MODERN INDUSTRY 
 
 IN RELATION TO 
 THE FAMILY, HEALTH 
 EDUCATION, MORALITY 
 
MODERN INDUSTRY 
 
 IN RELATION TO 
 THE FAMILY, HEALTH 
 EDUCATION, MORALITY 
 
 BY 
 FLORENCE KELLEY 
 
 General Secretary, National Consumers' League 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 
 LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 
 
 1914 
 
COPYBIGHT, 1914, BY 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
NOTE 
 
 This volume contains the substance amplified to 
 accord with the unprecedently rapid progress of 
 legislation of four lectures given in 1913 at Teach- 
 ers' College, Columbia University. They formed the 
 opening course of lectures delivered annually under 
 the Isabel Hampton Robb Foundation, established 
 by the National League of Nursing Education. 
 
 336234 
 
MODERN INDUSTRY IN RELATION TO 
 THE FAMILY 
 
MODERN INDUSTRY AND THE FAMILY 
 
 MODERN industry affords, in more generous 
 measure than the human race has before known 
 them, all those goods which form the material 
 basis of family life food, clothing, shelter, and 
 the materials and opportunities for subsistence 
 for husband, wife and children. 
 
 But modern industry tends to disintegrate the 
 family, so threatens it that the civilized nations 
 are, and for at least one generation have been, ac- 
 tively building a code intended to save the family 
 from this destructive pressure. 
 
 This is the paradox of Modern Industry. 
 
 It is my object to illustrate this paradox by in- 
 dicating some forms of the pressure of industry 
 upon the family, and upon each of its elements. 
 
 The American ideal of the home inherited 
 from the time when we were an agricultural coun- 
 try includes father, mother and children living 
 together in a house; the father the breadwinner, 
 the mother the homemaker, the children at play 
 and at school until they reach a reasonable age for 
 
 3 
 
4 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 Work t&e* boys Jfrelping their fathers with the 
 : .oMores,;ab,d tEe'girlg learning under their mothers' 
 eyes the arts of the housewife, the house which 
 shelters this group being the property of the fam- 
 ily or in process of becoming their property. 
 Originally, the typical home was a farm which 
 furnished subsistence, and the children received 
 within the family group industrial, religious and 
 moral training. Our departure from this early 
 ideal under the pressure of modern industry is 
 conspicuous. 
 
 The paradoxical tendency of the family to disin- 
 tegrate under pressure of the same industry which 
 affords it infinite material enrichment offers the 
 key to a complex, varied legislative movement go- 
 ing forward in all the civilized nations. Seem- 
 ingly incoherent, this movement is a ramified ef- 
 fort to safeguard the family. The mind is wear- 
 ied even by a partial enumeration of the elements 
 of the industrial and political code upon which the 
 modern world is at work to this end.* 
 
 * Among those elements the following are important: 
 
 a. Compulsory arbitration of labor disputes; 
 
 b. Workmen's compensation and social insurance, factory 
 inspection and compulsory provision of fire precautions and 
 safety devices; 
 
 c. Regulation of working time, including one day's rest in 
 seven, a short working day, prohibition of night work for 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 5 
 
 Such effort to bulwark the family by compre- 
 hensive legislation arises because, all over the 
 modern world, a large and increasing proportion 
 of husbands and fathers are by the nature of their 
 work taken out of their homes, or killed outright, 
 or maimed, or they are disabled by industrial dis- 
 eases, and thus disqualified for their normal duty 
 of breadwinner. 
 
 Or throughout long periods of seasonal unem- 
 ployment they are recurrently without earnings. 
 Even when in health and at work, unskilled labor- 
 ers and many employees of higher grade are so 
 far underpaid that they cannot maintain their 
 wives and children, who are, therefore, drawn out 
 of the home into industry to supplement the earn- 
 ings of the father; or the home is invaded under 
 the sweating system by the materials of industry. 
 
 women and children, and the utmost attainable restriction of 
 night work for men; 
 
 d. Prohibition of child labor and of homework under the 
 sweating system; 
 
 e. Minimum wage boards and widows' pensions with gen- 
 erous provision for institutional care of certain classes of 
 diseased and defective children; 
 
 f. Compulsory education prolonged for part time instruc- 
 tion throughout minority; 
 
 g. Housing codes; 
 h. Pure food laws; 
 
 i. The enfranchisement of women. 
 
6 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 Tendency to Celibacy 
 
 Vast numbers of men never found families at 
 all, because they fear to marry upon insufficient 
 wages insecurely held by reason of the precarious 
 nature of many employments; or because their 
 health is destroyed before they reach an economic 
 position which seems to them to justify mar- 
 riage; or because the girls whom they would 
 gladly marry v&rejworn out and broken_down\in the 
 service of industry. 
 
 Abjuring family life is a social loss from every 
 point of view, most of all when the men who thus 
 deny themselves are of a high type and animated 
 by unselfishness. Citizens of Cincinnati are erect- 
 ing a memorial to such a man, Joe Haeberle, once 
 head of the truck drivers' union of that city. This 
 self-taught German immigrant worked himself 
 literally to death in the service of the children of 
 Ohio. Having obtained some drinking fountains 
 for the teamsters' horses, he discovered that the 
 children made them centres of their play during 
 school hours. Thus he learned that great numbers 
 of children were out of school because Cincinnati 
 had not, at that time, free school books. For 
 many years he carried on the agitation for free 
 books, for effective compulsory education and, at 
 the last, for workable child labor laws. Ham- 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 7 
 
 pered by his foreign accent, his uncouth, ill-fitting 
 clothes, and his uncertain teamster's gait, Joe 
 Haeberle spent every free evening, every holiday, 
 every Sunday struggling against indifference, and 
 prejudice, and active, open hostility, to get for the 
 children of Ohio the best that any state gives its 
 children. A few months before his too early death, 
 he told one of his friends that he had never been 
 willing to ask a woman to share with him the 
 hardships of life on the only earnings he could 
 hope for, ten dollars a week. Faithful to his ideal 
 of the society of the future in which all children 
 should have the opportunity of education, un- 
 selfish in his life and his death, this tender, de- 
 voted servant of the children lived and died wife- 
 less and childless. 
 
 Compulsory celibacy is the lot of vast numbers 
 of men employed upon reclamation, schemes, 
 building railways, tunnels and water power con- 
 structions. Soinetmies_the work lies far from 
 civilization^ but oftener as in Massachusetts, 
 Connecticut and New York the inhumane ar- 
 rangements of the construction companies and 
 contractors make family life impossible for men 
 who do this work. Worn-out freight cars and 
 vermin-ridden bunk houses are not fit homes for 
 wives and children. But these are the dwellings 
 afforded for rapidly increasing thousands of work- 
 
8 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 ing men, for years at a time, a group being moved 
 from one section to another of some great under- 
 taking, the quality of their quarters varying little. 
 
 Of all the occupations which detach men from 
 home life the oldest is that of the sailors. In 
 Phoenicia, in the Greece of Homer, their craft 
 was already an ancient one. In our ports as then 
 the sailors are proverbially homeless, and their 
 numbers grow as the industry of Europe, particu- 
 larly that of Germany and England, lives increas- 
 ingly by manufacturing and distributing through- 
 out the world raw materials from the Tropics, 
 these nations importing meanwhile in ever larger 
 proportion their own food supplies.* 
 
 New and characteristic of modern industry is 
 the myriad of men who float about on land, their 
 family life reduced to a minimum by the nature 
 of their occupations, among whom are commer- 
 cial travellers, kept perforce away from their fam- 
 ilies a large part of every year. Sleeping car con- 
 ductors and porters, and dining car waiters, leav- 
 ing New York to go to Chicago, may there find or- 
 ders to go on to Seattle or San Diego, and do not 
 know when they will again reach home. In gen- 
 eral, family life in the home is obviously mini- 
 mized for all those husbands and fathers whose 
 
 *The phenomenal development of the cocoa and chocolate 
 industry and of rubber production are cases in point. 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 9 
 
 work keeps them travelling, e. g., railway engi- 
 neers, firemen and brakemen, conductors, porters 
 and waiters. 
 
 Hotel employes, cooks and waiters, and domes- 
 tic servants are virtually condemned by the pres- 
 ent organization of their occupations to separation 
 from their wives and children. And the demand 
 of the last named employment for surrender of 
 the family tie is obviously an element in the per- 
 manent, universal, unorganized boycott of domes- 
 tic service by American men. Native white Amer- 
 ican valets, footmen and butlers virtually do not 
 exist. 
 
 When the farm gave us our ideal of family life, 
 many varieties of industrial activity were carried 
 on upon farms and in rural villages. The village 
 blacksmith once made the plough which the 
 farmer owned. Now the city of Moline has grown 
 up around the plough-making industry, producing 
 millions of ploughs. South Bend makes agricul- 
 tural wagons, and Auburn manufactures the far- 
 mers 7 binding twine. Many cities thus specialize, 
 each in one industry formerly conducted on the 
 farms. 
 
 While those industries have gone from rural 
 life, a new disintegrating element has arisen in the 
 floating agricultural workers, a new apparition 
 from the city invading the country for a part of 
 
10 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 the year. When a Settlement recently wished to 
 send a young man to work on a Connecticut farm, 
 some forty farmers replied that there would be 
 work not for the whole year, but for a few months 
 only. For the prospective farm laborer in a New 
 England state these offers meant the choice over 
 the winter between tramping and the city lodging 
 house. 
 
 In the West thousands of men now go annually 
 from the cities to work in the grain harvest for a 
 period varying from five to nine months. At Hull 
 House, years ago, it was horrifying to discover, 
 in the neighboring frame cottages, Italian women 
 with children living four families in four rooms 
 of a flat, one wife and her children in one room, 
 because the four men breadwinners of the fam- 
 ilies had gone, early in the spring, to work on the 
 railroads. Later the men would leave the rail- 
 roads for the harvesting, beginning in Texas or 
 Arkansas, working northward into Western Can- 
 ada, and returning home to Chicago toward 
 Thanksgiving. Sometimes they did not come back 
 at all. After the harvest every year, families 
 were left fatherless by this new American agri- 
 culture. We thought of this development of 
 pressure of industry upon family life as an epi- 
 sode. 
 
 After twenty years we know, however, that it 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 11 
 
 is a regular part of Western American agriculture, 
 which affords no foundation for normal home life 
 for these thousands of migratory employes. In 
 the canning industry there are, besides floating 
 families of workers in buildings and sheds, vegeta- 
 ble and berry pickers by thousands of families in 
 fields. That is one most striking change that 
 modern industry has wrought in agriculture and 
 its immediate derivative industries, canning and 
 fruit preserving. In the West it is men who mi- 
 grate in the service of agriculture. In the East it 
 is largely women with numerous young children. 
 
 In the case of sailors, the nature of the work 
 itself involves the sacrifice of family life in the 
 home. In many other industries, however, the sac- 
 rifice is wantonly exacted, as when city railway 
 companies require the twelve hours day, and the 
 seven days week, and their men are never at home 
 to see the children awake. The federal statute in- 
 tended to preserve the health of railway em- 
 ployes in interstate commerce permits them to 
 work sixteen hours in twenty-four ! 
 
 Night work done in paper mills, glassworks, and 
 steel manufacture, and a growing number of con- 
 tinuous industries keeps fathers away from home 
 and makes impossible any wholesome domestic 
 companionship. A father at home by day, who is 
 trying to make up sleep lost the night before 
 
12 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 while at work, is not a helpful element of the fam- 
 ily life. 
 
 Night work of many kinds is obviously un- 
 avoidable. Its present rapidly increasing dislo- 
 cation of family life is, however, doubtless des- 
 tined to be checked in proportion as the workers 
 attain a deciding voice by strengthening their la- 
 bor organizations, or by using their votes more 
 wisely, or even by convincing the courts that the 
 present distribution of working hours is contrary 
 to sound public policy. 
 
 In the interest of the family life of wage earn- 
 ers, to assure to fathers opportunity of compan- 
 ionship with their wives and children, we Amer- 
 icans, in the Twentieth Century, have to strive 
 to get by statute that which was laid upon the 
 race by the Commandments, namely, one day's 
 rest in seven. This was commanded as of equal 
 importance with the injunction, Thou Shalt Not 
 Kill. The Book of Genesis records that the Lord 
 rested upon the seventh day. 
 
 Destruction of Fathers and Injury of Mothers 
 
 When families are founded they are, with ap- 
 palling frequency, disrupted by the destruction 
 that industry entails upon breadwinners. In 
 New York, this greatest of all the industrial states, 
 our highest court has held within three years that, 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 13 
 
 to compel employers to pay a fixed compensation 
 to injured employes or surviving widows and 
 children, would be taking property from the em- 
 ployers without due process of law. Yet the 
 process provided by the statute embodied the 
 principles common to the compensation laws of 
 modern industrial nations.* Workmen's com- 
 pensation was thus held contrary to our consti- 
 tution. Until this decision can be reversed, work- 
 ing people will have, in this state, only the barest 
 gambling chance to receive, under the common 
 law, some quite incalculable sum awarded by a 
 jury, after years of delay in the courts. And the 
 most dynamic of all stimuli the financial in- 
 centive for making industry safe is withdrawn 
 from employers. 
 
 Under this decision industry does not pay its 
 bills in the greatest industrial state in the Repub- 
 lic. If a railroad has killed the breadwinner of a 
 
 *Ives case, Court of Appeals of New York, March 24, 
 1911. Judge Werner, the presiding judge of the New York 
 Court of Appeals, who wrote the decision in the Ives case, 
 was not re-elected to succeed himself at the election in No- 
 vember, 1913. At the same election the New York State 
 Constitution was amended by a popular vote for the purpose 
 of facilitating legislation creating workmen's compensation. 
 In December, 1913, a statute was enacted in accordance with 
 the powers conferred by the amended Constitution. This 
 new statute also will, however, be tested as to its constitu- 
 tionality in due time by the New York Court of Appeals. 
 
14 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 family, the railroad industry is not now legally 
 the debtor of his widow during widowhood, and 
 of the fatherless children even until the 16th 
 birthday. If the breadwinner is not killed but 
 disabled by an injury incident to his work, or by 
 an industrial disease, transforming him from the 
 breadwinner to a dragging burden upon his wife 
 and children, they need not less but greater in- 
 demnification for their loss, not from taxes, or 
 charity, but from the industry which deprives 
 them of their breadwinner. We are, as a nation, 
 far slower than the nations of Europe to enforce 
 the payment of this debt to families bereft by in- 
 dustry of their breadwinners.* 
 
 As i marriages_fail to occur, and families fail to 
 be founded, because of fear of poverty, so, also, in 
 many families children are not born, or come into 
 life cruelly handicapped, because of the effects of 
 industry upon the health of the mothers while,~as 
 young girls and young women, they worked Jor 
 wages. Sterility among working class wives, 
 caused by protracted standing while at work in 
 their girlhood, is a source of apprehension among 
 physicians whose practice brings wage-earning 
 women patients under observation. Sir Thomas 
 
 * Obviously, the final simplification of the vexed problem 
 of widows' pensions lies in the direction of keeping fathers 
 alive, in good health and at work. 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 15 
 
 Oliver, the learned and sympathetic English stu- 
 dent of American industry from the medical point 
 of view, recently published, after a journey among 
 American factories, a warning as to the effect on 
 the future of the Republic of the employment of 
 so many young women in manufacture. 
 
 The absence from home at night of thousands of 
 young girls in the telephone service has become a 
 matter of course. Seventy-five per cent, of these 
 young workers at night are at the age of 18 years, 
 according to the latest official report of this state. 
 Sleep lost at night cannot be made up by day by 
 people who live in the industrial districts of any 
 city. What nation ever before took it for granted 
 that thousands of young girls 18 years old should, 
 in the way of earning their bread, be away from 
 home at night? This employment of young girls 
 may well be taken as an index of cynicism of pub- 
 lic opinion which accepts, under the corrupting in- 
 fluence of industry, such disintegration of the 
 family as inevitable. 
 
 The field of employment constantly widens in 
 which wives are expected to earn wages, as in to- 
 bacco factories, laundries, cigar making, the gar- 
 ment trades, and the textiles. It is no longer es- 
 pecially characteristic of any part of the country 
 (as the cotton mill regions of New England) or 
 of any one industry (as the textiles) that women 
 
16 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 continue wage earning after marriage. The cus- 
 tom tends to become universal. Industry now 
 counts upon having not only men and girls as 
 was for some generations characteristic of Amer- 
 ican manufacture but married women as well. 
 Girls marry with the knowledge that as wives they 
 will have to work for wages, and accept it as the 
 will of God, or the course of Nature, when in 
 their families babies die. 
 
 Family life in the home is sapped in its foun- 
 dations when the mothers of young children work 
 for wages. Yet each Census shows a greater num- 
 ber of cities where married women are so em- 
 ployed and infant mortality ranges high. In Fall 
 River, the characteristic textile manufacturing 
 city of New England, not only is the general death 
 rate higher than in any other city of the same 
 size, but infant mortality in particular reaches an 
 appalling figure.* This has been the history of 
 the textile industries wherever they have been de- 
 veloped in Germany, in England, in this coun- 
 try a high infant death rate has been their by- 
 -product. The double task laid upon mothers in 
 such industrial communities is more than they 
 can perform, and the babies pay the penalty with 
 their lives. 
 
 * Census of 1910, and Federal Report on the Conditions of 
 Labor of Woman and Child Wage-Earners. 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 17 
 
 The fact is moreover increasingly conspicuous 
 that, in working class districts of manufacturing 
 cities, the death rate of infants is far in excess of 
 that in regions inhabited by prosperous people in 
 the same cities. The children are consumed, di- 
 rectly or indirectly, in the process of producing 
 goods, and this while they are within the closest 
 embrace of the family, before they are old enough 
 for the kindergarten. 
 
 Throughout all civilization wages in industries 
 which employ married women tend to range so 
 low that only when the whole family is drawn into 
 wage earning can a subsistence be earned. In this 
 country it is relatively new, but here, as else- 
 where, when the textile industries develop, this 
 disintegration proceeds conspicuously. Except 
 that men in the occupation are largely supplanted 
 by their own wives and children, it might truth- 
 fully be said that the family is bodily transferred 
 from the home to the mill. 
 
 When wives are engaged in night work, the ef- 
 fect is devastating. Yet in the cotton mills of the 
 southern states such work is not exceptional, it is 
 a commonplace part of the life of many mill com- 
 munities. 
 
18 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 Withdrawal of Children from Homes 
 
 In most industrially developed states the com- 
 munity says to the parent: "You may not let 
 your child work (except as a newsboy) before its 
 14th birthday. You must keep your child in 
 school at least until that birthday, and beyond it 
 unless the child meets certain fixed requirements 
 as to stature, health and ability to read and write 
 English^ You must, moreover, feed and clothe 
 your boy or girl according to a minimum set for 
 you by usage. Failing in these things, appro- 
 priate penalties await you, among which is sheer 
 deprivation of the guardianship of your child." 
 
 In New York State 38,000 children are main- 
 tained in institutions, paid for out of taxes, be- 
 cause their natural guardians fail to meet these 
 requirements. Few of these institutions are 
 schools in any true sense. Fewer still are colonies 
 for the care of afflicted children for whom segre- 
 gation is needed the mentally deficient, or ad- 
 vanced cases of tuberculosis. In the main they 
 are free municipal boarding houses, communist 
 institutions in which various religious sects at- 
 tempt the task, financed out of taxes, of bringing 
 up children by wholesale. Undesirable though it 
 is, this undertaking constitutes at present the sole 
 official attempt of state or city to eke out the ef- 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 19 
 
 forts of parents who fail, under the pressure of 
 industry, to meet modern requirements. 
 
 Institutional care is, however, an attempt to 
 substitute charity for justice, necessary so long as 
 industry does not pay its debts to the disabled 
 and the bereft. 
 
 The stern pressure upon parents has led to a 
 nation-wide agitation for public pensions for 
 widows, mothers' pensions or "funds to parents" 
 acts. And states, cities and charitable organiza- 
 tions now vie with each other in assuring us that 
 no child need be undernourished, or unfitted for 
 school life by reason of destitution.* 
 
 Even more numerous than the families whose 
 breadwinners are dead or disabled are those whose 
 able-bodied fathers, working in underpaid indus- 
 tries for an insufficient annual income, cannot sup- 
 port the children as the community demands. 
 These account, perhaps more than all other influ- 
 ences combined for the exodus from home to mill 
 and mine of boys and girls who should still be 
 school children. 
 
 There is a tremendous and growing draft of 
 children out of the home into industry. In 1912 
 in New York City alone 42,000 children, boys and 
 
 *The change of attitude on this subject in the brief period 
 since the appearance of Robert Hunter's volume on Poverty 
 is striking. 
 
