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MISERY AND ITS CAUSES

AMERICAN SOCIAL PROGRESS SERIES
EDITED BY SAMUEL MCCUNE LINDSAY, PH.D.
A series of handbooks for the student and general reader,
giving the results of the newer social thought and of recent
scientific investigations of the facts of American social life and
institutions. Each volume about 200 pages.
1. THE NEW BASIS OF CIVILIZATION. - By Professor
S. N. PATTEN, PH.D., LL.D., University of Pennsylvania.
Price $1.00 net.
2. STANDARDS OF PUBLIC MORALITY. By ARTHUR
TWINING HADLEY, PH.D., LL.D., President of Yale
University. Price $1.00 net.
3. LEGISLATION AND ADMINISTRATION FOR SO-
CIAL WELFARE. By Professor JEREMIAH W. JENKS,
PH.D., LL.D., Cornell University. [In preparation.
4. MISERY AND ITS CAUSES. By EDWARD T. DEVINE,
PH.D., LL.D., Columbia University. Price $1.25 net.
YT
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York
AMERICAN SOCIAL PROGRESS SERIES
MISERY
AND ITS CAUSES
BY
EDWARD T." DEVINE, PH.D., LL.D.
SCHIFF PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL ECONOMY, COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY, GENERAL SECRETARY OF THE CHAR-
ITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY OF THE CITY OF
NEW YORK, AND EDITOR OF "THE SURVEY"
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1909
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1909,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1909.
Norwood Press
J. 8. Cushing Co. -- Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Hia. huang
6- 31 279
PREFACE OF THE EDITOR
PROFESSOR DEVINE'S “Misery and its Causes," like
Professor Patten's “New Basis of Civilization," with
which this series began, attempts to articulate a new
social philosophy, pragmatic, economic, and socially
adaptable to the existing conditions of American life.
Both volumes contain in substance the Kennedy lec-
tures for the year of their respective publication, as pre-
pared for the School of Philanthropy, on a foundation
.
.
Kennedy, for the express purpose of creating a literature
of social work which shall guide, inspire, and make more
efficient the busy practical worker who must-teplenish
from time to time the sources of his energies in order to
serve with power.
With fascinating realism, with astonishing concen-
tration, with the keenest insight and interpretation of
the results of an unusually rich, deep, and varied per-
sonal experience, and with a charm of style and a per-
fectly irresistible optimism in treating some of the
saddest facts of human life, Professor Devine has placed
.
[v]
PREFACE OF THE EDITOR
us all under lasting obligations not only for a better un-
derstanding of the causes of misery, but also for the
realization of the fact that there is a prophylaxis of
misery and the promise of a real world in which it will
be reduced by social control to manageable proportions.
SAMUEL MCCUNE LINDSAY.
NEW YORK CITY,
April 20, 1909.
[vi]
PREFACE
IT
For a little over a dozen years it has been my duty
and my opportunity to know something of the misery
of the poor in New York. I am quite aware that
there are many to whom that span of experience will
seem brief and inconclusive. Let me avert this objec-
tion by a disclaimer against the inference that I am
relying for my conclusions entirely upon my own per-
sonal experience and observation.
First of all I have had the benefit of the daily ex-
periences of my associates in the General Work of the
Charity Organization Society; of my associates in the
publication offices of Charities and the Commons, who
are gathering in assiduously, week by week, a world-
wide experience in social work; of my associates in
the School of Philanthropy, directors, instructors, re-
search fellows, and students; and of my colleague, the
director of the Department for the Improvement of
Social Conditions, and his staff.
This survey of modern misery has thus a somewhat
1 This journal has been rechristened The Survey while this
volume is in press.
V
(vii)
PREFACE
broader basis than any one personal experience with
dependent families, illuminating and instructive as that
case work alone would be if it could be fully analyzed
and interpreted. It so happens, further, that within
the past two years I have had some personal connec-
tion with three special inquiries, each of which reveals
certain aspects of the lives of workingmen which do
not necessarily and regularly enter into the experiences
of the charitable societies and which are yet to be
considered in any study of modern misery. I refer to
the Pittsburg Survey, carried out by the Charities
Publication Committee, to the investigation of the
Standard of Living, under the auspices of the State
Conference of Charities and Correction, and to an in-
vestigation of the need for an employment bureau in
New York City. There have been numerous other
inquiries which throw light upon our subject, but I
refer to these three because it happens to have been
my duty to be intimately in touch with them and to
know their results. I shall not attempt to present
their results in these lectures, but it is only reasonable
to point out that such views as I set forth as to the
character and causes of the misery which we encounter
in the tenements of New York and other modern com-
1 These three investigations were made possible by appro-
priations by the Russell Sage Foundation.
(viii ]
PREFACE
munities have been hammered out on the anvil in-
deed of my own observation and such capacity as I
have for getting the general bearing of things, but
by the sledge-hammer blows of facts recorded by
agents and visitors as a result of their daily visits,
and of investigations made under different auspices
and by wholly different methods which have no other
purpose in view except to disclose facts as they are.
For valuable suggestions in all parts of this study,
for the analysis of the five thousand family records on
which much of it is based, for the preparation of the
deep obligations to my assistant, Miss Lilian Brandt.
E. T. D.
New York,
March, 1909.
(ix)
CONTENTS
OLAPTER
PAGE
Yol
I. POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT . . . 1
II. OUT OF HEALTH . . . . . . 51
III. Out or WORK
. . 113
IV. OUT OF FRIENDS. .
V. THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS IN DEPENDENT
FAMILIES. . . . . . . 165
VI. THE JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF THE FUTURE 237
FE
MM
2
-
CHAPTER I
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
pe
T IKE the blind old Puritan of whose birth we
I have but lately celebrated the three hundredth
anniversary, I seek the causes of human misery.
Milton's theme is my theme – though you may think
his theological and mine sociological. He with poetic
license, with spiritual vision, with an assumption of
dogmatic authority, and withal with revolutionary
audacity, examined the phenomena that brought death
into the world and all our woe. I am attempting,
without dogma, without the warrant of other inspira-
tion than that which guides the humblest disciple of
science, and with no poetic invention, to examine with
you the circumstances which bring premature, un---
natural — what Metchnikoff calls violent — death
among the children of men; and the causes of that
misery which, whatever its origin, though it may in-
deed be the fruit of man's first disobedience, prompted
by the guile of the infernal serpent, is nevertheless
being perpetuated by the present voluntary actions of
men, and so is a proper subject for our frank and
earnest deliberation.
[3]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
If this were not so, if misery were inevitable, then
there would be no justification for the new view of
charity. If it is justified, it carries us irresistibly be-
yond the remedial agencies, beautiful and healing
though they may be, to the consideration of the causes
which bring them their tasks.
Although misery is our theme rather than poverty,
or dependence, or pauperism, yet it is obvious that
there are causes of misery that lie beyond the bound-
aries of this inquiry. Remorse over some past mis-
conduct, the total failure of some high ambition, dis-
appointment in love, the loneliness which comes from
the inability to make friends, the silent anguish of a
parent's broken heart, and a vast number of other
such experiences which are familiar enough, do not
readily lend themselves to social investigation or to
conscious remedial social endeavor. There is, how-
ever, no sharp line between such mental anguish as
lies in these experiences and that which is directly
traceable to preventable disease and accident, to loss
of employment and a low standard of living, to in-
temperance and vice and crime, to ignorance and
inefficiency, and to the other well-recognized causes of
dependence and misery among the poor.
We are to consider, then, not all misery, but such
misery as gives external, objective indication of its
[4]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
existence and its extent and its character. We shall
seek not the ultimate explanation of misery which shall
correlate the unhappy millionaire with the penniless
outcast, and measure on the same scale their merit
and their rewards, their shortcomings and their punish-
ments; but rather such obvious and, if you please,
more superficial explanations as will enable us to
understand the surplus misery of those whose hard-
ships bring them demonstrably to public attention.
[5]
II
'
The pictures of misery made familiar to us by Mil-
ton and Dante, and by many a sermon and novel,
have this in common — that the misery of which they
speak is punishment. It is the result of depravity, of
the deliberate choice of evil. It is eternal, not to be
ended, not to be mitigated, and still not to be borne.
It is without hope, though the human mind refuses to
compass the thought of the soul without hope. The
misery of the infernal regions, especially as it is de-
picted by the Italian poet, is the logical working out of
qualities of human character. There is an appropri-
ateness, a poetic justice, about each of the various
states of the fallen spirits, because they are but the
projection of desires which have been indulged, of
tendencies which have been encouraged, of appetites
which have been fed, of passions to which control has
been given over the lives of men.
This is one view also of the misery which we find
here on earth, in prisons and hospitals, in homes and
highways, in the haunts of vice and the hidden places
of sorrow and shame. There is comfort for those who
[6]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
are not miserable in the theory that misery is but the
natural_working out of human character, that it is
due to natural depravity, to deliberate wrong-doing
and a conscious choice of evil ways, in the theory that
suffering is proof of sin; and because of this satis-
faction this view becomes the conventional, orthodox
view. The sufferings of the tormented in hell by
sound theology are imputed to wickedness on earth.
It is an easy transition to impute the sufferings of the
poor on earth to the same cause. Here, however,
theology fails us, and the orthodoxy which insists upon
this explanation is not of the religious kind, though it
may seat itself in the church pew. It is rather the
orthodoxy of a certain social philosophy against which
every great religious teacher lifts his voice in indignant
protest, against which every scientific observer records
his testimony.
The assumption that misery is moral rather than
economic; that those who are in distress for the lack
of necessities of life are to be considered, without
further evidence, as needing discipline even though
they may need relief also, does not, it is true, rest ex-
clusively upon the feeling of personal superiority to
which I have attributed it. It is a stern doctrine
thoroughly interwoven into a vast quantity of literature
and into almost the whole of our charitable tradition.
[7]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
This connection that is assumed between the need
of assistance and some form of personal depravity or
shortcoming appears, superficially at least, to have
much justification when we are considering the out-
cast, the criminal, and the extreme type of parasitic
dependent. Here, apparently, the effects of evil and
undisciplined living are so plain that no one may miss
them. Reasoning from cause to effect in such cases
seems an easy and simple process. We may see
plainly in the very countenance the effects of vice, of
intemperance, of cringing helpless dependency. From
this very elementary reading of character, and reason-
ing from effect to cause, we imagine that we rise to
the perception of the earlier, subtler, less easily recog-
nizable evidences of other faults and evil tendencies
which, if unchecked, lead to the more deplorable con-
ditions. We discover, or think we discover, that un-
- employment is the first step toward vagrancy; that
poverty in which there are no discernible signs of
degeneration is an intermediate stage between inde-
pendence and pauperism; that suffering and privation
naturally attendant upon widowhood, orphanage, acute
illness, or friendless old age, are suspicious circum-
stances, justifying disciplinary measures even though
also demanding palliative relief; and finally, that
every application for charitable assistance, for what-
[8]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
1
ever reason made, is to be looked upon as the occasion,
not for lightening the burden of the one who asks aid,
but for being sure that the burden is heavy enough for
the discipline which is assumed, as a matter of course,
to be required. This attitude, it is obvious, is one
which is natural for high-minded, conscientious, and
intelligent persons. It rests upon an inability to trust
human nature under generous treatment, and yet it
may have no trace of smug hypocrisy. On the con-
trary, it may represent a high degree of personal re-
sponsibility, a genuine concern for the more permanent
welfare of those who are in trouble, and steadfast
determination not to do anything that will injure the
character of another, even though at the request of
that other himself. It may even be compatible with
a sympathetic and considerate attitude. It may repre-
sent a desire to consider the souls rather than merely
the bodies of the poor. I have come to believe, never-
theless, after some years of careful, candid, and open-
minded consideration of the subject, that this entire
view of poverty is one which rests upon an unproved
and unfounded assumption.
The only thing that we are warranted in taking for
granted when a family asks for assistance is that they
believe themselves to be in need of assistance. They
may be right or wrong about the fact; they may have
[9]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
very imperfect notions as to where their assistance
should come from, if they do require it; they may
wofully underestimate or overestimate the amount of
assistance that they require; they may be totally un-
able to give any clear and consistent account of the
reasons why they require it. If, however, they are not
mistaken about the fact and are really in need, and if
they have come to an appropriate place to ask for it,
it is fair and reasonable that nothing whatever should
revealed by the application.
[107
III
".
.
"
In contrast with the idea that misery is moral, the
inexorable visitation of punishment for immoral actions
and the inevitable outcome of depraved character, I
wish to present the idea that it is economic, the result
of maladjustment, that defective personality is only a
halfway explanation, which itself results directly from
conditions which society may largely control.
The question which I raise is whether the wretched
poor, the poor who suffer in their poverty, are poor
because they are shiftless, because they are undis-
ciplined, because they drink, because they steal, be-
cause they have superfluous children, because of per-
sonal depravity, personal inclination, and natural
preference; or whether they are shiftless and undis-
ciplined and drink and steal and are unable to care
for their too numerous children because our social in-
stitutions and economic arrangements are at fault. I
hold that personal depravity is as foreign to any sound
theory of the hardships of our modern poor as witch-
craft or demoniacal possession; that these hardships
are economic, social, transitional, measurable, manage-
*...-
[11]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
able. Misery, as we say of tuberculosis, is communi-
cable, curable, and preventable. It lies not in the un-
alterable nature of things, but in our particular human
institutions, our social arrangements, our tenements
and streets and subways, our laws and courts and
jails, our religion, our education, our philanthropy, our
politics, our industry and our business.
The difference between the misery of the Inferno
and the misery of New York is not so much one of
degree. Men and women and children here suffer, if
not so much as in hell, at least to the full limit of their
human capacity. It is not in its diversity. There are
more kinds of misery in New York than Milton ever
dreamed of in his blindness.
The real difference is that at which I have hinted
- that the one is presented as moral, appropriate to
the individual character, and therefore utterly hope-
less. The other is economic, accidental, and trans-
figured by the abiding presence of hope. The one is a
chief ornament of hell — considering its purpose and
character. The other is a chief blight upon earth —
mains, for it is an integral part of the conception of
the region in which it is placed. The other cannot
remain, for it is irreconcilable with the conception of
the society upon which it is an excrescence; or if in
[12]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
the mysteries of God it is reconcilable, yet only in the
sense that it is here for us to overcome, yielding its
mysterious blessing only as we become wise enough,
and strong enough, and good enough to destroy it.
No doubt we do encounter instances in which in this
life individuals who suffer are but paying penalties of
their own misdeeds. Passion and indolence do have
their consequences. I have no quarrel with those who
seek through education in the family, in church, in
school, or in neighborly relations, to instil in young
and old a wholesome fear of consequences. Nature
teaches us in lessons written large in human experi-
ence that certain habits will eventually prove injurious
and other habits salutary. We are fully warranted in
taking these lessons to heart and passing them on to
such as are not fools, and therefore do not insist on
learning in the dearest of all schools, that of experience.
It is the reverse of this position that is not tenable.
Evil passions and indolence produce misery, but it...
does not follow that misery, all misery, or most misery,
is to be attributed to indolence or evil passions. The
position which I suggest for your consideration is
merely that there is no presumption of wrong-doing in
the misery of the poor, that it may not be disciplinary,
that it may not be punishment, that it may not be the
working out of moral character. It may indeed be
[ 13 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
any of these things in a given instance, but the burden
of proof is upon those who allege it, and no charitable
society is justified, no public relief agency or institu-
tion is justified, in basing its policies upon the assump-
tion that because these men before us are afflicted in
mind or body, therefore either they or their parents
have sinned.
(14)
IV
It is essential that we should make another distinc-
tion - the distinction between this misery of the poor
and genuine poverty. There are indeed hardships
and deprivations which are associated with poverty.
Ireland has known them, when, in Elizabeth's reign,
thirty thousand persons are said to have perished in a
single year, chiefly from starvation; and when again,
in Victoria's reign, vast numbers of the Irish people
in sorrow and homesickness abandoned the green isle
and sought new homes, where with pick and spade,
with hod and barrow, they helped to build the indus-
tries of other lands.
Spain has known real poverty, when, at the close of
Philip's disastrous reign, the Armada destroyed, the
expensive wars ended, the industrious Moors expelled,
the mines over sea exhausted, and the peninsula thrown
back upon her own resources, it was found that those
resources were meagre and that the people were poor.
In striking contrast with what happened in that period,
just four centuries ago, we have seen Spain in our time
[15]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
actually benefited by defeats which, from a military
point of view, were equally striking, and by the loss in
the nineteenth century of the last remnants of that
colonial empire which she built up in the sixteenth.
In her withdrawal from the responsibilities of govern-
ment in the islands she left poverty, genuine poverty,
as the most notable of her parting gifts. This also is
changing, but ten years ago Cuba and Porto Rico and
the Philippines had more of poverty than all continental
United States.
Italy has known poverty in this literal and original
sense. Although four millions of Victor Emmanuel's
subjects have permanently expatriated themselves,
although for eight years more than half a million a
year have emigrated, the population of the peninsula
has not diminished as did the population of Ireland
in the last century, but rather it has increased. In
proportion to resources there is still over-population.
Living conditions in many districts are described as
similar to those of the Middle Ages. When the districts
which are now virtually abandoned because of malaria
are again available, and when by changes in her laws
and customs the able-bodied men between seventeen
1
2 Antonio Mangano: The Effect of Emigration upon Italy.
In Charities and the Commons, XIX, 1329, 1475; XX, 13, 167,
323.
[16] ,
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
and forty years of age, who constitute three-fourths of
her emigration, are induced or enabled to stay at
home and are put at profitable work, there may be
other relief from their poverty than that which emigra-
tion with all its disadvantages has to offer. But as it
now stands, especially in the southern provinces, there
are to be found appalling evidences of misery due to
mere inability to produce enough of the necessities of
life. The recent devastation of the earthquake, like
the horrible Black Death which in the fourteenth cen-
tury swept away half of the population of England,
may come in time to be looked upon as a blessing in
disguise — a very heavy and forbidding disguise, I
admit. From these poorest provinces alone there
have been swept away nearly half as many people as
have ordinarily emigrated from the whole of Italy in a
year; and, unlike the emigration process, the earth-
quake has taken the aged, the feeble, the young, the
helpless, along with the rest, and not, in dispropor-
tionate numbers, the able-bodied men of working
years.
I do not propose earthquakes as a remedy for dis-
tress, although over-population is clearly an evil, and
although the experience of San Francisco shows that
an enormous destruction of property may have com-
paratively little effect on the standards of living and
[17]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
smo na
A
the apparent prosperity of the community in which it
occurs.
Such poverty as that of Ireland, of Spain, of Italy, .
and of agricultural Russia, is not entirely unknown in
America also. In New England, on the frontier, in
southern mountains, in deserted mining regions, even
in the backward districts of our own Empire State,
you find deep local traces of it. You find here and
there, in every country, spots where food is scarce,
where human wants are unsupplied for the reason that
nature is niggardly and capital is scarce. Labor is of
little value and wages are low for the reason that there
is no profitable employment for labor. This is poverty.
It is to be found ordinarily in primitive, agricultural
communities rather than in industrial centres. It is a
condition from which mankind struggles upward by
uneven stages, sometimes very rapidly, when nature
grows lavish or invention forges new implements;
sometimes very slowly, when natural resources fail and
civilization is stagnant.
Even the possession of great natural resources, such
as deposits of iron and coal and the precious metals,
or a rich soil, or luxuriant vegetation, or a splendid
harbor, does not of itself insure a community against
real poverty. Until invention has shown the way to
apply labor to such resources they are no safeguard
[18]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
against poverty. Until the wants of men have been
adjusted to the utilization of resources they are as if they
were not. Tropical regions are called naturally produc-
tive, but they are rather the natural home of poverty,
through all the ages, until there is secured an adjust-
ment between wants and industries based upon the
utilization of resources.
.
ur
SAM
Fai dari
1
2014-06
[19]
The short and simple annals of the poor have spoken
eloquently of poverty of resources. The traditional
worthy poor of whom we hear in poetry and in ex-
hortation have been poor because toil is unproductive,
because their labor is expended at the margin of pro-
duction, as economists say, where a day's work yields
but a meagre return.
The annals of the city's tenements to-day have little
to say of poverty of resources. They are neither short
nor simple. They speak more eloquently and more
tragically than the traditional annals of the poor;
even more eloquently and more tragically, as I have
already hinted, than the blank verse in which poets
have described the sufferings of departed spirits. But
the story which they tell is not of poverty, even as it is
not of punishment. It is in the main of social malad-
justment. It is in the main of adverse conditions over
which the individual who suffers is unable to exercise
effective control but which are not beyond social control.
Here again I can bring you instances which might
be deemed convincing evidence to the contrary. There
[20]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
are individuals who do survive and who do triumph
over the most adverse conditions. No man can set
bounds to the capacity of the individual human spirit
even when chained to a frail body. Indomitable
courage, superhuman strength of will, inexhaustible
persistence, ingenuity and invention, called forth by
necessity, if not, as the old proverb teaches, the very
child of necessity, are qualities that we do meet in
everyday life, and thanks to such qualities the excep-
tional individual wrests victory from the teeth of dis-
aster.
It is hard to tell how much a man can stand. You
recall a recent incident of a laborer employed in the
East River Tunnel who discovered a tiny leak in the
roof of the air chamber in which, under the great air
pressure incident to such tunnelling, he was at work.
He tried to stop it, but the hole grew rapidly larger,
not because water was coming in, but because air was
escaping. Into the hole made in this way in the roof
of the tunnel the man himself was finally driven by
the force of the compressed air and up through the
mud and sand of the bed of the river and through the
river itself into the air above, very much to the as-
tonishment of the crew of a tug-boat who had the
honor of rescuing a man thrown into the river from
an altogether different direction from what is custom-
[21]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
ary. The workman survived this extraordinary ex-
perience, going to the hospital rather as a matter of
form than because he felt it to be necessary, and com-
plaining next day, as he told the story to his associates,
of a little stiffness but of no serious consequences.
A surgeon tells of a soldier wounded in the Philip-
pines by a bullet which passed clear through the skull,
leaving it apparently in the condition of a crushed egg-
shell. Without any extraordinary surgical attention
the wounds healed successfully and here again there
were no serious permanent consequences. Such things
happen. Nevertheless, most of us would prefer not to
take the chance of a wound like the soldier's or an
ascent like the tunnel laborer's.
Having exceptional instances in mind a worker
among the poor may not unnaturally attribute to moral
weakness the failure of any family to cope successfully
with such adversities as it encounters. It depends
cupon the standards which one applies. If we are to
say that weakness of character is responsible for the
failure of any individual to overcome obstacles which
Columbus or Darwin or Lincoln would have over-
come, then we do but set up a wholly unreasonable
standard, useless for practical purposes, even though we
do find here and there unrecorded village Hampdens,
mute, inglorious Miltons, who would measure up to it.
[ 22 ]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
We have no right to demand that the poor shall
meet single-handed, as stray heroes have done, ad-
verse conditions to which ordinary average human
beings are not, as a matter of fact, ordinarily sub-
jected. It may even be that the qualities that have
caused the successful to survive and to overcome will
not always bear close scrutiny. Cunning, rather than
strength of character, insensibility rather than patience,
the physical endurance of an animal nature rather
than the higher and more complex spiritual organiza-
tion of a fully civilized man, conformity to vice rather
than superior virtue, may account for the better show-
ing of the successful in the economic struggle, which
is only in part as yet a moral struggle. Let us hesi-
tate to praise indiscriminately the great and the power-
ful, or even the merely successful and prosperous, until
we have so far developed a civic conscience, and so
far socialized business and industry, as well as the
refined arts, that cunning and brute force no longer
obtain the natural rewards of right living and genuine
service to mankind.
[ 25 ]
VI
We now turn to the misery of our own day and our
own community — the surplus misery, as I have called
it, which we are all concerned to reduce and so far as
we can to eliminate, and which is of such a nature
as to constitute a social, not merely an individual,
problem. If it is not to any appreciable extent poverty
of national or community resources, as it clearly is not;
if it is not merely the natural result of personal de-
pravity, as I believe that it is not, — what is its nature ?
What are its several embodiments, to which we may
look for some indications of its character and its causes ?
First, then, the one thousand men and women in
Greater New York who last year took their own lives,
the seven thousand in the registration area of the
United States who in the year 1908 took their own
lives, are clearly an indication of human misery.
True, suicide may often be, as the verdicts so often
declare, but a manifestation of temporary insanity;
but insanity itself is a phase of misery, of which suicide,
when it is due to insanity, is only one, and one of the
least important, manifestations. Suicide is not excep-
[ 24 ]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
LN
tionally common among the poor. It occurs among
them, but also, as we well know, among university
professors, bank presidents, and in other ranks of
society. I have heard the pastor of a metropolitan
church, three of whose parishioners had committed
suicide, preach bravely upon the sanctity of life, and
urge upon his people, who were far above the average
in intelligence, the elementary duty of remaining alive,
even though in humiliation or in pain. I am not here
concerned with the personal cowardice, or the incred-
ible folly, or the egregious selfishness of the typical
suicide. I am not discussing with the philosophers
whether there may be extreme instances, as, for ex-
ample, of painful and incurable malady in advanced
life, when suicide can be theoretically defended. I
have rather to consider whether the misery of which
the act itself is in the vast majority of cases certainly
a symptom, is ordinarily from poverty, from depriva-
tion of the necessaries of life; whether, again, it can
be traced to personal delinquencies of the individual
who gives such irrefutable evidence of his despair; or
whether it is a result of maladjustment.
Three years ago the Joint Application Bureau made
an experimental inquiry into forty-three cases of un-
successful attempts at suicide resulting in commitment
to Bellevue Hospital. Nearly all of these patients
[ 25 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
were found to be self-supporting or to have friends
and relatives who could have provided for their needs.
This indicates that poverty plays little part as a cause
of attempt at suicide, which does not, however, ex-
clude the possibility that suicides in many instances
are in need of aid and advice."
The most obvious fact about the suicidal mania is
its extraordinary increase in nearly all civilized coun-
tries — the rate of suicide having increased even while
the general mortality rate has gone down. In the
forty-three years since the establishment of our Health
Department, the annual number of suicides in the
old New York City, Manhattan and Bronx Boroughs,
has increased tenfold. (Diagram 1.) There have been
minor fluctuations attributable doubtless to industrial
crises and similar causes, but any year which shows an
exceptionally high number for such reasons, as for
example 1874 and 1884, is soon surpassed by the
regular annual increase which goes steadily on in
periods of prosperity as in periods of depression. In
1905, 1906, and the first three quarters of 1907, the
number of suicides was unusually low, but a great in-
crease began at the time of the financial troubles in
October, 1907, and the year 1908 showed an increase
of fifty per cent over any of the preceding three years,
10. F. Lewis. In Charities and the Commons, XVIII, 80.
[26]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT

-
000
600
800
500
400
400
300
300
200
200
.
100
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
DIAGRAM 1. Deaths by suicide in Manhattan and Bronx Boroughs,
1866–1908. (Annual reports of the Department of Health of the City
of New York for 1904 and successive years.)
The dotted line indicates, on a much smaller scale (1,000,000 popu-
lation to 100 suicides), the population of the two boroughs at the census
years.
[27]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
a record higher by 77 than that of any previous year.
Besides the 644 actual deaths from suicide in that
year in the two boroughs, 235 cases of unsuccessful
suicide were admitted to the prison ward at Bellevue
Hospital - not of course by any means a full measure
of the unsuccessful attempts.
This steady increase over a period of forty years of
constantly augmenting wealth and enlightenment, an
increase far in excess of the increase in population, but
corresponding generally to what has occurred in Eu-
ropean countries, appears to me to be a phenomenon
of maladjustment, rather than of poverty or of de-
pravity. No doubt the weakening of religious faith
and the lessening of moral restraints often, perhaps
usually, precede, in the individual, the act of self-
slaughter, but these also are in part a result of the
maladjustments to which I refer. Disease, disappoint-
ment, business failure, unemployment, and sheer lone-
liness are among the commonly assigned causes of
suicide, but behind these, if we knew the facts, would
we not usually find that the unfortunate suicide had
not been rightly placed; that a different set of asso-
ciates, a different occupation, a different residence, a
different and generally not an impossible adjustment
of social or industrial relations, might have averted the
catastrophe ?
[ 28 ]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
U
Statistics have shown that there are relations between
suicide and many other natural and social phenomena.'
The rate is higher in cities than in rural communities.
Three or four men resort to suicide for every woman.
The age at which the maximum number occurs is the
decade between fifty and sixty. This advanced age is
the more striking when we remember that in propor-
tion to population the ratio would be still higher. In
other words, if we consider not the absolute number,
but the relation to population, the rate of suicide in-
creases with every decade from under twenty to over
seventy, thus controverting the popular impression as
to the relatively large number of youthful suicides.
They are most frequent in the spring and early sum-
mer months, suggesting that the nervous system does
not adjust itself promptly to changes in atmospheric
conditions. The hours most frequently chosen are not
those of the silent and lonely night, but from six in the
morning to three in the afternoon, hours of activity
and noise and social intercourse. Protestants have a
higher rate than Catholics, Roman Catholics than
Greek Catholics, Christians than Jews.
1 See Morselli : Suicide. Ogle: Suicides in England and Wales;
in Journal of the Statistical Society of London, XLIX, 101.
Dewey: Statistics of Suicide in New England; in Publica-
tions of the American Statistical Association, June and Septem-
ber, 1892.
[ 29 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
1
Suicides have increased with the increase in culture
and general education, and in a given country are apt
to be more numerous in the sections which are best,
educated, as judged by the superficial and inconclusive
test of ability to read or to sign the marriage register.
This is no ground for indictment against education,
but it suggests the importance of adjusting our educa-
tional system to the requirements of active life.
War and periods of economic disturbance are gen-
erally followed by an increase of suicide, although in
the actual stress of war and revolution petty individual
troubles are forgotten and there is a decrease.
There is a low rate among laborers and clergymen,
a high rate in the other learned professions, among
those who follow sedentary occupations, and among
those whose callings have temptations to an intemper-
ate mode of life. Ready access to instruments of self-
destruction seems to increase the probability of suicide.
Soldiers, for example, medical practitioners and chem-
ists, according to the English tables, all have high
rates. This theory finds support in our own experi-
ence in the frequency with which the elevated railways,
the subways, and Niagara Falls are chosen as a means
of suicide. There is, at least in England, a corre-
spondence between suicide and the general death-rate
which leads to the inference that conditions and habits
[30]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
which conduce to general unhealthiness conduce also
to self-destruction.
The conclusion reached by Morselli, the leading au-
thority on the subject, is that suicide is an incident of
maladjustment; in his own words, that “it is an effect
of the struggle for existence and of human selection,
which works according to the laws of evolution among
civilized people.” The cure which he proposes is
“to develop in man the power of well-ordering senti-
ments and ideas by which to reach a certain aim in
life; in short, to give force and energy to the moral
character."
That also is the cure which I would propose, though
it may be that I have a somewhat different idea from
what was in his mind as to the means of bringing it
about. Professor Patten, in a little volume now in
press, puts into a nugget of wisdom the means on
which I would rely “ to give force and energy to the
moral character.” He says: "We strengthen the will
not by discipline, but by giving the conditions for
normal growth. There is thus no specific remedy for
a weak will nor for vice.) The road from vice is the
road to complete development. Other paths and all
repression only changes its form."
The Roman Catholic confessional, the suicide
? Climax and Product.

