CHARITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE [page 2]
CHARITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
↑Two Groups Charitable & Radical↓
In an attempt to review the recent trend in the development of charity, that which has appeared most striking to your President is a gradual coming together of two groups of people who have too often been given to a suspicion of each other and sometimes to actual vituperation. One group ↑who↓ have traditionally been moved to action by "pity for the poor" we call the Charitables; the other, larger or smaller in each generation but always fired by a "hatred of injustice," we designate as the Radicals.
These two groups, as the result of a growing awareness of distress and of a slowly deepening perception of its causes, are at last uniting into an effective demand for juster social conditions. The Charitable have been brought to this combination through the conviction that the poverty and crime with which they constantly deal are often the result of untoward industrial conditions, while the Radicals have been slowly forced to the conclusion that if they would make an effective appeal to public opinion they must utilize carefully collected data as to the effect of existing conditions upon the poor and the criminal.
It ↑is↓ as if the Charitable had been brought through the care of the individual to a contemplation of social causes, and as if the Radical had been forced to test his social doctrine by a sympathetic observation of the individual ↑actual people.↓
↑"Grief of things as they Are"↓
In addition to this, both groups when brought close to the mysterious short-coming on the part of life itself, when ↑oppressed↓ by that "grief of things as they are" ↑[are about the griefs of ] the groups of↓ circumstances or wrong of man's own doing, ↑have↓ come to realize that what we need in the world over against man's misadventure [page 3] ↑Humanity's Self-Pity.↓ is a certain power of compassion ↑that↓ humanity ↑needs a↓ standing force of self-pity as an elementary ingredient in our social atmosphere if we are to live in it at all. (↑If this↓ sheer experience in the complexity of life) (Both groups ↑have been united↓ in sentiment as well as in conviction.)
It is perhaps not germane to this Conference that we should trace the steps by which the Radicals have met us half way, but is it not true that the numbers of this Conference ↑who have been brought close to↓ suffering, feebleness, and wrong-doing, are but fulfilling a paramount obligation when they take up the study of social conditions? Does not the obligation to trace poverty back to its immediate or contributing sources belong foremost and professionally to those whose business it is to care for the wounded in the unequal battles of modern industry?
↑Study of Imperfections↓
After all human progress is deeply indebted to a study of imperfections and the ↑course↓ of despair if not full of seasoned wisdom, are at least fertile in suggestion and a desperate spur to action. Moreover in its unending undertaking to prostrate into the jungle of ↑reduce the sense of↓ human misery, charity has shared the changes of the passing generations, until like all of its contemporaries, it too has become less dogmatic and has assumed the evolutionary way of understanding life; with then it has grown more democratic and has attained greater flexibility of temper. Moreover, modern charity continually discovering new obligations, has been obliged to call to its aid economics, sanitary science, statistical research, and many other agencies as the program of this Conference will testify. It has therefore through dire need, been forced to recognize that charitable effort is part of the general social movement; somewhat as John Stuart Mill, when he was hard pressed by the problems of life, restored political [page 4] economy to its proper place as a branch of social, philosophy, insisting that it was not a thing by itself, but was an important part of the great whole.
↑Changes Shown by Conference Records↓
It would be easy from the records of this Conference to trace the gradual changes which have brought us to a consciousness of the new social philosophy that Professor Patten declares is now being formed. As former records demonstrate the steps by which charitable folk were irresistibly led from Cure to Prevention -- ↑as it [proved] also be possible to demonstrate from↓ so contemporaneous records indicate that we are now being led in the same gradual but unresting manner from Prevention to a consideration of Vital Welfare. The negative policy of relieving destitution, or even the more generous one of preventing it, is giving away to the positive idea of raising life to its highest value.
↑Moral fire in new words↓
If at times the moral fire seems to be dying out of the good words Relief and Charity, it has undoubtedly filled with a new warmth certain words which belong distinctively to our own times; such wards as Prevention, Amelioration, and Social Justice. It is also true that those for whom these wards contain most of hope and warmth are those who have been long mindful of the old tasks and obligations as if the great basic emotion of Human Compassion had more than held its own in this mellow philosophy which we are framing After all sympathetic knowledge is the only way of approach to any human problem. The line of least resistance into the jungle of human wretchedness must always be through that region which is most thoroughly explored, not only by the information of the statistician but by the undertaking of the Charitable. [page 5]
With the cooperation of the audience I may be able to demonstrate that modern Charity is committed to this newer service of increasing the positive value of life, by recalling with you some of many agencies designed to safe-guard and enhance the life of the citizen which have had purely philanthropic origins.
