CHANGING AMERICA EO^V^ARD A. ROSS Class BookJHlil^ Copyright 1^^ COPYRIGHT DEPOSnV 3 L^^ CHANGING AMERICA Changing America STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY BY EDWARD ALS WORTH ROSS, Ph.D., LL.D. Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin Author of *' Social Control," " Social Psychology," " Sin and Society," '* The Changing Chinese," etc. NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1912 b^ Ij Copyright, 1909, 1912, by The Century Co. Copyright, 1908, by The Ridgway Co. Copyright, 1910, by The Atlantic Monthly Company Copyright, 1912, by The World To-Day Published, May, 1912 ©CLA314B46 TO V MY IRENIC AND CATHOLIC-MINDED CO-LABORER ALBION W. SMALL CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE The Outlook fob Plain Folk 3 The democratic trend — What democracy is — Causes of its growth — Light in the social deeps — Soap and water — Decentralized religion — ■ Curbed fecundity — The promise of leisure — Help from Science and Art — The newspaper cartoon — Immigration and a skew distribution of wealth the chief obstacles to democ- racy. CHAPTER II The Woeld-Wide Advance of Democracy .... 20 Toppling Oriental despotisms — Object lessons from the white man — Dynamic role of the missionary educator — Rise of a native press — Grim realities of Oriental government — How it outrages human nature — The passing of power to the shekel — The significance of the socialist movement in the West. CHAPTER III The Falling Birth-Rate 32 Malthus unrefuted, but he overlooked certain factors — Vast extension of the low-birth-rate area — The fall- ing death-rate — How the balance among races may be upset — Causes of the fall in the birth-rate — Social democracy — The downward spread of economic wants — The ascent of woman — Good and bad fruits of the restriction of fecundity — The probable fetter- ing of immigration — The altered horizon of races. CHAPTER IV The Significance of Increasing Divorce .... 49 What the facts show — Fallacies respecting the growth of divorce — The tendency no sure proof of moral de- cay — Economic causes of the movement — Intellectual causes — Their probable loss of strength in the near future — Remedies. CHAPTER V Women in Industry 64 The gathering army of working women — Why they enter industry — Most women workers young — Their CONTENTS PAGE pathetic helplessness — Why they cannot take care of their interests — Conditions worsening — The hotter pace of work — The undermining of health — Dam age to home and progeny — The futility of individual action — The necessity of collective action — Social intervention and arid legalism — The true test of policy. CHAPTER VI Commercialism Rampant 83 The business fallacy — What commercialism is — Nei- ther selfishness nor materialism — The ascendancy of business ideals — The relentless expulsion of " senti- ment " from industry — Standards of success — Ruth- less exploitation of resources, natural and human — The commercialization of vice — Intrusive advertising — Business ideals in relation to politics, education and and religion — Remedies. CHAPTER VII The Suppression of Important News 109 Momentous changes in the newspaper business — Cap- italist-owner supplants editor-owner — The manufac- turer of publicity gives the advertiser a dictatorial position — Newspaper publishing as a field for invest- ment — Progressive commercialization of the daily press — " Killing " live news — "Sacred cows " — New vent-holes for news — The need of an endowed news- paper — How to solve the problem of control. CHAPTER VIII The Middle West — The Fiber of the People . . 137 Sectional misapprehensions — Retarded growth of the Middle West — Its losses to the Farther West — Sat- uration of the East with the later immigrants — Its boom in manufacturing — Genesis of the pioneering breed — What type settled the West — The fiber of the left-behinds — Signs of deterioration in fished-out communities — Folk depletion — Loss of the we-feel- ing — Masculinity of the W^est — The position of women. CHAPTER IX The Middle West — The Reassertion of Democracy 163 The armies of security-holders in the East — The Ideal- ism of investors — Investors and the rule of the people — The board-room view — Investor sentiment a lid on Eastern popular discontent — Insurgency of the Middle West — Routes of democratic advance — Pro- visions for enlightening the voter — What the people will do with their new power — Will people-rule spread to the East? CONTENTS CHAPTER X PAGE The Middle West — State Universities and Their Influence 187 Comparative growth of higher education East and West — Motives for building up the state universities — The avalanche of students — The commonwealth college as alma mater — Its utilitarian atmosphere — Its coedu- cation — Its relation to the church colleges — Uni- versity financing — Beneficent social changes wrought by the college-bred — The university in the service of the state — The university in the service of the people. CHAPTER XI The Middle West — Society and Culture .... 212 The pleasant fruits of Eastern leisure — Manners East and West — Why the Sybarites leave the Middle West — Why the rich Goths leave — What manner of so- ciety they create in their capitals — The democratic spirit of Western society — Attitude toward the social problem — Culture East and West — The newspapers of the two sections ^ Easy intellectual standards of the. West — • Its passion for bigness — Migration of the talents to the Atlantic Slope — Future relations of the Middle West and the East. PKEFACE The average man's mental picture of his so- ciety is at least two or three decades out of date, so that half the time he is fighting wind- mills instead of grappling with the enemies that rise in his path. In this book I aim to bring the picture nearer to reality by describing cer- tain contemporary social developments. This is, to be sure, a hazardous undertaking and very likely I have misread some of the tenden- cies I perceive. The interpreter of the present ventures oftener on slippery places than the in- terpreter of the past; but then he may be more useful. For it is only living tendencies that man can work with, curb, or guide. Edward Alsworth Ross. FOREWOKD " Women in Industry '' is the stenographic re- port of an address given in 1909. " Commercial- ism Rampant '^ is an address prepared in 1908. Since then the situation has decidedly improved, especially the attitude of the church toward com- mercial evils, but I have thought it best to print it in its original form. To the publishers of Everyhody^s Magazine I am indebted for permis- sion to republish " The Outlook for Plain Folk " ; to the publishers of Hearsfs Magazine for per- mission to print " The World-Wide Advance of Democracy '' ; and to the publishers of the Atlan- tic Monthly for permission to reproduce " The Suppression of Important News." " The Sig- nificance of Increasing Divorce '' and the " Mid- dle West '' series have appeared in The Century. E. A. R. CHANGING AMERICA CHANGING AMERICA I THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK rriHE movement toward democracy is world- ^ wide and tidal. It lias gone on for a cen- tury and a quarter, and invaded every home of White men. Even seventy-odd years ago Sydney Smith could liken its opponents to Dame Part- ington trying to sweep back the Atlantic with a broom. It may be dammed for a decade; for a lifetime, never. Universal suffrage, confesses a critic, " has the majesty of doom." Race is no barrier to it. Yesterday it was English, or Danes, or Germans that made the great stride forward. To-day it is Japanese, Persians, Turks. To-morrow it may be Hindoos, or Chinese, or Burmans. Even the " changeless East " thrills with the electric impulse, and presently for a sample of " Oriental " government we shall need to look to Zanzibar or Borneo. Universal and irresistible as it is, this rise of the peoples is no mysterious fiat of Destiny. It 3 CHANGING AMERICA is the outworking of certain causes. The causes being there, the thing had to come. We look for the democratic trend to continue, only because the forces that have made for democracy persist, and are being aided by new forces. To be sure, we can see only to the crest of the next ridge. Is there a Valley of Shadow beyond? Who knows? The conjunctions of to-morrow may conspire to bring on an eclipse of the common man. But the future of the undistinguished many, so far as we can peer into it, is brighter than the past. Socially, democracy insists that the grading of folks on the basis of birth or rank or calling or cash is coarse and barbaric. It does not deny that men are as gold, silver, and copper in rela- tive worth. But it wants men rated, not by place or trappings, but by essential things — wisdom, character, efficiency. The application of these standards always humbles the exalted few, and gives more dignity and consideration to the busy people who make the world go round. Politically, democracy means the sovereignty, not of the average man — who is a rather nar- row, short-sighted, muddle-headed creature — but of a matured public opinion, a very different thing. " One man, one vote " does not make 4 THE OUTLOOK FOE PLAIN POLE Sambo equal to Socrates in the state, for tlie bal- loting but registers a public opinion. In tbe forming of this opinion the sage has a million times the weight of the field hand. With modern facilities for mind influencing mind, democracy, at its best, substitutes the direction of the recog- nized moral and intellectual elite for the rule of the strong, the rich, or the privileged. The general causes of democracy are apt to be overlooked by Americans, because so much of our own democracy roots in a single unique con- dition, namely, access to free land. Think of the bracing and equalizing influence of the gratuitous distribution of a vast public domain to actual set- tlers! Is it any wonder the spirit of equality grew up out of recurrent frontier conditions and spread eastward? But now, alas, free land is gone, and henceforth our fate will be that of transatlantic societies. If men are cheapening there, they will cheapen here. If the people win here, it will be for the same reasons that they win in Switzerland or Finland. What are these reasons? One is that light is flooding the social deeps. Jn 1800, the average inhabitant of the United States had had eighty-two days of schooling. 5 CHANGING AMEEICA 'Alexander Hamilton had tMs sort in mind wlien lie brought his fist down on the table and shouted, " The people, sir, the people is a great beast ! " So did Roger Sherman when he said, " The people immediately should have as little to do as may be about government." So did Elbridge Grerry when he declared democracy to be the worst of all political evils. So did John Adams when he demanded a separate representation for " the rich and the well-born." Hence they joined to interpose an electoral college between the peo- ple and the presidency, and the legislatures be- tween the people and the Senate. In 1900, the average American had had 1,046 days of school- ing — more than twelve times as much as his great-grandfather — yet Hamilton's sneer is still flung at him, and he is held unfit to choose a United States senator or pass upon an act of his legislature! The fact is, the common people are no longer " masses," nor do they behave like mobs. They have broken up into individuals. There is no real likeness between a deliberate referendum vote in sparsely settled Oregon and the offhand, tumultuous decision of six thousand Athenians met in their agora. Heavy Tories dub this " the 6 THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK era of crowds " ; but that is just what it is not. For crowds and mental epidemics go to the Mid- dle Ages, to Russia, to the Orient. Ours is the era of publics. Between the rule of the mob and the sovereignty of public opinion there is all the difference in the world, for the one enthrones the worst selves of the people, the other their best selves. Nevertheless, privilege screams the old taunts, and hurls at the pondered public opin- ion of to-day the worn epithets of the crowd psy- chologists — " hysteria,^' " frenzy," " delusion," " fanaticism," " clamor," and " impulse." SOAP AND DEMOCRACY Soap and water are befriending democracy. Of the personal habits of the masses down to the middle of the last century, the less said the better. The followers of Jack Cade and Rienzi were, literally, "the Great Unwashed." A gentleman had some excuse for crying " Faugh ! " and holding his civet-scented handkerchief to his nose. The common people lost quickly the re- spect of those of their number who had won through to cleanliness and refinement. "Good breeding " referred to baths rather than to man- ners. When, sixty years ago, street-cars were 7 CHANGIISTG AMERICA introduced, it was predicted that no gentleman could endure to ride in them. How is it now? The street-car is so popular with all classes that the cab can hardly find a foothold. Besides the triumphant progress of the private bath-tub — thanks to cheap city water — the cities have been installing municipal baths. Last year thirty-four American cities supplied more than eighteen million free baths. And the movement is in its infancy, if we consider what England and Germany are doing. The effect will be narrowing of the esthetic space between those with social position and those without. Class distinctions will count for less when they turn merely on whether you have an automobile, or keep a servant, or dress for dinner. NON-PARTIZAN RELIGION On the walls of old Roumanian churches are to be seen frescos of the Last Judgment, in which kings, nobles, and bishops are being led off to hell, while St. Peter welcomes a throng of peas- ants to paradise. This consoling prospect of redress was a soporific that kept the people quiet while they were shorn. The earlier prayer-book of the English Church defines " duty toward my 8 THE OUTLOOK FOE PLAIN FOLK neiglibor '' as including " to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters." No wonder the titled rake surmised, " God will think twice before he damns a person of quality ! '' To-day, through his twenty thousand village " popes,'' the Czar can drug his peasants with the story that the St. Petersburg massacre was worked up by Japanese spies. Without the enlivening prick of competition, a centralized ecclesiastical ma- chine at last betrays the people to the Powers that Be. The religion a hierarchy ladles out to its dupes is chloroform. How cheering, then, is the fact that many Western peoples have already escaped the grip of centralized churches, and that there is no prospect of their ever again fall- ing under priestly dictation. In all the forenoon lands, the end of clericalism is in sight. Reli- gion, of course, will live, but not as a prop to the authority of a dominating class. That scarcity enhances value is as true of hu- man beings as it is of fancy stock or fast horses. Now, there are signs that folks will soon cease to be a glut in the market. In what time a babe grows to manhood, the birth-rate of Italy has fallen a tenth, of Hungary an eighth, of Germany and Holland a seventh, of France and Scotland 9 CHANGING AMEEICA a sixth, of England a fifth. But not from hard times, mark you. For why should the baby crop of Australasia have shrunk a third? Why should the proportion of children among Ameri- cans have fallen a quarter in forty years? No symptom of pressure, this, but of release — re- lease of women from the home " sphere," of wives from the yoke of husbands, of married couples from the injunction to " increase and multiply." The unlooked-for promptness with which the mil- lions have developed a sense of responsibility in this matter of family bids us hope for a Golden Age when the specter of overpopulation will be laid forever. Tell a Celestial gentleman of a myriad of Chinese wiped out by plague or flood, and you get the bland comment, " Plenty Chinamen left ! " Such contempt is natural wherever overbreeding has cheapened humanity. In the teeming Orient common people seem as little considered as clay pigeons at the shooting traps. Being a grass- hopper in the eyes of others, the individual ends by being a grasshopper in his own eyes. Hence, in the East, pessimistic religion, crouching obe- dience to rulers, wifely submission, subordina- tion of self to family or community, frivolous sui- 10 THE OUTLOOK FOE PLAIN FOLK cide, meager philanthropy. The West, on the other hand, is already the region of dear men; with a slackening output of babies, human beings will become still dearer. The Black Death, by sweeping away a third of the English people in the fourteenth century, so enhanced a man's worth that serfdom came to an end. On the same principle, a lighter birth-rate will give the common people not only more economic value, but also more social and political value. THE PROMISE OF LEISURE The let-up in the struggle for food and the springing up of a population of iron slaves — the machines — to do man's bidding, hold out the promise of a broader margin of leisure for all. Few realize how much the political nullity of the masses has been due to their intense preoccupa- tion with the stern task of earning a living. Of necessity, they have been too engrossed with their work to lift their eyes to the common weal. But who can doubt that, ere long, all elements in society will have time to read, to think, to con- sult together, to organize? This cannot but make them abler to win and to retain political power. Popular intelligence has always proven 11 CHANGmG AMEEICA an embarrassment to ruling classes, and they throw what obstacles they can in the way of it. Moreover, it takes leisure, and Tv^ll-employed lei- sure, to fit the plain people successfully to take part in government. The appalling crudeness of their ideas has again and again defeated well- meant attempts to give a larger share of control to the workers. Unless such have a margin of free time, the words of Jesus ben Sirach are as true to-day as when they were written: " The wisdom of the scribe cometh by opportunity of leisure ; And he that hath little business shall become wise. How shall be become wise that holdeth the plow, That glorieth in the shaft of the goad, That driveth oxen, and is occupied with their labors, And whose discourse is of the stock of bulls? He will set his heart upon turning his furrows ; And his wakefulness is to give his heifers their fodder. So is every artificer and workmaster . . . So is the smith sitting by the anvil . . . So is the potter sitting at his work . . . All these put their trust in their hands ; And each becometh wise in his own work. . . They shall not be sought for in the council of the peo- ple . . ."* The coming rule of the functional people will therefore be warranted, not by their present wis- * Ecclesiasticus, xxxviii. The passage is too long to quote in full. 12 THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK dom, but by the intelligence they are likely to acquire when they have conquered for themselves a fair share of the leisure made possible by man's new mastery of the forces of nature. /Science is helping, in its way, to break down the claim of a particular class to act for the rest. A century ago a German apologist for aristocracy made the point that peasant and noble are not at all the same in bodily organization. They look alike, but a chemical examination would show an immense difference between them. The clod- hopper is merely a lump of organized potato, able to move itself and assimilate more potato. But the noble is made out of delicate viands — pheasants, truffles, and the like. In nerve and brain, therefore, prince and commoner are of dif- ferent clay. To-day Science scoffs at such a foundation for caste. THE FETISH OF HEREDITY So is it with the notion of heredity to which a privileged class appeals. Aristocracy predi- cates its superiority on the theory that the founder of a line hands down his capacity un- diminished to his descendants. Biology shows 13 CHANGING AMERICA that this original surplus of brains is by mar- riage halved in each generation; that extraor- dinary ability cannot be transmitted far, because the older race-heredity keeps pulling one's de- scendants down toward the race mean; that among the privileged the fools and weaklings are not winnowed out, as they are among plain people, but propagate their kind unhindered. Still, for all it pricks certain pink balloons of pretension, let us own frankly that Science can be twisted to the support of plutocratic arro- gance. Darwinism strips the common-place man of the dignity that attached to him as a son of God and, moreover, gives the successful a chance to parade themselves as the fittest. Art has been getting nearer the people. The poet or playwright no longer eats out of a royal or ducal hand. The painter is not a courtier, like Eubens or Lely. Artists are finding inspira- tion in the pathos, fidelity, or courage of peas- ants, fishermen, miners, or iron-workers. After Millet, Israels, Meunier, Repin, and Vereshtcha- gin, painters will hardly be content to take their themes from the pageant, the ball-room, or the fox-hunt. After Hugo, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Haupt- mann, and Hardy, imaginative writers are not 14 THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK likely to accept the feudal stigma on labor, nor to echo the sneer of Renan : " The masses do not count, are a mere bulk of raw material out of which, drop by drop, the essence is extracted.'' The needs of discipline make army and navy hotbeds of caste feeling, of contempt for the civil, or at least for the industrial, population. In view of the Juggernaut of European militarism, we Americans ought to be thankful that we should have to multiply our navy by seven to make it bulk among us as the navy bulks in Great Britain. In Germany, one man in thirty is in barracks, being drilled into deference and obed- ience; in the United States, one man in three hundred. We should need to multiply our army by ten to have overbearing officers knocking their men about and running civilians through with their swords, as in Germany. The newspaper cartoon is a democrat. Some day the inventor of it will rank with Gutenberg, for in enlightening the people on public affairs it is to red ink and capitals what the arc-light is to the tallow dip. Give it much of the credit for the growing failure of the bosses to hoodwink the voters. It is like the Greek fire that saved civilization from the Turks. Lie? Of course 15 CHAlTGmG AMEEICA tHe political machine, too, can launch its car- toons, but a false cartoon is like a wet rocket. It does not go off. Some, I know, will pooh-pooh my showing. " You are behind the times," I hear them say. " Actually the trend is all the other way. How about the rule of Big Business in American cities and states? Have not special interests, working through party machines, made self-government a fiction? And if democracy has become a sham in the house of its guardians, what hope is there for it elsewhere? No. What has been lost is not democracy, but certain fruits of democracy. The interests have their way only because they work in the dark — always in the dark. They contrive to fool enough of the people enough of the time. There is robbery by the mailed fist, and robbery by the lithe hand. The feudal classes spoiled the peo- ple like a Front de Boeuf, the corporations to- day filch from us like Fagin. The plain people here are not weak, as they are in Russia, in India, in South America. They are strong, but they have not been taking notice — that is all. They have been too sure, too careless, too trusting. But it will not take generations of slow upbuild- 16 THE OUTLOOK FOE PLAIN FOLK ing to put the people again at the helm. Ring the tocsin a few years, and we shall see who is master. Is it, then, all plain sailing for the common people? In this country the thronging in from the backward, benighted lands hurts socially the callings and circles that the immigrants enter. Their habits cause Americans to shrink from them as from a lower caste. Their helplessness invites oppression. Certain official brutalities peculiar to us — white peonage, police clubbing, the " sweat-box,'' the " third degree," the conyict- lease system — got their start in the abuse of the friendless alien. Their wage-cutting, " scabbing," and strike-breaking foment violence, which leads to the ready bayonet, state constabularies, and the denial of home rule to cities. Their po- litical crudeness brings reproach on democratic institutions. Their clannishness delivers them to the shrewd boss who gives them " representa- tion " on his ticket. Finally, our increasing di- versity in blood and tradition, by permitting race prejudice to be played upon, divides and weakens the people in their fight for self-government. Nor is this all. 17 CHANGING AMEKICA The startling inequalities of wealth that have sprung up in a generation threaten to establish class distinctions hostile to democracy. For the tendency of such abysmal contrasts is thus : The ultra-rich vie in extravagance. The spectacle of their baronial estates, princely houses, liveried lackeys, Sybaritic luxury, and elaborate ostenta- tion infects even the worthy with the worship of wealth. Success comes to be measured by the sheer cash standard. The young and ambitious realize it, and shape their course accordingly. People fall apart into as many social groups as there are styles of living, and forget how to meet their fellows on the level. The rule is, snobbish- ness toward those below you, and toadyism toward those above you. The rich are gan- grened with pride, the poor with envy. There is no longer a public opinion, there are only clash- ing class opinions. Honest labor is felt to be more disgraceful than mean parasitism. The toiling millions cease to be respected, even by themselves. The upper classes claim and are conceded the right to lead, finally the right to govern. Such would be the course of the malady. Un- less democracy mends the distribution of wealth, 18 THE OUTLOOK FOE PLAIN FOLK the mal-distribution of wealth will end democ- racy. And yet — summing up — the balance inclines in favor of democracy. The forces on its side reach deeper; they are civilizational. The swarming in of low-grade immigrants and the mal-distribution of wealth are manageable things. They can be, in fact elsewhere have been, success- fully dealt with by organized society. They are matters for statesmanship. So it is more likely that democracy will cut the roots of privilege than that privilege will cut the roots of democ- racy. Let the half-stifled muck-raker, the faltering soldier of the common good, the down-hearted re- former leave his trench for a moment and climb to the hilltop that looks out on all the peoples and on all the forces of the age. He will see that " the lips of the morning are reddening ! '' 19 II THE WORLD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY rriHIKTY odd years ago when the Shah, of -■" Persia was in Berlin as guest of the Ger- man Kaiser, a special musical program was given at Kroll's Theater for the pleasure of the East- ern potentate. At the close the Shah was asked if there was any number he would like to have repeated. Yes, would the orchestra please re- peat the first number? They played it, but he was dissatisfied; the piece that had caught his fancy was the one before that. Finally it be- came clear that what he wanted to hear again was the musicians tuning up their instruments. After His Majesty and suite had vacated the royal palace provided for their stay, the splen- did apartments were found to be in horrible con- dition ; for every morning the sun-worshipers had sacrificed goats in the tapestried audience hall! The other day from the land of this barbarian ruler came the cry of the Persian Majliss or as- 20 WOELD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCEACY sembly to the American Congress appealing for its support for maintaining popular government in Persia. Within six years we hav^ seen the creation of parliaments in Turkey, Russia, Persia and China, the birth of a republic in Portugal and in China, the overthrow of " Diaz-potism '' in Mexico, the startling spread of unrest in India and the growth of political socialism in all Western countries. Wherefore this stirring of Demos in many lands? There is no central fire that breaks out in volcanic eruption, now here, now there, for between Portugal and Asia, between the Far East and the Near East there is no secret co- operation. The peoples are restless because the world over certain universal causes are under- mining arbitrary and anti-social government. THE WHITE man's OBJECT-LESSONS As the pushing white man plants his settle- ments here and there over the globe, he furnishes other races impressive object lessons, in good government. Sixty years ago Hong-Kong was a barren rock infested by pirates. Now it har- bors a third of a million Chinese under the union jack and the number is ever swelling. 21 CHANGING AMEEICA Recently the Colony provided for the countless junks and sampans that line the shore a " typhoon refuge '' where, in case the little house-boat swamps, John and his family will find themselves in water of wading depth. At great cost the government has lined all the ravines and gullies that lace the mountain side with cement drains, so that not a hoof-printful of rainwater shall stand breeding the pestilent mosquito. At street corners boxes are placed to receive dead rats, for the rat is the bearer of the bubonic plague. In a single year sixty thousand dead rats were collected and examined and three hundred yielded evidences which subjected the wards from which they came to plague meas- ures. Imagine how the streams of Celestials cir- culating between Hong-Kong and the mainland spread the knowledge of what a civilized govern- ment does for its people! At Shanghai and Tientsin, veritable fairylands to the Chinese, they cannot but contrast the throngs of rick- shas, dog-carts, broughams and motor cars that pour endlessly through the spotless asphalt streets with the narrow, crooked, filthy, noisome streets of the native city, to be traversed only afoot or in sedan chair. Even the young mian- 22 WOELD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCEACY darin, burled alive in some dingy walled town of tlie far interior, without news, events, or so- ciety, recalls with longing the lights, the gor- geous tea houses and the alluring " sing song " girls of Foochow Eoad and curses the stupid policy that penalizes every enterprising China- man who tries to " start something " for the ben- efit of the community. At Kiaouchou the Ger- mans with their handsome streets, quays, docks, schools, parks and reforested hillsides are giving an object lesson to the intelligent Chinese. HEALTHY GOVERNMENT IS "CATCHING" Foreign residence or travel is another thing that converts the Asiatic to the Western idea of government for the people. Mournfully he con- trasts the wonderful bustle, riches and power of the self-governing countries with the sloth, pov- erty and weakness of his own country. The " Young Turk " movement started with Turks who knew the West and was at first directed from Paris. Wherever Chinese wander — Singapore, Borneo, Indo-China, Java, the Philip- pines — they find a better government than China has ever known. In the Malay States there are thirty; Chinese millionaires, yet until 23 CHANGING AMERICA lately not one of these dared return to his native province lest the mandarin, in the name of an old law which forbids the subjects of the Son of Heaven to leav^ the realm without permission, should lay him by the heels and wring his wealth out of him. Can we wonder that the ten mil- lions of Chinese prospering outside of China are enthusiastic supporters of the Chinese Revolu- tion? In spite of their discreet avoidance of political meddling, the missionary educators have been mining the foundations of the Asiatic state. In Robert's College and Beirut College the son of the muleteer as well as the son of the pasha learned of a kind of government that allows free speech, free press, free movement, free assem- blage and equality of all before the law. In the fourteen Protestant mission colleges planted about China the sons of peasants and of gentry became acquainted with Western discussions on liberty, equality and the responsibilities of rulers to the people. In certain of these colleges all the finer lads soon joined the secret societies that were striving to get the Manchu " old-man-of-the- sea '' off the back of the Chinese. As translator, too, the missionary has been an 24 WOELD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCEACY innocent abettor of revolution. He not only did the Bible into the Oriental tongues, but also the masterpieces of Western thought, including treatises on political science. Thus the intelli- gent natives have learned of the blessings we ex- pect from government, of our notion that the rulers are the servants, not the masters of the people. They become fascinated by the vision and read on and on till their minds are com- pletely alienated from Oriental ideas. Only when there is a crack in governmental authority and the red-hot lava rushes up through it, can we appreciate the heat and stress of the minds that have undergone this conversion. The native newspaper press is the chief dis- seminator of new ideas among the common peo- ple. Within a few weeks after the upheaval in Constantinople, over two hundred new papers had appeared. The peoples of Turkey have de- veloped a great interest in public happenings and their consumption of newspapers contin- ually rises. In China the last decade has seen the growth of a native press believed to include not less than four hundred sheets. In the vil- lages a number of poor men club together and subscribe for some paper published from the safe 25 CHANGING AMEEICA shelter of a foreign concession. It is understood in what order they shall read it and by the time the copy reaches subscriber number 5, it is worn to a rag. Among the illiterates the new ideas are spread by means of clever cartoons. REALITIES OF ORIENTAL GOVERNMENT Light always converts the Oriental into an in- surgent because governments of the classic Asiatic type cannot stand comparison. Through their crude taxing methods they torment the peo- ple needlessly, like a