20 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 girls below the age of 16 years, were given work- 
 ing papers. In all history this is new. Never be- 
 fore this modern industrial era did tens of thou- 
 sands of young girls and boys in a single city enter 
 upon industry away from all control by parents 
 or by responsible masters under some form of reg- 
 ulated indenture. Regularly each year, in this 
 city alone, more than forty thousand boys and 
 girls enter as independent units into the world of 
 labor. 
 
 The law authorizes the father and mother to 
 collect wages of minor children. But the employer 
 has no responsibility for getting the wage into the 
 hands of parents. Nor is there any responsibility 
 upon employers for the health and morals of these 
 young workers. No one who has not lived long 
 in the foreign colonies can estimate what it means 
 to an immigrant parent, when a boy decides that 
 he will no longer acknowledge a duty to his par- 
 ents and brothers and sisters, will no longer carry 
 home his wages. In serving on a scholarship com- 
 mittee it is startling to read in the family record 
 that there are two older brothers or two older sis- 
 ters, who recognize no duty toward their parents 
 or the younger child the candidate for a scholar- 
 ship who is left to suffer hardship or to accept 
 charity. We acquiesce very generally in the loss 
 of the sense of duty toward the family on the 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 21 
 
 part of sons and daughters because industry has 
 habituated us, and tempted them, to consider the 
 worker as an isolated unit, regardless of family 
 ties. 
 
 The House as the Home 
 
 Our traditional national ideal of family life in- 
 cludes owning a home, or entering upon the task 
 of acquiring one. 
 
 Modern industry achieves for business uses the 
 forty stories of the Metropolitan Tower and the 
 fifty floors of the Woolworth Building, cheering 
 the eyes of the city with their beauty. But for 
 the homes of families who work there is main- 
 tained and urgently needed a nationwide cru- 
 sade for a minimum standard of construction. 
 Philanthropy is not yet nobly striving to establish 
 among working people lofty ideals of healthful- 
 ness, beauty and comfort, in homes wherein a 
 worthy life may be lived and childhood may spend 
 its years in care-free play. Far from it, we are 
 still amply occupied in striving through philan- 
 thropic effort and penal statutes to establish mini- 
 mum standards below which none may descend. 
 
 In one-room log cabins among cotton fields in 
 Georgia and the Carolinas, in fifty-family tene- 
 ments in New York City, and in the repellent 
 shacks of miners' families in a dozen mining states, 
 
22 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 the irony is the same. Families who work are so 
 ill housed that it is a problem of self-defence for 
 civilization to set a lowest level beneath which no 
 southern plantation owner, no mining company, 
 no jerry-building city landlord may offer so-called 
 "homes/' 
 
 Recently I had occasion to come up from Jack- 
 sonville, Florida, through Georgia, the Carolinas, 
 and part of Virginia by day. Every new cotton 
 mill along the railway is costlier, more modern, 
 and better equipped than the last. But nothing 
 could be more discouraging than the monotonous 
 homes surrounding those mills. We have no dig- 
 nified ideal of family homes for wage-earning fam- 
 ilies. The farm houses of an older generation, 
 owned by their occupants, austere in their sim- 
 plicity, had at least a certain dignity. It is ap- 
 palling that American people who leave the farms 
 acquiesce in living in the homes provided for 
 them in the industrial centres by the industry of 
 to-day. 
 
 Everywhere, the world over, those who would 
 build wholesome and beautiful houses for work- 
 ing families, and keep them free from invasion by 
 industry, are confronted by an insoluble problem. 
 Everywhere this problem consists of the same two 
 factors the low family income of laborers, and 
 the monopoly power of landowners to make their 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 23 
 
 own terms for selling, leasing, renting land for 
 homes. 
 
 In New York and Chicago, in congested dis- 
 tricts where overcrowding is a perennial source of 
 disease, I have for more than 20 years observed 
 the landlords resisting every attempt to raise the 
 standard of workmen's city dwellings. In New 
 York, after generations of tenement house reform, 
 the number of sunless rooms constantly increases. 
 Every new tenement is larger, built to shelter more 
 people than the house which it displaces. Infants 
 and young children the tenderest, most perish- 
 able members of the family succumb most 
 quickly to the enfeebling influence of sunless 
 dwellings, overcrowding and bad air. And the 
 survivors carry with them through life the effects 
 upon body and character of this bad beginning. 
 Overcrowding and decency are mutually exclusive. 
 
 Overcrowding in tenements arises in part from 
 the fact that, among unskilled workers, the small 
 and irregular family wage compels the choice to 
 be made between food and rent. The question 
 forever confronting the unskilled laborer's family 
 is: "Shall we have more food and less space?" 
 If the decision is in favor of more food, a lodger 
 or boarder is commonly added to the already large 
 number of occupants of the flat, with all the de- 
 moralization and danger arising from the presence 
 

 24 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 of an outsider, a non-member of the family. A 
 neighbor of mine, a tailor out of work, took in a 
 man who shared the bed of the youngest son. The 
 little boy acquired, after a single night, an infec- 
 tion which left him hopelessly, incurably blind. 
 
 These facts are all well known, the story of the 
 tenements and their dwellers has long been thread- 
 bare, the effort to deal with them has long been 
 a weariness to the flesh. The tenements persist 
 and increase from generation to generation. This 
 is precisely the reason for presenting them once 
 more this sinister circumstance that, in spite of 
 the teachings of modern science and the efforts 
 to apply modern hygiene to every relation of life, 
 overcrowded tenements are still here, and New 
 York City still suffers, in the Borough of Man- 
 hattan, the densest congestion of population in 
 the history of the world. And this in spite of all 
 the wealth created by modern industry. 
 
 The explanation is to be found in the control 
 of industry itself over the minds of reformers 
 and of the authorities. It is, indeed, industry 
 which calls people to the congested centres by its 
 offer of varied work.* It is the Allied Real Estate 
 industry, the brokers, the builders, the speculators 
 in land and shelter, who constitute the active 
 
 *We have no coherent policy, in any state, calculated to 
 draw population away from congested city districts. 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 25 
 
 enemy to housing progress, just as it is manufac- 
 turing industry which calls little girls from school 
 to factory, and commercial industry which sells 
 foul milk to be fed to babies. 
 
 To deal with modern real estate industry in 
 this unlovely role of obstacle to progress we have 
 had, hitherto, only little groups of reformers ap- 
 plying little remedies. And the continuance of 
 the evil witnesses our failure. 
 
 Alone in all the world, our reformers discuss 
 houses as though they were balloons, or biplanes, 
 or clouds floating aloft unrelated to the land on 
 which they stand, unaffected by taxation, de- 
 tached from the whole plan of the city of which 
 they form so essential and injurious a part. For 
 generations our reformers have continued to do 
 this, untaught by failure, unstirred by the experi- 
 ments of other cities in other lands. 
 
 The comprehensive national policy of Australia 
 and New Zealand, applied to distributing popula- 
 tion, is too well known and too elaborate to be 
 summarized within the limits of a lecture. In 
 our neighboring country, Canada, Vancouver has 
 untaxed all buildings by way of placing a premium 
 upon constructing more of them. England ex- 
 hibits besides all the changes arising from the 
 Lloyd-George land taxes encouraging experi- 
 ments in the Garden Cities, in corporate owner- 
 
26 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 ship of land for the common good of the inhabi- 
 tants. Port Sunlight and Bournemouth are fa- 
 miliar examples and others, less well known, are 
 growing up in many parts of England. In Ger- 
 many, Frankfort and Ulm have for a quarter 
 century been acquiring land, in their municipal 
 capacity, for the express purpose of housing work- 
 ing people in homes satisfactory to them. 
 
 We, meanwhile, still putter along with prohi- 
 bitions and regulations upon owners, builders, 
 speculators whom we accept as inevitable. We 
 seem unteachable, refractory to enlightenment 
 drawn from our own experience of failure, or from 
 the stimulating examples to be found in other 
 lands. 
 
 Why have we no permanent Federal Commis- 
 sion on Homes? 
 
 Invasion of the Home by Manufacture 
 
 In New York City, the greatest, richest centre 
 of modern industry in the Western Hemisphere, 
 the home, the house, the tenement far from 
 sheltering the family and belonging to it, con- 
 sumes the family. The tenement house is pro- 
 verbially a breeding place of tuberculosis and 
 other social diseases. The high cost of land leads 
 to congestion of buildings, and this in turn to 
 insufficient light, air and space for the family 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 27 
 
 dwelling. To earn a share of the rent for 
 cramped, unwholesome quarters, mothers are 
 withdrawn from household work, and, children 
 stay from school. They are drawn into industry, 
 and the kitchen and bedroom become their work- 
 places. 
 
 The assumption universally underlies women's 
 wages that there is always a male breadwinner 
 successfully performing his allotted task, and any 
 earnings of wife and daughter are pin money 
 added to his steady income. In fact, however, in 
 the chaos of modern industry, the male adult 
 breadwinner father or older brother happens 
 with tragic frequency to be dead, killed outright 
 perhaps by his work a railway accident, a Ti- 
 tanic disaster, a mine collapse. Or he may be 
 gradually poisoned by the materials of his work, 
 or exhausted by its processes. He may be over- 
 borne by the temptations of alcohol, predisposed 
 to them by fatigue. Or he may be alive and 
 strong in body, mind and morals, but condemned 
 by the nature of his employment to long and re- 
 curring idleness without income. Irregularity of 
 work and earnings is a characteristic experience 
 of modern industrial life. In these cases the nor- 
 mal arrangement is inverted, and industry in- 
 vades the home in search of the labor of the crip- 
 pled, the bedridden, and the mothers of little 
 
28 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 children. Thus because industry has developed, 
 bringing in its train underpay, irregularity, dis- 
 ease and death, and because our industrial code 
 does not yet protect the family, widows and young 
 children are forced to take upon themselves the 
 burden of manufacture in the home under the 
 sweating system. 
 
 The cruel old decision of the Court of Appeals 
 of New York still stands unchanged since the 
 Jacobs case. The manufacturer's right to invade 
 with his materials the homes of the tenement 
 dwellers can be restricted only when the interest 
 of the health of the public in the restriction is 
 obvious to the Court. It was, therefore, deemed 
 wiser in 1913, not to include in a list of industries 
 to be banished by statute from the tenements 
 garments intended for adults! Children are ad- 
 mittedly endangered by germs transmitted in 
 tenement homework. Any gain to the family life 
 of the workers, any freeing of their homes from 
 invasion by industry, must be clearly subordinate 
 to safeguarding the health of purchasers, lest the 
 Court hold the new law contrary to the constitu- 
 tion. 
 
 Ownership of the Home 
 
 Incredible sacrifices have been made by mil- 
 lions of families for the sake of home ownership. 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 29 
 
 As long ago as the days of Martin Chuzzlewit, 
 Charles Dickens revealed a painful aspect of the 
 real estate gambling which has preyed upon this 
 effort. 
 
 More recently, great manufacturing corpora- 
 tions in villages and small cities have developed 
 from this an effective trap, encouraging employes 
 to buy homes, and so chaining them to the spot. 
 The owners of homes partly paid for dare not 
 strike, lest they lose all the payments they have 
 made. In Auburn, in 1913, the Harvester Works 
 threatened its striking employes that the works 
 might be permanently removed. That would 
 mean the loss of the employes' whole investment 
 in Auburn, a city of homes. 
 
 An opposite method of attaining the same end 
 is the generation long policy of coal-carrying 
 roads and coal companies, in Pennsylvania and 
 West Virginia, where the workers are perforce 
 tenants of their employers. In Westmoreland, 
 Pennsylvania, the evicted striking miners lived 
 for months in tents lent them by other working 
 men in the hard winter and late spring of 1912. 
 In the winter and spring of 1913 a similar experi- 
 ence has befallen the miners in West Virginia. 
 Whole communities, evicted by coal companies, 
 have camped in tents lent them by the minework- 
 ers' union. Evicted wives and newborn babies of 
 
30 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 skilled miners died of cold and exposure in the 
 midst of the coal fields a grewsome irony of 
 modern industry. 
 
 By their onslaughts on the family life of min- 
 ers the coal mining companies and the coal carry- 
 ing roads may contribute to end the private own- 
 ership of coal mines, to make coal a national pos- 
 session, and coal mining and coal carrying a na- 
 tional service. 
 
 Having thus briefly and fragmentarily indicated 
 the disintegrating effect of modern industry upon 
 the family as exemplified in the experience of 
 fathers, mothers, children, young daughters work- 
 ing at night, and the home itself (in the sense of 
 physical shelter), there remains underlying all 
 family life the means of subsistence. 
 
 The Wage Scale 
 
 In a steadily growing proportion of the Ameri- 
 can nation, the economic foundation of the family 
 is the wage scale. While our ideal of the home 
 remains agricultural we have become, also, an 
 industrial people largely dependent upon wages. 
 And the wage scale in private industry we have 
 left to be determined by the play of competition. 
 
 A single fact brought to light last year illumines 
 ironically the relation of modern industry to the 
 wage earning family. Dr. Caroline Hedger, of the 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 31 
 
 Chicago University Settlement, discovered that 
 children in the neighborhood of the Chicago 
 stockyards are fed coffee because their parents 
 cannot afford milk for them. Fathers and moth- 
 ers who spend their lives in killing cattle and 
 packing meat, to feed this nation and Europe, 
 cannot afford for their own children milk in in- 
 fancy. In the midst of more cows than are 
 brought together anywhere else, babies are fed 
 coffee for its cheapness. The railroads' profit on 
 hauling milk to the city, the milk trust's dividend 
 derived from distributing milk in the stockyards 
 district, the milk retailers' profit upon their share 
 of this work, and the meagre wage paid to men 
 and women who prepare a staple food for adults, 
 together result in robbing these babies altogether 
 of their most necessary food. 
 
 Competitive determination of wage scales is 
 less endurable from decade to decade. Therefore 
 we see our fellow citizens swarming into the fed- 
 eral civil service in quest of permanent salaries, 
 and into state and city employments lured by the 
 twofold attraction of permanent employment and 
 retiring pensions, however modest both may be. 
 Or they seek arbitration of their wage disputes 
 under the Erdman Act, or demand the creation 
 of minimum wage boards, at least for women and 
 minors. 
 
32 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 Why do we Americans not frankly copy the 
 good democratic method worked out by the Aus- 
 tralians since 1896, and adopted with some modi- 
 fications in England since 1910? They create in 
 an underpaid industry a board composed of rep- 
 resentatives, elected by employers and by em- 
 ployes, who meet and consider payrolls and the 
 cost of living. In the full light of publicity these 
 representatives of the parties in interest arrive at 
 an agreement which, if approved by the appro- 
 priate supervising authority, is thereafter binding 
 upon both for an agreed time. At the end of the 
 time, either side may ask for a change and the 
 negotiations may begin anew. 
 
 Our American spirit in relation to such legisla- 
 tion is undemocratic. Although minimum wage 
 laws are intended to confirm the economic foun- 
 dation of the family and check the process of dis- 
 integration, the members of families most con- 
 cerned are not necessarily to be consulted accord- 
 ing to our present initial statutes. 
 
 Men are omitted from these new laws upon an 
 arbitrary assumption that the laws would be un- 
 constitutional if applied to men. Why do we 
 Americans refuse to face the fact that women and 
 minors are earning wages primarily because of 
 underpaid husbands and fathers, who would gladly 
 keep their wives at home and their children in 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 83 
 
 school? That it is precisely in the interest of the 
 family that the wages of men should be regu- 
 lated? 
 
 Our new statutes do not, as in Australia, usu- 
 ally provide for election of members of the boards, 
 a safeguard of the interests of wageworkers, which 
 experience has shown to be useful. Unhappily, 
 this new institution of wage boards thus tends, in 
 one state after another, to become an eleemosy- 
 nary arrangement confined to women and minors, 
 instead of a democratic method of constraining 
 industry to pay its just debts from week to week, 
 to afford an honest and sufficient family liveli- 
 hood to all people, men and women alike, who do 
 honest work. Why do we not, at the beginning 
 of public regulation of wages, strengthen the eco- 
 nomic foundations of family life by providing that 
 men and women may be elected to represent their 
 fellow workers, meeting upon wage boards the 
 representatives of employers (elected by the em- 
 ployers), the whole group bringing to bear the 
 collective wisdom of all upon the difficult subject 
 of the payroll? 
 
 Regenerative Forces Within the Family 
 
 Within the family itself, two regenerative forces 
 are slowly becoming manifest, the consumers' 
 growing consciousness of power over industry, 
 
34 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 and the increasing numbers of enfranchised 
 women. 
 
 English, German, Belgian and Swiss families 
 have set an example to the rest of the world by 
 building up cooperative enterprises, retail distri- 
 butive at first, and now spreading powerfully in 
 the fields of wholesale distribution and manufac- 
 ture. Through these agencies cooperating fami- 
 lies lower prices, raise qualities, and standardize 
 conditions of employment hi relation to the ar- 
 ticles consumed in their homes. Incidentally they 
 compel their non-cooperative competitors to ap- 
 proach more or less closely the same improved 
 standards. 
 
 England has in its federated cooperative soci- 
 eties nearly three million members, men and wom- 
 en, whose capital amounts to more than two and 
 a half billion dollars wholly invested in coopera- 
 tive enterprises. Through this movement, a large 
 proportion of the domestic consumption of the 
 families is covered. 
 
 The German societies report a membership of 
 more than five and a half million, and an annual 
 turnover of a billion and a quarter dollars. 
 
 The admirable social achievement of the Bel- 
 gian cooperatives is too well known to require 
 more than a passing reference. 
 
 The Ninth International Cooperative Congress, 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 35 
 
 held at Glasgow in 1913, reports delegates from 
 24 nations, in which there are more than twenty 
 million members of cooperative societies. Of 
 these six millions are within the bodies organically 
 affiliated with the International Cooperative Al- 
 liance. 
 
 The improved quality of the cooperators them- 
 selves is increasingly recognized as of greater im- 
 portance than their industrial achievement. 
 Their self-confidence, business ability, and active 
 participation in the control of industry have no 
 parallel among us. In using this vast power at 
 their command as consumers, American families 
 have strangely lagged behind. Here is a promis- 
 ing field of activity ignored by those wives of pro- 
 fessional men, and better paid employes, whose 
 economic activities have gone from the home, and 
 whose enforced leisure is not altogether a source 
 of satisfaction. 
 
 Though the vast majority of consumers are 
 themselves workers farmers or wage earners 
 they have not yet generally perceived that the 
 tendency of the family to disintegrate has for its 
 final cause the lost ownership of their tools by the 
 workers. The civilized world is, however, gradu- 
 ally coming to see that it can never return to the 
 primitive ownership of the agricultural period. 
 The perception spreads from nation to nation that 
 
36 Modern Industry and the Family 
 
 the growing control of industry by those who work 
 brain workers and hand workers means hence- 
 forth not direct, individual possession, but an im- 
 measurable variety of forms of participation in 
 cooperative ownership, public and private. 
 
 In America voting women are increasing from 
 year to year and revealing the regenerative power 
 of the ballot in the service of the family. Four 
 and a half million women vote in Washington, 
 Oregon, California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Alaska, 
 Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Illinois; and in 
 thirteen other states the process of enfranchising 
 women will reach the stage of referendum to the 
 voters before the election of the next President 
 in 1916. Already wage earning women and girls 
 in Arizona, Washington, California, Colorado and 
 the District of Columbia enjoy the benefits of the 
 eight hours day; and in Washington, Oregon, 
 Utah, Colorado, and California minimum wage 
 laws for them have, with their help as voters, been 
 enacted, an epoch making innovation, even 
 though these laws are still experimental and in 
 need of improvement. It seems reasonable to be- 
 lieve that these are mere intimations of the meas- 
 ures of self-defence of the family which are des- 
 tined to be established by means of new powers 
 gradually being conferred upon women. 
 
 An infinite vista opens before the mind, of re- 
 
Modern Industry and the Family 37 
 
 generative power for the restoration and progress 
 of the family through the development of coop- 
 eration and community action in the industrial 
 field. The era of unbridled power exercised by 
 irresponsible industry at cost of the family the 
 fundamental institution of the human race is 
 slowly drawing to a close. 
 
 Hence the vital strength of the rapidly growing 
 movement to extend all devices of democratic 
 government. When the coming worldwide indus-, 
 trial code for restoring and safeguarding the fam- 
 ily is at length adopted in its fullness, it will ex- 
 press the will of the adult people whom it con- 
 cerns, men and women together. In that direction 
 lies hope of regeneration of the family under the 
 conditions created by modem industry. 
 
II 
 
 MODERN INDUSTRY IN RELATION TO 
 HEALTH 
 
MODERN INDUSTRY AND HEALTH 
 
 Modern industry offers, in abundance new to 
 human experience, everything requisite for the 
 enjoyment of good health. It produces unmeas- 
 ured wealth in myriad forms food, clothing, 
 shelter, books, the means of travel, recreation and 
 enjoyment. 
 