↑Formation of New State↓
To begin with with the most important: How far have the Philanthropists contributed to the formation of the modern state, not because they would stifle their own personal sentiments of pity and justice, but because they realized how inadequate these were unless they could find expression as an integral branch of corporate government. Through a century, therefore, in anticipation of coming changes which does so much to bring changes about, the Philanthropists have been steadily engaged in making a new state.
↑Illustration for Chimney Sweeps↓
We may concretely illustrate this process of state making by a century of effort in England to protect chimney sweeps, certainly a modest undertaking. "The Society for Superseding the Work of Climbing Boys" was founded in 1803 by some kind hearted people whose names have not been preserved. They first offered a prize of two hundred pounds for the best sweeping machine which should obviate the necessity for boys. Secondly they promoted a bill to protect the boys but although it passed the House of Commons, it was rejected by the Lords, possibly not because the Lords were more hard hearted, but because the chimneys in the old mansions and manor houses were hopelessly crooked and could not be swept by machinery. Thirdly, they appointed their own private inspectors to watch the conduct of the master sweepers, and maintained ↑these↓ inspectors for seventy years. They also purchased sweeping [page 6] machines and rented them to small masters for one shilling sixpence a week. They continually badgered the insurance companies to demand the use of these machines; finally in 1875 they succeeded in passing a law of regulation and safeguard for their grimy little proteges.
↑Aspects of Advanced Philanthropy↓
We have here an epitome of the most advanced philanthropy, stimulation of inventions which shall relieve the poor from degrading drudgery, cooperation with commercial enterprises, and finally protective legislation. But these obscure people whose hearts were wrung over the condition of chimney sweeps did even better than that. They were pioneers in the establishment of the modern principle of inspection, which when taken over by the government as an extension of the function of the state, is ably defended by the economist, but which was after all inaugurated by the Philanthropist. May we not credit to their initiative this most valuable instrument of the ↑modern↓ State?
↑Use of two Implements↓
During this long century as the Philanthropist endeavored to transform his pity into political action, he learned the use of two other great implements, first of popular agitation, second of statistical information. The first came about because the politicians would only yield under the pressure of public opinion and there is no doubt that the vehemence of the reformer is a very important factor in his chances for success. Fortunately The reform which the Philanthropist advocated are usually ↑were↓ legitimately open to the emotional appeal, to the higher sensibilities of the public, and he became an adept in the use of agitation for moral propaganda. Furthermore from the necessity of thus giving expression to their [page 7] sympathy with the distressed, the philanthropist did much to strengthen the sympathy itself, to create that social sympathy which is one of the greatest of social forces. As Mrs Fry [year] after year plead for a more humane treatment of England's prisoners, or as Dorothea Dix constantly urged new reforms in the treatment of the insane, ↑she not only↓ formulated ↑but she constantly [illegible]↓ scruples which not only already existed in the hearts of their ↑her↓ legislative hearers, but which she constantly.
But the Philanthropists also found that when they actually appeared before a Parliament or Legislature they were obliged to wield the weapon of statistics if only that they might appear as men of science and not as sentimentalists. Although the Philanthropist has often spoken slightingly of "mere knowledge" ↑Mere Knowledge↓ which informs the mind without resulting in action, he knows in his heart that knowledge is never "mere knowledge," and that the knowledge which be able to touch the springs of conduct it is indispensable to right conduct. The great problem of the would-be reformer is not so much the overcoming of actual opposition, the passing of time gradually does that for him, as the obtaining and formulating of sufficiently accurate knowledge and fitting this knowledge into the trend of his time. Lord Shaftsbury's calculation of the distance daily travelled by a child tending a machine brought to his cause those members of Parliament who had been quite untouched by his humanitarian enthusiasm and religious zeal, but the advocates of child labor legislation had before them a ↑century of↓ struggle half a century long with the "freedom of Contract" people before it was made clear to the British mind that to protect the children of the nation is not [page 8] in "restraint of trade" but the preservation of the most valuable asset of commerce.