clumsy sheep shearer who cannot remove the fleece without taking skin as well as wool. They fail to afford security, the sine qua non of thrift and enterprise. " Never will I invest a penny of my money outside the zone of foreign protection,'^ Wu Ting Fang once told me. Oriental governments bleed new in- dustries instead of encouraging them. Failing to separate the judicial from the executive, their courts are courts of injustice. The claim of the crown to all hidden wealth discourages the min- ing of the precious metals. Highways are not provided and public works are neglected. In consequence enterprises stifle, the people do not develop their capacities, and inevitably the bulk 26 WOELD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY of them remain ignorant, superstitious, ap- athetic and poor. In a recent book ,the Empress Dowager's first lady-in-waiting tells how among the Empress's New Year's presents were four bags of perfectly matched pearls from the Viceroy of Canton. Her Majesty, however, had already such stores of pearls that she took no notice of the splendid gift beyond remarking that they were "very nice." The Viceroy of Chili sent a cloak so overlaid with precious stones that Her Majesty found it " too heavy " and never wore it but once. Other viceroys sent like gifts, for each must keep himself in favor at Peking. In view of the squandering of peasant money on costly gewgaws for the court and on the pensions of a million Manchus, one cannot be surprised at the blood-curdling slogan, " Fellow countrymen, the Manchu has eaten our flesh long enough ; hence- forth we intend to sleep in his skin ! " The common characteristic of governments free from any form of popular control is that they take much and return little. Saving an oc- casional Alfred, or Frederick the Great, or Joseph the Second, no government serves the people unless it has to. The irresponsible rulers 27 CHAIN-GING- AMERICA either exact more or do less than popular govern- ments — usually both. In an " Oriental '^ coun- try four-fifths of the services we expect from gov- ernments are unknown. Roads, street cleaning, fire fighting, sanitation, patents, forestry, agri- cultural experiment, education and care of the poor are not recognized as duties of the official. Naturally, then, when Orientals learn of the tender and considerate revenue systems of the West, when they hear of the benefits showered upon the citizen, when they contrast the hard- working, business-like official on a fixed salary with the cormorant pashas and mandarins, they feel just as we should feel under such circum- stances; for human nature resents giving some- thing for nothing. Recent developments make it clear that the in- teraction between East and West is to produce, not compromise, but a complete acceptance of Western fundamental institutions by the Orient. It does not appear that the Asiatics balk at our political and social arrangements any more than they reject our surgery, telephones, or tramcars. In other words, the willed elements in our civ- ilization — not its' noxious by-products — are congenial to human nature and therefore of uni- 28 WORLD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY versal validity. It appears that the Turk hates espionage, arbitrary arrest, the passport system, the " baksheesh " plan and other practices of ab- solutism. He enjoys inviolability of domicile, sacredness of private correspondence, freedom from illegal arrest, liberty of assemblage, of speech and of the press. The Chinaman hates " squeeze,'^ official sloth and the waste of public money ; he likes roads, police, schools, and a uni- form currency. FROM SWORD TO SHEKEL Whenever the hated absolute government falls before a united people, all expect the event to usher in the Golden Age. In the Turkish " feast of liberty " there was a fraternization like that of the French at the Festival of the Constitution in 1790. Christian and Turk, Moslem and Jew, Kurd and Armenian, priest and layman, official and citizen, fell into one another's arms and kissed. But this spirit of brotherhood does not last long. Usually, the propertied middle class gains most, w^hile the dependent classes may be worse off after the change. In Japan the new industrialism is working out its inevitable re- sults in overwork, long hours, underpay, child 29 CHAN^Gma AMEEICA labor and female labor. Yeti the cotton and silk lords from Osaka and Kyoto, sitting in Parlia- ment, defeat every attempt of a paternal govern- ment to pass factory laws. The parliamentary regime at first seats certain classes in the sad- dle and the attainment of genuine democracy in any Oriental country will call for many strug- gles and sacrifices. Nevertheless, a society in which only two-thirds are skinned is better off than a society in which nine out of ten are flayed. The rule of the shekel is milder than the double despotism of shekel and sword. THE DEMOCRACY OF SOCIALISM The advance of socialism in Western countries i^ simply the later phase of the world wide drift toward democracy. Although possessed of the ballot, the working class has so far done little for itself because laborers have persisted in accept- ing and acting on the economic philosophy of their employers. But now there exists a full- fledged, working class philosophy — with press, literature, program and propaganda — which is dignified by the support of scholars, scientists, artists, prelates, publicists, journalists and statesmen. This philosophy calls black that 30 WOELD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCEACY which the reigning business-class philosophy calls white, and calls white that which the other calls black. It declares that the workers, not the idlers, are the cornerstone of society and in- sists that the first thing to be considered is liveli- hoods, not profits. However biased and wTong- headed this economic philosophy may be, it does give the working man courage to take a line of his own and develop his own attitude toward the social system the possessing class have framed. Through his own organs and orators he learns of damning facts once kept from him and becomes critical, self-assertive and demanding. The spread of socialism, then, is but the latest phase of the universal tendency for the people to endeavor to control government for their own benefit. 31 Ill THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE A CENTUEY ago Malthus startled the world •^^^ by demonstrating that our race naturally multiplies faster than it can increase its food supply, with the result that population tends ever to press painfully upon the means of sub- sistence. So long as mankind reproduces freely, numbers can be adjusted to resources only by the grinding of destructive agencies, such as war, famine, poverty and disease. To be sure, this ghastly train of ills may be escaped if only peo- ple will prudently postpone marriage. Since, however, late marriage calls for the exercise of more foresight and self-control than can be looked for in the masses, Malthus painted the fu- ture of humanity with a somberness that gave political economy its early nickname of "the dismal science." Malthus is not in the least " refuted " by the fact that, during his century, the inhabitants of 32 THE FALLUTG BIRTH-EATE Europe leaped in number from; one hundred and eighty-seven millions to four hundred millions, with no increase but rather a diminution of misery. It is true, unprecedented successes in augmenting the food supply have staved off the overpopulation danger. Within a life time, not only have the arts of food raising made giant strides, but, at the world's rim, great virgin tracts have been brought under the plow, while steam hurries to the larders of the Old World their surplus produce. But such a bounty of the gods is not rashly to be capitalized. While there is no limit to be set to the progress of scientific agriculture, no one can show where our century is to find its Mississippi Valley, Argentina, Canada, or New Zealand to fill with herds or farms. The vaunted plenty of our time adjourns but does not dispel the haunting vision of a starving race on a crowded planet. THE RACE-WIDE DECLINE IN THE BIRTH-RATE Nevertheless, the clouds that hung low about the future are breaking. The terrible Malthus failed to anticipate certain influences which in some places have already so far checked multi- plication] as to ameliorate the lot of even the 33 CHANGING AMEEICA lower and broader social layers. The sagging of the national birth-rate made its first appear- ance about fifty years ago in France, thereby giv- ing the other peoples a chance to thank God they were not as these decadent French. But the thing has become so general that to-day no people dares to point the finger of scorn. In 1878, after the notorious trial of the " Neo-Mal- thusians," Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant, for cir- culating " The Fruits of Philosophy," the fall of the birth-rate began in England. During the eighties, it invaded Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. In 1889 it seized with great viru- lence upon Australia, again as sequel to a law- case. Just before the close of the century Fin- land, Italy and Hungary fell into line. In Ger- many and Austria it is only within four or five years that the economists have begun to discuss " our diminishing fecundity." In all Christen- dom, only Eussia, the Balkan states and French Canada show the old-fashioned birth-rates of forty, fifty or even fifty-five, per thousand. If for each nation we compare the average birth-rate of 1903-5, with that of 1876-80, the per cent, of decline is as follows : — 34 THE FALLING BIETH-EATE New Zealand 34 Germany 17 New South Wales 30 Norway 16 England 25 Sweden 15 Scotland 21 Switzerland 13 Belgium 21 Austria 12 France 20 Italy 12 Holland 18 Denmark 11 Hungary 18 Ireland 9 The tendency in the United States is best re- vealed in the diminishing number of children un- der five years to each thousand women of child- bearing age. The decline from 1860 to 1890 is 24 per cent. 1850 626 1860 634 1870 572 1880 559 1890 485 1900 479 As the bulk of our recent immigration comes from the more prolific European peoples, certain New England states which are rapidly filling with aliens show a slight rise in fecundity. If, however, the contribution of the native women be separated from that of the foreign born women, it appears that the old American stock there is dying out. 35 CHANGmG AMEEICA THE DEATH-RATE FALLS FASTER THAN THE BIRTH-RATE Owing to the fact that the death rate has been falling even faster than the birth rate, there is, so far, no slackening in the growth of numbers. Indeed, part of the fall in the birth rate merely reflects the increasing proportion of aged. But it is certain that human life cannot be prolonged indefinitely, while there is no telling how far the aversion to large families may go. We may, therefore, count on a marked retardation in the growth of the Western peoples within our life- time. THE NEW MORTALITY MORE CONTAGIOUS THAN THE NEW FECUNDITY The forces reducing the death-rate are by no means the same as those cutting down the birth- rate, nor have they the same sphere of operation. Deaths are fewer because of advances in medi- cine, better medical education, public hospitals, pure water supply, milk inspection, housing re- form and sanitation. Births are rarer owing to enlightenment, the ascent of women and individ- ualistic democracy. The former may be intro- 36 THE FALLING BIETH-EATE duced quickly, from aboye. The latter await the slow action of the school, the press, the ballot, the loosening of custom. For this reason, where a backward folk is brought under efficient modern administration, the proportion of deaths may be rapidly reduced even though the people continue to breed in the old reckless way. This is why in Kussia and India, with their amazing birth-rate of 49 per thousand (New Jersey and Michigan have 18.5!), Science saves lives from disease only to lose them to famine. Here, then, is a factor which threatens to rupture the military and po- litical equilibrium between French and Ger- mans, between Germans and Slavs, between Europeans and Asiatics, between the white race and the yellow and brown races. If ever pacific China flames out into a Yellow Peril it will be in that momentous interval between her laying down drains and her quitting ancestor worship. FALSE INTERPRETATION An abrupt fall in the birth-rate of from 10 to 20 per cent, among the four hundred million bearers of the Occidental torch is a phenomenon so vast and so pregnant as to excite the liveliest 37 CHANGING AMEEICA speculation. Some lay it to physiological steril- ity produced by alcohol, city life and over-civil- ization. There are, indeed, in some quarters, notably in New England, evidences of a decline in female fertility ; but, on the whole, the lower birth-rate reflects the smaller size of families rather than the greater frequency of childless couples. New South Wales with a lower birth- rate than England has less than half her pro- portion of sterile unions. Others insist that vice, club-life, the comfort- able celibacy of cities, and the access of women to the occupations are turning people away from wedlock. It is true that the proportion of single women is increasing with us. Still, few peoples are so much married as Americans, and, for all that, their birth-rate has fallen fast and fallen far. Michigan, which is about as addicted to the married state as any white community in the world, has only two-thirds the fecundity of Eng- land and half that of Hungary. The root causes of the general shrinkage in fecundity are certain characteristic tendencies in our civilization. 38 THE FALLING BIETH-EATE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY Perhaps the master force of our time is de- mocracy. The barriers of caste are down so that more and more a man's social standing de- pends upon himself. The lists of life are open to all, and the passion to " succeed '' grows with the value of the prizes to be won. Never before did so many common people strain to reach a higher rung in the social ladder. But prudence bids these eager climbers avoid whatever will im- pede one's ascent or imperil one's footing. Children are incumbrances, so the ambitious dread the handicap of an early marriage and a large family. Even the unselfish, whose aim is to assure their children a social position equal to or superior to their own, will see to it that there are not more children than they can prop- erly equip. THE CONTAGION OF WANTS The effect of democracy is reinforced by the break-up of custom. As fixed class distinctions fade out, people cease to be guided by the tra- ditional standard of comfort of their class. It is no longer enough to live as father and mother lived. Wants and tastes once confined to the 39 CHANGING AMEEICA social elect, spread resistlesslj downward and in- fect the masses. Tidal waves of imitation carry the craving for luxuries hitherto looked upon as the prerogative of the rich among millions of people of limited means, and these, in their self- ish haste to gratify their new wants, learn to economize in offspring. Here the decencies, there the comforts, yonder the vanities of life compete with the possible child and bar it from existence. THE RISING VALUE OF WOMAN So long as woman existed for wifehood alone, her childbirth pangs did not count. Uncon- sciously the husband accepted the dictum of Luther, " If a woman becomes weary or at last dead from bearing, that matters not; let her then die from bearing, she is there to do it." But the great movement that has burst the fet- ters on woman's mind, and opened to her so many careers, exalts her in the marriage part- nership and causes the heavy price of mother- hood to be more considered by her husband as well as by herself. BLESSINGS FROM THE LESSENING OF FECUNDITY However we account for the fall in the birth- 40 THE FALLINGS BIETH-EATE rate, there is no question as to its consequences. The decline registers itself in a rising plane of comfort, a growth of small savings and a wider diffusion of ownership. Owing to the better care enjoyed by the aged when they do not have to compete for attention with an over- large brood of wailing infants, there is a striking increase in longevity. A greater proportion of lives are rounded out to the Psalmist's term. There is also a wonderful saving of life among infants, for often prolificacy does nothing but fill the churchyards with wee mounds. There is mournful meaning in the fact that the French Canadians, famed for their full quivers, show the census-taker no larger families than other Canadians. The shocking Slavic average of seven or eight births to a mother, is shadowed by the needless loss during the first year of a full fourth of all those bom. When we consider that in 1790 there were in this country just twice as many children under 16 to adults over 20 as there are to-day we un- derstand why the law limits child labor and in- sists on keeping children in school. The fact that now the average woman has about half as many children under 16 to look after as her 41 CHAl^GING AMERICA great-grandmother had throws a great light on the underlying causes of the women's club move- ment, the changing notion of woman's " sphere," the growing interest of women in public affairs, and the equal suffrage movement. With big families vanishes what Bishop Pot- ter called " the slaughter of women in the in- terest of bearing sixteen children." From the numerous gravestones to the third, fourth and even fifth wife in the Old New England burying grounds, we know that the teeming households of olden times were bought with a price and that the mothers paid it. The Puritan deification of fatherhood has well been characterized as " a system of female sacrifice — not to ancestors, but to descendants." VANISHING OF THE OVERPOPULATION SPECTER But the supreme service of forethoughted parenthood is that it bids fair to deliver us from the overpopulation horror, which was becoming more imminent with every stride in medicine or public hygiene. Most of the Western peoples have now an excess of births over deaths of one per cent, a year. If even a third of this increase should find a footing over sea, the home expan- 4^ THE FALLING BIETH-EATE sion would still be such that, at a future date no more remote from us than the founding of Jamestown, Europe w^ould groan under a popu- lation of three billions, while the United States of that day, with twice as many people as Europe now has, would be to China what China is to the present United States. Besides its attendant misery and degradation, population pressure sharpens every form of struggle among men, — competition, class strife, and war — and the dream of a moral redemption of our race would vanish into thin air if the enlightened peoples had failed to meet the crisis created by the re- duction of mortality. Once it seemed as if man's propensity to multiply foredoomed him to live ever in the pres- ence of vast immedicable woe. However smiling the gardens of Daphne, they had always to slope down into a huge malodorous quagmire of wretchedness. The wheel of Ixion, the cup of Tantalus, symbolized humanity striving ever by labor and ingenuity to relieve itself of a painful burden, only to have that burden inexorably rolled back upon it by its own fatal fecundity. Who could have foreseen that the evangel of freedom, universal instruction and individual 43 CHANGING AMEEICA self-development would so soon banish the over- population specter and clear the way for indef- inite progress? There is, to be sure, another side to the shield. THE UGLY SIDE OF RESTRICTION The new power to control the size of the fam- ily is at first wielded recklessly and selfishly. The very motives that have wholesomely mod- erated national fecundity prompt some couples to shirk all duties to the race. The egoistic dread of being handicapped in the pursuit of vanities might, if it became general, cause pop- ulation to dwindle even in an Eden. The shrinkage of thirty per cent, in the baby crop of roomy New South Wales in sixteen years is a portent. Are we coming to a time when the state will have to hire couples to produce chil- dren? Among the over-canny are found many stunted one-child and two-child families, the children of which are likely to lack in stamina and char- acter. Such a domestic ideal is morbid and nox- ious. The type it is safe to standardize is not the family of from one to three children, but the 44 THE FALLING BIETH-EATE family of from four to six children. The dwarf family, which is getting all too common in some circles, will hurry to Avernus the class, the peo- ple or the race that adopts it. The rising are the first to become child-shy, and so, as the witty Frenchman observed, " All the big families live in the little houses and all the little families live in the big houses." Since half the nation's children come from a quarter of the families, race deterioration soon sets in if the successful withhold their quota while the stupid multiply like rabbits. This recruitment from below is, however, a passing phase and some peoples are nearly by it. In England the careless prolificacy of the neglected masses is demonstrably lowering the race aver- age, but in democratic France, Scandivania, Australia and the United States the middle- sized family is coming to prevail at all levels of society. COMING BARRIERS TO IMMIGRATION Now that cheap travel stirs the social deeps and far-beckoning opportunity fills the steer- ages, immigration becomes ever more serious to the people that hopes to rid itself at least of 45 CHANGING AMEEICA slums, " masses " and " submerged." What is the good of practising prudence in the family if hungry strangers may crowd in and occupy at the banquet table of life the places reserved for its children? Shall it in order to relieve the teeming lands of their unemployed abide in the pit of wolfish competition and renounce the fair prospect of a growth in suavity, comfort and re- finement? If not, then the low-pressure society must not only slam its doors upon the indraught, but must double-lock them with forts and iron- clads, lest they be burst open by assault from some quarter where " cannon food '' is cheap. The rush of developments makes it certain that the vision of a globe " lapt in universal law '' is premature. If the seers of the mid-century who looked for the speedy triumph of free trade had read their Malthus aright, they might have an- ticipated the tariff barriers that have risen on all hands within the last thirty years. So, to- day one needs no prophet's mantle to foresee that presently the world will be cut up with immi- gration barriers which will never be leveled un- til the intelligent accommodation of numbers to resources has greatly equalized population pres- sure all over the globe. The French resent the 46 THE FALLING BIRTH-EATE million and a third aliens that have been squeezed into hollow and prosperous France by pressure in the neighbor lands. The English re- strict immigration from the Continent. The Germans feel the thrust from the overstocked Slavic areas. The United States, Canada, Aus- tralia and South Africa are barring out the Asiatic. Dams against the color races, with spillways of course for students, merchants and travelers, will presently enclose the white man's world. Within this area minor dams will pro- tect the high wages of the less prolific peoples against the surplus labor of the more prolific. Assuredly, every small-family nation will try to raise such a dam and every big-family nation will try to break it down. The outlook for peace and disarmament is, therefore, far from bright. One needs but compare the population- pressures in France, Germany, Kussia and Japan i to realize that, even to-day, the real enemy of \ the dove of peace is not the eagle of pride or the j vulture of greed but the stork ! r RESTRICTION AND RACE DESTINY The great point of doubt in birth restriction is the ability of the Western nations to retain 47 CHANGING AMERICA control of the vast African, Australasian and South American areas they have staked out as preserves to be peopled at their leisure with the diminishing overflow of their population. If underbreeding should leave them without the military strength that alone can defend their far flung frontiers in the Southern Hemisphere, those huge under-developed regions will as- suredly be filled with the children of the brown and the yellow races, and the whites will con- tribute less than they ought to the blood of the ultimate race that is to possess the globe. One starts at the thought that some day, when the Olympic games are held in a glittering capital by the waters of Victoria Nyanza, the Kirghiz- American champion of the hammer-throw may divide the hanzais of the amphitheater with the almond-eyed winner of the Marathon race ! 48 IV i THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INCREASING DIVORCE THE PROVEN TREND rilWENTY years ago an investigation by the -'- Department of Labor showed that, between 1867 and 1886, 328,716 divorces had been granted in the United States, and that divorces were increasing two and one-half times as fast as population. The recent census for the period 1887-1906 brings to light 945,625 divorces and establishes that the movement constantly gains in velocity. At present, probably one marriage in ten is broken by divorce and in some states the proportion may be as high as one in four. Forty years ago the broad contrast was between North and South ; but the divorce rates of North and South have been converging, whereas those of East and West have diverged. The Central States have two and one-half times the rate of the Atlantic States, while for the Western States the proportion is three and one-half. Although the tide of divorce is rising the world over, nowhere is it so high, nowhere is it 49 ^ CHAN-GIlSra AMEEICA rising so fast as in the United States. Our rate is twice that of Switzerland, thrice that of France, five times that of Germany and many times that of England and Canada. The census figures dissipate many false im- pressions. It is often assumed that many couples separate precipitately after the first quarrel before they have given marriage a fair trial. But the average interval before separa- tion exceeds six and one-half years, and is not diminishing. Since more than half the couples lived together above four years, while in the majority of cases the duration of marriage ex- ceeded seven years, it would be rash to surmise that people are forming risky and unstable unions in full view of their easy dissolution. Nor is divorce usually sought in order to re- marry. In Oonnecticut during a period of years the number of divorced persons married was about 40 per cent, of the number divorced in the same time. In Rhode Island from 1889 to 1896 the proportion was only 28 per cent. Re- marriage is one of those cases in which, as Doc- tor Johnson puts it, " hope triumphs over experi- ence," and it is not at all certain that the rate for divorced persons much exceeds that for wid- 5(> INCEEASING DIVORCE ows and widowers of the same age. Certainly the restrictions many states are imposing on re- marriage do not seem to affect appreciably the divorce rate. It is doubtful if one divorce in twenty is ob- tained by migrating to a " liberal " state. The social prominence of such exiles gives them a newspaper and magazine notoriety out of all re- lation to their numbers. A divorce " colony " at Reno or Cheyenne obscures the fact that the practice has descended among the plain people, few of whom can afford to seek relief outside their own state. MISINTERPRETATIONS It is erroneous to suppose that the cause and cure of the drift toward divorce is to be found in legislation. Twenty years ago Professor Will- cox, on the basis of the most rigid investigations, declared " the immediate, direct and measurable influence of legislation is subsidiary, unimpor- tant, almost imperceptible." Says Dr. Dike, the Secretary of the National League for the Protection of the Family : " The direct influence of lax laws in producing the great increase of divorce in the last forty years is relatively: 51 CHANGING AMEEICA small." Moreover, the tendency of legislation for the last twenty years has been decidedly in the direction of greater stringency. The failing grip of the legal institution need not entail a corresponding abandonment of the hallowed ideal of marriage as a lifelong union. If the iron clamp be loosed, it does not follow that the silken cord is weaker. Although in thirty-eight years, the resort to divorce has be- come three times as frequent, there is little to show that couples are taking the vows of wed- lock with any other desire or expectation than union till death. Nor can we conclude that wronged spouses are less faithful than formerly to this ideal. The loveless couples of the good old times appear to have been held together by public opinion, religious ordinance, ignorance of a remedy, the expense of divorce, or the wife's economic helplessness, rather than by a heroic fidelity to an ideal. In nineteen cases out of twenty the marriage purports to be shattered by some flagrant wrong, such as adultery, cruelty, drunkenness, deser- tion, imprisonment for crime, or neglect to pro- vide. Nevertheless, the growth of divorce can- not be taken as a sure sign of increasing de- 52 INCEEASING DIVOECE pravity on the part of husbands or wives. Often the " cause " that figures in the record is a screen for some deep-seated irritant. People will not allow their inmost domestic affairs to be dragged into newspaper publicity. Physi-' cians declare that many marital troubles have! their roots in the pathology of sex, and do not| argue moral fault on the part of either spouse.! Some of those who speak with utmost posi-' tiveness on the divorce problem betray a strange confusion of thought. A new legal cause for di- vorce is stigmatized as "an assault upon the marriage compact/' as if divorce ever broke up a happy home. The clergyman who characterizes a divorce law as " a statute undermining the very substructure of society " implies that noth- ing but coercion holds man and wife together. One divine, with unconscious cynicism, de- nounces divorce as " threatening the very founda- tions of the home.'' Another, who beseeches us to " protect the poor from the evils of loose di- vorce statutes " evidently conceives permission to separate as a malignant entity, going about rend- ing harmonious households. One judge pic- tures it as " the antipodal foe of marriage " which "invades the home and defiles its sanc- 53 CHANGING AMEEICA . titles," under the curious notion that there are any " sanctities '' left in the home made hideous hj brutality or drunkenness. Still more bizarre is the idea that by denying release to the mis- mated we shall "restore the purity of our homes." Very likely the oft-noted purity of homes and faithfulness to the legal tie in this country is in some relation to the opportunity of the dissatisfied to secure relief on a legal basis instead of following secret amorous in- trigue. Evidently there is widespread failure to dis- tinguish between symptom and disease. ECONOMIC CAUSES In view of the fact that two-thirds of the di- vorces are granted to the wife, it is safe to say that the majority of them would not be sought but for the access of women to the industrial field. Between 1870 and 1900, while population doubled, the number of working women trebled. No doubt the openings for women multiplied yet faster. More and more we live in cities and the city gives the woman her chance. The smallness of the alimony contingent — for only one wife in eight obtains alimony — and the presence of 55 54 mCEEASING DIVOECE per cent, of all divorced women among the bread- winners indicate that in most cases the wife who seeks a divorce expects to support herself. Hence, the better her prospect of solving the bread-and-butter question by her own efforts, the oftener the aggrieved wife will pluck up courage to break her fetters and face the world alone. Possibly the fact that in the North the wife takes the initiative in 71 per cent, of the cases, while in the South the wife seeks release in only 55 per cent, of the cases, is not owing to the greater meekness and patience of Southern wives but hinges on the difference in the indus- trial opportunity for women in the two sections. It has been noticed that the communities in which early marriage is the rule are the most free from divorce. The reason is that early sub- jection to the marital yoke hinders the woman developing to her full stature. There is no de- mand of a developing personality more insistent than the liberty to bestow or to withhold one's self and one's love; whereas the dwarfed per- sonality feels no imperative need for self-dis- posal, no profanation in accepting the mate pro- vided. Says Professor Willcox : " Only six- teen to twenty years of age when she passes out 55 CHANGING AMERICA of the control of her father and mother into that of a husband, with no taste of freedom inter- vening, with a mind and character so unformed as easily to be brought into harmony with or submission to her husband's, with no way of es- cape open to her after marriage, whatever the law may say, what wonder that the peasant woman of Russia, Ireland, or elsewhere, shows little inclination to divorce ! " Now, in the United States, the age at which women first marry is steadily rising. In Massa- chusetts the average is about twenty-five years. In Russia, nearly three brides out of ^Ye are under twenty. With us, thanks to woman's chance to earn, only one-ninth of the girls under twenty are married. Two-fifths of the girls be- tween the ages of sixteen and twenty-four are bread-winners, and after the seven years of in- dependence, which is the lot of the average young working woman, they enter upon wedlock with a high spirit that will not brook subjection. Nor is it to be forgotten that specialized in- dustry in a way unfits a young woman for mar- riage by weaning her from the domestic arts. The girl married at eighteen directly from the parental home is more likely to make and keep a 56 IlSrCEEASING DIVOKCE home happy than the girl who marries at twenty- five after some years in factory, store or office. iWithout her old housekeeping knack and despis- ing the crude work of the kitchen, the latter too