[ 31 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
TITYO
bureau of the Salvation Army, and such recent develop-
ments in Protestant churches as are typified by what
is known as the Emmanuel movement, have great pos-
sibilities of good in helping individuals past a crisis
which they might not survive unaided. Private in-
dividuals have many an unrecognized opportunity to
relieve such misery as tends towards suicide, merely
by readjusting other individuals who, as employees, or
as relatives, or as parishioners, or as patients, or as
beneficiaries, or as neighbors, put themselves to some
extent under the influence of the employer, or relative,
or pastor, or physician, or visitor, or neighbor, as the
case may be. All social policies which tend to lessen
maladjustment — preventive medicine, improved hous-
ing, higher standards of living, greater steadiness of
employment, the easier obtaining of loans on reason-
able terms, and above all the development of rational
recreation and amusements — will reduce the number
of suicides, by reducing its inciting cause.
[ 32 ]
VII
Next after suicides, in the minds of most of us, as
obviously wretched and plunged in misery, are the
incarcerated criminals, the 81,772 adult prisoners
confined on sentence in the 1333 civil prisons of the
United States, and the 23,034 children and young
persons in the 93'reformatory institutions. (Diagram
2.) The state of New York, with less than ten per
cent of the population of the country, has twelve per
cent of the incarcerated adult criminals, and twenty-
five per cent of the inmates of institutions for juvenile
delinquents.
In these convicted criminals we have admittedly a
host of unadjusted men and women, who have com-
mitted some definite offence of which they have been
found guilty in due process of law. There need be no
mawkish sentimentality in their behalf. I do not hold
them up before you as victims, in any exceptional
1 Special Report of the United States Census Bureau:
Prisoners and Juvenile Delinquents in Institutions, 1904.
2 Not all of these twenty-three thousand had committed
offences. The figure includes “persons between seven and
twenty-one years of age committed to the custody of reforma-
tory institutions by some lawfully constituted authority.”
.[33]

4,8. 81772
N.Y. 9882
0.8.28094
N.Y.8828



4.3. 26486
N.Y. 6844
VE
0.8. 85280
N.Y. 11010
U.S. 80846
N.Y. 11885
4.8. 82288
N.Y. 24907

0.a. 10811
N.Y. 2289
U.S. 158040
N.Y. 27019

.
.
1.8. 14781
N.Y. 1860
.
U.S. 71580
N.Y. 18668
10
9
DIAGRAM 2. The institutional population of the United States on a
given day in 1904.
almshouses. 4. In permanent homes for adults. 5. In temporary
homes. 6. In orphanages and children's homes. 7. In institutions for
the insane. 8. In institutions for the feeble-minded. 9. In hospitals.
10. In schools and homes for the deaf and blind.
The different circles represent, on the same scale for all, the total
number of persons in the different classes of institutions, and the black
portion the number in the state of New York.
[34]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
degree, of social injustice. We are far too lenient
with our criminals. We allow too many a crime to go
unpunished, we imprison for too short a period, we
pardon too easily, and we release after expiration of
sentence arbitrarily, with no security against a repeti-
tion of the crime. And yet, a large part of the misery
which leads straight to crime is clearly traceable to
social failure. The responsibility of society for juvenile
crime is so clearly recognized as to need no argument.
The lack of play grounds, the defects of our system
of elementary education, the evils associated with
over-crowding in tenements, are among the failures of
adjustment to present conditions which tend to the
manufacture of youthful criminals; and after that
process has once begun, the association of first offenders
with hardened criminals, the futile system of definite
short sentences, the absence of any comprehensive
scheme of reformation and rehabilitation -- though
there are institutions and societies which do reform
and rehabilitate, the inefficiency and corruption of
courts and police officers that are neither inefficient nor
corrupt ---- speedily complete the process, so that the
youthful offender, as he waxes in stature with the pass-
ing of the years, hardens also into an attitude of per-
manent hostility to society.
[35]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
This process is not a joyful one. On the contrary,
it is fraught with misery, with hardships and suffering,
with hatred and humiliation and revengeful resent-
ment. All this might very often be changed. If those
who are degenerate, really unfit for human companion-
ship, were humanely but firmly segregated in suitable
homes or colonies; if those who are really at war
with society in spirit, however trivial their specific
offence, were kept under discipline and educational
training until they were reconciled; if those who,
under the pressure of some extraordinary external im-
pulse which is not likely to recur, have committed a
crime, let us say against property, which they are
ready to expiate by restitution, were treated by a
method appropriate to their offence, and if an oppor-
tunity were given them on comparatively easy terms
to regain an honorable place in society; if to those
who are not criminals at all in any real sense, but
who have fallen under the influence of evil associates,
a chance were given under probation, – real proba-
tion, with so much of stern compulsion as is necessary
to enforce compliance with rational conditions imposed
by the court, and so much of human sympathy and
understanding as will induce a disposition to comply
with them, --- We might arrest this downward career in
many an individual. In fact, we do so arrest it now,
.: (36]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
in so far as we have already transformed piecemeal
our antiquated penal system. Social defence, relying
chiefly upon reformation and the improvement of social
conditions as its methods, has been accepted, though
not yet altogether consciously, as the basis of our
treatment of crime. Juvenile court, probation, reform-
atory, indeterminate sentence, prisoners' aid, and the
industrial colony, are so many indestructible parts of
a new and better plan which we shall one day piece
together into an integral social police and correctional
system —- such a system as that to which Mrs. Lowell,
inspired by a vision not yet realized, looked forward
when she projected a great municipal department on
the reduction of crime: to include prisons, reforma-
tories, courts, police, and all the other agencies by
which society would seek to extirpate crime rather
than repress it; to educate, train, and reform the crimi-
nal rather than punish him; to promote justice and
social order rather than perpetuate the misery from
[37]
VIII
Even more repulsive to our eyes than the lifeless
suicide, or the imprisoned murderer or thief, is that
“unhappy being,” if I may use words of Lecky, the
historian of European morals, “whose very name is
a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart
the transports of affection, and submits herself as a
passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted
as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most
part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early
death.” “On that one degraded and ignoble form,"
he says, “are concentrated the passions that might
have filled the world with shame. She remains, while
creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess
of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."
Although these words do not paint too darkly the
position of the prostitute, they fail to give an adequate
idea of the full sweep of the misery which is associated
with sexual immorality. I asked a probation officer
the other day, who works daily and nightly with the
unfortunate women brought into court on a charge
of disorderly conduct, how much of the misery of
1
[38]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
!
New York is, in her judgment, due to this cause alone,
and she said, “Oh, nine-tenths of it.” That was not
a well-considered answer, and on cross-examination
she would not insist upon her estimate, but it indicates
a better perspective than the impatient dismissal of the
whole subject which is the temptation of the average
citizen, and it suggests the wider range which we
must give our inquiry into the causes and conse-
quences of this social phenomenon.
I believe Lecky to be entirely mistaken as to the
essential nature of prostitution. Vice is not, as the
quotation suggests, an external manifestation of one
uncontrollable human impulse. When I see the evi-
dences of deliberate commercial investment in the
music halls, the dance halls, the Raines Law Hotels,
and the saloons that encourage this social evil; when
I learn of the corrupt alliance between politicians and
policemen and vice; when I consider the savings by
merchants and manufacturers who pay girls less than
a living wage; when I consider the "failure to give
natural, normal, obviously essential oversight to girls
in the period in which they most need protection, and
the failure to give sound instruction to the youth of
either sex on matters so vital to their own safety and
with the theory of vice which calls for “a priestess of
[ 39 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
humanity,” who at the same time, as Lecky puts it
again, is “herself the supreme type of vice,” and yet
ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. Ex-
cept in the case of a few moral perverts, girls become
prostitutes in New York, not because of some mys-
terious and unalterable law of human nature, not be-
cause humanity demands a priestess; but because it
is profitable for some people to perpetuate the existence
of vicious resorts and places of amusements, because
the difference between three dollars a week and twenty
dollars a night is too great a temptation for a girl of
neither watched when they are in danger nor taught
when they are in ignorance, because children are not
kept away from dangerous places, because again pros-
titution is not successfully kept out of the tenements,
because working girls, when temporarily unemployed,
have before their eyes the flaunting evidences of im-
moral prosperity, because girls who live in furnished
rooms and boarding places have no place to receive
their company except in their sleeping rooms, because
of the privations that under-employment or irregular
employment or underpaid employment or unemploy-
ment occasion, because of seasonal work and of work
under bad conditions. Such social and economic
causes as these do not account for all immorality — it
[ 40 ]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
U
is not my province to account for all immorality, but
rather to point out some of those adverse conditions
from which immorality, like crime and self-destruction,
are likely to result and in fact do result.
When I consider how those who do set out to deal
seriously with the social evil persistently revert to the
utterly discredited and futile method of licensing and
segregating and sanctioning the evil instead of eradi-
cating it, and to the inherently unjust and outrageous
discrimination against the female prostitute, with
virtual immunity for the male cadet who lives upon
her earnings, and complete immunity for the male
customer to whose demand she caters, I long for the
rise of a prophet who will be able to open the eyes of
the people to the simple elementary truth in this whole
matter. There is but one truth, and it is simple.
That truth is that purity of life is the only cure for
the social evil. Until the churches and the schools,
the public journals and the public platforms, the
family physician and parents in the home, are free to
teach and preach this truth, there will be no end of the
social evil. That teaching is positive, and not nega-
tive. It has to do with health and vigor and the per-
petuation of the race, not with vice, and disease, and
ugliness, and death. That teaching is obstructed and
thwarted by two things; by false modesty, and by
[41]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
· greed. Those are the two maladjustments which stand
in our way. The essential evil, towards which we
should direct our attention, lies not in the residuum
of vice which would remain because of the ultimate,
ineradicable human passions for which public prosti-
tution, in Lecky's conception of the matter, provides
a safety-valve. The evil lies in the ignorance and in
the habits to which we give tacit approval; against
which we do not strive earnestly and openly and
aggressively; concerning which there is a lamentable
“conspiracy of silence." These evils are definite,
quite within the grasp of any average intellect, and
eradicable.
[ 42 ]
IX
After suicides and criminals and prostitutes we come,
in our search for the embodiments of misery, to the
institutions which have grown up to care for particular
classes of dependents. All of these are naturally
brought under suspicion as the peculiar abodes of
misery. Each specialized group holds in precipita-
tion, as a chemist might say, one of the well-recognized
causes of human misery: physical disability in the
hospitals; permanent physical defect in schools and
homes for deaf and blind; mental disease and deficiency
in the institutions for the insane and feeble-minded;
friendless old age in the public almshouses and in the
private homes for the aged; homeless childhood in the
orphan asylums; immorality in the temporary homes for
women; lack of work in the temporary homes for men.
There were 85,290 persons in the almshouses of the
United States on January 1, 1905, and 80,346 more
in the permanent homes for adults, most of which are
privately managed homes for the aged or for incurables.
(Diagram 2.) In the orphanages and homes for children
- there were 92,289; in municipal lodging houses and
[43]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
other temporary homes 25,466,4 — altogether con-
siderably more than a quarter of a million of men,
women and children, who, whatever other character-
istics they may have, however widely they may differ
from one another as individuals, have this in common,
that they are not living in families, under the normal
conditions of home life. To a great extent they are
friendless. To be out of friends because one has out-
lived them, or for any other reason, is misfortune indeed.
On the same day there were in special institutions
158,040 insane and 15,511 feeble-minded; a large
proportion, probably, of all the recognizably insane
in our population, but a shamefully insignificant pro-
portion of all the feeble-minded. The misery which
they represent is not borne to any extent by themselves,
but by their families, and in the case of the feeble-
minded, discredit and unnecessary burdens rest upon
the whole nation until we adopt a more enlightened
policy. They are themselves, to a very great extent,
the results of social neglect or social mismanagement.
On the same day there were 14,731 persons in the
schools and homes for the deaf and the blind, who may
population, see the Special Reports of the United States
Census Bureau on Paupers in Almshouses, Benevolent Insti-
tutions, Insane and Feeble-Minded in Hospitals and Institu-
tions.
[ 44 ]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
be taken as merely typifying the misery that is due to
physical defect. These 14,731 are for the most part
not personally unhappy; they are a small proportion
of all the deaf and blind in our country - less than ten
per cent ? — and they are as a class the most fortunate
portion. I mention them only because they are the
only segregated group we have who suggest the misery
that is due to those imperfect senses, those mutilated and
deformed bodies, which are in every case a social and
an economic handicap, and in the case of those who
cannot be tenderly cherished and surrounded with com-
pensations, one of the most cruel of adverse conditions.
In the hospitals, finally, there were on January 1, 1905,
71,530 persons suffering from disease or serious accident.
This also is a small proportion of the total number who
were sick on that day, -- perhaps three per cent, -
though it is three times as many as there were in hos-
pitals fifteen years before. This increase of two hun-
dred per cent is an index not only of misfortune but also
of humanity. It is of course no indication of an in-
crease in the amount of sickness. It points rather to
readjustment by which the sick are cared for in a more
1 Based on the figures given in the Census Bureau report
on the deaf and blind in the population in 1900.
2 Based on an estimate arrived at by using Farr's ratio of
morbidity to mortality.
[45]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
humane and intelligent way; in the manner recom-
mended centuries ago by Sir Thomas More in his
Utopia, where in his enlightened city one may, if he
likes, be sick at home instead of using a public institu-
tion, but to do so is a serious error of judgment. Our
figures include some who were in hospitals, not from
necessity, but because there is a growing preference,
among those who are able to pay for any medical or
surgical care they may need, to be sick in a hospital
rather than at home. The hospital population does
concretely represent that large volume of misery which
lis due to disease and accident.
In the state of New York, with nine and one-half per
cent of the population of the country, we have thirteen
per cent of the inmates of schools and homes for the
deaf and blind, thirteen per cent of the paupers in
almshouses, fourteen per cent of the adults in perma-
nent homes, fourteen per cent of the feeble-minded in
institutions, seventeen per cent of the insane in special
institutions, twenty-two per cent of the sick in hos-
pitals, twenty-seven per cent of the inmates of tempo-
rary homes, and twenty-seven per cent of the children in
orphanages and homes. Some of these high percentages
are much to our credit, others are not; but none of
them is an indication of the relative strength in our
population of that particular class of dependents, and
[46]
POVERTY AND MALADJUSTMENT
such comparisons must always take into account the
situation of New York City as the chief port of immigra-
tion, and its other exceptional conditions.
There is one more fairly well-defined group to be
considered. It is outside of all these institutions and
constitutes an institution of itself. I refer to the bread
line. For the most part its individual units have had
or will have experience on the inside of prison and hos-
pital and almshouse and temporary shelter, but the
bread line itself is an embodiment of misery more dire
and unrelieved than is found in almost any other quar-
ter. Out of health, out of work, out of friends, out of
step with industry, out of touch with society, the men in
the bread lines are not unfairly taken as the clearest and
most unmistakable of all evidences of maladjustment.
I do not wish to represent that we find in these insti-
tutions, whether almshouse or hospital or asylum, such
unbroken and universal misery, such constant depres-
sion of spirits, such universal resentment against fate,
as may easily be imagined by those who have not been
accustomed to walk their corridors and to sit by their
bedsides. We may even look in vain for such outward
tokens of misery among criminals and outcast women,
though there is certainly little real joy among them.
All of these groups combined do not exhibit by any
means the sum of human misery, but each of them is
- .-* 747]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
""
,
Lit.
XI.
R
e: Link
Sinan
:
an index of hardship and misfortune, even though in-
dividuals among them may not be miserable and others
may be unconscious of their real misery, and others may
indeed be able to excite admiration and envy by com-
pensating qualities of mind and soul.
The causes of friendless old age, of orphanage, of
physical and mental disease and defect, are many and
intricate. Some of it is due, no doubt, to defective
personality, physical and moral. Much of it, certainly,
is the direct result of remediable social conditions, mal-
adjustments which can be corrected. Children are left
fatherless or motherless by the premature death of their
parents from preventable disease; people come to old age,
frequently an early old age, disabled by overwork or
work under bad conditions, having had little opportunity
to make provision for age, or to bring up their children
to a position in which they can care for their parents;
much of the blindness is due to preventable causes;
much of the feeble-mindedness to lack of custodial
care for feeble-minded and epileptic women and men;
some of the accidents to unguarded machinery; much
of the illness to unsanitary conditions of home and
factory and to a low standard of living imposed by a
low rate of wages. Thus much of the misery which the
institutional population reflects certainly represents a
defective social economy.
*** [ 48 ]
The thesis which I have maintained is that not poverty
and not punishment explains the misery of our modern
commercial and industrial communities, but rather
social maladjustment. It will not, I trust, be inferredo
that I would give aid or countenance to those who with
rash or violent hand would destroy the foundations on
which mankind has begun to rear the structure of
civilization. The institutions which have come into
being, not by distinct and deliberate legislative enact-
ments, but by the slow evolutionary processes of natural
selection, and by the no less evolutionary and natural
processes of the development of law and custom, are of
far more significance and value to us all than any arti-
ficial, suddenly created mechanism which we are likely
to invent. The family, the state, the church, property,
the civil and the criminal law, 'courts of justice, free
exchange of goods and of services, contract, the ballot,
public education, public relief, democracy, the rule of the
people with standards, which G. Lowes Dickinson dis-
tinguishes from ochlocracy, or the rule of the mob without
1 Justice and Liberty.
[ 49 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
standards, - these great social institutions I would not
overthrow if I could. No revolutionists could overthrow
them if they would. When I seek, with absolute frank-
ness, and a very earnest desire to see things as they are, the
causes of misery here in the city of New York, I have no
more intention of challenging the basis of our society, of
our industry, of our civilization, than the physician in-
tends to challenge the laws of anatomy and physiology
when he looks upon disease. I seek but to express vividly
and concretely, as we social workers find them, the condi-
tions which appear to us naturally and inevitably favor-
able to the perpetuation and increase of human misery,
If there shall emerge from the gloomy picture the brighter
outlines of a social programme that satisfies our sense
of justice, so much the better.