 For fighting disease, too, the arsenal was never 
 so well furnished. Every year we have more hos- 
 pitals, more costly and more splendid, more sana- 
 toria, more clinics, more medical schools, more 
 training schools for nurses. Endowments for re- 
 search increase and the discoveries from their 
 laboratories follow each other in hope-inspiring 
 succession. Crusades against disease are carried 
 forward, nationwide in scope, against tuberculosis, 
 infant mortality, cancer, blindness, the social dis- 
 eases, and insanity. 
 
 From year to year the social functions of doc- 
 tors and nurses are extended. School doctors and 
 school nurses are already an old story, their bene- 
 ficent work is recognized as indispensable, and 
 
 41 
 
42 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 their ranks are now increased by their colleagues 
 attached to municipal milk stations. Nursing the 
 poor in their homes has been, for more than a dec- 
 ade, a municipal activity in Los Angeles, and has 
 recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary as a 
 voluntary activity in New York City. We are 
 growing accustomed to the presence of nurses in 
 department stores and factories, to follow-up 
 nurses from the hospitals, and to nursing in con- 
 nection with industrial insurance. 
 
 It is the new wealth created by modern indus- 
 try which makes possible this nationwide war 
 upon disease. 
 
 This is, moreover, only a part of the cheerful 
 tale. Industry affords, almost from day to day, 
 fresh resources for making work healthful and 
 pleasant. Improvements in the production of 
 concrete, steel and glass, and advances in engineer- 
 ing, make possible the construction of factories 
 fireproof and perfectly lighted, ventilated, and 
 heated. Where the outside air is vitiated, it can 
 be purified by artificial means while it is brought 
 indoors, and this is increasingly done for commer- 
 cial purposes. Electrical vacuum processes draw 
 off dust at the point at which it is generated, so 
 that neither the particular workman engaged at 
 a machine hitherto a dangerous dust generator, 
 nor his colleague working in the same room, need 
 
Modern Industry and Health 43 
 
 henceforth suffer from dust. By the use of suit- 
 able glass shades, electric light can now be tem- 
 pered to the human eye. Seats of all kinds and 
 heights are ready on the market. The list of re- 
 sources made available by industry itself for mak- 
 ing work wholesome and agreeable can be pro- 
 longed indefinitely. 
 
 Normally industry itself should be an upbuild- 
 ing process, a daily benefit to mind and body of 
 all who participate in it. Every sound man and 
 woman is physically the better for regular active 
 work. Rational exertion with moderate leisure, 
 and assured livelihood without worry about daily 
 bread, naturally conduce to good health. And for 
 all these things modern industry amply provides 
 the raw materials. Never before were the techni- 
 cal conditions so favorable for assuring to all who 
 work reasonably short hours (to avoid the stupe- 
 fying effects of monotony and speeding) cheering 
 rewards, and the consciousness of useful service. 
 
 With the help of modern hygiene and prevent- 
 ive medicine, enriched by all the new resources, 
 we ought to be living in vigor and enjoyment on 
 our seventieth birthdays, unless we are cut down 
 by the enemy in the form of inoperable cancer, 
 or some obscure disease of the heart, or by one of 
 the mysterious maladies whose secrets science has 
 not yet laid bare. Indeed, Professor Metschni- 
 
44 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 koff has long encouraged us to hope that our great- 
 grandchildren may live in physical vigor far be- 
 yond the century mark. And certain life insur- 
 ance companies are collecting data about cen- 
 tenarian policy holders. 
 
 At present, however, the average age at death 
 of the American people, in the registration area, 
 is approximately 47 years instead of the Biblical 
 three score years and ten, or the 140 years held 
 out to the hopes of our successors by the head of 
 the Pasteur Institute. 
 
 Disease and Death By-products of Industry 
 
 It is the paradox of modern industry in relation 
 to health that, while producing the wealth which 
 enriches medical institutions and sustains the pro- 
 fessions of scientific research, medicine and nurs- 
 ing, it gives rise to a considerable part of the dis- 
 ease which they strive to cure, and the deaths 
 which they aim to defer. Avoidable disease and 
 premature death are among its regular by-prod- 
 ucts, and it exhausts ever widening ranges of 
 working people. It exerts a continuous injurious 
 influence upon masses of those who consume its 
 products, or work in its service. 
 
 These sinister facts have been slow to attract 
 widespread attention because we lack the two 
 
Modern Industry and Health 45 
 
 essential sources of knowledge about them vital 
 statistics and insurance records. 
 
 We are the one great nation without vital sta- 
 tistics. We do not know how many children are 
 born each year in our Republic, or how many 
 people die. 
 
 The first service of the federal Children's Bureau 
 in the initial year of its activity consists in forc.- 
 ing upon the attention of the nation the fact that, 
 of our forty-eight states, only eight register births 
 in accordance with the standard set by the Federal 
 Census Bureau.* These are the New England 
 states with Pennsylvania and Michigan. In New 
 York the vital statistics are good enough to bring 
 the city within the registration area. But it is 
 easier to get birth certificates for little Turks born 
 in Turkey, than for American children born in 
 the rural counties of New York State when the 
 children apply for "working papers," and their 
 birth certificates are their first requisite. 
 
 After the vital statistics which we lack, the sec- 
 ond available source of exact knowledge of the 
 
 * These states were admitted to the "provisional registration 
 area." Not all of them have complete registration. New 
 laws go into effect (1914) in Arkansas, North Carolina, and 
 Tennessee, and amendments in some other states. It is not 
 possible to say whether their results will be satisfactory until 
 they have had sufficient time to give a fair test, there are so 
 many conditions affecting the completeness of returns. 
 
46 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 relation of disease to industry would be the records 
 of social insurance such as Germany has been ac- 
 cumulating throughout a quarter century. In 
 the coal mining areas and textile manufacturing 
 districts in Germany, the births and deaths of 
 children, and the age at death, and causes of 
 death, of their fathers are known through vital 
 statistics and social insurance records. The rela- 
 tive dangers to life and health in these two great 
 industries can, therefore, be accurately traced. 
 
 For the corresponding coal mining areas of 
 West Virginia and textile manufacturing districts 
 of New Jersey, we know nothing trustworthy as 
 to birth, death, health or disease of children or 
 parents. So, too, in regard to the stockyards re- 
 gion of Chicago, the second city of the nation. 
 Although it is a matter of common knowledge that 
 children born in that part of the city die in great 
 numbers very young, we have no scientific, official 
 statement. 
 
 After a nationwide crusade lasting ten years, 
 we have no adequate registration of a disease so 
 omnipresent as tuberculosis. 
 
 We have no national policy with regard to 
 health, and no scientific basis for the adoption of 
 such a policy. The absence of vital statistics in- 
 dicates correctly our national indifference to the 
 ;whole subject. Indeed, in recent years an effort 
 
Modern Industry and Health 47 
 
 to create a federal Department of Health with a 
 representative in the Cabinet has called forth hor- 
 rifying opposition. 
 
 Under these circumstances of national indiffer- 
 ence to life and health, our belated state in regard 
 to social insurance follows naturally. The first 
 American conference on the subject occurred in 
 1913, and the tenth biennial meeting of the Inter- 
 national Conference, which will be held in the 
 United States in 1915, will be the first session held 
 in this country. Social insurance records are, 
 thus, for us wholly a hope for the future. 
 
 All these difficulties being duly recognized, it is 
 still true that, at least within the registration area, 
 we know enough in regard to deaths to venture 
 certain conclusions. Among these the most im- 
 portant is that, within that area, the death rate 
 is too slowly declining, the average life is too 
 slowly lengthening.* 
 
 After living more than twenty years in working 
 class districts of two leading industrial cities, New 
 York and Chicago, I am impressed with the deadly 
 effects, in working class families, of two active 
 continuing influences the bad food supply, and 
 the ignorant mothers in relation to that supply. 
 Whatever progress has been achieved in prolong- 
 ing human life by reducing mortality of infants 
 
48 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 and young children is due to efforts directly coun- 
 teracting these agencies. 
 
 Commercialized Food 
 
 In certain cities charitable societies and boards 
 of health afford, through a limited number of milk 
 stations, supplies especially provided for the chil- 
 dren of the poor and warranted not to kill or in- 
 jure them. But for the general supply consumed 
 by families who are neither rich enough to buy 
 certified milk, nor poor enough for charity, we set 
 a standard too low for health, too high for the 
 farmers under present railway charges. Why have 
 we not good milk for all, since the technical knowl- 
 edge necessary for obtaining it is now everywhere 
 available? 
 
 A chief difficulty is an industrial one, the slow 
 service and excessive charges of railroads. These 
 discourage farmers from enlarging their output, 
 and in great measure spoil the product in transit, 
 by exposing it to prolonged heat in summer, and 
 by tempting shippers to drug milk with preserva- 
 tives. 
 
 Retail dealers constitute a second great diffi- 
 culty in the way of a wholesome urban milk sup- 
 ply for all the children. They keep up the price, 
 and succumb to temptation to spoil milk as food 
 for babies by adding water or preservatives (for- 
 
Modern Industry and Health 49 
 
 maldehyde and others) to their own profit. They 
 add germs of malignant disease when milk is sold 
 in little shops that are the front rooms of dwell- 
 ings in which there happens to be illness. And 
 their dirty ways often add to milk filth bacteria 
 that are fatal, particularly during hot weather, 
 to little children and to invalids. Such hordes of 
 milk retailers are licensed, that no one can pos- 
 sibly know how they conduct their business day by 
 day and hour by hour. Yet this is a matter of 
 life and death for children. 
 
 Before infant mortality can be reduced to its 
 possible minimum, the milk industry must, in the 
 interest of all children in all city homes, be munici- 
 pal like the water supply, and like it safe and 
 abundant. Although this change obviously can- 
 not be complete until American railroads are, like 
 the Swiss railroads, public servants of the people, 
 hopeful beginnings exist in the municipal milk 
 stations of New York, Rochester, and a few other 
 cities. 
 
 Minor industrial causes of infant mortality are 
 worthless baby foods, poisonous soothing syrups, 
 and long rubbered feeding bottles. For children 
 a few years older, at the kindergarten and primary 
 school age, industry purveys candy, soda water 
 and ice-cream in which glue, lampblack, glucose, 
 sulphurous acid, saccharin, paraffin, coal-tar dyes, 
 
50 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 and many poisonous coloring matters are ingredi- 
 ents. It is chiefly boys and girls of wage earning 
 families who buy them, often as substitutes for 
 regular meals, spending for them pennies left for 
 food by a mother whose occupation keeps her 
 away from home at meal times. Children who 
 buy these substitutes for food do so habitually. 
 Their appetite for wholesome food is cloyed, their 
 digestion clogged, and malnutrition follows. 
 
 It is hard to conceive of a city or state produc- 
 ing and distributing substances like these. And 
 the question, therefore, arises in behalf of the 
 most dependent, defenceless members of the com- 
 munity, how long our food supply is to be, en- 
 trusted to adulterators and speculators? 
 
 There is a widespread misapprehension as to 
 the degree of protection afforded to the public 
 by the federal pure food law. All the substances 
 above enumerated are debarred from interstate 
 commerce if shipped for use as food. But they 
 can be legally manufactured and sold locally, un- 
 less state laws or city ordinances against them are 
 enacted and enforced. 
 
 All these injurious articles are sold to New York 
 City school children in the immediate vicinity of 
 school buildings. They are manufactured and 
 consumed within the city, and therefore escape 
 the national pure food and drug law. 
 
Modern Industry and Health 51 
 
 The same exemption applies to tuberculous milk 
 and meat if produced and sold locally. Every 
 state is free to legislate or not as it sees fit, and 
 every community is a law unto itself in the matter 
 of enforcement. In the whole country, only three 
 cities have municipal slaughter houses. In these 
 the city naturally determines the method of pre- 
 paring the meat supply, and the state laws can 
 obviously be enforced without incentive to resist- 
 ance or evasion. If the municipal abattoirs were 
 supplemented with city markets suitably placed, 
 one important element of the food problem of 
 wage-earning families in those cities would be 
 greatly simplified. 
 
 ^ Ignorant Mothers 
 
 Physicians and nurses working in connection 
 with milk stations agree that their most useful 
 service consists in educating mothers in the care 
 of babies and young children. For of what avail 
 is it to get certified milk into the tenements, an 
 expensive and laborious process, if the mothers 
 then leave it exposed to heat, bad air and flies? 
 Or if they continue, as before, to feed the babies 
 coffee, cucumbers and pickles? 
 
 The cause of the mothers' ignorance is usually 
 the insufficient wage of the family breadwinner 
 which in industrial communities urges the young 
 
52 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 girls to leave school from grades below that in 
 which domestic science instruction even begins. 
 In the great Southern cotton manufacturing 
 states in Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas 
 where children enter the mills exceptionally at 
 seven and eight years, and in great numbers at 
 eleven and twelve, their minds are not mature 
 enough to profit by such instruction as future 
 mothers need for the safety and welfare of their 
 children. 
 
 From the point of view, however, of the life 
 and health of the next generation, the employment 
 of little girls in mills is hardly more injurious than 
 the exhausting and stupefying work of older ones, 
 from fourteen to twenty. An industrial Republic 
 needs highly intelligent mothers, capable of tak- 
 ing care of the health of all the members of the 
 family, of whom the babies are merely the most 
 sensitive and perishable. For this reason the 
 public welfare requires that all working girls 
 should be kept in attendance at part time con- 
 tinuation schools far beyond the present limit of 
 sixteen years of age, whatever modification of 
 workroom schedules and of existing curricula this 
 may involve. 
 
 The disease most common among working peo- 
 ple, tuberculosis, is cultivated by wholesale in the 
 tenement home and in the workroom. Crowded 
 
Modern Industry and Health 53 
 
 sleeping rooms, broken rest, insufficient, ill pre- 
 pared, unsuitable food at home cooperate with 
 fatigue, dust, strain in the workroom to prepare 
 the bodies of workers, particularly of the young, 
 to receive the germ under circumstances favorable 
 to its development. Nightwork especially predis- 
 poses the young frame to welcome the plague, for 
 sleep lost at night cannot be made up in a working 
 class district. 
 
 Tuberculosis is a mass product of modern in- 
 dustry. Yet in our crusade against it we have, 
 hitherto, used retail measures. The crusade has, 
 therefore, no such sweeping reduction in cases to 
 report as its founders hoped and foretold a decade 
 ago. The industrial predisposing causes are all 
 still in force poverty, fatigue, tuberculous meat 
 and milk on the market, bad housing, and conges- 
 tion of population.* 
 
 Wages and Health 
 
 The cost of living has increased in recent years, 
 and the standard of living has fallen, certainly for 
 the unskilled, the common laborers. 
 
 *It will be a matter of literally vital interest to watch 
 the activities of the newly enfranchised women in San Fran- 
 cisco, Los Angeles and Chicago as to the public health in 
 these aspects the care of the food supply, the education of 
 girls for family life, and the solution of the hitherto insoluble 
 housing problem. 
 
54 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 In the minds of working people the world over 
 there has never been a doubt that, for their health, 
 the most important consideration is the standard 
 of living, steady income, rational in relation to the 
 cost of food, clothing, shelter. Hence their in- 
 numerable strikes for increased wages. 
 
 Unhappily, the workers have not hitherto con- 
 trolled this relation, for how do they profit by an 
 increased wage in the cases in which they succeed 
 in getting it, if the increase all goes to the land- 
 lord, the meat trust, the coal trust, the milkman? 
 Without scientific distribution of the necessaries 
 of life as pure and cheap as our existing technic 
 makes possible, the increase becomes illusory. 
 This long-delayed expansion of public functions 
 we are justified in expecting of the new voters of 
 whom so large a proportion are self-supporting, 
 or the wives of wage-earning men. 
 
 As important for the public health as for the 
 restoration of the family is the new interference 
 of the public in the determination of wages. It 
 has become a matter of almost annual recurrence 
 that the federal government intervenes between 
 some large congeries of railroads and their or- 
 ganized employes to maintain the standard of 
 wages. The new state commissions on women's 
 wages are obviously destined to contribute to- 
 wards preventing tuberculosis and insanity by 
 
Modern Industry and Health 55 
 
 assuring a livelihood, however modest, to women 
 workers who have proverbially worked the long- 
 est hours, at the most wearing tasks, for the most 
 wretched pay. 
 
 The present conflagration of interest and alarm 
 concerning the wages of women and girls in rela- 
 tion to the public health and morals was kindled 
 in greater degree than is commonly known by the 
 modest little volume, Making Both Ends Meet, 
 by Edith Wyatt and Sue Ainslie Clark,* which 
 embodied facts gathered directly from some hun- 
 dreds of women and girls living away from their 
 families and supporting themselves. Its publica- 
 tion stimulated some of the earliest direct efforts 
 in this country for wage legislation. 
 
 i 
 
 Preventable Dangers in Industry 
 
 The characteristic of modern industry is inces- 
 sant change. As old processes are abandoned and 
 new ones introduced, new dangers, new injurious 
 influences constantly arise, and new powers of 
 controlling them as well. Among the incidents 
 of industry varying from branch to branch, from 
 place to place, are heat, cold, glare, darkness, in- 
 
 *Macmillan, 1910. Miss Wyatt is Vice-President of the 
 Consumers' League of Illinois, and Miss Ainslie made her 
 investigation while one of the secretaries of the National 
 Consumers' League. 
 
56 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 sufficient lighting, noise, speeding, monotony, 
 heavy lifting, standing, bad air, dampness, con- 
 tact with poisonous materials, dangerous machin- 
 ery, and processes generating dust, gases and 
 vapors. 
 
 These industrial menaces to the health of wage- 
 earners are discussed in ever fresh editions of for- 
 eign standard works on industrial hygiene. It is 
 a striking and discreditable fact that we have, in 
 the United States, no standard work on this in- 
 finitely important subject. We are dependent 
 upon the English writers, Sir Thomas Oliver and 
 Hutchins and Harrison, although, in many impor- 
 tant respects, conditions are so different in the two 
 countries that these valuable works are in part 
 inapplicable here.* 
 
 Indeed, it is only because of the default of sci- 
 ence in this field that a lay observer finds a re- 
 
 *The first American monographs dealing with special as- 
 pects of industrial disease are still recent, Dr. Alice Hamil- 
 ton's studies of lead poisoning, published by the U. S. De- 
 partment of Labor, and Dr. John B. Andrews' investigation 
 of the use of white sulphur in manufacturing matches. 
 
 Two valuable state reports dealing with more general 
 aspects of health and industry are those of the Mass. State 
 Board of Health (1907) and the more recent Illinois State 
 Commission on the Health, Safety and Comfort of Em- 
 ployes. 
 
 The New York State Factories Investigating Commission, 
 also, in ita current reports contributes valuable data. 
 
Modern Industry and Health 57 
 
 spectful hearing. It is as a lay observer that I 
 venture to report the following observations inci- 
 dental to my work as factory inspector for the 
 State of Illinois, or as visitor for the National 
 Consumers' League, or as one (for a brief month) 
 of the members of the staff of the Pittsburgh 
 Survey. 
 
 In Chicago, at the Stockyards, in 1895, on an 
 August day so hot that three employes died of 
 sunstroke, young immigrant boys were serving as 
 door-openers of the cooling rooms. A boy open- 
 ing a door for little electric trains carrying sides 
 of beef, was as the door swung open exposed 
 to the scorching heat of the outside world. Then 
 -as the train slowly passed him the door swing- 
 ing inward he returned to his post inside the 
 cooling room where icicles hung from the ceiling 
 because that temperature was necessary for the 
 meat. All day long, he oscillated between those 
 extremes of temperature. Cynical, indeed, was 
 the contrast between the provision for the well- 
 being of the beef, and the exposure of the immi- 
 grant boys to pneumonia or rheumatism ! 
 
 If there is, to-day, any regulation of tempera- 
 ture at the Chicago Stockyards in the interest of 
 the health of employes, it has been achieved 
 through enforcement of the Health, Safety and-i 
 
58 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 t Comfort Act, under the new administration, and 
 x within the past few months. 
 
 In Pittsburgh, the Black City, a department 
 store exhibits marvellous laces, and delicately 
 tinted, perishable silks. The soot laden city air 
 is drawn down through a high intake, and kept 
 physically pure by being pumped through flowing 
 water and cotton batting. In this store are to be 
 found the most uniformly courteous, unwearied, 
 refreshed looking sales clerks in all the city. 
 When I commented upon this fact to the man- 
 ager, he agreed that pure, fresh air undoubtedly 
 was one contributing cause of this desirable con- 
 dition. "But," he said, "it is only honest to tell 
 you that we did that in the first place for the sake 
 of the laces and silks." 
 