often fails to make home comfortable, and the couple sink into a misery which may end in do- mestic shipwreck. The demoralizing reaction of home-slackness is brought out by studies made by Cadbury in Birmingham. There the propor- tion of sober and steady men is nearly twice as great in families where the wives do not work out as in homes presided over by employed women. Incessantly the factory planes away the eco- nomic basis of the family. In the time of our grandmothers the home was the seat of a score of productive processes, and the ideal wife was the " virtuous woman '' celebrated by Solomon. She might not be a " soul-mate " to her husband, but she was a prop to the prosperity of the household. Now that the machine has captured most of the domestic processes and the middle class home is sustained by the earnings of the husband, the wife from a helpmeet has become a luxury. If, now, there is a rift in the lute, the husband becomes conscious of carrying a bur- 57 CHANGING AMEEICA den, and resents things that are overlooked in the wife who is a true yoke-fellow. On the other hand, the capable, nnencumbered woman, who finds herself doomed by social con- vention to be supported in idleness by a husband ;who can earn, perhaps, little more than she can, is also making a sacrifice — a sacrifice which she will chafe under in case the marriage fails to satisfy her affections. In a word, outside of the manual laboring class, the old economic framework of the family has largely fallen away, leaving more of the strain to come on the personal tie. Husband and wife are held together by love, conscience, and convention, but very little by that profitable copartnership which once contributed so much to the stability of the home. INTELLECTUAL CAUSES The intellectual progress of women swells the demand for matrimonial surgery. To-day two ideals of the family are struggling for mastery — the old despotic family, of Roman origin and ecclesiastical sanction, based on the authority of the husband and the merging of the wife's legal personality in his, and the democratic family of 58 INCREASmG DIVORCE Germanic origin based on the consenting and harmonious wills of two equals. The one goes naturally with pioneering, agriculture and war- fare, which put men to the fore; the other goes with industry, peace and city life, which add to the consequence of women. In proportion as women escape from abject mental dependence on men and find a point of view of their own, they spurn patriarchal claims and expect marriage to be the union of equal wills. What with more girls than boys in the high schools and half as many women as men in college, it is not sur- prising that women more and more enter mar- riage with a connubial ideal of their own. Nevertheless, the men they wed — many of them — cherish the conviction that the husband is the rightful " head " of the family. The resulting clash of ideals is none the less disastrous because it is but an incident of a transition process in so- cial evolution. The intellectual ferment of our time weakens the grasp of the social institution upon the in- nocent individual. The voice of authority — whether it appeals to precedent, to doctrine, or to Holy Writ — is little heeded. No longer is a rigid arrangement able to hedge itself about 59 CHAN^GIlSra AMEEICA with a divine sanction. The question " Qui hono^^ is in the air. Any policy that crushes the individual or blocks his pursuit of happi- ness is challenged and obliged to produce the best of credentials. The feeling that " marriage is for man, not man for marriage" is — along with heresy trials and contempt of the courts — an outcome of the reigning spirit of criticism. Now, as ever, lawmaker and theologian stand ready to bind on hapless persons heavy burdens and grievous to be borne — for the callousness of the well-wed to the woes of the mismated passes all belief — but public sentiment is mas- ter to-day ; and public sentiment, taking the pro- motion of happiness as the end of human insti- tutions, flinches from keeping the unhappy locked together when no demonstrable harm will result. Any one who would turn this senti- ment against divorce must appeal to sociology rather than to dogma. An inevitable by-product of the liberation of women from men, and of both from Tradition, is a rank individualism which makes a lasting union impossible, and thus defeats the end for which marriage exists. No doubt much of the infidelity that purports to lie at the root of a 60 INCEEASING DIVORCE sixth of the cases of divorce is an expression of this exaggerated self-will. Let it be remem- bered, however, that no emancipation ever takes place without producing evils of this kind. When independence and the assertion of rights are in the air, there is sure to be some who be- come acutely conscious of their rights before they realize their duties. The marriage of per- sons of a dilated ego unwilling to bear or sacri- fice for the sake of preserving the union cannot but result in disaster. THE PROSPECT It has been calculated that if the movement toward divorce retains its present velocity, in forty years one marriage in four will end by di- vorce, and in eighty years one marriage in two. No one who understands the vital role of the family in a healthy society anticipates any such disastrous outcome. Already there are in sight certain influences that are likely to moderate the headlong movement. The industrial and intel- lectual emancipation of women will, of course, complete itself. But the old despotic ideal of the family will die out of men^s minds and cease to be a breeder of conjugal discord. The dis- 61 CHANGmG AMEEICA trust of institutions can hardly go much further. It is likely that the public, as it wins a deeper insight into the services of the family to society and to the race, will feel less sympathy with the wrong-doings, weaknesses and whims that shat- ter it. Individualism, too, is probably at its zenith. In the discussion of human relations we are likely to hear less of the radical and more of the ethical note. In proportion as the eman- cipated are led to an ethical view of life, they will cease to regard marriage simply as a fair weather arrangement with personal happiness in constant view. They will recognize its inex- orable demands for patience and self-control, for loyalty through sorrow and sickness, through misfortune and the aging years. REMEDIES The fact that accelerated divorce is produced by the modern social situation rather than by moral decay does not make it any less the symp- tom of a great evil. That one marriage in ten openly fails calls for vigorous effort to lessen the number of bad marriages. The school should instruct girls in the domestic arts which sup- ply the material basis of the home. There 62 mCEEASING DIVOKCB should be systematic instruction of youth in the ethics and ideals of the family. The fact that the likelihood of divorce is in inverse proportion to the length of time the parties were acquainted before marriage suggests the wisdom of requir- ing a formal declaration of intention to marry some weeks before a marriage license will be issued. Law or custom ought to devise some means of protecting pure women from marriage with men infected from vice. A way may be found to detect and punish the husbands who desert their families. Finally, the fact that in- temperance figures in nearly a fifth of the di- vorces ought to invigorate the temperance move- ment in all its branches. \ 63 WOMEN IN INDUSTRY fTlHEEE are about ^yq million women en- ^ gaged in gainful occupations in the United States. This number is increasing much more rapidly than is the general population. The reason why women in such great numbers are coming into our shops and factories is not be- cause of a restlessness which make^ them im- patient with the walls of home and carries them out into regions of danger and strain, but simply because the factory has been invading the home and has snatched out almost every useful task that used to be performed there. In the home there still remains the preparation of food and the rearing of children ; but the preparation of garments, the preparation of all sorts of household linen, the large number of industries that used to be carried on in the homes have van- ished, and the young women have had to follow them up and pursue these occupations where they are now being conducted — in the factory. 64 WOMEN" m INDUSTEY Formerly women, by their indoor occupations or the things they created there, were adding a very important element to the support of the family, but with the vanishing of these indus- tries the woman has to go out after a job. It is important to remember, not only that there are about five million of these laboring women, but that a very large number of them are young. You have not an army of women permanently enlisted in the field of labor. That is not the idea. A very large number of them are young women who will marry. If they did not marry there would have to be a vast increase of celibacy in this country. In the country at large about one-third of the single women be- tween the ages of 15 and 25 are engaged in oc- cupations outside their homes; and in the cities about 50 per cent. ; so that very nearly half of all the single young women in the country are at work. Between the ages of 25 and 35, about one- fifth of the number are so engaged. What does that mean? It means that they are being mar- ried — vanishing into homes ; that their lives are changed, that they are being rescued from the factories. So you must think of a great and in- creasing proportion of the young women who are 65 CHANGING AMEEICA destined to become wives and the mothers of the next generation, coming for about five years un- der the influence of the factory and store. Now, there they come under conditions which are not controlled by people who love them. In their homes they are surrounded by conditions shaped by affection. The moment they are mar- ried they pass into another home and there find conditions shaped by affection. But during that interval when they are out earning money, somewhere in the years between 15 and 25, they are under conditions not shaped by anybody who has any interest whatever in them. They go up against the rivalry of employers for profit. Who is to protect them during that epoch? As things are at present they have to protect them- selves. There is no father and mother to pro- tect them ; no husband. Can they protect them- selves? Hardly. In the first place is the girl of 17 to 20 aware of what protection means? She values wages. Possibly she will strike for higher wages; but is she aware of what that standing all day is doing to her? Is she aware of what sitting on that seat without any back is doing to her? Is she aware of what that breath- less rush is doing to her? Not at all. Against 66 WOMEN m INDUSTRY these things she will make no protest. She is not aware of what is happening to her. To tell the truth, she is not a competent guardian of her future life. Even if she were a competent guardian, this rattle-brained girl with a modicum of education and very little knowledge of hygiene — even if she did understand the laws of health and did realize exactly what happens to her when she is subjected for ten or twelve hours a day to the pace dictated by machinery, she would, never- theless, in many cases be powerless to influence conditions for the better. The reason is simply this: When people have options so that they can reject an unattractive proposition, they can improve their condition. If a girl is offered a task which is to be performed under a constant strain, or in an unsanitary place, and there is somie other paying work she can do in place of accepting that job, then she is in a position to defend her health and her comfort if she values them. The options people have depend, for one thing, upon how much they are ahead. A person who has something laid by so that he can afford to take a risk and allow for an idle three months 67 CHANGING AMEKICA is in a much better position to throw up a job which he feels is undermining his health than is the person who does not dare face two weeks without wages. A civil engineer who happens to be idle is invited to go to Panama. He real- izes that going to Panama involves the risk that he may die of the fever, and he declines the offer. With perhaps a whole year before him in which to secure a position, he is vastly more independ- ent than the man who has only three months, and he can reject an offer that seems to involve a risk. And the person who has three months in which to look around is far better off than the person who can only take three weeks. And the girl who has no money but her weekly wage, from which there is and can be no surplus, has no option at all. The miore you get people in the position where they have no option, where they dare not let go, where they are afraid if they let this job go they may not get another job quick enough — the more helpless they are and the more easily you can impose on them. If the laundryman says, " We expect you to work all night to get out this big order we have prom- ised," the girls have to accept the situation. If he says, " You have got to work all day Sunday," 68 WOMEN m INDUSTEY they must obey no matter how exhausted they are. The smaller the margin between one's re- sources and one's necessities the more helpless one is, the more unmurmuringly one has to ac- cept whatever conditions are laid down. And so in the stratum of labor in which there is no space, no margin, between necessary expenses and income, you get people that may sometimes be driven almost as slaves are driven ; you get a situation that is incompatible with a Christian civilization. Not only has an increasing number of women who are to become wives and mothers in the fu- ture been brought into conditions controlled by people who have no interest in their futures ; but these conditions are becoming more and more taxing. There was a time when a group of work people were speeded up by having a pace-maker. A girl would be paid to hurry things up, thus giving a leverage to rush the pace of others. Still, there was always a limit to the speed that pace-maker could impose. But with the coming in of machinery you can, by means of the ma- chine, dictate the rate at which the girls must work. They then have to keep up with the ma- 69 CHANGING AMEEICA chine or drop out. And so, by speeding up the machinery, you bring about a situation where young people are kept at the tightest possible tension, are keyed up to the utmost. At that point you get something more than a strain upon muscles; you get a strain upon nerves. There is a certain natural pace one can keep up. Force the pace and you get weariness. A man can go for hours at the rate of five miles an hour; he can run at the rate of six miles an hour for quite a long while; but if he tries to run eight miles an hour he will drop out very soon. I once was secretary of a national or- ganization and, rather than go down town to the stenographic bureau to dictate my letters, I formed the habit of writing them myself at high speed. In that one year I incurred a neuras- thenia that it took four years to overcome. Not that I had done so much work. I probably had done one-third more than I would normally. It was the pace that told. There is universal testimony that the pace of industry was never so great as now. Take the number of stitches that your sewing machines in , the shops are setting. Machines that in 1899 \were setting twenty -two hundred a minute were 70 WOMEN m USTDUSTRY in 1905 setting just twice as many. In those years the pace has been doubled ; and, moreover, some of the machines set several rows of stitches at a time. In cotton factories how many looms is a workman supposed to tend? One loom, two, three, four, and finally you get up to six or seven I have been told. In the stock yards you can take the number of carcasses a man was ex- pected to split in an hour during the last twenty years and see the increase that has been made, not through any extraneous aid but through key- ing up the pace. For my part, I do not know what is going to be the outcome of this tendency toward the double-quick. It is a real puzzle to me. For the present there is one thing I see to be done, and that is to compensate for this superhuman pace by shortening the time. A certain pace may be endured through an eight-hour day that cannot be endured for a ten-hour day. Now, what is the effect of working young women, usually in a standing position, at a rate dictated by machinery at high speed? I cannot go into details here; but there is no question that unless they are extraordinarily strong it is draining them of that stamina and vitality which 71 CHANGINa AMEEICA ought to be saved to enable tbem to meet suc- cessfully the strains and burdens of wifehood and motherhood. Girls may endure this thing for, say, five years, but in what condition do they pass into the home? Have they the resources of vitality for meeting the absolutely inevitable strains of the home that they ought to have? We know that long hours, in the confinement of the factory, with the nerves continually frayed by the noise, with the sickening smell of the ma- chine oil, often with too great heat and impure dust-laden air, standing at machinery going a relentless pace, produces a general deterioration of the physical tone. Standing causes various disorders : varicose veins and displacements ; the confinement produces anemia and the general undermining of the system fosters a tendency to tuberculosis. Even if nothing tragic happens before the time when that young woman is handed over to the young man who loves her to become a wife and the mother of a family, it will later be found that she cannot meet the tests. Cannot you imagine what will happen with the first baby, or the second baby? A rapid collapse often occurs — not early death perhaps, but dragging years of misery, of in- l72 WOMEN m INDUSTEY ability to be a helpmate, inability to rear a full- sized family, inability to bring into the world children with their proper share of stamina and vitality. You can see that society is paying pretty heavily for the service the girl rendered to industry during those few years of mill work. And think of the discouraging situation of the young man who, after he has been married two or three years, finds he has a wife who at the age of 28 or 30 has broken down, become a miserable invalid, suffering aches and pains all the time and unable to keep the home attractive. Think of him having to face twenty, thirty years of it, and all because of what? Because of just a few extra dollars added to the profits of the employer or a few extra dollars saved to the con- sumer of the goods she has helped to make! You see that sort of thing is waste; it is eat- ing up capital. For health and vitality are capital to the laborer. When a person is worn out society says: "We feel that we are obliged to take this burden on our shoulders and see that nobody actually starves,'' and so, whatever hu- man wreckage is created by this excessive haste and these excessive hours of industry is not borne by the industry that created it, but is just 73 CHANGINa AMEEICA coolly rolled on to the broad shoulders of so- ciety — for the sake of pennies, creating bur- dens that will cost dollars. Now, whatever wreckage is created by these conditions tends to spread out. It leaves re- sults in a progeny that does not start in life with a fair chance, a progeny born tired because the mother was fagged when she bore them. Hence you have people becoming vagrants, or idlers, or paupers in many cases, instead of be- ing self-supporting men and women. Start peo- ple without a fair show in life, and they cannot endure to the end. In the thirties, maybe, the sag or break will come. Unable to meet con- ditions, they cannot keep up the pace and they drop back. Once they fall upon the feather mattress of charity, once they lose their self- respect, they are perfectly happy and comfort- able, perfectly willing to lie upon the pocket- book of society. There is another consideration. Society can have the kind of women it wants. Take the women of eastern Prussia, for instance. These peasant women bear a child in the morning; in the afternoon they are out in the field. There the women work right along beside the men. I 74 WOMEN IN INDUSTEY have seen them and what a type are they? Squat, splay-footed, wide-backed, flat-breasted, broad-faced, short-necked — a type that lacks every grace that we associate with woman. For that is the only type that could survive under the harsh conditions that have prevailed there for centuries. Now, there will not be a disap- pearance of the race if we extend no hand to help these working girls. What will happen will be that the girls of the distinctly feminine type, the girls who have the qualities of fine- ness, grace and charm, will prove too fragile to meet the conditions. They will collapse and go to the bad, they will lose their health, or, if they endure until they are married and become mothers, they will not be able to be mothers of full families of sons and daughters that will en- dure to the end. But some there would be who could stand the conditions. And of what type would they be? They would be of this other type — the type that appears in those peasant women. In three or four generations we could have in this country, all through the lower stratum, that coarse type replacing the high-strung, high-bred, feminine type which is our pride, and which ex- 75 CHANGma AMEEICA tends up and down through all layers of society in this country. Do we want to have that dif- ferentiation of physique? Do we want to have a reversion, down in the stratum that has to work with its hands, of the feminine form to the masculine peasant type, to that Flemish- mare type that has lost the charm and grace of woman? What can be done about it? In the first place, it cannot be cured by in- dividual action on the part of the girls them- selves. People who are getting twenty dollars a week can probably exercise a certain control over the conditions under which they work. People who have options, who can afford to let go and look about them, can oblige the employer to bring the job to the point of attractiveness. But this stratum of girls who are not highly skilled, who are learners, and who are driven by machinery, have no margin with which to fight to improve conditions, and even if they did have the margin they do not know what condi- tions they ought to have to protect themselves. Nor can they fight for these conditions by col- lective action, because most of these young women are not in a position to wield the labor 76 WOMEN" m INDUSTEY organization to the same extent and to do with it the same things that men are able to. Why not? For one thing, they are women, and just because of that their attitude toward unpleas- ant features in their situation is less aggressive and resentful than that of men. Men are al- ways more willing to strike back, to make some sort of struggle against crushing conditions than are women, because it is their nature. And again, these young women have not had a long-enough experience and observation of in- dustry to realize what organization might do for them. They do not believe in it; they are not far-sighted enough; they know too little of eco- nomics. Again, they do not struggle to improve the conditions under which they work because there is always that door on beyond, the door that may be opened by marriage. " What's the use? Next year I may be married, and it wouldn't make any difference." There is al- ways that possible exit — an exit that for a vast number of them is not an exit. Young women will not pay dues, will not incur the risk of losing their jobs by making an effort to lay down conditions to employers as will men, who know that their lives long they will have to be 77 CHANGING AMEEICA workers and that therefore it is to their inter- est to look ahead and try to shape the conditions they will encounter year after year indefinitely. Nor can you cure this situation by appealing to the humanity of the employers. If the par- ticular employer is a monopolist, or has some advantage over all his competitors, then you may work upon his humanity, and, if he chooses to give good conditions to those girls, he can do so. But when he has lively competition, the humane employer is obliged to conform to the practice of his competitors. A laundry man may hate to keep the girls after six or on Sunday, or to work them beyond their strength; neverthe- less for him the price of laundering is fixed by the cost of it in other laundries where all these things are done, and he is obliged to conform in order to keep his business. The great law in business competition is that the plane of prac- tice will be determined by what the least scru- pulous man who succeeds in the business is willing to adopt. That determines the plane to which the rest are obliged to approximate. But some may suggest, " Can't you get the employ- ers as a body to change conditions? " That is a frail reed to lean on. You may get most of them 78 WOMEN IN INDUSTEY to agree that the pace which they are inflicting upon these young women is too hard, and yet, if one man in ten does not look at it that way and persists in the old methods with his help, the other nine-tenths of the employers will be helpless. They cannot coerce him. He can oblige them to conform to himi, whereas they can not oblige him to conform to them. What re- course, then, have you left? There is nothing left except the will of organized society express- ing itself in law. There is absolutely nothing else. Now what will happen if society decrees a cer- tain standard working day suited to the health and strength of the average young woman, so that the destruction of her vitality and stamina through overstrain would be the rare exception? Will anything dire happen? Will the linchpins of industry fall out? Will things go to smash? Not at all. One of two things will happen. In industries which are monopolies there will be less profit for employers. In industries which are not monopolies the consumers will have to pay a little more. The fact is, we as consumers are enjoying some things on terms to which we have no right. We have no right to 79 CHANGIlSrG AMEEICA Lave artificial flowers at the price we get them ; we have no right to get our laundry done so cheaply as it often is; we have no right to any- thing that has not paid the full bill. When you buy a keg of powder, you pay not only for the cost of making that powder, but part of the cost of all the powder that blew up accidentally, and, once every seven years, you and other buyers have to pay for the mill itself, because on an average once in seven years the whole thing is blown up. Queer, isn't it, that in paying for the powder you get you also pay for powder which you never get. But a stranger thing is that you do not pay anything at all for the men who are destroyed when the mills blow up. When you buy coal you pay for a fraction of all the damage by explosions in that mine, but nothing for the arms and legs of the human be- ings who are wrecked. Is it right that there should be charged in the cost of the products of industry only the wreckage of property but not the wreckage of human beings? Is it right for us to get some products so cheaply that only the part of the cost has been covered? The part that we exempt employers from feeling is not passed on. If we oblige employers to meet 80 WOMEK m INDUSTEY certain humane conditions the cost will be added in, passed on to us, and paid by us. Some say, " Oh, but such laws infringe that great principle of freedom of contract ! " The young woman is willing to work through half the night in this laundry rather than lose her job. The law steps in and says, " No, she shall not do it." Harsh, is n't it? There was a time when a man, if he had to borrow money to keep body and soul together, had a legal right to sell himself into slavery as security for money with which to buy bread for his faniily and him- self. He had the right to promise, " If I do not repay that money by the stipulated date I will become your slave." This produced debt- slavery, which nearly wrecked early Greece and Kome, but finally came a statesman who decreed that forever more no man should have the legal right to pawn himself. Do you realize that you have not that right to-day; that throughout the civilized world that right is denied? They have that right in Sumatra and the Malay states to- day, but all the men of the white race have lost that ineffably precious right of a man to put himself in pawn. Pity, is n't it? But we seem to get along pretty well, do w^ not? We don't 81 CHAJSTGING AMEEICA seem anxious to borrow that freedom from the Malay states or Sumatra. So I think nothing very serious will happen if, on the ground that we have an interest larger than her interest, we deny a girl the right to sell more than a limited number of hours of labor per day. Society looks ahead, and she does not. And so perhaps, if we invade that principle of freedom of contract, nothing very terrible will happen because, after all, it is not real freedom that is at stake, but only a formal freedom. For the last twenty years I have been devot- ing all my effort to getting deeper into the prin- ciples of social organization, the principles by which human beings can work together with the greatest success and happiness; and I can look back to the time when I thought that certain abstract principles were the thing; that we did not have to consider what degree of happiness they gave to people, but that planting ourselves upon these immutable principles, we should just shut our eyes, go ahead, and all would be well. I assure you the older I grow and the more I ex- plore different social systems the more fluid these principles become, until now, in social policy, I do not see anything at stake but the welfare of men, and women and children. 8^ VI COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT /^OUSIN JIM was bragging of his prosperity ^^ since lie had removed to this Northwest- ern mining town, but Lucy looked up from her sewing. " Yes/' she said, " I know my husband makes twice as much here as he did in the old home. But then his rheumatism is worse, the altitude gets on our nerves, it is hard to raise flowers, the schools are not so good, we miss the sight of the peaks, and I can't visit father and mother so often." Here you have the contrast between the com- mercial view and the human view. The man thinks the worth of existence is measured by the money one can lay out. The woman with her keen sense for reality knows that only a part of one's well-being comes that way. There are goods one cannot buy because they depend on general conditions. They are the non-eco- nomic goods. A student of mine investigating agriculture 83 CHANGING AMBEICA in Mississippi asked a farmer near the state capital, who had had great success in breeding fine milch cows, why he did n't run a dairy and double his income. " No," he replied, " I don't want to have a business that will tie me down so I can't hitch up and go off with my family to a barbecue now and then." Was this man a fool — or a philosopher? Those who are business men — and nothing more — slip easily into the fallacy of rating well-being by dollar income. What this type of man most longs for is not welfare^ but pros- perity. The wealth he habitually considers is bankable wealth. Values that are not pecuniary values strike him as moonshine. His ideal con- dition is high wages, big salaries and fat divi- dends; and any movement or policy that stands in the way of maximizing these " hurts busi- ness " and is anathema. " Come out to the ward meeting to-night and help us push for purer city water," I said once to my neighbor, a young furniture merchant. " Can't spare the time," was the reply ; " too busy hustling for business." When, three months later, his little daughter was convales- cing from a long and expensive illness of typhoid 84 COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT fever, it may have dawned upon him that some things need attention besides business! Such a man is the last to recognize that busi- ness, if its claims be pressed too relentlessly, may cut away big non-economic values, that there are business profits that cost ten times their worth of salubrity or quiet or natural beauty or civic conscience. He sees business made lively in his town by the " wide open " policy; he is blind to the ruin of boys and the wreck of homes. He deprecates the great " clean-up " movement in government. " Oh, yes, our house is dirty, to be sure, but then sweeping raises such a dust, and dust is dis- turbing to business ! " He grumbles at the anti- smoke ordinance that obliges manufacturers to spend a hundred thousand dollars in suppress- ing smoke that would destroy a million dollars worth of comfort, and echoes the railroad presi- dent who says : " The smoke-laden air of every city is but a testimonial of the general pros- perity of the country." He naturally sym- pathizes with the retort of the paper manu- facturers to the cry for free paper : " If we could not have newspapers of the present size, style and price, without driving out our paper indus- 85 CHAN^GING AMEEICA try, which alternative would be better for the country — a larger wage-fund or smaller pa- pers? " COMMERCIALISM IS NOT SELFISHNESS NOR MATERIALISM It is not a matter of selfishness. The com- mercialized man shows this bias when other men's profits — not his own profits — are at stake. Tell him of the forests of half a moun- tain state blighted by the arsenic fumes from giant smelters and he replies it would cut cop- per dividends to get rid of these fumes. To him the cost we impose on the railroads by obliging them to elevate their tracks is a tragic thing; but the racking anxiety of mothers who are obliged daily to send their children to school over grade crossings appeals to him not at all. Outside of office hours men of this type are as humane and public-spirited as other people. But their point of view makes them side with profits when humanity and public spirit stand in their way. They are victims of a fallacy. Nor is commercialism the samie thing as ma- terialism. One need not be crass of soul to be smitten with this blindness. A man may take 86 COMMEECIALISM RAMPANT the demands of his business as the Voice from Sinai, yet lay out his profits in stained glass, iu public libraries or in sending the Gospel to the heathen. My point is that there is a psychology of busi- ness which hinders its victims from seeing things in their true proportions. This is the more serious because the commercial view is spread- ing and threatens to become our national way of thinking. THE ASCENDANCY OF BUSINESS IDEALS For, in sooth, business men are in the saddle. It is settled that no man who does not bear the O. K. of business men can ever be elected presi- dent. A candidate's trump card is the promise of a " business '^ administration. ^' Success " has come to mean the same as " business suc- cess,'' that is, making money. Often one hears " You can't run business on religious principles," but never " You can't run religion on business principles." The highest compliment you can pay a philanthropy, an educational scheme, or a missionary project is to pronounce it " business- like " ; whereas a man is insulted if you pro- nounce his business " philanthropic," or " edu- 87 CHAN"GIlSrG AMEEICA cational," or " missionary-like." We have a new. moral type — the sheep in wolf's clothing — for the employer who provides rest-rooms and seats with hacks for his working girls feels obliged to dissemble his humanity by pretending he does it " simply to augment output ! " Our school board must, of course, be a " busi- ness board," i.e.