[50]
CHAPTER II
OUT OF HEALTH
TN the homes of the poor we come closer to the causes of
I misery than in hospital or almshouse, in orphan asy-
lum or prison, in night court or bread line or coroner's
office. In the homes of the poor we find the beginnings
of those tendencies which in the exceptional cases lead
to suicide or crime, to disabling disease and helplessness,
to friendlessness and public dependence, but which in
vastly more cases do not reach those extreme stages,
though they lead ever in those directions.
We find not merely the beginnings, but the unfolding
and interaction of all these tendencies, affecting indi-
viduals as in the institutional populations, and affecting
also the welfare of families. In the homes of the poor
we find the dire consequences of death and disease, of
unemployment and under-employment, of overwork and
nervous strain, of dark and ill-ventilated and overcrowded
rooms, of under-nourishment and exposure and poisoned
food, of ignorance and maladjustment. In the homes
of the poor, we find hardships and burdens not unlike
those which we find also in the homes of the prosperous
no
[53]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
and well-to-do. We find also courage and patience and
charity. We find extraordinary resources and extraor-
dinary powers of resistance. Again I find it difficult,
as always, to generalize about the poor without falling
straightway into contradictions and paradoxes, and so I
say simply that we find in the homes of the poor much
misery which is not true poverty and not punishment,
misery which is but a part of our common heritage, a
part of the result of a common failure in which they
vicariously suffer for the sins of others, a part of a
common burden which we may bear in common if we so
desire.
Ill health is perhaps the most constant of the attend-
ants of poverty. It has been customary to say that
twenty-five per cent of the distress known to charitable
societies is caused by sickness.. An inquiry into the
physical condition of the members of the families that
ask for aid, without for the moment taking any other
complications into account, clearly indicates that whether
it be the first cause or merely a complication from the
effect of other causes, physical disability is at any rate a
very serious disabling condition at the time of application
in three-fourths — not one-fourth — of all the families
Society, who are probably in this respect in no degree
exceptional among families in need of charitable aid.
[54]
OUT OF HEALTH
That we may see this disability in its natural human
relations, I venture to introduce the discussion of ill
health as a cause of misery with the stories of four
families.
[55]
Our first family consists of an Irish laborer forty-two
years of age, a Scotch wife ten years younger, and seven
children. They came to this country four years ago,
just after the man had failed in business through the
foolish indorsement of another man's note. The wife's
father is in fairly good circumstances in Scotland, but
too much annoyed at his son-in-law's business incapacity
to do anything for them. Putting the end of the story
first, as all impatient readers prefer, I am happy to say
that this man is now employed and supporting his
on
what money has been loaned to them within the past
year. I fear, however, that this is temporary, unsub-
stantial prosperity, reflecting the buoyancy of hope,
rather than that permanent relief which would justify
such confidence.
Intelligent, willing, sober, and respectable they are,
but not efficient and not able-bodied. When the wife
first came for help a year ago her husband had been out
of work for five months, with only now and then an
[56]
OUT OF HEALTH
"
operation. Twice the receivers of the Metropolitan
Railway had given him a chance. Both times he was
discharged within a month as incompetent. Later,
after he had had his operation and recovered, he worked
in the Woodyard, successfully as long as he was favored
by light tasks, but unable to perform work of ordinary
severity. Although he had recovered from his acute ill-
ness, strength, energy, and physical vigor did not appear.
When he applied for work he was not taken on because
he was obviously physically unfit. Even the Special
Employment Bureau for the Handicapped could do
little for him. Finally a superintendent of buildings in
an educational institution, though with many misgivings,
took him on where he is still employed, irregularly.
So much for the man. The wife also is ill. She has
at first some heart trouble, and neuralgia. At the same
time the oldest child, twelve years of age, has to go to
the hospital for a serious operation on her throat. These
misfortunes are definitely reported on the day when the
father is about to have his operation, and on the same
day the mother expresses a fear that two of the younger
children have measles, — a fear which in a day or two is
confirmed. In another week still another child develops
a very sore throat and the nurse reports that the baby
has a sore mouth.
[57]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
When they have to move, a month later, because the
agent objects to seven children, though he cannot dis-
possess them while they have the measles, the mother of
seven solves the rent problem in a new apartment by
taking in a boarder. It is a larger apartment of course --
five rooms — and it costs seventeen dollars a month.
Her own physical infirmities, however, have only just
begun. Her leg is injured in an accident, boils follow,
and it is three months before she is perceptibly better.
Meantime the baby has been very ill and another child
has had pneumonia.
At various times in this year's experience the visitor
has reported that they seemed discouraged, each time,
however, as if it were an unusual and rather surprising
development, worthy to be noted on that account, and
each time, if I recollect correctly, it was not the illness, or
the adverse sudden stroke of fate that appeared to them
discouraging, but rather its long sequelæ, the fact of not
finding employment, the fact of not regaining strength,
or the fact forsooth of not finding a real estate agent who
wanted a janitress with seven children !
You will readily separate in this history the accidental
from the typical. The large family, the multiplicity of
children's diseases, the operations, the failure in business
in the old country -- these are the accidents of this
particular case; but the physical incapacity directly
[58]
OUT OF HEALTH
resulting from disease and under-nourishment and the
complications of the physical and social environment -
these are typical and fundamental to our understanding
of causes and remedies.
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[09]
III
I turn to another case, in which for two years accident
and illness have shaped the family history. The woman
has become a widow within that period. She is now a
cleaner in one of the district offices of the Charity
Organization Society.
When she came from Ireland a girl of twenty-one,
just twenty-five years ago, she went into service with a
lady whose name she still gives as a reference and who
writes as follows: “In regard to William and Nellie
Brown, William worked in my husband's factory as a
truckman. Nellie lived with me first as upstairs girl,
then as cook. She was married from my house and I
took her back again after her marriage to William. She
lived with me for some time after her marriage. Nellie
was always a good, honest, sober girl and kind to every-
one. I am more than sorry to think there should have
been made such a change in their lives. I know any
help of any kind whatever will be well placed if given to
Nellie and her family of little children.”
That is all that any one could ask in the way of a
character. It is fully confirmed by the investigation
[60]
OUT OF HEALTH
clean and comfortable. The children were well cared
for. The family physician, who had known them for
twenty years and had treated them in all illness, corrobo-
rated in every particular such statements as had been
made to us.
What now was the distressing change which had moved
the pity of their old-time employers and which brought
them to us, not, I must add again, on their own applica-
tion, but on a neighbor's intervention ? The trouble
was that the sturdy truckman of forty-six was lying ill in
the J. Hood Wright Memorial Hospital, suffering from
injury to his spine, caused in part, or so his wife believed,
by the heavy lifting which his employment required,
though the official diagnosis says combined sclerosis and
pernicious anæmia. After having been taken care of at
home for ten weeks, until their savings were exhausted,
he remained alive four months more in the hospital, and
when he died he left just enough insurance on his life to
give his body decent burial.
So we have a widow on our hands with four small
children. She is no longer robust, however strong she
may have been as a maid twenty years ago. She says
that she has stomach trouble and the diagnosis of St.
Luke's Hospital says gastric indigestion. She is jani-
tress with free rent and a little besides. She is taking in
[61]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
washing -- though she has various ailments from time
to time besides her gastric indigestion; such as pleurisy
and a bad cough. There was another member of the
household, William's sister, of feeble intellect, with the
enlarged head of the idiot, but able to give some help
in the care of the children.
I shall not enter into the history of the relief, as I am
attempting to describe conditions in this family and not
the work of a district committee, but one feature of it is
worthy of mention. William, twelve years of age, at
work in violation of the law, was on the conscience of
the committee. He was taking care of a telephone, his
duties light, his employer interested in him, and the
conditions favorable, with promise of promotion. His
mother pleaded that he should not be disturbed. He
had not been doing particularly well in school and he had
never been so well, so good, and so happy as since he had
begun to work. But the committee was obdurate on this
point, seeing clearly its duty to uphold the law, and made
its provision of a pension conditional on William's
going to school. Just as this decision was reached, and
.
1
S
a neighbor called at the office with the startling news
that William, this strong, happy, twelve-year-old
youngster, had been hit by an automobile and had been
taken badly injured to the very hospital where his father
[62]
OUT OF HEALTH
IT
was still a patient. Into the details of the pitiful strug-
gle of the next year and a half for health for the boy
and for health for the mother, and relief for the idiotic
aunt by surgical operation, of church relief, fresh air
outings, and partial employment for the partially dis-
abled woman and light employment for the boy, now
also seriously disabled, perhaps for life, of the illegal,
surreptitious substitution of the second boy, only ten
years old, in the place which at the time of his accident
William still held in spite of the law and in spite of the
society, --- into these details of her struggle against
adverse conditions and her partial success, as I have
said, I cannot enter.
I hold this story also, though but briefly sketched in
outline, to be fairly typical of the conditions which cause
the misery of the poor. So typical is it indeed, so much
like the average, ordinary case, that when I asked the dis-
trict agent under whose care she has been to tell me about
some of her families, this one did not occur to her. She
began to tell me about an exceptional case in which there
had been an extraordinary combination of unfavorable
misfortunes. “Wait,” I said, before she had gone very
far, “I don't want a story that is exceptional. Let me
ask you on a venture about your own cleaner here in the
district office. Probably she has been chosen, has she
not, from among your applicants ? Tell me about her.”
1
[63]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
Rather reluctantly at first, until the details came into her
mind, she told me about this more ordinary, more
typical case. I submit it to your judgment, whether if
it is typical it is not also very illuminating.
[64]
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In the two instances which I have cited misery is the
result of ill health, disease, and death in families which
are entitled to be called respectable families, in which
there are no notable stains of misconduct upon the record,
unless perchance the business failure of the accommodat-
ing Irishman is to be so described. But of course I
would tell only half of my story and write myself down as
a false interpreter of social conditions if I sought to give
the impression that misery of the same sort is not often
accompanied by lapses from the path of rectitude. It is
not alone the good that die prematurely. It is not alone
the striking or interesting case that illustrates social
conditions. It is not alone the attractive family that
requirés our sympathetic understanding. It is not alone
the native born and those who speak our language that
suffer and need help.
A few days before Christmas, five years ago, an Italian
woman came to the lower east side district office, from a
day nursery, with her eleven-year-old daughter. Her
husband had died four months before and since then she
had tried to support herself and the three children by
[65]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
sewing at home. By working seventeen hours a day
she could earn barely three dollars a week. The oldest
child was Joseph, fourteen, out of school, running the
streets and “worrying his mother a good deal.” Fran-
cesca, the little girl of eleven, also out of school,“ seemed
bright and intelligent.” She helped her mother sew, did
all the washing, and was even found lighting a fire with
record adds, was full of smoke). Then there was Tony,
a child of four, who apparently had brought them, via
the day nursery, to the district office. The mother
“looked delicate and not able to do very hard work."
They had been in New York four years. Their rela-
tives in Italy were very poor. A brother of her husband
with his family lived next door, on Forsythe Street.
They had lived in the same house for a month but our
family had been put out because the children made so
much noise romping with their cousins. They had been
put out of another house because they were entertaining
two families of friends just come from Italy. The Laun-
dry was suggested, but the mother said she could not go
because she“ got sick when she put her hands in water."
A settlement asked Francesca to join a club of Italian
girls, and tried, unsuccessfully, to get hold of Joseph.
Francesca was told to come to the office in the morning,
to be taken to school and properly started. But she did
[66]
OUT OF HEALTH
not come, she did not go to the settlement, and when the
visitor went to see them, they had moved away, with the
relatives from next door, no one knew where.
In October the mother came again with Fanny to the
lower west side office. The two families were living
together in three ten-dollar rooms, and the woman's
seventeen-year-old brother had recently come from Italy
and was living with them. He was “working at flowers.”
and making only $1.50 a week. Our widow was out of
work. A settlement had got hold of the children and
they were all in school, including Joseph, who was re-
luctantly and unsatisfactorily complying with the new
child labor law. The mother did not want to go to the
Laundry, but “finally consented.” The next day came
Fanny to say her mother had secured work at finishing
pants, which was now her trade, and so she would not
need to go to the Laundry. In December she was still
working, but earning only about three dollars a week,
“which," the record says, “she feels is insufficient for
all her needs.” While she could earn as much as that,
however, she would not consider any other kind of work.
The brother's earnings meantime had increased until
he was paying two dollars a week for board. In January
the settlement was "satisfied with present conditions,"
and the record was closed for the time being.
In less than a month a third settlement asked help for
[67]
MISERY M
AND ITS CAUSES
-
•
grade, and he was staying away from school. The
truant officer could not find him and his mother would
not tell where he was. It was reported that she had
sent him “up to Fourteenth Street” to keep him out of
school, that he gave her three dollars a week and
“changed his employment often.” Later he was placed
in the Truant School, did well there, and in May got his
working papers.
In the summer the friendly visitor sent Fanny to the
country, and the next fall she was in school quite
regularly. The mother's brother was making ten dollars
a week during the rush season and Joseph was at home,
working and giving his mother four dollars out of his
wages of five. This fall of 1905 was the best time the
family had seen since we had known them.
In December Fanny was not well. The friendly
visitor sent her to the country, but the matron of the
house said she was very wild. She came home and was
entered at the Manhattan Trade School, on a scholarship,
to learn machine operating. About this time Joseph
began to steal from his mother, to stay away from home,
and to frequent pool-rooms. In February he was
arrested and sent to the reformatory on Hart's Island,
where, as in the Truant School, he made a good record.
The mother's brother, too, who generally paid five
[68]
OUT OF HEALTH
dollars a week, spent all his wages one week in the pool-
room. Fanny did not do well at the Trade School, stay-
ing away a great deal.
In July our applicant was examined at the Board of
Health Clinic and it was found that she had incipient
tuberculosis. The medical report said her general
condition was good, the prognosis favorable, and that
she was able to work. She did go on working, earning
now from ten to twelve dollars a week.
In October Fanny, not yet fifteen, was arrested for
shoplifting and was sent to the Protectory. Joseph
came back home about this time, but was doing nothing
and was talking about going back to Italy. The incipi-
ent consumptive is described as “not in very good con-
dition physically.”
A .year later, November, 1907, Fanny was at home
again, working with her mother. Joseph was still at
home, idle, and still talking about Italy. He was told
that he must earn his passage money if he wanted to go.
The next spring they were found in one small room,
the woman apparently out of work, Fanny earning $3.50
in a flower factory, Joseph working for a barber Satur-
days and Sundays. A third time a Laundry permit was
offered her and a third time she declined on the ground
that she was not able to do that kind of work. The
nurse took her again to the clinic of the Board of Health,
71
[69]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
11Y
with the same result as before. She came back after it
and asked for a Laundry permit. The physician who
examined her offered Fanny a position as chamber-maid
in his family, which she refused because she would not
stay away from home overnight. He also examined
Fanny and found that she, too, had tuberculosis. The
settlement just at this time offered the mother a position
as maid, but she “did not want to be a servant to any one
and would rather die than do that kind of work.” In
June she tried to commit little Tony, who has hardly
been mentioned up to this time, to an institution as a
public charge, but the application was not approved.
Fanny was sent to the state sanatorium. Her mother
would not consider it for herself and probably could not
have got in. She had a place at service in the country
with Tony but she kept it only two days as “she was not
satisfied.” Joseph went back to Sicily, through the gen-
1909, Fanny was still at Ray Brook and her mother was
working “somewhere uptown," earning seven or eight
dollars a week.
There you have, as you will have discovered, a record
of overcrowding, of improper home work in a tenement,
of seasonal work in factories, of lack of proper training
for children, and of inadequate relief; but behind all
these things, resulting perhaps in part from them, and
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[70]
OUT OF HEALTH
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causing them in part, you have widowhood and half
orphanage, and you have physical disability, taking the
very natural — almost inevitable — specific form of tu-
berculosis in both mother and daughter. You will notice
that the boy, Joseph, did well both times under discipline
- even under the discipline of the reformatory on
Hart's Island. The girl, on the other hand, did not do
well at the Trade School, and in fact was arrested for
shoplifting at about the time she left that excellent in-
stitution. Perhaps she may have fallen in with a bad
companion there, or perhaps she is one of those who do
best in the atmosphere of the home. Except for this
single instance, she has seemed to be all that could be
desired, - affectionate, helpful, and industrious.
[71]
May I add one more story, much briefer, and of a far
less attractive home? The man at the head of this fam-
ily was a deaf-mute of grossly immoral habits and vio-
lent temper, but an excellent workman, both as engraver
and photographer, and able to earn a good living.
The woman was a second wife, in good repute among
her neighbors, but of a very violent temper. She also,
however, was intelligent and capable. She had married
against the wishes of her parents, who were respectable
working people in a Newfoundland town. There were
two young girls (the man's children by a former wife,
from whom he had secured a divorce in Oregon on ac-
count of her immorality) about whom conflicting stories
were told. The neighbors and Sunday-school teacher,
who had been interested in them for years, spoke of
them both in the highest terms as industrious and of
good morals (except that the older one was perhaps
"unreliable”), and as giving of their earnings towards
the support of a most unhappy home. The parents,
on the other hand, gave a very unfavorable account of
their conduct. The only child of the couple lived but
. [72]
OUT OF HEALTH
a short time, and it was during that short life that care
the family physician. Man and wife quarrelled con-
stantly, separated on various occasions, and when the
baby died, the home was practically dissolved, the two
girls securing employment in families through the in-
terest of the Sunday-school teacher, and the parents
going into a furnished room.
Thus physical infirmity falls on the just and on the
unjust, robbing the one of the comfort which their in-
tegrity of character would seem to deserve, and giving
to the other the shield from severe condemnation which
their defects of character might otherwise invite.
[73]
re
e rare
Perfect health, full physical vigor, and overflowing
animal spirits are much more rare among dependent
families than the moral virtues. The prevalence of ill
health is due in large part of course to ignorance and
the continuous neglect of the elementary rules of per-
sonal hygiene. The health department and the public
schools, physicians and social workers, cry aloud from
the house-tops the value of fresh air; of simple, inexpen-
sive, nourishing food; of exercise in the open air; of the
practice of thorough mastication; of temperance in
diet; and of abstinence from drugs and strong drink.
But people — people in all income classes — are slow
to act upon these counsels, and they destroy foolishly and
recklessly their most valuable personal asset next to
good character; viz., their health. Economic neces-
sity excuses some, but only a very little, of this im-
providence. The schools must teach their lesson more
effectively and persistently; the department of health
must carry on its propaganda under even better con-
ditions and with greater resources; social workers and
physicians must join hands even more effectively in
[74]
OUT OF HEALTH
O
their education of the public, upon which sound public
sanitation and personal hygiene alike depend.
Disease has its social as well as its individual side,
and the winning fight of society with one kind after
another is one of the most satisfactory chapters in the
history of civilization. The list of infectious diseases
whose causes are known is being constantly lengthened,
and each new discovery about the true nature of a patho-
genic germ increases our power to guard against it.
Eventually even the chronic diseases will, it is confi-
dently hoped, yield to the persistent and well-planned
campaign of science, as many of the infectious diseases
have already yielded, and as spinal meningitis, for ex-
ample, is at this moment before our very eyes reluctantly
but surely giving ground.
Leprosy, the plague, cholera, yellow fever, typhus,
and smallpox are names which recall to students of the
history of civilization great scourges, substantially over-
come by the brilliant discoveries of science and the ap-
are not necessarily overcome for all peoples or among us
for all time. Disregard of suitable precautions would
bring them back upon us, and some of them may be said
to stand constantly at our doors, seeking entrance at the
slightest relaxation of vigilance. The Bubonic plague,
especially, may easily threaten any American community
[75]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
which does not exterminate its rats; and smallpox,
though the Health Board reports but a single death from
this cause in 1908, is apparently kept at bay only by the
universal and continuous practice of vaccination.
Bubonic plague and Asiatic cholera are two of the so-
called filth diseases which, for the moment at least, are
of more direct concern to the Orient than to us. There
are, however, two other diseases, quite as appropriately
called filth diseases, which have still a very direct con-
cern for us, though we are making great progress in
controlling them. These are typhoid and dysentery,
including with the latter summer complaint, cholera
.
diseases are everywhere recognized to be due to polluted
water, infected milk, and dirty food. They are elimi-
nated by purifying the water supply, building sewers,
exterminating flies, abandoning wells in towns, and
establishing severe and appropriate discipline wherever
people are gathered, without previous experience and
training, in camps or elsewhere with improvised sani-
tary arrangements.
In San Francisco, after the earthquake and fire,
typhoid was remorselessly and successfully kept from
the camps by the fact that the municipal government,
recognizing its helplessness, turned to the army and
* Sternberg: Infection and Immunity.
[76]
OUT OF HEALTH
asked that the military system of sanitation be estab-
lished and maintained. Acting on the advice of a
sanitary officer, Lieutenant-Colonel George H. Torney,
who has recently been appointed surgeon-general of
the army, the state and municipal health authorities,
with the assistance of such sanitary officers of the army
as could be spared to help them, maintained a rigorous
discipline, as a result of which the health of the com-
munity as a whole, notwithstanding the destruction of
the homes of the people — perhaps in part because of
the destruction of those homes — actually improved.
The abundance of plain and substantial food, and the
outdoor life which prevailed in San Francisco in the
three months following the disaster, may have been pur-
chased at an unreasonably high price; but any com-
munity, if it chooses, may by less drastic and more
appropriate means, without the previous trying experi-
ence of the destruction of property valued at between
four and five hundred million dollars, derive the benefits
that were then and there obtained. The rate at which
any community is lowering its death-rate from typhoid
and from intestinal diseases of infants, the two principal
remaining filth diseases, is an approximate index of its
civilization.
There are other diseases which quite as closely con-
cern us as factors in the misery of our modern American
11
[77]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
communities. Of these, I may name together two very
well-known diseases in order to contrast their character
and effects. One of them — tuberculosis — has been
slowly but surely disappearing, -- too slowly and none
too surely, but still on the whole, over a long period, and
now fortunately again over a short period, actually
diminishing. The other — pneumonia --- has been as
surely and not so slowly increasing. For two years
pneumonia has stood at the head in the mortality tables
of Greater New York, leading tuberculosis, heart dis-
ease, diseases of children, Bright's disease, and cancer,
in the order named.
. About tuberculosis there is much to say, but it is a
familiar story and I shall not weary you by its repetition.
Beseech and compel consumptives at large not to infect
others; beseech and compel incipient consumptives to
stop work for a time and go into a good sanatorium,
or failing that, to get under the care of a competent
physician; beseech and compel the municipal and state
authorities to build more hospitals and sanatoria, --
cheap, numerous, and well located for the early cases,
substantial, comfortable, and within easy reach for the
advanced cases; and help the families whose income is
reduced. When consumptives and others follow this
advice, we shall have done what the conditions call for to
reduce the misery from this greatest of all scourges. For
[78]
OUT OF HEALTH
1
you will of course understand that the mortality alone is
no test of the burdens imposed by a disease, but that we
must also take into account other considerations.
These two prevalent diseases of the lungs, pneumonia
and tuberculosis, present certain very striking contrasts: 1
the clinical course for pneumonia is, in a word, a sudden
attack, a few days' serious illness, and a short conva-
lescence. The clinical course for tuberculosis tells of
an insidious and prolonged beginning, total disability,
sometimes for many years, a long period of treatment,
and care even after apparent cure. The average
length of disabling sickness is four weeks or less in one
case and a year or more in the other. The prognosis
points, in the case of pneumonia, to probable recovery,
the mortality being from ten per cent to thirty-eight
per cent in general hospitals and less in private practice,
although close medical attention and skilful nursing
are so important in pneumonia, and the period for which
they are required so brief, as to make this a disease es-
pecially suitable for hospital care. In the case of tu-
berculosis, the recovery of well-developed cases is rare,
and the permanent arrest or cure of incipient cases,
under the best care, takes place in from forty per cent
to seventy-five per cent of the cases recorded.
Pneumonia is a disease of greatest importance in
* Arnold C. Klebs: American Medicine, December, 1903.
[79]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
childhood and old age, only about a fourth of all cases
falling between fifteen and fifty years of age, which
may roughly be considered the active working period.
Tuberculosis, on the other hand, is a disease of early
adult life, nearly three-fourths of all deaths from it
occurring between fifteen and fifty years of age. The
increase which has taken place in the death-rate from
pneumonia between 1890 and 1900 is chiefly under five
years of age and above sixty-five. Between the ages
five and sixty-five there has been a decrease. In the case
of tuberculosis there has been a very noteworthy de-
crease, but this decrease has been chiefly under fifteen
and over forty-five years of age, - greater in fact over
sixty-five years of age; and there has been but a slight
decrease, - in New York probably an actual increase,
until last year, -- in the deaths occurring between fifteen
and forty-five years of age.
Diphtheria is one of the diseases that is losing ground.
It is gratifying that the mortality which, previous to the
use of anti-toxin, ran close to fifty per cent of all cases,
has fallen to less than ten per cent, that its mortality
when compared with population, i.e. its real death-rate,
which, in the old city of New York, thirty-five years
ago, was three per thousand — greater than that of
tuberculosis to-day - has fallen until it is about one-
sixth as great as at the high point of 1875. In view,
[80]
OUT OF HEALTH
however, of the progress made under favorable condi-
tions, it is still a matter of great public concern that there
were nearly two thousand deaths from the disease last
year in Greater New York and more than sixteen thou-
sand cases reported. The situation obviously calls for
such wider application of existing knowledge as will
relieve these sixteen thousand homes of the anxiety
and burden which they were called upon to bear, and
will spare these nearly two thousand homes the grief
and loss which these preventable deaths occasion.
With pneumonia and diphtheria as brief, and there-
fore from the point of view of poverty less serious,
diseases, we may group scarlet fever and measles.
From the former there were in New York in 1908, 1333
deaths and 24,426 reported cases; from measles, which
we are apt to think of as a comparatively harmless,
childish complaint, there were nearly a thousand deaths,
— more than from typhoid, though not so many as from
suicide, more than half as many as from diphtheria, -
but there were nearly forty thousand cases of measles
in all, more than twice as many as of diphtheria, one-
half more than of scarlet fever, and more than ten times
the number of typhoid cases.
Measles, like scarlet fever, is a disease that has not
been materially influenced by modern sanitary measures.
Both in England and in this country the number of
[81]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
deaths has increased rather than diminished in some re-
cent decades. More deaths occur in proportion to the
population in cities than in the country, the greatest
mortality occurring in infants less than one year old,
and among young children.
"Measles," reads a circular of the Glasgow Board of
Health, “is a dangerous disease, one of the most dan-
gerous with which a child under five years of age can
be attacked. It is especially apt to be fatal to teething
children. It tends to kill by producing inflammation
of the lungs. It prepares the way for consumption. It
tends to maim by producing inflammation of the eyes
and ears.
“It is a great mistake to look upon measles as a trifling
disease. The older à child is, the less likely is it to
catch measles; and if it does, the less likely is it to die.
“If every child could be protected from measles until
it had passed its fifth year, the mortality from measles
would be enormously decreased. It is therefore a great
mistake, because as a rule children sooner or later have
I
means to protect them from it - even deliberately to
expose them to infection."
I have referred to the great scourges that have been
eradicated, and to one that is, we hope, destined to be
overcome by the vigorous campaign which is now in
[82]
OUT OF HEALTH
progress against it, and to the more acutely contagious
diseases for which the instruments of destruction at
least appear to have been forged. There are certain
other diseases which to the medical profession as such
appear less important, being somewhat in the nature of
luxuries and not a very serious menace to life, but which
from the point of view of the social welfare now really
outrank the diseases which I have named and which
appear higher up in the mortality tables. I refer to
such disabling complaints as rheumatism, indigestion,
influenza, colds, catarrh, bronchitis, and constipation;
ailments which limit earning capacity, undermine vigor
and energy, lower the physical tone, and prepare a way
for more acute diseases which get the credit of complete
disability and death. Defective eyesight and defective
breathing apparatus should perhaps from our point of
view be added to this category. I name them as al-
together undervalued causes of misery. I challenge
the medical schools and laboratories, the institutes of
research and family physicians, as not having paid
sufficient attention to these disabilities; but beyond this,
and as a more fundamental diagnosis of the difficulty,;
I challenge society as having permitted here very grave
maladjustments in not having appreciated the impor-
tance of ailments of this kind, and for this reason not
having been willing to pay for the service of investigat-
[83]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
ing their cause, their character, and their cure, or for
the service of treating them in time.
I suppose that no medical authority would think of
from the medical point of view they may have nothing
in common; but for us they have this in common, that
they increase to an enormous, though incalculable, ex-
tent the sum total of misery which men, women, and
children have to bear; they prevent that enjoyment
of the good things of life to which we are fully entitled
by the extraordinary amount of hard work that we do, by
the bounty of nature and the abundance of our inherited
wealth. Let endowments for laboratory research be
multiplied, and let those who are released from other
duties and are fitted by inclination and training for the
task bestir themselves to find out something directly
applicable and useful about rheumatism and colds, – to
take two of the most familiar examples of afflictions
from which many suffer and about which, as nearly as I
can make out, the medical profession at the moment
confesses bankruptcy, - and we shall be even more
ready than wenow are to join in the pæan of praise which
that profession so often exacts and, on the whole, so
richly deserves.
It is true, as Dr. Osler has said, that “measure as we
may the progress of the world - materially in the ad-
[84]
OUT OF HEALTH
vantages of steam, electricity, and the other mechanical
appliances; sociologically, in the great improvement
in the conditions of life; intellectually, in the diffusion
of education; morally, in the possibility of higher
standards of ethics -- there is no one measure which
can compare with the decrease of physical suffering in
man, woman, and child when stricken by disease or
accident." It is true, as he says, that this is one fact of
supreme personal importance to every one of us, and it
follows naturally that any halting in this process, any
standing still while men, women, and children suffer
by disease or accident, is equally a matter of supreme
personal importance to every one of us.
While certain diseases, especially those which afflict
young children, have rapidly diminished, there are
others, like cancer, Bright's disease, diseases of the
heart and circulatory organs, and insanity, that tend
to increase. No doubt to some extent the increase in
the one class of diseases is the inevitable consequence of
the decrease in the other. If children do not die from
neglect in infancy, from diphtheria, meningitis, measles,
and scarlet fever in childhood, or from tuberculosis in
early manhood, they are naturally kept alive to die of
such diseases as more commonly afflict those who are
past middle life. (Diagram 3.) We are not yet pre-
pared to insist that all deaths by violence, as these germ
TS
[85]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES

PNEUMONIA
DEBILITY
PREMATURE
CONGENITAL
BIRTH
DIARRHOEA
AND ENTERITIS
Under 8
BRONCHO-
PNEUMONIA
ALL OTHER CAUSED
DIPHTHERIA
MENINGIT18
TYPHOID FEVER
PUL.TUB.
8-14
- VIOLENCE
PNEUMONIA
HEART DISEASE
IQARLET FEVER
OTHER CAUSES
VIOLENCE
PNEUMONIA
TUBERCULO818
OF THE LUNGS
causes of death at different
ages (in four age-groups)
in the registration area of
the United States (com-
piled from the report of
the Census Office on Mor-
tality Statistics for 1906).
HEART DISEASE
18–49
BRIGHT'S
DISEASE
ALL OTHER CAUSES
'TYPHOID FEVER
PNEUMONIA
APOPLEXY
BRIGHTI. DISEASE
VIOLENCE
TUBERCULO818
HEART DISEASE
50 and
over
OF LUNGS
ALL OTHER CAUSES
[86]
OUT OF HEALTH
diseases have been called, shall cease, and that all shall
live to die a genuinely natural death at an age expressed
in three figures. Aside, however, from such changes
in the mortality tables as are to be attributed to a mere
postponement of death, brought about by the more
rapid advances of preventive medicine in relation to
diseases under middle age, there appear to be some
causes at work which are distinctly favorable to the
spread and increasing virulence of these diseases which
are more frequently associated with more advanced age.
Scientists are keenly alive to the importance of dis-
covering and counteracting these influences, and no
doubt more intelligent effort is now being directed to
the clinical and laboratory study of cancer, insanity,
and the other increasing maladies, than to any other of
the social maladjustments which fall within the range
of our discussion.
No statement concerning the misery due to disease,
however brief it must be, would be complete without a
reference to the venereal diseases.
Fortunately, the existence of the American Society
of Social and Moral Prophylaxis and its publications,
which are readily obtainable, prevent the necessity of
going in detail into a consideration of this painful sub-
ject. It is sufficient to point out that these diseases are
probably more prevalent in large towns than any other,
*ALLA w
onderimi seviyorumi
[87]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
milder and less dreaded is held to be responsible for a
large part — probably twenty to thirty per cent -- of
congenital blindness, and for an even larger part -
possibly forty-five per cent — of all sterile marriages.
Evidently here, rather than in deliberate restriction of the
size of families, is the real race suicide. The other and
more dreaded of the two principal venereal diseases,
although less frequent, is for those whom it affects even
more disastrous. No other disease is so susceptible of
hereditary transmission, and no patient can with real
safety ever be discharged as completely cured. For-
tunately one-third of all syphilitic children die within
six months, thus ending a miserable and harmful
existence.
SHIPPO The case here is very analogous to that of tubercu-
losis. Certain clearly defined public policies are es-
sential to social control of these two diseases. What is
required first of all, as in the case of tuberculosis, is the
more complete suppression of charlatanism. What is
required next is popular education, especially of young
people. We need, as Dr. Morrow has so clearly and
convincingly pointed out, to break effectively the con-
spiracy of silence, and of that conspiracy, if he will
allow me to say so, the name of the society which he has
1 Morrow: Social Diseases and Marriage.
Gravidanza
1
[88]
OUT OF HEALTH
S-
founded and to which I have referred – the American
Society of Social and Moral Prophylaxis --- appears to
me an excellent illustration..
Certain specific measures may be advisable, such as
are embodied in the law of Norway making the trans-
mission of venereal disease a penal offence, or the re-
quirement of a medical certificate as a condition of
obtaining a marriage license, or the compulsory regis-
tration of this disease as contagious. But far more
important than these is the popular education to which
I have referred in another connection, education not
in disease, but in health ; not in the consequences of
abuse and vicious indulgence, but in the joy and satis-
faction of purity and health.
4
[89]
VII
thing
Turning from considerations relating to the preva-
lence of specific diseases, there are some not unfamil-
iar facts which must be marshalled because they bear
directly upon the amount and kind of misery from
which we suffer. Diseases are not merely social, in
that their prevalence and mortality depend upon in-
fection, filth, public sanitation, hospital provision, and
the state of medical science. They are also economic,
and that in at least two ways: in relation to occupa-
tion, and in relation to income.
Many diseases are distinctly...oceupational; that is,
they are far more prevalent in particular occupations
because of conditions under which those occupations
are carried on, conditions which as a rule the individual
employee cannot control. The caisson disease and the
tunnel disease are illustrations which, although they
affect comparatively few workmen, bring out very
.-16.11-
MYR)
Oliver: Dangerous Trades; and Diseases of Occupation.
For & condensed discussion of the Hygiene of Occupation,
see article by G. M. Price, in the Reference Handbook of Medi-
cal Sciences.
[90]
OUT OF HEALTH
High praise to the builder of tunnels who has at last
bored benı ath a mighty river without the loss of a
single life. Dust-breathing trades, such as coal mining,
stone-cutting, metal polishing and the textile industries,
increase directly the diseases which affect the respira-
tory organs, and by so doing cause premature deaths,
break up homes, multiply widows and orphans, in-
crease the burdens and lessen the incomes of the fami-
lies affected, and lower standards of living. There is a')
direct connection between the nervous strain of over-
work and the speeding process and susceptibility to
disease.1
I make all allowance for the personal factor. I
realize that two men may stand side by side at the same
bench, one of whom, because of a good heredity, ex-
ceptional resistance to infection, careful personal habits,
and favorable outside home conditions, may go un-
scathed through experiences to which others of less
than the average resisting power will speedily succumb.
I do not undervalue personal abstinence from alco-
holic beverages and from excesses of other kinds, but
it is my idea that such a high standard of personal hy-
giene and self-restraint should naturally have the effect
1 See papers by George M. Dock, M.D., and by Jane Addams
and Alice Hamilton, M.D.; read in Section V of the Inter-
national Congress on Tuberculosis, 1908.
[91]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
of lengthening life and of giving a surplus physical en-
joyment, and not merely at best enabling a man of ro-
bust constitution to withstand dangers by which society
has surrounded him.
· Certain occupations are extra hazardous, unnecessa-
rily hazardous in any broad view of the matter, because
of the danger of accidents, or poisons, or irregular hours,
or excessive hours. Some occupations involve night
work, dampness, exposure to heat, to injurious light, or
to strain and unnatural positions. Some other occupa-
tions, not in themselves dangerous or injurious, become
so merely because they are carried on in places where
there is not sufficient light and adequate ventilation, or
because they are in buildings not properly constructed
for the purpose for which they are utilized. Work con-
VU
the same work, under precisely the same conditions,
with suitable pauses or change of position, relaxation,
and bringing into play new muscles. Work which is
suitable to some individuals may be entirely unsuited
to others, even of the same race, nationality, age and
size. Utterly stupid, gratuitously destructive of the
health and comfort of employees, are the mechanical
arrangements in many laundries, cigar factories, and
other industries.
Much of the physical injury resulting from occupa-
[92]
OUT OF HEALTH
tions would be avoided, even though precisely the same
kind of work were done in the aggregate, if boys on
going to work were sifted according to their capacity,
and their occupations were chosen under professional
advice, with reference to their particular physical consti-
tution. There should be guidance in the selection of
trades. Boys and girls choose their occupations largely
by accident and fail to appreciate that certain trades
should be followed only by the best physically endowed
constitutions. If there were medical advice in the
selection of trades, scrofulous individuals with a tuber-
culous family history would not embrace indoor, seden-
tary, inactive occupations, and those in which large
quantities of dust must be inhaled. No child under
eighteen years of age should be allowed to engage in any
occupation except that of developing the physical and
mental faculties. Women should not continue at work
immediately before or after child-birth, or engage in
occupations for which they are physically unfitted, or
disregard their physiological need for complete sus-
pension of labor at appropriate intervals.
Much of the misery traceable to occupations is due to
the fact that homes are transformed into factories. We
have long since reached the point at which all home
manufacture must be looked upon as a maladjustment. '
Clothing should be manufactured in factories built for
[ 93 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
the purpose, equipped with proper machinery, manned.
by factory operatives, inspected by the appropriate
state department, with ample ventilation, and if
necessary, in order to secure these conditions, with
a higher price to the consumer. What is true of
clothing is true of such other manufacture as is
still carried on in tenements.
[94]
VIII
The subject of industrial disease is still somewhat
obscure - its twilight darkness not having been illu-
minated either by official investigation on a large scale,
or by such continuous compilation of comparative
statistics as would make such an inquiry feasible. A
private life insurance company has done more than all
our labor bureaus in this country to bring out the rela-
tions between occupations and disease. But there is
another relation between industries and physical dis-
ability which is so obvious and direct that no dearth of
official statistics, no silence of the public guardians of
the interests of labor, can obscure it. I refer to death
and injury by industrial accidents. Nor is the state in
this matter entirely unmindful of its duty. We do now
learn regularly, although probably not yet completely,
from the State Labor Department about accidents in
factories and quarries and tunnel construction, from the
Public Service Commission about those which occur
within their jurisdiction, and from the Interstate Com-
merce Commission about those which are reported as
having occurred on railways. During the year 1908,
[95]
• MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
251 persons were killed by accidents in factories,
quarries, and tunnel construction in the state of New
York; at least 1663 were permanently disabled; 1541
others seriously, probably permanently, injured; and
10,474 temporarily disabled. An even greater number,
444, were killed in accidents on the steam roads, sub-
way and elevated roads and surface roads subject to the
jurisdiction of the Public Service Commission for the
first district, i.e. Greater New York; 2147 were seriously
injured, and 32,469 other persons were injured in a less
degree. (Diagram 4.) In the year ending June 30, 1908,
68,989 passengers and employees were injured, and
3764 were killed, on the railroads of the United States.
We have had no exhaustive study of accidents in this
community. Fortunately, however, we have a very
illuminating inquiry by Miss Crystal Eastman into the
industrial accidents occurring in an industrial com-
munity in a neighboring state — an inquiry whose
primary purpose was to ascertain precisely what fatali-
ties and serious injuries among wage earners mean to
the families of the victims. This investigation ex-
tended to all the deaths recorded in the Coroner's
office in the city of Pittsburg within a calendar year,
2 Charities and the Commons: XXI, 561, 1143; and forth-
coming volume published by Charities Publication Committee
for the Russell Sage Foundation.
[96]
OUT OF HEALTH

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111
TEMPORARY DISABLEMENT
75.24
10474
OTHER INJURIES
(NOT FATAL OR "SERIOU8'')
82.79
82469
DIAGRAM 4. Accidents in the year 1908 :
(a) In factories, quarries, and tunnel con-
struction in the state of New York, as reported
to the Department of Labor;
(b) On steam roads, subway and elevated roads,
and surface roads subject to the jurisdiction of
the Public Service Commission for the First