↑The Century 1803-1909 Mere Implements↓
The Century between the first demand upon Parliament for the protection of children made in 1803 to the carefully prepared plan for the public organization of the labor markets, submitted as a minority report of the Royal Poor Law Commission in 1909, equipped the Philanthropist with at least these three carefully tempered tools — invented and perfected through a hundred years ↑public inspection, moral propaganda & statistical information with ↑those tools↓ he laid the ↑sure↓ foundations ↑for a code of↓ social legislation.
During this long century the Philanthropists also worked out a philosophy resembling pragmatism, at least many of them came to believe that the concrete truth for them was that in which all their "experiences most profitably combined" and agreed that the final test was its "propitious reaction" upon the poor, the relief it brought to the most wretched members of the community. ↑This may have been the basis for the social philosophy who Prof Patten declares we are now forming.↓
↑Committee of Families & Neighborhoods↓
In the discussion of the current experience of the charitable who deal day by day with the wounded, constantly growing less fit because their standard of life is so lamentably low, we may well begin with those groupings which this Conference indicates under "Families and Neighborhoods ↑the Committees for and on children"↓ Are not the widow and fatherless, the scriptural and traditional objects of Charity.
If we view them in the light of our more mellow philosophy what do we see? A woman whose wages are fixed on the basis of individual subsistence, who is quite unable to earn a family wage, is still held by a legal obligation to support her children, with a desperate penalty of forfeiture if she fails. To refuse [page 9] relief to the mother of dependent children in order to compel her to support them, is therefore manifestly absurd; to grant her relief not in support of her economic insecurity, but merely in aid of her destitution, is an unending process. Who in this audience cannot recall at least one of these desperate mothers, over-worked and harried through a long day, prolonged by the family washing and cooking into the evening, followed by a night of foreboding and misgiving because the very children for whom her life is sacrificed are slowly shipping away from her control and affection?
↑Children of Nursery mothers↓
I can [recall] a very intelligent woman who for years ↑long↓ brought her children to the Hull-House Day Nursery with this result at the end of ten years of devotion: the one little girl is almost totally deaf owing to neglect following a case of measles because her mother could not stop work in order to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg flipping cars; the oldest boy has twice been arrested for petty larceny; the twin's boys in spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school, have been such habitual truants, that their natural intelligence has secured little aid from education. Of the five children three are now in semi-penal institutions, not because their mother was either neglectful or unintelligent, but because she could not perform the offices of two parents.
In spite of my acquaintance with these over-worked mothers, I found myself quite unprepared to believe the well substantiated story which was recently brought to the attention of a district office of the Chicago Associated Charities. A widow with three little children lived in a furnished room on the top floor of a [page 10] ↑An [illegible words]↓ cheap lodging hous. Every morning after she had put out the fire for fear of accident, and told the children to get into bed if they were cold, she locked the door and went to her scrubbing of a large down-town theater for which she received $16 a month. Because her fellow lodgers complained that the children cried all day, and beat upon the door with their fists crying "let me out," the landlady said that the mother must move. She tried in vain to find another room equally cheap, and at last quite crazed by worry and anxiety, made up her mind that she must dispose of her children. One morning she moved the bed to the window, opened the lower sash, and told the children that if they would climb up on the bed after she had gone and look out that they would see something very pretty on the street below. She then locked the door and went away as usual. The children of course climbed upon the bed and leaned out of the window, but were fortunately seen by a neighbor who mentioned them back until the door could be broken open by the landlady. Had the over-worked woman taken her own life, the State would have cared for her children either by the most approved method of boarding them out, or in institutions for dependent children. Would it, therefore, seem so unreasonable to board them with their own mother, requiring a standard of nutritution and school attendance? The beginnings already made in this direction are all due to voluntary charitable ↑effort perhaps the largest number of children boarded with their own mothers are in Chicago carefully supervised by Jewish Charities.↓
↑Boarding Children with Mother↓
But with the knowledge ↑all↓ charitable people possess, why do we not sternly accuse the State not only ↑both↓ with the loss of the mother, but ↑and↓ with the many results of imperfectly nourished and uneducated childhood? The results of neglect upon these children is obvious from many points of view, but if we consider [page 11] it only from the narrow standpoint of that most fruitful source of destitution, unemployment, we may instance the most explicit figures ↑statistics↓ of the many boys who have graduated into the condition of the unemployable directly from adolescence, because they had come into the labor market with defective nutrition and faulty discipline. Have not the administrators of charity upon whom this yearly burden is thrown a right to declare that they will no longer endure this premature exploiting of the undernourished and uneducated? Have they not a right to demand ↑both that shall be properly fed and↓ that public education shall bring forth better fruit, and might not their concerted action bring about industrial education and avocation bureaus?
