. But that work has been done, and to-day competition has itself become an antiquated method which ties its down to petty and inefficient forms of teamwork. The polliwog is through with its tail and gills, and is anxious to grow legs and lungs, and sit on a stone in the pride of its froghood. But legislators, lawyers, and old gentlemen generally are anxiously trying to coax back the vanishing tail. The only valid defense for the wastefulness and inefficiency of the competitive system is that it protects the consumer against the voracity of the monopolist. That end is wholly laudable, but we shall have to find more effective means of attaining it than moving back the clock-hands that destiny is driving forward.

Business is abandoning competition because it is inefficient, and larger and more powerful forms of association and teamwork are being wrought out. Christianity should help to end competition because it is immoral. Its murderous effect in England at the beginning of the capitalistic era is a matter of record. It has had much the same effect every time it invaded a new country or community. It is a shortsighted and suicidal policy. One nation after the other has had to hog-tie competition by government interference, inspection, and paternalism in the interests of safety and humanity. Competition as a principle is a denial of fraternity. In so far as it is allowed to do its unrestrained work, it establishes the law of tooth and nail, and brings back the age of savage warfare where every man's hand is against every man. It dechristianizes the social order. Whatever progress was achieved under the competitive system was secured, not by the competitive element in it, but by the fact that it allowed so large an application of the forces of association and teamwork. It behooves us to find forms of organization that will expand the present narrow areas of cooperation and make them nation wide. Men who are in the same line of work must be so organized that they can emulate while they cooperate. Commercial competition has developed in our commercial communities the lower instincts of selfishness, covetousness, and craft. A Christian social order must be such that it will develop and educate mutual interest and good will, and equip workmates with that sense of comradeship and solidarity to which they are entitled ....

Let its sum up the case of Christianity against Capitalism.

We saw that the distinctive characteristic of the capitalistic system is that the industrial outfit of society is owned and controlled by a limited group, while the mass of the industrial workers is without ownership or power over the system within which they work. A small group of great wealth and power is set over against a large group of propertyless men. Given this line-up, the rest follows with the inevitableness of a process in physics or chemistry.

Wherever the capitalist class remains in unorganized and small units, they will struggle for the prizes held out by modern industry. Capitalism in its youth threw off the restraints upon competition created by the older social order, and a fierce, free fight followed. Wherever the competitive principle is still in operation, it intensifies natural emulation by the size of the stakes it offers, enables the greedy and cunning to set the pace for the rest, makes men immoral by fear, and puts the selfish impulses in control. The charge of Christianity against cooperative capitalism is that it is unfraternal, the opposite of cooperation and teamwork.

Capitalism gives the owners and managers of industry autocratic power over the workers. The dangers always inherent in the leadership of the strong are intensified by the fact that in capitalistic industry wrong-doing. The practice of mutualism has always worked this way. Most sin is preying, and every new social relation begets its cannibalism. No one will "make the ephah small" or "falsify the balances" until there is buying and selling, "withhold the pledge" until there is loaning, "keep back the hire of the laborers" until there is a wage system, "justify the wicked for a reward" until men submit their disputes to a judge. The rise of the state makes possible counterfeiting, smuggling, peculation, and treason. Commerce tempts the pirate, the forger, and the embezzler. Every new fiduciary relation is a fresh opportunity for breach of trust. To-day the factory system makes it possible to work children to death on the double-quick, speculative building gives the jerry-builder his chance, long-range investment spawns the get-rich-quick concern, and the trust movement opens the door to the bubble promoter.

The springs of the older sin seem to be drying up. Our forced-draught pace relieves us of the superabundance of energy that demands an explosive outlet. Spasms of violent feeling go with a sluggish habit of life, and are as out of place to-day as are the hard-drinking habits of our Saxon ancestors. We are too busy to give rein to spite. The stresses and lures of civilized life leave slender margin for the gratification of animosities. In quiet, side-tracked communities there is still much old-fashioned hatred, leading to personal clash, but elsewhere the cherishing of malice is felt to be an expensive luxury. Moreover, brutality, lust, and cruelty are on the wane. In this country, it is true, statistics show a widening torrent of bloody crime, but the cause is the weakening of law rather than an excess of bile. Outer civilized peoples seem to be turning away from the sins of passion.

The darling sins that are blackening the face of our time are incidental to the ruthless pursuit of private ends, and hence quite "without prejudice." The victims are used or sacrificed not at all from personal ill-will, but because they can serve as pawns in somebody's little game. Like the wayfarers run down by the automobilist, they are offered up to the God of Speed. The essence of the wrongs that infest our articulated society is betrayal rather than aggression. Having perforce to build men of willow into a social fabric that calls for oak, we see on all hands monstrous treacheries,-adulterators, peculators, boodlers, grafters, violating the trust others have placed its them. The little finger of Chicane has come to be thicker than the loins of Violence.

The sinister opportunities presented in this webbed social life have been seized unhesitatingly, because such treasons have not yet become infamous. The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate, murders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a "rake-off" instead of a jimmy, cheats with a company prospectus instead of a deck of card:, or scuttles his town instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a malefactor. The shedder of blood, the oppressor of the widow and the fatherless, long ago became odious, but latter-day treacheries fly no skull-and-crossbones flag at the masthead. The qualities which differentiate them froth primitive sin and procure them such indulgence may be clearly defined.