 In a candy factory in the same Black City of 
 Pittsburgh, I found on a horribly smoky, muggy 
 September afternoon, in 1907, a workroom so cool 
 and refreshing, in which everyone looked so com- 
 fortable, that I have always remembered it as a 
 bright spot in a dismal experience. The work- 
 room was kept at a fixed temperature and the air 
 pure because the girls were dipping chocolates of 
 the finest and most expensive quality which would 
 be ruined if the heat and soot of the city reached 
 them. For that one room the air was pumped 
 through cotton batting and cold, flowing water 
 
Modern Industry and Health 59 
 
 and, by a fortunate accident, the temperature re- 
 quired for the chocolates happened also to be 
 wholesome and agreeable for the workers. The 
 closing gong sounded while we lingered in the 
 room, and the girls showed no zeal to rush for 
 their hats and quit the place. I spoke of this to 
 one of them, and her quick reply was "Do you 
 think we're going to be as comfortable as this 
 again before we get back here to-morrow morn- 
 ing?" 
 
 Surely the time cannot be far distant when the 
 conscience of the community will demand of the 
 chocolate industry that it shall do throughout, 
 for the health and comfort of its workers, what it 
 now finds it profitable to do in one room in each 
 factory for the sake of the appearance of its 
 product. 
 
 In a southern city, in the heart of a vast to- 
 bacco growing region, I was taken to see a new 
 candy factory of which the citizens were proud. 
 It was in a fine new concrete building, with in- 
 numerable windows admitting light and air. 
 These were open in the mild southern climate, 
 and a swarm of bees had entered through them in 
 search of sweets. A battle was going on between 
 the employes and the bees, and the floor was 
 strewn with dead and wounded insects. To me as 
 representative of the consuming public, this floor 
 
60 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 was of extraordinary interest. It was of light- 
 colored concrete, smooth and adapted to the main- 
 tenance of exquisite cleanliness. The manager 
 had provided numerous spittoons for the use of 
 the workmen. Neither he nor they seemed, how- 
 ever, to feel under obligation to use them, and 
 the light-colored, smooth concrete floor was dis- 
 figured in many directions with pools of tobacco 
 juice, through which flies and surviving wounded 
 bees crawled in great numbers, crawling after- 
 wards over candy in various stages of preparation 
 and packing. 
 
 In this new factory the latest machinery was 
 installed. Here, too, the chocolate room was kept 
 at a fixed temperature. The candies were of all 
 qualities, from fine bon-bons to the poisonous 
 trash which mission Sunday schools buy for their 
 Christmas trees. Coal-tar dyes of many colors 
 stood boldly open to view, and our friendly host 
 offered us candies to eat, unconscious of the hor- 
 ror inspired by his defiled floor, his spittoons, and 
 his coal-tar dyes. 
 
 There was, at that time, no state factory law, 
 and no requirement that seats should be provided 
 for women and girls at work. A large group of 
 young girls, apparently between 14 and 16 years 
 of age stood, packing candy for shipment, at a 
 table far too high for them, which had been origi- 
 
Modern Industry and Health 61 
 
 nally adapted to a group of men who were now 
 working in a different part of the factory. To our 
 suggestion that the girls could do more work in a 
 day if the table were lowered and they were al- 
 lowed to sit, the manager genially replied that 
 they were paid by the piece and worked as hard as 
 they could, whatever position they were in. The 
 concrete floor, which so sadly failed of its purpose 
 in the matter of cleanliness, was terribly hard 
 upon the feet of all who had to stand long upon 
 it. Needless standing is always an indication of 
 incompetent management. It is less injurious to 
 boys than to girls because of their different struc- 
 ture, and because they are so inevitably restless 
 that they shift about and lessen the harm to them- 
 selves without knowing that they are doing it. 
 Their very restlessness often saves them from be- 
 ing asked to stand except when actively engaged 
 in tending a machine which automatically keeps 
 them still. 
 
 That factory ships candy in quantities through- 
 out the Southwest, and the people of the city in 
 which it stands buy its product with pride and 
 pleasure because it is the most modern of their 
 industries. The manager is a much respected, 
 enterprising citizen, no more aware of the relation 
 of industry to health and disease than the people 
 among whom he moves socially. 
 
62 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 How far we are from acting upon the idea that 
 work is one foundation of health, how much 
 farther from compelling industry to use its own 
 inherent resources for the good health of the work- 
 ers, is illustrated by an episode of the Pittsburgh 
 Survey. During an early conference of the in- 
 vestigators, in September, 1907, someone sug- 
 gested that one of the first inquiries should test 
 the truth of the statement that, in the steel in- 
 dustry, men were employed 365 days in the year, 
 twelve hours a day; and twice a month 24 hours 
 at a stretch, at the turn of the shift from night- 
 work to daywork on Sunday. All who were pres- 
 ent agreed, except the questioner, that it seemed 
 inconceivable that men could endure such strain, 
 especially in the heat at which much of the work 
 is done. 
 
 After a fortnight, however, Professor Commons 
 reported that it was true. Those were the work- 
 ing hours, for the water boys as well as for the 
 men whom they served, and the consequences were 
 such as would naturally follow. Occasionally a 
 man died at his work. Sometimes a man collapsed 
 on the way home. Strained hearts, paralysis, and 
 disorders less obviously traceable to a particular 
 exertion but due to heat, fatigue, and strain car- 
 ried men off. 
 
 The steel industry did not, at that time, get 
 
Modern Industry and Health 63 
 
 many local recruits among Americans, or among 
 foreigners who had been here any length of time. 
 Employment bureaus were maintained to bring in 
 men from Ellis Island to Pittsburgh, to work 
 under that strain. 
 
 When the facts were ascertained and made pub- 
 lic, conditions began very slowly to change in 
 some degree. Sunday repair work was reduced 
 in some places; shifts were, in some cases, changed 
 from two of twelve hours to three of eight hours 
 each, though 63 per cent, of employes in the steel 
 industry still worked 12 hours in 24 in the year 
 1913. 
 
 The stockholders of the industry have again 
 voted against a general reduction of the working 
 hours to eight; and the legislature of Pennsyl- 
 vania has again killed a bill which would, if 
 enacted, have ended the employment at night of 
 boys fourteen and fifteen years old in making 
 steel. 
 
 Neither the federal government, the State of 
 Pennsylvania, nor the City of Pittsburgh has 
 records showing what this overwork has been do- 
 ing to the health of the workers. When men fell 
 ill of tuberculosis, rheumatism, or other slow dis- 
 abling disease, they commonly went home to 
 Europe to die, so that they did not even appear 
 
64 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 in the mortality figures of the decennial federal 
 Census. 
 
 The steel industry had been encouraged in reck- 
 lessness by a decision of the Supreme Court of 
 Pennsylvania. If an alien was killed in industry, 
 the surviving alien dependents living in Europe 
 could not through counsel, or through the consul 
 of their own country, appear in any court in Penn- 
 sylvania to ask damages for the loss of their bread- 
 winner. This has recently been altered by statute, 
 so that to-day, if a Slav or an Italian comes to this 
 country leaving his family in Europe and is killed 
 while still an alien, his family may claim damages. 
 
 Sinister, indeed, for a series of years, was the 
 influence of that decision upon the health and 
 safety of workingmen in Pennsylvania. To avoid 
 the possible costs entailed by the death of native 
 or naturalized men while at work, employment 
 agents bringing in recruits for the dangerous in- 
 dustries were actively tempted by the decision to 
 prefer detached aliens. 
 
 Our greatest manufacturing industry was, 
 under that decision, moving in the direction ex- 
 actly opposite to that of Germany and the other 
 most enlightened industrial nations. They have, 
 for a quarter century, been striving to stimulate 
 employers to make industry safe by increasingly 
 placing upon them the cost of the death or dis- 
 
Modern Industry and Health 65 
 
 ability of a wage earner. The employers, under 
 this compulsion, form mutual insurance compan- 
 ies and distribute over the whole industry, as they 
 see fit, the damage cost arising from deaths and 
 injuries. Such insurance affords the maximum 
 financial stimulus for employers to make industry 
 safe. The Pennsylvania decision worked for 
 years in exactly the opposite way. 
 
 Among several states which are now legislating 
 with intent to make industry safe, perhaps the 
 most striking experiment is that of Washington. 
 The statute provides that if, in any occupation, 
 an employe loses his life or becomes permanently 
 disabled, his dependents have a valid, legal claim 
 upon that industry the wife throughout widow- 
 hood, the children until the 16th birthday. 
 
 This statute has been unanimously sustained by 
 the Supreme Court of Washington, and is pending 
 before the Supreme Court of the United States, in 
 a case to test its constitutionality. There was in 
 the state one extra hazardous industry, the manu- 
 facture of explosives. Only two establishments 
 were engaged in it. One blew up, killing eight 
 employes. The State of Washington paid the 
 damages due, under the statute, to the survivors 
 and to the dependents of the dead, and sent the 
 bill to the company and its competitor. The com- 
 petitor is testing the constitutionality of the law. 
 
66 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 No other state seems to have gone quite so far 
 as Washington in its effort to make it worth while 
 for the extra hazardous industries to reduce their 
 hazards. The decision of the Supreme Court of 
 the United States will, therefore, be of epoch mak- 
 ing importance. 
 
 Between the extremes of policy adopted by 
 Washington on the one hand, and the courts of 
 Pennsylvania on the other (whose decisions have, 
 for years, deprived thousands of working people 
 of compensation for injuries) experiments in great 
 variety are in process, all directed toward assur- 
 ing to wage workers and their families some com- 
 pensation, and to employers new stimulus for 
 making industry safe. 
 
 Any constitution can, with the expenditure of 
 time and trouble, be brought into line with civi- 
 lization.* Laws must ultimately be enacted in 
 every state, assuring to the survivors of men 
 killed at work some payment of damages, and to 
 workers hurt but not killed some reasonable com- 
 pensation for the loss of health, or limbs, or earn- 
 ing power. In not one state has this yet been 
 done effectively. 
 
 If the Supreme Court of the United States fol- 
 
 *This has been conclusively shown by the action of the 
 voters of New York State during the past three years in 
 relation to workmen's compensation. 
 
Modern Industry and Health 67 
 
 lows the reasoning of the Court of Washington, 
 the slow process of changing constitutions and 
 statutes of other states will be relatively easy. If, 
 however, the Supreme Court of the United States 
 should follow the reasoning of the New York 
 Court of Appeals in the Ives case, we shall be con- 
 fronted by the painful and weary task of amend- 
 ing the Constitution of the United States. The 
 recent adoption of two amendments, the first in 
 nearly fifty years, shows that this process, though 
 slow and discouraging, is no longer impossible. 
 
 Factory Inspection 
 
 One serious weakness in our dealing with in- 
 dustry in relation to health, safety and comfort 
 lies in our disregard of the factory inspection staff. 
 In Germany, where accidents and bad health 
 among employes are causes of direct expense to 
 employers, the aid and advice of inspectors are 
 sought for keeping factories safe and wholesome. 
 Inspectors are technically trained men and wom- 
 en, carefully fitted for their work and of great im- 
 portance to both employers and employes. Their 
 visits are, therefore, welcomed by both. 
 
 In this country, on the contrary, inspectors are 
 selected in consideration of their usefulness to a 
 party organization, or a trade union, rather than 
 their technical qualifications for their task. In 
 
68 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 the greatest industrial state, New York, where the 
 inspection staff has the nominal protection of the 
 civil service law, the State Civil Service Commis- 
 sion has, for many years, been as actively in poli- 
 tics as any avowedly political part of the state 
 government. This is utterly demoralizing to the 
 inspection staff and the employers, and defeats the 
 purpose for which the inspectors exist. 
 
 Twenty years ago, I cherished hopes of im- 
 proved provisions for the health of factory work- 
 ers to come through the employment of women 
 as inspectors. Experience has shown that there 
 is a large field in which they can be of great ser- 
 vice. But neither men nor women can do what 
 needs to be done until our whole attitude toward 
 the task is fundamentally changed. At present, 
 the employes are so hopeless of benefits to be de- 
 rived from the visits of inspectors, that they are 
 commonly either wholly indifferent or, sometimes, 
 willing cynically to join with foreman or superin- 
 tendent in tricking an inspector and concealing 
 violations of the law. 
 
 A black chapter in our industrial history is this 
 of our treatment of our factory inspectors. They 
 have been left in the position of hostile critics 
 prosecutors of corporations infinitely more pow- 
 erful than themselves. Within the factory they 
 have been met as enemies, bribed when possible 
 
Modern Industry and Health 69 
 
 and, in shamefully numerous cases, removed from 
 office when they could be neither bribed, tricked 
 nor intimidated. 
 
 Under these sorry conditions the scientific out- 
 put of these officials is naturally valueless. In- 
 deed, with the honorable exception of the New 
 York State reports standardized a few years ago 
 by Commissioner Sherman, the official reports on 
 factory inspection only deepen the darkness of our 
 ignorance of the relation of the different branches 
 of industry to the health of the workers or the 
 consumers. 
 
 Fatigue and Disease 
 
 During the past three-quarters of a century 
 there has been a continuous movement for a 
 shorter working day. When, in 1830, my father 
 was a printer's apprentice in Philadelphia, he and 
 his fellow apprentices regularly expected to work 
 in summer "from light until dark," i. e. from the 
 moment they could see after dawn, until they 
 could no longer see in the late dusk of the summer 
 evening. In winter they worked from 6 a. m. to 
 8 p. m. with an hour for dinner, and a half hour 
 each for breakfast and supper. 
 
 During the three-quarters of a century since 
 those days, hundreds of thousands of men and 
 women have engaged in strikes in the hope of es- 
 
70 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 tablishing permanently a shorter working day. 
 In so doing, they were performing, at a terrible 
 cost to themselves, an invaluable service in behalf 
 of the public health of this nation. But this fact 
 was not recognized until within recent years, and 
 then only incidentally. Even now it appears 
 probable that far more would have been gained, 
 and at infinitely less cost in suffering, if the energy 
 spent in strikes for shorter working hours had all 
 been directed to enacting and enforcing statutes. 
 Since 1895, the Supreme Court of the United 
 States has, at different times and in connection 
 with several cases, laid down the principle that 
 the welfare of the community requires some rea- 
 sonable restriction upon the working hours of 
 adult men and women. The Court decided in 
 1898,* that the working day might reasonably be 
 limited to eight hours for men working under- 
 ground in mines and smelters. This could be done 
 because mining was an intrinsically dangerous oc- 
 cupation. Later, the Court held f that the work- 
 ing hours of bakers could not be limited by statute 
 to ten in twenty-four. For if baking had been an 
 intrinsically dangerous occupation, the women 
 who have, since the foundation of the Republic, 
 baked bread for their families, must have suffered 
 
 * Holden vs. Hardy, 169 U. S. 366. 
 
 t Lochner vs. New York, 198 U. S. 45, 1905. 
 
Modern Industry and Health 71 
 
 in health. The Court was not acquainted with 
 the trade life of bakers. It did not know that, in 
 American cities, thousands of bakers work under- 
 ground, almost like miners. 
 
 In this decision the Court laid down the prin- 
 ciple that, where a statute interferes with the free- 
 dom of contract of adults, professedly in the in- 
 terest of the public health and welfare, the fact 
 must be made clear to the Court that the public 
 health is really concerned. 
 
 In this decision began the recent era of sus- 
 tained, continuing effort for a working day lim- 
 ited by statute for men and women in manufac- 
 ture. Upon this decision rests the procedure of 
 the National Consumers' League whose Commit- 
 tee on the Legal Defence of Labor Laws has since 
 1907 continuously prepared briefs for the use of 
 the courts in cases involving working hours.* 
 
 In the preparation of these briefs the fact has 
 been discovered and popularized that, of all the 
 industrial causes of disease, none is so universal 
 
 * Fatigue and Efficiency, by Josephine Goldmark. The 
 Russell Sage Foundation, 1912. This fundamental work deal- 
 ing with the relation of fatigue to disease grew out of a 
 brief prepared by Miss Goldmark in defence of the Oregon 
 ten hours' law for women employed in manufacture. The 
 brief formed the basis of the favorable decision handed 
 down in January, 1908, by the Supreme Court of the United 
 States. 
 
72 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 as fatigue. Of all the poisons, it is the most uni- 
 versally diffused, controllable but not to-day con- 
 trolled. Sinister as many industrial poisons are 
 now known to be, this one alone invests with a 
 deadly threat the common run of ordinary occu- 
 pations. This gives new significance to the com- 
 plaint that working people are worn out prema- 
 turely by simple tasks, if these tasks involve mo- 
 notony or speeding. 
 
 We know now for the first time, in a form clear 
 not only to learned courts, but to the simplest 
 machine tenders, why these are often old at thirty, 
 and superannuated at forty years. The omni- 
 present poison of fatigue prepares the frames for 
 every germ that lurks. 
 
 This consideration it is which led the Supreme 
 Court of Mississippi to speak recently of the "in- 
 alienable right to rest," in a decision sustaining as 
 constitutional a statute limiting to ten hours the 
 working day of men and women in cotton mills. 
 
 The whole procedure in defence of labor laws 
 has thus been revolutionized. Instead of abstract 
 discussions of abstract freedom, the procedure is, 
 to-day, to ascertain the exact facts, to show what 
 the existing working hours are, what other nations 
 and states have done about it, and what the medi- 
 cal profession says on the subject. The final de- 
 ciding factor is. not "freedom" but health. 
 
Modern Industry and Health 73 
 
 The International Conference for Labor Legis- 
 lation at Berne, Switzerland, in September, 1913, 
 had for its principal subjects two proposals deal- 
 ing with working hours. One was the introduction 
 of the ten hours days for women in manufacture in 
 all the fourteen nations of Europe, by a treaty 
 like that which took effect on New Year's Day, 
 1910, and assured to all women so employed a 
 period of 11 hours' rest at night, of which seven 
 hours must fall between 10 p. m. and 5 a. m. 
 
 The second proposal was to extend to boys be- 
 low the age of 16 years the same period of rest at 
 night which has already been established for 
 women. 
 
 The ambassadors of the fourteen European na- 
 tions are to meet in Berne, Switzerland, in 1914, 
 to take action upon these two proposals. 
 
 We cannot participate in this treaty procedure 
 because each of our states is too sovereign to be 
 bound as to its industrial legislation by an inter- 
 national treaty. Yet no state is sovereign enough 
 to bind itself. The action of the European nations 
 in this field is, nevertheless, of immeasurable im- 
 portance to us. For what seems to them so ur- 
 gently needful for the health of the working class 
 of all European nations, that they deal with it in 
 this elaborate and comprehensive manner, seems 
 in consequence to the Supreme Court of the 
 
74 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 United States to be reasonable when the individ- 
 ual American states enact similar measures. And 
 the Court inclines, therefore, to sustain these 
 measures as constitutional. 
 
 At present, only six of our states have estab- 
 lished a closing hour at night for the work of 
 women: Massachusetts, New York, Pennsyl- 
 vania, Connecticut, Indiana and Nebraska. 
 Among these six are, however, the four in which 
 the largest number of women are employed in 
 manufacture. 
 
 Four other states Arizona, California, Colo- 
 rado and Washington have established the eight 
 hours day for women and girls, and Oregon has 
 now a working day of eight hours and twenty min- 
 utes, and a working week of 50 hours for women 
 of all ages. 
 
 In February, 1914, President Wilson signed a 
 bill limiting to eight hours in one day the work 
 of women in industry in the District of Columbia. 
 This applies to virtually all occupations except 
 domestic service, nursing the sick, and office work. 
 The bill was introduced at the request of the Na- 
 tional Consumers' League and is the first eight 
 hours law for women in the East. 
 
Modern Industry and Health 75 
 
 Industry, Health and Vice 
 
 While we thus struggle by petty retail measures 
 against disease, industry produces it by wholesale. 
 If in reply to this it is objected that much illness 
 is due not to work but to personal vices, the use of 
 alcohol and others, the answer is that these, too, 
 are cultivated as a part of the field of industry. 
 The wholesale and retail organization of the al- 
 cohol industry has recently forced itself anew upon 
 the attention of the nation by its successful re- 
 sistance to the enfranchisement of women in Wis- 
 consin, Michigan and Ohio. In all three states 
 there was a well-organized and largely financed 
 campaign of producers and distributors of alco- 
 holic beverages to defeat the suffrage amend- 
 ments. 
 
 The international organization of the white 
 slave traffic is no longer a subject of dispute. Our 
 own government and the governments of Euro- 
 pean nations are legislating with regard to it. 
 
 From these two important disease producing 
 agencies men can free themselves by their own 
 choice. But inescapable accompaniments of in- 
 dustry, perennially producing disease for hun- 
 dreds of thousands of wage-earners, are fatigue, 
 worry and an insufficient livelihood. Against 
 these the individual is largely powerless. 
 
76 Modern Industry and Health 
 
 In April, 1913, the most terrible of all the rela- 
 tions of industry to disease entered upon a unique 
 process of hopeful change. Through the efforts 
 of the voting women of San Francisco, incited 
 originally by an obscure woman worker in the 
 needle trades, Judge Charles Weller was recalled 
 from the Bench. This judge had degraded his 
 high office by systematically protecting men who 
 enticed young girls from honest work into the 
 fields of dishonor. He had reduced the bail of a 
 man under trial charged with being a white slaver. 
 He had protected that incredible American in- 
 dustry the white slave traffic. 
 