^ one that bothers little with the problemis of teaching the children, but knows how to keep teachers in their places and get the lowest bids on text books and coal. For a while it was considered fitting that such amiable vi- sionaries as scholars should be picked and offi- cered by a business man as university president. More and more the solid men of business are looked to to finance the philanthropies, support the churches, and endow the colleges; for be- side their dollars how paltry look the nickels of the other sorts of successful men ! Among Americans business ideals are not held in check by the influence of a landed aristocracy. In most of the Old World the leading social class despises the trader's point of view and prides itself on appreciating things from the en- joyer's view point. The standard for judging a thing or an activity is not how much it fetches, 88 COMMEECIALISM EAMPAISTT but how much it adds to the worth of life. Since this aristocratic emphasis on living rather than on money-making leeches down through the general community, commercialism is in Europe more confined to the business class. THE BANISHING OF " SENTIMENT " FROM BUSINESS The escape of business from the control of hu- man sentiment and conscience has been aided by new forms of management. Most important enterprises are now organized as corporations, which means that the owners are not the same persons as the managers. Of such there are reckoned sixty-seven hundred (exclusive of banking and insurance companies) with a cap- italization of thirty-six billions. Every year sees the stock-holders on whose behalf the enter- prise is conducted more numerous, more scat- tered, more shepherded by the big insiders, more ignorant of the business they draw divi- dends from. Th'^, as if to eliminate the per- sonal element altogether, between the men who provide the money and the men who run the busi- ness there is interposed the financial institution in the form of savings bank, trust company or 89 CHANGING AMEEICA insurance company. Moreover, when the busi- ness passes out of personal or local hands and is offered in shares to the general investing public, the Big Men have carefully seen to it that the stock is watered to the limit, so that frequently nothing but the most avaricious, ruthless, and ag- gressive management can enable the stock to pay ordinary returns to the innocent investors. Now, the manager under this system has in- vented a marvelous device for transmitting this remorseless pressure to the superintendents un- der him. This is the weekly cost statement. For example, the head of each lard room in a group of affiliated packing plants files at the office a statement from which can be figured the exact cost-per-unit of his output. This enables the management to compare a man's showing on a given week with the performance of his pred- ecessors, with his own previous performance, and with the performance of the heads of other lard departments. If the comparison is in the least unfavorable to him, the superintendent is warned, and if his showing does not soon im- prove he loses his job. Such cost-checking keys up technical efficiency, but it also forces bosses to go to the limit in driving labor or deteriorat- 90 COMMEECIALISM EAMPANT ing product for the sake of a dollar of gain. The Pittsburgh Survey tells us how this de- vice worked in the steel industry. " When a mill broke a record, the men who accomplished the feat were praised, . . . while the su- perintendents of other mills taunted their men with the disgrace of being beaten. This would rouse all the skilled men to greater activity, and another mill would establish a new record.'^ " They kept raising the pace until finally, when it had reached a very high point, the superin- tendent told them that, having demonstrated their ability to produce that much steel, it would thereafter be expected of them. Conse- quently, the system is well established to-day. Superintendent is pitted against superintendent, foremen against foremen, mill against mill." " In all the speeding up, superintendent and fore- man are major factors. If one superintendent does not make good, some other can." The re- sult of this system was thus deliberately summed up by the distinguished political economist in charge of the Pittsburgh investigation before the assembled economists of America : " The mass of workers in the steel industry are driven as large numbers of laborers, whether slave or free, 91 CHANGmG AMEEICA have scarcely before in human history been driven.'' Seeing that such cross comparison of costs is a favorite means of the trust for leveling up ef- ficiency in its various scattered plants, and see- ing that there are seven great industrial trusts controlling over sixteen hundred plants and three hundred lesser trusts controlling over five thousand plants, it is clear that a large and in- creasing part of the industry of the country is being driven ahead under this savage spur. Look, now, at some of the outcroppings of this business fallacy in our American life. HEROES OF SUCCESS If all the blessings are to be had for money and if nothing is to be had for nothing, we may well idolize those who put dollars into our pockets. So the man who pays the salaries and wages that keep many families is hailed as the chief public benefactor. We will grant him al- most anything in the way of free site, free use of public property, bonus, tax exemption or tariff protection. If his refinery taints the air, if his chimneys smut the sky, if his waste poisons our streams, we tolerate it. For what if he should 92 COMMEECIALISM EAMPAISTT get cross and quit? Does lie demand the right to hire and work as he pleases our children and young women? Quick, deny him nothing, he might sulk or move to another state! Does he object to those union pickets on the street cor- ner talking to his strike breakers? Then let our bluecoats sweep them out of the street. Hu- man rights? Shucks! Do we thus admire and coddle those whose dividends are in benefits, not cash? The daring surgeon who establishes a new operation, the bacteriologist who finds the serum for some virulent disease, the experimenter whose table shows the way to the conquest of the air, the plant-breeder who creates more luscious va- rieties of fruits, the civilizer of a tribe of sav- ages, the translator of the Bible into a strange tongue, the founder of a great social settlement, the inventor of a better method of teaching the deaf — these, alas, are not the men " who do things." For they give blessings, mere bless- ings, not money! THE EXPLOITATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES Obsessed by the business fallacy, we placed, of course, no restriction on the exploitation of 93, CHANGING MIEEICA the public domain, the heritage of posterity, upon which alone can rest our hope of national permanence. What if our natural gas was riotously used up, and our petroleum, instead of being husbanded for our grandchildren, is being spread to the four corners of the earth as fast as commercial genius can do it! Posterity, when it contemplates the dry holes in the ground, can reflect that at least we had money to burn. What if fifty years will see an end to our an- thracite ! Did n't the gay patrons of New York restaurants swallow forty thousand quarts of champagne last New Year's Eve? What if, in our ^^ hurry-up " mining, more coal is wasted than is used ! Have n't we more and bigger mil- lionaires than any other people? What if we are within sixty years of " good-bye, iron ore ! " Were there ever such hotels, such steam yachts, such alimonies as ours? On with the dance! THE WASTE OF LIFE AND LIMB No matter who may be hurt, the maxim of business seems to be " Full steam ahead ! " Be- fore the recent panic our railroads were killing annually in round numbers ten thousand and hurting a hundred thousand. One trainman out 94 COMMEECIALISM EAMPANT of eight is injured during the year. Formerly one brakeman out of eighty was killed. Among our workers it is estimated that oyer half a mil- lion a year are killed or so maimed as to be partially or wholly incapacitated for work. An inventor says, " If I produce a device to save time, I can sell it readily in twenty places, but if I offer an idea for saving life I cannot dispose of it at all." Safety appliances had to be forced on the railroads by law, and safety fenders are rarely provided for street cars save under com- pulsion. In Europe there are ten " museums of security," where safety appliances are exhibited in operation. For years government and so- cieties there have been offering prizes to stimu- late the invention of such devices. Compared with their partly humanized industry, our in- dustry shows double the number of casualties it ought to show. A packer was showing a prominent settlement worker about his plant. They entered an inner room with double doors and Avithout windows or ventilation, the walls and ceiling dripping with moisture, where, in a temperature of 38°, fifteen young women were trimming hams. The tem- perature was carefully kept the same as that 95 CHAATGmG AMEEICA of the chilling-room from which the meat came and to which it was returned. " You see we waste nothing here/' he said, " not even heat.'' " Nothing," she replied, " but the health of girls ! " IMMIGRATION In thirty years there has been a great shifting in the sources of our immigration from North- western Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe. The newer immigrants are six to ten times as illiterate as the older. They come, most of them, from practical motives, and, thanks to cheaper ocean passage, from humbler strata. Members of stock and races that have been el- bowed aside in the swayings of the mightier races, many of them have neither the mental ca- pacity nor the stability of character of the West- European breeds. Who wants this element? Not labor, whom it displaces. Not the farmers, who limit their families when they see the opportunities that ought to be reserved for posterity seized by aliens. Not the professional classes, with their abhorrence of dirt, disease and disorder. Not the fourteen millions already here, most of whom 96 COMMERCIALISM EAMPANT are anxious enough to close the door. Save a handful of distinguished humanitarians, no- body wants them but certain business men — the mine-owner, the mill-owner, the contractor, the railway people, the steamship companies. To give these gentlemen cheap labor or a full steerage, the race welfare has, so far, been un- hesitatingly sacrificed. THE PANDERING INTERESTS The commercialization of vice is the key to our recent sumptuary history. For vice is harder to uproot now that people have ceased to gratify their harmful appetites by their own en- terprise. Gone is the conversion of peaches into brandy, the distilling of rye into whiskey, for home consumption. To-day you buy your poisons, and every vice has behind it a business interest. Then, combination has been going on among vice-caterers. The saloon keepers are often mere agents of the big brewers, the tobacconists clerks of the tobacco trust. The prostitute is not for herself, but is owned by some " madam '' who, in turn, may be under a syndicate that maintains a chain of brothels and recruits its 97 CHANGma AMEKICA girls through an organized and far-reaching white slave traffic. Thus banded, a pandering interest is far more formidable. The preacher, editor, or prosecutor who assails a noxious local traffic is amazed to behold the forces that line up against him. He strikes at a groggery and collides with distant brewers, tackles a pool-room and finds himself confronted with a telegraph company, aims at a bucket-shop and uncovers a syndicate. For the village vice-caterer has become the tentacle of an octopus. Onc6 concentrated, a pandering interest en- ters on an aggressive campaign to " develop busi- ness." By advertising, circulars, posters, and free samples, it seeks to recruit new customers, especially among the young. Old-time tobacco was as inert as maple sugar; but trustified to- bacco has been known to tempt boys with cig- arettes sold under cost and put up in packages containing suggestive pictures to stimulate buy- ing. The hard cider of yore was about as push- ful as hen's eggs ; but to-day there are decoctions that snare the sweat-won dollars from the pock- ets of the negro field-hand by an obscene title coupled with a picture of a naked white woman 98 COMMEECIALISM EAMPANT on the label. What if this gin does breed rapes and lynchings ! " Business is business." Those who would check the insidious moral gangrene soon find that, like St. Paul at Ephesus, they have collided with a commercial interest. For example, a certain society of social hygiene issues decent unsensational pamphlets of warning against the venereal peril. When the society sought to circulate its pamphlets in the red-light district policemen interfered at first on the ground that they were "hurting business " and " scaring away customers.'' Per- suade moonshiners from their whiskey, and no- body objects; it is not a staple of commerce. But lure away patrons from an organized traffic and you will have trouble. Essay regulation, and you will find the profits from a soul-destroy- ing business are just as hard to kill as the profits from a legitimate business. Liquor dealers, dive-keepers and gamblers will fight righteous restrictions just as desperately as haberdashers would fight wicked restrictions. And they win sympathizers, too, for, after all, the open vice- shop brings people to town, you know. What applause was there on Commercial Street when the mayor of O declared in defense of his 99 CHAISTGING AMERICA " lid off " policy. " I want O to be a town where a stranger can have some fun ! '^ THE SACRIFICE OF BEAUTY AND QUIET Speeding through the solemn wilderness traversed by the Canadian Pacific Railway, I once saw against a background of shaggy pines a colossal sign. " Use Scrubem's Tooth Pow- der." Had we passengers felt proper resent- ment, we would have avoided that tooth powder to the end of our days. But, idolators of " en- terprise " that we are, we never think of boy- cotting those who fling their business in our faces at inopportune moments. In the city every accessible spot where the eye may wander fran- tically proclaims the merits of somebody's pickles or Scotch whiskey. At night giant il- luminated letters notify you of a safety razor, flashing and vanishing lights tell of a hair tonic, or a beam of living light writes on the sky the name of somebody's malted milk ! As you leave the city, you behold from the car window efligies of animals dotting the meadows and calling at- tention to a catsup or a toilet soap. Follow the country lane, the forest path or the trout brook, and you find fences, barns, trees and boulders 100 COMMEECIALISM RAMPANT shouting to you of pills, fly-screens and canned soup. All this shameless uglifying sells not a penny-worth more of goods and could easily be stopped. Why, then, should a man be allowed to violently seize and wrench my attention every time I step out of doors, to flash his wares into my brain with a sign, or blare them into my ear with a band? Simply because, with us, the busi- ness man's eagerness to sell his goods is a sacred passion, and nothing may stand in the way of its satisfaction. POLITICS Municipal government is said to be the one great political failure of the American people. But is it? Is the rottenness in so many cities due to the will or the neglect of the citizen? A government that expresses the character of the masses is liable to be jingoistic, spread-eagle, noisy and wasteful. But when you find a gov- ernment that is sordid, brutal and corrupt, it exists not hecause of the people, hut in spite of them. The situation in San Francisco, Phila- delphia, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati may show that the citizens there are timid and ineffective ; it does not prove them vicious and venal. 101 CHAl^GIlSra AMEEICA But if these wicked city administrations do not represent the people, what then, do they repre- sent? Why, business, especially certain kinds of business. Says Mr. Steffens, "My gropings into the misgovernment of cities have drawn me everywhere, but always, always out of politics into business. Business started the corruption of politics in Pittsburgh, upholds it in Philadel- phia, boomed with it in Chicago, and withered with its reform, and in New York business financed the return of Tammany Hall. Here, then, is our guide out of the labyrinth. Not the political ring, but big business — that is the crux of the situation." Now, it is not surprising that vice-caterers should corrupt the police and that franchise- seeking corporations should buy councilmen. But why should men in a straight, clean busi- ness, decent respectable men, pillars of society, not hypocrites but good men who by their giv- ings have demonstrated their interest in the wel- fare of their fellows, " go along " and be silent while their city is harried by a ravening pack of corruptionists? Is it not that "business" is a word to conjure with? Is it not that, so vital to the common welfare has it been supposed to 102 COMMEECIALISM EAMPANT be that enterprises should expand freely, that good men felt themselves justified in counte- nancing any situation demanded by Big Busi- ness? EDUCATION Our education is not commercialized, but is it not a fact that all the far-sighted educators are worrying lest this new and promising move- ment for industrial education be captured by men with business ideals and become a device for supplying merchants and manufacturers with cheap labor skilled at the public expense? RELIGION Since the parable of the Widow's Mite reli- gion cannot be commercialized, though, to be sure, Mr. Kockefeller does hold up the Kingdom of Heaven as a field for remunerative invest- ment when he tells his Sunday School class, " According as you put something in, the greater will be your dividends of salvation.'' Neverthe- less, the Church senses the business obsession of our time and shrinks from taking a stand that might bring her into clash with the profits mania. For what is the evil the Church de- 103 CHA:t^GING AMEEICA nounces most uncompromisinglj? Why, di- vorce! But there is no money in getting di- vorced — only alimony. And Sabbath-break- ing — how inexorable she is about that — if it isn't too lucrative! Sunday games, sports, ex- cursions — all anathema — and college students should not be called on to recite on Monday mornings lest they be tempted to study on Sun- day! But never a remonstrance against the ut- ter disappearance of Sunday from the steel in- dustry. Then how firmly she insists that " In God we trust " be restored to our coins ! But in this she has commercial support. Did not the pious president of one of the Standard Oil com- panies declare to his employees that he would confine himself to paper money and checks for the rest of his days rather than touch coins un- hallowed by the sacred motto? On the other hand, how cautious is the Church — as an organization — in taking a stand that may lift the bristles of a financial interest! There is the Behemoth of our time, and the Church knows it. She has nerved her- self to antagonize certain minor disreputable businesses, such as liquor, race-track, and gam- bling. But — aside from child labor — has she 104 COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT let drive at a full-grown Business Proposition like night work by women, " speeding up," the eighty-four-hour week, or the waste of life and limb in industry? Faithlessness? Cowardice? No. Only the natural reluctance of the vase to come into collision with the kettle. EBMEDIES I have shown that in unfettered business lurk certain bad tendencies which business men are slow to perceive and resist, and that, owing to a too-ready acceptance of the views of the com- mercial group, Americans frequently permit the sacrifice of a non-economic interest when it happens to stand in the path of Business. What are the remedies? Attack the business policy in its citadels — in Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce, in trade associations and trade journals. It has often been observed that in the United States commercial pursuits attract a larger share of the national ability than in other countries. For this reason one finds among American business men an unusual number of big, statesmanlike minds capable of grasping and applying the wel- fare idea, once it is presented to them. 105 CHANGING AMEEICA Slhow the impolicy of the people accepting meekly the leadership of any single group. Once we were led by the clergy, then by the law- yers, then by the business men. Each group had failings of its own and misled the people sometimes into quicksands and waste places. Let the people harken a little less to commer- cial magnates and a little more to geologists, economists, physicians, teachers, and social workers. Enlighten the public as to its real and per- manent interests. What has already been ac- complished along this line is most encouraging. For years we have had a President who thinks in terms of welfare instead of wealth, a man as elemental and uncommercial as Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett, yet withal a scholar, familiar with the ideas of the far-sighted thinkers who are beseeching people to look at matters from the standpoint of society and of posterity. Un- der his leadership the people have become aroused as to the use of natural resources, the conditions of meat-packing, the purity of foods, the hygiene of industry, industrial accidents, child labor, the protection of the family. Organize centers of resistance to the encroach- 106 COMMEECIALISM EAMPANT ments of the business interests. Associations such as the Consumers' League, the Immigration Restriction League, the Anti- Saloon League, the Forestry Association, the Child Labor Commit- tee, the Women's Trade Union League, the Na- tional Public Health Association, create sound public sentiment and focus it at the critical mo- ment at the points where it can be most effective. If only philanthropists would provide adequate funds for their investigation and publicity work, these associations might stand more nearly on a footing with the greedy interests they are trying to balk. Combat aggressions on the public welfare by creating public commissions provided with ade- quate funds, such as fish and game commissions, public health boards, pure food commissions, the Conservation Commission, and the Country Life Commission. Finally, install permanent machinery in the form of a corps of trained factory inspectors, food inspectors, sanitary agents, health officers, forest rangers, and the like, animated with the professional spirit and devoting themselves to carrying out the settled purpose of the commu- nity, even after the community has ceased to 107 CHANGING AMERICA think about the matter. Fear not lest Business will turn the tables on these regulators as soon as the public looks some other way. Take, for example, the newly constituted meat-inspection service. If the packers should get their man at the head of the Department of Agriculture and word should come to the thousand inspectors to "go easy," what would happen? Would the zealous graduates of our veterinary colleges close their eyes to the signs of disease in the car- casses gliding past them, sit tight and draw their salaries? Not at all. They would resign and protest in such numbers as to make the chloro- forming of the service a blazing national scandal. For there forms in your true expert a con- science that insists on his really doing the work for which he draws the wage. 108 VII THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS TV/TOST of the criticism launched at our daily ■^^^ newspapers hits the wrong party. Granted they sensationalize vice and crime, " play up '' trivialities, exploit the private affairs of promi- nent people, embroider facts, and offend good taste with screech, blare, and color. But all this may be only the means of meeting the de- mand, of " giving the publiq what it wants." The newspaper cannot be expected to remain dignified and serious now that it caters to the cohimon millions, instead of, as formerly, to the professional and business classes. To interest errand-boy and factory-girl and raw immigrant, it had to become spicy, amusing, emotional, and chromatic. For these, blame, then, the Ameri- can people. There is just one deadly, damning count against the daily newspaper as it is coming to be, namely. It does not give the neios. For all its pretensions, many a daily news- 109 CHANGING AMEEICA paper is not " giving the public what it wants.'' In spite of these widely trumpeted prodigies of costly journalistic " enterprise," these ferreting reporters and hurrying correspondents, these leased cables and special trains, news, good " live '' news, " red-hot stuff," is deliberately be- ing suppressed or distorted. This occurs oftener now than formerly, and bids fair to occur yet oftener in the future. And this in spite of the fact that the aspira- tion of the press has been upward. Venality has waned. Better and better men have been drawn into journalism, and they have wrought under more self-restraint. The time when it could be said, as it was said of the Eeverend Dr. Dodd, that one had " descended so low as to be- come editor of a newspaper," seems as remote as the Ice Age. The editor who uses his paper to air his prejudices, satisfy his grudges, and serve his private ambitions, is going out. So- bered by a growing realization of their social function, newspaper men have come under a sense of responsibility. Not long ago it seemed as if a professional spirit and a professional ethics were about to inspire the newspaper world; and to this end courses and schools of 110 THE SUPPEESSION OF IMPOETANT NEWS journalism were established, with high hopes. The arrest of this promising movement explains why nine out of ten newspaper men of fifteen years' experience are cynics. As usual, no one is to blame. The apostasy of the daily press is caused by three economic developments in the field of newspaper publish- ing. CAPITALIST-OWNER SUPPLANTS EDITOR-OWNER In the first place, the great city daily has be- come a blanket sheet with elaborate presswork, printed in mammoth editions that must be turned out in the least time. The necessary plant is so costly, and the Associated Press fran- chise is so expensive, that the daily newspaper in the big city has become a capitalistic enter- prise. To-day a million dollars will not begin to outfit a metropolitan newspaper. The editor is no longer the owner, for he has not, and can- not command, the capital needed to start it or buy it. The editor of the type of Greeley, Dana, Medill, Story, Halstead, and Kaymond, who owns his paper and makes it his astral body, the projection of his character and ideals, is rare. Perhaps Mr. Watterson and Mr. Nelson 111' CHAISTGINa AMEEICA are the best living representatives of the type. More and more the owner of the big daily is a business man who finds it hard to see w^hy he should run his property on different lines from the hotel proprietor, the vaudeville manager, or the owner of an amusement park. The editors are hired men, and they may put into the paper no more of their conscience and ideals than com- ports with getting the biggest return from the investment. Of course, the old-time editor who owned his paper tried to make money, — no sin that ! — but just as to-day the author, the lec- turer, or the scholar tries to make money, namely, within the limitations imposed by his principles and his professional standards. But, now that the provider of the newspaper capital hires the editor instead of the editor hiring the newspaper capital, the paper is likelier to be run as a money-maker pure and simple — a fac- tory where ink and brains are so applied to white paper as to turn out the largest possible market- able product. The capitalist-owner means no harm, but he is not bothered by the standards that hamper the editor-owner. He follows a few simple maxims that work out well enough in sell- ing shoes or cigars or sheet-music. " Give peo- 11^ THE SUPPEESSIOK OF IMPOETANT NEWS pie what tliey want, not what you want." " Back nothing that will be unpopular.'' " Run the concern for all it is worth." This drifting of ultimate control into the hands of men with business motives is what is known as " the commercialization of the press." ADVERTISING CENSORS THE NEV7S The significance of it is apparent when you consider the second economic development, namely, the growth of newspaper advertising. The dissemination of news and the purveyance of publicity are two essentially distinct func- tions which, for the sake of convenience, are car- ried on by the same agency. The one appeals to subscribers, the other to advertisers. The one calls for good faith, the other does not. The one is the corner-stone of liberty and democ- racy, the other a convenience of commerce. Now, the purveyance of publicity is becoming the main concern of the newspaper, and threat- ens to throw quite into the shade the communi- cation of news or opinions. Every year the sale of advertising yields a larger proportion of the total receipts, and the subscribers furnish a smaller proportion. Thirty years ago, adver- 113 CHANGING AMEEICA tising yielded less than half of the earnings of the daily newspapers. To-day, it yields at least two-thirds. In the larger dailies the receipts from advertisers are several times the receipts from the readers, in some cases constituting ninety per cent, of the total revenues. As the newspaper expands to eight, twelve, and six- teen pages, while the price sinks to three cents, two cents, one cent, the time comes when the ad- vertisers support the newspaper. The readers are there to read^ not to provide funds. " He who pays the piper calls the tune." When news- columns and editorial page are a mere incident in the profitable sale of mercantile publicity, it is strictly " business-like " to let the big adver- tisers censor both. Of course, you must not let the cat out of the bag, or you will lose readers, and thereupon ad- vertising. As the publicity expert, Deweese, frankly puts it, " The reader must be flim- flammed with the idea that the publisher is really publishing the newspaper or magazine for him." The wise owner will " maintain the beau- tiful and impressive bluff of running a journal to influence public opinion, to purify politics, to elevate public morals, etc." In the last 114 THE SUPPEESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS analysis, then, the smothering of facts in def- erence to the advertiser finds a limit in the intel- ligence and alertness of the reading public. Handled as "a commercial proposition," the newspaper dares not suppress such news beyond a certain point, and it can always proudly point to the unsuppressed news as proof of its inde- pendence and public spirit. THE LENGTHENING PHALANX OF ADVERTISERS The immunity enjoyed by the big advertiser becomes more serious as more kinds of business resort to advertising. Formerly, readers who understood why accidents and labor troubles never occur in department stores, why dramatic criticisms are so lenient, and the reviews of books from the publishers who advertise are so good-natured, could still expect from their jour- nal an ungloved freedom in dealing with gas, electric, railroad, and banking companies. But now the gas people advertise, " Cook with gas," the electric people urge you to put your sewing- machine on their current, and the railroads spill oceans of ink to attract settlers or tourists. The banks and trust companies are buyers of space, investment advertising has sprung up like 115 CHANGING AMEEICA Jonah's gourd, and telephone and traction com- panies are being drawn into the vortex of com- petitive publicity. Presently, in the news- columns of the sheet that steers by the cash-reg- ister, every concern that has favors to seek, duties to dodge, or regulations to evade, will be able to press the soft pedal. THE " KEPT " NEWSPAPER A third development is the subordination of newspapers to other enterprises. After a news- paper becomes a piece of paying property, de- tachable from the editor's personality, which may be bought and sold like a hotel or mill, it may come into the hands of those who will hold it in bondage to other and bigger investments. The magnate-owner may find it to his advantage not to run it as a newspaper pure and simple, but to make it — on the sly — an instrument for coloring certain kinds of news, diffusing certain misinformation, or fostering certain im- pressions or prejudices in its clientele. In a word, he may shape its policy by non- journalistic considerations. By making his paper help his other schemes, or further his political or social ambitions, he will hurt it as a money-maker, no 116 THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS doubt, but he may contrive to fool enough of the people enough of the time. Aside from such thraldom, newspapers are subject to the tendency of diverse businesses to become tied together by the cross-investments of their owners. But naturally, when the shares of a newspaper lie in the safe-deposit box cheek by jowl with gas, telephone, and pipe-line stock, a tenderness for these collateral interests is likely to affect the news-columns. " KILLING " IMPORTANT NEWS That in consequence of its commercialization, and its frequent subjection to outside interests, the daily newspaper is constantly suppressing important news, will appear from the instances that follow. They are hardly a third of the ma- terial that has come to the writer's attention. A prominent Philadelphia clothier visiting New York was caught perverting boys, and cut his throat. His firm being a heavy advertiser, not a single paper in his home city mentioned the tragedy. One New York paper took ad- vantage of the situation by sending over an ex- tra edition containing the story. The firm in question has a large branch in a Western city. 117 CHANGING AMEEICA There too the local press was silent, and the opening was seized by a Chicago paper. In this same Western city the vice-president of this firm was indicted for bribing an alder- man to secure the passage of an ordinance au- thorizing the firm to bridge an alley separating two of its buildings. Kepresentatives of the firm requested the newspapers in which it advertised to ignore the trial. Accordingly the five Eng- lish papers published no account of the trial, which lasted a week and disclosed highly sensa- tional matter. Only the German papers sent re- porters to the trial and published the proceed- ings. In a great jobbing center, one orf the most prominent cases of the United States District Attorney was the prosecution of certain firms for misbranding goods. The facts brought out appeared in the press of the smaller centers, but not a word was printed in the local papers. In another center, four firms were fined for selling potted cheese which had been treated with pre- servatives. The local newspapers stated the facts, but withheld the names of the firms, a con- sideration they are not likely to show to the or- dinary culprit. 