The stealings and slayings that lurk in the complexities of our social relations are not deeds of the dive, the dark alley, the lonely road, and the midnight hour. They require no nocturnal prowling with muffled step and bated breath, no weapon or offer of violence. Unlike the old-time villain, the latter-day malefactor does not wear a slouch hat and a comforter, breathe forth curses and an odor of gin, go about his nefarious work with clenched teeth and an evil scowl. In the supreme moment his lineaments are not distorted with rage, or lust, or malevolence. One misses the dramatic setting, the time-honored insignia of turpitude. Fagin and Bill Sykes and Simon Legree are vanishing types. Gamester, murderer, body-snatcher, and kidnapper may appeal to a Hogarth, but what challenge finds his pencil in the countenance of the boodler, the savings-bank wrecker, or the ballot-box stuffer? Among our criminals of greed, one begins to meet the "grand style" of the great criminals of ambition. Macbeth or Richard III. The modern high-powered dealer of woe wears immaculate linen, carries a silk hat and a lighted cigar, sins with a calm countenance and a serene soul, leagues or months from the evil he causes. Upon his gentlemanly presence the eventual blood and tears do not obtrude themselves…

Because of the special qualities of the Newer Unrighteousness, because these devastating latter-day wrongs, being comely of look, do not advertise their vileness, and are without the ulcerous hag-visage of the primitive sins, it is possible for iniquity to flourish greatly, even while men are getting better. Briber and boodler and grafter are often "good men," judged by the old tests, and would have passed for virtuous in the American community of seventy years ago. Among the chiefest sinners are now enrolled men who are pure and kind-hearted, loving in their families, faithful to their friends, and generous to the needy.

One might suppose that an exasperated public would sternly castigate these modern sins. But the fact is, the very qualities that lull the conscience of the sinner blind the eyes of the onlookers. People are sentimental, and bastinado wrong-doing not according to its harmfulness, but according to the infamy that has come to attach to it.

Undiscerning, they chastise with scorpions the old authentic sins, but spare the new. They do not see that boodling is treason, that blackmail is piracy, that embezzlement is theft, that speculation is gambling, that tax-dodging is larceny, that railroad discrimination is treachery, that the factory labor of children is slavery, that deleterious adulteration is murder. It has not come home to them that the fraudulent promoter "devours widows' houses," that the monopolist "grinds the faces of the poor," that mercenary editors and spellbinders "put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter." The cloven hoof hides in patent leather; and to-day, as in Hosea's time, the people "are destroyed for lack of knowledge." The mob lynches the red-handed slayer, when it ought to keep a gallows Haman-high for the venal mine inspector, the seller of infected milk, the maintainer of a fire-trap theatre. The child-beater is forever blasted in reputation, but the exploiter of infant toil, or the concocter of a soothing syrup for the drugging of babies, stands a pillar of society. The petty shoplifter is more abhorred than the stealer of a franchise, and the wife-whipper is outcast long before the man who sends his over-insured ship to founder with its crew ....

The grading of sinners according to badness of character goes on the assumption that the wickedest man is the most dangerous. This would be true if men were abreast in their opportunities to do harm. In that case the blackest villain would be the worst scourge of society. But the fact is that the patent ruffian is confined to the social basement, and enjoys few opportunities. He can assault or molest, to be sure; but he cannot betray. Nobody depends on him, so he cannot commit breach of trust,--that arch sin of our time. He does not hold in his hand the safety or welfare or money of the public. He is the clinker, not the live coal; vermin, not beast of prey. To-day the villain most in need of curbing is the respectable, exemplary, trusted personage who, strategically placed at the focus of a spider-web of fiduciary relations, is able from his office-chair to pick a thousand pockets, poison a thousand sick, pollute a thousand minds, or imperil a thousand lives. It is the great-scale, high-voltage sinner that needs the shackle. To strike harder at the petty pickpocket than at the prominent and unabashed person who in a large, impressive way sells out his constituents, his followers, his depositors, his stockholders, his policy-holders, his subscribers, or his customers is to "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel….

The real weakness in the moral position of Americans is not their attitude toward the plain criminal, but their attitude toward the quasi-criminal. The shocking leniency of the public in judging conspicuous persons who have thriven by anti-social practices is not due, as many imagine, to sycophancy. Let a prominent man commit some offense in bad odor and the multitude flings its stones with a right good will. The social lynching of the self-made magnate who put away his faded, toil-worn wife for the sake of a soubrette, proves that the props of the morality have not rotted through. Sex righteousness continues to be thus stiffly upheld simply because man has not been inventing new ways of wronging woman. So long ago were sex sins recognized and branded that the public, feeling sure of itself, lays on with promptness and emphasis. The slowness of this same public in lashing other kinds of transgression betrays, not sycophancy or unthinking admiration of success, but perplexity. The prosperous evildoers that bask undisturbed in popular favor have been careful to shun--or seem to shun--the familiar types of wickedness. Overlooked in Bible and Prayer-book, their obliquities lack the brimstone smell. Surpass as their misdeeds may in meanness and cruelty, there has not yet been time enough to store up strong emotion about them; and so the sight of them does not let loose the flood of wrath and abhorrence that rushes down upon the long-attainted sins.  The immunity enjoyed by the perpetrator of new sins has brought into being a class for which we may coin the term criminaloid ….

