Various

“ Women of means can hire trained specialists for their babies. The poor are helped by settlement nurseries, but the intelligent self-supporting mothers, such as school-teachers and journalists, are utterly helpless, each groping blindly with her own individual problem that can no longer be solved individually. These women, while compelled to do a man’s work, never can have that singleness of mind that a man has while attending to his business. ”

“ As long as most mothers were able to stay at home and personally care for their babies, the care of children remained an individual matter. But, present economic conditions which force so many young mothers to earn a living away from their homes and babies, present this problem. How shall these babies be adequately cared for, in their mother’s absence?
The public nurseries are charitable institutions for the children of the poor. The middle-class working women, who earn enough to pay a little for the care of their babies, are not permitted to leave their little ones in them. ”

“ But, it is an infringement of the right of the community when men and woman with venereal disease go about freely. The community is interested in its own perpetuation. Therefore, it is interested that the prospective and the actual husband shall be just as clean from disease as the girl.
But, “they” say such handling of the situation does not meet the economic objection; these suggestions do not even attempt to provide more cash for the girl. Good, the suggestions do not solve the problem for her; that is just the point. She must solve it for herself. That is the only salvation worth having. ”

“ There is no equitable fairness either to mistress or servant. No one really knows what is fair. The same haphazard system applies to hours of work. Neither employer nor servant knows what constitutes a fair day’s work for a cook or a maid. The whole question should be threshed out and adjusted to a standard just as are other branches of labor. Whether the eight-hour idea can be effectively worked out in the home is a question: more likely we shall have to begin on a ten-hour-day basis and gradually adjust ourselves to an eight-hour schedule with extra pay for extra hours. ”

“ In your issue of March 15, 1913, you describe the ringing of a bell, every five minutes, to indicate the unearned increment of $1,000 in New York city real estate. This corresponds to a yearly increase of a little over $106,000,000. As stated further on, however, the community takes over $57,000,000 of this, directly, in taxes. It is perfectly true that the industries of the city account for the increase in value. But, on the other hand, the men who own and have built skyscrapers on the land have made the space in which the community lives. ”

“ The large demand for a good book and our failure to meet it has been a source of anxiety to all who have appreciated the dire need which it voiced. Then came The Three Gifts of Life, which answers the appeal for knowledge concerning the mysteries of reproduction, showing the origin of life in plants, animals and human beings—not detached as physiological fact but interwoven in ordinary experience. ”

“ In the matter of prostitution we have heard so much about the big things—the inevitableness of it, because the man wants it, because the girl may have more money than her pay-envelope brings her, and the necessity for changing public opinion before any change in dealing with the situation can become effective—that we have become well-nigh overwhelmed by the magnitude of the evil. ”

“ One of the most interesting chapters is entitled Social Aspects of Land and Labor in the United States, though in the first paragraph the reader is confronted with the statement that “The nation’s population is ultimately determined by the amount of its arable land.” This is doubtless a casual statement and ought not to be allowed to mar what is otherwise an excellent chapter. Of course it is only the nation’s rural population which is ultimately determined by its arable land. So long as foreign markets hold out, there is no limit to the urban population short of lack of building room. ”

“ Temporarily and to a small degree increase of land tax will stimulate building and thereby, by disturbing the relation of supply and demand, reduce rents. But this effect will last only until those who hold unsalable land have made the best of a bad investment. No one will continue to engage in any kind of a business beyond the point at which it yields a return fairly equivalent to that obtainable in other lines.
It is almost an axiom that 4 per cent of the total cost of any kind of a building must be allowed for taxes, insurance, repairs, depreciation, &c. ”

“ Ambition and a desire to see the world stimulated an Oriental Jewish migration which is largely responsible for their presence in New York city. It is almost the only Jewish migration to America that was not due to poverty or persecution. The Spanish Jews chose America as their place of pilgrimage in the face of the fact that the Spanish government has recently sent representatives to Turkey for the purpose of inducing them to return to Spain, an evidence that that country believes them to have qualities that would be an asset to the country of their choice. ”

“ To be successful it cannot be hasty, inexpensive or inexpert. Quite as important as this study of outdoor relief will be a study of the conditions under which children are admitted to institutions which must be undertaken with much the same end in view.
Those who have felt the need of more facts before enacting mothers’ pension legislation have been much interested in the study which Massachusetts has been making. If all the possibilities of such a study were realized in this report, a good many of our stumbling blocks would be removed. ”

“ Wilson very properly insists that if a farmer is producing but sixty bushels of potatoes on an acre of land which should yield three hundred bushels he is guilty of a wrong that should be denounced just as stridently as the doctrinal sins which have so long occupied the attention of rural pastors. ”

“ The commission expressed its belief that widows’ families were the most important single group in poverty and that they should be dealt with by a method unhampered by the need of dealing with other cases. The commission’s bill, it was argued, would further break up indiscriminate relief, introducing state control and state standards for a great group of dependents, continuing the process begun for the feeble-minded, insane, blind and the like. The friends of the bill believed that the state Board of Charity administered so much relief that widows would not be adequately cared for by it. ”

“ First, that the mineral constituents of foods are much more important in body building than food chemists and dietitians are aware; in fact, that we are either literally starving ourselves and our children by eliminating the ash from our bread, meat, potatoes, rice and other foods, or we are rendering our bodies susceptible to disease—such as tuberculosis—through failure to supply certain mineral defenses to the tissues. ”

“ If we have failed in our relief work, the children of the widow are not the only ones who have suffered. Upon the children of disabled fathers, of incompetent and neglectful parents, of all those tragic families who fall outside the commission’s category of “worthy,” our sins are visited still more heavily. The commission was charged only with the duty of studying the condition of widows; but it seems to have taken some note of families of other types. We read: “Consistently, widows through death of husbands by disease or other industrial cause ... ”