↑Committee on Relation of Schools & Community↓
↑To consider the affairs of the Committee on the [relation?] of the school & the Committee we will [recall] that the first free public education in England was established by↓ the Poor Law Guardians in England ↑because they↓ resolved that the [children] should no longer be subject to that curious penal discipline which characterized the "Unions ↑and↓ segregated the children ↑the pauper children↓ altogether from the poor horses into district ↑schools↓.
↑Beginning of British Board School↓
It is true that the British Board Schools have suffered from this humble beginning, but the indications are that the next great advance in English education will also be indebted to a charitable source. The latest ↑minority↓ report of the Poor Law Commission, without apology for entering the field of education, recommends that "the legally permissible hours for the employment of boys must be shortened, that they must be required to spend the hours so set free, in physical and technological training, that the manufacturing of the unemployable may cease." This same report of a Charity Commission recommends that the girls [page 12]
↑Next demand on Public Education↓ be subjected to a drastic and a long enduring course of training in domestic economy and the care of children, and when we reflect upon the number of heart breaking causes of ill health and criminality apparently due to the ignorance of a mother, this recommendation seems absolutely germane to the purpose for which ↑this Charity↓ the Commission was appointed.
↑More volunteers needed in London↓
How far this demand upon education made by the charitable, will in the end commit us to the feeding of school children, and to adequate provisions for the recreation of the adolescent each community must decide for itself, largely upon the data presented to it by its charitable people, ↑It is significant that the immediate results of the assumption by the London Education Authority of its new duties of feeding & medically inspecting the children of school age was the call by the London County Council, for 7000 volunteers to fill the children's Care Committees. The ↑aldermen↓ asked for volunteers who had had experience in charitable agencies such as County Holiday Fund Committees, Apprenticeship Committees, Schools for Mothers Committees and so on indefinitely. The State in the administration of this advanced measures was undoubtedly dependent upon the [cooperation] of the charitable folk of London.↓
May we not expect valuable educational results from the report submitted by the Committee of this Conference on "The Relation of School and Community" because such a Committee will consciously and systematically undertake to do that which has for so long a time been going on almost surreptitiously? For although the public schools in America are suite free from the odor of charity, and were inaugurated and conducted as a matter of public policy, they are greatly indebted to the educational results obtained from the care of defective and [illegible] ↑delinquent↓ children. Certainly the training of the brain through the coordinating muscles was first painstakingly worked out by these dealing with children whose minds could not be approached [page 13] through the more conventional methods of education. At the present moment the best agricultural training given to boys as well as the most thorough trade instruction is to be found in institutions for the wayward, from the well tilled garden patches in the truant schools to the elaborately equipped machine shops in the State Reformatories. Is it not true that the purely doctrinaire beginning of the American public schools places them in constant danger of becoming remote from the actual lives of the children and that they are greatly in need of the illumination and help of those who know the boys and girls as they live in their uncomfortable homes and see them in their unguided desperate efforts to find work.
↑Committee in Health & Sanitation↓
If we consider the work of another Committee of this Conference, that on "Health and Sanitation," the argument becomes easy, for public health is a magic word which ever grows more potent as we realize that the very existence of the modern city would be an impossibility, had it not been discovered that the health of the individual is dependent upon the hygienic condition of his surroundings.