[ 46 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
and to all of the injuries within three months which
were sufficiently serious to bring a patient into the hos-
pital. There were in that year in Allegheny County 526
deaths from industrial accidents. This is half as many
as were killed in the Slocum disaster and almost as
many as lost their lives in the San Francisco earthquake.
It is nearly as many as were burned to death in the Iro-
quois Theatre. Any railway wreck or other disaster
that caused so many deaths at once, reckless as we
are of human lives, would appear to be — what these
deaths actually are — an appalling catastrophe. Two
hundred and fifty-eight of the persons who were killed
were married men supporting families, three were
women contributing to the support of others, and
265 were single men from thirteen to sixty-five years of
age.
The loss to the family of the wage earner who is killed
is of two kinds, personal and economic. The grief, the
loneliness, the wreck of plans, the blasting of hopes, the
loss of the experience, the judgment, and the strength of
the head of the household, make up the personal loss.
These things are a part of that misery which I attribute
to maladjustment, taking in this instance the form of
unprotected machinery or reckless habits, or imperfect
statutes, or inefficient administration either of govern-
ment or of industry. This personal loss, though it is
[98]
OUT OF HEALTH
by far the most serious part of the injury, is incalculable.
It is not so of the economic loss; that is largely calcu-
lable, and the calculation has been made.
The special object of the inquiry was to ascertain
how this loss is distributed — whether it falls upon the
families of the wage earners, or upon the employers, so
that it may become in the first instance a burden upon
the industry in which the wage earners are employed
and thence be transferred, like any other cost of pro-
duction, to the purchasers of commodities. The facts
were obtainable in the case of 304 deaths of men who
were contributing a part or the whole of the mainte-
1
men. Of these 304 families, 88 received literally not
one dollar of compensation from the employer; 93
families received not more than $100, a sum which
would cover reasonable funeral expenses, but would not
take the place of any share of the loss of income; 62
families received something over $100, but not more
than $500; 61 families received more than $500 —
most of them under $1000. In other words, 181
families — fifty-nine and one-half per cent — were
left by employers to bear the entire income loss,
and only 61 families, or twenty per cent, received in
compensation for the death of a regular income pro-
vider more than a sum which would approximate
[99]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
one year's income of the lowest paid of the workers
killed.
The earnings at the time of death were ascertained in
the case of 193 of the married men. The wage loss to
the families of these married men, based on their earn-
ings at death and their expectation of life, according to
the standard mortality tables, deducting $300 a year
to cover the maintenance of the man who was killed
and taking account only of what would have been
available over and above this cost of his personal
maintenance, would amount to $2,754,357. The total
compensation made to these 193 families, including
the sum for funeral expenses, was $72,039, or ap-
proximately two and one-half per cent of the actual
loss.
Among the 288 persons whose injuries were less than
fatal, and concerning whom the facts were ascertained,
164 were married men, nine were single men wholly
supporting a family, eight were the chief support of the
family, fifty more contributed regularly to the support
of a family, and fifty-seven only were free from de-
pendents. Miss Eastman justly points out, however,
that in considering the hardships of these cases of injury
we may not disregard the single men who have no one
dependent upon them, as we may in cases of death; for
the problem of existence for a single man disabled and
[100]
ni
deprived of income is serious enough even though there
be no family to aid.
The proportion of loss borne by employers in these
injury cases, in other words, by the industries in which
the victims were engaged, does not differ greatly from
that of the death cases. Fifty-six per cent of the married
men received no compensation, 69 per cent of the single
men contributing to the support of others received no
compensation, and eighty per cent of the single men
without dependents received no compensation; under-
standing, however, by compensation, compensation for
their loss of income. Hospital charges were paid by
the employer in eighty-four per cent of the injury cases,
and frequently some outside medical expense was met,
as for examination by a specialist or the purchase of an
artificial limb. Nineteen of the 288 injured employees
received full pay during the time they were disabled.
Compensation in the remainder of the cases varied
without any obvious relation to the need, length of dis-
ability, or other fixed principle; none of them received
more than $1000, although six men were totally dis-
abled for life. Of these six men thus totally disabled
for the 'remainder of their natural lives, three received
no compensation whatever aside from hospital care,
one received $30, one $125, and one $365. Twenty-
seven men were partially disabled for life, their earning
[101]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
power being reduced, on an average, nearly thirty per
cent. Twelve of these men received no compensation;
seven received $100 or less; and seven received more
than $100, two of them over $500. Two hundred and
twenty-nine who were temporarily disabled received an
aggregate compensation of $6719, which is calculated
to have been one-sixth of their pecuniary loss from ac-
cident. Some of those who were put down as partially
disabled suffered from permanent injury which, while
not totally disabling them, has seriously crippled their
earning power or has caused a grave and painful afflic-
tion, which in some instances may have serious effects in
after life. Three men for the loss of an eye received
nothing; one man, $48; two men, $50 each; one, $75;
one, $100; two, $150 each; and one, $200. For the
loss of an arm two men received no compensation and
one, $300. For the loss of a leg compensation runs from
nothing to $225. Compensation, where any is indi-
cated, included as a rule the cost of an artificial leg.
There were ten men who lost two or more fingers: six
received nothing; one, $15; two, $100; one for the loss
of three fingers, $250. Compensation in the ten cases
averaged $19 a finger.
Miss Eastman shows conclusively, with a wealth of
illustrative detail and an incisive analysis of the objec-
tions to the whole plan by which the loss from accidents
[102]
OUT OF HEALTH
is distributed under our American laws and customs,
that wages do not cover risks whatever the legal
assumption to the contrary; that the doctrine of the
assumption of risk and the responsibility of the fellow-
servant are nothing less than a legal and judicial
maladjustment.
It is a serious question whether the employers' liabil-
ity laws in New York and in Pennsylvania are not really
worse than no law at all. If the man who is injured
had no legal claim whatever on his employer, but relied
entirely upon his generosity, he would probably fare
better than under existing conditions which give him a
legal claim for damages in perhaps ten per cent of the
cases of death or serious injury. The method of em-
ployers' liability is uneconomic and flagrantly unjust.
To abolish it without substituting compensation on the
English principle or insurance on the German principle
would be an improvement, but it would not be just and
it would not be wise. It is possible to work out a system
which shall not be burdensome upon industry; which
shall give prompt, sure, and reasonable compensation;
which shall be free from all the absurdities, delays, and
injustice of the existing system; which shall remove one
of the chief causes of bitterness and class antagonism;
and which, by operating to reduce the whole number of
accidents, shall save us from a considerable part not
[103]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
only of the economic loss which we now distribute so
unjustly and uneconomically, but also of that personal
loss which is none the less real because we cannot ex-
press it in terms of money.>
[104]
IX
The economic aspects of disease and physical disabil-
ity are not exhausted by the consideration of occupa-
tional diseases, accidents, and other consequences of the
conditions prevailing in certain industries. They take
us into the home as well as into the factory. The
amount of the family income and the standard of living
which it permits have a direct relation to suscepti-
bility to disease and the power of resistance. The
decrease in disease is probably due quite as much to the
general improvement in the standard of living, our
greater wealth, the diffusion of knowledge, shorter
hours of labor, the improvement of machinery, and such
causes, as to advances in medical science and in pre-
ventive hygiene.
We cannot of course disentangle the effects of these
two sets of influences, nor is there any advantage in
doing so. I wish merely to emphasize the fact that
many people are out of health and enduring the misery
resulting therefrom as best they can merely because,
from lack of income, they are living in overcrowded
quarters, or taking in lodgers, or sending wife and
T
[105]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
children to work, or living without sufficient nourish-
ment and recreation, and without prompt and efficient
attention to their physical ailments.
Dr. Chapin's study of the standard of living in New
York,' and Miss Byington's study of the Slavs in Home-
stead," alike show that the true function of the lodger is
that of a rent-paying necessity. Seventy per cent of the
families in New York who reported lodgers were over-
crowded. By every test that we may choose to apply,
we find that families which are partially dependent upon
the earnings of mother and children, and families which
are dependent upon lodgers for a part of their income,
have a lower standard, other things being equal, than
those who live entirely upon the father's earnings.
This is what one would naturally expect, but accurate
observation and statistical analysis do not always, as so
clearly in this instance, establish the expected.
The conditions which we find among the Slavs in
Homestead are hard work, low wages, unsanitary homes,
mon practice among them and it is not, as might be
1 The Standard of Living among Workingmen's Families in
New York City. Published by Charities Publication Com-
mittee for the Russell Sage Foundation,
· Charities and the Commons, XXI, 913; and forthcoming
volume to be published by Charities Publication Committee
for the Russell Sage Foundation.
[106]
OUT OF HEALTH
u
supposed, the giving of a home to a friend from the old
country, nor letting an extra room which the family does
not need for its own purposes. It is a deliberate business
venture to increase the inadequate income from the
man's earnings. It is not young couples without chil-
dren, or elderly people whose children have left the
parental roof, that take lodgers, but families with grow-
ing children; and it is to the health and morals, the
comfort and discipline of these growing children that the
practice is disastrous.
Overcrowding, and the resort to supplementary
earnings by wife and children, obvious as are their dis-
advantages, are after all a means of escape from other
hardships resulting from inadequate and irregular in-
come. They are the price paid for food and shelter
and the other necessities of life. Sometimes even these
sacrifices are not sufficient to insure the elementary
conditions of decent living. The Committee on the
Standard of Living thought that it was a safe inference,
from the data in their possession, that an income under
$800, however earned, is not enough to permit the main-
tenance of a normal standard for a family of five persons
in the city of New York. Nearly one-third of all the
families studied by the Committee with incomes from
$600 to $800 were underfed. The average expenditure
for clothing was less than is necessary. The furnishings
[107]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
of apartments were inadequate. On an average less
than ten dollars a year was spent on account of health;
the dentist was completely ignored, and recreation and
education, save as they are free, were reduced to the
lowest terms. There was no provision for the future
except at the sacrifice of necessary food or excessive
overcrowding. Under such conditions infection gains a
comparatively easy foothold, and the foundations are
laid for an infinite variety of chronic ailments.
Misery springing from disease which is essentially
economic will continue among us until workingmen are
able to have a reasonable amount of light and air in
their homes; to restrict the household to its natural
members; to withhold children from gainful occupa-
tions until they have been prepared and have the neces-
sary strength and maturity; until they are able to take
a reasonable amount of recreation and to enjoy their
holidays; to work without overwork; to consult a
dentist or a physician, and if necessary a specialist, in
time; in short, to have an income sufficient to provide
for the essentials of rational living.
[108]
The subject to which I have invited your attention in
this chapter is a depressing one. Out of Health is a most
disagreeable theme. I have not been unaware of the in-
cipient feelings of irritation and mental revolt which may
have been aroused by thus dwelling upon this reverse
side of our community life, when we might instead have
been picturing the health and energy of human beings
as they work and play. I hope that it is so; that in
spite of these statistics of pathological conditions, these
evidences of misery, we have been able to realize, as
we should always realize, that this is but the reverse
side.
Out of Health shall be replaced, as the theme of
our closing paragraphs, with Out of Doors. I hold
that the hope of the future — in this matter of health
and vigor, in this matter of energy and activity, in
this matter of life and enjoyment — lies primarily
not in the test-tube of the laboratory, not in anti-
toxin or serum, not in quarantine or the killing of
the mosquito or the rat, and not in the isolation of
germs, but in rational living. These infectious diseases
[109]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
we must deal with, of course, and we must deal with them
by appropriate means. Vermin must be exterminated,
immunity must be effected, surgeons and physicians
must have their appropriate instruments; but if our hope
of health lay solely in these directions, it would be but a
petty, artificial, mechanical, undesirable immunity that
we should have attained.
We shall be a strong and healthy race because we have
good red blood in our veins; because children are born
into families that desire them and are ready to work for
them and to make sacrifices for them and to teach them
right methods of living; because we throw open our
windows and go out into the fresh air, touching again,
like Antæus of old, mother earth, from whom we draw
our sustenance, not allowing our lives to be circumscribed
by office walls or factory walls, or tenements or apart-
ments, by subway trains and surface cars, by pavements
and bill boards, by electric lights and all the fiendish
noises of the towns. We cannot go backward, but by
going forward we can bring back into our civilization
some of the things which we have lost. We can organize
fresh air and solitude and communion with nature; we
can take stock of our industrial organization to find out
whether it is conserving life or destroying life; and we
can put an end to the maladjustments by which life is
destroyed. We can save the babies from milk poison-
[110]
OUT OF HEALTH
ing; we can save the children from the permanent dis-
abilities resulting from neglect of their childish ailments;
we can save the young girls from the dangers and the
injuries attendant upon their employment in factories,
department stores, or elsewhere; we can save the boys
from loss of their manhood and fit them better by
vocational training for a normal life; we can save the
women from overwork, from work at all when they ought
to be idle, and from injurious idleness when they ought
to be occupied; we can save the men from industrial
accidents, from death by tuberculosis and typhoid, and
from that kind of shiftlessness and failure to provide for
their families which is really due to malaria, indigestion,
and other similar ailments; and we can save them, I
believe, at last, from the terrible curse of alcoholism,
which is half a disease and half a crime and altogether
the greatest foe of health and vigor that we have.
We can save the babies, the boys and the girls, the men
and women, from these things, but of course the “we”
who can save them are but the “we” — men and women
and children -- who are to be saved. This is no pater-
nalistic enterprise but, on the contrary, of the very essence
of democracy. Democracy in the merely negative sense
of kicking out the kings, the hereditary law makers, and
the aristocracy, is after all a very paltry thing. The
democracy to which we pledge our faith is the rule of the
[111]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
many with standards. This is the place for us to begin
to erect our standards. The most elementary of all
standards for which to secure recognition is the stand-
ard of health.
[112]
M
SC
CHAPTER III
OUT OF WORK
TNCOMES may be secured by gifts and inheritance,
pensation is received. The poor- like the well-to-do-
furnish illustrations of all of these sources of income.
Their income from gifts we call charity. Their income
from violence and from fraud is comparatively negligible,
for pocket picking and begging-letter writing and such-
like occupations, while disastrous enough to the charac-
ter of those who resort to them, do not yield in the aggre-
gate any such incomes as individuals may secure — with
equally disastrous results to character — from wrecking
railways and bribing courts and legislatures and munici-
pal authorities, from mingling fraud with other ingredi-
ents in foods and medicines, and other such forms of
violence and dishonesty as are mainly open only to those
who have some income in advance. Those whom we
call the poor probably derive on the whole a smaller pro-
portion of their income from gifts and from preying upon
society than do those who rank above them in the scale
of incomes. Parasites, paupers, and criminals there are
among them certainly. Begging and thieving are un-
[115]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
fortunately among their sources of income. Those who
strive successfully for the eradication of pauperism and
of crime are the best friends of the poor; and I suspect..
that the wise and courageous teachers who strive for the
eradication of similar weaknesses and defects among the
rich, which take of course among them very different
forms, are likewise the best friends of the rich. The
little brothers of the rich and the big brothers of the poor
are akin in spirit. They have somewhat the same dis-
couragements, though the more powerful criminaloids
may find ways not open to the poor criminal of striking
back when the correcting rod smites their shoulders, and
so perhaps the reformer who confines himself to pauper-
ism and open crime has, on the whole, the easier time.
If I am right in my conviction that both gifts and
thievings make up comparatively a negligible part of the
income of the poor, and that, like farmers and skilled
mechanics and the commercial classes and the profes-
sional classes, the poor live mainly on their earnings -
then it becomes more important than workers among
the poor have usually realized to consider the condi-
tions under which those incomes are earned and the
consequences of any interruption of those earnings,
either for personal reasons, such as physical disability
and bad habits, or for industrial reasons, such as contrac-
tion in the amount of employment available, changes
A
[116]
OUT OF WORK
in the location of industries, or the system of casual
labor.
From the point of view of the charitable agencies, the
importance of this subject is indicated by the fact that in
two-thirds of the families who come under the care of the
Charity Organization Society in industrially normal
times one or more wage earners are unemployed at the
time of their application for aid. This proportion, as
one might have expected, was higher in 1907–1908, after
the financial crisis, than in the preceding year, but the
difference is not so great as might naturally have been
expected. In 1906–1907, sixty-five per cent of the new
families who applied for aid had some wage earner un-
employed, either from personal disability or industrial
conditions, and in 1907-1908 this was true of seventy-
two per cent. This increase from sixty-five per cent to
seventy-two per cent does not represent the full conse-
quences among wage earners of the changed industrial
conditions. No statistics of charitable societies will
however, that even in prosperous times the distress which
leads to application for charitable assistance is closely
connected with the temporary cutting off of an income
which is ordinarily, even if irregularly, earned.
Our records do not conclusively show the reasons for
unemployment. Acute illness would naturally be ac-
[117]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
cepted as a sufficient explanation until you reflect that
some of those who are acutely ill were unemployed before
their illness and will be so again after their recovery.
Intemperance would explain it, but then, unfortunately
for that explanation, some of our intemperate men and
women are not unemployed.
[118]
II
The besetting vices of those who from the two polar
points of view discuss the unemployed are callousness
and sentimentality. A thick-and-thin apologist of
things as they are looks naturally on a fringe of unem-
ployed workingmen just as he looks on a few unrented
houses, a stock of unsold goods, or a surplus of uninvested
capital. They are merely an incident, and an inevitable,
normal, and desirable incident, of the labor market.
If there were no unemployed, no new enterprises could
be undertaken, labor organizations would become too
powerful, wages would soar upwards, and the demands
of workingmen for all kinds of reasonable and unreason-
able conditions would have to be granted. A large sur-
plus body of workers keeps those who are employed in a
proper state of discipline, leaves the capitalist free to
encourage any new undertaking which requires labor,
sense about recognizing a union or agreeing on the terms
of a collective bargain.
It is ordinarily assumed that the wage system, as it
now prevails in mills, mines, building operations, stores
[119]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
and offices, and elsewhere throughout our industrial and
commercial organization, does presuppose this constant
industry for a period of years absolutely all workers were
employed, so that employers could not resort to a threat,
actual or implied, of replacing their present employees
by others, the strength of the workers in the demand for
higher wages and better terms would tend to become
so great that the unregulated laissez-faire wage system
would break down, and employers would take the initia-
tive in asking for compulsory arbitration or the limita-
tion of wages by statute, as they have so often done be-
fore when for exceptional reasons the supply of laborers
was abnormally reduced.
The calm acceptance of a situation in which sur-
rounding every industry there is an eager and perhaps
half-famished ring of unemployed, whose presence un-
dermines the natural strength of the employed working-
men, whose lower standards threaten their standard of
living, whose necessities may be played off against the
otherwise successful attempts of wage earners to increase
their wages and improve their condition, is nothing else
than callousness.
Apologists for existing conditions in this respect
take their stand upon the eternal economic laws and
rely upon the ultimate harmony between the self-interest
[120]
OUT OF WORK
of the individual and the broad interests of society.
I also believe in that harmony of interests, and in
the justice of the fundamental economic principles
upon which our industry and commerce are founded.
But I see in many places maladjustments for which
our greed and ignorance, our short-sighted policies,
and our inefficient social control are responsible, which
disturb those harmonies and pervert those laws.
The unemployed are made up of an extraordinary
combination of the results of such maladjustments.
Some of these we can, if we will, readjust radically and
at once. Others we can for the time being only bear
with patience, as penalties for our own mistakes, or as
voluntarily assumed burdens originating in the mis-
takes of others and transferred to us. But the first
thing of all is for us to see clearly that no rational system
of industry -- no such sys!em as is consistent with our
American laws and traditions and public standards --
requires or contemplates this unemployed fringe.
In any community there are growing into maturity and
earning capacity every year a host of boys eager to take
the place of the generation which is passing into in-
dustrial retirement. This is the natural, inevitable,
essential fringe, which corresponds under normal
conditions to the uninvested capital and the unsold
stocks of goods. When, in addition to these, there are
[121]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
injected into the industrial system large masses of labor-
ers from foreign lands, who come not in a slow and
moderate international adjustment of surplus labor,
but in millions, because of religious persecution else-
where, because of misrule, because of political revo-
lution, because of the collapse of the economic system
of an entire nation, because of a widespread network
of solicitation by agents of transportation companies,
because of a demand not for labor, but for cheap labor,
then it is evident that there is a maladjustment - a
violent and unnatural disturbance of the equilibrium
which the economic laws tend to establish. This is,
however, one maladjustment which I had in mind in
suggesting that it may be better to endure it with all its
burdens and with all the actual injustice which it in-
flicts on American workingmen. Possibly we may be
nearing the end of that great world movement of popula-
tions toward us, which, beginning in the British Islands
and Scandinavia, has swept down through Germany
to Italy and southeastern Europe, emptying one area
after another of its surplus population. Possibly
Africa, South America, and Siberia, rather than the
United States, will absorb the greater part of what
remains, so that the menace of unrestricted immigration
will of itself pass away through the reëstablishment of a
more stable equilibrium and the substitution of more
[122]
OUT OF WORK
virgin lands than ours in whatever further readjustment
of population may still need to take place. A more
strict regulation of immigration than has prevailed
would have been advisable. We have missed an op-
portunity for selection such as has never before been
presented, and for an improvement of the stock that
might have been secured. We have striven -- not
very successfully — to keep out the enfeebled and dis-
eased, the insane, the pauper, and the criminal, and we
have admitted without hindrance a very large number
who have made life harder for wage earners already here,
and have swollen the number of the unemployed; but
looking ahead, the policy of restriction appears to me
likely to be of diminishing importance. It has never
been popular, because of its obvious conflict with our
ideal of America as the asylum of the oppressed. Very
well, let us cherish the ideal, but let us frankly recognize
what it costs, and one of those costs is certainly the very
serious complication of our problem of the unemployed.
( 123 )
III
The effect of immigration is not the only maladjust-
ment which that problem presents. Disabling uncom-
pensated accidents and industrial diseases, which I
have discussed in another connection, are another.
Accidents to tramps on unpoliced railways is another.
Unemployed they usually are of course at the time of
injury; but unemployed they remain permanently,
partly on account of the injury; and of these there are
some thousands chronically among the unemployed.
Another cause of maladjustment arises from the
displacement of labor by new machinery or new indus-
trial processes. Some drivers on the old horse-cars, of
which we cherish a few relics in New York, became
motormen, and some of the engineers and firemen on the
elevated steam railways showed sufficient adaptability
to fit into the electric service; but others were crowded
out by the substitution of electricity for animal and
steam power and contribute to the number of the un-
employed. Compositors in printing-offices succeeded,
because of their unions, in controlling to some extent
the conditions under which type-setting machines could
[ 124 ]
OUT OF WORK
be introduced, and the financial resources of the typo-
graphical unions have been sufficient to care for some of
those who were unable to adjust themselves to machine
composition. But, especially in the country offices and
in open shops, the old time tramp printer, intemperate
in habits, an easy victim to tuberculosis and other
diseases, furnishes a typical illustration of the stranded
worker, who is at first irregularly, then frequently, and
then chronically, and then entirely, unemployed.
It is notorious that the insatiable factory wears out
its workers with great rapidity. As it scraps machinery
so it scraps human beings. The young, the vigorous,
the adaptable, the supple of limb, the alert of mind, are
in demand. In business and in the professions maturity
of judgment and ripened experience offset, to some
extent, the disadvantages of old age; but in the factory
and on the railway, with spade and pick, at the spindle,
at the steel converters, there are no offsets. Middle age
is old age, and the worn-out worker, if he has no children
and if he has no savings, becomes an item in the aggre-
gate of the unemployed. The veteran of industry who is
crowded out by changes in processes and the use of new
machinery is obviously an instance of maladjustment.
The majority are not thus crowded out; the majority
are able to turn themselves to new methods. The
reason why a certain proportion --- constituting a large
[ 125]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
number absolutely when compared with theunemployed,
although a small number relatively when compared with
those who remain at work --are unable to make the new
adjustment is that their education was originally in-
complete. They have had no general training back
of their immediate trade such as ought to be provided
by the public educational system for all boys before
they enter upon their particular calling. Assuming
health and a fair average degree of general efficiency,
men ought to be able to change from a more primitive
to a more complex occupation without great difficulty.
Already the change is far easier than it used to be.
The gulf separating one trade from another is not so
wide as the present traditions of employers and the
policies of trade unions presuppose.
I am indebted to Herbert S. Brown for an admirable
statement of the possibility of much freer movement
from one occupation to another than is actually taking
place. Mr. Brown says:-
IT
The natural limits to occupational mobility are, I believe,
custom, by habit, by employers, and by trade unions. The
long apprenticeships demanded in some trades are sheer
humbug, designed to keep down the total of workmen avail-
able in the craft. That the apprentice appears slow means
almost always that he is not given the chance to learn --
[126]
OUT OF WORK
assuming, of course, reasonable energy and natural fitness for
the work.
Back of each skilled trade and occupation lies primarily
nothing more mysterious than a certain deftness of hand,
accuracy of eye, coördination of muscles, sense of rhythm,
commercial instinct, or whatever else it may be, essential to
the profitable prosecution of that occupation. Many a one
of such human qualities will open the way to success in more
than one trade, – the more general of them to a large num-
ber of trades. For example, the man who has the "me-
chanical instinct,” and has had sufficient training in any one
of the score or more trades to have acquired accurate and
quick coördination of brain and muscle, can and frequently
does pass freely from one trade to another, with no greater
handicap than the few weeks' or months' delay requisite to
learn the special processes of the new trade and to bring his
speed up to that of the man whose longer experience has
made the work practically automatic. And the lower the
grade of skill required, the easier to make transitions. It is
unreasonable to expect, and secure, of the men who carry
on the difficult work of the world, the astonishing mobility
which history relates of Julius Cæsar, or Goethe, or the ex-
plumber Croker, with many another immortal not yet dead
enough to mention by name, and then deny to the deft fingers
that roll cigarettes in hopeless competition with automatic
machinery the chance at a dozen other occupations unknown
to them but known to us where the deft finger is a valuable
asset.
I believe that it is possible to weave through the maze of
endlessly divided and subdivided craft and occupation a
[127]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
comparatively simple classification based on the underlying
essential, human qualification, rather than on a technical
knowledge of trade peculiarity. I believe it would be possi-
ble to pass men properly qualified, under such a classifica-
parative ease. And I believe that the encouragement of such
interoccupational mobility would be of very great benefit to
the community. It is part of my creed in life that every
man has a place, perhaps a dozen places, into which, when
at last found, he will fit with definite profit to himself and
every one else concerned. I believe that “congested” popu-
lation means congested wealth, and that, with proper mo-
bility facilitated, the tangle will resolve itself, so that ulti-
mately we may be able to say, the more people the more
prosperity.
If this view is sound, as I believe it to be, it follows
that the changes within any particular trade, resulting
merely from the invention of a new tool, a new machine,
new and more effective ways of making combinations,
ought to be possible for almost any competent working-
man, and that in the comparatively few instances where
new machines or new processes really mean revolution,
changing the character of a trade, there should open up
a comparatively easy change to another trade which in
the demands that it makes upon workers is on the level
with that of the machine or process which has been
abandoned.
[ 128)
OUT OF WORK
The maladjustment, as you will see, is in part in
the educational system, but in a larger part even more
nearly at hand awaiting only an awakening to pos-
sible changes of occupation which unadjusted individuals
might even now make without serious difficulty.
The accession to the numbers of the unemployed
caused by old age, especially by old age at what ought
to be the full maturity of middle age, presents a more
difficult problem. The very changes from one trade
to another, of which I have just been speaking, pre-
suppose the adaptability, the suppleness, the alertness
of youth, the very qualities the lack of which has caused
these particular individuals to be displaced. The
remedy, therefore, lies in the lengthening of the effec-
tive working period of human life — a slower and more
fundamental change, but this also is taking place. The
great advances in preventive medicine, as we have
already seen, are overcoming the diseases incident to
childhood and youth, and the effect of this will certainly
be the strengthening of the period of middle life, the
carrying forward into manhood of the qualities which
put a premium upon youth.
We shall probably not slacken the pace of the wheels
of industry, but we may get the stiffness out of the
joints of the middle-aged man. We shall not create
conditions which will lessen the advantage of the ca-
[129]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
pacity for turning from one occupation to another
slightly different, but we may increase the number of
- people who have this capacity and lengthen the period
during which this ability is maintained. We may not
be able to use less efficient workers, but we may in-
crease the occupational mobility of those who are effi-
cient, and the ease with which they change from one
trade to another allied to it. We may recognize that
individuals suffer and that the industries of the nation
as a whole suffer from the lack of this occupational
mobility and from the shortness of the working period.
The individual employer, it is true, may be able to
keep his working force efficient though the units in it
change rapidly. He scraps his machinery at his own
expense, but heretofore he has been allowed to scrap
his labor at the expense of the families of the laborer
and the charities of the community. It has been in
this respect a callous age, that it has not recognized
that such rapid wearing out of human lives as does
take place should be a burden upon the industry in
which it occurs rather than upon charity or upon
wives and children. Compensation for accidents and
for occupational diseases, and retiring pensions in old
age, are to be the order of the day.
As a matter of fact, frequent changes are a disad-
vantage to employers also, though not so great as the
[130]
OUT OF WORK
$
disadvantages to the community. Already a steel
manufacturer has arisen to declare that strictly on
business grounds he cannot afford to permit condi-
tions that use up his workingmen, and a large em-
ployer of railway labor in the northwest is emphatic
in his opinion that his primary concern is to give even
to common laborers engaged in construction such
treatment that they will desire to remain or to return
season after season in preference to looking for work
elsewhere. In other words, even in common labor
permanency of tenure is seen to be an advantage to
the individual employer as it undeniably is to the
community as a whole.
Casual labor is the greatest of all maladjustments.
The man who changes constantly from job to job,
with periods of idleness between, comes to every job
demoralized, unskilled, unsteady, and unfit. But casual
labor, as matters now stand, is still demanded in some
industries. It is a convenience to the employer, and
that from the broader point of view it is an economic
and a social maladjustment does not occur to him, or
if it does, he declines to see why the burden of bring-
ing about a readjustment should fall upon him. It is
the employer therefore who in the first instance needs
readjustment.
When the Charity Organization Society in the
[131]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
O
neighboring town of Bayonne a few years ago went
to the managers of the coal yards, and asked that in-
stead of keeping twice the number of men actually
needed on an average through the year in the constant
expectation of occasional work they should give notice
definitely that they would give preference to married
heads of families, and would, to the utmost of their
ability, distribute their work in such a way that these
permanent resident heads of families should be able to
do it; and when the managers of the coal yards gave a
favorable response to this suggestion and made it clear
to a lot of men whom they had irregularly employed
as casual laborers that there would be no work at all
for them and that it would be well for them immedi-
ately to look elsewhere, there was, although on a small
scale, a prophetic advance in the direction of a very
essential readjustment.
Seasonal trades have some of the demoralizing in-
fluences of casual labor, periods of feverişh overwork
alternating with periods of idleness. The reports
made to the Department of Labor by representative
trade unions in the state of New York show the fluctu-
ations in employment among the workingmen who are
on the whole most fortunately situated. The per-
centage of members unemployed for all reasons at the
end of the month varies in normal years from six or
( 132 )
OUT OF WORK