Nation-wide is the zone of devastation of the adulterator, the rebater, the commercial free-booker, the fraud promoter, the humbug healer, the law-defying monopolist. State-wide is the burnt district of the corrupt legislator, the corporation- owned judge, the venal inspector, the bought bank examiner, the mercenary editor. But draw near the sinner and he whitens. If his fellow men are wronged clear to his doorstep he is criminal, not criminaloid. For the latter loses his sinister look, even takes on a benign aspect, as you come close. Within his home town, his ward, his circle, he is perhaps a good man, if this power is unrestrained by democratic checks and fortified by almost absolute ownership of the means of production and life. Consequently the master class in large domains of industry have exacted excessive toil, and have paid wages that were neither a just return for the work done nor sufficient to support life normally. The working class is everywhere in a state of unrest and embitterment. By great sacrifices it has tried to organize in order to strengthen its position against these odds, but the master class has hampered or suppressed the organizations of labor. This line-up of two antagonistic classes is the historical continuation of the same line-up which we see in chattel slavery and feudal serfdom. In recent years the development of corporations has added a new difficulty by depersonalizing the master. The whole situation contradicts the spirit of American institutions. It is the last intrenchment of the despotic principle. It tempts the class in power to be satisfied with a semi-morality in their treatment of the working class. It is not Christian.

The capitalist class serves society in the capacity of the middleman, and modern conditions make this function more important than ever before. But under the capitalistic organization this wholesome function is not under public control, and the relations created call out the selfish motives and leave the higher motives of human nature dormant. Under competition business readily drifts into the use of tricky methods, sells harmful or adulterated goods, and breaks down the moral self-restraint of the buyer. Under monopoly the middleman is able to practice extortion on the consumer. The kindly and friendly relations that abound in actual business life between the dealer and the consumer are due to the personal character of the parties and the ineradicable social nature of man, and are not created by the nature of business itself.

In all the operations of capitalistic industry and commerce the aim that controls and directs is not the purpose to supply human needs, but to make a profit for those who direct industry. This in itself is an irrational and unchristian adjustment of the social order, for it sets money up as the prime aim, and human life as something secondary, or as a means to secure money. The supremacy of profit in capitalism stamps it as a mammonistic organization with which Christianity can never be content. "Profit" commonly contains considerable elements of just reward for able work; it may contain nothing but that; but where it is large and dissociated from hard work, it is traceable to some kind of monopoly privilege and power, either the power to withhold part of the earnings of the workers by the control of the means of production, or the ability to throw part of the expenses of business on the community, or the power to overcharge the public. In so far as profit is derived from these sources, it is tribute collected by power from the helpless, a form of legalized graft, and a contradiction of Christian relations.

Thus our capitalistic commerce and industry lies alongside of the home, the school, the Church, and the democratized States as an unregenerate part of the social order, not based on freedom, love, and mutual service, as they are, but on autocracy, antagonism of interests, and exploitation. Such a verdict does not condemn the moral character of the men in business. On the contrary, it gives a remarkable value to every virtue they exhibit in business, for every act of honesty, justice, and kindness in a triumph over hostile conditions, a refusal of Christianity and humanity to be chilled by low temperature or scorched by the flame of high-pressure temptation. Our business life has been made endurable only by the high qualities of the men and women engaged in it. These personal qualities have been created by the home, the school, and the Church. The State has also made Business tolerable by pulling a few of the teeth and shortening the tether of greed. Thus moral forces generated outside of Capitalism have invaded its domain and supplied the moral qualities without which it would have collapsed. But capitalistic business in turn is invading the regenerate portions of the social order, paralyzing their activities, breaking down the respect for the higher values, desecrating the holy, and invading God's country ....

Immediately after the Methodist General Conference, in December, 1908, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America was organized at Philadelphia, representing and uniting thirty-three Protestant denominations. This organization marked an epoch in the history of American Protestantism. But no other session created so profound an interest as that devoted to "Social Service." The report of the Commission was heard with tense feeling, which broke into prolonged and enthusiastic applause at the close. The Bill of Rights adopted by the Methodist Convention was presented with some changes and adopted without the slightest disposition to halt it at any point. The following declaration, therefore, has stood since 1908 as the common sense of the Protestant churches of America:

"We deem it the duty of all Christian people to concern themselves directly which certain practical industrial problems. To us it seems that the churches must stand:

For equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life.

For the right of all men to the opportunity for self-maintenance, a right ever to be wisely and strongly safeguarded against encroachments of every kind.

For the right of workers to some protection against the hardships, often resulting from the swift crises of industrial change.

For the principle of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions.

For the protection of the worker from dangerous machinery, occupational disease, injuries, and mortality.

For the abolition of child labor.

For such regulations of the conditions of toil for women as shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the community.

For the suppression, of the 'sweating system.'

For the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practicable point and for that degree of measure for all which is a condition of the highest human life.

For a release from employment one day in seven.

For a living wage as a minimum in every industry, and for the highest wage that each industry can afford.

For the most equitable division of the products of industry that can ultimately be devised.

For suitable provision for the old age of the workers and for those incapacitated by injury.

For the abatement of poverty.

To the toilers of America and to those who by organized effort are seeking to lift the crushing burdens of the poor, and to reduce the hardships and uphold like 'dignity of labor, this Council sends the greeting of human brotherhood and the pledge of sympathy and of help in a cause which belongs to all who follow Christ."

 

Introduction: Ross's important little book Sin and Society read by Theodore Roosevelt among other people, tried to forward reform by updating the American ethical system. In the harsh survival situation of early America such sins as drunkenness and theft were serious in their social consequences, and when one man injured another it was usually a matter of physical assault. The rise of a complicated industrial society allowed some man to injure millions impersonally, and the old ethical focus upon individual behavior and personal violence allowed more important modern forms of antisocial activity to go undenounced and unimpeded. In undertaking to reorient the public morality Ross went to the very heart of the reform task. Since the American people have not yet successfully shifted from an individualistic to a collective ethic, Sin and Society has a freshness and relevance few books of that period can match, despite its somewhat dated, biblical style.