↑Manchester Committee 1844↓
But quite as the first Commission to inquire into the condition of great towns was appointed through the solicitation of the philanthropic folk of Manchester in 1844 and as sanitary science, both in knowledge and municipal authority has leapt forward under pressure of epidemics raging through the poorer quarters of crowded cities, so the advocates of the most advanced measures in City Hygiene and preventive sanitary science are those who have realized that neglected childhood and neglected disease are the most potent causes of social insufficiency. In proof of this we may instance the two new departments at present being urged upon the Congress of the [page 14] United States, a Department of Health and the Children's Bureau. In the hearings before the Committees in regard to both of these new departments the Philanthropists have been in the majority.
↑[Illustrial upon Tuberculosis Crusade↓
Many illustrations are possible of social advances due to sanitary science pushed by the charitable, but for our purpose nothing illustrates this more rapidly and graphically than the changes arising from the movement to control and eradicate tuberculosis. We can quite honestly instance the demand for a more generous feeding of the healthful members of the family chichis arising from the proper feeding of the tuberculosis patient; better tenements for the entire population which will doubtless result from those tenements of no darks rooms & no halls ways, which have been built for incipient cases of tuberculosis; we may also claim that more rest and leisure for all will follow the demand which is made for it on behalf of the tuberculosis patient. This latter will quickly bring us back to the social movement itself for the effort to adjust a man's work to his powers, is largely at the base at the entire labor struggle.
↑Advance in Social [illegible]↓
Not the least of the results from the tuberculosis campaign may be instanced the advance in social advertising which the tuberculosis people have taught us all. A recent exhibition in Boston showed an incandescent lamp which flickered into darkness twice a minute to illustrate the rate of death from tuberculosis in the world, but nearby the knife of a miniature guillotine fell every ten seconds to show the rate of industrial accidents in the United States. And there is no doubt that the second dramatization would have been impossible without the suggestion of the first and the wonderful methods of popular [page 15] instruction which the destroyers of the white plague have evolved. But have we as a body of charitable men and women done what we ought to eradicate dark tenements, unclean milk, disease-breeding food, and many another evil to which the attention of the sanitary engineer needs be perpetually directed if the health of the poor is to be preserved and their children kept alive. That might we not do if we properly bestirred ourselves at this moment of human conservation and city planning? We could overwhelm every city government in the land with verified knowledge which exactly fits in with the trend of the times.
↑Committee a State Supervision & Administration↓
To consider the affairs of that most important Committee of "State Supervision and Administration," let us take up first that venerable and primitive obligation of the State to care for its paupers, to see to it that no member of the community shall actually perish through lack of shelter or foot. The report I have so often quoted declares that in England the State performs this duty in such wise that many destitute men prefer extreme exposure and semi-starvation outside, to the shelter and food within the Unions. This fearless minority advance this preposition, that the State "which does not welcome the entrance of a destitute person into a poor house as gladly as an isolation hospital welcome a small-pox patient, which does not in fact search out destitution as the local health authorities search out infectious diseases" is derilect in the performance of its most obvious duty.
On the other hand what is the result of a system of public relief which prides itself upon keeping people out of its institutions. On the streets of Chicago there appears from time to time a poor half-witted woman named Agnes who is not considered [page 16] sufficiently imbecile for restraint although she is quite unable to name the fathers of her six children who have been born at various times in the County Infirmary as the official records shows. Various complaints are registered against her, and she is occasionally arrested for vagrancy, although nothing effective can be done for her under that charge.
↑Peat-House & Hospital↓
Institutions as well as men are so prone to forget the pit whence they were digged. What most beneficent of institutions the modern hospital, had its origin in the 18th Century Peat House which must have killed more people than it cured. But the very number of sick people which it itself was a great sense of the early peat house became the surest foundation for the scientific study and the [aseptic] cleanliness which are the hospital's great contributions to society.
↑Valuable Study in Hospital for the Insane↓
Does not this history of the hospital, so recent as to ↑be↓ almost be in the memory of living men suggest that in the building up of this new social philosophy which has for its object the humanizing and development of our common life, the most valuable data might be supplied from those vast institutions wherein the wrecks of the system are gathered. To illustrate from the hospitals for the instance: those institutions which unfortunately still reflect something of the dread and discipline of the patients upon which they were founded. In this period of intense and over-wrought industrialism there are no other institutions which could perform as great a service to the community, if they could only determine how many patients became insane because of black terror lest they lose their work, how [page 17] many through malnutrition when they had lost it, and how many because of the sheer monotony of their employment. Psychiatry is doing something to show us the after effects of fear upon the minds of children, but little has yet been done to show how far that fear of the future, arising from economic insecurity has superinduced insanity.