118 THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS In a trial in a great city it was brought out by sworn testimony that, during a recent labor struggle which involved teamsters on the one hand and the department stores and the mail- order houses on the other, the employers had plotted to provoke the strikers to violence by sending a long line of strike-breaking wagons out of their way to pass a lot on which the strik- ers were meeting. These wagons were the bait to a trap, for a strong force of policemen was held in readiness in the vicinity, and the gov- ernor of the state was at the telephone ready to call out the militia if a riot broke out. Fortu- nately, the strikers restrained themselves, and the trap was not sprung. It is easy to imagine the headlines that would have been used if labor had been found in so diabolical a plot. Yet the newspapers unanimously refused to print this testimony. In the same city, during a strike of the ele- vator men in the large stores, the business agent of the elevator-starters' union was beaten to death, in an alley behind a certain emporium, by a "strong-arm" man hired by that firm. The story, supported by affidavits, was given by a responsible! lawyer to three newspaper men, 119 CHAN-GIKG AMERICA eacli of whom accepted it as true and promised to print it. The account never appeared. In another city the sales-girls in the big shops had to sign an exceedingly mean and oppressive contract which, if generally known, would have made the firms odious to the public. A promi- nent social worker brought these contracts, and evidence as to the bad conditions that had be- come established under them, to every newspaper in the city. Not one would print a line on the subject. On the outbreak of a justifiable street-car strike the newspapers were disposed to treat it in a sympathetic way. Suddenly they veered, and became unanimously hostile to the strikers. Inquiry showed that the big merchants had threatened to withdraw their advertisements un- less the newspapers changed their attitude. In the summer of 1908 disastrous fires raged in the northern Lake country, and great areas of standing timber were destroyed. A promi- nent organ of the lumber industry belittled the losses and printed reassuring statements from lumbermen who were at the very moment call- ing upon the state for a fire patrol. When taxed with the deceit, the organ pleaded its ob- 120 THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPOBTANT NEWS ligation to support the market for the bonds which the lumber companies of the Lake region had been advertising in its columns. On account of agitating for teachers' pen- sions, a teacher was summarily dismissed by a corrupt school-board, in violation of their own published rule regarding tenure. An influential newspaper published the facts of school-board grafting brought out in the teacher's suit for re- instatement until, through his club affiliations, a big merchant was induced to threaten the paper with the withdrawal of his advertising. No further reports of the revelations appeared. During labor disputes the facts are usually distorted to the injury of labor. In one case, strikers held a meeting on a vacant lot enclosed by a newly-erected billboard. Forthwith ap- peared, in a yellow journal professing warm friendship for labor, a front-page cut of the bill- board and a lurid story of how the strikers had built a " stockade," behind which they intended to bid defiance to the bluecoats. It is not sur- prising that when the van bringing these lying sheets appeared in their quarter of the city, the libeled men overturned it. During the struggle of carriage-drivers for a 121 CHANGIISTG AMEEICA six-day week, certain great dailies lent them-, selves to a concerted effort of the liverymen to win public sympathy by making it appear that the strikers were interfering with funerals. One paper falsely stated that a strong force of police was being held in reserve in case of " riots," and that policemen would ride beside the non-union drivers of hearses. Another, under the mis- leading headline, " Two Funerals Stopped by Striking Cab-men," described harmless colloquies between hearse-drivers and pickets. This was followed up with a solemn editorial, " May a Man go to his Long Best in Peace?" although, as a matter of fact, the strikers had no intention of interfering with funerals. The lying headline is a favorite device for mis- leading the reader. One sheet prints on its front page a huge " scare " headline, " ^ Hang Hay- wood and a Million Men will March in Re- venge,' says Darrow." The few readers whose glance fell from the incendiary headline to the dispatch below it found only the following: " Mr. Darrow, in closing the argument, said that *if the jury hangs Bill Haywood, one million willing hands will seize the banner of liberty by the open grave, and bear it on to victory.' " In 122 THE SUPPEESSION OF IMPOETANT NEWS the same style, a dispatch telling of the death of an English policeman, from injuries received during a riot precipitated by suffragettes at- tempting to enter a hall during a political meet- ing, is headed, " Suffragettes kill Policeman ! '' The alacrity with which many dailies serve as mouthpieces of the financial powers came out very clearly during the recent industrial de- pression. The owner of one leading newspaper called his reporters together and said in effect, " Boys, the first of you who turns in a story of a lay-off or a shut-down, gets the sack." Early in the depression the newspapers teemed with glowing accounts of the resumption of steel mills and the revival of business, all baseless. After harvest time they began to cheep, " Pros- perity," " Bumper Crops," " Farmers buying Automobiles." In cities where banks and em- ployers offered clearing-house certificates instead of cash, the press usually printed fairy tales of the enthusiasm with which these makieshifts were taken by depositors and workingmen. The numbers and sufferings of the unemployed were ruthlessly concealed from the reading pub- 123 CHANGING AMERICA lie. A mass meeting of men out of work was represented as " anarchistic " or " instigated by the socialists for political effect." In one daily appeared a dispatch under the heading " Five Thousand Jobs Offered; only Ten apply.'' It stated that the Commissioner of Public Works of Detroit, misled by reports of dire distress, set afoot a public work which called for five thou- sand men. Only ten men applied for work, and all these expected to be bosses. Correspondence with the official established the fact that the number of jobs offered was five hundred, and that three thousand men applied for them! " SACRED cows " On the desk of every editor and sub-editor of a newspaper run by a capitalist promoter now under prison sentence lay a list of sixteen cor- porations in which the owner was interested. This was to remind them not to print anything damaging to these concerns. In the office these corporations were jocularly referred to as " sacred cows.'' Nearly every form of privilege is found in the herd of " sacred cows " venerated by the daily press. 124 THE SUPPEESSION OF IMPOETANT NEWS The railroad company is a " sacred cow." At a hearing before a state railroad commission, the attorney of a shippers' association got an eminent magnate into the witness chair, with the intention of wringing from him the truth re- garding the political expenditures of his rail- road. At this point the commission, an abject creature of the railroads, arbitrarily excluded the daring attorney from the case. The mem- orable excoriation which that attorney gave the commission to its face was made to appear in the papers as the cause instead of the consequence of this exclusion. Subsequently, when the at- torney filed charges with the governor against the commission, one editor wrote an editorial stating the facts and criticizing the commission- ers. The editorial was suppressed after it was in type. The public-service company is a " sacred cow.'^ In a city of the Southwest, last summer, while houses were burning from lack of water for the fire hose, a lumber company offered to supply the firemen with water. The water company re- plied that they had "sufficient." Neither this nor other damaging information concerning the company's conduct got into the columns of the 125 CHANGING AMEEICA local press. A yellow journal conspicuous in the fight for cheaper gas by its ferocious onslaughts on the " gas trust," suddenly ceased its attack. Soon it began to carry a full-page " Cook with gas " advertisement. The cow had found the en- trance to the sacred fold. Traction is a " sacred cow." The truth about Cleveland's fight for the three-cent fare has been widely suppressed. For instance, while Mayor Johnson was superintending the removal of the tracks of a defunct street railway, he was served with a court order enjoining him from tearing up the rails. As the injunction was not in- dorsed, as by law it should be, he thought it was an ordinary communication, and put it in his pocket to examine later. The next day he was summoned to show reason why he should not be found in contempt of court. When the facts came out, he was, of course, discharged. An examination of the seven leading dailies of the country shows that a dispatch was sent out from Cleveland stating that Mayor Johnson, after acknowledging service, pocketed the in- junction, and ordered his men to proceed with their work. In the newspaper offices this dis- patch was then embroidered. One paper said 126 THE SUPPEESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS the mayor told his men to go ahead and ignore the injunction. Another had the mayor inti- mating in advance that he would not obey an or- der if one were issued. A third invented a con- versation in which the mayor and his superin- tendent made merry over the injunction. Not one of the seven journals reported the mayor's complete exoneration later. The tax system is a " sacred cow." During a banquet of two hundred single-taxers, at the con- clusion of their state conference, a man fell in a fit. Reporters saw the trifling incident, yet the morning papers, under big headlines, " Many poisoned at Single-Tax Banquet," told in detail how a large number of banqueters had been ptomaine-poisoned. The conference had formu- lated a single-tax amendment to the state con- stitution, which they intended to present to the people for signature under the new Initiative Law. One paper gave a line and a half to this most significant action. No other paper noticed it. The party system is a "sacred cow." When a county district court declared that the Initi- ative and Referendum amendment to the Oregon constitution was invalid, the item was spread 127 CHANGING AMEEICA broadcast. But when later the Supreme Court of Oregon reversed that decision, the fact was too trivial to be put on the wires. The " man higher up " is a " sacred cow." In reporting Prosecutor Heney's argument in the Calhoun case, the leading San Francisco paper omitted everything on the guilt of Calhoun and made conspicuous certain statements of Mr. Heney with reference to himself, with intent to make it appear that his argument was but a vin- dication of himself, and that he made no points against the accused. The argument for the de- fense was printed in full, the " points " being neatly displayed in large type at proper inter- vals. At a crisis in this prosecution a Washing- ton dispatch quoted the chairman of the Appro- priations Committee as stating in the House that " Mr. Heney received during 1908 |23,000, for which he performed no service whatever for the Government.'' It was some hours before the re- port was corrected by adding Mr. Tawney's con- cluding words, " during that year." In view of their suppression and misrepre- sentation of vital truth, the big daily papers, broadly speaking, must be counted as allies of those whom — as Editor Dana reverently put 128 THE SUPPEESSION OF IMPOKTANT NEWS it — " G'Dd has endowed with a genius for sav- ing, for getting rich, for bringing wealth to- gether, for accumulating and concentrating money." In rallying to the side, of the people they are slower than the weeklies, the magazines, the pulpit, the platform, the bar, the literati, the intellectuals, the social settlements, and the universities. HOW A vox CLAMANTIS BECOMES PROPERTY Now and then, to be sure, in some betrayed and misgoverned city, a man of force takes some little sheet, prints all the news, ventilates the local situation, arouses the community, builds up a huge circulation, and proves that truth-tell- ing still pays. But such exploits do not counter- act the economic developments which have brought on the glacial epoch in journalism. Note what happens later to such a newspaper. It is now a valuable property, and as such it will be treated. The editor need not repeat the bold strokes that won public confidence; he has only to avoid anything that would forfeit it. Uncon- sciously he becomes, perhaps, less a newspaper man, more a business man. He may make in- vestments which muzzle his paper here, form 129 cha:n"ging ameeica social connections whicli silence it there. He may tire of fighting and want to " cash in." In any case, when his newspaper falls into the hands of others, it will be run as a business, and not as a crusade. WILL NEWS "out"? What can be done about the suppression of news? At least, we can refrain from arraign- ing and preaching. To urge the editor, under the thumb of the advertiser or of the owner, to be more independent, is to invite him to remove himself from his profession. As for the capital- ist-owner, to exhort him to run his newspaper in the interests of truth and progress is about as reasonable as to exhort the mill-owner to work his property for the public good instead of for his private benefit. What is needed is a broad new avenue to the public mind. Already smothered facts are cut- ting little channels for themselves. The im- mense vogue of the " muck-raking " magazines is due to their being vehicles for suppressed news. Non-partizan leaders are meeting with cheering response when they found weeklies in order to reach their natural following. The So- 130 THE SUPPEESSION OF IMPOETANT NEWS cialist Party supports two dailies, less to spread their ideas than to print what the capitalistic dailies would stifle. Civic associations, munici- pal voters' leagues, and legislative voters' leagues, are circulating tons of leaflets and bul- letins full of suppressed facts. Within a year five cities have, with the taxpayers' money, started journals to acquaint the citizens with municipal happenings and affairs. In many cities have sprung up private non-partizan weeklies to re- port civic information. Moreover, the spoken word is once more a power. The demand for lecturers and speakers is insatiable, and the plat- form bids fair to recover its old prestige. The smotherers are dismayed by the growth of the Chautauqua circuit. Congressional speeches give vent to boycotted truth, and circulate widely under the franking privilege. City clubs and Saturday lunch clubs are formed to listen to facts and ideas tabooed by the daily press. More is made of public hearings before committees of councilmen or legislators. When all is said, however, the defection of the daily press has been a staggering blow to de- mocracy. 131 CHAN-QING AMEEICA THE NEED OF THE ENDOWED NEWSPAPER Many insist that tlie public is able to recog- nize and pay for tbe truth. " Trust the pub- lic '' and in the end merit will be rewarded. Time and again men have sunk money in start- ing an honest and outspoken sheet, confident that soon the public would rally to its support. But such hopes are doomed to disappointment. The editor who turns away bad advertising or defies his big patrons cannot lay his copy on the subscriber's doorstep for as little money as the editor who purveys publicity for all it is worth ; and the masses will not pay three cents when an- other paper that " looks just as good " can be had for a cent. In a word, the art of simulating honesty and independence has outrun the insight of the average reader. To conclude that the people are not able to recognize and pay for the truth about current happenings simply puts the dissemination of news in a class with other momentous social services. Because people fail to recognize and pay for good books, endowed libraries stud the land. Because they fail to recognize and pay for good instruction, education is provided free 132 THE SUPPEESSION OF IMPOETANT NEWS or at part cost. Just as the moment came wlien it was seen that private schools, loan libraries, commercial parks, baths, gymnasia, athletic grounds, and play-grounds would not answer, so the moment is here for recognizing that the com- mercial news medium does not adequately meet the needs of democratic citizenship. Endowment is necessary, and, since we are not yet wise enough to run a public-owned daily newspaper, the funds must come from private sources. In view of the fact that in fifteen years large donations aggregating more than a thou- sand million of dollars have been made for pub- lic purposes in this country, it is safe to predict that, if the usefulness of a non-commercial news- paper be demonstrated, funds will be forthcom- ing. In the cities, where the secret control of the channels of publicity is easiest, there are likely to be founded financially independent newspapers, the gift of public-spirited men of wealth. THE CONTROL OF THE ENDOWED NEWSPAPER The ultimate control of such a foundation constitutes a problem. A newspaper free to ig- nore the threats of big advertisers or powerful 133 CHANGING AMERICA interests, one not to be bought, bullied, or bludgeoned, one that might at any moment blurt out the damning truth about police protection to vice, corporate tax-dodging, the grabbing of water frontage by railroads, or the non-enforce- ment of the factory laws, would be of such strategic importance in the struggle for wealth that desperate efforts would be made to chloro- form it. If its governing board perpetuated it- self by co-optation, it would eventually be packed mth " safe " men, who would see to it that the newspaper was run in a " conservative '' spirit ; for, in the long run, those who can watch for an advantage all the time will beat the people, who can watch only some of the time. Chloroformed the endowed newspaper will be, unless it be committed to the onward thought and conscience of the community. This could be done by letting vacancies on the governing board be filled in turn by the local bar associa- tion, the medical association, the ministers' union, the degree-granting faculties, the feder- ated teachers, the central labor union, the cham- ber of commerce, the associated charities, the public libraries, the non-partizan citizens' asso- ciations, the improvement leagues, and the social 134 THE SUPPEESSION OF IMPOETANT I^EWS settlements. In this way the endowment would rest ultimately on the chief apexes of moral and intellectual worth in the city. THE SERVICES OF THE ENDOWED NEWSPAPER While giving, with headline, cut, and cartoon the interesting news, — forgeries and accidents society and sports, as well as business and poli tics, — the endowed newspaper would not drama tize crime, or gossip of private affairs ; above all it would not " fake," " doctor," or sensationalize the news. Too self-respecting to use keyhole tactics, and too serious to chronicle the small beer of the wedding trousseau or the divorce court, such a newspaper could not begin to match the commercial press in circulation. But it would reach those who reach the public through the weeklies and monthlies, and would inform the teachers, preachers, lecturers, and public men, who speak to the people eye to eye. What is more, it would be a corrective neivs- paper, giving a wholesome leverage for lifting up the commercial press. The big papers would not dare be caught smothering or " cooking " the news. The revelations of an independent jour- nal that everybody believed, would be a terror to 135 CHANGING AMEEICA them, and, under the spur of a competitor not to be frightened, bought up, or tired out, they must needs, in sheer self-preservation, tell the truth much oftener than they do. The Erie Canal handles less than a twentieth of the traffic -across the State of New York, yet, by its stand- ing offer of cheap transportation, it exerts a reg- ulative pressure on railway rates which is real- ized only when the canal opens in the spring. On the same principle, the endowed newspaper in a given city might print only a twentieth of the daily press output and yet exercise over the other nineteen-twentieths an influence great and salutary. 136 VIII THE MIDDLE WEST — THE FIBER OF THE PEOPLE T N these days of change, by the time a national -*■ trait has come to be generally recognized it has vanished. The school geographies insist that the French are "gay"; in point of fact, they have become in the last forty years a very serious people. The world thinks of the Brit- ish as "stolid"; but, since Maf eking night, these same British seem to have turned demon- strative, almost mercurial. We go on thinking of the Germans as cautious and sluggish, whereas, actually, they are daring and energetic. So is it with sectional traits. By the time some impression about the West has sunk deep into the Eastern mind, the West has swept on- ward and falsified it. The Yankee thinks of the Middle West as the land of privation and hard- ship ; it is, in fact, a scene of comfort and plenty. He regards it as peopled by a hodgepodge of aliens, whereas the hodgepodge is at his own 137 CHANGIlSra AMEEICA door. He looks upon New England as the ref- uge of the primal American spirit, when, in sooth, Iowa and Kansas are more evenly Ameri- can in tone than any like population in the East. The Back Bay may think of the Illinois farmer as raising corn to feed hogs, which he will sell in order to buy more land on which to raise more corn to feed more hogs with which to buy more land; and so on. But the grandson of the man of whom this was said sends his daugh- ter to college, taxes himself for a public library, and is patron of the local art-loan ex- hibit. Nor is the Middle West without its delusions. It imagines it is growing faster than the East, because the drift from the crowd toward the Edge of Things, and from the wearied land to the virgin soils, has been a constant in American history. That the center of population, which has traveled westward at the average rate of fifty miles a decade, should halt, or even retreat, would be deemed a marvel, like the sun standing still in the vale of Ajalon. Yet that very por- tent impends. The center, which migrated fifty- eight miles in the seventies, and forty-eight miles in the eighties, shifted only fourteen miles in 138 THE MIDDLE WEST the nineties. That it then moved on thirty-one miles was due to the rush to the Pacific slope, where a family, being at the long arm of the lever, balances half a dozen Slovak families shantied in Pittsburgh. The truth is that the East grew faster than the Middle West through the nineties, and in the last ten years it has been gaining nearly twice as rapidly, having added a quarter to its people while the West was adding a seventh. While in the East one county out of four lost in population, more than two counties out of five in the Middle West showed a de- crease. THE NEW BLOOD OF THE WEST — WHERE IT COMES FROM One reason is that the Western farmer resents cramping conditions more strongly, and responds sooner to the lure of fresh acres, than the East- ern farmer. The West it is that peoples the newer West, while the enterprising spirits of the older commonwealths seek their chance in the near cities. A lifetime ago the old Yankee stock was faring overland to settle the wilderness. To-day only a sprinkling of the native Ameri- 139 CHANGING AMEEICA cans west of tlie Great Lakes claim an Eastern State as their birthplace. If in Iowa seventy- one counties out of ninety-nine have gone back in population during the last decade, and an equal number in Missouri, it is assuredly not from bad times, but from the call of cheap land in Texas or the Canadian Northwest. New Englanders and Middle State people settled freely from the Western Reserve to the Mississippi. But the men from> this area settled Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, and thence over- flowed into Oklahoma and Colorado. Ohio, Wis- consin, and Illinois provided the bulk of the American element in Minnesota, and she in turn pours most of her increase into the region be- yond. East and Middle West are not far apart in numbers ; but since 1860, Colorado has drawn from two to three times as many of her people from the Middle West as from the East, In North Dakota, in 1900, five times as many peo- ple hailed from west of Pittsburgh as from east of it; in South Dakota, ^Ye times as many; in Washington, three times as many ; in Oklahoma, eighteen times as many. While the West is even now being tapped by ^^ home-seekers' excursions," which annually 140 THE MIDDLE WEST carry nearly half a million west-bound through Minneapolis, Omaha, and Kansas City, the East is soaking up the new immigration like a dry sponge. From thirty to forty years ago, great numbers of Germans, Scandinavians, Mennonites, Poles, Bohemians, and even Icelanders, landing at Castle Garden, journeyed straight through, with a rail- road-ticket pinned to the shoulder, and within a year they were settled on government land. To- day the still virgin lands lie beyond the ken of the insweeping tides from southern Europe and the Orient, dreaming of jobs rather than of farms. Of these aliens, in their first crudeness, the East gets nearly three times as many as it should in comparison with the Middle West. THE UNDERSTATURED IMMIGRANTS A generation ago the traveler from the valley of the Connecticut or the Mohawk was offended by the peasant look of many a settlement beyond Chicago. To-day this new immigration, which has Constantinople as its geographical center, is so alien, so ignorant, and so helpless, that it takes refuge in the first industrial harbors or bays it finds. The huge, pregnant, intimidating 141 CHANGING AMEEICA fact of our time is the progressive saturation of the Northeast with these understatured new- comers, who have no intention whatever of seek- ing the few remaining fragments of the frontier, — Idaho, the " short-grass " country, the Texas Panhandle, or the cut-over pine lands of the Northwest, — which remind us that Volume I of American history is not yet ended. A recent leisurely drive through Connecticut prompts Mr. Poultney Bigelow to remark: " The overwhelming majority of those we saw by the roadside were Italians. . . . They cannot yet speak English nor can the hundreds of Slavonians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Poles, Eumanians, Syrians, and Bulgarians who seem to stand sentry at every cross-road where we yearned for some one of English speech from whom we might extract information. . . . To find the children of those whose homes rep- resent the ruins of modern Connecticut, follow me into the slums of Boston, New York, or Chicago, or into the hundreds of equally un- savory factory towns that blot the landscape of this otherwise beautiful State." Not scattered as in the flush days of free land, but marshaled in gangs of miners, shovel- 14:2 THE MIDDLE WEST ers, or concrete-mixers, or lodged in certain pockets, — a Ghetto, a Little Italy, or Little Hungary, or Little Armenia, — the later aliens form, as it were, insoluble clots. Few venture far inland in their raw state. Those who filter through the industrial mesentery to the remote farming regions are already half Americanized and are readily absorbed into the democratic society of the West. This is why its proportion of illiterate foreign-born men is less than half as great as that of the East. As fresh coal in a furnace sends up the steam- gage, so the automatic stoker at Ellis Island charges the yicinity with a cheap labor that is filling southern New England and the Middle States with dumps, coal-breakers, canneries, sky-scrapers, wharves, subways, barge canals, and metaled roads. It is also clinching their hold on manufacturing industries and postponing that proximity of factory to farm which is the dream of every Western town. While insisting masterfully on its tariff protection, this region, which in the late eighties was gloomily listing its abandoned farms, now sees its export trade spring up like Jonah's gourd, smiles at the West's endeavor to get mills of its own, and 143 CHAiSTGIXG AMERICA does not mind sending sheaves of its cial paper" to be rediscounted by Western banks. DIVERGENCES IN THE AMERICAN STOCK There is another basis of divergence between the sections. The American stock in the Mid- dle West is not altogether of the same type as the American stock in the East. On the physical side the evidence is strong. Dr. Gould's tabulation of the measurements of soldiers by the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War shows that the men from New Eng- land weighed 139.4 lbs., those from the Middle States 141 lbs., those from Ohio and Indiana 145.4 lbs., and the men from Michigan, Mis- souri, and Illinois 141.8 lbs. The last figure may reflect the dyspepsia which troubled the native volunteers much more than the foreign-born and which raged with special virulence in the newer regions, where people had not yet ceased to live on " hog and hominy." From New England the proportion of tall men in a thousand was 295; from the Middle States, 237; from Ohio and In- diana, 486; and from Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri, 466. The chest expansion rose from 144 THE MIDDLE WEST 2.6 in New Englanders to 3.25 in the men from the West. Even to-day the makers of ready-made cloth- ing note a slight tendency toward larger sizes in the West, and observe that the Western man is generally broader than the Eastern man. V^HY MEN WENT WEST A hundred years ago the Rev. Timothy Dwight commented complacently on the benefit to Connecticut from the draining away to the frontier — then western New York — of the restless spirits who chafed under the rule of the old families and the Congregational clergy. It never occurred to him that these insurgent spirits were carrying with them to the wilder- ness a precious energy and initiative. The unprosperous, the shiftless, and the mi- gratory sought the frontier, to be sure; but the enterprising, too, were attracted by it. The timorous and cautious stayed and accepted the cramping conditions of an old society ; but those who dared take chances, to " place a bet on themselves," were apt to catch the Western fever. Among the sons and grandsons of such risk-takers the venturesome temper cropped out 145 CHANGING AMEEICA much oftener than among the sons and grand- sons of the stay-at-homes. Hence, the strange fact that it was the roomy West that settled the farther West. On each new frontier have swarmed men from what was itself frontier only a generation earlier. During the hundred years required to settle the country from the Alleghanies to the Rock- ies, the venturing spirit became visibly intensi- fied in the Americans of the interior. Less and less provocation was needed to make a man pull up stakes and head for the open country in a covered wagon. The stalwart youth spurned his natal spot as " too crowded " when, in fact, it was full of every opportunity save that of free land. In the last Westernmost decanting of the pioneering breed, courage and love of inde- pendence reach their greatest intensity. To-day in the recesses of the Rocky Mountains you come upon steady-eyed, eagle-faced men with tawny mustaches, whose masterful, unswerving will and fierce impatience of restraint remind you of their spiritual kinsmen, the heroes of the Ice- landic sagas. 