CAROLINE BARTLETT CRANE.

“If you please, madam, will you come and look us over and inform us what is wrong so that we may right it, and what is good so that we may continue it?”

The invitation has gone out from fifty-nine American cities. Their self-chosen instructor as a woman, Mrs. Caroline Bartlett Crane. In response to their appeal she has called upon them, submitted them to a detailed inspection, praised their merits, criticised their faults and departed leaving behind her specific directions for their guidance.

Mrs. Crane calls her visits “sanitary surveys.” When a city desires her services, it calls upon her as a professional municipal expert and places the keys of the municipality at her disposal. She arrives at an appointed time and personally investigates the water supply, sewers, street sanitation, garbage collection and disposal, milk supply, meat supply, markets, bakeries, food factories, schoolhouses tenements and homes for the poor, almshouses, hospital dispensaries and jails, studies the city's 0124resources, its system of public health administration and any other incidentals which occur to her. Then she addresses mass meetings of citizens which are called to hear her, reporting conditions as she finds them and suggesting improvements. Finally these reports and suggestions are incorporated in a printed booklet which serves as a municipal text-book for some years following.

Some of the cities which have sent for Mrs. Crane have been aroused to the need of her services through the necessity for self-preservation. An epidemic of typhoid, a scourge of fire, or an intolerably bad milk or meat supply, brought to them the realisation of their need for reform. But many cities have aroused themselves to a consciousness of their condition. These have not asked to be corrected because of their deficiencies, but because they are already so far on the road toward progress that they welcome the stimulus of criticism and advice. Both they and Mrs. Crane are working at a comparatively new task.

It took twenty years’ experience to develop Mrs. Crane into what she calls a “professional sanitarian.” In 1889 the Rev. Caroline Bartlett was called to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to minister to the spiritual needs of the handful of people who still clung to the remnant of the 0135Unitarian Church left in the city. The Rev. Caroline Bartlett met her new congregation with something like dismay. She had just left her first parish in South Dakota where hardly a member was over forty years of age. Here the faithful remnant included, for the most part, gray-haired men and women. They needed a minister, they explained, for funerals. Small wonder had the young pastor turned and fled to more cheerful surroundings, but she stayed and sorrowfully enough ministered to the funerals. At the same time she started a search for children. There were just four found available among the congregation and three of these were in the same family. But with the four she started a Sunday School.

It must have been an attractive Sunday School, for soon there were more pupils, and more and more. At the same time the congregation increased and under the stimulating influence of their pastor began to hold mid-weekly meetings for the purpose of studying their town. The young pastor saw nothing unusual in their choice of a study. The church was to minister to the needs of the people here and hereafter, and three years of study convinced her that here the people had many needs. So when the congregation grew too big for the little Gothic church and money was found for 0146a new one, the church that was planned included features unusual at that time, and not so very common now.

The new church had a kindergarten, because there was none in the town; it had a gymnasium for women, a manual training department, a domestic science department. It did not have a library nor a gymnasium for men because these were found in the town, and the church was not starting an institution to rival those in existence, it was filling the people's need. The new church was renamed the People's Church, and with the relinquishing of sectarian boundaries it grew in numbers and in power. And then just when her people were beginning to feel that their young pastor was their own peculiar possession, they had demonstrated to them that she had her own life to live, as well as to help them.

One New Year's eve a musicale was announced. As usual the church was full to overflowing. Suddenly the organ overture began to play a wedding march and before the excited congregation could catch breath, their pastor, clad in white, stepped to the altar, met there one of the city's leading physicians, and before anyone could interfere became Mrs. Crane. Kalamazoo talked late that night and went to bed with an uneasy mind. Like the small girl, 0157it was afraid of the “never-again-the-sameness” supposed to come when a woman enters married life. But Mrs. Crane continued to ministers to their needs as thoughtfully and as energetically as Miss Bartlett had before her. One of her first efforts was to start a class in marketing, cooking, housekeeping, nursing and sewing, which she herself promptly joined. Now although Mrs. Crane believes that the church should minister to the temporal needs of its people, she also believes that when the need ceases it should turn its energy into new fields. In course of time Kalamazoo awakened to the fact that kindergartens and cooking courses and manual training are excellent things and started to incorporate them in its public schools. Then the People's Church closed its classes in those branches.

As there was no good, wholesome dining-room for working women, it converted its basement into a restaurant where good dinners are served nightly at a cost of about ten cents. The kindergarten was kept for the Sunday service so that parents might leave their children and attend church—not necessarily the People's Church—upon the Sabbath day.

When Mrs. Crane found that church work was running smoothly she began to look farmer. One of the first things she noticed was 0168that the alleys and back yards of the business section were very dirty. They were much like the back yards of the average town, but that fact had no weight with Mrs. Crane. Surreptitiously she photographed a number of the worst places. Then she called together a number of progressive women from her own and other churches and organised a Civic Improvement League. At one of the first meetings there was a lantern exhibition of Kalamazoo alleys and back yards. As picture after picture appeared upon the screen the inhabitants of Kalamazoo squirmed in their seats. Mrs. Crane was merciful and tactful enough to suppress names and localities, and every owner of a yard that was shown made up his mind instantly that no one should ever recognize that yard as his. As a consequence Kalamazoo went through a cleaning period in the next twenty-four hours that put the slides hopelessly out of date. There wasn't a back yard in the town that even faintly resembled them. The Mayor issued a proclamation for an annual cleaning day and proper receptacles for ashes and garbage were provided. Mrs. Crane undertook to see that this effect was permanent. Let “sanitary” restaurants, hotels, plumbing establishments look out that their rear entrances were as “sanitary” as their front. Mrs. Crane's ever active 0179camera made truthful photos and these were quietly mailed to the transgressors. Usually no other warning was necessary. The back yards of Kalamazoo continued clean. Next, Mrs. Crane noticed that by contrast the streets of the city were woefully dirty.

After much hard work she induced the members of the Civic Improvement League to ask the City Council for permission to keep six blocks of the main business section clean for three months, as a demonstration of how the work should be done. The women of the League at once began a study of the street-cleaning system introduced into New York City by Colonel Waring, and when the Council at last gave a reluctant consent to the experiment they knew how the work should be done. When the time drew near it was arranged that the women should act as inspectors, relieving each other, so that none would be overworked, and that their duty would be to follow and supervise the men with their handbrooms and small carts. At the moment of starting the yellow press deposited a number of reporters armed with cameras in Kalamazoo and the women inspectors fled in haste. To be sure they gave excuses. One woman found a suddenly sick baby, another unexpected company, a third was really ill. Mrs. Crane listed and said nothing. 01810She didn't wait to get angry or afraid. She walked out from her home and faced the cameras. And for three months daily she inspected every one of the six blocks experimented upon—alone. Every night she bathed her aching feet and every morning she got up and set her lips firmly together and went on.

At the end of three months she had reduced the cost of cleaning those six blocks $3.89 per day. The streets were cleaner than any resident had believed possible and the City Council was only too glad to adopt her methods as its own. The Civic Improvement League made up for its desertion by placing galvanised iron cans upon the street corners and by organising Junior Civil Leagues among school children who promised to help to keep the streets free from rubbish.

This civic service was undertaken two years after Mrs Crane had resigned her pastorate on account of a prolonged illness. When she recovered Kalamazoo needed her more than the church did—for the church was doing very well and the city had other weaknesses besides dirty streets. One of the Kalamazoo weaknesses was the administration of charity. Kalamazoo is a middle-sized city. It has outgrown the village stage where everyone knows everyone else, and it has not yet become a great city where 01911evil is so obvious that it is a part of evil city government to attend to all its manifestations. The good folk of Kalamazoo hardly realised that they had grown beyond the time when it was well to give to him that asked. As a result, certain noted vagabonds and certain shrewd families with a sharp eye toward making an easy living were having an excellent time, bountifully supported by the unthinking citizens. Mrs. Crane organized a Charity Organisation Branch of the Civic Improvement League. She asked churches, societies and individuals to direct funds and appeals for help to this branch. She begged housewives not to feed wanderers, reminding them that in all probability they were helping some deserting husband or bad son to more evil ways. She promised to take care of every case referred to her. And she did. She did so well that the city of Kalamazoo decided to contribute fifty dollars monthly to the Charity Organisation Branch, “for,” said the Mayor, “Mrs. Crane makes it go times as far as we can.”

This Charity Organisation Branch went to work with a will. It decided to find or to provide work for every self-respecting applicant. It had no trouble in finding work for the women, and it promptly installed a woodyard for men out of work. All the husky tramps who had 02012found Kalamazoo a delightful and profitable stopping place promptly left the town. On the road they notified their brother hoboes of the change in Kalamazoo, so that the number of Weary Willies visiting Kalamazoo included only those strays who had missed the warning. The Branch also determined to root out shiftlessness among the poor, a Herculean task.

“They must be taught to save,” said Mrs. Crane.

She arranged with a local savings bank for the acceptance of small accounts, from one penny upwards. It was astonishing how those accounts grew. In the eight years since they have been inaugurated sixty-five thousand three hundred and eighty dollars have been deposited.

Every penny of this was saved by people who never had known what it meant to put a dollar away for a rainy day. The Branch also waged a war upon deserting husbands. In these cases frequently the discipline was needed by the wife. When a husband deserted from an untidy, unattractive home, Mrs. Crane promptly sent a visiting housekeeper to instruct the wife to keep the home attractive. “We will make your husband to what is right if you will do your part,” was the nature of the bargain. Stimulated by this promise, and enlightened by 02113the knowledge brought by her instructor, the discouraged woman went to work.

The Branch also supplies trained nurses to visit homes where a nurse is needed, savings collectors to keep the people awake to the need of putting money into their accounts, and friendly visitors to dispense cheer generally. According to Mrs. Crane's doctrine there are no worthy and unworthy poor. There are just poor. If they do what is wrong they need more than food and clothes and work; they need guidance and advice and discipline. And because they need these they are not sent away, but made to stay and take the help that is offered. All this effort means a good deal of expense. Mrs. Crane has very definite ideas as to expense in charity work. She does not believe in charity balls nor charity fairs nor charity “hold-ups.” Contributions to the Charity Branch are from church collections, from the city and from individuals who are philanthropically inclined.

There are no pet charities in Kalamazo and no one society is trying to outdo another—for there is but one. Consequently a little money goes along way. nor was all this work accomplished in Kalamazoo itself. To rid the city of tramps, Mrs. Crane appealed to the railroads, and freight cars through Michigan are strictly 02214watched. To prevent mortgaging the goods of the poor at extortionate rates of interest, she started a movement which resulted in a State law making it a felony to charge more than a specified rate of interest upon any chattel mortgage loan.

In 1903, a s Chairman of the committee on Household Economics of the Twentieth Century Club of Kalamazo, Mrs. Crane attempted to secure a speaker on meat inspection. All the officials importuned were busy. They wrote Mrs. Crane kindly letters and regretted their inability to help her out, but they could not come to Kalamazoo.

The usual thing for a chairman to do upon such an occasion is to read the letters from the officials, to neatly express her own regret at the unfortunate occurrence and to skip that part of the programme. But such a course never suggested itself to Mrs. Crane. Meat was on the programme planned, therefore meat must be talked about. If all the State officials were busy, she would simply have to do it herself. She did not know anything about meats before they came into her own hands, but his fact did not deter her at all. Nor did she hunt up a book and read up on meats.

“For what,” she argued, “is the use of a book when there are real things to learn from?” 02315So she hunted up all the butchers and abattoirs, and slaughter sheds about Kalamazoo. When she had located seven she invited the wife of the Mayor, and the wife of a former mayor and two men to visit with her. Without sending word of their intentions, the five visited six of the seven slaughter houses in a day and a half. The party stated out resolved not to comment or to show any surprise at anything they saw. When they arrived at the first house they were glad to the resolution. Horror and disgust robbed them all of power to speak words adequate to meet the conditions. The buildings were old abandoned barns or sheds, unpainted, warped and rotting. Dense black cobwebs covered the ceilings and upper walls, while within six feet of the floors, walls, posts and shelves were caked with blood, grime, grease, mold and putrid flesh. Without provision for drainage, the floors let through their cracks blood and refuse which there remained, putrefying. The offal of freshly killed animals was fed to those waiting in the pens. Rats abounded. Revolting as these details appeared, they were less dangerous than the fact that animals brought to the houses were accepted unquestioningly in any condition, diseased or well, and promptly made away with.

Mrs. Crane and her committee returned home, 02416literally ill. But the lecture was given to the club. More than that, Mrs. Crane repeated it to the City Council. The members of the Council were aghast; they promised to remedy conditions at once.

Then the district-attorney found that under the city charter nothing could be done with the slaughter houses as they were outside city limits; it was beyond the city's power even to refuse the entrance of the goods to the city's markets. And the Council regretted its inability as the State officials had done, and everybody considered the matter ended. That is, except Mrs. Crane.

She determined to find out whether Kalamazoo was an exceptional offender in the matter of bad slaughter houses and lack of inspection of animals. So she wrote to the Mayor of Grand Rapids and the Mayor replied that no such conditions existed there. Mrs. Crane had her doubts and went to Grand Rapids. She found the same conditions as in Kalamazoo, and convinced the Mayor that he had been mistaken. She went to Owosso and Lansing and found things no better. Then she determined to put the matter before the State legislature. It was a year and a half until the legislature met, so she had plenty of time. She sent to every State in the Union for every meat inspection 02517ordinance in existence, then she went to talk to the State Board of Health. The State Board of Health immediately appointed a committee to look into the matter and the committee never was called. Mrs. Crane was on the committee and decided that if anything was to be done she would have to do it. So she sent for more information, to Germany, New Zealand, France, Argentine Republic and read everything she received in reply.

By the time the legislature convened she knew the meat laws in pretty nearly every country on earth and in every State in the Union. She prepared a bill providing that cities in the State could make their own meat inspection ordinances. She was a bit afraid of the bill, for although by this time she knew a good deal about meat, she still knew nothing about law. So she took the bill first to a lawyer friend and then to the State attorney-general, and when it had been pronounced constitutional, she managed to get the bill introduced. And then she heard that the bill was scheduled to be defeated. Someone telegraphed Mrs. Crane of this fact. It was at night, but she got out of bed and took a train for Lansing. On the way she worked out a set of reasons for the passage of the bill. When she arrived at Lansing she had these printed. She sat up all night, rushed 02618the freshly printed reasons to the capitol and saw them placed on the desk of every legislator. She was given the privilege of the floor, made a speech in favour of the bill and it passed by a count of sixty-one to sixteen. She went home and drafted a city ordinance which would forever do away with filthy slaughter houses and uninspected animal slaughter, had it pronounced constitutional and presented it to the City Council. After several years of strife, during which Mrs. Crane found opposed to her an organised body of local butchers, the City Council accepted and passed it.

Michigan newspapers had made familiar the name of the woman who knew more about meat and meat inspection than legislators or health officers. and the people of Michigan began to inquire, “Who is Caroline Bartlett Crane? Where does she come from?” The people of Kalamazoo found that Kalamazoo was becoming a favourite stopping-place for visitors.

The Mayor of Saginaw was the first to ask Mrs.Crane to visit a city outside her own for the purpose of inspection. Mrs. Crane did not care about going. She had her hands pretty full at Kalamazoo. But the Mayor was urgent, and finally Mrs. Crane went. Arrived at Saginaw, she visited the local slaughter houses, assisted the officials in drafting a meat inspection 02719ordinance for the city, and addressed a public meeting called by the Mayor. This was her first inspection and she had no idea that it would not be the last. But calls upon her became frequent and urgent and in her own State she visited and inspected Big Rapids, Calumet, Hastings and Bay City.

She was asked to inspect and report on slaughter houses and meat inspection, but work done in Kalamazoo proved a foundation for work that was general. Cities which called Mrs. Grace found that she knew a great deal more than they about problems common to most cities, and Mrs. Crane mastered every new problem by a thorough study not only of all the printed matter available thereon, but as in the case of meat inspection by actual investigation of the best and worst concrete expositions to be found.

Demands for inspection crew, until, harassed for time, Mrs. Crane decided to put a pride upon her services, and to formulate a definite professionals plan which she called a “sanitary survey.” To-day the cities that call upon her gladly pay for her services, furnish funds for all expenses, a secretary, automobiles, theatres and halls for meetings, official authority to conduct her investigations and an escort to accompany her.

02820

To the women of the fifty-nine progressive cities must be given much of the credit of the calls for Mrs. Crane. In 1908 the Women's Club of Erie, Pennsylvania, asked her to make a general survey of sanitary conditions. In 1910 she received a request for a more extended investigation from the same club, together with the Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Trade, the Teachers’ Association, the Juvenile City League, and the Erie High School Association. AT Nashville, Tennessee, the movement originated with the women of the Tennessee Federation of Women's Clubs, but before Mrs. Crane accepted, the State, City and County Boards of Health, the Mayor and City Council, the Board of Trade, the Centennial Club, the Housekeeper's Club, the Anti-Tuberculosis League, and fifteen additional civic and literary societies had joined in the invitation. In Rochester, New York, the Mayor, Chamber of Commerce, Board of Education, Public Health Association, City Federation of Women's Clubs, Council of Jewish Women, Social Settlement, Children's Aid Society, Humane Society, and Daughters of the American Revolution joined with the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, and forgetting class, creed and office, asked Mrs. Crane to come and help them go forward. Kentucky and Minnesota went at the 02921thing thoroughly. The Kentucky Board of Health and the State Federation of Women's Clubs combined their resources and secured Mrs. Crane for a five weeks’ tour of the State with inspection of the twelve leading cities, while the State of Minnesota a little later, through its State Board of Health, State Federation of Women's Clubs and the Commercial Clubs of Minnesota, St. Paul and Duluth, enjoyed an even more thorough survey, covering the seventeen leading cities and towns and occupying nearly two months.

In 1918, under auspices of the State Board of Health, State Department of Agriculture and State Federation of Clubs, Mrs. Crane made a survey of thirteen leading cities in the State of Washington. Here, as in her State-wide campaigns, she was sworn in as a State Health Officer during the period of her survey.

How Mrs. Crane can accomplish so much in so brief a time spent in the field can be understood only when one knows her method and also the amount of data gathered by her in advance of her visit.

In the fall of 1912 Mrs. Crane accepted an invitation to visit and survey the city of Montgomery, Alabama. The women of the city had been convinced of the need for Mrs. Crane some two years before and had patiently waited and 03022worked all that time for her coming. The male population proved indifferent, or amused, or openly antagonistic to such a proposition. Montgomery was well able to take care of herself, why send for an outsider? But the women persisted and after two years the men resigned themselves. The City Commission frankly admitted that they did not care particularly about it. “But,” said the President, “the women got hot after us and would not let us alone, so we voted one hundred dollars to the fund, and agreed to give Mrs. Crane any help she needed.”

This vital matter settled, a triumphant invitation was dispatched to Mrs. Crane. An answer arrive promptly and was read eagerly. Then the women turned to each other in dismay. For the letter of acceptance contained two startling requests. The first was that an inclosed list of questions should be answered, at once. The second demanded that until her arrival, as far as possible, all news of her coming be kept a secret. The committee groaned as they read over the questions. There were more than a hundred! Mrs. Crane wanted to know the acreage, property valuation, tax rate and charter limit on taxation. She asked for a map showing all sewers and sewer outlets, the location of parks, playgrounds and recreation centres. She inquired the nature of recent bond 03123issues, what they were for, how many had been approved and how many rejected by the people within the last ten years. She asked the bonding limit, the method of municipal accounting and reporting, the public utilities owned and operated by the municipality. She wanted the charter date, its home-rule features, its amendments. The source and quantity of water, its storage and treatment, its cost, the soil conditions, various kinds of street pavements, dairies, abattoirs, markets, bakeries, and the municipal regulations affecting them, housing ordinance, milk and meat inspection ordinances, status of the smoke nuisance, school census and appropriation, hospital and dispensary equipment, all were the subjects of minute detailed questioning, and every answer was to be signed by an official in a position to know the facts.

“Mrs. Crane will know a lot about Montgomery before she sets foot in it,” remarked one committee member sagely.

“Yes,” retorted another, “and so will we!” The committee members looked at each other in sudden enlightenment. The education of Montgomery had already begun! It was hard work to get answers to that list of questions without the general public getting an inkling of what it was all about. The women stole in and out of public offices as quietly as possible, binding 03224every official to silence as they secured the necessary information. On the street corners and in private places they whispered confidences, always ready to change instantly to some other topic is someone not in the secret happened along. The questions were answered and the reply mailed and Mrs. Crane will on her way before somebody told. Just three days before her arrival the morning paper announced her visit.

The committee held a wrathful session, but no weak spot could they discover.

“And,” wailed the youthful president of the City Federation of Women's Clubs, “what will Mrs. Crane think of us? What can I say to her?”

But when Mrs. Crane stepped from the car on Tuesday morning, November twelfth, she seemed little disturbed by the confession. She looked into the anxious faces of the ten persons who awaited her, a delegation from the Federation of Women's Clubs, several Health Officers, one member of the City Commission, and smiled reassuringly.

“They haven't had time to clean up much, even if they did get ready for me,” she said. “Now let us get to work.” The delegation were aghast. They were prepared to escort Mrs. Crane to her hotel and to wait until she 03325was rested and refreshed. But Mrs. Crane evidently was quite ready for business. The Commissioner of Health handed her the badge which made her for the nonce an authorized City Official, and Mrs. Crane pinned it under the lapel of her coat out of sight but ready in case of emergency. She jumped into waiting automobile, tucked her baggage in with her and asked to be taken to the city waterworks.

The survey was on! The machines which were to carry the escort were quickly filled and fell into line behind. Arrived at the waterworks, Mrs. Crane inspected them carefully, the wells, the surrounding area, the protection of reservoirs, the sanitary and bacteriologic weekly reports, and satisfied herself that there was no physical connection between the artesian system and the river supply used for commercial purposes. She made but few comments and then asked to see the municipal garbage incinerator. En route the visiting sanitarian closely observed streets, alleys and back yards, stopping the machines to walk where special scrutiny was needed and asking continually for specific information from the accompanying officials. It was one o'clock when the party stopped for lunch. In the hotel where luncheon was served an association of advertising men were holding a meeting. It had been arranged 03426that Mrs. Crane should speak to them. The men welcomed her cordially, and after two hours’ inspection, Mrs. Crane congratulated them upon the city water system and the incinerator, and asked their co-operation in a plan for progressively ridding the town of the smoke nuisance. Then she returned to the autos and asked to be taken to some of the dairies. By this time the number of machines had increased to four and the accomplishing escort had grown so large that the cars were crowded. Through the town they ran in line, making quite an imposing touring expedition, while the uninitiated citizens surveyed the overflowing loads of women in open-eyed wonder. Arrived at the first dairy, men and women alighted and prepared to follow Mrs. Crane.

“Now keep right with me,” urged that lady, “and do not say anything either favourable or otherwise.” It was a difficult request to comply with. The women walked sedately over the rough ground into the stables, holding their skirts tightly about them, their eyes fixed on Mrs. Crane. When the visiting sanitarian looked up, seventeen anxious pairs of eyes followed hers. Armed by their housewifely experience, the women often knew instinctively what was good and what was bad. Silently they observed every cobweb, every fly, every sign of 03527disorder. With respect they listened to Mrs. Crane's conversation with the dairyman, as to the feeding and care of the cattle, and the discussion of temperature requirements, pressure sterilisers, bacterial counts, and butter-fat content with the city milk inspector. They inspected the watering troughs, the milk house with its separator and cans. They nodded wisely as Mrs. Crane explained the advantages of the excellent partly covered milk pails used, and examined the immaculate cheesecloth and antiseptic absorbent cotton used as strainers. And they smiled with amusement but still more with satisfaction when after minute questioning as to the method of cleansing and sterilising, Mrs. Crane put her nose into pail after pail.

“It's the only way to tell positively,” observed one matron, breaking her bond of silence.

“Don't be too hard on us Friday night, madam,” called the dairyman after he had accepted an invitation to be present at the mass meeting of citizens, when the results of the survey were to be given. But his radiant smile indicated that he thought he had little to fear. Several other dairies were visited and the visiting delegation on the whole was well pleased. The barns were clean, the yards well drained, 03628the cattle tuberculin tested, the milk houses and separators screened and well kept. One ambitious dairyman had screened in his entire stable and had succeeded in keeping the flies in wonderfully well. He listened respectfully while Mrs. Crane gently suggested that the doors be hung with ravelled rope of strips of gunny sacking so that the flies would be brushed off as the cattle entered. The delegation left the dairies with a sense of well-being, and Mrs. Crane announced, “Now I want to see the almshouse.”

“But the almshouse does not belong to the city,” protested the women.

“Well,” said Mrs. Crane firmly, “it is on city ground and most of the inmates come from the city. I want to see it.”

The county almshouse at Montgomery has a charming location. The autos drew up on a shady lawn across which under great trees the shadows of late afternoon were falling. A picturesque though dilapidated red brick building stood at one end and at the side ran a number of little two-room wooden cottages, on whose porches sat men and women. A man sauntered across the grass to extend a welcome.

“Come right through,” he urged; “right through and see everything.”

“You are the superintendent?” the visiting 03729sanitarian asked. “You work for the county?”

No'm, that is, not exactly. I get 'em”— he indicated by a sweep of his arm the figures on the porches—“by contract. I get thirty-seven and a half cents a day from the county for everyone that's here.”

“And for that, what do you do?”

“Do”—the superintendent seemed puzzled. “Do, ma'am? Why I feed ‘em, I clothe ‘em, I bury ‘em.”

Silently the delegation filed into the first little cottage. The room on the left was the abode of two old women, one of whom was blind, and of four splendid children, one a girl of thirteen. The children, it was explained, were there only “temporarily,” although they had been there for months. The mother was ill and in the hospital, the father had disappeared, and there was no place in the city to send them. The next room was the abode of two men, then absent. Up one rickety pair of steps and down another filed the delegation, finding desperate illness, crudely waited on, idleness and the plaintive wish for “patches to make quilts of,” just some more of the “forgotten people” whose cause Mrs. Crane has pleaded up and down the land for years, down to the negro division, which was separated by a board fence from the 03830white, and into a cottage where lay a helpless, bedridden, blind mother. One baby just able to toddle sat upon the knee of an elderly woman, one but an infant of a few months lay on the bed.

“I've been here three years,” moaned the sick woman.

“What is the matter?” asked Mrs. Crane of the keeper.

“Syphilis,” he replied laconically.

“But these children—their father—” The superintendent shrugged his shoulders.

“Born here. You can't help things like that, ma'am, you just can't help it.”

It was a very noisy delegation that wandered back to the machines. The women were explaining volubly. The county was responsible for the almshouse, and what the keeper said was true, it was difficult to prevent such things— they were always happening in the negro quarter of the city. To which Mrs. Crane said simply: “And what is to be the future of those children, born as they are— under county auspices?”

The next morning the delighted occupants of the almshouse found roses, and magazines and patches at their doorways, and the women met with the answer to that question stirring actively 03931in their minds. They would learn how to prevent the birth of such children—and the almshouse should be remodelled. There was no time for discussion. The tour had sprung into prominence upon the front page of the morning paper and the escort of interested men and women grew so large that it had to be curtailed. The permanent escort, including the Commissioner of Health and Sanitation with one or more of his assistants, and the President and two members of the City Federation of Women's Clubs rarely left the side of their valued visitor. They intended to learn.

Mrs. Crane had entered Montgomery at ten minutes past ten Tuesday morning. She left Montgomery on Saturday at the same hour. In the intervening four days she inspected the waterworks, streets, alleys, sewer system, the incinerator, the county almshouse, two public schools for white children, two public schools for coloured children, one High School, the Union slaughter house, five dairies, four factories and one railroad shed (for the smoke nuisance), six bakeries, the city jail, the county jail, the anti-tuberculosis camp, the hospital for contagious diseases, the city laboratory and free dispensary, six meat markets, four restaurants, one cold storage plant, two moving-picture shows, one railway station and one 04032boarding house, interviewed several city officials, made a study of the administration of the Health Department, was interviewed by several reporters and made seven speeches before various audiences!

The six bakeries visited were a revelation to the women of Montgomery if not to the Commissioner of Health and Sanitation.

The front room of one of these fairly glistened with cleanliness and, beautifully decorated, presented such an inviting appearance that the delegation entered with a feeling that here at least things would be well. But hardly had the women crossed the dividing line between the shop and workrooms than they stopped in horror. Grime, cobwebs and dirt were everywhere, refuse of all kinds filled the corners and ledges. A trap door, partly open, revealed a dark, wet subcellar. It took the united efforts of the Commissioner and an assistant to move the heavy barrels which barred this passage, but Mrs. Crane was determined to go down. When she did, accompanied by the most daring members of the party, not even her whispered warning could restrain the women.

