Various

“ And this is what a social settlement should be:
“It should be a small institution for all the poor, not merely for the children. At its head should be one boss—a man. He should be married or a widower, and have varied experience. He should not be a minister, for if he is of the same religion as the people he would duplicate the work of their minister, and if he proselytizes, the people will run away. He should not be a professor, because he sees through narrow academic spectacles, and he should not be an amateur who goes into the work for a few years. ”

“ But will there always be poor mothers? Have we not begun a war on poverty?
Why is not the prevention and cure of poverty as wide and noble a field as the cure of tuberculosis? Are we not studying to eliminate it in the same way by destroying its breeding places, by rescuing the child, by no longer considering poverty as “the curse of God?” Poverty and tuberculosis and other dark shapes go hand in hand. Why is not the prevention of needless poverty also a constructive health measure? ”

“ It seems to me that taking away the children from a mother, is like taking away her life, for the connection is so close and subtle. Many a mother would prefer a quick and sudden death to that slow and living one. It is like giving capital punishment for a trivial offense. Sometimes the offense is unintentional. It may be poverty.
There is a certain temporary relief gained, when children have been entirely dependent on the mother, and she has had no bread to give them. ”

“ It is here, to my mind, in this last query, that we find the real weakness of the organized peace movement. This movement is too academic, too aristocratic, too exclusive. It is too much confined to earnest scholars who deal in theories, and amiable social leaders who deal in fads. It holds too many dinners at $10 a plate, conducts too many meetings in luxurious parlors and salons, and puts its privileges of membership and co-operation at too high a price of refinement, culture and material wealth. There is too much “function” and not enough “crusade!” ”

“ The only way the workers, herded into gangs and treated as machines for grinding out dividends, can defend themselves is through organization. Ordinary unionism, therefore, finds its justification as a war-measure. Scientific management, however, by establishing that community of interest between capital and labor which has so long been obscured by ignorance, creates industrial peace, and the only persons who have reason to oppose it are those who have a personal interest in the continuance of warfare. ”

“ This is said to be the biggest problem of religion, as it is the newest, for “it is only lately that man has been able even to formulate the true significance of religion in terms at once rational for the intellect and practical for the conduct of the daily life.”
“People will be happy as fast as they learn to face these questions and to say yes to them. Only men of good will really know what they want in this world; can meet and make and control conditions in life; can handle successfully the new and tremendous powers of nature and science. Only they can establish thorough democracy. ”

“ In the schools they learn that the United Stales is the greatest nation in the world, and on the streets they learn that Italy is a despicable nation. So they think that everything Italian is to be thrown away. There is no family life, so the children acquire awful habits.”
Not in the school or settlement, but at home, said Professor Racca, we learn not to steal and lie. In Italy and Russia the home, he said, is the center of the intellectual and moral life. Therefore the responsibility is America’s if in America these homes crumble and the morals of the children crumble with them. ”

“ What I do not have patience with is the preaching of that good old-fashioned dogma “the mother’s best place is in the home.” Nothing can be more valuable to the state than the mother’s contribution, but the home has no safeguards other than those which the man, with his willing or unwilling hands can give her.
It is the preachers and the social workers, I have thought to myself many times who have waked our sleeping “social conscience.” It may be a good genie that is waked but it wants something to do, and will not be put off with promises. ”

“ The extent and causes of poverty are accounted for in largest part by industrial conditions, the economic burdens of land, rent and interest, immigration, drink and war. But to whatever factors the problem is due it can be met only as man becomes more religious, which the author makes equivalent to being more human and more civilized. Socialism rises above its “difficulties”, if at all, only as it becomes so human as to be “a form of the religion of pity and sympathy.” It fails most “in not understanding the spiritual implication of democracy, because a materialistic democracy is impossible.” ”

“ He must be a whole-hearted supporter of Lloyd-George’s schemes of social insurance, old-age pensions, taxation of land values and better education. With tax-payers’ associations he is surely unpopular, for he actually denounces thrift in government and advocates spending more and ever more on public undertakings. He laments that a surplus in the national revenue is made the excuse for lowering taxes, while there are a thousand good objects on which the surplus could be spent. ”

“ Who are these men that are deliberately and openly planning the utter rout of the casualty companies? The writer is among them. They are those who seek to destroy private business in all its forms and to substitute state management and control in its place. Their activities in the present campaign have nothing to do with the particular merits or demerits of the compensation measures in question. Their whole attitude is false, in that they do not admit their motives, and besides wantonly misstate facts as to their adversaries. ”

“ There should be women police in our dance halls—the happy hunting ground of the white slave trader—to watch the girls and also the boys, to warn the girls when they are seen taking too much liquor and to watch that if intoxicated they are not accompanied from the hall by young men who have plied them with liquor for illicit purposes. ”

“ The only real boss, in fact, is knowledge; and if anyone can speak with knowledge, he will be listened to, and he will have his reward. On the other hand, the tongue of ignorance must be still; and so it follows that to the extent that unionism means the placing of ignorant men in the saddle, or to the extent that it involves high labor costs, to that extent must scientific management always be against it. ”

“ Many students of municipal affairs believe that every large city should have morals police, of whom a certain number should be women, if it would properly protect young girls for whose unwary feet so many pitfalls are spread, and if it would deal adequately with prostitution—that grave menace to health and morals. ”

“ It is the common people—peasants, artisans, factory workers—who pay the price of war and it is only through the organized revolt of these people that the curse of militarism can be destroyed. Here, in “the multitudes,” whom Jesus sought out with so true an instinct, do we find the hope of future peace upon earth. No movement which ignores this factor in the situation can be regarded either as efficient or genuinely in earnest. ”