146 THE MIDDLE WEST A COMPARISON FROM THE CIVIL WAR The fiber of the pioneering breed conies out in a remarkable way in the stubbornness and extraordinary willingness to take punishment showm by our soldiers in the Civil War. On comparing the average losses of troops in great modern wars we get this table : For the twelve principal battles of the Seven Years' War, victors 14 per cent., defeated 19 per cent. For the twenty-two principal battles of the Napoleonic epoch, victors 12 per cent., defeated 19 per cent. For the four principal battles of the Crimean War, victors 10 per cent., defeated 17 per cent. For the four principal battles of the Franco- Austrian War, victors 8 per cent., defeated 8.5 per cent. For the six principal battles of the Austro- Prussian War, victors 7 per cent., defeated 9 per cent. For the eight principal battles of the Franco- Prussian War, victors 10 per cent., defeated 9 per cent. For the twelve principal battles of our Civil 147 CHAN"GING AMEEICA WaTy the losses of the Union Army amounted to 19.7 per cent., and those of the Confederate Army to 19.6 per cent. The comparison suggests that two centuries of frontier selections may hare gradually built up in the Americans a peculiar strength of will, a trait which presumably retains its greatest freshness and vigor in those who have followed farthest the migrating frontier. WESTERN SELF-RESPECT AND INDEPENDENCE In the pioneer blood lurks, too, a secret horror of taking another man's orders or pay. The man borderers despise is not the wight who is poor or out-at-elbows, but the man who for a wage submits himself to another's will. They regard the negro menial as sent by Providence to ren- der necessary services no real man will under- take, and they marvel that in older communities are to be found white men who will serve as waiter, porter, or boot-black. I have heard sturdy farm-lads wish they might once gaze upon a valet or footman, " just to see how that sort of fellow would look." " Why," I asked the Master of the National Grange, " is the Grange so much stronger in the 148 THE MIDDLE WEST East than in the West? '' " Because/' came the reply, " the social advantages of the Grange ap- peal much more to the Eastern farmer than to the Western. The Western farmer is absorbed in making money." His mind has run to crops and bullocks, and some take it as proof that he is sordid. But there is another way of looking at it. The Westerner's willingness to give up home, neigh- bors, and old associations for the sake of a " claim '' on the prairie is not sordid. His stern preoccupation with "getting ahead" is a part of his inherited passion for personal independ- ence. I have seen a gray hue steal over the face of the settler when speaking of some one who had " lost his farm " and " had to go out by the day." For the wage-earner's lot the true-born Westerner feels a dread quite incomprehensible to cities and to old communities. If he ruth- lessly sacrifices comforts and culture, it is that he may win a footing of his own and so call no man master. Once he has cleared off the mortgage, im- proved his place, and gained a soothing sense of financial security, he will provide books, piano, music lessons, travel, and college educa- 149 CHANGING AMEEICA tion for his children, even if in the mean- time his own capacity to enjoy has been atrophied. The surest proof of the Westerner's hidden idealism is his response to the charm and appeal of girlhood. No people in the world offer so many of their daughters a college education or discriminate less against daughters in providing opportunities. Not long ago I talked with one of our best art- ists in black-and-white returning from his first trip to the West. " Yesterday/' he said, " I saw in St. Paul a wonderful and beautiful thing, which would be impossible in New York City or in Europe. It was Tag Day, and on the street corners and in the lobbies of hotels and office buildings were stationed couples of bright-eyed girls in their teens, soliciting contributions to charity. Here were these pretty, unchaperoned young creatures accosting every man who passed, and yet I doubt if one of them met yesterday with a word or look that could wound her inno- cence. It was Arcadian." SIGNS OF DETERIORATION IN NEW ENGLAND Further proof that the wanderers to the West differed from the home-stayers is gained by 150 THE MIDDLE WEST scrutinizing the descendants of those who for generations withstood the call of the frontier. Of course the growing cities of the East have always vied with the frontier in luring the am- bitious, and there is, therefore, no perceptible difference in fiber between the business and pro- fessional corps in the Eastern centers and the corresponding element in the cities of the Mis- sissippi Valley. Then, too, the already successful and estab- lished people in the older communities were quite too well off to be attracted by the West. Those with the right combination of ability and temperament to keep themselves at the top at hom^ had no incentive to migrate. Hence " the Brahmin caste," as Dr. Holmes called it, the old, influential families of the seaboard States, which have given great leadership not only to their region, but often to the nation. But looking past these conspicuous and well- recognized tendencies, one comes upon some- thing very significant. In the rougher parts of New England to-day one finds old towns that touched their zenith eighty years ago. The elite of the young people have regularly mi- grated, formerly to the West, of late to the rising 151 CHANGING AMEEICA cities of their own region. Aside from the aliens that here and there have seeped in, the inhabitants are of the blood of those ivho always stayed hehind. In such districts the children are, in general, so listless that they have to be incited to play. Left to themselves, they do nothing but loaf about and play mean tricks on one another. Not half the high-school lads will watch their ball-team play a match game. They shrink from a " hike '' of a few miles on a Sat- urday afternoon, and find the " boy scout " work too strenuous. The elderly farmers are ob- viously less supple and active than men of fifty ought to be. Outsiders agree that the average farmer accomplishes no more in three days than " a good, bright man " can do in one day. A laziness worthy of the hook-worm belt will keep a man sitting on his door-step till his barn tum- bles down before his eyes. Never-works loaf all day about the grocery, the feed store, or the livery-stable. In villages still bearing traces of the famed New England neatness, loose clap- boards, unpruned trees, cluttered-up door-yards, broken windows, unpainted houses, leaning fences, and crazy buggies testify to the sagging of the community below its former plane. Tidy 152 THE MIDDLE WEST places are to be seen, but the proportion of slovens has visibly grown. In some of these fished-out communities the teachers complain that the school-children do not make the progress of children elsewhere. To hold the pupil's attention, it is necessary to keep him amused. The mentally incompetent are rap- idly increasing, probably because the normal couple averages less than two children, while the dull has four or ^re. Intellectual craving is very rare, and in a town of fourteen hundred the preacher could not recall in his ^ve years a youth who had gone to college. The comment of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction upon the classical academies which once flourished in these towns is perti- nent. " Out of these academies went a steady stream of sons and daughters who were, other things being equal, always the strongest of the generation, for otherwise they would not have gained this education. They became lawyers, or physicians, or clergymen, or schoolmasters, or business men in the cities, and the girls went with them prevailingly to be their wives. The unambitious, the dull, the unfortunate boys and girls of the old country-side, who could not get 153 CHANGINa AMERICA to the academy, as a class remained behind and became the dominant stock. And the old acad- emy, haying sorted out and sent away the am- bitious stock, is now dormant." Social workers doubt if the morals of these country boys and girls are as good as they are in the ordinary city tenements or on the Bowery. With the departure of the finer youths, vanish the higher interests that hold up the young. Gone are the singing-schools, spelling-matches, and debating-societies that once enlivened the long winter evenings. The rising generation seem utterly dead to higher things. Card-play- ing, smoking, dances, and motion pictures sum up their recreations, and those who try to inter- est them in religion, education, or even sport, agree that there is ^^ nothing to build on.'' Solitary tippling is in great favor with adults, and marital transgressions are frequent. There is little public spirit, and men of ample means are not ashamed to refuse a contribution to a welfare undertaking on the ground that they " see nothing in it " for themselves. The pros- pering are very furtive about their investments, and each strives to hide from his neighbors how well off he is. 154 THE MIDDLE WEST In the communities of which I speak, the churches are dead or languishing. In villages that once maintained three, two will be found boarded up. The habit of church attendance has almost died out. The clergymen are in de- spair, for their members are elderly people, mostly women. Young recruits are not in sight, and the church is dropping into the graveyard. LACK OF COMMUNITY LIFE Although this is an extreme case, the down- ward tendency is wide-spread. Says the head of the Church and Country Life Department of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions : Allowing for some exceptions, not too numer- ous, it may be said that throughout the pros- perous and productive farming regions of the United States, which have been settled for fifty years, community life has disappeared. There is no play for the children; there is no recre- ation for young people; there are no adequate opportunities for acquaintance and marriage for young men and women ; there is not a sufficient educational system for the needs of country peo- ple, and there is not for the average man or woman born in the country an economic oppor- 155 CHANGING AMERICA tunity within reach of his birthplace, such as will satisfy even modest desires. There is not in a weak community that satisfaction of social in- stinct which makes it " a good place to live in." Time was in New England and New York and Pennsylvania when there was a community to which every farmer belonged with some pleasure and pride. The absence of community life throughout these country regions expresses to- day what one man calls " the intolerable condi- tion of country life." OTHER REGIONS THAT SHARE THIS RETROGRESSION If the moral sag is deepest in certain New England spots, it is only because nowhere else in the North has a rural population been so skimmed and reskimmed. But the thing has a wider range than people suspect. The disfran- chisement of seventeen hundred citizens of Adams County, Ohio, for selling their votes lets in a pitiless ray on the dry rot of the lifeless communities that have missed the electrifying touch of railroad or city. The knots of gaping, tobacco-chewing loafers that haunt railway-sta- tions in some parts of Indiana suggest that the 156 THE MIDDLE WEST natural pace-makers of the neighborhood have moved on to create prosperity elsewhere. In southern Michigan, in Illinois, and even on into Missouri, are communities which remind one of fished-out ponds populated chiefly by bullheads and suckers. The investigations that led to the establish- ment of the " county work " of the Young Men's Christian Association show that rural decay is to be found, on the poorer soils at least, in purely farming regions as far west as the Mis- sissippi Kiver. " It is like a solar eclipse," said one investigator, " with its darkest shadow rest- ing on the New England hills, and its penum- bra reaching out even to regions only two gen- erations from the pioneer stage." THE ^^ WE-FBELING " OF THE WEST Whatever be its range, the cause of the phe- nomenon is not degeneration, but folk-depletion, which seems to have swept west with the same pace as the twin blight of soil-depletion. Over the leaner areas the more ambitious and stirring persons who, had they stayed, would have led in community cooperation and stamped upon their coarser neighbors their own ideals, sought the 157 CHANGING AMEEICA beckoning cities or the inviting soils farther West. The longer this drain has gone on, the worse the slump. In the younger States the signs of sag fade out, and you find in the coun- try school-houses the same literary societies, de- bating-clubs, and lecture courses New England was priding herself on sixty years ago. The preacher or teacher stationed in the de- caying communities imagines that the heart- breaking spiritual deadness he sees about him reflects a general condition, and concludes that the whole country is on the down grade. It has never occurred to him that the choice spirits whose departure has so impoverished the neigh- borhood are — many of them — serving as moral dynamos to lift the tone, the refinement, and the ideals of communities in the West. Let those who despond at the spread of caries in the old " bone and sinew '' of the nation watch the crowds — mostly farmers — at some agricul- tural fair in one of the States beyond the Missis- sippi. What, he will see there in the way of stature and thew, of poise and carriage, of clear- ness of skin and eye, of sobriety and good tem- per, of good manners and natural politeness, will convince him that there is a morning fresh- 158 THE MIDDLE WEST ness to balance the twilight that broods over some of the old homes of the American stock. " Do you note any difference," I asked a West- ern man in the service of a New England State, "between your people and the people here?" " Yes," he replied, " my own people look at life in a big way. They are more willing to co- operate, more generous in supporting things for the general good, more ready to use the State government to serve their common needs. The folks here lack the we-teeling. An intense pa- rochialism keeps them jealous of their State gov- ernment, and a suspicious individualism hinders them from working together for their common benefit. In many directions I see their narrow- mindedness and mistrust of one another holding them back from prosperity." THE QUESTION OF VIRILITY In an Eastern county-seat town a resident of less than two years was able to count among his acquaintance forty-seven childless couples. An- other informant could recall among fifteen couples, friends of his, only three who had any children. " They don't want the bother." School after school that used to boast twenty or 159 CHANGING AMERICA thirty children is now lonesome with from fiye to ten. There is no way of separating in the records the native births from those among the foreign-born; but a state officer versed in sta- tistics avers that the American blood is not averaging more than one child to the family, whereas the aliens exhibit from five to twelve children a couple. But if the old branches on the tree are well- nigh sapless, the transplanted scions in the West do not fail to put forth young shoots. Children in proportion to women are half as numerous again in the Middle West as in New England and twice as numerous in the Dakotas. This despite the fact that a third of the children of New England were furnished by fecund immi- grant mothers. Not without justice is the West spoken of as ^^ virile." Through the Northeast the women outnumber the men, to the point sometimes of be- ing a drug in the matrimonial market. In New England the shortage of men is three per cent., in Massachusetts six per cent. But the Middle West shows eleven men for ten women, the trans- Mississippi country eight men to seven women, and in the Dakotas the excess of men is a third. 160 THE MIDDLE WEST Hence, as you leave salt water the status of women rises until, in the inter-mountain States, where there are at least two suitors for every woman, the sex becomes an upper caste to which nothing will be denied from street-car seats to ballots and public offices. THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE WEST That the divorce rate rises as you go West is partly due to the willingness of chivalrous leg- islators to put this weapon into the wife's hands, partly to the divorcee's much better chance of re- marriage. It is a curious fact that the order of the forty-six States arranged according to divorce rates, beginning with the lowest, tallies in a re- markable way with the order of the States ar- ranged according to proportion of women, be- ginning with the highest. Any shortage of women that makes the men eager suitors alters the terms of the marriage partnership to the advantage of the wife and betters the lot of the married woman. Accord- ingly the codes of the Western States treat the wife with more liberality than did the codes of the older States, and fairness to women seems to be a Western practice that spreads East. In- 161 / CHANGING AMEEICA deed, the enviable position of the American woman is largely the cumulative outcome of the scarcity value she has for a time enjoyed in the newer commonwealths. 162 IX THE MIDDLE WEST — THE REASSERTION OF DE- MOCRACY TT has been only a hundred and ten years -■• since the first Yankee church spire rose in the Ohio Valley. A century ago Indiana was the rawest of frontiers. It is only a rounded lifetime since the real beginning of the settle- ment of Wisconsin. Forty years ago log houses were still common in Iowa. The settling of the first tier of States beyond the Missouri River was but yesterday. To-day in North Dakota traction-engines, breaking the prairie sod with a battery of plows, are making quick fortunes for up-to-date settlers. Through the Middle West, then, survives much of that comparative equality of condition brought about by the orig- inal access of all to free land. What is more, there survives much of the self- confident individualism of the pioneers. Even after a generation or two of fulfilment and pros- perity, the people still think of the West as the 163 CHANGING AMEEICA poor man's chance, the land dedicated to equal opportunity, and they kindle into fierce resent- ment when confronted by aggregations of wealth and power which seem to lift the high higher and keep the under man down. " They 're a bull-headed lot," laments the adroit wire-puller, fresh from the easy political management of the non-resistants of the Keystone State. More- over, the Old- World bonds of social caste are dreaded by the sons of men who, half a century ago, endured log hut or sod house that they might escape these bonds. The Middle West has four millions out of the seven million persons of German parentage in this country, and the high tide of this immigration coincided with bad po- litical and social conditions in Germany. It has also over a million from a people that has never bowed the neck under the yoke of feudalism, the Scandinavians. And not a few threads of social idealism have been woven into the soul of this Middle West. Zoar in Ohio, New Harmony in Indiana, Amana and Icaria in Iowa — what generous aspirations these recall! Separatists, Rappites, Owenites, Fourierltes, Inspirationists, Icarians, sought the uncrowded West to make their dreams come 164 THE EEASSEETION OF DEMOCEACY true. They failed often, and yet tliey leavened great numbers with their vision of a society that should be free from ancient dwarfing oppressions and inequalities. Into the ground pattern of the East, to be sure, were woven more threads of idealism than into that of the Middle West, but they lie a century or two farther back, and the idealism was moral rather than so- cial, INVESTMENT EAST AND WEST The East has had time to accumulate, and for two generations it has been exporting capital to the less-developed parts, where there are farms to improve, mines to open, railways to build, and mills to run. In any sightly New England town you are pointed out the pleasant homes of cul- tivated persons who " inherited money " or " married money,'' and often derive their income from sources beyond their ken — Western rail- roads, Southern traction, or Montana copper. Of course the Middle West has a very respect- able quota of rich men, but it is easier for them to find use for their capital in their business. The great armies of security-holders live on the Atlantic slope, and their ranks are continually 165 CHANGING AMEEICA reinforced by coupon-clippers " sugared off " from the rest of the country. The mutual savings-banks of the East, with their millions of depositors, have about two thou- sand millions of money in public and corporate bonds. The great insurance companies are nearly all in New England, New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania, and are as heavy bond-buyers as the savings-banks. In New York there are 391 firms dealing in securi- ties, in Boston 129, in Philadelphia 122, in Balti- more 44, in Pittsburgh 39, in Cincinnati 42, in Chicago 101, and in St. Louis 35. Plainly, the East has a long lead as security-buyer, al- though a quarter of a billion bonds have been marketed in Chicago in a year, and the Chi- cago Stock Exchange is growing like a mush- room). The East, therefore, differs profoundly from the Middle West in that it has a vastly larger proportion of investors. It is the home not only of most of the owners of its own enterprises, but also of the owners of railways, public utilities, mines, mills, and industrial plants in all parts of the country. In the northern Mississippi Valley " Eastern money '^ is a term to conjure 166 THE REASSEETION OF DEMOCRACY with, like " Yankee capital '' in the South ; and the promoter of an interurban or a water-power development who has " got Eastern men inter- ested'' is looked upon as having taken Croesus himself into partnership. New York and Bos- ton, for example, are the headquarters of huge organizations, capitalized for hundreds of mil- lions, which control electric-lighting, power, and traction companies in all parts of the United States. No doubt, too, the stream of dividends from the nine hundred millions of American cap- ital in Mexico mostly irrigates the pleasure re- sorts between Palm Beach and Bar Harbor. There are little old States where the share- holders are so numerous that " Strike for your dividends ! " is nearly as good a vote-winning cry- as " Higher wages ! " or " Down with the cost of living ! " INVESTORS' IDEALISM Buoyed up by his life-preserver of assured in- come, or afloat on his raft of stocks and bonds, the investor is able to look about and see more than the panting swimmer. From investors, therefore, has come much of the support for re- forms that clash with the crude instinctive prej- udices of the common man. They insisted that 167 CHANGING AMEEICA government must be economical and efficient at a time when tlie masses were content if only it were popular. Tliey struck at the spoils system while yet the plain people naively thought the offices "ought to be passed around." The leisured have led in calling for the reform of our consular service and the purging of the pension- roll. The " silk-stockings " have stood up for the negro or the Indian when the hustling ma- jority were too busy to notice his plight. The " white-collared '^ supported conservation when the average American regarded the public domain as a grab-bag. To-day the " kid-gloved " champion international peace, while the " shirt- sleeves '' multitude are still finding a childish pleasure in ironclads and submarines. INVESTORS AND THE RULE OF THE PEOPLE But the man on the raft is likely to turn a critical eye upon the struggling swimmers. In- vestors believe in philanthropy rather than in community self-help, approve " social service," but shrink from anything that smacks of read- justment, are readier to promote " social wel- fare " than to concede legal rights. Mingling too exclusively with their own kind, these excel- 168 THE REASSEETION OF DEMOCRACY lent shareholding gentlemen — sons, perhaps, of the Puritans or the Quakers — settle into mis- trust of the unpropertied, and come to regard questions too much from the dividend point of view. Gradually two contrasted political creeds develop, the one professed, the other believed. There is the time-hallowed official creed for the Fourth of July, Washington's birthday, and other public occasions; and there is the creed, taken for granted in the parlor-car, the billiard- room, the library, the lobby, and the fashionable club, that the people are the " mob," and that, in the words of old Roger Sherman, "the peo- ple immediately should have as little to do as may be about government." It is easy thence to drift on into the board- room view that the skilful party managers, who keep the people amused with the semblance of power while they pull the wires in the primaries, conventions, and caucuses where government is actually shaped, are necessary to the rule of property, and every " reform " that weakens party hold or makes the chosen official obedient to the public instead of to the party boss is rev- olutionary and subversive. The hundreds of thousands of security-holders 169 CHANGING AMEEICA in the East constitute, therefore, a powerful con- servative element which continually retards that region in its democratic development. The Middle West is no more fecund in constructive ideas, but it ripens them sooner. The same re- sentment against chicane and boss rule may- smolder in the hearts of the plain people on both sides of the Alleghanies ; but it is far harder for popular discontent in the East to find able lead- ers, break on the surface, and enact itself. Where investors are many, their sentiments per- vade the air, and affect the organs that guide and voice public opinion. Unconsciously the chair, the pulpit, the rostrum, the sanctum, and the salon are tinctured by the political creed of this element, which is close-knit, positive, and in- fluential. No wonder, then, that the East con- tinually hovers between opposite tendencies — to become like Europe, because it is the Mecca of America's rich and the world's poor, and to become democratic and national, in sympathy with the impulses that reach it from the vast in- terior. In the East, many men of high ideals and in- dependent means have enlisted in politics on the side of the public welfare, and have served as a 170 THE EEASSEETION" OP DEMOCRACY kind of counterpoise to the selfish machines; but, as you leave the investor belt and enter the younger America, the number of sturdy idealists whose income goes on whether they win or lose to-day's fight is very few. The political Hes- sians know they can tire out the leaders of the people because these sooner or later must return to their neglected callings, leaving the party ma- chines masters of the field. It is not surpris- ing, then, that the people of the West do not rely on the aid of chivalrous Lafayettes, Steu- bens, and Pulaskis from the propertied class, but purpose to safeguard their dearest interests by bringing government more immediately under their own control. THE WEAK PARTIZANSHIP OF THE WEST In struggling to gain this control, the people of the West have an advantage in that they have not been wont to identify the foundations of their prosperity with the continuance of one party in power. The Kepublicanism of the West has not been of the hidebound sort one finds in certain old manufacturing States like Pennsyl- vania or Khode Island, whose outraged citizens can be brought into line at the eleventh hour by 171 CHANGIlSrG AMEEICA the dread of losing their tariff protection. Their, Democracy has not been of the fanatical temper one finds in the lower South, where good men can be rallied in support of anything held neces- sary to keep in power the party claiming to stand between them and the "horrors of negro domi- nation.^' Thanks to this comparative independ- ence, the Westerners have had both parties court- ing their favor by good works. MIDDLE WESTERN PROSPERITY Less than twenty years ago the people of the upper Mississippi Valley were heavily indebted to the East, but since the middle nineties a dra- matic change has taken place in their condition. The swift shrinkage of the frontier, the abrupt slowing up in the creation of new farms com- peting with old ones, and the growing plentiful- ness of gold, have conspired to bring about a great rise in the price of farm products. That python, the " higher cost of living," which is tightening its coils on the families of laborers, clerks, and professional men, is to the farmer an angel showering him with the good things of life. In a decade the acre value of Middle Western farm-land has doubled, and the value of 172' THE EBASSBRTION OF DEMOCEACY the buildings very nearly so. The mortgages to the East have been cleared away, and a surplus has been accumulated which reveals itself in the piling up of bank-deposits and the overflow of capital. A Kansas City banker outbid the Eastern bankers for the Philippine bond issue of 1906. Since, thanks to the alien inpouring, the East maintains its big lead in manufacturing, some expect to see a rapid expansion of the in- vestment market in the Middle West in the com- ing decade. Western farmers are converting much of their prosperity into attractive homes, macadam roads, asphalt streets, cement' walks, spacious parks, and handsome public buildings. Telephones^ bath-tubs, hot and cold water, acetylene gas, pianos, gramophones, books, and magazines are going into the houses. In January you may find half a thousand Northern farmers basking in certain of the Gulf resorts. For three years the West has been the largest market for the mod- erate-priced automobiles. Pennsylvania has is- sued one automobile license for every 178 of her people; Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minne- sota have outstanding one license to about every 100 inhabitants. But Iowa has licensed one ma- 173 CHANGING AMEEICA chine for every eighty-one persons, Nebraska one for every fifty-three, and South Dakota one for every thirty-five! The point of this is that the present political ferment in this region, unlike the radicalism of the early nineties, is no frothing up from eco- nomic distress. It comes not from the disap- pointments of men, but from their settled con- victions, and no cry that " hogs is up,'' no " full dinner-pail " symbol, can exorcise it. Until lately, these men, secure in the belief that the fabric of their government was perfect, were giv- ing themselves to their private concerns. But that Capuan epoch is past. The government in- vestigations, the " literature of exposure," and the endless rumors of deals and mergers, have clouded the beaming optimism of the Westerner. Since he caught the sound 6i softly closing doors, since he glimpsed ahead felt-shod financiers slip- ping in front of the main social advance and stealthily impounding forests, water-powers, ore- beds, oil-fields, coal-veins, water-rights, smelters, elevators, packing-houses, patents, and fran- chises, weaving, as it were, a barb-wire shearing- pen in which to corral the ovine public, the flint in him shows, and it takes little to strike fire THE EEASSEETION OF DEMOCRACY from him. It is this affrighting vision of mo- nopoly that explains the iron determination of the people to get a firmer grip on their govern- ment. It is true, as witness Oregon, that when they get direct legislation they do nothing rad- ical with it ; but they are thinking of the future, like a prudent traveler who looks to his shoot- ing-irons before setting out through a country infested by brigands. Putting aside the South, let us consider the parts played by the Faj' West, the Middle West, and the East in the various extensions of popular rule in the course of the last decade. DIRECT PRIMARIES Beginning in Minnesota's experiments in 1899 and 1901, the system of direct nominations was well worked out in the Wisconsin and Oregon laws of 1904. By the end of 1908 two of the three Pacific States and more than half of the fourteen Middle Western States had adopted mandatory laws covering virtually all State offices. Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania had mandatory laws covering all but State offices. Since then California, Michigan, and New Jersey have fallen in line. Other Eastern States have 175 CHANGING AMERICA come part way. It is evident that tlie movement for the curtailment of the power of the part}^ bosses has become nation-wide, and within five years it will be the established American prac- tice. COMMISSION GOVERNMENT FOR CITIES Eight Western States have constitutional pro- visions authorizing municipalities under certain restrictions to construct their own charters. Nine out of fourteen States in the Middle West have granted permission to cities of various sizes to adopt the* commission form of government. In the East, Massachusetts has by special acts allowed certain cities to adopt the commission form, and New Jersey allows cities to throw aside the old cumbrous type of municipal government, which offered such opportunities for the corrupt sway of special interests. West of Denver, we find twenty-five cities under commission govern- ment; between Pittsburgh and Denver seventy- one; east of Pittsburgh, ten. POPULAR CHOICE OF UNITED STATES SENATORS When a " special interest " is brought to a diamond-point in a staff of highly paid officers, ■ 176 THE REASSBRTION OF DEMOCRACY or acquires a razor-edge in the shape of a corps of expert lobbyists, it is able to cut its way through the more massive, but less concentrated, " general interest " that opposes it. As an in- creasing number of special interests became sharply apexed, and therefore quietly effective at strategic places and moments, the failures of legislatures to choose United States Senators that represent the people became ever more fre- quent and scandalous. Accordingly, the policy of letting the voters register their preference for Senator has been adopted in some form in all the Western States and in New Jersey. PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY In 1910, Oregon, the experiment-station of de- mocracy, provided for a special primary in which the people might voice their preference for Presi- dential candidates. Since then North Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan and Washington have joined her. INITIATIVE AND REFERENDUM Oregon, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Missouri, Colorado, and California have the initiative and 177 CHANGING AMERICA referendum. In 1910 the people of Illinois, by a vote of seven to two, indicated their desire to have this check submitted as a constitutional amendment, but their desire was ignored by the legislature. In Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming the legislature of 1911 voted to submit the initi- ative and referendum as an amendment to the State constitution. In North Dakota and Wis- consin the proposal must be approved by the next legislature before going to the people. In several of the formulated amendments the foes of direct legislation have tricked the people by framing a system cumbrous and unworkable. The constitutional convention now sitting in Ohio is favorable to direct legislation. Arising in the Far West, where, owing to economic con- ditions, the undermining of representative gov- ernment by greedy special interests had gone further than in the agricultural States, the pop- ular control of lawmaking is advancing with great rapidity in the Middle West, and will soon be mooted on the Atlantic slope. In view of the copious and exact knowledge of industry that underlies the making of a good workingmen's compensation act, a court-proof 178 THE EEASSEETION OF DEMOCRACY public-utilities law, or a scientific insurance code, it is not to be expected that the bulk of fu- ture legislation in the West will come by rough- and-ready town-meeting methods. Organized into committees and equipped with a legislative reference bureau, the legislature will remain the chief smithy for hammering out statutes. The reserred rights of the people will serve chiefly as a check on unfaithful lawmakers, and make it unprofitable for special interests to corrupt or own a legislature that " cannot deliver the goods." THE RECALL Provision for the recall of any elective officer who has lost the confidence of the people exists in Oregon and California and is proposed for Arizona. The amendment before the people in Washington and proposed in Idaho and Wiscon- sin excludes judges from the operation of the re- call. The sentiment among progressives of the Middle West makes it certain that the recall will be up for consideration very soon. Its salutari- ness in city government under the commission plan is widely accepted. Its merit in applica- tion to State officers is questioned, especially in 179 CHANGING AMEEICA its application to judges. It is felt that, unlike other elective State officers, the judge is an ex- pert, one " learned in the law " ; and it is un- reasonable that an expert should at every mo- ment submit his actions to the judgment of the inexpert. Furthermore, the judge administers justice not solely as he will, but as the law has been laid down; and it is not certain that the righteous judge, thus hampered, can avoid gusts of unpopularity. It is possible, then, that de- mocracy will take a fresh tack. The strong feel- ing against judges arises from their frequent overturning of hard-won remedial statutes on the ground of alleged unconstitutionality. Some progressives propose that when one organ of government declares to be unconstitutional the act of a coordinate organ, the issue thus made up shall go to the people, whose will the consti- tution purports to embody. In a word, they would leave the court only the power to force any act of the legislature deemed unconstitu- tional to a referendum. Whatever the devices that may finally be worked out, it is certain that the people are as- suming more control over government. This does not mean, however, that the conditions un- 180 THE EEASSERTIO¥ OF DEMOCEACY der whicli the insurance business or the railroad business is to be carried on are to be settled by the lone farmer at the plow's tail, by the work- ingman at his noon lunch, and by the street- corner crowd in the light of soap-box ora- tory. THE GROWING INTELLIGENCE OF THE PEOPLE In thirty-eight years the proportion of chil- dren enrolled in the common schools has grown from 61 to 72 per cent.; the length of the school term from 132 to 155 days; the yearly schooling for each child from 48 days to 81 days. The expenditure per pupil has more than doubled and the per capita outlay is two and one-half times as great as forty years ago. And fit guides of public opinion are growing in number. In thirty years the secondary schools of the nation have grown from 1400 to 12,000. During the last eighteen years the proportion of youth receiving high- school instruction has doubled, while the enrol- ment in the public high schools has more than quadrupled. As for the colleges, their attend- ance increased 400 per cent, while the popula- tion was gaining 100 per cent. 181 CHANGING AMERICA THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF THE VOTER In Oregon arguments for and against every measure submitted to the electors are condensed into a booklet and mailed from the office of the Secretary of State to every voter at least fifty- five days before the election. Oklahoma makes similar provision. Several cities publish a gazette to keep the voters informed on municipal affairs, and in Oregon the reformers have pro- posed a state gazette to help the people audit their government. In the Mississippi Valley the national move- ment for the wider use of the school plant is ex- tending the opportunity which school-houses offer for the gathering of citizens to consider questions of common welfare. A recent Wiscon- sin law orders that "where the citizens of any community are organized into a non-partizan, non-sectarian, non-exclusive association for the presentation and discussion of public questions," the school board shall accommodate them in^ some school building and provide, free of charge, light, heat, and janitor service. Such neighbor- hood citizenship organization buttresses the foundations of democracy, and in the Middle 182 THE EEASSEETION" OF DEMOCRACY West the movement is spreading like wild-fire. Of late no fewer than ten state universities and colleges have adopted " social center develop- ment '' as a part of their extension work. ^ , THE PRACTICAL OUTCOME The reassertion of democracy has been prompted, not by seditious intent, popular self- conceit, or the seduction of strange doctrines, but by prudence. Bitter experience has taught the people that the secret rule of certain kinds of property or certain kinds of business through the party machines means things abominable — pred- atory vice, private monopoly, the wasting of nat- ural wealth, overworked children and women, in- dustrial oppression. On the other hand, with gov- ernment made more responsive to the prevail- ingly humane and righteous wishes of the people, we may look the sooner for the legal protection of the weak in industry, workingmen's compen- sation, legal standards of housing, the regulation of public utilities, the supervision of insurance, perhaps the guaranty of bank deposits, and the taxation of site values. No doubt certain forms of acquisitive enter- prise will suffer. The peddling of extra-hazard- 183 CHANGING AMERICA ons securities, counterfeiting in the form of stock-watering, the use of unfair methods against smaller business competitors, the impounding of stock in holding companies, the enchaining of banks so as to monopolize credit — all such ex- ploits are likely to be outlawed. Promoters, developers, security-manufacturers, speculators, and monopolizers will find themselves hampered, and will, no doubt, complain that the stakes are smaller and the game is less interesting. The swaying ideas in this democratic move- ment are not parts of an imported philosophy of overturn. In Oregon or Kansas or Wiscon- sin! probably not one man in twenty has ever heard family, property, or State seriously called in question. Nowhere in the nation is the in- stitution of property more respected by the plain people than in the farming Middle West, where ownership is easy and a proletariat has hardly begun to form. Recently a Chicago woman who knows labor campaigned rural Illinois in behalf of woman suffrage ; and this is what she noted : The eyes of the farmer are cold, clear, and steady, as if he had never been torn or confused by any great grief or fearful crisis. The burning look in the eyes of the city workman who knows that he is exploited and who has no 184 THE EEASSERTION" OF DEMOCEACY redress, no home, no security,- no fruit of his toil — this look I never once saw in the eyes of the men down State. From such people nothing more alarming is to be expected than sober efforts to safeguard the public welfare where it is menaced by private enterprise, and to broaden individual oppor- tunity where it is abridged by massed capital. WILL THE WEST CONVERT THE EAST? It is an old, old thing, the reaction of the frontier upon the seaboard. " In nearly every colony prior to the Kevolution," says Turner, " struggles had been in progress between the party of privilege, chiefly the Eastern men of property allied with the English authorities, and the democratic classes strongest in the West and the cities.'' All through American history de- mocracy has been like a trade-wind, blowing ever from the sunset. The young States of the Ohio Valley led in multiplying the number of elective offices, in introducing rapid rotation in office, in submitting State constitutions to popular rati- fication. Class bulwarks of colonial date were thus pounded to pieces by the surf of democratic sentiment from the West. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy, Lincoln Republicanism, 185 CHANGIISTG AMEEICA Gran^erism, Populism, Bryan Democracy, Koosevelt Eepublicanism — wave after wave has rolled seaward, loosing the East from its Old- World or " first-family " or " best-people " moor- ings. Some of these impulses were wrong- headed and died away, others prevailed, and the sum of these successful Western initiatives is what we offer to the world as the American po- litical system. There are, to be sure, very good reasons why the East might reject the new democracy. With its legion of intelligent investors and its multi- tude of ignorant aliens, it might well plead: " Leave me alone. Your case is not my case." But the nationalizing forces are hard to with- stand. The tendency toward unity of institu- tions all over the nation is stronger now than ever before. Twenty years ago who expected there would ever be so much populistic opinion along the Hudson or so much capitalistic senti- ment along the Missouri as there is to-day? If, then, the past is a safe guide, we may look for the East to be shaken presently with the same democratic revolution that is accomplishing it- self in the States of the Far West and the Mid- dle West. 186 THE MIDDLE WEST — STATE UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE SOME years ago the thesis of a graduate stu- dent in the University of Nebraska shed new light on the memorials presented to the National Assembly of France in 1789. In reviewing it, a savant of the Sorbonne commented on the re- markable fact that the French should learn some- thing about the causes of their revolution from the scholarship of a young university established in a region that, when that revolution occurred, knew only the redskin and the buffalo. To Americans the type of foreign compliment is familiar, but let it stand as a just tribute to the swiftness with which the higher life unfolds in the newer West. The thirteen state universities of the Middle West dispose of over |11,000,000 of working in- come and maintain 3000 professors and instruc- tors teaching 35,000 young men and women. 187 CHANGING AMEEICA The thirteen leading endowed institutions of the East, namely, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cor- nell, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Massachusetts In- stitute of Technology, Brown, Dartmouth, Tufts, Syracuse, Williams, and Amherst, have 34,000 students, taught by 4000 men, and enjoy a work- ing income of about |13,000,000. The differ- ence between the groups is not great, but the significant thing is that the Western universities have been growing in attendance about twice as fast as the Eastern institutions. At present they have four times as many students as they had twenty years ago, and five times as large a teaching force. Meanwhile the value of their buildings and grounds has increased fourfold, of their libraries and equipment sixfold, and their total working income more than eightfold. De- spite such noble foundations as those of North- western and Chicago, educators generally real- ize that in the Middle West the future lies with the State institutions. THE RISE OF THE STATE UNIVERSITIES The vast resources of Harvard, Yale, and Co- lumbia are the slow accumulation of time, and 188 IimVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE represent the gifts of several generations. The Middle West, too, would have had such founda- tions had it been willing to wait for wealthy donors. In its early period, indeed, colleges were thickly planted, and they were as gener- ously supported as were the Eastern colleges in their adolescence. Forty years ago such insti- tutions as Oberlin, Wabash, Knox, Northwestern, Beloit, and Iowa were playing a leading role. Then dawned the era of specialized and costly education, the era of laboratories, collections, workshops and gymnasiums, and the church col- leges were unable to meet the demand. Unwill- ing to let two or three generations of her young people miss their chance while the colleges were slowly gathering endowments, the State enlarged her heart and began to give generously to the uni- versity that, under the ordinance of 1787, had been planted in each commonwealth of the Northwesti and endowed with public lands. Thanks to the agitation for State aid, the people of the West have come to a different conception of the role of higher education from the people of the Northeast. They regard it less as the basis of individual success than as a sure means to social progress, and they agree that the State 189 CHAKGmG AMEEICA should bear a part of the cost of social progress. In the last fifteen years, moreover, the ominous drift toward economic inequality has made them solicitous to bring about a greater equality of opportunity. To make education free from sill to capstone appeals to them as one safe way to counteract the sinister forces of social stratifi- cation. It is this unspoken concern for the fu- ture of democracy that prompts the two or three millions of people in a Western State to build up a university that would be the glory of a Euro- pean kingdom. President Pritchett of the Carnegie Founda- tion for the Advancement of Teaching points out that these Western States " represent a differ- ent stage of educational consciousness from what one sees in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. Penn- sylvania, for example, is one of the oldest and richest States of the Union. It has no debt, and has an enormous income. In no other State has the individualistic conception of education lingered longer. As a whole, the State has never come into a conception of education from the point of view of the whole people. As a conse- quence, its public-school system is still in its 190 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIE USTFLUBNCE rudimentary stage; its normal schools are pri- vate enterprises, and the normal schools and many of its colleges are engaged in the work of secondary education. The only evidence of a state-wide interest in education is to be seen in its series of appropriations to private institu- tions — colleges, hospitals, and charitable con- cerns — which makes education in that old and rich State a part of the politics in which Penn- sylvania has achieved so bad an eminence." THE AVALANCHE OF WESTERN STUDENTS The offer of a college course at a nominal fee has brought down on the Western colleges a veritable avalanche of students. Massachusetts has 223 of her youth in college for every 100,000 of her population, while New York has 198 ma- triculates. But Illinois and Wisconsin have re- spectively 230 and 246 sons and daughters in college for every 100,000 of population. The two Eastern States boast of many famous edu- cational centers, but fewer than half the students in Massachusetts colleges come from the Bay State, and only three-fifths of those in New York colleges hail from the Empire State; so that the college trend in these States by no 191 CHANGi:^G AMEEICA means matclies the glory of tlieir universities. When you stop to consider, it is wonderful that in communities only a life-time from the red Indian the pursuit of higher studies should already have come up abreast of that in com- munities with a start of two centuries. In view of the fact that a third of the Illinois youth any- where in college and two-thirds of those of Wis- consin are enrolled in their State university, it is certain that nothing but the State's shoulder- ing of the burden of higher education as a part of its duty to posterity has enabled the Middle West so soon to overtake the East. The difference in tuition between the big uni- versities of the two regions runs from $125 to |200. There is also a difference in the cost of living, and, what is more, in the prevailing style of living. It will cost a Wisconsin student at least |500 less to obtain a first-class degree than it will cost a Massachusetts student, and this is a great lift to any one who is on his own resources. It is gratuitous education, not a sharper thirst for learning, that accounts for the much larger proportion of Western young people who, by stretching on tiptoe, contrive to pluck the col- lege sheepskin. The State's standing offer to 193 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE give away instruction costing it from |400 to $600 draws out an astonishing number of aspi- rants from families with small means. Indeed, there seems to be no limit to the number of high- school graduates who can achieve four years at college if they have set their hearts on it. One can forgive corybantic athletics, wandering glee- clubs, itinerant dramatic troupes, and other spectacular by-products of university life in view of their publicity value. They inspire longings in young people who, once they are on the cam- pus, will wake up to their opportunities. Just so the numerous bread-and-butter courses lure to the university talented striplings who will in the end develop a taste for culture. And the clever are not slow to use these courses as decoys. Far- mer Skinflint's boy persuades his father to give him a chance by harping on the courses in stock- judging, soils, and plant diseases. Gradgrind's son wheedles the old man by talking up the in* struction in accounting and business manage- ment, while the daughter points him out studies that fit a girl to be factory inspector, settlement warden, or social-center secretary. Once he is past his freshman year, the bright youth contrives somehow to work himself 193 CHANGING AMEEICA through. He tends furnace, waits on table, washes dishes, hammers out calculus while night clerk, lives out of a paper bag, scissors his cuffs, blacks his shoes with stove polish, and in the end scores above the dawdler who commiserates him from the cushioned window-seat of a luxu- rious chapter-house. THE STATE UNIVERSITY AS ALMA MATER The sum of the ages of the half-dozen leading universities of the East is fully a thousand years. The ages of the six great state universities of the Middle West amount to only three centuries. To those with a historical sense the difference in venerableness is impressive, and they fancy the Western undergraduate is missing something sweet and mellowing. The fact is, to the aver- age collegian the hoar of antiquity means noth- ing, for he cannot appreciate it. To him a col- lege is as venerable as are its elms. A shaft on the campus to the unreturning boys of '61 moves him as much as a tablet to the sacrifices of Alma Mater in the Revolution. The student body changes every four years. Ten generations have passed through the college halls while the wheel of life outside has made one turn. A student 194 IJNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE custom started by men who are now inventors, explorers, judges, and senators is revered as much as we grown-ups revere Charter Oak or Liberty Bell. The students in the Western uni- versities, then, do not miss that rime of age their elders make much of. To them the plain gray buildings, with small-paned windows recalling the middle of the last century, are charged with sentiment, and the traditions of the place are as the law of the Medes and Persians. The Wis- consin graduate, delirious in a Philippine hos- pital, is as likely to babble of the graceful fox- squirrels that chase one another in the campus elms as is the fevered Princeton man to rave of the pleasant twilight singing on the steps of Nassau Hall. Some imagine a state university has to be bleak and utilitarian, like an industrial school or asylum for the blind. Now, aside from two or three that have had Aladdin's lamp to rub, the endowed institutions do not surpass the commonwealth colleges in beauty of grounds and architecture. But, in any case, it is not towers and arcades that make a college loved. To how many promising farm lads, tired of " playing chambermaid to a cow," to how many 195 CHANGING AMEEICA bright girls, eating out their hearts in a dull country town, the state university has opened a celestial vision ! Tax-money or gift, it makes no difference what builds the college, if only it is there one catches the Gleam. As youth passes through these halls, it decks them with tradi- tions, gilds them with poetry, and hallows them with dreams. If it have a torch to pass on, the commonwealth college will be loved, cannot help being loved. So the student customs strike root, the classes plant their ivy, the alumni hold their reunions, and the " old grads," grizzling about the temples, sing with a catch in the voice Here's to good old Kansas, Drink her down, drink her down! just as they do in the halls of John and Eli. STATE UNIVERSITY ATMOSPHERE The state universities have the taint of use- fulness, and those who care most for social pres- tige send their sons to a salt-water college. Leisure-class tastes and ideals are much more in evidence at the old endowed institutions. But, despite the atmosphere of earnestness and work, eager, speculative minds do not always feel themselves at home in the state university. Sur- 196 TjmYEESITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE round a thousand young people who love knowl- edge for its own sake with two or three thou- sand others who value it as a saddle-beast that will carry them to the top of the hill, and they will miss the ozone of Parnassus. With its vast provision for professional and technical studies and its swelling concourse of the practical- minded, the state university is not the ideal re- sort for the student of an intellectual temper and a disinterested interest in things. The utili- tarian spirit of the place leaks in at the keyhole and dulls the edge of speculation. There is too little of that eager discussion of questions reli- gious, ethical, philosophical, and social, which springs up naturally in the isolated college of purely liberal studies. It is bad form to be keen about the problems of life, and the youth of parts, finding his advances met with raised eye- brows, goes away sometimes with his yearnings unsatisfied. The courts have settled it that in the tax-sup- ported institution there can be no compulsory daily chapel, no required Bible study and " Chris- tian evidences,'' with Paley and Butler in the senior year. Darwin and Spencer are not anath- ema, and one cannot guarantee the " religious 197 CHAJSTGmG AMEEICA atmospliere " promised by the denominational college. Yet somehow the student's character has suffered less than was expected. It would take a bold man to arraign the state university product as inferior to the output of the college in moral principle and spirit of service. The secret is that religion has been there all the time, but it has been home-grown rather than catered. Student and faculty volunteers contribute to the quickening of the religious life, the denomina- tions build their hostels and maintain their stu- dent pastors, religious leaders with a message are brought in, and no one fears lest in the state university the things of the spirit are falling into neglect and decay. COEDUCATION The assumption that Helen shall go to college as well as Walter is general in the West, and nineteen times out of twenty Helen will be co- educated. The tax-supported university has per- force to open its doors as wide to women as td" men, and the approaching tide of equal suffrage makes it certain that if in the future either sex is to be discriminated against, it will not be women. If ever a new departure confounded the 198 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE prophets, it was coeducation. It has not bred license and scandal. The young women have not been masculinized. I asked a young woman who divided her time equally between Vassar and Wisconsin, " What is the difference between the girls there and here? '' " Oh, at Vassar we are so much more self-re- liant. Here the girls simply sit back as meek as mice and let the men run things." The early " co-eds '' were ultra-earnest, so it used to be said that the coeducated girl turned out a blue-stocking or a frump. Now that the " daughter of Eve " type is attending in ever greater numbers, it would be quite as fair to charge that coeducation hatches out a butterfly or a flirt. One president notices " a tendency for the men to fix the standards, not only for themselves, but for the women,'' and observes that the women " regard as successful the one who is attractive to the young men." The fact is, of course, that the presence or absence of male students is of little consequence in Helen's edu- cation. The type of college girl — which, like De Vries's CEnothera LamarcMana^ seems to be in a state of lively and startling mutation — is formed in the family and society rather than in 199 CHANGING AMERICA the college. Anyway, it is the coeducated girl who secures the truly feminine education; for the studies of Vassar women and Williams men are more alike than are the courses chosen by the two sexes in the liberal arts college of a Western university. STATE UNIVERSITY AND DENOMINATIONAL COLLEGES The amazing growth of the state university has made mock of all prophecy. When Ne- braska laid out Lincoln, her capital, in 1868, four city blocks were deemed ample for the state university, although land was to be had for a song. To-day the campus is overcrowded and hemmed in by the city, yet the university cannot remove to the outskirts without sacrificing more than half a million dollars' worth of buildings. When, in the early eighties, the Regents of the University of Minnesota found themselves with a building appropriation of |30,000 a year for six years, the president of the board said he thought Minnesota would be greatly displeased if the university with that sum did not build all the buildings it would ever need. Now one state university has nearly |1,000,000 worth of build- 200 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE ings under construction, and the architect is told to plan for 10,000 students. When in the seventies the state university sought to supplement the income from its lands by calling upon the legislature, the banded de- nominational colleges often fought the university appropriation, and I can remember when it was a part of the duty of certain persuasive profess- ors to lobby at the capitol for the university bill. The great freshet of students, beginning in the late eighties, allayed the fears of the colleges lest their classrooms be emptied, and reconciled them to state support of the university. In some cases they now cooperate with it in entrance require- ments, fit their work into its scheme, and under the advice of its deans recast their courses of study with reference to the university profes- sional schools. The college has all the students it can well take care of, while on the other hand, the university, but for the colleges, would be swamped with undergraduates. So far the State cannot tap the Pierian spring fast enough to slake the spreading thirst for a higher education, and it is fortunate that the colleges are there to attract and set to work the gifts of generous in- dividuals. 201 CHANGING AMERICA UNIVERSITY FINANCING " Does n't it humiliate you/' a great money- raising president asked the head of a state uni- versity, " to have to wheedle your biennial ap- propriation out of ignorant farmer legislators? '' " Tastes differ/' was the reply. " For my part, I 'd rather lay our needs before the repre- sentatives of the people than hang on to the coat- tails of the plutocrat." In these days of im- perative expansion, the head of the private in- stitution must be a good beggar unless there is a legion of prospering alumni to whose loyalty he can appeal. The resulting dependence on the rich is anything but dignified. I have seen the president of a great university turn, in his com- mencement address, to a local capitalist who had extended emergency relief, with a sweeping obeisance and the salutation, " You, sir, were the captain of our salvation ! " " The ideal founder of a university," confided another presi- dent to me, " is one considerate enough to die promptly." On the other hand, the distin- guished head of a state university felt obliged to wait upon a railroad president in the largest commercial city of the State and beg that mag- 202 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIE INFLUENCE nate to order his railroad legislators to pass the university appropriation bill unmutilated. I have known such malign corporate domination of politics that the professors in the service of the State were less free to break a lance for the public cause than the professors on a neighbor- ing multi-millionaire foundation. The existence of the endowed university and the state univer- sity side by side is a good thing for academic free- dom. In both there are dangers to the scholar's independence, but they are not the same dangers ; so that the scholar evicted from one may find refuge with the other. While the greater insti- tutions of both types are reasonably free, this unhappily is not true of certain young state uni- versities in the Far West, without alumni to pro- tect them against the politician; nor is it true of many struggling colleges, which show in their pasteurized texts and teaching their tenderness for the susceptibilities of the possible donor. I say " possible,'' for if ethics, economics, and sociology are chloroformed, it is not for givers, but for those who may give. The money that "taints" is the money coveted, but not yet ac- quired. CHANGING AMEEICA UNIVERSITY-WROUGHT CHANGES Watching tlie transformation of the Middle West is like seeing tlie trick mango-tree grow un- der the hands of the Hindu juggler. Twenty years ago in the university of a certain Western State there were fewer than 800 students. An- other institution was planted near by, a keen rivalry sprang up, the legislature began to give generously, the young people of the State began to take notice, and now there are nearly 6000 of them in the two institutions. On public educa- tion the effect was magical. Five years after the growth began, every high school was able to have a college graduate as its principal. Four years later it was possible to insist that every high- school teacher should be a graduate. Now, even the grammar schools are largely in the hands of the college-bred, and the staffs of the high schools are made up of those who have done graduate work. It is sweet to watch the fresh green spread after the water has been turned into the irriga- tion-ditch. It is sweeter to watch the standards of the community rise after the broad stream of trained young people begins to issue from the 204 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE universities and progressively saturate the walks and professions. There is soon a marked im- provement in the quality of editorial writing, po- litical spell-binding, jury pleading, legislative de- bate, and commemorative eloquence. Bun- combe, bombast, claptrap, and rant wilt under the October breath of criticism. The country is leavened with farmers who attend the February " short course '' and are proud to be registered at the university as " pure-seed raisers " or pos- sessors of " accredited farms." Rural leader- ship passes from the strong pioneer-bred man of limited outlook and stubborn prejudices to an alert, reading, progressive type molded in the col- lege of agriculture and eager to " keep up." As the alumnae filter in, the women's clubs, instead of listening to papers on Etruscan art and miracle plays, take to studying milk supply, charity organization, and retardation in the schools. Legislative committees begin to be overwhelmed with damning facts about cash- girls, factory women, and industrial diseases, gleaned by fair bachelors in the college settle- ments. The paunchy, overjowled deadheads who embezzle the local party organization and snuggle ever closer to the business interests that 205 CHANGING AMERICA " come across," are annoyed by crisp-speaking young lawyers and school principals and elec- tricians with pointed questions about assessments, paving contracts, and franchises. As educated men filter through the community, reforms are secured that twenty years ago seemed millen- nial. The separation of local from State sources of revenue, the separation of local from national elections, the treatment of a franchise as val- uable property, the discriminating between or- dinary industry and natural monopoly, the prac- tice of scientific charity and penology, the con- centration of responsibility in government — these and a score of other good things which once seemed as far above popular comprehension as four-dimensional space, have come to pass, thanks chiefly to the radiations from the class- rooms. THE UNIVERSITY AS SERVANT OF THE STATE The University of Wisconsin has led in new forms of service which are likely to be taken up by other commonwealth institutions. It is a matter of common remark by foreigners that our State governments are weak on the administra- tive side. This is owing to the early democratic 206 