“Ugh,” said one frankly, “to think I ever ate anything from here.” The toilet facilities for the bakers and candy pullers proved both 04133unclean and unsanitary. When as a final query the visiting sanitarian asked a candy maker,

“And where do you wash your hands?” a hesitation and an involuntary glance at a soiled apron answered sufficiently, and the delegation went forth. Even in the cleanest bakery of all Mrs. Crane's little pocket flashlight revealed families of roaches occupying the closets for raising the dough, and a grimy, gray, dirty mop which “cleaned” the oven floor for baking rye bread. When the women disbanded for the day, they looked at each other hopelessly.

“Where,” demanded one, “am I to buy bread until I can get this thing stopped?” No one answered.

The city jail, which the women visited for the first time, proved a fire-trap. Three young white men, about twenty years of age, peered from the grated door of a windowless cell, while Mrs. Crane questioned them.

“Locked up on suspicion, ma'am,” said one, smiling.

“But why haven't you chairs?” asked the visitor.

“Laws, ma'am, if we had, we'd be eaten alive if we sat down.”

Mrs. Crane sought the keeper. He denied the charge indignantly.

04234

“Well,” she said firmly, “I want to go in that cell.”

There was a long wait until the keys were sorted, but at last the cell door swung wide. Mrs. Crane entered. She flashed her pocket lamp over some of the cracks in the wooden wall, and revealed vermin in serried ranks, as close as they could crowd. Then she showed the result to the keeper and the visiting escort.

City prisoners sentenced to short terms for violating a municipal ordinance appeared clad in stripes, in which they were sent out to work upon the roads, forever branded after one offence against the city law, a punishment common in Alabama.

It was a distinct relief to ride from the gloomy place into the anti-tuberculosis camp with its miniature bungalows, its spotless cleanliness and perfect sanitation. And the women drew a breath of relief as they heard their visitor state,

“This is the most perfect thing of its kind that I have ever seen.”

It was in the public schools that the inspecting party received enthusiastic welcome. Every teacher knew of Mrs. Crane, and some of those intelligent young women seemed familiar with the evils which Mrs. Crane found, although the visiting party plainly regarded them as something 04335entirely new. Little boys and girls sat up straight at Mrs. Crane's request, betraying the fact that many pairs of heels failed to reach the floor, a condition working a dire injury to plastic little bodies. Many windows let in light at an angle that must surely damage sensitive eyes.

Toilets, cellars, furnaces were inspected and many suggestions offered for improvement in ventilation and fire protection.

“Talk to the Board of Education,” begged the teachers; “please do.”

“You have a large class,” observed Mrs. Crane to the teacher of a First Grade in the West End School in the factory district.

“It will be much smaller after to-morrow,” replied the teacher sadly.

“Why?” inquired Mrs. Crane.

“Well, you see the compulsory education law requires eight weeks of schooling. Tomorrow will end the first eight weeks of the school year. Then a good many of my children will go back to the cotton mills to return to me again next season.”

Mrs. Crane turned to the listening children.

“And do you go?” she asked of a boy near her. He nodded. “And you—and you——”

“And that boy”—it was the teacher's low voice—” is the very brightest of my flock, my 04436helper, my right hand. He could go far if he had the chance, but for three years he has gone to the mill.” Mrs. Crane turned to the child.

“How much do you make at the mill?” she asked.

“Fifty cents a day, ma'am.”

Now this was no sanitarian's affair—it belonged to quite a different department in civics, that of child labour. Yet this self-designated “sanitarian” dropped to her knees beside the child, put her arms about him and turned his wondering face towards the accompanying delegation.

“Ladies,” she pleaded, “here, here is your chance to begin this thing. Fifty cents a day will lift the mortgage from this child's life. His teacher says that of all her boys he is her brightest—her right-hand man. Free him— give him his chance.” The tears were running down her cheeks and down the cheeks of the women, while the Commissioner went into the hall to clear his throat. Before they left the room the women had pledged themselves—and the mortgage had been lifted. Through the years to come this child—as but the beginning of their protest against child labour—would be protected. The boy watched them go out— puzzled, unknowing.

On Friday night a mass meeting of the citizens 04537of Montgomery assembled to hear the results of the survey. Among the audience were the dairymen, the butchers, the bakers, the restaurant keepers, various city officials and a large representation of school teachers. With unflagging interest they listened while Mrs. Crane talked for over two hours. Tactfully she put her compliments first, and the gratified citizens learned that their water supply was excellent, their sewer system and street cleaning good, the refuse collection exceptional. They beamed as they were congratulated upon the remarkably good work done by their Health Officials, their thrifty and unusual system of disposing of street sweepings, on their garbage incinerator, on their good dairies, and on the unsurpassed Union abattoir with its thorough system of meat inspection, even including the microscopic examination of pork. They listened courageously while the speaker revealed the conditions in the bakeries, some of the schoolhouses and the city jail. Then Mrs. Crane told the story of the county almshouse.

“I seem to see,” she said, “those children, born under county auspices, going into your schools for their eight weeks of study, sent to your county jail like the little fellow of eleven whom I saw there running about the corridor just outside the pens in which you keep your 04638desperate criminals—because you have no other place for him and he is supposed to have stolen some sacks—sent through the city jail and put in stripes for the first offence, unwanted, unloved, discredited, returning to those pens where now your murderers wait their day of doom—what else can I see for them?”

There were men in that audience as well as women who wept. The sanitarian has vanished and Caroline Bartlett Crane, preacher and pastor, stood there telling her people once more the truth of the Scriptures, “as ye have sown —so shall ye reap.”

The next morning there was a hurried conference, the delegation escorted Mrs. Crane to the station, regretfully saw her depart and returned to their homes, worn out. The survey was over.

Directly after her departure there was an outbreak of commendation and protest. Indignant bakers rushed into print, while a satisfied restaurant keeper whose place had been warmly praised rubbed his hands in glee and did some judicious advertising. The daily papers demanded interviews from city officials and the city officials upheld Mrs. Crane bravely, declaring that they were glad she had come as they needed public support to effect the changes desired. The President of the City Commission 04739authorised the committee of women to continue their inspection of food supplies, the Commissioner of Health and Sanitation agreed to appoint a food inspector, and active women from the Federation of Women's Clubs talked to six clubs, urging them not to buy bread from any bakery in town until the women's committee pronounced it fit to patronise. A committee at once took charge of the little boy who was not to go back to the mill. The President of the County board of Revenue was appealed to concerning the matter of the almshouse, and an active campaign was begun to arouse public sentiment toward the abolition of the contract system and to call for a county election to provide funds for the erection and maintenance of a model almshouse when the present contract expires. The little boy of eleven was found to be illegally detained and was removed to a reformatory.

All this happened within one month of Mrs. Crane's departure. It is typical of the aftermath of her surveys in cities generally. In a few weeks Montgomery citizens read her printed report of her survey, which contained many more minute and technical suggestions than could be given at a two-hour meeting. The practical results of her surveys all over America present a sum total of improvement that is 04840inspiring. Sometimes she appears as a prophet of warning. In 1910 Mrs. Crane told Erie, Pennsylvania, that it ran the danger of a terrible epidemic unless it purified its water supply. In 1911 Erie sorrowfully and publicly admitted the justice of the warning in the face of one hundred and three deaths from typhoid, untold suffering, and a city expense of twelve thousand dollars. At Sea Breeze, Florida, a great hotel owned by the Mayor was ruthlessly condemned by her for lack of proper fire protection and fire escapes. Two weeks later the hotel burned to the ground, the people barely escaping with their lives, some by jumping from the windows. A Rochester school building, the twin of one condemned by Mrs. Crane, was also burned before that active city could put through various improvements upon which it had determined after her visit. At Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where an angry official sued Mrs. Crane but afterwards found his case quashed, the contract system of caring for the poor was abandoned and a new almshouse built; a tuberculosis sanitarium rose at Paducah, and at Valley City, North Dakota, a beautiful new infirmary replaces the old poorhouse. At Albert Lea, Minnesota, the citizens boast a new municipal hospital; at Big Rapids, Michigan, a fine new abattoir. At Rochester, Minnesota, the father 04941of a child in one of the public schools altered a whole classroom to demonstrate Mrs. Crane's system of scientific lighting. While at Mankato, Minnesota, the bakeries, market places, etc., went through a thorough cleaning and scouring to get upon the “white list” suggested by Mrs. Crane, and begged for frequent inspection.

At Uniontown, Pennsylvania, her condemnation of the public water supply caused the State Board of Health to make an independent investigation which confirmed her findings, and following which the dangerous conditions on the watershed were promptly eliminated. The almshouse was practically made over on the inside and fire escapes were erected, and a trained nurse was put in charge of the sick. A dangerous schoolhouse was condemned, fire escapes went up all over the city, and a bad basement bakery chose the alternative of building new sanitary quarters rather than be forced out of business by disgusted patrons. The woman who had been most active in securing Mrs. Crane's survey was placed on the City Board of Health.

Of equal if not of greater value are the more general results. In probably twenty cities permanent civic leagues have been inaugurated, under various names, to work at various tasks. During the year, after her survey of Kentucky, 05042that State secured more advanced health legislation than in all its part history, including thirty thousand dollars annually for a State Bacteriological Laboratory, an annual school for county and city health officials, and a law forbidding the importation of any but tuberculintested cattle. In Minnesota and in Erie, Pennsylvania, her Minnesota report, a volume of two hundred and forty pages, is being used by the women's clubs as a handbook on sanitation. Health officers and faithful, painstaking officials have found their first public recognition through her keen-eyed vigilance have gone to work with renewed courage, while careless officials have been awakened to some sense of their grave responsibility. And often for the first time in its history the whole city works together for the common good. Long after she has left them “her” cities, as she calls them, write to her for advice and help.

Nor does she neglect her home city. There are school gardens and back yard gardens and public playgrounds in Kalamazoo which owe their existence to her. There are children properly clothed and fed and going to school, who, but for her, would be on the streets; there are other children who, but for Mrs. Crane, would be side by side with hardened criminals in jail, learning to be good and useful citizens under 05143the leadership of a society girl who has decided to be of use in the world. There are aged and infirm men and women living and dying in comfort when but for her they would be as she found them, living in quarters indescribable in the almshouses, and dying without a doctor or nurse. There are widows living upon pensions which enable them to care for their children as a mother should, who bless the name of Mrs. Crane.

When the Mayor and City Council recently decided to pass a new smoke ordinance, they appealed for advice and help to Mrs. Crane. The work in Kalamazoo goes on. If there were need for further proof of the success of her undertaking it could be found in the fact that all her cities—good, bad, indifferent—like her. Where there has been ground for praise the has commended, and where she has found corrupt administration, neglect, fraud, open violation of the law, she has fearlessly and publicly told the truth as she saw it, and despite the individual resentment of exposed officials the people have believed and have supported her. On her desk daily appears a pile of letters, from individuals, from officials, from societies, in which one question is repeated over and over,

“When are you coming—again?”

In the face of this enormous activity, it seems 05244almost impossible to believe Mrs. Crane's statement that she is, first of all, a home woman. But the statement is true, She steadily refuses to leave her home for more than two months in any one year. Although a happy home means more than good housekeeping, it usually includes it, and Mrs. Crane is a good housekeeper, of the most up-to-date pattern. She uses dustless dusters and vacuum cleaners and fireless cookers and every other labour-saving invention on the market. She planned her own house and it has every convenience that modern science can devise and closets innumerable. She believes in outdoor sleeping and uses her outdoor sleeping porch through all the year except the three winter months. And she has been housekeeping seventeen years, and in that time has had four maids who were married by her in her own study and left her only to start homes of their own.

The machinery of Mrs. Crane's household is invisible. The two maids work on an eight-hour schedule, at least one on duty every hour in the day. Every duty is carefully planned and the entire household co-operates.

When the curtains are drawn at night, Mrs. Crane sits at her piano, her husband in the big chair opposite, following contentedly his favourite selections, then there is apparent that 05345atmosphere that not even the most perfect housekeeping can bring, that deeply spiritual feeling that makes home, because love abides there.

“Minister to municipalities” someone has called her, and of all the titles invented to cover her peculiar field of work, this is the one she likes the best.

“I am still a preacher,” she insists. “Formerly I preached from the Bible, to-day I preach from life. What happens in Kalamazoo to-day is of an much moment as that which happened to tribes of wanderers thousands of years ago.”

After all it isn't a question of title but of woman. Caroline Bartlett Crane, sanitarian, municipal expert, or minister to municipalities, or what you will, stands for a new type of community usefulness, a new kind of social service, and for a new concept of the sphere of home for woman.

054

SOPHIE WRIGHT

055

SOPHIE WRIGHT

SOPHIE WRIGHT

The room was softly lighted, for the latticed shutters jealousy excluded sunbeams and permitted only a softened ray to escape them. On the threshold a large, pleasant, capable-looking woman with a hearty handshake gave me greeting. A question trembled upon my lips, but before it was uttered the pleasant, capable-looking woman smilingly passed across the room and guided me to an armchair near the window. I looked down. In the softly padded chair depths reclined a tiny figure, scarce larger than a child's. A delicate little hand sought mine, while my question fell awkwardly and hesitatingly.

“Is this—is this Miss Wright?”

“I am Miss Wright, dear,” answered a gentle voice. “Won't you sit down?”

A chair was pushed forward. I sat down, my eyes focused upon the armchair near the window. Sophie Wright lay there; Sophie Wright, who for twenty years had educated the men and boys of New Orleans in the most wonderful free night school the country has ever known, supporting 05750her night work with the product of her labour by day; Sophie Wright, who made possible the New Orleans Home for Crippled Children, who was the foremost woman in the South, and without whose aid no work in service was begun; Sophie Wright, whom a city delighted to honour by purchasing through its citizens a home for its foremost citizen, and whose name stands for achievement rarely equalled by man or woman. Yet across from me lay this frail body, with tiny hands, the head surmounted by hair as white as snow, the great brown eyes plainly revealing suffering.

“You are ill,” I stammered.

“I am better,” she replied gently. “You know I have never been without suffering.” The delicate body and the white hair bore mute testimony to the truth of the statement, to days of pain and nights without rest; but the wonderfully spiritual countenance bore as plainly witness to a second truth, that of an indomitable soul, schooled to patience and yet never ceasing to fight for its ends. This woman who was called the first citizen of the South went about her work in a steel harness with the aid of crutches. She was not rich. Until a few years ago she was actually poor, so poor that for every hour of service to her fellows she worked an hour to pay for her own living. Yet despite 05851this double handicap she had a forty-six live a life so full of accomplishment at you believed when Miss Sophie said:

“I did not do those things. Look at me. How could I? It was God, not I.”

Let me tell you her story. Her parents were the impoverished children of impoverished parents, ruined in the depression that was the aftermath of the Civil War. When Miss Sophie was a baby of three years she fell, injuring both back and hip so badly that she was incased in plaster and strapped to a chair. Until she was ten this chair was her world; she could not walk a step. Then slowly she began to walk, and soon she was seen to the nearest school. The way was long, and the little limbs were very feeble. Often she begged to stay at home; but her mother insisted, and day after day she dragged her tired body the long way to the schoolhouse. And the mother-love which prompted even suffering for the sake of joys to come was ere long justified. Miss Sophie learned quickly. In four years she had mastered all that the school could give, and her active mind ached for something more to do. Scarcely had she left her eighth grade studies when she decided to have a school of her own, partly for the joy of it and partly for the sake of the income to be realised. In the front room 05952of her mother's little cottage she arranged a few borrowed desks and benches, and upon the front door she tacked her sign, “Day School for Girls.” Then with a sublime disregard for the effect produced by her youth, her physical condition, her short frock and twin pigtails, she went out to canvass for pupils. The energy and persistence that have helped her win many battles since actually convinced a few mothers that she was able to teach their daughters something that was worth fifty cents a month, and so the famous Sophie Wright School for Girls began.

Miss Sophie was very careful about her first pupils. No one who approached eighth grade standards was admitted, for very good reasons; but in two years she found that her pupils were growing up and would soon find her instruction inadequate and leave her. This was not to be thought of. There were twenty pupils now, and her salary was ten dollars a month, a sum not to be lightly considered. Something must be done. There was a normal school in the city which could give her instruction if she could but find a way to pay for it. So she took her crutch and called upon the principal. Somehow she convinced him that she was a very able teacher of mathematics, and that she would be willing to come to him for the low rate of instruction in other branches. For two years she 06053studied and taught in the normal school in the afternoon and taught her own growing school in the forenoon. Then her own school outgrew her mother's cottage and she went in search of a larger house. She found one that she thought might do. The agent asked one hundred dollars a month for it. With a courage worthy of a financier she signed the lease—and then went out to find one hundred dollars. A professional money lender finally agreed to advance the sum. It took Miss Sophie one year to repay that first hundred at twelve per cent. interest a month, two hundred and twenty dollars in all; but she did it, borrowed no more, and the school still grew. It was just as she began to feel prosperous that her opportunity for service came.

One day after school hours the door bell rang. Miss Sophie answered. At the door stood a sturdy young fellow awkwardly twisting his hat in his hands. Miss Sophie asked him what he wanted. To her surprise he replied, “An education.”

“But my school is for girls,” she replied, pointing to the sign.

“Yes,” he said, “I know, but—”

In a moment he was within, telling his story. He had run away from home to be an acrobat in a circus. The circus was stranded: he was without money and without work. But there 06154was a chance for him. In a short time a civil service examination was to be held and a number of positions would be open to the successful applicants. If he could learn a little, he could pass and hope for a place. He did not know where to go and he had seen her sign. She could teach. Would she teach him? Would she? Sophie Wright has never said no to that appeal. She studied a moment and then it was all arranged. As she had to teach in the morning and to study and teach in the afternoon, of course he must come in the evening. That was very easily managed. She looked at the young man with sparkling eyes. She, little, weak and suffering, was actually stronger than this robust fellow. He had come to her for help! And when he faltered, “I cannot pay,” she replied joyously, “It does not matter. You need help and I can give it. Come.”

He came. Before long a second young man joined him. Miss Sophie did not object. How could she? He needed instruction, too. Before she realised it there had come to her another, and another, until her day school benches were full to overflowing. New Orleans had no night schools. New Orleans boys left the day schools to go into mills and factories. Necessity drove them there. New Orleans received every year thousands of immigrants. There was no place 06255for them to learn English, no place to work for the future, except Miss Sophie's. And to her door there came nightly more and more of them. They came and they stayed—some because they were in earnest and wanted to learn; some because they had to, for Miss Sophie made them. For with all her gentleness Miss Sophie had no time for triflers. If a boy knocked at her door asked to learn, he came and he learned. If he grew weary and ran out of her schoolroom, she followed him promptly.

“Come back,” she commanded. “You asked to come, and someone may have been refused who could have had your place. The room is full. You must keep your place and learn. Come back.”

And strange to say the boy would come back and stay. In this free school where attendance was purely voluntary, discipline was maintained even if a boy had to be thrashed, and he took the thrashing and stayed and behaved himself! It sounds incredible. It is a fact. She managed her boys as a general manages an army.

“Why should I let a boy go?” she asked. “It is better to thrash him and make him a man.”

“But,” I asked, “how could you do it?”

“Well, of course I couldn't have done it if 06356they had not let me,” Miss Sophie confessed, “for they were much stronger than I and I was lame beside. But I had to have discipline, and they respected my thrashings. One of my friends said that I ought to pray when things went wrong. Well, I did pray often after they had all gone and the school was closed. But I could not pray in that schoolroom. Why, some of the boys just came in for a good time and to try to break up the school, and they would have tried to pour ink down my back as I knelt!”

One young ruffian who entered the school with the avowed intention of studying, began by insisting that a smaller boy smoke a cigarette. His victim, afraid, obeyed. Miss Sophie watched. The bully stood over six feet. He had just won a local prize-fight and he believed that he had the school at his mercy. Miss Sophie breathed a little prayer for help. Her sixty boys were watching her. The little fellow could be punished easily, but he was not the real culprit, as both she and the boys knew. Trembling inwardly she summoned the prize-fighter to the platform. He arose, put his hands in his pockets and laughed.

“I ain't afraid of you,” he shouted and started toward her. As he came she pushed a chair toward him. He fell over it, and as his 06457hands were in his pockets and his position most convenient, Miss Sophie administered the thrashing he deserved while the class waited breathless. When she had finished and let him up he looked at her savagely.

“I'd like to kill you!” he said thickly.

Then Miss Sophie surprised him. “I don't blame you,” she said without anger. “Come.” She led the way to her office. After a long talk he agreed to forgive her and to let the school alone. But he started to go away, saying, “But I never will come back.”

Miss Sophie hastened after him. “Come alone,” she cried. “I'll find a time. I want to teach you.” He came. After some months had passed he re-entered his old class. Miss Sophie later held him as one of her warm friends and admirers, and the State to-day regards him as a most promising citizen.

These troublesome boys were the exceptions. The majority were pitifully eager to learn, and Miss Sophie put more vim into her teaching than into her spanking. She liked it better. The day school became the small end of her business, a means of making money wherewith to run the night school. The time came when the hundred dollar a month house no longer sufficed. The overflow of boys and men filled the halls and stairways. Miss Sophie's persuasive 06558powers and genuine enthusiasm for the work spread to the teachers in her day school, and without hope of compensation they offered to join in her labour. The growth of the night school forced her to seek larger quarters. At last she found a house opposite a park and consequently pleasantly located for her girls, but near enough to mills and factories to be within easy reach of many of her boys. The house was for sale and its price was ten thousand dollars. Again Miss Sophie found a money lender to advance the sum, and saddled with this new responsibility she opened her larger school. The princess for her day school had been steadily rising, and the aristocratic mothers of some of her pupils objected strenuously to the night school. The seats occupied by their daughters by day were at night given over to common workmen; it was unusual and undesirable. But Miss Sophie refused to consider complaints, and here her remarkable qualities as a teacher and organiser held her in good stead. Fastidious mothers might object, but where could they find a teacher to equal Miss Sophie or a school managed as hers? In time they grew passive if not reconciled, and despite the objections the day school grew and flourished.

Every penny that could be spared from her modest living and from the help which her family 06659needed, Miss Sophie spent on her boys. It was fourteen years after her first pupil had knocked at her door before she owned half a share in her school building. Then in 1897 came the epidemic of yellow fever. The school closed. Miss Sophie thought for a moment of the interest which must be paid, of taxes and repairs and the necessary living expenses. Then she looked at the empty building and forgot all about money. For here was just the place for a bureau of supplies for the stricken families. At once she went out into the blinding sunshine, to the parents of her girls, to her friends, to strangers, collecting what she could. And as soon as her house was filled, out she went again to give to the quarantined, to those afraid to venture forth, to those who hungered, for mills, stores and factories were closed and Famine stalked the streets of the poor. With her worked her teachers, spurred on by the brave little woman beside them, risking contagion, bearing fatigue, enduring without complaint the heat of that awful summer.

When frost came and the weary women were able to rest, when the city came out from seclusion and life again looked normal, then Miss Sophie faced her darkest hour. For through all these months the interest had steadily accumulated. The money lender believed that he 06760would have to foreclose and there seemed no help. Then a banker of the city came forward. He had watched Miss Sophie and he believed in her work and in her honesty. He took the loan over, reduced the interest and then volunteered to increase the amount so that the school could be properly refitted. And before the joy of this announcement had passed, two business men of the city offered to give between them two thousand dollars a year for night school work. Then there began a real school. For nearly fifteen years Miss Sophie had supported her night school single-handed. There were soap boxes for seats and crude benches for desks and dog-eared books that had been carefully handled and repaired until they were scarcely legible. All these were discarded and dictionaries, new books, maps, desks and all the appurtenances of up-to-date teaching were purchased by Miss Sophie, hurrying from shop to shop with a joy that cannot be put into words. At last her school was as she had dreamed it. When she threw open her renovated, fully equipped building, three hundred men and boys were waiting to enter. Before the year was over there were one thousand. Then the number grew to twelve hundred, to fifteen hundred, and the school was filled to overflowing.

Girls began to knock at her doors asking admission. 06861The first year that she opened classes for them two hundred attended. The night school was becoming famous. In 1903 three hundred pupils had to be refused admission for lack of room, and this despite the fact that the soap box era had returned and porches, halls and stairs were filled with the overflow. And over all this mass—Austrian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, American—Miss Sophie commanded.

The increasing numbers made expenses heavier, but money was forthcoming. Employers in mills, stores and factories found that employees who attended Miss Sophie's school gave more intelligent service. From some of these came contributions; from some came personal visits and a real interest in the work.

People in New Orleans fell into the habit of coming to Miss Sophie for help in any philanthropic undertaking. One day someone brought to her a little orphan boy crippled almost exactly as Miss Sophie had been. He was alone, friendless and in want, and there was in all the State no institution to receive him. What could be done? Miss Sophie made that place. She want to the Home for Incurable and asked permission to erect as an annex a Home for Crippled Children. She found that a cottage properly equipped would cost ten thousand dollars. 06962Without a thought that that was the very sum which she owed upon her improved school building, she went to work. She enlisted the aid of The King's Daughters, of private individuals, of every organisation in the city which she could persuade to help, and in just one year she had the money, ten thousand dollars; the cottage was being built, and the little boy who was a cripple and all those who were like him had a home.

The struggle for that ten thousand dollars awoke the people of New Orleans to the worth of the woman in their midst as all her years of service had not done. The New Orleans Picayune, a daily paper, had made a practice of presenting annually or biennially, as the occasion offered, a loving cup to the person who trough the intervening time had given to the community the best service. Miss Sophie's quiet, steady work at the night school had grown so gradually into the life of the city and had for so many years been taken for granted that it had not received much public notice. But the raising of the ten thousand dollars for the Home for Crippled Children focused public attention. The New Orleans Picayune decided to give the cup to Miss Sophie. Miss Sophie's “boys,” some twenty thousand of them in all ranks of life—lawyers, merchants, successful businessmen, 07063street car conductors, ash collectors, truck drivers—joined in making plans for a celebration of a magnitude never before known. The girls who had been graduated from the day school, and the girls from the night school and their parents of New Orleans laboured in behalf of the woman who had for so many years laboured for it. New Orleans was awake at last. Someone had remembered the mortgage on the school, and the people of the city had cried with one voice: “Lift it!”

Without a word in print, lest the news should travel to Miss Sophie, the women of the city went out to collect the money. It had taken Miss Sophie one year to collect ten thousand dollars. It took the people of New Orleans exactly three days to find the exact sum for Miss Sophie. Then the great day came. From noon until late at night, Miss Sophie sat upon the platform they had erected for her, and like a queen received the homage of those who passed before her. The cup was presented, a beautiful thing, made of silver and properly inscribed. Then from out of the crowd a boy lifted to her a second cup, a thing of still greater beauty, a cup of flowers from her boys to her. The silver cup had been presented with a neat 07164speech; but the boy who lifted his offering had no words, and she who received it was alike voiceless. Bending down she drew him into her arms and kissed him. Then when all the people could see, someone handed Miss Sophie a note. She looked at it, slipped it in her dress and turned again to the people. She found them smiling, radiant. They knew the contents of that bit of white paper, although Miss Sophie never guessed. Not until she had returned home did she think of the note. She opened it then and sat dazed. It was the check of ten thousand dollars, the check the spelled release from debt and poverty at the hands of a loving people.

The city of New Orleans having once awakened to the worth of its best citizen has never slumbered again. The Board of Education, stimulated by Miss Sophie's efforts, instituted free night schools. These grew until three years ago Miss Sophie felt justified in closing her school with its fifteen hundred pupils, since her boys could find instruction elsewhere. It was twenty-five years since she had opened her door to the stranded circus performer.

The closing of the night school did not mean idleness. Despite two long and acute illnesses the work of the first citizen of New Orleans went on. Miss Sophie's next step was in behalf 07265of her girls. For a long time her office had been the refuge of boys and girls who had somehow gotten on the wrong track.

“Girls go wrong because they are so very tired,” she said, “that it is too much trouble to do right.” So her first effort was to establish a home where working girls might spend a carefree vacation. She induced a friend to lend her a cottage and “Rest-a-While,” a vacation home for girls, was opened. She went to the Young Women's Christian Association, and opened classes for the girls who wished to go on. She continued her day school, grown to one hundred and fifty pupils, secretly receiving many a free pupil. She insisted that her girls wear uniforms, so that no one would know the rich girl from her less wealthy neighbour.

And in between times, for there were still in between times in this life of activity, Miss Sophie talked to mother's clubs and lectured in the public schools, always providing that all talks were free. The inmates in the city almshouse and in the Home for Incurables looked forward eagerly to her weekly coming, for she told them the most wonderful stories which, she said quaintly, “add brightness to their lives.” Her “boys” and their families visited and consulted her about many things—their sickly children, 07366their financial difficulties. Sometimes a street sweeper who had been in her night school would stop her in the street to chat, and Miss Sophie would always stop gladly.