The sinful heart is ever the same, but sin changes its quality as society develops. Modern sin takes its character from the mutualism of our time. Under our present manner of living, how many of my vital interests I must intrust to others! Nowadays the water main is my well, the trolley car my carriage, the banker's safe my old stocking, the policeman's billy my fist. My own eyes and nose and judgment defer to the inspector of food, or drugs, or gas, or factories, or tenements, or insurance companies. I rely upon others to look after my drains, invest my savings, nurse my sick, and teach my children. I let the meat trust butcher my pig, the oil trust mould my candles, the sugar trust boil my sorghum, the coal trust chop my wood, the barb wire company split my rails.

But this spread-out manner of life lays snares for the weak and opens doors to the wicked. Interdependence puts us, as it were, at one another's mercy, and so ushers in a multitude of new forms of judged by !he simple old-time tests. Very likely he kept his marriage vows, pays his debts, "mixes" well, stands by his friends, and has a contracted kind of public spirit. He is ready enough to rescue imperiled babies, protect maidens, or help poor widows. He is unevenly moral: oak in the family and clan virtues, but basswood in commercial and civic ethic. In some relations he is more sympathetic and generous than his critics; and he resents with genuine feeling the scorn of men who happen to have specialized in other virtues than those appeal to him. Perhaps his point of honor is to give bribes but not to take them; perhaps it is to "stay bought" or not to sell out to both sides at once.

The type is exemplified by the St. Louis boodler, who, after accepting $25,000 to vote against a certain franchise, was offered a larger sum to vote for it. He did so, but returned the first bribe. He was asked on the witness-stand why he had returned it. "Because it wasn't mine!" he exclaimed, flushing with anger. "I hadn't earned it."

Seeing that the conventional sins are mostly close-range inflictions, whereas the long-range sins, being recent in type, have not yet been branded, the criminaloid receives from his community the credit of the close-in good he does, but not the shame of the remote evil he works.

Sometimes it is time instead of space that divides him from his victims. It is tomorrow's morrow that will suffer from the patent soothing-syrup, the factory toil of infants, the grabbing of public lands, the butchery of forests, and the smuggling in of coolies. In such a case the short-sighted many exonerate him; only the far-sighted few mark him for what he is. Or it may be a social interval that leaves him his illusion of innocence. Like Robin Hood, the criminaloid spares his own sort and finds his quarry of another social plane. The labor grafter, the political "striker," and the blackmailing society editor prey upward; the franchise grabber, the fiduciary thief, and the frenzied financier prey downward. In either case the sinner moves in an atmosphere of friendly approval and can still any smart of conscience with the balm of good fellowship and adulation....

Our moral pace-setters strike at bad personal habits, but act as if there was something sacred about money-making; and, seeing that the master iniquities of our time are connected with money-making, they do not get into the big fight at all.

Because society develops, comes into new situations, runs into strange perils, finds old foes with new faces and enemies masquerading as friends, it is folly to train its guns ever on the same spot. Yesterday's battle-cries of conscience cannot thrill us, and so the battle-cries of to-day may have little meaning for our children's children. They, perhaps, will be worrying about the marriage of the tainted, or the two-child system. Every age has to reconnoitre its foes and mark where they are massing. Like a rudderless steamer on a river of savage Africa, society, caught in the current of evolution, dips, lurches, drifts, swings, exposing now port, now starboard, to the missiles of fresh enemies that present themselves in strange guise at every turn of the stream....

The conclusion of the whole matter is this:

Our social organization has developed to a stage where the old righteousness is not enough. We need an annual supplement to the Decalogue. The growth of credit institutions, the spread of fiduciary relations, the enmeshing of industry in law, the interlacing of government and business, the multiplication of boards and inspectors beneficent as they all are, they invite to sin. What gateways they open to greed! What fresh parasites they let in on us! How idle in our new situation to intone the old litanies! The reality of this close-knit life is not to be seen and touched; it must be thought. The sins it opens the door to are to be discerned by knitting the brows rather than by opening the eyes. It takes imagination to see that bogus medical diploma, lying advertisement, and fake testimonial are death-dealing instruments. It takes imagination to see that savings-bank wrecker, loan shark, and investment swindler, in taking livelihoods take lives. It takes imagination to see that the business of debauching voters, fixing juries, seducing law-makers, and corrupting public servants is like sawing through the props of crowded grand-stand. Whether we like it or not, we are in the organic phase, and the thickening perils that beset our path can be beheld only by the mind's eye.

The problem of security is therefore being silently transformed. Blind, instinctive reactions are no longer to be trusted. Social defense is coming to be a matter for the expert. The rearing of dikes against faithlessness and fraud calls for intelligent social engineering. If in this strait the public does not speedily become far shrewder in the grading and grilling of sinners, there is nothing for it but to turn over the defense of society to professionals.

Prof. Fisher concludes also that on the average every American is sick thirteen days in the year.

Possibilities of lengthening lives and avoiding sickness and invalidity, like the possibilities of preventing accidents, will be availed of when business as well as humanity demands it....

Can there be any doubt that if every accident had to be carefully investigated and adequately compensated for, their number would be reduced to a half or a third.

Unnecessary Unemployment

And undoubtedly the paramount evil in the workingman's life, irregularity of employment-would yield in large measure to like treatment.

The New York Commission in its recent report on unemployment gives data from the Trade Unions showing "that organized workers lose on the average twenty per cent of their possible income through unemployment," and data from the charitable societies showing that "from 25 to 35 per cent of those who apply to them for relief every year have been brought to their destitute condition primarily through lack of work."