“ And why, if we are to be so very careful and scientific about it, is the question of non-support always confused with that of the death of the wage-earner? The man cannot take his responsibilities with him into the next life, whatever we say, and the poor cannot carry adequate insurance till we copy England or Germany. ”

“ GRAHAM TAYLOR It is as obvious in New York and Chicago as it has been in some other cities that the effort to secure a morals commission for city governments is intended not only to repress and prevent the social evil but also quite as much to protect and improve the morals of the police, which are corrupted under the present conditions. ”

“ Women police are not needed to handle crowds, to regulate street traffic, to arrest drunkards and criminals, but they are sorely needed in order that they may adequately protect the thousands of children and young people who every day are exposed to the dangers of unsupervised and disreputable places of amusement and for whose safety and welfare the city is responsible. ”

“ Business enterprise has taken advantage of this natural desire for recreation, and commercialized amusements have sprung up on all sides ready to cater to every taste of this childish multitude. Penny arcades, slot machines, moving picture shows, cheap theaters, amusements parks and dance halls are all attempting to lure children with every device known to modern advertising. Young people are thus without protection and exposed to temptation at the very moment when they are least able to withstand it. ”

“ Professor Racca in his address expressed the opinion that volunteer workers should be avoided because they usually have little preparation and the settlements cannot command them as well as if they were paid. Not many girls, he thought, should do social work for young men, because young men, of southern races especially, although they have respect for women, “do not have enough respect to accept a woman as their leader as confidentially as they would a man.” For work with women and children he was of opinion there should be a woman as headworker. ”

“ Italy fattening upon the unholy spoils wrested from effete Turkey, Russia recreating the armies and navies annihilated by Japan, Germany increasing her military forces to hitherto unheard of proportions, France answering her neighbor’s challenge by raising her enlistment period for citizens from two to three years, England insisting on a five-Dreadnoughts-a-year basis, and her colonies building ships for the imperial navy! ”

“ He described his own childhood in an “average mountain home” in the South as the oldest of ten children, all of whom, he said incidentally are now doing pretty well in life. He told of the sacrifices by his father for their education and said that any time within the past twenty years, his father might have moved to a cotton mill town and lived on the labor of his children if he had been willing to do so. In all probability in that case the children would have been doomed to the common fate of cotton factory workers, with the low wages and hopeless outlook of an unskilled trade. ”

“ The sociological trend of thought and life today is a realization of essential characteristics of Christianity and makes rightful demands upon Christians. Certainly the church is to refrain from seeking to allay the restlessness and fever of social discontent by administering any anodynes that superinduce social lethargy. Its plain task is to heal, tone up and invigorate the social system, to quicken and guide those social promptings and aspirations, and make men know assuredly that Democracy means the wider opportunity and the larger obligation with respect to social service. ”

“ While improvement in the police department will incalculably improve the tone of the city’s morals without any change in the statutory standards, nevertheless we have throughout hewn to the line of police reform and not of vice suppression. ”

“ Turning to what the Italian might gain from the land of his adoption, Professor Racca said:
“It would be a good thing if the young Italian could acquire something of the strong will of the American and could retain something of the geniality and taste of his Italian parents. As it is, fathers of boys who go to settlements make most extraordinary comments showing that they do not at all understand what is being done at the settlements. For instance, one says he is so sorry that the boys spend their evenings with those bad women there.
“The new life of the immigrant is sometimes a tragedy. ”

“ In the same way, if there are more children with their mothers, after a certain law has been passed, and at the same time more in the institutions, it shows, surely, that the attention of the community has been called to a lot of children unknown before or that someone has blundered in counting them. A new law does not produce a spontaneous crop of children, under the Juvenile Court limit. Where were those children? These are the things that a mother naturally asks. They say that the soldiers are dying out. ”

“ What the casualty insurance companies most desire is that the compensation law shall be so framed as to induce all employers, or all large employers, pretty unanimously to adopt one course or the other; that is, en masse to elect the compensation features of the law, or, en masse to reject them. Otherwise the casualty companies have to do business under two different laws, providing for two different kinds of insurance, the consequent of which is to duplicate the work and a large part of the expenses of the insurance companies. ”

“ But let us not forget that the fact of bearing and rearing a child in itself creates a certain, if variable, state of dependence for a woman. No amount of learned reasoning can change the fundamental fact that while the child is coming into the world and is young the mother must forfeit a certain amount of her independence to care for the child. ”

“ How carefully Miss Richmond, appealing to our judgment and sound sense, figures out the seemingly fabulous sums that might have been saved to fight tuberculosis and feeble-mindedness, from the sums wasted in soldiers pensions. But why, I ask, is the whole country spell-bound, helpless and hopeless at the prospect of the mounting pension ladder? If we admit that the granting of pensions to disabled soldiers was right, why attack the principle instead of the abuse of the practise? ”

“ Under scientific management the workers are not subordinates, but coordinates, and each individual is free to earn, learn, and rise as the Almighty has given him the power. No form of collective bargaining would seem to be called for, because tasks are set and wages fixed, not by arbitrary action, but by knowledge. ”

“ He should be a psychologist. He should know America thoroughly. If he is working for Italians he should have lived at least two years in Italy in the very provinces from which immigrants come. He should know dialect. He should not think that he can learn to know the Italian and his traditions by “doing Italy”—by visiting museums, art collections and churches. He should work in a narrow field and should take the place of the priests in Italy.
“He should visit every person every day, and in this way really be their friend, father and brother. ”