She found time to fill the offices of Honorary Vice President of the National Congress of Mothers, of a membership on the Executive Board of the National Federation of Women's Clubs, of the Louisiana Presidency of The King's Daughters, offices gladly given to her in recognition of her lifetime of service. She found time to write two little books, intimate heart-to-heart talks with parents and teachers. She superintendent her Home Institute personally, and taught there daily. Her one hundred and fifty pupils came lovingly to her to consult her about affairs of great import in their lives, to ask her to join them on excursions and frolics. An unusual honour was the naming of a new high school for her just before her death. The city of New Orleans had always named its high schools for men and women who had completed their lifetime. When the Mayor and the Council of the City of New Orleans asked Miss Sophie if the school might be named for her, she assented without a thought of the previous restriction. The announcement was formally made and the people of New Orleans rejoiced, with the exception of a few conservatives who 07467trembled at the risk of naming a school for a living person.

The citizens of New Orleans decided that the objection was absurd, and that as for twenty-five years Miss Sophie had been taking them on trust, asking nothing of them but an opportunity to serve, they could well afford to take her future on trust as well. So the new high school bears the title “Sophie Wright High School for Girls.”

Bereft of Miss Sophie, the city of New Orleans is having a difficult time to follow her wonderful example. Often a boy came to her and asked, “Miss Sophie, can't you open your school again!” And shortly before her last illness an Italian, who had once been in her classes, determinedly rang her door bell.

“I come to your school,” he announced.

“But I haven't any school for men now,” she said gently. “You know the city has many schools which take the place of mine.”

“Yes,” he assented, “I know. I been there. But oh, Miss Sophie, they no care for ma heart like you do!”

075

JANE ADDAMS

076

JANE ADDAMS

JANE ADDAMS

It was the great meeting of the National Suffrage Convention in Philadelphia. Four thousand people, mainly women, filled the opera house to its capacity, while hundreds of others desiring to enter blocked the streets about and listened to overflow speakers. There had been brilliant speeches by well-known orators, both men and women; Anna Howard Shaw, Professor DuBois, Julia Lathrop, had been enthusiastically received. Late in the session, when the audience was settling down to ennui, President Shaw arose. Without preface she announced the next speaker, Miss Jane Addams.

In an instant there arose from the crowded house a murmur which swelled to a cheer; handkerchiefs floated high in air, hands were clapped furiously and fast until the echoes sounded in the crowded street, and for full five minutes there was an ovation the like to which is seldom seen save in well-organized political meetings. Miss Addams raised her hand. At once there was quiet. She began to speak in slow, measured 07872tones, without any effort at oratory, but with a gravity that indicated a profound faith in her words. That faith was reflected in the countenances of her hearers. In absolute stillness the vast audience heard her through. Then as she sat down, once more the cheer arose, the handkerchiefs fluttered and the furious clapping of hands resounded. A newspaper reporter at my elbow, a veteran who has sat through hundreds of such meetings, looked curiously at the excited throng.

“The most popular woman in America,” she said decisively. The reporter knew. At the present time Jane Addams of all women stands first in public approval. The women in the audience in Philadelphia represented every State in the Union. However divided they were on other matters, on one they agreed. Miss Addams, more than any other of their distinguished company, had their loyal support. Scarcely less enthusiastic were the audiences of men and women throughout the country who listened to Jane Addams's speeches as a delegate from the newly formed Progressive Party. Those who approved of women's entrance into politics and those who did not, came to hear Miss Addams. Abroad Miss Addams is recognised as the most conspicuous American woman engaged in public work. A Frenchman who 07973met Miss Addams during the Paris Exposition, asked her where she lived.

“In Chicago,” she answered.

“But where?” he persisted; “I know Chicago a little.”

“Oh, down by the river,” she replied.

“And do you like it there?”

“Yes, indeed; I live in a Settlement.” The Frenchmen failed to understand. Miss Addams mentioned Toynbee Hall in London. The man had not heard of it. Patiently she began to explain the work at Hull House. At the first mention of the name the Frenchman brightened.

“Hull House!” he exclaimed. “You are Miss Jane Addams of Hull House. I know much about that place.”

Having mentioned Hull House, Jane Addams is explained. Hull House is Jane Addams's contribution to history, her expression of herself, her work, her art and her gift to humanity. In her autobiography she tells how the idea of Hull House first came into being. Before she was seven years old she was taken by her father to a neighbouring town. John Addams was a miller and this journey, undertaken for business purposes, led them to a mill in the poorest quarter of the little city. Little Jane looked curiously at the squalid houses, crowded close to each other.

08074

“Why,” she inquired, “do people live in such horrid little houses, so close together?” She listened thoughtfully to the reply and then announced with much firmness:

“When I grow up I shall, of course, have a large house, but it shall be built not among other large houses but right in the midst of horrid little houses like these.”

Through the years that idea of the “large house among the horrid little houses” persisted. It coloured and directed the final period of her education, and in 1888 it crystallised into a definite determination to open a settlement. In preparation Miss Addams and an old school friend, Miss Eliza Starr, who was travelling with her when the decision was made, visited Toynbee Hall and the People's Palace. In January, 1889, she and Miss Starr were in Chicago hunting for a house in which to begin. They found their joy just what they sought, a large house in the midst of horrid little houses, an old homestead built by a Mr. Charles J. Hull, with little thought that it was to make the name of Hull go down in history.

Hull House opened in 1889, when Miss Addams was nearly thirty years old. The year preceding its inauguration she spent in an unsettled mental state, since she had determined to open a house “in a part of the city where many 08175primitive and actual needs were found” and she was weary of “preparing for life,” a process which had taken so long that it seemed that she would never actually reach life itself. The years of preparation, however, were none too long. Only a degree of maturity could hope to cope with the problems met at Hull House.

Her object was twofold. Not only was her “large house in the midst of the horrid little houses” to extend a helping hand to the dwellers about, but it was to reach into the midst of the groups of large houses and draw from them the young women who had much of the preparation for life of which she had wearied, and little chance at doing anything to justify it. Hull House was designed not only as a relief station for the poor but as a field for work for girls of good families who needed an outlet for activity. This original idea of Hull House is characteristic of Miss Addams's life and beliefs. Always she stands between and pulls from both sides. Always she refuses to believe that perfect understanding and harmony and the solution of human ills can come in any other way than step by step from people working together. In the early days she believed that all the world was willing if it could but find a way, and to that belief, somewhat modified by experience, she has tenaciously clung, 08276refusing to ally herself with labour or capital, trying to hold to a middle course where labour and capital might meet. At a meeting of a club of secularists which she addressed, a voice from the audience called:

“You are all right now, but mark my words, when you are subsidised by the millionaires you will be afraid to talk like this.”

“I do not intent to be subsidised by millionaires,” quickly returned Miss Addams, “nor do I propose to be bullied by workingmen, and I shall state my honest opinion without consulting either.” To her surprise the radical audience broke into applause. That speech epitomises Miss Addams's stand at Hull House.

“The thing I remember about the early days at Hull House,” said a woman who has known the House during all the years of its existence, “is that no matter who called, nor when, Miss Addams or Miss Starr always opened the door. There were servants in the house, of course, but they never answered. Miss Addams or Miss Starr let you in.” The personal attention to the opening of the door represented Hull House's first mission—that of neighbourliness. To be neighbourly to the folk surrounding Hull House required considerable effort as well as a great deal of tact and discrimination. Situated 08377in the heart of a foreign district Hull House is equally accessible to a colony of ten thousand Italians, and somewhat smaller settlements of Germans, Polish and Russian Jews. A little farther away but still within reaching distance of settlement activities, are large numbers of Bohemians, Canadian-French, Irish and Irish-Americans. Differences of race and religion as well as of temperament made Miss Addams's task no easy one. But from the first all of these varied groups accepted the new settlement in all sincerity. The vicinity of Hull House knew no snobbishness. Miss Addams and Miss Starr were asked quite as a matter of course, “to wash the new-born babies, to prepare the dead for burial, to nurse the sick and ‘to mind the children.’” As sincerely as it was asked of them, Miss Addams and Miss Starr accepted these novel tasks, and the two gentlewomen, reared in ease, found their days filled with the humblest services, performed under conditions blacker than they had imagined. For months these simple services, together with certain social activities, were all that Hull House dared essay. But however beautiful and poetic the literal caring for the sick and ministering to those who mourned, there was more important work to be done. Hull House still administers to these needs in the persons of nurses and 08478visiting housekeepers supplied by societies organised since its inception, but local conditions soon made public work for the general welfare imperative. On of the most conspicuous features of the new Settlement was the filth that surrounded it. Streets and alleys reeked with foul smells arising from piles of decaying rubbish. Housewives innocently swept th refuse from their kitchens into the gutter as they had in the little villages from whence they came. In the village street the piles of refuse here and there exposed to sun and air might decay and disintegrate without great menace to the inhabitants, but when five families dwell in one small house and small house crowded against small house and the piles grew to be one continuous layer, the danger of disease was plain.

After three summers of breathing air polluted by the smell of decaying refuse, Miss Addams grew desperate. For three years she had tried to fight the evil, first by establishing an incinerator at Hull House, and second, by reporting conditions to City Hall, and third, by endeavouring to educate the people of the neighbourhood. But Miss Addams's most vigorous talks to mothers concerning th menace of a decaying garbage pile failed of effect when the local collector did not appear; pails overflowed and there was no place to put garbage save the 08579gutter. In desperation she applied for the job of removing the garbage from the Nineteenth Ward. She did not expect to receive the contract, but was rewarded for her persistence when the Mayor of the City appointed her Garbage Inspector for the Ward. The salary accompanying the position was one thousand dollars a year. Miss Addams earned it. She was on the streets at six in the morning to see that the men were at work; she followed the wagons with their malodorous contents to be certain that they were not overfull and that hasty and careless loading did not permit droppings to mark their pathway. She visited the unspeakable dumps; she prosecuted landlords who failed to provide proper receptacles for garbage. She investigated the stables in the district, and insisted upon prompt removal of their refuse. It was a thoroughly unpleasant business for that first summer, but the rewards were many. The neighbourhood about Hull House began to look fairly clean. One street in particular marked a veritable triumph. Miss Addams found it apparently unpaved, although the city plans recorded its paving. Tentatively she dug into the dank, unpleasant surface which was composed entirely of refuse, and finding nothing that resembled earth underneath she kept on. At a depth of eighteen inches she 08680found the lost paying! It look a personal visit from the Mayor to convince him that such a thing could be, and then he insisted upon the contractor removing the accumulation. When the long-lost pavement reappeared the residents in the street regarded it with curiosity. The most of them had never seen it!

It is impossible to crowd into one short article the work of twenty-five years at Hull House, but a résumé of some of its activities and ministrations serves to show why Hull House became famous, first locally and then nationally as a pioneer in a new kind of settlement work. With the exception of religion there was no human interest that it failed to touch. In a day when kindergartens were unknown it established one; long before Mrs. Young brought handiwork into the schools of Chicago, Hull House had organised classes in manual training. When recreation centres were not dreamed of Hull House had established various forms of social life adapted to its people. These included parties for the babies, dances for the young and receptions to the neighbourhood pioneers,—the old folks who had dwelt about Hull House all their lives. True to the spirit of modern social work all these undertakings and many more rested upon investigations. It required no investigation upon the part of Miss 08781Addams to convince her that the people young and old needed social life, nor that the streets needed cleaning. Daily she had demonstrations of both needs as she walked the filthy streets, and saw through the open windows the young folk carousing in the dance halls, and the desolate old folk sitting idle in the dreary corners of the squalid tenements. But the enormous activity of Hull House could not be sustained upon Miss Addams's slender resources. To convince the outsider figures were needed. Consequently every undertaking at Hull House was preceded or immediately followed, when the undertaking was an emergency, by a thorough investigation. The investigations brought results. They convinced the outsider; they brought funds to Hull House, but more than this, they helped Miss Addams to know her section of Chicago. No one knows Chicago as does Miss Addams. Officials succeed each other, political bosses change and Miss Addams remains. And even if the political bosses do remain, they are able to see but one side. Investigations made at Hull House are impartial and dispassionate, regarding the welfare of humanity as the one end of life.

With this end in view, they have certain very practical results. One of the first was the establishment of a coffee house, which also sold prepared 08882foods to the mothers who worked all day in factories, followed by the establishment of a co-operative lodging house for working girls who were homeless or far away from their homes. The latter has grown into the famous “Jane Club,” named for Miss Addams, which now possesses an attractive building of its own and carries on various activities independent of the main settlement. A day nursery maintained for sixteen years, afterwards transferred to the United Charities of Chicago, was opened long before a United Charities was thought of. The garbage investigations, already instanced, resulted in the cleaning up of some of the filth of the Nineteenth Ward; the housing investigation into a campaign for ordinances covering the construction of tenements which actually succeeded in having passed by the City Councils a model tenement house code, although to secure its enforcement a battle was waged that necessitated the discharge of almost half the inspecting force. An investigation into the sale of cocaine and similar drugs also resulted, after many years, in a new and better law, better enforced, to deal with the evil. Research into the methods used in dealing with recent immigrants resulted in the establishment of a branch station of the Federal Post-office at Hull House, so that the alien who wanted to send money 08983home to his family might do so without being defrauded. An investigation into the laws governing the work of children led to a campaign resulting in the framing of recommendations which were incorporated in the first factory law of Illinois, and in the passage of subsequent laws affecting the sweatshops and the labour of women.

Miss Addams did not accomplish all this alone. One of her most successful achievements is that Hull House actually did in a measure fulfil her twofold ambition. Young women who needed work as a means of self-expression did come and reside in the “big house among the horrid little houses.” And as the spirit that actuates modern philanthropy grew, both men and women who wanted to do social work, whether as a means of livelihood or as a method of self-expression, or both, drifted naturally to Hull House, as the foremost settlement representative of the modern spirit. Among them Miss Addams excited the same spirit of almost passionate devotion shown by the women of the suffrage association. At Hull House Miss Addams was the dynamic force. So intense was this personal feeling that the spirits of the residents of the Settlement rose and fell with Miss Addams.

“When Miss Addams had a headache,” said 09084one visitor to Hull House, “the residents went about with hushed voices and soft tread, not that Miss Addams required it, but that they just naturally felt that way. When she recovered, everybody was gay.” This extreme personal devotion lent itself well to Miss Addams's sincere desire to forward the cause of Hull House. Work undertaken by the young men and women who were with her proved notable work. Many of the one-time residents of Hull House are now almost as famous as Miss Addams, specialising in some particular line, of which Hull House was the starting point.

Not only did Miss Addams ally herself with individuals but with any public or semi-public body bound upon the same mission. With the nine other Settlements now existent in Chicago, Hull House undertook an investigation into the work of the city newsboys; with the Committee of Fifty it analysed the social value of the saloons; in co-operation with the American Academy of Science it undertook an investigation into infant mortality in its relation to nationality. Always true to her theory of working together, Miss Addams has stood ready to join any movement for the common good. Her appointments to special committees and associations for special purposes have been too numerous 09185to recount. In addition to these she has held in the twenty-five years various public offices, beginning with that of Garbage Inspector for the Nineteenth Ward. For some years she was an active member of the Chicago Board of Education. During the Pullman strike she was a conspicous member of the Convention on Industrial Conciliation and arbitration, and during the later teamster's strike she was again appointed one of the arbitrators.

From childhood Miss Addams has been an advocate of woman suffrage. John Addams had believed in suffrage; his daughter accepted the belief as a matter of course. When she was attending Rockford College, she with other enthusiasts in the cause of woman applied for an opportunity for that college to compete in the intercollegiate oratorical contest of Illinois. Rockford was admitted as the first woman's college to compete and Miss Addams was elected as its orator. When the competition had ended she was accorded fifth place, and returned to find herself disgraced in the eyes of her classmates because she had failed to make her male competitors yield her first and so failed the cause of woman. In later years she has always been allied with the National Woman's Suffrage Association in which she has held many offices, retaining that of Vice President for 09286years. The introduction of the plank for woman suffrage into the platform of the Progressive Party at the time of its formation is credited largely to her influence, and certainly the mere impetus of her personality and her direct entrance into political matters has made many who were opposed or indifferent warm supporters of the suffrage cause.

In the early days of the work at Hull House her support of woman suffrage proved a stumbling-block in neighbourhood work. Many of the foreign-born women failed to understand the suffrage work, as they had come from lands where male suffrage was far from universal and woman suffrage not discussed as a possibility. Going fearlessly about to strange tenements at any hour of the day or night to nurse the sick or care for the new-born babies was a comprehensible, womanly task, but the women looked askance at Miss Addams's inspection of alleys and streets, her first departure into public matters.

When this was followed by a housing investigation their disapproval grew, and Miss Addams became accustomed to performing some neighbourly office, such as the bathing of an invalid, to the accompaniment of a drastic lecture upon her straying into the paths destined to be trodden by men, alone.

09387

As the years passed this feeling of antagonism towards the public work was somewhat softened, the second generation of immigrants boldly joining the suffragists. Many of those of the first generation, finding through the trades union the power of having a voice in affairs, also became converts. When Hull House was organised, trades unions among Chicago women were rare, but in twenty-five years they have multiplied rapidly, and to them Hull House has always extended a helping hand. The women shirtmakers and the women cloakmakers were organised in the House itself, as was also the Dorcas Federal Labour Union, a united body of representatives from all unions in the city which received women in membership.

A picture of the Hull House, of which Miss Addams is the Head Resident, to-day involves such a number of elements as to be difficult to reduce to words. The original “big House” has grown into a group of buildings—the Jane Club, before mentioned; the Butler Gallery, which is devoted to exhibits, particularly of pictures and works of art; the Children's House; the Music School; the Hull House Theatre; the Boys’ Club Building, which contains workshops, where instruction is given in wood, iron, brass, copper and tin, commercial photography 09488printing, electrical construction and telegraphy; and the Hull House Gymnasium. In these are carried on the most varied activities, not only those indicated by the names of the buildings, but also college extension classes, a summer school and labour museum. The last is a unique feature.

One of the difficulties encountered in the work at Hull House was that of the antagonism between the immigrants and their children. The youngsters, picking up American dress, and American customs, fell easily into the habit of despising their parents and of regarding their knowledge as of little worth. While visiting in the neighbourhood Miss Addams came across an Italian woman spinning with the old distaff in her hands. Shortly after there was an exhibit of weaving at Hull House, at which women of various nationalities demonstrated their methods. From this developed the Labour Museum, now a permanent institution, where are kept the primitive instruments upon which the women work, dressed in the garments of their own manufacture, a picturesque valuable exhibit, since the sons and daughters who come to Hull House have learned to be proud of the skill of mothers who are thus honoured.

The residents at Hull House now number nearly fifty, and the majority of these are business 09589and professional people who spend only their leisure time in settlement work. In addition to the regular clubs and classes there are always new enterprises on hand, and Hull House varies from month to month and from year to year according to the conditions governing the portion of humanity to which it appeals. Miss Addams, as a figure of national importance, is frequently absent, but Hull House activities go on. Although her personal influence has been one of the main factors in the success of the Settlement, she has also succeeded in making her work independent of her personality.

During the past five years she has figured in many national undertakings, the most conspicuous of these her acceptance of a commission as a delegate in the Progressive Party. And in the midst of this activity she had found time to write. Her books on social topics, “Democracy and Social Ethics,” “Newer Ideals of Peace,” “The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets,” “A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil,” and particularly her “Twenty Years at Hull House,” are valuable additions to America's literature on social problems.

Her popularity with her own sex is significant. For her fame rests not upon mental brilliancy nor versatility, although she possesses both, but on those twenty-five years of steady 09690daily service to the people about her. Because of these she is honoured, and her position among American women to-day is in itself a revelation of the ideals of the present feminist movement.

097

KATE BARNARD

098

KATE BARNARD

KATE BARNARD

This is a melodrama of modern, up-to-date politics. These scene is Oklahoma, the time is the present and the heroine is Kate Barnard. By way of a prologue, a word of explanation.

Oklahoma is a new State. It is still in its early childhood, for it is but five years old. New States can well be the scenes of strange and unusual activities. They are without precedent; their political offices are free from the “dead wood” of family history and of family influence. And so it happens that in the State of Oklahoma (where women do not vote), a woman helped to plan twenty-four of the planks in the constitution, had three of them named for her and created and was elected to the first State office in the world occupied by a woman, simply because she could fill that office, and the new State, without any prejudice or precedent concerning sex to bother it, gladly accepted her.

This does not mean that life in Oklahoma is free from complexities. Oklahoma is new, but it is the epitome of civilisation. All the virtues 10094of older States are there, and all the vices also. Oklahoma imported slums when she imported fireproof buildings. She knows the vice of graft as well as the virtue of compulsory education. She is simply any other State unencumbered by tradition, so that when she moves it is at a pace that keeps her sister States panting with the effort to keep up with her.

Kate Barnard is the strongest individual force in the State of Oklahoma. Officially she has been recognised by election to the self-created office of Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, which she filled for two successive terms of four years each, declining to run for a third.

Ask any politician in Oklahoma who is the best vote-getter in the State; he will answer, “Kate Barnard.” Ask an ordinary citizen who can boast of the greatest personal popularity; he will answer, “Kate Barnard.” Ask a workingman or any union of workingmen who is the best friend of labour; they will answer, “Kate Barnard.” At her last election she polled the largest vote in the State, running ahead of her ticket and beating Governor Cruce by 485 votes, and received a majority of 28,798 over her Republican opponent, while the Governor received 20,691.

This State force is thirty years old. She is 10195a slight little women, with soft, black hair and sharp, blue eyes. She looks like a sixteen-year-old girl, for her weight at the best of times is not over ninety pounds, and when she has been working hard it is not over eighty. “Eighty-five pounds of dynamite,” someone laughingly called her, and the phrase is well put, for every pound of the little woman's body radiates force. All through the State she is called by her first name. “Miss Barnard” is seldom heard, “Miss Kate” only occasionally; but “Kate,” “Our Kate” and “Oklahoma Kate” are household words.

Kate came to Oklahoma when she was a girl of twelve. Her mother was dead; her father had lost a great deal of his property and wanted to file a claim for a farm. He placed Kate on the farm and went to the city to make a living. Out in the woods, the little girl stayed in a tiny, two-room hut, lonely and half afraid. Her father secured an appointment as postmaster for the country around; but as he was away, Kate was the actual postmistress. She had very little schooling—two or three years in a convent school. In this short time she learned enough to become a teacher in a country school, and with the product of her labour here she studied stenography. She was ambitious, energetic and quick. She progressed rapidly in stenographic 10296work until she became a political reporter. At two territorial legislative sessions she was reporter for the senate, the highest paid position of its kind.

Then came the year of the World's Fair at St. Louis. Oklahoma wanted to be a State. Oklahoma had an exhibit and wanted a boomer to show off that exhibit and to convince every visitor to the Fair that Oklahoma deserved statehood. There were four hundred and ninety-eight men and women in Oklahoma who thought themselves properly equipped for the task. It was assigned to Kate Barnard. She went to St. Louis and boomed Oklahoma in a manner that thoroughly satisfied the Oklahomans, but she found time to do several things besides.

One day the city editor of a St. Louis paper looked up from his desk into the face of a little woman who, without waiting for preliminaries, said abruptly, “I am Kate Barnard of Oklahoma, and I except to make a career. I am interested in poverty and crime. I want to cure them. Please send me to the slums in St. Louis to look into the matter.”

The editor was highly amused. But there happened to be a reporter in the office who was especially fitted to be the young lady's guide; so he detailed him for the task. The reporter was 10397a poet, filled with the horror of his new experience in writing up daily the awful happenings of humanity. He guided Miss Kate through the slums and helped her to see that mass of misery with his eyes. What she said went into the paper the next day. It aroused all St. Louis. It brought the discharge of the poet, but it awoke the citizens to righteous indignation. And Miss Kate kept on talking to any reporter who would print a line. She told of the tenements she had see—of their dilapidated state; of their lack of plumbing, of room, of ventilation; of their overcrowding; of the condition of the families within their walls. And then she pointed out that these tenements brought in an income of a million and a half a year to their owners.

Like most slums, these dilapidated but roomy houses had once been the mansions of the rich, and the ownership was still vested in the families of the former occupants. They indignantly denied Kate's statements and took a slumming tour in order that they might repudiate them. They were amazed at the condition of their property. For years they had been receiving the rents at the hands of agents, without a thought of the property itself. The result was the organisation of the East Side Improvement Society, 10498the demolishing of many rookeries and the building in their stead of several blocks of modern, sanitary tenement flats.

After this successful campaign for social betterment Miss Barnard again visited the editor, asking him to advise her where she ought to go next.

“Why don't you clean up Oklahoma?” he inquired.

“Why, we haven't any such places in Oklahoma,” indignantly replied Kate. “I never saw them.”

“Go home and look,” advised the editor.

Kate returned home. She had boomed Oklahoma in every way, and the territory was well pleased with its representative. But Kate had new ideas. She began to look for slum conditions at home. She found them. Then she did what seemed the best thing to do at once—organised a coterie of young girls into a charity association and appealed to people for help. She stacked contributions in her own home, and before long she had her house and yard full of furniture, clothing and food. She and her young friends dressed and put into school three hundred children. By actual count she gave out ten thousand garments to the needy during the first year. But as fast as she gave out garments, more needy came. It seemed an endless 10599task, and she set to work to find a better plan. She went to a leading business man and asked, “How much do you pay out monthly for charity?”

“Twenty-five dollars.”

“How many members are there in the Chamber of Commerce?”

“Two hundred.”

Miss Kate made a rapid calculation.

“Well,” she said, “you are paying too much. You give me two dollars a month, and I will guarantee to make it go as far as twenty-five.”

He gave her the two dollars. So did several hundred other business men. With their aid and that of the Chamber of Commerce and of the Ministerial Alliance which she pressed into service, she revived a defunct Provident Association. She made herself its first matron and spent her winter in literally clothing the naked and burying the dead and nursing the sick. She used the newspaper as much as they would allow her. For a time she had an almost daily appeal in The Oklahoman. She began to realise how little she knew about charity work and she persuaded The Oklahoman to send her on a trip to secure articles from workers through the country—Jacob Riis, Edwin Markham, Luther Burbank and Jane Addams among them. The 106100Oklahoman printed these articles, and she came back filled with knowledge and enthusiasm.

Charity work had convinced Miss Kate that the solution of the wage question would solve many other of her problems. She joined the American Federation of Labour and got permission from Samuel Gompers to organise the unskilled workmen of Oklahoma City into a union of their own. She saw that work was procured for many of them on public works at a higher wage scale, and demands on her charity bureau became less frequent. All this time she worked for any reform that bettered the condition of the workers. She did not try to work alone. She campaigned after the most noted reformers in every field and she got them. Graham Taylor, the celebrated sociologist, helped her with her work against child labour; Charles R. Henderson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, gave her information; Edwin Markham wrote a poem for her; Jack London was persuaded to give her a newspaper column; Luther Burbank wrote for her “The Forming of the Human Plant.” And all this help was heralded in the daily press and repeated from platforms and pulpits. Statehood was coming. All this was a plan of education on the part of Kate, of education for the coming constitution. She found funds with which to pay the expenses 107101of experts who could advise as to the different planks. The late Samuel J. Barrows, President of the International Prison Association, travelled hundreds of miles to talk on the prison plank. Alexander Johnson, Secretary of the National Charities Conference, drafted the law for the care of the feeble-minded. A. J. McKelway, of the Russell Sage Foundation, helped on the child labour section. Jacob Riis, Hastings Hart and other experts helped. But Kate did not believe in experts alone. She was instrumental in organising a movement to call together the working class representatives to decide upon the various planks. Delegates representing some hundred thousand toilers went to Shawnee, and in convention formulated what were called the twenty-four demands of labour. The work of the experts helped to put these demands into proper shape. Kate approved of them. She campaigned for them. She sent copies of every one of the twenty-four demands to every candidate for delegate to the constitutional convention and asked for his support. Neither Republicans nor Democrats liked this high-handed way of telling them what to do. The territory had been a Republican territory. The Republicans decided to ignore the planks and Miss Kate. The Democrats promised to support labour's demands. And when election 108102came there were ninety-eight Democrats and twelve Republicans elected, a sweeping victory for labour and for Miss Kate. She attended the constitutional convention. She made speeches in behalf of all twenty-four planks and especially in behalf of three: one against child labour, one in favour of compulsory education and one creating the office of Commissioner of Charities and Corrections. The convention named the three “Kate's planks.” They passed the whole twenty-four demands of labour, and the present constitution of Oklahoma, thanks to Miss Kate, is known as the most perfect State constitution in the world.

Then she became candidate for the position of Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, on the Democratic ticket. She won by twenty-nine thousand majority. The day she stepped into office she silenced the tongues that were accusing her of working for a “nice fat job” by doing a curious thing. The law had provided two thousand five hundred dollars as a fitting salary for the Commissioner of Charities and Corrections. Kate Barnard said that fifteen hundred dollars was enough! And this is the salary she received during her first term.