Some irregularity of employment is doubtless inevitable; but in the main irregularity is remediable. It has been overcome with great profit to both employer and employee in important businesses which have recognized the problem as one seriously demanding solution. Society and industry need only the necessary incentive to secure a great reduction in irregularity of employment. In the scientifically managed business irregularity tends to disappear. So far as it is irremediable it should be compensated for like the inevitable accident....

Consider how great would be the incentive to humanize social and industrial conditions if the coat of inhuman conditions were not only made manifest, but had to be borne from clay to day unless the inhuman conditions themselves were removed!

Mere description of the misery unnecessarily entailed by the inhuman conditions, mere statements of cost however clear and forceful, will fail to secure the removal of these inhuman conditions of industry and in the life of our people from which this misery springs. But if society and industry and the individual were made to pay from day to day the actual cost of the sickness, accident, invalidity, premature death or premature old age consequent upon excessive hours of labor or unhygienic conditions of work, of unnecessary risk, and of irregularity in employment, those evils would be rapidly reduced.

We need a comprehensive system of workingmen's insurance as an incentive to justice. We need it: "Lest we forget."

The Arguments Against Alcohol

Introduction: Two speakers at the Sixteenth National Convention of the Anti-Saloon League of America, both clelgymen. summarize the leading arguments against alcoholic beverages. Here again we find progressive concerns in cluster-conservation, efficiency. opposition to "vice" and worries about the vigor of "the race."

Human Conservation

BY REV. A. C. BANE, DD

FINANCIAL SECRETARY OF ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE OF AMERICA

The greatest, noblest, bravest act ever performed for humanity's betterment, was when, just outside the gates of Jerusalem, Jesus died for man.

Had he died for his property, his liberty or his country, his sacrifice, however worthy, would have been forgotten by the modern historian; but the fact that he suffered and died for man makes his deed immortal. Love for mankind, devotion to human welfare, sacrifice for the people's good, these are the principles that will reflect that divine heart, and meet our modern social conditions.

For several generations past the people of this nation and their public servants have made the dollar mark their coat of arms, they have followed gold, they have worshipped gold, they have served bold, and neglected human interests, and until recently most of our legislation has been in the interest of coin and commerce.

Cattle, sheep, hogs and horses, in the public marts of the nation, have been worth more than men. Stocks, bonds, houses, lands, crops and currency have had a higher value than boys and girls in the popular estimation. The government has been willing to furnish an expert to cure a hog of the cholera, a horse of the glanders, or a cow of tuberculosis, while permitting hundreds of human beings to the daily of neglect. But the time is rapidly approaching when we will think more of men and women than we do now of hogs; when we will cherish man as of superior value to mere things.

We are getting our eyes open to see Christ's value of humanity, as greater than that of all the material world, which estimate of value led the Eternal God to give up his life for man. This is evinced in the trend of all recent progressive legislation, which has been to protect human beings rather than dollars, and also in the many new organizations and efforts for the betterment of mankind.

SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN WELFARE

In the consideration of every public question and problem of state craft, the query of supreme importance is, how does it affect the human weal, what influence will it have upon personal life and character?

There are numerous arguments that can be successfully used against the alcoholic liquor traffic.

We may argue against it that it debauches morals, wastes wealth, decreases efficiency, produces drunkards, and corrupts politics, but the overpowering argument against the traffic is, that it degenerates and destroys mankind.

There are many reasons that can be urged for its absolute Prohibition by legal enactment; we may urge its Prohibition on the ground that Prohibition will prevent crime, insanity and poverty; that it will save strength, health and wealth; that it will increase human efficiency, assure human safety and reduce taxation; but the supreme reason for the complete prohibition of the liquor traffic is found in the all inclusive statement: THE CONSERVATION OF HUMANITY. The present universal war on alcohol is a titanic struggle to save the human race.

We must realize that we are "our brothers' keeper," that we must "love our neighbor as ourself," that all legislation must have man's welfare in view. This vision is receiving modern consideration as never before; to save and conserve the whole man, in all his social relations, is the consummation for which the Christian world is now working.

Social sins, weaknesses, and imperfection; social waste, neglect and inequalities, are commanding public attention as never before. The people are studying the subject of poverty and wealth; the laboring man and woman and their safety, housing, recreations, and wages; the child and its welfare; motherhood; the social evil and all vice and crime; the home; personal health; efficiency; and good government. You cannot study these questions without facing the liquor traffic; you can see alcoholic liquor at every angle of these social problems; in fact the liquor traffic and habit will be found at the base of every social ill that curses humanity; John Barleycorn's face is reflected by every turn of the social mirror. The social ills of America and the world cannot be cured without abolishing the traffic in strong drink. We are almost ready to proclaim that Prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors as the great "cure-all" for America's social woes.

THE FIVE FINGERS

BY REV. WILBUR F. CRAFT S. SUPERINTENDENT OF INTERNATIONAL REFORM BUREAU WASHINGTON, D. C.

And, now let me show to eye and ear the five fingers of the hand with which God is writing the doom of King Alcohol.

I. THE FINGER OF HYGIENE

...the strongest proof that alcoholic drinks injure health and shorten life is the testimony of life insurance.

The average length of life, as shown by experience of European insurance societies, indicates that the total abstainer at 20 years of age leas expectation of 44 years of added life; average life 64 years.

The moderate drinker at 20 years of age has expectation of 31 years of added life; average life, 51 years. .The hard drinker at 20 years of age and after has expectation of 15 years of added life; average, 35 years; loss 29 years.

II. FIVE FINGER OF EFFICIENCY

Prof. G. Aschaffenberg's experiments, made on four printers on four consecutive days, shows the average loss of working ability due to alcohol to be about 9 per cent. Loss of working ability greatest in heaviest drinker; least in lightest drinker, but his work far short of expected.