 The new voters of San Francisco enlisted 
 enough righteous men to form, with them, a safe- 
 guard for wage-earning girls against the most ter- 
 rible form of exploitation. In doing this they 
 went straight to the root of the most threatening 
 of social diseases, the plague that lurks in unde- 
 fended girlhood under pressure of underpaid in- 
 dustry. This incident heralds, I believe, a signifi- 
 cant approaching change in the relation of in- 
 dustry to health. 
 
Ill 
 
 MODERN INDUSTRY IN RELATION TO 
 EDUCATION 
 
MODERN INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION 
 
 We have no national ideal of education, inher- 
 ited, traditional, corresponding to our ideal of the 
 family. Even the little red school house, with the 
 three R's, meagre symbol of a scant ideal, was 
 never national. It was Northern and Western, 
 as the log school house belonged to the pioneers. 
 The neighborhood school house with a seat for 
 every child, is, in hundreds of counties in the 
 South, still a dream of the future. 
 
 We are committed to universal, free, compul- 
 sory education of all citizens as the logical corol- 
 lary of universal suffrage. But the Census of 1910 
 reveals the fact that we have more than a million 
 and a half native whites, ten years old and older, 
 who are unable to read and write, three per cent, 
 of their number.* Clearly, therefore, we are not 
 at present approaching even the minimum educa- 
 tional achievement demanded of a democratic in- 
 dustrial Republic as the condition of its con- 
 tinued existence. 
 
 * 1,535,530 persons, 10 years of age and over, of whom 
 obviously some small per cent, must be presumed to be 
 mentally deficient. 
 
 79 
 
80 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 Our ideal of education differs from our ideal of 
 the family in that it is not inherited, but essen- 
 tially modern. It differs, also, in that we are not 
 falling away from it, as we have fallen away, under 
 the pressure of modern industry, from our ideal 
 of the family, but are approaching it, however 
 slowly. 
 
 Throughout this lecture I assume that educa- 
 tion is a lifelong process of fitting human beings 
 for life in Society, for self-support, for sharing in 
 the conduct of industry, for parenthood, for the 
 fullest responsibility of citizenship, for all noble 
 enjoyment. 
 
 For education in this modern, comprehensive 
 interpretation, industry affords a financial basis 
 and equipment more generous than the human 
 race ever before possessed. Lavishly abundant 
 resources exist for placing instruction at the com- 
 mand of all men, women and children in the Re- 
 public. Never was a nation so rich as we are. 
 
 The universities number their students by 
 thousands, the elementary schools count their 
 pupils by millions. Yet we are confronted by 
 chronic, wholesale poverty, inextricably associated 
 with gross ignorance. This holds true among na- 
 tive Americans of English stock, in the Southern 
 states, as it does among immigrants in the North- 
 ern industrial states. The question thus arises 
 
Modern Industry and Education 81 
 
 whether poverty and ignorance, in combination, 
 may not be a by-product of modern industry. 
 
 When I was in college, students in this country 
 were quite without knowledge of the essential 
 nature of modern industry. At Cornell, where I 
 was a student in 1876, we were taught no eco- 
 nomics worthy of the name. At the University of 
 Pennsylvania my brother learned that the point 
 of greatest importance in relation to industry was 
 to understand the theory of a beneficent protec- 
 tive tariff. At Yale our contemporaries were 
 taught by Professor Sumner the supreme advan- 
 tage of free trade. Later, however, Professor Sum- 
 ner was the first to awaken in our minds a glim- 
 mering consciousness of a permanent wage-earn- 
 ing class in this country by his little volume en- 
 titled "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other." 
 Even the courageous pioneer work of Professor 
 Richard T. Ely, at Johns Hopkins, which he has 
 since carried forward there and at the University 
 of Wisconsin, had not then begun. The American 
 faculties of those days cannot be justly blamed 
 for not giving us what they did not possess. Few 
 American teachers of economics and sociology 
 then read French and German. Fewer still had, 
 like Professor Ely, studied in Europe. 
 
 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
 Sheffield, Cornell and Lawrence were new, or still 
 
82 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 in prospect. Training men to apply science in the 
 service of industry was still experimental in the 
 field of higher education, and social science had 
 hardly crossed the Atlantic. The American Social 
 Science Association was not yet a dozen years old. 
 
 Then began that application of science in the 
 service of industry which has increasingly ab- 
 sorbed our intellectual ability, and largely de- 
 flected it from the task of widening the boundaries 
 of knowledge. 
 
 The men whose minds were trained (or left un- 
 trained) by the Faculties of those days are the 
 Bench and the Bar, the captains of industry, the 
 Senators and the Faculties of to-day. Men of my 
 generation, and older men, have hitherto decided 
 all things relating to industry and to education, 
 and they are not yet relinquishing that task to 
 their successors. Upon them rests the full respon- 
 sibility for the anarchical form of industry in the 
 United States in contrast with the beginnings of 
 industrial order visible in some of the European 
 countries. When, in 1883, I was a student of the 
 Faculty of Law in Zurich, professors in Switzer- 
 land and Germany were already lecturing on new 
 aspects of industry in courses leading to the de- 
 gree of Doctor of Laws. In the University of 
 Berlin the same thing was happening. Avowedly 
 impelled by the hope of checking the revolution- 
 
Modern Industry and Education 83 
 
 ary political activity of a rapidly growing party 
 of wage-earners, Prince Bismarck was calling upon 
 the universities to apply to industrial problems 
 the collective wisdom of the leaders of German 
 economic thought; and under his leadership the 
 foundations were laid for that nationwide, in- 
 clusive, industrial insurance which the world is 
 now slowly copying. 
 
 In my student days we heard much, not only at 
 Cornell, but in the world at large, of the Conflict 
 of Science and Religion. The President of Cornell 
 published volumes on this general theme. But 
 industry, and the laws and courts which bul- 
 warked it, were sacrosanct. They were the Tem- 
 ple and the Ark of the Covenant, and critical 
 study of them would have been blasphemy if any- 
 one had thought of attempting it. 
 
 There could not have been a graver misfortune 
 for a great nation in the stage of industrial devel- 
 opment in which we then were, than such incom- 
 petence in relation to industry as disgraced our 
 American colleges and universities. The wage- 
 earners have ever since been tragically paying the 
 penalty of that default of the higher education, 
 and they must continue to pay until the men of 
 my generation now in control of industry, and of 
 interpreting and enforcing the law in relation to 
 it, shall give way to the new generation. Criti- 
 
84 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 cism, however constructive and suggestive, cannot 
 help people who are fifty years old and older to 
 acquire social and industrial vision. The time for 
 that vision is youth. Only the new generation 
 can retrieve our sins of omission and commission, 
 and this they are preparing to do. 
 
 Within the academic halls the change amounts 
 to a revolution. Classes in economics and sociol- 
 ogy now vie in numbers and popularity with 
 classes in literature. In their brief, sacrificial ca- 
 reers Elizabeth Butler, of Columbia, and Carola 
 Woerishoffer, of Bryn Mawr, heralded the new day 
 that has come, the new challenge that science of- 
 fers to industry. This old world can never again 
 be quite so sodden when thousands of young men 
 and women are sent forth every year trained to 
 face the world and to strive all their lives to see 
 it exactly as it is. 
 
 To these successors we must look for a revolu- 
 tion in education in relation to industry. To 
 them it will not present itself as a revolution, but 
 as a natural next step, when they bring into the 
 foreground of education the teaching of hygiene 
 as applied to every relation of life. For men and 
 women accustomed throughout the high schools, 
 colleges and universities to athletics, to the out- 
 door life, to physical efficiency, it must seem in- 
 sanely perverse that we reserve outdoor classes for 
 
Modern Industry and Education 85 
 
 the children of less and least vitality. For the 
 new generation of educational leaders health will 
 inevitably be the first consideration, in school and 
 in industry. To the new generation we must look, 
 therefore, for the new science that we lack indus- 
 trial hygiene and the new pedagogy that will 
 send forth young workers into industry aware of 
 the provisions which the state enacts for their 
 protection, and alert to avail themselves of the 
 benefits thereof. 
 
 One glaring fact confronts the graduates of to- 
 day, namely, the dominant influence of industry 
 in determining the ideals and the administrative 
 policy of our privately endowed universities, col- 
 leges and schools, and in modifying the state uni- 
 versities and the public schools. When the gradu- 
 ates leave the universities it is to enter a world in 
 which industry calls a million children a year too 
 early away from the elementary classrooms ir*o 
 its service. It thus creates as its permanent by- 
 product within the voting citizenship illiteracy 
 and stupidity, and broken health bred of monoto- 
 nous labor. 
 
 Enlightening the Consumers 
 
 Wholly new within the educational institutions 
 and in the world at large is the attempt to educate 
 the consumers to know and use their power in 
 
86 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 relation to industry. To-day, more than ever be- 
 fore, the enlightened consumer can truthfully say: 
 
 "When I depart this life, I shall have prac- 
 tised certain negative virtues. I shall have done 
 nothing to maintain or encourage certain 
 evil industries. No young girl will have been 
 withdrawn from any class in domestic science 
 to prepare for my use any cigars, cigarettes, 
 chewing gum or tobacco, or rouge, or hair- 
 dye, or imitation jewelry. No birds will have 
 been killed to decorate my hats, no children 
 kept at home from kindergarten or primary 
 school, or robbed of their hours, of play to 
 'willow' plumes for my headgear. In these 
 modest abstinences I have striven to keep my 
 individual conscience clear in relation to in- 
 dustry because I, personally, received some 
 education as to the powers of consumers." 
 
 Every generous young mind can be kindled to a 
 passionate interest in the relation of working chil- 
 dren to itself and its material possessions. And 
 this youthful interest may determine the later 
 activities of a lifetime, as Lord Shaftesbury re- 
 lated that, when he was a lad of fourteen years, 
 the sight of a pauper workingman's funeral modi- 
 fied the whole subsequent course of his life. 
 
 How few, however, compared with the whole 
 mass, are the enlightened consumers! How diffi- 
 cult is their path, and how incomplete their pres- 
 ent achievement! Why, indeed, is education of 
 
Modern Industry and Education 87 
 
 consumers left to a volunteer body, such as the 
 Consumers' League? 
 
 What help do the rank and file of students in 
 colleges and normal schools get from their Fac- 
 ulties in acquiring this elementary social instruc- 
 tion? Why do not all the colleges inculcate a 
 scientific attitude of mind with regard to industry, 
 awakening the spirit of inquiry, and teaching the 
 available methods of applying this spirit? The 
 colleges have long prepared students for the ser- 
 vice of industry. When will they give a like share 
 of attention to the mastery thereof? 
 
 A while ago I spoke to the students in a South- 
 ern girls' college. They were so young 13 to 19 
 years or thereabouts that I asked a member of 
 their Faculty to tell me some of their interests, so 
 that I might connect my suggestions with those 
 interests, as we do with children. She replied, 
 "They don't know anything about anything. They 
 would gladly take an interest, but the President 
 and their mothers don't think they ought to know 
 much about life." Yet many avenues of approach 
 offered access to those young minds. They were 
 alive to the usefulness of placing early their 
 Christmas orders for candy and chocolates. They 
 responded to an appeal in behalf of overworked 
 young girls in paper-box factories who prepare, 
 at the last moment, boxes for Christmas choco- 
 
88 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 lates and candies, under pressure of "rush orders" 
 of belated shoppers. They saw that daguerreo- 
 types are no longer made because we all prefer 
 photographs, and horsehair sofas are extinct be- 
 cause no one would give them houseroom. And 
 they followed the analogy that goods may be 
 coveted because their history has been righteous 
 throughout the processes of production and dis- 
 tribution. They grasped the suggestion that 
 everything made to-day is made to be sold, that 
 the purchaser is the true Lord of Industry, and 
 that we, all of us, are purchasers. They agreed 
 that there is no longer any innocent bystander. 
 
 Even more necessary is such enlightenment in 
 high schools and elementary schools. In certain 
 practical ways it can be begun very early. Thus 
 the Paulist Fathers in New York City have, for 
 years, through their Sunday School, appealed to 
 children, even little ones, and their mothers, to 
 be considerate about Christmas shopping. And 
 nuns of teaching orders, during one of their sum- 
 mer schools on the Pacific Coast, listened re- 
 ceptively to an officer of the Consumers' League 
 explaining to them the possibility of similar sug- 
 gestions to their pupils. 
 
 The children in grammar grades, and still more 
 those in high schools, are keenly alert to sugges- 
 tions of the power we all potentially possess as 
 
Modern Industry and Education 89 
 
 consumers. Their interest in regard to things that 
 they buy is of the liveliest. They are in nowise 
 blase. Beginning with their hair ribbons, tracing 
 them back to the silk mills in New Jersey and 
 Pennsylvania, school girls care eagerly to know 
 why, in silk ribbon mills, wages are low, and work- 
 rooms hot and stuffy, and how it comes that quick, 
 capable girls, hardly older than themselves, must 
 serve as pacemakers for slower and less gifted 
 workers. 
 
 Any restless school boy, at the hobbledehoy age, 
 will listen to the story of the "grinders' phthisis" 
 that cuts down in their prime men who prepare 
 blades for pocket-knives; to a description of need- 
 less danger to other boys arising from unguarded 
 machines in pencil factories, and of the small pay 
 that goes with putting rubbers in pencils. Tales 
 of mine and breaker boys and young lads working 
 at night in glass works in West Virginia find a 
 responsive chord in the breasts of school boys, 
 who readily see that none of us escape using coal 
 and glass. They, too, perceive that there are, in 
 this case, no innocent bystanders, that we are all 
 tarred with the same stick. 
 
 Working-class children during their few brief 
 years in the elementary schools need the appeal 
 to sympathetic imagination the more because of 
 the dulling experience that befalls them in the 
 
90 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 . long years of work that follow. Their direst need 
 is for cultivation of their critical sense in relation 
 to industry. 
 
 Refreshing is the alert response of young minds 
 stirred by the idea of their relation, previously an 
 unconscious one, as indirect employers. Curi- 
 ously varied is the expression of the faces of a 
 high school class when asked how they account 
 for the fact, by no means inevitable, that other 
 children of their own age are less educated than 
 themselves? They are visibly shocked by a blunt 
 statement that the present difference in oppor- 
 tunity is due not to their own superior gifts, or 
 to the superior thrift or generosity, necessarily, of 
 their parents, but to the defective organization of 
 education and of industry. To most young minds 
 the idea is fascinatingly new that the transforma- 
 tion of industry is to-day the life and death ques- 
 tion of this Republic. 
 
 This new education of youth the Nation sorely 
 needs. We must establish in all the oncoming 
 generation an unwearying spirit of inquiry with 
 regard to industry. Nothing can safely be as- 
 sumed in relation to it. Is it paying its social 
 costs? Is its product, indeed, value received? 
 Does it bring forth beauty? Or does it give us 
 personal adornment at cost of smoke-laden, filthy 
 sky and air? 
 
Modern Industry and Education 91 
 
 Child Labor 
 
 Far, however, from educating the children of 
 wage-earners to intelligent criticism as consumers, 
 the schools surrender them too early to the ser- 
 vice of industry, and tend increasingly to rob the 
 few years now sacred to childhood by making the 
 schools' work vocational and industrial*/ The new 
 vocational effort largely addresses itself to fitting 
 American youth to escape from machine tending 
 to become foremen, managers, superintendents. 
 But in the nature of industry the opportunities 
 for such work are a trivial fraction of the whole. 
 Vast multitudes must be machine tenders, and 
 machines increase daily, and under the present 
 conditions machines destroy mind. 
 
 For more than a century philanthropists have 
 struggled in England and, more recently, in this 
 country, to safeguard children of wage earners 
 from destruction by industry. The National Child 
 Labor Committee, the National Consumers' 
 League, the National Education Association, and 
 other national bodies galore have for years worked 
 to assure educational opportunity to all the chil- 
 dren. They strive to establish minimum standards 
 below which the school year may not be shortened, 
 children may not leave school unable to read and 
 
92 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 write, and industrial employment may be for- 
 bidden. 
 
 Always and everywhere they find the same 
 forces opposing them. Rural industries claim 
 children for the beet fields, the cotton and to- 
 bacco fields, the bean and pea fields, the berry 
 patches, the cranberry bogs, the canneries, and 
 the orchards. Coal mines consume boys in break- 
 ers and underground. Urban industries, too, cot- 
 ton and woollen and silk mills, glass works, sweat- 
 shops, the messenger service, and the newspapers, 
 all industries the world over in which children 
 can be employed, are forever calling them from 
 school to work. 
 
 Only the men and women who are engaged in 
 the struggle year after year know how powerful 
 and how active are the interests that profit by the 
 labor of children. In four Southern states the 
 Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama the cotton 
 mill interest has hitherto succeeded in pre- 
 venting the adoption of the fourteenth birthday 
 as the lowest limit for children beginning to work. 
 In West Virginia the glass companies and the mine 
 owners killed all child labor legislation at the ses- 
 sion of 1913. In Pennsylvania in the same year 
 the glass companies and the textile manufacturers 
 successfully made common cause against the 
 working children, killed the child labor bill, and 
 
Modern Industry and Education 93 
 
 kept in force the old law. Under it boys of four- 
 teen years may still be legally required to work 
 eight hours at night in glassworks and all other 
 industries having continuing processes. 
 
 Children have a statutory limit of their work- 
 ing day to eight hours in twenty-four in only one 
 Southern state, Mississippi, and in only one New 
 England state, Massachusetts. Forty states now 
 forbid employment of children before the four- 
 teenth birthday. Only the Southern cotton manu- 
 facturing states show no disposition thus to pro- 
 tect their young boys and girls and give them 
 time for a rudimentary education. Of children 
 who work on these terms, what cant it is to say 
 that they have "a square deal," or "an equal op- 
 portunity" with children of the socialized North- 
 western states, with their long childhood safe- 
 guarded from wage-earning, with abundant 
 schools, and free university tuition to tempt them 
 to continue the process of education! 
 
 For the unfortunate children, twelve and thir- 
 teen years old, of the belated Southern cotton 
 manufacturing states, the federal bill pending be- 
 fore Congress seems to offer new hope. It rein- 
 troduces the idea of federal action in defence of 
 boys and girls now legally employed below the age 
 of fourteen years in mills and mines. It proposes 
 to exclude from interstate commerce all goods 
 
94 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 derived from mills or mines in which children be- 
 low the age of fourteen years are employed. 
 
 The federal bill thus brings into sharp relief 
 the fact that native white orphans, of native par- 
 entage, in Georgia are future citizens of this Re- 
 public as surely as the happier immigrant chil- 
 dren of New York, or the native children of the 
 enlightened and humane Northwestern states. As 
 future citizens, the children of the South need 
 fourteen years, at least, of childhood in which to 
 grow and learn. And the bill appeals to the whole 
 nation to see that this claim is enforced, this right 
 is guaranteed to them. 
 
 The Working Class Children 
 
 Modern industry tends to keep the wage-earn- 
 ers spiritually poor and dull. Of all the charges 
 made against it to-day this is the gravest. The 
 ultimate blasphemy is the proposal to fit children 
 for industry as industry is. It must be revolu- 
 tionized before it will be fit for children and youth 
 to enter. It must first be made democratic and 
 cooperative, transformed into service. 
 
 The need of to-day is for education to enable 
 children and youth, and men and women, to re- 
 sist the ruinous, stupefying influence of industry. 
 To make this resistance successful, the schools 
 must keep the whole body of young workers on 
 
Modern Industry and Education 95 
 
 their rolls at least for regular part time attend- 
 ance, until the twenty-first birthday, until the edu- 
 cation for citizenship ends, and education by and 
 through the duties of citizenship begins. 
 
 One short step in this direction has been taken 
 in Wisconsin and in Ohio, where the working 
 week of children below the 16th birthday is re- 
 duced to 48 hours, of which five must be spent in 
 continuous classes. Enlightened teachers of these 
 classes strive to rekindle in working boys and girls, 
 from week to week, the intellectual life which in- 
 dustry tends to extinguish by dulling monotonous 
 work. This is one line of hopeful effort in a direc- 
 tion immeasurably important, for in a Republic 
 on pain of utter failure the common laborers must 
 be educated citizens. Massachusetts has for many 
 years recognized this, at least in a modest degree, 
 in the statute which holds the employer responsi- 
 ble for regular school attendance of all illiterate 
 minor employes. 
 
 In speaking to teachers about vocational train- 
 ing, my one appeal to them is to fit every child to 
 resist the pressure of industry, to inculcate in all 
 children the ambition to become cooperative citi- 
 zens, keeping themselves in health, practising the 
 art of thinking. Above all else is the need to cher- 
 ish their critical faculty, to train them to resist 
 monotony, and to organize their own activities 
 
96 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 for themselves, so that they may combat suc- 
 cessfully the deadliest foe of this Republic, the 
 lowering of the citizenship by industry. How else 
 can the wage workers regain their lost share of 
 control and develop anew the sense of civic and in- 
 dustrial responsibility? 
 