The office into which Kate stepped is no sine-cure. Among her many duties she included the charge of three hundred and twenty-five jails, 109103poorhouses, orphanages, rescue homes and institutions caring for children, the deaf, the blind and the insane. She was expected to suggest changes in the material, the equipment and in the management of these institutions both public and private. The constitution of the State gave her the power to suggest changes, and the courts of Oklahoma decided that she had the power to enforce her suggestions whether in private or public institutions. She was expected to formulate constructive legislation along all these lines. She was officially the “next friend” to all orphans, all friendless persons, all defectives and delinquent persons, and she was empowered to conduct lawsuits in their behalf and see that they are not defrauded of their property or personal rights. Kate stepped into the office when she was in her twenties. One of the first things she did was to send for her old friend, the St. Louis editor, and make him Assistant Commissioner, a move which showed her wisdom, as his knowledge proved invaluable to her.

The total appropriation for the office of Commissioner of Charities and Corrections in 1911 was fifteen thousand eight hundred dollars. At the beginning of Kate's term it was still less. Considering this sum, infinitesimal when compared with the immense appropriations of older 110104States, the work accomplished by the office is marvellous. During her first three years Kate took five hundred children out of the mines and placed them in school despite the efforts of the mine workers to keep them at work. When parents were dependent upon the labour of their children, she enforced Oklahoma's excellent compulsory education law—Kate's own—which provides that the dependent parents of children under sixteen who are attending school shall receive from the State a sum equal to the wages the child would earn during the school term. It may be supposed that in the progressive West child labour is rare. But that is one of the imported vices of the new State. Kate had one case of a child whose parents lived at Fort Cobb, Oklahoma. The child was two years old. He picked forty pounds of cotton a day, dragging behind him a sack weighing from five to ten pounds! Kate rescued him among the five hundred. She kept the truant officers on the job until the truant service in Oklahoma has been pronounced the best in the country.

She was just as diligent in the matter of child labour. The law—again Kate's law—provides that no child under fourteen shall be employed in factories, bowling alleys, in poolrooms, billiard halls or at anything held by the Commissioner of Charities and Corrections to be injurious 111105to health or morals. Kate's interpretation of that clever little last clause was broad enough to satisfy the most earnest advocate against child labour. The remaining clauses provide that no child under sixteen shall be employed where machinery or acids are used, or goods manufactured for immoral purposes. No girls are allowed to stand at work. No children and no women are allowed in mines.

Almost as soon as Kate took office she became involved in political warfare. The Speaker of the legislature was unfriendly toward Kate and her legislation. Kate had backed the Speaker with all her might one year before, for he, as president of the constitutional convention, had worked for her three planks in that particular convention. He was elected to the legislature and soon after suffered a change of sentiment. Kate believed that he was blocking her progressive legislation.

She went to the State Federation of Labour and had it declare him an enemy to the masses in Oklahoma. She announced that she was his friend personally, but she would fight him to the death politically. She challenged him to meet her in debate. He declined.

The fight became so intense that the Speaker would have been unseated had not the Governor and mutual friends interfered. She performed 112106the unheard-of feat of organising the Democratic legislative caucus against her opponent. The Speaker kept his job; but thirty-two of Miss Kate's bills became laws.

Kate worked hard for a Juvenile Court bill and in its interest visited Judge B. Lindsey in Denver, Judge Mack in Chicago and Judge Bishop in St. Louis. The bill passed.

There came rumours to Oklahoma that the Territory's prisoners, housed in Kansas, were being harshly treated. Kate asked and received authority to make an inspection. Oklahoma had no prisons. It paid the State of Kansas forty cents a day for each convict kept and permitted that State to make whatever it could in addition out of the work of the prisoners. Kate went into that prison. She crept and she crawled through the inky depths of the State coal mine where many of the Oklahoma prisoners were employed. The whisper of her coming spread through the prisoners, and despite the vigilance of her conductors she heard voices about her in the darkness:

“Make them show you the water-hole, girl.” “For God's sake the dungeon.” “Don't go away without seeing the crib.”

She came back to Oklahoma with twelve distinct charges against the prison. Governor Hoch of Kansas indignantly denied her charges 113107and requested Oklahoma to appoint an investigating commission. The commission upheld Kate's charges and added twelve more of their own. Oklahoma took its convicts, six hundred and thirty-eight of them, and brought them home. The men thankfully promised not to try to escape, and they dwelt contentedly in huts and sheds while erecting with their own hands a prison wherein to serve the remainder of their sentences.

In one tour of inspection Kate visited a county jail. She found there eight boys, ranging in age from eleven to fifteen years, in cells with men. She refused to leave the premises until they were segregated. She spent all afternoon pleading with the jailers and declaring the boys must leave. She called the county attorney and the county judge. Four of the boys had never been in jail before; but the county attorney pronounced them incorrigible. He cited the law which gave the justice of the peace jurisdiction over such cases. And then Kate spoke.

“After all my efforts to pass a Juvenile Court law,” she said, “I find the richest county in the State unaware that there is one. The law has been in effect for over a year, and it is beyond me why you do not know about it.” The boys looked at her in wonder as she settled herself down, declaring that she intended to 114108stay until conditions were remedied. And at last an aroused, very sheepish county attorney and several disgruntled officials cleared an upstairs room and placed the boys in it.

For a long time the citizens of Oklahoma City have dreamed of pure drinking water. When the city was but a third of its present size, the dream was so vivid that engineers were called there to make complete plans for a good supply and a thorough system of purification. The price of the work, however, made it impossible, and the plans were shelved. During a later administration the plans were taken from the pigeonholes, politicians passed the word along that there would be something doing ere long in the water line, and the land on both banks of the nearest streams was quietly purchased. A city official owned so much of it that he resigned his office when the question of water supply came up. But the politicians still rebelled at the price. So they had another engineer make a new set of plans. The work entailed by these was much cheaper, since no adequate system of purification was included. Nothing was said of this fact, however, and the citizens were notified of a one-million-and-a-half bond issue to provide funds. They were to vote for the bond issue on a Tuesday, and it was the preceding Thursday before Kate decided 115109she would like to look into that water matter. So she asked, as a taxpayer, to be taken to the site for the works and shown the plans. The officials took her there rather reluctantly. She heard all they had to say and then asked, “And where does the purification come in?”

At that they laughed and assured her that it made no difference.

Kate retorted that as far as she could see it made a great deal of difference. The men argued and cajoled, and finally their spokesman said, “Well, Miss Kate, we don't want to have any trouble with you; but it's too late for all this. Nothing can be done with the bill now.”

Kate's eyes snapped. She is a little woman, but when she is indignant she looks tall.

“Well,” she retorted, “I'll see about that. I never will allow the people to drink polluted water.”

Thursday she began her campaign. The papers refused to help her. She sent out hundreds of handbills, headed, in big, black type, with:

DEATH IN THE WATER

Underneath was a line announcing a meeting on the proposed bond issue. On Saturday night she held four big, continuous meetings, going from room to room to speak.

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On Sunday morning an official met her in the lobby of her hotel.

“Miss Barnard,” he stated clearly, “you're no lady.” That is a deadly insult in Oklahoma. Two men sprang toward him and thrashed him.

On Monday bullies were hired to break up Kate's ward meetings. At one she started to speak, when the injured official interrupted her from the floor. A man near would have stopped him; but Kate called: “Let him speak.”

He began by telling the crowd that Kate knew nothing, and at that statement two burly fellows near him took him by his collar and carried him out. Threatening letters were sent her. She read them to the meeting. Then the crowd stood up and yelled:

“We'll stand by you, Kate.”

“We'll,” she stated, “I need money for hall rent.”

Out on the platform came a rain of dollars and half dollars and bills. On Tuesday she went in an auto from poll to poll. The vote was two to one against the bond issue. Then the council of the city, chastened, appointed a commission to see whether they could not combine economy and purity.

When the time came for re-election, Kate had many enemies. Any good fighter does. 117111The Democratic party again named her on their ticket. The Republicans nominated the president of the State suffrage society as her opponent. Kate has never been particularly interested in the matter of suffrage.

“I don't consider woman suffrage within the jurisdiction of my office,” she said. “However, if the gallantry of Oklahoma were to grant women the right to vote, you can bet that Kate Barnard would do her best to cast an intelligent vote. But,” she adds, “I am more interested in saving the poor, destitute, blind, deaf and insane than in securing the vote for women.”

Kate went out campaigning. But there was little self-glorification in her speeches. They were intended to educate the people to the need for protective legislation.

“If you want to know what is the matter with this old world, go out into the woods and see how God made it,” she advised one audience. “God has nothing to do with our evils. The fault is with our forefathers.”

“Capital, instead of looking into the eye of ‘a brother of mine,’ wonders ‘how much can I get out of him?’ “ she said to another. Then she added sadly, “There is no use getting swelled up over Old Glory when such a condition as this exists in our country.”

While stumping the State, she heard that 118112the miners, who had been out of work five months, were in dire straits. At once she called off all speaking dates and scurried across country to them, bringing aid and staying until they were relieved.

When election came she ran twenty-nine thousand ahead of the woman who opposed her.

Always frail and delicate, the beginning of her second term found her a physical wreck. But she found rest almost impossible. The work called her and as long as she was able to stand she was at her office. There were days and weeks when this was not possible, times of desperate illness. Yet in the first year of her second term she managed to recover one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of property for Indian minors. She stood as the “next friend” to these despoiled children. She is trying to have a new penal law passed which will revolutionise prison methods and a new law providing for scientific hospital care for the insane, instead of the custodial care now in vogue. When illness forces her to be away from her office, she writes to her assistants continually.

During a troubled time she wrote them:

“When temptation comes look into the eye of the helpless orphan from whose side they would tear you with a lasso of gold; when they 119113threaten you remember that you can die but once. If they touch a hair of your heads, I will put them into the penitentiary, so help me God!”

That is no idle promise. Kate can do it and she will. The curtain has not yet run down upon the finale of the play. The end is not yet written. Did melodrama ever present a more thrilling heroine than Kate Barnard at thirty, from her sick-bed defying the powers of darkness, her small self a mighty force used only for good in behalf of the weak and unfortunate?

120

ALBION FELLOWS BACON

121

Photograph by William. ALBION FELLOWS BACON

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“But we can't build that unless we put a window in it,” argued the architect with the prospective landlord, “at least we can't in Indianapolis.”

“We can't, eh?” returned the landlord. “Why can't we?”

“Well, you see,” explained the architect, “Mrs. Bacon's tenement-house law—”

“Mrs. Bacon's law be—” but the landlord stopped suddenly. “Ever see her?” he inquired, smiling.

“Yes,” assented the architect, his eyes merry and his lips twitching, “I've seen her.”

“Well, put in the window. I don't want to fight Mrs. Bacon.”

There are few citizens of Indiana who do. Mrs. Bacon has roused Indiana from a comfortable and complacent slumber. She has induced Indiana to take a strong dose of preventive medicine which does not agree at all with a certain portion of her population, but bids fair to succeed in keeping Indiana permanently awake to the necessity of more disagreeable 123118medicine. And Indiana generally approves of the treatment!

A few years ago the citizens of Indiana read of the evils of the slum as of a strange tale of far-away cities. Indiana considered herself free from such evils. She has no great cities. Indianapolis, the largest, has a population of two hundred and thirty-four thousand, a modest total when compared with the millions of the great cities, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York. Indiana read of slum conditions in these great places with a thrill of horror and a touch of complacency. Indiana was free from slums. And they suddenly upon Indiana's complacent dream broke a voice in warning.

“So shall you be fifty years hence. In your country towns are the slums in embryo. In your little cities to-day are the evils which threaten great ones—and more—there are some that are peculiarly your own.”

It is not pleasant to be aroused thus from complacent dreams. Indiana, aroused, sought this prophet. And it found—Mrs. Albion Fellows Bacon.

Mrs. Bacon came without fame and without credentials. She represented no society; she bore no statistics. She appeared before her native State a fragile, tiny woman, with scarce five feet to uphold her dignity, weak, timid and 124119appealing, her one strength in her intensity of purpose. She repeated her message and societies and individuals rushed to her support. Indiana accepted from her hands its first tenement-house law—a law which makes slums such as those in our great cities forever impossible in Indiana, and which will wipe out the little plague spots now in existence. And having accepted the law and secured its passage, Indiana named it after its maker. The State is proud of Mrs. Bacon.

Mrs. Bacon's work began where, according to an old saying, all good work should begin, at home, that is in the city of Evansville, where she resides. For the first ten years of her married life she was a semi-invalid and her hands were full to overflowing with a husband and four children—including twins. As she grew stronger the consciousness of the world about her own household oppressed her. The daughter of a minister, she had been taught from early childhood that she had a social duty as well as a personal one, and she confesses with the utmost simplicity that all at once she realised that she was not visiting the sick, the poor and those in prison as Christ had commanded. So she began in a very humble way to visit the sick in the hospitals and in their homes. Gradually she interested her friends and as a result 125120a Flower Mission was formed. Following the Flower Mission, she became one of a Visiting Nurse Circle. This circle supplied a nurse in homes too poor to afford one, where the patient could not for some reason be cared for at a hospital. In both these organizations Mrs. Bacon met cases which seemed to her to call for masculine treatment. So she formed a unique circle of men visitors. These men visitors made their calls in the evenings. They were business men, and their practical help did wonders in meeting practical problems. A little later Mrs. Bacon helped to organise a Working Girl's Association, of which she later became the president. The Working Girl's Association was a very active organisation. Among other things it fitted up a room in a respectable lodging house for any girl who came to the city and who found herself homeless. It placed signs in the depot telling girls newly arrived in the city where to apply for help; it maintained a lunch room, dormitory, a library and social evenings. Ten years of this kind of work made their impression upon Mrs. Bacon. One day an old woman came to her home to ask for a dollar to help pay the rent. The woman was lame and walked with crutches.

“I'm in an awful place,” she sighed, “and I want to move as soon as I can find a better 126121one. I've been sick ever since I came there on account of the smells in the yard. I have to keep my windows shut all the time on account of them. There ain't no sink and no sewer and the people throw everything out into the yard. The people that tends to such things ought to do something about it.”

“But,” said Mrs. Bacon thoughtfully, “there isn't anyone who attends to such things.”

And there was not. Evansville is a city of about seventy thousand inhabitants. It is in the farthest point south in the State, right in the corner next to Kentucky, and it borders upon the Ohio River. And Evansville, like hundreds of other cities just growing up, has passed from the village stage, where everybody knows everybody and the community at large acts on everything because it is so obvious, into that of the comparatively large city where evils have ceased to be known, because they are farther away, and are not so acute as to demand attention.

Mrs. Bacon talked a little to people whom she met about the housing of the poor, and the people generally shrugged their shoulders and asked:

“What do you expect! The poor are so shiftless and dirty.”

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Mrs. Bacon knew that they were dirty. What she could not understand was how they could be anything else.

Evansville had sewers and city water. But neither found its way near the homes of the poor. The water supply was invariably a “cistern” in the back yard. Sometimes the “cistern” supplied twenty families, sometimes only three. The cisterns were often barrels sunk about one-third into the ground and occasionally having a dilapidated cover.

These barrels were filled from a fire plug by means of a long hose, or with rain water from the roofs. They were exposed through their defective covers to the dust and dirt of the yard, to cats and dogs and rats which climb or jump over them and occasionally fall in, and, worst of all, to infection through the earth from the outside vaults and surface scum. Water in such “cisterns” rarely makes anything clean, and when to this is added the fact that often there was not enough water to go around, it is little wonder that the poor were dirty.

“They look pretty bad, don't they?” observed one woman to Mrs. Bacon as she hung out her line with damp, gray clothes. “But we have to be sparin’ of the water.”

When tenements are three and four stories high and there is nothing but a cistern, all the 128123water for washing, cooking and drinking must be carried up those two or three flights of steps, and when there are four little children and days are cold, it was quite a natural result that the poor should be dirty.

Mrs. Bacon thought that the poor did look shiftless. The yard conditions were bad enough to start with, and the people made them worse by throwing refuse of every kind, dishwater and garbage into yards. But there was actually no other place to throw the dishwater, and the garbage was collected at such irregular intervals that to avoid keeping it in the living-rooms of the family it had to be put into the yards. There was no room for the garbage to remain indefinitely in the living-rooms, as they were fully occupied by the families.

It seems almost absurd to speak of over-crowding in Evansville. Yet families of six to twelve people were crowded into one room, cooking, eating and sleeping, in many places. Some had two rooms or even three, but often the sleeping-room had no window and the air was foul. And these people were not tramps, but labourers and mill workers, who lived in such quarters because they were the only ones which could be secured.

Added to this Mrs. Bacon found such minor details as leaky roofs, dangerous stairways, and 129124entire absence of paint which made clothes, mothers, babies, walls and all a hopeless, sodden gray. In indignation she sought the secretary of the Charity Organization Society.

“Why do not the landlords cut windows in those dark rooms?” she demanded. “Why do they not mend those dangerous stairways and those leaky roofs? Why do they not drain the yards and put in hydrants?” And the secretary answered wearily:

“They do not have to. The houses bring good rent anyway, and there is no law to require it.”

Mrs. Bacon went home thoughtful. It appeared that the poor would keep on being shiftless and dirtier than ever under such conditions. And she knew only too well that there was no help. Evansville is a mill town; population is somewhat transitory, and a respectable workman with even a fair salary had actually no other place to live in than those dangerous, disease-breeding rattletraps. It was evident that the rent paid was sufficient to be worth better quarters. It occurred to Mrs. Bacon that there ought to be “someone to attend to those things.”

“But,” she confesses, “it never did occur to me for a long while that that ‘someone’ was I. The conditions made me literally sick. I 130125used to lie awake at night and see those people. I would see the babies crawling in the filthy yards. I could feel the wind through the cracked walls. But still I never realised that I could do anything about it.”

Then one morning Mrs. Bacon picked up her paper and noticed that a building ordinance was to be introduced in the Council. She wondered if something regarding tenements could go into that ordinance. she knew the Mayor of Evansville quite well, and she put on her hat and coat, called on the Mayor and explained her errand.

“Couldn't we have something in that building ordinance about tenements?” she concluded.

“Why, yes,” said the Mayor heartily. “Now you go home and write out the sections and we will put them right in.”

Mrs. Bacon walked home rather bewildered. She was to write the sections. How? She sighed over this new and unexpected responsibility. But being a practical person and honestly knowing nothing of ordinances applying to tenements, she sat the greater part of that day writing letters to persons who did know and who would be willing to extend that knowledge. Full of confidence, she sent to New York, Chicago and Indianapolis for tenement ordinances.

131126

“I thought,” she admits naively, “that I would copy a section or two and send them to the Mayor. But when they came they did not fit Evansville.”

To make them fit Mrs. Bacon sat down and worked them over. Then she brought the matter before the Monday Night Club, which was composed of representatives from various charitable and philanthropic enterprises. Among others was a lawyer and he went over all the sections. Then the sections went to the Council and lay dormant for months. In the meantime the State Conference of Charities met in Evansville. Mrs. Bacon went to the conference and spoke to those assembled on “The Homes of the Poor.” This was the first speech on housing which the conference had considered. Mrs. Bacon suggested that what was needed was a State law, and as it looked as if the city ordinance would never pass, she determined to make the attempt to get it.

This meant more complete investigation. The Commercial Club and Associated Charities of Indianapolis were already at work on conditions in that city. Mrs. Bacon extended her work in Evansville, and took the trolley to various nearby small towns. To the cities farther away she sent investigators, and every return convinced her that the conditions in Evansville 132127were typical. Reports from Lafayette, South Bend, Richmond, Bloomington, Princeton, Muncie, Knightstown and Warsaw contained statements of overcrowding, dark rooms, insufficient water supply, lack of sewage, foul air, filth and disease. And no one was “attending to these things” anywhere. It seemed as if the drafting of a State law depended on Mrs. Bacon. So she sent again for information, this time to every State in the Union and to Germany and France. She read books on housing. And with infinite pains she drafted a law, which, she says, “was not only what the poor needed, but what the public would stand for and the legislature was likely to pass.”

She took her bill to the State Conference of Charities and they indorsed it. Then the secretary of the Charity Organisation Society took Mrs. Bacon to the Commercial Club of Indianapolis. The Commercial Club had assisted in the investigation in that city and they were heartily in sympathy with the bill. After a long discussion they heartily indorsed it, and Mrs. Bacon rejoiced.

“Now, if this is what you are looking for, take it as your measure,” she proposed. But the Commercial Club protested in alarm.

“Oh, no; it is your measure. You must take it to the legislature.”

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“I felt,” said Mrs. Bacon, in telling of the incident, “as if a brick house had fallen on my head. I had never been inside of a legislature. I knew it as a seething mass of men. I was badly frightened. But I thought, ‘I won't be a baby, I'll just do it.’” This was in the fall and Mrs. Bacon had three months to prepare for her ordeal. The presidential campaign was on, but Mrs. Bacon made up her mind to force slum questions upon the public. She wrote, she spoke, she designed and even drew cartoons, and she succeeded in getting a great deal of newspaper publicity for the work. She wrote letters to clubs, to individuals, men and women of prominence and influence, to ministers, teachers, politicians and to the one hundred and fifty members of the legislature. She talked with and wrote to those who had a greater knowledge of slum conditions than she. Chief among these were Jacob Riis and Lawrence Veiller. She secured pictures of old houses and of slum alleys, mounted them on nice white cardboard, drew symbolic sketches around the margins and had them all ready to be hung in the legislative halls when January came. The two long lines of white cardboard, with their pictures attached, she called “The State Wash.” The bill was proposed and referred to committee. At the hearing Mrs. Bacon told 134129her story. The committee reported the bill favourably and arranged that Mrs. Bacon should address the legislature. Mrs. Bacon spoke for fifteen minutes.

“I felt so little,” she said. “The place seemed made for giants.” And then the bill came up for its second reading and amendments began to fly like bullets on a battlefield.

The amendments were referred to committee. The committee held its meetings in a long dining-room, with the chairman seated at one end of the table and Mrs. Bacon at the other explaining the effect of each amendment.

The bill dragged from January to March. Four times Mrs. Bacon went to Indianapolis and stayed a week every time. And when the final roll was called, a very excited woman found herself within the railings of the floor itself, walking up and down the aisles with no clear consciousness that she had risen, and none that she was upon forbidden ground. When the count was taken, the bill had won by one vote.

Then Mrs. Bacon counted on a little rest. But as soon as the bill was signed trouble began. Shortly after its signing the Indianapolis papers came out with staring headlines.

MRS. BACON'S BUILDING LAW STOPS FLAT BUILDING IN INDIANAPOLIS

As a matter of fact, a very elegant apartment house then in process of construction had a number of rooms without windows. As tenements are most often old houses remodelled, Mrs. Bacon's law wisely provided against dark rooms. The permit for the elegant house was refused and the owners of the house began a suit to test the constitutionality of the law. The courts decided in favour of the law and of Mrs. Bacon.

In the meantime the city ordinance which had lain dormant had been unearthed and passed. Upon her return to Evansville, Mrs. Bacon found that she had both a State and city law to assist her in rebuilding her own city. But even then, as before, it was “nobody's business.” Evidently more than a law was needed. Mrs. Bacon thought it over and then decided that to enforce the law two direct allies must be secured. The first was a person whose business it should be to see that the law was enforced; the second was the sympathy of the public towards its enforcement. So she went again to the Council and asked for a building inspector. She visited every councilman personally and attended every meeting. And the building inspector 136131was appointed. The second ally was not so easily secured. But Mrs. Bacon went to work to educate her public through the press and through lectures. She sent for Jacob Riis, and he lectured not only in Evansville but in Indianapolis, Terre Haute and South Bend. For these lectures she had lantern slides made from the “State Wash.” To make these attractive she coloured them herself. And under the stimulus of this work Evansville began to clean up. A number of landlords whitewashed and painted and made small improvements. A number of dilapidated tenements actually came down. A few good tenements went up. One of these was named “The Albion,” in honour of Mrs. Bacon. And after the appointment of the building inspector no buildings went up which did not comply with the wise provisions of Mrs. Bacon's law. Every building left a portion of its lot vacant for light and air; every building had a rear yard and no rear tenement; every room had a window; every grown person had at least four hundred cubic feet of air and every child two hundred—a provision intended to prevent fifty persons from occupying a house designed for ten. The new buildings had drainage and sinks and other necessary adjuncts to cleanliness, as provided. But Mrs. Bacon was not satisfied. The law as passed affected only 137132cities of the first class. Evansville and Indianapolis were the only first-class cities in the entire State. At the next session of the legislature she and the citizens who were with her, including a representation from the architects of the state, worked to extend the law to all the cities of the State.

“It is just like putting large shoes on a baby,” urged Mrs. Bacon, “the feet will soon grow into them.”

Then followed a long and bitter struggle, lasting the entire session. Slum owners packed the corridors, and a vicious lobby worked persistently to defeat the bill. It passed the House triumphantly, by an almost unanimous vote. But the Senate held back its final readings until the least night of its session, and then, after a brave fight, that resulted in victory, that victory was wrested away by the change of one vote. It was a bitter defeat.

There were two years before the next session of the legislature met. During that time public sentiment in favour of housing reform laws grew apace in Indiana, and Mrs. Bacon “sat up at night and watered it to make it grow.” The State Federation of Women's Clubs organised a Committee on Housing and made Mrs. Bacon Chairman. The Indiana Housing Association was organised and made her its Secretary.

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She went then to the political leaders, and when the bill came up to the legislatures the leaders were with her to a man. Even then the slum owners were so busy and came in such numbers that it took another long hard fight to win the law—but the fight was won and the bill passed, a law for the one hundred cities of the State.

As soon as the first law was safety through the legislature, and its constitutionally declared by the courts, Mrs. Bacon started for a rest. She took her older daughter and went East to the Summer Chautauqua and prepared to recuperate by taking a course of studies in song writing. For Mrs. Bacon, before she began the serious business of lawmaking, was valued by her family and friends as a talented and entertaining person. She has published one book of poetry; and many of her verses are found in the current magazines. She has composed a number of songs, but finding that she did not understand music well enough to write them all, she went to Chautauqua. She draws will, paints well and often supplies illustrations for her poems. Her songs are the delight of her friends, and of her children. And then she is, as she says, “very domestic.”

“Any women who is the mother of twins,” she remarks sagely, “is bound to be domestic.” 139134And when her neighbours inquire how she finds time for all her activities, she replies pertinently: “Well, I do not play bridge and I seldom go to matinées.”

But Mrs. Bacon has her strongest ally toward time-saving in the helpfulness of her children. The children understand very well just what their mother is doing. There are but three now, and the three have been with their mother in all of her visits and in all of her investigations when it was possible to take them. Mrs. Bacon believes firmly in training children to citizenship. She does not believe in sheltering them from a knowledge of conditions, but in keeping them informed as to conditions and showing that through their work and interest such evils as they meet may be made to disappear. One night, when the twins were quite small, Mrs. Bacon gave them a little talk upon the things a good citizen must do. She told them how selfish it was to sit in one's comfortable home and not think of the others whose homes are far from comfortable. The children liked it immensely, and when she had finished Joy turned to her mother quickly.

“Why, mother,” she said happily, “that's what you are, isn't it—a good citizen?”

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Decidedly Mrs. Bacon's work is domestic in the finest and sweetest sense of the world. When she goes from her home she carries with her, not only the fruits of her own hours of study with which to move and impress those to whom she carries her message, but every loving help that every member of her family has been able to give to her.

The successful passage of the first law made Mrs. Bacon known throughout the State. By the time the second had passed she was a recognised “housing expert” and cities all over the country were asking her to come and help them. When a call came she answered it, giving freely advice and suggestions; but she cannot conduct campaigns for other States, as she is needed to supervise the enforcing of the law at home. The glory of passing laws seems an empty one while the tenements still exist.

“For years,” she says, “there will be need of a voluntary association to look after the housing in every town. More than that, the landlords need models. I should like to organise a company to build model tenements and demonstrate that they can be built and run at a profit and still be decent homes.”

“Nobody's business” has become her business. The building inspector calls on her frequently and presents plans for new buildings, 141136consulting her upon doubtful points of interpretation.

“I know that conditions that have been fifty years in growing cannot be wiped out in a few years with the small force at our command,” says Mrs. Bacon, “but when one feels these conditions keenly enough to be driven into this work, it is so hard to be patient. When I see the dreadful old tenements that still stand, I feel that I have done so little.”

But the business men of the town think otherwise. “Evansville is a changed city,” averred one. “We are actually beginning to have a little of the civic pride so much talked of and so little seen. Before Mrs. Bacon's agitation in favour of good tenements, the old dilapidated houses were everywhere, even on our main street right between the most prosperous stores. In this short time every one of the old tenements on the main street has gone.”

“Now that your law is in effect will you rest?” she was asked.