ITUTULUI
HH80%
1
60%
40%
11
11
20%
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
DIAGRAM 5. Percentage of unemployed members of representative trade unions in the state of New
York at the end of each month from January, 1902, to June, 1908, as reported to the State Department
of Labor.
[138]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
seven in August and September to twenty in December
and January. (Diagram 5.)
This system of casual, intermittent, and uncertain
employment is one with which not even the large
charitable societies are fit to deal. It is one with which
it is very difficult for organized labor to deal; but
employers, acting through well-directed employment
agencies, could deal with it if they would, with some
advantage to themselves and with very great advantage
to the community.
The growth of cities and towns and the abandon-
ment of farm life is another of the revolutionary changes
that have resulted in the misplacing of a large number
of individuals. The migration of population to the
urban centres is an entirely natural and not undesir-
able change. On the whole, a smaller proportion of
our population will hereafter live upon the land, at
least as agricultural laborers, for the simple reason
that it requires a smaller proportion of the population
to produce our food and agricultural products. The
commodities which we require demand that a larger
proportion of the population shall be engaged in trade,
in transportation, and in industry. I have little sym-
pathy with the popular watchword “Landless men to
manless land," for the reason that landless men on
manless land will ordinarily mean fruitless farms.
2
[ 134]
OUT OF WORK
But I have a keen sympathy for policies that will re-
strict congestion and enlarge the areas in which these
urban populations may live. I have great sympathy
with the establishment of colonies of people who really
have the qualities which will enable them to succeed
in agricultural pursuits. I have great sympathy for
picking out the exceptional man and family that
naturally belongs on the farm because of previous
training or experience or inheritance or personal
adaptability, and I have still greater sympathy for
plans that will enable those who are actually on farms
to become so prosperous by more scientific agriculture,
by improved business organization, by coöperative
methods and otherwise, that they can profitably remain
there. The maladjustment here lies not in the mere
relative increase in urban population, but in the mis-
takes by which individuals who ought to remain on
farms get into the towns, either through misunder-
standing and ignorance, or through the absence of that
degree of success and of enjoyment which country life
might easily afford.
(135)
IV
Such, then, are some of the maladjustments which
are responsible for the lack of income from unemploy-
ment, irregular employment, and unemployability, im-
migration, uncompensated accidents, industrial changes,
the displacement of workers prematurely disabled by
old age, the lack of a reasonable degree of occupa-
tional mobility, and the growth of urban population.
In our generation we have seen these influences acting
on an unprecedented scale, in every conceivable com-
bination, and with disastrous consequences to large
numbers of workingmen and their families. When to
these economic changes we add the complications aris-
ing from disease, from feeble wills and deficient original
physical and mental endowment, or inadequate moral
training and deficient or inappropriate intellectual and
manual training, we begin to find an explanation of
bread lines, homeless men, and other apparently able-
bodied unemployed.
I would not minimize the influences of those financial
and industrial crises, as a result of which mills close
down, railways reduce their tonnage, builders cease
their operations, and thousands of people who are
LU
[ 136]
· OUT OF WORK
ordinarily continuously employed are thrown out of
work. Whether railways and mills need begin their
policy of retrenchment, made necessary by a reduc-
tion of business, by the wholesale discharge of large
numbers of laborers, whose incomes are at best barely
enough to support their families and to maintain a
desirable standard of living, is a question which only
the directors and stockholders of the companies can
ultimately decide. An official of one of the large rail-
way systems has recently expressed to me his con-
viction that this policy, so contrary to that which is
followed even in the clerical staff of the railway com-
panies, is both cruel and unjust. On a week's notice,
or on no notice, out they go, without insurance benefits,
without personal consideration, without the possibility
of finding other work, for the reason that the depres-
sion which has led to their discharge is likely to affect
temporarily all the other occupations to which they
would naturally turn. This contingency, like old age
and sickness, is one for which I believe provision
no doubt more difficult to arrange its details.
It is very greatly to the credit of workingmen and an
evidence of their strength that, for the most part, even
during the past two years of trial and strain, those
who are ordinarily employed have been able to take
[ 137]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
care of themselves, — not without hardship, not with-
out reducing their savings, not without lowering their
standards of living, not without changing their occu-
pations, not without moving to other places, and, in the
case of aliens, not without returning in large numbers
to their homes abroad; but to a very limited extent
indeed have the able-bodied men who are ordinarily
regularly employed appeared in the bread lines or in
the municipal lodging-house or at the offices of chari-
table societies. They have come in limited numbers,
in some cities more than in others, but for the most
part they have relied upon themselves and upon such
mutual assistance by relatives and friends and unions
as makes no public show.
A period of widespread and general unemployment
does increase the burdens of charitable agencies, be-
cause to some extent it closes resources which are
ordinarily open to the sick and disabled, to widows
and orphans, and to those who are otherwise taxed
beyond their reasonable strength. The helpless can-
not get the help from their immediate friends which
they ordinarily get, and therefore they turn to the
societies. The increased burden on the charitable
agencies is not due to any great extent directly to ap-
plications for assistance from the families of genuinely
able-bodied men.
[138]
I have recently had the honor of submitting to the
Russell Sage Foundation a report on the desirability
of establishing an employment bureau in the city of
New York. The inquiry which led to this report
was instigated by a suggestion that such a bureau
should be established upon a business basis, with an
ample working capital, subscribed not primarily in the
expectation of profit, but from a public-spirited desire
to be of actual assistance to the unemployed, and in
the belief that that assistance could be given more
effectively and with greater assurance of permanency
if employers at least were required to pay for the
services which the bureau could render. The investi-
gation disclosed that a large proportion of existing
commercial employment agencies are conducted not
upon a legitimate business basis, but upon an exploit-
ing, extortionate, semi-fraudulent basis; that, in this
country, free public employment bureaus have not
Published by Charities Publication Committee for the
Russell Sage Foundation.
era
[139]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
been conspicuously successful, but on the contrary
have been as a rule perfunctory, political, and of very
limited usefulness; that the want advertisements,
while acting as an intermediary with fair success in
certain occupations, are in many instances vague and
misleading, and that the degree of their usefulness is
by no means indicated by the space which they occupy
on the padded page of many newspapers; that trade
unions, the ordinary means of communication between
cmployers and employees in the trades which are most
completely organized, have thus far not developed in
most occupations a systematic and effective mechanism
for this purpose, and that such mechanism as they
have is not adapted to bring about the distribution of
surplus labor to other communities or from one occu-
pation to another.
Since existing commercial agencies, free public em-
ployment bureaus, want advertisements, and the
unions are found not to be meeting the need, there
remains the method of throwing upon individual work-
ingmen the responsibility of going about from place
to place to make personal application for work. This
is the time-honored method much in favor with those
who look with misgiving upon any relief policies or
even upon changes in business methods which seem
likely to undermine the feeling of personal responsi-
[140]
OUT OF WORK
bility; but it is an expensive, time-consuming, physically
laborious, and mentally depressing process.
✓ The conclusion which I have reached is that there
is at present a maladjustment between work and
workers, both within our own community and as be-
and serious hardship involved in the search for labor
which might be obviated by the creation of an employ-
ment exchange, or work market, well organized and
managed, with facilities that would enable it to bring
about a quick adjustment between those who are un-
employed and work that they might be capable of
doing, whether in their own immediate neighborhood or
at a distance. Such a bureau can, to some extent, deal
with congestion of population on the only natural
basis — that of finding employment in less congested
neighborhoods; it can, to some extent, deal with the
evil of casual labor by moving men quickly without
the waste of time and the demoralization incident to
intermittent periods of idleness; it can, to some ex-
tent, deal with the evil of misplaced labor, becoming
vocational in the sense of studying carefully its candi-
dates for employment with a view to securing the kind
of work which they can do best; it can deal with the
abuses of exploiting commercial agencies, bringing to
bear upon them a competition like that which the
[141]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
Provident Loan Society brought to bear upon the old,
unregulated pawn shops, and which the model tene-
ments have brought upon unsanitary and indecent
tenements.
V The employment bureau is not a complete solution
of the problem of the unemployed, but if rightly man-
aged it would in the long run help materially in the
solution of the problem of our ignorance in regard to
the real extent and character of the problem of the
unemployed. It would help individuals at any rate,
and whether it were to succeed or fail as a business
enterprise it would help us to understand what needs
to be done. In so far as the unemployed are so be-
cause of sheer industrial contraction, because there is
no work anywhere to be had, the employment bureau
would not solve it. For that, prosperity is the only
solution. In so far as the unemployed are utterly
incapable and unfit to be employed, the bureau is no
solution. For that, education is the only solution. In
so far, however, as the surplus labor in one place is
counterbalanced by insufficiency in another, and in so
far as the unemployed are unable to find opportuni-
ties which really exist even in their own neighborhood,
the employment bureau would help to meet the diffi-
culty; in so far as it is an instance of maladjustment
between work and workers it could help to effect an
( 142]
OUT OF WORK
adjustment. To those who will undertake to try out
this experiment there will come what appears to me
to be one of the greatest opportunities that has yet
been presented in connection with the making of a
broad, constructive social programme.
[143]
VI
Sentimentality, the second of the two besetting
weaknesses of many of those who begin to talk or
write about the unemployed, has a curiously paralyz-
ing effect upon the intellect, quite as disastrous as that
paralysis of the sympathy which we call callousness.
There are people who could not apparently, to save
their lives, at least not to save their reputations, make
a perfectly straight unvarnished statement even about
such facts as actually are or certainly ought to be in
their possession. The number of the unemployed
known to them, the number who come to them for
help, the number whom they place in positions, the
number among these who succeed, the effect of cold
weather, the effect of spring weather, — on these and
on many other very interesting and important points
they throw out an inky cloud of reckless and utterly
misleading reports and interviews and epistles, which
are gravely accepted in newspaper offices and pulpits
as if they had some demonstrable reference to facts.
An unemployed man becomes in their hands a mystery,
such stuff as dreams are made of — pipe dreams.
[ 144 ]
OUT OF WORK
He is a thing apart, not to be treated like other mortals
but cherished, coddled, lamented when he disappears,
magnified by hocus-pocus statistics when he consents
to materialize, but whisked away into the never-never-
land when you approach too near Ninety-nine
and a half per cent of him does well on farms, but
when a letter is received offering twenty-five dollars a
month and board for a man who is a fast milker, it is
a subject for high merriment.? Why should one of
the charmed circle of the unemployed be expected to
become a fast milker? Ridiculous. And twenty-five
dollars a month — laughter - and board — great
laughter. Lay it on the table of course. The impu-
dence of the farmer who expects any such return as
that for his absurd wages and his board forsooth!
The unemployed as a stock in trade, as a stage
property, so to speak, must have these elements of
mystery, these sacrosanct features. But as human
beings, with the ordinary faults and virtues, why
should they not be brought to the same tests to which
the employed have to submit as a matter of course ?
Where they live, what they can do, their physical con-
dition, and their personal reputation are matters of
1 See, for example, the New York Herald for February 14, 1909.
* Current newspaper report of a meeting of the unemployed
in Chicago.
[145]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
legitimate interest to those who are asked to provide
employment, or to initiate public policies in their be-
half. When we cease to take seriously the silly senti-
mental generalizations about the unemployed, and
think instead of individual men out of work, we shall
find, I think, a real need for at least three things: a
compulsory colony for vagrants; a voluntary colony
for those who need and are willing to accept instruc-
tion and discipline without compulsion; and an em-
ployment exchange, or work market, with distinct
departments for the several kinds of labor. I depre-
cate callousness and I deprecate sentimentality, but I
urge upon thinking and public-spirited citizens very
serious and persistent attention to these real needs.
[ 146 ]
US ONNITIDUL
AL
UCI
10
2005
MOTO
DATUM TOTIUS
VITUIN
PL
CHAPTER IV
OUT OF FRIENDS
T ET us begin our study of friendlessness with the
D ash barrel foundling. What more wretched
object of pity could I conjure before your imagi-
nation than the infant abandoned in the hour of its
birth, unacknowledged, unsheltered, and unnamed;
pathetic token of misery, unconscious of its shame, ex-
posed to the buffetings of chance, the child of igno-
rance and sin, and yet a human child ?
Fielding, in introducing his foundling “Tom Jones,"
puts into the mouth of the worthy housekeeper words
which exquisitely express a certain conventional atti-
tude towards these “misbegotten wretches, whom,”
she says, “I don't look upon as my fellow-creatures.
If I might be so bold, I would have it put in a basket
and sent out and laid at the church warden's door.
It is a good night, only a little rainy and windy, and
if it was well wrapped up and put in a warm basket,
it's two to one that it lives till it is found in the morn-
ing. But if it shouldn't, we have discharged our duty
in taking proper care of it, and it is, perhaps, better
(149)
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
for such creatures to die in a state of innocence than
to grow up and imitate their mothers; for nothing
better can be expected of them.”
Unfortunately for her respectable views, but fortu-
nately for Tom Jones, the master of the house got one
of his fingers in the baby's hand, "which, by its gentle
pressure, seeming to implore his assistance, had cer-
tainly outpleaded the eloquence of Mrs. Deborah had
it been ten times greater than it was;” and such was
her discernment and the respect in which she held
the master, that her scruples gave way to his com-
mands and she finally took the child, we are told, under
her arms, without any apparent disgust at the illegality
of its birth and, declaring it was a sweet little infant,
walked off with it to her own chamber.
On reflection, I shall not dwell upon the friendless-
ness of any infant child that is allowed to live. Un-
fortunately, for the great majority of such foundling
children, we still pursue the strictly correct, but for
the child fatal, policy recommended by Mrs. Deborah
Wilkins. We put them not at the church warden's
door, but in a hospital, where they thrive about equally
well, although it has been shown by actual experience
in New York City that by another method almost as
good a chance of life can be given these motherless
infants who become public charges as the average
Latever.
1
[150]
OUT OF FRIENDS
child has under normal conditions in a healthy com-
munity.
Private institutions under religious auspices seek to
take the place of parents who feel constrained to
abandon their infants, and in one way or another the
period of friendlessness in the case of physically normal
infants generally comes speedily to an end. Grim
Death himself is the kind friend who often adopts the
child, but if he can be kept at a distance human friends
are always ready to perform, even for these misbe-
gotten children, some such service as the Squire per-
formed for Tom Jones.
Much the same thing is true of older children whom
death or abandonment leaves friendless at a tender
age. For these children also, if they are really without
friends and relatives, foster homes are waiting. For a
few misfits there may remain a long period of malad-
justment during which the institution or the boarding
home may be essential, but, paradoxical as it may
seem, the reason for the large institutional population
of children is precisely that they are not out of friends,
that a surviving parent or grandparents, or aunts or
uncles, or brothers or sisters — some near of kin -
desire to retain their hold upon the child, usually a
very natural and proper desire, one which must be
taken into account and one which is often the decisive
[151]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
and controlling factor in the situation. Charitable
societies, officers and teachers in institutions for chil-
dren, as well as the relatives, and other private citizens
if you give them a chance, are friends of these children,
and they are by no means to be described as out of
friends. For the real orphans who have none to
claim them family homes are to be found, so that the
friendlessness of the orphan child, like the friendless-
ness of the foundling, is but a brief and passing period
and need not detain us.
( 152 )
II
We come next to the stranger, the grown boy and
girl, the young man and woman, or the adult of mature
years, who comes to the city without friends. For the
best and strongest among them it is a time of peril
and trial; for the weak and ignorant to be out of
friends is disaster.
The young man who moves to a new community
without introductions and connections which will
bring him quickly into new social relations discards
a certain part of his working capital. It is true that
he may be well advised in doing so. A business or
professional opening or a call for special service of a
kind that he can render may be, under given circum-
stances, of more importance than friends. But if he
comes as a homeless tramp, there is no such offset; and
if the disability of sickness or of failure in business
overtakes even the worker where there are no friends;
and especially if, by any act of folly or from the ex-
ceptional necessity which does sometimes arise, the
victim of such misfortune in a strange community has
[153]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
YA
put it out of his power to return to his home or to
call upon his earlier friends, — then the natural conse-
quences of his sickness, or his lack of work, or any
other such misfortune as may come upon him, are
multiplied beyond calculation.
The Greeks, in their comparatively simple civiliza-
tion, without automobiles or ocean liners, without
steam or electricity, without congestion of cities or de-
population of farms, without overwork or unemploy-
ment, without sanitation or insanitation - the Greeks,
in their simplicity, had one word for friend and guest,
for stranger and barbarian. This was not because of
them, under the conditions in which they lived, the
stranger was the guest, the friend, the royal claimant
to all the privileges of hospitality, the foe and stranger
on the battlefield, but the guest-friend this side the
threshold.
Increasing density and mobility of population have
changed all that. The assize of Clarendon over seven
centuries ago in England, in order to check crime and
vagrancy, in the interests of peace and security, pro-
vided that no stranger should remain in any place
except in a borough, that even there he must remain
not more than one night unless sureties were given
for his good behavior, and that a list of the names
[154]
OUT OF FRIENDS
of these strangers must be handed to the magistrate.
After seven centuries of such legislation, now relaxing
a little and now tightening again, the Royal Poor
Law Commission, which has just submitted its report,
takes the liberal position that settlement shall be
gained in one year instead of three, and that the county
be adopted as the normal administrative area instead
of the parish, as in earlier days, or the union of parishes
which is now the unit of poor law administration, and
proposes to deal comprehensively, by labor colonies
and otherwise, with the vagrant.
In this country the appellation “stranger" has, on
the whole, had a significance very like that given to it
by the Greeks. To be hailed as “stranger," especially
in the south and west, is to be put upon a footing of
just so much intimacy and good-fellowship as subse-
quent acquaintance may show that you are entitled to.
We mix so easily, and move so rapidly, and strike roots
in a new ground so naturally, and tear them up again
on such slight provocation, that settlement and legal
residence have, for the most part, only an arbitrary,
technical significance. And yet with us also home has
a deep and tender meaning. The institution of “home
week” in the older New England states brings a re-
sponse. Family reunions are the chief attraction of
the Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays, and friend-
[155]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
ship is still — rather than hatred, or patriotism, or love
itself - the master passion. At home and among
friends every man is a more complete man, with a
better chance both to earn and to live.
( 186 )
III
1
Friendship is too sacred and too great a theme to be
treated here, as it were parenthetically, but it is the true
contrasting background of our inquiry. Friendlessness,
as nothing else in the last analysis, is misery. One is
not reduced to this condition merely by geographical
distance, and very seldom indeed merely by the passing
of time. The old outlive particular friends, but they
do not normally from the passing years alone become
friendless. The farmer-boy moves into the town, but
normally the post-office and the railway and the recurring
holidays are gracious ministers to keep him in touch
with his friends, and normally he finds in his own ex-
perience that the world is very small indeed.
The church exists primarily to prevent that friend-
lessness which tends to become misery and disaster.
The church of every creed proclaims one common Father
and the brotherhood of man; the church seeks out the
stranger to give him friends, to make certain demands
upon him, and to respond to those demands is forthwith
to cease to be friendless and alone. I have understood
the Commissioner of Public Charities to say that no
[157]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
2
man comes to the Municipal Lodging House or to the
Bowery bread line through the route of regular attend-
ance at church and Sunday-school. I have not exam-
ined the statistics upon which he bases this conclusion,
but I am very ready to believe that the church, for all
those to whom it makes effective appeal, is the great-
est of all safeguards against such misery as comes from
lack of friends. Unfortunately, there remain the un-
churched who do not hear this appeal, or for whom,
though they hear, it has no particular meaning.
Fraternal societies and clubs, trade unions and other
social organizations, play a large part in the prophylaxis
of misery, whatever other functions they may intend to
there are in cheap hotels and lodging houses, in tem-
porary homes and shelters, in boarding houses, and as
lodgers in tenements, a host of individuals who are
stranded in this sense. They have no physical dis-
ability; they are not entirely without income; they are
fairly adjusted, it may be, so far as their employment
is concerned; but they suffer from a social maladjust-
ment in that they have not made friends. Some few
of them shrink from companionship and cherish their
privacy, but the greater number of them await only
opportunity to set in operation those all but universal
and natural interchanges of courtesy and good-will
[ 158]
OUT OF FRIENDS
from which acquaintance and friendship inevitably
spring
Among those who have taken a friendly, coöperative
interest — which I much appreciate - in the selection
of topics to be considered in this discussion, and who
have suggested that to my three particular Outs, -
Out of Health, Out of Work, Out of Friends, — I add
various other Outs, - such as Out of School, Out of
Society, Out of Favor, - there is one who has insisted
that there is at least one other loss deserving of more
than passing mention, viz., Out of Heart. It is his
thought that a man can come through any difficulties
and deprivations if he but keep up his courage; that
fear is the only foeman capable of doing mortal injury
to the human spirit. I wish that I had the time and
the insight to develop this theme. Out of heart, as I
see it, does not always result from fear. It may result
rather from lack of ambition, from that apathy and
numbness which may be due to privation rather than
to any original lack of spirit. To put heart into the
poor is to give them both ambition and courage, and
this I suppose is the true function of friendship.
Suicide, friendless old age, unemployment under
ordinary industrial conditions, some forms of insanity
and other disabling disease, immorality and crime,
owe a part of their prevalence and their virulence to

NI
[ 159]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
this absence of the capacity or opportunity for personal
friendship, to the absence of those social props and
safeguards which our friends naturally supply. The
almshouse is the final apotheosis of friendlessness.
[160]
IV
Recognizing all this, and much that I have not even
hinted as to the power of personal influence to transform
human lives, there has been developed as a feature of
organized charity a systematic scheme of friendly
visiting among the poor. The friendly visitor is the man
or woman who goes to a family that is in distress, not to
carry them relief, or to solve their immediate specific
problem as a district agent might have to do, but in
order to establish a more permanent relation, in order
to become a neighbor, interested in their affairs, sharing
their troubles, sympathizing with them in adversity and
in prosperity, representing them before the charitable
societies when necessary, or before the courts, or before
employers, or wherever else they may need a friend to
stand by them.
Now the poor need friends. We shall not quarrel
surely about that. They need other things also, as I
have tried to show. They need health, they need homes,
they need protection, they need leisure, they need regu-
larity of income, they need insurance against certain
contingencies, they need the conditions which permit
M
[161]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
a higher standard of living, they need education; and
as a means to all these things and in response to a deep-
seated universal social instinct which demands satis-
faction, even when physical wants are not fully sup-
plied, they need friends.
About a year ago I had some part — a very modest
part indeed - in a discussion as to whether the friendly
carried it out, is the best way of meeting that need.
Professor Patten had made ? what seemed to me then
and seems to me now a very interesting and important
discovery,— that what the poor need most from the
well-to-do and cultured classes is not more neighbor-
liness, but better citizenship; not so much an altruism
of volunteer personal service, as an income altruism
that will create more favorable conditions of living;
not so much personal sympathy for the misfortunes and
hardships of some one family, valuable as that is, as an
intelligent understanding of the misfortunes and hard-
ships which many families encounter, and an effective
sympathy with them in their attempts to rise to a level
in which those misfortunes will occur less frequently
and those hardships will be less in evidence. It was
his idea that, if working and living conditions become
1 Who is the Good Neighbor? In Charities and the Com-
mons, XIX, 1642.
[162]
OUT OF FRIENDS
tolerable, acquaintance and friendship will spring up
spontaneously among those who are naturally neighbors,
who are thrown into ordinary industrial and social
relations. This is not to say that personal friendships
must forever be founded upon the accidents of birth or
income or education. We all know instances to the
contrary - instances which are prophetic of a better
social order when there shall be freer mingling among
all sorts and conditions of men. The question which
Professor Patten raised is not at all as to the possibility
of such an exceptional personal relation, or as to its
beauty or its value for both sides, but rather as to the
relative value, in a broad programme of social work, of
an organized system of friendly visiting which enlists
visitors on one side of a line, and lists the visited on the
other side, and adjusts the one to the other by a process
essentially arbitrary and artificial, however skilful the
adjustment may be and however accurate the psycho-
logical analysis both of the visitor and of the visited,
upon which the adjustment is based.
The question, I repeat, is not about the value of
friendship, but about the way to secure it. I confess
that it is my own strong conviction that the provision
of neighborhood facilities for spontaneous social inter-
course, the shortening of hours, the raising of wages,
the improvement of health, and other similar methods,
[163]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
ve mo
will prove more productive of the best kind of neigh-
borliness and mutual personal service, than all the
efforts consciously directed towards that specific end.
The lesson of this maladjustment is therefore like
that of the others which we have considered. The
remedies that we find to be indicated are the remedies
for the other kinds of misery. The faith upon which
we may stand is the faith which has inspired our policies
for dealing with health problems and industrial prob-
lems. The confidence which it implies in the soundness
of human nature and its responsiveness to generous
treatment is again put in contrast with the pessimistic
view that to be friendless is to be without the latent
capacity for friendship. That faith assumes in its
democracy that there is the same capacity among the
poor as among others to make friends, to choose their
friends, to be friends, as well as to be befriended.
( 164 )
L
.
C
CHAPTER V
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS IN DEPENDENT
FAMILIES
W H EN I was ready to write these lectures, I did,
first of all, what I have long made it a prof-
itable practice to do under similar circumstances. I
called our staff of district agents into a sort of con-
fidential consultation; and on this occasion I put to
them the straight question which I am here trying to
answer. Asking them to disregard for the moment all
that they had read about the causes of poverty, and all
that I or any one had tried to teach them, I demanded
their own personal impressions as to the immediate
causes, the actual present moving causes, of such dis-
tress as they encounter in the homes of the poor.
The first said ignorance and overcrowding and low
wages, especially in work done at home. Cross-exam-
ined closely, she insisted that it was her deliberate opin-
ion that either by increasing income, or by giving enough
time and attention to counteract their ignorance of
things which they ought to know, in almost every
S
encountered could be made to disappear. The second
said that in a very small proportion of instances the
[167]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
distress is due to the fault of the individual himself,
but that in far the greater proportion it is due to some
outside cause, to environmental conditions, such, for
example, as an inability to find work at remunerative
wages. A third said that ignorance of matters directly
affecting the physical welfare and the care of the family
was the most prominent cause of misery, and another
attributed it to the kind of work that people are doing.
Another said hard conditions, and another ignorance,
having changed her earlier impression that lack of
ambition was the great failing. Another indorsed the
first answer -- ignorance, overcrowding, and low wages
— and added physical disability and industrial mal-
adjustment. Still another gave her voice for ignorance,
and a preference, especially among foreigners, for re-
maining in certain undesirable occupations. Another
said lack of employment, and still another ignorance
and physical handicap. Another said that the un-
preparedness of women to make a home was the chief
evil. The last vote of all was again for ignorance, but
not this time so much the ignorance of the poor, that
is, of those who suffer, as the ignorance of the rest of us,
the effects of whose actions recoil upon them. One
objector expressed doubt as to whether ignorance was
so much at fault as will power, suggesting that knowl-
edge without strength and opportunity only adds to
[168]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
the suffering. It was the idea of this agent that the
environment of the great mass of human beings is
distinctly unfavorable to the development of the higher
qualities and the attainment of the higher ideals, and
that those who succeed often do so through the display
of what are really ignoble and questionable traits.
The most striking thing about this concurrent testimony
is its wide departure from conventional discussions of
poverty. There is not a word about drink, not a word
about unwise philanthropy, not a word about laziness, not
a word even about lack of work, although this discussion
occurred in the midst of a winter when every agent was
overworked because of the large number of applications
from those who were out of work. Ignorance and
sheer incapacity are so nearly universal and so much a
matter of course that they are not ordinarily named in
the records, and yet are so obvious and so serious that
they arise at once in the minds of workers when they
are directly challenged to give their impressions.
I have before me a personal letter, written soon after
the stimulating discussion in agents' meeting by one who
had taken part in it. This letter, as the writer says, is
disjointed. It does not set out to be philosophical or
scientific. It begins with a paragraph which I shall
not quote, expressing the conviction that if we could
have one generation sober we would have gone a long
[169]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
way toward solving the problem of poverty, and that
brotherly love, religiously carried out, would pretty
nearly take us the rest of the way. I need not take you
to a district agent's letter to learn the value of religion
and temperance. You will agree with her or disagree
with her about such matters according to your own pre-
vious convictions and your bringing up, and so we pass
that over. But the writer has painted a picture which,
disjointed and inartistic as it is, I present as it is drawn,
complete in its very incompleteness, the more convincing
that it is a bit inarticulate.
"Ignorance," she says, “not necessarily a lack of book
learning, is one of the prime causes of poverty — ignorance
of all that goes to make up life. A child reared in a very
poor home has to go to work before he should. He drudges
away and adds his little mite to the family budget. He is
underfed and improperly fed; he has had no child life, and
finally he tires of putting all his wage into the house and not
having money to handle; he meets a girl who has probably
a similar story to tell; they marry, thinking to better their
condition, neither of them having anything like the knowl-
edge that one should possess to enter into that bond; neither
have they any regard as to whether they are physically fit
to marry; no cash saved, not even reasonably sure of an in-
come. They buy their household effects on the instalment
plan, and before they have had time to pay for them the
husband loses his work; in the meantime the wife has had
them both insured; that runs behind — the majority of the
[170]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
poor starve themselves that they may be in a position to
have a decent burial; their rent piles up; they have had to
pinch and save and run in debt to get food of any descrip-
tion; their bodies have been undernourished; they may
have their rooms in a basement because the rent is cheap;
one or the other contracts rheumatism; the wife becomes
pregnant; a midwife or a maternity hospital confines her;
she does not get the proper food or after attention; they get
their pint of beer to help strengthen her, — probably a doctor
has prescribed it to help produce milk, - both have prob-
ably been brought up to its use, have never heard of its bad
effects; they cannot believe that the same amount of cash
invested in milk would nourish them better; one or both
drift into the drinking habit. She gets careless; she scarcely
weans the baby until another is on the way; she has never
been taught her duty as a mother; she cannot recall any
early training or example in this direction; she has no sense
of responsibility; no resources in time of adversity; she has
a lack of fine principles; lacks frugality; would not think
that time never comes; she has no apparent pride in her-
self, home, or husband; does not understand how to make
the most of things; she has inherited a moral weakness;
lacks will power and control; she cannot see that she is los-
ing her grip, so to speak, on her husband — if she ever had
any; she is discouraged and is beginning to show the strain;
the second child fares worse than the first; she has not been
taught how to prepare meals properly; she has no idea of
the kind of food which is most wholesome; she has no time
to prepare a meal, having spent the morning hours in gossip
[171]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
with neighbors; she runs to the delicatessen store and pays
two or three times as much for an improperly cooked dish
as it is worth and serves it cold; it is not conducive to her
husband's comfort, health, or temper; the table is rarely
ever set; there is no table linen; food is pitched on the
table; she looks like distress; the children look worse and
are slapped in the face and banged about, — in short, her
home life with her husband is worse than her parental home
was. The husband gets sick; if he goes to the dispensary
and gets medicine he does not follow it up and take the
medicine as he should — they lack that great essential,
thoroughness. He returns to work too soon; finally is handi-
capped by disease of some kind which prevents his working
as usual, but the babies continue to come with perfect regu-
larity. Immorality in the home results from crowded con-
ditions; children see what is not fit for their eyes and early
begin practices ruinous to them and to those with whom
they come in contact. Children are conceived while their
parents are drunk -- they learn the taste of drink with their
mother's milk. What can be expected of the outcome ?
The mother knows nothing of her duty as a mother; she,
too, is run down in health; the children have not had half
a chance; and as soon as they are large enough history
repeats itself, and so it goes."
Some superficial social students will be ready to stop
right here. “These families are made up," I hear
them say, “according to your own testimony, of igno-
rant, inefficient people. They are getting as much as
they earn, and if it is not enough to live on, there is
[172]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
nothing for it but to help them out as we are doing with
a little charitable relief, take their children into asylums,
their sick into hospitals, their old and worn-out into
the almshouse, and make the best of it.” But I reply
that is not making the best of it. That is taking the
line which is of least resistance only because the ruts
are deep with long travel along that line. It is the line
neither of least natural resistance, nor of science, nor
yet of common sense.
If there is any one evil that is easy to overcome, it is
ignorance. If there is any one misfortune from which
it is both just and feasible to relieve mankind, it is ig-
norance. If there is any one serious mistake in the
letter which I have quoted, it is in the statement that
“history repeats itself, and so it goes.” To me it is not a
ground for pessimism, but for very confident optimism,
to discover that what is wrong with my brother is nothing
worse than ignorance. Do I not know that others, no
better than he, have overcome ignorance, and that under
proper conditions he also will overcome it? Let any
man who despairs of the capacity of the poor to rise
from their poverty seek other explanation than that they
are ignorant and incapable. This first fragmentary
testimony is not discouraging, but distinctly promising.
10
(173]
An experienced district agent has recently spent
more than a year as a fellow in the School of Philan-
thropy in a careful, intensive study of five hundred
families who had been for some period under the con-
tinuous oversight and care of the Society's district com-
mittees. She distinguishes among the families seven
different types, classified according to the character-
istics of the principal breadwinner in the family.
(Diagram 6.)
There were, first, the families who were in some
temporary difficulty, shown to be temporary not only
by the appearance of things at the time of their applica-
tion, but by the subsequent history. These difficul-
ties were usually either of unemployment or of acute
illness, circumstances for which the head of the family,
in the absence of any general scheme of insurance
against these casualties, can hardly be held responsible.
There were 109 of these cases, or about twenty-two per
cent of the whole number. There was, second, the
* Miss Caroline Goodyear, of the New York Charity Organ-
ization Society.
[174]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
non-support type, including all cases in which distinct
blame attaches to the man for his failure to support his