↑[illegible] distressed Insanity↓
I recall a Bohemian who borrowed a hundred dollars from a country woman in Chicago with which to bring his family to America. Partly through lack of work and partly through many attacks of rheumatic fever he was unable to pay his debt in the time specified. His creditor persistently threatened to arrest him and threw him into prison. This impending fate so preyed upon his mind, that after weeks of sleeplessness he became so insane that he was committed to the County Hospital. His case was declared hopeless, but when a resident of Hull-House who during his absence made the acquaintance of his family was able to frighten his ↑his↓ creditor ↑was frightened↓ into a withdrawal of her threats, and when she made a reassuring visit to the patient in the hospital, he began to mend, and now five years later he is not only free from debt but has almost completed the payment upon a house and lot of his own.
↑Breakdown of Young Russian↓
A young Russian coming to Chicago in the hope of obtaining that freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three months of bitter disillusionment, the result of no work and insufficient food, was sent to the County Hospital for the Insane. A little group of his young countrymen startled by this revelation of his destitution, devotedly went to see him each week with promises [page 18] of work and companionship, he made a speedy recovery, and I find it hard to connect the promising lawyer when I occasionally meet with the desperate and forlorn young men of fifteen years ago. Doubtless the hospital care, the rest and food, were the basis of recovery in both cases, but was not reassurance and the removal of dread also a factor ↑in the↓ a cure of that type ↑of↓ disordered mind which the alienists define as "due to conflict through poor adaptation." The official records apparently tell us little by which such a connection can be made, but a fine beginning in this line of research through the instrument of human sympathy, has been made by the National Committee of Mental Hygiene as well as by the Psychiatric Institutes ↑of Psychiatry in↓ of New York and Michigan. In a course of study held by the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy for the attendants of the Insane in State Institutions, they were carefully taught the first principles of observation as well as methods of diversion and instruction. This course of study which was inaugurated by the Illinois State Board of Charities, Dr Adolph Meyer a leading medical authority calls "one of the most useful steps ever taken in Our field by Philanthropy." As Scientific "Child Study" was founded by the educators of the feeble-minded, may we not hope from this carefully accumulated data not only to achieve a more humanitarian care of the insane, but so to modify our daily occupations that insanity may be reduced.
↑Care of Inebriates↓
There is also the pioneer care of the inebriates which is undertaken by several State Boards of Control indicating the time when inebriety will be treated as a disease and a misfortunate and the habitual drunkard will no longer be fined and imprisoned as a criminal. The drunkard brings us quite naturally perhaps to [page 19] ↑Committee on Law Breakers↓ a consideration of the problems confronting the Committee on Law Breakers. Here we will admit at once that it is impossible for the non-professional to realize the difficulties of prison administration, ↑that most difficult of all the tasks which Society commissions↓ and although it may seem at moments as if the State held all too firmly with our young offenders it has already become a question of cure and education. Whatever is done for the ↑for persons↓ discharged (man or boy,) smarting under a sense of injustice which is often more than he can withstand, must for many years be undertaken by those not in the direct employ of the State. Are these discharged men and boys sufficiently fortified against their prison friends? A boy of my acquaintance sentenced to the Reform School because he [purloined] a horse and buggy with which he took two friends for a drive into the country, came home at the end of two years only to be called a horse-thief and thrown out by his father as he was again by his uncle with whom he sought shelter. There seemed to him nothing to do but to join two of his ↑Reform↓ school acquaintances in ↑the↓ job of petty larceny. There is something very pathetic in the spectacle of those disappointed parents who throw ↑off↓ their erring children through sheer chagrin, as there is in the ↑mere↓ statement that so many of the young criminals are the oldest boys in large families, when we recall what a wonder the first child is, and the adoration he receives from his young parents. As we fail to make many other obvious connections, that of the wayward girl with insufficient housing for instance. Out of the total number of ↑500↓ girls in the Illinois Industrial School committed for their first sexual immorality, 46 had become involved with members [page 20] of their own families, 19 with their fathers, the rest with brothers or uncles.