“I cannot rest while there is one of those miserable ‘homes’ left,” she answered. “I cannot rest while little children live in such places. But if it were for no other reason than for the good of my children, I should have to go on. The town must be safe for them and for all other children as well—that is the duty of a 142137good citizen. And I must train them to be good citizens. But there is a reward in the work itself which ought to recommend it to any woman. At my age so many women find life closing. The children are almost grown, and there are many hours of idleness—hours which were once full to overflowing. Old age seems imminent with nothing more interesting than a secondary interest in life, through the children. I feel that I am on the threshold of life. The interest of the work is vital, and the work itself is worth while. Every day brings a new outlook and a fresh fund of enthusiasm, and there is no such thing as old age visible upon the horizon.”

There is nothing of the martyr in Mrs. Bacon. Long days of hard work, long, sleepless nights, the strain and fatigue of a legislative session in behalf of those who were “nobody's business,”—all these are more than outweighed by her reward, the gain in life itself. If the people who were nobody's business held it in their power to recompense their deliverer her request would be: “Help me to go on.”

143

HANNAH KENT SCHOFF

144

HANNAH KENT SCHOFF

HANNAH KENT SCHOFF

How important is a hog? That is the question with which Mrs. Frederic Schoff startled the National Government. The Government is interested in hogs. It maintains a department in which experts experiment and labour, and send out information to farmers throughout the land upon the feeding, the raising and the diseases of hogs. Mrs. Schoff thoroughly approves of that department—only——

“Why,” she asked, “does the Government think it worth while to maintain a department to train farmers in the care of hogs, and not even consider the subject of training parents to care for their children?” How important is a hog?

The National Government is subjected to a good many inquiries, but it turned a listening ear to that of Mrs. Schoof. The relative importance of hogs and children is a matter of moment, and Mrs. Schoff is not alone in asking the question. With her are one hundred thousand American mothers, eager to hear the answer.

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For ten years Mrs. Schoff has been their leader as president of the largest band of organised mothers the world has yet known.

Mrs. Schoff's personal experience has fitted her for this leadership. She is the mother of seven children. All of the seven are healthy, happy, useful citizens, and the grandchildren, who now complete the family circle, give every evidence of making a similar record.

Four sons and three daughters make a busy household. Mrs. Schoff had not had time even to think of a public career, up to a certain morning in May, 1899, when she picked up the morning paper and settled herself in the library of her comfortable home in Philadelphia to read. Upon the first page, surmounted by staring headlines, there appeared the story of a fire, a fire started by a little girl of eight years who had succeeded in burning down the house in which she lived. The fire had been started deliberately; the girl herself admitted the fact. When arrested and brought before the presiding judge, she stated readily that she had started the fire.

“I did it to see the fire burn and the engines run!” she said.

The reporters’ investigation of the child's history revealed that she had been left orphaned when two years old, and placed in a “Home.” 147143Recently she had been sent from the “Home” to become a helper and general household drudge in a city boarding house, where her only associates were ignorant servants. Evidently one city editor, at least, regarded the influences surrounding her as of the best, for his account was surmounted by the startling headline, “A Prodigy of Crime.”

Philadelphia citizens who read this were properly shocked at the depravity of one so young. Doubtless, several mothers remembered the day their Marys set fire to the lace curtains, “Just for fun,” and set the paper aside with a sigh of sympathy for the unfortunate little waif. And there the matter might have rested, had it not happened that the startling headlines were also read by Mrs. Schoff.

With growing indignation she followed the account of the “crime,” and found that the presiding judge had sent the little prodigy to a reformatory. She put down the paper and looked at her own little girls, who were playing near. Suppose that one of them had set fire to the house, “to see the fire burn and the engines run.” What was to become of this child, to be associated with companions whose ways had been proved evil? Mrs. Schoff decided that the judge who had passed such a sentence ought to be remonstrated with.

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She called in person to plead the child's cause.

“But,” remonstrated the bewildered judge, “what am I to do with her? I have no other place to send her, and to tell the truth they do not even want her there, because of the serious nature of the offence!”

Friendless, arrested, tried in the criminal court, and sentenced to the House of Refuge, and only eight years old! Mrs. Schoff went home determined to know more of the law that branded children of tender years as criminals and sent them to reformatories, and still more determined to rescue that little girl. On the morrow she began an investigation of the local conditions.

At that time, Pennsylvania had two reformatories, one in the western part of the State and one in the eastern. In addition, there was a reformatory for boys over fifteen years of age at Huntington. Excluding this, Mrs. Schoff found sixteen hundred children in the two reformatories, and these included waifs, homeless little ones, and children accused of the most serious crimes. Any magistrate could commit a child to a reformatory upon the parents’ statement of incorrigibility. The child's side of the case was never heard. Men and women contracting second marriages made use of this opportunity 149145to get rid of their existing families, and the children, innocent and helpless, were sent to associate with boys and girls of sixteen and eighteen years whose records proved without a doubt real guilt and immorality.

Children were tried in the criminal courts, kept waiting in the cages for criminals which also housed men and women steeped in crime. Every day they received lessons never to be forgotten. There were five hundred children ranging in age from six to sixteen years in the Philadelphia County prison, and children in every county prison throughout the State. There were two to three hundred children passing through the city station houses every month. These were sent to prison or freed according to the will of the presiding judge, who was crowded with cases, and possessed no accurate information which might enable him to judge wisely. Altogether, there were over three thousand children accused of delinquency, among whom, doubtless, were many whose “crimes” consisted of a curiosity similar to that which longed to “see the fire burn and the engines run.”

Getting the little prodigy of crime out of a reformatory was small portion of the task which now confronted Mrs. Schoff. If one little girl had been thus condemned, doubtless there were hundreds of others in similar position. 150146Mrs. Schoff looked over the results of her investigation and knew that she could not do this work alone. She took her facts and presented them to the New Century Club of Philadelphia, of which she is a member.

Now the New Century Club of Philadelphia is a woman's club, and one of the most conservative clubs known. In 1899 it was a social and not a civic club, and it did not care to concern itself with things outside its own particular interests. When Mrs. Schoff presented her facts, the club was shocked—genuinely and sincerely shocked, at the condition of affairs—but the New Century Club had never handled shocking matters, and had gone on very comfortably in its own prescribed path. Mrs. Schoff, having presented her facts, waited. The wisdom of her waiting was shown when in October she was invited to form a committee to pursue the investigations, and to take such action as was deemed advisable. A committee was formed which agreed to act in conjunction with a similar committee from the Pennsylvania Congress of Mothers. Some of the women, with the horror of the tales ringing in their ears, wanted to proceed at once upon a political campaign, but Mrs. Schoff remonstrated.

“We do not know enough,” she urged. The committee looked at the awful statistics of the 151147numbers of children in reformatories and prisons and wondered. Mrs. Schoff went on:

“We know that this is all wrong, but how can make it right?”

Eager as the women were to rescue the unfortunate children, whose stories had touched them, the truth of the remonstrance was obvious, and they yielded. Then followed a remarkable winter. This committee of women, hardly one of whom had any experience with public work, set about making themselves familiar with the methods of dealing with helpless, dependent and delinquent children throughout the nation. The Philadelphia Bar Association threw open its library, and Mrs. Schoff and her associates pored over the great volumes. As they found the final law in every State, they copied it, until finally a typewritten copy of every law of every State was ready for publication. It made a book of four hundred pages. According to the judgment of the committee, Massachusetts, Michigan and Illinois had the best records, so Mrs. Schoff packed her trunk, kissed her own children and went to visit Massachusetts, Michigan and Illinois. Illinois, which had just introduced a juvenile court and probation system, made a profound impression. She returned to Philadelphia, deciding that the committee knew enough to begin to work.

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She went personally to the Governor of Pennsylvania and to various political leaders. These gentlemen appeared shocked and interested. They asked numerous questions and Mrs. Schoff met them at every turn. Finally they all promised hearty support, and with this encouragement, she employed a lawyer to draft two bills similar to those in Illinois. These bills provided:

1. Separate time and place for trial of children's cases, and no detention of children in police stations.

2. Probation officers, whose salaries were not to be paid from the public treasury, but who were appointed by the judge.

3. A house of detention in all cities, of the first and second class, for children awaiting trial.

4. Boards of visitors for all institutions, to be composed of men and women.

Nobody paid much attention to the bills, probably doubting the influence of their backers. When a possibility of their passage was shown there rose a storm of opposition. The managers of the Eastern House of Refuge and other agencies organised ostensibly for the protection of children began a war against the bills. In these agencies, as in many “homes” and institutions for the care of children the appropriations 153149depended upon the number of children—the more children, the better. Under such conditions children, good or bad, are likely to remain in institutions, else how are the managers and matrons to make a living? Naturally the open arguments of these office-holders took a more subtle form.

The press of the State had been intelligently interested in the proposed laws and gave valuable aid. Pamphlets prepared by Mrs. Schoff and her fellow-workers were sent to every member of the legislature and Mrs. Schoff was given several hearings.

In May, 1901, the bills passed. They provided than no child in Pennsylvania could be tried in criminal courts, that probation officers should be appointed, that detention houses for children awaiting hearing or trial should be provided, and that no magistrate could commit children to reform schools, but that such commitment must be through a Juvenile Court.

The first Juvenile Court in Pennsylvania was held in Philadelphia, June 14, 1901. Mrs. Schoff was there, and with her two probation officers, who had their salaries guaranteed by the Pennsylvania Congress of Mothers. The work under the new laws started. The enemies of the bills immediately began a suit against the constitutionality of the laws, a suit which pended for 154150two years. In those two years Mrs. Schoff attended every session of the court, met the probation officers every week and went over every case. She secured the best legal talent and had a new set of laws drawn. Before the old laws were declared unconstitutional, the new laws were passed, but only after a battle royal. The appeals against their constitutionality was carried to the Supreme Court, but the two years’ results had demonstrated unquestionably the worth of the measures. The Supreme Court declared the laws constitutional and they still stand.

Then Mrs. Schoff found a new task awaiting her. Philadelphia has a peculiar judicial system—the judges rotate. They sit awhile in one court and then move to another, and so on until they have made the rounds. Consequently, the new children's court was presided over by some fifteen judges, coming one after another, each one quite unacquainted with the lads and lassies arraigned before him. One of the offenders might have been a regular, appearing every other month, yet a particular judge might never have seen him. Another occasional offender might have appeared before this same judge a twelvemonth ago, and never have transgressed since. Yet the judge, remembering his appearance at the last sitting, naturally concluded him 155151a desperate character. It was obvious that someone must attend court regularly and become familiar with every small offender, his surroundings and history. That someone was Mrs. Schoff. For eight years she rarely missed a court morning. Probation officers came and went, judges succeeded each other, but Mrs. Schoff remained. For eight years she met the probation officers each week and went over every case. Only when the probation officers were established, so that their knowledge of the work was sufficient to carry it on, did Mrs. Schoff cease attending court.

There were six hundred children in Moyamensing prison in 1900. To-day there is not one. There were three hundred children passing through the station houses, in Philadelphia alone, in that same year. To-day there are but one-half that number arrested and these are held in the House of Detention. Of fifteen hundred cases tried in the Juvenile Court in 1908, there were sixty-three where probation was unsuccessful. But the movement did not stop in Philadelphia. One year after the opening of the Juvenile Court in Philadelphia, a similar court opened in Pittsburg. Now they extend through the State. Nor did the movement stop with the State.

One year before the little “prodigy of 156152crime” started her fire, Mrs. Schoff was asked to join the National Congress of Mothers, and to become an officer in that organisation. she looked at her own family and hesitated.

“I haven't done public work, I do not know enough about it,” she said. “I haven't time.”

“But you have seven children of your own,” urged her friends. Mrs. Schoff assented dubiously. That was just it. The youngest of the seven was just two years old, and the oldest grown. Between the two were the other five, and Mrs. Schoff has confessed since, that not, being at all sure how they would all turn out, she felt considerable reluctance to become an officer in such an organisation. However, she was at last persuaded and the children continued to flourish.

The first year of her membership was a quiet one. Then came the work for the Juvenile Court. As soon as she was convinced of the success of the system, Mrs. Schoff carried the idea to the Congress of Mothers. As a result, other cities and States began to ask her to come and speak to them. The National Congress of Mothers made her first Vice-President, and then President. As the head of this large organisation, numbering seventy thousand mothers throughout the United States, her influence was enormous. At the request of Connecticut, 157153Louisiana and Idaho, she visited and assisted in establishing Juvenile Courts and probation systems in those States. Then she received a unique honour. She was asked to visit Canada to speak on Juvenile Court work. After making her address, she received an invitation to speak upon the same subject before the Canadian Parliament. Mrs. Schoff is the only woman in the history of Canada who has been thus honoured. Both houses adjourned and held a joint session to hear her. As a result, the Canadian Government sent two probation officers to be trained under her direction, and today Juvenile Court and probation work is well established in Canada.

Between attending the sessions of the Juvenile Court, attending to the wants of her own seven children, and occasionally visiting some other city or State, Mrs. Schoff found her life a busy one. Nevertheless, she found time to think.

“Whose was the fault when a child of six or seven years appeared in the courtroom?” One little boy, sad-faced and wet-eyed, was accused of the theft of some lead pipe. The mother, summoned by the probation officer, eyed the child stolidly.

“I'd be glad if I didn't have no boy at all,” she said.

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A tiny little girl arrested in the Tenderloin at four o'clock in the morning with a boy no older than herself, presented herself ragged and unkempt before the judge. Her mother did not think it worth while to come to court. Her stepfather was ill. The child did not know the name of her own father. The door of the room in which they lived was never locked; the girl might come and go at any hour. And this boy and girl were but two. Slowly Mrs. Schoff realised that the crime of the children was the crime of the parents, and that the crime of the parents, like that of the children, was committed because they knew no better. To assure herself that her theory was just, she formed a committee of five women, all of whom had experience with juvenile offenders, and with them prepared a questionnaire which was sent to the convicts in eight of the largest penitentiaries in the United States. The replies of the prisoners strengthened her belief that parents and society had made criminals through a mistaken treatment of childish offences.

The way to cure children, Mrs. Schoff decided, was to cure parents, and she set about finding a means to that end. Now when Mrs. Schoff entered the National Congress of Mothers, it was a purely national organisation, composed 159155of women throughout the United States, who were bound only by large interests. There were no local organisations. The women of the Congress were notable women, women of culture, of ideas and ability, but they represented only one class.

Mrs. Schoff wanted to work for State and local organisations, to get hold of all mothers, notable and obscure. Beginning with her own State, she wrote to the superintendent of schools in every county in Pennyslvania, personally, asking his co-operation in forming parent-teachers’ associations, in connection with the schools of his district. Mother's clubs, which were flourishing in a few sections and languishing in many more, seized at this new organisation. Heretofore every mothers’ club had been a single sporadic attempt by a single school. The new organisation offered opportunities for interchange of speakers, ideas and material. Its connection with the Mothers’ Congress gave it a central body. New parent-associations were formed throughout the State.

The idea was carried to other States. Massachusetts soon had three thousand parents anxious for instruction. Texas brought an equal number, and the State University of Texas recognised the work as so important that it offered to pay for the expense of the local organisation. 160156Far away California organised with six thousand members.

These associations represented parents of all classes, educated and uneducated, intelligent and uncouth, but they were bound by one common interest, the desire to do something for their children. In schools in the foreign districts of large cities, the classes organised became a matter of pride to the parents. If there was no suitable leader, the National Congress of Mothers furnished one.

As the associations grew, they applied to the National Congress for material and information. In response, Mrs. Schoff wrote to educators, physicians and specialists upon children, throughout the country, asking for contributions, in the shape of articles to be read at parents’ meetings. These articles were printed as leaflets and sent to the various associations. This method of procedure forms a marked contrast to that of the usual mothers’ club, where the women listen to a paper arranged by one of their own number, frequently a method of procedure which might be likened to a “blind leading of the blind.”

In organising and helping new groups of parents, Mrs. Schoff was tireless. In one year she visited many counties in Pennyslvania and thirteen States in behalf of the associations and 161157Juvenile Court work. And during these years of organisations and of study of varying conditions, the question of the relative importance of hogs and children forced itself upon her.

Following this question came the idea of a Federal Bureau, for the purpose of informing parents as to the physical, mental and moral care of their children—a department to be called “Home Welfare,” or “Department of the Child and Home.” Here parents could secure as adequate information about the nutrition and diseases and education of their children as is now given farmers in the care of hogs. Mrs. Schoff carried her scheme to Washington.

She went first to the Department of Education as she felt that the matter really belonged there, but at that time she found the Department restricted in the matter of expenditure and run on the supposition that it was related to schools only.

So there began another campaign, this time to persuade the Government that education is not confined to schooling. Having proved by actual tests that infant mortality could be reduced seventy per cent, by education of mothers, convinced that juvenile crime was chiefly the result of parental ignorance, Mrs. Schoff demanded that the Department extend its work of education to adults in behalf of the children. 162158In 1913 she succeeded in having the Commissioner of Education, Dr. P. P. Claxton, establish a Home Education Division of the Bureau. Dr. Claxton appointed Mrs. Schoff Director of the new division, a post without salary but giving her the opportunity she longed for, that of putting a part of the government at the service of the parents. In its first year the Home Education Division secured sixteen hundred women who pledged themselves to co-operate with its efforts in their communities. In that one year it replied to inquiries for help from forty thousand mothers! As the inquiries came, Mrs. Schoff was able to classify them and to prepare pamphlets containing only statements authorised by experts which served to answer certain groups of questions. A simple little leaflet on the care of young babies brought hundreds of letters of appreciation from women who frankly stated that it was their first opportunity to obtain free advice from authorities on the bringing up of children, although their husband had long enjoyed a like privilege with regard to crops and cattle.

Under Mrs. Schoff's leadership three International Congresses on the Welfare of the Child have been held in Washington, and invitations to every nation have been issued by the Department of State. Many countries responded, 163159China and the Philippine Islands sending official invitations to Mrs. Schoff to come and establish a similar work for children there.

As President of the National Congress of Mothers, Mrs. Schoff receives daily numerous appeals for help from all over the country.

“We know that you are a friend of mothers and children,” is the general tenor of the introduction to these letters, and with this in extenuation of their appeal they proceed to ask for advice upon almost every conceivable question from the merits of a particular soothing syrup to the most intimate personal problems. Mrs. Schoff answers every letter personally, no matter how trivial the request. She confesses that sometimes the answers are pitifully inadequate, for it would take a wisdom greater than Solomon's to meet them all, but at least a word of sympathy goes out to the petitioner.

In the midst of her national interests, Mrs. Schoff never neglects her home city. Two summers ago she visited the Chief of the Bureau of Health.

“Dr. Neff,” she said, “cannot something be done to save the babies in Philadelphia?”

“Mrs. Schoff,” the Chief said, as he looked up, “I will start to-morrow if I can find people enough interested to help me out. I've tried and failed.”

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Mrs. Schoff left the office and went to work. As a result The Philadelphia Alliance for the Care of Babies was formed and began sending out nurses and instruction. But the mothers would not bring their babies to be inspected. Evidently they dreaded the ordeal more than the loss of the baby.

“Give prizes for the best babies,” suggested Mrs. Schoff. And then the mothers came.

“We'll make them good mothers if they have to be bribed,” said Mrs. Schoff, laughing. And while she confesses that the ethical standard of the alliance is thus under reproach, she adds:

“But the babies live! It takes something startling to make many mothers realise that instinct does not teach them to be good mothers.”

The little “Prodigy of Crime,” who gave Mrs. Schoff to the wider field of motherhood, is a grown woman now. She never stayed in the Reformatory, but was given a new trial in a real home. She was graduated from Normal School, and was chosen from six hundred girls in the State to be assistant principal of the school where she is now.

“And that is what people thought a ‘Prodigy of Crime,’” says Mrs. Schoff triumphantly. Then she adds, “That is what ought to happen; it is just what I should want to happen if it had been my little girl.”

165

FRANCES A. KELLOR

166

FRANCES A. KELLOR

FRANCES A. KELLOR

“He taka da doll’ an’ got no teek.” The speaker, a short, swarthy Italian, fixed his eyes pleadingly upon the face of the man he was addressing.

“How many dollars did you give him?”

“Eh?” The Italian, bewildered, turned to his two companions. Volubly they began to translate, both talking at once. As the owner of the pleading eyes answered, the babble grew in intensity. It seemed impossible that the young man who stood listening should be able to gather anything from the confusion of sound, but he nodded.

“I see. You gave him seven dollars and a half for a ticket and you got no ticket and he refuses to return the money.”

The three men assented vigorously, nodding their heads and continuing the babble until again interrupted.

“Where do you live?” demanded the young man.

“Leeve?” the first man repeated,—“no leeve, go ‘way.”

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“When?” There was another babble, followed by looks of despair, as the young man shook his head ruefully.

“It's twelve o'clock and you go at two,” he muttered. “Well, sit down. I'll see Miss Kellor.”

Downcast the three men obeyed. Anxiously they watched the door through which he departed. In a few minutes he reappeared, struggling into an overcoat.

“Come with me,” he ordered. “I'll get your money.”

The three arose with alacrity, their faces wreathed in smiles. As they passed to the doorway the spokesman hesitated.

“Tell Mees,” he said, pointing to the door through which the young man had passed. “T'anks.”

Back of the door a tall, handsome man, also Italian, stood fingering his hat nervously.

“I know, Lady,” he protested. “There is no use goin’ ‘gainst the law. I been in this country long time. I don't want no trouble, Lady.”

The “Lady” looked at him sternly.

“You understand, then,” she said crisply, “that your advertisements are illegal. You are not a banker. You have no right to receive, hold and transmit money and you must stop doing 169165so and your advertisements must stop at once.”

“I bring you the papers so you see my ad is out,” protested the culprit. He was dismissed by a nod and hurried out, muttering something which certainly was not “t'anks.”

A persistent jingle of the telephone claimed the “Lady's” immediate attention.

“How do you know there is work in Florida for these people?” she demanded. “The Governor said so? Well, don't take the Governor's word for it, but find out what the work is and how much there is of it and where before you send a single man down.” The telephone was replaced and a patient assistant who stood at her elbow presented a paper.

“How about the school in the lumber camp?”

“There are sixty children,” reported the assistant.

“Sixty children and one teacher! They must have another at once and more room.”

The visitor who had been permitted to enter listened in bewilderment almost equal to that of the Italians. A temple of justice was this small room, where the defrauded were helped to regain their lost possessions, where the defrauder received his reprimand and possibly was sent to punishment; an employment bureau where jobs were secured, investigated and guaranteed; 170166a department of education where teachers were decided upon and classrooms determined. And all this varied and complicated business was presided over by a “Lady.”

The sign on the front door read New York State Department of Labour Bureau of Industries and Immigration and on the inner door Frances A. Kellor, Chief Investigator.

Four years ago there was no Bureau of Industries and Immigration. The ticket seller held his seven dollars and a half and refused to surrender either ticket or money. The “banker” advertised his house as a safe depository for funds. Companies of men went to Florida or to other places upon rumours of work that was not, and children in camps sat in crowded classrooms or did not sit in classrooms at all. Yet it was no one's business to see that these offences were corrected. But there was Miss Kellor. For many years she has been working in behalf of the immigrant, laying the foundation which makes her a fit guardian for Uncle Sam's new children.

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When she was but a university student she began a study of Southern prisons and printed a report upon her investigations. It was a dismal topic for a very much alive young woman; but Miss Kellor found it abounding in interest. The condition of the people in the prisons led her to believe that there was something wrong with the labour situation, and soon after her graduation she began to study the problem of employment. The College Settlement of New York City gave her a fellowship, and under the auspices of the Woman's Municipal League she began an investigation of employment agencies. Dressed as an employee she visited several employment offices and endeavoured to become friendly with the girls who sat about the rooms waiting for positions. At first she was unsuccessful as her difference in training was obvious, but she soon learned to talk in up-to-date slang about supposed mistresses and her acquaintance flourished.

The flippant greeting of the office manager, “Well, sis, out of a job?” which at first had sorely tried her dignity, became a matter of course. When she looked too respectable to be a “girl” in some of the cheaper offices, she became a mistress. Frequently she did not know which she would impersonate until the office door closed behind her.

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The main object of the majority of offices seemed to be to get as much money out of both employer and employee as was possible. To this end girls who needed work were forced to register and to pay in advance for any position obtained. In one office the men managers guarded the door and actually prevented any girl who had not paid her fee from departing. If she came in merely to inquire terms she paid for getting out. The lodging houses conducted in connection with the offices furnished further means of extracting money. And there were graver evils. Sometimes these lodging houses and the offices were located in houses of illrepute and the girls stopping over night subjected to the advances and even to the threats of the proprietors.

American girls fared badly enough under this system; but foreign girls were infinitely worse off. Not understanding the language they frequently accepted proposals made to them, not understanding their nature, and then were warned that they had chosen them “of their own free will.” Frequently they were sent to work in disorderly houses with no idea of the character of the houses to which they were going. Many offices furnished girls for such houses upon the payment of an extra fee. Girls were sent to men's clubs and to the homes of 173169bachelors and widowers, without any investigation as to the nature of such homes. Sending a foreign girl ignorant of the language and uncertain as to where to turn for help to such places was practically to send her to slavery. There was no way out.

When the investigation was over Miss Kellor compiled the results of her own investigations with those of eight other investigators and published them in book form. The book was entitled “Out of Work.” It was the first investigation of its kind that was general enough and systematic enough to be worth anything to the general public. It proved conclusively that girls, especially foreign girls, were made a part of a deliberate system of exploitation, and this not in single cases but in hundreds. “Out of Work” had a profound effect upon people in New York and other large cities where similar abuses might be supposed to exist. Individuals and societies set to work at once to work for some system of licensing boarding and lodging houses, as well as employment offices, that would put a stop to the traffic in immigrant girls.

Associations in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania formed an Inter-Municipal Research Committee with which Miss Kellor worked for four years, planning and superintending investigations in the cities named and 174170endeavouring to standardise similar investigations throughout the country. As the investigations showed plainly the need for legislation, the Committee planned and worked for laws that would remedy conditions. When there was need Miss Kellor plunged into a political campaign to help elect some candidate who would assist in getting the laws through. Standing in an automobile, she conducted street meetings in behalf of the man who was to help girls out of employment. The result of her efforts in New York City was the improved law of 1906 in relation to employment agencies. The law provided for inspectors to see that it was enforced, and although it has not completely eradicated the evils that existed, it has mitigated them. Its enforcement through the visits of inspectors has considerably reduced the number on undesirable agencies by revoking their licenses, and although a number of agencies which are unlicensed practise secretly, they are unable to advertise and attract girls as they did formerly.

After the Probation Commission to which Governor Higgins appointed Miss Kellor a member had finished its work and had been succeeded by a permanent commission, Governor Hughes made her a member of the Commission on Immigration. The members of the 175171Commission made Miss Kellor their Secretary. The Commission was appointed in 1908, and their report was transmitted to the legislature in 1909. It contained a recommendation for the Bureau of Industries and Immigration, of which Miss Kellor became the head.

New York is the gateway through which three-fourths of the immigrants reach this country. In 1910 five hundred and eighty thousand five hundred and seventeen persons were landed at Ellis Island, accepted by the authorities and deposited by the Government tug at the landing at Battery Place. Between Battery Place and the surface, elevated and subway lines there is a distance of several rods. Hardly have the men and women shouldered their bundles, gazing in bewilderment at the strange city, when from Battery Place and the surrounding streets there swoop down upon them, like a flock of hawks, hotel runners, cabbies and confidence men. They seize the immigrant's baggage, talk volubly to him, guarantee to take him to his destination or a good hotel, to sell him an elevated ticket, to do anything that will secure a dollar's profit. The bewildered immigrant succumbs. He listens to the man who promises so kindly to help him and cheerfully pays a dollar or two, or even five, for a five-cent elevated or subway ticket.

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As soon as the Bureau of Industries and Immigration was established Miss Kellor began an attempt to stop such fleecing. With the aid of interpreters she provided for the Italian, Polish, German, Yiddish, French and Hungarian press an announcement of the work of the Bureau. The American papers published in these language gladly printed the notices. Then she sent a similar notice to a number of foreign papers intended to reach the people before they embarked. This notice was printed and re-printed in fifty-seven different dialects. The direct result was that the Bureau was besieged with applicants who had in one way or another been exploited.

The men and women who brought their grievances to her proved the need of some court of appeal. Not only the incoming but the outgoing immigrant was represented. Having saved a little money, the immigrant desires to return to bring his family, to visit or to stay at home. In the town in which he works he purchases a ticket and pays for hotel accommodations to a man who solicits his patronage, a “runner.” He is given a button to identify him in New York. On the train is a runner for another hotel. He contrives that the immigrant shall lose the button and carries him off to his own hotel. The first hotel refuses to refund the 177173money paid for accommodations. In a hundred different ways he is bled of dollar after dollar. Sometimes he never finds it out.