21.8%
TEMPORARY DIFFICULTY
WIDOW TYPE 80.4%
MISCELLANEOUS 8.00%
MOTHERLESS 3.8%
OLD AGE 6.8%
MAN PHYSICALLY OR
MENTALLY INEFFICIENT
11.8
NON-SUPPORT 21.00
DIAGRAM 6. Types among 500 families under the care of the
Charity Organization Society of the City of New York.
household; there were 105 of these cases, or twenty-one
per cent of the five hundred. There were, third, the
well-disposed but physically or mentally inefficient, men
willing to work and showing that willingness by every
[175]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
reasonable test, but incapable at best of earning a suffi-
cient support for the family, easily thrown out of em-
ployment, and hard to restore to it. There were only
58 of these families, twelve per cent of the five hundred.
There was next the widow type, including among these
the cases in which the man is permanently absent, or
totally disabled by tuberculosis or other chronic physi-
cal or mental disability. These were the most numer-
ous — 152 cases, or thirty per cent of the whole. Af-
fording a direct contrast to these is the motherless type.
There were eighteen of these, 3.6 per cent. They are
seldom under care for a great length of time, as these
children are usually taken by relatives or committed
to an institution. For the same reason widowers with
children, and families of orphan children, as a rule do not
apply at all to the charitable agencies. Old age marks
the type in 28 cases, 5.6 per cent, leaving thirty in all,
or six per cent, for a final miscellaneous group, made up
chiefly of women on the verge of old age and of families
in which mothers, either through marked moral de-
generacy or otherwise, signally fail in their responsibili-
ties, leaving the home a travesty, as the investigator puts
it, of the motherless type, and forming the typical case
for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
This classification, as you will see, was not devised to
establish any thesis, nor does it pretend to be an analy-
[176]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
sis of the causes of poverty. Experienced social workers
recognize even from this brief description not only the
types that I have enumerated, but also the course of
treatment fairly well indicated for each of the typical
cases. The temporary difficulties of the first group,
where there is acute illness of the wage earner or genu-
ine unemployment without other serious complications,
may require temporary relief, with cautious safeguards
against the forming of a habit of dependence. A tonic
rather than a palliative is required. The non-support
cases require discipline; the physically or mentally in-
efficient require medical care and special attention such
as is perhaps best illustrated thus far by the employ-
ment bureau for the handicapped; the widow and
fatherless children are likely to require permanent,
liberal, and regular relief; the motherless family is
fortunate if there is a near relative of the father, or a
daughter old enough to assume the responsibility for
the household; while old age, in the absence of any
general system of old-age pensions, points as a rule to
care in a permanent home, although there are adven-
turous spirits who favor a boarding-out system, such as
has been found in some states to be a satisfactory sub-
stitute for institutional care in the case of children.
[177]
III
I have thought that it would be a contribution to a
preventive and constructive programme in social work to
make a somewhat careful study of the conspicuous
characteristics of a large group of dependent families,
of the respects in which they and their circumstances
are different from other families and their circum-
tances, and equally of the respects in which they are
not different, based upon case records and contem-
poraneously recorded observations and impressions.
It has appeared to me that such an analysis would
throw light upon the conditions which accompany
destitution and give to those who are able to draw their
own conclusions some basis for inference concerning the
causes of poverty and the measures which are indicated
for its prevention.
I have therefore made an inquiry into the conditions
present in five thousand families who came under the
care of the district committees of the Charity Organiza-
tion Society in the two years ending September 30, 1908.
We know these families at best only superficially.
Even so we find without difficulty all those well-defined
[178]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
manifestations of misery which we have been consider-
ing, not isolated, but in combination one with another
and with others less obtrusive. The hardships and dis-
advantageous conditions which we discern clearly go
far towards explaining their present misery and far
towards accounting for the emergence of the particular
classes of unfortunates in isolation to whom we have
referred. If we could know them well enough, if we
could know more intimately the handicaps of body and
the subtler defects of personality which they have in-
herited, the deficiencies of their education, the unfavor-
able industrial conditions which have been imposed
upon them, we might then be able to speak with more
assurance as to the relative importance of the causes
which are operating to produce poverty, dependence,
and misery. The Rockefeller Institute is working with
this in view in the particular field of preventive medi-
cine. In the larger field of social misery there are pre-
cisely similar opportunities for those who approach its
specific problems in the same spirit.
The records of these five thousand families were ex-
amined for all the information they contained in regard
to the constitution and the circumstances of the fami-
lies at the time of their application for assistance, in-
cluding also, of course, such well-defined permanent
characteristics as must have been a part of the situation
( 179]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
at that time. No attempt has been made to decide in -
each case, with the aid of a prearranged list of possible
causes, which one was the cause of dependence in that
particular family on that particular occasion. Our in-
terest is not in the psychology of the tabulators, but in
the facts about the families; and on the basis of the
facts discovered about these families, not in the first
visit, but in the course of the Society's entire acquaint-
ance with them, it is possible to describe the conditions
which existed at the critical period when the family, of
its own initiative or through the offices of a friend, came
to us for help.
1 The Causes of Poverty: by Lilian Brandt. In Political
Science Quarterly, XXIII, No. 4.
(180)
IV
What were these five thousand families like? How
do they differ from the “normal family” we all have in
our minds ?
There are among them representatives of all the
types of misery that we have discussed. Two men and
one woman committed suicide; four men and two
women are known to have tried to do so. There are
criminals among them, ranging from the young Ger-
man, less than a year in the country, who, as if playing
the part of a popular newspaper character, stole a little
food for his wife and baby; through the so-called petty
offenders — “drunk and disorderlies,” wife beaters,
men who consistently avoid supporting their fami-
lies, and petty thieves — who form the bulk of the
criminals in these families; to an occasional forger,
burglar, blackmailer, murderer -- a young clerk, for
example, to cite another newspaper type, in prison be-
cause he has shot a girl with whom he was infatuated,
leaving his wife and two children dependent.
There are old people among them, waiting for death
to make room for them in one of the private homes for
the aged. There are others who will go, less reluctantly,
[181]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
LA
L
it is good to remember, than their predecessors went ten
years ago, to the City Home for the Aged and Infirm.
Some of the children were already in institutions, put
there by parents as the first resort when their hard
times came; others will be sent because their parents
are not fit guardians. There are insane and feeble-
minded and epileptic, and blind, and lame, and crooked.
Practically all of the families are familiar with hospitals
and dispensaries. There are men and women, a few,
alone, with illegitimate children.
It should be kept in mind for a background that these
are in the main American families either by birth or by
long residence. (Diagrams 7 and 8.) They are not,
therefore, as a body, laboring under the disadvantage
of recent arrival in the country, and in this respect they
differ from some of the other groups of dependent fam-
ilies in New York City. For this reason, however,
they are more typical of the poor of American cities than
the entire body of dependent families in New York would
be. For this reason also, their other disabilities can be
seen in truer proportions than if they were dwarfed, as
they frequently are in popular considerations of the poor
of New York, by the assumption that most of them are
recent immigrants, all of whose troubles may be traced
to that fact.
( 182 )
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
Only 240 had been less than a year in the city when
they applied for assistance, and of these 66 were
S

ALL NEGROES
ALL OTHERS 16.28%
DIAGRAM 7.
Nativity of head
of family.
(SOME 30 COUNTRIES,
UNITED 6TATES
(WHITE)
84.00%
NONE REPRESENTED BY
AS MANY AS 100)
ENGLAND & WALES 3.82%
GERMANY 10.68%
2000
IRELAND 19.24%
ITALY 14.084
1500
1000
DIAGRAM 8. Resi-
500T
500
in New York City.
LESS THAN
6 YEARS
5-19
YEARS
20 YEARS
AND OVER
native Americans, while some of the foreign-born had
been living already for a number of years in other parts
[ 183]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
of this country. About one-sixth of them altogether
had lived in New York less than five years; over a
fourth from five to twenty years, and nearly half had
lived here at least twenty years. (Diagram 8.) Most of
them, in other words, have been on Manhattan Island
sufficiently long to justify them in calling it their home.
In over a third of our cases the head of the family,
whether man or woman, was born in the United States;
in twenty-three per cent the head of the family had
been born and lived all his life in New York City. In
nineteen per cent he was born in Ireland, in fourteen
per cent in Italy; in ten and a half per cent in Ger-
many. (Diagram 7.) In the two years covered by this
study the Italians gained perceptibly upon the Irish,
and they bid fair, at an early date, to come next to the
native-born among our families. Of course percent-
ages of nationalities mean nothing at all as to their rela-
tive tendency toward dependence unless the number of
those who apply for help at different places is com-
plete and is compared with the total number of the same
nationality in the population. The Irish, for example,
furnish many families, not because there is necessarily,
in proportion to their numbers, exceptional destitution
among the Irish, but because New York is to a large
extent an Irish city. Russians and Austrians do not
appear among our families because Russian and Aus-
[ 184]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
trian Jews apply instead to the United Hebrew Chari-
ties. To make any generalization concerning German
dependence we would need to take into account both
applications to the German Society and the total Ger-
man population of the city. It must always be remem-
bered that the five thousand families are not necessarily
representative even of Greater New York, for the rea-
son that the residents of three of the five boroughs,
Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond, are excluded. It
may be of interest, however, to record that some thirty-
five nationalities were represented among them, in-
cluding Arabia, China, Japan, India, Syria, and our
own Philippine Islands.
The next significant thing about these families is that
a large proportion of them are not normally constituted
families. (Diagram 9.)
There are twelve families of orphans, children left
without either father or mother, and unable, because
they are too young or too inexperienced or too delicate,
to earn enough among them to keep together without
assistance.
There are next 162 cases in which there is no woman
at the head of the family, 54 of these being single men,
94 widowers, and fourteen deserted husbands. I should
say in passing that men or women who are technically
"homeless” are cared for in the Joint Application
[ 185]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
Bureau, and as most single men and some women are
without shelter or are living at a lodging house when they

66.84%
WOMAN ONI
WIDOWS
MILY -
FAMIL
ONLY AT HEA
OF
MARRIED COUPTER
HEAD OF FAMI
HEAD
DESERTED WOMEN
SINGLE WOMEN
MILY -
WOMAN AT
40.88%
MAN AND WO
AND SINGLE MEN
WIDOWERS, DESERTED HUSBANDS,
UNMARRIED COUPLES
MAN ONLY
3.24.
DIAGRAM 9. Family status.
(The narrow section between Single Women and Widowers represents
Orphans, .24%.)
ask for charitable assistance they do not as a rule come
under the care of the districts, and are therefore not
represented in this study in the proportions they occupy
in the dependent population of the city. Most of the
[186]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
widowers and deserted husbands had children under
twenty-one, five of them had each five under fourteen.
This group, like the orphan children, is a small pro-
portion of the total five thousand cases. The next
group, however, the cases in which there is no male head
of the family, consists of 2044 cases, four-tenths of the
whole number. Seven hundred and eighty-five of these
were single women or widows or deserted women who
had no children under twenty-one years of age, but
there were 1248 widows and divorced, separated and
deserted women with from one to eight children under
twenty-one — in most cases at least one under fourteen,
in 103, five or more — and eleven young unmarried
women with illegitimate children. One of the widows
was a young Italian woman with four little children,
whose husband had been murdered the day before, but
most of the widowhood was not recent at the time of ap-
plication, while on the other hand most of the desertion
was recent. In less than twenty-five per cent of the
cases of widows had the husband been dead less than a
year, while the deserting husband had been away less
than a year in sixty per cent and less than a month in
thirty per cent of the cases.
These families deprived by death or desertion of their
natural head are a constant large class among dependent
families. Over one-fourth of the five thousand are
TO
а
I
[187]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
widows; one-tenth are deserted women. Half of the
widows and four-fifths of the deserted women have
little children dependent upon them. In Manhattan and
Bronx boroughs widows constitute a little over four per
cent of the total population; they constitute nearly
seven per cent of the individuals making up these families.
Comparing the numbers just given with those quoted
from the earlier study it will be seen that there is a close
correspondence. The total number of families in which
there is a woman at the head is naturally a larger pro-
portion of the whole than those that are distinguished
as the widowhood type, but the proportion in which
there is actually a widow at the head of the family is a
little less than Miss Goodyear's calculation shows, since,
looking at the family from the standpoint of treatment,
she has very naturally included cases in which the male
head of the family is totally disabled or has been for
some time away from the family so that the treatment
to be given approximates that which would naturally be
given to the widow with children. The two studies then,
relating to different periods, the one intensive and the
other extensive, bring us to the same generalization, that
about one-third of all our families are widows with
children or families that are practically in their position.
It is on behalf of these families that there has recently
arisen a demand for a reconsideration of the policy
[188]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
which now prevails on the time-honored but with us,
practically for a third of a century, closed subject of
public out-door relief. While prohibiting, at first gradu-
ally and piecemeal and finally by a charter provision,
the giving of public out-door relief in the homes of the
poor, whether in the form of groceries, or coal, or money,
we have pursued a very liberal policy with reference to
the care of children in institutions. In the case of certain
institutions, of late years a larger number than before,
the municipal authorities have paid institutions for the
care of children, even though they were actually boarded
outside the walls of the institution in private families,
provided these were other families than those in which
the children originally belonged. Some of those who
are vehemently opposed to the institutional care of chil-
dren and others who are alarmed lest the burden upon
the private relief societies may soon become greater than
they can bear — if it is not already so — are beginning
to protest that it would be more logical and consistent
to pay the mothers of these children for their mainte-
nance in their own homes, or possibly, as a halfway
measure, to permit the institutions to which children are
committed to use the money which is now paid to them
in maintaining these children in their own homes,
provided they are good homes, rather than in the homes
of strangers. There are undoubtedly two sides to this
[ 189]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
I
ND
question, or perhaps more than two. I point out merely
that the departure from payment for institutional care
which we have already made, slight as it is, breaks down
the traditional division of work between public and
private charity; and on the other hand, that the very
large sum now raised annually by the charitable societies
for the relief of the poor in their homes — more than a
million dollars a year — would be endangered by any
system of public relief of the poor in their homes even
though it were limited to widows with children. Those
who favor public relief for widows with children, as an
alternative for institutional care, should face the prob-
ability that it must become also a substitute for a very
considerable part of the private relief which is now
provided. A longer look ahead may possibly discover
yet other substitutes for both public and private relief.
Indemnity in cases of accident, sickness, old age, and
even unemployment, through insurance, to the cost of
which the insured have contributed, is a policy which is
to be preferred to charitable relief on grounds both of
justice and of expediency.
We find, then, among these five thousand families a
very few cases in which there is no head of the family;
we find a small number, not much over three per cent,
consisting of a man alone or with dependent children;
we find a larger number, forty-one per cent, consisting
[190]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
of a woman alone, or with children dependent on her;
and we come, finally, to the cases in which there are both
a man and a woman at the head of the family. There
are 2782 of these, forty of them, however, not married,
and in 476 cases there are no children under twenty-one.
Of normally constituted families, therefore, in the ordi-
U
there are among our five thousand dependent families
only 2277, or forty-six per cent.
(191)
The next conspicuous characteristic of these families,
after the fact that a large proportion of them are mere
mutilated fragments of families, is the large number of
small children. The five thousand families contained
19,504 individuals, and of these 9172, nearly half, were
children under fourteen years of age. In the gen-
eral population of the state of New York children
under fourteen form twenty-seven per cent of the
total; young persons between fourteen and twenty-
one, twelve and one half per cent; and the adult popula-
tion twenty-one years of age and over, amounts to sixty
per cent. In these five thousand dependent families the
corresponding percentages are forty-seven, instead of
twenty-seven, under fourteen years of age; nine, instead
of twelve and one-half, between fourteen and twenty-one;
and forty-four, instead of sixty and one-half, adult. In
other words, the abnormal proportion of small children
is counterbalanced by a small proportion both of older
children and of adults. This does not indicate unusually
large families, but the absence which we have already
noted, of the full quota of male heads, and an un-
usual proportion of young families. (Diagram 10.)
[192]

BOARDERS 8.08%
18.604
(HEADS OF FAMILIES)
MEN
CONTRIBUTING RELATIONS 8.86%
DEPENDENT ADULTS 1.98%
1.36610ACR DEPENDENT CHILDREN
LODGERS
CHILDREN 21 YEARS & OVER 2.8350
CHILDREN 14-20 7.86%
WOMEN 28.72%
42.619
CHILDREN UNDER 14


DULTS 27
174: 27.872
MOUL
RUNDERTA!
LOREN UND
EARS OF AGE
ETHICHILDREN
1 YEARS
Colto
AGE & OVER
2.65 0663
OF AGES
14-20.0185
WWW.83N
FAMMIES
09 FINO
6000 DEPENDENT
POPULATION OF
THE STATE OF NEW YORK
1900
DIAGRAM 10. Composition of households; and composition of
families in comparison with the general population of the State of
New York.
[193]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
The age of the head of the family tells the
same story. (Diagram 11.) If we group ages in
five-year periods, we shall find the maximum in
the period from thirty-five to forty, the age in which
there is normally the largest number of small chil-
dren. There is among these families a curve similar
to that which has been noticed in the life of an individual,
the reverse of what has been called the curve of economic
prosperity. Our line rises steadily from twenty to
forty; descending from this maximum by regular stages
until the number between fifty-five and sixty ap-
proximates that between twenty and twenty-five; after
which, in old age, it rises again, and there are six hun-
dred families, sometimes, of course, a single aged man or
woman, in which the head is over sixty years of age.
The descending line between forty and sixty represents
in the individual family the improvement resulting from
the growth of children and their assuming the burdens
of wage earners.
In size, we have said, these families are not conspicu-
ous. The average number of individuals in our five
thousand families was four, including lodgers and
boarders and relatives, both dependent and contributing.
So far as our records indicate, 1332 individuals belonging
to these families were away from home at the time of the
application - in hospitals, institutions for children,
[194]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS

000
7604
800
::..
:
500
_
:
.
800
;
..;.
po
GROUPS U.WER ZU
UNDER 20 20 24 26 - 28 8 0 - 84 85.-.89 40-44 46 - 49 60-64 6669 80 AND OVER
DIAGRAM 11. Age of head of family: the number of heads of families in each age-group, the solid
black representing men, the shaded portion women.
[195]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
prisons, insane asylums, or in another city or even
country for one reason or another — but these absences
were more than offset by the 2072 individuals who were
members of the household, but not, strictly speaking,
of the family. In other words, the families, including
members away from home, average 3.9 persons to the
family; while the average size of the household with
which we are directly concerned is an even four. The
average for “private families” in the general population
of Manhattan and Bronx boroughs in 1900 was 4.5.
Even the addition of the deceased and deserted husbands
would not bring our figure up to that. “Family,” in the
Census terminology, is almost identical with "household”
as we use the word, and the size of our five thousand house-
holds follows quite closely the size of the 433,953 house-
holds in which the population of Manhattan and Bronx
boroughs was distributed in 1900. (Diagram 12.) In
both cases the household of three persons figures most
prominently. It is followed in our families by house-
holds of two and of four; in the general population
households of four are more numerous than those of
two. Households of one person are less numerous in
the Census figures than in ours, because a person
temporarily with friends or boarding would be enu-
merated as part of that “family”; and in the same
way the large households are more numerous in the
(1961
20% 15% 10% 54%
5% 10% 15% 20%
8001
HOUSE-1
HOLDS
HOUSE-
HOLDS
OF
nc
700
O Ho.co
DIAGRAM 12.
Size of household
(a) among the 5000
families, at left of
diagram; and (b)
in the general
population of Man-
hattan and Bronx
boroughs, at right.

800H
O
40 C 7 Oct
O
600
O
400
20% 15% 10% 51%
IL
% 10% 15% 20%
300
300
200
200
100
100
'
'
CHILDREN
3
NO. OF FAMILIES 845
9
899673
5 6
358228
512
8
378
103
10
1
DIAGRAM 13. Size of families as indicated by the number of children under 21 years of age.
[ 261)
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
Census figures, because they include hotels, boarding-
houses, schools, and other congregate families.
Of our five thousand families there were 1342 in
which there were no children at all under twenty-one
years of age; about one-third of these were married
couples, and all but sixty of the remaining two-thirds
were single women. In 845 families there was one
child; in 893, two children; in 673 families there were
three children; and in the remaining 1247 families there
were four or more children, reaching a climax in one
noteworthy family of ten, all under twenty-one, and all
at home. This is shown in Diagram 13, in which the
width of the column indicates the size of the family, and
the height indicates the number of families of each size.
If we consider only children under fourteen years of
age, that is, under the legal working age, it appears that
one-third of the families were childless in this sense;
about one-sixth had one child, and another one-sixth
two children; approximately seven hundred had three
children; nearly five hundred had four children; and
the remaining families had five or more, nine being the
maximum number.
( 198 )
VI
Our five thousand families are fundamentally handi-
capped as a group, from an economic point of view, by,
widowhood and desertion and by an unusual proportion
of young children. They exhibit also many other dis-
abilities: physical and moral, as individuals and as
families; inherent and accidental; personal and en
vironmental; economic and social; temporary and
permanent; curable and ineradicable. -
Under twenty-five headings we have put down all the
adverse conditions which we know were present at the
time of the application for assistance and which were
sufficiently tangible and definite to be classified, includ-
ing those already mentioned and including all the defects
of character which, whether or not they were in evi-
dence at that particular time, are known to have been
an element in the situation. Some of these disabilities
are such natural and inevitable experiences as spring
from widowhood, childbirth, large families, and old age
- not in themselves causes of poverty in well-regulated
families and in well-regulated communities, but never-
theless genuine disabilities under the circumstances in
[ 199]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
which they are encountered in our New York tenements.
Others are such exceptional misfortunes as have always
touched the fountains of compassion — an acute illness,
death by violence, physical deformity, mental afflictions,
domestic tragedy. Others have their origin more di-
rectly in our industrial system, or farther back in its
financial foundation. The failure of a Trust Company
precipitates—of course I do not mean causes -- an eco-
nomic disturbance, for which frenzied finance, a bad bank-
ing system, and worse banking practice have prepared the
way, and straightway shops close, railway cars are idle,
building operations cease, and for two years or more
families in the tenements of New York are in need of
food and clothing and money to pay their rent. This
appears in our table of disabilities as unemployment —
a barbarous word, as my critics frequently protest, but I
tell them rather a barbarous fact for which there is no
pretty word, and the barbarity of the word, which already
has ample authority for its use both in England and
America, troubles me much less than the barbarity of
the fact. Distress due to unemployment resulting
directly from the faulty judgment and the reprehensible
practices of financiers and other business men is a form
of that maladjustment which I hold to be responsible
for so large a part of our poverty.
In the disabilities to which I have referred there may
[200]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
always be an element of personal weakness, a certain
congenital tendency it may be towards dependence, a
weakness at this point of the resisting power which gives
entrance to the full force and influence of the disability.
That is to say, another family might also have lost its
principal breadwinner, and not come to actual poverty
as a result. Old age might have brought to others only
dignified retirement and comfortable leisure. Others
might have had large broods of children without the
pinch of hunger, and the advent of each child, under
other more favorable circumstances, might not have
prompted an application for charitable assistance.
Illness, deformity, insanity, and domestic tragedy do
not always mean dependence, and it is true, as I have
said repeatedly, that we have no complete diagnosis
of the dependence until we have examined the heredity
and the mental and physical qualities of the individual,
as well as the particular circumstances which seem to
have brought the family into its present trouble. In
so far as personal infirmities of character have been
revealed in the course of our acquaintance we have
taken them into account. These are the cases in which
there is a present or previous criminal record, in the
technical sense, in which there is evidence of immorality,
in which there are wayward and incorrigible children,
in which there is cruelty and abuse by the husband, or
[ 201 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
7
hamdawani's
Cince 24:D:
.'
definite evidence of non-support of his family, or actual
desertion of wife and children. Even a violent temper
or excessive irritability are put down — not in malice,
but in charity, in order that we may fully understand
what the disabilities are with which we have to deal.
Under some twenty-five headings, then, from widow-
hood to gambling, from rheumatism to unreliability,
from recent arrival in New York to a residence of sixty
years on earth, we have put them all down. We have
not sought to say in any one case that widowhood, or
unemployment, or intemperance, or accident, or shift-
lessness, or any other specific disability, is the sole
cause or the chief cause or the contributing cause of the
poverty, but we have put down every such disability
without exaggeration or prejudice in order that they
may be considered en masse and in isolation, in the
several independent instances and in their relation to
one another."
ten
.
**
*
.
.
.
[202]
VII
Let us first run over these twenty-five disabilities in
the order of their numerical importance, without regard
to natural groupings, beginning with the smallest fig-
ures, at the bottom of the column in the table on
page 204.
In twenty-two of the five thousand families, less than
one-half of one per cent, there is a definite record of
gambling. In nearly one per cent children under
fourteen years of age were working for money at the
time of application; not ordinarily in violation of the
law, but running errands or selling papers after school
hours and on Saturday, or out of school altogether
acting as nurse-maid, though there are instances of a
thirteen-year-old Italian girl who was a cigar-stripper,
a little Russian finisher, and an American telegraph
messenger. Small as this percentage is, it illustrates
the misplaced thrift that is less than a virtue, and forms
a contrast to the laziness and shiftlessness that are a
larger item among the fathers and mothers.
A disposition to beg was noted in two per cent of the
families, more frequently on the part of the woman
VI
IT
[203]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
The principal disabilities present in five thousand
dependent families in New York City

FAMILIES
DISABILITIES
NUMBER OF
INDIVIDUALS
AFFECTED
NUMBER PER CENT
4424
3458
2014
1472
69.16
44.681
29.44
1603
1365
27.30
1158
984
19.68
944
833
18.88
16.66
1000
675
814
619
606
16.28
12.38
12.12
1. Unemployment. ........
2. Overcrowding .........
3. Widowhood ..........
4. Chronic physical disability other
than tuberculosis or rheumatism
5. Temporary physical disability other
than accident or childbirth ..
6. More than three children under
fourteen . .. · · · · · · ·
7. Intemperance .
.
.
8. Less than five years in New York
City . . . . . . . . . . . .
9. Tuberculosis . .........
10. Desertion and persistent non-support
11. Head of family sixty years old or
more .....
12. Laziness, shiftlessness, etc. ...
13. Childbirth ........
14. Rheumatism . .........
15. Immorality ....
16. Mental disease, defect, or deficiency
17. Cruelty, abuse, etc. .......
18. Accident ...........
19. Untruthfulness, unreliability, etc.
20. Criminal record ........
21. Violent or irritable temper, etc. . .
22. Waywardness of children ....
23. Disposition to beg .......
24. Child labor (generally not illegal) .
25. Gambling ...........
599
588
667
363
359
363
347
11.98
11.76
7.26
6.94
5.12
4.96
4.42
3.96
337
256
267
229
201
210
161
148
160
1
3.88
248
221
198
194
151
140
129
117
134
3.02
2.80
2.58
2.34
0.84
0.44
1 Based on the 4508 cases in which there was definite information on this point.
[ 204]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
than of the man, as she is too generally the official
representative of the family in its dealings with chari-
table agencies; and in two and a half per cent there were
children who were unruly to the degree generally de-
scribed as waywardness or incorrigibility. Of one Irish
family it is recorded that all of the seven children “run
wild, steal from wagons, etc.”
A violent, morbid, irritable, quarrelsome, melancholy,
disagreeable, obstinate, stubborn, complaining, un-
reasonable, excitable, nervous, reckless, impertinent,
despondent, jealous, peculiar, or depressing, temper or
disposition, not amounting to cruelty or well-recognized
mental defect, was discernible in three per cent of the
cases. This would be a small percentage of deviations
from equability and poise in five thousand families
unharassed by the immediate pressure of the rent
problem, but the poor cannot afford to be cross or have
the blues. Excuses could be found in many cases:
irritability is frequently accompanied by illness;
one girl who is described as “insolent and melancholy”
had at the time three cases of tuberculosis in her family;
a woman is said to be "jealous," whose husband sup-
ports other women instead of herself.
In three per cent, also, there was a criminal record.
If men were relatively few, as they were, among the
persons with abnormal dispositions, here they constitute
[205]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
almost the entire group. The offences most frequently
noted are non-support, small thefts, and disorderly
conduct, but there are a few clearly defined examples
of bigamy and the other more serious crimes: one man
had committed forgery and gone away with another
woman, leaving a wife and eight children, five of them
under fourteen; another had served three sentences for
robbery; another is now in Sing Sing for nineteen years;
another is an "anarchist on parole.” From our point
of view, however, the petty offences are equally serious,
and the man who is “constantly in the work-house
for non-support and intoxication," and still more the
man who ought to be there for the same reasons but is
not, may be really more harmful elements in their fami-
lies and in the community than a criminal of passion.
Untruthfulness and unreliability are sufficiently
serious to appear in the record in four per cent of the
cases. This includes two instances of “inconsistent”
women, which must be admitted to be an abnormally
low proportion. Unreliability is sometimes accompa-
nied by mental defect or by age, and may not always
be a fault. Occasionally a woman is described as
“reticent” or “evasive,” or “not frank,” but such are
not included in this group, nor is the man who is said
to be a “smooth talker.” Here again, as in the case of
faults of temper and a disposition to beg, the bulk of
.
[206]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
the individuals concerned are women; and here again,
it is not because the men are almost all upright and
trustworthy, but because it is the statements of the
women which we have the opportunity of testing.
In four per cent of all the families, also, some one was
suffering from the effects of an accident at the time of
the application. Over half the injured persons were
men, and many of these had been hurt while at work;
the women and children were more frequently suffering
from a fall or some domestic mishap.
The cases of cruelty and abusiveness number about
four and a half per cent, not including here desertion
or mere non-support without other mistreatment.
Most of these are husbands, but a few are mothers
who abused their children — one regularly drugged
her baby — and a few are grown children who were
unkind to parents — two, for instance, were “neglect-
ful” of a widowed mother who had tuberculosis.
Mental disease, defect, or deficiency was found in
five per cent of all the cases, ranging in degree and
variety from the cases of insanity on Ward's Island and
the family in which the mother and both children were
microcephalic to senility and children who “do not seem
very bright.” This is distributed almost equally, as
far as number of cases goes, among men, women, and
children, but on account of their unequal numbers in
[ 207]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
the families it works out that three per cent of the men
are affected, two per cent of the women, and seven-
tenths of one per cent of the children.
There is a record of immorality in five per cent of
the cases, involving 337 of the members of our families.
In this case the proportion of men and of women is
just the same, four per cent, though the number of
women is larger.
With disabling rheumatism in seven per cent of the
cases, and disability attendant on childbirth in seven
per cent, we come to the end of the adverse condi-
tions which are present in less than one-tenth of all the
families.
[208]
VIII
The first item above one-tenth is a compound of lazi-
ness, shiftlessness, and untidiness, which is found in one-
ninth of the families, affecting seven per cent of the men
and seven per cent of the women. In more than one
case the man is lazy, his wife neglectful and untidy.
It is impossible to distinguish in the records between
the shiftlessness which is a moral defect and the shift-
lessness which is the result of under-nourishment, but
no doubt both kinds are represented.
In almost the same number of cases, also about one-
ninth, the head of the family is sixty years of age or
over. This is an arbitrary line to draw. In some,
though not many, of these families there are grown chil-
dren on whom has devolved the responsibility for the
support of the family, though the father or the mother
is still by courtesy regarded as its head; and in other
cases, not included here, the head of the family, though
not yet sixty, is really incapacitated by age; a man is
said to be "feeble” at fifty-four; a woman is "pre-
maturely old” at thirty-five. There is pathos in plenty
among this group. An old couple had been in a private
Home, but they were dissatisfied and unruly and found
[ 209]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
themselves in consequence in a worse state. A German
waiter of sixty-six, a widower without children so far
as the record shows, out of work, living in a furnished
room, had tried to commit suicide.
Next in order is one of the two remaining items which
suggest defect of character, one which practically without
exception does imply a very serious moral defect, what-
ever extenuating circumstances there may be. Thefour-
teen deserted men, the 499 deserted women, and the 93
additional cases with a record of previous desertion or per-
to twelve per cent of the total. Most of the deserting
husbands, so far as we know them, are of the type we
have learned to recognize —— young, able to work but
not inclined to, ease-loving, intemperate, and irre-
sponsible; they deserted small children generally, and
wives who as a rule have done their duty to the home
as far as their education and abilities permit. Our
sympathy may go with one man who left because his
wife had pawned clothes and furniture in order to give
money to a lodger, but this is an exceptional case.
Most of the husbands whose wives had left them were
of the same character as the ones who had themselves
deserted, the women having gone away after a long
1 Family Desertion. Published by the New York Charity
Organization Society, 1904.
[ 210]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
course of cruelty and abuse. Here, too, however, there
is an exception, in the woman who ran away with an- ·
other man, taking her baby with her.
In twelve per cent of the families, once more, there
was either well-established or suspected tuberculosis,
nine per cent of all the men of the families and four per
cent of the women being affected by it. This is prob-
ably an understatement, if all incipient tuberculosis
is considered, but it is grave enough as it stands.
The percentage jumps now from twelve to sixteen,
where we find the families who have been less than five
years in New York, and may therefore be under a dis-
advantage on account of lack of social or industrial
connections.
Just above, at seventeen percent, is the last
item which will be understood to reveal a defect of
character, and which is, as may have been anticipated,
intemperance. Exactly a thousand individuals, in 833
families, are described as intemperate. There are
nearly twice as many intemperate men as there are
intemperate women. Perhaps the full force of that
would be more apparent if I were to put it the other
way — that our records show half as many intemperate
women as intemperate men. It must be remembered,
however, that the habits of the departed male heads of
our widows' families are not taken into account in this
ni
[211]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
connection, that for the most part we do not know about
the habits of the departed deserters, and that unfor-
tunately we do not always know as much about the hus-
band as we know about the wife, even when he is in the
flesh and in the household, since he is very often gener-
ously willing that the wife should assume full respon-
sibility for the interviews and correspondence with
charitable, as with educational and religious, agencies.
So this particular percentage may need to be corrected.
I may go a step towards correcting it by adding that the
intemperate men are nineteen per cent of the male
heads of families, the intemperate women seven per cent
of all the women.
After intemperance we come to the disability which
has figured in tables of causes of poverty as “large
family.” In nineteen per cent of the families there
were more than three children under fourteen years of
age, that is, under working age; and although this is an
arbitrary number at which to draw the line of large
families, and although there may be a difference of
opinion as to whether it is a disability or an asset, still
it is true that each child under fourteen adds to the ex-
penses and not to the potential income of the family;
while on the other hand, our idea of a normal family
assumes that a man should be able to support at least
three children.
[212]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
There was acute illness or physical disability of a
temporary character, other than that due to accident or
childbirth, which have been mentioned separately, in
twenty per cent of the families. Pneumonia, bron-
chitis, measles, severe colds, all the common illnesses
and many uncommon ones, are found. Underfed
children and overworked women are also included here,
on the presumption that these troubles are ordinarily
curable in no great length of time, though the conse-
quences of continued underfeeding and overwork
may indeed be permanent. It must be remembered
that a trivial complaint, which in more fortunate fami-
lies may be something of a luxury, bringing a day of
unaccustomed rest to the adult and a delightful degree
of indulgence and importance to the child, may be of
serious consequence to the poor, involving not only loss
of income for the time of incapacity, but possibly also
loss of position.
Some chronic physical disability, other than tuber-
culosis or rheumatism, which have been enumerated
separately, was present in twenty-seven per cent:
paralysis, defective senses, constitutional lack of
strength, the “feebleness” of old age, deformities and
amputations, cancer, hernia, and other diseases which,
though not necessarily incurable, generally mean a long
period of at least partial incapacity. The classifica-
[213]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
tion would doubtless not bear examination from a
medical point of view, as its basis has been the probable
economic bearings of the disability. A few cases of
excessive corpulence are in the list. There is a deaf
mute among them; a hunchback living with a crippled
sister; a peddler of forty-seven who was deaf, blind,
and lame.
Widowhood is the disability which comes next in
order, affecting twenty-nine per cent of the cases, if both
widowers and widows be considered.
There remain only two of the twenty-five headings —
overcrowding and unemployment, the former involv-
ing over two thousand of the five thousand families, the
latter nearly thirty-five hundred.
(214)
IX
According to the very reasonable standard adopted
by the New York State Conference Committee on the
standard of living, by which more than one and a half
persons to a room is held to be overcrowding, forty-five
per cent of all the families about whom we know ex-
actly the facts on this point were living in an over-
crowded condition. At a time when so much attention
is rightly given to the manifold evils resulting from
overcrowding, it is of interest to dwell on this for a
moment. We have no measurements that indicate the
size of rooms, though most of us probably have suffi-
ciently clear impressions upon this point; but the rec-
ords do indicate the number of rooms, and we find
that of our five thousand families over seven hundred
were living in a single room, nearly nine hundred in
two rooms, about fifteen hundred in three rooms, one
thousand in four rooms, three hundred in five rooms,
one hundred and thirty-nine with relatives or friends,
and the eighty-two additional families concerning whom
this information is available were in apartments
[215]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
ranging from six to fourteen rooms. These facts are
shown in Diagram 14, in which the width of the column
represents the size of the apartment. The largest
number, as you will have noticed — about thirty per
cent of the whole -- were in three-room apartments.
It is, however, more illuminating to bring the number of
rooms into direct relation with the size of the family, by
asking how many of our families, according to an
arbitrary standard, were actually living in an over-
crowded condition. (Diagram 15.)
According to the standard we have adopted, we must
assume that none of our 539 single men and women,
each of whom has at least one room, is overcrowded,
while twenty-five per cent of the 867 families consisting
of two persons, often a man and wife or a mother and
child in a furnished room, are overcrowded. In the
case of these two groups, single persons living alone and
two persons in a furnished room, the standard is of com-
paratively little value. There are sufficiently serious
overcrowding is perhaps not especially conspicuous
among them. After we reach the families with three
members, however, we find a steady increase of over-
crowding, as is to be expected, with the increase in the
size of families, except that families of five members are
overcrowded in a larger proportion of instances than
[216]