Are children annually sacrificed through lack of that safeguarding which it is the business of the charitable to urge? The friendly visitors who know best of all the heavy burdens which these neglected children bear?
↑Support for Prisoner's Families↓
Certainly upon the charitable and pos no one else falls the care of the prisoner's family during his incarceration, and this in spite of the fact that Detroit is making an effort to support the prisoner's family from the work ↑earnings↓ of the prisoner and that many another experiment is being made ↑Washington has done much already↓ in the direction ↑of securing family support from the prisoner himself and Cleveland [illegible] the prisoners as well as support for family.↓
Although the present Mayor of Chicago issues so many pardons that he practically does away with the work of one municipal judge each year, if those pardons were issued not for political reasons but were based upon the popular plea that the prisoner had a wife and little children to care for, one might be almost willing to accept them in lieu of any reasonable arrangements to care fro the prisoner's family and as one of those first blind efforts to meet the popular demand for mercy so often founded upon a subtile perception of justice. The Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago undertakes to investigate the family of each man committed to the City House of Correction cooperating with the warden in order to secure parole wherever practicable that the father may earn money for his dependent children. I cite from two of their reports one ↑knowing that the burden of the family faces upon the charities:↓ although his wife testified that he was a moderate drinker. during the incarceration ↑of a man committed for drunkenness↓ his wife and five children received provisions [page 21] and coal from the County Agent, $1.50 a week from the United Charities to buy milk for the baby, an order from the School Principal for a pair of shoes for the boy although the neighbors as well as the family testified they had never received any charity before. Another family of seven children, the youngest four weeks old, the mother in bed with a milk leg, was receiving aid from the County as well as from private Charities, ↑although↓ the prisoner owned his own house, and had for years been employed in the freight house of one railroad.
↑Two cases [illegible] support for prisoners families↓
In both of these cases and in a thousand others it is the charitable agencies upon whom falls the entire care of the prisoner's family, and also in that heart-breaking attempt to re-establish the discharged prisoner himself. How is such a man ↑"with his artificially consummated unfitness"↓ to wrestle successfully with alert, unhampered competitors in the labor market? Have not those who constantly attempt to assist him, a right to demand that men "shall not be daily destroyed under our law for want of that human insight which sees men as they are?"
↑Committee on Occupational Standards↓
Let us consider next the Committee on "Occupational Standards" newly appointed this year which has to do with that other function of the State by which it seeks to protect its workers from their own weakness and degradation, and insists that the livelihood of the manual laborer shall not be beaten down below the level of efficient citizenship. This undertaking of the State assumes new forms almost daily. What have the charitable people contributed to the movement for State control over industrial diseases or the protection of machinery? What have the done ↑in collecting data which illustrates pro and con the necessity for↓ old age pensions, industrial insurance, employer's liability acts, the regulation of the hours of labor, the control of the "sweated trades," the prohibition of the sale of intoxicants? Perhaps the charity of the past may have ↑claimed a share only in the last two, and yet where could [page 22] trustworthy data for the use of the State legislators be so easily collected as in the State institutions for the criminal and defective, and in the orphanages and hospitals of private philanthropy. [Although] the connection is so obvious and is only↓ contemporaneous charity ↑that↓ is taking a leading part in the establishment of the various safeguards against premature disablement and dependence of the ↑manual↓ worker. It is perhaps significant that the most drastic survey of industrial conditions ever made in America was inaugurated and carried out by the editors of a paper called "↑Charities↓."