For this transportation situation, Miss Kellor found remedies. Upon her findings she induced one railway line running out of New York to completely reorganise its system of distribution of immigrants. A number of transfer companies have stopped their agents from making overcharges upon baggage. A set of regulations for runners from emigrant hotels has been adopted. Under these regulations runners from hotels doing a legitimate business are admitted to the docks where the immigrants land. Upon proof of any violation of the regulations the passes for runners are revoked. The Board of Health has visited fifty-four lodging houses and has drawn up a new set of regulations for these houses as a result.

The immigrant who begins to work begins to save money, usually to bring his family over to him. This money he deposits in a bank. When he sends money abroad it is usually through this same bank, for he does not understand enough English to fill out the complicated blank necessary to obtain a mail order. For the same reason he seeks a bank conducted by someone who speaks his language. The foreign papers are full of advertisements of private banks 178174whose sole business is this with immigrants. In many cases these banks have no legal right to exist. An individual starts a “bank” without pass books or receipts, accepts money and disappears.

Miss Kellor made it a part of her office work to examine these advertisements in foreign newspapers, to look up these “banks” and find out whether they were incorporated and bonded and to what extent they where liable to their depositors. Since her term as Chief Investigator many “banks” have gone out of existence.

To handle individual cases of abuse in transportation, banking or other things Miss Kellor established what she called a Bureau of Adjustment. The Bureau acted as a mediator to bring aggrieved parties together and to induce a settlement. It was of the utmost importance to the alien, since it relieved him of the necessity of going to law to recover his property. Because of his inability to pay, the immigrant cannot go to a good lawyer and readily falls into the hands of shysters, who promise to collect nothing unless successful.

Many of the incidents are so trivial that the time of the court is wasted, and no court has the time nor patience to unravel the story of the immigrant interwoven as it is with international 179175complication, feuds and personal hatred. But Miss Kellor had. With the utmost patience she unravelled the threads of this tangled skein and found the truth. She had to move quickly, for the alien is a transient and three-fourths of the frauds committed are made in the belief that he will not have time to prosecute. Fortunately Miss Kellor is a graduate of a law school and possesses the legal knowledge required to handle many of her cases. In her first year in office she received and adjusted thirty-nine complaints against banks, four against collection agencies, thirty against steamship companies, thirty-one against employment agencies, nine of accidents, one against a benefit society, four on child labour, three on contract labour, six on deportation, six on domestic relations, thirty-six against immigrant hotels, six against emigrant societies, four against lawyers, fifty-nine against notaries and two against labour camps. This indicates a busy year for the Bureau of Adjustment. But Miss Kellor has done more than adjust individual cases. Realising that to help one man at a time is a slow method of accomplishing anything in a situation that affects hundreds of thousands, she selected a group of fifty newspapers representing all nationalities, persuaded them to act with her and furnished them with the full facts regarding every case of exploitation or fraud 180176that was likely to be widespread. The papers printed the results of her cases and reported fraudulent concerns, hotels and institutions. As a result these places are finding it increasingly difficult to do business. The immigrant reads and is warned in time.

In a short time the Bureau of Adjustment became also a Bureau of Information. Immigrants who came for help brought friends who wished to know how to learn English; where to stop in other cities; how to find work; how to find lost relatives and friends; the wisest way to invest their earnings, with especial inquiries as to the worth of real estate, mining stock and government lands. The finding of work proved the most difficult of all these problems.

In New York State a large number of aliens are employed in quarries, on road work, in canneries, in public works, camps and in other industries where camp conditions prevail. Miss Kellor located three hundred and sixteen such industries. Many of these she investigated personally. She found one State camp whose largest building, twenty by fifty feet, was set upon the edge of a canal on swampy ground in the midst of mud so deep that she was forced to don rubber boots. This building contained fifty-two bunks in a double tier and had one small stove to heat it and to cook upon. Nearby 181177were shacks set upon the muddy ground, without floors and containing bunks for two or more men. These had no windows, having only holes covered with wooden boards. There was no bathtub. The muddy water of the canal was the only available wash water. Here men lived for months perhaps for years; and this camp was but one of many similar to it, some being even worse. The State contract provided carefully and specifically for the kind of material used in construction and for rigid inspection as to its quality. It did not mention the workmen. In canneries, quarries and lumber camps the situation is complicated by the presence of women and children. In canneries both mothers and fathers are employed, and the children wander about, neglected by their parents and the State alike. Men, women and children sleep, live and eat in one small shack. Overcrowding, filth and squalor, disease and immorality are the results.

It has been impossible in four short years to eradicate such a situation as this; but Miss Kellor has made great headway. In the first place she investigated forty-nine camps where there were children. Where there were no schools, or where school facilities were inadequate, she wrote to the State superintendents. She also obtained all the names of children admitted to the State and asked the superintendents 182178to help her to locate them. I some camps she found the managers very willing to assist her. Sometimes the camp agreed to provide a building if the State would supply teachers. Sometimes it provided vehicles to drive the children to the nearest school. The matter of adequate accommodations requires legislation; so she made a compilation of all laws affecting aliens. Many of the laws were obsolete, defective, forgotten or inapplicable to present conditions; but they showed plainly that new ones were necessary. She published these laws in a manual and sent copies to courts, lawyers, organisations and to the consuls who act in behalf of their countrymen.

She hoped to convince them, as she herself had been convinced, that without revision of laws, the work of an immigration bureau must be limited to assistance of individual cases, a never-ending task. So forcibly did this phase of the work impress her, that in 1913 she resigned from the New York State Bureau to assume the managing directorship of the Legislative Committee of the North American Civic League for Immigrants, a committee which is engaged in investigating the possibilities of governmental action in all matters pertaining to the transportation, employment, education, naturalisation and standard of living of the immigrant, 183179at the same time endeavouring to formulate a domestic immigration policy.

In 1913 Miss Kellor became a well-known figure in the daily press as the Chairman of the National Progressive Service of the newly formed Progressive Party. Always an active advocate of woman suffrage, she believed that the new political party offered opportunity for the securing of the ballot as well as the reforms for which she was working. The prominence into which this office brought her name has overshadowed her work on immigration questions. But it is not as a member of a political party, however worthy, that Miss Kellor has demonstrated her value. For years she has guarded the gateway to America, extending a helping hand to those who would adopt a new fatherland, endeavouring to see that the alien passing through bears with him untouched his material possessions, and more important still, those high ideals of justice and fair treatment which America means to him.

184

JULIA TUTWILER

185

JULIA TUTWILER

JULIA TUTWILER

“We painted her old horse green.” The young man who bore the imposing title of Assistant Secretary to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce settled back in his chair and smiled reminiscently.

“I went to school to her. Choctaw was the horse's name. She had picked him up somewhere and kept him, an old, forlorn, wornout specimen, and we painted him from head to hoof. Miss Julia felt awfully hurt about it, but she didn't get mad. The girls in the school were furious and they got at him with linseed oil and sweet oil until he must have been water-proofed for life. But see here,” said the young man, suddenly sitting up straight and speaking earnestly, “don't you get any idea that because we played tricks on her, Miss Julia didn't amount to much. Why, I have seen her go out into the wet grass and pick up a weed and bring it into chapel and hold us all spellbound for an hour talking about it. She was a wonderful teacher and she is a great big woman, the biggest the State has ever known.”

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From all over the State of Alabama comes the echo of that sentiment, ever growing stronger. From Mobile, from Montgomery, from Birmingham, from Livingston, Dotham, Greene Springs, Speigener, Tuscaloosa and a score of other town which have felt the direct influence of her personality comes the tribute—the biggest woman the State of Alabama has known. Men and women involuntarily raise their heads proudly when her name is mentioned and exclaim, “Miss Julia? You know Lyman Abbott said publicly that she is Alabama's first citizen.

No appreciation of Dr. Abbott's could have pleased her people more. With pride they point out her achievements and honours.

Through her the State of Alabama decided to give to its girls the benefits of a higher education. Through her the University of the State of Alabama opened its doors to women; through her industrial education for boys and girls began. Through her grew the first organised prohibition movement, and under her grew the State's most famous Normal college. From her pen came articles that brought Alabama nation-wide fame, and songs that have been given first place in the public schools and at all public gatherings. For twenty-five years she has worked steadily and persistently to better 188185the conditions for prisoners, succeeding in establishing the first juvenile reform school, in securing prison inspection, prison chaplains and some modification of the still existent prison contract system.

Julia Tutwiler is seventy-three years old and still working. Within the last two years articles by Miss Julia, urging prison reform and prison night schools, have appeared regularly in one of the Birmingham papers. Not long ago the ladies of the city of Montgomery were startled by an urgent appeal for quilt scraps presented to them through mail and press. Miss Julia was visiting the prisons and she found that the women wanted something to do. If she could collect enough quilt scraps she would start them all at patchwork. When the legislature of the State of Alabama was last in session there was no more active lobbyist than Miss Julia. For prison reform and child labour bills she interviewed and pleaded, her energy unflagging, her vitality apparently inexhaustible.

Visitors from other States looked with curiosity at the busy little white-haired woman “with the face of a saint,” clad in faded, black skirt, coat of obsolete fashion and a bonnet slipped backwards and sidewise. Evidently this shabby little woman was a person of influence, 189186for senator and officials stopped respectfully when she addressed them and listened attentively to her earnest words. They could give her all she wanted; but there was nothing but love and reverence in their hearts for their first citizen.

Miss Julia bears upon her shoulders not only the honours, accorded her but those given to a great family. There were eleven of the Tutwiler brothers and sisters, many of whom have added their part to family history; but in this one, the greater daughter of a great father, family gifts have been epitomised.

Dr. Henry Tutwiler is still lovingly referred to as one of the State's distinguished gentlemen. He was the first to take the degree of M.A. at the University of Virginia, the first professor of ancient languages at the University of Alabama, the founder and president of the famous high school for boys at Greene Springs, known as the “Rugby” of Alabama. A close friend of Thomas Jefferson and a classmate of Edgar Allan Poe, Dr. Tutwiler is remembered as one of the finest men of his generation.

Under his personal tutelage Miss Julia grew up. To broaden her outlook Dr. Tutwiler sent her for two years to a private schools in Philadelphia conducted by a Parisian family, where she mastered the French language. Vassar College 190187opened at this time, and Miss Julia, with the vision of her life-work already before her, decided to visit there to study the higher order of women's colleges. She stayed at Vassar a year and during the latter part of her visit was given charge of several French and German classes. When she returned to Alabama she taught at Greensboro and at her father's school at Greene Springs. But she was dissatisfied with her education. Alabama was conservative and upheld the traditions of the South with regard to the education of women. There was no place for her to study in her own State, so she went to Lexington, Virginia, where at the Washington and Lee University she studied Greek and Latin and received a teacher's certificate in those branches. Still unsatisfied she went abroad and settled three years in a German family where she both studied and taught, availing herself of every opportunity to study Germany's progressive methods in education and storing up in her active mind suggestions which she could carry back to her beloved State. During this time she visited the industrial schools, the prisons and reform schools, and managed to pass two rigid German examinations, receiving after each a diploma from the Prussian Board of Education. When she returned she taught five years in the Tuscaloosa 191188Female Academy, going abroad during one scholastic year to study schools in Paris. She was a young and comparatively inexperienced teacher at that time, but she soon became one of the most popular at the Academy.

“She was one of the most brilliant women I ever met,” testified one of her pupils at the Academy. “She never was pretty, but she had a low, sweet voice and a radiant smile. She never saw a fault if she could help it, and if she did see it no one ever knew she saw it. And she was always doing the most beautiful things for someone. I remember when one of the professors, a poor young fellow, lost a child. Miss Julia went quietly to every one of the fifty boarders at school and asked for a contribution of fifty cents to be used for a little tombstone, for the father could not buy one. Of course we all gave the money, much to the happiness of the parents; but no one else save Miss Julia would have thought about it.”

In the fall of 1881 Miss Julia was made co-principal with Dr. Carlos G. Smith of the Livingston Female Academy. The institution was a private one when she entered it; but one year later the State made an appropriation of two thousand dollars for tuition and five hundred dollars for appliances to be used in adding to the academy a training school for teachers.

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“This,” says Miss Julia, “was the first and only gift which the women of the State had up to that time received from State or Federal treasury.”

A few years later the name of the Academy was changed to that of the Alabama Normal College and Miss Julia was made the first president. Then she began the work that laid the foundation for her State-wide fame. The new Normal School was planned by her carefully, lovingly, the course of study being based upon all that she learned in America, in Germany, in France. Neglecting none of the academic studies, she managed to introduce something of industrial education, of art and of science, although these things were regarded as innovations, perhaps dangerous for female minds. She mothered her girls as she taught them, studying them individually, gauging accurately their gifts and inclinations. Her own salary was five hundred dollars; but she had some personal fortune, and this was spent generously in financing the student years of girls whose parents were unable to keep them at the school longer. No one will ever be able to measure Miss Julia's efforts in behalf of her girls as individuals. For one of her protégées who was possessed of a fine voice, Miss Julia found a foster father and mother in New York City. 193190They took the girl abroad and educated her. To-day she is a grand opera singer. Another girl who displayed considerable artistic ability found herself enabled to go to Paris and Rome. Since she has returned she has made a reputation for herself in America.

When Miss Julia took the Livingston School it was a small academy; but erelong it became the most popular school in the State, and Miss Julia's growing fame drew to it ever-increasing numbers of students. The State enlarged its appropriation to seven thousand dollars, to ten thousand, to fifteen thousand, and still it was insufficient. Miss Julia proved herself not only a good and great teacher, but a thoroughly alert business woman. When the appropriation was but two thousand dollars she took hold of the boarding department, ran it so it paid a profit sufficient to furnish the salaries of several extra teachers and filled up the remaining gap in the faculty by doing the work of three herself.

Not content with making the school the first in the State, she turned her attention to the town. When she came to Livingston she found a village of some four hundred white people. In this small town were three large and flourishing saloons, supported not by the white residents but by the negroes in the country around. 194191Livingston is on the edge of the Black Belt in a black country where there are six thousand negroes. Every Saturday the little town was filled with drunken, roistering negroes who spent for whisky the money that should have clothed and fed their children. Miss Julia was moved by a double purpose. Decidedly this town was no place for her girls; nor was it right that these black people should waste their earnings. The saloons were the cause of the trouble; the saloons must go. She organised among her students a campaign for prohibition and brought it to the white citizens. It was hotly contested by some of the town's leading men; but she was at last successful and the town of Livingston and its near neighbour, Sumter, were freed from saloons twenty-five years before the prohibition movement became a power in the State.

Livingston grew as the school grew. Miss Julia grew bolder in making innovations. One year she talked seriously to her girls about the advisability of giving up their expensive graduation gowns and taking the money for a trip through surrounding States. The girls listened with respect but with considerable amusement. It was well known that dress was the last consideration with Miss Julia. Her pupils tell a story of one morning when she conducted chapel 195192exercises with her dress skirt on wrong side out. The school had become co-educational at that time, and try as they might, ripples of merriment broke from the assembled students. Much disturbed at the unusual outbreak, Miss Julia stepped forward to inquire the cause; but one of her teachers intervened. Then, aghast at her thoughtlessness, she retired, rearranged the skirt and returned to her subdued but still amused pupils. The girls decided to try the trip and to let the dresses go, and this was the beginning of a series of trips on which Miss Julia “carried” her pupils. Her knowledge and her genius for imparting it made her a rare guide; but she sorely tried her young charges by her indifference to dress. For one trip she had a new waist and skirt especially made. When the party arrived at Chattanooga some function was to be attended and the girls decided that Miss Julia must wear her new frock. To their dismay they found the carefully packed waist but no skirt. They telegraphed to Livingston to have the skirt sent on and arrived at their next stop only to find that the waist, laid away by Miss Julia, had been left in the dresser of their hotel in Chattanooga. The party was on its return journey when the parts were finally brought together.

Before she had accepted the school at Livingston 196193Miss Julia's writings had made an impression on the educational world. She was the first woman in Alabama ever requested to write a paper for a State educational convention. she selected for her subject. “Trade Schools for Women.” The paper described the schools of that kind which she had examined in Paris and urged the opening of similar schools in Alabama. It was regarded as a startling and radical demand, and the paper itself is now filed among the “pioneer papers” of Dr. J.L.M. Curry, as the first paper written in the United States which advocated a school of this character.

In 1878 Miss Julia was selected by the National Journal of Education to report the educational features of the Paris Exposition. Her prose writings as well as her poems and songs found a ready market, and she was a contributor to various papers and magazines, among them St. Nicholas, Appleton's Weekly, The Churchman, The San Francisco Post and The London Christian World. One of her songs, entitled “Alabama,” so appealed to the Women's Christian Association of the State that they decided to adopt it as their State song, and it was afterwards formally accepted by the government as the song of the State. Alabama's State patriotism is strong and every school child of 197194ten knows and sings Miss Julia's “Alabama.” In her songs as in her other work she laboured for a cause. “The Star Spangled Banner of Peace,” “Dixie Now” and the “Southern Yankee Doodle” were Miss Julia's contribution to the movement to awaken national patriotism and overcome sectional feeling. These too are school songs in the South and their popularity indicates that they must in some measure have accomplished their object.

Honours which came to Miss Julia were accepted as a State tribute by the citizens of Alabama. She was invited to attend three world congresses. In 1893 she was a member of the Congress of Representative Women of the World at Chicago and was appointed to read an article in the Assembly Hall of the Woman's Building. She was made one of the Judges of Liberal Arts at the World's Fair. She was made Secretary for the State in the International Congress of Charities and Corrections and one of the Vice-Presidents of the International Congress of Education. Perhaps the most highly prized honour of all was that awarded by her own Governor. He selected her as the citizen of most worth to represent Alabama at the casting of the new Liberty Bell.

In the meanwhile the progress of the school 198195at Livingston was marked. But Miss Julia, once radiantly happy over this gift of greater education to her girls, began to regret that they could go no farther. Many of the young women could not afford to leave the State for university training and yet were obviously fitted to go on. For years she worked to get the University of Alabama to open its doors to her graduates but without avail. Then slowly, reluctantly, those doors did open. Miss Julia had by sheer persistence wearied the authorities until they gave her permission to use a vacant cottage on the University grounds. The experiment was regarded as hazardous by the trustees, faculty and the people at large. It is safe to say that no ten young women who ever matriculated for a college course were as carefully coached on conduct as well as on subjects as the ten young women first sent to the University of Alabama by Miss Julia. At the end of the year the trustees, the faculty and the people at large saw a triumphant Miss Julia and the downfall of their doubts. Her ten girls had won sixty-six per cent, of all the honours given against the competition of several hundred young men. Their conduct was pronounced irreproachable by the most conservative of the professors, and they had done all the work of their cottage including their own cooking. In June, 1900, Miss Rose Lewthorn, 199196one of Miss Julia's girls, received the first State degree ever conferred upon a woman. She also received the honour given to the Senior Class. Of six honour given that year, four were won by young women from the Alabama Normal College. In 1901 two graduates of the University won a place on the Roll of Honour. One was Miss Julia's pupil. The year following the first degree of M.A. ever conferred by the State upon a woman was given to Miss Lila MacMahon, who was prepared for the University at Miss Julia's Normal School. The cause of higher education for women in Alabama was won, and the fame of the teaching that produced such scholars filled the State. The trustees of the University determined to do the thing well while they were about it, and the building which shelters the women students is known as the “Julia S. Tutwiler Annex.”

Even with the Normal College and the State University opening their doors to women, Miss Julia did not feel that the opportunities for education for girls in Alabama were sufficient. Her “pioneer paper” on industrial education had been followed by many others. Many girls would never be students at Normal Colleges or Universities who were nevertheless bright, capable young women and able to progress in a different 200197way. From lecture platform and in her writings she preached the necessity of training for the girl who would early enter the home or the industrial world. At her own expense she sent circulars to individuals and clubs all over the State. She went to the legislature to test and improve the sentiment of that body. She succeeded in attracting the best women in Alabama to the project. As one noted club woman remarked, “We took hold of it with a whoop.”

As a result there was passed by the Legislature of 1893 a bill which provided for the Alabama Girls’ Industrial School. The name was afterwards changed to the Alabama Girls’ Technical Institute, and the school, founded in 1896, is a State institution. Miss Julia was offered the presidency, but she declined. Four hundred and fifty girls are now at Montevallo. Everything that an up-to-date school of the most expensive type can boast is theirs, the free gift of the State. There is a campus of thirty acres, with basket-ball, tennis and croquet grounds. There are fine buildings, a chapel, a dormitory, a library, laboratories, a gymnasium, an infirmary, a kitchen, a laundry, a power house and a dairy. There are a farm and a truck garden. The only cost to the young women who attend the Institute is for board and incidentals, and 201198the expense is so small that the school is meeting the need which Miss Julia felt, that of providing a sensible education for the girl who is not an academic scholar. There is academic instruction of the best kind; but in addition the girls learn the science of home-making and the relative value and prices of foods. They study fuels and combustion, marketing, sewing, millinery, gardening, farming, dairying, tomato canning and strawberry culture. For the girl who wants business training there are courses in telegraphy, bookkeeping, shorthand and typewriting. For the girl of gifts there are music, the fine arts, and manual training. Few States have equalled this remarkable institution of which Alabama may justly be proud. The little woman who wrote the “Pioneer Paper” and who worked so hard to secure industrial education has not been forgotten. Among the students there has been organised a “Julia S. Tutwiler Club,” which, emulating its inspirer, provides a scholarship yearly for some girl trying to better her condition.

“She never stopped to consider herself,” said one of her former pupils. “She was for the boy and girl, black and white, good and bad.”

Because the girl who was struggling onward needed help Miss Julia gave it; but through all 202199the years in which she built up the great educational institutions for women she worked as well for the girl who failed. Boys had not seemed to need her much in the onward struggle, but here among the failures they needed her sorely. Away back in the days when she taught in the Female Academy at Tuscaloosa she began her work with prisoners. There were no reform schools for wayward children in those days, and the most of the prisoners were really boys and girls about the age of those in her classes at the Academy. Miss Julia had visited the prisons in Germany and intended to investigate those of her own State. But she was unable to resist the immediate appeal of the unfortunates with whom she came in contact. On Sundays she gathered as many of her fellow-teachers as she could and went to visit the convicts, her Bible under her arm, reading, instructing, consoling, aiding. She persuaded the Bible houses to give her copies of the New Testament and finally secured one for every cell she visited. Before school and after, whenever her happier work could spare her, she was at the prisons.

It was common thing for a girl student to meet her on the street hurrying to school and inquire severely,

“Miss Julia, have you had any breakfast?” 203200To which frequently Miss Julia was forced to make embarrassed and apologetic response,

“Law, honey, I've been so busy I've just forgotten all about it.”

There was a county jail at Livingston, and when Miss Julia went there her work went on. On Sunday she would see her flock safely to church and then steal out to visit and conduct services in the jail itself. When she became convinced that to really help she must have State-wide knowledge of conditions to secure remedial legislation she left her flourishing college for week-ends and visited jails and prisons throughout the State.

She persuaded the railroads that her investigations were worth while and secured a pass which permitted her to board any train in the State at any place. As Livingston is not on a main line, Miss Julia frequently left the Normal College on Friday afternoon, walked down three miles of railroad track to the main line crossing and then patiently waited for the first main-line train which slowed up. No train stopped there; but a switch made slow running necessary, and as the engineer slowed down Miss Julia clutched the hand rail of the rear car and swung herself aboard, terrifying the conductors and brakemen, who expected her to be 204201killed and remonstrated vainly with her concerning her recklessness. For years she adopted this as her programme, while the trainmen were in despair, but unhurt and smiling she went on to the convict prisons and camps near Birmingham, where thousands of the Alabama prisoners are sent to work in the mines.

What she found there was enough to dishearten the bravest. The majority of Alabama prisoners were then and are still hired out by the State to private employers. There is no discrimination made as to the nature of the crime. Red-handed murderers and professional burglars are rented out side by side with youths who in a spirit of fun stole a ride on a freight car. Together they work in mines where life is in constant danger. Miss Julia tells a pitiful story of two boys who were travelling with a small show and who were accidentally left behind when the company left Birmingham. The boys consulted and decided that they would “beat” their way. They boarded a freight train and were arrested at a town named Jaspar. When taken before the Justice they begged to be allowed to remain in jail until they could communicate with their friends. The Justice refused and sent them, in company with other offenders, to the Banner Mine. It was 205202at noon of that very day that the explosion occurred which is national history, and the two lads were among those literally blown to pieces.

As a source of income the State prizes convict labour, and the man who happens to be president of the convict commission is rated not by the number of men who are returned to society as better citizens for their discipline but by the number of dollars turned into the State treasury.

There is so much left to be desired for Alabama that it is difficult to realise that conditions are better than in the days when Miss Julia began her work. But there are certain specific improvements that can be traced to her efforts. Among these is the Boys’ Reformatory at Eastlake, Birmingham, known as the Alabama Industrial School. Miss Julia was the first to go to the Governor and legislature with the plans for such an institution and when she failed there to take her hopes to the State Federation of Women's Clubs. The women listened and were convinced. They founded the school with their own money, and although the State is now contributing to its support, they still help to sustain and to manage it.

For twenty-five years Miss Julia worked as Superintendent of the Prison and Jail Department 206203of the Alabama Women's Christian Temperance Union. Her reports to the Union show the concrete results of her many years of labour, results which the world is unlikely to see. They include a chaplain secured for one prison, a hospital established in another, a convict camp made sanitary and a prison inspection law passed. For years Miss Julia worked to establish night schools for the convicts and at last she succeeded. The legislature passed a bill providing for a number of night schools and they were accordingly started. At once they proved popular with the prisoners.

For eight or ten years the night school work kept on. At the State farm at Speigener, at the Pratt mines, at Coalburg and at various other places night schools flourished. Then suddenly they ceased. An official in power omitted to specify night schools in his agreement with the contractors for prison labour. All the years of labour on Miss Julia's part seemed suddenly futile. Nevertheless she began again. As with her girls, the effort in behalf of all never lessened her interest in an individual, and her personal ministrations among the prisoners gained for her at the instance of Bishop Fitzgerald the sobriquet “The Angel of the Stockade.” When she retired from Normal College the State decided to make her President Emeritus and to 207204continue the salary which she had been receiving.

“Well,” said Miss Julia, “as long as the State pays me a salary I must earn it.” So she planned a year of work for the prisoners and faithfully went from city to city, visiting the prisons, speaking to clubs and associations and endeavouring in every way to better conditions. After a year the State discontinued the salary despite an indignant popular protest; but the work went on. Miss Julia was taken ill, but she wrote constantly for the papers and magazines, and the women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, moved by new admiration for her magnanimity, founded a Julia S. Tutwiler Scholarship at the State University.

There are many influences now working in behalf of Alabama prisoners. There is a new State prison inspector who is doing good work. There are associations which are endeavouring to put an end to the contract system, and one great company employing five hundred convicts has voluntarily refused to contract for prison labour. The twenty-five years of patient, quiet work are somewhat obscured by these more recent dramatic events; but Miss Julia rejoices. Not for glory nor for honours has she toiled, although both are hers, but for the great end, with no thought of self. In the words of her own 208205State song is her life best typified, except that in all eyes save hers the little given—is much.

Little, little can I give thee, Alabama, Mother mine, But that little—hand, brain, spirit, All I have and am are thine. Take, oh, take the gift and giver, Take and serve thyself with me; Alabama, Alabama, I will e'er be true to thee,”

209

LUCRETIA L. BLANKENBURG

210

Moffett Studio LUCRETIA L. BLANKENBURG

LUCRETIA L. BLANKENBURG

The Mayor of Philadelphia is Rudolph Blankenburg. Lucretia Blankenburg is his wife. Therefore Philadelphia, the “boss-ridden,” the “corrupt and contented,” the “slothful”; Philadelphia, the “home of unscrupulous politicians,” the “delight of the grafter,” holds her head proudly, repudiates all her former titles and invites America to witness her reformation.

Philadelphia has been paying Rudolph Blankenburg for his services a little less than a year. It has been receiving the services of both the Blankenburgs for nearly forty. Slowly, painstakingly and unfalteringly this man and woman have worked half a lifetime for civic righteousness, unrecognised, unrewarded, unknown to the great body of citizens. Then suddenly the misgoverned people wearied of their rulers, wearied of the black morass of political defilement, of shameful epithets thrown at them by sister cities and looked for a leader to better things. They found him at his self-appointed task, gave him recognition and the highest office in their 212210power, and then sat back amazed to find that instead of one they had secured two public servants, both of whom approached their work with a deep sense of its obligation, both of whom entered with eagerness upon the task before them, both of whom were well fitted to straighten out the difficulties besetting the hitherto “worst governed city in America.”

When Mr. Blankenburg was elected, his wife said:

“If he needs my help he shall have it. I hope to aid him much in the four years that are ahead. It is a great and serious task that is before us, and one that will necessitate many hours of thought and labour.”