1900
1400
1800
1800
1200
1200
1100
1000
1000
00
.
600
00
800
400
800
800
IT
100
1 ROOM 2 ROOM8 3 ROOM8 4 ROOMS 6 ROOM8 6 ROOM8 7 ROOMS
878 1492 1028 806 06
19

20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
DIAGRAM 14.
Number of fam-
HOUSEHOLDO
ilies occupying ***
apartments of 10-14 PERSONS
specified size.
O PERSONS
OF
1
.
8 PERSONS
17 PERSONS
UHU
6 PERSONS
6 PERSONS,
4 PERSONS .. i
Percentage of
overcrowding
in households of
specified size.
8 PERSONS ....
2 PERSONS.
I
20% 40%
80% 80% 2log
[217]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
families of six. Nearly all of the families with eight,
nine, or ten members are overcrowded according to our
standard, and all of those with more than this number,
with a single exception of a family of fourteen occupying
ten rooms.
The largest number of families, as I pointed out
a moment ago, are in three-room apartments. You
would expect this of the families in which there are only
two members, and perhaps, as is the case, of those in
actually a larger number of families in which there are
four persons in three-room apartments, and also a larger
number of families in which there are five persons in
three-room apartments, and also a larger number of
families in which there are six persons, and also a larger
number of families in which there are seven persons,
than in an apartment of any other size, may well seem
extraordinary. In other words, we have by no means
told the whole truth in showing that half the families
are overcrowded according to the standard of one and
one-half persons to each room. The 115 families of
seven members who are living in three-room apart-
ments would still be overcrowded even if the standard
were lowered to two persons per room. This would be
true also of the two hundred one-room families with
two members each, of the 148 one-room families with
[218]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
three members each, of the 60 one-room families with
four members each, of the 26 one-room families with
five members each, of the 15 one-room families with six
members each, and of the ten one-room families in
which, incredible as it seems, there were from seven to
ten members.
Apply your own standard, whatever it may be, in the
case of the two-room families. One hundred and forty-
four of them consisted of four individuals, 97 were
households of five, 76 of six, 27 of seven, 20 of eight,
five of nine, and one each were families of ten and of
eleven. It is interesting that just as the apartment
with three rooms is the prevailing type among our
families - thirty per cent of the whole — so the
household of three persons appears most frequently,
although it is less than twenty per cent of the whole,
the families being somewhat more evenly distributed
from one to fourteen than the number of rooms in
the apartments which they occupy.
So much for the bare facts about the extent of over-
crowding among the five thousand families who came
under our care. There is probably little need to dwell
upon its evils. Who does not know that overcrowding
inevitably means disease; that it means the undermin-
ing of physical vigor and energy; that when sickness
does come it means added discomfort and misery ?
[219]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
Even aside from specific illness and the peculiar hard-
ships incident to illness in a tenement, overcrowding
involves constant irritation and nervous tension which
is in itself a most intolerable evil. Overcrowding in the
tenements necessarily means overcrowding in halls and
stairways, in streets and schools, in trains and in street
cars, and in all public places. Overcrowding even in the
isolated home is an evil, but when those homes are in
tenements, and congestion to the acre accompanies
overcrowding in the home, the unmitigated, incalculable
evils of congestion become apparent.
Such congestion of population as we find in tene-
ments of Manhattan Island and the Bronx and as are
found also in Queens and Brooklyn, is one of the great
social maladjustments, for which the most extreme
individualist who knows anything whatever about the
conditions in modern cities will scarcely venture to hold
the individual who suffers primarily responsible. Tax
laws, transportation mismanagement, factory adminis-
tration, immigration laws, town planlessness, the
laissez-faire policy with reference to the location of the
factories, and inadequate building laws, are responsible
for this maladjustment between homes and people. If
we were discussing the misery of the recently arrived
Jews in New York, it might conceivably be suggested
that they should remain in Russia and defend them-
[ 220 ]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
selves against persecution rather than fly from it. If
we were discussing misery among the Italians, it might
conceivably be maintained that they should remain in
Italy, put into operation Malthusian checks upon
population, and reorganize their methods of production.
But, as you have seen, we are considering here, just now
at any rate, families in 34 per cent of which not only the
children, but the adult head of the family, was born in the
United States, families 75 per cent of which have lived
here at least long enough for the adult head of the fam-
ily to have become naturalized, and half of them for
more than twenty years, so that all the children under
voting age would have been born here. And it is of
these families that I am compelled to report that one-
half of them are actually living in an overcrowded con-
dition, according to the low standard of four rooms for
a family of six persons, and that, for example, 371
families with from four to eleven members each were
living in two-room apartments at the time of their appli-
cation for assistance within the two years covered by
this study.
The last item in the list is unemployment. In 3458
families, sixty-nine per cent of the five thousand, there
were 4424 wage earners out of work or only partially or
irregularly employed, including in this count those who
were unemployed on account of temporary illness or any
[ 221]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
other disability which had not permanently removed its
victim from the wage-earning class.
There is a difference in this item between the two
years which are covered by the study, the percentage
being 65 for the families applying in 1906–1907, and
72 for those applying in 1907–1908. The difference is
much less than would be expected, however, and rather
emphasizes the constancy of this adverse condition
than the difference in industrial conditions.
Mention is found in the records of some other
characteristics in addition to those which have been
classified under these twenty-five headings. A few
men and women are chloroform or opium eaters; a few
men and boys smoke cigarettes to excess; several men
are written down as “worthless" or "a weak character”;
several women are said to be “poor managers”; not a
few men and women are called extravagant, and on the
other hand one woman was a miser; one woman, only,
was said to be a gossip; one “left her bills unpaid,”
which is not wholly surprising; profane, obscene, and
other varieties of "bad" language are not infrequently
mentioned.
It is noteworthy that inefficiency is rarely recorded
definitely. Occasionally a man or a woman is described
as "incapable” or “unambitious,” and one woman, —
only one person in the five thousand families, - is
[ 222]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
characterized as “ignorant.” Yet the impression with
which we come to the end of a survey of these families
is that the average of economic efficiency is low, whether
it is due to physical disability, deficiency in character, a
low grade of intelligence, or inadequate education.
[ 223 ]
X
If all the percentages which I have given for these
twenty-five adverse conditions were added together, the
sum would be something like 350; that is to say, they
do not occur singly, as a rule, but there are three or four
to each family. To see the combinations in which they
occur, the twenty-five classes have been reduced to eight,
the conditions in a thousand families who applied for the
first time in the year 1906–1907, a normal year in the
way of industrial conditions, have been analyzed on that
basis, and their concurrence noted.
Unemployment, overcrowding, recent arrival in New
York, large family, and old age of the head of the
family, are retained as separate classifications.
Widowhood and desertion are combined; the seven
headings which indicate physical disability, and the ten
which express or suggest some defect of character, have
each been combined into one. Arranging these eight
disabilities then in the order of their prevalence we find
(Diagram 16) that, in a thousand families, there is some
kind of physical disability in 764, several kinds in some;
that persons ordinarily wage earners are idle in 669; that
[ 224]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
there is some defect of character in 425; widowhood or
desertion in 387; overcrowding in 324;1 comparative
strangeness to the environment in 182; more than three
children under fourteen in 169; and incapacity due to
old age in 120.

Physical disability
Unemployment
Defect of character
Widowbood and
desertion
Overcrowding
Recent arrival inN.Y.
Large family
Hold age
1200
1400
600
1800
DIAGRAM 16. Principal disabilities present in 1000 families; number
of families in which each one occurred.
"Defect of character” has been interpreted very
broadly in order that there might be no ground for
inferring that its full weight was not being given.
Every family in which there was a wayward child,
1 A smaller percentage than is given in the preceding table,
because of the cases in which definite information on this
point was not contained in the records.
[225]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
or a woman with a bad temper or a disposition to
beg, or any one who was lazy, has been counted
in, though in many of these cases there may be
physiological or external reasons for what seem
to be faults. In every case of desertion it has been
assumed that something was wrong with the character
of the deserter, even when nothing definite is known
except the fact of desertion, and that this is an element
in the family's present situation, even when the offender
himself no longer is. Every unmarried couple also is
included. Even with this rigorous interpretation of
the term, however, we find that defect of character
sufficiently noticeable to be recorded is present, to our
knowledge, in only a little over two-fifths of all the
cases, while over three-fourths of them are physically
or mentally handicapped, in some way or in numerous
ways, at the time of application.
In studying the coincidence of these eight principal dis-
abilities, let us consider first merely the number of them
found in each family. There are nine families among
the thousand in which none of the eight is discovered
and 69 in which there is only one. In 244, about a
quarter, some two of the eight are found in combina-
tion; in 338, a third of all, there are three; in 247,
again a quarter, there are four; in 79, five; in twelve,
six; and finally, in two heavily burdened families, all
[ 226]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
I
but one of the eight. There is none with all eight,
because the last two of the conditions are practically
mutually exclusive. Two-thirds of these families pre-
sent at least three of these conditions which we call
adverse because any one of them may be, has frequently
been held to be, the cause of dependence.
Let us now examine the coincidence of the eight
disabilities, considering them first as if personified,
each given an entity of its own apart from the family
to which it belongs. (Table on page 228.) A large
family of small children and old age, as I have intimated,
are not found alone or in combination with each other:
but each of the other disabilities appears in combina-
tion with each of the eight and these two appear with
each of the other six.
Physical disability and widowhood are more apt to be
alone than any of the others, but only four per cent of
all the cases of each is unattended by any of the other
troubles; a short residence in the city and defect of
character appear alone in only two per cent of all the
cases of each; lack of work in less than two; and over-
crowding in less than one per cent.
Physical disability accompanies eighty-five per cent
of the cases of old age. It is found in connection
with eighty-two per cent of the families where there
is lack of work, while moral defect accompanies only
[ 227]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES

. Combinations of the principal disabilities in one thousand dependent
families in New York City
PEROENTAGE OF OABES IN WHICH EACH DISABILITY
JB AOCOMPANIED BY
DISABILITIES
NUMBER OF OASES
IN WHICH EACH
DISABILITY APPEABO
PAYSIOAL OR
MENTAL DISABILITY
APPEARS
ALONE
UNEMPLOY-
MENT
DEFECT OF
CHARACTER
WIDOWROOD
OR DESERTION
OVER-
OBOWDING
RECENT ARRIVAL
IN NEW YORK
CITY
MORE THAN
THREE CHILDREN
UNDER 14
OLD AGE OF HEAD
OF FAMILY
764
3.6
39.4
1.6
1. Physical or mental disability ..
2. Unemployment ....... 669
3. Defect of character ..... 425
4. Widowhood or desertion .... 387
5. Overcrowding ........ 324
6. Recent arrival in New York City
7. More than three children under 14 | 169
8. Old age of head of family ... 120
2.1
3.6
0.9
82.1
41.7
72.2 65.6
66.7 49.4 49.9
78.1 69.1 43.8
69.8 67.0 38.5
78.1 |
65.1 43.2
| 85.0 67.5 | 22.5
|
33.0 32.3 16.6 17.3 | 13.3
| 28.5 33.5 18.2 16.4 12.1
45.4 33.4 16.5 17.2 6.4
25.1 | 16.0 ( 10.9 | 15.2
29.9
22.5 | 36.4 | 4.0
34.1 40.1
12.6 | 10.4
24.8 | 69.8 | 13.6.
-0.0
49.2 10.8 | 10.8 0.0
182
0.0
0.0
-.
[228]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
:
forty-two per cent. In seventy-two per cent of
the families displaying defect of character there is
physical disability also. Defect of character accom-
panies widowhood (separated for this purpose from
desertion) and old age least often; it accompanies
overcrowding and a large family most frequently.
Overcrowding is naturally most conspicuous in con-
nection with large families, and after that in connection
with the newcomers to the city; it is least among the
widows and the aged, who are not infrequently single
individuals living alone, or with friends, so that their
real condition is not known. Overcrowding is itself
accompanied by physical disability in seventy-eight
per cent of all the instances in which it occurs; by lack
of work in sixty-nine per cent; by defect of character in
forty-four per cent.
[ 229]
Let us now suppose the thousand families standing
in a long row before us, their disabilities plainly marked
on them - more plainly than they ever would be in the
flesh — and all their good qualities and their favorable
circumstances blotted out, because these do not help to
account for their poverty: what appearance would
they represent ?
The large diagram opposite this page is an attempt
to answer that question. The thousand families stand
before us in five rows, each one in a narrow column
assigned to it. The eight disabilities are pictured
wherever they occur, each one in its own place in the
column. Physical and mental disability, which occurs
in the largest number of families, is represented at the
bottom of the column; unemployment has the space
next above; defect of character next; widowhood and
desertion fourth, going on up the column; then over-
crowding, short residence in New York, numerous
children, and old age, in the order named. The rela-
tive amount of shading in the different positions gives
[ 230]