'The old argument for abstinence was that one who drinks may become a drunkard; the new argument is that only by abstinence can one reach the highest efficiency.

FOR EFFICIENCY AND SUCCESS, ABSTAIN.

III. THE FINGER OF HEREDITY

A man may be willing to fly the motto for himself: "A short life and a happy one," and risk both health and property for fuddle and fellowship, but not many who are fathers or mothers, or expect to be, will be indifferent when shown incontrovertible proofs that drinkers have fewer and weaker children than abstainers.

The investigation of 20 families by Prof. Demme, Bern, 1878-89, shows that in a total of 61 children of temperate families 50 were normal, 2 dwarfed and deformed, 2 backward, 2 with St. Vitus Dance, 5 died in infancy. But in a total of 57 children in 10 intemperate families, 10 were normal, 10 dwarfed and deformed, 7 idiotic, 5 epileptic, 25 died in infancy.

FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN, ABSTAIN.

IV. THE FINGER OF PATRIOTISM

In this connection we quote as of profound significance a statement of the Crown Prince of Sweden at the opening of the Good Templar Summer Festival, Hessellholm, 1910: "That nation which is first to

free itself from the injuries effects of alcohol will thereby attain a marked advantage over other nations in the amicable, yet intensive, struggle for existence. I hope that our country will be the one which will first understand and secure this advantage."

In France also the patriotic argument is foremost. Long before the war, because France was a "dying nation;" the government put up posters warning against tippling that falls short of drunkenness "for the future of the nation." Great Britain, too, takes up the patriotic argument, alarmed by the failure of 80 per cent of those who offered themselves for the Boer war to pass the examination.

The present war has made all open-minded men realize that patriotism calls for abstinence. The grandest achievement of the war is not some scene on the battlefield, but Russia's patriotic renunciation of intoxicants; and the meanest scene of the whole war is the refusal of the Anglican convocation at York to give up its clerical todthes even when Kitchener and the King led the way.

FOR THE SAKE OF OUR COUNTRY, ABSTAIN.

V. THE FINGER OF RACE DEGENERACY

Dr. J. H. Kellogg, of Battle Creek, pictures the decay of nations in a stereopticon lecture, by a series of six trees dying at the top. Bulgaria had the least dead wood, representing the fact that one person in every thousand In that country lives to pass the 100-year mark, and not a few live for half a century longer. The United States comes next, but with one centenarian in 25,000. Then the record grows worse and worse; Spain, 44,000; France, 190,000; England, 200,000; Germany, 700,000. It is not mere accident that the nation whose favorite drink is buttermilk stands at the head, while the nation which drinks eight times as much beer is the lowest in the line.

Alcohol is not alone responsible for race degeneracy: Sex abuses have done quite as much in the destruction of nations; and sins of ignorance and of willful indulgence in eating must take a share of the blame, and also tobacco and other habit-forming drugs that in less violent ways work with alcohol to undermine the health.

Sir Andrew Clark, physician to Queen Victoria, said that when he looked at the hospital wards, and saw that seven out of ten owed their diseases to alcohol, and when he thought of all the others evils wrought by drink he felt impelled to give up his profession, "To give up everything, and go forth upon a holy crusade, preaching to all men, 'Beware of this enemy of the race.' "

If we can not give up everything to do this grand and necessary work, surely we can give a little time, a little work, a little money, an earnest prayer, a few words, a good example, a temperance vote.

FOR THE SAKE OF THE IMPERILED HUMAN RACE, ABSTAIN AND PROHIBIT.

Equality for Women

Introduction: The volumes making up The History of Woman Suffrage (edited by several suffragettes, principally Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Ida H. Harper), and in particular Volumes 4 (1883-1900) and 5 (1900-1920) are an indispensable source on the progressive movement. Reprinted below are various speeches given at conventions of the National American Women Suffrage Association, and part of the introduction to Volume 4, written by Susan B. Anthony and Ida H. Harper. They capture the seriousness and dedication that helped make this reform movement irresistible, and they also reveal how many diverse anxieties and hopes led these lathes to a single remedy.

National-American Convention of 1896

Miss Anthony closed with an earnest appeal that the committee would report in favor of a Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, thus enabling the women to carry their case to the Legislatures of the different States instead of to the masses of voters. She then submitted for publication and distribution the address of Mrs. Stanton, which said in part:

Could we resurrect from the archives of this Capitol all the petitions and speeches presented here by women for human freedom during this century, they would reach above this dome and make a more fitting pedestal for the Goddess of Liberty than the crowning point of an edifice beneath which the mother of the race has so long pleaded in vain for her natural right of self-government-a right her sons should have occurred to her long ago of their own free will by statutes carved indelibly on the corner-stones of the Republic .....

As arguments have thus far proved unavailing, may not appeals to your feelings, to your moral sense, find the response so long withheld by your reason? Allow me, honorable gentlemen, to paint you a picture and bring within the compass of your vision at once the comparative position of two classes of citizens: The central object is a ballot box guarded by three inspectors of foreign birth. On the right is a multitude of coarse, ignorant beings, designated in our constitutions as male citizens-many of them fresh from the steerage of incoming steamers. There, too, are natives of the same type from the slums of our cities. Policemen are respectfully guiding them all to the ballot box. Those who can not stand, because of their frequent potations, are carefully supported on either side, each in turn depositing his vote, for what purpose he neither knows nor cares, except to get the promised bribe.