 Far from equipping children to maintain them- 
 selves against its injurious tendencies, our ele- 
 mentary schools tend rather to serve as feeders 
 for industry. Domestic science begins commonly 
 in the sixth or seventh grade, if at all, while 
 daughters of working families leave by thousands 
 from the fifth to enter upon industrial life. When 
 a little immigrant girl fresh from the steerage en- 
 ters school in the foreign colony of a manufactur- 
 ing city, she makes on the first day the acquaint- 
 ance of Teacher, who is thenceforth her ideal lady. 
 Teacher is usually young, friendly, dressed in 
 shirtwaist, necktie, trig skirt, belt, and shoes with 
 heels. She catches the little girl's imagination, 
 and a process of imitation begins which lasts at 
 least until the child's 14th birthday. But through- 
 out all that time, never once does Teacher do any- 
 thing which Mother is seen to do at home. If the 
 windows are ever washed, it is by the janitor or 
 his assistant, and usually out of school hours. If 
 the floor is scrubbed, the process is unseen. Wash- 
 ing day is unknown within the classroom, and 
 
Modern Industry and Education 97 
 
 babies are alien to the activities of Teacher. Not 
 so much as a cup of cocoa or a slice of toast is 
 she seen to prepare by any girl who leaves from 
 the "working paper grades." 
 
 By their one-sided curriculum, the schools may 
 truthfully be said actively to divert the little 
 daughters of wage-earning families from home life 
 to becoming cash girls and factory hands. For the 
 schools teach exactly those things which prepare 
 girls to become at the earliest moment cash chil- 
 dren and machine tenders: punctuality, regular- 
 ity, attention, obedience, and a little reading and 
 writing excellent things in themselves, but 
 wretched preparation either for domestic service 
 as an alternative choice of occupations, or for 
 homemaking a decade later on in the lives of the 
 pupils. 
 
 With our material supplies in lavish abundance 
 for the full and generous education of every man, 
 woman and child throughout this whole country, 
 our trouble is our own lack of vision, in city, state 
 and nation. 
 
 Teaching is already a public service, although 
 the ethics of Boards of Education are still largely 
 commercial, because these Boards are chiefly com- 
 posed of business men, with an occasional physi- 
 cian whose ideals vary but slightly from theirs. 
 The teaching staff itself, being in contact with 
 
98 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 the children, is increasingly socially minded. But 
 the teaching staff, also, is vitiated by sordid ideals 
 derived from its competitive environment. It, 
 too, suffers the taint of modern industry. 
 
 Where the National Child Labor Committee, 
 when it entered the field ten years ago, reasona- 
 bly expected to find its strongest allies, among 
 principals and teachers, it has found, in a disap- 
 pointing number of individual cases, an unthink- 
 ing willingness to surrender children under pre- 
 text of their poverty to the greedy hunger of 
 mills, mines, sweatshops, cotton fields, and the 
 city street trades. Many children leave school by 
 reason of the perverse suggestions of their teach- 
 ers. 
 
 Not from the teaching staff has come the in- 
 sistent demand for scholarships to keep all the 
 children in school at least to the 16th birthday. 
 
 Surely our grandchildren will look back with 
 wonder that we, who waste money hi war and 
 preparations for war, leave 80,000 children perma- 
 nently in half-time classes for want of school room 
 in the greatest industrial city in this hemisphere, 
 and issue in New York City in one year 42,000 
 working papers to children below the age of 16 
 years. The records of illiterate children ten to 
 fourteen years old form a part of every decennial 
 federal Census, chiefly of native children of native 
 
Modern Industry and Education 99 
 
 parents, in the Southern states. We let boys and 
 girls go into monotonous occupations at fourteen 
 years old or earlier, before their judgment has had 
 time to develop. Yet industry holds out to the 
 rank and file of those who leave from the fifth 
 and sixth grades the educational steerage little 
 hope of orderly promotion such as they have ex- 
 perienced in school, and slight promise of later 
 variety of employment, or material increase in 
 wages. 
 
 All this with no resounding protest from the 
 teaching staff! Small wonder that the children 
 lack the instruction adapted to prepare them for 
 the change from our industrial chaos to the or- 
 derly industrial service of the future! 
 
 Unacquainted with industry and out of touch 
 with it, untrained in the principles and practice 
 of cooperation, disfranchised and thus deprived of 
 the education derived from active citizenship, the 
 teachers of our schools are, in most of the states, 
 failing the children to-day, as the universities and 
 colleges failed their students in the Nineteenth 
 Century. They are not educating the masses of 
 children to be masters of industry. On the con- 
 trary, they are participating at least to the ex- 
 tent of passive acquiescence in the evil process of 
 making them slaves of machines. 
 
 What sixth grade class in this whole nation 
 
100 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 sends out its pupils fortified with full knowledge 
 of the meagre laws framed for their protection? 
 What children are taught in school that they can- 
 not before the 16th birthday legally work in New 
 York after five o'clock in a factory, and after seven 
 in a store? How many know that they are enti- 
 tled to seats with backs and to the use thereof 
 whenever the nature of their work permits such 
 use? Is there anything that they more urgently 
 need to know than these eminently practical 
 items? But how many teachers know even these 
 few things about industry as it is to-day? And 
 how can they teach what they do not know? 
 
 How many normal schools require their gradu- 
 ating classes to pass an examination in the pro- 
 visions of the compulsory education law, and the 
 labor law applying to children and adolescents? 
 But without this knowledge, how can the gradu- 
 ates, when they find positions, be sure of obeying 
 the statutes themselves? And how can they in- 
 struct their "working paper classes" and other 
 appropriate grades as to the protection which the 
 law provides and the children are entitled to claim 
 in factories, stores and workshops? 
 
 Machine Tenders 
 
 Modern industry calls increasingly for common 
 labor not only to dig with pick and shovel, but to 
 
Modern Industry and Bu-aVion ID! 
 
 do a thousand simplified thmg3 for which: jjfetffifj 
 hands, fourteen to sixteen years old, being obtain- 
 able for low wages, are commercially preferred to 
 the hands of older persons. Requiring attention, 
 speed and some slight dexterity but no other qual- 
 ity, such work deadens young minds. Machine 
 tending habituates them to irresponsibility and 
 monotony, to the utter absence of thought, of in- 
 ventiveness, of judgment, of ambition. Men and 
 women who have spent these plastic years in this 
 way are worse human beings, not better ones, for 
 their contact with industry. 
 
 Obviously machine tending fits no girl for 
 bringing up children in a home of her own later 
 on, or for taking any part whatever in domestic 
 life. The special skill that she needs as future 
 wife and mother is skill in the art of living. Pro- 
 longed machine tending prepares no boy for pro- 
 motion to the post of foreman or superintendent. 
 On the contrary, the longer a boy tends a machine, 
 the less is he likely to develop qualities fitting 
 him for managing men or affairs. In the words 
 of Joseph Lee, of Boston, president of the Na- 
 tional Playgrounds Association of America, such 
 employment dzseducates growing minds. 
 
 Work must be done, however. Obviously, it 
 must not be done by young children, or in large 
 measure by adolescents. Who shall do it in order 
 
102 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 at. the .least injury .may be wrought? What does 
 machine tending do to older minds? Many years 
 ago when I was chief factory inspector of the State 
 of Illinois, I found, in a tin can factory, a shelf 
 filled with young boys whose duty was to watch 
 unceasingly a never-ending procession of lids of 
 tomato cans, milk cans, soup cans, cans for all sorts 
 of goods, as these lids came down a slit in an in- 
 cline from the upper to the lower floor. When a 
 can lid was defective, a boy picked it out. Small 
 fingers were cut and tied up in rags. Young legs 
 and backs were made crooked, young eyes were 
 strained by continuous watching. The work was 
 legal, once the boys were 14 years old and had 
 filed employment certificates at the factory office ; 
 but young minds and bodies were cramped, stupe- 
 fied and deadened in that work. I asked Mr. 
 Henry Demarest Lloyd to go with me to see those 
 boys, hoping that he might make them the text of 
 some noble chapter, perhaps in his volume on the 
 Lords of Industry. 
 
 On the way to them he saw a man, white-haired 
 like himself, watching an endless procession of 
 cans to which the lids would later be attached. 
 This work called for no quality of mind, but sus- 
 tained attention to a horrible monotony. The 
 man watched perpetually for dents in tin cans, 
 and when a can was dented, he removed it, using 
 
Modern Industry and Education 103 
 
 one hand at long intervals. He needed good sight 
 in order never to miss a dent. Thirteen years he 
 had sat there, day after day, looking at cans. Mil- 
 lions of them had passed before his eyes and gone 
 their ways to the dump after their brief service 
 was rendered. His industrial usefulness was re- 
 duced to the use of his eyes exclusively. If they 
 should lose their keenness, he would be a pauper. 
 For discovering dents in cans is not work that so- 
 ciety recompenses with a margin for savings. 
 
 To Mr. Lloyd, then at the height of his powers, 
 those lost thirteen years were a tragedy. He was 
 fascinated, horrified at the sight of the slave of the 
 machine. The man was a native American, edu- 
 cated to read and write, but at the end of ten 
 hours' work his eyes were too weary for reading. 
 All his powers were absorbed by seeking dents in 
 cans; whatever intelligence he exercised, he had 
 to summon after exhausting the day's normal sup- 
 ply of power of attention. 
 
 That can-watcher is a type of millions of men 
 who, in an infinite variety of ways, are reduced to 
 some one form of attention. Often that is the 
 sole demand upon one, his other powers atrophy 
 by disuse. But the permanent tendency of indus- 
 try is to install more automatic machines, to re- 
 quire more tenders, perhaps one for one machine, 
 perhaps one for six, or eight, or twenty. And 
 
104 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 their inevitable tendency is to make the machine 
 tender automatic like themselves. All intelligence 
 for the performance of a voter's duty the machine 
 tender must get and keep in spite of his work. 
 
 For this more, perhaps, than for any other rea- 
 son, the working day in industry must be short- 
 ened for men as well as for women and youth, to 
 save human faculties from being utterly dead- 
 ened in the modern process of production, and to 
 afford leisure for the valuable active uses of the 
 mind. The unskilled laborer's working day must 
 be shortened, his wage assured, the tasks of self- 
 government laid upon him, not only as a citizen, 
 but in his industry. This the trade unions have 
 insisted upon for two generations. But the courts 
 have not yet sustained on these grounds any 
 statute limiting the hours of labor of men or 
 women. 
 
 The courts hold that, where obvious physical in- 
 jury results from excessive hours of work, the 
 freedom of contract may be abridged. But courts 
 and legislators do not see that an industry which 
 by long daily hours of monotonous work dulls the 
 mind of the voters, attacks the life of the Repub- 
 lic. It has, so far as I know, never been held that 
 working hours can be shortened by statute in the 
 interest of the public intelligence. 
 
 Had the educated men of my generation been 
 
Modern Industry and Education 105 
 
 trained in youth to insight and vision, to discern 
 the industrial process of stupefying and, on the 
 other hand, the demand of expanding democracy 
 for intelligence in all the citizens, how different 
 must have been their recent attitude toward the 
 movement for a shorter working day, for one 
 day's rest in seven, for the abolition of night work 
 in every possible case! 
 
 Democracy makes ever-widening demands upon 
 the time and intelligence of the citizens. The in- 
 itiative and referendum, the recall, proportional 
 voting, direct primaries the new processes of 
 democracy call into action growing bodies of 
 public-spirited citizens, and demand of the rank 
 and file a continuing series of decisions on matters 
 of importance. Workmen's compensation, mini- 
 mum wage boards, mothers' pensions, the short 
 working day, child labor, compulsory education, 
 equal suffrage, are all being legislated upon. Sev- 
 eral of these measures call for popular votes, and 
 all of them concern wage-earning people. There 
 is incessant call for more intelligence in the voting 
 constituency. But what intelligence can a man 
 or woman exercise whose mind is dimmed by 
 spending ten hours or more every day watching 
 for dents in cans? How can weary eyes and a 
 jaded mind be used for thoughtful reading on po- 
 litical subjects? What is left wherewith to make 
 
106 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 decisions? It is an irreconcilable conflict of ex- 
 perience. 
 
 The Wage Earners Educating Themselves 
 
 Men and women employed in monotonous in- 
 dustries in this country have missed the stimulus 
 and education derived by cooperators from their 
 personal interest in their cooperative business, 
 because they have shirked the task of cooperative 
 production and distribution carried forward on a 
 vast scale during the past half century in Eng- 
 land and on the Continent. In England one in 
 six of the adult population is a cooperator, and 
 wage-earning consumers sharing in the control of 
 production and distribution acquire admirable so- 
 cial education in the process. All this has been 
 lost out of the experience of American wage earn- 
 ers. Cooperative industry calls for sustained in- 
 telligent effort by all the cooperators. Public 
 ownership calls for an intelligently critical voting 
 constituency forever alert to public affairs. But 
 how can these qualities be demanded of common 
 laborers, of machine tenders, of men and women 
 speeded as American industry drives them to- 
 day? 
 
 Chief among the agencies of education, for good 
 or evil, is work. The twin sources of human char- 
 acter which have fitted the race for civilization 
 
Modern Industry and Education 107 
 
 are the daily work done since the race began, and 
 the discipline derived from family life since the 
 first human mother cradled her first child. The 
 schools awaken intelligence in multitudes of chil- 
 dren during the few years of childhood, but the 
 character and the intellectual development of the 
 nations are determined by the long, unending dis- 
 cipline of work. 
 
 Our gravest mistake is habitually considering 
 education as an experience of youth; worse still, 
 as a process of preparing children for industry. 
 While consciousness remains, life itself is educat- 
 ing us. 
 
 An illuminating little book, a creative study of 
 one of our lost opportunities for making industry 
 the handmaiden of education is unhappily con- 
 cealed and disguised by its author, Gerald Stan- 
 ley Lee, under the silly title, "Inspired Million- 
 aires." It has substantial merit; it presents 
 vividly the stimulating effect upon mill hands 
 which would follow if they moved step by step, 
 in regular promotion, from one part of the work 
 of the mill to another so that in an industrial life- 
 time all the employes might come into contact 
 with every process for which they are not physi- 
 cally or mentally incapacitated. 
 
 Whenever the workers with hand and brain 
 grasp the possibilities that lurk in this idea, they 
 
108 Modern Industry and Education 
 
 will undoubtedly make it the complement to the 
 present sordid "efficiency" movement. Their goal 
 will be the efficiency of the manual worker as a 
 human being, not merely his efficiency in pro- 
 ducing goods as means to profits. Then no man 
 will be reduced, like the slave of tin cans, to the 
 use of his eyes alone. In that man's work there 
 was never the waste of a motion : there was only 
 the waste of a human life. 
 
 In a near-by university city, which is also a 
 manufacturing centre, I. spoke recently to an audi- 
 ence of about four hundred wage-earning men 
 and women. We were in a loathsome little hall, 
 used during the week for moving picture shows, 
 for the cruel waste of the school buildings, unused 
 at night, entails the cost of rent upon wage earn- 
 ers who would gladly use schools as they now use 
 the ugly, ill-ventilated premises which alone their 
 wages can command. The air was poisonously 
 bad, but the audience remained from eight to 
 eleven on Sunday evening, discussing the prosaic 
 subject of minimum wages boards. Their eager, 
 sustained attention was wonderful and, at the end 
 of my hour-long monologue, they asked questions. 
 I know much more about minimum wages boards 
 from defending them under that hail of penetrat- 
 ing questions. They had looked eagerly forward 
 through the week to Sunday, preparing those 
 
Modern Industry and Education 109 
 
 questions. Despite the bad air, they had suc- 
 ceeded in listening critically. For them any possi- 
 ble change in industrial conditions, however minor 
 they may think that change likely to prove under 
 the test of experience, kindles the mind. They 
 are people under stress. 
 
 This is one of the most vital processes of edu- 
 cation going forward to-day this deliberate, con- 
 tinuing effort of men and women, many of them 
 already disciplined by experience in labor unions, 
 to brace themselves against the destructive pres- 
 sure of industry; to regain for themselves and 
 their fellow wage earners some share of possession < 
 and control of industry, through cooperation, 
 through public ownership, through every possible 
 extension of democracy. 
 
 Thousands of such groups of working men and 
 women are, throughout their long hours of 
 monotony in the week, saving their minds from 
 utter ruin by pondering the themes which they 
 discuss in their meetings on Sunday. Scattered 
 everywhere throughout the nation, they are safe- 
 guarding their health and intelligence, and devel- 
 oping their morals and citizenship. In spite of 
 their stupefying work, and with cruelly little help 
 from the constituted educational authorities, the 
 wage earners are educating themselves. 
 
IV 
 
 MODERN INDUSTRY IN RELATION TO 
 MORALITY 
 
MODERN INDUSTRY AND MORALITY 
 
 We are undergoing a transition in the life of the 
 nation greater than any hitherto experienced, a 
 change immeasurably greater than the freeing of 
 four million slaves, a half century ago, as an inci- 
 dent of a long and terrible war. This transition 
 is of such import that it is quite impossible for us 
 in the midst of it to measure its scope. Whether 
 or not we are aware of it, whether we like it or not, 
 we are living in the initial stages of the change 
 from work done almost universally for private 
 gain to work in the service of all. 
 
 The vast multitude of federal employes who 
 conduct the postal service, the health service, the 
 forestry service, are soon to be augmented by rail- 
 way and telegraph workers administering public 
 transportation and communication. Postmaster- 
 General Hitchcock, after introducing parcels posts 
 and postal banks, left, as his parting message to 
 the American people, advice that the public should 
 own the telegraphs and telephones, and several 
 cities in North Dakota are already taking his ad- 
 
 113 
 
114 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 vice.* Postal savings banks and the parcels post 
 came to us long after Europe had tested them, 
 and only when our need was so urgent that they 
 could not longer be deferred, and then only when 
 the national banks were assured the privilege of 
 receiving the postal bank deposits at two per cent. 
 They are now a matter of course. 
 
 Vast reclamation schemes applying to swamp 
 and desert lands, and river regulation on a scale 
 previously undreamed of, are already carried out, 
 or are now in process, or are definitely planned by 
 the federal authorities; and Congress is never 
 without measures under consideration looking in 
 these directions. 
 
 Mr. Stimson, Secretary of War under Mr. Taft, 
 made vigorous recommendations for federal activi- 
 ties in relation to water storage and the use of 
 power generated from navigable rivers, and the 
 floods have given new weight to his words. The 
 Secretary of the Navy has made public facts 
 which strongly support the bill pending in Con- 
 gress for establishing public armor plate works for 
 the use of the Navy. 
 
 The physical valuation of the railways by the 
 Interstate Commerce Commission, a long and ex- 
 ceedingly difficult step toward public ownership, 
 
 * Postmaster-General Burleson is bringing the proposal ac- 
 tively forward in the Wilson administration. 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 115 
 
 is already under way. And an appropriation for 
 building a federal railroad in Alaska is in force. 
 Ever- widening areas of industry are coming into 
 public possession, to be administered by cities, 
 states and by the federal government: education, 
 elementary and advanced, the public library busi- 
 ness, lighting, the provision of milk, water, ice and 
 coal, the use of water power for generating elec- 
 tricity, as in the great hydro-electric works at 
 Lewiston, Maine, and Houston, Texas.* 
 
 * Among items too numerous to catalogue the following are 
 current: 
 
 Seattle owns a street car line, and San Francisco both owns 
 and operates one; Detroit and Cleveland have voted to 
 acquire car lines. Boston and New York City own sub- 
 ways, though the citizens of New York have cause for bitter 
 regret that theirs is leased to private corporations. 
 
 Three Southern cities two in Texas and one in Tennessee 
 own municipal abattoirs, and the federal Department of 
 Agriculture vigorously recommends that all cities establish 
 them. City health inspectors are as much a matter of 
 course as the police, and are now reinforced by school nurses 
 and doctors, while municipal physicians and nurses in the 
 tuberculosis service, the maternity service, and the hospital 
 follow-up work are increasing even more rapidly than are 
 city milk stations. Serums and vaccines are commonly fur- 
 nished by public health authorities. 
 
 It has recently been held by the Supreme Court of Georgia 
 that the city of Camilla may make and sell ice, and New 
 York City is now establishing a municipal ice plant. Schenec- 
 tady buys and sells ice and coal in the service of its citizens. 
 Philadelphia has been sustained by the Pennsylvania courts 
 
116 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 The transition from competition to public serv- 
 ice is far advanced. The very recent change in 
 attitude of legislatures and courts is more signifi- 
 cant than the actual tasks already undertaken. 
 
 The material conditions for the vast change are 
 at hand, and many phases of the transition have 
 already been successfully achieved in other coun- 
 tries whose experience awaits our study. 
 
 The coming public service will test our morality 
 on the largest scale yet applied to it. Can our 
 democracy administer industry? Have we, as a 
 nation, the moral qualities requisite for enduring 
 that moral strain? 
 