8. OLD AGE
7. LARGE FAMILY
6. BRIEF RESIDENCE IN NEW YORK CITY
8. OVERCROWDING
4. WIDOWHOOD OR DESERTION
3. DEFECT OF CHARACTER
2. UNEMPLOYMENT
1. PHYSICAL OR MENTAL DISABILITY
8 FAMILIES
SHOWED
NONE OF
THE 8
DISABILITIES
8. OLD AGE
7. LARGE FAMILY
6. BRIEF RESIDENCE IN NEW YORK CITY
6. OVERCROWDING
4. WIDOWHOOD OR DESERTION
3. DEFECT OF CHARACTER
2. UNEMPLOYMENT
1. PHYSICAL OR MENTAL DISABILITY
28 FAMILIES
SHOWED ONLY NO. 1
11 SHOWED
ONLY NO. 2
ONLY
NO. 2
14
ONLY NO. 4
a ONLY NO. SO
4 ONLY NO. 6
NO
NO COA a ovo
and NW A o od
-
90 FAMILIEB SHOWED BOTH NO. 1 AND NO. 2
6
4
6
7 1
69 14
NO. 2 AND NO. 3
2
3
24
34
NO. 1.AND NO. 4
3712 6
4
3 2
NO. 1 AND NO. 8
NO. 21
AND
NO. 3 AND NO. 4
NW online movo
manzana na
a
70 FAMILIES SHOWED NO. 1, NO. 2, AND NO. 8
0
2
5
3
2
3
3
2
6
4
3 1
4
6
112 3 3 1
33
NO. 1, NO. 2, AND NO. 4
86
NO. 1, NO. 2, AND NO. 6
22
NO. 1, NO. 2,
AND NO. 6
10
NO. 1, NO. 2,
AND NO. 7
2E
NO. 1, NO. 8,
AND NO. 8
26
NO. 1, NO. 3,
AND NO. 4
31 10
NO. 1,
NO. 4,
AND NO. 6
13 3
NO. 1, NO. 4,
AHD NO. 8
11 2 12
NO. 1, NO. 6, NO. 2, NO. 3,
AND NO. 7 AND NO. 4
WAS
HWINDIR
88 FAMILIES SHOWED NO. 1,
NO. 2, NO. 3, AND NO. 4
8
7
4
6
4 14
8
8
3
2 6
4 11
28
NO. 1, NO.2, NO. 3,
AND NO. 6
10
11
NO. 1, NO. 1, NO. 2,
NO.2, NO. 3,
NO. 3, AND NO. 7
AND NO, 6
18
NO. 1, NO. 2,
NO. 4, AND NO. 8
20
NO. 1, NO. 2,
NO. 6, AND NO. 6
8. OLD AGE
7. LARGE FAMILY
6. BRIEF RESIDENCE IN NEW YORK CITY
6. OVERCROWDING
4. WIDOWHOOD OR DESERTION
8. DEFECT OF CHARACTER
2. UNEMPLOYMENT
1. PHYSICAL OR MENTAL DISABILITY
7
1
4
111 2 2
7
21 6
22
NO. 1, NO. 8,
NO. 9, NO. 6,
AND NO. 1
3 214 221121,3 6
27
NO. 1, NO. 2,
NO. 8, AND NO. 7
8. OLO AGE
7. LARGE FAMILY
6. BRIEF RESIDENCE IN NEW YORK CITY
5. OVERCROWDING
4. WIDOWHOOD OR DESERTION
3. DEFECT OF CHARACTER
2. UNEMPLOYMENT
1. PHYSICAL OR MENTAL DISABILITY
$
3 11
2 SHOWED 7
14
NO. 1, NO. 2,
NO. 3, NO. 4,
AND NO. 8
SHOWED 6
DIAGRAM 17. Combinations of the eight principal disabilities in one thousand dependent families in New York City.
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
an impression of the relative predominance of the eight
disabilities. They are combined in 126 different ways.
The families are classified in these rows according
to the number of disabilities they show. In the tier at
the top are placed, at the left, the nine who are not
marked with any of these eight disabilities, though they
may be just above the line of some of them. Next to
them stand the 69 families whose troubles, accord-
ing to this analysis, are simple. It will be noticed
that physical disability is the trouble that is found most
frequently alone, and widowhood next. There are no
cases of desertion here because it is assumed that all
of them are accompanied by defect of character. It
is evident also that neither a large number of small
children nor old age of the head of the family is found
alone in any case, and this presents the temptation to
draw the inference that neither one of these is by itself
an insuperable cause of poverty.
The next group of families, in the tier below, those
who present two disabilities, begins with a long row of
90 families in which there is both illness and lack
of work. A combination of physical and moral defect
is shown in a small group of eleven, followed by another
long line, of thirty-four, of physical disability combined
with widowhood or desertion. The only other con-
spicuous groups among the twenty-two varieties of com-
3
[ 231 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
binations of two disabilities are defect of character
combined with unemployment, in fourteen cases, and
with widowhood or desertion (chiefly, as a matter of
fact, with desertion) in twenty-four.
Coming to the families showing three disabilities,
in the middle row, we begin with another long line of
seventy, combining physical or mental disability, lack
of work, and defect of character. The other conspicu-
ous threefold combinations are physical disability and
unemployment with overcrowding, with widowhood,
with old age, with recent arrival in the city, and the first
named with moral defect and widowhood or desertion,
number four representing here again chiefly desertion.
Passing down the line, with only a panoramic glimpse of
the 130 families who have three of the disabilities in thirty
other combinations, we reach the 247 families, in the
row below, in which four are found. There are thirty-
six different combinations among them also, the most
conspicuous being physical disability, lack of work,
moral defect, and widowhood or desertion; the first
three and overcrowding; the first two, overcrowding,
and large family; the first two, overcrowding, and short
residence in the city.
The 79 families in the bottom row who are handi-
capped by five of the eight disabilities present
eighteen different combinations, the most important
[ 232]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
ULI
being numbers one, two, and three, with overcrowding
and a large family, and numbers one, two, three, four,
and five.
At the end of this row are twelve families who have
all but two of their disability spaces filled up; and
finally one family with all of the difficulties except old
age, and one with all except an unusual number of
small children.
I think this attempt to picture the adverse conditions
in a thousand families must have made clear, in the
first place, how complex a thing poverty is; how im-
possible it is ordinarily, in any one family, to know
what is really responsible for the economic difficulties; •
how unnecessary it is to try, since the full force of the
various adverse conditions and their relations one to
another are expressed with more truth by enumerating
them all than by selecting one in each case, or even two,
and suppressing the others.
In the second place, I hope that the faithful represen-
tation of the various adverse conditions just as they
have been found in these families has created a true
image of their relative importance which, when placed
against the background of impressions gained through
long experience, will give a sound basis for social action.
[ 233 ]
XII
nefficiency to what
can be overcome dily to tabu-
The picture is encouraging. The ignorance and
inefficiency to which district agents bear testimony is,
I repeat, an evil which can be overcome. These other
troubles, which lend themselves more readily to tabu-
lation, are no more hopeless.
Physical and mental disability can be cured or im-
proved, or prevented. The labor market can be better
managed and the number of the unemployable can be
reduced. The disastrous economic consequences of
widowhood can be largely obviated by a proper system
of insurance, and the amount of it can be greatly de-
creased by reducing to a minimum the premature deaths
in middle age from disease and accident. It can be
made difficult for a man to evade the responsibility for
supporting his family, and the disposition to do so can
be diminished by the proper education of boys to a
sense of responsibility and of girls to domestic efficiency.
Overcrowding can be lessened. The number of
strangers unfitted to cope with city life can be cut down
by encouraging some would-be emigrants to remain
in Europe, by facilitating the distribution to other parts
[234]
THE ADVERSE CONDITIONS
of the country of the immigrants who do come, and by
keeping on the farms and in small towns those native
Americans who are better off there. The level of in-
dustrial efficiency of men can be raised and the domes-
tic efficiency of women can be enhanced until the rais-
ing of four or five children will not be too great an
economic burden for the average man. And finally,
old age need not be unprovided for.
Defects of character, it is true, may not yield to the
same direct frontal attack. But they will in part dis-
appear as an indirect result of the other changes, and
in part they will cease to be the controlling factor in the
family's economic condition. The road from vice, in the
language which I have already quoted, is the road to
complete development, and that is the road of educa-
tion and of opportunity. Defects of character will
remain after all our efforts, but they will be reduced to
manageable proportions and they will not defy social
control. Subjected to discipline they will less often
injure others besides their possessors, whose incom-
plete development they indicate. Our supreme aim
is to strengthen character. It is as means to this end
that we covet for the poor better conditions of industry,
fewer burdens, higher standards, safer homes, a larger
life.
[235]
PM
4
TS
14
CHAPTER VI
THE JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF THE
FUTURE
MT|HE subject of this lecture is intended to suggest not
1 a contrast, but a union. The future to which it
refers is not a distant Utopia, but that immediate future
which is of direct personal concern to this generation.
I have tried to paint as I see them the actual conditions
which here in our own communities are producing misery.
I have sought to describe them clearly, concretely, un-
conventionally, without distortion or exaggeration, with-
out apology or defence. I have used illustrations drawn
from experiences in New York freely, although not
exclusively, but if my analysis is correct, it applies with
scarcely any modification to almost any American com-
munity, to any community in which the essential
economic conditions of prosperity are present, in
which there is a free surplus to be applied to com-
munity problems, in which free political institutions are
at work, that is to say, the courts independent and im-
partial, the legislature representative and responsive to
public opinion, the municipal and state administration
efficient and honest. These terms are relative and we
apply them with due reservations. Yet after all they
are
[ 239]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
do apply increasingly. They tend to be true of all our
American communities, and we are constrained, even
as we seek to make them more nearly applicable, to pro-
ceed upon the assumption that our political institutions
really are performing their natural functions, that we
are industrially producing a surplus and not using up
our capital, and that we do have therefore the basis for
a sound and progressive social policy.
I have described conditions which at very many vital
points do not square with our sense of justice, and which
would be sufficient cause for grave concern even if we
considered them solely from the point of view of the
continuance of that degree of general prosperity and
welfare on which the individual prosperity and welfare
of the mightiest and shrewdest among us depend.
What I wish now to do is to bring home simply, and
again without exaggeration or undue reserve, the fact
of social responsibility. If there is preventable misery
here in New York and in other American communities,
there is personal responsibility which it behooves us to
attempt to place, or, if you like, to shoulder.
[240]
I venture once more to recapitulate the causes of
misery, this time by the positive method of attempting
to enumerate certain of the essential conditions of an
ideal, or normal, community, using that phrase "ideal
community” not in an absolute, but in a relative sense,
incorporating only those conceptions which by common
consent may be realized by reasonable effort and a mod-
erate exercise of rational social control.
Of such essential conditions I name first a sound
physical heredity. Degenerate offspring of feeble-
minded, alcoholic, or syphilitic parents come into the
world with a just grievance against society. Their
birth is inexcusable. All that happens to them sub-
sequently and to others because of them is purely
gratuitous misery. Custodial or probationary care of
those who are demonstrably physically unfit to become
the parents of normal children is a policy to which we
are already committed in some degree and the full
adoption of which would probably do more than any
other one thing to eliminate pauperism, degeneracy,
and congenital criminality. Supplementing that, the
[ 241 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
protection of workingwomen in the weeks preceding
childbirth, the abolition of working conditions which
use up the vitality of girls before marriage, and the
education of boys and girls to physical as well as moral
fitness for fatherhood and motherhood, are obvious and
practicable measures by which the proportion of well-
born children may be increased.
We cannot adopt the policy of segregation in full,
for there is a wide border-land in which the hardships
and injustice of interference might well outweigh the
gain. Research and experiment are essential here,
conducted, of course, like other experiments, in surgery,
medicine, and sanitation, with due regard to personal
rights, with full appreciation of the sanctity of life,
prosecuted mainly at the outset by the method of trac-
ing out the immediate ancestry and the hereditary
legacies of those who present themselves as candidates
for public support or for discipline, but leading to defi-
nite policies for reducing the number of such births
as are certain to result in misery, and increasing the
relative number of such births as may at least lead to
useful and happy lives.
Next after a sound heredity, I name as an essential
condition of a normal community, protected childhood.
The long struggle of the ages for a protected childhood
is, like that for the conquest of disease, one of the most
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JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
fascinating and extraordinary stories in the history of
civilization. Protection has been required first from
actual exposure and abandonment, then from death by
neglect, in orphanage or on the failure of parents in
ability to care for their offspring, then from actual
those into whose power the child may happen to have
come, then from exploitation by employment for wages
in the tender years of childhood. Corresponding to
these stages in the development of a higher humanity
on the mere physical side there have come into being
alongside the family, which is of course the fundamental
social institution for the protection of childhood, the
school, the orphan asylum, the foster home, the humane
society, the child labor committee, resulting in the
series of enactments in penal code, in factory act,
and now, for example, in England in the general act
known as the Children's Charter. Elementary schools
have come to be the great bulwark of childhood,
supplementing the home and the church, reaching
ou', imperatively for the child who would other-
wise be in the factory, giving to health authorities an
opening for universal and constructive oversight of in-
fectious diseases and remediable physical defects, and
insuring a certain amount of sympathetic interest for
the child in his times of trial and danger. Just now the
[ 243 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
paramount issues in the never ending endeavor to secure
for childhood a more perfect protection centre in the
concerted effort to prevent premature employment in
wage-earning occupations, and in the complementary
effort to keep children in school. The complete elimi-
nation of child labor from mills, factories, mines, and
street trades is thus the particular aspect of this prob-
lem which is of most vital concern to society at the
present moment, but it is typical of many others affect-
ing both health and morals. The ideal which we place
before us is a protected childhood, extending to the
relation of motherhood and infancy, through the critical
adolescence where wise protection is so sorely needed,
and as nearly as may be insuring not merely life, but
normal, wholesome development both of soul and of
body.
The third condition of our ideal community, upon
which I think we may rationally insist, is a prolonged
working period for both women and men. I dare not
set limits, but surely it is reasonable that the conditions
of industry and of home life shall be such that workers
shall not be worn out and thrown upon the scrap heap
before even the eldest of the children are ready to step
into the vacant places. If there can be an overlapping
of twenty years and more between the coming of age of
the son and the retirement of the father, then there is
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JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
an opportunity for family prosperity to reach and main-
tain a high level in this period; there is an opportunity
for savings, and for the strengthening of the family to the
third and fourth generation. The fall in the death-rate,
the conquest of infectious diseases, the lessening of the
danger of death or injury from industrial accidents, the
increase of occupational mobility, a more careful selec-
tion of trades with reference to special fitness, and, though
it may seem paradoxical, the cutting off of some of the
working years at the beginning of the period, postpon-
ing wage-earning until the physical system is hardened
and fit for the strain of it, have all a tendency to pro-
long the effective working period.
A fourth condition of a normal community is freedom
from preventable disease. There is no need to dwell
upon this consummation, so devoutly to be wished on
its own account, so inseparably connected with almost
every other kind of progress, so directly within possible
social control, so sadly neglected, notwithstanding much
agitation and notwithstanding many expensive demon-
strations, so certainly a matter for national, state, and
municipal action, for voluntary coöperation in educa-
tional and relief measures, and above all for the fullest
exercise of the principle of individual initiative and
responsibility.
A fifth condition of our normal community is free-
[245]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
dom from professional crime. I do not lay it down that
crimes of passion or crimes resulting from new social
adjustments shall totally disappear, though they may
certainly be reduced. What I have in mind is that we
shall learn in time how to protect society from the ex-
pense and danger of having at large in the community a
class of well-known and easily identified criminals
whom we try and convict and sentence from time to
time, but whom we do not reform and do not outlaw.
In one stage of civilization, the good shut themselves in
their homes and try with locks and bars to protect their
possessions from the depredations of the bad, whom
they leave in undisputed possession of the highways.
Later it occurs to them to find out whether they cannot
shut up the robbers, and enjoy for themselves the
freedom of the realm. There may be a still higher
stage in which the bad become good, and the prisons,
like the castles, may be torn down, but until that time
comes it is firmly to be insisted that the second stage is
higher than the first and that we have scarcely yet at-
'tained it. The ideal community will indeed reform
the prison and jail, but it will not tolerate a recognized
class of professional criminals, vagrants, thieves, cadets,
procurers, or black-hand murderers, and the streets will
be as safe as the firesides.
A sixth condition of our community is that there will
•11
[ 246]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
be some general system of insurance against all of the
ordinary contingencies which now cause dependence or
a sudden extreme lowering of the standard of living.
Death, old age, accident, sickness, and unemployment
are the principal contingencies of this kind. I am not
prepared to say that this insurance should be govern-
mental. Loss of property by fire is a risk against which
there has come to be an all but universal insurance by
private contract on a commercial basis. Life insurance
as a private business enterprise has also attained enor-
mous proportions, although, as we now recognize, at
disproportionally heavy expense to the insured because
of the use of obsolete mortality tables and the accu-
mulation of deferred dividends.
The other risks are only in very small part covered
by any plan, and we have not enough experience to in-
dicate whether they are such as can be met by new forms
of fraternal or commercial insurance. Several hopeful
experiments are in progress. It would appear to be in
harmony with our national instincts and preferences to
work out the problem on the basis of private initiative,
and it will perh ps be fortunate if the government is
not called upon to organize and administer à com-
plicated and delicate insurance scheme. Yet in some
way it must be worked out. Indemnity has a better
sound than relief. It is more democratic, more business-
[ 247]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
like, more just. You cannot pay for charity from the
day's wages, but you can pay for indemnity, and where
the risk rests upon a divided responsibility, as in the
matter of accidents and industrial disease, you can divide
the payment. Employers and employees can unite to
make up an insurance fund and both will have an in-
terest in keeping to a minimum the demands upon it.
I am not now making a social programme in detail; I
merely indicate that one of the essential conditions of
any community which is to satisfy our most rudimentary
sense of justice is provision for indemnity rather than
public relief for disabled workingmen and for their
families on the death of the wage earner, --- distributing
these losses so that they will not fall as they do now in
our American system — or rather in our American
chaos — chiefly on women and children and disabled
men.
A seventh condition upon which I would insist is that
the prevailing system of elementary education shall be
adapted to present-day needs and resources, freed from
new ideal — the ideal of an education for rational living,
both on the occupational side and with reference to the
use which we are to make of the incomes which we earn.
The education of girls presents distinct problems, quite
as worthy of the best intellects in the educational
[ 248]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
world as those which arise in the education of boys.
We must break into the rigidity of the school system
so far as to take account definitely of the physiological
differences between the sexes. Vocational training –
industrial, commercial, and domestic — will be under-
taken seriously in our ideal community.
An eighth feature of the ideal community will be a
liberal relief system. This demand sufficiently differ-
entiates our merely relatively ideal community from the
visionary Utopias of the philosophers. We shall need
relief in our community, if for no other reason, because
we do not contemplate a static society, in which every
individual is definitely placed and in which he may cal-
culate precisely what will happen to him. We contem-
plate a progressive society, with all the infinite variety
of influences at work that we know to have been at work
in the past, that even now mould our immediate future
in lines that we cannot foresee. Let sanitation, educa-
tion, insurance, and all the other social forces work to-
gether in the most complete harmony, there will still
arise from time to time, if society is making new dis-
coveries and new advances, meeting new obstacles and
developing new tendencies, a need for helping individ-
uals and families to make new adjustments. There
will still be individual failures that should be dealt
with on the basis of personal consideration involving
SO
[ 249]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
accurate knowledge of personal circumstances, and
special safeguards appropriate to personal weaknesses
and peculiarities. However organized and adminis-
tered, this is relief, not insurance or compensation, or
education in the ordinary sense. I would shrink from
the consequences of establishing a community, if I
could, in which there was no provision for charity.
A ninth condition, like several of those which we have
already discussed, would come not primarily through
legislation, but it would come nevertheless, or our com-
munity would not deserve to be called even relatively
ideal. There would be a standard of living high enough
to insure full nourishment, reasonable recreation,
shelter — not only from cold and rain and heat, but
from darkness and overcrowding and indecency-and
such other elementary necessities as were found in New
York by the committee of the state conference which
investigated the subject to cost for a family of five per-
sons not less than eight hundred and ordinarily nine
hundred dollars a year. Naturally the full realization of
our earlier conditions would help to secure this one, but
it conduces to a clearer understanding of the matter to
name explicitly a normal standard of living as a part of
that ideal towards which we press forward through
legislation, education, relief, and by whatever other
routes we may find it good to travel.
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JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
The final condition of our ideal community, which I
name not lightly, nor yet with misgiving, is religion.
Even in our imperfect world we have the redeeming and
purifying influence of religion. It is the greatest thing
in the world, but it is not yet social. Saints and martyrs
there have been and are. Do you remember the lines
in which Richard Burton in the Independent some
years ago described the modern saint ?
“No monkish garb he wears, no beads he tells,
Nor is immured in walls remote from strife,
But from his heart deep mercy ever wells;
He looks humanely forth on human life.
"In place of missals or of altar dreams,
He cons the passioned book of deeds and days;
Striving to cast the comforting sweet beams
Of charity on dark and noisome ways.
“Not hedged about by sacerdotal rule,
He walks a fellow of the scarred and weak;
Liberal and wise his gifts; he goes to school
To Justice; and he turns the other cheek.
ry
“He looks not holy; simple is his belief;
His creed, for mystic visions, do not scan;
His face shows lines cut there by others' grief,
And in his eyes is love of brother-man.
[251]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
“Not self nor self-salvation is his care;
He yearns to make the world a sunnier clime
To live in; and his mission everywhere
Is strangely like the Christ's in olden time.
“No mediæval mystery, no crowned
Dim figure halo-ringed, uncanny bright;
A modern saint! A man who treads earth's ground
And ministers to men with all his might.”
It was not, I suppose, the poet's idea to disparage
the mediæval saints, or those earlier holy visions of
purity and charity best embodied in monasticism. That
life had its virtues and its justifications in conditions
that have passed, and it is no part of our present task to
review them. But certainly the modern times call for
such men as Burton describes, who tread earth's ground
and minister to men with all their might.
But the individual saint, even the modern saint multi-
plied indefinitely, does not make a religious community.
For that it is essential that those who have the religious
spirit shall have the social spirit as well. It is not
enough for them to minister to men with all their might;
they must have a clear conception of what the things are
that cause the misery of men, what the influences are
that are producing degeneracy, where the maladjust-
ments are, and how to readjust the anti-social elements.
[ 252]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
Dr. Dickinson S. Miller defines religion as “the power
of the holy spirit gained in prayer.” 1 Spiritual power,
however gained, directed towards the social causes of
misery, I deem to be a very essential feature of our
ideal community.
1 Address delivered at Union Settlement on February 12, 1909.
[253]
III
Sound heredity; protected childhood; a prolonged
working age; freedom from preventable disease and
from professional crime; indemnity against the economic
losses occasioned by death, accident, illness, and com-
pulsory idleness; rational education; charity; normal
standards of living and a social religion, — these surely
are not unreasonable demands. I hope one day to see
them incorporated in a political platform. They are
not fantastic, sentimental, visionary. They are not of
doubtful value. They are all in line of proved and
attainable ambitions. If this is so, then the gradual
disappearance of misery is no quixotic ideal. The
embodiments of misery — suicide, criminal, outcast,
insane, feeble-minded, diseased, overcrowded, over-
worked, friendless — all are perpetuated and multiplied
by these conditions which our normal community would
have brought measurably under control. No revolu-
* See an article by Prof. Simon N. Patten in The Survey,
April 3, 1909, on The Principles of Economic Interference.
Dr. Patten holds that “the economist must stand in the front
ranks of those who are moulding public opinion along these
lines."
[254]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
tionary principle need be invoked to compass these ends.
We have already devised, if not perfected, a social
mechanism, including legislation, courts of justice, busi-
ness and industry, religion, education, philanthropy,
fraternal organization, labor union, and other economic
and social institutions which I believe to be fully equal
to the task of establishing a more perfect justice and
diffusing among all classes the benefits of prosperity.
What is needed is that every man from the highest to the
lowest shall become aware of the natural, the inevitable
consequences of his acts, that the responsibility, for
example, of the individual law-maker, law enforcer, and
law interpreter shall be brought home by such full and
authoritative information in regard to the matters of
may understand, as they have not understood, what
really happens as a result of their vote, their routine
administration, or their decision.
A court of appeals, in order to relieve a single power-
ful society from unwelcome official inspection, distorts
the perfectly plain meaning of a constitutional provision
and a legislative enactment designed to carry it into
effect, by arguments which the chief justice feels con-
strained to disavow, though he adds his necessary vote.
As a result of that decision a large number of charitable
institutions and societies that had neither sought nor
[ 255]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
desired such exemption, are withdrawn from the in-
spection and supervision which would have protected
their inmates, and abuses exist which the state might
have asserted -- I go farther and say that, so far as a
constitutional provision could accomplish it, actually
had asserted — its right to prevent. A supreme court
is called upon to determine the constitutionality of a
statute limiting the hours of labor of women, and rather
to the surprise of everybody, they decide that this is
within the police power of the state. Why do they so
decide? Because a public-spirited lawyer and a private
society at the opposite side of the continent from that
in which the case had its origin had taken the trouble to
collect and prepare for effective presentation to the
court a mass of evidence concerning the hardships and
injuries resulting from the operation of the principle of
free contract in the particular industry in question.
Courts cannot forever, even if they have the inclination,
prevent the expression of the public will through legis-
lation. Abraham Lincoln may not have been a great
constitutional lawyer, but he was the great rectifier of
the greatest of all our maladjustments, and he said that
if the policy of the government upon vital questions
affecting the whole people were to be irrevocably fixed
by decisions of the Supreme Court, the people would
have ceased to be their own rulers. The decision
[ 256 ]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
in the Oregon case indicates that the courts have not
always the will to invalidate such legislation even if,
temporarily at least, they have the power. It would be
a very dangerous thing for the idea to become definitely
crystallized that the courts are wilfully and determinedly
anti-social in their traditions and inclinations. They
have unfortunately given some color to this idea, but I
believe that it has been mainly from lack of specific in-
formation and not from class interest or corruption.
Learned in the law, the judges are assumed to be; ac-
quainted with previous controlling decisions and with
the development of the principles upon which those de-
cisions rest, they are; but just as familiarity with the
manner in which business is conducted is necessary in
order to decide intricate questions relating to contracts
and fraud, just as familiarity with maritime practice
is necessary in an admiralty court, so when it comes to
ruling on questions affecting social welfare, such as those
relating to insanitary tenements, prohibition of child
labor, and compensation for accidents, there is a body
of definite knowledge with which courts as well as legis-
latures must become familiar. The New York tene-
ment-house law has been upheld at every point, for the
reason that from this point of view the cases were prop-
erly prepared. Do not imagine that there were no
plausible grounds on which it might have been declared
[ 257]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
unconstitutional. But the facts about the iniquity of
the school sinks and the unlighted rooms were in evi-
dence, and the law stands. I would be sorry for the
judge who had to reside in the city of New York after
having decided that it was not within the power of the
legislature of the state of New York to put an end to the
dumb-bell tenement. The reason why it would be un-
comfortable to make such a decision, notwithstanding
the fact that many other decisions which are on all fours
with it have been made, is that on this particular sub-
ject there has been a long-continued and effective cam-
paign of education. My expectation is that with fuller
knowledge on other questions there will come a cor-
responding enlargement of the sphere of legitimate
public control, with the complete sanction and full
support of the courts. It is fortunate on the whole that
legislation on these subjects cannot proceed too rapidly,
or too far in advance of such investigation and education.
Responsibility rests, however, not alone upon the state
and upon those who enact and administer its laws. A
friend of mine is constantly urging the enormous ad-
vantage which would be gained by the publication of
even a single daily newspaper which would edit its
news and write its editorials from a social point of view.
If even murders, suicides, divorces, labor disputes, and
other matters which now occupy so large a part of the
( 258 ]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
entire space set apart for news, were given their ap-
propriate social setting, they would not merely be' more
edifying — that is a point which my friend does not
insist upon — but they would be vastly more interesting.
Such editing would certainly increase the circulation of
any newspaper which first catches the trick of it. To
interpret events of public interest from the social point
of view, in such a way as to enhance their news value,
to discover their significance in relation to the common
welfare, requires, however, a certain training, a familiar-
ity, like that which we have already found to be useful for
law-makers and judges, with a body of knowledge
about living and working conditions which is only slowly,
though at certain points now more rapidly, coming into
available form. The editor who sets his reporters at
finding out absurdly irrelevant details about a murder,
when it has perhaps a profound social significance
awaiting the slightest inquiry in the right direction, is
missing his opportunity, both from the commercial and
from the educational standpoint. The daily press has
frequently undertaken enterprises for the public good. It
uses its great influence for schools and parks, for hсalth
and morals, for justice and prosperity. No fault can be
found with the public spirit of journalists as a class.
With them, as with the judges, the frequent failure to
take the new view of things, the sound view, is not from
[259]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES -
inclination, from narrow class prejudice, or from venal
subservience to some special interest. It is rather from
lack of acquaintance with what is after all a specialized
body of knowledge. This is not wholly to their dis-
credit. It is partly the fault of social workers who have
not been able to make themselves articulate, who have
not been able on their part to interpret their experiences
and observations, or who, when they have done so, have
not brought these results directly to the attention of
newspaper men who would have been glad to get them.
All this, however, is changing with great rapidity. A
normal newspaper, in a normal community, will be one
which will identify two classes of news: one private,
accidental, of no social importance, and therefore not to
be printed; the other public, social, significant, and
therefore to be published, interpreted, given its natural
and appropriate setting, and reduced or expanded to its
due proportions.
Not less than upon legislators, judges, and editors,
perhaps even more directly than upon any of these,
there rests a social responsibility on teachers and edu-
cational authorities who direct their work and deter-
mine what facilities they shall have. If my district
agents are right in the opinions which I have presented
from them, that ignorance is at the bottom of the greater
part of the misery which they encounter, then is not the
[260]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
responsibility for that misery brought very directly
home to the Board of Education, and to the Board of
Estimate which decides upon the amount of the ap-
propriation placed at their disposal ? You will re-
member that we were speaking mainly not of immi-
grants, nor of those who have moved into New York
from other places. The families with whom these district
agents are best acquainted, from whom they get those
strong impressions showing such remarkable unanim-
ity, were New York families. They are not chronic
paupers. For the most part we know them only in
some exceptional misfortune, some urgent necessity,
and then only for a few weeks or months. But they are
ignorant of the things which as children they should
have been taught. They are ignorant of things which
in night schools they may even as adults be taught.
They are ignorant of the best occupations to pursue,
ignorant of how to earn an income and how to spend it
— and the ignorance which is their misfortune and
handicap they are to some extent passing on to their
children. The misery of New York would be directly
diminished by the carrying out of definite policies which
are urged by the City Superintendent, but which he
urges in vain upon our educational and financial authori-
ties; and by the adoption of policies and methods which
other experts, of sound and judicious temperament,
I
O
[261]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
are urging in vain. This is not the occasion on which
to distinguish among these methods and policies. I seek
only to make it clear that there is a direct connection be-
tween the efficiency of the educational system of to-day
and the lessening of the misery of to-morrow.
That efficiency, it may not be superfluous to add,
does not depend exclusively upon the Superintendent
and the appropriating and governing boards. The
system rests upon the skill and the devotion of the indi-
vidual teacher. No failure of the mechanism at the top
can entirely rob the teacher of the chance to awaken the
powers of the child, to teach him some at least of the
things that he needs to know, - just as no enthusiasm
and organizing skill at the top, no liberality of the
representatives of the taxpayers, can insure that teach-
ing, except by discovering and giving scope to the per-
sonal enthusiasm and the professional skill of the class-
room teacher. The relation between increased effi-
ciency and diminished misery is so direct and obvious
that I have long looked to the teacher in the elementary
schools as the one best entitled to be known as the social
worker.
The farmer who sends a can of milk to the station
with dirt in it, which by reasonable precautions and
compliance with law he could have kept out of it, is
responsible for the milk-poisoning which causes the
[ 262]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
death of a child in the city. The proprietor of a patent
medicine who puts cocaine or alcohol poison into a
family remedy and creates a class of drug inebriates is
responsible for the wreckage of life and misery which
result. In a community with a local market we may
form a fair judgment about the results of our actions by
observing what happens in our home or in that of our
immediate neighbor. But in these national and world
markets to which we now contribute our services and
from which we draw our commodities we must lift our
eyes to a wider range. The villagers who pollute the
streams cause the typhoid epidemic, and even if a stricter
sanitation down stream finally controls it, there are the
deaths and the cases of long and anxious sickness which
earlier attention to the sewers up the stream might have
prevented.
Misery is not a phenomenon of the big cities alone,
and in villages and towns it represents social malad-
justments, just as it does in urban life. The education
of health officers is indeed one of the crying needs of
rural America. The removal of this office from politics,
dignifying it by providing suitable compensation and
definite preparation for its duties, would save life and
health, as no other single reform in the field of social
welfare, with the possible exception of the further social-
izing of the schools.
[ 263]
IV
There are practical consequences of accepting or
rejecting the general view of misery which we have here
been considering. It is not wholesome or conducive to
intellectual integrity to entertain two distinct sets of ideals
and principles, one inspiring and attractive, but vision-
ary, impractical; the other opportunist, compromising,
especially designed for busy and preoccupied people.
I at least have no desire to dream dreams that are dreams
merely. Whatever inspiring vision of a better future
we may discern should help us to decide about expendi-
tures in this coming year's municipal budget; whether
to support or oppose bills pending in the state legisla-
ture; to pick the leaders whom we shall follow in politics,
in education, and in social reform; to decide whether
such money as we have to give in charity shall be given
for one kind of relief or another, and whether such time
as we have to devote to public service shall be given to
one or another of the movements which appeal to us.
Poverty may be taken in either of two widely differ-
ent senses. It may be understood to mean merely that
temporary even if complete lack of wealth which is an
[264 ]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
incentive to wholesome labor. To be poor in this sense,
even to be penniless or in debt, may be of no disad-
vantage. I have been in that condition myself, and I
have no expectation of ever being far removed from it.
Most of my personal friends have known poverty in this
sense; many of them pass out of it but a little way, and
come back into it again and again.
There is another kind of poverty — so different from
this mere lack of wealth that it has seemed to me better
to use the word misery for it. This poverty which spells
misery implies lack of wealth, but it implies also other
very grave disadvantages. To be poor, when poverty
means a low standard of living, overcrowding, over-
work, disease, friendlessness, and other specific forms
of misery, to some of which I have directed attention, is
a very serious matter. I have no expectation that
poverty in the first sense will be abolished. I have
no desire that it should be. But I have a very ardent
desire that misery, poverty in the second sense, should
be eliminated from our social life. I believe that it
can be.
[265]
There remains the question of cost. No one appre-
ciates more keenly than the social worker the value of
prosperity. Those especially who find their approach
to the problems of social work through the doorway of
economics have been trained, when face to face with a
particular proposition, to ask instinctively two ques-
tions: Have we the money, or the resources, to do what
we see requires to be done? Will it increase or dimin-
ish our economic prosperity, our social welfare, our bur-
dens as taxpayers, our benefits as citizens ? They may
not be particularly interested in abstract questions relat-
ing to the public revenues, but they do not get very far
without recognizing that their interests are inseparably
united with those of the statesmen, experts in budget-
making and in shaping fiscal policies, generous tax-
payers, and shrewd financiers, who believe in keeping a
favorable treasury balance and a margin of taxation,
and who know how to do it. The social workers can-
not afford to be indifferent to cost, but neither can they
afford to permit the real economic character of the
policies which they advocate to be misunderstood by
[ 266 )
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
those students of finance who should be their firm sup-
porters both in theory and in practice.
I find that I have been cited in an article by Mr.
Edgar J. Levey in a recent number of the Political
Science Quarterly as an impressive example of the
extent to which modern philanthropy is tending to
merge into municipal socialism. Mr. Levey does full
justice, I am bound to say, to my hard earned
reputation “as naturally conservative in disposition,
as a believer in industrialism, and as opposed to
socialistic theories of government,” and he represents
with entire accuracy my view that distress and crime
are more largely the results of social environment
than of defective character, and that our efforts
should therefore be directed toward the changing of
adverse social conditions, some of which, as I had said in
an article which he quotes, “can be accomplished only
by the resources of legislation, of taxation, of large ex-
penditure, or by changes in our educational system, or
in our penal system, or in our taxing system, or even in
our industrial system.” 2 His warning is that we are
overestimating the willingness and ability of the com-
munity to pay for the measures which we urge, that we
1 Municipal Socialism and Its Economic Limitations. Po-
litical Science Quarterly, XXIV, No. 1.
2 The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1908.
[ 267]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
must curb our impatience lest disaster befall, that these
adverse social conditions cannot be rapidly changed
without bankruptcy.
The challenge which Mr. Levey offers, the advocates
of the new view of charity must clearly accept. First of
all I may emulate Mr. Levey's courtesy by pointing out
that his danger signal is the more impressive because
it comes from the chairman of the Charity Organiza-
tion Society's Committee on the Prevention of Tuber-
culosis, who in that capacity and no doubt in other
capacities has not infrequently had occasion to urge
upon the municipal authorities the extension of its
sphere of operations in the very directions which he
finds to be inimical to prosperity and in conflict with
abstract justice. He is not to be classed among the
reactionaries. I do not wish to represent that even in
this article Mr. Levey opposes such activities. His
position, as I understand it, is that we must not go too
far, that we must first create our surplus wealth, and then
indulge our altruistic impulses so far as our surplus
permits, that what he calls the philanthropic improve-
ment of social conditions is economically unprofitable,
representing what economists used to call unproductive
expenditure, like the clergyman's salary; that it is
somewhat in the nature of a luxury, harmless enough or
even praiseworthy within limits, but essentially unjust
It
Y
(
[268]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
when undertaken from taxation, which involves taking
money from the pockets of one class, whether willing or
unwilling, and giving it to others who have not earned
it, however' much their needs and misfortunes may ap.
peal to our sympathy. In this respect the humanitarian
municipalization is considered far more serious than
such economic ventures as public ownership, operation
and control of industrial functions, especially of those
which are monopolistic in character, such as water
supply, lighting, street railways, and telephone service.
Such municipal activities, although unjust in Mr.
Levey's view, in that they involve taking from one for
the benefit of another, may nevertheless, he says, be
entirely compatible with improved efficiency and eco-
nomic profit, and in so far as these results may be pre-
dicted they need not concern us, being in direct contrast,
even to some extent in antagonism, with the humanita-
rian expenditures; and it is the latter especially that are
bringing us face to face with the problem which to Mr.
Levey seems destined to become of supreme impor-
tance in the future history of New York and of other
cities.
1 For further discussion see The Survey, April 17, 1909; page
135.
[269]
VI
in
There is another view, however, even of municipal
finance. I take issue squarely with this whole concep-
tion of municipal expenditures for the improvement of
adverse social conditions. For some of the readjust-
ments which need to be made the resources of legisla-
tion and of taxation are indeed essential, but such ex-
penditures are not uneconomic, unproductive. They
do not represent the indulgence of altruistic sentiment.
They are investments. Large expenditures may be
required, but they are required as capital. They take
the place of larger expenditures and greater burdens.
They mean the exercise of sound judgment in choosing
the lesser of evils, the greater of benefits, and not the
luxurious enjoyment of surplus dividends.
The penal and police system, for example, in which
I have advocated certain radical changes, is probably
costing us now every year more than it need cost to be
genuinely reformative and an adequate means of social
defence; but whether expenditures to maintain it should
be a little more or a little less, or whether they should
take a different direction, is just such a question as a
[270]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
business man would consider, not in spending his sur-
plus income, but in the actual management of his
business. No increase which the most radical prison
reformer would be likely to urge in the interests of effi-
ciency and humanity would compare in amount with the
direct financial losses occasioned by the operations of
professional criminals.
The educational system is costing immense sums, but
they should be increased until we catch up with our
educational problem, and we should expect that in the
long run those initial investments would be financially
justified. To the objection that there is no such definite
test as in a business investment, that it is all guess work
whether money spent for reformatories and for education
is invested wisely, whether the community is better off for
such expenditures, I reply that this is precisely because
these humanitarian expenditures, as they are called,
have not been taken seriously; because they are looked
upon as from surplus, instead of from capital, cs com-
paratively indifferent matters, so long as we have the
money. We are face to face with the problem which is
to become of supreme importance, but, as I see it, for a
different reason from that which has been suggested.
Our danger is not that we shall destroy prosperity
through excessive taxation, but that we shall fail to bring
to bear upon the improvement of social conditions that
[271 ]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
trained judgment, that sanity and common sense, that
willingness to spend money at the places where it is
needed, and to refrain from spending where it is un-
productive in the social sense, all of which qualities we
have developed to such an extraordinary degree in our
industrialism.
The expenditures which are urged for the prevention
of tuberculosis and for the more suitable care of con-
sumptives are justified on this ground, among others,
that they will ultimately lessen the demands on public
and private charity; that they will increase efficiency;
that they will promote prosperity; develop, if you
please, tax-paying capacity; promote social welfare.
This is the typical expenditure for social improvement.
It seems to me essentially fallacious to look upon such
expenditures as indulgences to be allowed rather spar-
ingly to such communities as are rich enough to afford
them. They are literally a husbanding of resources, a
safeguard against later unprofitable but compulsory
expenditure, a repair in the social organism which, like
the repair of a leaky roof, may avert disaster.
No community is so poor that it can afford to permit
typhoid for lack of a filter, or inefficient children for lack
of good schools, or criminals for lack of playgrounds, or
wayward girls for lack of protection, or exploited child-
hood for lack of a factory inspector, or industrial ac-
[ 272]
JUSTICE AND PROSPERITY OF FUTURE
cidents for lack of a compensation law or an insurance
system. These things, I repeat, are not luxuries.
Those who insist upon them are not afflicted with “mu-
nicipal megalomania,” and if they are municipal so-
cialists, so much the worse for the brand of individu-
alism which makes a present of the certain future to its
antagonists. Economic prosperity is essential, and I
would be the last to argue in favor of reckless waste of
resources. Sanity in expenditures is as necessary in
social betterment as in private business. I urge the
sanity, the reasonableness, of removing the causes of
misery, that we may not have to pay for its consequences.
We may send children to school, keep them out of
factories, provide them with playgrounds, operate for
their adenoids, and fit them for useful trades and oc-
cupations; or we may keep our hospitals and courts and
prisons and charities going at their maximum capacity.
We are right or wrong in the position that these are al-
ternatives. If we are right, these expenditures and en-
actments designed to change the adverse conditions are
serious policies, not indulgences to be allowed half good
naturedly and half indifferently if there happens to be
plenty of spare money about, not required for other pur-
poses. Of course the money must be available or it
cannot be spent, but if the advocates of better social
conditions, of education and health and room and leisure
YY
1Qiin
INU
[273]
MISERY AND ITS CAUSES
and recreation and reasonable standards, are in earnest;
if they make it clear that the irreducible minimum of
these things which they seek, and which they seek not
alone through municipal expenditure, but in larger part
through voluntary coöperation and individual initia-
tive, represents investment and not luxury, they will, I
think, escape the reproach of youthful extravagance,
and of having neglected finance for the more alluring
but less firmly grounded social science.
There is no more firmly grounded programme than
that of social work. Its objects are clearly formulated.
Its methods are becoming crystallized and understood.
Its natural allies are the financiers and the sanitarians
and the engineers and the captains of industry. Effi-
ciency is its watchword, prosperity is its halfway station,
justice is its foundation.
The justice and prosperity of the future is to be the
outcome of the partial justice and the imperfect and un-
equally shared prosperity of the present. Slowly, and
with faltering steps, humanity presses onward to the
realization of its ideal. Misery is the denial of that
ideal, but misery is cast out, here a little and there a
little; for the ideal, and not its negation, is forever true
and in the end omnipotent.
[274]
BY EDWARD T. DEVINE, Ph.D., LL.D.
Schiff Professor of Social Economy in Columbia University
General Secretary of the Charity Organization Society of New York City
Editor of Charities and the Commons
The Principles of Relief Cloth, $2.00 net
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