In the months that have passed since the Mayor entered upon his duties she has made her word good. She has helped at every turn, so efficiently that certain wiseacres smile when her name is mentioned and say knowingly:

“Mrs. Blankenburg? Oh, yes, of course she is the real Mayor of Philadelphia.”

The wiseacres are wrong. Rudolph Blankenburg is a man quite capable of handling a man's job, even the difficult task of giving a graftridden city an honest, progressive business administration. The Mayor of Philadelphia is the man whom the people elected, but he himself 213211will admit that the city has also acquired a Mayoress, a Mayor's right hand, a person whose companionship he values even on official journeys, whose counsel he respects, whose civic work is as worthy of commendation as his own.

“Usually,” said Mrs. Blankenburg, “we divide the speechmaking. Mr. Blankenburg is always being called upon for conventions, public school openings, bazaars and the like. Sometimes he speaks and sometimes I do. One Blankenburg is enough for one evening. Only once have we spoken from the same platform.”

In the same way they have been working for forty years, “dividing” the civic duties or occasionally joining forces to batter down some persistent obstacle in their path or to obtain some much-desired end.

When Mrs. Blankenburg was chairman of the Committee on Education of the New Century Club she was working hard to get kindergartens into the public school system. To do this she wanted to have Miss Anna Hallowell elected a member of the Board of Education. Miss Hallowell was president of an association organised to foster kindergartens, knew all about kindergartens and might be counted on to convert the Board. But opposing Miss Hallowell as a 214212candidate for the position was a man. Men were preferred to women on the Board of Education, and the man stood a good chance of winning the election. Mr. Blankenburg knew the man, and having himself first been converted to the idea of kindergartens, so used his persuasive powers upon his friend that the man withdrew his candidacy. Miss Hallowell was elected, and kindergartens became a part of the public school system.

It is impossible to write of one of the Blankenburgs without constantly referring to the other. When lives are united not only by mutual affection, but also by mutual work and mutual interests, they are too closely interwoven to permit detailed individual analysis. As the novelists say, “there is a strong thread of romance running through their lives,” a real romance of a real attraction. They are no longer young; the Mayor will be seventy his next birthday, and his wife is a few years younger. But the romance lives.

Mrs. Blankenburg's maiden name was Lucretia Longshore. That in itself involves a story, for she was named for Lucretia Mott, one of the pioneer woman suffragists, and one of the band of Friends to whom Philadelphia owes its sobriquet, “the Quaker City.” Lucretia Mott was her mother's intimate friend. 215213The mother herself was one of those brave women who dared public opinion in behalf of her convictions. While conservative Philadelphia shook its head in horrified disapproval, Dr. Hannah E. Longshore hung out her sign—the first woman physician in that city. According to the social custom of the day, she was snubbed, ostracised, openly laughed at and subjected to all the persecutions great and petty which come to pioneers in a new field to thought. Her daughter, naturally, grew up a suffragist. When she was a young girl, a German youth of twenty-two came to the city with letters of introduction to her family. At once he became a welcome visitor. When he had made a start in the new country he and Lucretia Longshore were married. Three daughters were born to the young couple; but none lived to maturity. After the grief following their death had softened, the Blankenburgs endeavoured to fill the vacant place. They adopted a daughter.

It was the time of the Centennial Exposition that the Blankenburgs began their public work. The exposition had called for assistance from all public-spirited citizens and there seemed much to be done when it ended. The Blankenburg business of manufacturing bedquilts, spreads and yarn was doing splendidly, and its head, unlike the average money-maker, 216214thought he could discern equally important duties elsewhere. Mrs. Blackenburg began by joining a woman's club.

A woman who belonged to a club was a somewhat remarkable person in those days. Women's clubs were few and the majority of those in existence were given over to literary and musical events and to the study of Shakespeare and Browning. A committee of the New Century Club, of which Mrs. Blackensburg was a member, interested themselves in starting night classes in instruction for working women, did not think of regarding their work as a civic movement.

Mrs. Blackenburg looked surprised when questioned about it.

“Why, I suppose that was civic work,” she said, “but I never thought of it in that way. Of course everybody copied from us. The Y. W. C. A., and afterwards the public schools and various church organizations, took up the same work, following our example and urged by us as individuals, but we never called the work ‘civic’ in the beginning.”

The beginning consisted of three or four classes held in the building of the New Century Club. Mrs. Blackenburg had studied bookkeeping and she became the teacher in that department. She also assisted in planning the cooking 217215class of which she is justly proud. Mrs. Rorer is the star pupil.

One of Mrs. Blackenburg's pupils in the bookkeeping class was a little woman who kept a store and sold cigars and shoes. She did not do well at the bookkeeping; in fact she failed so utterly that Mrs. Blackenburg asked her gently if she did not think she had better give the class up.

“I know I shall never learn,” said the woman, “but can't I just come and sit in the class? It is my only opportunity to get into society.”

The pathetic little speech set Mrs. Blackenburg thinking. If this woman's chances for social intercourse were so limited, there must be hundreds of others similarly situated and something ought to be done.

She talked over the problem with a co-worker, Mrs. Eliza S. Turner, and Mrs. Turner brought the matter before the other Club members. After much discussion there was formed as an adjunct to the New Century Club of New Century Guild, an organization to be composed of working women, to be fostered and helped by the parent association until it could stand alone.

To Mrs. Blackenburg fell the difficult task of trying to finance the new organization. The 218216members bought two houses on Arch Street, a decaying residence section. Mrs. Blankenburg tried to rent one at a sufficient profit to enable the club to carry the other.

“And I had a perfectly awful time doing it,” she admitted. “I never knew how dreadful tenants could be.”

In course of time the decayed residence district became a flourishing business section. The houses were sold at a profit, and just at this time an endowment of twenty thousand dollars came to the guild. To-day the New Century Guild, with twelve hundred members, a charming club-house which it owns, a library, rest rooms, an assembly hall and a restaurant for noonday lunches, is one of the most important clubs in the city and almost independent of its founders.

“Of course we still help the new things along,” said Mrs. Blankenburg. “For instance, I have just been down to the opening of the new dining-room and I do anything I can. But the Guild is really independent and a wonderfully successful organisation.”

A great deal of Mrs. Blankenburg's work has been directly in behalf of women. One of her first efforts was to get a representation of women on the Board of Education. She succeeded in having Miss Anna Hallowell elected, 219217and later Mrs. Mary Mumford, and Philadelphia schools benefited by the work of these two educational experts. In 1895 a committee of the Pennsylvania Woman's Suffrage Association, of which Mrs. Blankenburg was President, secured a law which provided that a married woman who contributed to the support of her children should have an equal right to the custody and care of the minor children. Before this time the enlightened State of Pennsylvania gave this right to the mother only when the father had been proved a drunkard or worthless or had failed to provide for his family. For years she has been working for the passage of a law which will protect a childless widow equally with a childless widower. As the law now stands a childless widow inherits one-half the personal estate and the use of one-half the real estate of her deceased husband, while the childless widower gets all the personal and the use of all the real estate.

Addressing members of a legislature is usually an event in the life of a woman who has had that honour. To Mrs. Blankenburg it is part of the year's work.

“I have addressed legislatures—well, I do not know how many times. I have held four different meetings in the hall of the House in behalf of laws for women, and I have spoken 220218often in both House and Senate. I have spoken at Congress, too, when we had hearings on bills. I always speak from the standpoint of the housekeeper; I have no other. I am not a college woman. Few colleges were open to women in my day; so mine is purely the home viewpoint.”

Mrs. Blankenburg was one of the committee of women who inaugurated the system of police matrons in Philadelphia. The committee was a voluntary one; it had no authority and received no compensation. It did have the entée to station houses and it equipped the first matron's department. Through its efforts four police matrons were appointed as an experiment. The four matrons were greatly assisted by the committee members. They visited the stations frequently, found clothing, homes and jobs for some of the unfortunate women and generally made the innovation so successful that the police matron became a part of the police system. There was much other miscellaneous civic work.

“You know I have seldom been a leader in things,” confided Mrs. Blankenburg, “but I am often on committees and work had helping to push things along.”

All Philadelphia knows that. I was a reporter on a Philadelphia newspaper in 1907 and 221219shortly after my entrance into the fourth estate, a fellow-reporter drew me aside.

“I'll give you a tip,” she said. “Whenever you are out of news, go up and spend an hour with Mrs. Blankenburg. She will always see you and she is always doing something for the good of the town, and if she hasn't any news of herself she knows somebody else who is doing something, too. I can always get a column of news there.”

As a member of the Woman's Health Protective Association, Mrs. Blankenburg ably assisted in “pushing along” movements to secure trolley fenders, vestibules on trolley cars and sand filtration of water.

In 1903 Mrs. Blankenburg opened an active campaign against the smoke nuisance. Philadelphia had city ordinances and State laws. But Philadelphia continued to be smoky and dirty. Mrs. Blankenburg organised a committee to try to persuade the offenders to stop. The committee did everything it could up to the point of the defective legislation. It persuaded and coaxed and forced, and Philadelphia began to be cleaner. In her own district Mrs. Blankenburg got up a petition, secured the signatures of several hundred householders and sent it to the offending firms. One firm immediately changed its fuel and put in smoke consumers; 222220a second reduced the number of smoke-stacks. In order to raise money to continue the campaign and to carry it to Harrisburg for better laws on the smoke nuisance, Mrs. Blankenburg sent out a printed notice asking for contributions. The notice did not bear her name; but the answer were sent to her as chairman of the committee. On opening one she read:

“I will contribute to your fund if you will agree to join me in a movement to suppress that pestiferous nuisance, Rudolph Blankenburg.” She declined the contribution, but she continued to work to abate the nuisance until her husband's term in office brought about an enforcement of the smoke laws.

Rudolph Blankenburg has become a “pestiferous nuisance” indeed to the politicians. While his wife worked steadily at her task, he was busily engaged at his. During the Russian famine he helped to collect the shipload of provisions which Philadelphia sent to the starving people. The Mayor of the city asked him to supervise the taking of the ship to its destination; but he refused unless he was allowed to pay his own expenses. This concession made, he followed the shipload over the frozen steppes to the very homes of the needy.

He helped to plan the Philadelphia Charity 223221Organisation. He was an active member of the German Citizen's Relief Committee at the time of the Johnstown floods. He worked for the refugees from the San Francisco earthquake. Whenever the city needed a man who could be counted upon to give both time and money to a needy cause, it appointed Rudolph Blankenburg and he accepted, always providing that he pay his own expenses. At home he studied the money-lenders. He opened offices in the Betz Building and sat there four or five hours daily, attending to the complaints of men and women who had been fleeced. In four years he relieved two thousand on hundred cases at his own expense. He was elected County Commissioner and he executed his duties, but sent his salary to the City Trust funds, providing that it be divided between certain city pension lists. He worked hard politically as a progressive in his party, traveling at his own expense and asking no recompense in money or in office. A politician who wanted to run things on a business basis, who cared not for dollars nor preference, who was stubbornly and persistently honest and incapable of compromise! No wonder he was found more “pestiferous” than the smoke nuisance.

Nor had Mrs. Blankenburg been politically idle. She is a member of the Good Citizens’ 224222Club. She was a member of the Woman's City Party during its lifetime and she worked hard in this connection. In her own district she is a member of the Tenth Ward Woman's City Improvement Society, and if the residents of the Tenth Ward are still in ignorance as to the vital facts concerning their ward and city it is not the fault of Mrs. Blankenburg. Very painstakingly and carefully she wrote a series of Civic Bulletins labelled: “Do You Know the Tenth Ward?” “City Housekeeping,” “City Fathers,” etc. These bulletins are little primers. They ask every conceivable question about the ward and the city—how many voters there are, how many schools, how many churches, what are the methods of city government, the power vested in the mayor and council. They are in the simplest English and delivered to every householder as a budget of valuable information.

When Mr. Blankenburg was nominated, the women of Philadelphia rallied at once to his support. For the first time in the history of the city, women formed active political committees which raised campaign funds, held meetings and conducted house to house canvasses in his behalf.

“When they did that,” said Mrs. Blankenburg, “I felt that I ought to step aside and keep 225223quiet. But of course they met with me often and I helped some.”

It was the queerest election campaign Philadelphia has ever known. In a ward meeting where Mr. Blankenburg's opponent was in the ascendency, a woman suddenly rose. She was poorly dressed, and the people assembled stared as she began to speak. It was a pitiful story of a hunted woman, hunted by one of those fiends in human form, the loan shark, until everything had gone and life itself seemed not worth the struggle. And then came help—help in the form of a man, just, wise and tender. He had lifted her out of her despondency, had helped her to her feet, had given her courage, had righted her wrong. He was Rudolph Blankenburg. With tears streaming down her worn cheeks, she besought them to vote for him, this man who without reward or profit had saved her and thousands like her. The hall was very silent as she finished, and the opposition let the speech remain unanswered.

One day a woman appeared at both the Men's and Women's Campaign Headquarters. Each time she took from her purse five hundred one-dollar bills.

“For Mr. Blankenburg's election,” she said, “and with every bill there goes a prayer.” She refused to give her name.

226224

Children in the schools formed Blankenburg Clubs, with the slogan, “For good government.” When election day came there seemed a slim chance of winning. Mrs. Blankenburg sat all evening in her favourite rocker, interested but not excited in the returns over the telephone. Her chief concern was lest her husband should come home alone.

He came at three o'clock and he had two thousand men with him. He stopped a moment to tell her the news, and then he drew her to the doorway while he made a speech.

“It was the women and children of this city who elected me,” he said.

Since then the life of the Blankenburgs has been busier than ever. The Mayor has had his job and has tackled it with energy and enthusiasm. Mrs. Blankenburg has been made a vice-president of the Patrons’ Section of the National Education Association and First Vice-President of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. In addition she has the cares incident to the administration.

At first she was deluged with letters asking for positions. When the people found that she had no positions to give, they began asking assistance. One man wanted her to see that the Mayor stopped the boys in his neighbourhood from playing ball on Sundays. Several asked 227225her assistance in selecting wives, and one asked for help in burying a dead cat. There are hundreds of these senseless letters, and then there are a great many requests for interviews and innumerable telephone calls.

“People all want to come and tell me their troubles,” she said: “and when I can I let them. Many are in earnest, and I can help. But it does take time.”

There are almost daily complaints about City Hall. One woman employee who wanted her room changed wrote about it and then confidently told her fellows it would be done, as she had written to Mrs. Blankenburg.

“Those things I send promptly to the City Hall departments,” said Mrs. Blankenburg in referring to the matter, “unless they are confidential, and then I pay no attention to them. I do not meddle at all in City Hall.”

Despite the years given to public service the Blankenburg business and the Blankenburg fortune have increased. But there has been little change in the home. The Quaker touch is plainly seen in its comfortable, unostentatious furnishings. Mrs. Blankenburg manages her own household affairs, plans her dinners and is quite capable of cooking them and making her own frocks. The household is not troubled by social ambitions.

228226

“I never gave a tea in my life,” declared Mrs. Blankenburg. “I really detest those stand-up-and-get-acquainted affairs. Of course it is worth while to meet somebody who has done something in the world. I love dinner parties where interesting people meet to discuss the really important things of life.”

“You never see the Mayor without her anywhere except in his office,” is a general and satisfied comment. Of course she is with him—because he wants her there. When I last called to see her, the Mayor came in very hot and tired.

“Thee knows I have to go out again tonight,” he reminded her. “I am to crown a queen. Thee had better come with me. Else the queen and I may elope.”

Mrs. Blankenburg smiled.

“There is a carnival in West Philadelphia,” she explained.

The Mayor went out but returned shortly. Some repair work was being done in the dining-room and parlours, and his wife had prepared a table for dinner in the little study where we sat. The Mayor sat down, apologised for the necessity of eating in my presence, and then returned to his point anxiously.

“Now will thee go with me to-night?” he queried.

229227

The thermometer stood at 92°. Mrs. Blankenburg had superintended workmen, arranged meals in a disrupted household, tried to help a young woman to sell some oil paintings, received me and given me the help I asked for, and doubtless done a score of things besides; but she looked up radiant.

“Why, of course I will go,” she answered, “if thee wants me.” She rose and sat down close by the little table. I went away with the picture fast in my memory.

Together they are fighting the good fight. The next years must bring great changes for Philadelphia with the Blankenburgs at the helm. Perhaps at the end the unconverted faction will admit the sincerity of the Blankenburg motto:

“It is better to serve the people than to exploit them.”

230

ANNA HOWARD SHAW

231

Photograph by Aime Dupont ANNA HOWARD SHAW

ANNA HOWARD SHAW

She wants to be a policeman, and she says that she thinks she has fairly earned the place. She has her own political platform, one which is strictly non-partisan. And if the eighty thousand women of whom she is the chosen leader should acquire the ballot, she may yet reach the summit of her ambition. Should she succeed, the force will have every reason to welcome to its number the Reverend Anna Howard Shaw.

Miss Shaw is a self-made woman. The sixty-odd years which have given her dignity and wisdom mark a history that abounds in romantic interest. And you may go back even farther than sixty years to find the spirit which has animated Miss Shaw manifested in her ancestors. Miss Shaw's grandmother was an Englishwoman, a Unitarian. She was required by law to pay tithes to the Church of England, and she would not. She sat in her doorway, defiantly knitting and denouncing the unjust law while her household goods were auctioned every year in the street.

Miss Shaw is also English born. She came 233232to America when four years old, the family settling in Massachusetts. Eight years later they joined the pioneers journeying westward and decided to stop in Michigan. There in the depth of the Michigan woods they built a log cabin and lined the walls of it, for warmth, with old copies of the New York Independent. There were no schools, no books and no papers in the settlement, but Miss Shaw's father was a scholar and Miss Shaw inherited his studious tendencies. She was always indifferent to housework and, whenever she could, stole away with a book or a paper or anything printed, to the woods to study.

There were wolves in the woods, as Anna well knew. Nevertheless she ran away at every opportunity. One day after such an escapade, her father spoke seriously to her. She had found an especially interesting book and had stayed away from morning until nightfall.

“A girl who will run away to the woods and stay all day to read,” said Mr. Shaw sternly, “is of no account. Your place is at home helping your mother. I suppose we shall never be able to do anything with you; you are the one black sheep of the whole family.”

The twelve-year old girl started up, deeply hurt.

“Some day you will take all that back,” she 234233declared, her eyes flashing. “I am going to study and study and some day I shall go to college, and when I am through I shall make money—lots of money. I shall be worth ten thousand dollars!” Then she stopped, suddenly afraid of her own words.

“I wonder if a woman ever was worth ten thousand dollars,” she thought guiltily. “Well, now I'll have to do it.”

Mr. Shaw, however, was unimpressed. He sent the ambitious student to bed supperless, and shook his head mournfully over his wicked little daughter.

At fifteen years of age she had learned enough to become a teacher. The salary was two dollars a week, payable at any time the community found convenient. At one time Anna decided that the struggle was useless, that she never would save enough to go to college and that she would forget her ambitions and become a tailoress. But she reconsidered the matter and kept on. At last she had saved eighteen dollars. It came very slowly, especially as the first year's salary was a whole year late. This was owing to the fact that the school-teachers could not be paid until the dog tax was collected! With that precious eighteen dollars she started for Albion College.

It was all she had. Her father and mother, 235234impressed by her desire for an education, had planned to send her to the University of Michigan, but just before the time for her to go, she decided that she ought to become a preacher. The presiding elder of a local church offered her an opportunity to talk from his pulpit. Her first sermon proved such a successful one that he invited her to preach in every pulpit in his circuit and the next year she was licensed as a local preacher by the regular district conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Her ambition to go to college became one to graduate from a school of theology, and this change in plan met with strong opposition on the part of her parents. When she refused to give up preaching her father and mother told her that they would do nothing whatever to assist her in her college course.

During the years at Albion she continued her preaching, although it added but little to her uncertain income,—Miss Shaw says that she never knew until church was out whether she would be paid with a bouquet of flowers or a greenback. Somehow or other she managed to continue her work until she was ready for Boston University.

The years at Albion had been hard enough, but those in Boston were still harder. Money did not go very far in Boston. Miss Shaw lectured 236235wherever she could induce people to pay her and preached as often as she could find a pulpit vacant. But she earned only enough money to keep her in an attic without fire. She studied in bed to keep warm and watched her breath make frosty clouds upon the air as she recited her lessons. Her shoes begun to go and she could not get new ones. Finally she actually began to suffer for the necessities of life.

One day she crept up the stairs of the University and found herself too weak to reach the recitation-room. She sat down upon the steps and rested her head against the wall. The Superintendent of the Missionary Society came by and exclaimed in wonder at her. Too weak to be proud, Miss Shaw told why she was sitting there.

“Too much work and too little food,” she said wearily.

“But why,” asked the superintendent, “do you work so hard?”

“One must live,” replied Miss Shaw. A day later the superintendent proposed that Miss Shaw abandon her irregular work, as she had a position to offer her.

“It will pay,” she said, “five dollars a week.” This was about the sum Miss Shaw had been ekeing out in various directions, and 237236delighted to obtain regular employment she readily accepted.

“But what must I do?” She asked.

“You are to promise not to speak in public or to do any extra work during the remainder of the college year,” said the superintendent. It was not difficult for Miss Shaw to promise to faithfully earn her five dollars, and pro-foundly grateful for the kindness that made it possible, she asked the name of her benefactor, but the superintendent refused to disclose it. And although the sum paid weekly was a “salary” Miss Shaw accepted it as a loan, and when better days came repaid it through the medium of the superintendent in order that it might help some other tired and discouraged student.

It was while she was a theological student at Boston University that she obtained her first pastorate; this was at the Methodist Church at Hingham, Massachusetts. Her second was at Dennis, Massachusetts, where she filled the Methodist and Congregational pulpits for six years. During her third year at the University she became the warm friend of Mrs. Persis Addy, a widow. Mrs. Addy persuaded Miss Shaw to leave her attic and come to her home, agreeing to permit her to preserve her independence by paying board. At the close of the course Mrs. Addy planned to take Miss Shaw 238237abroad, but died just before her graduation. When her will was read it was found that she had left the young student fifteen hundred dollars to take the trip, and Miss Shaw decided to go.

Mrs. Addy's father advised her to deposit the money in the bank of which he was president and to borrow a sufficient amount to go to Europe and then repay it little by little from her work on her return. As an incentive to saving, this sounded like a good plan. Miss Shaw accepted the offer, and still has the two bonds which she bought then with the fifteen hundred dollars. The interest on them has paid the travelling expenses of a half-dozen trips to Europe which she has taken since she bought them.

After the four years at Boston University and a successful graduation, Miss Shaw expected to be ordained and to begin her work as a regular pastor. She applied for ordination to the Church which appealed to her most, the Methodist Episcopal; but the Methodist Episcopal Church did not want her because she was a woman. They deliberated the matter for some time, while Miss Shaw waited and smarted over the injustice done her. One of the ministers at the conference knew Miss Shaw well. He had been glad to have her supply his place during an extended illness. The young woman 239238had pleased his congregation. Moreover, she had refused to accept any salary for her services, turning the whole amount over to him when he recovered, and this despite the fact that she was forced to drive a long distance to take his place. The minister felt grateful—but after all she was a woman and he did not approve of women as ministers of the gospel. So he voted against her ordination. When the Methodist Episcopal Church decided that Miss Shaw could not be ordained, she turned to the Methodist Protestant Church and at last was made a regularly ordained pastor. She secured a pastorate and was a great success as a preacher. Her pastoral duties were more difficult. She wanted to extend her field of work among the working people and she found that they were hard to reach.

“I found she said, “that if I went among the people with Bible or with a tract in my hand I could do nothing with them. They simply would not listen.”

In the face of this discouraging fact Miss Shaw did some hard thinking. She had laboured for years to be able to minister and now she could not, for her people would not hear. Finally she decided that if she could help them they might listen, and she went back to the University and started upon four years more of 240239study, this time for a physician's degree. She kept her pastorate and managed to complete her course. She is probably the first woman in this country to receive both theological and medical degrees. Then she went to the people she desired to help as a medical missionary.

“Then,” she says happily, “every door opened to me and I could get to the people who were susceptible to influence.” With a case of medicines, she was a successful pastor. She was particularly interested in immoral women, and it was with them in mind that she studied to be a doctor, because she believed that in no other way than through a knowledge of medicine could she get at them. But her work among them was “simply like being at the bottom of a precipice taking away the dead bodies of the people who fell over instead of being at the top and preventing them from falling.” Miss Shaw reasoned that financial independence was what these women needed. She felt that the basis of financial independence and of every other principle of life was freedom, and that the first thing necessary was to remedy the political subjection of women so that they would be in a position politically to help themselves. Miss Shaw began to speak for suffrage societies.

At once she demonstrated that she was a remarkable 241240speaker and calls for her services began to come from far and near. Her pastoral duties prevented her acceptance of many of these calls, and these refusals made her consider her own position seriously. She was holding a little country charge and had very little chance of holding anything else. The prejudice against women preachers was a bar to advancement. Young men, no better equipped than herself, were being called to large churches while she was left to vegetate. The ten thousand dollars which she had promised to make seemed very remote indeed unless some miracle happened, or unless she entered some work that gave promise of a future. So she entered the suffrage work.

She could not give free lectures, for she had her living to earn, but she did not anticipate adding much toward that promised ten thousand dollars.

The suffrage society received her upon those terms and in a very short time she became known as one of their ablest speakers. At one meeting in San Francisco five thousand people stood before the doors of the hall in which she was to speak, waiting for admission. She had always been an active temperance worker, and she was able to combine with her suffrage work her activities in the Woman's Christian Temperance 242241Union. Her success accomplished what all her years of persistent work had failed to accomplish—it convinced her father. He walked twelve miles to hear her preach one sermon, and when he heard her preach the sermon at the Woman's Congress at the Columbian Exposition, he told her that it was the happiest day of his life. For years she was the friend and co-worker of Susan B. Anthony, and when Miss Anthony died she named Miss Shaw as her successor to the presidency of the National Woman's Suffrage Association.

At the time Miss Shaw became president of the national association, the ballot had been granted to women in only four States, and the suffragists engineered about one campaign in ten years. Now they engineer practically ten campaigns in one year and there are nine States in which women may vote.

During Miss Shaw's presidency, the main offices of the Association have been moved from Warren, Ohio, to New York City. The Association has grown from seventeen thousand to sixty-five thousand paid members. The literature department has increased from the sales of thirteen hundred dollars a year to thirteen thousand dollars a year. A department devoted entirely to press work has been created. It furnishes material for all of the leading press syndicates 243242in the United States, for foreign syndicates, and sends articles to hundreds of papers around the country. Miss Shaw is modest about these achievements. “They only indicate the growth of the movement within the last few years,” she says, “and our movement has only grown in proportion to similar movements in European countries.”

As the head of the executive work of the association, Miss Shaw spends a good deal of time in her office as well as on the lecture platform, but she always goes into the field when campaigns are pending. The Association superintends much of the legislative work of the campaigns: it sends speakers and articles and also money. Miss Shaw personally raises a large part of the money. “I beg it,” she says.

One of the original features of her lectures is her question box. At the beginning she invites her hearers to write questions and to send them to the box to be answered. Her knowledge of the Constitution of the United States has never been found wanting in answer to the most searching questions; neither has she failed to reply to the anxious mother who queried as to the care of her baby during an attack of croup.

Miss Shaw has been the recipient of many honours. She was the first woman to preach in 244243Denmark, or in Norway, or in the cities of Berlin and Amsterdam, and the first woman to preach as an ordained minister in an orthodox church in England. After a lengthy conference she was invited to speak from the pulpit of the Established Church of Sweden, and here, too, she was the pioneer of her sex. The aisles of the Gustaf Vasse in Stockholm were packed and the building failed to accommodate the crowd which gathered to hear her. At the International Convention of the Woman's Suffrage Alliance, held in Sweden, the entire assemblage rose as she entered, in honour of her presence.

People marked her white hair in the recent suffrage parade in New York City. She walked the course from Fifty-ninth Street to Union Square with a step as light as that of any girl. Then she made six speeches from the various stands, only stopping when nightfall broke up the meeting.

During the long, hard years of study and the long, hard years of work, Miss Shaw confesses that she still found time to dream. For twenty years she dreamed of a home. It is quite usual to hear anti-suffrage orators announce that suffragists do not desire homes, that they are never in their homes, and that their only desire is to get away from the home. Nevertheless, Miss Shaw, without any excuse in the shape of 245244a husband and babies, wanted a home. And her dream took a distinct form. When she had accumulated a part of the ten thousand dollars she sought a real-estate agent.

“I want,” she said, “land on a high hill overlooking boulders with trees growing among them, with a stream of water and a ruined monastery.”

The agent regarded her dubiously.

“You won't get anything like that this side of Paradise,” he said.

“Well,” retorted Miss Shaw, “then I will wait until I get to Paradise to get it.”

But at the end of a year of search the agent telegraphed: “Come; I've got your land.”