On the left stand a group of intelligent, moral, highly-cultivated women, whose ancestors for generations have fought the battles of liberty and have made this country all it is to-day. These come from the schools and colleges as teachers and professors; from the press and pulpit as writers and preachers; from the courts and hospitals as lawyers and physicians; and from happy and respectable homes as honored mothers, wives and sisters. Knowing the needs of humanity subjectively in all the higher walks of life, and objectively in the world of work, in the charities, in the asylums and prisons, in the sanitary condition of our streets and public buildings, they are peculiarly fitted to write, speak and vote intelligently on all these questions of such vital, far-reaching consequence to the welfare of society. But the inspectors refuse their votes because they are not designated in the Constitution as "male" citizens, and the policemen drive them away.

Sad and humiliated they retire to their respective abodes, followed by the jeers of those in authority. Imagine the feelings of these dignified women, returning to their daily round of duties, compelled to leave their interests, public and private, in the State and the home, to these ignorant masses. The most grievous result of war to the conquered is wearing a foreign yoke, yet this is the position of the daughters of the Puritans ....

What a dark page the present political position of women will be for the future historian! In reading of the republics of Greece and Rome and the grand utterances of their philosophers in paeans to liberty, we wonder that under such governments there should have been a class of citizens held in slavery. Our descendants will be still more surprised to know that our disfranchised citizens, our pariahs, our slaves, belonged to the most highly educated, moral, virtuous class in the nation, women of wealth and position who paid millions of taxes-every year into the State and national treasuries; women who had given thousands to build colleges and churches and to encourage the sciences and arts. From the dawn of creation to this hour history affords no other instance of so large a class of such a character subordinated politically to the ignorant masses.

The National American Convention of 1903

The address of Miss Belle Kearney, Mississippi's famous orator, was a leading feature of the last evening's program-The South and Woman Suffrage . . . . The address closed as follows:

The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained, for upon unquestioned authority it is stated that in every southern State but one there are more educated women than all the illiterate voters, white and black, native and foreign, combined. As you probably know, of all the women in the South who can read and write, ten out of every eleven are white. When it comes to the proportion of property between the races, that of the write outweighs that of the black immeasurably. The South is slow to grasp the great fact that the enfranchisement of women would settle the race question in politics. The civilization of the North is threatened by the influx of foreigners with their imported customs; by the greed of monopolistic wealth and the unrest among the working classes; by the strength of the liquor traffic and encroachments upon religious belief. Some day the North will be compelled to look to the South for redemption from those evils on account of the purity of its Anglo-Saxon blood, the simplicity of its social and economic structure, the great advance in prohibitory law and the maintenance of the sanctity of its faith, which has been kept inviolate. Just as surely as the North will be forced to turn to the South for the nation's salvation, just so surely will the South be compelled to look to its Anglo-Saxon women as the medium through which to retain the supremacy of the white race over the African.

National American Convention of 1908

It was at this meeting that Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago, made the address on The Modern City and the Municipal Franchise for Women, which was thenceforth a part of the standard suffrage literature. Quotations are wholly inadequate.

It has been well said that the modern city is a stronghold of in industrialism quite as the feudal city was a stronghold of militarism, but the modern cities fear no enemies and rivals from without and their problems of government are solely internal. Affairs for the most part are going badly in these great new centres, in which the quickly-congregated population has not yet learned to arrange its affairs satisfactorily. Unsanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality, the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution and drunkeness are the enemies which the modem cities must face and overcome, would they survive. Logically their electorate should be made up of those who can bear a valiant part in this arduous contest, those who in the past have at least attempted to care for children, to clean houses, to prepare foods, to isolate the family from moral dangers; those who have traditionally taken care of that side of life which inevitably becomes the subject of municipal consideration and control as soon as the population is congested. To test the elector's fitness to deal with this situation by his ability to bear arms is absurd. These problems must be solved, if they are solved at all, not from the military point of view, not even from the industrial point of view, but from a third, which is rapidly developing in all the great cities of the world-the human-welfare point of view ....

City- housekeeping has failed partly became women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities. The men have been carelessly indifferent to much of this civic housekeeping, as they have always been indifferent to the details of the household…. The very multifariousness and complexity of a city government demand the help of minds accustomed to detail and variety of work, to a sense of obligation for the health and welfare of young children and to a responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of other people. Because all these things have traditionally been in the hands of women, it they take no part in them now they are not only missing the education which the natural participation in civic life would bring to them but they are losing what they have always had.

National American Convention of 1912

Mrs. Jean Nelson Penfield, chairman of the Woman Suffrage Party of New York numbering 60,000 members, said in part: The dominant thought in the world today is that of conservation; the tendency of the whole business world is toward economy. How to lessen the cost of production, how to improve the machinery of business so as to reduce friction-these are the questions that are being asked not only in the business world but in the affairs of state. No intelligent man in this scientific day would try to do anything by an indirect and wasteful method if he could accomplish his purpose by a direct and economic method. Even the bricklayer is taught how to handle his bricks so that the best results may be secured at the least possible expenditure of time and energy. Women alone seem to represent a great body of energy, vitality and talent which is unconserved, unutilized and recklessly wasted. If a man wants reform he goes armed with a vote to the ballot box and even to the Legislature with that power of the vote behind him; but if women want these things they are asked to take the long, questionable, roundabout route of personal influence, of petition, of indirection. Women have accomplished a great deal in this way but it has required a long time…. Take, for instance, one class of work-the establishment of manual training, domestic science, open-air schools, school gardens and playgrounds-all once just "women's notions" but now established institutions. Women have to found and finance and demonstrate them before municipalities would have anything to do with them, but when city or State adopts these institutions the management is immediately and entirely taken out of the hands of women and placed in the hands of men ....