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE dread of a " permanent office-holding class " and the naive faith that any honest, capable citizen will " make good " in any office. As a great variety of new tasks calling for special knowl- edge and skill are thrust upon government, the old-style, all-around, interchangeable office- holder proves a frail reed to lean on, and the ex- pert is called in. Now, a university faculty is the natural rendezvous of experts, and nothing could be more fortunate than the fact that at Madison the demand for experts on Capitol Hill and the supply of experts on University Hill, a mile away, should meet and satisfy each other. There are now between thirty and forty faculty men connected with the non-political public serv- ice of Wisconsin. The president of the univer- sity is chairman of the Conservation Commis- sion and member of the Forestry Commission, the Free Library Commission, and the Public Affairs Commission. One dean is superintend- ent of the Geological and Natural History Sur- vey and serves on the Fish Commission, the Forestry Commission, the Conservation Com- mission, and the State Park Board. Another serves on the Forestry Commission and the Board of Immigration. One professor of bac- 207 CHANGING AMEEICA teriology is director of the State Hygienic Lab- oratory. Other professors sit on the Live Stock Sanitary Board, the Board of Agriculture, and the State History Commission. Divers members of the engineering faculty value public utilities for the Eailroad Commission. Former pro- fessors on the Tax Commission and the Indus- trial Commission teach classes without pay. On the other hand, the State Forester and the head of the Legislative Keference Library offer univer- sity courses. Altogether, professors administer or advise on nineteen state boards or commis- sions, besides being frequently called in by com- mittees of the legislature for aid in formulating laws. The effect has been not to draw the uni- versity into politics, but to take out of politics state services calling for expert knowledge. Thanks chiefly to this happy cooperation be- tween university and capitol, Wisconsin has often been called " the best-governed State in the Union." THE UNIVERSITY AS SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE The endowed university owes its benefactors gratitude; the state university owes both grati- tude and service. In the former a professor 208 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE feels that his duty is to his science; in the lat- ter he feels that his obligation is to the common- wealth. In casting about for new ways of mak- ing itself useful, the state university cannot but question if its task ends with teaching a few thousand on its campus. Out in the State there are a hundred times as many, — the tortoise upon which the commonwealth rests, — held away from the campus by the necessity of earning their living. What can it do for them? The University of Wisconsin answers the question by extending its campus to the bound- aries of the State, so that it now enrolls more students out of sight of its dome than under it. In six years its extension work has grown until now 5000 are taking courses by correspondence. It has sent missionaries through the shops and factories and organized groups of artisans who prosecute their studies under the stimulus of traveling instructors teaching them on employ- ers' time. At three district centers away from Madison a staff of half a dozen organizers and teachers has been planted, and when the State is covered there will be seventeen such districts, each served from a convenient center. A " bureau of general welfare " answers thou- 209 CHANGING AMEEICA sands of questions upon sanitation, economics, government, sociology, education, agriculture, engineering, manufacturing, etc. The shops and laboratories freely test soils, ores, fuels, com- mercial fertilizers, building materials, road ma- terials, ceramic clays, water samples, and evi- dences of disease. A municipal reference bureau furnishes information on municipal sub- jects from paving and sewage disposal to play- grounds and social centers. To serve the active minds at the cross-roads and the country town there is a " bureau of de- bating and public discussion " which briefs live questions impartially and loans packages of se- lected material on the subjects the people are discussing. Last March it sent out 403 such package libraries on 190 subjects to 137 localities in the State. It lit up nine debates on capital punishment, eleven on the recall, twelve on par- cels post, seventeen on commission government, nine on initiative and referendum, and thirty on woman suffrage. If public-spirited men are ready to join in a movement for the common good, the extension department is there to be used. Thus, besides organizing a " municipal and social institute " in 210 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE Milwaukee and a state " bakers' institute," it has promoted an organization for the reform of the criminal law, an anti-tuberculosis confer- ence, a state conference on charities and correc- tions, and a national conference on civic and social-center development. Tw^entj years ago not more than four state universities in the land had as much to spend for all their work as this university will spend for extension the coming year. And it is an- nounced that a sister state university will put exhibits, lantern, tent, and a staff of lecturers into automobiles and hold a " university week '' in strategic centers all over its State. So in this line we have had our Burbank. The educational " plumcot " is standardized, any one can get the seed, and what one state university does now, all will shortly be doing. The fruit will be ripe in our children's time, and it will be sweet. 211 XI THE MIDDLE WEST — SOCIETY AND CULTURE rriHEKE is a California type, molded by gold- -■■ hunting, the Sierra, the red-woods, and an ocean that rolls to one's feet cocoanuts from the South Seas. There is, or rather was, a Southern type, the product of slavery, plantation life, a kindly climate, and the English country -gentle- man tradition. But there is no Middle-Western type to puzzle the Easterner, for there is in the Middle West no soul-mold that the East does not know. Along the Ohio and the Missouri one finds about the same sort of people to be found along the Connecticut, but they occur in different proportions. It is this difference of proportion that furnishes the key to Middle-Western so- ciety. SOME GAINS FROM LEISURE I have already shown how the political con- trast between the two regions corresponds to the 212 SOCIETY AND CULTUEE frequency of the investor. Now, similarly, their social contrast reflects the comparative strength of two elements, the leisured and the pleasure- hunting rich. Besides the occasional artist or poet, the social circles of the East contain a leaven of those who, having lived much out of harness, have learned to loaf and invite their souls. About the cloth one comes gratefully upon persons who have had time to discover and indulge a fondness for Eng- lish cathedrals, early Florentine art, or Albanian ballads; who prick across the conversation on some curious and interesting hobby, like missals, Satsuma-ware, or Russian folE-lore. Then, too, many of inherited leisure have given thought to being agreeable, and have lifted the giving ofi pleasure through social intercourse to a fine art. A recent English visitor complains that we use speech for the conveyance of fact, and that rarely did he come upon those who know how to converse with charm, to play with a topic till they kindle brilliancy in the vis-a-vis and he goes away pleased with himself and with them. This criticism holds for the Middle West, for the leisured there are few, and social intercourse is 213 CHANGING AMEEICA chiefly the relaxation of the busy. Graceful badinage, like the old-fashioned graceful letter- writing, takes time, and both go out when the tempo of life is quick. Men of action in their playful moods chaff or tell droll stories, and only women have time to acquire that happy mingling of thought, imagination, and wit which makes delightful conversation. The same visitor observes that " absence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surliness, but independence." Now, one mo- tive that peopled the West was the passion for independence, and so it is not surprising that the plain people there often suspect manners to be a capitulation to the spirit of servility. The rea- son why so many hurried visitors dislike the Middle West is that they take to be selfish and indifferent a people who are not used to express- ing in the conventional forms their kindness and hospitality. If those who have lived long among them resent such criticism, it is because, back of the nonchalant, undemonstrative manner, they know there is as much justice and good-will as thereis anywhere in the world. %U SOCIETY AND CULTURE THE EXODUS OF THE SYBARITES Among a people that exalts " doing things " into a kind of religion the successful man keeps on with his work even after he has ceased to care for its rewards. Though he have much goods laid up for many years, the Middle West- erner is loath to say, " Soul, take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry/' So few lay off their harness before life's afternoon that nearly all circles tingle with the spirit of the striving. At the governor's ball, all the men you meet are workers near the top of their respective ladders of endeavor. The drone under forty is regarded with impatience, even contempt; for the social aspirant is gauged chiefly by his proven worth in the competitions of real life. To escape this nipping and eager air, those who early find themselves in the coupon-clipping class drift away from the hustling West to places where they can meet other idlers, kill time grace- fully with fox-hunt, coaching-party, and horse show, and be looked up to as better and happier than other people. Then, too, the West is not well enough upholstered to make the sybarite perfectly comfortable, and so he gravitates 216 CHANGING AMEEICA toward the London hotel where Jeames warms the morning newspaper before handing it to you, or the Paris restaurant where Gaston, after carving your duck, places the carcass in a silver press and squeezes you its last savory drop of juice. The exodus of this type is a blessing to the West, for it postpones the day when the noxious idea will take root that the elegant loafer is superior to the capable doer. THE EXODUS OF MONEYED GOTHS The Western millionaire with strong local at- tachments cares more for the people among whom he has prospered than for Vanity Fair, and will not uproot in order that " the girls " may have a shy at a titled foreigner. He keeps on a human basis with his townsmen, gives freely of his time and money to community interests, and, when he dies, bequeaths liberally to local institutions. But there is another type who, once he has blossomed into purple opulence, longs for New York and Newport, in order to mix in a kind of life that can give him his money's worth. First Ms womenfolk awaken to the limitations of Peoria, Grand Kapids, or Sioux City, for they 216 SOCIETY AND CULTUEE notice they are getting only turkey for their ter- rapin. Presently, he, too, confesses that society among people who have to observe office-hours and eschew golf lacks distinction, and he is ready to migrate to Fifth Avenue, which is often only a way station for Mayfair or the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. GOTHIC SOCIETY AND ITS INFLUENCE Like the " bonanza kings " who left the Com- stock lode to go down to San Francisco and make Nob Hill a fit launching place for the word " nobby '' ; like the cattle lords from el campo who flaunt their wealth in the Avenida de Mayo of Buenos Aires; like the diamond kings, nitrate kings, and Band magnates who would swamp London society with a torrent of expenditure no home-grown fortune can match, the newly rich from all parts of this country, converging upon Eastern centers, particularly New York, seek to substitute, for the natural society they find, their own notion of society. And their own notion is that society exists to sweeten with the charm of social exclusiveness the joint enjoy- ment of the costly. In the extravagant, self-in- dulgent circles they form there is wrought out an 317 CHANGING AMEEICA Alice-in-Wonderland table of values that stands plain common-sense philosophy on its head. Lit- erature, the crown of all great society, is little respected, or understood. The spender outshines the achiever. Publicity is to be sought, not shunned. The social bond is not sympathy of tastes, but the sharing of expensive pleasures. The giver of a new thrill or the inventor of a fetching stunt is more of a hero than a Pasteur or a Peary. From these glittering circles, thanks to the yellow press, false standards spread through the social body, and corrupt home-bred notions of what is fit or decent or worth while. For many, pleasure-class example breaks the mainspring of useful endeavor. It makes the strung bow envy the unbent bow. It makes people who have to work hate their work. It makes the functional people as grasshoppers in their own eyes. Serv- ants it turns into shameless tip-extractors. It whets greed and hurries men into graft, extor- tion, and monopoly. In the lives of multitudes who have nothing to look forward to but the common lot it sows the stinging nettle of ungrati- fied worldliness. And so the poison leaches down through the layers of society. Parents 218 SOCIETY AND CULTUEE communicate the virus to their children, fashion- able schools to their pupils, college fraternities to their members. From the pleasure centers it spreads to the hustle centers, from the metrop- olis to the cities, and from the cities to the towns and to the country-side. Against this contagion the people of the Middle West are by no means proof, but they have the good fortune to live rather out of its reach. The person ludicrously out of touch with reality usually turns out to be of Eastern origin. Even leisure-class refinement sometimes makes one un- able to tell a hawk from a hand-saw. Add pleas- ure-class artificiality, and you get people with their feet clear off the ground, like Marie An- toinette, who, when she heard the poor crying for bread, asked why they did n't eat cake ! At a recent ekklesia of a national Greek -letter fra- ternity, an Eastern undergraduate voted against chartering a petitioning Western chapter with the explanation, " Somehow I can't think much of fellows that send us a representative who neg- lects the crease in his trousers." "A gentle- man," observed a callow sophomore whose mother supports him with her pen, " is a fellow who changes all his linen every day." The rising fees 219 CHANGING AMEEICA of Eastern engineering scliools are welcomed by some students on the ground that they will " keep the muckers out of the profession.'' An aston- ishing number of Eastern parents will own that they send their sons to college, not for any knowl- edge or ideals the faculty may give them, but for the ease, polish and desirable social connections that may come from four years of college resi- dence. The boys quickly catch the idea and learn how to intimate delicately to the professors their sense of the secondariness of study and the all- importance^of " student life and association." SOCIAL DEMOCRACY OF THE WEST The Middle- Western students are still naive enough to respect knowledge, although, to be sure, some of them show their respect by stand- ing afar off. Perhaps this is linked up with the interesting fact that in the East a fifth of the secondary schools are private, while in the Middle West only a twentieth cater to social exclusive- ness. Nor has the Middle West placed a stigma upon labor. It is said that when Senator Philetus Sawyer of Wisconsin, who made his for- tune out of sawmills, set up his carriage in Wash- ington, he appropriately put on it the Latin 220 SOCIETY AND CULTURE word " Vidi," which, being translated, signifies " I saw.'' When John Johnson first ran for gov- ernor of Minnesota, his political opponents jeered at him as of poor-house extraction. The people of the State rebuked the un-American gibe with a big majority for the man who had come up by his personal merits, and his subsequent career justified their estimate. I have heard the wife of a Western farmer governor — who did well, by the way — confess naively her enjoyment of life in the " Executive Mansion," and impart the confidence, " Do you know, when we go back home, I just believe I won't have the hired men eat at the family table. It 's so much nicer with- out them." Servants the West welcomes,— although it calls them " help,"— but it dreads the servile spirit. His French cook or his private car might not hurt a candidate for office, but his English butler would damn him politically. " Some time since," writes a Kansas professor, "a distinguished visitor from the East came to the State to deliver a public address. He was hospitably received, attentively listened to, and highly praised; but to no purpose all these fine ideas: the great man was found wanting, for 221 CHANGIJSTG AMEEICA there was discovered, among his other impedi- menta, a valet. It was a fatal mischance. The poor valet was more commented upon than the address, more observed than his master. The circumstance stamped the misguided man as clearly not our kind of man. Obviously, no man who carries a valet can speak the Kansas lan- guage." Although minor place of relaxation are spring- ing up in the Middle West, I think that the pre- tentious and costly pleasure-centers of America — the cream-pots of the country's wealth-produc- tion — will be situated in Oalifornia, on the Gulf, or on the Atlantic coast. Here most nakedly will be exhibited plutocratic pomp, " the lust of the eyes and pride of life," while most of the dwellers in the Mississippi Valley will escape ocular infection with foolish standards that put people out of joint with their work and their attainable happiness. Commenting on the irruption of rich summer residents into a charm- ing New Hampshire district, a friend says, '' These millionaires, with their costly ^ cottages,' their footmen, and their motor-cars are making our farmers feel like peasants." The Western obverse of this is the experience of a colleague SOCIETY AND CULTURE of mine of Iowa extraction who drove over to the old home in his 25-horse-power evidence-of-pros- perity, just to let his farmer cousins and neigh- bors know he was getting on. " The joke was on me," he confesses with a chuckle, ^^ for most of them had better automobiles than mine, and rather pitied me." LEISURE-CLASS ROLE OF WESTERN WOMEN If there is a leisure class in the West, it is the idle wives of busy, successful men. It is they who look out for " tone," who hit up the pace, who see to it that in style of living and entertaining their set keeps always a lap or two ahead of those with purses a pennyweight lighter. It is the high function of these social arbiters to " draw the line," to make two barriers rise where one rose before, to cry, like the celebrants of the classic mysteries, Procul o procul este, prof ani ! And in view of the stubborn democratic preju- dices and the exasperated, uncowed common sense they have to contend with, who can say these ladies have not done wonders? To be sure, their men, under the crude notion that " society " 223 CHANGING AMERICA exists to help you meet people you like, smile at social discriminations turning on the number of one's servants or the horse-power of one's auto- mobile. But gradually the snobbery of the home atmosphere gets into their system, and in a few years the lumber magnate or the oil capitalist with a pretty daughter will send the rising young merchant about his business with the hauteur of a Spanish hidalgo. THE WEST AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM Strong in the old-American spirit, the Middle West scoffs at solving the social problem by preaching the " trusteeship of wealth " or ex- horting Dives to regard himself as a " steward." Aware of what H. G. Wells calls "the secular extinction of opportunity,'' it is not to be recon- ciled to social stratification by any amount of " welfare work " in the mills or of " social work " in the tenements. It knows philanthropy is good, but it thinks that the linch- pins of society ought to be rights and the spirit of square dealing rather than gifts and the spirit of kindness. Less advanced in accumulation than the East, it puts the welfare of people above the rights of property, and anxiously legis- 224 SOCIETY AND CULTURE lates for conditions that will conserve the man- hood of the workingman. On the whole, the Western States have gone further than the Eastern States on behalf of labor. They are cutting down the working day for women and stopping night work. Illinois and Ohio have gone far in organizing factory inspection, and Wisconsin leads in creating an industrial commission empowered to make work places "safe" and "healthful." The most stringent laws for the protection of workmen in building construction are found in Nebraska, Indiana, and Oregon. The subject of minimum wage is being considered in Minnesota, Wiscon- sin, and Massachusetts, and Wisconsin is in the van in working out a policy for unemployment. Still, this modest lead in labor legislation is no just measure of the Middle West's lead in democracy. There is in the East a non-demo- cratic force behind such laws. Like the blood which secretes a thyro-iodine that regulates blood-presure, capitalism secretes a form of capi- tal which reacts upon and regulates the indus- trial process. Bondholders are interested in the core of a business, stock-holders in its margins and fluctuations. Regulative laws may shrink 225 CHANGING AMEEICA dividends, but the bondholder is sure of his in- terest. He does not lose if he follows his con- science in matters of child labor or industrial diseases. Now, in the East one finds a growing number of bondholders — widows and spinster daughters of rich men, heirs indifferent to money- making — who feel social compunction and in- terest themselves in social reform. In the Mid- dle West, outside a few large cities, the people of means who are semi-detached from industry and care for social reform are very few. Hence, in the Middle West social legislation witnesses to the instinct of the plain people rather than to the initiative of the leisured. CULTURE EAST AND WEST Fifty years ago family intercourse, money- making, religion, and politics summed up the strong interests of life in the Middle West, while music, art, literature, and science were neglected. Outside a few university centers, easy popular standards of excellence prevailed, and there was little spur to high achievement in any line. If we note the birthplace of the first thousand of living American men of science, we find that 509 of them were born in the East, and only half 226 SOCIETY AND CULTUEE as many in the Middle West. Yet, in 1860, about the time these future scientists were com- ing into the world, the Middle West had six sevenths as many people as the East. The dif- ference measures the former backwardness of the West in cultivated homes, educational oppor- tunities, and stimulus to scientific pursuits. Again, of living Americans listed in " Who 's Who in America," the Middle West contributes 44 for every 100,000 inhabitants it had in 1860, while the East contributes 82, or nearly twice as many. Since then the progress of the region has been so rapid that to-day it stands virtually abreast of the East in visible provision for the higher life. Comparison of the two regions in literacy, in public instruction, in state aid to schools, in library extension, in penal systems, in state care of defectives, in anti-tuberculosis activities, in city-park systems, and in the beauty of public buildings, shows little or no difference. The East is ahead in urban sanitation, the Grange movement and the woman's club movement, while the Middle West makes the better showing in city-planning, state parks, and the establishment of legislative reference libraries. In public 337 CHANGING AMEEICA libraries there is a gap, narrowing, but not yet closed. The West has only two libraries where the East has three, owns less than half as many books, and reports only two thirds the number of book-borrowers. The fact that the libraries of the older region have eight times as much endowment throws some light on the difference. Bome years ago Mr. Howells made the start- ling suggestion that perhaps the literary capi- tal of the moment was not New York or Boston, but Indianapolis. It is indeed, not easy to ex- plain the Indiana group of imaginative writers, and one feels there is no telling when a spring of literature may open still farther west. On the other hand, when one marks the strength of their German element, one does not marvel that Cin- cinnati and Chicago support as good musical organizations as can be found in the United States. Recently an Oxford fellow visited us for the first time, and in his letters to an architect friend in England he commented unfavorably upon the people of the Middle West. " What you say about those Americans is incredible,'' wrote back the Englishman. " If they care so little 228 SOCIETY AND CULTUEE for beauty, tell me why is it they are at present putting into their homes and public buildings some of the finest architecture of our time ? '' Aside from two or three journals read by the 61ite, the newspapers of the East impress me asi less quiet and sane than those of the Middle West. A Chicago news-stand is less suggestive of bedlam than one in New York or even in Bos- ton. The saffron screamers of the middle-sized cities seem to cater to left-behinds, half-baked immigrants, and petty social climbers. In cities of like size in the Missouri Valley the news- papers obviously reflect the taste of a well-bal- anced and thinking people. INTELLECTUAL FAULTS OF THE MIDDLE WEST If not many peaks shoot up from this high plateau, it is because certain faults vitiate the intellectual strivings of Westerners. Not long ago the Oxford dons were induced to set down their opinion of the Rhodes scholars from America. In their confidential reports these picked college-bred Americans are described as " superficial and inaccurate," " singularly un- educated,'' " lacking in accuracy and the power of hard grind,'' " inclined to drift from one sub- 229 CHANGING AMEEICA ject to another, resting content with a bird's-eye view/' " dilettante/' " restless, volatile, never-edu- cated grufidlich/^ There is complaint of their "superficiality of training and diffuseness of interests," although some dons admit they are " above the average in industry and interest in their work." Now, these are, broadly speaking, American faults, but I think the East has got rid of them more than the Middle West. In the first grapple with nature, alertness and resource- fulness are the prime intellectual virtues. It is complex society, with its specialization and its demand for skill, that drives home the need of thorough training and careful preparation for one's work. The vocations are as differentiated in the West as in the East, but the slack stand- ards of the recent pioneer past live on. In the absence of small, well-defined areas and of little historic commonwealths, the spatial imagination is quickened in the inhabitants of this great Mississippi Valley. Nature sets no limits, and no community sees reason for impos- ing limits of its own making. Hence arises a passion for magnitude. The Westerner thinks of growth in terms of size, and his taste for leaping totals is insatiable. Glibly from his 230 SOCIETY AND CULTUEE tongue roll figures of crop values, output of fac- tories, tonnage totals, trade volume, bank clear- ings, height of sky-scrapers, miles of asphalt, acres of parks, enrolment of pupils, and member- ship in churches. This, too, is an American fault, to care more for growth in quantity than for refinement in quality ; but I fancy one has to hunt longer west of Pittsburg than east of it for that reflective Remnant who wonder if the staggering crop total stands for soil-robbing, if the " phenomenal " factory output represents " speeding up," if the swelling rail tonnage reflects headlong deforesta- tion — the discerning few who care more for deepening popular thought than for expanding li- brary circulation, for improving teaching than for regimenting more children in the schools, for inspiring a feeling for art than for acquiring canvases, for spiritualizing lives than for gaining communicants. THE EXODUS OF THE GREEKS There is a marked gravitation of Middle- Western ability toward our European frontage, where the talents find inspiration, apprecia- tion, and a market for their wares. A Western 231 CHANGING AMEEICA city has its distinguished public men, — judges, bishops, lawyers, educators, and engineers, — but the Eastern city is the Mecca for inventors, chem- ists, artists, scuHptors, illustrators, musicians, and authors. Out of forty-seven residents of Springfield, Massachusetts, whose names are in "Who's Who," twelve are authors and artists; out of forty -nine such in Omaha, only three are writers. East Orange with fifty-three names boasts ten authors; Kansas City with forty -five names has none. If the pages of that directory are representative, much of the cream of the American intellect gathers in southern New England and in the vicinity of New York. Bos- ton and St. Louis are matched in size; but the former has 870 names in " Who's Who," the latter only 225. Chicago has forty-one per cent, more people than Philadelphia, but only nineteen per cent, more citizens of eminence. Hartford, a third the size of Minneapolis, has six-sevenths as many residents of note. Worcester, with fewer people than Toledo, has two and one- third times as many citizens one hears about. New York has ten times the population of De- troit, but it holds thirty times as many persons of prominence. Kansas City, twice as big as 232 I SOCIETY AND CULTUEE Cambridge, has a fourth as many names on the roll of fame. To be sure, Bridgeport and NeW' ark and Buffalo come off badly in comparison with Denver and Cincinnati, but the fact re- mains that out of twelve thousand persons of note dwelling between the North Atlantic and the Kockies, the East is the home of seventy per cent., whereas its proportionate share should be only forty-six per cent. It is not surprising, then, that in the Middle West persons of literary or intellectual note are much oftener of university connection than in the East. The presence or absence of a uni- versity makes a bigger difference than in the older region, where more writers and thinkers are supported by inherited means or by the literary market than by a professor's salary. Besides the emigration of people of talent, there is a continual drifting away of persons who might help form the taste of their community. The Middle West is a far richer area than the East. From the eastern edge of Ohio travel due west to North Platte, Nebraska, — more than twelve hundred miles, — and never at one time will you have under your eye two square miles of poor laud. Clearly, this well-dowered region 233 CHANGING AMEEICA is to be the seat of numbers, comfort, wealth, and power. But it is singularly uniform, and, though pleasing, is lacking in physical charm and striking scenery. The tendency of the Mid- dle Westerners who can live where they please to seek mountain or sea is already pronounced, and will become stronger. The segregation process which is making central England indus- trial and southern England residential will show itself here. People of the interior who do not remove to genial Flordia or picturesque Cali- fornia will seek the pleasure cities of the sea- board, the cultivated suburbs near the big cen- ters, or the lovely spots amid the hills, lakes, and valleys of the Appalachians. WILL THE MIDDLE WEST BECOME LIKE THE EAST? Since the East in its colonial period had many " Western " characteristics, since the Middle West itself presents a smooth gradation, — for the traits of Kansas to-day were the traits of Ohio in 1850, — some predict that the Middle West is to take on in time the present characteristics of the East. I doubt it. Certain factors are at work that may long hold the two regions apart. By its geographical position the Mississippi 234 SOCIETY AND CULTURE Valley escapes the temptation to look constantly across the water and model itself on Old-World, especially English, patterns. Screened in a measure from the sapping seductiveness of for- eign example, it seems destined to be the most " American " part of our country. Moreover, growth in wealth, prestige, and political power will lend it courage to break away from Eastern example and dare to be itself. While from Western towns stream continually those who yield to the scenic, cultural, or social attractions of the East, there is a counterbalanc- ing flow from the older region of persons who covet the freedom and unconventionality of the West. This interchange of misfits retards the assimilation of the two to each other. Finally, since the disappearance of the fron- tier, it is the East, not the West, that absorbs the bulk of our immigrants. The sinister phe- nomena that more and more crop up in the East from the presence of an enormous and growing number of raw aliens cannot but lower the pres- tige of the East in the rest of the country and lessen the willingness of other Americans to take it as a model. Still, the nationalizing forces will not be idle. 335 CHANaiNG AMEEICA No doubt the East will follow the Middle West in the assumption of higher education by the State, in the restoration of popular control over goyemment, in the regulation of railroad and public-utility companies, in the extension of equal educational, industrial, and political op- portunities to women. On the other hand, the Middle West will probably become more like the East in the strength of the investor element, in the consequent tenderness for vested rights, in aversion to the wildcat speculative spirit, in greater attention to family and lineage, in higher standards of technical excellence, and in the con- forming of individual opinion to established or expert opinion. THE END 236 m 10 13^2 LIBRARY OF CX)NGR£SS D0DE'S5nb3E