Miss Shaw hastened to inspect it and found the hill, the boulders and the stream, and agreed to dispense with the monastery. But she was dismayed to find that in order to get her hill, boulders, trees and stream she would have to purchase twenty-three acres at a price which represented every dollar she possessed. All night she sat up and went over the figures, only to come again and again to the same conclusion. If she brought the view, she would not have a penny left with which to build the home! Morning found her determined to spend every penny she had and to get the view. So she bought the twenty-three acres. She reserved eight and set 246245to work to sell the remainder, succeeding so well that in less than a year she was ready to build Alnwick Lodge.

Alnwick Lodge is more than a house; it is a direct reflex of its builder and mistress. It is a distinctly original home. Outside it looks like a substantial dwelling of Colonial type with rough-plastered, biscuit-coloured walls and white trimmings. But the instant the visitor steps over the threshold the originality is apparent. In this home the front of the building is the back and the back is the front.

“You see,” explains Miss Shaw, “the maid always likes to see the road and the passers-by. So we put the kitchen at the front. The rear, which looks over the boulders and brook, is more interesting to me; so I have put the great porch there.”

The house has two distinct interests. One is its perfect convenience in housekeeping appointments. Any anti-suffragist who is using the anti-home argument will be utterly put to rout after one visit to Alnwick Lodge. In the first place there are numerous windows. All the radiators are under windows, and under windows which are placed so that they catch the prevailing winds. The result is a cool house in summer and a warm one in winter. All walls are painted in biscuit colour and all ceilings 247246white. All the windows are large, extending close to the floor and ceiling. There is an abundance of light at night as well as by day. In the great living-room, which occupies one-half of the ground floor, there are lights in the ceiling at every corner, as well as the central chandelier. The door between the dining-room and pantry is half glass. The pantry itself, unlike the usual dark closet, has a large window and is supplied with a sink and hot and cold water. Both the pantry and kitchen have great closets. The kitchen boasts a small vine-covered porch which was designed by Miss Shaw, not for buckets and pails, but for the maid to entertain her company! The basement is well floored and well lighted, with an up-to-date laundry installed, and in the basement is also the water-tank. This water-tank occupies its unique position because of Miss Shaw's logical reasoning. Tanks are usually on the roof—because of the stupidity of builders. The water has to be pumped up anyway, and a tank on the roof freezes in cold weather. Then it may leak, and if it leaks it ruins ceilings and walls; a basement tank may leak and hurt nothing. All of this is so sensible that you wonder that tanks are ever placed on roofs. The kitchen and basement contain more of Miss Shaw's handiwork than any other portion of the house.

248247

“I do not claim to be an excellent house-keeper,” she says, “but I can handle wood.”

Back in that Michigan forest she learned to fell trees, and at sixty-odd she still fells trees, for exercise and recreation. She cuts her own kindlings and her logs for grate-fires. She puts up shelves, preserve-closets and racks as well as an expert carpenter. Her latest addition to her kitchen is a fireless cooker, which she built according to scientific principles and which she says works well.

The stairway to the second floor is Miss Shaw's pride.

“Not a stairway in a hundred,” she asserts, “has a low enough tread.” This stair has broad, low steps. It was secured only after a hard battle with the architect, who wanted the steps deeper, claiming that low ones were not architecturally correct.

“Well,” said Miss Shaw at last, “low steps are hygienic, and if you make these broad, I will cut off that curlicue you have at the bottom, myself.” At this proposed mutilation of the curved rail of his Colonial stairway the architect surrendered.

There is a sun-parlour halfway to the second floor, known as “The Children's Corner,” where little visitors may play without disturbing their elders on either floor. The bathroom 249248windows are another unusual feature. These are high in the wall, so high that no one can see in, and the light can never be too strong. Therefore, neither blinds nor curtains are needed. None of the bedroom closets have doors, because they are more sanitary when the air has access to them. As no brooms are used in the house, they do not get dusty. All bedroom windows are made so low that you may lie in bed and look out to the “view.” There are two outdoor sleeping-porches opening from the bedrooms.

With all this the house is not large nor elaborate; but it is the work of a woman who understands housekeeping and the minimising of labour as well as the securing of comfort.

But this is only one of the interests which Alnwick Lodge holds. The second lies in its furnishings and in its activities. Although the house is but seven years old, the path across the fields from the station at Moylan, Pennsylvania, is well worn by the steps of hundreds of visitors. Women who have laboured long in the cause of woman's suffrage come to the friendly living-room, almost as to a shrine. For here is Miss Susan Anthony's favourite chair and her footstool. In a corner is her old bookcase. Mrs. Lucy Reid Anthony's chair, over one hundred years old, stands near Miss Susan's. In 250249the dining-room is the silver tea-service presented to Miss Anthony by the Woman's Political Equality Club of Rochester. On the sideboard and in the china-closet are numerous pieces presented to Miss Shaw or to Miss Anthony, representing every State in the country and every nation in the world.

And upstairs, in what is known as the friend's room—there is no “guest” room—the walls are lined with the friendly faces of the women who have devoted their lives to the cause of suffrage. Alice and Phœbe Cary, Anna Dickinson, Frances Wright, Anna Ella Carroll, Elizabeth Smith Miller, Margaret Bright Lucas, Abigail Adams, Lucretia Mott, Charlotte Bronté, Julia Ward Howe—all these and many more look down upon the “friend” who-sleeps there—a force well calculated to win a convert to the “cause.”

And although the home is so young, it has seen many frolics. Even professional suffrage workers have time for merrymaking. There have been times when twenty-four cots in the big attic were not enough to hold the friends who thronged the house. And Miss Shaw has married one of her young friends beneath her roof, and hopes to marry another erelong, acting as minister, friend and hostess at one time.

“A place for us all to be happy in,” says 251250Miss Shaw contentedly; “it was for that I built it. Men and women in public life find it hard to withdraw when age makes it wise for them to do so. Often they hang on and as their followers turn to younger leaders, they grow bitter,deeming the world ungrateful. Or if they do stop they know not what to do. I have insured myself against unhappiness. I have built my new interest while the old still calls me, and there I shall be happy when I can be active no longer.”

It is a curious circumstance that hardly anyone calls Miss Shaw “Doctor.” She has earned the title twice; but to the great majority of her friends and adherents she is “Miss” Shaw. Many do not know that she has a legitimate right to the little. Perhaps they will when she gets to the police force. Despite her words about retiring to Alnwick Lodge, she is at present an exceedingly active person. With the same practical foresight which planned the comforts of her home, she has gotten ready her political platform and published it, so as to familiarise the public with it in advance in order that it may know what she stands for. Among her planks are the popular election of Senators; reciprocity with Canada; the tariff revision downwards; a national child-labour law; a law regulating the hours of work for women; a universal 252251marriage law; economy in naval and military expenditures; reformed civil service reform; absolute voidity for elections where corruption is proved; all bills for the national good; none that would benefit a State, district or individual at the expense of others.

Senators and representatives, Miss Shaw believes, are too local in their interests. They lobby in behalf of a small group of people instead of in the interest of the country as a whole. She believes that uniform divorce and marriage laws are absolutely necessary, and she also adds:

“The universal marriage law should forbid all marriages between people who are under eighteen years of age and should require proof of the physical, mental and moral fitness of both parties before the ceremony is performed.”

She is also a strong believer in the establishment of universal peace, which she says almost all women would advocate.

She firmly believes in democracy, and from the first has been one of the women to make a stand for suffrage for all women, instead of a restricted suffrage in favour of moneyed women who are property owners.

And, although there are many suffragists who would accept the concession of a vote for taxpaying women as an opening wedge for the 253252greater concession of votes for all women, Miss Shaw has sturdily opposed any acceptance of such halfway measures. “We want,” she says, “all women to vote,” and if we do, it will mean a real republic for the first time in the history of the country.

To the usual masculine objections to woman suffrage, Miss Shaw's alert mind and ready wit give pointed answers.

“You men say that we will neglect our families if we vote,” she said to one male audience. “You state that we will grow coarse and not be attractive to you; you say that we will always cast our ballot wrongly. Very well! Does the government demand of a man, when he starts to vote, that he shall promise not to neglect his family, that he will stay attractive to the other sex and always cast his vote right?”

Her platform show a mind alert and active, conversant with everyday national problems and looking, as she claims to look toward the benefit of the country as a whole, rather than special legislation in favour of one class.

254

ELLA FLAGG YOUNG

255

ELLA FLAGG YOUNG

ELLA FLAGG YOUNG

When the news of the election of Mrs. Ella Flagg Young to the superintendency of the school of the city of Chicago flashed across the country there followed a sensation. A woman superintendent was thing unknown in history. That one should have been elected in a city the size of Chicago marked a radical step from educational tradition. The daily press was busy for a week explaining in detail the answer to the prevalent question “How did it ever happen?” The answer contained two theories and the circumstances seemed to warrant a faith in either. For three months Chicago had been in a state of civil war regarding the election of a superintendent of education. Theoretically the election rested with the Board of Education, the members of which were impartial citizens selected for their office because of their ability to see things from an unbiased point of view. In reality the situation was one common in great cities; the superintendency was not a matter of the Board of Education but of a political factional fight. So fiercely did the 257256battle rage that the inert citizens awoke to listen to the mud-slinging and wrangling between the factions interested. After three months of warfare the Board of Education began to be uneasy. There didn't seem to be any likelihood of either side winning out, and the Board occupied an unenviable position. As a private matter it was all very well to have a few political interests, but as a Board it had a certain standard of dignity to maintain and it was beginning to appear slightly ridiculous. It decided to elect a superintendent. The wrangling and mud-slinging had succeeded in reducing the candidates for the position to six, five men and one woman. The Board invited the six to come before it and state their qualifications for office. Politeness is supposed to give ladies prefence in such matters, but evidently the Chicago Board of Education lacked training in the finer courtesies. The candidates appeared before the Board in alphabetical order and Mrs. Young was heard last. The Board was hot, tired, uncomfortable and puzzled. Mrs. Young came before it cool, calm and collected. She began to speak, not of herself but of the schools of the city of Chicago, what they were and what she believed they could be. In a short time the hot, tired, uneasy men were listening. A little later they hung on her words. It two hours before 258257she finished, and when she did the men were no longer uneasy. They had found a woman to take the problem off their hands. Where they had speculated she knew. She knew their problem and she sympathised; she knew the dissension in the teaching force and she outlined the remedy. The Board asked no question which she could not answer. And her earnestness carried conviction that she would do what she promised. Because of the impression she made upon them they elected her.

The other explanation is shorter. The politicians, unable to agree, permitted the Board of Education to elect Mrs. Young as the least offensive compromise candidate, and one not likely to trouble them. According to conviction the members of the inquiring public accepted one explanation or the other and promptly asked a second question:

“Who is Mrs. Young?”

The educational world knew Mrs. Young well. But outside Chicago the general public knew very little of her. Her long history in Chicago schools had up to this time been free from dramatic episode and like many other worthy people she escaped public notice by doing the thing before her with all her might and avoiding side issues.

It is fifty-two years since she entered the Chicago 259258school system. Handicapped by ill-health, she had been educated at home by her mother, who in her belief that her daughter would not live to maturity sought to shield her from contact with life. Before she was seventeen, however, the death of her parents forced her into the world, and at that early age she was appointed to a grade teachership in the Foster School. In eight months she was promoted to be Head Assistant of the Grammar department in the same school. One year and a half later a School of Practice was opened in connection with the Chicago Normal School. At twenty Ella Flagg was its first principal. The remarkable appointment of a girl of twenty as head of a school intended as a model for study on the part of teachers in training indicates the unusual teaching ability which Mrs. Young possesses. Six years later, in 1871, she became a teacher in one of the City High Schools. In 1874 she was called to the Normal School as teacher of mathematics. From 1886 to 1887 she returned to the elementary schools, acting as principal of grammar schools. In the latter year she was elected district superintendent, and in this office she served twelve years. At the end of this time she took her first decisive step toward independence in educational methods. Very abruptly she resigned her superintendency, 260259stating that under existing conditions district superintendents were mere figureheads without authority or opportunity for real educational work. Her resignation caused a mild flutter in educational circles, but hardly had it been made public when President Harper of the University of Chicago offered her a full professorship in the University.

“But I haven't a Doctor's degree,” said Mrs. Young.

“It's the woman I want, not the degree,” retorted the President.

Mrs. Young refused. Years before, when principals’ examinations had been instituted as a part of the city requirements for certificate, she as acting principal was entitled to receive a similar certificate on the basis of experience. She declined, was the first woman to take the examination and received the certificate in the regulation way. Likewise she declined to serve the University of Chicago as a professor until she had obtained her degree. She did consent to serve in the meantime as Associate Professional Lecturer. While she served a year in this capacity she studied, and at the close of the year she passed her examinations, received the degree of doctor of philosophy and accepted a professorship in the Department of Education. She stayed at the University four years. 261260She was an inspiring teacher and she employed unique methods in dealing with the young men and women. Always she believed in fostering the social side of the University life, and while there she instituted the innovation of serving tea and cake during class. When she resigned her professorship in 1904 it was to travel abroad and study further. By this time a number of people were interested in her remarkable career and several offered to finance her trip. Like the principal's certificate and the professorship, these offers were declined. Mrs. Young preferred first and last to pay her own way. During her absence she visited schools in France, Germany, Switzerland and England. The schools of Chicago missed her. While she was away, in August, 1905, she was appointed principal of the Chicago Normal School, and she returned to assume that position.

It was while she was at the Normal School that the city generally seemed to awaken to some realisation of her power as an educator. The Normal School was not remarkable when she became its manager, but in a short time it began to improve, and in four years it had grown into the progressive Teachers’ College it is to-day. From the Normal College she was called to the superintendency.

This summarises her regular work, the work 262261for which the city paid her. It is impossible to summarise the other work which Mrs. Young undertook, the unpaid work outside city jurisdiction which has made her such a power with the teaching force. Always she has been a leader among the teachers. She was the first president of the Schoolmistresses’ Club of Illinois, through which she met not only Chicago teachers but teachers from small towns throughout the State, who came to the meetings in search of help in their work. In 1889 she was appointed by the Governor as a member of the State Board of Education, and she held this office for twenty-five years, reappointed by successive Governors. It was only when her duties as superintendent of schools for Chicago prevented her from attending the State board meetings that she resigned. It is said that she organized an odd club of superintendents, and other officials, who met at her residence to discuss educational problems, and it is certain that whether organized or not, many gatherings of this kind were held in her home, where Mrs. Young welcomed them, and true to her belief in socialising educational matters, served refreshments. About 1902 a band of teachers who had worked under her and with her organized the Ella Flagg Young Club, named in her honour.

263262

The position of superintendent of schools in the city of Chicago is no sinecure. The total value of the school property in the year in which Mrs. Young took office was forty-two million three hundred sixty thousand seven hundred and thirty-eight dollars. The annual expenditures totalled over twelve million. There were six thousand two hundred and ninety-six teachers, five hundred and thirty-four of whom were men. The schools numbered two hundred and sixty-seven and the pupils two hundred and ninety thousand.

In addition the Board of Education and the teaching body were divided by the most serious dissensions. Education was suffering from lack of attention while its directors engaged in civil war.

It was shortly after he appointment to office, while she was still adjusting these warring factions, that I visited Chicago. I had an appointment to see Mrs. Young and I waited her arrival in the anteroom of the superintendent's office. After half an hour the door opened. Straight through the doorway, looking neither to the right nor left, shot a gray-haired, small woman, clad in a dark tailored suit. It was impossible to observe more, for so quickly did she move that in a moment she was through the crowd and in her private sanctum. There was another 264263wait and then I was shown in. Mrs. Young looked up from a batch of letters she was signing.

“Won't you sit down?” she said. I sat. She looked up at me inquiringly, but I sat persistently silent until she put down her pen, smiled and said:

“You wanted to interview me, didn't you? Well, I warn you I'm not a bit good at being interviewed. I can't talk. Why don't you interview Mrs. Henrotin or one of the women who can tell interesting things?”

“The main reason,” I retorted, “ is that I don't want to interview anybody but you.”

“Well,” she said resignedly, “can you make it short?”

I took out a list of fourteen questions I wanted to ask and her face brightened. About halfway through a member of the Board of Education called Mrs. Young to decide a point at a committee meeting. She went, returned in five minutes and continued answering questions. A second call took her away ten minutes. She came back looking distinctly worried.

“You see how busy I am,” she said apologetically, “and,” she added whimsically, “I am sixty-four years old.”

I knew her age, but I had not tought of it. The main impression she had made on me from 265264her entrance through the door until the end of the interview was of a small intensely dynamic body. It is almost impossible to connect age with anything dynamic. Some writer, in dilating upon her able school management, has stated that she has “eliminated the sex element.” It is perhaps true that the superintendent's office in Chicago is not so overwhelmingly feminine as the usual superintendent's office is so overwhelmingly masculine,—Mrs. Young may have removed the offence of sex emphasis, but personally Mrs. Young is neither masculine nor neutral; she is distinctly feminine and the impression of her womanhood was only secondary to the impression of her dynamic force. The effect of this feminine quality is seen in the results of her work in its attention to small but pertinent detail as well as to larger issues.

In one year after her taking office the press all over the country was commenting upon the change wrought in Chicago school matters. Between the former superintendent and the teaching force there had been a serious breach which completely hampered all school management. Between the Board of Education and the teachers was another breach, so that the teachers as a whole were restless, dissatisfied and unhappy. At the end of that first year 266265warring factions had become passive. An inquiry among the teachers throughout the city established the superintendent's popularity.

“Look at us,” said one earnest woman. “Can't you see that we are happy in our work?”

“You ought to be among us now,” remarked one of the members of the Board of Education to a former colleague. “Trouble? Not a bit of it. We don't know the meaning of the word without looking in a dictionary.”

It is noteworthy that Mrs. Young accomplished this without taking sides. Having assumed office she began work for the children of Chicago. In the war that had preceded her the children had been overshadowed. Mrs. Young rescued them from the darkness and set them in the light. Somewhat shamefacedly educators realised that their business was first of all the schools, and conscience-stricken they set to work. These are some of the things Mrs. Young did for the children during her first year.

She found a system of artificial ventilation in school buildings which succeeded in producing foul air. The system forbade the opening of windows. Mrs. Young ordered them opened from top and bottom and the rooms aired.

She organised fresh-air classes for pupils who needed an extra amount of oxygen, but she 267266forbade the mention of disease in connection with these special classes.

She selected ten songs to be known as Chicago's school songs. These were taught to every school child in the city, so that at any gathering of schools the children met singing the same songs, a common possession.

She revised the course of study. Far from being autocratic about this most important work, she called to her her superintendents, group of principals and Normal School teachers, and a group of the actual teachers of grade children to plan with her the most practical course to be devised. In the revised course of study two things were marked. The first was the introduction of handwork to be taught in every grade, and in Teachers’ College. The second was a course to be taught in the elementary schools to be known as “Chicago” This course was to make the children intelligent about their own city. It included local geography, industries, history, method of government and some idea of the political situation. Whenever possible, Mrs. Young advocated illustrating this course by visits through the city.

So much for the children. For the teachers of Chicago that first year did the following:

The salaries of the elementary teachers were raised. The salaries of High School teachers 268267were raised. The maximum salary for principals was raised. Teachers who were absent because of illness had been paid their salaries less their substitutes’ pay for two weeks. Mrs. Young made the two weeks, ten. To every school which needed it she gave a clerk to handle mechanical work, correspondence, reports, etc., thus relieving the principal and permitting her to give her time to the work for which she was appointed, the supervision of the teaching. She arranged that every large school should have an extra teacher to supplement the teaching force. She had a swimming pool installed in Teacher's College. She opened her office door to the teaching force of the city, inviting them to come to discuss with her any subject of interest to teacher, schools or pupils.

Towards the end of Mrs. Young's first year of superintendency the teachers of the city of Chicago planned to give a reception to commemorate the occasion. Men and women vied with each other in making the affair a success. The teaching force as a whole, six thousand strong, entered into the event with an enthusiasm that resulted in a demonstration the like of which Chicago nor any other city has seen. The Auditorium Theatre, where the reception was held, seats some four thousand five hundred people. On the night of the reception seven 269268thousand people crowded into the building and then the doors were shut to exclude hundreds more. In the centre of the great auditorium a daïs had been erected, and as the orchestra struck up a stirring march two hundred and fifty teachers, representing every public school in the city, marched from the main entrance to the daïs. In their hands they held long bands of ribbon, and holding these they lined the way Mrs. Young must pass, acting as a guard to keep the audience from pressing toward her. Between these ribbon guards marched two hundred schoolgirls, each bearing a long-stemmed American Beauty rose. At a signal they turned and, holding the roses high, formed and arched bower. Through that aisle crowned with flowers came Mrs. Young alone. In silence the spectators watched her until she mounted the daïs. Then as the orchestra struck up “Illinois,” thousands of handkerchiefs were tossed into the air, and led by the children the mighty throng broke into song.

“When you heard our city calling, Mrs. Young, Mrs. Young! When our hopes was slowly falling, Mrs. Young, Mrs. Young! When our fate was poised anew, When for justice we would sue, Then our eyes were turned to you, Mrs. Young, Mrs. Young!”

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There was no speechmaking. On the daïs she stood listening, listening to the spontaneous acknowledgment of her years of service, her face illumined and radiant.

In that same month, the month of June, 1910, there was a meeting of the National Education Association at Boston. When Mrs. Young first attended a meeting of the National Education Association it was in Ogdensburg. At Ogdensburg Mrs. Young sat in the gallery and looked down on an organisation of men carrying on business for the promoting of education. Women were not then permitted upon the floor of the National Education Association meetings and in them they had no active part. Women were at that time merely teachers; no principalship was ever conferred except upon a man. But by the time of the Boston convention matters had changed. Women had become principals, and good principals; women had even become assistant superintendents. Women on the teaching force outnumbered the men about ten to one, and yet true to old traditions men still held control of the offices of the Association. June, 1910, marked a revolution in the Association. To the astonishment of the public and the utter surprise of the majority of men in the Association, Mrs. Young was elected president by a vote of two to one, from the 271270floor, defeating the man who was the official nominee.

The educational world had now given Mrs. Young all it had to offer. She was at the same time head of the school system in the second largest city in the country and of the largest association of teachers and educators. The skeptical public waited for the usual development. For when men or women reach the zenith in any profession it has become quite customary for them to spend the greater portion of their time not in actual service but in telling other people how they did it. Mrs. Young proved an exception. Not only did she continue to devote her time to the schools of Chicago, but the representatives of the press who called at her office found it increasingly difficult to see her. Finally she adopted a definite policy with regard to interviews.

“My time belongs to the city of Chicago,” she said firmly. “I have no time for papers nor for magazines. The only information I will give personally is that which is due to the people of the city and such statements will always be given to the daily press.”

And interviewers who want other information get it elsewhere. Mrs. Young is busy.

In the four years that have followed the climax of that first Mrs. Young's glory has in 272271no wise diminished. There is nothing that her world can offer her; she can but hold what she has attained. She is sustaining well the record of her first year. In addition to the changes mentioned she established two years’ vocational work in High Schools and has planned prevocational work for backward children in the grades. She instituted a two-year commercial course in High Schools. She placed a kinder-garten in almost every school. She extended manual training and domestic science so that every child could be instructed in these arts. She introduced a custom of employing skilled workers, both men and women, to teach trades and technical subjects in night schools, the technical departments of High Schools, and the handicraft departments of the elementary schools. She introduced women deans into High Schools. She organised teachers and principals into councils to discuss school management and courses of study. She arranged financial matters so that principals, when ordering supplies, might be intelligent as to the expenditure of their appropriation. She continued uninfluenced by any agency to weigh women and men in the same balance and to mete out rewards proportionately. This was such a new thing in educational circles that the sudden prominence of women in Chicago 273272school matters evoked comment. But investigation into causes showed that Mrs. Young had not become a partisan of her sex. She had simply given justice, and the balance of power had so long been swayed by men to men that justice to women in the teaching profession was a novelty.

It so happened that some six months after Mrs. Young's appointment to the superintendency I was in Illinois visiting. In one of the smaller towns I met a man of influence politically who, despite the distance between, kept an active attention on Chicago matters. Somewhat curiously I asked what he thought of Mrs. Young. He chuckled a bit ruefully.

“Oh, Ella Young,” he said. “We never expected to elect her. We did it at the last minute because we couldn't get our man. We compromised on her, expecting to shelve her in a year. And now,” he added, smiling broadly, albeit with some chagrin, “we've got her and we've got to keep her, I guess. We never supposed she could do it.”

Had “they” supposed it, the powers that suffered her to become a compromise candidate, Mrs. Young would never have occupied the superintendency. Even after her successful term in office they decided to oust her. In the summer of 1913 Mrs. Young found matters so difficult 274273that she offered her resignation. The Board of Education refused it, despite the fact that the immediate cause of Mrs. Young's action was an effort on the part of certain members of the Board to dictate the selection of text-books, a prerogative which belonged to the superintendent. The Board refused to accept a resignation, but in December, 1913, at the time of her re-election, there was waged a battle that no one besides Chicago politicians was able to understand. Mrs. Young had made a record as superintendent that had set a pace for educators throughout the nation; Mrs. Young had faithfully filled every requirement of her office. Yet with the whole country honouring her, with Chicago schools recognised as among the most progressive in the land, with the body of teachers devoted to her, willing to work with her and for her, the men “who expected to shelve her in a year” made the attempt. Despite them, she was re-elected, but under such conditions that she felt it imperative that she send in her resignation. The day that her resignation went in the women of Chicago rose. Women counted little in the city when Mrs. Young entered office, but in the year of her re-election they had the franchise,—and political power. The teaching force is composed mainly of women and it stayed loyal to Mrs. 275274Young. Added to this were the women's clubs, the settlements and last but not least the mothers of the children in the schools.

These newly enfranchised citizens did not mince matters. The Women's Association of Commerce, one of the first women's organisations to protect against the removal of Mrs. Young, stated publicly that “it believed that by her removal the Board of Education, servants of the people, had betrayed a public trust and that Chicago men and women stood humiliated before the world.

“It believed that a great wrong had been committed against children, parents, teachers of Chicago, against the whole educational system of America; against a great woman.

“It believed that as Chicago is the vortical centre of social and industrial unrest, so is it the dynamic centre of forces constructing the new human era, that it shall be untainted by vicious politics when men and women shall be politically, socially, industrially and commercially equal.

“It believed that passive acceptance of the deposition of Mrs. Young was collusion with the destructive forces of society that would forever delay the establishment of a new era among us; that passive acceptance was betrayal of the trust of all the world.

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“No middle course was there for us to tread. Either we were aligned with progress or we were aligned with ignorance and retrogression. By our creed we had proclaimed our intellectual and moral standards. We believed, we said, that with women lay the solution of our great civic, industrial and political problems. Here was occasion to test the integrity of our creed. Were we not organised for service not restricted to a small coterie, to the community, not even to America?

“And in conformity to our tenements, the Association protested against the removal of Mrs. Young.”

The Women's Association of Commerce voiced the sentiments of the women of the city. Mrs. Young's removal was not a personal matter. It represented the injustice that had been meted out for centuries by men to the women they governed. And the women who had the vote declined longer to accept injustice. A Committee representing the spirit of all the organised women in the city waited on the Mayor. Meetings were held, the daily press contained columns of protest. Mrs. Young's resignation was not accepted. Instead, all the necessary steps toward making her re-acceptance of office an affair concerning which there could not be the least doubt were taken by a chastened and 277276humbled Board of Education. The politicians of Chicago were beaten by a woman, and by a woman nearly seventy years of age, whom they had coolly calculated could be “shelved” without trouble.

At sixty-nine Mrs. Young shows no sign of weakness. Both mind and body are alert and vigorous. Daily she administers the school affairs of Chicago with as sure a touch and as firm as when she entered office.

Almost all her life Mrs. Young has been a public servant. As such her career has been frank and open, without a suggestion of personal ambition. The offices she has occupied have sought her, and the woman has always been bigger than the office, even to the superintendency. But the private life of Mrs. Young, and her real personality as an individual, are difficult to analyse, since all individual matters she is as reserved as she is frank in matters of public concern. Commenting on this reserve, a friend of twenty-five years, Dr. J. Rose Colby, says:

“In the midst of her half public and public life is her personal life as a human being, rich in all the ties but one that make the fulness of life, and holding them all with a loyalty as rare as even her devotion to her work has been. ... All the great relationships of life except parenthood 278277have shaped this woman and informed her vision. Nay, though actual parenthood has not come to her, yet the mother heart was her endowment, and whoever has seen her with children or heard her talk of them, knows that one of the forces that have given her power and wisdom as a teacher and a guide of teachers is the deep seat of motherliness of her....

“Her power to make friends and her capacity for friendship have enriched her own life and the lives of others. And she adds a charm of high spirits of banter, and of humour to her serious intercourse with friends.”

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Gift of NAWSA, Nov, 1, 1938 JK1881 .N357 Sec. III, no.25 Rare BK Coll