 We who are here, living in the midst of the 
 transition, make our contribution to it consciously 
 or unconsciously. We shape it, determine its 
 character, and we are ill-fitted for the task. We 
 suffer the disadvantage of living in a period when 
 the morality of our great-grandparents is out- 
 grown, and that of our grandchildren is not yet 
 established. We live in a period of disintegration, 
 of unparallelled moral pressure, and inadequate 
 moral guidance, with the duty resting upon us of 
 
 in its policy of buying land in excess of its immediate needs 
 in connection with a boulevard. 
 
 The state of Wisconsin leases land in its lake region to 
 summer tenants. It also sells insurance; and savings bank 
 insurance in Massachusetts is increasingly a state affair. 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 117 
 
 scanning the horizon for every ray which may 
 serve to illumine and guide us. 
 
 The fundamental moral teaching that prevailed 
 on this continent when the Republic was founded 
 had its roots in the experience of an agricultural 
 people its precepts and maxims were in harmony 
 with and adequate to the clear demands of re- 
 sponsibility and decency within the rural family. 
 Those precepts defined the duties of father, 
 mother and children living upon the farm which 
 they owned and controlled, from which they de- 
 rived their subsistence a self-sustaining group 
 and the simple relations of such a family group 
 with other similar family groups. Complex mod- 
 ern industrial relations did not develop until the 
 middle of the Nineteenth Century. Then came, 
 after the Civil War, the change crescendo to the 
 full complexity in which we live. 
 
 To-day agriculture is still our chief industry, 
 despite the modern development which has made 
 us the most industrially productive of all nations; 
 and the morality of agricultural individualism is 
 our accepted morality. This affords no adequate 
 guidance in the intricate relations of our rapidly 
 changing life; and its insufficiency becomes from 
 year to year more obvious with the evolution of 
 industry. Between that obsolete morality which 
 remains embodied in our laws, and our human 
 
118 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 needs in modern daily life, the contradiction has 
 become intolerable. 
 
 It is ominous that the industrial change comes 
 not because the American people are intellectually 
 convinced that it is desirable, but because past 
 conditions can no longer be endured. It is, for 
 instance, not reassuring that we are being driven 
 toward public ownership of railroads by the in- 
 competence and dishonesty of private manage- 
 ment, and the consequent sacrifice of life, limb, 
 health and welfare of employes and of travellers. 
 
 This is, however, the case at the present mo- 
 ment. Over-capitalization, insufficient equip- 
 ment, overworked employes, appalling railway 
 accidents, belated travel, delayed freight these 
 accompaniments of irresponsible anonymous 
 ownership are driving conservative New England 
 toward responsible public ownership of her rail- 
 roads. Meanwhile the Panama railroad offers an 
 enticing sample on a small scale of the ability of 
 the federal government to administer transporta- 
 tion, even under present difficulties. 
 
 Irresponsible Anonymous Ownership 
 
 The old theory was that enlightened self-in- 
 terest could be trusted to conduct industry, that 
 the sum of all selfish interests would coincide with 
 public interest. Tested in practice, however, this 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 119 
 
 theory has not sustained modern life. Industry 
 conducted for profit and regulated only by the 
 pressure of competition (the labor being per- 
 formed by men, women and children who are 
 merely "hands") has produced, among its fruits, 
 the maximum cynical disregard of the manhood, 
 womanhood and childhood of the workers, and a 
 loss of moral responsibility in the relation of the 
 owners of industry to the consuming public. 
 
 The fundamental immorality of our era from 
 which innumerable smaller ills arise is that the 
 worker has lost the ownership and control of his 
 tools, his means of production. In the evolution 
 from the distaff and spinning wheel to the cotton 
 mill village owned anonymously by bond and 
 stockholders who may live in Europe, or in South 
 America, or Japan, the old foundation of indus- 
 trial morality, honesty between two individual 
 persons, is no longer adequate. 
 
 The modern wage worker deprived of owner- 
 ship and control of his tools is not obviously de- 
 pendent like the chattel slave before the emanci- 
 pation, or the coolie before the exclusion laws, or 
 the peon, whom the federal government still occa- 
 sionally discovers in the South, where at this mo- 
 ment peonage exists, in horrifying forms, in the 
 mining regions in West Virginia. The great mass 
 of wage-earning people are not now consciously 
 
120 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 dependent as the Negroes and Chinese were. They 
 are not like them conspicuously in need of being 
 freed by the federal authorities. 
 
 The fundamental immorality to-day is far more 
 subtle. Instead of the wage earners owning and 
 thereby controlling things, as the farmers did in 
 the agricultural period, they are now under the 
 control of things (products and means of produc- 
 tion). Through those things they are controlled 
 by other human beings who, as stockholders and 
 bond owners, possess perhaps a great factory town 
 like Gary, Indiana, or a cotton mill village in 
 Rhode Island or Georgia a modern Franken- 
 stein into which the ancient tools of the workers 
 have now developed. 
 
 As an example of such anonymous, impersonal 
 ownership, I venture once more to refer to the 
 former conditions in the steel industry, to the 
 cruelty, among others, of excessive working hours 
 in intolerable heat. When in the Pittsburgh Sur- 
 vey the exact facts were made public, Mr. Charles 
 Cabot, a stockholder in the steel industry, pro- 
 tested that these things were not and, in the na- 
 ture of things, could not be true. When, however, 
 the statements had all been substantiated, Mr. 
 Cabot declared that every shareholder in that in- 
 dustry ought to know these conditions. He, 
 therefore, asked the corporation for a list of stock- 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 121 
 
 holders in order that he might bring the facts to 
 the knowledge of the owners, his fellow bond and 
 stockholders in the industry. Three years passed 
 before he succeeded in getting the list. 
 
 In a great corporation owned by bond and 
 stockholders nobody knows who is the employer. 
 The employer is a vast composite changing from 
 day to day with every transfer of stocks and 
 bonds. Nor are the employes known. Even the 
 manager or foreman often knows a given employe 
 only as a number on the pay roll. If the "hand" 
 is killed, buried, perhaps, in molten metal, no- 
 body knows who has perished except from the 
 number on his locker. So entirely anonymous is 
 the relation between stockholder and employe, 
 and among fellow owners in the most highly de- 
 veloped of our industries. This form, this organi- 
 zation of industry, and this anonymous relation 
 within it, have grown up since the Civil War. 
 The steel industry is, perhaps, the perfect example 
 of the alienation of the anonymous worker and 
 anonymous employer. It is the current industrial 
 ideal of organization toward which the great in- 
 dustries tend the uttermost detachment of the 
 worker from ownership of the tools, and utter 
 freedom on the part of the owners from personal 
 responsibility alike toward the workers and the 
 community. 
 
122 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 One incidental result of this detachment is a 
 lack of scruple on the part of the anonymous 
 owners of a given industry, the employers of the 
 labor engaged in it, toward the consuming pub- 
 lic. One of the earliest maxims laid down for 
 the guidance of people entering trade is the old 
 Roman saying: Caveat emptor Let the pur- 
 chaser beware! Never was it more applicable 
 than to-day. The anonymous relation of the per- 
 son offering goods for sale is fundamentally im- 
 moral primarily because it is devoid of responsi- 
 bility. 
 
 The federal pure food act proclaims to the world 
 that our food-producing industries, although they 
 are organized with greater ability than has ever 
 before been devoted to the task, cannot be trusted 
 to feed America. The meat inspection law pub- 
 lishes similar tidings of the meat industry to the 
 people who consume its product. 
 
 When federal inspection of the stock yards was 
 forced upon us by the German government, which 
 excluded from German territory our meat prod- 
 ucts unless the commercial integrity of the pack- 
 ers and the purity of their goods were guaranteed 
 by the federal government, the brand upon the 
 meat incidentally branded the packers. The 
 morality of the men in charge of this great staple 
 American industry has never borne any proportion 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 123 
 
 to their ability. Yet the federal Department of 
 Agriculture for years permitted the sale to us of 
 meat which could not be guaranteed by it and, 
 therefore, could not be sent abroad. These things 
 have been possible because the ownership of the 
 vast and complicated meat industry had been ir- 
 responsible. There is no moral restraint on the 
 part of managers of stock yards. Theirs is a 
 property, an investment, not a service. 
 
 A similar thing was true long ago of the Scotch 
 fisheries. The contents of the kegs of herring 
 were notoriously different from their labels, so 
 that foreign consumers demanded as a guarantee 
 of honest contents the brand of the English gov- 
 ernment. Most products are, however, not sold 
 to foreign nations able to establish and to enforce 
 upon us an international standard of integrity. 
 The slow passage of the pure-food law by Con- 
 gress (requiring eighteen years of continuous ef- 
 fort) and the painful, largely unsuccessful strug- 
 gle to get the law enforced against powerful food- 
 producing companies and their agents in the press, 
 indicate the patience of the American people in 
 the presence of commercial dishonesty and lack of 
 standards. 
 
 The public accepts with heartfelt admiration 
 gifts to charity and to the higher education from 
 known adulterators of food, so confused are our 
 
124 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 moral standards in relation to industry. And this 
 confusion is a normal product of modern indus- 
 try. 
 
 One sinister consequence of the anonymous, im- 
 personal ownership of business, and the accom- 
 panying degradation of the workers to the posi- 
 tion of "hands," is their own acceptance of this 
 position. Filthy or diseased meat, adulterated 
 eatables, short-weight packages, though the prod- 
 uct of their labor appear to them to be no con- 
 cern of theirs. They feel no share in the guilt of 
 the employing concern under whose orders, and in 
 whose pay, they put alum in bread, formaldehyde 
 in milk, tin, lead or iron in silk (in the process of 
 dyeing), or shoddy in place of wool in garments 
 to be worn by other working people. Steel work- 
 ers know when there are blow holes in armor 
 plates, but they regard it as no affair of theirs. 
 The negotiation is between the steel manufacturer 
 and the Navy Department, and the wage earner's 
 experience has awakened in him no patriot's rage 
 against such treason. If he thinks at all of the 
 matter, it is perhaps to reflect that wars are fought 
 to the profit of financiers, and at cost of working 
 people, whichever side wins. Or the steel worker 
 may sullenly remember that he has long been 
 begging the Government to abolish contract work 
 and make its own steel plate. 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 125 
 
 In any case, the irresponsible state of mind of 
 employing corporations and indifferent "hands" 
 is more threatening to civilization than the actual 
 harm inflicted by alum, formaldehyde, shoddy, 
 blow holes and all the other poisons and dishonest 
 products. And this indifference, like the moral 
 confusion of the general public concerning gifts 
 derived from these and similar sinister sources for 
 the higher education, philanthropy and religion, 
 is a normal product of modern industry. 
 
 Our confusion is well illustrated in relation to 
 our concept of murder. 
 
 The Old Commandment in the New Order 
 
 The Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, is 
 still valid in our laws to the extent that the indi- 
 vidual murderer of an individual person pays with 
 his life for his crime, the hangman or electrocu- 
 tioner being held somewhat whimsically ex- 
 empt from the effect of the Commandment. But 
 wholesale killing in industry as in war remains un- 
 punished. 
 
 Our morality has been sapped by precept and 
 practice, by living in a society in which the moral 
 foundations of industry are false and corrupting. 
 The human mind accepts without revolt that to 
 which it is accustomed from childhood. Canni- 
 bals were not horrified at eating their grand- 
 
126 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 parents. Soldiers do not recoil from murder, they 
 plan it systematically years in advance; and on 
 the field of battle they bayonet men as butchers 
 stick pigs. And gentle grandmothers give little 
 children paper or tin soldiers as playthings, and 
 read of bayonet charges with enthusiasm. 
 
 Owners of tenement houses do not count them- 
 selves infanticides, though the death rate of babies 
 in tenements is twice as large as elsewhere. On 
 the contrary, the real estate interests fight as one 
 man every requirement of tenement house sanita- 
 tion which seems to threaten to cut into their 
 incomes. The landlords' resistance to improved 
 housing is uninterrupted and nation wide. 
 
 Although dirty milk is a permanently active 
 cause of disease and death, the milk producers and 
 dealers succeeded in 1913 in defeating legislation 
 calculated to assure greater cleanliness in the rural 
 treatment of the milk supply of New York City. 
 
 Builders, managers, stock and bond holders of 
 factories are not punished as murderers, though a 
 hundred and more men and women perish by fire 
 and smoke in a single work room. In connection 
 with the most terrible of factory fires, the owners 
 of the building have been absolved by the courts 
 of New York State from all criminal responsibil- 
 ity for the monstrous slaughter, and the firm is 
 still doing business. 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 127 
 
 When hundreds of women and children on a 
 Sunday School outing in the East River perished 
 by drowning, many of the 'victims were lost be- 
 cause the cork safety belts carried on the boat were 
 weighted with lead or iron, substances cheaper 
 than cork in belts bought and sold by weight. 
 Only the captain of the Slocum was punished. 
 Manufacturers and dealers in cork safety belts ap- 
 pear to be free to continue to furnish their death- 
 dealing wares. 
 
 We are by way of forgetting the Iroquois Thea- 
 tre in Chicago in which children were suffocated 
 at a matinee. The manager far from having 
 been punished for failing to supply the needed 
 precautions for safety appeared before a legis- 
 lative committee at Springfield, in 1911, insolently 
 to oppose, and demand the repeal of, the benefi- 
 cent Illinois statute which keeps young children 
 off the stage. 
 
 Some years ago a speculator cornered the ice 
 supply in summer in New York City. The price 
 rose, poor mothers could not buy ice, and the list 
 of deaths of babies lengthened, for milk without 
 ice is poison in the tenements in summer. Later 
 for an offence unrelated to this, the speculator was 
 sent to a federal penitentiary for a long term. 
 Upon the representations of reputable physicians 
 that the convict was about to die, the President 
 
128 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 pardoned him. Our moral sense is dulled by 
 modern industry, and the President in pardon- 
 ing a single influential one among hundreds 
 of sick convicts, and one whose record was, 
 perhaps, the most anti-social of all, did but act in 
 accordance with prevailing standards. 
 
 It is silly and confusing to tilt at Big Business, 
 as though bigness in itself were the sole or the 
 chief active element in our political and industrial 
 immorality. The pushcart peddlers and news ven- 
 dors who have stands on city street corners are 
 animated by precisely the same business motives 
 as the gas trust, the surface car companies and all 
 the other large exploiters of the cities. And their 
 very numbers make the little offenders perhaps 
 the more insidiously poisonous to the community, 
 in these days of transition to new forms of indus- 
 try calling for new and loftier morality. The 
 source of corruption in large and small alike is ir- 
 responsibility, the relation to the community of 
 freebooting exploiters in a society which sends 
 those who fail to the almshouse and the potter's 
 field. 
 
 Morally Extra Hazardous Employments 
 
 In any review of the moral aspects of our pres- 
 ent transition, our failure to develop voluntary 
 cooperation in distribution looms large. We are 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 129 
 
 punished for our sins of omission by having the 
 vastest department store industry in the world 
 with its morally extra hazardous employment of 
 thousands of underpaid, inexperienced young 
 women and girls, transferred from the meagre life 
 of the tenement and the narrow, rigid routine of 
 the elementary school to the midst of luxury such 
 as had not been invented in the days of Louis 
 XVI. In the midst of this poisonous luxury they 
 are paid from three dollars a week upward. 
 
 In the interest of the public morals because of 
 the nature of the surroundings and the unlimited 
 access of the public the demand would be a le- 
 gitimate one that girls should not be employed 
 in department stores before the 21st birthday, un- 
 til their youthful character had time to solidify. 
 
 The investment in department stores is stu- 
 pendous. In the whole country it runs into hun- 
 dreds of millions, upon which dividends must be 
 earned. Window dressing, counter dressing, and 
 newspaper advertising are obviously directed to 
 the single purpose of enticing consumers, chiefly 
 women, to buy, in addition to the necessary 
 staples, articles of which they would otherwise 
 not think. Its aim is the enticement of consum- 
 ers, as adulterating goods in manufacture is in- 
 tended to exploit them. 
 
 This particular form of moral strain was un- 
 
130 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 known before the present half century. The dis- 
 proportion between what the employes get and 
 what surrounds them, indicates the cynicism, the 
 blunted sympathy of the consuming public. Were 
 women richer in discernment, in sympathetic im- 
 agination, we must have registered long since our 
 veto upon this /mseducation of ourselves and of 
 those who serve us in the stores. As an index both 
 of our undeveloped sympathy and of our potential 
 power as consumers, these stores are monumental. 
 We have never even discerned how pernicious is 
 their influence in the great cities. 
 
 Had we developed a cooperative movement in 
 proportion to our retail distribution, comparable 
 to the similar movements in England, Germany 
 and Belgium, our exploitation of young workers 
 in retail trade could never have reached its pres- 
 ent extent. In cooperative commerce there is vir- 
 tually no advertising. Goods are made, trans- 
 ported and sold to meet human needs which re- 
 quire no stimulation. The consequent saving to 
 the public is not confined to dollars and cents. For 
 both employes and purchasers the saving of 
 moral strain is incalculable. 
 
 How alien to our whole habit of mind is the de- 
 mand for an administration of industry giving to 
 the workers active benefit throughout the process 
 of work itself! We may, indeed, be justly charged 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 131 
 
 with having maintained a national policy of pres- 
 sure upon the wage earners. For generations we 
 imported slaves. When that form of competition 
 was abolished, there came the coolies. After their 
 Irish competitors succeeded in getting them ex- 
 cluded, peonage and child labor loomed up, and 
 still exist. Now the steerage brings detached 
 young girls by tens of thousands from Europe. 
 
 Every immigrant girl who enters upon manu- 
 facture or commerce is a living threat to the 
 standard of life of men and women already here. 
 Witness Lawrence, Little Falls, the stockyards, 
 the underpaid needle trades, the department 
 stores. 
 
 Since the Children's Crusade, dark episode of 
 the Dark Ages, there has been no international 
 spectacle at once so pathetic, so cruel, so shameful 
 to the nations which permit it, as this migration 
 of young girls lured by American industry. 
 
 Moral Self-education by Consumers 
 
 For nearly a quarter century the Consumers' 
 League has been bringing to bear upon industry 
 the intelligence of consumers in the interests of 
 their own consciences and of the life, health, in- 
 telligence and well-being of wage workers. It has 
 promoted short working hours for women and 
 children, wage boards, and healthful conditions of 
 
132 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 work, and the abolition of child labor and of the 
 sweating system. The League holds that con- 
 sumers are entitled to a clean conscience if they 
 act as conscientious people; that they can, if they 
 will, enforce a claim to have all that they buy free 
 from the taint of cruelty. By faithful organized 
 inquiry they can ascertain the facts of industry, 
 and when in the light of the facts standards are 
 set up, consumers have power to enforce them. 
 After this quarter century of modest experimental 
 effort, it is clear that the enlightened consuming 
 public is destined to play an increasing part in 
 determining industrial morality. 
 
 Nothing could, however, be clearer than the 
 teaching of this same quarter century's experi- 
 ence : that no one can, by individual effort alone, 
 however patient and enlightened that effort may 
 be, achieve any satisfying personal relation to in- 
 dustry. The larger the range and scope of the 
 associated effort, the greater its value, particularly 
 its educational value, for the participants. Think- 
 ing people are challenged to ceaseless effort to in- 
 crease the enlightened power of consumers over 
 production and distribution, by law, by publicity, 
 by cooperation. 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 133 
 
 Our Preparation for the Change 
 
 Our lack is intellectual and spiritual. We dis- 
 trust ourselves and each other. The mental en- 
 ergy of our ablest men has been too largely ex- 
 pended in industrial organization in the service of 
 greed for dividends. We have been taught too 
 long, and we have believed too credulously, that 
 the profit motive is the best of which we are ca- 
 pable. The failure and crime that we see we at- 
 tribute to the frailty of human nature, not, as the 
 facts demand, to the corroding power of industry 
 on a basis fundamentally immoral. 
 
 We all suffer a lack of moral sensitiveness be- 
 cause we are, throughout our lives, members of a 
 society in which the average length of life of wage 
 earners is conspicuously less than the life of pros- 
 perous people. We accept this with equanimity 
 as we accept child labor, and avoidable night work 
 even when performed by young girls, and the 
 monstrous spectacle of wholesale poverty in the 
 midst of riches beyond the power of the mind to 
 compute or to conceive. Our industrial epoch has 
 corroded our morals and hardened our hearts as 
 surely as slavery injured its contemporaries, and 
 far more subtly. There is grave reason to fear 
 that it may have unfitted us for the oncoming 
 stage of civilization, as slave owning unfitted the 
 
134 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 white race for freedom and democracy, and left its 
 blight of race hatred from which the Republic still 
 suffers. 
 