↑English "Bounty"↓
Long ago the English Economist was horrified over an administration of the Poor Law which paid "rates in aid of wages" and designated such charity as a "bounty" paid to employers: but the employer who pays starvation wages to his employees and who "sweats" them without regard to their health or endurance comes to rely absolutely upon the "bounty" with which his wages are supplemented. The long struggle to establish a living wage which is carried on by trade unionists has its charitable as well as its economic aspects ↑as Father Regan will demonstrate at on of the lessons of this conference.↓ Even conceding that the employers themselves largely pay the taxes sustaining the hospitals and poor houses in which the disabled and scrap-heaped workers are cared for, public funds are thus withdrawn from those under [illegible] or which this paper please, the enrichment of human life, the fuller developments and education of the children. From the human as well as from the economic standpoint there is certainly an obligation resting upon the Charity and Correction people to discover how much of their material comes to them as the result of social neglect, remedial incapacity, and the lack of industrial safeguards. Perhaps the most revolutionary proposition ever seriously put before a modern government was the plan for a public organization of the Labor Market placed before the English Parliament in 1909, [page 23] and although it was written in its final form by two economists, its material was collected by those trained in charitable administration, and it was put forth as a report of a Poor Law Commission. This Report ↑stated that↓ divided all of the Unemployed, the Under-Employed, and the Unemployable ↑are↓ the results of three types of trades; first The Subsidized Labor Trades wherein women and children are paid wages insufficient to maintain them at the required standard of health and industrial inefficiency so that their wages must be supplemented by relatives of charity, second Labor Deteriorating Trades which have sapped the energy, the capacity, the character, of successive generations of workers, third Bare Subsistence Trades where the worker is forced to ↑such↓ a low level in his standard of life ↑that he↓ and continually falls below self support.
↑White lead poisoning↓
But although this brilliant formulazation came from England, one does not need to cross the water, to find instances of the relation of industry to charity. ↑An American↓ white lead factory discharges every employee ↑laborer↓ at the end of three months not through the recommendation of the foreman but directly from the office in order to prevent the men from developing lead poisoning. This is of course cheaper than to employ examining physicians or to install safeguards. But how about discontinuous employment as a factor in the breeding of discouragement and poverty? Of this the charitable people say never a word. In a pottery factory instanced by Prof. [Edsall] of the University of Pennsylvania, men are chiefly engaged who are already afflicted with tuberculosis and cancer, because knowing they have but little time to live, they do not resent the fate of lead poisoning. [page 24]
It is because our modern industrialism is so new that we have been slow to connect it with the poverty all about us? The socialists talk constantly of the relation of economic wrong to destitution and point out the connection between industrial maladjustment and individual poverty, but after all the study of social conditions, the obligation to ↑eradicate↓ trace poverty back to its immediate or contributing sources ↑cannot↓ belongs not to one political party or ↑nor to one↓ economic school, ↑and after all↓ and after all it was not a socialist but ↑that ancient friend of the poor↓ St. Augustine, who said "thou givest bread to the hungry, but better were it, that none hungered and thou had'st none to give to him." ↑That friend of the poor St Augustine↓
↑The Planet of John Ball↓
Three hundred years ago John Ball looking out over England tells us that he saw "the great treading down the little, the strong beating down the weak, and cruel men fearing not, and kind men daring not, and wise men caring not," and then with his heart burning within him, he cries aloud "and the Saints in heaven forbearing, and yet bidding me not to forbear."
If we compare our time with his, we will admit that although the great still tread down the little, and the strong beat down the weak, that the cruel are at last becoming afraid of public opinion, that kind men are more daring in their schemes of alleviation than they used to be ↑and↓ that wise men are at last learning to regard human sympathy as one source of wisdom and in that sense at least was more solicitious. We do not venture to say whether or not the Saints in heaven forbar but we are very certain that no Saint upon earth could forbear in the presence of contemporaneous, social and industrial conditions, and whether ↑both↓ saint or sinner, we all know that the [page 25] conditions can only be made more righteous and more human by the increasing devotion of countless generations of men.
↑Crusade against Destitution↓
The English economists and philanthropists have started a Crusade against Destitution; the most intrepid of revolutionists are those who have been stung into revolt by the poverty and degradation of Russia's peasants; the Social Democrats of Germany are five ↑three & a half↓ million men vowed to the destruction of poverty, the part shall taken by America ↑shall take↓ take in this international crusade of the compassionate, in this standing army of humanity's self-pity suddenly mobilized for a new conquest; ↑it lies largely with the members of this conference to determine, for your President is firmly convinced that out of the most persistent efforts to alleviate poverty, will come the most successful efforts to eradicate poverty.↓
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