“ COMMUNITY MACHINERY IN THE SOUTH Three distinct social agencies have been recently developed in Birmingham, Ala., from one association, the Boys’ Club and Children’s Aid Society. They are the Juvenile Court with its probation system, the Children’s Aid Society and the Boys’ Club proper. The story of these changes is expressive of the development of social organization in the southern cities.
The parent society has for several years been one of Birmingham’s most vigorous efforts toward the betterment of the conditions affecting child life. ”

“ Nazileh, gay, sad, loving, poetic, mischievous little girl, always courteous, never shrewd, seems to represent the best type of Syrian child. We need her filial devotion, her deference to old age, her fine hold on tradition in this rough and ready civilization of ours. Evidently the high tide of immigration that washes in so many problems, brings treasure also. ”

“ The essential ashes, always present in food stuffs—vegetable or animal—in their original raw state, are removed in the manufacture or in the cooking. Wholesome nutritious whole wheat bread and unpolished rice are set over against the insidious, emasculated, mineral-denuded white bread and polished rice—real whited sepulchers, beautiful but deadly. ”

“ That the pastor and the church ministering to the farmer of each type are determined by that type is a clearly stated lesson that social workers outside of rural communities might very well take to heart.
Some communities, Dr. Wilson recognizes, are exceptional. He apparently agrees with Prof. T. N. Carver of Harvard that the best farmers in the country are the Mormons, the Scotch Presbyterians, and the Pennsylvania Germans. Each one of these peoples—for they are no less—has come to agricultural prosperity because this agriculture has been built around the church. ”

“ Intensive work has been done by the Industrial Removal Office, also, in distributing individuals in other parts of the country besides New York or sending them to Panama, Central and South America and the 138Philippines, where their antique Spanish dialect survives and where, without the handicap of language, in more than one case, beginning as peddlers, they have become merchants. Many of those who have succeeded in business import their goods from the United States, thus becoming a medium of bringing about business relations between this country and its Latin-American neighbors. ”

“ At the same time, no one who has been in touch with the marvelous change which has brought New Jersey to the first rank of progressive states can fail to realize that in practically one session of the Legislature the astounding insight, force and influence of one man achieved what might otherwise have taken years to accomplish. It must be remembered that almost all the important Wilson legislation was passed by the Legislature of 1911, when the House was Democratic. ”

“ The land area itself is utterly inadequate for the business and living room of the community. There does not seem to be any great injustice in leaving for the men who have bought and improved and who manage this land, between 40 and 43 per cent of the increase, especially as the increase is itself subject to an increased assessment and progressive taxation.
Looking at the matter in another way, the owner of land in New York is allowed a trifle over 11⁄2 per cent a year interest on his investment. ”

“ Around the man’s neck a noose hangs loosely; about him he sees only the inexorable faces, the wide stretches of the plains, the silences in which there is no help. The man looks past the plains into the ghastly future that is just ahead. ”

“ The problem faced by these mothers can be solved only by social co-operative measures. The establishment of a new type of public nursery to meet the demands of intelligent mothers is now under way. To distinguish it from the prevailing nurseries it is to be called “the baby garden.” The children are to be divided into the following groups according to age: Infants of one year or less; babies from a year to two years; those from two to four years. Only experts in baby culture specially trained to meet the needs of each of these individual groups are to be placed in charge. ”

“ So it seems that my fellow “Socialist agitators” and I are leading around by their noses such staid and proper citizens as are to be found in the City Club of New York, the New York Federation of Labor and the American Association for Labor Legislation. [5] And because some of us are advocating here and now in New York that employers shall be permitted self-insurance, mutual insurance or contribution to a state managed fund, we are “seeking to destroy private business in all its forms.” ”

“ For these nurseries attempt to minister only to physical wants. Although the needs of the child at infancy seem to be largely physical, we know, that from the day of its birth, the infant is getting impressions and forming habits. The manner in which we satisfy his needs, the habits which he forms under our care, shape his future character,—and yet, the training of the so-called trained nurses in charge of the average nursery, enables them to attend to the physical needs only. ”

“ The market is flooded with publications on education with reference to sex, and most of them are the product of superficial or one-sided knowledge and a ready pen. The emphasis is unduly put on disease because most writers are so impressed by the results of ignorance that they find it impossible to take the attitude of the normal, healthy individual whom they are trying to reach. ”

“ DETAINING THE DEFECTIVE DELINQUENT The province of Ontario, Canada, is trying to provide a means for more adequately handling the delinquent girl or woman who is also feeble-minded or suffering from venereal disease. It is well known that a third or a fourth of the boys and girls sent to reformatories are mentally deficient, but in many places there is no legal treatment for them except that of the reformatory which is designed for normal people. ”

“ The standard of work done by the public agencies and many of the private agencies for the care of children in Massachusetts is unusually high. It may be doubted, however, whether any such agency after the most careful preliminary inquiry is fully able to determine the real economic status of a family which is usually a matter that requires long acquaintance. Many of these societies receiving children who have been removed from their mothers have very little first hand information as to the reason for it. ”

“ To determine just where it does lie calls for a study requiring money, time and the sure touch of somebody who knows what to look for. The mothers’ pension schemes which the various states have worked out give us very little that is new or of higher promise in the service that goes with relief. The subsidy plan that follows the study of the Massachusetts commission is no exception.
Few institutions have been subject to more criticism than public outdoor relief. No institution has been under fire so long with so little real effort to find out what makes it criticizable. ”