 Acid tests of the industrial morality of every 
 public movement are the questions : "Does it tend 
 to restore to the people who work a share in the 
 ownership and control of the tools of industry? 
 Does it contribute to the ability of any group of 
 wage earners to fit themselves in mind, character 
 and economic position to participate helpfully in 
 the transition? Does it promote the enactment of 
 the industrial code?". Whatever is calculated to 
 enable us as a people, or any group among us, to 
 make a step forward on the road to peaceful serv- 
 ice away from the battlefield of greed, is a contri- 
 bution to the sum total of industrial morality. 
 And whatsoever hinders a forward step is in itself 
 actively evil, because it prolongs the existing evil. 
 
 We can retrieve our integrity only as we come 
 to accept as our ideal service instead of profit. 
 And this can be achieved only as industry becomes 
 a city, state, and national service. We are, in- 
 deed, confronted by the task of extending public 
 ownership of industry, and cooperative distribu- 
 tion of products, in the interest of the moral life 
 of the American people. 
 
 No one can predict how we, as a nation, shall 
 bear the strain of industry made collective, and 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 135 
 
 permanently a cooperative undertaking of citi- 
 zens, without the relation of master and men. No 
 prophet can foretell with certainty whether we 
 can make that change peacefully, without a great 
 revulsion and reaction, by reason of the unco- 
 operative spirit in which we have all been bred. 
 In the transition from the old industrial society 
 we need to bring to bear all the wisdom, all the 
 varied experience and discipline, that life has be- 
 stowed upon us all. We cannot safely omit from 
 the common task any human soul however hum- 
 ble. 
 
 In each generation some cause arises which 
 serves as a touchstone for the genuine democracy 
 of mankind. Such to-day is the industrial transi- 
 tion. On the Pacific Coast and in the Northwest 
 where the citizens have developed democratic in- 
 stitutions the initiative, the referendum, the re- 
 call (including judges), equal suffrage, minimum 
 wage boards, and the short working day they go 
 forward confidently with transition measures. 
 There the conservation battle rages. 
 
 Indeed, the most hopeful feature of our outlook 
 is our democracy, the fact that manhood suffrage 
 has long been a matter of course in most of the 
 states, the rapidly developing movement for giv- 
 ing votes to women, and the spread of the new de- 
 
136 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 vices of democracy eastward from the Pacific 
 Coast. 
 
 It is the teachers' duty to prepare the minds of 
 the next generation for carrying on the further 
 stages of this industrial and political change. But 
 how can the teachers themselves be fitted for their 
 task? 
 
 The time of transition needs more than all 
 things else socially minded people, multitudes of 
 average men and women trained to habits of in- 
 tegrity and cooperation. But what preparation 
 has been made for this? 
 
 Aside from building and loan associations, and 
 farmers' clubs and other agricultural organiza- 
 tions, including the shippers' associations, we are 
 almost without the experience of industrial co- 
 operation. 
 
 Among industrial wage-earning people outside 
 the railway Brotherhoods organization, asso- 
 ciated action, has had to fight a losing battle for 
 its life. In the steel industry, in the stock yards 
 and packing houses, and in numerous other occu- 
 pations there has been a systematic and largely 
 successful movement to extinguish the unions, 
 some of the most important of which have 
 perished outright, while others have been per- 
 manently crippled. 
 
 The treasurer of a great manufacturing cor- 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 137 
 
 poration explained to me with pride and pleasure 
 some years ago, on the occasion of his leaving his 
 office, that, in his opinion, his greatest service had 
 consisted in the device which he had invented for 
 making organization impossible among the em- 
 ployes. This device consisted in a rigid rule that, 
 whenever the unskilled men in any department 
 who spoke the same language reached the propor- 
 tion of fifteen per cent, of all the men in that de- 
 partment, men speaking other languages must be 
 engaged. This was avowedly for the purpose of 
 making it difficult for the men to know each other. 
 This method has since been widely adopted by 
 large employers. 
 
 For five and twenty years the unions have been 
 increasingly compelled to place themselves on a 
 war footing, if they were to exist at all, and the 
 enormous majority of wage earners are wholly 
 unorganized. No preparation could be less 
 adapted than this to a peaceful change to indus- 
 try organized as a public service. Grave, indeed, 
 is the responsibility of the men who have done 
 this, gravest of all when, in the process, they have 
 deprived working men and women of the consti- 
 tutional rights of organization and assemblage, of 
 freedom of speech and of the press! 
 
 The causal relation of industry to the present 
 evils in social life and personal character has been 
 
138 Modern Industry and Morality 
 
 slow to compel recognition, slower in this country 
 than in Europe. With growing insight comes a 
 challenge to our integrity of intellect and charac- 
 ter. To see injustice without protesting is to share 
 in it. To profit by recognized injustice is cynical. 
 
 This causal relation reveals itself naturally first 
 to those who suffer acutely, to men and women 
 who, working long and hard, get little pay, are in- 
 jured in health, and die young. Their work brings 
 them together in mines and mills, in industrial 
 cities such as the world never before beheld, their 
 daily experience is in common, they compare 
 grievances, and are stimulated to common effort 
 for the common good. Because they can achieve 
 nothing alone, they are disciplined perforce to 
 work together, to acquire whatever virtues come 
 of voluntary association. 
 
 Just in proportion as they resist the inherent 
 tendency of industry and participate in hasten- 
 ing the change they are agents of regeneration. 
 Unlike the slaves who were set free without their 
 own participation, unlike the coolies who were 
 excluded without protest, the wage earners 
 through their solidarity, their organizations, their 
 political party, test the democracy of our time 
 and are preparing, however haltingly, the condi- 
 tions necessary to a higher and finer civilization. 
 
 The changed morality that is needed to make 
 
Modern Industry and Morality 139 
 
 the present transformation in our national life a 
 beneficent one is yet to be inculcated in the 
 schools, the colleges and universities. The teach- 
 ing profession confronts to-day the noble task of 
 preparing the mind and spirit- of the oncoming 
 generation for this change. Theirs is the new duty 
 of inculcating the new ideal of the democracy of 
 the future: the ideal of service performed not as 
 philanthropy, not as charity, not alone in the care 
 of childhood and old age, but in a transformed 
 industry, a universal service of men and women of 
 to-morrow the direct, inevitable consequence of 
 the industrial development of to-day. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Alabama- 
 child labor in, 52, 92 
 Alaska 
 
 federal railroad in, 115 
 
 women vote in, 36 
 American 
 
 colleges and universities, 
 83 
 
 Conference on Social In- 
 surance, 47 
 
 industry, 100, 122 
 
 monographs on industrial 
 disease, 56 
 
 Social Science Association, 
 
 81 
 Andrews, John B. 
 
 investigation of white sul- 
 phur in industry, 56 
 Arbitration 
 
 compulsory of labor dis- 
 putes, 4 
 Arizona 
 
 eight-hour law in, 36, 74 
 
 women vote in, 36 
 Arkansas 
 
 birth registration in, 45 
 
 harvesting in, 10 
 Auburn, 9, 28 
 Australia, 25, 32, 33 
 Berlin, University of, 82 
 
 Berne- 
 International Conference 
 for Labor Legislation 
 in, 73 
 
 Births, registration of, 45, 46 
 
 Bismarck, Prince, 83 
 
 Boston owns subways, 115 
 
 Bournemouth, 26 
 
 Burleson, Postmaster - Gen- 
 eral, 114 
 
 Butler, Elizabeth, 24 
 
 Cabot, Charles, 120 
 
 California 
 eight-hour law for women 
 
 in, 36, 74 
 
 minimum wage law in, 36 
 women vote in, 36 
 
 Camilla, Georgia, city of, 115 
 
 Canada, untaxing buildings 
 
 in, 25 
 harvesting in Western, 10 
 
 Carolinas, the 
 child labor in, 52, 92 
 housing in, 22 
 
 Census, the, 16, 44, 64, 74, 98 
 
 Chicago 
 
 congested districts in, 47 
 new voters in, 53 
 Stockyards, 31, 46, 57 
 University Settlement, 31 
 
 141 
 
142 
 
 Index 
 
 Child labor, 5, 6, 17, 27, 28, 
 
 52, 57, 91, 93, 105, 133 
 Federal bill, 93, 94, 102 
 National Committee, 91, 98 
 Children's Bureau, 45 
 Cincinnati, Haeberle monu- 
 ment in, 6 
 
 free school books in, 6 
 Clark, S. A., 55 
 Code, the industrial, 5, 37, 
 
 134 
 
 Colorado 
 eight-hour day for women 
 
 in, 36, 74 
 
 Minimum Wage Board, 36 
 women vote in, 36 
 Commons, Professor, 62 
 Compulsory arbitration, 4 
 Compulsory education 5, 6, 
 
 18, 100, 105 
 
 Congested districts, 23, 24 
 Congestion of population in 
 Borough of Manhattan, 
 24 
 Connecticut, closing hour for 
 
 women's work, 74 
 farm labor in, 10 
 Consumers, 55, 85, 89, 106, 
 
 123, 129, 131, 132 
 Consumers' League, 131, 132 
 Continuation schools, 52. 
 
 in Ohio and Wisconsin, 95 
 Cooperative Congress (In- 
 ternational), 34 
 distribution, 134 
 
 Cooperation, development of, 
 
 37, 109 
 in England and on the 
 
 Continent, 34, 106 
 Cornell, 81, 83 
 Cost of living, 53 
 Court of Appeals of New 
 
 York, 13, 28 
 
 Dangerous industries, 64, 70 
 Death rate, 16, 17, 47 
 Detroit votes to acquire 
 
 street car line, 116 
 District of Columbia, eight- 
 hour day for women in, 
 36, 74 
 
 Ellis Island, 64 
 Ely, Professor Richard T., 81 
 England, 8, 16, 26, 130 
 Federated Cooperative So- 
 cieties in, 34 
 Garden Cities in, 25 
 Lloyd George land taxes 
 
 in, 25 
 
 minimum wage laws in, 32 
 Erdman Act, 31 
 Europe, 31, 63, 64, 81, 119, 
 
 138 
 
 night work treaty in, 73 
 Extra-hazardous industries, 
 
 65, 66 
 
 morally, 128 
 
 Factory inspection, 67, 68 
 Fall River, 16 
 Fatigue, 53, 71, 72, 75 
 and Efficiency, 71 
 
Index 
 
 143 
 
 Federal Cabinet, 47 
 Census Bureau, 45 
 child labor bill, 93, 94 
 civil service, 31 
 Commission on Homes, 
 
 26 
 
 Department of Agricul- 
 ture, 115, 123 
 Department of Health, 
 
 47 
 
 Employes, 113 
 Government, 63, 119, 
 
 122 
 inspection of stockyards, 
 
 122 
 
 penitentiary, 127 
 Pure Food Act, 50, 122 
 railroad in Alaska, 115 
 Report on Conditions of 
 Labor of Woman and 
 Child Wage-earners, 16 
 Foreign colonies, 48 
 Frankfort, 26 
 Garden cities, 25 
 Gary, Indiana, 120 
 Georgia, 120 
 Camilla, 115 
 
 child labor in, 52, 92, 94 
 housing in, 21, 22 
 Supreme Court of, 115 
 Germany, 8, 16, 64, 82 
 cooperative movement in, 
 
 130 
 
 factory inspectors in, 67 
 social insurance in, 46, 65 
 
 Glasgow, International Co- 
 operative Congress in, 35 
 Goldmark, Josephine, 71 
 Haeberle, Joe, 6 
 Hamilton, Alice, studies of 
 
 lead poisoning by, 56 
 Health, Safety and Comfort 
 
 Act (Illinois), 56, 57 
 Hedger, Dr. Caroline, 30 
 Holden vs. Hardy, 70 
 Homework, 5, 28 
 Housing 
 codes, 5 
 in Carolinas, Georgia, 
 
 Virginia, 22 
 
 New York City, 23, 24 
 problem hitherto insolu- 
 ble, 53 
 
 Hull House, 10 
 Hunter, Robert, 19 
 Illinois 
 State Factory Inspector of, 
 
 57 
 
 women vote in, 36 
 Indiana, closing hour for 
 
 work of women in, 74 
 Gary, 120 
 
 Industrial code, 4, 28, 37, 134 
 Industrial disease, 14, 56, 63 
 
 tuberculosis an, 53 
 Industrial hygiene, 56, 85 
 Infant mortality, 16, 49 
 
 crusade against, 41 
 Initiative and referendum, 
 105, 135 
 
144 
 
 Index 
 
 Institutions for children, 18 
 Insurance 
 International Conference 
 
 on Social, 47 
 mutual, 65 
 records, 45 
 savings bank, 116 
 social, 4, 46, 47 
 International Conference for 
 
 Labor Legislation, 73 
 International Cooperative 
 
 Alliance, 35 
 
 Interstate Commerce Com- 
 mission, 114 
 Ives case, 13, 67 
 Japan, 119 
 
 Kansas, women vote in, 36 
 Labor organizations, 12, 109, 
 
 136, 137 
 Land taxes, 25 
 Lee, General Stanley, 107 
 Lloyd George, 25 
 Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 102, 
 
 103 
 
 Lochner vs. New York, 70 
 Lords of Industry, 88, 102 
 Los Angeles 
 enfranchised women in, 
 
 53 
 nursing the poor in their 
 
 homes in, 42 
 Massachusetts 
 State Board of Health, 56 
 closing hour for women's 
 work in, 74 
 
 Massachusetts Continued 
 compulsory education of il- 
 literate minors in, 95 
 eight-hour working day of 
 
 children in, 93 
 savings bank insurance in, 
 
 116 
 
 Metschnikoff, Professor, 43 
 Michigan 
 
 alcohol industry in, 75 
 
 registration of births, 45 
 
 Milk stations, 48, 50, 51, 115 
 
 Minimum wage boards, 5, 
 
 31, 32, 105, 108, 135 
 standards of home con- 
 struction, 21 
 
 standards in education, 
 91 
 
 eight-hour day of working 
 
 children in, 93 
 Supreme Court of, 72 
 Mothers' pensions, 5, 14 
 National Consumers' League, 
 
 55, 57, 71, 74, 91 
 Child Labor Committee, 
 
 91 
 
 Education Association, 91 
 Nebraska, closing hour for 
 
 women's work in, 74 
 New England, 16, 45, 118 
 cotton mill regions of, 15 
 farm labor in, 10 
 working day of children in, 
 93 
 
Index 
 
 145 
 
 New Jersey 
 birth registration in, 46 
 silk mills in, 89 
 New York City, 19, 47, 50 
 birth registration in, 45 
 congested district in, 23 
 housing in, 21, 23, 24, 26 
 municipal milk stations in, 
 
 49, 126 
 nursing the poor in their 
 
 homes in, 42 
 Paulist Fathers in, 88 
 owns subways, 115 
 working papers in, 98 
 New York State, 7, 8, 12 
 children's institutions in, 
 
 18 
 Civil Service Commission, 
 
 68 
 closing hour for women's 
 
 work in, 74 
 Constitution, 13, 28 
 Court of Appeals, 13, 28, 
 
 67 
 Factories Investigating 
 
 Commission, 56 
 Factory Inspectors, 68 
 registration of births in, 45 
 New Zealand, 25 
 Night work, 4, 5, 11, 12, 15, 
 
 17, 62, 73, 74, 89, 105, 133 
 North Carolina, birth regis- 
 tration in, 45 
 Ohio- 
 alcohol industry in, 75 
 
 Ohio Continued 
 
 child labor in, 6 
 
 compulsory education in, 6 
 
 continuation schools in, 
 95 
 
 free schoolbooks in, 6 
 Oliver, Sir Thomas, 15, 56 
 Oregon- 
 minimum wage law in, 36 
 
 women vote in, 36 
 
 working day of women in, 
 
 71 
 Ownership, cooperative, 36 
 
 corporate, 25 
 
 home, 28 
 
 irresponsible anonymous, 
 114, 118 
 
 of business, 124 
 
 of tools, 119, 121 
 
 primitive, 35 
 
 public, 106, 109, 118, 133 
 Pasteur Institute, 44 
 Paulist Fathers, 88 
 Pennsylvania 
 
 Closing hour for women's 
 work in, 74 
 
 Coal roads in, 29, 30 
 
 glass industry in, 92 
 
 legislature of, 63 
 
 registration of births in, 45 
 
 silk mills in, 89 
 
 Supreme Court of, 64, 65, 
 66, 115 
 
 Westmoreland, 29 
 Philadelphia, 69, 115 
 
146 
 
 Index 
 
 Pittsburgh, 57, 58 
 City of, 63 
 Ellis Island to, 63 
 Survey, 57, 62, 120 
 
 Port Sunlight, 26 
 
 Recall, 76, 135 
 
 Referendum, 36, 135 
 
 Registration 
 area, 45, 47 
 of births, 45 
 of deaths, 46 
 of tuberculosis, 46 
 
 Rhode Island, 120 
 
 Rochester, milk stations in, 
 49 
 
 Russell Sage Foundation, 
 71 
 
 Safety devices, 4 
 
 San Francisco 
 new voters in, 53 
 owns street car line, 115 
 women voters recall Judge 
 Weller in, 76 
 
 Schenectady, 115 
 
 Scholarship committee, 20 
 
 Seattle owns street car line, 
 115 
 
 Shaftesbury, Lord, 86 
 
 Sherman, P. T., Commission- 
 er of Labor, 69 
 
 Slocum disaster, 127 
 
 Social insurance, 46 
 
 Standard of 
 education, 91 
 housing, 21 
 
 Standard of 
 
 living, 53, 54 
 
 wages, 54 
 
 Steel industry, 62, 64, 121, 136 
 Strikes for higher wages, 54 
 
 for shorter working hours, 
 
 69 
 
 Sumner, Professor, 81 
 Supreme Court of 
 
 Mississippi, 72 
 
 Pennsylvania, 64, 66, 115 
 
 United States, 65, 66, 70, 
 71, 74, 75 
 
 Washington, 65 
 Sweating system, 5, 23 
 Switzerland, 82 
 Taxation, 25 
 Taxes, 14, 18 
 
 Tenement houses, 21, 24, 28, 
 126 
 
 certified milk in, 51 
 
 breeding places of tuber- 
 culosis, 51 
 
 reform, 23, 25 
 Tennessee, birth registration 
 in, 45 
 
 municipal abattoirs in, 115 
 Texas, harvesting in, 10 
 
 municipal abattoirs in, 115 
 Tuberculosis, 18, 51 
 
 crusade against, 41 
 
 preventing, 54 
 
 tenements breeding places 
 
 of, 26, 52 
 Ulm, land policy of, 26 
 
Index 
 
 147 
 
 Unemployment, 5 
 United States, 47, 56, 82 
 
 constitution, 67 
 
 Supreme Court, 65, 67, 
 
 70, 71, 73, 74 
 Utah- 
 minimum wage law in, 36 
 
 women vote in, 36 
 Vancouver, untaxing build- 
 ings in, 25 
 Vice, 75 
 Virginia 
 
 housing in, 22 
 Vital statistics, 45, 46 
 Vocational education, 95 
 Wage boards, 5, 31-33, 105, 
 
 108, 135 
 
 Wages, public interference 
 with, 54 
 
 public regulation of, 33 
 
 strikes for increased, 54 
 
 unskilled laborers, 23 
 
 legislation, 55 
 
 scale, 31 
 
 women's, 27 
 Washington 
 
 eight-hour law for women 
 in, 36 
 
 women vote in, 36 
 
 workmen's compensation in, 
 65, 67 
 
 Weller, Judge Charles, 76 
 Werner, Justice, 13 
 Westmoreland, 29 
 West Virginia boys work at 
 night in, 89 
 
 coal roads in, 28 
 
 glass works in, 89-92 
 
 lack of vital statistics in, 
 46 
 
 peonage in, 119 
 Widows, 13, 23 
 
 pensions, 5, 14, 19 
 Wilson, President, 74 
 
 Administration, 114 
 Wisconsin, alcohol industry 
 in, 75 
 
 continuation schools in, 95 
 
 leases land to summer ten- 
 ants, 115 
 
 Woerishoffer, Carola, 84 
 Working hours, 12, 69, 104 
 
 of bakers, 70, 71 
 
 of children, 93 
 
 miners, 70 
 
 steel industry, 62, 63 
 
 strikes for shorter, 69 
 Working papers, 45, 98, 100 
 Workmen's compensation, 4, 
 
 13, 66, 67, 105 
 Wyatt, Edith, 55 
 Zurich, 82 
 
TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIALISM 
 
 What it is not; What it is; 
 How it may come. 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMOND KELLY, M.A., F.G.S. 
 
 Late Lecturer on Municipal Government at Columbia 
 
 University. Founder of the City Club and the 
 
 Good Government Clubs of New York. 
 
 Author of "Government or Human 
 
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 Effort," etc. 
 
 With Introductory Notes by Prof essor Franklin 
 
 H. Giddings of Columbia University, 
 
 and Rufus W. Weeks 
 
 Crown 8vo. pp. xx+446. $1.75 net. 
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 From a published review by JOHN SPARGO. 
 
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. 248 pages. $l.OOwe*. By mail $1.1O 
 
 HALF A MAN 
 
 THE STATUS OF THE NEGRO IN 
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