Among thinking women there is a growing consciousness of being cut off, shut out from the civic life in which they have an equal stake with men. We ask you to recognize that the time is here for you to submit an amendment to the States for ratification which will give women the influence and power of the suffrage.

Aside from all political hostility, however, woman suffrage has to face a tremendous opposition from other sources. The attitude of a remonstrant is the natural one of the vast majority of people. Their fast cry on coming into the world, if translated, would be, "I object." They are opposed on principle to every innovation, and the greatest of these is the enfranchisement of women. To grant woman an equality with man in the affairs of life is contrary to every tradition, every precedent, every inheritance, every instinct and every teaching. The acceptance of this idea is possible only to those of especially progressive tendencies and a strong sense of justice, and it is yet too soon to expect these from the majority. If it had been necessary to have the consent of the majority of the men in every State for women to enter the universities, to control their own property, to engage in the various professions and occupations, to speak from the public platform and to form great organizations, in not one would they be enjoying these privileges to-day. It is very probable that this would be equally true if they had depended upon the permission of a majority of women themselves. They are more conservative even than men, because of the narrowness and isolation of their lives, the subjection in which they always have been held, the severe punishment inflicted by society on those who dare step outside the prescribed sphere, and, stronger than all, perhaps, their religious tendencies through which it has been impressed upon them that their subordinate position was assigned by the Divine will and that to rebel against it is to defy the Creator. In all the generations, Church, State and society have combined to retard the development of women, with the inevitable result that those of every class are narrower, more bigoted and less progressive than the men of that class.

While the girls are crowding the colleges now until they threaten to exceed the number of boys, the demand for the higher education was made by the merest handful of women and granted by an equally small number of men, who, on the boards of trustees, were able to do so, but it would have been deferred for decades if it had depended on a popular vote of either men or women. The pioneers in the professions found their most trying opposition from other women, instigated by the men who did their thinking for them to believe that the whole sex was being disgraced. Married women almost universally were opposed to laws which would give them control of their property, being assured by their masculine advisers that this would deprive them of the love and protection of their husbands. Public sentiment was wholly opposed to these laws and no such objections ever have been made in Legislatures even to woman suffrage as were urged against allowing a wife to own property. The contest was won by the smallest fraction of women and a few strong, far-seeing men, the latter actuated not alone by a sentiment of justice but also by the desire of preventing husbands from squandering the property which fathers had accumulated and wished to secure to their daughters, and fortunate indeed was it that this action did not have to be ratified by the voters.

There are in the United States between three and four million women engaged in wage-earning occupations outside of domestic service. Would this be possible had they been obliged to have the duly recorded permission of a majority of all the men over twenty-one years old? If the question were submitted to the votes of these men to-day whether women should be allowed to continue in these employments and enter any and all others, would it be carried in the affirmative in a single State?

And yet this prejudiced, conservative and in a degree ignorant and vicious electorate possesses absolutely the power to withhold the suffrage from women. A large part of it is composed of foreign-born men bringing from the Old World the most primitive ideas of the degraded position which properly belongs to woman. Another part is addicted to habits with which it never would give women the chance to interfere. Boys of twenty-one form another portion, fully imbued with a belief in woman's inferiority which only experience can eradicate. Men of the so-called working classes vote against it because they fear to add to the power of the so-called aristocracy. The latter oppose it because they think the suffrage already has been too widely extended and ought to be curtailed instead of expanded. The old fogies cast a negative ballot because they believe woman ought to be kept in her "sphere'" and the strictly orthodox because it is not authorized by the Scriptures. A large body who are "almost persuaded;" but have some fingering doubts as to the "expediency," satisfy their consciences for voting "no" by saying that the women of their family and acquaintance do not want it. Thus is the most valuable of human rights the right of individual representation-made the football of Legislatures, the shuttlecock of voters, kicked and tossed like the veriest plaything in utter disregard of the vital fact that it is the one principle above all others on which the Government is founded ....

But have we not reason to hope, in this era of rapid fulfilment when in all material things electricity is accomplishing in a day what required months under the old regime-that moral progress will keep pace? And that as much stronger as the electric power has shown itself than the coarse and heavy forces of the stone and iron periods, so much superior will prove the noblesse oblige of the men and women of the present, achieving in a generation what was not possible to the narrow selfishness and ignorant prejudice of all the past ages? ' `

A part of the magnificent plan to beautify Washington, the capital of the nation, is a colossal statue to American Womanhood. The design embodies a great arch of marble standing on a base in the form of an oval and broken by sweeps of steps. On either side are large bronze panels, bearing groups of figures. One of these will be a symbolic design showing the spirit of the people descending to lay offerings on woman's altar. Lofty pillars crowned by figures representing Victory, are to be placed at the approaches. Surmounting the arch will be the chief group of the composition, symbolizing Woman Glorified. She is rising from her throne to greet War and Peace, The nature and Art, Science and Industry, who approach to lay homage at her feet. Inside the arch is a memorial hall for recording the achievements of women. How soon this symbol shall become reality and woman stand forth in all the glory of freedom to reach her highest stature, depends upon the use she makes of the opportunities already hers and the fraternal assistance she receives from man. Fearless of criticism, courageous in faith, let each take for a guide these inspiring words which it has been said the Puritan of old would utter if he could speak: "I was a radical in my day; be thou the same in thine! I turned my back upon the old tyrannies and heresies and struck for the new liberties and beliefs; my liberty and my belief are doubtless already tyranny and heresy to thine age; strike thou for the new!"